Interestingly, if you look at administrations rather than Congress, since WW2, Democrats in the White House have pretty much been the fiscal conservatives. (In a relative sense, mind you, as nobody actually reduces spending, some just spend less fast.) I recall one somewhat libertarian-inclined economist observing a year or two ago that the best combination, from a standpoint of "increasing spending the slowest," is a Republican legislature and a Democratic president. I suspect having the same party in control of both legislative and administrative branches, particularly when the legislative control is strong enough that the minority party can't even be an effective road block, is nearly always a blank check. (The Republicans under Bush have been worse than the Democrats were in Clinton's first two years, which is also interesting. I don't think it indicates a partisan bent toward spending, though, as much as a refusal to "break ranks" with the current administration.)
You're missing a fundamental point here. Whether or not you or I might disagree on the definition of a "good movie," it would not be very hard for either of us to point to movies we would consider good that didn't find much of an audience at all, and I don't think it would be hard for either of us to point to movies we would not consider particularly good that had huge audiences and box office receipts. The end result of your logic is that box office receipts are a reliable indication of quality, and that Star Wars III and Harry Potter 4 were by far the two best movies of last year. I'm sorry, but that's nuts.
Hollywood has always made pictures aimed for commercial success, and other pictures aimed for Oscars. The second type of film used to be called "prestige pictures." If you insist on the belief that popularity is the best judge of quality, yeah, I guess that's elite. So let's fix this. Our students should be studying Stephen King, Jackie Collins and Dan Brown as writers, right? You don't have any problem with them studying Toni Morrison instead of dead white guys who aren't selling any more (canons are never popular, after all). And the best artist alive is clearly Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light®.
Either that, or we might just have to admit that popularity isn't a direct correlation to quality. That doesn't mean that what's popular is trash, either--a lot of what's popular is pretty good. (And frankly, that gets recognized more in awards than you're allowing, unless you want to argue that The Lord of the Rings was a little arthouse movie.) But directors, actors, subject material, promotional budget, and how approachable the movie is all have a direct impact on ticket sales. A movie with a challenging theme usually isn't going to do as well as the box office as one with a "universal" theme.
In your take of things, only movies that are as universal as possible, with the broadest (and, let's be honest, least controversial) themes, can be considered good. And with all due respect, that's pretty disheartening. Maybe you think judging films based on their writing, directing, and performances regardless of their popularity is a sign of a nefarious political agenda. I think judging them on anything else would be.
As a long-time text editor junkie, I actually like TextMate in a lot of ways despite its occasional warts. I've been a Vim user since the late '90s, it's pretty powerful, and you certainly can't beat its price, but the only editor I've seen that really beats TextMate's extensibility through its "bundle" system is XEmacs. (Or GNU Emacs, of course -- I just find XEmacs a bit friendlier.) And TM is considerably easier to extend than Emacsen.
If you like Vim for everything, more power to you; I'm still likely to use it for quick edits, because it's so nice to have a full-featured editor in the terminal window. But for heavy lifting, I like GUI editors, and TM is becoming one of the best ones I've seen. (Lest anyone pipe up with "the keyboard is better than the mouse" arguments, learn to use them in harmony, son. It's not like offering mouse-based selection and commands renders an editor incapable of full keyboard control.)
It's worth noting as a minor nitpick that it's not actually AppleScript itself that's tied to the OS, but rather the Open Scripting Architecture, which is basically akin to the Amiga's "ARexx Ports" approach -- any language that can be built to talk with OSA can be used instead of AppleScript. There aren't many other OSA languages -- Frontier and JavaScript are the two most well-known ones -- but there's nothing intrinsic to AppleScript to prevent more from being developed. (Philip Aker has produced "OSAComponents," which claim to make Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP and Tcl/Tk "peer-level" scripting languages in the system, but I haven't tried them.)
Also, even non-OSA languages can use the "osascript" utility to execute an OSA script. I find AppleScript profoundly annoying, but it's not that difficult to write, say, a Ruby or an Expect script which does all of the heavy lifting in its native tongue and passes just what it has to via AppleScript.
Photoshop has a complete object model exposed to scripting languages, and is scriptable in Javascript (on Mac and Windows), AppleScript (Mac only) and VBScript (Windows only); technically, it's scriptable in anything that can send Apple Events on the Mac or OLE commands on Windows. It's not uncommon to hear about sophisticated workflows people have put together -- coordinating Photoshop actions, OS features and even other applications -- using AppleScript. Photoshop's scripting capability is often cited by professionals as one of its best features.
No offense, but writing that off blithely as "pretty bad scripting" casts a bit of a shadow over the rest of your analysis for me.
Not to say that one party is less trustworthy than the other, but scare tactics are a favorite weapon of the liberals lately.
Um, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you understand how much this has been a "weapon" of the conservatives, too, on every subject from national security (only Republicans can keep you safe, Democrats don't understand what happened on 9-11!) to gay marriage (it threatens your stable, heterosexual family!) to tax cuts (it's not an estate tax, it's a DEATH tax!). One can argue the Democrats' problem PR-wise hasn't been using scare tactics, it's that they haven't been using them nearly as effectively as Republicans have.
"The Nation" is indeed a liberal magazine; it's been around over a century and may actually be the nation's oldest political commentary magazine. If your idea of "the liberal media" is the centrist big names like CNN, NBC, and Newsweek, it'll probably seem pretty radical and wild-eyed, but that's not a commentary on The Nation as much as it is a commentary on how far right the political center has moved in the last 2-3 decades. Think of The Nation as something like the left version of the National Review. (And, lest any liberals think otherwise, I do mean that as a compliment--if only more political punditry was up to their standards.)
I think you're missing the Anonymous Coward's point there, which is that the text of the resolution seems to suggest time limits to the "authorization of force" that can't be extended indefinitely. There are also legitimate questions as to whether the "authorization of force" really is equivalent to a declaration of war. Furthermore, whatever you call it, it was an action specifically against the Hussein government, which is unquestionably no longer in power. We are fighting in Iraq, but we are most definitely not at war with Iraq.
These sound like matters of semantics, I suppose, but they're pretty serious ones. Whether the war against Hussein's forces was "legal" constitutionally doesn't automatically mean that continued fighting is. And if we accept the implicit notion that the "war on terror" gives the president expanded powers just as if it was a war conducted against a state, that may well be a long-term shift in the balance of constitutional power between the branches of our government. There is no concrete milestone for declaring victory against a tactic, so when exactly are those powers rescinded? And if we're essentially saying that the president gets to waive fundamental constitutional rights like the fourth amendment in the name of national security, where do we draw the line? The administration may indeed only be tapping phone calls to/from suspected terrorists outside the country, but there's no reason why their logic can't be applied to calls completely within the country. And just what's the measure of "suspicious activity"? If you have certain magazine subscriptions? Attend certain meetings?
Whenever we talk about expanding the powers of any governmental entity, we need to ask ourselves not whether we trust the current administrators with that power, but whether we can reasonably expect to trust the next office-holder with that power. And the next. And the next. And the next. It really doesn't matter whether you think Bush is the greatest president we've ever seen, and it really doesn't matter whether I agree with you, because what we're talking about is potentially changing the powers reserved for the presidency as an institution. Would you have trusted John Kerry with that power? How about John McCain? How about Hillary Clinton?
Show me one instance where Flash truly is the best choice out there.
I'd nominate Yahoo! Maps as a great example of using Flash for good, rather than evil. Google Maps accomplishes much the same thing without Flash, but I'd argue it does it less elegantly. (Yahoo also has a much better directory when you're searching for businesses, since it's really using a business directory, rather than just doing a web search.)
Flash is designed for web applications, sure, and its limitations in interacting with the client environment beyond the browser are intentional. Of course it's not appropriate for all applications -- it's not appropriate for any application that isn't, in effect, a thin client with all the data on the server side. But within that context, Flash does a pretty good job, and might be a better choice for in-browser client web applets than Java. It's unfortunate Flash has a lot of baggage from the way it's usually been used, but as people pointed out with some insightful jokes earlier in the comments, the technology isn't the problem.
BBEdit -- and many other text editors -- tend to use somewhat more complex algorithms for determining one undo step. It's usually something like "the text inserted from the point you started typing after the last cursor repositioning until the next cursor repositioning or undoable command." So, if you click on a word and type a new word to replace it, then decide you don't want to do that, one undo step and the old word is back. You start typing at the end of a paragraph and decide not to, one undo step and your typed text is deleted. But, you start typing THE QUICK BROWN FOX, stop and select "FOX" and do a "change case" command on it, then type JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG, you have three undoable steps: typing JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG, the change case command, and typing THE QUICK BROWN FOX.
And, yes, this is an irritating misfeature in TextMate. Having said that, I'm still a TextMate convert from BBEdit. (For the record, I've used Vim for close to a decade and regularly use XEmacs on Windows. All of the editors have their strengths and weaknesses, but I've come to believe TextMate's design may make it as powerful as Emacs in the long run, without the rather user-hostile UI.) While I know TextMate isn't, strictly speaking, an IDE, for a scripting language like Python, I'm not sure that's such a big deal. (I'll risk a minor flamewar and suggest that the love showered on Eclipse by Java users for doing all that typing for them might really be a sign that Java requires way too much goddamn typing to get anything done.)
No, I really don't think those old school typographers would let their readers choose their line lengths. Layout and design principles do have some subjectivity to them, sure. But even if yellow and red are your two favorite colors, red text on a yellow background is going to be harder to read than black text on a white background. You may love Zapf Chancery, but if you typeset your resume in it, you're making everyone's life really difficult.
This isn't about doing what big companies do because they're big companies; some big companies do have terrible web sites, and some of the best ones out there (like "A List Apart") aren't corporate sites at all. It's about understanding why conventional design principles exist. It's possible to break them and come up with great things. It's also possible to break them and come up with really, really terrible things.
Incidentally, Google's home page really doesn't have a lot of text on it, which puts it somewhat outside the realm of what I'm talking about. Their front page is a fine design model for what it is. However, their corporate history page, while it's tastefully designed, can get pretty hard to read if your browser window's wide enough that you're getting two dozen or more words per line, particularly given the fairly tiny type size and tight leading they're using. If you resize your browser window so it's closer to the proportions of an 8.5" x 11" page, the text will be easier to read. This isn't something readers are always consciously aware of, but your reading speed drops, as your eyes will have to work harder to track across the lines.
I see a lot of "if you're a good web designer, you won't care about resolution, and you'll be smart enough to make your sites resolution-independent" kind of comments in this mix here. Yeah, there's something to that. The web isn't the same as the printed page, after all.
But you'll notice that many--not most, but I'd honestly say the majority--of professionally-designed web sites that are text-heavy do use a fixed width for text blocks. Despite what some people here seem to think, sites that do that are not designed by ignorant graphic designers too stupid to use good design principles. They're designed by graphic designers smart enough to know that "the web isn't the same as the printed page" doesn't mean that everything we've learned in centuries of typography and layout is merrily tossed out.
One of the basic rules of typography is that line length affects readability. You can play around with the length for various effects, but a block of text that's wider than about 39 ems and longer than a paragraph or two is going to be harder to read. This still applies on the screen.
There's an implicit attitude among a lot of hardcore tech types that graphic design doesn't involve actual work -- we're just sitting around stapling Dreamweaver templates over your glorious PHP, and that any design decisions we make that aren't The Way Engineers Would Do It are proof that we're clueless. I'm sorry you guys resent any use of the web that couldn't have been done in HTML 2.0, but it's time to take your hands off the VAX keyboard and back away slowly.
I agree that when you're designing a web page, you shouldn't be thinking too much about the user's screen resolution, but the reality is that I'm probably not going to be designing my page so it will fill up your 2048x1536 display; I'm going to be designing my page so it's going to be readable on your 2048x1536 display. And that may just mean designing for a specific width. Get over it.
While you're right, that tutorial is actually embedding a ruby interpreter on the web page. I don't think it's 'Ajax' that's as much at fault here as the fact that this is doing stupid web browser tricks that, in this case, just happen to be done with Ajax.:)
IIRC, there's a tutorial out there somewhere telling developers how to make Ajax-happy applications that don't break the BACK button and are bookmarkable.
Okay, this is off-topic here, but it's a genuine question: why is it supposedly so much better to have the control key to the left of the A key?
This may be a naive question, but it doesn't come from lack of experience; I've been using computers since 1977 and certainly have used my share of keyboards that have the control key in its original placement. The thing is, if you're used to touch typing, the reason that we have two shift keys is because we use the one opposite the key we're shifting, and strike the letter key with the same finger we normally would. Capital A is struck with the right shift key, capital I with the left. Given that control and alt/meta are, in effect, also shift keys, isn't it logical to approach them the same way? I know that I use the Emacs-ish ^A, ^E and ^D fairly frequently, and all of these are easier for me to type being able to hit the right control and type normally. If control is where caps lock is, ^A and ^Z are fairly awkward to type.
So, really, why is the left of the A key such an exalted position for the control key? Is there really any testing that's been done to show that this position increases typing speed or accuracy, reduces stress, etc., or is it just the weight of tradition that makes people "know" that's the "correct" placement?
"Support for OS X" in this case means a native GUI interface on OS X, rather than the X11 interface. Both Emacs and XEmacs have support for this in various states of repair in their development branches. The Emacs build that ships with OS X is console-only.
Flash isn't a language, but ActionScript is. And, to be fair to Flash, I've seen a (very small) number of sites that actually use it for practical interface work -- an online reservation system, or the new Yahoo! maps beta, and it's good or better than any AJAX system I've seen. Flash is really a pretty good system for "rich internet applications" (the buzzword before "Web 2.0" became fashionable); it's just that developers (as opposed to designers), and users, have grown to think of it as a system for little more than producing annoying animated advertisements and unnecessarily frilly web pages. That it's gotten that reputation is largely Macromedia's fault, but it's not really a correct perception of it, and hasn't been since Flash 5, at least.
At any rate, it may not be the best use of your time, but were I actually developing a web-based application that needed a sophisticated client, I wouldn't rule Flash out, depending on what the back end system I was developing on was. Like it or not, Flash has one big advantage over Ajax and, for that matter, HTML/CSS in general: it bypasses browser compatibility issues entirely.
When is the DoJ going to crack down on Apple for bundling apps that compete with and ultimately destroy 3rd party apps such as Watson and the Caffeine Suite.
It's worth noting in passing that Caffeine Software was basically one guy, who shut it down after he got a job at... Apple. Personally, I have trouble believing that the disappearance of TIFFany at Apple's behest and the appearance a couple years later of Aperture are completely unrelated, but I've never seen any evidence to confirm my theory.
Sherlock/Watson I think they did a pretty dirty thing with; I half wonder if it wasn't that Steve Jobs or someone else high up just got a bug up their ass about Watson's name, which could be taken as a slap in the face for the previous (useless) releases of Sherlock. Konfabulator versus Dashboard, though, I can't get too worked up about; to me, Dashboard is spiritually the return of desk accessories, and implementation-wise, Konfabulator done better.
This is always an interesting dilemma. When Microsoft Word and WordPerfect integrated spelling and grammar-checking into their applications, they knew there was a thriving market for "add-on" programs with those functions, and they had to be aware that their integration would pretty much snuff that market out of existence. Is that sufficient reason not to do that integration, though?
Adium is an open source IM client licensed under the GPL and based on libgaim. If you're calling it proprietary because it's Mac-only, when we're comparing it to the Windows-only, closed source Trillian, that's a little... dubious.
Yes, I do remember her health care plan, because I actually had to read the "short" 30-odd page summary when I was working at an accounting textbook company at the time.
It was not socialized medicine.
It wasn't even socialized insurance (which is what Canada has, more or less, not socialized medicine--doctors in Canada are still private practitioners.) This is a meme that was pushed by insurance companies who didn't like the fact that the proposed health care plan might have made them less money.
Essentially, it set up the idea of state (not federal) "health care alliances" that could function as co-ops to provide privately-purchased insurance to everyone, and -- here's what insurance companies really didn't like -- it would have made it illegal to deny insurance based on pre-existing conditions. But there was no national insurance company; the idea was to use the market to achieve universal health care. Its stated goal was actually to increase competition in the health care marketplace, not to replace it with a government insurance company.
It really wasn't a very good plan, as proposed. It's debatable whether it actually would have increased competition, but it'd have certainly increased both taxes and government bureaucracy, neither of which are particularly popular; even though government-run programs like Social Security and Medicare are surprisingly efficient when you compare them to their private counterparts, the particular plan envisioned managed the hat trick of being both terribly convoluted and vague about details.
However, a lot of the vitriol directed toward the plan probably wouldn't have been present if it hadn't had Hillary Clinton's name on it. It wasn't even "her" plan; she was just chair of the bipartisan committee that put it together. But both Clintons were, from very early on, the focus of a lot of hatred of political opponents, and demonizing "Hillary Care" became a key element of the 1994 Republican revolution. (I've often seen Bush supporters lament the ferocity of the attacks on him and ask, "Has there ever been a president who endured the kind of personal mudslinging and viciousness that George W. has gone through?" to which the only answer is, "Dude, were you effing comatose through the Clinton administration?")
Whether Ms. Clinton is a moderate is a subjective question; VoteMatch's political spectrum defines her as a "liberal populist"; on economic issues she's pretty left, but on social issues she's slightly tilted toward the authoritarian side. She's always been far more amenable to censorship and speech restrictions than anyone I'd identify as a liberal or a libertarian would be. And on national security, she's pretty consistently been in the "liberal hawk" camp. And yes, she gets criticized from the left on a lot of issues pretty constantly.
While you're certainly right that she moved from Arkansas to New York because it's an easier place for her to win, that doesn't make her a flaming left-wing liberal -- it makes her a calculating opportunist who recognized that New York was a much more important state politically than Arkansas is. Really, I doubt she was "too liberal" for Arkansas; she's only slightly to the left of senator Mark Pryor -- who's in turn really only slightly to the left of governor Mike Huckabee.
(In full disclosure, VoteMatch categorizes me as a "libertarian-leaning liberal," and it seems every time Ms. Clinton takes a public stand on something, I like her less.)
My "any OS version that hasn't been around for a year" comment was based on the observed practices of four companies I've worked at. Granted, that was mostly Windows, but the place I'm at currently -- a very big company -- is just testing a new version of their IT-approved Linux based around Red Hat Enteprise Linux 4. Most of the Linux machines in the company are still on RHEL 3.
With all due respect, welcome to enterprise-level IT. In several big companies I've been at, including the one I'm at now, corporate policy dictates what software you're using, particularly operating systems. And without getting into specifics, we'll just say that any OS version, regardless of vendor, that hasn't been around for at least a year isn't very likely to be running in such a place.
The most unrealistic part of this study when it comes to deviance from "real world applications" is that, upon finding this problem, the study's authors didn't adequately simulate the series of e-mail messages, telephone conferences and face-to-face meetings between at least three departments, that would happen as people tried to find a solution everyone would bless. The solution the admins actually came up with, backporting from a more recent release to the officially-sanctioned one, is not at all unusual.
Sure, there are companies out there that don't have enforced IT policies, but I haven't been to or worked with one bigger than a few hundred people that didn't have one. And once you have an IT department, they tend to try and clamp down on sysadmins doing their own thing, because consistency in management becomes more important to them than individual efficiency. (This isn't entirely bureaucratic nonsense, either, since if your unapproved software becomes important to the company and then breaks in a way you can't fix, it becomes their problem.) The study described here may not be perfect, but forcing the admins to work under arbitrary restrictions isn't a flaw.
True. I should have said that seems unique -- or maybe uncommon -- in the States, not universally. Europe seems to have much better rail systems all around than the USA does, although I know that has a lot to do with population distribution. The San Francisco Bay Area is good for such a rail system in that it's a collection of a few big cities, with small-to-medium cities set fairly closely together between them over a pretty large area. Most other metro areas in America really can't make that claim.
The SF Bay Area does have the oddity that there are a bunch of metro sytems operating here which have different but overlapping operating areas: SF MUNI, BART, VTA, CalTrain, ACE. And there's another bus-only system or two I'm forgetting. This is the main reason the system you describe, where the one ticket lets you hop off onto buses, doesn't happen here--the agencies would all have to actually coordinate with one another, rather than just pretend they're coordinating.
It's only decent when you compare it to the light rail fiasco of the south bay.
VTA has its problems and it may well be a fiasco in the political sense, but the VTA light rail system covers a good chunk of Santa Clara County now, and the cars are generally on time, well-maintained, clean and quiet, with smooth rides (on most of the trains, at least; a few of the oldest cars are a bit jerky, but nothing too terrible). I've never had any reason to ride BART (I live near Los Gatos, so I'd have to drive a while to get to the closest station), but friends who've been on both tend to prefer VTA's light rail.
It's probably fair to keep in mind that BART is rather unique for being a "medium-range" transit system; most other urban rail systems in the country are in-city, more like SF's MUNI streetcars. Fremont to Walnut Creek is a $4.40 trip, which may seem expensive, but that's a 45-mile drive. At current gas prices, driving could easily cost you as much (or more!), and BART's trains can get you there in an hour--not much slower than driving. I can't speak to the trains' aroma, but their prices and speed really don't seem to be bad at all.
I was being grumpy during the Clinton administration, too, just not as grumpy. But if you don't think anyone from "the left side" criticized Clinton during the Clinton years, you were probably listening to what conservatives said liberals were saying about Clinton, rather than what liberals actually *were* saying.:)
He routinely took heat from civil liberties types who were concerned with his administration's policies toward individual privacy, for example, and for that matter, government transparency; his administration was arguably the second worst in recent memory when it came to such matters behind the current one, and the criticisms that have been made about the Bush administration being more concerned with corporations than individuals were a pretty constant chorus from the anti-corporate left against Clinton, too. Liberal columnist Molly Ivins' book about the Clinton years, "You Gotta Dance With Them That Brung Ya," said she gave it that title because the publisher wouldn't let her go with her initial title she thought summed up her feelings about the administration: "Nausea."
One of the things that's actually struck me as most peculiar in recent years, in fact, is how unwilling Republicans have been to criticize their own compared to Democrats. When Clinton did things that weren't canonically "Democratic" like massive industry deregulation and slashing welfare, groups anywhere to the left of the rather centrist DLC lit into him pretty viciously. When Bush did things like massively *expanding* welfare programs and ballooning deficits, most of the right (other than groups that are really more libertarian, like Cato) seemed to bite their tongues.
Look, while this is somewhat off-topic, I think it's important to understand that at least some of the "antibushitarians" like myself are ultimately critics of this administration not because of choices they made that we wouldn't have (not solely, anyway) -- reasonable people can disagree over a wide range of topics, and even though I may not be persuaded by some of the arguments the Bush supporters have made about various actions, most of those arguments are at least reasoned. No, the criticism is that more than any other administration I'm aware of, the Bush administration has a demonstrable and pervasive disdain for the ideas of accountability and transparency. They want to conduct as much of their activities as they can in secrecy and they impugn the integrity and patriotism of anyone who criticizes this. And this is a really profoundly worrisome precedent for anyone who cares about responsible -- or even responsive -- government.
As to Guantanamo and who's held there, the poster you cheered on in particular might want to read this Washington Post piece by a lawyer who wrote:
[My client] is innocent. I don't mean he claims to be. I mean the military says so. It held a secret tribunal and ruled that he is not al Qaeda, not Taliban, not a terrorist. The whole thing was a mistake: The Pentagon paid $5,000 to a bounty hunter, and it got taken. The military people reached this conclusion, and they wrote it down on a memo, and then they classified the memo and Adel went from the hearing room back to his prison cell. He is a prisoner today, eight months later. And [...] only habeas corpus revealed that it wasn't just Adel who was innocent -- it was Abu Bakker and Ahmet and Ayoub and Zakerjain and Sadiq -- all Guantanamo "terrorists" whom the military has found innocent.
I know that what happens to "suspected terrorists" seems awfully remote: sure, the president has extraordinary powers to designate someone, even an American citizen, as an "enemy combatant" and whisk them off into a secretive system where they lose many constitutional rights, but it's quite a stretch to say he's going to abuse that power, right? It's Chicken Little hyperbole to think that expanding executive powers under the auspices of wartime is a harbinger of impending fascism.
But the question isn't what this president will do with that power, but what that power will allow any president to do. Think of a president you don't like with the power to do that, or even one you might generally like who falls under the sway of a Joe McCarthy type who sees enemies under every rock. Or, hell, ask the folks who call a certain Senator from New York "Hitlery Clinton" if they'd really like her to have that power. And if these are "wartime powers," when do they end when the war is against not a state but a concept? There will, after all, always be terrorism.
And before you think the abuse of that power to really go after political opponents is so far-fetched in today's America, ask yourself what's traditionally kept that power in check. Look, they're back: transparency and accountability! Our entire political system is supposed to function on the premise that no one branch of government has power that's so broad that we, the American people, have to just trust them not to abuse it. But that's exactly the kind of power that the Bush administration has been arguing they need.
So the next time an "antibushitarian" gets a little twitchy when someone says that by criticizing the president they're "supporting the terrorists," think about what that accusation really means. And when that's being used to describe the political opponents of an administration that's created a whole new prison system expressly designed to be as opaque as possible...
The question isn't "can they do whatever the hell they want," the question is "should they do whatever the hell they want," which is something a lot of people don't seem to get in discussions like these. There are many actions which are perfectly legal which are nonetheless offensive, bad business, or just plain stupid. In theory, Google could turn off Google Mail tomorrow without warning and tell everyone "tough cookies" when they wanted their mail back, and by your logic, anyone who said that was wrong would be making an argument that's shit. Why, it's Google's server! Well, yeah, it is, but if Google did that, Google would be behaving like shits.
AOL's actions aren't nearly as obnoxious--nobody lost data--but there's absolutely no reason why AOL couldn't have made this an "opt-in" feature rather than an "opt-out" one. AIM users are a captive audience, but that's not an excuse to annoy that audience. People who actually wanted to use these "buddies" would have likely opted in anyway, and AOL wouldn't have annoyed thousands of users unnecessarily.
If nothing else, keep this sort of thing in mind the next time you wonder why so many people seem to "irrationally" hate big business. Sorry, but I reject the notion that "I'm peeing on you because I can" represents the pinnacle of customer service.
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Interestingly, if you look at administrations rather than Congress, since WW2, Democrats in the White House have pretty much been the fiscal conservatives. (In a relative sense, mind you, as nobody actually reduces spending, some just spend less fast.) I recall one somewhat libertarian-inclined economist observing a year or two ago that the best combination, from a standpoint of "increasing spending the slowest," is a Republican legislature and a Democratic president. I suspect having the same party in control of both legislative and administrative branches, particularly when the legislative control is strong enough that the minority party can't even be an effective road block, is nearly always a blank check. (The Republicans under Bush have been worse than the Democrats were in Clinton's first two years, which is also interesting. I don't think it indicates a partisan bent toward spending, though, as much as a refusal to "break ranks" with the current administration.)
You're missing a fundamental point here. Whether or not you or I might disagree on the definition of a "good movie," it would not be very hard for either of us to point to movies we would consider good that didn't find much of an audience at all, and I don't think it would be hard for either of us to point to movies we would not consider particularly good that had huge audiences and box office receipts. The end result of your logic is that box office receipts are a reliable indication of quality, and that Star Wars III and Harry Potter 4 were by far the two best movies of last year. I'm sorry, but that's nuts.
Hollywood has always made pictures aimed for commercial success, and other pictures aimed for Oscars. The second type of film used to be called "prestige pictures." If you insist on the belief that popularity is the best judge of quality, yeah, I guess that's elite. So let's fix this. Our students should be studying Stephen King, Jackie Collins and Dan Brown as writers, right? You don't have any problem with them studying Toni Morrison instead of dead white guys who aren't selling any more (canons are never popular, after all). And the best artist alive is clearly Thomas Kinkade, Painter of Light®.
Either that, or we might just have to admit that popularity isn't a direct correlation to quality. That doesn't mean that what's popular is trash, either--a lot of what's popular is pretty good. (And frankly, that gets recognized more in awards than you're allowing, unless you want to argue that The Lord of the Rings was a little arthouse movie.) But directors, actors, subject material, promotional budget, and how approachable the movie is all have a direct impact on ticket sales. A movie with a challenging theme usually isn't going to do as well as the box office as one with a "universal" theme.
In your take of things, only movies that are as universal as possible, with the broadest (and, let's be honest, least controversial) themes, can be considered good. And with all due respect, that's pretty disheartening. Maybe you think judging films based on their writing, directing, and performances regardless of their popularity is a sign of a nefarious political agenda. I think judging them on anything else would be.
As a long-time text editor junkie, I actually like TextMate in a lot of ways despite its occasional warts. I've been a Vim user since the late '90s, it's pretty powerful, and you certainly can't beat its price, but the only editor I've seen that really beats TextMate's extensibility through its "bundle" system is XEmacs. (Or GNU Emacs, of course -- I just find XEmacs a bit friendlier.) And TM is considerably easier to extend than Emacsen.
If you like Vim for everything, more power to you; I'm still likely to use it for quick edits, because it's so nice to have a full-featured editor in the terminal window. But for heavy lifting, I like GUI editors, and TM is becoming one of the best ones I've seen. (Lest anyone pipe up with "the keyboard is better than the mouse" arguments, learn to use them in harmony, son. It's not like offering mouse-based selection and commands renders an editor incapable of full keyboard control.)
It's worth noting as a minor nitpick that it's not actually AppleScript itself that's tied to the OS, but rather the Open Scripting Architecture, which is basically akin to the Amiga's "ARexx Ports" approach -- any language that can be built to talk with OSA can be used instead of AppleScript. There aren't many other OSA languages -- Frontier and JavaScript are the two most well-known ones -- but there's nothing intrinsic to AppleScript to prevent more from being developed. (Philip Aker has produced "OSAComponents," which claim to make Ruby, Python, Perl, PHP and Tcl/Tk "peer-level" scripting languages in the system, but I haven't tried them.)
Also, even non-OSA languages can use the "osascript" utility to execute an OSA script. I find AppleScript profoundly annoying, but it's not that difficult to write, say, a Ruby or an Expect script which does all of the heavy lifting in its native tongue and passes just what it has to via AppleScript.
Photoshop has a complete object model exposed to scripting languages, and is scriptable in Javascript (on Mac and Windows), AppleScript (Mac only) and VBScript (Windows only); technically, it's scriptable in anything that can send Apple Events on the Mac or OLE commands on Windows. It's not uncommon to hear about sophisticated workflows people have put together -- coordinating Photoshop actions, OS features and even other applications -- using AppleScript. Photoshop's scripting capability is often cited by professionals as one of its best features.
No offense, but writing that off blithely as "pretty bad scripting" casts a bit of a shadow over the rest of your analysis for me.
Not to say that one party is less trustworthy than the other, but scare tactics are a favorite weapon of the liberals lately.
Um, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you understand how much this has been a "weapon" of the conservatives, too, on every subject from national security (only Republicans can keep you safe, Democrats don't understand what happened on 9-11!) to gay marriage (it threatens your stable, heterosexual family!) to tax cuts (it's not an estate tax, it's a DEATH tax!). One can argue the Democrats' problem PR-wise hasn't been using scare tactics, it's that they haven't been using them nearly as effectively as Republicans have.
"The Nation" is indeed a liberal magazine; it's been around over a century and may actually be the nation's oldest political commentary magazine. If your idea of "the liberal media" is the centrist big names like CNN, NBC, and Newsweek, it'll probably seem pretty radical and wild-eyed, but that's not a commentary on The Nation as much as it is a commentary on how far right the political center has moved in the last 2-3 decades. Think of The Nation as something like the left version of the National Review. (And, lest any liberals think otherwise, I do mean that as a compliment--if only more political punditry was up to their standards.)
I think you're missing the Anonymous Coward's point there, which is that the text of the resolution seems to suggest time limits to the "authorization of force" that can't be extended indefinitely. There are also legitimate questions as to whether the "authorization of force" really is equivalent to a declaration of war. Furthermore, whatever you call it, it was an action specifically against the Hussein government, which is unquestionably no longer in power. We are fighting in Iraq, but we are most definitely not at war with Iraq.
These sound like matters of semantics, I suppose, but they're pretty serious ones. Whether the war against Hussein's forces was "legal" constitutionally doesn't automatically mean that continued fighting is. And if we accept the implicit notion that the "war on terror" gives the president expanded powers just as if it was a war conducted against a state, that may well be a long-term shift in the balance of constitutional power between the branches of our government. There is no concrete milestone for declaring victory against a tactic, so when exactly are those powers rescinded? And if we're essentially saying that the president gets to waive fundamental constitutional rights like the fourth amendment in the name of national security, where do we draw the line? The administration may indeed only be tapping phone calls to/from suspected terrorists outside the country, but there's no reason why their logic can't be applied to calls completely within the country. And just what's the measure of "suspicious activity"? If you have certain magazine subscriptions? Attend certain meetings?
Whenever we talk about expanding the powers of any governmental entity, we need to ask ourselves not whether we trust the current administrators with that power, but whether we can reasonably expect to trust the next office-holder with that power. And the next. And the next. And the next. It really doesn't matter whether you think Bush is the greatest president we've ever seen, and it really doesn't matter whether I agree with you, because what we're talking about is potentially changing the powers reserved for the presidency as an institution. Would you have trusted John Kerry with that power? How about John McCain? How about Hillary Clinton?
Show me one instance where Flash truly is the best choice out there.
I'd nominate Yahoo! Maps as a great example of using Flash for good, rather than evil. Google Maps accomplishes much the same thing without Flash, but I'd argue it does it less elegantly. (Yahoo also has a much better directory when you're searching for businesses, since it's really using a business directory, rather than just doing a web search.)
Flash is designed for web applications, sure, and its limitations in interacting with the client environment beyond the browser are intentional. Of course it's not appropriate for all applications -- it's not appropriate for any application that isn't, in effect, a thin client with all the data on the server side. But within that context, Flash does a pretty good job, and might be a better choice for in-browser client web applets than Java. It's unfortunate Flash has a lot of baggage from the way it's usually been used, but as people pointed out with some insightful jokes earlier in the comments, the technology isn't the problem.
BBEdit -- and many other text editors -- tend to use somewhat more complex algorithms for determining one undo step. It's usually something like "the text inserted from the point you started typing after the last cursor repositioning until the next cursor repositioning or undoable command." So, if you click on a word and type a new word to replace it, then decide you don't want to do that, one undo step and the old word is back. You start typing at the end of a paragraph and decide not to, one undo step and your typed text is deleted. But, you start typing THE QUICK BROWN FOX, stop and select "FOX" and do a "change case" command on it, then type JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG, you have three undoable steps: typing JUMPS OVER THE LAZY DOG, the change case command, and typing THE QUICK BROWN FOX.
And, yes, this is an irritating misfeature in TextMate. Having said that, I'm still a TextMate convert from BBEdit. (For the record, I've used Vim for close to a decade and regularly use XEmacs on Windows. All of the editors have their strengths and weaknesses, but I've come to believe TextMate's design may make it as powerful as Emacs in the long run, without the rather user-hostile UI.) While I know TextMate isn't, strictly speaking, an IDE, for a scripting language like Python, I'm not sure that's such a big deal. (I'll risk a minor flamewar and suggest that the love showered on Eclipse by Java users for doing all that typing for them might really be a sign that Java requires way too much goddamn typing to get anything done.)
No, I really don't think those old school typographers would let their readers choose their line lengths. Layout and design principles do have some subjectivity to them, sure. But even if yellow and red are your two favorite colors, red text on a yellow background is going to be harder to read than black text on a white background. You may love Zapf Chancery, but if you typeset your resume in it, you're making everyone's life really difficult.
This isn't about doing what big companies do because they're big companies; some big companies do have terrible web sites, and some of the best ones out there (like "A List Apart") aren't corporate sites at all. It's about understanding why conventional design principles exist. It's possible to break them and come up with great things. It's also possible to break them and come up with really, really terrible things.
Incidentally, Google's home page really doesn't have a lot of text on it, which puts it somewhat outside the realm of what I'm talking about. Their front page is a fine design model for what it is. However, their corporate history page, while it's tastefully designed, can get pretty hard to read if your browser window's wide enough that you're getting two dozen or more words per line, particularly given the fairly tiny type size and tight leading they're using. If you resize your browser window so it's closer to the proportions of an 8.5" x 11" page, the text will be easier to read. This isn't something readers are always consciously aware of, but your reading speed drops, as your eyes will have to work harder to track across the lines.
I see a lot of "if you're a good web designer, you won't care about resolution, and you'll be smart enough to make your sites resolution-independent" kind of comments in this mix here. Yeah, there's something to that. The web isn't the same as the printed page, after all.
But you'll notice that many--not most, but I'd honestly say the majority--of professionally-designed web sites that are text-heavy do use a fixed width for text blocks. Despite what some people here seem to think, sites that do that are not designed by ignorant graphic designers too stupid to use good design principles. They're designed by graphic designers smart enough to know that "the web isn't the same as the printed page" doesn't mean that everything we've learned in centuries of typography and layout is merrily tossed out.
One of the basic rules of typography is that line length affects readability. You can play around with the length for various effects, but a block of text that's wider than about 39 ems and longer than a paragraph or two is going to be harder to read. This still applies on the screen.
There's an implicit attitude among a lot of hardcore tech types that graphic design doesn't involve actual work -- we're just sitting around stapling Dreamweaver templates over your glorious PHP, and that any design decisions we make that aren't The Way Engineers Would Do It are proof that we're clueless. I'm sorry you guys resent any use of the web that couldn't have been done in HTML 2.0, but it's time to take your hands off the VAX keyboard and back away slowly.
I agree that when you're designing a web page, you shouldn't be thinking too much about the user's screen resolution, but the reality is that I'm probably not going to be designing my page so it will fill up your 2048x1536 display; I'm going to be designing my page so it's going to be readable on your 2048x1536 display. And that may just mean designing for a specific width. Get over it.
While you're right, that tutorial is actually embedding a ruby interpreter on the web page. I don't think it's 'Ajax' that's as much at fault here as the fact that this is doing stupid web browser tricks that, in this case, just happen to be done with Ajax. :)
IIRC, there's a tutorial out there somewhere telling developers how to make Ajax-happy applications that don't break the BACK button and are bookmarkable.
Okay, this is off-topic here, but it's a genuine question: why is it supposedly so much better to have the control key to the left of the A key?
This may be a naive question, but it doesn't come from lack of experience; I've been using computers since 1977 and certainly have used my share of keyboards that have the control key in its original placement. The thing is, if you're used to touch typing, the reason that we have two shift keys is because we use the one opposite the key we're shifting, and strike the letter key with the same finger we normally would. Capital A is struck with the right shift key, capital I with the left. Given that control and alt/meta are, in effect, also shift keys, isn't it logical to approach them the same way? I know that I use the Emacs-ish ^A, ^E and ^D fairly frequently, and all of these are easier for me to type being able to hit the right control and type normally. If control is where caps lock is, ^A and ^Z are fairly awkward to type.
So, really, why is the left of the A key such an exalted position for the control key? Is there really any testing that's been done to show that this position increases typing speed or accuracy, reduces stress, etc., or is it just the weight of tradition that makes people "know" that's the "correct" placement?
"Support for OS X" in this case means a native GUI interface on OS X, rather than the X11 interface. Both Emacs and XEmacs have support for this in various states of repair in their development branches. The Emacs build that ships with OS X is console-only.
Flash isn't a language, but ActionScript is. And, to be fair to Flash, I've seen a (very small) number of sites that actually use it for practical interface work -- an online reservation system, or the new Yahoo! maps beta, and it's good or better than any AJAX system I've seen. Flash is really a pretty good system for "rich internet applications" (the buzzword before "Web 2.0" became fashionable); it's just that developers (as opposed to designers), and users, have grown to think of it as a system for little more than producing annoying animated advertisements and unnecessarily frilly web pages. That it's gotten that reputation is largely Macromedia's fault, but it's not really a correct perception of it, and hasn't been since Flash 5, at least.
At any rate, it may not be the best use of your time, but were I actually developing a web-based application that needed a sophisticated client, I wouldn't rule Flash out, depending on what the back end system I was developing on was. Like it or not, Flash has one big advantage over Ajax and, for that matter, HTML/CSS in general: it bypasses browser compatibility issues entirely.
When is the DoJ going to crack down on Apple for bundling apps that compete with and ultimately destroy 3rd party apps such as Watson and the Caffeine Suite.
It's worth noting in passing that Caffeine Software was basically one guy, who shut it down after he got a job at... Apple. Personally, I have trouble believing that the disappearance of TIFFany at Apple's behest and the appearance a couple years later of Aperture are completely unrelated, but I've never seen any evidence to confirm my theory.
Sherlock/Watson I think they did a pretty dirty thing with; I half wonder if it wasn't that Steve Jobs or someone else high up just got a bug up their ass about Watson's name, which could be taken as a slap in the face for the previous (useless) releases of Sherlock. Konfabulator versus Dashboard, though, I can't get too worked up about; to me, Dashboard is spiritually the return of desk accessories, and implementation-wise, Konfabulator done better.
This is always an interesting dilemma. When Microsoft Word and WordPerfect integrated spelling and grammar-checking into their applications, they knew there was a thriving market for "add-on" programs with those functions, and they had to be aware that their integration would pretty much snuff that market out of existence. Is that sufficient reason not to do that integration, though?
Adium is an open source IM client licensed under the GPL and based on libgaim. If you're calling it proprietary because it's Mac-only, when we're comparing it to the Windows-only, closed source Trillian, that's a little... dubious.
Yes, I do remember her health care plan, because I actually had to read the "short" 30-odd page summary when I was working at an accounting textbook company at the time.
It was not socialized medicine.
It wasn't even socialized insurance (which is what Canada has, more or less, not socialized medicine--doctors in Canada are still private practitioners.) This is a meme that was pushed by insurance companies who didn't like the fact that the proposed health care plan might have made them less money.
Essentially, it set up the idea of state (not federal) "health care alliances" that could function as co-ops to provide privately-purchased insurance to everyone, and -- here's what insurance companies really didn't like -- it would have made it illegal to deny insurance based on pre-existing conditions. But there was no national insurance company; the idea was to use the market to achieve universal health care. Its stated goal was actually to increase competition in the health care marketplace, not to replace it with a government insurance company.
It really wasn't a very good plan, as proposed. It's debatable whether it actually would have increased competition, but it'd have certainly increased both taxes and government bureaucracy, neither of which are particularly popular; even though government-run programs like Social Security and Medicare are surprisingly efficient when you compare them to their private counterparts, the particular plan envisioned managed the hat trick of being both terribly convoluted and vague about details.
However, a lot of the vitriol directed toward the plan probably wouldn't have been present if it hadn't had Hillary Clinton's name on it. It wasn't even "her" plan; she was just chair of the bipartisan committee that put it together. But both Clintons were, from very early on, the focus of a lot of hatred of political opponents, and demonizing "Hillary Care" became a key element of the 1994 Republican revolution. (I've often seen Bush supporters lament the ferocity of the attacks on him and ask, "Has there ever been a president who endured the kind of personal mudslinging and viciousness that George W. has gone through?" to which the only answer is, "Dude, were you effing comatose through the Clinton administration?")
Whether Ms. Clinton is a moderate is a subjective question; VoteMatch's political spectrum defines her as a "liberal populist"; on economic issues she's pretty left, but on social issues she's slightly tilted toward the authoritarian side. She's always been far more amenable to censorship and speech restrictions than anyone I'd identify as a liberal or a libertarian would be. And on national security, she's pretty consistently been in the "liberal hawk" camp. And yes, she gets criticized from the left on a lot of issues pretty constantly.
While you're certainly right that she moved from Arkansas to New York because it's an easier place for her to win, that doesn't make her a flaming left-wing liberal -- it makes her a calculating opportunist who recognized that New York was a much more important state politically than Arkansas is. Really, I doubt she was "too liberal" for Arkansas; she's only slightly to the left of senator Mark Pryor -- who's in turn really only slightly to the left of governor Mike Huckabee.
(In full disclosure, VoteMatch categorizes me as a "libertarian-leaning liberal," and it seems every time Ms. Clinton takes a public stand on something, I like her less.)
My "any OS version that hasn't been around for a year" comment was based on the observed practices of four companies I've worked at. Granted, that was mostly Windows, but the place I'm at currently -- a very big company -- is just testing a new version of their IT-approved Linux based around Red Hat Enteprise Linux 4. Most of the Linux machines in the company are still on RHEL 3.
With all due respect, welcome to enterprise-level IT. In several big companies I've been at, including the one I'm at now, corporate policy dictates what software you're using, particularly operating systems. And without getting into specifics, we'll just say that any OS version, regardless of vendor, that hasn't been around for at least a year isn't very likely to be running in such a place.
The most unrealistic part of this study when it comes to deviance from "real world applications" is that, upon finding this problem, the study's authors didn't adequately simulate the series of e-mail messages, telephone conferences and face-to-face meetings between at least three departments, that would happen as people tried to find a solution everyone would bless. The solution the admins actually came up with, backporting from a more recent release to the officially-sanctioned one, is not at all unusual.
Sure, there are companies out there that don't have enforced IT policies, but I haven't been to or worked with one bigger than a few hundred people that didn't have one. And once you have an IT department, they tend to try and clamp down on sysadmins doing their own thing, because consistency in management becomes more important to them than individual efficiency. (This isn't entirely bureaucratic nonsense, either, since if your unapproved software becomes important to the company and then breaks in a way you can't fix, it becomes their problem.) The study described here may not be perfect, but forcing the admins to work under arbitrary restrictions isn't a flaw.
True. I should have said that seems unique -- or maybe uncommon -- in the States, not universally. Europe seems to have much better rail systems all around than the USA does, although I know that has a lot to do with population distribution. The San Francisco Bay Area is good for such a rail system in that it's a collection of a few big cities, with small-to-medium cities set fairly closely together between them over a pretty large area. Most other metro areas in America really can't make that claim.
The SF Bay Area does have the oddity that there are a bunch of metro sytems operating here which have different but overlapping operating areas: SF MUNI, BART, VTA, CalTrain, ACE. And there's another bus-only system or two I'm forgetting. This is the main reason the system you describe, where the one ticket lets you hop off onto buses, doesn't happen here--the agencies would all have to actually coordinate with one another, rather than just pretend they're coordinating.
It's only decent when you compare it to the light rail fiasco of the south bay.
VTA has its problems and it may well be a fiasco in the political sense, but the VTA light rail system covers a good chunk of Santa Clara County now, and the cars are generally on time, well-maintained, clean and quiet, with smooth rides (on most of the trains, at least; a few of the oldest cars are a bit jerky, but nothing too terrible). I've never had any reason to ride BART (I live near Los Gatos, so I'd have to drive a while to get to the closest station), but friends who've been on both tend to prefer VTA's light rail.
It's probably fair to keep in mind that BART is rather unique for being a "medium-range" transit system; most other urban rail systems in the country are in-city, more like SF's MUNI streetcars. Fremont to Walnut Creek is a $4.40 trip, which may seem expensive, but that's a 45-mile drive. At current gas prices, driving could easily cost you as much (or more!), and BART's trains can get you there in an hour--not much slower than driving. I can't speak to the trains' aroma, but their prices and speed really don't seem to be bad at all.
I was being grumpy during the Clinton administration, too, just not as grumpy. But if you don't think anyone from "the left side" criticized Clinton during the Clinton years, you were probably listening to what conservatives said liberals were saying about Clinton, rather than what liberals actually *were* saying. :)
He routinely took heat from civil liberties types who were concerned with his administration's policies toward individual privacy, for example, and for that matter, government transparency; his administration was arguably the second worst in recent memory when it came to such matters behind the current one, and the criticisms that have been made about the Bush administration being more concerned with corporations than individuals were a pretty constant chorus from the anti-corporate left against Clinton, too. Liberal columnist Molly Ivins' book about the Clinton years, "You Gotta Dance With Them That Brung Ya," said she gave it that title because the publisher wouldn't let her go with her initial title she thought summed up her feelings about the administration: "Nausea."
One of the things that's actually struck me as most peculiar in recent years, in fact, is how unwilling Republicans have been to criticize their own compared to Democrats. When Clinton did things that weren't canonically "Democratic" like massive industry deregulation and slashing welfare, groups anywhere to the left of the rather centrist DLC lit into him pretty viciously. When Bush did things like massively *expanding* welfare programs and ballooning deficits, most of the right (other than groups that are really more libertarian, like Cato) seemed to bite their tongues.
Look, while this is somewhat off-topic, I think it's important to understand that at least some of the "antibushitarians" like myself are ultimately critics of this administration not because of choices they made that we wouldn't have (not solely, anyway) -- reasonable people can disagree over a wide range of topics, and even though I may not be persuaded by some of the arguments the Bush supporters have made about various actions, most of those arguments are at least reasoned. No, the criticism is that more than any other administration I'm aware of, the Bush administration has a demonstrable and pervasive disdain for the ideas of accountability and transparency. They want to conduct as much of their activities as they can in secrecy and they impugn the integrity and patriotism of anyone who criticizes this. And this is a really profoundly worrisome precedent for anyone who cares about responsible -- or even responsive -- government.
As to Guantanamo and who's held there, the poster you cheered on in particular might want to read this Washington Post piece by a lawyer who wrote:
I know that what happens to "suspected terrorists" seems awfully remote: sure, the president has extraordinary powers to designate someone, even an American citizen, as an "enemy combatant" and whisk them off into a secretive system where they lose many constitutional rights, but it's quite a stretch to say he's going to abuse that power, right? It's Chicken Little hyperbole to think that expanding executive powers under the auspices of wartime is a harbinger of impending fascism.
But the question isn't what this president will do with that power, but what that power will allow any president to do. Think of a president you don't like with the power to do that, or even one you might generally like who falls under the sway of a Joe McCarthy type who sees enemies under every rock. Or, hell, ask the folks who call a certain Senator from New York "Hitlery Clinton" if they'd really like her to have that power. And if these are "wartime powers," when do they end when the war is against not a state but a concept? There will, after all, always be terrorism.
And before you think the abuse of that power to really go after political opponents is so far-fetched in today's America, ask yourself what's traditionally kept that power in check. Look, they're back: transparency and accountability! Our entire political system is supposed to function on the premise that no one branch of government has power that's so broad that we, the American people, have to just trust them not to abuse it. But that's exactly the kind of power that the Bush administration has been arguing they need.
So the next time an "antibushitarian" gets a little twitchy when someone says that by criticizing the president they're "supporting the terrorists," think about what that accusation really means. And when that's being used to describe the political opponents of an administration that's created a whole new prison system expressly designed to be as opaque as possible...
The question isn't "can they do whatever the hell they want," the question is "should they do whatever the hell they want," which is something a lot of people don't seem to get in discussions like these. There are many actions which are perfectly legal which are nonetheless offensive, bad business, or just plain stupid. In theory, Google could turn off Google Mail tomorrow without warning and tell everyone "tough cookies" when they wanted their mail back, and by your logic, anyone who said that was wrong would be making an argument that's shit. Why, it's Google's server! Well, yeah, it is, but if Google did that, Google would be behaving like shits.
AOL's actions aren't nearly as obnoxious--nobody lost data--but there's absolutely no reason why AOL couldn't have made this an "opt-in" feature rather than an "opt-out" one. AIM users are a captive audience, but that's not an excuse to annoy that audience. People who actually wanted to use these "buddies" would have likely opted in anyway, and AOL wouldn't have annoyed thousands of users unnecessarily.
If nothing else, keep this sort of thing in mind the next time you wonder why so many people seem to "irrationally" hate big business. Sorry, but I reject the notion that "I'm peeing on you because I can" represents the pinnacle of customer service.