There is nothing that President Obama can do, or not do, that will meet with the approval of those who oppose him on abstract general principles. In the past few weeks I've been treated to a few rants about how the President, Cabinet, and Congressional leadership are literally *Marxists* who are bent on turning the United States into a Socialist state.
Obama's party has the supermajority in the government. There's nothing stopping him from getting things done except his party's own ineptitude. As for socialism, if you don't see how the government forcing everyone to pay for health insurance isn't an intrusion of government into our personal lives, nothing will convince you.
I like how his administration has pledged to enforce drug laws in California to fight the movement to legalize marijuana, but it is not willing to enforce immigration laws in Arizona. Pheonix is statistically the kidnapping capital of the nation thanks to Mexican drug cartels crossing the border, but heaven forbid we offend a Hispanic voter somewhere by daring to suggest that immigrants come into to the U.S. legally.
The only people I ever hear calling him "messiah" are right-wingers. They sound pretty ridiculous and juvenile when they do it. Just FYI.
I remember in 2008 when multiple major newspapers referred to Obama as a "Democratic rock star" or a "rising rock star of the Democratic Party." It was all in the span of a month, and all equally embarrassing. You may not have heard his followers call him a messiah, but they most certainly treated him like one. Hope and change!
That quote is as exaggerated as Al Gore supposedly claiming to have invented the internet. Palin said there was an island in Alaska from which you could see Russian land, which is true.
Yeah, Jackson sure proved how much he cared about the source material. I'm sure Tolkien fans loved seeing Gimli rolling down a hill for comic relief, Aragorn's life-saving horse, and Galadriel the Incredible Hulk.
Del Toro prefers animatronics because CGI doesn't look real enough for creature footage. You probably would have gotten a more authentic film from him than "pan the camera around everything" Jackson. A lot of the outdoor scenery in the LOTR films was pretty bland and ordinary-looking compared to the version of Middle-Earth in the book, which was alive, conscious, and menacing. In the book, Saruman didn't try to take down the mountain to stop the fellowship--the mountain itself did. That kind of ominous threat from the world around them would have come through in a Del Toro version. It would have been surreal and fantastical instead of just static footage of New Zealand plains.
Don't worry, Peter Jackson wants to make it two films, with the first film being the Hobbit we know and the second film being an entirely brand new piece of fiction not written by Tolkien. I'm sure it'll be chock full of bullshit that looks cool.
First off, nerds already wear glasses, so wearing glasses over glasses is awkward. Second, 3D television sales have been a disaster, so it's a pointless technology that only works well on a gigantic screen and not a standard sized television. Third, people mock 3D because they see it exactly for what it is--a desperate gimmick for theaters trying to compete with technology in the home as well as an excuse to charge extra for ticket prices, which was the primary reason Avatar became the highest grossing film.
People aren't "against emerging technologies." It's not even a new technology. People are against cheesy gimmicks. You cite a videogame as an example for 3D, which already shows you how gimmicky it is and how it places emphasis on visuals, not storytelling. It may be great for Left 4 Dead, but for a two hour movie trying to tell a story?
3D fads in film have come and gone several times before. It's not some new trend. They had this shit in the 1950s with the old red and blue glasses.
And yet - it is still the language in which most desktop software and games are written to this day, and this doesn't show the signs of changing.
Huh? There are absolutely signs. Java's sudden popularity in the 90s was a sign. People learning languages like Ruby, C#, and Objective-C is a sign. Web development languages are a sign.
Your argument is like claiming Windows is awesome because it's still the most-used operating system. And calling Objective-C a fad of the day is amusing considering it's as old as C++.
Your problem is that you don't explain what's bad about it being a walled garden from a confident company. That strict control has made it the best mobile phone experience available. Idealism often has little to do with realism or practicality. Most people have lives and don't care about ideology. They just want it to work, and the iPhone does.
P.S. Next time--and there will be one--I suggest not inserting unnecessary line breaks in the word processor you used to type your post (a situation which is itself hilariously pathetic).
You not only have no evidence that even remotely suggests that I am MrHanky, but you don't believe it yourself. You just want to believe it, so that you can tell yourself that you've humiliated an opponent.
Logical common sense dictates that you're MrHanky. You lost the argument, so you have to post anonymously now as a sockpuppet. With no other counterargument, your only tact now is to go the tired psychology route, which will falter as your last post did.
At no point did he "cite Google's security team as something to trust". Nothing that he said even remotely implies such a thing. You know this, and you acknowledged it by your steadfast refusal to show where he spoke words anything like those you clumsily tried to put in his mouth.
I already cited where in your post you did, in fact, imply that Google's security team was to be trusted. You got called out on this and were completely embarrassed by it, leading to your current predicament.
Your claim about his "defending" Google was rightly called a lie by him and also by me. You had the choice of either citing something specific he said and showing how it supported your claim, or admitting that it was an incompetent lie. No other choices were possible. You chose the latter, and continue to choose it by repeating your assertion without proof. Variations of "it's right there in your post" don't fool anyone, not even yourself.
Again, your words have already been cited, and you've also gotten confused, as you apparently believe that citing your own post isn't a good enough citation of your own post. Mind-boggling. Clearly, your utter decimation here has left you in such a jumbled state that you're just throwing out any mindless distraction you can think of in an attempt to try to make everyone forget that you got called out on your double-standard. Unfortunately for you, it won't work.
And if "strawman argument" is tired debate terminology, that is only because the strawman argument is itself a tired debate tactic. The reason you are complaining about my use of the term is because it is absolutely appropriate, as the claims you routinely make about what other people say are classic examples of the well-known logical fallacy. Knowing that logic is not on your side, you heap scorn on logic itself. In other words, you want to lie without being called out as the liar you are, and you are raging impotently that this was not allowed to happen.
You can declare the reason for something if you want, but it doesn't make it true or remove that fact that you criticized people for trusting Apple security team while implying Google's security team was someone to trust. You've been backed into a corner and forced into lamely claiming that I'm "raging impotently" simply because I'm dismantling every one of your troll posts.
This is an attempt on your part to trick me into not replying as a way of "defying" you, so that you can tell yourself that you scared me away, and that this somehow proves you right.
Having lost the argument, and seeing now that I'm far better at this than you are, your only recourse is to go the tired "detached narrative" routine, describing everything that's going on as if you're some third-party who's not involved, removing yourself from the position of defeat. I'm afraid that you're quite firmly in the loser's bracket here, MrHanky. Let this serve as a lesson to you in the future not to argue with your betters.
It is another attempt to forestall your humiliation through lying. Like all your other attempts before it, it is a failure, fit only to serve as an unconditional surrender of the argument due to your own intellectual inadequacy. Of course, now that I have replied you'll backpedal and tell yourself that I proved you right by responding after all. But you won't be able to believe that either.
I'll be the first to say that gender roles are purely cultural constructs, and not even constant in any time or place.
It's a biological fact that males and females behave certain ways and are attracted to certain things across all cultures. We know how male and female brains work differently from each other.
It only makes no sense if you're committed to believing that our ideas about gender are innate and in no way cultural despite all evidence to the contrary.
What evidence to the contrary? There are certain gender archetypes that span all cultures. Specific gender roles are very much proven to be innate.
That's not really accurate. In Japan, a prettyboy is considered pretty much what a prettyboy is considered here, an effeminate guy with the face of a model who 12-year-old teenyboppers love. Granted, there is a little more history behind the archetype in their culture, but their culture is also older than ours. Muscular bodybuilders hanging out with each other in speedos is a gay stereotype here, too.
American and Japanese cultures aren't that different. Most of the weird ideas make sense when you find out there's historical context behind it (e.g., Mario's Tanooki Suit is bizarre until you read that a tanuki is a Japanese raccoon that was often a shapeshifter in folklore). I'm sure someone not familiar with European mythological archetypes would find elements of Lord of the Rings strange and arbitrary.
WoW has done this for all of its existence - making players feel rewarded, and minimizing penalties for death, mistakes, etc. Look where it is now.
There has to be punishment for failure, though. WotLK removed all difficulty in questing, and entire tiers of content were skippable. For months, the end-game content was a single room with bosses who come to you. There wasn't even a reason to be in a guild anymore. You could get end-game gear tokens from random 5-mans.
The lack of challenge was a real problem. Cataclysm is revamping nearly everything and introducing difficult questing and heroic dungeons again as a reaction to WotLK's total lack of difficulty.
Of course you're MrHanky. The fact that you're anonymously tracking my comments is bizarre and proof that I utterly destroyed your absurd arguments. You are desperate to dance around the fact that you:
1.) Criticized people for trusting Apple's security team. 2.) Cited Google's security team as something to trust.
You got called out as a fanboy. This embarrassed you so deeply that you've resorted to posting as an anonymous third person. You've completely run out of steam and have to resort to using tired debate terminology like "strawman arguments," even though what you wrote is as clear as day in your post history.
I won, and it's obvious that it struck a nerve with you because you continue to reply. You will reply again because your only recourse now is to seek the last word.
I already pointed out your double-standard when I originally responded to it. You criticized trust in Apple security while trusting in Google's security. The fact you're posting anonymously now is proof I completely decimated your points, leaving you running with your tail between your legs. Let this serve as a less next time not to argue with someone before thinking through your arguments.
Unfortunately, the left-wing sites are having a field day with this story and using it as an example of "conservative government" and "Ayn Rand conservativism," completely ignoring that the subscription fee is essentially a voluntary tax and that it's actually an example of a government monopoly on fire protection.
You think that's the problem with the Obama era and not the disastrous rise in the deficit, mishandling of the BP spill, mishandling of Middle-East negotiations, the closed-door passage of healthcare legislation, etc.?
I knew that this story would hit Slashdot. I knew someone would use some local incident in Fulton County to extrapolate a statement on the entire nation, because it makes certain people feel insightful and intellectual to criticize the nation they're living in in a contrarian fashion. Left-wingers on sites like ThinkProgress and Alternet have been pushing the story as proof of how "conservative government" does things, ignoring the fact that the "subscription fee" is essentially the same thing as a tax you can opt out of at your own risk.
If you don't pay, if you can't pay, you will not get services
America's privatized hospitals don't turn people away from the E.R. They treat them and bill them later. This story should be a criticism of the local government for not doing that. There's really no story here except that there should probably be a policy of billing people if they request service but haven't paid yet.
We have turned into the Randian utopia of rugged individualists who have given up on treating each other as human beings.
Your nickname is accurate, because this has nothing to do with Ayn Rand. The fact nobody took up the guy's offer to pay means there's a lack of a free market and a government monopoly on fire protection, a distinctly anti-libertarian situation.
We treat each other like consumers.
This is so corny. You even double-spaced it for dramatic effect. You may as well have ended the sentence with "maaaan."
It's sad, and it's one of the things I had hoped the Obama era would overcome. Unfortunately, it seems like the problem has only been exacerbated.
Governments are the most corrupt and clumsy organizations in the world. If you believed big government is miraculously problem-free compared to free markets, you probably deserve the lesson that the Obama era is teaching you.
Slashdot Mirror
Obama's party has the supermajority in the government. There's nothing stopping him from getting things done except his party's own ineptitude. As for socialism, if you don't see how the government forcing everyone to pay for health insurance isn't an intrusion of government into our personal lives, nothing will convince you.
I like how his administration has pledged to enforce drug laws in California to fight the movement to legalize marijuana, but it is not willing to enforce immigration laws in Arizona. Pheonix is statistically the kidnapping capital of the nation thanks to Mexican drug cartels crossing the border, but heaven forbid we offend a Hispanic voter somewhere by daring to suggest that immigrants come into to the U.S. legally.
I'm pretty sure Obama has her beat after buying two television channels to campaign on.
I remember in 2008 when multiple major newspapers referred to Obama as a "Democratic rock star" or a "rising rock star of the Democratic Party." It was all in the span of a month, and all equally embarrassing. You may not have heard his followers call him a messiah, but they most certainly treated him like one. Hope and change!
That quote is as exaggerated as Al Gore supposedly claiming to have invented the internet. Palin said there was an island in Alaska from which you could see Russian land, which is true.
Because of the foreshortening technique used to make the Hobbit actors shorter than everyone else, I doubt there won't be a ton of postprocessing.
Yeah, Jackson sure proved how much he cared about the source material. I'm sure Tolkien fans loved seeing Gimli rolling down a hill for comic relief, Aragorn's life-saving horse, and Galadriel the Incredible Hulk.
Del Toro prefers animatronics because CGI doesn't look real enough for creature footage. You probably would have gotten a more authentic film from him than "pan the camera around everything" Jackson. A lot of the outdoor scenery in the LOTR films was pretty bland and ordinary-looking compared to the version of Middle-Earth in the book, which was alive, conscious, and menacing. In the book, Saruman didn't try to take down the mountain to stop the fellowship--the mountain itself did. That kind of ominous threat from the world around them would have come through in a Del Toro version. It would have been surreal and fantastical instead of just static footage of New Zealand plains.
Don't worry, Peter Jackson wants to make it two films, with the first film being the Hobbit we know and the second film being an entirely brand new piece of fiction not written by Tolkien. I'm sure it'll be chock full of bullshit that looks cool.
First off, nerds already wear glasses, so wearing glasses over glasses is awkward. Second, 3D television sales have been a disaster, so it's a pointless technology that only works well on a gigantic screen and not a standard sized television. Third, people mock 3D because they see it exactly for what it is--a desperate gimmick for theaters trying to compete with technology in the home as well as an excuse to charge extra for ticket prices, which was the primary reason Avatar became the highest grossing film.
People aren't "against emerging technologies." It's not even a new technology. People are against cheesy gimmicks. You cite a videogame as an example for 3D, which already shows you how gimmicky it is and how it places emphasis on visuals, not storytelling. It may be great for Left 4 Dead, but for a two hour movie trying to tell a story?
3D fads in film have come and gone several times before. It's not some new trend. They had this shit in the 1950s with the old red and blue glasses.
From Doom to Quake 3, in fact.
Huh? There are absolutely signs. Java's sudden popularity in the 90s was a sign. People learning languages like Ruby, C#, and Objective-C is a sign. Web development languages are a sign.
Your argument is like claiming Windows is awesome because it's still the most-used operating system. And calling Objective-C a fad of the day is amusing considering it's as old as C++.
When was this written, 1978? "Portable computers" are called laptops or netbooks.
Your problem is that you don't explain what's bad about it being a walled garden from a confident company. That strict control has made it the best mobile phone experience available. Idealism often has little to do with realism or practicality. Most people have lives and don't care about ideology. They just want it to work, and the iPhone does.
P.S. Next time--and there will be one--I suggest not inserting unnecessary line breaks in the word processor you used to type your post (a situation which is itself hilariously pathetic).
Next.
Logical common sense dictates that you're MrHanky. You lost the argument, so you have to post anonymously now as a sockpuppet. With no other counterargument, your only tact now is to go the tired psychology route, which will falter as your last post did.
I already cited where in your post you did, in fact, imply that Google's security team was to be trusted. You got called out on this and were completely embarrassed by it, leading to your current predicament.
Again, your words have already been cited, and you've also gotten confused, as you apparently believe that citing your own post isn't a good enough citation of your own post. Mind-boggling. Clearly, your utter decimation here has left you in such a jumbled state that you're just throwing out any mindless distraction you can think of in an attempt to try to make everyone forget that you got called out on your double-standard. Unfortunately for you, it won't work.
You can declare the reason for something if you want, but it doesn't make it true or remove that fact that you criticized people for trusting Apple security team while implying Google's security team was someone to trust. You've been backed into a corner and forced into lamely claiming that I'm "raging impotently" simply because I'm dismantling every one of your troll posts.
Having lost the argument, and seeing now that I'm far better at this than you are, your only recourse is to go the tired "detached narrative" routine, describing everything that's going on as if you're some third-party who's not involved, removing yourself from the position of defeat. I'm afraid that you're quite firmly in the loser's bracket here, MrHanky. Let this serve as a lesson to you in the future not to argue with your betters.
It's a biological fact that males and females behave certain ways and are attracted to certain things across all cultures. We know how male and female brains work differently from each other.
What evidence to the contrary? There are certain gender archetypes that span all cultures. Specific gender roles are very much proven to be innate.
That's not really accurate. In Japan, a prettyboy is considered pretty much what a prettyboy is considered here, an effeminate guy with the face of a model who 12-year-old teenyboppers love. Granted, there is a little more history behind the archetype in their culture, but their culture is also older than ours. Muscular bodybuilders hanging out with each other in speedos is a gay stereotype here, too.
American and Japanese cultures aren't that different. Most of the weird ideas make sense when you find out there's historical context behind it (e.g., Mario's Tanooki Suit is bizarre until you read that a tanuki is a Japanese raccoon that was often a shapeshifter in folklore). I'm sure someone not familiar with European mythological archetypes would find elements of Lord of the Rings strange and arbitrary.
There has to be punishment for failure, though. WotLK removed all difficulty in questing, and entire tiers of content were skippable. For months, the end-game content was a single room with bosses who come to you. There wasn't even a reason to be in a guild anymore. You could get end-game gear tokens from random 5-mans.
The lack of challenge was a real problem. Cataclysm is revamping nearly everything and introducing difficult questing and heroic dungeons again as a reaction to WotLK's total lack of difficulty.
Of course you're MrHanky. The fact that you're anonymously tracking my comments is bizarre and proof that I utterly destroyed your absurd arguments. You are desperate to dance around the fact that you:
1.) Criticized people for trusting Apple's security team.
2.) Cited Google's security team as something to trust.
You got called out as a fanboy. This embarrassed you so deeply that you've resorted to posting as an anonymous third person. You've completely run out of steam and have to resort to using tired debate terminology like "strawman arguments," even though what you wrote is as clear as day in your post history.
I won, and it's obvious that it struck a nerve with you because you continue to reply. You will reply again because your only recourse now is to seek the last word.
Next.
The Obama Era is going to change everything!*
* Dramatization. Results may vary.
I already pointed out your double-standard when I originally responded to it. You criticized trust in Apple security while trusting in Google's security. The fact you're posting anonymously now is proof I completely decimated your points, leaving you running with your tail between your legs. Let this serve as a less next time not to argue with someone before thinking through your arguments.
Next.
Unfortunately, the left-wing sites are having a field day with this story and using it as an example of "conservative government" and "Ayn Rand conservativism," completely ignoring that the subscription fee is essentially a voluntary tax and that it's actually an example of a government monopoly on fire protection.
You think that's the problem with the Obama era and not the disastrous rise in the deficit, mishandling of the BP spill, mishandling of Middle-East negotiations, the closed-door passage of healthcare legislation, etc.?
I knew that this story would hit Slashdot. I knew someone would use some local incident in Fulton County to extrapolate a statement on the entire nation, because it makes certain people feel insightful and intellectual to criticize the nation they're living in in a contrarian fashion. Left-wingers on sites like ThinkProgress and Alternet have been pushing the story as proof of how "conservative government" does things, ignoring the fact that the "subscription fee" is essentially the same thing as a tax you can opt out of at your own risk.
America's privatized hospitals don't turn people away from the E.R. They treat them and bill them later. This story should be a criticism of the local government for not doing that. There's really no story here except that there should probably be a policy of billing people if they request service but haven't paid yet.
Your nickname is accurate, because this has nothing to do with Ayn Rand. The fact nobody took up the guy's offer to pay means there's a lack of a free market and a government monopoly on fire protection, a distinctly anti-libertarian situation.
This is so corny. You even double-spaced it for dramatic effect. You may as well have ended the sentence with "maaaan."
Governments are the most corrupt and clumsy organizations in the world. If you believed big government is miraculously problem-free compared to free markets, you probably deserve the lesson that the Obama era is teaching you.