.. albeit one that was not expressed very diplomatically.
When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, it sent a shock wave through the collective American populace. From coast to coast, people were asking themselves a simple question: "How could this have happened?" There was a sense of general dismay that the Soviets had won this particular leg of the Space Race, and Americans were more or less united in the goal of making sure that it didn't happen again.
As a result of this, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), which set new standards for math and science education and established low-interest loans for college tuition. We recognized a threat, we took it seriously, we invested in our educational system, and the result of that investment was the generation that built the tools with which we won the Cold War.
Fast-forward to Modern America, and not only does it seem that we did not learn from that lesson of the past, but we're also moving in the wrong direction. Test scores are slipping, math and science education are being regarded in some circles as irrelevant (and even as "dirty" in some more extreme circles), and I've even seen the phrase "college-educated" used as a slur. (As if having a college education is a bad thing!)
It is dismissive to suggest that the rising and disturbing trend of religious fanaticism here at home has nothing to do with this trend. No offense intended to anybody's beliefs, but it should be obvious that the "6000 year-old Universe" crowd has far more political clout and organization than they did (say) ten years ago, and it is dangerous to dismiss them as "quaint" or "traditional." When I think "quaint", I think of Norman Rockwell paintings; it is hardly an adjective that I would attach to a movement that (I would contend) is a threat to the national security and the future of the United States.
Of course, it's equally dismissive to suggest that only religious fanaticism is responsible for our nation's disinterest in proper education. We've got a culture that is obsessed with shark bites, missing white women, and celebrity divorces. We've got parents that are more worried about having better landscaping or a bigger SUV than their neighbors than they are about their own children's education.
Personally, I don't care so much about the root causes of the problem as I do about the problem itself, and I'd like to see it fixed. Maybe what we need is a new national committment to math and science education, much like the one that served us so well in the past. Maybe what we need is a National Defense Education Act for the new millennium.
Sadly, however, I have very little faith that such an act would even make it out of committee in today's climate.
The problem which all you armchair libertarians don't seem to comprehend is that terrorists don't play by the rules. We aren't fighting Basque separatists or IRA who in their better days would actually call up and warn about a bomb going off in a theater so that innocents would have a fighting chance to escape. These are _thugs_ who like sawing off heads on live TV.
Do you listen to yourself?
You say that terrorists are thugs that "don't play by the rules." Okay, I'll agree with that. But then you (apparently) imply that terrorists will also go to a public library, check out suspicious books with a library card that they obtained with their real name and address. Does this even remotely make sense? Why would somebody who doesn't "play by the rules" go through the trouble to obtain a valid library card?
If I'm a terrorist and I want to obtain material from a library book, why wouldn't I just go there and photocopy some pages out of it and leave no trail of evidence at all? Why not just buy the book for cash at a bookstore, again leaving no records or traceability whatsoever? If I want some information off of the Internet, why wouldn't I just hit some random coffee house Wi-Fi hotspot and do my surfing there? For people who "don't play by the rules", you sure are assuming that terrorists are going to go out of their way to leave a trail of bread crumbs for the boys at the FBI.
Let's get real here, shall we? This provision makes no sense unless you assume that its sole intention is to monitor the reading habits of ordinary, law-abiding Americans.. people who (up until now) have never had any particular reason to be wary of the books that they check out of the library. No terrorist is ever going to leave the paper trail that this provision requires in order to be useful. Only John Q. Public is going to do that.
Modern-day America is becoming a scary place. The idea that so-called "conservatives" are actively embracing a privacy-invading and blatantly unconstitutional law solely on the basis of "it hasn't been used yet" is staggering to say the least.
Plus, it's not like annoying ads are making sales to me anyway. If anything, I will make it a point to avoid the product.
As an expansion of this line of thinking, I wonder how many Adblock users would be rampantly clicking on flashing ads if they weren't running Adblock? I could be wrong on this, but it seems to me that the typical Adblock user is not going to be the soccer mom type who downloaded Firefox because she heard about it on the news or saw the ad in the New York Times. The way some people complain about this, you'd think that they were under the impression that Adblock users would be buying thousands of dollars worth of merchandise each day if they would only allow the ads to be shown.
Adblock is simple to install, but its care and feeding (i.e., maintaining an up-to-date set of filters) takes a bit more savvy. Your typical Adblock user is more likely to be an experienced, technically-oriented Internet user, and as near as I can tell, these people are not in the habit of clicking on banner ads to begin with. I've bought plenty of things online, but I've never done so (to the best of my recollection) because I saw an obtrusive advertisement jump out at me when I was reading one of my favorite Web sites.
Adblock can almost be viewed as sort of a Do Not Call list for obnoxious Web site advertising. The analogy isn't perfect, I admit, but what's the big deal? People who sign up for the DNC list are not going to buy things from telemarketers anyway, so why bother calling them? People who use Adblock are not going to be playing your silly "punch the monkey" game anyway, so why waste the resources to send it to them? Hell, if anything, advertisers should be sending me money for all the bandwidth I'm saving them.
This is a completely hypothetical question. I have seen no evidence of concerted voter fraud and have no reason to believe that the results of the 2004 presidential election were illegitimate. Instead, I'm wondering if some of the experts on the Constitution and the law could shed some light on what would happen in the (again, hypothetical) case where election fraud was proven, and in particular, if it was fraud that demonstrably changed the outcome of the election.
Would we have new elections? Would the election be awarded to the opposing candidate? Would the sitting president be obligated to step down? If so, who would serve in his place? Would it make any difference if this was discovered before or after the oath of office was administered? I would imagine that "turmoil" would be an understatement.
For instance, I now read Slashdot with no ads, and I'm not a subscriber. Adblock decreases the value proposition of a Slashdot subscription.
The Slashdot crew is just going to have to start slipping some subtle product plugs into their stories (i.e., "The Shuttle's re-entry was as smooth as an ice-cold Budweiser.")
Revengefully lighting a place on fire and watching its inhabitants burn isn't enforcing the law--it's setting an example for those who would consider resisting (regardless of the validity of the reason) in the future.
"Revengefully lighting a place on fire?" Where on Earth are you getting this from? G. Gordon Liddy? The Montana Militia? The idea that the FBI would purposely and "revengefully" light fire to a compound containing young children and then gleefully watch it burn to the ground in full view of countless news cameras might sound perfectly plausible to those people, but to those of us with both feet grounded firmly in reality, it is the worst kind of delusional, black-helicoptered paranoia.
I would have no problem with the Waco incident if the police had killed only the men resisting, but they didn't.
The truth is that we will probably never know what caused the Waco fire. I do agree that the official government report (which concluded that the fire was intentionally set by the Davidians) was likely a whitewash. It's far more likely that the fire was started by kerosene lamps that the Davidians were burning inside the compound, but like I said, we'll never know for sure. Incidentally, it bears repeating: The whole reason that there was a 51-day standoff to begin with was that the Branch Davidians murdered 4 law enforcement officers and wounded 20 others. You call this "resisting", but I'm more of an old-fashioned kind of a guy; I say we call murder "murder."
Their actions killed EVERYBODY.
There were nine survivors.
If John Ashcroft had done the same, liberals would be screaming Nazi analogies and for impeachment of Bush himself.
On this we agree. The loony left and the radical right both have their fair share of idiocy.
Well, in that particular case, I agree that Reno did not act properly. If I had been the Attorney General, the INS would have gone in and taken the boy back to his father about nine days sooner.
The only thing I remember her doing was frying a whole bunch of fellow citizens down in Texas.
While I have no strong opinions about Janet Reno (pro or con), I think you're leaving some basic facts out of the equation here. The Branch Davidians (the "fellow citizens" you're referring to here) were in violation of several firearms laws at varying levels. Law enforcement authorities obtained a proper warrant and served it on February 28, 1993. If you're keeping score, that was almost two weeks before Janet Reno was even sworn in as Attorney General on March 12th. In the resulting raid, four federal agents were murdered by these same "fellow citizens" that you are (at least tangentially) defending. These were men with families, and they were just doing their job. I've never understood why it's not okay for the government to enforce the law, but it's all fine and dandy to kill law enforcement officers.
Janet Reno made the best of a bad situation. Even though she had only been in office for a couple of weeks when the final raid happened and had very little to do with its planning and how it was executed, she took full responsibility for it. She was, after all, the Attorney General at the time that it happened. But there's a certain amount of logical inconsistency here; we are told that we cannot blame President Bush for the intelligence failures that led to 9/11 because he had only been in office for eight months before it happened, but we can blame Waco on Reno even though it started before she became AG and she had only been in office for a couple of weeks. (For the record, I don't blame 9/11 on President Bush.)
You know that the FBI/ATF bent over backwards to bring the Waco siege to a peaceful conclusion, don't you? They repeatedly tried to negotiate with Koresh, offering food and other basic supplies if he would just release some of the children from the compound, to which he replied (literally) "kiss my ass." The way that the situation resolved itself was tragic and there will probably always be questions about it, but the basic fact of the matter is that the Branch Davidians had 51 days to end the standoff peacefully and they chose not to. And I've never understood the mindset that can dismiss the murder of law enforcement agents, particularly in the post-9/11 era.
Re:Misguided article
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Humor in Games?
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· Score: 2, Informative
Recently I've been playing GTA:SA, and I can see why WCTR is window dressing - because it gets old. It only has so much content, and after that, it becomes stale and repetitive.
Keep playing, then. One of the differences between GTA: VC and GTA: SA is that the radio content is dynamic -- especially WCTR. As you progress through the game, the contents of the shows change (i.e., you hear new episodes of "He Said, She Said") and the news that gets reported changes in accordance with the missions that you've done. News travels fast in SA.. you can frame an annoying DA with drugs, watch him get hauled away by the cops, turn on your radio, and hear it on the news immediately.:)
(Incidentally, hearing Richard Burns mock the attendees of a Former Child Actors Convention in Las Venturas is very, very funny.)
um... actually, most of us DID like it - the plurality of the vote went for Bush, after all... I know, I know - 43% to 18% of/. readers apparently like Kerry vs. Bush..
I suspect that's what he meant by "us".. Slashdot readers, not Americans in general.
Furthermore, Saddam kicked out the weapons inspectors in 1998, when Clinton was still in power. The UN pulled them out in 2003, before we invaded. Saddam kicking the weapons inspectors out in 1998 was a clear violation of UN resolutions and treaties ending the war. We did jack shit about it then.
We did "jack shit" about it then? Are you kidding, or completely out of your mind?
So explain why it is important that we increased our knoweldge of the red planet several times over, how it was worth $820 Million, and why it was important to do it right now (instead of waiting until space exploration was say ten times cheaper)?
First of all, space exploration is getting cheaper. The missions of the past (i.e., the Viking landers, the failed Mars Observer, the Cassini and Galileo missions, etc.) all had price tags that ran into the billions of dollars. The cost of space exploration is not going to just magically decrease as a function of time. It's going to take research, development, and (in some cases) trial and error. The lessons learned from the twin MER missions and all of the others going on right now are going to benefit us all, public and private sector, in planning future missions and making them more cost-effective and reliable.
Now, $820 million is obviously nothing to sneeze at. It's a lot of money. But it's quite attractive when compared to a price tag of $7 billion, and in the grand scheme of things, it's just a drop in the bucket of the entire federal outlay. To put things in perspective, we (by which I mean the United States) are spending more than that per week in Afghanistan and Iraq. So we increased our knowledge of our closest neighbor in the solar system several times over for less than what we're spending in one week to support our current military engagements. Kind of makes you think, doesn't it? (Well, it makes me think, anyway.)
Why is learning about Mars important? Well, the most obvious reason is that it's the most Earth-like planet in the solar system, and was likely even more Earth-like in the distant past. Studying the past, present, and future of Mars can give us insights into our own planet's past, present, and future. Beyond that, at a more fundamental level, we gain more knowledge about the universe around us, and increasing the collective knowledge of Mankind is always a worthwhile endeavor. We can debate about whether or not it's worth $820 million in this specific case, but as I've said, there are other tangible benefits as well.
Additionally, Mars is really the only viable option for human colonization if at some point we decide to (or, in a more grim scenario, are forced to) spread humanity beyond the gravity well of Earth. Mercury and Venus are completely inhospitable, we obviously can't live on the gas giants, and while some of their satellites may be candidates for settlement, Mars is really the only place in the solar system that is comparable to Earth. The more we learn about it now, the better-prepared we will be to put human boots on its surface if (and when) the time comes.
I'd rather my tax dollars weren't spent except where absolutely necessary (say, for defense). Everything else, leave to industry.
As far as the space program is concerned, the problem with this is that "industry" is typically only interested in things that can be done for financial gain. Now, there are certain things associated with space that are (or will be) profitable; space tourism is an obvious example. Additionally, the aerospace industry (i.e., Boeing) already sells its services to the government in the form of launch vehicles to put satellites into orbit, and competing for various technical contracts.
The problem is that not everything that involves the space program is done for (or will result in) financial gain. For example, consider the recent Mars rover missions. By all accounts, these missions have increased our knowledge of the Red Planet by several times more than all of the previous missions combined. Are these missions profitable? Is anybody making money off of them (aside from the private sector contractors that won the bids to do a lot of the work that went into them?) Probably not.
CEOs in the boardrooms of private industry would never say "I know! Let's build a spacecraft to explore the Saturn system and a probe to land on Titan!" They would never undertake such a mission because there would be no financial reason for them to do so. This is not a "slam" against corporations; it's just a basic statement of fact. The fundamental role of the corporation is to earn profits for its shareholders, and there is nothing financially profitable about building a complicated probe to explore the moons of Saturn.
But does that mean that such a mission is not profitable in other, less tangible ways? Aside from the more zealous libertarian types who only want to see their tax dollars spent on tanks or the extreme fundamentalist types who view exploration of the heavens as blasphemy, most people would probably agree that expanding our knowledge of the universe that we live in is a Good Thing (TM). It's profitable from an intellectual and scientific (if not economic) standpoint. And it's hardwired into our very being; curiosity (and the desire to satisfy that curiosity) is one of the things that makes us human.
So I'm all for expanding the role of private industry in space, but there will always be a role for publicly-funded missions as well. And that is how it should be. Space is an awfully big place; there's plenty of room for both the public and the private sectors.
While it's true that non-US citizens cannot vote in next week's election, it is decidely untrue that the lives of these same non-US citizens will not be (potentially) affected by the result of said election. You may want to ask the surviving family members of dead Iraqi civilians if their lives have been affected in any way by the actions of the current U.S. President.
Okay, so I'm prepared to admit that this particular example might be a bit inflammatory and politically-charged. But I think it illustrates a fundamental point: the rest of the world may not be participating in the U.S. elections, but they definitely have an interest in the candidates, in their positions, and (particularly) in the outcome. That being the case, it is reasonable to assume that the candidates should want to make information about their issues, their stances, and their beliefs available to everybody -- U.S. citizens or not.
There may be valid technical reasons behind the restrictions that the Bush campaign has placed on his Web site, but even the most loyal Bush partisans should recognize that from a PR standpoint, this looks bad. It lends creedence to several of the allegations that Bush's opponents have made against him; most namely, the charge that he simply does not care about the rest of the world. This is something that he has been trying to shake for quite some time now, and his campaign staff is definitely not helping him with this move.
Was? It's still sending down data to us every day.
NEWS: FBI Introduces Anti-Piracy Seal
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FBI Anti-Piracy Seal
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· Score: 4, Funny
WASHINGTON, DC (UPI) - Vowing to put a dent in an illegal practice that robs the entertainment industry of three billion dollars a year, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has unleashed a new tool in the fight against online music pirates. In a media event this afternoon at FBI Headquarters in Washington, Director Robert Mueller unveiled Chester, the bureau's official Anti-Piracy Seal. Chester, a seven year-old harp seal that was rescued from a fisherman's net off the coast of Maine, has been recruited by the bureau to "inform America's youth about the harmful practice of copyright infringement," according to Mueller. "We hope that he will teach our children that it is wrong to steal music from the Internet."
Chester impressed a crowd of roughly 100 reporters, music industry representatives, teachers, and students by balancing a copy of Hoobastank's latest CD The Reason on his nose while holding a copy of Incubus' Crow Left of the Murder between his front flippers. At one point in the press conference, an actor portraying an online music pirate attempted to take the Incubus album from Chester, at which point the seal snarled and bit off the would-be-thief's left pinky. Chester also demonstrated that he was able to use lawn darts to burst large balloons that were imprinted with the logos of Kazaa, Morpheus, Gnutella, and other popular Internet P2P ("peer-to-peer") file sharing applications.
"He's quite the talented creature," beamed Mueller.
After the press conference was over, Mueller loaded Chester up in an unmarked Chevy Malibu and took him to Millard Fillmore Elementary School in suburban Washington, D.C. for a classroom visit. The popular seal captured the hearts of Mrs. Eleanor Richards' third grade class when he waddled around the room with a bucketful of FBI/RIAA anti-piracy literature hanging from his nose. "Chester taught me that it is real, real bad to steal music," said nine year-old Timmy Jacobson, of Alexandria, VA.
"I learned that Adolf Hitler also stoled music," pointed out ten year-old Kaitlyn Frankenhoff.
Chester is scheduled to visit five schools a week during an extended tour that is expected to last eighteen months. His initial weeks will take him from the Beltway south through the Carolinas, to Georgia and Florida, and finally to New Orleans, LA. Mueller is excited about the impact of Chester's mission. "We will get the truth about music sharing out," he said. "The next generation of American children will understand the value of honesty and the reward of a hard day's work." According to Mueller, Chester is also able to "answer the telephone", "close car doors", and "play sand volleyball." When he's not fighting music pirates, Chester enjoys dining on rotten fish and soft serve ice cream.
Yes, far inferior to an attorney general who actively seeks out and kills American citizens..
I assume you're referring to the Waco siege. While I have no strong opinions about Janet Reno (pro or con), I think you're leaving some basic facts out of the equation here. The Branch Davidians (the "American citizens" you're referring to here) were in violation of several firearms laws at varying levels. Law enforcement authorities obtained a proper warrant and served it on February 28, 1993. If you're keeping score, that was almost two weeks before Janet Reno was even sworn in as Attorney General on March 12th. In the resulting raid, four federal agents were murdered by these same "American citizens" that you are (apparently) defending. These were men with families, and they were just doing their job. I've never understood why it's not okay for the government to enforce the law, but it's all fine and dandy to kill law enforcement officers.
Janet Reno made the best of a bad situation. Even though she had only been in office for a couple of weeks when the final raid happened and had very little to do with the plan for the final raid and how it was executed, she took full responsibility for it. She was, after all, the Attorney General at the time that it happened. But there's a certain amount of logical inconsistency here; we are told that we cannot blame President Bush for the intelligence failures that led to 9/11 because he had only been in office for eight months before it happened, but we can blame Waco on Reno even though she had only been in office for a couple of weeks. (For the record, I don't blame 9/11 on President Bush.)
You know that the FBI/ATF bent over backwards to bring the Waco siege to a peaceful conclusion, don't you? They repeatedly tried to negotiate with Koresh, offering food and other basic supplies if he would just release some of the children from the compound, to which he replied (literally) "kiss my ass." The way that the situation resolved itself was tragic and there will probably always be questions about it, but the basic fact of the matter is that the Branch Davidians had 51 days to end the standoff peacefully and they chose not to. And I've never understood the mindset that can dismiss the murder of law enforcement agents, particularly in the post-9/11 era.
You're correct when you say that the Bible does not state that there are life on other planets. However, the Bible also says nothing
about televisions or microwave ovens, but we have those today, don't we? I think the point is that just because the Bible doesn't
explicitly say that there are extraterrestrial civilizations doesn't mean that they don't exist, only that the Bible is silent on that
point.
Friends, I think the facts point to the existence of at least 59 extraterrestrial civilizations. I submit that all life.. whether it is
Earth-based or not.. is cursed by sin. Because of this, all life is in need of salvation from that sin. We know from historical record
(the Bible) that the Lord Jesus Christ spent 33 years cleansing this planet of sin. Because the Bible is inerrant, we must assume that
33 years is the exact amount of time required to purge the sin of a planet. (After all, if it were more or less, that would imply an
imperfect Christ.. something that is not allowed by Scripture.)
We also know that Jesus pledged to return one day. So far, He hasn't. This means that he is most likely purging other civilizations
of sin. Christ died 1,970 years ago; assuming that He is not bound by the speed of light, that gives Him enough time to purge 59
planets of sin. (If he is limited by lightspeed, things get complicated, but there is no reason to assume that such an arbitrary natural
law applies to God.)
The point is that with each passing year that Jesus does not return, the odds for extraterrestrial life go up. This is a good thing. I for
one am excited about the prospect of life among the stars, and I am convinced that it exists. Don't let an overly-narrow
interpretation of Scripture dictate a purely ethnocentric worldview to you; it will only hold you back.
Returning zero is equivalent to returning EXIT_SUCCESS, so there's no problem with that. (C99 7.20.4.3 says "If the value of status is zero or EXIT_SUCCESS, an implementation-defined form of the status successful termination is returned.") And there's nothing wrong with "int main()." You're correct about calling printf() without #including stdio.h, though.
The public was not ignorant about the war in Iraq.
I suppose this is why over two thirds of Americans believe that most of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis. I suppose this is why most Americans believed the administration's rhetoric about massive stockpiles of "ultimate weapons" in Iraq. I suppose this is why 48% of Americans believed that there were close ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, and why 25% believe that we have found WMD in Iraq and that world opinion was strongly behind the Bush administration in the days leading up to the war.
Perhaps "ignorant" is not the right word. "Gullible" might be more like it. After all, most of the folks who held (and continue to hold) any of the above misconceptions were just believing what they were being told by the administration and the media. As the days go by and more and more of this material is revealed to be misleading, incomplete, or outright untrue, it will be interesting to see what the reaction is.
We are simply pursuing policy that is in our interest.
The problem with technologies like Bayesian filters and challenge-response systems is that they don't actually do anything to cut down on the amount of spam that you get. What they do is cut down on the amount of spam that you see. To a lot of folks, this is a pretty subtle distinction, but for many, it's a major issue.
I get about 200 spams a day, and the size of the messages seems to be getting larger every day. If I go a couple of days without checking my mail, it can take several minutes to download all of my messages, even over DSL. I don't even want to think about how long it would take to download the same volume of data on a dialup connection. Lots of people have unlimited Internet access, but what about people who pay by the hour or pay by data volume? What about people with limited POP3 quotas who end up missing legitimate messages because spammers have filled up their inboxes? If I go on vacation for a week, I'm guaranteed to have a full inbox when I come home, along with God knows how many legitimate mails returned to the sender.
Why the hell is "liberty" a concept that is afforded to spammers and not the rest of us? How exactly is it "libertarian" to force Joe Schmoe on a time-limited 56k dialup connection to pay for donkey-porn spam? How exactly is it "libertarian" to force somebody with per-month data transfer limits to pay for somebody else's Viagra advertisements (that the spammer is essentially sending out for free?) How exactly is it "libertarian" to say "Well, if your e-mail quota gets blown by spammers, that's your tough luck?"
Many of the utopian ideals that libertarians espouse require that we live in a world that is (in general) populated by rational, well-behaved individuals who are willing to adhere to certain basic rules of society. Spammers do not fall under this category of people. Obviously, no law or government action is going to be able to completely stop spam. But to the extent that it can help improve the situation as it exists today, I'd much rather take a shot at doing something than doing nothing at all.
Dean's primary point is that any American family that ran their finances the way that the federal government currently does would be out on the streets, in prison, or worse. If the government wants to do things like spend hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq, it should at least be willing to pay for it, instead of running up half a trillion dollars in debt (just this year alone.) There is certainly government waste that can be eliminated, but the bottom line is that we've made lots of commitments over the past couple of years, and money just doesn't grow on trees.
IMHO, I think that the "my taxes are too high" crowd needs a little perspective. First of all, taxes in America are on the low end compared to other highly-developed nations in the world. Second, the highest federal tax rate under President Eisenhower in the 1950s was 90%. That's ninety, with an 'n'. Today, the highest federal tax rate is just over 35%. The 90% rate was a holdover from the days of World War II, a time period where Americans were willing to make sacrifices in order to help their country out. It saddens me that we have an environment today where there are untold millions of people who want to wage war the world over, but are unwilling to make the same sacrifice. Instead, they would put the burden squarely on the shoulders of our children and our grandchildren after them.
I benefit from the Bush tax cuts. Not in any sort of life-changing way, mind you, but it's certainly more than a couple of bucks a month. And while I wouldn't dream of returning to the days of a 90% federal tax rate, it wouldn't bother me in the least to see Dean's plan implemented and to roll back the Bush tax cuts. If it's a choice between that and leaving untold trillions in debt to those that I leave behind, I gotta go with Dr. Dean on this one.
You know, posts like this are why I like browsing Slashdot with a +6 Flamebait modifier.:)
You say that "Red Hat makes cash from volunteer work and don't [sic] give back." First of all, the most obvious point to make is that there is nothing requiring them to "give back" anything. All that they have to do, according to the GPL, is to make sure that they continue to release the source code to the software. They are not required to make yearly donations to GNU or to the EFF.
Second, they do give back. The money that Red Hat makes doesn't all go straight into Bob Young's wallet. Red Hat has lots of developers that are working on lots of things, such as cluster management and IP load balancing. These are capabilities that benefit the community as a whole, and the money flowing into Red Hat allows them to pay talented developers to make a lot of useful contributions to the operating system and its supporting software. What's wrong with that?
Finally, your assertion that Red Hat is making money off of OSS developers is pretty silly. The basic functionality of any Red Hat release is still freely-downloadable over the Internet. Red Hat is not making its millions of dollars from Joe Linux User buying a boxed set of CDs at Egghead. Instead, they're making money from businesses and corporations who are buying Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS (for example) at $2,499 a pop. These people are not shelling out money for Mozilla or Apache. They're paying for things like 24x7 tech support, Red Hat Network subscriptions for OS upgrades and security patches, the additional "enterprise" capability provided by the more-expensive products, hardcopy documentation, etc.
Your average Red Hat home user needs none of this, which is why your average Red Hat home user doesn't pay a dime for his/her distribution. Those of us who have been using Linux for more than a decade have been fighting hard to get it into our places of work, and the types of things that Red Hat (and others) are now providing, such as round-the-clock support, are exactly the types of things that the PHB types wanted to see before they would allow it in. I know that there are plenty of purist types who believe that nobody should be allowed to make a red cent off of software, but I'm inclined to cut Red Hat some slack here. They're helping to increase Linux acceptance in mainstream IT shops by leaps and bounds.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd call it Hypatia.
.. albeit one that was not expressed very diplomatically.
When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, it sent a shock wave through the collective American populace. From coast to coast, people were asking themselves a simple question: "How could this have happened?" There was a sense of general dismay that the Soviets had won this particular leg of the Space Race, and Americans were more or less united in the goal of making sure that it didn't happen again.
As a result of this, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), which set new standards for math and science education and established low-interest loans for college tuition. We recognized a threat, we took it seriously, we invested in our educational system, and the result of that investment was the generation that built the tools with which we won the Cold War.
Fast-forward to Modern America, and not only does it seem that we did not learn from that lesson of the past, but we're also moving in the wrong direction. Test scores are slipping, math and science education are being regarded in some circles as irrelevant (and even as "dirty" in some more extreme circles), and I've even seen the phrase "college-educated" used as a slur. (As if having a college education is a bad thing!)
It is dismissive to suggest that the rising and disturbing trend of religious fanaticism here at home has nothing to do with this trend. No offense intended to anybody's beliefs, but it should be obvious that the "6000 year-old Universe" crowd has far more political clout and organization than they did (say) ten years ago, and it is dangerous to dismiss them as "quaint" or "traditional." When I think "quaint", I think of Norman Rockwell paintings; it is hardly an adjective that I would attach to a movement that (I would contend) is a threat to the national security and the future of the United States.
Of course, it's equally dismissive to suggest that only religious fanaticism is responsible for our nation's disinterest in proper education. We've got a culture that is obsessed with shark bites, missing white women, and celebrity divorces. We've got parents that are more worried about having better landscaping or a bigger SUV than their neighbors than they are about their own children's education.
Personally, I don't care so much about the root causes of the problem as I do about the problem itself, and I'd like to see it fixed. Maybe what we need is a new national committment to math and science education, much like the one that served us so well in the past. Maybe what we need is a National Defense Education Act for the new millennium.
Sadly, however, I have very little faith that such an act would even make it out of committee in today's climate.
The problem which all you armchair libertarians don't seem to comprehend is that terrorists don't play by the rules. We aren't fighting Basque separatists or IRA who in their better days would actually call up and warn about a bomb going off in a theater so that innocents would have a fighting chance to escape. These are _thugs_ who like sawing off heads on live TV.
.. people who (up until now) have never had any particular reason to be wary of the books that they check out of the library. No terrorist is ever going to leave the paper trail that this provision requires in order to be useful. Only John Q. Public is going to do that.
Do you listen to yourself?
You say that terrorists are thugs that "don't play by the rules." Okay, I'll agree with that. But then you (apparently) imply that terrorists will also go to a public library, check out suspicious books with a library card that they obtained with their real name and address. Does this even remotely make sense? Why would somebody who doesn't "play by the rules" go through the trouble to obtain a valid library card?
If I'm a terrorist and I want to obtain material from a library book, why wouldn't I just go there and photocopy some pages out of it and leave no trail of evidence at all? Why not just buy the book for cash at a bookstore, again leaving no records or traceability whatsoever? If I want some information off of the Internet, why wouldn't I just hit some random coffee house Wi-Fi hotspot and do my surfing there? For people who "don't play by the rules", you sure are assuming that terrorists are going to go out of their way to leave a trail of bread crumbs for the boys at the FBI.
Let's get real here, shall we? This provision makes no sense unless you assume that its sole intention is to monitor the reading habits of ordinary, law-abiding Americans
Modern-day America is becoming a scary place. The idea that so-called "conservatives" are actively embracing a privacy-invading and blatantly unconstitutional law solely on the basis of "it hasn't been used yet" is staggering to say the least.
Plus, it's not like annoying ads are making sales to me anyway. If anything, I will make it a point to avoid the product.
As an expansion of this line of thinking, I wonder how many Adblock users would be rampantly clicking on flashing ads if they weren't running Adblock? I could be wrong on this, but it seems to me that the typical Adblock user is not going to be the soccer mom type who downloaded Firefox because she heard about it on the news or saw the ad in the New York Times. The way some people complain about this, you'd think that they were under the impression that Adblock users would be buying thousands of dollars worth of merchandise each day if they would only allow the ads to be shown.
Adblock is simple to install, but its care and feeding (i.e., maintaining an up-to-date set of filters) takes a bit more savvy. Your typical Adblock user is more likely to be an experienced, technically-oriented Internet user, and as near as I can tell, these people are not in the habit of clicking on banner ads to begin with. I've bought plenty of things online, but I've never done so (to the best of my recollection) because I saw an obtrusive advertisement jump out at me when I was reading one of my favorite Web sites.
Adblock can almost be viewed as sort of a Do Not Call list for obnoxious Web site advertising. The analogy isn't perfect, I admit, but what's the big deal? People who sign up for the DNC list are not going to buy things from telemarketers anyway, so why bother calling them? People who use Adblock are not going to be playing your silly "punch the monkey" game anyway, so why waste the resources to send it to them? Hell, if anything, advertisers should be sending me money for all the bandwidth I'm saving them.
Yeah, that's the ticket.
This is a completely hypothetical question. I have seen no evidence of concerted voter fraud and have no reason to believe that the results of the 2004 presidential election were illegitimate. Instead, I'm wondering if some of the experts on the Constitution and the law could shed some light on what would happen in the (again, hypothetical) case where election fraud was proven, and in particular, if it was fraud that demonstrably changed the outcome of the election.
Would we have new elections? Would the election be awarded to the opposing candidate? Would the sitting president be obligated to step down? If so, who would serve in his place? Would it make any difference if this was discovered before or after the oath of office was administered? I would imagine that "turmoil" would be an understatement.
For instance, I now read Slashdot with no ads, and I'm not a subscriber. Adblock decreases the value proposition of a Slashdot subscription.
The Slashdot crew is just going to have to start slipping some subtle product plugs into their stories (i.e., "The Shuttle's re-entry was as smooth as an ice-cold Budweiser.")
(Props to Dave Letterman.)
Revengefully lighting a place on fire and watching its inhabitants burn isn't enforcing the law--it's setting an example for those who would consider resisting (regardless of the validity of the reason) in the future.
"Revengefully lighting a place on fire?" Where on Earth are you getting this from? G. Gordon Liddy? The Montana Militia? The idea that the FBI would purposely and "revengefully" light fire to a compound containing young children and then gleefully watch it burn to the ground in full view of countless news cameras might sound perfectly plausible to those people, but to those of us with both feet grounded firmly in reality, it is the worst kind of delusional, black-helicoptered paranoia.
I would have no problem with the Waco incident if the police had killed only the men resisting, but they didn't.
The truth is that we will probably never know what caused the Waco fire. I do agree that the official government report (which concluded that the fire was intentionally set by the Davidians) was likely a whitewash. It's far more likely that the fire was started by kerosene lamps that the Davidians were burning inside the compound, but like I said, we'll never know for sure. Incidentally, it bears repeating: The whole reason that there was a 51-day standoff to begin with was that the Branch Davidians murdered 4 law enforcement officers and wounded 20 others. You call this "resisting", but I'm more of an old-fashioned kind of a guy; I say we call murder "murder."
Their actions killed EVERYBODY.
There were nine survivors.
If John Ashcroft had done the same, liberals would be screaming Nazi analogies and for impeachment of Bush himself.
On this we agree. The loony left and the radical right both have their fair share of idiocy.
Well, in that particular case, I agree that Reno did not act properly. If I had been the Attorney General, the INS would have gone in and taken the boy back to his father about nine days sooner.
The only thing I remember her doing was frying a whole bunch of fellow citizens down in Texas.
While I have no strong opinions about Janet Reno (pro or con), I think you're leaving some basic facts out of the equation here. The Branch Davidians (the "fellow citizens" you're referring to here) were in violation of several firearms laws at varying levels. Law enforcement authorities obtained a proper warrant and served it on February 28, 1993. If you're keeping score, that was almost two weeks before Janet Reno was even sworn in as Attorney General on March 12th. In the resulting raid, four federal agents were murdered by these same "fellow citizens" that you are (at least tangentially) defending. These were men with families, and they were just doing their job. I've never understood why it's not okay for the government to enforce the law, but it's all fine and dandy to kill law enforcement officers.
Janet Reno made the best of a bad situation. Even though she had only been in office for a couple of weeks when the final raid happened and had very little to do with its planning and how it was executed, she took full responsibility for it. She was, after all, the Attorney General at the time that it happened. But there's a certain amount of logical inconsistency here; we are told that we cannot blame President Bush for the intelligence failures that led to 9/11 because he had only been in office for eight months before it happened, but we can blame Waco on Reno even though it started before she became AG and she had only been in office for a couple of weeks. (For the record, I don't blame 9/11 on President Bush.)
You know that the FBI/ATF bent over backwards to bring the Waco siege to a peaceful conclusion, don't you? They repeatedly tried to negotiate with Koresh, offering food and other basic supplies if he would just release some of the children from the compound, to which he replied (literally) "kiss my ass." The way that the situation resolved itself was tragic and there will probably always be questions about it, but the basic fact of the matter is that the Branch Davidians had 51 days to end the standoff peacefully and they chose not to. And I've never understood the mindset that can dismiss the murder of law enforcement agents, particularly in the post-9/11 era.
Recently I've been playing GTA:SA, and I can see why WCTR is window dressing - because it gets old. It only has so much content, and after that, it becomes stale and repetitive.
.. you can frame an annoying DA with drugs, watch him get hauled away by the cops, turn on your radio, and hear it on the news immediately. :)
Keep playing, then. One of the differences between GTA: VC and GTA: SA is that the radio content is dynamic -- especially WCTR. As you progress through the game, the contents of the shows change (i.e., you hear new episodes of "He Said, She Said") and the news that gets reported changes in accordance with the missions that you've done. News travels fast in SA
(Incidentally, hearing Richard Burns mock the attendees of a Former Child Actors Convention in Las Venturas is very, very funny.)
um... actually, most of us DID like it - the plurality of the vote went for Bush, after all. .. I know, I know - 43% to 18% of /. readers apparently like Kerry vs. Bush ..
.. Slashdot readers, not Americans in general.
I suspect that's what he meant by "us"
Furthermore, Saddam kicked out the weapons inspectors in 1998, when Clinton was still in power. The UN pulled them out in 2003, before we invaded. Saddam kicking the weapons inspectors out in 1998 was a clear violation of UN resolutions and treaties ending the war. We did jack shit about it then.
We did "jack shit" about it then? Are you kidding, or completely out of your mind?
Does the phrase "Operation Desert Fox" ring a bell?
So explain why it is important that we increased our knoweldge of the red planet several times over, how it was worth $820 Million, and why it was important to do it right now (instead of waiting until space exploration was say ten times cheaper)?
First of all, space exploration is getting cheaper. The missions of the past (i.e., the Viking landers, the failed Mars Observer, the Cassini and Galileo missions, etc.) all had price tags that ran into the billions of dollars. The cost of space exploration is not going to just magically decrease as a function of time. It's going to take research, development, and (in some cases) trial and error. The lessons learned from the twin MER missions and all of the others going on right now are going to benefit us all, public and private sector, in planning future missions and making them more cost-effective and reliable.
Now, $820 million is obviously nothing to sneeze at. It's a lot of money. But it's quite attractive when compared to a price tag of $7 billion, and in the grand scheme of things, it's just a drop in the bucket of the entire federal outlay. To put things in perspective, we (by which I mean the United States) are spending more than that per week in Afghanistan and Iraq. So we increased our knowledge of our closest neighbor in the solar system several times over for less than what we're spending in one week to support our current military engagements. Kind of makes you think, doesn't it? (Well, it makes me think, anyway.)
Why is learning about Mars important? Well, the most obvious reason is that it's the most Earth-like planet in the solar system, and was likely even more Earth-like in the distant past. Studying the past, present, and future of Mars can give us insights into our own planet's past, present, and future. Beyond that, at a more fundamental level, we gain more knowledge about the universe around us, and increasing the collective knowledge of Mankind is always a worthwhile endeavor. We can debate about whether or not it's worth $820 million in this specific case, but as I've said, there are other tangible benefits as well.
Additionally, Mars is really the only viable option for human colonization if at some point we decide to (or, in a more grim scenario, are forced to) spread humanity beyond the gravity well of Earth. Mercury and Venus are completely inhospitable, we obviously can't live on the gas giants, and while some of their satellites may be candidates for settlement, Mars is really the only place in the solar system that is comparable to Earth. The more we learn about it now, the better-prepared we will be to put human boots on its surface if (and when) the time comes.
I'd rather my tax dollars weren't spent except where absolutely necessary (say, for defense). Everything else, leave to industry.
As far as the space program is concerned, the problem with this is that "industry" is typically only interested in things that can be done for financial gain. Now, there are certain things associated with space that are (or will be) profitable; space tourism is an obvious example. Additionally, the aerospace industry (i.e., Boeing) already sells its services to the government in the form of launch vehicles to put satellites into orbit, and competing for various technical contracts.
The problem is that not everything that involves the space program is done for (or will result in) financial gain. For example, consider the recent Mars rover missions. By all accounts, these missions have increased our knowledge of the Red Planet by several times more than all of the previous missions combined. Are these missions profitable? Is anybody making money off of them (aside from the private sector contractors that won the bids to do a lot of the work that went into them?) Probably not.
CEOs in the boardrooms of private industry would never say "I know! Let's build a spacecraft to explore the Saturn system and a probe to land on Titan!" They would never undertake such a mission because there would be no financial reason for them to do so. This is not a "slam" against corporations; it's just a basic statement of fact. The fundamental role of the corporation is to earn profits for its shareholders, and there is nothing financially profitable about building a complicated probe to explore the moons of Saturn.
But does that mean that such a mission is not profitable in other, less tangible ways? Aside from the more zealous libertarian types who only want to see their tax dollars spent on tanks or the extreme fundamentalist types who view exploration of the heavens as blasphemy, most people would probably agree that expanding our knowledge of the universe that we live in is a Good Thing (TM). It's profitable from an intellectual and scientific (if not economic) standpoint. And it's hardwired into our very being; curiosity (and the desire to satisfy that curiosity) is one of the things that makes us human.
So I'm all for expanding the role of private industry in space, but there will always be a role for publicly-funded missions as well. And that is how it should be. Space is an awfully big place; there's plenty of room for both the public and the private sectors.
While it's true that non-US citizens cannot vote in next week's election, it is decidely untrue that the lives of these same non-US citizens will not be (potentially) affected by the result of said election. You may want to ask the surviving family members of dead Iraqi civilians if their lives have been affected in any way by the actions of the current U.S. President.
Okay, so I'm prepared to admit that this particular example might be a bit inflammatory and politically-charged. But I think it illustrates a fundamental point: the rest of the world may not be participating in the U.S. elections, but they definitely have an interest in the candidates, in their positions, and (particularly) in the outcome. That being the case, it is reasonable to assume that the candidates should want to make information about their issues, their stances, and their beliefs available to everybody -- U.S. citizens or not.
There may be valid technical reasons behind the restrictions that the Bush campaign has placed on his Web site, but even the most loyal Bush partisans should recognize that from a PR standpoint, this looks bad. It lends creedence to several of the allegations that Bush's opponents have made against him; most namely, the charge that he simply does not care about the rest of the world. This is something that he has been trying to shake for quite some time now, and his campaign staff is definitely not helping him with this move.
Pheakin' bird was inctruckingcredibly sturdy.
Was? It's still sending down data to us every day.
WASHINGTON, DC (UPI) - Vowing to put a dent in an illegal practice that robs the entertainment industry of three billion dollars a year, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has unleashed a new tool in the fight against online music pirates. In a media event this afternoon at FBI Headquarters in Washington, Director Robert Mueller unveiled Chester, the bureau's official Anti-Piracy Seal. Chester, a seven year-old harp seal that was rescued from a fisherman's net off the coast of Maine, has been recruited by the bureau to "inform America's youth about the harmful practice of copyright infringement," according to Mueller. "We hope that he will teach our children that it is wrong to steal music from the Internet."
Chester impressed a crowd of roughly 100 reporters, music industry representatives, teachers, and students by balancing a copy of Hoobastank's latest CD The Reason on his nose while holding a copy of Incubus' Crow Left of the Murder between his front flippers. At one point in the press conference, an actor portraying an online music pirate attempted to take the Incubus album from Chester, at which point the seal snarled and bit off the would-be-thief's left pinky. Chester also demonstrated that he was able to use lawn darts to burst large balloons that were imprinted with the logos of Kazaa, Morpheus, Gnutella, and other popular Internet P2P ("peer-to-peer") file sharing applications.
"He's quite the talented creature," beamed Mueller.
After the press conference was over, Mueller loaded Chester up in an unmarked Chevy Malibu and took him to Millard Fillmore Elementary School in suburban Washington, D.C. for a classroom visit. The popular seal captured the hearts of Mrs. Eleanor Richards' third grade class when he waddled around the room with a bucketful of FBI/RIAA anti-piracy literature hanging from his nose. "Chester taught me that it is real, real bad to steal music," said nine year-old Timmy Jacobson, of Alexandria, VA.
"I learned that Adolf Hitler also stoled music," pointed out ten year-old Kaitlyn Frankenhoff.
Chester is scheduled to visit five schools a week during an extended tour that is expected to last eighteen months. His initial weeks will take him from the Beltway south through the Carolinas, to Georgia and Florida, and finally to New Orleans, LA. Mueller is excited about the impact of Chester's mission. "We will get the truth about music sharing out," he said. "The next generation of American children will understand the value of honesty and the reward of a hard day's work." According to Mueller, Chester is also able to "answer the telephone", "close car doors", and "play sand volleyball." When he's not fighting music pirates, Chester enjoys dining on rotten fish and soft serve ice cream.
Hillary Rosen contributed to this story.
Yes, far inferior to an attorney general who actively seeks out and kills American citizens ..
I assume you're referring to the Waco siege. While I have no strong opinions about Janet Reno (pro or con), I think you're leaving some basic facts out of the equation here. The Branch Davidians (the "American citizens" you're referring to here) were in violation of several firearms laws at varying levels. Law enforcement authorities obtained a proper warrant and served it on February 28, 1993. If you're keeping score, that was almost two weeks before Janet Reno was even sworn in as Attorney General on March 12th. In the resulting raid, four federal agents were murdered by these same "American citizens" that you are (apparently) defending. These were men with families, and they were just doing their job. I've never understood why it's not okay for the government to enforce the law, but it's all fine and dandy to kill law enforcement officers.
Janet Reno made the best of a bad situation. Even though she had only been in office for a couple of weeks when the final raid happened and had very little to do with the plan for the final raid and how it was executed, she took full responsibility for it. She was, after all, the Attorney General at the time that it happened. But there's a certain amount of logical inconsistency here; we are told that we cannot blame President Bush for the intelligence failures that led to 9/11 because he had only been in office for eight months before it happened, but we can blame Waco on Reno even though she had only been in office for a couple of weeks. (For the record, I don't blame 9/11 on President Bush.)
You know that the FBI/ATF bent over backwards to bring the Waco siege to a peaceful conclusion, don't you? They repeatedly tried to negotiate with Koresh, offering food and other basic supplies if he would just release some of the children from the compound, to which he replied (literally) "kiss my ass." The way that the situation resolved itself was tragic and there will probably always be questions about it, but the basic fact of the matter is that the Branch Davidians had 51 days to end the standoff peacefully and they chose not to. And I've never understood the mindset that can dismiss the murder of law enforcement agents, particularly in the post-9/11 era.
Friends, I think the facts point to the existence of at least 59 extraterrestrial civilizations. I submit that all life .. whether it is
Earth-based or not .. is cursed by sin. Because of this, all life is in need of salvation from that sin. We know from historical record
(the Bible) that the Lord Jesus Christ spent 33 years cleansing this planet of sin. Because the Bible is inerrant, we must assume that
33 years is the exact amount of time required to purge the sin of a planet. (After all, if it were more or less, that would imply an
imperfect Christ .. something that is not allowed by Scripture.)
We also know that Jesus pledged to return one day. So far, He hasn't. This means that he is most likely purging other civilizations of sin. Christ died 1,970 years ago; assuming that He is not bound by the speed of light, that gives Him enough time to purge 59 planets of sin. (If he is limited by lightspeed, things get complicated, but there is no reason to assume that such an arbitrary natural law applies to God.)
The point is that with each passing year that Jesus does not return, the odds for extraterrestrial life go up. This is a good thing. I for one am excited about the prospect of life among the stars, and I am convinced that it exists. Don't let an overly-narrow interpretation of Scripture dictate a purely ethnocentric worldview to you; it will only hold you back.
Returning zero is equivalent to returning EXIT_SUCCESS, so there's no problem with that. (C99 7.20.4.3 says "If the value of status is zero or EXIT_SUCCESS, an implementation-defined form of the status successful termination is returned.") And there's nothing wrong with "int main()." You're correct about calling printf() without #including stdio.h, though.
The public was not ignorant about the war in Iraq.
I suppose this is why over two thirds of Americans believe that most of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis. I suppose this is why most Americans believed the administration's rhetoric about massive stockpiles of "ultimate weapons" in Iraq. I suppose this is why 48% of Americans believed that there were close ties between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, and why 25% believe that we have found WMD in Iraq and that world opinion was strongly behind the Bush administration in the days leading up to the war.
Perhaps "ignorant" is not the right word. "Gullible" might be more like it. After all, most of the folks who held (and continue to hold) any of the above misconceptions were just believing what they were being told by the administration and the media. As the days go by and more and more of this material is revealed to be misleading, incomplete, or outright untrue, it will be interesting to see what the reaction is.
We are simply pursuing policy that is in our interest.
Oh, how I wish that were true.
Remember who was first in space? Not John Glenn, but Yuri Gagarin.
:(
John Glenn wasn't even the first American in space.
Few people remember Al Sheppard anymore.
The problem with technologies like Bayesian filters and challenge-response systems is that they don't actually do anything to cut down on the amount of spam that you get. What they do is cut down on the amount of spam that you see. To a lot of folks, this is a pretty subtle distinction, but for many, it's a major issue.
I get about 200 spams a day, and the size of the messages seems to be getting larger every day. If I go a couple of days without checking my mail, it can take several minutes to download all of my messages, even over DSL. I don't even want to think about how long it would take to download the same volume of data on a dialup connection. Lots of people have unlimited Internet access, but what about people who pay by the hour or pay by data volume? What about people with limited POP3 quotas who end up missing legitimate messages because spammers have filled up their inboxes? If I go on vacation for a week, I'm guaranteed to have a full inbox when I come home, along with God knows how many legitimate mails returned to the sender.
Why the hell is "liberty" a concept that is afforded to spammers and not the rest of us? How exactly is it "libertarian" to force Joe Schmoe on a time-limited 56k dialup connection to pay for donkey-porn spam? How exactly is it "libertarian" to force somebody with per-month data transfer limits to pay for somebody else's Viagra advertisements (that the spammer is essentially sending out for free?) How exactly is it "libertarian" to say "Well, if your e-mail quota gets blown by spammers, that's your tough luck?"
Many of the utopian ideals that libertarians espouse require that we live in a world that is (in general) populated by rational, well-behaved individuals who are willing to adhere to certain basic rules of society. Spammers do not fall under this category of people. Obviously, no law or government action is going to be able to completely stop spam. But to the extent that it can help improve the situation as it exists today, I'd much rather take a shot at doing something than doing nothing at all.
Dean's primary point is that any American family that ran their finances the way that the federal government currently does would be out on the streets, in prison, or worse. If the government wants to do things like spend hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq, it should at least be willing to pay for it, instead of running up half a trillion dollars in debt (just this year alone.) There is certainly government waste that can be eliminated, but the bottom line is that we've made lots of commitments over the past couple of years, and money just doesn't grow on trees.
IMHO, I think that the "my taxes are too high" crowd needs a little perspective. First of all, taxes in America are on the low end compared to other highly-developed nations in the world. Second, the highest federal tax rate under President Eisenhower in the 1950s was 90%. That's ninety, with an 'n'. Today, the highest federal tax rate is just over 35%. The 90% rate was a holdover from the days of World War II, a time period where Americans were willing to make sacrifices in order to help their country out. It saddens me that we have an environment today where there are untold millions of people who want to wage war the world over, but are unwilling to make the same sacrifice. Instead, they would put the burden squarely on the shoulders of our children and our grandchildren after them.
I benefit from the Bush tax cuts. Not in any sort of life-changing way, mind you, but it's certainly more than a couple of bucks a month. And while I wouldn't dream of returning to the days of a 90% federal tax rate, it wouldn't bother me in the least to see Dean's plan implemented and to roll back the Bush tax cuts. If it's a choice between that and leaving untold trillions in debt to those that I leave behind, I gotta go with Dr. Dean on this one.
You know, posts like this are why I like browsing Slashdot with a +6 Flamebait modifier. :)
You say that "Red Hat makes cash from volunteer work and don't [sic] give back." First of all, the most obvious point to make is that there is nothing requiring them to "give back" anything. All that they have to do, according to the GPL, is to make sure that they continue to release the source code to the software. They are not required to make yearly donations to GNU or to the EFF.
Second, they do give back. The money that Red Hat makes doesn't all go straight into Bob Young's wallet. Red Hat has lots of developers that are working on lots of things, such as cluster management and IP load balancing. These are capabilities that benefit the community as a whole, and the money flowing into Red Hat allows them to pay talented developers to make a lot of useful contributions to the operating system and its supporting software. What's wrong with that?
Finally, your assertion that Red Hat is making money off of OSS developers is pretty silly. The basic functionality of any Red Hat release is still freely-downloadable over the Internet. Red Hat is not making its millions of dollars from Joe Linux User buying a boxed set of CDs at Egghead. Instead, they're making money from businesses and corporations who are buying Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS (for example) at $2,499 a pop. These people are not shelling out money for Mozilla or Apache. They're paying for things like 24x7 tech support, Red Hat Network subscriptions for OS upgrades and security patches, the additional "enterprise" capability provided by the more-expensive products, hardcopy documentation, etc.
Your average Red Hat home user needs none of this, which is why your average Red Hat home user doesn't pay a dime for his/her distribution. Those of us who have been using Linux for more than a decade have been fighting hard to get it into our places of work, and the types of things that Red Hat (and others) are now providing, such as round-the-clock support, are exactly the types of things that the PHB types wanted to see before they would allow it in. I know that there are plenty of purist types who believe that nobody should be allowed to make a red cent off of software, but I'm inclined to cut Red Hat some slack here. They're helping to increase Linux acceptance in mainstream IT shops by leaps and bounds.