Didn't we just pass legislation that for the first time forces private citizens to buy a product from a select set of other private citizens.
Poor grammar aside, if you've got a better idea to mitigate the ballooning cost of health care that can pass Congress and its corrupt members (that would negate the public option), as well as be deficit-neutral (which nixes tax cuts to the rich), let's hear it. Otherwise, kindly keep your talking points off your soapbox.
Re: 16th Amendment. If you're going to lay blame solely on the Democrats for the income tax, you had better include the Republicans who first instituted it to fund the Civil War, and whose President (William Howard Taft-- the very same Republican who ousted the progressive, trust-busting Roosevelt and sent the GOP down a laissez-faire route that culminated in Black Monday, 1929) proposed and enacted the amendment itself-- or, you can admit that you're a dishonest partisan hack. Choice is yours. If you think that blowhard rhetoric alone will negate the facts in the article you cited, you are as delusional as those who think that if they believe a thing ought to be true, it must therefore be true.
Re: Social Security. What you are arguing is a logical farce: If FDR could not convince the courts to uphold his New Deal legislation (NIRA and others), the courts were correct; however, if the courts upheld Social Security, FDR must have deceived them. In your argument, you do not consider the possibility that this part of the New Deal was constitutional according to the highest court in the country, because your ideology that social assistance of any form is anathema (despite the fact that federal 'transfer' of tax revenues to social services is the norm in every industrialized nation except for those that have failed) trumps intellectual honesty.
The rest is logical garbage. A huge rant does not an argument make, nor are you John Cleese.
Then the key(s) to not voting in psychopaths/megalomaniacs is to either devalue the credo that "successful people get shit done" (which the public schools attempt to indoctrinate into us)-- which is exceedingly hard, as such people tend to be sociopaths or megalomaniacs almost by definition-- or, to consistently highlight how such people abuse their power, which is inevitable for them. I contend that the latter is much easier, though potentially messier, and provides an opening for the former: "see what he did while he got shit done?"
Take Mark Sanford, who abused his office to both betray his family and principles, and put the people of his state at risk by skipping town unannounced, all to get his "winky wacked"* by an Argentinian lover. Despite getting caught and giving a Palin-esque confession at a press conference, he has steadfastly refused to resign and even tried to negotiate with his wife for a way to continue seeing his lover, adding insult to injury to the parties he betrayed. If that doesn't describe someone who doesn't give a shit about anyone but himself, I don't know what does.
Or how about the darling of the nominal conservatives, Sarah Palin?** She is clearly one of the most incompetent and corrupt politicians out there, and yet she is a master of self-victimization, even leveraging her youngest child to her own political advantage and crying "sexism" and "media bias" when she is called on it. Her blatant hypocrisy and moral inconsistency do not faze her one bit, but her followers see that as strength rather than a serious moral failure, and as such they will likely defend her to the death despite the overwhelming evidence against them. For all the talk the political Right sputters about Obama's so-called "cult of personality", our President has nothing on the former governor. Whether she quit her job (destroying any chance she had of demonstrating or developing her governing skills) for profit or to evade ethics investigations, who can tell?
You can find plenty of examples on both sides of the aisle. I can easily name corrupt Democrats like Spitzer, Blagojevich, and Edwards, for example, but the Republicans IMO are much more egregious because of their consistent claim to moral superiority-- the day the GOP abandons this foolish idea along with the evangelical vote is the day they start to win electoral and policy victories.
* Gratuitous Lewis Black quote ** Yes, if you're one of those who are still sane and read W. F. Buckley and the like, you hate Palin as much as I do. All the more reason to fight against her and the others who are destroying conservatism, even if it means breaking Reagan's "11th Commandment". If you're still doubtful that conservatives shouldn't fight, remember that WFB fought mercilessly against the John Birch Society because they were, frankly, insane-- and scarcely 2 years after WFB's death, this group is one of CPAC's key funders, and their ideas are gaining traction mainly because of tools like Beck and Malkin, and leaders like Palin and Bachmann. If conservatism is to survive without becoming a political afterthought, conservatives must reject lies, hysteria, and those who spread it.
When the Famicom came out, people thought video gaming was dead because Atari and its competitors completely imploded under the collapsing home video gaming bubble they created. It sparked a new and viable market that continues to this day.
When the PlayStation crushed the competition, people thought Sony would never look back and that Nintendo was finished in the living room. Two generations later, Nintendo is back on top.
Could this new 3DS be a flop? Maybe, but with Iwata at the helm and Miyamoto still cranking out great stuff, I doubt it-- Iwata learned several key lessons from Nintendo's failures, and Miyamoto is a gaming genius.
besides North Korea and Cuba are there any other communistic states left?
Off the top of my head, Vietnam seems to be doing somewhat okay (a mini-China from the looks of things), and Cuba, well, is faring much like its first premier Fidel.
Great grand internet firewalls need to go. Speech needs to be free.
I didn't realize it at the time, but the Berlin Wall fell not long after Reagan called on Gorbachev to tear it down (which was on its face more about bravado than it was about smart diplomacy, but eh).
Unfortunately the Chinese have likely learned not that they should liberate their people, but that they could learn how the Soviets failed politically and craft ways to keep the Communists in power. Everyone thought that the regime would crumble once their economy was more globalized, but they're more powerful than ever before. The Chinese Communists only understand power, and they are more than willing to use any means necessary to keep their people locked down, whether out in the open as in the Tiananmen Square massacre, or by blocking (read: monitoring) their Internet transactions.
When a political power feels threatened, it'll go almost as far as committing perjury to defend itself. In essence, they will say anything to either take the heat off of them or to bring the troublemaker down with them.
And that's standard practice in diplomacy. Everyone knows that everyone else is lying or hiding something; the trick is to know where the deception is.
Not condoning the behavior of the Chinese (especially since they're using their propaganda ministry directly), but putting this action into perspective. In the long haul it will mean very, very little, because China is just as dependent on the US as the Americans are to them.
It's also about controlling the entire chain of production, from studio to screen. That's why Viacom tried to buy Youtube, and why they have this convoluted scheme of suing infringing uploads while uploading illicitly themselves, apparently designed solely to undermine Youtube legally. You control the entire chain, you get to dictate the terms to every link. It's that simple.
Youtube is the final link between the studio and the viewer, and Viacom wanted to be the first to control it. But Google made a better offer, and Viacom is now in "if I can't have it, NO ONE CAN!!" tantrum mode.
Damn you cheap bastards! One day it'll bite your butt to be so selfish.
It's because the more "faithful" (read: fanatically pious) among the religious Right felt that money is better spent on saving people they do not understand, and as such have serious problems interacting with, than on helping their neighbors, whom Jesus called to love as they love themselves.
It's also because they allied themselves with conservatives and libertarians, who found that Christian demographics are easily manipulated-- just tell them that the other side wants to kill babies or outlaw Christianity, even if they are outright lies.
I'd say a good chunk of those resisting any move to paperless are legal professionals. Our courtrooms aren't exactly made for digital, and nothing says "concrete evidence" better than a physical document. And because the corporate lawyer wants to receive everything as a physical object, many businesses find that the cost of going paperless may not be worth it. If we want to really push paperless, I think we should start here.
Of course, that involves convincing Luddite politicians to authorize digitizing a courtroom and setting standards for digital document certification, etc. After you, gentlemen...
They tried edutainment stuff in the early days of the Famicom and NES, but these failed to take off nearly as well as the games. IMO it's not surprising that they'd be cautious in going down the road that burned them before-- and Miyamoto would know, he was there back in those days.
Another possibility is that they wanted to see what the market would do before moving in with their own ideas.
I'm no lawyer, but if Google can substantiate this claim with evidence, at the very least it'll really hurt their ability to convince the judge:
For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately "roughed up" the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko's to upload clips from computers that couldn't be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt "very strongly" that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.
At the very least, if Google can prove this, they have a battery of arguments that say Viacom acted in bad faith. It might not be proof of blunder on the order of SCO's vacuous litigation, but it will certainly piss the judge off against Viacom.
If I were the judge... well, see the comment title (LoC = Library of Congress).
It seems you're presuming that the risk of STD is worth a teenager's freedom.
Look, I understand that a parent will have to let go sooner or later and let their kids screw up-- sometimes so badly that the error has serious consequences. But the general rule is, if the teenager lives with his parents, he'd better listen to them while they can because chances are, they faced the same decisions he is or will be facing. If the teenager is indeed smarter than his parents, surely he's smart enough to find a way to live on his own, but I'd say that's a minuscule fraction of a percentage point of all teens, particularly in the US.
That's not presumption, that is (or was) common sense.
It's a rare manager who can recognize that rewarding employees-- or even just taking care of their basic needs-- is a very sure way to maintain productivity. It's a shame that there are far too many who think that the only way to get their employees to work is to build on the "indentured servitude" model.
FOR SALE. Off-road rover, all-electric. RUSSIAN QUALITY! Works in low gravity or no atmosphere. $2000 OBO. ONLY ONE UNIT AVAILABLE. First come first serve.
1. "Significant percentage of PS3 users" != "significant percentage of internet-connected device users". Even if all of the PS3 users in the world use their console to watch online videos, they're still dwarfed by the number of people using PCs for the same purpose.
2. You're missing the point that you can't judge a contender for a standard based on how many people use it. If that were the case, then the W3C would standardize on IE6 behavior for HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript, and ECMA/ISO would standardize on Microsoft Office (non-Open XML) documents. There's also the fact that, should the W3C choose Theora, Dirac, or something else other than H.264, there's nothing stopping Sony from patching PS3s to support the new standard. To suggest otherwise is, as GP mentioned, short-sighted.
3. You mentioned elsewhere that if the W3C kept it codec-neutral, that would be fine. I would agree, except that we'd be back in the days of "this site requires IE 8.x or higher", and that would, in practice, run counter to the W3C's goal of a single standard for all browsers and sites.
Slashdot Mirror
Poor grammar aside, if you've got a better idea to mitigate the ballooning cost of health care that can pass Congress and its corrupt members (that would negate the public option), as well as be deficit-neutral (which nixes tax cuts to the rich), let's hear it. Otherwise, kindly keep your talking points off your soapbox.
Re: 16th Amendment. If you're going to lay blame solely on the Democrats for the income tax, you had better include the Republicans who first instituted it to fund the Civil War, and whose President (William Howard Taft-- the very same Republican who ousted the progressive, trust-busting Roosevelt and sent the GOP down a laissez-faire route that culminated in Black Monday, 1929) proposed and enacted the amendment itself-- or, you can admit that you're a dishonest partisan hack. Choice is yours. If you think that blowhard rhetoric alone will negate the facts in the article you cited, you are as delusional as those who think that if they believe a thing ought to be true, it must therefore be true.
Re: Social Security. What you are arguing is a logical farce: If FDR could not convince the courts to uphold his New Deal legislation (NIRA and others), the courts were correct; however, if the courts upheld Social Security, FDR must have deceived them. In your argument, you do not consider the possibility that this part of the New Deal was constitutional according to the highest court in the country, because your ideology that social assistance of any form is anathema (despite the fact that federal 'transfer' of tax revenues to social services is the norm in every industrialized nation except for those that have failed) trumps intellectual honesty.
The rest is logical garbage. A huge rant does not an argument make, nor are you John Cleese.
Then the key(s) to not voting in psychopaths/megalomaniacs is to either devalue the credo that "successful people get shit done" (which the public schools attempt to indoctrinate into us)-- which is exceedingly hard, as such people tend to be sociopaths or megalomaniacs almost by definition-- or, to consistently highlight how such people abuse their power, which is inevitable for them. I contend that the latter is much easier, though potentially messier, and provides an opening for the former: "see what he did while he got shit done?"
Take Mark Sanford, who abused his office to both betray his family and principles, and put the people of his state at risk by skipping town unannounced, all to get his "winky wacked"* by an Argentinian lover. Despite getting caught and giving a Palin-esque confession at a press conference, he has steadfastly refused to resign and even tried to negotiate with his wife for a way to continue seeing his lover, adding insult to injury to the parties he betrayed. If that doesn't describe someone who doesn't give a shit about anyone but himself, I don't know what does.
Or how about the darling of the nominal conservatives, Sarah Palin?** She is clearly one of the most incompetent and corrupt politicians out there, and yet she is a master of self-victimization, even leveraging her youngest child to her own political advantage and crying "sexism" and "media bias" when she is called on it. Her blatant hypocrisy and moral inconsistency do not faze her one bit, but her followers see that as strength rather than a serious moral failure, and as such they will likely defend her to the death despite the overwhelming evidence against them. For all the talk the political Right sputters about Obama's so-called "cult of personality", our President has nothing on the former governor. Whether she quit her job (destroying any chance she had of demonstrating or developing her governing skills) for profit or to evade ethics investigations, who can tell?
You can find plenty of examples on both sides of the aisle. I can easily name corrupt Democrats like Spitzer, Blagojevich, and Edwards, for example, but the Republicans IMO are much more egregious because of their consistent claim to moral superiority-- the day the GOP abandons this foolish idea along with the evangelical vote is the day they start to win electoral and policy victories.
* Gratuitous Lewis Black quote
** Yes, if you're one of those who are still sane and read W. F. Buckley and the like, you hate Palin as much as I do. All the more reason to fight against her and the others who are destroying conservatism, even if it means breaking Reagan's "11th Commandment". If you're still doubtful that conservatives shouldn't fight, remember that WFB fought mercilessly against the John Birch Society because they were, frankly, insane-- and scarcely 2 years after WFB's death, this group is one of CPAC's key funders, and their ideas are gaining traction mainly because of tools like Beck and Malkin, and leaders like Palin and Bachmann. If conservatism is to survive without becoming a political afterthought, conservatives must reject lies, hysteria, and those who spread it.
Control the information.
You can own the media markets outright (Italy's Berlusconi), or, as Chavez and countless others before him did, simply arrest them.
Fat lotta good the UN does on either account...
This gives me a great idea for Mike Meyers, a simian, and a form-fitting black outfit...
We could go further back in history, you know:
When the Famicom came out, people thought video gaming was dead because Atari and its competitors completely imploded under the collapsing home video gaming bubble they created. It sparked a new and viable market that continues to this day.
When the PlayStation crushed the competition, people thought Sony would never look back and that Nintendo was finished in the living room. Two generations later, Nintendo is back on top.
Could this new 3DS be a flop? Maybe, but with Iwata at the helm and Miyamoto still cranking out great stuff, I doubt it-- Iwata learned several key lessons from Nintendo's failures, and Miyamoto is a gaming genius.
Wouldn't you know, I discovered the clip. And I predict a number of replies pointing it out as well.
Bring 'em on. They posted videos of LoB clips.
But they seem to have pulled their own Roman Joke Names clip. A shame-- I liked Incontinentia Buttocks...
Off the top of my head, Vietnam seems to be doing somewhat okay (a mini-China from the looks of things), and Cuba, well, is faring much like its first premier Fidel.
I didn't realize it at the time, but the Berlin Wall fell not long after Reagan called on Gorbachev to tear it down (which was on its face more about bravado than it was about smart diplomacy, but eh).
Unfortunately the Chinese have likely learned not that they should liberate their people, but that they could learn how the Soviets failed politically and craft ways to keep the Communists in power. Everyone thought that the regime would crumble once their economy was more globalized, but they're more powerful than ever before. The Chinese Communists only understand power, and they are more than willing to use any means necessary to keep their people locked down, whether out in the open as in the Tiananmen Square massacre, or by blocking (read: monitoring) their Internet transactions.
Handy mnemonic: The joke you mention is a product of budget reconciliation; hence, COBRA (Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act).
Yeah, there's something comical about a villain who is taken down so easily. Reminds me of this cartoon about an incompetent criminal.
When a political power feels threatened, it'll go almost as far as committing perjury to defend itself. In essence, they will say anything to either take the heat off of them or to bring the troublemaker down with them.
And that's standard practice in diplomacy. Everyone knows that everyone else is lying or hiding something; the trick is to know where the deception is.
Not condoning the behavior of the Chinese (especially since they're using their propaganda ministry directly), but putting this action into perspective. In the long haul it will mean very, very little, because China is just as dependent on the US as the Americans are to them.
It's also about controlling the entire chain of production, from studio to screen. That's why Viacom tried to buy Youtube, and why they have this convoluted scheme of suing infringing uploads while uploading illicitly themselves, apparently designed solely to undermine Youtube legally. You control the entire chain, you get to dictate the terms to every link. It's that simple.
Youtube is the final link between the studio and the viewer, and Viacom wanted to be the first to control it. But Google made a better offer, and Viacom is now in "if I can't have it, NO ONE CAN!!" tantrum mode.
It's because the more "faithful" (read: fanatically pious) among the religious Right felt that money is better spent on saving people they do not understand, and as such have serious problems interacting with, than on helping their neighbors, whom Jesus called to love as they love themselves.
It's also because they allied themselves with conservatives and libertarians, who found that Christian demographics are easily manipulated-- just tell them that the other side wants to kill babies or outlaw Christianity, even if they are outright lies.
It's probably because I'm really sleepy right now, but that reminded me of the first battle in Wrath of Khan.
Next thing you know, the Republicans will be panicking that their shields are dropping. One could only hope.
I'd say a good chunk of those resisting any move to paperless are legal professionals. Our courtrooms aren't exactly made for digital, and nothing says "concrete evidence" better than a physical document. And because the corporate lawyer wants to receive everything as a physical object, many businesses find that the cost of going paperless may not be worth it. If we want to really push paperless, I think we should start here.
Of course, that involves convincing Luddite politicians to authorize digitizing a courtroom and setting standards for digital document certification, etc. After you, gentlemen...
They tried edutainment stuff in the early days of the Famicom and NES, but these failed to take off nearly as well as the games. IMO it's not surprising that they'd be cautious in going down the road that burned them before-- and Miyamoto would know, he was there back in those days.
Another possibility is that they wanted to see what the market would do before moving in with their own ideas.
I'm no lawyer, but if Google can substantiate this claim with evidence, at the very least it'll really hurt their ability to convince the judge:
At the very least, if Google can prove this, they have a battery of arguments that say Viacom acted in bad faith. It might not be proof of blunder on the order of SCO's vacuous litigation, but it will certainly piss the judge off against Viacom.
If I were the judge... well, see the comment title (LoC = Library of Congress).
How much do you want to bet that at least 30,000 of those requests were for Obama's birth certificate?
It seems you're presuming that the risk of STD is worth a teenager's freedom.
Look, I understand that a parent will have to let go sooner or later and let their kids screw up-- sometimes so badly that the error has serious consequences. But the general rule is, if the teenager lives with his parents, he'd better listen to them while they can because chances are, they faced the same decisions he is or will be facing. If the teenager is indeed smarter than his parents, surely he's smart enough to find a way to live on his own, but I'd say that's a minuscule fraction of a percentage point of all teens, particularly in the US.
That's not presumption, that is (or was) common sense.
It's a rare manager who can recognize that rewarding employees-- or even just taking care of their basic needs-- is a very sure way to maintain productivity. It's a shame that there are far too many who think that the only way to get their employees to work is to build on the "indentured servitude" model.
I'm surprised no one brought up the (cheesy) G4TV faux "interview":
"Hmm... it says here you have experience in Word and Excel... But what exactly do you mean by 'Level 8 Beast Slayer'?"
Umm... I was bored?
FOR SALE. Off-road rover, all-electric.
RUSSIAN QUALITY! Works in low gravity or
no atmosphere. $2000 OBO.
ONLY ONE UNIT AVAILABLE. First come first serve.
I believe I told you: Half means half the genetic codebase, not half the mass.
In short, yes, you did use too many monkeys.
1. "Significant percentage of PS3 users" != "significant percentage of internet-connected device users". Even if all of the PS3 users in the world use their console to watch online videos, they're still dwarfed by the number of people using PCs for the same purpose.
2. You're missing the point that you can't judge a contender for a standard based on how many people use it. If that were the case, then the W3C would standardize on IE6 behavior for HTML5, CSS3, and Javascript, and ECMA/ISO would standardize on Microsoft Office (non-Open XML) documents. There's also the fact that, should the W3C choose Theora, Dirac, or something else other than H.264, there's nothing stopping Sony from patching PS3s to support the new standard. To suggest otherwise is, as GP mentioned, short-sighted.
3. You mentioned elsewhere that if the W3C kept it codec-neutral, that would be fine. I would agree, except that we'd be back in the days of "this site requires IE 8.x or higher", and that would, in practice, run counter to the W3C's goal of a single standard for all browsers and sites.
They should get a big DJ rig and run this L4D2 classic.