Actually, I'd say it's most certainly a bad thing, and I'd wager it's largely a new phenomenon tied to the exploitative music business of the last century. I suspect it's an unavoidable artifact of heavy marketing of specific genres, targetted advertising and faux cultures.
So, you think there were no traveling minstrels back in the day that were booed off stage or were otherwise "crap" by the contemporary standards of the time? People rate things in a relative fashion. Schubert may be a god when compared to, say, John Tesh; but he may also be "crap" when compared to Beethoven.
Things become normalized to a bell curve, where the entire sample is eventually relegated to that top 5 percentile (the good stuff), the bottom 5, or the middle 90. Greatness not exist in a vacuum, in and of itself. Good cannot be good without the crap to compare it to.
Right after Grape Ape and Captain Caveman. If they're scraping the bottom of the barrel with the likes of Underdog (they already did Rocky and Bullwinkle), then any of those cheesey Hanna-Barbarra flicks have a shot. Just wait 'til they take on the Sid and Marty Croft shows: Land of the Lost, The Bugalloos, Dr. Shrinker, H.R. Puff-n-Stuff, and that one with the sea creature whose name escapes me.
Then come the cheesy 80's series remakes: Webster, Small Wonder, Punky Brewster, Diff'rent Strokes.
As someone who used to watch the show, I'll take a shot at the joke. My first guess is that, in the cartoon, Voltron used to launch the heads (from just the hands?) as missiles at the enemies. I recall, as a kid, wondering "WTF?!?" at how, not only did the heads get back on the lions after being destroyed, but how the pilot survived (who, or so I thought, sat in the head).
Or, more likely, was that Blue Lion's pilot was a moody, pain in the ass (would "emo" be an appropriate contemporary term for this guy?), and that the other characters wouldn't mind seeing him dead. While Airwolf came later than Voltron, I would liken the blue pilot to a cartoon version of Stringfellow Hawk -- broody and down all the time.
It's been so long since I've seen the show, so, with my faded memory, the joke may be too subtle for me to catch. I *tried* to watch an episode on Netflix's "Watch Now" feature, but I couldn't even get past the introduction before I killed the stream. Too much cheese for this guy's taste -- nostalgia only goes so far.
I've benchmarked a handful of select programs with various optimizations (FreeBSD, not Gentoo). There's certainly no general/golden rule. I do agree that often (maybe 50% of the time) that -Os is a very good option for some small libraries and programs. However, there's a whole world out there beyond -O optimizations (which I know are just short-hand pre-sets for collections of various flags).
What someone needs to do is set up an automated build system that uses "-fprofile-generate/-fprofile-use" -- especially for base system, multimedia, and compression libraries. I got something like a 12% speedup in using that for mplayer (or was that mpg123...) in benchmark mode, as opposed to stock ports compiler options under FreeBSD/amd64 (which, I believe, is "-O2 -fno-strict-aliasing", though many individual ports tweak those to the extreme). Granted, each program would need a decent corpus of representitive "work" to do for this method to be effective, but it could be done on port-by-port basis.
If someone wants to rock the world of Gentoo (and has more free time than sense), they should fork the project and incorporate the "profile" method I mentioned above *and* ACOVEA into an automated build system. Now *that* would be impressive.:)
The world has more to worry about than what's described in the article. I just recently visited an airport, after not being at one for a good while. Apparently shampoo, bottles of water, and shoes are dangerous. Those items are *much* easier to find than jury rigging a pocket laser.
I swear, the US is turning into a country of emasculated pansies. We defeated England (with help), then Germany and Japan (again, with help), and stood nose-to-nose with the USSR for years, but we now duck and cover if you bring more than 3 fl. oz. of liquids onto a plane! How sad is that?
But, back on topic... Very cool hardware hack. We need someone to rig up an array of these enclosed in a box for a super-fast oven: Block of ice to boeuf bourguignon in eight seconds.
Seriously, this isn't any more of a government intrusion than the mandated nutrition information on the side of cereal boxes.
I'm going to tweak this analogy a bit. The V-Chip is more like the government forcing milk, bread, and cereals to be fortified with vitamins and minerals. Firstly, if such unhealthy crap weren't sold as "food" to begin with, then there wouldn't be a need for the additions. But more importantly, those of us who *do* give a shit about the food we consume are forced to pay extra for the additives, even though we are quite capable of knowing that boxed cereal has the nutritional value of the cardboard its packaged in and can supplement our diet accordingly.
I'm a pretty liberal-minded person and think the State can, and should, step in from time to time. However, I think that the market should decide these two particular things. If you can't find a broadcast TV package that won't expose Little Johnny to T&A and harsh language, then cancel your damned TV, otherwise buck up and deal w/ the fact that your kids will eventually consume the same entertainment that you do. Likewise, if you're too dumb to know that eating unfortified Fruit Loops every day will have long-term negative health affects on your kids, then you can deal with Child Services eventually taking possession of your precious little sprog for malnutrition charges.
There are a lot of things that we *cannot* control as indivuduals/households: indutrial pollution, unsafe materials in products, etc. The government should regulate certain things, as the average person just can't politely ask the nearest coal-fired power plant to keep the mercury out of the air in the city. However, you *can* quite easily regulate stuff you deem unsafe for kids to watch at home -- don't *have* it in the home to begin with. Harsh? Maybe. But it's one of the many sacrifices that come with having kids. Deal.
Before anyone retorts, I have 2 kids. We don't *have* TV at home, and I lock the DSL modem down when we leave the kids home alone. I can deal with this. Government need not apply. And if I forget and my kids end up on BangBus.com when we're at the movies, well... I'm sure they'll live to see another day. I also don't lock up my kitchen, and my kids have been burned by a hot stove and cut themselves on knives. ZOMG!
You would think people would act rationally and try to figure out things, but that's not usually the case. Usually the sender would simply see an error message, often repeated after a few attempts to email the same person, then contact the recipient by other means to tell them there was a problem on our end. They rarely (if ever) actually read the error message itself, which, though terse, should have been enough to clue them in that it was on their end. The sender rarely consulted w/ their own sysadmin/isp/whatever before bugging *us* first.
No, I didn't just route these to the bit bucket. However, the overhead of handling complaints was unbearable so we just gave it up.
I used to use this under postfix at a department of a large university, and, later, at a small software company. I was constantly *amazed* at the lack of "correct" DNS configuration out there. Rejecting SMTP connections based on the lack of rDNS does indeed block a TON of spam, but also results in much gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair for the admin who uses it.
For a site with low, static email traffic, this is a great method. Otherwise, I wouldn't wish the resulting pain on anyone.
Now... if I could selectively gray-list such hosts, then that may help a lot.
A few days ago, my wife and I got *really* bored and watched the 1987 film "White Water Summer" with a very young Kevin Bacon and Sean Astin. Horrible movie -- this was via NetFlix's "Watch Now" service, and the selection is, shall we say, somewhat lacking. Anyway, it's rated PG (remember, the PG-13 rating was added in July 1, 1984) and I was surprised to see a scene where a very pissed off Astin tells Bacon to "fuck off" (or maybe it was "fuck yourself").
Not that *I* cared, but it does illustrate how the spectrum of tolerances shift over time.
Nudity and foul language were a staple of movies long ago. While before PG-13, the PG movie "Airplane" has an obviously-gratuitous naked breast shot in one scene. We had lovely young Jane Seyemore showing all-but-nipple in a scene from the 1977 rated G movie "Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger". I recall the theatrical release of "Superman: The Movie" (PG, 1978) as a kid and seeing a full-frontal nude toddler crawling out of the crater before the bewildered Mr. & Mrs. Clark (has that since been edited out, I wonder?). The 1977 "Life of Brian" (R) had a full-frontal nude scene of Brian, to no fanfare (that I've ever heard of), yet I recall the scandal of "a male actor will appear in a full-frontal nude scene" in the 1993 R-rated "Sliver".
These days, I rarely hear "fuck" in PG-13 movies. In fact, I can't think of any off the top of my head. I don't even hear it all that much in R-rated movies. I remember the hilarious scene in "Star Trek: Generations" (PG, 1994) where, during the crash scene, Data mutters "oh, shit!". But I can't recall hearing "shit" in the last 20 or so PG-13 movies I've seen.
I recall seeing more nudity in PG movies of my very early youth than I often see in most R-rated movies today. I have to wonder if "Porky's" (R, 1981) would have gotten the NC-17 axe had it been released today? The closest contemporary film might be "American Pie", but that seems pretty tame in comparison. Violence was always there, to be sure, but the ratings they use these days as the result of nudity and language just baffles me. Plus, it seems that's *all* that's accounted for in pushing up ratings, leaving just the violene for our youth to consume, which is just... weird.
The pandering to the tween-to-young-adult deographic by film producers does piss me off a bit, too. It seems most PG-13 movies push the envelope in order to get the teens legally in the theater, so most films come with that rating, and are often less "adult" than I'd like. Even the R films seems pretty toned down to me.
As it should be. My comment was tongue-in-cheek. Since I live in the fucked up state of Utah, I'll share with you my nomination for asshat of the year award. I don't keep up with current events all that much, but I heard that this made national/world news coverage.:)
Like most people I have no problems being on government registers, I don't suffer from paranoid delusions so I know that the risk of that data being abused is very small.
Aren't the congestion-charge things pretty new? And they have *already* slid down the slippery slope, albeit just a little, to use it for a purpose for which it was not intended for?
This isn't trying to utilize 50-years old power lines for broadband data transmission. This system is less than a couple of years old and The Man has crossed the line in the sand for a questionable use.
I'd say it's been abused already, sir. Therefore, the risk of further abuse is fairly large.
And it kills stupid eagles, who despite being stupid are still cool.
I can't be bothered to look up the articles, but I've read on many occasions that the danger to birds is an overblown straw man, as the windows of houses and building kill far more birds each year. It also seems that cars kill plenty of birds, as well.
Although really, switching to KDE is known to have a much stronger positive effect.
Fancy desktops are for wusses. I switched from KDE to evilwm at the start of the year. Now *that* is a huge improvement in memory footprint and desktop responsiveness (not to mention getting more screen real estate). Even rxvt takes up more resident memory than evilwm.;) If I could get apps a tad leaner than Firefox and Gaim (that don't totally suck -- Links, for example, doesn't count), I'd be a that much happier.
While I enjoy this kind of alt.support.childfree angst as much as the next USENET veteran, your post is pointless in this discussion. A non sequitur, really. Why it got modded so high is really beyond me. Save these posts for articles/threads where the topic is the nanny state, in it's mis-guided attempt to "save the children", trampling on your child free existence. The original write-up does not cover this, nor does this thread, which is about *parenting* style and has no relevance to you.
I've got 2 kids of my own, and I have been known to spout some pretty harsh anti-{breeder/sprog} opinions myself. But really... let's keep on target, shall we?
Sorry, it's Linux that's playing the license games, not Sun. One only needs to look at ZFS support in FreeBSD to see that (Speaking of, where's the 'ZFS On FreeBSD!' story?).
Maybe because FreeBSD 7.0 hasn't been released yet? Sure, it's there, but not all of us run CURRENT. Personally, I'm chomping at the bit to get ZFS, but I'm sticking with STABLE.
Check out this FBI summary (warning, XLS file) from 2003 on murders committed by weapon type. Of the 14,400 or so murders in 2003, gun murders numbered about 9,600. Sure, guns are responsible for about two-thirds of all murders, but the remaining numbers of murders are still non trivial. Guns are (arguably) just easier to dispatch someone with, but, as the numbers show, where there's a will, there's a way. If guns suddenly vanished under civilian ownership, I seriously doubt we'd see an immediate 2/3 reduction in the murder rate.
(For fun, note that "personal weapons" (hands, feet, etc.) outnumber "blunt objects" in number of murders.)
I speak for anyone else, but 14,400 murders in a country of about 300 million? That really doesn't seem so bad to me. Other countries tell us how violent we are as a culture, but I just don't see that in the above numbers. Does media scare mongering have more to do with the US's bad image than reality?
I support a small shop that uses Quickbooks. They use the Evil Redmond OS on the desktop, and that will never change. That's ok. However, the office server and the web server are both FreeBSD, and we use MySQL. It would be awesome if I could have Quickbooks use the live DB server, as the office workers can then use the invoices generated online by the shopping cart, and, conversely, the online cart can use the live price data from Quickbooks. As it stands now, the online price data must be updated by hand via a web form, and invoices are mailed to sales personnel and entered by hand back into QB.
Maybe there is a connector for QB to use an arbitrary DB back end? I don't know for certain, as I've never actually been tasked to research the matter. Though I did a brief search and didn't find anything useful.
The truth is, most users of Quickbooks are Windows users. That's fine, I suppose. But it would be nice to tie the front end into a "real" database back end for other uses so the two areas of the business don't need to worry about the data being out of sync.
Maybe these days university unix admins are more clueful, but when I was in college (1990-'96), all of my homedirs were set with 755 with a corresponding default umask. Maybe it was admin ignorance (Purdue? I doubt it), or maybe it the spirit of online collaboration back then. My buddies and I grabbed all sorts of stuff from others' homedirs: humor files (Purity Test, anyone?), various dot-files to learn scripting from, sound/bitmap files from the guys with X station accounts, etc. It was a very open environment back then.
A close analogy might be: on an account with similar permissions as outlined above, I FTP'ed a Postscript file of a research paper from a subscription site (like the ACM, for example) to my homedir, and then a bunch of others on the same server swiped a copy from my directory. Could the ACM reasonably sue me for copyright infringement?
It's been 17 years since my first university unix account, so things may be a very different these days.
Since Bush took office, there have been no efforts to stifle dissent.
I don't recall "Free Speech Zones" (you know, those small, sometimes-fenced areas that are usually vary far from the object of public grievances) being such a popular tactic until Shrub took office. Maybe I just wasn't paying that much attention before.
And frankly, there are enough laws that limit my freedom on a daily basis in the name of protecting me from myself, that I am just not too concerned about whether or not Uncle Sam will know if I check-out a book on Communism from a public library.
So resignation to the status quo is the solution? That truly can't be healthy for a democracy such as ours.
Last Thursday, the Diane Rehm show had a segment on this very topic, talking with the author of the book "Nation of Secrets". Show available in Real or Windows Media format. Very interesting topic.
Sure, there's the Federal Excise Tax (not sure what that goes to), but there's still the Carrier Universal Service Charge. Even though land line coverage has been established to nearly every reasonable location in this country for many years, we still pay for it. That is indeed a subsidy, and the industry still suckles that particular federal teat.
You're telling me that there aren't government subsidies (whether overt, as with farming, or more indirect) that affect the price of our gasoline? Instead of the mild ad hominem quip, why not figure out "where to start" and just counter my claim?
Slashdot Mirror
So, you think there were no traveling minstrels back in the day that were booed off stage or were otherwise "crap" by the contemporary standards of the time? People rate things in a relative fashion. Schubert may be a god when compared to, say, John Tesh; but he may also be "crap" when compared to Beethoven.
Things become normalized to a bell curve, where the entire sample is eventually relegated to that top 5 percentile (the good stuff), the bottom 5, or the middle 90. Greatness not exist in a vacuum, in and of itself. Good cannot be good without the crap to compare it to.
Then come the cheesy 80's series remakes: Webster, Small Wonder, Punky Brewster, Diff'rent Strokes.
Hollywood knows no shame.
Or, more likely, was that Blue Lion's pilot was a moody, pain in the ass (would "emo" be an appropriate contemporary term for this guy?), and that the other characters wouldn't mind seeing him dead. While Airwolf came later than Voltron, I would liken the blue pilot to a cartoon version of Stringfellow Hawk -- broody and down all the time.
It's been so long since I've seen the show, so, with my faded memory, the joke may be too subtle for me to catch. I *tried* to watch an episode on Netflix's "Watch Now" feature, but I couldn't even get past the introduction before I killed the stream. Too much cheese for this guy's taste -- nostalgia only goes so far.
What someone needs to do is set up an automated build system that uses "-fprofile-generate/-fprofile-use" -- especially for base system, multimedia, and compression libraries. I got something like a 12% speedup in using that for mplayer (or was that mpg123...) in benchmark mode, as opposed to stock ports compiler options under FreeBSD/amd64 (which, I believe, is "-O2 -fno-strict-aliasing", though many individual ports tweak those to the extreme). Granted, each program would need a decent corpus of representitive "work" to do for this method to be effective, but it could be done on port-by-port basis.
If someone wants to rock the world of Gentoo (and has more free time than sense), they should fork the project and incorporate the "profile" method I mentioned above *and* ACOVEA into an automated build system. Now *that* would be impressive. :)
I swear, the US is turning into a country of emasculated pansies. We defeated England (with help), then Germany and Japan (again, with help), and stood nose-to-nose with the USSR for years, but we now duck and cover if you bring more than 3 fl. oz. of liquids onto a plane! How sad is that?
But, back on topic... Very cool hardware hack. We need someone to rig up an array of these enclosed in a box for a super-fast oven: Block of ice to boeuf bourguignon in eight seconds.
I'm going to tweak this analogy a bit. The V-Chip is more like the government forcing milk, bread, and cereals to be fortified with vitamins and minerals. Firstly, if such unhealthy crap weren't sold as "food" to begin with, then there wouldn't be a need for the additions. But more importantly, those of us who *do* give a shit about the food we consume are forced to pay extra for the additives, even though we are quite capable of knowing that boxed cereal has the nutritional value of the cardboard its packaged in and can supplement our diet accordingly.
I'm a pretty liberal-minded person and think the State can, and should, step in from time to time. However, I think that the market should decide these two particular things. If you can't find a broadcast TV package that won't expose Little Johnny to T&A and harsh language, then cancel your damned TV, otherwise buck up and deal w/ the fact that your kids will eventually consume the same entertainment that you do. Likewise, if you're too dumb to know that eating unfortified Fruit Loops every day will have long-term negative health affects on your kids, then you can deal with Child Services eventually taking possession of your precious little sprog for malnutrition charges.
There are a lot of things that we *cannot* control as indivuduals/households: indutrial pollution, unsafe materials in products, etc. The government should regulate certain things, as the average person just can't politely ask the nearest coal-fired power plant to keep the mercury out of the air in the city. However, you *can* quite easily regulate stuff you deem unsafe for kids to watch at home -- don't *have* it in the home to begin with. Harsh? Maybe. But it's one of the many sacrifices that come with having kids. Deal.
Before anyone retorts, I have 2 kids. We don't *have* TV at home, and I lock the DSL modem down when we leave the kids home alone. I can deal with this. Government need not apply. And if I forget and my kids end up on BangBus.com when we're at the movies, well... I'm sure they'll live to see another day. I also don't lock up my kitchen, and my kids have been burned by a hot stove and cut themselves on knives. ZOMG!
No, I didn't just route these to the bit bucket. However, the overhead of handling complaints was unbearable so we just gave it up.
For a site with low, static email traffic, this is a great method. Otherwise, I wouldn't wish the resulting pain on anyone.
Now... if I could selectively gray-list such hosts, then that may help a lot.
Not that *I* cared, but it does illustrate how the spectrum of tolerances shift over time.
Nudity and foul language were a staple of movies long ago. While before PG-13, the PG movie "Airplane" has an obviously-gratuitous naked breast shot in one scene. We had lovely young Jane Seyemore showing all-but-nipple in a scene from the 1977 rated G movie "Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger". I recall the theatrical release of "Superman: The Movie" (PG, 1978) as a kid and seeing a full-frontal nude toddler crawling out of the crater before the bewildered Mr. & Mrs. Clark (has that since been edited out, I wonder?). The 1977 "Life of Brian" (R) had a full-frontal nude scene of Brian, to no fanfare (that I've ever heard of), yet I recall the scandal of "a male actor will appear in a full-frontal nude scene" in the 1993 R-rated "Sliver".
These days, I rarely hear "fuck" in PG-13 movies. In fact, I can't think of any off the top of my head. I don't even hear it all that much in R-rated movies. I remember the hilarious scene in "Star Trek: Generations" (PG, 1994) where, during the crash scene, Data mutters "oh, shit!". But I can't recall hearing "shit" in the last 20 or so PG-13 movies I've seen.
I recall seeing more nudity in PG movies of my very early youth than I often see in most R-rated movies today. I have to wonder if "Porky's" (R, 1981) would have gotten the NC-17 axe had it been released today? The closest contemporary film might be "American Pie", but that seems pretty tame in comparison. Violence was always there, to be sure, but the ratings they use these days as the result of nudity and language just baffles me. Plus, it seems that's *all* that's accounted for in pushing up ratings, leaving just the violene for our youth to consume, which is just... weird.
The pandering to the tween-to-young-adult deographic by film producers does piss me off a bit, too. It seems most PG-13 movies push the envelope in order to get the teens legally in the theater, so most films come with that rating, and are often less "adult" than I'd like. Even the R films seems pretty toned down to me.
As it should be. My comment was tongue-in-cheek. Since I live in the fucked up state of Utah, I'll share with you my nomination for asshat of the year award. I don't keep up with current events all that much, but I heard that this made national/world news coverage. :)
Aren't the congestion-charge things pretty new? And they have *already* slid down the slippery slope, albeit just a little, to use it for a purpose for which it was not intended for?
This isn't trying to utilize 50-years old power lines for broadband data transmission. This system is less than a couple of years old and The Man has crossed the line in the sand for a questionable use.
I'd say it's been abused already, sir. Therefore, the risk of further abuse is fairly large.
At least she didn't forget to water her lawn, otherwise those thugs would have *really* fucked her up. :)
I can't be bothered to look up the articles, but I've read on many occasions that the danger to birds is an overblown straw man, as the windows of houses and building kill far more birds each year. It also seems that cars kill plenty of birds, as well.
Fancy desktops are for wusses. I switched from KDE to evilwm at the start of the year. Now *that* is a huge improvement in memory footprint and desktop responsiveness (not to mention getting more screen real estate). Even rxvt takes up more resident memory than evilwm. ;) If I could get apps a tad leaner than Firefox and Gaim (that don't totally suck -- Links, for example, doesn't count), I'd be a that much happier.
I've got 2 kids of my own, and I have been known to spout some pretty harsh anti-{breeder/sprog} opinions myself. But really... let's keep on target, shall we?
Maybe because FreeBSD 7.0 hasn't been released yet? Sure, it's there, but not all of us run CURRENT. Personally, I'm chomping at the bit to get ZFS, but I'm sticking with STABLE.
"What say you now, Goliath? Without your hair, you no longer possess your fantastic strength!"
Check out this FBI summary (warning, XLS file) from 2003 on murders committed by weapon type. Of the 14,400 or so murders in 2003, gun murders numbered about 9,600. Sure, guns are responsible for about two-thirds of all murders, but the remaining numbers of murders are still non trivial. Guns are (arguably) just easier to dispatch someone with, but, as the numbers show, where there's a will, there's a way. If guns suddenly vanished under civilian ownership, I seriously doubt we'd see an immediate 2/3 reduction in the murder rate.
(For fun, note that "personal weapons" (hands, feet, etc.) outnumber "blunt objects" in number of murders.)
I speak for anyone else, but 14,400 murders in a country of about 300 million? That really doesn't seem so bad to me. Other countries tell us how violent we are as a culture, but I just don't see that in the above numbers. Does media scare mongering have more to do with the US's bad image than reality?
I support a small shop that uses Quickbooks. They use the Evil Redmond OS on the desktop, and that will never change. That's ok. However, the office server and the web server are both FreeBSD, and we use MySQL. It would be awesome if I could have Quickbooks use the live DB server, as the office workers can then use the invoices generated online by the shopping cart, and, conversely, the online cart can use the live price data from Quickbooks. As it stands now, the online price data must be updated by hand via a web form, and invoices are mailed to sales personnel and entered by hand back into QB.
Maybe there is a connector for QB to use an arbitrary DB back end? I don't know for certain, as I've never actually been tasked to research the matter. Though I did a brief search and didn't find anything useful.
The truth is, most users of Quickbooks are Windows users. That's fine, I suppose. But it would be nice to tie the front end into a "real" database back end for other uses so the two areas of the business don't need to worry about the data being out of sync.
Maybe these days university unix admins are more clueful, but when I was in college (1990-'96), all of my homedirs were set with 755 with a corresponding default umask. Maybe it was admin ignorance (Purdue? I doubt it), or maybe it the spirit of online collaboration back then. My buddies and I grabbed all sorts of stuff from others' homedirs: humor files (Purity Test, anyone?), various dot-files to learn scripting from, sound/bitmap files from the guys with X station accounts, etc. It was a very open environment back then.
A close analogy might be: on an account with similar permissions as outlined above, I FTP'ed a Postscript file of a research paper from a subscription site (like the ACM, for example) to my homedir, and then a bunch of others on the same server swiped a copy from my directory. Could the ACM reasonably sue me for copyright infringement?
It's been 17 years since my first university unix account, so things may be a very different these days.
I don't recall "Free Speech Zones" (you know, those small, sometimes-fenced areas that are usually vary far from the object of public grievances) being such a popular tactic until Shrub took office. Maybe I just wasn't paying that much attention before.
So resignation to the status quo is the solution? That truly can't be healthy for a democracy such as ours.
Last Thursday, the Diane Rehm show had a segment on this very topic, talking with the author of the book "Nation of Secrets". Show available in Real or Windows Media format. Very interesting topic.
Sure, there's the Federal Excise Tax (not sure what that goes to), but there's still the Carrier Universal Service Charge. Even though land line coverage has been established to nearly every reasonable location in this country for many years, we still pay for it. That is indeed a subsidy, and the industry still suckles that particular federal teat.
Try looking at any phone bill. See those federal surcharges? Those are subsidies.
You're telling me that there aren't government subsidies (whether overt, as with farming, or more indirect) that affect the price of our gasoline? Instead of the mild ad hominem quip, why not figure out "where to start" and just counter my claim?