If it was possible to prevent glass windows from being broken by properly maintaining them, having a window broken would indicate professional neglect (what translated into various crimes and civil actions for at least some professions).
There is no excuse for having an insecure system operating in an insecure manner while there are cheaper ways of having a secure system operating in a secure manner. Just because Microsoft taught people to accept glaring flaws and deficiencies as facts of life, doesn't mean that there should be no responsibility for having them.
I have seen it. Journalists didn't publish to inform the people -- people don't make decisions and don't elect officials on issues at a scale that matters for most people anyway. Journalists published to shame and provoke the officials into doing the right things, that requires courage, but in the end it works, and elections don't. With "freedom of speech" such a system is impossible -- anything written can be dismissed as a tinfoil lunacy. This was a fundamental difference between investigative journalism in Capitalist societies and in USSR. Considering that most people can't hire lobbyists but can find a smart journalist, I fine the variant with censorship and mandatory reaction to published word a superior and much more egalitarian system. Ironically, after dissolution of USSR, people stopped reading newspapers, and when they did, only to discuss, who paid for what editorial. "Free speech" robbed them from investigative journalism being an effective lobby and advocacy mechanism.
I really hate to tell you this, bud, but history VERY clearly shows that these idealistic goals were not only not accomplished, but were never even attempted with any degree of credibility. You are echoing propaganda, not reality.
Just shut up about your positive void coefficient. Those reactors operated before and after Chernobyl for decades, and only once, through extreme stupidity and disregard for all specifications, a bunch of idiots managed to cause a disaster. I can assure you that the same kind of idiots would cause a disaster on a reactor with positive void coefficient, negative void coefficient, pebble bed reactor, gas-firing power plant, coal power plant, hydroelectric power plant, AC transmission line, DC transmission line, steel mill, railroad or a sewer system. That's the nature of idiots around machinery.
Someone would have to visit Pripyat with a truck, pick up few tons of contaminated soil, bring it to UK, and smear it those sheep to get anything noticeable. If there are radioactive sheep in UK, it's from someone in UK mishandling the radioactive materials.
We also have to keep in mind the evacuation of civilians and public warning (including other countries affected by the fallout). Here, the USSR was criminally negligent. Some of those deaths could have been prevented merely by not having people there.
That's a total and undiluted bullshit. If anything, evacuation was excessive and covered areas with no risks for the population living there. Opportunist politicians were riding the wave of panic while all the work was done by others, usually misdirected and distracted by politicians' demands for sweeping and grandiose actions.
In reality, most work was done by health and environmental safety services that sifted through agricultural products, soil and water samples, prevented contaminated products from reaching consumers, determined areas unsafe for agriculture and collected disease statistics that ended up showing no noticeable harm for general population in the end. But you, shitheads, don't talk about those people. You would rather denigrate everyone and call them criminals -- I guess, including myself, as I made some (minor) contribution to those efforts.
That's what happened, these were 100% preventable deaths even after the disaster had occurred.
Yeah, those death could be prevented. At the cost of thousands or tens of thousands dead if reactor continued burning. In case of Chernobyl the blame should be not on people who designed the reactor and not on those who handled mitigation of the disaster but on those who mismanaged its operation in a spectacular way, causing the disaster in the first place. It wouldn't matter if reactor was "safer" -- there is always something an idiot can do to cause a major disaster. Even in the absence of a nuclear reactor.
In Fukushima they were lucky that the damage was relatively minor and unlucky that power plant had no procedure and made no preparation to react to such damage. The fact that it happened, shows that nuclear power plants and idiots still occasionally mix, just with less severe consequences.
But until very recently the degree of lies and deception in the "free world" could not hold a candle to that practiced in the so-called "Communist" regimes.
Perhaps "until recently" when "recently" is defined as "since 17th century".
Wholesale censorship was and is the norm, for just one example.
Oh yes, this whole freedom of speech crap.
Communist leaders restricted freedom of speech because they themselves given up the freedom of listening -- by their own policy all officials had an obligation to respond and take action for everything that was published in any government publications if it applied to the scope of their power. Getting things published was a hurdle that one had to overcome to get things done by the government. A person that overcame the censorship (and it was always possible unless you are stupid -- it was a pretty good test of intellect that plenty of people, sadly, failed) is automatically an accomplished lobbyist.
What complete and utter bullshit. Its their way of goving back to society.
The key word is "back". Don't steal, and there is no need to give a fraction of it "back".
It would just be another Microsoft like company. Only a greedy monopolistic business could achieve the same results as Microsoft.
You mean, only a greedy monopolistic business can shit up all software and computer industry for the foreseeable future, right?
And it works equally bad on all of them. GCC is the shittiest compiler for C and C++ (especially) on the planet.
That's a very bold claim considering that absolutely everyone who does any software development for any platform other than Windows, uses gcc unless specifically locked out of it.
Also, you are probably stupid if you think portability has anything to do with a compiler.
Yes, what would I know after spending decades studying Computer Science and developing all kinds of software except office suites and games.
Anyone selling a computing product with any software already has a way to ship code on the platform.
This is not even wrong, it's a statement with no relationship with reality.
The problem is a unified API. Either you can use something shit like Java,.NET or other horrible things, or you can use something designed and written for that specific platform. Also writing on unified API means writing to a common subset of functions for all platforms - a shitty way to write code.
"API" is worthless. Any moron can write a piece of software, declare some dumb API to it and then proudly sit on it and insist that everyone else, forever, used his API to access his magical product. Vendor-locked APIs are a bane of a progress in software development.
Properly developed software is modular, with interfaces between those modules clearly specified in terms of data structures, function calls, objects and protocols (network, IPC, bus or other forms of it). Pieces of it may look like "API", and certainly morons such as yourself would treat it as "API" that their lowly bug-ridden program uses to access "a library". In reality, modular development with clearly specified interfaces allows independent development and replacement of all parts of such system without affecting the functionality, something that no company can accomplish by itself. However this also means that no one can exercise full control over work of others -- and this is the likes of Microsoft and Oracle fear more than anyone fears anything else.
Also if you are writing performance oriented software, there is ****NEVER**** going to be any API that will be successful across multiple h/w architectures. Good luck trying to maintain and ship 30 different kinds performance critical modules. Its amazing how you can spew so much bullshit without realizing that you were standing knee deep in shit all this time.
You really are that clueless. Not only I know what I am talking about, this happens to be my job as an embedded system and DSP developer. My software runs on all architectures Microsoft ever supported, on more architectures that Microsoft can't dream of supporting, and on FPGAs where most of it doesn't even qualify as strictly "software". I have software running as hard realtime, soft realtime, not realtime at all and, of course, RTL that is pretty much as hard realtime as anyone can imagine.
The problems I have to solve while developing it have absolutely nothing to do with "difficulties" dealing hardware diversity and everything with using hardware where it is appropriate to achieve the design goals of the whole system. Microsoft, in its boundless stupidity, turned its limitation as one-trick pony into a doctrine, no, paradigm that it imposed onto everyone who fallen under its power. I am smart enough to keep myself away from this abyss of stupidity. You are on the bottom of it, barking at me.
Did you even read what this conversation is about? We have already covered "what-is-Communism", multiple times.
And of course, there is a political ideology of Capitalism (and it is not Democracy or Republic)! All economic systems have political ideologies behind them.
!!!RARE!!! The original Facebook share! Never sold since IPO! Own a part of Internet history! $300 or better offer! (check other items in my Ebay store)
And like many Socialist leaders, I highly doubt Brezhnev's private beliefs matched his public pronouncements.
Brezhnev was stupid, and most likely a narcissist, but not a sadist or sociopath. His actions are consistent with genuinely trying to advance Communist doctrine, but being too much of a fuckup to accomplish anything but harm.
Socialist leaders have never wanted to give up their power, once achieved... thus true Communism will never exist.
That's a load of bullshit. Capitalist leaders never given up power, either, they just maintain an ever-changing figurehead as a lip service to democracy. Communists were simply more honest -- experienced leader that has no way to personally benefit from his decisions (because he already has everything a person can have, but can't quit the system and become a capitalist and can't leave anything to his children) is better than a temporary leader that spends eight making sure that he will be rich and powerful after his time is up.
Gates has done far more philanthropic good than you can ever do in your lifetime, or even 100 lifetimes.
First and foremost, rich people's "philantropy" is an admission of guilt. Everyone else SIMPLY DID NOT TAKE BILLIONS FROM OTHERS, so we have no obligation to throw money back at people.
Second, more likely than not his "philantropy" misdirects research and fucks up economies of the whole countries. Everything Gates ever did in his life is to control people and make them suffer. Deep inside he knows that he is the dumbest person among his "friends", and his intellect is at the level of writing BASIC interpreter, a 70's equivalent of an address book application in PHP. He can't stand his own intellectual inferiority, and the only thing he does is forcing his dumb ideas on smart people, bringing them down to his level. There are plenty of people like him, but he is the only of them who was lucky enough to amass such a power.
So, just shut the fuck up and say thanks that demand for Microsoft software & intel hardware created an huge market for x86 commodity hardware. Without this, no Linux, no FSF, no OSS , no GPL and all the other things that zealots here like.
Microsoft did nothing that someone else -- anyone else -- wouldn't do far better. It deserves as much praise for modern technology as Inquisition deserves praise for its role in the development of space travel.
Without MS you would be paying $10,000 for a personal computer and
Being able to buy a PC that is actually worth $10000 would be a much better situation than dealing with $1000 computer that is the worst and at the same time the best general-purpose computer available. Modern PCs lack modularity, extensibility and flexibility of interfaces, what also impedes development of hardware, however Intel, not Microsoft is primarily responsible for that problem. Microsoft is responsible for placing Intel and its retarded x86 architecture into its current position though, and if you are too dumb to understand it, it's not a good thing.
have to write software that shipped on 30 different hardware architectures.
I work with multiple architectures just fine, thanks to gcc being implemented on all of them. Microsoft is the only company that can't deal with hardware diversity, but that's because they are stupid, and all their ideas are stupid.
No Communist Party ever claimed that they have implemented Communism -- they (correctly) called the system they had "Socialism". Khruschev famously made a statement that "The current generation of Soviet people will live under Communism", and even though he was wrong, he definitely expected Communism to be implemented decades ahead in the future. Brezhnev added a long stage of "Developed Socialism" that is supposed to come before Communism, mostly to explain why his government is not busy advancing the society toward Communism (in reality he was just incompetent as a government leader, politician and -- especially -- a Communist).
Microsoft manages to infect all forms of human intellectual activity with its "computer is a fussy little creature that shows pretty little windows" mentality. It preventied all kinds of progress that would require people who do not specialize in writing glossy-looking GUI programs to operate on any kind of data in any meaningful manner. Only decades, maybe centuries later, mankind has a chance to change its relationship with computers.
So then you're only pretending to be ignorant. Since you are not stupid, it only stands to reason that you hope enough other people are to enact laws that are in clear contravention of the US Constitution.
Actually I don't care for your Constitution and the way how laws do or don't follow it. For example, obscenity, secrecy and privacy laws openly impose limits onto First Amendment, and no one cares because nothing would ever function if First Amendment was taken literally as prohibiting all restrictions for all kinds of communication.
It's asininity to argue that the same men who wrote about the importance of an armed populace, later went on to write into the supreme law of the land a guarantee of the preservation of that right but that these two events are... coincidental.
My point is that Second Amendment has nothing to do with it. Having armed population is not the same as having population armed with legally obtained and kept weapons -- all revolutions in the world were performed almost exclusively with illegal weapons, and social progress (or something else) that resulted from them was completely unaffected.
Madison was talking about State governments controlling militias, not individuals spontaneously and without any involvement of State governments rising against governments. You can probably convince States to create militias right now -- with all kinds of weapons up to nukes in states with all kinds of weapon control laws. They just would be very, very small militias considering how little money States have for such excesses.
The Federal position is that no state or group of states may secede from the Union without a 2/3 majority, just like the way they got in.
And that was precisely the situation that Madison was fantasizing about -- Federal-government-turned-evil establishes a law that oppresses a State, and State with its militia magically becomes more powerful than its Federal oppressors. He thought that State governments, imbued with some kind of democratic infallibility, will be never in a position when other States will be eager to enforce the oppression.
This wasn't just "We don't like you leaving, so we're going to make you stay". There was a legitimate and arguable legal foundation for the North's position.
Apparently not legal enough according to democratically elected governments of Southern states.
Slavery was of secondary importance to the Union. This is evidenced by the fact that not all of the slave states attempted to leave. And in the slave states that did not rebel, Lincoln didn't free the slaves. Why? Because that was less important. It was later handled with a Constitutional amendment, and that had a 2/3 majority vote. It's economic reality that when slavery exists, it has to expand or it will collapse under its own weight. That's why all the north had to do was prevent any other states from becoming slave states and bide their time.
Slavery was the reason why secession happened. It's completely irrelevant why Union fought it -- it would be a good thing even if the true reason for it was that Lincoln had a gay lover somewhere in Mississippi, or something equally ridiculous. However also regardless of the outcome being a good or bad thing, it was an act of oppression that Madison didn't think was possible. Because Madison stupidly believed in democracy automatically making everything better. And for that reason he expected that State governments and not the individuals must be in control of armed forces of the states. No "popular uprising" without State governments' blessing, and certainly no Second Amendment being in any way important. If States kept all weapons in government-controlled arsenals, it would suit his ideas just fine. And would produce Civil War exactly like it happened, too. Individual people with weapons organizing themselves and shooting tax agencies (or whatever they are supposed to oppose, maybe abortion clinic, I am not up to date with this), is a recent, and idiotic, redneck fantasy.
Now sales taxes go to expand Amazon's profit margins, thanks to free competition between cities! Something is seriously backward in this picture (and should've never been legal to begin with).
Signed those of us smart enough to remember socialists/communists equal everyone is poor and starving and most of the time disappear.Oh all socialists/communists are the laziest scum you'll ever meet.
Not sure if it was supposed to be serious. If it was, someone is a... proud American patriot.
Also Communism (as the stage of society's development when oppression and trade become unnecessary to support the production that supports society members' needs) is both a social and economic system. It's a separate question if such development is possible or desirable, but that's the definition given to it by Communists themselves. The definition of "Communism" as a "society in a country with Communist party in power" was only ever used by anti-Communist propaganda -- for this reason it can't be taken seriously, no matter how much such propaganda was loud and widespread.
Slashdot Mirror
I worked in one of the organizations that performed food and environmental safety measurements.
If it was possible to prevent glass windows from being broken by properly maintaining them, having a window broken would indicate professional neglect (what translated into various crimes and civil actions for at least some professions).
There is no excuse for having an insecure system operating in an insecure manner while there are cheaper ways of having a secure system operating in a secure manner. Just because Microsoft taught people to accept glaring flaws and deficiencies as facts of life, doesn't mean that there should be no responsibility for having them.
s/fine/find/
s/robbed them from/robbed them of/
Oh, good Grid, you really believe that bilge?
I have seen it.
Journalists didn't publish to inform the people -- people don't make decisions and don't elect officials on issues at a scale that matters for most people anyway. Journalists published to shame and provoke the officials into doing the right things, that requires courage, but in the end it works, and elections don't. With "freedom of speech" such a system is impossible -- anything written can be dismissed as a tinfoil lunacy. This was a fundamental difference between investigative journalism in Capitalist societies and in USSR. Considering that most people can't hire lobbyists but can find a smart journalist, I fine the variant with censorship and mandatory reaction to published word a superior and much more egalitarian system. Ironically, after dissolution of USSR, people stopped reading newspapers, and when they did, only to discuss, who paid for what editorial. "Free speech" robbed them from investigative journalism being an effective lobby and advocacy mechanism.
I really hate to tell you this, bud, but history VERY clearly shows that these idealistic goals were not only not accomplished, but were never even attempted with any degree of credibility. You are echoing propaganda, not reality.
I lived there, you moron!
Just shut up about your positive void coefficient. Those reactors operated before and after Chernobyl for decades, and only once, through extreme stupidity and disregard for all specifications, a bunch of idiots managed to cause a disaster. I can assure you that the same kind of idiots would cause a disaster on a reactor with positive void coefficient, negative void coefficient, pebble bed reactor, gas-firing power plant, coal power plant, hydroelectric power plant, AC transmission line, DC transmission line, steel mill, railroad or a sewer system. That's the nature of idiots around machinery.
No. Just no.
Someone would have to visit Pripyat with a truck, pick up few tons of contaminated soil, bring it to UK, and smear it those sheep to get anything noticeable. If there are radioactive sheep in UK, it's from someone in UK mishandling the radioactive materials.
We also have to keep in mind the evacuation of civilians and public warning (including other countries affected by the fallout). Here, the USSR was criminally negligent. Some of those deaths could have been prevented merely by not having people there.
That's a total and undiluted bullshit. If anything, evacuation was excessive and covered areas with no risks for the population living there. Opportunist politicians were riding the wave of panic while all the work was done by others, usually misdirected and distracted by politicians' demands for sweeping and grandiose actions.
In reality, most work was done by health and environmental safety services that sifted through agricultural products, soil and water samples, prevented contaminated products from reaching consumers, determined areas unsafe for agriculture and collected disease statistics that ended up showing no noticeable harm for general population in the end. But you, shitheads, don't talk about those people. You would rather denigrate everyone and call them criminals -- I guess, including myself, as I made some (minor) contribution to those efforts.
That's what happened, these were 100% preventable deaths even after the disaster had occurred.
Yeah, those death could be prevented. At the cost of thousands or tens of thousands dead if reactor continued burning. In case of Chernobyl the blame should be not on people who designed the reactor and not on those who handled mitigation of the disaster but on those who mismanaged its operation in a spectacular way, causing the disaster in the first place. It wouldn't matter if reactor was "safer" -- there is always something an idiot can do to cause a major disaster. Even in the absence of a nuclear reactor.
In Fukushima they were lucky that the damage was relatively minor and unlucky that power plant had no procedure and made no preparation to react to such damage. The fact that it happened, shows that nuclear power plants and idiots still occasionally mix, just with less severe consequences.
But until very recently the degree of lies and deception in the "free world" could not hold a candle to that practiced in the so-called "Communist" regimes.
Perhaps "until recently" when "recently" is defined as "since 17th century".
Wholesale censorship was and is the norm, for just one example.
Oh yes, this whole freedom of speech crap.
Communist leaders restricted freedom of speech because they themselves given up the freedom of listening -- by their own policy all officials had an obligation to respond and take action for everything that was published in any government publications if it applied to the scope of their power. Getting things published was a hurdle that one had to overcome to get things done by the government. A person that overcame the censorship (and it was always possible unless you are stupid -- it was a pretty good test of intellect that plenty of people, sadly, failed) is automatically an accomplished lobbyist.
What complete and utter bullshit. Its their way of goving back to society.
The key word is "back". Don't steal, and there is no need to give a fraction of it "back".
It would just be another Microsoft like company. Only a greedy monopolistic business could achieve the same results as Microsoft.
You mean, only a greedy monopolistic business can shit up all software and computer industry for the foreseeable future, right?
And it works equally bad on all of them. GCC is the shittiest compiler for C and C++ (especially) on the planet.
That's a very bold claim considering that absolutely everyone who does any software development for any platform other than Windows, uses gcc unless specifically locked out of it.
Also, you are probably stupid if you think portability has anything to do with a compiler.
Yes, what would I know after spending decades studying Computer Science and developing all kinds of software except office suites and games.
Anyone selling a computing product with any software already has a way to ship code on the platform.
This is not even wrong, it's a statement with no relationship with reality.
The problem is a unified API. Either you can use something shit like Java, .NET or other horrible things, or you can use something designed and written for that specific platform. Also writing on unified API means writing to a common subset of functions for all platforms - a shitty way to write code.
"API" is worthless. Any moron can write a piece of software, declare some dumb API to it and then proudly sit on it and insist that everyone else, forever, used his API to access his magical product. Vendor-locked APIs are a bane of a progress in software development.
Properly developed software is modular, with interfaces between those modules clearly specified in terms of data structures, function calls, objects and protocols (network, IPC, bus or other forms of it). Pieces of it may look like "API", and certainly morons such as yourself would treat it as "API" that their lowly bug-ridden program uses to access "a library". In reality, modular development with clearly specified interfaces allows independent development and replacement of all parts of such system without affecting the functionality, something that no company can accomplish by itself. However this also means that no one can exercise full control over work of others -- and this is the likes of Microsoft and Oracle fear more than anyone fears anything else.
Also if you are writing performance oriented software, there is ****NEVER**** going to be any API that will be successful across multiple h/w architectures. Good luck trying to maintain and ship 30 different kinds performance critical modules. Its amazing how you can spew so much bullshit without realizing that you were standing knee deep in shit all this time.
You really are that clueless. Not only I know what I am talking about, this happens to be my job as an embedded system and DSP developer. My software runs on all architectures Microsoft ever supported, on more architectures that Microsoft can't dream of supporting, and on FPGAs where most of it doesn't even qualify as strictly "software". I have software running as hard realtime, soft realtime, not realtime at all and, of course, RTL that is pretty much as hard realtime as anyone can imagine.
The problems I have to solve while developing it have absolutely nothing to do with "difficulties" dealing hardware diversity and everything with using hardware where it is appropriate to achieve the design goals of the whole system. Microsoft, in its boundless stupidity, turned its limitation as one-trick pony into a doctrine, no, paradigm that it imposed onto everyone who fallen under its power. I am smart enough to keep myself away from this abyss of stupidity. You are on the bottom of it, barking at me.
Because you can walk into Wal-Mart and name your salary, right?
Social Conservatives are getting more and more annoying as the elections are approaching.
10 people
user management
What is wrong in this picture? Or, to be more blunt, what are the real intentions of posting this question here?
I have a point, but you were too busy adoring your glorious masters to get it.
You are a true American patriot.
Did you even read what this conversation is about? We have already covered "what-is-Communism", multiple times.
And of course, there is a political ideology of Capitalism (and it is not Democracy or Republic)! All economic systems have political ideologies behind them.
feeding frenzy
!!!RARE!!! The original Facebook share! Never sold since IPO! Own a part of Internet history! $300 or better offer!
(check other items in my Ebay store)
's/spends eight/spends eight years/'
And like many Socialist leaders, I highly doubt Brezhnev's private beliefs matched his public pronouncements.
Brezhnev was stupid, and most likely a narcissist, but not a sadist or sociopath. His actions are consistent with genuinely trying to advance Communist doctrine, but being too much of a fuckup to accomplish anything but harm.
Socialist leaders have never wanted to give up their power, once achieved... thus true Communism will never exist.
That's a load of bullshit. Capitalist leaders never given up power, either, they just maintain an ever-changing figurehead as a lip service to democracy. Communists were simply more honest -- experienced leader that has no way to personally benefit from his decisions (because he already has everything a person can have, but can't quit the system and become a capitalist and can't leave anything to his children) is better than a temporary leader that spends eight making sure that he will be rich and powerful after his time is up.
Gates has done far more philanthropic good than you can ever do in your lifetime, or even 100 lifetimes.
First and foremost, rich people's "philantropy" is an admission of guilt. Everyone else SIMPLY DID NOT TAKE BILLIONS FROM OTHERS, so we have no obligation to throw money back at people.
Second, more likely than not his "philantropy" misdirects research and fucks up economies of the whole countries. Everything Gates ever did in his life is to control people and make them suffer. Deep inside he knows that he is the dumbest person among his "friends", and his intellect is at the level of writing BASIC interpreter, a 70's equivalent of an address book application in PHP. He can't stand his own intellectual inferiority, and the only thing he does is forcing his dumb ideas on smart people, bringing them down to his level. There are plenty of people like him, but he is the only of them who was lucky enough to amass such a power.
So, just shut the fuck up and say thanks that demand for Microsoft software & intel hardware created an huge market for x86 commodity hardware. Without this, no Linux, no FSF, no OSS , no GPL and all the other things that zealots here like.
Microsoft did nothing that someone else -- anyone else -- wouldn't do far better. It deserves as much praise for modern technology as Inquisition deserves praise for its role in the development of space travel.
Without MS you would be paying $10,000 for a personal computer and
Being able to buy a PC that is actually worth $10000 would be a much better situation than dealing with $1000 computer that is the worst and at the same time the best general-purpose computer available. Modern PCs lack modularity, extensibility and flexibility of interfaces, what also impedes development of hardware, however Intel, not Microsoft is primarily responsible for that problem. Microsoft is responsible for placing Intel and its retarded x86 architecture into its current position though, and if you are too dumb to understand it, it's not a good thing.
have to write software that shipped on 30 different hardware architectures.
I work with multiple architectures just fine, thanks to gcc being implemented on all of them. Microsoft is the only company that can't deal with hardware diversity, but that's because they are stupid, and all their ideas are stupid.
what they call "communism"
No Communist Party ever claimed that they have implemented Communism -- they (correctly) called the system they had "Socialism". Khruschev famously made a statement that "The current generation of Soviet people will live under Communism", and even though he was wrong, he definitely expected Communism to be implemented decades ahead in the future. Brezhnev added a long stage of "Developed Socialism" that is supposed to come before Communism, mostly to explain why his government is not busy advancing the society toward Communism (in reality he was just incompetent as a government leader, politician and -- especially -- a Communist).
That's still better than Gates.
Microsoft manages to infect all forms of human intellectual activity with its "computer is a fussy little creature that shows pretty little windows" mentality. It preventied all kinds of progress that would require people who do not specialize in writing glossy-looking GUI programs to operate on any kind of data in any meaningful manner. Only decades, maybe centuries later, mankind has a chance to change its relationship with computers.
The fact that the article is attacking a strawman, misrepresenting the nature of the material that its author opposes?
So then you're only pretending to be ignorant. Since you are not stupid, it only stands to reason that you hope enough other people are to enact laws that are in clear contravention of the US Constitution.
Actually I don't care for your Constitution and the way how laws do or don't follow it. For example, obscenity, secrecy and privacy laws openly impose limits onto First Amendment, and no one cares because nothing would ever function if First Amendment was taken literally as prohibiting all restrictions for all kinds of communication.
It's asininity to argue that the same men who wrote about the importance of an armed populace, later went on to write into the supreme law of the land a guarantee of the preservation of that right but that these two events are... coincidental.
My point is that Second Amendment has nothing to do with it. Having armed population is not the same as having population armed with legally obtained and kept weapons -- all revolutions in the world were performed almost exclusively with illegal weapons, and social progress (or something else) that resulted from them was completely unaffected.
Madison was talking about State governments controlling militias, not individuals spontaneously and without any involvement of State governments rising against governments. You can probably convince States to create militias right now -- with all kinds of weapons up to nukes in states with all kinds of weapon control laws. They just would be very, very small militias considering how little money States have for such excesses.
The Federal position is that no state or group of states may secede from the Union without a 2/3 majority, just like the way they got in.
And that was precisely the situation that Madison was fantasizing about -- Federal-government-turned-evil establishes a law that oppresses a State, and State with its militia magically becomes more powerful than its Federal oppressors. He thought that State governments, imbued with some kind of democratic infallibility, will be never in a position when other States will be eager to enforce the oppression.
This wasn't just "We don't like you leaving, so we're going to make you stay". There was a legitimate and arguable legal foundation for the North's position.
Apparently not legal enough according to democratically elected governments of Southern states.
Slavery was of secondary importance to the Union. This is evidenced by the fact that not all of the slave states attempted to leave. And in the slave states that did not rebel, Lincoln didn't free the slaves. Why? Because that was less important. It was later handled with a Constitutional amendment, and that had a 2/3 majority vote. It's economic reality that when slavery exists, it has to expand or it will collapse under its own weight. That's why all the north had to do was prevent any other states from becoming slave states and bide their time.
Slavery was the reason why secession happened. It's completely irrelevant why Union fought it -- it would be a good thing even if the true reason for it was that Lincoln had a gay lover somewhere in Mississippi, or something equally ridiculous. However also regardless of the outcome being a good or bad thing, it was an act of oppression that Madison didn't think was possible. Because Madison stupidly believed in democracy automatically making everything better. And for that reason he expected that State governments and not the individuals must be in control of armed forces of the states. No "popular uprising" without State governments' blessing, and certainly no Second Amendment being in any way important. If States kept all weapons in government-controlled arsenals, it would suit his ideas just fine. And would produce Civil War exactly like it happened, too. Individual people with weapons organizing themselves and shooting tax agencies (or whatever they are supposed to oppose, maybe abortion clinic, I am not up to date with this), is a recent, and idiotic, redneck fantasy.
Now sales taxes go to expand Amazon's profit margins, thanks to free competition between cities!
Something is seriously backward in this picture (and should've never been legal to begin with).
Signed those of us smart enough to remember socialists/communists equal everyone is poor and starving and most of the time disappear.Oh all socialists/communists are the laziest scum you'll ever meet.
Not sure if it was supposed to be serious. If it was, someone is a... proud American patriot.
Also Communism (as the stage of society's development when oppression and trade become unnecessary to support the production that supports society members' needs) is both a social and economic system. It's a separate question if such development is possible or desirable, but that's the definition given to it by Communists themselves. The definition of "Communism" as a "society in a country with Communist party in power" was only ever used by anti-Communist propaganda -- for this reason it can't be taken seriously, no matter how much such propaganda was loud and widespread.