Yes, they are criminals--but they are also a national security threat, and they are not amenable to the criminal justice system. Our judicial system is built on concepts such as innocent-until-proven-guilty and the like which are vitally necessary when dealing with fellow citizens, but which are absurd when facing an organised foe (can you see soldiers arresting the enemy and trying him before executing him?). The terrorist threat occupies a middle ground: they are not as innocuous as serial killers, yet not as openly organised as an opposing state. It's a new paradigm, but one which I feel is better met with a military approach than a police one. I don't mind a somewhat neutered military nearly so much as I do a greatly-empowered police force.
I'm another libertarian (little-l--the capital-L party is increasingly absurd) who's voting for Bush. Yes, he's increased the size of government--but Kerry would be worse. Yes, he's run up debt--but Kerry would be worse (or, worse still, would cut back on the essentials to fund statist programs). I support the Afghan War whole-heartedly, and am more in favour of the Iraq War than not (the root cause of the terrorist attacks was Middle Eastern instability: we are resolving this by building better states where we are able; we cannot overthrow Saudia Arabia, but we could conquer & rebuild Afghanistan & Iraq). The Patriot Act is not the bogeyman it appears to be: there are innumerable articles out there on the subject. I'm not in favour of his position on gay marriage (my position is that we abolish civil marriage entirely: it's a religous, not a state, issue), but as I'm a right-libertarian, it doesn't annoy me much. Likewise with medicinal marijuana (has Kerry come out in support?) and euthanasia (which is a worrisome subject, anyway: some large fraction of Dutch euthanasia is involuntary--we call that murder where I come from).
Bush is bad, but Kerry is worse. Kerry supports infanticide, but doesn't support executing murderers. Do you really think that Kerry would reduce the size of the Dep't of Education? Do you really think that he would roll back the atrocious Medicare drug coverage? Do you believe that he would repeal the unconstitutional McCain-Feingold campaign-finance legislation? Do you think that he'd ever veto any gun control legislation? Do you honestly believe that he'd support drug legalisation?
Meanwhile, there's a war on, and this is a man who would send the Boston PD out to capture Bin Laden, and whose idea of foreign policy is Clintonian lip-biting and speechifying: exactly the policies which led al Qaeda to believe that we'd ignore attacks.
Yes, Bush is the lesser of the two evils. Surely any adult who's voted for president in the last few decades is used to that choice?
Lest anyone start posting about how this is a bad thing, note that allowing emergency and military use of any band is a Good Idea. Would you want a ham who arranged a spark-gap transmitter to send out an SOS to be called up for it? Would you want the military to be unable to co-ordinate ativities in the event of an invasion (well, some folks would, but their opinion hardly counts)?
Anyone who relies on using someone else's frequencies deserves what he gets.
There was a great parody website with a band called something-or-other Messiahs, with about fourteen mangled umlauts and other diacritics scattered throughout--like something Brunching Shuttlecocks might have done back in the day. I wish I could find it; I just spent an unproductive half-hour at things:-(
You (jokingly) raise a good point: if one is going to install on the GNU tools on Windows, why bother with Windows at all? It's a shoddy, poor kernel--use Linux, or BSD or whatever, and get better performance, better stability and freedom as well.
# your choice of how your desktop environment looks
themes?
More than themes--completely different desktop environments. Sure, GNOME & KDE are pretty much Macish/Windowsish--but fvwm2, ion (my personal favourite) or emacs (which can run without X, and provides an entire operating environment: mail, news, web, calendar, appointments, program editing, compiling, debugging, word processing &c) are entirely different.
With free software, one has real, meaningful choice--not just 'paint the windows another colour' (my problem with much of the KDE/GNOME stuff), but actual radically different behaviours. This means that your environment can be customised for what you do. A truck's cockpit is not like a car's, and neither's is like a subway train's--why must every user's environment be the same?
I understand I (looks like the numeral one) and O (looks like the numeral zero), and can even see Z (could look like a 2 if handwritten), but why eliminate Q and U?
It's not oil dependency that should prevent us from drilling in the ANWR. It's a respect for the unrecoverable resource that is there, on TOP of the ground that should drive the decision.
Which unrecoverable resource: the pestilential swamp; the filth which fills it; the mosquitos which infest it; or the stench which pervades it? The ANWR is a pit--paving it would improve it. But, of course, the drilling proposals wouldn't pave it, and would in fact be extremely low-impact.
Tremendous sex appeal? Tremendous sex appeal?!? The girl is unattractive, with a skeletal smile in an over-large face. No, thank you. There are several prettier actresses of a similar age--why couldn't one of them have been hired.
Unions have to do with things precisely because they are, for the most part, mechanisms for workers to work less and earn more. They serve as engines of mediocrity, pulling everyone down to the average (e.g. the practise of forbidding workers from working through their breaks).
Are European CEOs really so much less competent?
Given that GDPs across Europe are laughably low, probably.
Do you really believe that the CEOs of Enron, Worldcom, Qwest, Northwestern Power, and even Disney among others deserved the insane compensation they received for ruining their companies?
That's a straw man--those guys obviously don't deserve high incomes, because they failed. I merely noted that it's not unreasonable that a man who commands hundreds of thousands of employees might contribute, say, a thousand-fold what each of them does.
He's written for the Nation since '82. Granted, he's not on the loony-left, but he's certainly not conservative. It is possible to be a liberal and support the war, just as it is possible to be a conservative and oppose it.
And Michael Moore is certainly grotesquely fat. Never having met the 'man,' I cannot say whether or not he is literally malodorous--but considering his generally dishevelled look, I wouldn't wager any great sum on his personal hygiene. Certainly his politics stink; why not his person?
Nothings wrong with charging for software--it's charging for software and not passing on the source which is unkind, like selling a car with the hood welded shut.
It's quite possible for a CEO to contribute more than 1,000 times what his employees contribute, particularly if they are union. Not that I agree with the inflation in CEO salaries over the last thirty years--I just don't find it inconceivable that a man exponential levels above the grunts can contribute exponentially more than they can, esp. when they've all manner of no-work provisions.
Part of the matter is a realisation that sometimes otherwise illegal acts may be necessary. Say that one man must die in order that a hundred billion million may live better lives...
Speaking as someone who went to college in North Texas, no it's not likely that it really occurred to anyone, except as an ironic aside. Everything out there is labeled 'North Texas.' Texas is allowed to break itself into five states at any time, and it shows: North Texas, East Texas, West Texas, Central Texas and Nearly Mexico are all quite distinct areas. It's a great state--every American should spend a decade there, IMHO. Except that would mean that Yankees could vote, which would be a Bad Thing.
Gosh, how many/.ers remember the whole stupid, silly, sublimely ridiculous Natalie Portman-petrified, hot-grits posts? Way, way, way to many years. Good lord, I'm old:-(
The backstory is that Firefly is a thinly-concealed retelling of the period immediately after the War Between the States (the US Civil War, for you Yankees out there). The monolithic central government has ruthlessly oppressed those who wished to be free, and they have been prevented from engaging in normal business thereafter. The Reavers are, of course, the aboriginal Americans.
And yes, that monolithic government is very much a government of the corps, by the corps and for the corps--just like late 19th century America.
Imagine the benefits to society contact with an alien race could bring!
You're the sort of person who would welcome the ETs in Independence Day, aren't you? I am far less optimistic; indeed I wonder if the rational reaction to the existence of another starfaring race is genocide--and thus if we let anyone know we exist, we set ourselves up for extinction.
Not really--the command line is good and fast over a remote session; it is secure, with SSH; it is convenient, with GNU screen (a tool which has revolutionised my work life). I like to ssh into my home box from work and run gnus (a mail/news reader) within emacs; it'd be cool to also be able to run gaim (which is a GUI AIM/Jabber/MSN/&c. client) within the command line. It'd be really nice to be able to run gnucash within a TTY.
Command line interfaces are snappy; they are easy to use (albeit sometimes difficult to learn); they are aesthetically pleasing.
Actually, esr addresses that: Apache far outnumber IIS, and yet it's IIS that the worms are targetted against. Yes, part of it is that Apache users are smarter; part of it is that Apache default configs are more secure; but most of it is simply that Apache is better written.
Even when GNU/X/Linux is on every desktop, it will be more secure, and for much the same reasons. Users will be smarter because they will be using their brains; default installations will be more hardened; and the code will be better written.
If the US had any sense, there'd be only one country left in the world using a ridiculous system of measurements.
If the international community had any sense, there'd be only one country left in the world using a ridiculous system of measurements: France. The standard system is far superior in many respects than the French system (notably, in its choice of bases, multiples and scales of units). Afficionados of French units are the sort of people who get huffy over the fact that a kilobyte is 1,024 bytes, not 1,000, and then propose prefixes such as kibi- just to salve their sores.
Why should I care how many inches there are to a metre? Everything I see is in inches, feet and yards. I'm familiar with French units, but fortunately I live in an area which hasn't adopted their use. They're not very well thought out.
How the hell was that moderated Troll? Trolls are morons who post ASCII middle fingers, random nonsense and that kinda thing. This was an on-topic reply to a post. Sheesh.
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Yes, they are criminals--but they are also a national security threat, and they are not amenable to the criminal justice system. Our judicial system is built on concepts such as innocent-until-proven-guilty and the like which are vitally necessary when dealing with fellow citizens, but which are absurd when facing an organised foe (can you see soldiers arresting the enemy and trying him before executing him?). The terrorist threat occupies a middle ground: they are not as innocuous as serial killers, yet not as openly organised as an opposing state. It's a new paradigm, but one which I feel is better met with a military approach than a police one. I don't mind a somewhat neutered military nearly so much as I do a greatly-empowered police force.
Bush is bad, but Kerry is worse. Kerry supports infanticide, but doesn't support executing murderers. Do you really think that Kerry would reduce the size of the Dep't of Education? Do you really think that he would roll back the atrocious Medicare drug coverage? Do you believe that he would repeal the unconstitutional McCain-Feingold campaign-finance legislation? Do you think that he'd ever veto any gun control legislation? Do you honestly believe that he'd support drug legalisation?
Meanwhile, there's a war on, and this is a man who would send the Boston PD out to capture Bin Laden, and whose idea of foreign policy is Clintonian lip-biting and speechifying: exactly the policies which led al Qaeda to believe that we'd ignore attacks.
Yes, Bush is the lesser of the two evils. Surely any adult who's voted for president in the last few decades is used to that choice?
Anyone who relies on using someone else's frequencies deserves what he gets.
There was a great parody website with a band called something-or-other Messiahs, with about fourteen mangled umlauts and other diacritics scattered throughout--like something Brunching Shuttlecocks might have done back in the day. I wish I could find it; I just spent an unproductive half-hour at things:-(
You (jokingly) raise a good point: if one is going to install on the GNU tools on Windows, why bother with Windows at all? It's a shoddy, poor kernel--use Linux, or BSD or whatever, and get better performance, better stability and freedom as well.
themes?
More than themes--completely different desktop environments. Sure, GNOME & KDE are pretty much Macish/Windowsish--but fvwm2, ion (my personal favourite) or emacs (which can run without X, and provides an entire operating environment: mail, news, web, calendar, appointments, program editing, compiling, debugging, word processing &c) are entirely different.
With free software, one has real, meaningful choice--not just 'paint the windows another colour' (my problem with much of the KDE/GNOME stuff), but actual radically different behaviours. This means that your environment can be customised for what you do. A truck's cockpit is not like a car's, and neither's is like a subway train's--why must every user's environment be the same?
I understand I (looks like the numeral one) and O (looks like the numeral zero), and can even see Z (could look like a 2 if handwritten), but why eliminate Q and U?
Which unrecoverable resource: the pestilential swamp; the filth which fills it; the mosquitos which infest it; or the stench which pervades it? The ANWR is a pit--paving it would improve it. But, of course, the drilling proposals wouldn't pave it, and would in fact be extremely low-impact.
Tremendous sex appeal? Tremendous sex appeal?!? The girl is unattractive, with a skeletal smile in an over-large face. No, thank you. There are several prettier actresses of a similar age--why couldn't one of them have been hired.
Are European CEOs really so much less competent?
Given that GDPs across Europe are laughably low, probably.
Do you really believe that the CEOs of Enron, Worldcom, Qwest, Northwestern Power, and even Disney among others deserved the insane compensation they received for ruining their companies?
That's a straw man--those guys obviously don't deserve high incomes, because they failed. I merely noted that it's not unreasonable that a man who commands hundreds of thousands of employees might contribute, say, a thousand-fold what each of them does.
And Michael Moore is certainly grotesquely fat. Never having met the 'man,' I cannot say whether or not he is literally malodorous--but considering his generally dishevelled look, I wouldn't wager any great sum on his personal hygiene. Certainly his politics stink; why not his person?
Hitchens is a liberal--he would be in favour of a Democratic version of Limbaugh or O'Reilly. Moore's not that, though, nor is Franken.
Nothings wrong with charging for software--it's charging for software and not passing on the source which is unkind, like selling a car with the hood welded shut.
Personal anecdotes are relevant; they are merely hearsay, however. FWIW, I am not aware of a Toys R Us in driving distance of my home, FWIW.
It's quite possible for a CEO to contribute more than 1,000 times what his employees contribute, particularly if they are union. Not that I agree with the inflation in CEO salaries over the last thirty years--I just don't find it inconceivable that a man exponential levels above the grunts can contribute exponentially more than they can, esp. when they've all manner of no-work provisions.
Part of the matter is a realisation that sometimes otherwise illegal acts may be necessary. Say that one man must die in order that a hundred billion million may live better lives...
Speaking as someone who went to college in North Texas, no it's not likely that it really occurred to anyone, except as an ironic aside. Everything out there is labeled 'North Texas.' Texas is allowed to break itself into five states at any time, and it shows: North Texas, East Texas, West Texas, Central Texas and Nearly Mexico are all quite distinct areas. It's a great state--every American should spend a decade there, IMHO. Except that would mean that Yankees could vote, which would be a Bad Thing.
Gosh, how many /.ers remember the whole stupid, silly, sublimely ridiculous Natalie Portman-petrified, hot-grits posts? Way, way, way to many years. Good lord, I'm old:-(
And yes, that monolithic government is very much a government of the corps, by the corps and for the corps--just like late 19th century America.
You're the sort of person who would welcome the ETs in Independence Day, aren't you? I am far less optimistic; indeed I wonder if the rational reaction to the existence of another starfaring race is genocide--and thus if we let anyone know we exist, we set ourselves up for extinction.
Command line interfaces are snappy; they are easy to use (albeit sometimes difficult to learn); they are aesthetically pleasing.
Even when GNU/X/Linux is on every desktop, it will be more secure, and for much the same reasons. Users will be smarter because they will be using their brains; default installations will be more hardened; and the code will be better written.
If the international community had any sense, there'd be only one country left in the world using a ridiculous system of measurements: France. The standard system is far superior in many respects than the French system (notably, in its choice of bases, multiples and scales of units). Afficionados of French units are the sort of people who get huffy over the fact that a kilobyte is 1,024 bytes, not 1,000, and then propose prefixes such as kibi- just to salve their sores.
Why should I care how many inches there are to a metre? Everything I see is in inches, feet and yards. I'm familiar with French units, but fortunately I live in an area which hasn't adopted their use. They're not very well thought out.
How the hell was that moderated Troll? Trolls are morons who post ASCII middle fingers, random nonsense and that kinda thing. This was an on-topic reply to a post. Sheesh.