"This is great for a democracy like the UK, but for a Republic like the US, this isn't the best idea."
I swear, if I hear one more person say that "The US isn't a democracy, it's a republic," I'm going to kill somebody.
First off, what you're trying to drive at isn't "the US is a republic" so much as "the US is a federal republic." The "federal" part is how state's rights come into the equation, and also explains how democracy is used in our country (in a decentrallized manner).
Secondly, I'd personally say the US is more democratic than the UK. The election of the US president is far more accessible to the public than the election of the UK's prime minister, members of the upper house of the US legislature are chosen democratically while members of the House of Lords are born into the role, and there's still that monarchy bit.
"This means we are NOT a democracy."
How is it members of the House of Representatives are chosen again? Or the Senate, as of 1913? Hm? And that doesn't even begin to get into questions about our state and local governments. The only way we're not a democracy is if you compare us to a "true" democracy, where there is no legislature and the people vote on laws directly (offering Socrates a drink on the house).
You get the "we're a republic" from the bit of the federal constitution that says the states will have a "republican form of government." But don't forget that those governments have been formed democratically since before there even was a United States (let alone a federal constitution).
"Our Republic was designed to protect the minority (as small as one person) from a crazy majority"
RepublicS. And you're mincing words. The federal constitution was written in such a way to detatch the federal government from the passions of the mob (paraphrasing) while maintaining a decentralized power base (ie. federal). Note that there is no mention of the individual in the original document. The federal constitution has little to say about the role of the individual because that's what state constitutions are for.
"It is only because we have forgotten about the Republic that such unconstitutional programs such as Social Security, Federal Education subsidies and control, and the Welfare State have come into existance (wholly socialist schemes that truly have no place in a free culture)"
At worst they violate the Tenth Amendment, and vaguely at that. The only thing really restricting the way Congress spends its money is the Twenty-Seventh Amendment, which says they can't give themselves pay raises.
"so long as the Supreme Court actually does the job intended, to protect the rights of the people by making sure ALL laws abide by the Constitutional restraints on government."
Where exactly in the federal constitution does it mention the concept of judicial review? Hint: It doesn't. In many ways it's a power the court gave itself in the early Nineteenth Century.
"Unfortunately, the Supreme Court is handled by Socialists and Fascists, not onstitutionalists"
Then complain your democratically elected members of Congress. The ones that the federal constitution grants the power to impeach any and all federal judges. Oh, wait, that's right, you don't believe there's democracy in this country...
"so we would be at great risk of losing the country to both the Socialist left and the Fascist right, both of which feed each other's desires by giving in to bad schemes."
Get off your damned soap box before you embarass yourself any further. You're giving us true political crackpots a bad name.
Except that those questions are now dated. Most 20-somethings today have difficulty answering those questions because they were in their early teens when the game (and the questions) came out.
"The problem (as far as the government was concerned) is that people were running their cars on fish'n'chip oil without paying any fuel tax."
OK, so let me get this straight: The government is unhappy that you're not paying a tax on more environment-fuel, a tax that was supposed to convince you to use more environment-friendly alternatives to begin with.
"Easy. Make it an all or nothing situation. If you're going to spend more than the limit on your own campaign, you campaign may not take donations of any kind. Every expense must be paid for by your campaign. If you take any donation, the limit applies."
Way to guarantee only self-made millionaires will win elections there. If only the rich are allowed to spend more, only the rich will get elected.
"Most multi-millionaire candidates don't *give* money to their campaigns, they just *loan* it."
And how do they explain that one to the FEC? Are they a real bank in and of themselves? Did they subject themselves to a credit check? Is the interest you're giving yourself realistic?
" Then after they get elected, they can worry about paying themselves back."
You go around and ask for donations for the sake of giving yourself more money to pay yourself back (with interest, even) and see how far you get. Especially after the election has come and gone.
It doesn't say "Congress shall make no law except where corporations are concerned," it says "Congress shall make no law." Just because you don't agree with what they're saying doesn't mean they have no right.
"Put a cap on monitary donations to no more than $ 5000.00 total per year to any policitcal campain (Local, Federal, or State). This would force "individuals" to re-think how they donate monies."
This one's counter-productive. All you'd do is give people more incentive to find new and interesting ways to launder their money. In many ways this right here resembles the bill you're against.
"ALL donations regardless of the amounts must appear on the donater's tax returns (any amount over the $ 5000 would be taxed at the maximum % as a penalty)"
Which would restrict political donors only to those people who have both a large donation to make and the time and resources to spend on an accoutant to properly fill out the tax paperwork.
"All donations must appear on the polititians "records" and NOT aggrigrated."
So that even if "the little guy" was willing to deal with all the paperwork of making the donation, the candidate would be less willing to accept such small sums because of the paperwork overhead involved.
"NOTE: Lobbiests could still violage #1 but would be severely limited by #2 and #3."
Just the opposite. The $5000 cap means that anybody who wants to give more will have to donate through a lobbyist PAC. And the paperwork requirement on the part of the donor would make donating to the lobbying PAC all that more tempting because they can handle the paperwork for you.
While we're on the subect, 1, 2 and 4 (so long as the individual donations are over $50 or so) are current federal laws. Even the $5000 cap you mention is spot on (to the point where I suspect you were quoting from FEC publications). Corporation, labor unions and other such groups cannot donate directly, and there's quite a bit of paperwork involved in receiving donations (federal law requires you to name a treasurer to manage all that).
The problem, in my opinion, is the placement of donation caps to begin with. All you are doing is funneling money through the lobbying groups and the two major political parties, money that they wouldn't be handling otherwise. This pretty much gives them much more clout with the candidates than they'd have otherwise. I believe the solution is to maintain public disclosure of all donors and donations while eliminating the caps. It would take power away from the lobbyists and the parties (who would no longer function as necesary middle-men) while making it easier to spot illegitimate contributions, because why would you try to donate through a third party if you don't have to?
"Because for this to have any effect whatsoever it would have to be done by a significant percentage of the population."
Ah yes, the classic "Nobody else is doing it, so why should I?" argument. Guess what: A boycott has to start somewhere. And it's also nice to take responsibility for your own actions every once in a while.
"How will you be able to spread the word about this boycott?"
Through free or cheap mediums, such as word-of-mouth or the internet.
"Do you think you could ever get more than a modicum of people to join in?"
There's only one way to find out.
"Man, hell no! "Law & Order" is on tonight!"
And right there is the answer to the original poster's question of "Are we too addicted to their drug to do this?"
"Think about this: There hasn't been an effective consumer boycotts since the 1980's."
I didn't realize that twenty years was "A Long Time." But that's all moot. A recent piece on NPR talked about how French importers in the US have seen around 40% of their business vanish overnight. Sounds like a boycott to me...
"Why do you think that is?"
It's happening, it's just that you're not paying any attention. The answer lies within.
"And do you think you could fight the backlash of propaganda from the media were this to ever even to show the smallest signs of gaining traction?"
That would work in your favor, putting you in the role of David against Goliath. Everybody loves an underdog and they know better than to make one of you. There's only so much they can do before it blows up in their faces.
"Having worked in the US Congress as a Legislative Correspondent, I can confidently say, huh uh!"
Apples and Oranges. We're talking about state legislatures debating state bills. Each state legislature has far fewer consitutents (and far fewer letters, phone calls, etc.) than anybody on Capitol Hill. They also get far less voter attention than federal politicians, which makes every vote count even more.
Hell, if you're worried about your inability to reach your state legislators, go to the legislature's website and schedule a meeting with the committee! You talk to them, they talk to you, all in an official capacity, and all you have to be is willing to show up. Compare that with all the arm-twisting you need to go through just to sit and watch a few minutes of your federal legislature in person.
"You only got the bikini after playing through the game as armorless Samus, and if you didn't figure out she was a woman before then, you were blind."
Actually, I'm pretty sure you had to beat the game in less than an hour with armorless Samus. Since you had to go through the game two or three times straight to see that particular ending (and you had to be paying enough attention to realize what you were seeing), that one can be written off as bored game programmers putting an Easter Egg into a corner of the game they thought the vast majority of the players wouldn't bother looking for, let alone find.
How many people here can honestly say they found this little quirk without being told about it first?
"I didn't call anyone a bigot; why do you suggest that I did?"
It was quite heavily implied by:
Porn games have female characters too...
You suggested that Metroid was little more than pornography.
"I'm sure that FDR spent a night with his mistress not thinking (...) World War I."
President Wilson, on the other hand...:)
Re:offtopic
on
Nuke-Lobbing
·
· Score: 2, Informative
"The official reasons given (9/11, WMD, "he gassed his own people", bringing democracy to the nations in the region, etc.) either make no logical sense, are obvious lies, or are so outlandish that it's clear nobody in the administration takes them seriously."
Let's put it this way: If the fundamental government in Iraq were changed to a democratic model for other Arabs to follow, we woudln't have the totalitarian regimes in place that breed the kind of terrorism we saw 9/11/01 in the first place.
"It has something to do with Israel."
So we're attacking Iraq instead of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, etc?
"It has something to do with oil."
So we attacked Iraq instead of Venezuela, Mexico, etc?
"We want to invade a country so we can gain access to its oil fields."
Between how little oil we've been buying from Iraq and the incredibly long distance it has to be shipped from, going after Iraq simply for it's oil is counter-productive. France and Russia need Iraqi oil far more than we do.
And again, if we wanted access to OPEC oil, there's still Venezuela, where most of our foreign oil comes from. Hell, we could have used their recent strike as a precedent.
"And here I was thinking that the atomic bomb might have had something to do with it."
How do you fly a B-29 over 1500 miles of featureless ocean from Tinian to Hiroshima? Point to a compass heading and hope there's no cross-wind? Follow the long chain of Japanese-controlled islands north of Iwo Jima and hope they don't shoot at you? Even more interesting is the 6.5 hour flight back, trying to pick out an awfully small island in an awfully big ocean.
Better yet, how does the USS Indianapolis carry the bomb over 5000 miles from San Francisco to Tinian? Even that late in the war, the Japanese controlled far more islands in the area than the US. How would the lone ship know that the particular island ahead of them was controlled by the US without getting well within Japanese bomber range?
And that's long before we get into questions like "How do the amphibious forces know which islands they're taking?" Heck, if the forces in Normandy are able to land on the wrong beaches, how can they be sure they're even landing on the right island?
One word: Longitude. Generally speaking, you determine your longitude by comparing what the local solar time is (determined by looking at the position of the sun in the sky) and comparing it to the time in some reference point (say, the Prime Meridian). Every hour's difference is 15 degrees of longitude.
Obviously, there have been all sorts of tweaks and modifications to this formula in the past 200+ years or so, but the basics are the same: You need to know what time it is to know where you are. Your precious little GPS receivers wouldn't work if they could get as accurate a time measurement as possible from the US Naval Observatory.
(Some historians have suggested that the US won the war in the Pacific because US ships had more accurate clocks.)
"Why is she built like a goddamned SoCal pop star?"
This can be explained by real-world things like limitations on early video game hardware (hard to demonstrate she's a woman and not a man in 8-bit graphics), as well as fictional elements of the backstory (she's a cyborg, she needs to fit in a suit built by non-humans, she needs to fit into a suit that can curl into a ball and fit into confined spaces, etc.), but let's ignore these for a moment.
"however, it basically negates the positive effects of having a female protagonist."
OK, let's see... She's portrayed as someone that can do the near-impossible with little to no outside support, essentially in claustrophobic isolation. She's skilled, resourceful, intelligent, and brave without losing her humanity (expecially difficult considering how utterly inhuman her adversaries can be), at times willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for the survival of others. In short, she's doing pretty damned good for a human being, reguardless of sex.
Essentially, Samus is everything a true feminist (ie. not a reverse sexist) could possibly want in the portrayal of a woman. And yet you want to throw all that out the window simply because of the way she looks? Who's the bigot here?
I think the best part about the way Nintendo's female protagonists are handled in their games isn't that they're there, but that the games don't make a big deal about the fact they're women. They don't jump up and down saying "Hey! Look at me! I'm a woman a video game! You should buy this game for your daughter simply because there's a woman in this game!"
"If this feature is implemented, it WILL be used by someone."
And that user is prosecutable under federal (and possibly state, depending on state) wiretap laws, as well as any other laws broken to gain unauthorized access to the Cisco box. Even if the federal government agrees to ignore any violations of wiretap laws used to get information they deem useful, the state may not be so willing to play along. Just ask Linda Tripp.
If you want the wiretap laws to be more harsh, fine. But that's a completely different issue.
"Or maybe "Gamera" (Friend to Children) or "Super A-Number-One Dimensional Brower Mozilla""
Toho Pictures already has their legal department foaming at the mouth at the use of the "-zilla" suffix. If the Moz group changed their name to that, there might be bloodshed involved.
That, or they send in Mothra, I'm not quite sure which...
Slashdot Mirror
But think of the thousands of acres of pristine lunar rain forests!
"This is great for a democracy like the UK, but for a Republic like the US, this isn't the best idea."
I swear, if I hear one more person say that "The US isn't a democracy, it's a republic," I'm going to kill somebody.
First off, what you're trying to drive at isn't "the US is a republic" so much as "the US is a federal republic." The "federal" part is how state's rights come into the equation, and also explains how democracy is used in our country (in a decentrallized manner).
Secondly, I'd personally say the US is more democratic than the UK. The election of the US president is far more accessible to the public than the election of the UK's prime minister, members of the upper house of the US legislature are chosen democratically while members of the House of Lords are born into the role, and there's still that monarchy bit.
"This means we are NOT a democracy."
How is it members of the House of Representatives are chosen again? Or the Senate, as of 1913? Hm? And that doesn't even begin to get into questions about our state and local governments. The only way we're not a democracy is if you compare us to a "true" democracy, where there is no legislature and the people vote on laws directly (offering Socrates a drink on the house).
You get the "we're a republic" from the bit of the federal constitution that says the states will have a "republican form of government." But don't forget that those governments have been formed democratically since before there even was a United States (let alone a federal constitution).
"Our Republic was designed to protect the minority (as small as one person) from a crazy majority"
RepublicS. And you're mincing words. The federal constitution was written in such a way to detatch the federal government from the passions of the mob (paraphrasing) while maintaining a decentralized power base (ie. federal). Note that there is no mention of the individual in the original document. The federal constitution has little to say about the role of the individual because that's what state constitutions are for.
"It is only because we have forgotten about the Republic that such unconstitutional programs such as Social Security, Federal Education subsidies and control, and the Welfare State have come into existance (wholly socialist schemes that truly have no place in a free culture)"
At worst they violate the Tenth Amendment, and vaguely at that. The only thing really restricting the way Congress spends its money is the Twenty-Seventh Amendment, which says they can't give themselves pay raises.
"so long as the Supreme Court actually does the job intended, to protect the rights of the people by making sure ALL laws abide by the Constitutional restraints on government."
Where exactly in the federal constitution does it mention the concept of judicial review? Hint: It doesn't. In many ways it's a power the court gave itself in the early Nineteenth Century.
"Unfortunately, the Supreme Court is handled by Socialists and Fascists, not onstitutionalists"
Then complain your democratically elected members of Congress. The ones that the federal constitution grants the power to impeach any and all federal judges. Oh, wait, that's right, you don't believe there's democracy in this country...
"so we would be at great risk of losing the country to both the Socialist left and the Fascist right, both of which feed each other's desires by giving in to bad schemes."
Get off your damned soap box before you embarass yourself any further. You're giving us true political crackpots a bad name.
"Human history is rife with aristocide and mob attacks on perceived elites."
European history, perhaps a little bit of Asian, but to my knowledge nothing like that has happened in North America.
Except that those questions are now dated. Most 20-somethings today have difficulty answering those questions because they were in their early teens when the game (and the questions) came out.
"I believe he would have written an entirely original song, and there would obviously be no need to get permission."
:)
No no, the DMCA closes that particular loophole.
"The problem (as far as the government was concerned) is that people were running their cars on fish'n'chip oil without paying any fuel tax."
OK, so let me get this straight: The government is unhappy that you're not paying a tax on more environment-fuel, a tax that was supposed to convince you to use more environment-friendly alternatives to begin with.
You know there's too much bureaucracy when...
"That's high for a producer of a commodity product. OSes and office suites aren't rocket science anymore."
Must be all that money they're making on Xbox sales.
"This is probably a sign that the current administration has really bad cyber security plans."
If the security is so bad for a former Microsoft employee to want to wash his hands of it, I weep for the future.
"Easy. Make it an all or nothing situation. If you're going to spend more than the limit on your own campaign, you campaign may not take donations of any kind. Every expense must be paid for by your campaign. If you take any donation, the limit applies."
Way to guarantee only self-made millionaires will win elections there. If only the rich are allowed to spend more, only the rich will get elected.
"Most multi-millionaire candidates don't *give* money to their campaigns, they just *loan* it."
And how do they explain that one to the FEC? Are they a real bank in and of themselves? Did they subject themselves to a credit check? Is the interest you're giving yourself realistic?
" Then after they get elected, they can worry about paying themselves back."
You go around and ask for donations for the sake of giving yourself more money to pay yourself back (with interest, even) and see how far you get. Especially after the election has come and gone.
"Corporations have no right to free speech!"
It doesn't say "Congress shall make no law except where corporations are concerned," it says "Congress shall make no law." Just because you don't agree with what they're saying doesn't mean they have no right.
"Put a cap on monitary donations to no more than $ 5000.00 total per year to any policitcal campain (Local, Federal, or State). This would force "individuals" to re-think how they donate monies."
This one's counter-productive. All you'd do is give people more incentive to find new and interesting ways to launder their money. In many ways this right here resembles the bill you're against.
"ALL donations regardless of the amounts must appear on the donater's tax returns (any amount over the $ 5000 would be taxed at the maximum % as a penalty)"
Which would restrict political donors only to those people who have both a large donation to make and the time and resources to spend on an accoutant to properly fill out the tax paperwork.
"All donations must appear on the polititians "records" and NOT aggrigrated."
So that even if "the little guy" was willing to deal with all the paperwork of making the donation, the candidate would be less willing to accept such small sums because of the paperwork overhead involved.
"NOTE: Lobbiests could still violage #1 but would be severely limited by #2 and #3."
Just the opposite. The $5000 cap means that anybody who wants to give more will have to donate through a lobbyist PAC. And the paperwork requirement on the part of the donor would make donating to the lobbying PAC all that more tempting because they can handle the paperwork for you.
While we're on the subect, 1, 2 and 4 (so long as the individual donations are over $50 or so) are current federal laws. Even the $5000 cap you mention is spot on (to the point where I suspect you were quoting from FEC publications). Corporation, labor unions and other such groups cannot donate directly, and there's quite a bit of paperwork involved in receiving donations (federal law requires you to name a treasurer to manage all that).
The problem, in my opinion, is the placement of donation caps to begin with. All you are doing is funneling money through the lobbying groups and the two major political parties, money that they wouldn't be handling otherwise. This pretty much gives them much more clout with the candidates than they'd have otherwise. I believe the solution is to maintain public disclosure of all donors and donations while eliminating the caps. It would take power away from the lobbyists and the parties (who would no longer function as necesary middle-men) while making it easier to spot illegitimate contributions, because why would you try to donate through a third party if you don't have to?
"Because for this to have any effect whatsoever it would have to be done by a significant percentage of the population."
Ah yes, the classic "Nobody else is doing it, so why should I?" argument. Guess what: A boycott has to start somewhere. And it's also nice to take responsibility for your own actions every once in a while.
"How will you be able to spread the word about this boycott?"
Through free or cheap mediums, such as word-of-mouth or the internet.
"Do you think you could ever get more than a modicum of people to join in?"
There's only one way to find out.
"Man, hell no! "Law & Order" is on tonight!"
And right there is the answer to the original poster's question of "Are we too addicted to their drug to do this?"
"Think about this: There hasn't been an effective consumer boycotts since the 1980's."
I didn't realize that twenty years was "A Long Time." But that's all moot. A recent piece on NPR talked about how French importers in the US have seen around 40% of their business vanish overnight. Sounds like a boycott to me...
"Why do you think that is?"
It's happening, it's just that you're not paying any attention. The answer lies within.
"And do you think you could fight the backlash of propaganda from the media were this to ever even to show the smallest signs of gaining traction?"
That would work in your favor, putting you in the role of David against Goliath. Everybody loves an underdog and they know better than to make one of you. There's only so much they can do before it blows up in their faces.
That depends on whether or not the governor is willing to pay any attention to out-of-state lobbyists.
"Having worked in the US Congress as a Legislative Correspondent, I can confidently say, huh uh!"
Apples and Oranges. We're talking about state legislatures debating state bills. Each state legislature has far fewer consitutents (and far fewer letters, phone calls, etc.) than anybody on Capitol Hill. They also get far less voter attention than federal politicians, which makes every vote count even more.
Hell, if you're worried about your inability to reach your state legislators, go to the legislature's website and schedule a meeting with the committee! You talk to them, they talk to you, all in an official capacity, and all you have to be is willing to show up. Compare that with all the arm-twisting you need to go through just to sit and watch a few minutes of your federal legislature in person.
Actually, I'm pretty sure you had to beat the game in less than an hour with armorless Samus. Since you had to go through the game two or three times straight to see that particular ending (and you had to be paying enough attention to realize what you were seeing), that one can be written off as bored game programmers putting an Easter Egg into a corner of the game they thought the vast majority of the players wouldn't bother looking for, let alone find.
How many people here can honestly say they found this little quirk without being told about it first?
"I didn't call anyone a bigot; why do you suggest that I did?"
It was quite heavily implied by:You suggested that Metroid was little more than pornography.
"I'm sure that FDR spent a night with his mistress not thinking (...) World War I."
:)
President Wilson, on the other hand...
"The official reasons given (9/11, WMD, "he gassed his own people", bringing democracy to the nations in the region, etc.) either make no logical sense, are obvious lies, or are so outlandish that it's clear nobody in the administration takes them seriously."
Let's put it this way: If the fundamental government in Iraq were changed to a democratic model for other Arabs to follow, we woudln't have the totalitarian regimes in place that breed the kind of terrorism we saw 9/11/01 in the first place.
"It has something to do with Israel."
So we're attacking Iraq instead of Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, etc?
"It has something to do with oil."
So we attacked Iraq instead of Venezuela, Mexico, etc?
"We want to invade a country so we can gain access to its oil fields."
Between how little oil we've been buying from Iraq and the incredibly long distance it has to be shipped from, going after Iraq simply for it's oil is counter-productive. France and Russia need Iraqi oil far more than we do.
And again, if we wanted access to OPEC oil, there's still Venezuela, where most of our foreign oil comes from. Hell, we could have used their recent strike as a precedent.
"And here I was thinking that the atomic bomb might have had something to do with it."
How do you fly a B-29 over 1500 miles of featureless ocean from Tinian to Hiroshima? Point to a compass heading and hope there's no cross-wind? Follow the long chain of Japanese-controlled islands north of Iwo Jima and hope they don't shoot at you? Even more interesting is the 6.5 hour flight back, trying to pick out an awfully small island in an awfully big ocean.
Better yet, how does the USS Indianapolis carry the bomb over 5000 miles from San Francisco to Tinian? Even that late in the war, the Japanese controlled far more islands in the area than the US. How would the lone ship know that the particular island ahead of them was controlled by the US without getting well within Japanese bomber range?
And that's long before we get into questions like "How do the amphibious forces know which islands they're taking?" Heck, if the forces in Normandy are able to land on the wrong beaches, how can they be sure they're even landing on the right island?
That's almost as unbelievable as a hot girl knowing what "Maxtor" is!
One word: Longitude. Generally speaking, you determine your longitude by comparing what the local solar time is (determined by looking at the position of the sun in the sky) and comparing it to the time in some reference point (say, the Prime Meridian). Every hour's difference is 15 degrees of longitude.
Obviously, there have been all sorts of tweaks and modifications to this formula in the past 200+ years or so, but the basics are the same: You need to know what time it is to know where you are. Your precious little GPS receivers wouldn't work if they could get as accurate a time measurement as possible from the US Naval Observatory.
(Some historians have suggested that the US won the war in the Pacific because US ships had more accurate clocks.)
"Why is she built like a goddamned SoCal pop star?"
This can be explained by real-world things like limitations on early video game hardware (hard to demonstrate she's a woman and not a man in 8-bit graphics), as well as fictional elements of the backstory (she's a cyborg, she needs to fit in a suit built by non-humans, she needs to fit into a suit that can curl into a ball and fit into confined spaces, etc.), but let's ignore these for a moment.
"however, it basically negates the positive effects of having a female protagonist."
OK, let's see... She's portrayed as someone that can do the near-impossible with little to no outside support, essentially in claustrophobic isolation. She's skilled, resourceful, intelligent, and brave without losing her humanity (expecially difficult considering how utterly inhuman her adversaries can be), at times willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for the survival of others. In short, she's doing pretty damned good for a human being, reguardless of sex.
Essentially, Samus is everything a true feminist (ie. not a reverse sexist) could possibly want in the portrayal of a woman. And yet you want to throw all that out the window simply because of the way she looks? Who's the bigot here?
I think the best part about the way Nintendo's female protagonists are handled in their games isn't that they're there, but that the games don't make a big deal about the fact they're women. They don't jump up and down saying "Hey! Look at me! I'm a woman a video game! You should buy this game for your daughter simply because there's a woman in this game!"
"Men are all super muscular or pretty boys, girls are all tall and big breated."
Obviously not somebody who'd played a lot of Super Mario Bros. 2.
"If this feature is implemented, it WILL be used by someone."
And that user is prosecutable under federal (and possibly state, depending on state) wiretap laws, as well as any other laws broken to gain unauthorized access to the Cisco box. Even if the federal government agrees to ignore any violations of wiretap laws used to get information they deem useful, the state may not be so willing to play along. Just ask Linda Tripp.
If you want the wiretap laws to be more harsh, fine. But that's a completely different issue.
"Or maybe "Gamera" (Friend to Children) or "Super A-Number-One Dimensional Brower Mozilla""
Toho Pictures already has their legal department foaming at the mouth at the use of the "-zilla" suffix. If the Moz group changed their name to that, there might be bloodshed involved.
That, or they send in Mothra, I'm not quite sure which...