Isn't having a Chief Technology Officer like having a Chief Refrigeration Officer or a Chief Vending Machine Officer?
Yes, by all means, lets create yet another cabinet level position for something that should be, at best, an Undersecretary job. To be fair, all Presidents these days try to make a splash with a constituency by creating a cabinet level post for their interests (Reagan made the head of Veterans Affairs a cabinet level post; it could be handled by an assistant secretary in the DOD). We already have an advisor post for science and technology. IT in particular is no longer anything special... its common and widespread and simply a utility service now, like getting water, power, and telephones. And since any government CTO will almost certainly mainly be a CIO job, it'll be like creating a cabinet position for a utility service.... Secretary of janitorial services... secretary of motor vehicles, etc.
Have you ever seen a modern Presidential staff meeting with all cabinet secretaries present? I'd say we need less top cabinet posts, not more, and we need to make some of the current posts sub-cabinet positions. Fold some of these agencies into larger ones.
At least of modern times, anyway. He was writing "techno-thrillers" before critics coined the term for Tom Clancy... he gave incredibly descriptive narratives about telecom technology in Congo, years before Clancy wrote The Hunt For Red October. Like many great genre authors, he could also write outside his genre... see Eaters of the Dead and The Great Train Robbery. I was completely unaware of his battle with cancer, and news of his death made an already rotten day worse.
Ok, I'm genuinely surprised at this. Considering how unstable 3X was, I'm shocked that anyone is using it for anything. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see DOS used in embedded systems, but 3X? Lots of people should have been fired a long time ago for going there in the first place.
"The GOP has lost it's way, and every year the party moves to the religious right."
What a crock. The party has been led by the religious right since 1980. You're acting like you woke up one day and found Jerry Falwell had kicked out Nelson Rockefeller yesterday. I don't know what party you've been taking about, but Republican politics has been dominated as much by social issues as economic since Reagan, Schafly, and southerners took it over from the liberal northeasterners in the late 70's. And they've had a pretty good track record of success since then.
You're right in one respect about the party losing it's way... Bush embraced "campaign finance reform", "comprehensive immigration reform", and new spending with the same gusto as Democrats. So did McCain on the first two issues.
Palin may have had a shot in 2012, until Tina Fey and the rest of the cast of Saturday Night Live destroyed her political career.
Now she will always be linked to the SNL skits and not taken seriously. I would be surprised to see her make national headlines again. I don't know Alaskan politics, so it would be interesting to see if she gets re-elected up there easily or not.
People said the same things about Ronald Reagan. He was always portrayed as being stupid in the press. He failed in two prior attempts (68 and 76) to get the nomination before he succeeded in 80.
The only people that take Tina Fey's impersonation of Palin as a real model are people that wouldn't vote for Palin anyway. The fact is that Palin has a big future in politics. Romney spent millions of his own money and actually lost support. Same for Guiliani. Palin attracts huge crowds wherever she goes. You can't buy that. Write her off if you wish. More fool you.
"Last year, you spent $1, 975 per-capita on medicare and medicaid. A number of countries provide universal healthcare for less than this."
And if people were just items on a conveyor belt judged solely on efficiency, you'd have a great argument.
That lower cost also means things like rationing, lower levels of physician and nurse staffing, longer (sometimes much longer) waits for critical care, and in some cases, outright denial of treatment.
It would also mean a huge blow to drug development. Making new medicines is an expensive process, and if you take away the profit motive, you're pretty much stuck with hoping that university labs can find all your new breakthroughs. There's a reason most new breakthrough drugs are developed in the US. You can make money here. Even drug companies that do have some kind of universal care in their home countries do a great deal of their research and new drug sales in the US.
Efficiency as a judge is a double edged sword. Taken to it's logical extent, it means that at some point, you start cutting the really sick and the elderly off from the system, and basically tell them that they have to die for the greater good. Even if that's not an outright policy, it's often a result of socialized medicine. Don't think so? How many Canadians and Britons die waiting for major surgeries that are rationed because of national health system budgets?
If you get a major disease, treatment without insurance may very well bankrupt you in this country, but at least you'll get to live. You can always make money back. Once you die, that's it. I'll start taking the virtues of nationalized medicine in a better light when Canadians quit coming to this country for surgery because the waiting list in their home country will literally kill them.
If nationalized care is so great, why is Europe moving to privatize more, not less of their health care systems?
"Or, like, going to the post office and waiting often for minutes in short lines with government workers who are helpful and fri... wait, that wouldn't back up your example."
Yes, it does, only in ways you didn't think of. The USPS is run more like a corporation than a government bureaucracy now. It's easier to fire a USPS employee than it is to fire drone in another federal agency. And the USPS has to compete with other private firms, like FedEx and UPS. So it keeps them on their toes. They're also governed like a corporation, with a board of directors, and an Executive that basically has all the powers of a CEO. They heavily subcontract out work to non-government third parties to reduce costs.
The key here is competition. The Post Office has it, and thus treats people like valuable customers than can be lost. The DMV doesn't. Where else are you going to go to get a drivers license?
"Oh yeah, Wal-mart."
But Wal Mart is a perfect example of markets. Their motto is "low prices, always". You're making a choice when you go to a Wal Mart to forsake other things... better service, for example... in exchange for the lowest price possible. But you have a choice. You can choose to take your money to other places... Target, Circuit City, Sears, JC Penney, Macy's... where you have the choice to spend more money and get better service.
Would it be so bad if the government were able to do nothing?
No, it would be totally awesome if the government wasn't able to do anything. I mean, look at Hurricane Katrina. That was so awesome when the government failed to prevent/prepare for/respond to that disaster. I just get warm fuzzies inside every time I think about it.
So the government can prevent hurricanes? People choose to live in a sinking bowl of mud with no bedrock and water on three sides of the city, and it's the governments fault? It's the governments fault when those people didn't leave when they were warned that, hey, there's a fscking hurricane coming, get out of Dodge. That's the government's fault?
I know what you mean. I get those same warm fuzzies when I realize people like you vote.
"The 20+ years of neoconservative leadership has bankrupted the Republican party of its core conservative platform, and the pandering to the religious fundamentalists has turned off the moderates of the party."
I'm so tired of hearing this libertarian crap. Look, if you don't like the social conservatives, then go join Bob Barr. Because the so-called "neo-cons" and religious conservatives are not going away. They still make up a huge chunk of the population. And stop it with the "core conservative platform", because it's pretty obvious that you have no idea what that is. Look at the word Conservative. The core word is "conserve". It's always included both political and social values worth conserving.
The party of Rockefeller has been dead for 40 years, and when it was alive, it was getting its ass kicked. I'll never understand people that claim to be Republican complaining about "those church freaks", when social conservatives have been the engine of GOP success. Barry Goldwater didn't go fully Libertarian until old age. When he was running for office, he ran on just as many social issues as the modern GOP does. Since the 60's, social issues have always been a core component of GOP politics. One of the things that's helped the Democrats tremendously is that they've stopped pushing away religious voters, openly embracing them. Barack Obama came out against gay marriage and preached about the need for personal responsibility. You never would have heard Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis go anywhere near those positions. So quit pretending that social issues don't matter in elections. What you're talking about is expelling the base of the party, it's largest and most dedicated core. That is, to put it mildly, stupid. It sounds to me like you'd be happier in the Libertarian Party or Democratic Party anyway.
So cease with the "we need to be more moderate" stuff. This same lie gets trotted out every four years; the key to greater Republican success is to act more like Democrats. John McCain has reached across the aisle and partnered with Democrats on so many things, he was actually hated by his own base at one time. How much did that help him today? By your reasoning, Barack Obama should be losing in a landslide, and every Democrat would be packing their bags today. Barney Frank and John Kerry certainly aren't preaching moderation. They're talking about massive military cuts and a second New Deal. Doesn't seem to be hurting the Democrats any, does it?
The fact is that the GOP could have raised George Washington from the grave and ran him today, and still he would probably lose. There's a perfect storm working against the GOP this election, 90% from economics. People aren't even paying attention to details... they rarely do in big elections... all they know is that they see things are bad, and the guy in the White House is a Republican, so that means it's time for a Democrat. I have no doubt that if Democratic policies start hurting them, voters will start the pendulum swinging in the other direction. But even with that factor, you still need a large, dedicated base to win elections.
"It's the same old story that we've seen forever. If a resource is essentially free and limitless, you can only make it commercially viable by restricting it's supply by some means. Music, Water, Electricity, Freedom, you name it. The less it's available, the more it costs you. Information is no different."
Except that none of those things are free and limitless. Music is work, made by people. Water is not only not free, it's downright scarce in many areas, especially when you consider that it costs a lot of money to make water usuable for humans to consume... or do you drink straight from mud puddles or the ocean?
Last I checked, it cost money to produce electricity at plants... infrastructure costs, fuel to run the plants, people to operate them.
Even as cliched as it sounds, Freedom isn't free. Eliminate your military and your police force, and get back with me in one year and tell me how free you feel when criminals start abusing the populace and foreign powers start setting up shop wherever they like in your territories.
Like everything else on your list, Internet usage wouldn't exist without work, resources, and infrastructure. All those things cost money.
True. But they won't meter all traffic the same way. Movies on "ATT Movies" won't count against the tier. They will partner with lets say Amazon for unmetered music downloads.
And the problem with that is... ?
Shouldn't a company be allowed to discount services on their own networks as incentive to gain customers? As long as they're not blocking the traffic of competitors, and as long as their policy for outside traffic caps is consistent, so?
On my Altel cell plan, I can talk to a number of other Altel customers without taking a hit on my minutes. How is that any different from an ISP going "OK, our standard plan is 250 GB of traffic a month, but if you download movies from us, we don't count it against your limit"? As long as they're not blocking the traffic of competitors and treating all their traffic the same way (IE, their competitors traffic all counts equally against your 250 GB limit), then again, so?
In all practicality,, this is the end of net-neutrality.
First of all, net neutrality is an illusion, and always has been. As long as it costs money to use the Internet, there's going to be restrictions of some kind. Was it a violation of "net neutrality" when early dialup plans limited the amount of time you could surf?
Everyone knows that the biggest users of bandwidth are a few people that are constantly downloading things like movies, all day long. When guys like that start affecting my use of the Internet, then to hell with net neutrality if it means that I'm paying full price for my plan while they slow the network down for everyone else.
I have no problems whatsoever with a pay-per-use plan for the Internet. People that use more bandwidth should pay more for their service. We meter electricity. We meter water. We meter some aspect of telephone usage. Why shouldn't Internet use be metered? It costs money to use this service. As long as it isn't, as long as everyone has a flat rate plan with unlimited usage, the reality is that most people are subsidizing the usage of a few bandwidth hogs.
You'd be surprised how honest people can be when their job doesn't rely on what the average dimwit thinks.
... which is an excellent argument against electing judges.
I disagree, because the mindset of an upper-chamber Lord/Senator and the mindset of Judges are totally different. Even with our current system, Senators tend to be more concerned with getting things passed by consensus than Judges. Judges tend to be motivated by ideology more (on both sides). Witness the near-century long struggle in America between strict-constructionists and "Living Constitution" adherents.
In the US Senate, even Ted Kennedy or John McCain will eagerly cross the aisle to get something they deem important done. In the US Supreme Court, eh, not so much. It was not for nothing that Oliver Wendell Holmes described SCOTUS as "nine scorpions in a bottle".
I've come to the conclusion that A) perhaps electing Senators was a mistake... we simply turned them into Congressmen with longer terms, and B) perhaps court appointments, if not elected, should perhaps be limited. Set the terms to 10 years, perhaps. Because you're never going to know what you'll get in a judge, and some really do have a "God in black robes" mindset once they're in place, and essentially, untouchable. I think there were very few weaknesses in the design of the Constitution, but I think untouchable, lifetime judicial appointments may have been one of them. While there are checks and balances on the power of Congress and the Presidency, there aren't really on the power of federal judges, especially SCOTUS. Once SCOTUS rules on something... even if 90 percent of Americans absolutely disagree... that's it, unless you care to remove them by force. I don't know how the power of the SCOTUS should be balanced (perhaps a 3/4ths vote of Congress to override a ruling?), but I do think we should consider some kind of check.
Look, if you want to use something like a 500mhz CPU, you're going to have to go ultralight. I use an older desktop on these older boxes... usually Windowmaker in my case, which is easy for me because despite being older, it looks like Unix, and not some Windows or OS X knockoff, like GNOME or KDE. If I wanted Windows on the box, I'd run Windows on the box.
Anyway, if you're using something like Seamonkey for your broswer, and some older, lightweight X apps, you can run an old box quickly and productively. Even updated apps like the GIMP run fine on such hardware. What kills you are things like Firefox and OpenOffice (OO, in particular, is a resource hog extraordinaire).
I see Windows ME wasn't on that list. There was no rehashing of Microsoft Bob. That's because you can't polish a turd. And many, many people think Vista is a very big turd.
"Computers are getting faster MUCH MUCH more quickly than operating systems are getting slower."
That's not true anymore. With the end of higher clock speeds, we've gone to multiple cores to split up workloads in an effort to find someway to get increasing performance. But it's not the same as actually having a higher clock speed. I know we tended to overrate clock speed in the past, but it does matter, even if we find ways to do more work per clock cycle. In the death of Moore's Law, we've hit a wall that we can't break through, and even going over it is tougher than we thought. Even with the advance of technology and the size of modern software codebases, a 2 gig minimum of ram just for bearable usage is a disgrace.
If others are whining about the good ole' days, you sir, are making excuses for the new ones.
"These reports don't make future versions look that hopeful either."
I was afraid of this... that 7 would just be Vista with some new pretties tacked on. If 7 still takes a minimum of 2 gigs of ram just to make average functions bearable, then it's still shitty software.
I couldn't even play my favorite game (Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory) on Vista until Microsoft came out with some patches. And I have a lot of old PC games that I like. Maybe I'll just move completely to the Mac ( I use one at work) and dual boot it under XP for my games. I'm simply not going to reward Microsoft for not giving me what I want out of an OS.
I have my complaints about Apple too... ugly and overpriced hardware, that dreary grey-metallic theme... but Apple continually improves the performance of their software. Everyone knows by now about how Apple has made their operating systems faster, even on older supported hardware. And that's what counts.
Has Microsoft ever... ever made an operating system that was faster than a previous version? Hmm? If that's too hard, then try this... have they even come up with one that wasn't noticeably slower on similar hardware?
Even Vista basic needs 512 mb ram at minimum for tolerable usage.
Windows 2000 was fast with half that memory, and it did nearly everything we wanted. What does Vista or 7 do that Windows 2000 does not that the public wants? Do we really believe that consumers were crying out for Aero Glass?
It's kind of like praising No Child Left Behind. Something like it was necessary, but did we have to have the result?
In an economy where knowledge, software, and creative work is paid for, you do have to have some legal protection for those works. Despite what some may wish, this isn't a Brave GNU World where everything is free as in give it all away. People want paychecks.
That said, what we desperately need is a system that both protects the copyright of these works, and allows common sense fair use for the end customer. We don't have that with a Wild West kind of no-copyright system, and we don't have that with the DMCA.
I think this is all moot, as Barney Frank recently stated he wanted huge budget cuts at the Pentagon, a 25 percent across the board cut. "We don't need all those fancy new weapons", Mr Frank said.
With that kind of attitude in the coming adminstration and Congress, what makes you think something like a new moon shot is going to survive? The attitude is going to be "we've been to the moon... been there, done that". Congress and a President Obama are likely going to see manned spaceflight... especially expensive projects like moonshots... as a waste of money better spent elsewhere.
Like it or not, get ready for the return of "better, faster, cheaper". As before, only the last two will really be true. But manned spaceflight outside of ISS support missions is about to take a long hiatus.
"If you really want performance, run FreeDOS. Otherwise, shut up and get used to progress."
Jeez you're an idiot. I wouldn't have posted that under a registered nick either.
So people should just settle for bloat simply because of the advance of technology? Apple manages to make OS X faster than older versions. Other Linux distros do. Bad software isn't "progress".
"There is no fundamental reason why a desk top PC is going to be unreliable. Poor design and quality control of the OS is the cause."
You could make that argument about the Windows 3X-9X series, but not about DOS and the NT based operating systems. DOS was always pretty stable for me (DOS was certainly more stable than the graphical Apple OS's that were being sold at the time... and we don't equate Apple with bad software quality... why?), and while NT 4 was an improvement, Win2K and XP were very stable operating systems.
One thing that no one really acknowledges is that even with the newer NT based systems, Windows isn't going to be quite as stable as, say, OS X, because the hardware available to Windows is almost unlimited, while Apple systems have very few devices to have stable drivers for. With such a high number of devices available, Microsoft had to rely on the manufacturers for drivers, and those drivers didn't always mesh well with the OS. This is why when you install a driver on XP or Vista, and it hasn't been vetted by Microsoft, you get a message that essentially tells you to install at your own risk.
Once upon a time, my Linux boxes were far and away more stable than the 9X boxes I had. But if I've got good drivers on an XP box now, my Mac and my Linux box isn't any more stable or reliable.
"No, it's because that's a fucking ridiculous idea. Unless you have someone actually watching the entire length of that fence 24/7, it may as well not be there. If you've got someone watching the fence 24/7, why do you need the fence?"
That's ridiculous. That's like saying "why build walls for prisons? If guards are watching they aren't going anywhere".
You don't have to be there to watch the fence area. You can watch remotely, and the presence of a physical barrier can give you time to get there before an intruder can get through. This is the basic principle of any kind of secured area.
And I agree with one of the parent posters that most objections to the fence (or of border security of any kind) is usually on some political basis... libertarians and their sovereignty-be-damned "free flow of people" ideas, or other groups that simply don't believe that nations have the right (and duty) to protect their borders.
His post may have been, but your hysterical defense of them was almost as bad. They're a political advocacy group, not angels. And they're very choosy about who's civil liberties they fight for. It's pretty much been ACLU policy that the 2nd Amendment doesn't exist except as the ridiculous "collective right" theory.
I'm as much of a gadget freak as anyone, but I'm old school about books. I like the tactile pleasure of actually having pages in my hand. I spend enough damned time on electronic screens during the day. I want to relax when I read a book. I couldn't stand to read anything but short texts on an electronic device. Give me a musty old library or a book store any day.
I usually turn to O'Reilly for getting started with a new language, but oddly they don't have a guide to COBOL (similar situation with LISP, which I'd love to master). How do people learn COBOL? I notice there's a COBOL for Dummies, but I honestly doubt it's a rigorous intro.
If that's what you want, your only real option are college textbooks. Back in college, I used an older version of this book, by the Sterns.
"So, no, libertarians did NOT want the Fed to lower interest rates."
First, I am not a Libertarian; I'm a Republican, but I've gotta defend you here. You're right. Just an hour down the road from me at Auburn University sits the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, a think tank for the Austrian School, and home of Lew Rockwell. Outside of the Daily Kos, you won't find anyone that hates George Bush more. So both his "anti-state" and his "free-market" ideology cred is solid. And this guy has been screaming for years about the Fed policy, as has the rest of the Mises Institute, as have most Libertarians. They're pretty consistent on the "no fiat money" stand, and thought the whole interest rate philosophy was insane. Ron Paul has made great hay lately about "the day the Austrian School predicted has arrived".
Slashdot Mirror
Isn't having a Chief Technology Officer like having a Chief Refrigeration Officer or a Chief Vending Machine Officer?
Yes, by all means, lets create yet another cabinet level position for something that should be, at best, an Undersecretary job. To be fair, all Presidents these days try to make a splash with a constituency by creating a cabinet level post for their interests (Reagan made the head of Veterans Affairs a cabinet level post; it could be handled by an assistant secretary in the DOD). We already have an advisor post for science and technology. IT in particular is no longer anything special... its common and widespread and simply a utility service now, like getting water, power, and telephones. And since any government CTO will almost certainly mainly be a CIO job, it'll be like creating a cabinet position for a utility service.... Secretary of janitorial services... secretary of motor vehicles, etc.
Have you ever seen a modern Presidential staff meeting with all cabinet secretaries present? I'd say we need less top cabinet posts, not more, and we need to make some of the current posts sub-cabinet positions. Fold some of these agencies into larger ones.
At least of modern times, anyway. He was writing "techno-thrillers" before critics coined the term for Tom Clancy... he gave incredibly descriptive narratives about telecom technology in Congo, years before Clancy wrote The Hunt For Red October. Like many great genre authors, he could also write outside his genre... see Eaters of the Dead and The Great Train Robbery. I was completely unaware of his battle with cancer, and news of his death made an already rotten day worse.
Ok, I'm genuinely surprised at this. Considering how unstable 3X was, I'm shocked that anyone is using it for anything. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see DOS used in embedded systems, but 3X? Lots of people should have been fired a long time ago for going there in the first place.
"The GOP has lost it's way, and every year the party moves to the religious right."
What a crock. The party has been led by the religious right since 1980. You're acting like you woke up one day and found Jerry Falwell had kicked out Nelson Rockefeller yesterday. I don't know what party you've been taking about, but Republican politics has been dominated as much by social issues as economic since Reagan, Schafly, and southerners took it over from the liberal northeasterners in the late 70's. And they've had a pretty good track record of success since then.
You're right in one respect about the party losing it's way... Bush embraced "campaign finance reform", "comprehensive immigration reform", and new spending with the same gusto as Democrats. So did McCain on the first two issues.
Palin may have had a shot in 2012, until Tina Fey and the rest of the cast of Saturday Night Live destroyed her political career.
Now she will always be linked to the SNL skits and not taken seriously. I would be surprised to see her make national headlines again. I don't know Alaskan politics, so it would be interesting to see if she gets re-elected up there easily or not.
People said the same things about Ronald Reagan. He was always portrayed as being stupid in the press. He failed in two prior attempts (68 and 76) to get the nomination before he succeeded in 80.
The only people that take Tina Fey's impersonation of Palin as a real model are people that wouldn't vote for Palin anyway. The fact is that Palin has a big future in politics. Romney spent millions of his own money and actually lost support. Same for Guiliani. Palin attracts huge crowds wherever she goes. You can't buy that. Write her off if you wish. More fool you.
"Last year, you spent $1, 975 per-capita on medicare and medicaid. A number of countries provide universal healthcare for less than this."
And if people were just items on a conveyor belt judged solely on efficiency, you'd have a great argument.
That lower cost also means things like rationing, lower levels of physician and nurse staffing, longer (sometimes much longer) waits for critical care, and in some cases, outright denial of treatment.
It would also mean a huge blow to drug development. Making new medicines is an expensive process, and if you take away the profit motive, you're pretty much stuck with hoping that university labs can find all your new breakthroughs. There's a reason most new breakthrough drugs are developed in the US. You can make money here. Even drug companies that do have some kind of universal care in their home countries do a great deal of their research and new drug sales in the US.
Efficiency as a judge is a double edged sword. Taken to it's logical extent, it means that at some point, you start cutting the really sick and the elderly off from the system, and basically tell them that they have to die for the greater good. Even if that's not an outright policy, it's often a result of socialized medicine. Don't think so? How many Canadians and Britons die waiting for major surgeries that are rationed because of national health system budgets?
If you get a major disease, treatment without insurance may very well bankrupt you in this country, but at least you'll get to live. You can always make money back. Once you die, that's it. I'll start taking the virtues of nationalized medicine in a better light when Canadians quit coming to this country for surgery because the waiting list in their home country will literally kill them.
If nationalized care is so great, why is Europe moving to privatize more, not less of their health care systems?
"Or, like, going to the post office and waiting often for minutes in short lines with government workers who are helpful and fri... wait, that wouldn't back up your example."
Yes, it does, only in ways you didn't think of. The USPS is run more like a corporation than a government bureaucracy now. It's easier to fire a USPS employee than it is to fire drone in another federal agency. And the USPS has to compete with other private firms, like FedEx and UPS. So it keeps them on their toes. They're also governed like a corporation, with a board of directors, and an Executive that basically has all the powers of a CEO. They heavily subcontract out work to non-government third parties to reduce costs.
The key here is competition. The Post Office has it, and thus treats people like valuable customers than can be lost. The DMV doesn't. Where else are you going to go to get a drivers license?
"Oh yeah, Wal-mart."
But Wal Mart is a perfect example of markets. Their motto is "low prices, always". You're making a choice when you go to a Wal Mart to forsake other things... better service, for example... in exchange for the lowest price possible. But you have a choice. You can choose to take your money to other places... Target, Circuit City, Sears, JC Penney, Macy's... where you have the choice to spend more money and get better service.
Would it be so bad if the government were able to do nothing?
No, it would be totally awesome if the government wasn't able to do anything. I mean, look at Hurricane Katrina. That was so awesome when the government failed to prevent/prepare for/respond to that disaster. I just get warm fuzzies inside every time I think about it.
So the government can prevent hurricanes? People choose to live in a sinking bowl of mud with no bedrock and water on three sides of the city, and it's the governments fault? It's the governments fault when those people didn't leave when they were warned that, hey, there's a fscking hurricane coming, get out of Dodge. That's the government's fault?
I know what you mean. I get those same warm fuzzies when I realize people like you vote.
"The 20+ years of neoconservative leadership has bankrupted the Republican party of its core conservative platform, and the pandering to the religious fundamentalists has turned off the moderates of the party."
I'm so tired of hearing this libertarian crap. Look, if you don't like the social conservatives, then go join Bob Barr. Because the so-called "neo-cons" and religious conservatives are not going away. They still make up a huge chunk of the population. And stop it with the "core conservative platform", because it's pretty obvious that you have no idea what that is. Look at the word Conservative. The core word is "conserve". It's always included both political and social values worth conserving.
The party of Rockefeller has been dead for 40 years, and when it was alive, it was getting its ass kicked. I'll never understand people that claim to be Republican complaining about "those church freaks", when social conservatives have been the engine of GOP success. Barry Goldwater didn't go fully Libertarian until old age. When he was running for office, he ran on just as many social issues as the modern GOP does. Since the 60's, social issues have always been a core component of GOP politics. One of the things that's helped the Democrats tremendously is that they've stopped pushing away religious voters, openly embracing them. Barack Obama came out against gay marriage and preached about the need for personal responsibility. You never would have heard Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis go anywhere near those positions. So quit pretending that social issues don't matter in elections. What you're talking about is expelling the base of the party, it's largest and most dedicated core. That is, to put it mildly, stupid. It sounds to me like you'd be happier in the Libertarian Party or Democratic Party anyway.
So cease with the "we need to be more moderate" stuff. This same lie gets trotted out every four years; the key to greater Republican success is to act more like Democrats. John McCain has reached across the aisle and partnered with Democrats on so many things, he was actually hated by his own base at one time. How much did that help him today? By your reasoning, Barack Obama should be losing in a landslide, and every Democrat would be packing their bags today. Barney Frank and John Kerry certainly aren't preaching moderation. They're talking about massive military cuts and a second New Deal. Doesn't seem to be hurting the Democrats any, does it?
The fact is that the GOP could have raised George Washington from the grave and ran him today, and still he would probably lose. There's a perfect storm working against the GOP this election, 90% from economics. People aren't even paying attention to details... they rarely do in big elections... all they know is that they see things are bad, and the guy in the White House is a Republican, so that means it's time for a Democrat. I have no doubt that if Democratic policies start hurting them, voters will start the pendulum swinging in the other direction. But even with that factor, you still need a large, dedicated base to win elections.
"It's the same old story that we've seen forever. If a resource is essentially free and limitless, you can only make it commercially viable by restricting it's supply by some means. Music, Water, Electricity, Freedom, you name it. The less it's available, the more it costs you. Information is no different."
Except that none of those things are free and limitless. Music is work, made by people. Water is not only not free, it's downright scarce in many areas, especially when you consider that it costs a lot of money to make water usuable for humans to consume... or do you drink straight from mud puddles or the ocean?
Last I checked, it cost money to produce electricity at plants... infrastructure costs, fuel to run the plants, people to operate them.
Even as cliched as it sounds, Freedom isn't free. Eliminate your military and your police force, and get back with me in one year and tell me how free you feel when criminals start abusing the populace and foreign powers start setting up shop wherever they like in your territories.
Like everything else on your list, Internet usage wouldn't exist without work, resources, and infrastructure. All those things cost money.
True. But they won't meter all traffic the same way. Movies on "ATT Movies" won't count against the tier. They will partner with lets say Amazon for unmetered music downloads.
And the problem with that is... ?
Shouldn't a company be allowed to discount services on their own networks as incentive to gain customers? As long as they're not blocking the traffic of competitors, and as long as their policy for outside traffic caps is consistent, so?
On my Altel cell plan, I can talk to a number of other Altel customers without taking a hit on my minutes. How is that any different from an ISP going "OK, our standard plan is 250 GB of traffic a month, but if you download movies from us, we don't count it against your limit"? As long as they're not blocking the traffic of competitors and treating all their traffic the same way (IE, their competitors traffic all counts equally against your 250 GB limit), then again, so?
In all practicality,, this is the end of net-neutrality.
First of all, net neutrality is an illusion, and always has been. As long as it costs money to use the Internet, there's going to be restrictions of some kind. Was it a violation of "net neutrality" when early dialup plans limited the amount of time you could surf?
Everyone knows that the biggest users of bandwidth are a few people that are constantly downloading things like movies, all day long. When guys like that start affecting my use of the Internet, then to hell with net neutrality if it means that I'm paying full price for my plan while they slow the network down for everyone else.
I have no problems whatsoever with a pay-per-use plan for the Internet. People that use more bandwidth should pay more for their service. We meter electricity. We meter water. We meter some aspect of telephone usage. Why shouldn't Internet use be metered? It costs money to use this service. As long as it isn't, as long as everyone has a flat rate plan with unlimited usage, the reality is that most people are subsidizing the usage of a few bandwidth hogs.
You'd be surprised how honest people can be when their job doesn't rely on what the average dimwit thinks.
... which is an excellent argument against electing judges.
I disagree, because the mindset of an upper-chamber Lord/Senator and the mindset of Judges are totally different. Even with our current system, Senators tend to be more concerned with getting things passed by consensus than Judges. Judges tend to be motivated by ideology more (on both sides). Witness the near-century long struggle in America between strict-constructionists and "Living Constitution" adherents.
In the US Senate, even Ted Kennedy or John McCain will eagerly cross the aisle to get something they deem important done. In the US Supreme Court, eh, not so much. It was not for nothing that Oliver Wendell Holmes described SCOTUS as "nine scorpions in a bottle".
I've come to the conclusion that A) perhaps electing Senators was a mistake... we simply turned them into Congressmen with longer terms, and B) perhaps court appointments, if not elected, should perhaps be limited. Set the terms to 10 years, perhaps. Because you're never going to know what you'll get in a judge, and some really do have a "God in black robes" mindset once they're in place, and essentially, untouchable. I think there were very few weaknesses in the design of the Constitution, but I think untouchable, lifetime judicial appointments may have been one of them. While there are checks and balances on the power of Congress and the Presidency, there aren't really on the power of federal judges, especially SCOTUS. Once SCOTUS rules on something... even if 90 percent of Americans absolutely disagree... that's it, unless you care to remove them by force. I don't know how the power of the SCOTUS should be balanced (perhaps a 3/4ths vote of Congress to override a ruling?), but I do think we should consider some kind of check.
Look, if you want to use something like a 500mhz CPU, you're going to have to go ultralight. I use an older desktop on these older boxes... usually Windowmaker in my case, which is easy for me because despite being older, it looks like Unix, and not some Windows or OS X knockoff, like GNOME or KDE. If I wanted Windows on the box, I'd run Windows on the box.
Anyway, if you're using something like Seamonkey for your broswer, and some older, lightweight X apps, you can run an old box quickly and productively. Even updated apps like the GIMP run fine on such hardware. What kills you are things like Firefox and OpenOffice (OO, in particular, is a resource hog extraordinaire).
Windows 3 to 3.1
Win 95 to Win 98
Win 2000 to Win XP
But you don't rehash suckass operating systems.
I see Windows ME wasn't on that list. There was no rehashing of Microsoft Bob. That's because you can't polish a turd. And many, many people think Vista is a very big turd.
"Computers are getting faster MUCH MUCH more quickly than operating systems are getting slower."
That's not true anymore. With the end of higher clock speeds, we've gone to multiple cores to split up workloads in an effort to find someway to get increasing performance. But it's not the same as actually having a higher clock speed. I know we tended to overrate clock speed in the past, but it does matter, even if we find ways to do more work per clock cycle. In the death of Moore's Law, we've hit a wall that we can't break through, and even going over it is tougher than we thought. Even with the advance of technology and the size of modern software codebases, a 2 gig minimum of ram just for bearable usage is a disgrace.
If others are whining about the good ole' days, you sir, are making excuses for the new ones.
"These reports don't make future versions look that hopeful either."
I was afraid of this... that 7 would just be Vista with some new pretties tacked on. If 7 still takes a minimum of 2 gigs of ram just to make average functions bearable, then it's still shitty software.
I couldn't even play my favorite game (Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory) on Vista until Microsoft came out with some patches. And I have a lot of old PC games that I like. Maybe I'll just move completely to the Mac ( I use one at work) and dual boot it under XP for my games. I'm simply not going to reward Microsoft for not giving me what I want out of an OS.
I have my complaints about Apple too... ugly and overpriced hardware, that dreary grey-metallic theme... but Apple continually improves the performance of their software. Everyone knows by now about how Apple has made their operating systems faster, even on older supported hardware. And that's what counts.
Has Microsoft ever... ever made an operating system that was faster than a previous version? Hmm? If that's too hard, then try this... have they even come up with one that wasn't noticeably slower on similar hardware?
Even Vista basic needs 512 mb ram at minimum for tolerable usage.
Windows 2000 was fast with half that memory, and it did nearly everything we wanted. What does Vista or 7 do that Windows 2000 does not that the public wants? Do we really believe that consumers were crying out for Aero Glass?
It's kind of like praising No Child Left Behind. Something like it was necessary, but did we have to have the result?
In an economy where knowledge, software, and creative work is paid for, you do have to have some legal protection for those works. Despite what some may wish, this isn't a Brave GNU World where everything is free as in give it all away. People want paychecks.
That said, what we desperately need is a system that both protects the copyright of these works, and allows common sense fair use for the end customer. We don't have that with a Wild West kind of no-copyright system, and we don't have that with the DMCA.
I think this is all moot, as Barney Frank recently stated he wanted huge budget cuts at the Pentagon, a 25 percent across the board cut. "We don't need all those fancy new weapons", Mr Frank said.
With that kind of attitude in the coming adminstration and Congress, what makes you think something like a new moon shot is going to survive? The attitude is going to be "we've been to the moon... been there, done that". Congress and a President Obama are likely going to see manned spaceflight... especially expensive projects like moonshots... as a waste of money better spent elsewhere.
Like it or not, get ready for the return of "better, faster, cheaper". As before, only the last two will really be true. But manned spaceflight outside of ISS support missions is about to take a long hiatus.
"If you really want performance, run FreeDOS. Otherwise, shut up and get used to progress."
Jeez you're an idiot. I wouldn't have posted that under a registered nick either.
So people should just settle for bloat simply because of the advance of technology? Apple manages to make OS X faster than older versions. Other Linux distros do. Bad software isn't "progress".
"There is no fundamental reason why a desk top PC is going to be unreliable. Poor design and quality control of the OS is the cause."
You could make that argument about the Windows 3X-9X series, but not about DOS and the NT based operating systems. DOS was always pretty stable for me (DOS was certainly more stable than the graphical Apple OS's that were being sold at the time... and we don't equate Apple with bad software quality... why?), and while NT 4 was an improvement, Win2K and XP were very stable operating systems.
One thing that no one really acknowledges is that even with the newer NT based systems, Windows isn't going to be quite as stable as, say, OS X, because the hardware available to Windows is almost unlimited, while Apple systems have very few devices to have stable drivers for. With such a high number of devices available, Microsoft had to rely on the manufacturers for drivers, and those drivers didn't always mesh well with the OS. This is why when you install a driver on XP or Vista, and it hasn't been vetted by Microsoft, you get a message that essentially tells you to install at your own risk.
Once upon a time, my Linux boxes were far and away more stable than the 9X boxes I had. But if I've got good drivers on an XP box now, my Mac and my Linux box isn't any more stable or reliable.
"No, it's because that's a fucking ridiculous idea. Unless you have someone actually watching the entire length of that fence 24/7, it may as well not be there. If you've got someone watching the fence 24/7, why do you need the fence?"
That's ridiculous. That's like saying "why build walls for prisons? If guards are watching they aren't going anywhere".
You don't have to be there to watch the fence area. You can watch remotely, and the presence of a physical barrier can give you time to get there before an intruder can get through. This is the basic principle of any kind of secured area.
And I agree with one of the parent posters that most objections to the fence (or of border security of any kind) is usually on some political basis... libertarians and their sovereignty-be-damned "free flow of people" ideas, or other groups that simply don't believe that nations have the right (and duty) to protect their borders.
That is ridiculous anti-ACLU bullshit.
His post may have been, but your hysterical defense of them was almost as bad. They're a political advocacy group, not angels. And they're very choosy about who's civil liberties they fight for. It's pretty much been ACLU policy that the 2nd Amendment doesn't exist except as the ridiculous "collective right" theory.
I'm as much of a gadget freak as anyone, but I'm old school about books. I like the tactile pleasure of actually having pages in my hand. I spend enough damned time on electronic screens during the day. I want to relax when I read a book. I couldn't stand to read anything but short texts on an electronic device. Give me a musty old library or a book store any day.
I usually turn to O'Reilly for getting started with a new language, but oddly they don't have a guide to COBOL (similar situation with LISP, which I'd love to master). How do people learn COBOL? I notice there's a COBOL for Dummies , but I honestly doubt it's a rigorous intro.
If that's what you want, your only real option are college textbooks. Back in college, I used an older version of this book, by the Sterns.
"So, no, libertarians did NOT want the Fed to lower interest rates."
First, I am not a Libertarian; I'm a Republican, but I've gotta defend you here. You're right. Just an hour down the road from me at Auburn University sits the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, a think tank for the Austrian School, and home of Lew Rockwell. Outside of the Daily Kos, you won't find anyone that hates George Bush more. So both his "anti-state" and his "free-market" ideology cred is solid. And this guy has been screaming for years about the Fed policy, as has the rest of the Mises Institute, as have most Libertarians. They're pretty consistent on the "no fiat money" stand, and thought the whole interest rate philosophy was insane. Ron Paul has made great hay lately about "the day the Austrian School predicted has arrived".