Where does this come from? I'm a French and I don't hear around me, everyday, non-stop American bashing
You do hear it, but you don't even notice it because you just think the propaganda is truth. Read Jean-Francois Revel or Philippe Roger ("The American Enemy"), French intellectuals who analyze the widespread French anti-Americanism. European writers like Karl May or von Trier wrote about US culture and society without ever having set foot in it, and Georges Duhamel denied it was even necessary to leave Paris to condemn American culture. In German politics, the words "Rautierkapitalismus" and "amerikanische Verhältnisse" are used to strike fear into people to keep voting for Germany's epidemic crony capitalism. And the major thrust of both Hitler's and Mussolini's economic policy was to find a "third position" to the "enslavement by US capitalism" and communism.
If anything we don't like you being so arrogant yourself (what with "Land of the Free" and other pre-made propaganda, implying the rest of the West is so bad to live in).
Don't flatter yourself into thinking that we would bother to impress you. Most Americans (myself included) don't care about the misconceptions European have about themselves or what Europeans think about the US or Americans. What we care about is the misconceptions other Americans have about Europe, because some politicians in the US keep pointing to Europe and want us to emulate it, based on the same kind of phony propaganda European governments use to try to keep their own citizens in line.
I spent many years living in Europe. If you like it, enjoy it. I do not want the US to turn into anything like it, and that means making it clear to my fellow Americans that Europe isn't the social and cultural paradise Europeans make it out to be.
If you want to do business in a country, you have to follow the laws.
That's true neither as a moral nor as a factual statement. Lots of businesses are operating in violation of laws, from banks to pot growers. Furthermore, for some laws, it is your moral right, and perhaps duty, to violate them, like discriminatory laws or laws attempting to shield fraud or human rights abusers.
You can chat over any TCP connection. You can chat through HTTP on a web page. Short of banning all Internet connections and all web access, they can't even come up with a legal definition that kills online chatting, let alone police it.
Did the New Zealand people really want this? No. But we're getting it anyway. Because the US military industrial complex calls the shots even in countries they have no official democratic authority over.
You have three choices: (1) either you comply with US political pressure, (2) you become powerful enough yourself, or (3) you ally yourself with other countries opposed to US foreign policy. You seem to want all the benefits of (1) without the obligations and reciprocity that come with it. Sorry, can't have that.
For example, if you want the US to provide you with intelligence, you need to provide the US with intelligence. And US intelligence is more useful to you than the other way around. Ditto for free trade. You want to export your goods without hassles? Then you need to let other countries export to yours without hassles.
Your leaders are choosing a couple of percent of economic growth plus a tiny increase in security over your privacy and autonomy, and they are doing it because your voters would kick them out of office if they didn't. And US politicians are making the same choices for the same reasons: people complain about the negative consequences, but they'd complain even more if politicians chose differently.
but you're actually choosing who will run the military and spy infrastructures of the whole Western world
Yes, we are. We got into this position after enduring centuries of European imperialism, and European military and intelligence dominance. And the way we got into that position was because Europe self-destructed and then after the war was content to let the US run its affairs while it relaxed for a while. And I include Australia and NZ under "European imperialism"; don't fancy yourself as being somehow separate from that.
This means that we've all become very interested in American politics, even though we'd rather not.
Who are you kidding? European obsession with, arrogance towards, and dislike of, the US has been around, with brief interruptions, since the US was founded. Don't expect American voters to suddenly start caring after two centuries of European intellectuals getting their panties in a knot.
Having said that, in many ways, many Americans dislike the same things about the US government that the Europeans dislike about the US government, and hopefully we can emphasize privacy and civil liberties more in future elections. But how we deal with that is our business, not yours. Go fix your own country, it seems to need it.
No, but we also don't force you to wear a "I squished three puppies sign" around your neck until you die, in particular if you have shown contrition and haven't done it for 10 years.
By the standards of 90% of the rest of the inhabitable world, it really isn't (or at least it wasn't). I don't think you know much about Pacific islands. You are, after all, generalizing about all islands in an area that covers a third of the surface of our planet.
I chose the term "most" carefully. The bigger islands are quite comfortable, but the smaller they get, the more marginal and numerous they get.
You don't seem to remember back in this conversation more than a few posts.
I do remember. You tried to give it as an example of the dangers of something, although you were never quite clear about what. It's not an example of the dangers of unsustainability because Nauru's resources could never have been used sustainably. It's not an example of the dangers of free markets, because Nauru reached its current point through tribal, collectivist policies. And it's not even clear that the Nauruan's are economically worse off now than they were pre-contact (although they may be less happy).
And if you don't have money, you don't get a vote. You're implicitly describing a plutocracy here.
Oh, dear, you really don't understand the difference between market "votes" and political "votes"? In markets, you "vote" for or against products, for or against successful businesses; in politics, you vote for or against laws and representatives. Different kinds of "votes". Problems occur when you're trying to use political votes to make market decisions, or vice versa. (Furthermore, there is nobody in the US who has "no money"; everybody has some money to spend.)
In any case, markets shift away from functioning cleanly based on the definition of good and bad decisions. In a properly functioning market speculation would not be rewarded.
Speculation is taking on high risks for the potential of large financial gains. Many ventures require people willing to take high risks because they are inherently risky. Most of the high tech companies you rely on day to day wouldn't exist without speculation.
In any case, you still haven't shown how there's some "free market" method of allocating publicly owned resources.
By definition, publicly owned resources aren't allocated by the free market. Only privately owned resources can be allocated by markets.
"You proposed we adopt sustainability, which will invariably lead to economic collapse." - I think you need to consider the definition of the term: "oxymoron".
Well, the problem is that people who advocate policies under the name "sustainability" in fact advocate unsustainable policies, knowingly or unknowingly.
You keep presenting these "grave economic consequences" as a forgone conclusion but you haven't provided any proof, or even a good working theory for why this must be the case.... Climate change is only one consequence. Basically you're proposing recklessness.
Sustainability at the very least means ending the use of all fossil fuels, since they are not renewable. What are you going to replace that energy and those resources with? Renewable energy right now is about 12% of global energy production. Where is a plausible plan to increase that to 100%? Most of the renewable energy is hydroelectric, which is cheaper than any other energy source, so that certainly can't be expanded (otherwise it already would have been). Even if you could come up with a technical solution, where is the extra money going to come from to pay for the higher cost of renewable energy?
Or if you are not going to replace them, where is the fertilizer and energy going to come from that we need to feed, clothe, shelter, and protect ourselves?
People proposing sustainability need to answer these questions in great detail before we change what we're doing. Otherwise, adopting policies imposing sustainability is reckless.
I believe electing greedy, power-hungry imbeciles is bad no matter how much power presidents have.
That's sort of like saying that the common cold and wrinkles are bad; they are, of course, but you have more chance of avoiding either of those than to elect a better kind of president. Democracy almost never puts good people in charge, and when it does, it's an accident, an accident that's less and less likely in this day and age.
That's why we have checks and balances, so that politicians keep each other in check. The problem we're experiencing right now is that these checks and balances are at risk from executive overreach.
Think of the executive branch as the nation's janitors. It's a dirty job and few people want to do it. They have always stealing our toilet paper rolls and not doing a good job cleaning, but we kind of accept that because it's too hard to do anything about it. Recently, they have started going through our lockers and stealing computers, and we really ought to put a stop to that before it gets out of hand any more.
I responded to WindBourne's false claim that this is "the neo-cons" fault, so he dragged politics into this. If the federal government wasn't wasting so much money on entitlements and stimuli, NASA funding wouldn't even be an issue, and we could do a kick-ass space program with public funds, wasteful as that is.
And it isn't the "neo-cons" that turned NASA into a "jobs program" for themselves, both parties are misusing it for that, as both parties are doing with every program, and as is unavoidable if you give politicians a large chunk of tax dollars to do with as they please..
And I do think that private space exploration is the answer, but neither party is interested in that. Private space exploration means no handouts from Congress, but simply a repeal of excessive restrictions and regulations, and maybe some tax exemptions.
WindBourne isn't interested in private space exploration, he's interested in playing politics with NASA, just like the neo-cons.
You're saying that the fault with government (and you are clearly unhappy about it) is that we elect the wrong presidents, and if people only paid more attention and elected better people and maybe we got a few more parties, things would improve.
I'm saying that you're misdiagnosing the problem. It doesn't matter who we put in the White House, they simply can't do a better job. There is only so much that is humanly possible for the president to do, and we're demanding much more of him than that. The solution is to reduce the job requirements, not to hope that we'll find Superman.
The fact that you think Steve Pinker is a "self-styled retard neuroscientist" just demonstrates your ignorance. Learn something about the world you live in. And his findings are consistent with lots of other scientists. Sorry, man, but the "retard" here is you.
A lot of this "big scary NSA" non-sense is based on a misconception that just because the NSA is capturing this information means they're using it, or even looking at it.
The fact that this information is easily available at all, and potentially without a court order, is a threat to our political system. You can be sure that the president gets national security reports on all major political figures, both allies and foes alike. Tax evasion, extramarital affairs, homosexuality, illegitimate children, drug habits, whatever are all considered security relevant and would of course be reported. And all of those also happen to be wonderful means for exerting pressure on people to vote his way or drop out of political races. This is too powerful a political weapon to give to the executive branch.
We voted for a "better" president last time around: a Harvard educated constitutional scholar, Nobel prize winner, and community organizer who talked the talk and walked the walk... until he became president, started having delusions of grandeur, and became intoxicated with his own power and myth.
I don't want a "better" president, I want a boring president who proposes no meaningful new legislation, stays out of my hair, lowers taxes, doesn't start any new wars, and quietly leaves at the end of his term. Kudos if he cuts a few useless departments and gives away some executive powers in the process. I think I'm in the silent majority there. Looking back, Romney might just have been dull enough for the job.
It's not a terrible system if those two parties actually represent the will of the American people. And they do because our system forces parties to constantly guess what the mainstream wants. In the European system, you tend to have half a dozen parties, each with their own extremist positions, and there is little reason to pay attention to what the mainstream wants: getting more votes is not reliably increasing your likelihood of having influence. And despite a larger number of parties, many viewpoints remain unrepresented in European parliaments.
If you read carefully, saying that specific requests have come in for 20000 users doesn't mean that there aren't other mechanisms in place to collect a lot more data without specific requests. For example, the NSA could be collecting data where Facebook's servers connect to the Internet. Past reports and disclosures on NSA activities (as well as the activities of other spy agencies) suggest that this is likely routine practice. Facebook doesn't even deny this, and of course even if they did, it's questionable whether such a denial was meaningful. In addition, it's clear that the NSA and other agencies actively collect data from all open sources that they can. And, of course, you have to assume that the Utah data center is going to be used to store something, and it ain't gonna be data obtained from just 20000 Facebook-related requests, because those would fit on my hard drive.
So I don't know what these disclosures are supposed to accomplish. They really don't change anything. At the root of the problem is really that there isn't enough transparency and that people have lost trust. What we need and should demand is complete legal, fiscal, and legislative transparency on our spy organizations, what they are legally allowed to do, who sets limits on them, and how much we're spending on it. I don't see why understanding in such general terms what these organizations do should hinder their ability to catch terrorists. And if such disclosures really interfere with their capabilities, that suggests by itself that they are doing something they shouldn't be doing.
The difference between a whore and a courtesan is like the difference between Walmart and Tiffany's. People resent the cheapness; if it's expensive enough and done with style, it becomes chic.
First of all, it contributes to the objectification of women. The pervasive idea in our society that women are pretty things to parade around, and if you're really successful,
Just like people with homosexual tendencies are often the loudest homophobes, I suspect people with sexist tendencies are often the loudest crusaders against sexism. So don't generalize from your own dysfunctions to the rest of society.
Besides, weird as that may seem to you, people actually enjoy being objectified occasionally, and they have control over it by how they dress. Revealing dress = please objectify me, conservative dress = relate to me as a person. Works for both men and women. You should try it sometime, it's fun.
When you so blatantly target your marketing towards men, it sends the message that your product isn't for women
Yes, that's often the intended message. As for many other products, people create different products for men and women, not because they are sexist, but because men and women actually have different preferences. Imagine that, companies giving people what they want. What is the world coming to?
Only if you also disregard any possible benefits that change could bring.
If we really wanted the kind of do-good-activist-president you imagine, we'd need to switch to a European style parliamentary system, where the president (or chancellor as the case may be), can actually get things done and is selected based on skill by parliament. The US system is set up to elect a dull, ineffective caretaker with limited power, and most US presidents have been duds. This has only become a problem recently as the executive has gotten more and more power.
Should we switch to a European system? I don't think so. While European leaders sometimes do a lot of good, they just as often do irreparable damage. The US system is a good one, we just need to turn back the clock on excessive executive and federal powers.
Anyone is allowed to if they want to. It's a problem when your boss tells you to and makes it a job requirement.
Geez, I didn't know that booth babes were actually slaves to their bosses. I thought they chose their profession, just like fashion models.
So I assume you also object to fashion models? I mean, their bosses tell them to wear revealing clothes and parade up and down in front of men as well.
First off, this nightmare that is ongoing with NASA, is NOT NASA's fault, but the fault, of the God Damn neo-cons that are running the house.
No, its the fault of the god damn progressives, who waste all of our tax dollars on entitlements, crony capitalism, Keynesian stimuli, and interest payments, so that there is less and less left for infrastructure and science.
The majority of those shits are looking to keep NASA as a Job's bill. They do not care whether we go to the moon or not.
Whereas the progressives and Democrats have everybody's best interest at heart? Get real. Democrats are as corrupt as Republicans, if not more so.
Google, Apple, and Facebook were never "groundbreaking". They were well executed implementations of largely known technologies and ideas. And much of the innovation that came out of these companies actually was acquired, when they bought up startups and academics, thereby also spreading the wealth.
And that's not going to stop either: people are going to continue to come up with innovative ideas, form small startups, and then the Googles and Apples of this world are going to buy them and stick their name on it.
And because most people are unintelligent and apathetic.
And of course you are so much smarter than they all, right? I don't think so.
Actually, not voting at all is entirely rational if you look at return on time invested.
And, more generally, the low voter turnout in US elections tells you that most people just don't give a sh*t. They have low expectations of the government, but they are personally doing well enough that they don't really care. Ironically, a large part of the "the sky is falling" progressives are themselves doing very well and now little to nothing of the groups they are supposedly trying to help.
If someone else owns the copyright, you simply shouldn't have copies of the code around at all, for any purpose. I think as a potential employer, the fact that you took their code, made a copy, and are now shopping it around to new employers is a red flag, whether the copyright notice on it is intact or not. The fact that this may be JavaScript code that's served by some public server doesn't change that.
Slashdot Mirror
You do hear it, but you don't even notice it because you just think the propaganda is truth. Read Jean-Francois Revel or Philippe Roger ("The American Enemy"), French intellectuals who analyze the widespread French anti-Americanism. European writers like Karl May or von Trier wrote about US culture and society without ever having set foot in it, and Georges Duhamel denied it was even necessary to leave Paris to condemn American culture. In German politics, the words "Rautierkapitalismus" and "amerikanische Verhältnisse" are used to strike fear into people to keep voting for Germany's epidemic crony capitalism. And the major thrust of both Hitler's and Mussolini's economic policy was to find a "third position" to the "enslavement by US capitalism" and communism.
Don't flatter yourself into thinking that we would bother to impress you. Most Americans (myself included) don't care about the misconceptions European have about themselves or what Europeans think about the US or Americans. What we care about is the misconceptions other Americans have about Europe, because some politicians in the US keep pointing to Europe and want us to emulate it, based on the same kind of phony propaganda European governments use to try to keep their own citizens in line.
I spent many years living in Europe. If you like it, enjoy it. I do not want the US to turn into anything like it, and that means making it clear to my fellow Americans that Europe isn't the social and cultural paradise Europeans make it out to be.
Thank you for illustrating my point about European arrogance again. Kind of ironic that you use a US cultural symbol.
That's true neither as a moral nor as a factual statement. Lots of businesses are operating in violation of laws, from banks to pot growers. Furthermore, for some laws, it is your moral right, and perhaps duty, to violate them, like discriminatory laws or laws attempting to shield fraud or human rights abusers.
You can chat over any TCP connection. You can chat through HTTP on a web page. Short of banning all Internet connections and all web access, they can't even come up with a legal definition that kills online chatting, let alone police it.
You have three choices: (1) either you comply with US political pressure, (2) you become powerful enough yourself, or (3) you ally yourself with other countries opposed to US foreign policy. You seem to want all the benefits of (1) without the obligations and reciprocity that come with it. Sorry, can't have that.
For example, if you want the US to provide you with intelligence, you need to provide the US with intelligence. And US intelligence is more useful to you than the other way around. Ditto for free trade. You want to export your goods without hassles? Then you need to let other countries export to yours without hassles.
Your leaders are choosing a couple of percent of economic growth plus a tiny increase in security over your privacy and autonomy, and they are doing it because your voters would kick them out of office if they didn't. And US politicians are making the same choices for the same reasons: people complain about the negative consequences, but they'd complain even more if politicians chose differently.
Yes, we are. We got into this position after enduring centuries of European imperialism, and European military and intelligence dominance. And the way we got into that position was because Europe self-destructed and then after the war was content to let the US run its affairs while it relaxed for a while. And I include Australia and NZ under "European imperialism"; don't fancy yourself as being somehow separate from that.
Who are you kidding? European obsession with, arrogance towards, and dislike of, the US has been around, with brief interruptions, since the US was founded. Don't expect American voters to suddenly start caring after two centuries of European intellectuals getting their panties in a knot.
Having said that, in many ways, many Americans dislike the same things about the US government that the Europeans dislike about the US government, and hopefully we can emphasize privacy and civil liberties more in future elections. But how we deal with that is our business, not yours. Go fix your own country, it seems to need it.
No, but we also don't force you to wear a "I squished three puppies sign" around your neck until you die, in particular if you have shown contrition and haven't done it for 10 years.
I chose the term "most" carefully. The bigger islands are quite comfortable, but the smaller they get, the more marginal and numerous they get.
I do remember. You tried to give it as an example of the dangers of something, although you were never quite clear about what. It's not an example of the dangers of unsustainability because Nauru's resources could never have been used sustainably. It's not an example of the dangers of free markets, because Nauru reached its current point through tribal, collectivist policies. And it's not even clear that the Nauruan's are economically worse off now than they were pre-contact (although they may be less happy).
Oh, dear, you really don't understand the difference between market "votes" and political "votes"? In markets, you "vote" for or against products, for or against successful businesses; in politics, you vote for or against laws and representatives. Different kinds of "votes". Problems occur when you're trying to use political votes to make market decisions, or vice versa. (Furthermore, there is nobody in the US who has "no money"; everybody has some money to spend.)
Speculation is taking on high risks for the potential of large financial gains. Many ventures require people willing to take high risks because they are inherently risky. Most of the high tech companies you rely on day to day wouldn't exist without speculation.
By definition, publicly owned resources aren't allocated by the free market. Only privately owned resources can be allocated by markets.
Well, the problem is that people who advocate policies under the name "sustainability" in fact advocate unsustainable policies, knowingly or unknowingly.
Sustainability at the very least means ending the use of all fossil fuels, since they are not renewable. What are you going to replace that energy and those resources with? Renewable energy right now is about 12% of global energy production. Where is a plausible plan to increase that to 100%? Most of the renewable energy is hydroelectric, which is cheaper than any other energy source, so that certainly can't be expanded (otherwise it already would have been). Even if you could come up with a technical solution, where is the extra money going to come from to pay for the higher cost of renewable energy?
Or if you are not going to replace them, where is the fertilizer and energy going to come from that we need to feed, clothe, shelter, and protect ourselves?
People proposing sustainability need to answer these questions in great detail before we change what we're doing. Otherwise, adopting policies imposing sustainability is reckless.
That's sort of like saying that the common cold and wrinkles are bad; they are, of course, but you have more chance of avoiding either of those than to elect a better kind of president. Democracy almost never puts good people in charge, and when it does, it's an accident, an accident that's less and less likely in this day and age.
That's why we have checks and balances, so that politicians keep each other in check. The problem we're experiencing right now is that these checks and balances are at risk from executive overreach.
Think of the executive branch as the nation's janitors. It's a dirty job and few people want to do it. They have always stealing our toilet paper rolls and not doing a good job cleaning, but we kind of accept that because it's too hard to do anything about it. Recently, they have started going through our lockers and stealing computers, and we really ought to put a stop to that before it gets out of hand any more.
I responded to WindBourne's false claim that this is "the neo-cons" fault, so he dragged politics into this. If the federal government wasn't wasting so much money on entitlements and stimuli, NASA funding wouldn't even be an issue, and we could do a kick-ass space program with public funds, wasteful as that is.
And it isn't the "neo-cons" that turned NASA into a "jobs program" for themselves, both parties are misusing it for that, as both parties are doing with every program, and as is unavoidable if you give politicians a large chunk of tax dollars to do with as they please..
And I do think that private space exploration is the answer, but neither party is interested in that. Private space exploration means no handouts from Congress, but simply a repeal of excessive restrictions and regulations, and maybe some tax exemptions.
WindBourne isn't interested in private space exploration, he's interested in playing politics with NASA, just like the neo-cons.
You're saying that the fault with government (and you are clearly unhappy about it) is that we elect the wrong presidents, and if people only paid more attention and elected better people and maybe we got a few more parties, things would improve.
I'm saying that you're misdiagnosing the problem. It doesn't matter who we put in the White House, they simply can't do a better job. There is only so much that is humanly possible for the president to do, and we're demanding much more of him than that. The solution is to reduce the job requirements, not to hope that we'll find Superman.
The fact that you think Steve Pinker is a "self-styled retard neuroscientist" just demonstrates your ignorance. Learn something about the world you live in. And his findings are consistent with lots of other scientists. Sorry, man, but the "retard" here is you.
Does your reply have anything to do with what I wrote?
The fact that this information is easily available at all, and potentially without a court order, is a threat to our political system. You can be sure that the president gets national security reports on all major political figures, both allies and foes alike. Tax evasion, extramarital affairs, homosexuality, illegitimate children, drug habits, whatever are all considered security relevant and would of course be reported. And all of those also happen to be wonderful means for exerting pressure on people to vote his way or drop out of political races. This is too powerful a political weapon to give to the executive branch.
We voted for a "better" president last time around: a Harvard educated constitutional scholar, Nobel prize winner, and community organizer who talked the talk and walked the walk... until he became president, started having delusions of grandeur, and became intoxicated with his own power and myth.
I don't want a "better" president, I want a boring president who proposes no meaningful new legislation, stays out of my hair, lowers taxes, doesn't start any new wars, and quietly leaves at the end of his term. Kudos if he cuts a few useless departments and gives away some executive powers in the process. I think I'm in the silent majority there. Looking back, Romney might just have been dull enough for the job.
It's not a terrible system if those two parties actually represent the will of the American people. And they do because our system forces parties to constantly guess what the mainstream wants. In the European system, you tend to have half a dozen parties, each with their own extremist positions, and there is little reason to pay attention to what the mainstream wants: getting more votes is not reliably increasing your likelihood of having influence. And despite a larger number of parties, many viewpoints remain unrepresented in European parliaments.
If you read carefully, saying that specific requests have come in for 20000 users doesn't mean that there aren't other mechanisms in place to collect a lot more data without specific requests. For example, the NSA could be collecting data where Facebook's servers connect to the Internet. Past reports and disclosures on NSA activities (as well as the activities of other spy agencies) suggest that this is likely routine practice. Facebook doesn't even deny this, and of course even if they did, it's questionable whether such a denial was meaningful. In addition, it's clear that the NSA and other agencies actively collect data from all open sources that they can. And, of course, you have to assume that the Utah data center is going to be used to store something, and it ain't gonna be data obtained from just 20000 Facebook-related requests, because those would fit on my hard drive.
So I don't know what these disclosures are supposed to accomplish. They really don't change anything. At the root of the problem is really that there isn't enough transparency and that people have lost trust. What we need and should demand is complete legal, fiscal, and legislative transparency on our spy organizations, what they are legally allowed to do, who sets limits on them, and how much we're spending on it. I don't see why understanding in such general terms what these organizations do should hinder their ability to catch terrorists. And if such disclosures really interfere with their capabilities, that suggests by itself that they are doing something they shouldn't be doing.
The difference between a whore and a courtesan is like the difference between Walmart and Tiffany's. People resent the cheapness; if it's expensive enough and done with style, it becomes chic.
Just like people with homosexual tendencies are often the loudest homophobes, I suspect people with sexist tendencies are often the loudest crusaders against sexism. So don't generalize from your own dysfunctions to the rest of society.
Besides, weird as that may seem to you, people actually enjoy being objectified occasionally, and they have control over it by how they dress. Revealing dress = please objectify me, conservative dress = relate to me as a person. Works for both men and women. You should try it sometime, it's fun.
Yes, that's often the intended message. As for many other products, people create different products for men and women, not because they are sexist, but because men and women actually have different preferences. Imagine that, companies giving people what they want. What is the world coming to?
If we really wanted the kind of do-good-activist-president you imagine, we'd need to switch to a European style parliamentary system, where the president (or chancellor as the case may be), can actually get things done and is selected based on skill by parliament. The US system is set up to elect a dull, ineffective caretaker with limited power, and most US presidents have been duds. This has only become a problem recently as the executive has gotten more and more power.
Should we switch to a European system? I don't think so. While European leaders sometimes do a lot of good, they just as often do irreparable damage. The US system is a good one, we just need to turn back the clock on excessive executive and federal powers.
Geez, I didn't know that booth babes were actually slaves to their bosses. I thought they chose their profession, just like fashion models.
So I assume you also object to fashion models? I mean, their bosses tell them to wear revealing clothes and parade up and down in front of men as well.
No, its the fault of the god damn progressives, who waste all of our tax dollars on entitlements, crony capitalism, Keynesian stimuli, and interest payments, so that there is less and less left for infrastructure and science.
Whereas the progressives and Democrats have everybody's best interest at heart? Get real. Democrats are as corrupt as Republicans, if not more so.
Google, Apple, and Facebook were never "groundbreaking". They were well executed implementations of largely known technologies and ideas. And much of the innovation that came out of these companies actually was acquired, when they bought up startups and academics, thereby also spreading the wealth.
And that's not going to stop either: people are going to continue to come up with innovative ideas, form small startups, and then the Googles and Apples of this world are going to buy them and stick their name on it.
Apparently, it's sexist when hired female sales staff ("booth babes") wear T-shirts, makeup, and big hair. But apparently it is OK to use your feminine wiles if you declare yourself a feminist and a female technologist (and apparently, you don't actually need to know much about technology to do so). Can someone who is well versed in the intricacies of sexism and political correctness please explain who is allowed to wear revealing clothes under what circumstances, and who is not?
And of course you are so much smarter than they all, right? I don't think so.
Actually, not voting at all is entirely rational if you look at return on time invested.
And, more generally, the low voter turnout in US elections tells you that most people just don't give a sh*t. They have low expectations of the government, but they are personally doing well enough that they don't really care. Ironically, a large part of the "the sky is falling" progressives are themselves doing very well and now little to nothing of the groups they are supposedly trying to help.
If someone else owns the copyright, you simply shouldn't have copies of the code around at all, for any purpose. I think as a potential employer, the fact that you took their code, made a copy, and are now shopping it around to new employers is a red flag, whether the copyright notice on it is intact or not. The fact that this may be JavaScript code that's served by some public server doesn't change that.