I actually use CAPS LOCK regularly when writing macros in C. It's much easier on the finger to not have to chord full words with the shift key pressed. Try it sometime. Once you get in the habit of using it on long stretches of capitalized letters (like CAPS LOCK), you'll never go back.
My biggest gripe is that I have to press shift to use the underscore key.
1. Fascism isn't a product of the right, it's more leftist. You aren't even using the term correctly.
Never refute a point with an article that starts out with a logical fallacy in the very first paragraph.
There are few words the American Left loves to fling around with such abandon as the word "fascist." According to them, social conservatives, libertarians and the Religious Right are all various brands of fascism, that political ideology which came into such disrepute following the demise of il Duce, Benito Mussolini.
No one in the American Left thinks that libertarians are fascists. Perhaps doomed, naive, ideologues who cannot see the logical conclusion of their avowed economic policies, but people with a deep respect for freedom nonetheless that we can find no fault with. To claim as such is a straw man, or at the very least, the result of arguing with people that don't understand what a Libertarian is. Libertarians don't want the kind of social control that social conservatives want -- that's why they're on opposite ends of the classic two-way axis. They also rarely possess the mild xenophobia, militarism, and demand that the government shepherd them that the people the American Left is really afraid of do possess.
Now, as for the actual argument...
Fascism is an Authoritarian system. It often picks up traits from both the Left and the Right, but it's root are in anti-Communism during the economic and social malaise of the post-WWI period in Europe (and in the US to a lesser degree). Much of the Western world was in the grip of the post-WWI Depression, and many people were of the opinion that Western democracy was a failed and ineffectual form of government. Communist movement (and to a lesser degree anarchist movements) flourished. A lot people with right-wing tendencies rebelled against Communism and sought to create a strong dictatorial government that did not follow Marxist beliefs.
The Manifesto cited was not the core sets of beliefs of the architects of the Fascist Movement within Italy. It was the public, "Vote for us!" PR much like the "smaller government" trope of the modern Republican Party. (Medicare Part D, anyone?) You'll note that in the years to come after they rose to power, much of those Democratic prinicples outlined in the first section went away, and in both Italy and most other Fascist countries, the labor principles were put aside as they quickly formed government-sanctioned industry cartels. They would give people a lot of what they wanted, but they had ZERO tolerance for strikers and for collective bargaining outside of the structured framework they had set up.
Fascists pander to the people for popular support but keep their wealthy friends close and in power, just as the Republicans did with Medicare Part D which is a benefit for old people that is explicitly designed to preserve industry profits. Mussolini rose to power with the blessing of the monarchy who was afraid of Marxists. Hitler's rise to power coincided with the purging of people with more socialist than nationalist leanings in the Nazi Party in the Night of the Long Knives. Unlike Authoritarian Leftist movements, there is no deevolution of power from capitalists to labor.
You see, one core difference between Fascist Authoritarianism and Communist Authoritarianism is that while both believe in centrally controlled economies, Communists believe in the industries being wholly owned and controlled by the State whereas Fascists believe in letting oligopolies be independently owned by friends of the administration and to keep the benefits and ownership of business firmly in the hands of an elite instead of in the hands of the people. It is Crony Capitalism in practice, though with a good bit more state control of production, even if the wealth generated flows into a few hands.
At their end of the political spectrum, Fascism and Communism both start to
"...[T]he government or *AA would have to admit evidence of having done so in open court, ruining their hard-won subversion of TOR as an intelligence gathering tool."
Because one side is commiting all the crimes. Leave Israel alone and they will leave you alone.
Spoken like a man who only has the superficial understanding of the conflict that the mainstream media covers. Israel is NOT in anyway innocent of all crimes. They've done everything from settle conquered land and drive out the natives in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to collective punishment in the form of mass demolitions of housing tracts where a terrorist lived to firing missiles and bombs into crowded markets and residential areas. Many of the Israeli settlers are just as much religious fanatics as some of the supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah and often do not treat their Palestinian neighbors as human, shunning them and occasionally using violence against them. Many harbor racist, anti-Arab attitudes, and the Palestinians' attitude about Israel is shaped by their contact with these Israelis (and the occupying IDF) first and foremost.
The Israelis occupy the Palestinian territories with a force that is notorious for having a hair trigger and killing innocents. The Palestinian economy is nonexistent because they can't move freely around their territory thanks to check-points, and they can't trade with neighbors with the borders shut. Unemployment in the Gaza Strip was 30% in 2005, before the recent siege. In the West Bank, Israel has built a barrier deep into internationally recognized Palestinian territory "to prevent terror attacks" that has cut a lot of prime Palestinian farmland off from its owners, and Israel has repeatedly refused to honor its obligations under the Oslo peace accord to withdraw ALL settlers from both the West Bank and Gaza Strip, instead funnelling more and more settlers into the West Bank to consolodate their grip.
The IDF is infamous for heavy-handed tactics against the Palestinians in most of the world (outside the US, anyway). Heavy civilian casualties are common. This is because terrorists live side by side with civilians. (Do you think they have a choice, if they want to resist occupation, by the way? I mean, it's not like they can build bases.) Israel likes to thump its chest about how terrorists use civilians as body shields (apparently because they commit the evil acts of living in apartments with their families and shopping in the public -- the bastards), but Israel is more than willing to fire that rocket or drop that bomb and chalk everyone else up as acceptable losses if it means cutting the next head off the Hydra.
They also have a policy of bulldozing down houses "that are harboring terrorists" without regard for any of the other families living there or the women and children of the accused terrorists. The UN and many human rights organizations have condemned these demolitions as collective punishment (in violation of the Geneva Convention and thus a war crime), but they've never been held to task for it thanks to US veto power. They've demolished apartment buildings, markets, schools, playgrounds -- they even bulldozed down the Gaza Strip's only zoo in Rafah. Jenin lost 10% of the housing in a city of 13,000.
Look at the current conflict in Lebanon -- there's a 10:1 Lebanese to Israeli civilian death ratio, Lebanon's economy has been utterly destroyed by the devastation to infrastructure, and relief supplies cannot get into most of the country thanks to the destruction of all bridges and major roadways. Hezbollah hasn't done a fraction of the level of damage that Israel has done, and yet they want more, more, more devastation and military occupation. They seem incapable of figuring out that occupying more land only breeds more hate and that moderate Lebanese are now crying that they will never recognize Israel's right to exist.
Honestly, what kind of idiots are they to think that bombing places that harbor terrorists will make less terrorists?
Now don't get me wrong. I don't think that -- by a long shot -- all of the blame rests on Israel's
What's the point? Are you really implying that Israel deserves all of the blame for the past fighting?
For me the key point has always been this: the vast majority of Arab governments and their people don't believe in Israel's right to exist. It's hard to make peace with someone, who despite the terrible suffering of their own people, refuse to accept their neighbor's right to exist.
Why does all of the blame have to belong to only one side?
It's from the sexual harrassment lawsuit filed against Bill O'Reilly in which he calls up a subordinate and launches into a variety of lewd and disgusting sexual advances including a fantasy involving sex in shower using a loofah as a tool which he later calls "the falafel thing."
Al Fraken loves to bring it up on his show occasionally because it not only shows how much of a creepy, disturbed hypocrite O'Reilly is (on matters of sexual morality at the very least), but the suit also contains a bizarre rambling about how people at the top of FOX and of the Bush administration are keeping an eye on Al Fraken and that "one day he's going to get a knock at the door and life as he's known it will change forever."
Europe already spread all of its nastiest diseases during the colonial period. It's only in the past century or so that increased global trade has resulted in more exchange of diseases from Africa and Asia to the rest of the world. Also, people in Asia and Africa live closer to the wild and have more contact with wild animals that can prove to be vectors of new diseases such as SARS and AIDS.
There's just way too much to go into here, but I'm going to have to disagree on most of this having graduated from a good CS program.
Practical knowledge is exactly the kind of thing that you can learn without school, but theoretical knowledge is the structure to hang it on. Instead of learning C or Java or whatever, my college taught language and library independent concepts that can be transferred to picking up any new language or library. Give me two weeks of study, and I'll probably program circles around any trade-school or self-taught programmer. I know that I was looking at most of my self-taught code from high school with shock and dismay after only a year of college.
Next, where is one supposed to learn about solid software construction and tight coding? Not in any real-world company, I've worked in, that's for sure! Most real-world code is horribly designed and sloppy by the standard you learn in college. In fact, a lot of practical experience is learning how to improve poorly designed code without making it collapse on itself due to all the hacks to meet deadlines that make maintainability difficult. In addition, I've unfortunately never seen someone fired for not commenting their code at work, but I have seen people failed for it in college.
As for Big O, while optimization is the last thing you usually need to concern yourself with, a lack of understanding of algorithmic complexity leads to incredibly poor designs. I've even made simple mistakes in this when having to rush to implement a project without sitting down and designing it properly first when just trying to "get it to work." I ended up with a tool that would've taken a month to run but that I was able to redesign to work overnight after profiling what I'd done. Someone without training wouldn't have realized the boneheaded error that I'm ashamed to have to admit that I'd made. (I was doing something in O(n^2) time using arrays that could've been done in O(ln n) time by using hash tables.)
At least that has been my experience with Comp Sci majors lately.
I recommend hiring from a different school. There are worlds of difference between CS programs. Some teach the fundamentals, and some are just expensive trade schools.
I've read the FairTax book. One of the problems with the prebate is that it's based on federal poverty limit calculations which are based on tripling the cost of food expenditures. Even in the day when the standard was set, food expenditures were more like 25% of expenses, and they've dropped ever since. The federal poverty guidelines are a joke.
The other problem is that it still doesn't solve the problem that the lower and the majority of the middle classes both spend 100% of their income whereas the upper classes do not. It only partially alleviates that burden. The explicit goal that Boortz crows about is that it will kick off a wave of investment if we just take all the taxes off of the rich and their businesses that will vitalize the economy. It's supply-side (aka voodoo) economics, plain and simple.
Cablevision is infamous for their bandwidth capping. If you saturate your upsteam connection for a few hours or sometimes even a few minutes, you can get slapped with bandwidth restrictions.
I get webpages fast enough. All I care about is server and P2P capabilities. I'm better off with cheap DSL since I'm actually allowed to use it.
There are already existing ISPs that sell 30Mbps over coax.
Where, what's rent like, and do I have to learn a new language or wear funny hats? Oh, and can you acutally USE it for more than a couple of days without going over your limit for the month?
I think Sun is in a position similar to Microsoft, though I don't know what their weak points are. (All I know is that, due to pressure from Boost-using customers, recent versions of their compiler should handle it better.)
Oh, yeah. We in fact upgraded our compiler from Sun Studio 8 to 10 specifically to be able to get Boost's singleton implementation and SmartPointers.
Well, to each his own; but just remember that the existence of Obj-C++ means the woojiness is always within your reach, should the desire for woojiness* suddenly overtake you -- or should you hit a problem that would be most elegantly solved with a design that uses a function template.
Out of curiosity, where would you find use for a function template in a language that supports overloadable functions and a generic base class? I can't really think of one, but I'm still at the head-hurty / "Wow, that's both cool and horrible" stage of C++ learning when looking at Boost and STL implementations.
But, the prostitutes 'services' were never caught under either systems taxes. However, with the newer, higher consumption tax, the purchases made by the man and woman outside of that transaction, would help make up for that loss of 'service' tax.
The second system is the FairTax. My whole point is that the same amount of taxes is dodged whether it's dodged in Alice's unreported income taxes or Bob's sales taxes. The only way this is made up is by the fact that the poor and middle class (like Alice, Bob, and most of the types of criminals that Boortz cares about probably are) will carry far more of the tax burden.
No system is perfect, there will be some cash under the table transactions for some things, but, I think in general the fair tax consumption type thing would be more fair and capture income for the govt. in a much more desired way.
I strongly disagree. The FairTax is nothing less than a recipe for neo-feudalism. The lower down the income ladder you get, the greater the percentage of income spent in consumption and the less saved / invested. Consumption taxes are inherently regressive, and the FairTax's "prebate" only shifts the burden onto the middle class, which will shrink over time.
It would essentially give the rich a free ride and eliminate all the controls on aristocracy and plutocracy that we've installed since the Guilded Age. Our society would move into a stratified economic structure. Already, the top 1% of income earners own as much as the bottom 90%, and intergenerational class mobility is at an all time low. The elimination of estate taxes, investment taxes, and business taxes would essentially rest the entire back of the US government on an increasingly poorer and poorer majority while an elite class still got to enjoy all the benefits of the government acting to protect their business interests.
Plus, the fact that it's essentially voluntary as retailers and wholesalers have no way of verifying whether a purchase is legitimate business expense or not means that it would collapse government revenues in a handful of years. If it survived, it could only do so as a VAT with the government rebating taxes on expenses to businesses after precollecting the taxes. The entire concept is ludicrously flawed except as the ultimate expression of trickle-down economics.
Sounds like someone hasn't tasted the sweet goodness of Boost. (:
Like most of Boost, it's a hack. An elegant, beautiful hack but a hack nonetheless, meant to implement in code missing features built-in in other languages.
Reading the code in the Boost libraries gives me headaches -- and often gives various compilers fits. (Templated templates, anyone? I had to find documentation for THAT in a footnote in the appendix to chapter on templates Stroustrup's book, and the Solaris compiler didn't support it fully at the time.)
I much prefer Objective-C's way of doing things to C++'s even despite the mystical "woojiness" of Boost.
I dunno. I like the idea of a consumption tax, like the FairTax.org one. I think it would be more fair and distribute the burden better. First, many of the extremely wealthy, don't work...they live off investments, so don't pay income taxes. However, they DO buy lots of stuff...expensive stuff, and you'd catch them on this new method.
Currently, investments are taxed in the form of capital gains and dividend taxes as well as the estate tax for the super rich. The proponents of the so-called FairTax would do away with all of this. The wealthy spend a significantly small percentage of their income than the middle class and would escape enormous amounts of taxation. In addition, the FairTax is ridiculously easy to dodge by simply claming purchases as business expenses, which wouldn't be audited due to the closing of the IRS that they propose.
Also, there is a lot of 'cash' basis transactions out there...whether for illegal ventures (drugs, gambling, prostitution, illegal immigrant work)...that the govt. doesn't get a cut of. However, again, all the people involved in these 'trades' do buy stuff...and the consumption tax would get those dollars that currently are lost.
This is, of course, a fallacy. It's a slick one, though, since it hides that the tax dodge happens at a different part of the equation. It's like claiming that a fridge dodges the laws of thermodynamics by cooling things because you're only looking inside the fridge and not looking at the whole system including the heat exchanger on the outside of the box. Let me walk you through it:
A man, Bob, visits a prostitute, Alice. Under the current system, Bob's income is taxed, but Jane's is not. Neither Alice's purchase of goods, nor Bob's purchase of "services" is taxed. Alice is dodging taxes by not reporting income.
Under the FairTax, Bob and Alice's incomes are not taxed. Alice's purchases of goods are taxed, but Bob's purchase of "services" is not taxed. Bob is dodging taxes by not paying sales tax for the "services" he has purchased.
In this case, Alice's income is the "fridge" from before. You see no taxes being paid at all before and then taxes being paid now and think that you've made a positive because you don't see Bob's dodged taxes in the other half of the equation. The tax dodge has been moved from after Alice gets her money to the time of each transaction. The same amount of taxes is dodged because instead of Alice dodging taxes, Bob is now the one dodging them. Do you think that drug dealers, prostitutes, illegal labor, etc. will charge sales tax for their services and dutifully report it to the authorities?
It's quite frankly, the silliest argument in the FairTax book, and Boortz should be ashamed of making it.
Sure, this photographer is at fault, and you can make assumptions about his political motives for photoshopping this image.
I don't get it either. I doubt it's political, though. There are more than enough bombed out buildings in Lebanon right now to use for a story. I'm going to guess that laziness or just plain lack of access to the active front was the primary motivator since a building still burning is a scoop that shows "on the scene reporting" where as a burnt-out shell doesn't.
Instead of making anything resembling a valid argument countering those in "an inconvenient truth", they resort to trying to discredit Al Gore by telling people it's "uncool" to be too intelligent [...]
I hope you do realize that that was George W. Bush's entire 2000 campaign theme, practically. Read Politics Lost by Joel Klein sometime. Part of the goal was to define Al Gore's character as dry, boring, and wooden (something his own campaign consultants didn't help with) and to define Bush as folksy and more of a "regular guy." Presidential elections are more of a referendum of character and charisma than politics when courting swing voters.
Also, go back and see if you can find video clips of all the "hillariously" stupid things that Bush said on the 2000 campaign trail like, "I believe that gynecologists should be allowed to practice their love with women," and "I know that man and fish can coexist peacefully." Every SINGLE time he says something incredibly stupid that would be put on a mocking desk calendar for years, he smirks right as he does it. He knows what he's saying. Just ask yourself how many times he's said something kooky and stupefyingly dumb after getting elected.
A large part of politics is about finding a negative label to box somebody into and to make sure they stay there. Al Gore's box is "boring nerd," just like Hillary Clinton's is "the Hildebeast," and Howard Dean's is "screaming maniac." As long as you can prod people to think of opposition candidates as narrow, flawed stereotypes, you can discourage them from listening to anything they say. It's FAR more effective than actually engaging his arguments.
Why in the world would the "oil companies" give a rat's ass about "man made" global warming in the first place? Demand is not going to go down, supply is limited cuz the tree huggers won't let them drill in new areas, so they are going to make the huge profit regardless on what "scam of the year" folks are believing in.
The worry the oil companies have about global warming is that people will wake up and try to do something about it, which will decrease demand as the best way to put a stop to global warming is to stop burning fossil fuels and replace them with renewable carbon fuels like biofuels or non-carbon fuels like hydrogen from non-fossil power plants. That would reduce the world oil demand to nothing but fertilizers, plastics, pharmaceuticals, and other petro-chemicals.
You'd have to completely be out of touch with everything that climate scientists have been saying to miss something like that. Oh, wait...
The only people scared they are going to LOSE money is those bellying up to the government teet for research on global warming. If the public finds out it's junk science made up to scare them into pushing for even more bigger government that will taxe them more, it's adios to that grant money.
Yeah, cause the great Big Global Warming Scare companies made $10 billion dollar profits in 3Q 2005. Yeah, THAT'S where all the money conspiracies are -- with the Big GW, the Jews, and the Gay Martian Illluminated Masters. I know my climate research friends are rolling in their Bentleys just lighting up the money-wrapped cigars and laughing and laughing at all the panicked people trying to destroy our way of life.
Needless to say aside from his brilliance as a president in a time of war, his economic policiies were a such a disacster that we are still recovering from them today.
Yes, we are certainly recovering from a time of prosperity and financial certainty and returning to the more natural state of depression and fear of crippling poverty that preceded his disasterous policies. Whew! Thank goodness!
Even if someone was never able to pay off their debt they were trying to enter the plantation class which was actually a very small number of people. The poor whites defended the slave owners because it was the dream of many people to eventually become a plantation owner.
Boy, take away the racism and slavery, and not that much has changed, has it? Think of all the people up in their ears in debt today, fired from well-paying jobs that were offshored and now working two minimum wage jobs that fiercely oppose progressive taxation and demand flat taxation or consumption taxes or demand an end to estate taxes that will put most of the burden on themselves.
So, to summarize, if you want to see judges actually strike down unconstitutional laws, vote Republican.
What, you mean like Scalia, Thomas, and Alito did in Rumsfield vs. Hamdan in their dissent?
No, thanks! I'll take unconstitutional rulings over property rights over unconstitutional rules over whether or not the government can kidnap people, torture them, and then try them in unaccountable military tribunals where not only they and their attorney aren't allowed to see evidence against them. I'd rather lose my house to a scummy developer and a crooked city than my life and liberty to an unaccountable unitary executive (aka dictator).
I'm sorry, but as much as I hate, hate, hate the Kelo decision, it's nothing compared to the Constitutional mangling that conservative/authoritarian justices are in favor of.
Slashdot Mirror
So, what use is this CAPS key?
I actually use CAPS LOCK regularly when writing macros in C. It's much easier on the finger to not have to chord full words with the shift key pressed. Try it sometime. Once you get in the habit of using it on long stretches of capitalized letters (like CAPS LOCK), you'll never go back.
My biggest gripe is that I have to press shift to use the underscore key.
Never refute a point with an article that starts out with a logical fallacy in the very first paragraph.
No one in the American Left thinks that libertarians are fascists. Perhaps doomed, naive, ideologues who cannot see the logical conclusion of their avowed economic policies, but people with a deep respect for freedom nonetheless that we can find no fault with. To claim as such is a straw man, or at the very least, the result of arguing with people that don't understand what a Libertarian is. Libertarians don't want the kind of social control that social conservatives want -- that's why they're on opposite ends of the classic two-way axis. They also rarely possess the mild xenophobia, militarism, and demand that the government shepherd them that the people the American Left is really afraid of do possess.
Now, as for the actual argument...
Fascism is an Authoritarian system. It often picks up traits from both the Left and the Right, but it's root are in anti-Communism during the economic and social malaise of the post-WWI period in Europe (and in the US to a lesser degree). Much of the Western world was in the grip of the post-WWI Depression, and many people were of the opinion that Western democracy was a failed and ineffectual form of government. Communist movement (and to a lesser degree anarchist movements) flourished. A lot people with right-wing tendencies rebelled against Communism and sought to create a strong dictatorial government that did not follow Marxist beliefs.
The Manifesto cited was not the core sets of beliefs of the architects of the Fascist Movement within Italy. It was the public, "Vote for us!" PR much like the "smaller government" trope of the modern Republican Party. (Medicare Part D, anyone?) You'll note that in the years to come after they rose to power, much of those Democratic prinicples outlined in the first section went away, and in both Italy and most other Fascist countries, the labor principles were put aside as they quickly formed government-sanctioned industry cartels. They would give people a lot of what they wanted, but they had ZERO tolerance for strikers and for collective bargaining outside of the structured framework they had set up.
Fascists pander to the people for popular support but keep their wealthy friends close and in power, just as the Republicans did with Medicare Part D which is a benefit for old people that is explicitly designed to preserve industry profits. Mussolini rose to power with the blessing of the monarchy who was afraid of Marxists. Hitler's rise to power coincided with the purging of people with more socialist than nationalist leanings in the Nazi Party in the Night of the Long Knives. Unlike Authoritarian Leftist movements, there is no deevolution of power from capitalists to labor.
You see, one core difference between Fascist Authoritarianism and Communist Authoritarianism is that while both believe in centrally controlled economies, Communists believe in the industries being wholly owned and controlled by the State whereas Fascists believe in letting oligopolies be independently owned by friends of the administration and to keep the benefits and ownership of business firmly in the hands of an elite instead of in the hands of the people. It is Crony Capitalism in practice, though with a good bit more state control of production, even if the wealth generated flows into a few hands.
At their end of the political spectrum, Fascism and Communism both start to
"...[T]he government or *AA would have to admit evidence of having done so in open court, ruining their hard-won subversion of TOR as an intelligence gathering tool."
Welcome to the US! You must be new here.
Because one side is commiting all the crimes. Leave Israel alone and they will leave you alone.
Spoken like a man who only has the superficial understanding of the conflict that the mainstream media covers. Israel is NOT in anyway innocent of all crimes. They've done everything from settle conquered land and drive out the natives in the West Bank and Gaza Strip to collective punishment in the form of mass demolitions of housing tracts where a terrorist lived to firing missiles and bombs into crowded markets and residential areas. Many of the Israeli settlers are just as much religious fanatics as some of the supporters of Hamas and Hezbollah and often do not treat their Palestinian neighbors as human, shunning them and occasionally using violence against them. Many harbor racist, anti-Arab attitudes, and the Palestinians' attitude about Israel is shaped by their contact with these Israelis (and the occupying IDF) first and foremost.
The Israelis occupy the Palestinian territories with a force that is notorious for having a hair trigger and killing innocents. The Palestinian economy is nonexistent because they can't move freely around their territory thanks to check-points, and they can't trade with neighbors with the borders shut. Unemployment in the Gaza Strip was 30% in 2005, before the recent siege. In the West Bank, Israel has built a barrier deep into internationally recognized Palestinian territory "to prevent terror attacks" that has cut a lot of prime Palestinian farmland off from its owners, and Israel has repeatedly refused to honor its obligations under the Oslo peace accord to withdraw ALL settlers from both the West Bank and Gaza Strip, instead funnelling more and more settlers into the West Bank to consolodate their grip.
The IDF is infamous for heavy-handed tactics against the Palestinians in most of the world (outside the US, anyway). Heavy civilian casualties are common. This is because terrorists live side by side with civilians. (Do you think they have a choice, if they want to resist occupation, by the way? I mean, it's not like they can build bases.) Israel likes to thump its chest about how terrorists use civilians as body shields (apparently because they commit the evil acts of living in apartments with their families and shopping in the public -- the bastards), but Israel is more than willing to fire that rocket or drop that bomb and chalk everyone else up as acceptable losses if it means cutting the next head off the Hydra.
They also have a policy of bulldozing down houses "that are harboring terrorists" without regard for any of the other families living there or the women and children of the accused terrorists. The UN and many human rights organizations have condemned these demolitions as collective punishment (in violation of the Geneva Convention and thus a war crime), but they've never been held to task for it thanks to US veto power. They've demolished apartment buildings, markets, schools, playgrounds -- they even bulldozed down the Gaza Strip's only zoo in Rafah. Jenin lost 10% of the housing in a city of 13,000.
Look at the current conflict in Lebanon -- there's a 10:1 Lebanese to Israeli civilian death ratio, Lebanon's economy has been utterly destroyed by the devastation to infrastructure, and relief supplies cannot get into most of the country thanks to the destruction of all bridges and major roadways. Hezbollah hasn't done a fraction of the level of damage that Israel has done, and yet they want more, more, more devastation and military occupation. They seem incapable of figuring out that occupying more land only breeds more hate and that moderate Lebanese are now crying that they will never recognize Israel's right to exist.
Honestly, what kind of idiots are they to think that bombing places that harbor terrorists will make less terrorists?
Now don't get me wrong. I don't think that -- by a long shot -- all of the blame rests on Israel's
What's the point? Are you really implying that Israel deserves all of the blame for the past fighting?
For me the key point has always been this: the vast majority of Arab governments and their people don't believe in Israel's right to exist. It's hard to make peace with someone, who despite the terrible suffering of their own people, refuse to accept their neighbor's right to exist.
Why does all of the blame have to belong to only one side?
I can't believe I spelled Franken wrong twice.
It's from the sexual harrassment lawsuit filed against Bill O'Reilly in which he calls up a subordinate and launches into a variety of lewd and disgusting sexual advances including a fantasy involving sex in shower using a loofah as a tool which he later calls "the falafel thing."
Al Fraken loves to bring it up on his show occasionally because it not only shows how much of a creepy, disturbed hypocrite O'Reilly is (on matters of sexual morality at the very least), but the suit also contains a bizarre rambling about how people at the top of FOX and of the Bush administration are keeping an eye on Al Fraken and that "one day he's going to get a knock at the door and life as he's known it will change forever."
Full complaint here at the Smoking Gun.
Europe already spread all of its nastiest diseases during the colonial period. It's only in the past century or so that increased global trade has resulted in more exchange of diseases from Africa and Asia to the rest of the world. Also, people in Asia and Africa live closer to the wild and have more contact with wild animals that can prove to be vectors of new diseases such as SARS and AIDS.
2. I'd choose bark park with a 3/4 life span vs. no fun for a long time and all the other dogs I know agree.
Sshhh! Sshh! What are you doing? On the internet, no one's supposed to know that you're a dog!
There's just way too much to go into here, but I'm going to have to disagree on most of this having graduated from a good CS program.
Practical knowledge is exactly the kind of thing that you can learn without school, but theoretical knowledge is the structure to hang it on. Instead of learning C or Java or whatever, my college taught language and library independent concepts that can be transferred to picking up any new language or library. Give me two weeks of study, and I'll probably program circles around any trade-school or self-taught programmer. I know that I was looking at most of my self-taught code from high school with shock and dismay after only a year of college.
Next, where is one supposed to learn about solid software construction and tight coding? Not in any real-world company, I've worked in, that's for sure! Most real-world code is horribly designed and sloppy by the standard you learn in college. In fact, a lot of practical experience is learning how to improve poorly designed code without making it collapse on itself due to all the hacks to meet deadlines that make maintainability difficult. In addition, I've unfortunately never seen someone fired for not commenting their code at work, but I have seen people failed for it in college.
As for Big O, while optimization is the last thing you usually need to concern yourself with, a lack of understanding of algorithmic complexity leads to incredibly poor designs. I've even made simple mistakes in this when having to rush to implement a project without sitting down and designing it properly first when just trying to "get it to work." I ended up with a tool that would've taken a month to run but that I was able to redesign to work overnight after profiling what I'd done. Someone without training wouldn't have realized the boneheaded error that I'm ashamed to have to admit that I'd made. (I was doing something in O(n^2) time using arrays that could've been done in O(ln n) time by using hash tables.)
At least that has been my experience with Comp Sci majors lately.
I recommend hiring from a different school. There are worlds of difference between CS programs. Some teach the fundamentals, and some are just expensive trade schools.
I've read the FairTax book. One of the problems with the prebate is that it's based on federal poverty limit calculations which are based on tripling the cost of food expenditures. Even in the day when the standard was set, food expenditures were more like 25% of expenses, and they've dropped ever since. The federal poverty guidelines are a joke.
The other problem is that it still doesn't solve the problem that the lower and the majority of the middle classes both spend 100% of their income whereas the upper classes do not. It only partially alleviates that burden. The explicit goal that Boortz crows about is that it will kick off a wave of investment if we just take all the taxes off of the rich and their businesses that will vitalize the economy. It's supply-side (aka voodoo) economics, plain and simple.
Cablevision is infamous for their bandwidth capping. If you saturate your upsteam connection for a few hours or sometimes even a few minutes, you can get slapped with bandwidth restrictions.
I get webpages fast enough. All I care about is server and P2P capabilities. I'm better off with cheap DSL since I'm actually allowed to use it.
There are already existing ISPs that sell 30Mbps over coax.
Where, what's rent like, and do I have to learn a new language or wear funny hats?
Oh, and can you acutally USE it for more than a couple of days without going over your limit for the month?
I think Sun is in a position similar to Microsoft, though I don't know what their weak points are. (All I know is that, due to pressure from Boost-using customers, recent versions of their compiler should handle it better.)
Oh, yeah. We in fact upgraded our compiler from Sun Studio 8 to 10 specifically to be able to get Boost's singleton implementation and SmartPointers.
Well, to each his own; but just remember that the existence of Obj-C++ means the woojiness is always within your reach, should the desire for woojiness* suddenly overtake you -- or should you hit a problem that would be most elegantly solved with a design that uses a function template.
Out of curiosity, where would you find use for a function template in a language that supports overloadable functions and a generic base class? I can't really think of one, but I'm still at the head-hurty / "Wow, that's both cool and horrible" stage of C++ learning when looking at Boost and STL implementations.
But, the prostitutes 'services' were never caught under either systems taxes. However, with the newer, higher consumption tax, the purchases made by the man and woman outside of that transaction, would help make up for that loss of 'service' tax.
The second system is the FairTax. My whole point is that the same amount of taxes is dodged whether it's dodged in Alice's unreported income taxes or Bob's sales taxes. The only way this is made up is by the fact that the poor and middle class (like Alice, Bob, and most of the types of criminals that Boortz cares about probably are) will carry far more of the tax burden.
No system is perfect, there will be some cash under the table transactions for some things, but, I think in general the fair tax consumption type thing would be more fair and capture income for the govt. in a much more desired way.
I strongly disagree. The FairTax is nothing less than a recipe for neo-feudalism. The lower down the income ladder you get, the greater the percentage of income spent in consumption and the less saved / invested. Consumption taxes are inherently regressive, and the FairTax's "prebate" only shifts the burden onto the middle class, which will shrink over time.
It would essentially give the rich a free ride and eliminate all the controls on aristocracy and plutocracy that we've installed since the Guilded Age. Our society would move into a stratified economic structure. Already, the top 1% of income earners own as much as the bottom 90%, and intergenerational class mobility is at an all time low. The elimination of estate taxes, investment taxes, and business taxes would essentially rest the entire back of the US government on an increasingly poorer and poorer majority while an elite class still got to enjoy all the benefits of the government acting to protect their business interests.
Plus, the fact that it's essentially voluntary as retailers and wholesalers have no way of verifying whether a purchase is legitimate business expense or not means that it would collapse government revenues in a handful of years. If it survived, it could only do so as a VAT with the government rebating taxes on expenses to businesses after precollecting the taxes. The entire concept is ludicrously flawed except as the ultimate expression of trickle-down economics.
Sounds like someone hasn't tasted the sweet goodness of Boost. (:
Like most of Boost, it's a hack. An elegant, beautiful hack but a hack nonetheless, meant to implement in code missing features built-in in other languages.
Reading the code in the Boost libraries gives me headaches -- and often gives various compilers fits. (Templated templates, anyone? I had to find documentation for THAT in a footnote in the appendix to chapter on templates Stroustrup's book, and the Solaris compiler didn't support it fully at the time.)
I much prefer Objective-C's way of doing things to C++'s even despite the mystical "woojiness" of Boost.
I dunno. I like the idea of a consumption tax, like the FairTax.org one. I think it would be more fair and distribute the burden better. First, many of the extremely wealthy, don't work...they live off investments, so don't pay income taxes. However, they DO buy lots of stuff...expensive stuff, and you'd catch them on this new method.
Currently, investments are taxed in the form of capital gains and dividend taxes as well as the estate tax for the super rich. The proponents of the so-called FairTax would do away with all of this. The wealthy spend a significantly small percentage of their income than the middle class and would escape enormous amounts of taxation. In addition, the FairTax is ridiculously easy to dodge by simply claming purchases as business expenses, which wouldn't be audited due to the closing of the IRS that they propose.
Also, there is a lot of 'cash' basis transactions out there...whether for illegal ventures (drugs, gambling, prostitution, illegal immigrant work)...that the govt. doesn't get a cut of. However, again, all the people involved in these 'trades' do buy stuff...and the consumption tax would get those dollars that currently are lost.
This is, of course, a fallacy. It's a slick one, though, since it hides that the tax dodge happens at a different part of the equation. It's like claiming that a fridge dodges the laws of thermodynamics by cooling things because you're only looking inside the fridge and not looking at the whole system including the heat exchanger on the outside of the box. Let me walk you through it:
A man, Bob, visits a prostitute, Alice. Under the current system, Bob's income is taxed, but Jane's is not. Neither Alice's purchase of goods, nor Bob's purchase of "services" is taxed. Alice is dodging taxes by not reporting income.
Under the FairTax, Bob and Alice's incomes are not taxed. Alice's purchases of goods are taxed, but Bob's purchase of "services" is not taxed. Bob is dodging taxes by not paying sales tax for the "services" he has purchased.
In this case, Alice's income is the "fridge" from before. You see no taxes being paid at all before and then taxes being paid now and think that you've made a positive because you don't see Bob's dodged taxes in the other half of the equation. The tax dodge has been moved from after Alice gets her money to the time of each transaction. The same amount of taxes is dodged because instead of Alice dodging taxes, Bob is now the one dodging them. Do you think that drug dealers, prostitutes, illegal labor, etc. will charge sales tax for their services and dutifully report it to the authorities?
It's quite frankly, the silliest argument in the FairTax book, and Boortz should be ashamed of making it.
...[T]he Civil Rights trial of Paula Jones.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Sure, this photographer is at fault, and you can make assumptions about his political motives for photoshopping this image.
I don't get it either. I doubt it's political, though. There are more than enough bombed out buildings in Lebanon right now to use for a story. I'm going to guess that laziness or just plain lack of access to the active front was the primary motivator since a building still burning is a scoop that shows "on the scene reporting" where as a burnt-out shell doesn't.
Instead of making anything resembling a valid argument countering those in "an inconvenient truth", they resort to trying to discredit Al Gore by telling people it's "uncool" to be too intelligent [...]
I hope you do realize that that was George W. Bush's entire 2000 campaign theme, practically. Read Politics Lost by Joel Klein sometime. Part of the goal was to define Al Gore's character as dry, boring, and wooden (something his own campaign consultants didn't help with) and to define Bush as folksy and more of a "regular guy." Presidential elections are more of a referendum of character and charisma than politics when courting swing voters.
Also, go back and see if you can find video clips of all the "hillariously" stupid things that Bush said on the 2000 campaign trail like, "I believe that gynecologists should be allowed to practice their love with women," and "I know that man and fish can coexist peacefully." Every SINGLE time he says something incredibly stupid that would be put on a mocking desk calendar for years, he smirks right as he does it. He knows what he's saying. Just ask yourself how many times he's said something kooky and stupefyingly dumb after getting elected.
A large part of politics is about finding a negative label to box somebody into and to make sure they stay there. Al Gore's box is "boring nerd," just like Hillary Clinton's is "the Hildebeast," and Howard Dean's is "screaming maniac." As long as you can prod people to think of opposition candidates as narrow, flawed stereotypes, you can discourage them from listening to anything they say. It's FAR more effective than actually engaging his arguments.
I'm confused. Did Clinton? What civil rights trial was this, and what did he lie about?
Why in the world would the "oil companies" give a rat's ass about "man made" global warming in the first place? Demand is not going to go down, supply is limited cuz the tree huggers won't let them drill in new areas, so they are going to make the huge profit regardless on what "scam of the year" folks are believing in.
The worry the oil companies have about global warming is that people will wake up and try to do something about it, which will decrease demand as the best way to put a stop to global warming is to stop burning fossil fuels and replace them with renewable carbon fuels like biofuels or non-carbon fuels like hydrogen from non-fossil power plants. That would reduce the world oil demand to nothing but fertilizers, plastics, pharmaceuticals, and other petro-chemicals.
You'd have to completely be out of touch with everything that climate scientists have been saying to miss something like that. Oh, wait...
The only people scared they are going to LOSE money is those bellying up to the government teet for research on global warming. If the public finds out it's junk science made up to scare them into pushing for even more bigger government that will taxe them more, it's adios to that grant money.
Yeah, cause the great Big Global Warming Scare companies made $10 billion dollar profits in 3Q 2005. Yeah, THAT'S where all the money conspiracies are -- with the Big GW, the Jews, and the Gay Martian Illluminated Masters. I know my climate research friends are rolling in their Bentleys just lighting up the money-wrapped cigars and laughing and laughing at all the panicked people trying to destroy our way of life.
Needless to say aside from his brilliance as a president in a time of war, his economic policiies were a such a disacster that we are still recovering from them today.
Yes, we are certainly recovering from a time of prosperity and financial certainty and returning to the more natural state of depression and fear of crippling poverty that preceded his disasterous policies. Whew! Thank goodness!
Even if someone was never able to pay off their debt they were trying to enter the plantation class which was actually a very small number of people. The poor whites defended the slave owners because it was the dream of many people to eventually become a plantation owner.
Boy, take away the racism and slavery, and not that much has changed, has it? Think of all the people up in their ears in debt today, fired from well-paying jobs that were offshored and now working two minimum wage jobs that fiercely oppose progressive taxation and demand flat taxation or consumption taxes or demand an end to estate taxes that will put most of the burden on themselves.
So, to summarize, if you want to see judges actually strike down unconstitutional laws, vote Republican.
What, you mean like Scalia, Thomas, and Alito did in Rumsfield vs. Hamdan in their dissent?
No, thanks! I'll take unconstitutional rulings over property rights over unconstitutional rules over whether or not the government can kidnap people, torture them, and then try them in unaccountable military tribunals where not only they and their attorney aren't allowed to see evidence against them. I'd rather lose my house to a scummy developer and a crooked city than my life and liberty to an unaccountable unitary executive (aka dictator).
I'm sorry, but as much as I hate, hate, hate the Kelo decision, it's nothing compared to the Constitutional mangling that conservative/authoritarian justices are in favor of.