Having said this, I come from a smaller nation (New Zealand) that has decided to not support the US on several occasions, including various nuclear issues and the Iraq invasion. The result is that our government is now pursuing a Free Trade Agreement with China, because the US won't speak to us. I'm not sure which is worse.
As an American, I'd like to say, Good for you for standing up to our nutjobs. More countries (I'm talking about you Tony Blair!) should do that.
That said, free trade with China isn't really that good of an idea on completely unrelated economic terms. When we did this, we were told "Now we have 1.2 billion more customers!", only that's not what happened at all. And it was perfectly obvious that this argument was bogus. The Chinese simply don't make enough to purchase our goods. Instead, they make the goods, and we import them. But never fear! We can now all get jobs at Walmart.
I don't think free trade is good for workers in industrialized nations. It depresses living standards for 95+% of the population, through job loss. Regulated trade was worked since the beginning of time. There's nothing wrong with that system.
I'm a proud capitalist. Captialism works where alternate economic models (i.e. socialism) fail because it recognizes that fundamentally people are greedy bastards only out for themselves. It uses that the engine of commerce. (i.e. Sellers try to maximize profits, while buyers try to minimize cost.) Socialism on the other hand relies on everyone working for the greater good.
Capitalism in a very real sense is a greedy algorithm (Well actually, it's more min-max, but induldge me.). Greedy algorithms, are very good for a lot of problem domains, but they also have the annoying habit of biting you in the ass from time to time, because they don't examine the long term consequences. Capitalism is the same way. That's why we have economic regulations. They were all placed there, because at sometime in the past, we were bitten in the ass. Now that the US, and through extension the world, is all for deregulation, we're being bitten in the ass all over again. (e.g. Enron and California's manufactured power crisis, the recent Vioxx scandal,...)
He got them to make a presentation at the UN and propose a resolution authorizing the war. Of course they said "screw you UN" when it became obvious they didn't have anywhere near enough votes.
The biggest lie was the "We're trying to strengthen the UN, by ignoring it." Yeah. I'm going to believe that the very people that have argued that the UN is worthless and the US should pull out of it, are now all of all sudden big fans of the UN.
If he writes a book called I Argued Against It And Was Only Following Orders
Conventional wisdom is, he's the main critic in Bush at War, and Plan of Attack.
Of course the "I was only following orders" part is the most problematic.
I think that might signal interest in a 2008 presidential run...
Nah, they want to pass the Arnold Amendment and run the Governator.
Of the two governors in Predator, I'll take Jesse.
I agree that he's tarnished his reputation - the UN presentation was particularly damning, especially (but not solely) in hindsight.
The UN thing definatly hurt him, but I'm willing to give him a pass on it, if it turns out he was lied to as well.
If I remember correctly, Bob Woodward said that when Powell was given the initial talking points for the presentation from Wolfowitz et. al., he threw them down and bellowed, "This is all bullshit! I'm not saying this! I'm only going to present our best case. What is it?", and thus the mobile lab presentation was made. Now if it turns out, they played Powell for a fool by "sexing up", as the Brits put it, the mobile lab "intel", then it's not his fault. He was lied to as well.
This could be a possiblility, afterall, if you're already lying to the American people and the world, what's one more lie to the heretic in your own midsts?
Re:Replacement will send signal
on
Colin Powell Resigns
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Powell's replacement will - I think - send a strong signal about the strategy a Bush 43B administration will pursue.
A moderate (like one of the current favourites for the job, John Danforth, the current US ambassador to the UN... though I don't know enough about him to know if the description is accurate) will imply that there will continue to be a level of debate between the neoconservative and less revolutionary wings of the administration.
Yeah, and moderate Colin Powell really influenced this administration's foriegn policy didn't he? Powell was nothing more than window dressing. He was marginalized from the very beginning. So much so that the week before 9/11 Time magazine's cover story was "Where have gone Colin Powell?". Any moderate (read non-neo-con ideologue), will be marginalized as well.
Powell has tarnished his own reputation, by not resigning years ago.
There are other "professional audio" tools for Linux out there. Now I'm not into this, but how does Wired compare with these? [...] The smaller Audacity A wave/AIFF/MP3/Ogg/etc editor
Well as an Audacity user I'll tell you that audacity sucks. Far from being "professional" quality, it's not even "amature" quality. I've used version 1.2.1 (the newest in debian) and it suffers from major bugs. The biggest of which is that the gui's representation of the time index gets further and further out of sync with the actual time index on the file. The problem shows up when you delete large chunks of the audio. At first everything seems fine, but when you export the wav and then play it back, it's all screwed up.
Find a family member or friend who would cancel out your lesser evil vote. Make a deal with them to both vote third party. You get to take a vote AWAY from your greater evil, and the third paties get two votes.
If I keep the agreement the best I can hope for is my canidate gaining 0 votes, while the worst case is your canidate (my evil canidate) getting an additional vote. Bad for me. If break the deal, my canidate gets at most 1 more vote (good for me) or at worse our votes cancel out.
If enough people did this when the candidates suck perhaps we'd have REAL debates?
Nope. It's free advertising time, and neither side wants their canidate to come off as a dumbass (the first 2004 debate not withstanding). Plus the populus doesn't want indepth discussions of policies. Instead they want O'Rielly and Crossfire style shouting matches and easy answers. The days of Lincoln-Douglas are long gone.
Adult Swim. And even then, all I watch is Futurama and Family Guy.
Yeah, but Family Guy was/is nothing more than an exercise of a no talent hack trying his damnednest to be zany. Sure Matt Groening has his non-sequer moments, but they use well established characters being simply the characters they are. Seth MacFarlane on the other hand simply tries to throw out one liners that don't have any basis whatsoever and tries to see if they stick. Unsuprisingly, they don't.
And Stewie! God, he's simply Brain from Pinky and the Brain. Everyone else is simply stock characters.
I'll grant you, there's about one good to descent joke in each 24 minute episode, but to sit through all those painful minutes! Take last night's "Peter and Lois run for school board" episode. The one joke, "I'm asian reporter Trisha Takanawa...Mr. Griffin how do you respond?" "Thanks Connie." But then there's the "Scouts/Indian Gambling" episode. The entire episode sucked (especially the indian gambling part), until Peter's Now You Know ("Canada sucks.")
My point is there are actually original and FUNNY animated shows elsewhere. Hell, some ofthem are even on Adult Swim. The Venture Brothers come immediately to mind. Ahh Doctor Girlfriend, Phantom Limb, and of course Doctor Venture and his aura of failure.
1) What I'm saying in regards to the space used is that in order to use IE, you *have* to have Windows, which has a certain space requirement. If you're running anything else, Firefox is just a small program to add to it. You can't use IE on Linux, for example. (disregarding WINE/Crossover Plugin)
If you're running anything else, Firefox is just a small program to add to it.
Well since Firefox isn't included with any operating system, it's "just a small program to add" to every operating system it runs on, including Windows! Now if you're running Windows, IE is included so you don't have to install anything. You don't get a much smaller footprint than zero!
See how filesize is a bullshit argument?
2) If you had to add anything to the api layer (Or just a plugin) which would be easier to do? Firefox, which is open source, and you don't have to ask permission and sign away your rights and life, or IE, which you probably couldn't even get access unless you paid a crapload of money, or were already a "partner" with Microsoft.
Yes you can change the API, but you typically don't need to, and even if you do it's not always advisable. Doing so introduces all sorts of deployment issues, and isn't always as easy as it sounds.
Yes, it is MUCH cheaper to use OSS platforms over propretary plaforms. Assuming of course the platforms are equally effective for the application domain. If you have to patch the OSS platform and/or extend it in any significant way it can change the economics. (i.e. You spend more time and money developing the platform itself, than it would have to just gone and bought a proprietary platform.)
I'm not saying IE is superior. I'm not saying Mozilla is superior. I'm not even saying IE and Mozilla are equal. What I am saying is that there are plenty of arguments for why one should prefer Mozilla over IE without having to resorting to making up crap.
The vast majority of folks who want this changed live in New York and California -- States that consistently get lots more federal money than they pay in federal taxes.
Maybe you should check the facts. I know that you want to say "Those damn California liberals want my money!" but that's simply not what's going on. Republican states tend to be poor and sparsely populated. This means that they generate little revenue for the federal government, but actually require more in spending (primarily in highway funds). The non-partisan Tax Foundation issued a report about his recently.
States Receiving Most in Federal Spending Per Dollar of Federal Taxes Paid:
1. D.C. ($6.17)
2. North Dakota ($2.03)
3. New Mexico ($1.89)
4. Mississippi ($1.84)
5. Alaska ($1.82)
6. West Virginia ($1.74)
7. Montana ($1.64)
8. Alabama ($1.61)
9. South Dakota ($1.59)
10. Arkansas ($1.53)
States Receiving Least in Federal Spending Per Dollar of Federal Taxes Paid:
1. New Jersey ($0.62)
2. Connecticut ($0.64)
3. New Hampshire ($0.68)
4. Nevada ($0.73)
5. Illinois ($0.77)
6. Minnesota ($0.77)
7. Colorado ($0.79)
8. Massachusetts ($0.79)
9. California ($0.81)
10. New York ($0.81)
I've been following along the election with www.electoral-vote.com
The problem with electoral-vote.com is that the methodology used is somewhat naive. States are predicted based on the most poll with the most recent middle date. This sounds good, until you realize that not every poll is as reliable/accurate. For instance, Strategic Vision is a Republican pollster, and constantly shows Bush having stronger numbers. Currently they are the only pollster that still thinks Michigan is a tossup (47%-61% Kerry), while the other pollsters put the state solidly in Kerry's column (Zogby 53%-44%, Rasmussen 51%-46%),...). This is a consistent trend for Strategic Vision. So what happens is that every time Strategic Vision releases a poll, electoral-vote.com flips states or moves states to toss-up or toss-up to "strong Bush" or whatever.
This drove me crazy, so I created my own electoral vote prediction script, http://www.cs.siu.edu/~jkoren/electoral_vote.html. What I do is take the polls from 9 national pollsters in the last 7 days and then average them for each state, weighted for what I call "trustworthiness". It's not perfect, but it's less erratic. (New Mexico's 10 point swing today withstanding. I honestly don't know what happened there, but it should sort itself out as soon as more polls come in.)
I'm no microsoft lover, but I'm not going to tolerate friendly fud either.
ActiveX: Microsoft OS (98/ME/2000/XP/2003) 250MB - 3GB Internet Explorer No additional - included in above
Firefox: Your choice of OS (so no additional needed - it works with whatever you're running) Mozilla Firefox itself: 10-20MB (16MB for me, on XP Pro, with some extensions installed)
Comparing Firefox's footprint of "10-20mb" to IE's footprint of "250mb-3gb" is absurd. You're comparing a browser to a browser with a complete OS. Without all that other 250mb of stuff, Firefox is worthless. A fairer comparison would be:
Microsoft OS with IE: 250mb-3gb Microsoft OS with Firefox: 260mb-3gb
Not nearly as compelling now is it? Of course it doesn't matter, because of the group think here is "Microsoft Bad. Open Source Good." Microsoft is no nice guy, but open source stuff isn't some wonderful panacea that automatically makes it superior in everyway to proprietary code.
Plus...one's open source, so if it doesn't have functionality that should be added at the api layer (or any layer for that matter) you can easily do it yourself
I wouldn't say you could "easily" do it yourself. It may be possible, but it's not necessarily easy. Plus if you do change the API, you have to patch the client, then distribute your customized client to everyone. Complicating things you'll have to explain to all the lusers, that just because both are mozilla version x, they aren't really the same.
It's like people who link to that worldvoting site... it's 75%/25% in favor of kerry in the US. That shows a bias.
Yeah worldvote or whatever is simply an online poll. Of course, it's bullshit. A much more reliable indicator would be the extensive scientific polling by the nonpartisan Pew Research's "Global Attitudes Project".
the liberal news media. Do some independent research people.
Okay. I'll do some research.
William Kristol, editor of the "Weekly Standard", and one of the most influential conservative voices in America today, said in an interview with the New Yorker in 1995, "I admit it. The whole idea of the 'liberal media' was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.'"
Former Republican party chairman, Rich Bond, in the August 20, 1992 issue of the "Washington Post", said of conservative cries of "liberal media bias", "If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is 'work the refs.'"
By playground rules, you lose. I cite "your own guy said so".
The best example of an anti-Bush/pro-Kerry "documentary" is, of course, Fahrenheit 911.
Of course that wasn't put on tv by PBS, CBS, Sundance or any television channel as the original poster implied.
That way, the uninformed younger voters of the USA will vote to oust the current president based upon their unwarranted fears of an unlikely draft instead of their beliefs on any real issues.
Unless of course they heard the administration critics saying there aren't enough troops in Iraq, and heard Bush was against a draft. The implication being that the President's opponent was for the draft, and therefore an antidraft vote would be a vote for Bush.
How do you reconcile Americans supposed fondness for "Nationalism" with the current trend among American government and business to sell America down the river in the name of "Globalization". Globalization is a death knell for "Nationalism".
Not for the United States. The American "brand" is dominant, and will be for a long time. American brands, fast food, movies, and music are dominant in the world. No other culture projects so much influence. This used to be called "the Americanization of the world". Now some call it "Internationalization", but that's simply an attempt to make the it faceless.
Kentucky Fried Chicken is the most popular resturant in China. A guy from Taiwan asked me recently, and I swear he honestly said this, "Do you have 7-Elevens in the US?".
Americans see that, and say as the theme from "Team America: World Police" goes, "America? FUCK YEAH!".
Or are you thinking that American's can maintain their "Patriotism" and "Nationalism" on a military, social and a political level while they abandon it on economic level?
Exactly. It's a brand. How many times have you heard, "American is the best nation in the world!", from someone who doesn't know anything about the rest of the world. Or how about "America has the best healthcare system in the world!" Well, we're the only industrializaed nation that doesn't have national healthcare coverage, and we have some of most expensive medical bills in the world, so objectively we don't. Say that and people start yelling "Why do you hate America?" and crap like that. Why? You're dimishinishing the brand.
From way over here in.ie, it seems like any fool should be able to see that re-electing Bush would be an insane choice. But clearly many non-foolish Americans disagree, and I for one would like to know what they're being told that we're not.
No. They are fools. Trust me. I've talked to them. Like Bush, they have an incredibly simplistic worldview.
And this is worse than anti-Bush / pro-Kerry documentaries being put on TV by PBS, CBS, Sundance, etc. how?
What are you talking about? Can you even name one?
When someone wants to bash Bush, the Democrats hail it as free speech, but when someone wants to bash Kerry, like this documentary or the swift boat book, they immediately call for censorship.
No. We called them uncredible bald-faced liars, because that's what they are.
hell, in Texas, the Dems did it a decade ago, and now that the Reps are in power they want to do it their way.
Well actually, there was no gerrymandering in Texas ten years ago. The legislature could never agree on a redisticting plan, so the courts had to step in and draw the districts. Something had to be done, because the old districts violated the election laws because they relied on the old population distribution.
That was the flimsy rational DeLay used for an unprecidented mid-decade redistricting.
How about the military absentee ballots also in Florida being discounted? Guess which way *they* lean?
Well none since the election has occured yet.
Secondly, absentee ballots aren't typically counted at all. There's nothing nefarious behind it. It's just that absentee ballots go into a special bin, and the margin of victory is typically greater than the number of absentee ballots. The outcome isn't going to change, so who cares.
Also do you really think that everyone in Iraq is saying "Gee. Everything is going so swell! I don't mind being forced to say in after my time is up!" Perhaps you should check out Steve Brozak. Marine. Investment banker. Iraq vetran. Life long Republican. Now, the Democratic canidate for New Jersey's 7th congressional district.
To quote Brozak: "It was that same arrogant, contemptuous attitude. When I came back [from Iraq] and said we have a problem, we need to address it right away, we are fighting for our lives, their attitude was, 'We know better than you do.' It was their contempt for the people in uniform, it was their contempt for all Americans" that finally drove him out of the Republican Party.
I'm not trolling. I honestly wnat to know, why are we as a society bothering with HDTV? What does it give us, that we don't already have? A different aspect ratio? Letterboxing gives us that. Higher resolution? I've been to Best Buy and have seen their HD sets. I wasn't impressed. Broadcast flags? I can do without that, thank you very much.
It strikes me that something is wrong when you have to legislate a technological upgrade. Even with that HDTV market penetration is lagging far behind expectations.
Yes, I know that we're all going to have to upgrade. I just wish it didn't reek of the corps finally getting a law pass requiring me to buy buy buy.
From the blurb: The ad shows an eagle unable to fly because of smog, and then talks about how much cleaner coal is now and will be in the future, with a sub-title saying that this is because of EPA regulation
The great irony is that the coal industry fought tooth and nail to oppose these very regulations. They never would never be able to make these claims if it weren't for "those damn liberal treehuggers".
As many people have told you, you are in fact the evil twin. Don't feel too bad though, you're just "evil" in the nominal sense. Your clean shaven, "good" twin is an utter bastard.
As Stan told Evil Cartman in the Spooky Fish episode of South Park, "You know Evil Cartman, I like you better than our Cartman.".
Slashdot Mirror
Having said this, I come from a smaller nation (New Zealand) that has decided to not support the US on several occasions, including various nuclear issues and the Iraq invasion. The result is that our government is now pursuing a Free Trade Agreement with China, because the US won't speak to us. I'm not sure which is worse.
...)
As an American, I'd like to say, Good for you for standing up to our nutjobs. More countries (I'm talking about you Tony Blair!) should do that.
That said, free trade with China isn't really that good of an idea on completely unrelated economic terms. When we did this, we were told "Now we have 1.2 billion more customers!", only that's not what happened at all. And it was perfectly obvious that this argument was bogus. The Chinese simply don't make enough to purchase our goods. Instead, they make the goods, and we import them. But never fear! We can now all get jobs at Walmart.
I don't think free trade is good for workers in industrialized nations. It depresses living standards for 95+% of the population, through job loss. Regulated trade was worked since the beginning of time. There's nothing wrong with that system.
I'm a proud capitalist. Captialism works where alternate economic models (i.e. socialism) fail because it recognizes that fundamentally people are greedy bastards only out for themselves. It uses that the engine of commerce. (i.e. Sellers try to maximize profits, while buyers try to minimize cost.) Socialism on the other hand relies on everyone working for the greater good.
Capitalism in a very real sense is a greedy algorithm (Well actually, it's more min-max, but induldge me.). Greedy algorithms, are very good for a lot of problem domains, but they also have the annoying habit of biting you in the ass from time to time, because they don't examine the long term consequences. Capitalism is the same way. That's why we have economic regulations. They were all placed there, because at sometime in the past, we were bitten in the ass. Now that the US, and through extension the world, is all for deregulation, we're being bitten in the ass all over again. (e.g. Enron and California's manufactured power crisis, the recent Vioxx scandal,
He had some.
He got them to make a presentation at the UN and propose a resolution authorizing the war. Of course they said "screw you UN" when it became obvious they didn't have anywhere near enough votes.
The biggest lie was the "We're trying to strengthen the UN, by ignoring it." Yeah. I'm going to believe that the very people that have argued that the UN is worthless and the US should pull out of it, are now all of all sudden big fans of the UN.
If he writes a book called I Argued Against It And Was Only Following Orders
Conventional wisdom is, he's the main critic in Bush at War, and Plan of Attack.
Of course the "I was only following orders" part is the most problematic.
I think that might signal interest in a 2008 presidential run...
Nah, they want to pass the Arnold Amendment and run the Governator.
Of the two governors in Predator, I'll take Jesse.
I agree that he's tarnished his reputation - the UN presentation was particularly damning, especially (but not solely) in hindsight.
The UN thing definatly hurt him, but I'm willing to give him a pass on it, if it turns out he was lied to as well.
If I remember correctly, Bob Woodward said that when Powell was given the initial talking points for the presentation from Wolfowitz et. al., he threw them down and bellowed, "This is all bullshit! I'm not saying this! I'm only going to present our best case. What is it?", and thus the mobile lab presentation was made. Now if it turns out, they played Powell for a fool by "sexing up", as the Brits put it, the mobile lab "intel", then it's not his fault. He was lied to as well.
This could be a possiblility, afterall, if you're already lying to the American people and the world, what's one more lie to the heretic in your own midsts?
Powell's replacement will - I think - send a strong signal about the strategy a Bush 43B administration will pursue.
A moderate (like one of the current favourites for the job, John Danforth, the current US ambassador to the UN... though I don't know enough about him to know if the description is accurate) will imply that there will continue to be a level of debate between the neoconservative and less revolutionary wings of the administration.
Yeah, and moderate Colin Powell really influenced this administration's foriegn policy didn't he? Powell was nothing more than window dressing. He was marginalized from the very beginning. So much so that the week before 9/11 Time magazine's cover story was "Where have gone Colin Powell?". Any moderate (read non-neo-con ideologue), will be marginalized as well.
Powell has tarnished his own reputation, by not resigning years ago.
There are other "professional audio" tools for Linux out there. Now I'm not into this, but how does Wired compare with these?
[...]
The smaller Audacity A wave/AIFF/MP3/Ogg/etc editor
Well as an Audacity user I'll tell you that audacity sucks. Far from being "professional" quality, it's not even "amature" quality. I've used version 1.2.1 (the newest in debian) and it suffers from major bugs. The biggest of which is that the gui's representation of the time index gets further and further out of sync with the actual time index on the file. The problem shows up when you delete large chunks of the audio. At first everything seems fine, but when you export the wav and then play it back, it's all screwed up.
Don't waste your time with it.
Find a family member or friend who would cancel out your lesser evil vote. Make a deal with them to both vote third party. You get to take a vote AWAY from your greater evil, and the third paties get two votes.
Sorry to rain your parade but it won't work. What you propose is a lot like the prisoner's diIf enough people did this when the candidates suck perhaps we'd have REAL debates?lemma, but without the downside of screwing your partner over. Let's game your strategy.
VoteForMyCanidate - VoteForYourCanidate = NetVotesForMyCanidate
0 - 0 = 0
0 - 1 = -1
1 - 0 = +1
1 - 1 = 0
If I keep the agreement the best I can hope for is my canidate gaining 0 votes, while the worst case is your canidate (my evil canidate) getting an additional vote. Bad for me. If break the deal, my canidate gets at most 1 more vote (good for me) or at worse our votes cancel out.
If enough people did this when the candidates suck perhaps we'd have REAL debates?
Nope. It's free advertising time, and neither side wants their canidate to come off as a dumbass (the first 2004 debate not withstanding). Plus the populus doesn't want indepth discussions of policies. Instead they want O'Rielly and Crossfire style shouting matches and easy answers. The days of Lincoln-Douglas are long gone.
Adult Swim. And even then, all I watch is Futurama and Family Guy.
Yeah, but Family Guy was/is nothing more than an exercise of a no talent hack trying his damnednest to be zany. Sure Matt Groening has his non-sequer moments, but they use well established characters being simply the characters they are. Seth MacFarlane on the other hand simply tries to throw out one liners that don't have any basis whatsoever and tries to see if they stick. Unsuprisingly, they don't.
And Stewie! God, he's simply Brain from Pinky and the Brain. Everyone else is simply stock characters.
I'll grant you, there's about one good to descent joke in each 24 minute episode, but to sit through all those painful minutes! Take last night's "Peter and Lois run for school board" episode. The one joke, "I'm asian reporter Trisha Takanawa...Mr. Griffin how do you respond?" "Thanks Connie." But then there's the "Scouts/Indian Gambling" episode. The entire episode sucked (especially the indian gambling part), until Peter's Now You Know ("Canada sucks.")
My point is there are actually original and FUNNY animated shows elsewhere. Hell, some ofthem are even on Adult Swim. The Venture Brothers come immediately to mind. Ahh Doctor Girlfriend, Phantom Limb, and of course Doctor Venture and his aura of failure.
They used to keep me glued to the set for 90 minutes, now I can barely stand to sit through 60. :(
You could watch that show for an hour?!?
1) What I'm saying in regards to the space used is that in order to use IE, you *have* to have Windows, which has a certain space requirement. If you're running anything else, Firefox is just a small program to add to it. You can't use IE on Linux, for example. (disregarding WINE/Crossover Plugin)
It's still a bullshit comparison. You have to have any operating system. Every operating system has space requirements. Apple says MacOSX requires 2GB. Solaris requires 1-2GB. Even Redhat requires 1.7GB for the "personal desktop" install. Yes, you can fit linux in 500mb, but you can do that with any of them. It's just a matter of how much you can do without.
If you're running anything else, Firefox is just a small program to add to it.
Well since Firefox isn't included with any operating system, it's "just a small program to add" to every operating system it runs on, including Windows! Now if you're running Windows, IE is included so you don't have to install anything. You don't get a much smaller footprint than zero!
See how filesize is a bullshit argument?
2) If you had to add anything to the api layer (Or just a plugin) which would be easier to do? Firefox, which is open source, and you don't have to ask permission and sign away your rights and life, or IE, which you probably couldn't even get access unless you paid a crapload of money, or were already a "partner" with Microsoft.
Yes you can change the API, but you typically don't need to, and even if you do it's not always advisable. Doing so introduces all sorts of deployment issues, and isn't always as easy as it sounds.
Yes, it is MUCH cheaper to use OSS platforms over propretary plaforms. Assuming of course the platforms are equally effective for the application domain. If you have to patch the OSS platform and/or extend it in any significant way it can change the economics. (i.e. You spend more time and money developing the platform itself, than it would have to just gone and bought a proprietary platform.)
I'm not saying IE is superior. I'm not saying Mozilla is superior. I'm not even saying IE and Mozilla are equal. What I am saying is that there are plenty of arguments for why one should prefer Mozilla over IE without having to resorting to making up crap.
The vast majority of folks who want this changed live in New York and California -- States that consistently get lots more federal money than they pay in federal taxes.
Maybe you should check the facts. I know that you want to say "Those damn California liberals want my money!" but that's simply not what's going on. Republican states tend to be poor and sparsely populated. This means that they generate little revenue for the federal government, but actually require more in spending (primarily in highway funds). The non-partisan Tax Foundation issued a report about his recently.
States Receiving Most in Federal Spending Per Dollar of Federal Taxes Paid:
1. D.C. ($6.17)
2. North Dakota ($2.03)
3. New Mexico ($1.89)
4. Mississippi ($1.84)
5. Alaska ($1.82)
6. West Virginia ($1.74)
7. Montana ($1.64)
8. Alabama ($1.61)
9. South Dakota ($1.59)
10. Arkansas ($1.53)
States Receiving Least in Federal Spending Per Dollar of Federal Taxes Paid:
1. New Jersey ($0.62)
2. Connecticut ($0.64)
3. New Hampshire ($0.68)
4. Nevada ($0.73)
5. Illinois ($0.77)
6. Minnesota ($0.77)
7. Colorado ($0.79)
8. Massachusetts ($0.79)
9. California ($0.81)
10. New York ($0.81)
I've been following along the election with www.electoral-vote.com
...). This is a consistent trend for Strategic Vision. So what happens is that every time Strategic Vision releases a poll, electoral-vote.com flips states or moves states to toss-up or toss-up to "strong Bush" or whatever.
.
The problem with electoral-vote.com is that the methodology used is somewhat naive. States are predicted based on the most poll with the most recent middle date. This sounds good, until you realize that not every poll is as reliable/accurate. For instance, Strategic Vision is a Republican pollster, and constantly shows Bush having stronger numbers. Currently they are the only pollster that still thinks Michigan is a tossup (47%-61% Kerry), while the other pollsters put the state solidly in Kerry's column (Zogby 53%-44%, Rasmussen 51%-46%),
This drove me crazy, so I created my own electoral vote prediction script, http://www.cs.siu.edu/~jkoren/electoral_vote.html
What I do is take the polls from 9 national pollsters in the last 7 days and then average them for each state, weighted for what I call "trustworthiness". It's not perfect, but it's less erratic. (New Mexico's 10 point swing today withstanding. I honestly don't know what happened there, but it should sort itself out as soon as more polls come in.)
I'm no microsoft lover, but I'm not going to tolerate friendly fud either.
ActiveX:
Microsoft OS (98/ME/2000/XP/2003) 250MB - 3GB
Internet Explorer No additional - included in above
Firefox:
Your choice of OS (so no additional needed - it works with whatever you're running)
Mozilla Firefox itself: 10-20MB (16MB for me, on XP Pro, with some extensions installed)
Comparing Firefox's footprint of "10-20mb" to IE's footprint of "250mb-3gb" is absurd. You're comparing a browser to a browser with a complete OS. Without all that other 250mb of stuff, Firefox is worthless. A fairer comparison would be:
Microsoft OS with IE: 250mb-3gb
Microsoft OS with Firefox: 260mb-3gb
Not nearly as compelling now is it? Of course it doesn't matter, because of the group think here is "Microsoft Bad. Open Source Good." Microsoft is no nice guy, but open source stuff isn't some wonderful panacea that automatically makes it superior in everyway to proprietary code.
Plus...one's open source, so if it doesn't have functionality that should be added at the api layer (or any layer for that matter) you can easily do it yourself
I wouldn't say you could "easily" do it yourself. It may be possible, but it's not necessarily easy. Plus if you do change the API, you have to patch the client, then distribute your customized client to everyone. Complicating things you'll have to explain to all the lusers, that just because both are mozilla version x, they aren't really the same.
It's like people who link to that worldvoting site... it's 75%/25% in favor of kerry in the US. That shows a bias.
Yeah worldvote or whatever is simply an online poll. Of course, it's bullshit. A much more reliable indicator would be the extensive scientific polling by the nonpartisan Pew Research's "Global Attitudes Project".
the liberal news media. Do some independent research people.
Okay. I'll do some research.
William Kristol, editor of the "Weekly Standard", and one of the most influential conservative voices in America today, said in an interview with the New Yorker in 1995, "I admit it. The whole idea of the 'liberal media' was often used as an excuse by conservatives for conservative failures.'"
Former Republican party chairman, Rich Bond, in the August 20, 1992 issue of the "Washington Post", said of conservative cries of "liberal media bias", "If you watch any great coach, what they try to do is 'work the refs.'"
By playground rules, you lose. I cite "your own guy said so".
one of the greatest, well it certainly has some competition
Vietnam
Korea
Bay of Pigs
At least Korea was based on a real invasion.
To you, "best" means "nationalized" and "inexpensive".
;)
It means "inexpensive" and "complete coverage".
It was a good Straw Man argument though.
Thanks. I've been studying Frank Luntz.
Civil Air Patrol? I thought they just guarded the parking lot at air shows.
The best example of an anti-Bush/pro-Kerry "documentary" is, of course, Fahrenheit 911.
Of course that wasn't put on tv by PBS, CBS, Sundance or any television channel as the original poster implied.
That way, the uninformed younger voters of the USA will vote to oust the current president based upon their unwarranted fears of an unlikely draft instead of their beliefs on any real issues.
Unless of course they heard the administration critics saying there aren't enough troops in Iraq, and heard Bush was against a draft. The implication being that the President's opponent was for the draft, and therefore an antidraft vote would be a vote for Bush.
It's a push.
How do you reconcile Americans supposed fondness for "Nationalism" with the current trend among American government and business to sell America down the river in the name of "Globalization". Globalization is a death knell for "Nationalism".
Not for the United States. The American "brand" is dominant, and will be for a long time. American brands, fast food, movies, and music are dominant in the world. No other culture projects so much influence. This used to be called "the Americanization of the world". Now some call it "Internationalization", but that's simply an attempt to make the it faceless.
Kentucky Fried Chicken is the most popular resturant in China. A guy from Taiwan asked me recently, and I swear he honestly said this, "Do you have 7-Elevens in the US?".
Americans see that, and say as the theme from "Team America: World Police" goes, "America? FUCK YEAH!".
Or are you thinking that American's can maintain their "Patriotism" and "Nationalism" on a military, social and a political level while they abandon it on economic level?
Exactly. It's a brand. How many times have you heard, "American is the best nation in the world!", from someone who doesn't know anything about the rest of the world. Or how about "America has the best healthcare system in the world!" Well, we're the only industrializaed nation that doesn't have national healthcare coverage, and we have some of most expensive medical bills in the world, so objectively we don't. Say that and people start yelling "Why do you hate America?" and crap like that. Why? You're dimishinishing the brand.
From way over here in .ie, it seems like any fool should be able to see that re-electing Bush would be an insane choice. But clearly many non-foolish Americans disagree, and I for one would like to know what they're being told that we're not.
No. They are fools. Trust me. I've talked to them. Like Bush, they have an incredibly simplistic worldview.
And this is worse than anti-Bush / pro-Kerry documentaries being put on TV by PBS, CBS, Sundance, etc. how?
What are you talking about? Can you even name one?
When someone wants to bash Bush, the Democrats hail it as free speech, but when someone wants to bash Kerry, like this documentary or the swift boat book, they immediately call for censorship.
No. We called them uncredible bald-faced liars, because that's what they are.
hell, in Texas, the Dems did it a decade ago, and now that the Reps are in power they want to do it their way.
Well actually, there was no gerrymandering in Texas ten years ago. The legislature could never agree on a redisticting plan, so the courts had to step in and draw the districts. Something had to be done, because the old districts violated the election laws because they relied on the old population distribution.
That was the flimsy rational DeLay used for an unprecidented mid-decade redistricting.
How about the military absentee ballots also in Florida being discounted? Guess which way *they* lean?
Well none since the election has occured yet.
Secondly, absentee ballots aren't typically counted at all. There's nothing nefarious behind it. It's just that absentee ballots go into a special bin, and the margin of victory is typically greater than the number of absentee ballots. The outcome isn't going to change, so who cares.
Also do you really think that everyone in Iraq is saying "Gee. Everything is going so swell! I don't mind being forced to say in after my time is up!" Perhaps you should check out Steve Brozak. Marine. Investment banker. Iraq vetran. Life long Republican. Now, the Democratic canidate for New Jersey's 7th congressional district.
To quote Brozak: "It was that same arrogant, contemptuous attitude. When I came back [from Iraq] and said we have a problem, we need to address it right away, we are fighting for our lives, their attitude was, 'We know better than you do.' It was their contempt for the people in uniform, it was their contempt for all Americans" that finally drove him out of the Republican Party.
--
KMFDM: Kill Mother F*cking Darl McBride
If you're going to use the word "fucking", grow some balls and actually use it, instead of pussyfooting around with it.
Indeed. Why bother with higher resolution PC displays? Why don't we all stick with 640x480... Why does anyone need more?
You do a lot of reading on your television?
I'm not trolling. I honestly wnat to know, why are we as a society bothering with HDTV? What does it give us, that we don't already have? A different aspect ratio? Letterboxing gives us that. Higher resolution? I've been to Best Buy and have seen their HD sets. I wasn't impressed. Broadcast flags? I can do without that, thank you very much.
It strikes me that something is wrong when you have to legislate a technological upgrade. Even with that HDTV market penetration is lagging far behind expectations.
Yes, I know that we're all going to have to upgrade. I just wish it didn't reek of the corps finally getting a law pass requiring me to buy buy buy.
From the blurb:
The ad shows an eagle unable to fly because of smog, and then talks about how much cleaner coal is now and will be in the future, with a sub-title saying that this is because of EPA regulation
The great irony is that the coal industry fought tooth and nail to oppose these very regulations. They never would never be able to make these claims if it weren't for "those damn liberal treehuggers".
As many people have told you, you are in fact the evil twin. Don't feel too bad though, you're just "evil" in the nominal sense. Your clean shaven, "good" twin is an utter bastard.
As Stan told Evil Cartman in the Spooky Fish episode of South Park, "You know Evil Cartman, I like you better than our Cartman.".