There was zero reason to Watchmen to have released as R rated. If anything I got the distinct impression they were after that so all those geeks who would see the film regardless of rating could somehow feel smug that they were seeing an serious "artsy" film, you know what I mean.
Um... did you see the same movie I did? Did you read the source material? Watchmen is about the threat of annihilation as well as plenty of philosophy on humanity (or lack thereof) and other deep discussions. It also features AS PART OF THE STORY human beings as the almost barbaric, violent psychopaths that about 1 in 24 in our Western civilization actually are. It shows people being torn apart at the molecular level at one end of the scale of brutality, and then shows violent death and dismemberment at a very intimate and personal level. And this is all part of the story because it highlights exactly what is wrong with society and humanity as a whole, thus precipitating the actions of Ozymandias.
Even if we were to edit out the "glowing blue peenster" that some people in this forum seem to object to (that I probably wouldn't have even noticed had it not been bought to my attention by forums like this) and nudity, there's no way this movie would EVER be a PG-13. The very subject matter is unsuitable for less than an R rating.
PS. WTF, "Liberty" rocket?! How on Earth Astrium agreed to such ridiculous name?... (will any possible manned spacecraft launched by this rocket include "freedom fries" in its menu?)
Like Americans have a lock on that word? You do realize Astrium is French, and the national motto of France has been "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" officially since the founding of the Third Republic? I realize what you stated was in jest, but "Liberty" isn't necessarily synonymous with "American", despite the political attempts to make it so during the last decade or so.
This is probably an unpopular idea around here, but some people here really have to embrace the inevitable. Globalization is inevitable, it's just rather challenging for individuals at the moment because of the draconian ideals of the world governments. The future of work in IT, and probably in most industries is dependent on the individual's ability to be mobile and flexible. Instead of tying oneself to a single place in a single country we must as individuals be willing to move to where the work is. Just as the idea that we could start working at 18 for a company that we would then retire from at 65 with a full pension went by the wayside, so must this idea that we can expect the jobs to follow us. Get over yourself; you are not the only person in the world who can do the job and you're not the center of the universe.
So you might think from the above that I have been untouched by outsourcing, that I have stood apart from it all this time and have some agenda. No. I have had my job outsourced and lost it. I have a house with a mortgage and kids... all things that I did when I too was selfish and self-centered enough to think that there would always be work where I am looking for it; in my own back yard. Even recently in my full-time job I've seen parts of my job handed to third-party outsourced vendors, though I continue to keep ahead of the wave of outsourcing enough that I have been able to "surf" so far. However, I don't expect this to last and within 10 years my ability to get a job will be partly dependent upon my ability and willingness to uproot myself and move to where the jobs actually are. The funny thing is; I've done it before when I moved myself from the UK to the US, 16 years ago.
I am already preparing. I have paid off all my credit cards, I have just purchased a car with cash and am getting ready to sell my big fancy BMW that I purchased in hubris. I have already budgeted to take the saved money and use it to fix up my house over the next 18 months, and market-willing I will be able to flip my house for at least what I owe in about 2-3 years. Once I do that, I will stay roughly where I am for a few more years living in more transient housing... apartments for now, though I do feel that even a 1 year lease severely limits my options. However, my son by that point will be 14 and getting closer to the point that he can get out on his own... and I'm not having any more kids. Once he is independent I will be free to follow the work, and since I already have dual citizenship of UK and Ireland (and therefore Europe) and am a legal permanent resident in the USA I already have some modicum of flexibility there.
The only down side to what I foresee is that the current draconian and "tribalist" ideals of world governments mean that there are hoops to jump through in order to work in these other countries. However, even these are not impossible to overcome... all it takes in most countries is to make yourself valuable enough to companies already embedded in those countries that they will do most of the leg work for you.
If this scares you, it probably should... but change is always scary. We as a species will overcome and survive, we always have. However, the notion of national identity will one day be viewed as a rather quaint notion. Worlds without borders is the way of the future, and we either embrace it or perish.
Seems to me that this should be a choice. The student (or their family) are paying for the college in the first place, should it not be their choice whether or not they pay attention? I realize that in theory the idea of distraction might be valid (distracting other kids with screensavers and games), it also seems to me that a little self control would go a long way there for the kids who are being distracted. Alternatively, as another poster mentioned have a brief at the start of the session about laptop etiquette.
Of course, I think that the social network problem and games could both be battled with a relatively simple fix; turn off the wireless! Last I checked, laptops still come with onboard storage for documents... hell even that Google thing has storage for offline edits. Most game players are playing online games anyway these days, so turning off the wifi makes it less interesting... though yes, the hardcore gamers might still fire up a game in class. Having said all this, the same students who are playing games and their social networks during a class are probably the same students who doodle in their notebooks and distract those around them during class... should we also ban pen and paper?
It seems to me that the technology progresses, but people remain fundamentally the same. You're not going to fix that by striking out at the new technology. I am not currently in college, but my girlfriend is and they've had exactly this discussion in the last 12 months because she likes to take notes using her cellphone (an old HTC Touch Pro), which she can then save, email or print. Me, I go to meeting with my iPhone and use Evernote to take notes during the meeting... that way I have a copy of it waiting on my desktop computer when I get out of the meeting. And yes, I've seen people at meetings sitting there with their cellphones playing games or on Facebook... hell, I've done it once or twice. Still, that's my choice; if I miss something fundamental in the meeting because I'm distracted then I will pay the price... no-one else.
Well, I for one rather liked it. After 20-odd years it was exactly what I expected from a sequel to Tron.
For the sake of record, let me tell you where I stand on this whole thing. I was born in 1973, so while I was certainly old enough to remember Tron in the movies on first run, I can't actually remember seeing it at the theatre. I know I did because I remember going INTO the theatre, but don't actually remember watching the movie. I have similar experiences of The Empire Strikes Back and Star Wars (point of trivia; I saw all three at the old Odeon in Brighton, England). However, I do remember talking about Tron with my dad and brother after seeing it, and I remember liking it as an adventure movie and that's it. I don't remember ever getting any deeper meaning from it than that, and other than some rather chintzy toys they released and remembering some bits of the marketing for the movie it didn't make a truly significant impact on my life and I just moved on with whatever else was cool at the time.
So, a few years later I get to see it again on VHS, and this time I get more of it. There's a lot more of Tron in subtext than is actually spelled out on-screen. The whole thing about religion is one of the more obvious but is never exactly spelled out for the viewer. Instead it is left as an exercise to the viewer to think about things beyond the movie theatre. I like movies like that, and I believe that's why Tron gained such a following in the successive years. It also didn't hurt that I was significantly more into computers than my peers, and thus although I found the imagery of the inside of the computer amusing and naive, I also got that it was a lovely way to think about how a computer worked. However, I can't remember the effects blowing me away as a child, and they certainly didn't by the time I was a teenager seeing it again and getting the story a bit better. Still, it became a favourite of mine because it was a fun movie with a little bit of depth but it was by no means a piece of literature or art; it was pop psychology and psuedo religion wrapped in a pretty and enjoyable package.
So what do I think of Tron:Legacy as an adult? I enjoyed it. It was another fun romp through the world of the computer, upgraded and updated in such a way that it distinctly distances itself from the look of Tron while also honouring it. It continues with very similar themes while adding a more "late 80's Zen Philosophy" thing that I remember from my teens and is very much in keeping with the character of Flynn as he would have grown during those years of the late 80's. The story itself was rather linear and there WAS an awful lot of exposition... but I liked it. The exposition alone fleshed out the world very nicely and added some layers to the movie that aren't there otherwise. The ISOs were a bit of a left turn though; they were briefly mentioned and made to be the messiah... then it's like the writers didn't know where to take them. As a result, the "last of its kind" ISO... well the ISOs seem to exist solely to set that character apart from the other programs but with no hint as to WHY. That's a story that I feel could have been fleshed out a lot... maybe in the sequel.
As a result of the linearity the "big reveal" in the third act really wasn't; it was telegraphed reasonably early on if you were paying close enough attention. However, it WAS nice and I definitely don't feel that it was a bad reveal. In general though the movie was a nice romp, enjoyable to me as a late-coming fan of the original, and no more a work of art or literature than it's predecessor. I feel a lot of stuff was set up though to feed into a sequel, and there are a couple of threads I'd like to see continued. So let's hope they can continue down this road and make it... at least I do. There's still plenty of stuff in subtext in Tron:Legacy that's not explicitly spelled out on-screen... and there's enough there that it made for an entertaining discussion with my son after the movie about some of the deeper aspects behind it.
So your argument is that changes to Ubuntu will cause a drop in it's market share? I highly doubt it, to be honest. The traction is already there and the only people who are going to avoid Ubuntu because of the window compositor they're using are going to be those "in the know". Sorry, those people aren't the target market for Ubuntu anyway.
Seriously, what's going to be the actual cost of this move? Some older application incompatibility? Irrelevant to the target market because generally the target market for Ubuntu likes "new and shiny" and doesn't give a fig for the underlying architecture (except that it's Linux and free).
Me, I'll be one of the many "in the know" who won't really care because I know that all the applications I actually run on Ubuntu are going to be recompiled for this layer anyway. I rarely use software from outside the official repos because there's just nothing I feel like messing with. It works, and so long as it continues to work I will continue to use it. I don't see this changing, and this change that's being proposed will come up slowly and carefully. I have complete faith in that.
I'm not one of the Ubuntu faithful necessarily... but I do like it when my computers just get out of my way and let me get my real work done.
What, you don't think it was ruined when they stopped making or showing shows with actual science fiction content about 10 years ago?
Seriously, Sci-Fi, or SyFy or whatever... they do have two shows that I watch today which are Eureka (because my 10 year old son enjoys it) and Stargate Universe (despite being predictable and not really very good science fiction) but I could easily live without both. BSG was good in its first year... you know, the time when SciFi had little to do with it and the BBC and CBC did most of the driving of the series. After that... meh. The last half of the last season was enjoyable enough but that whole lump in the middle... take it or leave it.
Caprica never really got started for me. I liked the pilot but it was like they set up a load of decent threads and ideas that just couldn't be followed up in even the second episode. It fell into the same trap as Heroes, except that the latter had an awesome first season and probably should have just ended it there because the threads all fell apart completely in the second season.
Meh... I think i'm about ready to give up on TV in general. There's really nothing on that I make time to watch any more.
Re:I agree with one thing: fragmentation
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Desktop Linux Is Dead
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I wish I had mod points here, and that you hadn't been tagged as a troll. Although your KDE-specific evangelism IS a bit of a problem, your core point is actually very valid and correct. It's the APIs and programming interfaces that make Linux on the desktop almost unusable for the average user. If there weren't 20 different ways of doing everything then we'd have some more traction and a more usable desktop.
I'll relate one of my most recent experiences... just this weekend in fact. I upgraded my Kubuntu 10.04 to Kubuntu 10.10 on Friday. I then spent an hour on Saturday trying to fathom how in hell to control my sound inputs so that I could make Skype use the microphone on my headset instead of the built in one on my laptop. An hour. And you know what the fix was? To install a different mixer for PulseAudio instead of the deafult KDE one so I could select my microphone inputs. Even then it was opaque as hell and took some experimentation using Audacity in monitor mode (which I had installed already but isn't installed by default) to determine which one worked and setting the appropriate input level. I mean WTF? A normal user would have given up at the point of clicking on the KDE Mixer and not finding any functions there to switch inputs. A middling-experience user would maybe have poked around in System Settings (of which there are NONE!) before giving up and installing Windows.
This is a huge problem. I have been working as a systems analyst for years, run Linux since 1993 as a side project, spent several years from 1999 to 2004 running it as my primary OS before switching to Mac. I have only recently returned to trying to use it as my primary OS, and while I'm incredibly impressed with Kubuntu 10.10, the lack of some critical applications and the incredible inconsistency between APIs and interfaces is making me think maybe a new Mac laptop is in my future. I really want to give Linux the shot because I recently got an awesome laptop to run it on and I am definitely on-board with the whole FOSS thing. Even I had trouble and had to resort to some rather opaque Google searches. This is not the way to win users at home OR in the Enterprise. Trust me; enterprise desktop tech support don't have time for this crap either and would rather just install Windows 7 on the hardware.
If you want to see one of these fantastic cars, there's one on display at the St. Louis Museum of Transportation. I love that place; loads of trains, cars and all manner of awesome transportation stuff (even some boats)... and one of the turbine cars is still on display there. I ended up signing up for a membership to the place because my 10 year old son loved it so much.
I think the technology in this thing was awesome... hell, I even love the styling in a retro sort of way. I would have jumped at the opportunity to buy and own a turbine powered car... and though I'm sure the fuel mileage wasn't fantastic, the fact that it could run on just about anything meant that you could have filled it up with whatever was cheapest at the time and used that to get to work. I'm sure that might still happen again; the age of the turbine car may only be in limbo... not over.
Jay Leno has a turbine powered motorbike as well (http://www.bikemenu.com/turbine.html). I remember reading an article he wrote about it that made me laugh; that it was often interesting to sit at a set of lights and look in the rear view mirror and watch the front bumper of the car behind him melting because of the heat output...
Although I would tend to agree with you, I use KUbuntu 10.04 today on my laptop and my MythTV box at home. Simply put, they're well put together, well supported and don't suffer from some of the strange GUI ideas that Canonical put in the regular Ubuntu (which shooed me away from it for a LONG time I might add).
I have used Macs for years, and still have my Macbook Pro for a few applications I just can't get under Linux (for example my own business is mostly managed using iRatchet, and I still haven't got a good way to get music and podcasts to my iPhone from Linux) but it took playing with KUbuntu on my laptop to convince me that Linux was ready for me to return. I used to run all kinds of distros... I have run Fedora numerous times, Gentoo, Redhat... you name it. I like the fact that for the most part Kubuntu gets out of my way and lets me get my work done the same way OSX does. I've had a couple of issues with wireless network not working after updates, but I find a second reboot usually clears that up. Other than that, it's rock solid stable, gets me better battery life than Windows 7 on the same hardware and generally just works like an operating system should.
Of course, freedom of choice is what Linux is all about anyway... and yes Mint is a great distro as well. However, I found that if I have a problem with Kubuntu it's usually much easier to find answers than it is for Mint simply because of the larger community of users.
As a Brit living in the USA I sort of see your point... but have you been to America? Huge amounts of this country are rural and incredibly sparsely populated. There are entire swathes of the midwest where you can literally drive miles and not see a single house. The simple fact is that the people who live in these rural areas have to rely on the fire departments of small towns. Since they don't live in these small towns, those small towns cannot collect taxes from them. As a result, the taxes that pay for the fire department are the taxes from the people of that small town. Now, optionally the small towns have the right to charge for "extended fire coverage" to places outside their borders, and as such these people in TFA were asked to pay that small sum of money ($75 a year... a tiny amount, really) to help pay for the costs of keeping the firefighters on-call, the cost of the fire trucks, the cost of the fuel for the fire trucks and so on.
Now, I can see your argument about your friend who pays no taxes to speak of also getting fire coverage... but this is not the same. There is simply the incredibly impracticality of providing fire coverage to everyone in the USA regardless of location... the costs become immense quite rapidly. In Britain you have a much smaller distance to cover... simply put there are VERY few people in the UK who are effectively beyond the borders of a town and thus they are covered by a particular town's fire department. The fact that the fire department is also paid out of a "federal" pool (I know that's an Americanism but it fits) instead of local funds makes a huge difference... that way those taxes are collected across the entire country rather than by municipalities.
America works differently; government is much more fragmented simply because of the incredible size of this country. Federal government only collects taxes for federal programs... and generally "benefits" type programs are collected by municipalities. Firefighters fall into the latter category and thus I definitely see why it would be unfair to expect assistance from a municipality into which you pay nothing.
On the flip side of the coin I do think that this particular instance falls into the "grey area" where you can't really say if the firefighters were right or wrong. Were they wrong to refuse to put out the fire? Well, given that outside the city limits theirs is a paid service, it would be a bad precedent to set to put the fire out. Once the rest of the neighbours had found out then the entire revenue stream of money from those remote families is at risk... they would quite likely think that because one person got a fire put out with no $75 a year fee, that they can expect the same and may well stop paying. It may be an ethical debate at that point, but even billing the person after the fact or fining them may be a dead loss because you've already set that precedent. And because money is constantly being spent to maintain the fire department, money must constantly be coming in. Offering to pay your $75 "insurance payment" while your house is burning is frankly ridiculous and stupid.
These people have now paid for their own short sightedness. As much as I am a believer in some "benefits" programs like federal healthcare, I also understand that here in America we are as limited by logistics and geography as we are limited by "the way things actually work".
LOL... remember Air Warrior well. I never got into it beyond the first one, but I remember well the bombing missions we used to undertake. Honestly there just wasn't any other gameplay environment that felt quite the same as climbing into a B17 with a few of your friends and then dropping a load of ordinance on an enemy airbase while fighters swarmed around you being shot down either by your gunners or by one of your fighter escorts.
Of course, the amount of planning that was involved was immense. There would be long email chains for days prior planning the raids, and even then you were often at the mercy of the dreaded busy signal or line drops. But once in the air, the long flights to the enemy bases might seem boring as depending on your route it might take an hour or more to reach your target... but it was always tense while you looked out for fighters and chatted with your colleagues (or occasionally jumped on the open channel to taunt your enemies). Spotting an enemy scout at high altitude coming out of the North when you were half way to your target was always terrifying as you knew he would be reporting his sighting to his colleagues and getting ready to attack. Problem was, unlike in real life you couldn't silence the scout with a P51... even if you shot him down he could still report to his commanders.
The problems I had with the game were legion, though. Lag could sometimes make dogfights completely unpredictable... but a good furball could be a blast. Disconnects were rife, and the servers would suddenly drop everyone for no reason right in the middle of a mission far too often for my tastes.
I'm sure it would all be better today... with better graphics, more planes, bigger servers... whatever... but I can't dedicate that kind of time to these things any more. That was one hell of a time-sink as even a single mission to just fly out, scout and take down enemies could kill two hours in an evening easily. This being in the UK as well it was painful to think of the amount of money I paid to play that game, too!
Good times. Thanks, Slash for making me feel old:P
Honestly, my hope is that the strides being made by China and India into space will spark the US into action to become competitive again. However, I am fully aware that given the current state of US politics and politicians that is so incredibly unlikely. Things like this spurring the US into action reminds me of Merry and Pip trying to spur the Ents into action in LOTR... except that with the USA there won't be a sudden realization that the battle needs to be fought until Mordor is already long since lost.
I am already waiting. I have been watching the Aptera with extreme interest since I first read about it right here on Slash. It seems perfect for my needs as a daily commuting vehicle as I have about a 20 mile commute to work. Double that and add some little running around during the day and we can say that on a busy day I might go 70 miles total. That's well within the range of every EV out there. Big range means nothing to me because it's really the exception that I would go more than this in a day. Being a two-seater is a bit of a problem as a family car, but most families own two cars anyway. Besides, the Aptera is looking to be low enough in cost that I could then add that Tesla sedan as the family hauler and we could be incredibly happy with that. I figure for those rare times I need to go farther in a day, there's always rental cars. Hell, I do this already most of the time because when you take into account wear and tear on your car as well as the cost of fuel, the cost is about the same or sometimes even cheaper. If I'm driving to Chicago for example (about 300 miles) there's a part of me that would love to have the creature comforts of my BMW... but when I consider the true cost of that car for those miles I find it more convenient to rent a basic car with a CD player for that drive and usually I'm quite happy.
Yes, my BMW is not exactly the best example of efficiency and "green-ness" out there, but it's what I have today. Will that change? Yes... I think I can say without a shadow of a doubt that in the next few years that will change significantly. First however there has to be the cars I want to drive available as electric. The Aptera I think will be the perfect daily car, and the Tesla sedan the perfect family hauler. I will gladly invest in the infrastructure (charging stations) to power both of these and keep them in my garage and will trade my Bimmer in a heartbeat for them. There will be those that will laugh at the Aptera because of the way it looks... but I used to drive a Subaru SVX (owned three of them actually) so I'm used to being laughed at for the car I drive;)
Reminds me of the old story I read once about a pilot submitting a "squawk" report on an aircraft he'd been flying saying "Auto-land not working properly on this aircraft." After a week or so the report came back from the shop foreman; "Auto-land not installed on this aircraft."
I must admit, the image of the plane barrelling out of control into the runway, full of passengers while the pilot sat by wondering why the approach wasn't as smooth as he'd hoped just makes me crack up.
Well like a lot of people here have said; don't use your work account for personal stuff. Problem solved. Anything on a work system is open to scrutiny; I know because I build systems specifically designed to store this stuff. For example; email. Where I work EVERY email received or sent is stored in a database for 7 years in case of legal discovery process. This is a very common practice and access to this database is strictly limited. However, even if you delete it, purge your deleted items, whatever... that email is still in the system for 7 years whether you like it or not. So plain and simple; don't do it. I keep my personal email to my GMail account and even then I prefer to use face-to-face for completely personal stuff.
As for personal files I have a 2GB USB stick with nothing on it but a Truecrypt store. It uses two key files, both accessible from separate online services in case I need to set up access on another machine... and a 30 character password. I periodically sync that store to my Drobo at home, and that in turn gets backed up to Mozy. The contents never get out unless I want them to. Sure the store is small but my REALLY personal files are not that big; Excel and Word documents mostly with a few text-only PDF's. Is it possible that someone could hack it? Yeah... no encryption is perfect. But they'd have to be REALLY determined to get to that data and if they're that determined then power to them. Chances are though that even the fact that the data is encrypted and just a simple password won't cut it will usually deter most.
As for personal photographs and the like... meh. My perspective on that is if you don't want it getting out don't take a picture of it. As I said, no security is perfect and thus everything that is stored has the potential to be used and abused.
And web storage? Forget it. I only use it for my keyfiles and non-sensitive data. Even then only I know where those keyfiles and stuff are so the really sensitive data gets protected. I know enough about how corporations work on the back end... and I've seen enough "secure data leaks" in my lifetime in IT that I don't trust my sensitive or personal data to anything I don't control absolutely. Like my USB stick.
Actually, one thing I was impressed by was Leo Laporte actually demonstrating it on his streamed "This Week In Tech" podcast... though it may also have been Macbreak Weekly. If you were watching the stream then he actually demonstrated the problem occurring and it was eye opening. It also occurred to me that I hold my phone EXACTLY the way he did to recreate the problem.
I have a 3GS but normally use a Bluetooth headset. However, those times I do hold my iPhone I would hold it that way in my left hand. As a result, yeah... the iPhone 4 is not a great option for me unless I'm using Bluetooth.
All this being said, I'm sticking with my 3GS for now. It does everything I need of it, and while I'm still not a fan of the locked down platform there's no doubt in my mind that it's still better than the Windows Mobile devices I had before in the most critical element; making a call. WinMo in the last few years has become "MobileME"; bloated, unstable and generally not fun to use. That last iteration (WinMo 6.5 or something?) was horrendous as a phone, though as a portable computer it was actually pretty good. However, stability problems plagued it when I used it. Since I've owned my 3GS I think I've rebooted it 4 times beyond firmware upgrades, and now I'm running iOS 4 on it so I get all the software goodness of the iPhone 4 without the antenna problems of it.
You mean the communications array that had been established to be useless by that point? The one they sacrificed because they wanted to fix the ship instead of roast alive because the heat shield was damaged?
Oh, and have you seen what happens when a spark ignites in a high oxygen environment with lots of combustible material nearby?
I graduated high school and studied Physics at college... personally I think it was all explained in the context of the movie.
Seriously... 15 years ago when I came to the USA I felt that I was moving to the land of the free. I'm now looking at all the stuff the government is doing and seriously considering moving back to my country of origin so that I can give my son a better upbringing than I feel he can get here with the laughable "Security Theater" we have here. I have watched just about every freedom that Americans have had for hundreds of years basically vanish in 10 years. At the rate things are going I wonder if Mexico are going to have to start patrolling their borders to watch out for Americans trying to escape the tyranny.
Also, the focus on the "Terrorists" is pathetic. We've had terrorists in the USA as long as the USA has existed. The only reason they're clamping down now is because they see an opportunity to destroy our way of life and they grabbed it. What about the Neo Nazis? I'd say they're as bad or in some cases worse than the people who have committed the more recent public terrorist acts in the USA. Oh no, sorry... we can't clamp down on them; they're white. They make up a significant voting pool in the Midwest so we can't do anything about them.
It really pains me to see this country going down the tubes so rapidly... giving up everything that made America great. The sad thing is that the core values and ideals... hell even the core laws and rules are good. However, it has now become common practice to ignore the words of those base laws (like the constitution) while claiming to uphold the spirit of them.
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There was zero reason to Watchmen to have released as R rated. If anything I got the distinct impression they were after that so all those geeks who would see the film regardless of rating could somehow feel smug that they were seeing an serious "artsy" film, you know what I mean.
Um... did you see the same movie I did? Did you read the source material? Watchmen is about the threat of annihilation as well as plenty of philosophy on humanity (or lack thereof) and other deep discussions. It also features AS PART OF THE STORY human beings as the almost barbaric, violent psychopaths that about 1 in 24 in our Western civilization actually are. It shows people being torn apart at the molecular level at one end of the scale of brutality, and then shows violent death and dismemberment at a very intimate and personal level. And this is all part of the story because it highlights exactly what is wrong with society and humanity as a whole, thus precipitating the actions of Ozymandias.
Even if we were to edit out the "glowing blue peenster" that some people in this forum seem to object to (that I probably wouldn't have even noticed had it not been bought to my attention by forums like this) and nudity, there's no way this movie would EVER be a PG-13. The very subject matter is unsuitable for less than an R rating.
PS. WTF, "Liberty" rocket?! How on Earth Astrium agreed to such ridiculous name?... (will any possible manned spacecraft launched by this rocket include "freedom fries" in its menu?)
Like Americans have a lock on that word? You do realize Astrium is French, and the national motto of France has been "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" officially since the founding of the Third Republic? I realize what you stated was in jest, but "Liberty" isn't necessarily synonymous with "American", despite the political attempts to make it so during the last decade or so.
This is probably an unpopular idea around here, but some people here really have to embrace the inevitable. Globalization is inevitable, it's just rather challenging for individuals at the moment because of the draconian ideals of the world governments. The future of work in IT, and probably in most industries is dependent on the individual's ability to be mobile and flexible. Instead of tying oneself to a single place in a single country we must as individuals be willing to move to where the work is. Just as the idea that we could start working at 18 for a company that we would then retire from at 65 with a full pension went by the wayside, so must this idea that we can expect the jobs to follow us. Get over yourself; you are not the only person in the world who can do the job and you're not the center of the universe.
So you might think from the above that I have been untouched by outsourcing, that I have stood apart from it all this time and have some agenda. No. I have had my job outsourced and lost it. I have a house with a mortgage and kids... all things that I did when I too was selfish and self-centered enough to think that there would always be work where I am looking for it; in my own back yard. Even recently in my full-time job I've seen parts of my job handed to third-party outsourced vendors, though I continue to keep ahead of the wave of outsourcing enough that I have been able to "surf" so far. However, I don't expect this to last and within 10 years my ability to get a job will be partly dependent upon my ability and willingness to uproot myself and move to where the jobs actually are. The funny thing is; I've done it before when I moved myself from the UK to the US, 16 years ago.
I am already preparing. I have paid off all my credit cards, I have just purchased a car with cash and am getting ready to sell my big fancy BMW that I purchased in hubris. I have already budgeted to take the saved money and use it to fix up my house over the next 18 months, and market-willing I will be able to flip my house for at least what I owe in about 2-3 years. Once I do that, I will stay roughly where I am for a few more years living in more transient housing... apartments for now, though I do feel that even a 1 year lease severely limits my options. However, my son by that point will be 14 and getting closer to the point that he can get out on his own... and I'm not having any more kids. Once he is independent I will be free to follow the work, and since I already have dual citizenship of UK and Ireland (and therefore Europe) and am a legal permanent resident in the USA I already have some modicum of flexibility there.
The only down side to what I foresee is that the current draconian and "tribalist" ideals of world governments mean that there are hoops to jump through in order to work in these other countries. However, even these are not impossible to overcome... all it takes in most countries is to make yourself valuable enough to companies already embedded in those countries that they will do most of the leg work for you.
If this scares you, it probably should... but change is always scary. We as a species will overcome and survive, we always have. However, the notion of national identity will one day be viewed as a rather quaint notion. Worlds without borders is the way of the future, and we either embrace it or perish.
My 2c. No change given.
Seems to me that this should be a choice. The student (or their family) are paying for the college in the first place, should it not be their choice whether or not they pay attention? I realize that in theory the idea of distraction might be valid (distracting other kids with screensavers and games), it also seems to me that a little self control would go a long way there for the kids who are being distracted. Alternatively, as another poster mentioned have a brief at the start of the session about laptop etiquette.
Of course, I think that the social network problem and games could both be battled with a relatively simple fix; turn off the wireless! Last I checked, laptops still come with onboard storage for documents... hell even that Google thing has storage for offline edits. Most game players are playing online games anyway these days, so turning off the wifi makes it less interesting... though yes, the hardcore gamers might still fire up a game in class. Having said all this, the same students who are playing games and their social networks during a class are probably the same students who doodle in their notebooks and distract those around them during class... should we also ban pen and paper?
It seems to me that the technology progresses, but people remain fundamentally the same. You're not going to fix that by striking out at the new technology. I am not currently in college, but my girlfriend is and they've had exactly this discussion in the last 12 months because she likes to take notes using her cellphone (an old HTC Touch Pro), which she can then save, email or print. Me, I go to meeting with my iPhone and use Evernote to take notes during the meeting... that way I have a copy of it waiting on my desktop computer when I get out of the meeting. And yes, I've seen people at meetings sitting there with their cellphones playing games or on Facebook... hell, I've done it once or twice. Still, that's my choice; if I miss something fundamental in the meeting because I'm distracted then I will pay the price... no-one else.
Well, I for one rather liked it. After 20-odd years it was exactly what I expected from a sequel to Tron.
For the sake of record, let me tell you where I stand on this whole thing. I was born in 1973, so while I was certainly old enough to remember Tron in the movies on first run, I can't actually remember seeing it at the theatre. I know I did because I remember going INTO the theatre, but don't actually remember watching the movie. I have similar experiences of The Empire Strikes Back and Star Wars (point of trivia; I saw all three at the old Odeon in Brighton, England). However, I do remember talking about Tron with my dad and brother after seeing it, and I remember liking it as an adventure movie and that's it. I don't remember ever getting any deeper meaning from it than that, and other than some rather chintzy toys they released and remembering some bits of the marketing for the movie it didn't make a truly significant impact on my life and I just moved on with whatever else was cool at the time.
So, a few years later I get to see it again on VHS, and this time I get more of it. There's a lot more of Tron in subtext than is actually spelled out on-screen. The whole thing about religion is one of the more obvious but is never exactly spelled out for the viewer. Instead it is left as an exercise to the viewer to think about things beyond the movie theatre. I like movies like that, and I believe that's why Tron gained such a following in the successive years. It also didn't hurt that I was significantly more into computers than my peers, and thus although I found the imagery of the inside of the computer amusing and naive, I also got that it was a lovely way to think about how a computer worked. However, I can't remember the effects blowing me away as a child, and they certainly didn't by the time I was a teenager seeing it again and getting the story a bit better. Still, it became a favourite of mine because it was a fun movie with a little bit of depth but it was by no means a piece of literature or art; it was pop psychology and psuedo religion wrapped in a pretty and enjoyable package.
So what do I think of Tron:Legacy as an adult? I enjoyed it. It was another fun romp through the world of the computer, upgraded and updated in such a way that it distinctly distances itself from the look of Tron while also honouring it. It continues with very similar themes while adding a more "late 80's Zen Philosophy" thing that I remember from my teens and is very much in keeping with the character of Flynn as he would have grown during those years of the late 80's. The story itself was rather linear and there WAS an awful lot of exposition... but I liked it. The exposition alone fleshed out the world very nicely and added some layers to the movie that aren't there otherwise. The ISOs were a bit of a left turn though; they were briefly mentioned and made to be the messiah... then it's like the writers didn't know where to take them. As a result, the "last of its kind" ISO... well the ISOs seem to exist solely to set that character apart from the other programs but with no hint as to WHY. That's a story that I feel could have been fleshed out a lot... maybe in the sequel.
As a result of the linearity the "big reveal" in the third act really wasn't; it was telegraphed reasonably early on if you were paying close enough attention. However, it WAS nice and I definitely don't feel that it was a bad reveal. In general though the movie was a nice romp, enjoyable to me as a late-coming fan of the original, and no more a work of art or literature than it's predecessor. I feel a lot of stuff was set up though to feed into a sequel, and there are a couple of threads I'd like to see continued. So let's hope they can continue down this road and make it... at least I do. There's still plenty of stuff in subtext in Tron:Legacy that's not explicitly spelled out on-screen... and there's enough there that it made for an entertaining discussion with my son after the movie about some of the deeper aspects behind it.
"Has Linux ever had a stable sound system?"
Yes, when it did not supported sound.
Indeed... I distinctly remember Linux working just as well with my Soundblaster AWE32 as it did with my Gravis Ultrasound I had before it...
PinkOS.
You got me here, it took me a bit to get it. Communist - Pinko - PinkOS
You think that's bad? I read it and immediately wondered what the hell Apple had to do with it
So your argument is that changes to Ubuntu will cause a drop in it's market share? I highly doubt it, to be honest. The traction is already there and the only people who are going to avoid Ubuntu because of the window compositor they're using are going to be those "in the know". Sorry, those people aren't the target market for Ubuntu anyway.
Seriously, what's going to be the actual cost of this move? Some older application incompatibility? Irrelevant to the target market because generally the target market for Ubuntu likes "new and shiny" and doesn't give a fig for the underlying architecture (except that it's Linux and free).
Me, I'll be one of the many "in the know" who won't really care because I know that all the applications I actually run on Ubuntu are going to be recompiled for this layer anyway. I rarely use software from outside the official repos because there's just nothing I feel like messing with. It works, and so long as it continues to work I will continue to use it. I don't see this changing, and this change that's being proposed will come up slowly and carefully. I have complete faith in that.
I'm not one of the Ubuntu faithful necessarily... but I do like it when my computers just get out of my way and let me get my real work done.
Absolutely... an efficient one-handed input system. That'll be absolutely perfect for surfing porn^H^H^H^H^H^H reading Wikipedia articles...
What, you don't think it was ruined when they stopped making or showing shows with actual science fiction content about 10 years ago?
Seriously, Sci-Fi, or SyFy or whatever... they do have two shows that I watch today which are Eureka (because my 10 year old son enjoys it) and Stargate Universe (despite being predictable and not really very good science fiction) but I could easily live without both. BSG was good in its first year... you know, the time when SciFi had little to do with it and the BBC and CBC did most of the driving of the series. After that... meh. The last half of the last season was enjoyable enough but that whole lump in the middle... take it or leave it.
Caprica never really got started for me. I liked the pilot but it was like they set up a load of decent threads and ideas that just couldn't be followed up in even the second episode. It fell into the same trap as Heroes, except that the latter had an awesome first season and probably should have just ended it there because the threads all fell apart completely in the second season.
Meh... I think i'm about ready to give up on TV in general. There's really nothing on that I make time to watch any more.
I wish I had mod points here, and that you hadn't been tagged as a troll. Although your KDE-specific evangelism IS a bit of a problem, your core point is actually very valid and correct. It's the APIs and programming interfaces that make Linux on the desktop almost unusable for the average user. If there weren't 20 different ways of doing everything then we'd have some more traction and a more usable desktop.
I'll relate one of my most recent experiences... just this weekend in fact. I upgraded my Kubuntu 10.04 to Kubuntu 10.10 on Friday. I then spent an hour on Saturday trying to fathom how in hell to control my sound inputs so that I could make Skype use the microphone on my headset instead of the built in one on my laptop. An hour. And you know what the fix was? To install a different mixer for PulseAudio instead of the deafult KDE one so I could select my microphone inputs. Even then it was opaque as hell and took some experimentation using Audacity in monitor mode (which I had installed already but isn't installed by default) to determine which one worked and setting the appropriate input level. I mean WTF? A normal user would have given up at the point of clicking on the KDE Mixer and not finding any functions there to switch inputs. A middling-experience user would maybe have poked around in System Settings (of which there are NONE!) before giving up and installing Windows.
This is a huge problem. I have been working as a systems analyst for years, run Linux since 1993 as a side project, spent several years from 1999 to 2004 running it as my primary OS before switching to Mac. I have only recently returned to trying to use it as my primary OS, and while I'm incredibly impressed with Kubuntu 10.10, the lack of some critical applications and the incredible inconsistency between APIs and interfaces is making me think maybe a new Mac laptop is in my future. I really want to give Linux the shot because I recently got an awesome laptop to run it on and I am definitely on-board with the whole FOSS thing. Even I had trouble and had to resort to some rather opaque Google searches. This is not the way to win users at home OR in the Enterprise. Trust me; enterprise desktop tech support don't have time for this crap either and would rather just install Windows 7 on the hardware.
If you want to see one of these fantastic cars, there's one on display at the St. Louis Museum of Transportation. I love that place; loads of trains, cars and all manner of awesome transportation stuff (even some boats)... and one of the turbine cars is still on display there. I ended up signing up for a membership to the place because my 10 year old son loved it so much.
I think the technology in this thing was awesome... hell, I even love the styling in a retro sort of way. I would have jumped at the opportunity to buy and own a turbine powered car... and though I'm sure the fuel mileage wasn't fantastic, the fact that it could run on just about anything meant that you could have filled it up with whatever was cheapest at the time and used that to get to work. I'm sure that might still happen again; the age of the turbine car may only be in limbo... not over.
Jay Leno has a turbine powered motorbike as well (http://www.bikemenu.com/turbine.html). I remember reading an article he wrote about it that made me laugh; that it was often interesting to sit at a set of lights and look in the rear view mirror and watch the front bumper of the car behind him melting because of the heat output...
Although I would tend to agree with you, I use KUbuntu 10.04 today on my laptop and my MythTV box at home. Simply put, they're well put together, well supported and don't suffer from some of the strange GUI ideas that Canonical put in the regular Ubuntu (which shooed me away from it for a LONG time I might add).
I have used Macs for years, and still have my Macbook Pro for a few applications I just can't get under Linux (for example my own business is mostly managed using iRatchet, and I still haven't got a good way to get music and podcasts to my iPhone from Linux) but it took playing with KUbuntu on my laptop to convince me that Linux was ready for me to return. I used to run all kinds of distros... I have run Fedora numerous times, Gentoo, Redhat... you name it. I like the fact that for the most part Kubuntu gets out of my way and lets me get my work done the same way OSX does. I've had a couple of issues with wireless network not working after updates, but I find a second reboot usually clears that up. Other than that, it's rock solid stable, gets me better battery life than Windows 7 on the same hardware and generally just works like an operating system should.
Of course, freedom of choice is what Linux is all about anyway... and yes Mint is a great distro as well. However, I found that if I have a problem with Kubuntu it's usually much easier to find answers than it is for Mint simply because of the larger community of users.
As a Brit living in the USA I sort of see your point... but have you been to America? Huge amounts of this country are rural and incredibly sparsely populated. There are entire swathes of the midwest where you can literally drive miles and not see a single house. The simple fact is that the people who live in these rural areas have to rely on the fire departments of small towns. Since they don't live in these small towns, those small towns cannot collect taxes from them. As a result, the taxes that pay for the fire department are the taxes from the people of that small town. Now, optionally the small towns have the right to charge for "extended fire coverage" to places outside their borders, and as such these people in TFA were asked to pay that small sum of money ($75 a year... a tiny amount, really) to help pay for the costs of keeping the firefighters on-call, the cost of the fire trucks, the cost of the fuel for the fire trucks and so on.
Now, I can see your argument about your friend who pays no taxes to speak of also getting fire coverage... but this is not the same. There is simply the incredibly impracticality of providing fire coverage to everyone in the USA regardless of location... the costs become immense quite rapidly. In Britain you have a much smaller distance to cover... simply put there are VERY few people in the UK who are effectively beyond the borders of a town and thus they are covered by a particular town's fire department. The fact that the fire department is also paid out of a "federal" pool (I know that's an Americanism but it fits) instead of local funds makes a huge difference... that way those taxes are collected across the entire country rather than by municipalities.
America works differently; government is much more fragmented simply because of the incredible size of this country. Federal government only collects taxes for federal programs... and generally "benefits" type programs are collected by municipalities. Firefighters fall into the latter category and thus I definitely see why it would be unfair to expect assistance from a municipality into which you pay nothing.
On the flip side of the coin I do think that this particular instance falls into the "grey area" where you can't really say if the firefighters were right or wrong. Were they wrong to refuse to put out the fire? Well, given that outside the city limits theirs is a paid service, it would be a bad precedent to set to put the fire out. Once the rest of the neighbours had found out then the entire revenue stream of money from those remote families is at risk... they would quite likely think that because one person got a fire put out with no $75 a year fee, that they can expect the same and may well stop paying. It may be an ethical debate at that point, but even billing the person after the fact or fining them may be a dead loss because you've already set that precedent. And because money is constantly being spent to maintain the fire department, money must constantly be coming in. Offering to pay your $75 "insurance payment" while your house is burning is frankly ridiculous and stupid.
These people have now paid for their own short sightedness. As much as I am a believer in some "benefits" programs like federal healthcare, I also understand that here in America we are as limited by logistics and geography as we are limited by "the way things actually work".
And that's what I get for posting without sufficient coffee in my system... I meant of course Middle Earth ;)
LOL... remember Air Warrior well. I never got into it beyond the first one, but I remember well the bombing missions we used to undertake. Honestly there just wasn't any other gameplay environment that felt quite the same as climbing into a B17 with a few of your friends and then dropping a load of ordinance on an enemy airbase while fighters swarmed around you being shot down either by your gunners or by one of your fighter escorts.
Of course, the amount of planning that was involved was immense. There would be long email chains for days prior planning the raids, and even then you were often at the mercy of the dreaded busy signal or line drops. But once in the air, the long flights to the enemy bases might seem boring as depending on your route it might take an hour or more to reach your target... but it was always tense while you looked out for fighters and chatted with your colleagues (or occasionally jumped on the open channel to taunt your enemies). Spotting an enemy scout at high altitude coming out of the North when you were half way to your target was always terrifying as you knew he would be reporting his sighting to his colleagues and getting ready to attack. Problem was, unlike in real life you couldn't silence the scout with a P51... even if you shot him down he could still report to his commanders.
The problems I had with the game were legion, though. Lag could sometimes make dogfights completely unpredictable... but a good furball could be a blast. Disconnects were rife, and the servers would suddenly drop everyone for no reason right in the middle of a mission far too often for my tastes.
I'm sure it would all be better today... with better graphics, more planes, bigger servers... whatever... but I can't dedicate that kind of time to these things any more. That was one hell of a time-sink as even a single mission to just fly out, scout and take down enemies could kill two hours in an evening easily. This being in the UK as well it was painful to think of the amount of money I paid to play that game, too!
Good times. Thanks, Slash for making me feel old :P
Honestly, my hope is that the strides being made by China and India into space will spark the US into action to become competitive again. However, I am fully aware that given the current state of US politics and politicians that is so incredibly unlikely. Things like this spurring the US into action reminds me of Merry and Pip trying to spur the Ents into action in LOTR... except that with the USA there won't be a sudden realization that the battle needs to be fought until Mordor is already long since lost.
I am already waiting. I have been watching the Aptera with extreme interest since I first read about it right here on Slash. It seems perfect for my needs as a daily commuting vehicle as I have about a 20 mile commute to work. Double that and add some little running around during the day and we can say that on a busy day I might go 70 miles total. That's well within the range of every EV out there. Big range means nothing to me because it's really the exception that I would go more than this in a day. Being a two-seater is a bit of a problem as a family car, but most families own two cars anyway. Besides, the Aptera is looking to be low enough in cost that I could then add that Tesla sedan as the family hauler and we could be incredibly happy with that. I figure for those rare times I need to go farther in a day, there's always rental cars. Hell, I do this already most of the time because when you take into account wear and tear on your car as well as the cost of fuel, the cost is about the same or sometimes even cheaper. If I'm driving to Chicago for example (about 300 miles) there's a part of me that would love to have the creature comforts of my BMW... but when I consider the true cost of that car for those miles I find it more convenient to rent a basic car with a CD player for that drive and usually I'm quite happy.
Yes, my BMW is not exactly the best example of efficiency and "green-ness" out there, but it's what I have today. Will that change? Yes... I think I can say without a shadow of a doubt that in the next few years that will change significantly. First however there has to be the cars I want to drive available as electric. The Aptera I think will be the perfect daily car, and the Tesla sedan the perfect family hauler. I will gladly invest in the infrastructure (charging stations) to power both of these and keep them in my garage and will trade my Bimmer in a heartbeat for them. There will be those that will laugh at the Aptera because of the way it looks... but I used to drive a Subaru SVX (owned three of them actually) so I'm used to being laughed at for the car I drive ;)
Reminds me of the old story I read once about a pilot submitting a "squawk" report on an aircraft he'd been flying saying "Auto-land not working properly on this aircraft." After a week or so the report came back from the shop foreman; "Auto-land not installed on this aircraft."
I must admit, the image of the plane barrelling out of control into the runway, full of passengers while the pilot sat by wondering why the approach wasn't as smooth as he'd hoped just makes me crack up.
Yes, I am a pilot :)
Yes, children are pretty much the world's biggest market.
Only because there's such a supply.
... and it only requires unskilled labor to produce more.
Well like a lot of people here have said; don't use your work account for personal stuff. Problem solved. Anything on a work system is open to scrutiny; I know because I build systems specifically designed to store this stuff. For example; email. Where I work EVERY email received or sent is stored in a database for 7 years in case of legal discovery process. This is a very common practice and access to this database is strictly limited. However, even if you delete it, purge your deleted items, whatever... that email is still in the system for 7 years whether you like it or not. So plain and simple; don't do it. I keep my personal email to my GMail account and even then I prefer to use face-to-face for completely personal stuff.
As for personal files I have a 2GB USB stick with nothing on it but a Truecrypt store. It uses two key files, both accessible from separate online services in case I need to set up access on another machine... and a 30 character password. I periodically sync that store to my Drobo at home, and that in turn gets backed up to Mozy. The contents never get out unless I want them to. Sure the store is small but my REALLY personal files are not that big; Excel and Word documents mostly with a few text-only PDF's. Is it possible that someone could hack it? Yeah... no encryption is perfect. But they'd have to be REALLY determined to get to that data and if they're that determined then power to them. Chances are though that even the fact that the data is encrypted and just a simple password won't cut it will usually deter most.
As for personal photographs and the like... meh. My perspective on that is if you don't want it getting out don't take a picture of it. As I said, no security is perfect and thus everything that is stored has the potential to be used and abused.
And web storage? Forget it. I only use it for my keyfiles and non-sensitive data. Even then only I know where those keyfiles and stuff are so the really sensitive data gets protected. I know enough about how corporations work on the back end... and I've seen enough "secure data leaks" in my lifetime in IT that I don't trust my sensitive or personal data to anything I don't control absolutely. Like my USB stick.
Actually, one thing I was impressed by was Leo Laporte actually demonstrating it on his streamed "This Week In Tech" podcast... though it may also have been Macbreak Weekly. If you were watching the stream then he actually demonstrated the problem occurring and it was eye opening. It also occurred to me that I hold my phone EXACTLY the way he did to recreate the problem.
I have a 3GS but normally use a Bluetooth headset. However, those times I do hold my iPhone I would hold it that way in my left hand. As a result, yeah... the iPhone 4 is not a great option for me unless I'm using Bluetooth.
All this being said, I'm sticking with my 3GS for now. It does everything I need of it, and while I'm still not a fan of the locked down platform there's no doubt in my mind that it's still better than the Windows Mobile devices I had before in the most critical element; making a call. WinMo in the last few years has become "MobileME"; bloated, unstable and generally not fun to use. That last iteration (WinMo 6.5 or something?) was horrendous as a phone, though as a portable computer it was actually pretty good. However, stability problems plagued it when I used it. Since I've owned my 3GS I think I've rebooted it 4 times beyond firmware upgrades, and now I'm running iOS 4 on it so I get all the software goodness of the iPhone 4 without the antenna problems of it.
You mean the communications array that had been established to be useless by that point? The one they sacrificed because they wanted to fix the ship instead of roast alive because the heat shield was damaged?
Oh, and have you seen what happens when a spark ignites in a high oxygen environment with lots of combustible material nearby?
I graduated high school and studied Physics at college... personally I think it was all explained in the context of the movie.
Now I can finally stick it to the man and drop my cable provider forever!
Instead, I'll be downloading all my entertainment on my Cable Internet Connection... wait...
Seriously... 15 years ago when I came to the USA I felt that I was moving to the land of the free. I'm now looking at all the stuff the government is doing and seriously considering moving back to my country of origin so that I can give my son a better upbringing than I feel he can get here with the laughable "Security Theater" we have here. I have watched just about every freedom that Americans have had for hundreds of years basically vanish in 10 years. At the rate things are going I wonder if Mexico are going to have to start patrolling their borders to watch out for Americans trying to escape the tyranny.
Also, the focus on the "Terrorists" is pathetic. We've had terrorists in the USA as long as the USA has existed. The only reason they're clamping down now is because they see an opportunity to destroy our way of life and they grabbed it. What about the Neo Nazis? I'd say they're as bad or in some cases worse than the people who have committed the more recent public terrorist acts in the USA. Oh no, sorry... we can't clamp down on them; they're white. They make up a significant voting pool in the Midwest so we can't do anything about them.
It really pains me to see this country going down the tubes so rapidly... giving up everything that made America great. The sad thing is that the core values and ideals... hell even the core laws and rules are good. However, it has now become common practice to ignore the words of those base laws (like the constitution) while claiming to uphold the spirit of them.