Democrats and the same thing as Republicans. The blinders are well in effect for you, too, with your ignoring all the ridiculous crap that Democrats have done. BTW, I think both parties are pathetic and the people that go on and on about one being better than the other are blind to the real world.
Carter screwed up big and repeatedly, as did Reagan, both Bush's, and Clinton. Carter is the only one that probably isn't a criminal, but he was trying to be an honest man in a profession that requires deception, which makes him foolish. Just because he wasn't a lying, stealing, asshole doesn't make him a *good* president, it just makes him less of a bad president than the other four.
Your belief that Reagan and Bush orchestrated a massive multinational conspiracy to have terrorists keeping hostages, to overthrow governments, and to ruin the economy - just so that Carter lost the election - sounds like something a crackpot website would go on about. It is ridiculous in magnitude, and even more ridiculous in value. If they wanted Carter out of the White House, they only had to ruin him personally, and it would've been much easier. Plus, it wouldn't have screwed a whole region over, as well as nearly throwing the US into another depression. Seriously here, how can *anyone* believe this kind of filth; if they had the resources to arrange all the conspiracy-nut things, they had far more than the necessary resources to much more easily and permanantly ruin just Carter, or even the entire Democrat party.
Bub, first off I said "Almost everything the US has done", not everything. If you take a multiple choice test and answer 'A' for everything, you'll still tend to get some answers correct. Not that everything the US has done right has been by accident, but it looks bad given the track record.
Germany and Japan were already industrialized first-world countries *before* the US got involved. The US was also largely responsible for blowing their stuff up, and then coming in to rebuild it and "fix" their governments. Have to give the US credit for that, they aren't sore winners like some other countries are, such as France is.
Iraq *is* doing terribly right now. It will improve, and then we'll see what their government ends up like. Maybe they'll end up being another Iran, maybe not.
S. Korea has been successful because the US never left. It can practically be considered a US territory, considering the US military presence there. That is not a success, even if it's better than it was.
You missed an important point. If you see someone cooking their food wrong, so you kick in their front door, take away their utensils, and then cook for them, they will resent you. They'll probably try to beat the hell out of you and throw you out first, but they'll resent you. The US keeps smashing their way into other countries and taking over. That builds a great deal of resentment, and from that, a lot of terrorists. It is a bad policy to try to force someone to have you run their show. The US runs the US, and that's all it *should* run.
You aren't going to get my agreement on you there. I hate Pres. Kennedy with a passion, and think we're lucky to be alive after his presidency. He played things loose and fast, and that caused a lot of problems. He didn't really understand consequences.
Pres. Reagan had some good ideas, and maybe they worked, or maybe we got lucky. I don't know enough about all the economic factors to make an informed statement about it. He did do a number of things that were rather nasty, though, and have been mentioned repeatedly by others in this thread.
They were, however, both very likeable people. To that end, they tended to both get their way, good or bad.
I honestly don't consider us to have had a good president for over 100 years.
Never said he wasn't either of those things, just that he wasn't a good president. You know the saying "The path to Hell is paved with good intentions."? Pres. Carter is not a bad person by any means, but he ended up doing, supporting, or causing a lot of bad things, and I'm sure he didn't intend for them to be that way. He's just too trusting and too honest for his own good.
There are a lot of things that if it had worked out we would've been better. That might be one of them, but we'll never know. Pres. Carter managed to get Congress so upset with him that he accomplished nothing. The most telling part of how bad that was is that Congress was completely Democrat controlled, and yet he still was at odds with it on just about everything he pushed.
If we were more concerned with pushing for alternative energy R&D instead of lowest possible cost and maintaining status quo, we wouldn't need something like Carter's energy programs. It's important to remember that conservation is only a temporary stop-gap measure. You still have the same problems, they're just shifted a little into the future. (I'm not saying that we shouldn't conserve, of course.)
Our terrorist problem goes back a lot futher than even Reagon. Not that he didn't screw up badly, too, but you have to go back to WWII even. We were screwing around in Africa, and then pretty constantly involved politically and militarily the entire time after that. We created a lot of enemies with Korea and Vietnam. We were involved in messing about with USSR bloc nations. Then you have the nearly continual involvement in the Middle East. We've also been heavily influencing South American countries, and regularly having little operations down there.
You're right about Reagan doing the very wrong thing with appeasing though. That's why the US always had the policy of not negotiating with terrorists.
We're going to have constant enemies like this until we pull back our direct involvment in foreign countries. Almost everything the US has done with putting people in power and destabilizing governments has ended up worse than what was already there...
I actually find that it doesn't make my brain shut up at all. It just makes me focus more on whatever is in front of me. Sometimes that means I get a whole lot of work done, and sometimes it means I've gone on about physics, history or politics, and sometimes it means I had an hours long meandering conversation with one person.
A bunch of people mentioned having multiple concurrent lines of thought... is that the common way? I have a hard time telling someone what I'm thinking, because I never feel like there is anything bouncing around. It's always like whatever it is, it's just suddenly there! As in, when I stop and consider it, my mind feels blank. Seems odd.
Looks like the unpopular opinion is struck down as flamebait/troll yet again...
If Pres. Carter had done nothing other than messing with the IRS, he would still have been a one of the more terrible presidents in the last 100 years. But no, we also endured the Iran hostage crisis, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the horrid handling of the oil shortages, the terrible economic conditions, the absolute failure to accomplish any of his campaign promises, the continuation/reinstatment of the draft programs, and the policy to consider Taiwan as a part of China.
An amusing thought game is trying to figure out how far you could get technologically if you were transported to some past period. You have to take for granted that you wouldn't die of disease and that you could enlist help, but it's still kind of fun. I know that if I had a few willing people that I could get to steel and an ICE within a decade. Getting electricity is even easier, since you can use water or wind to directly drive a dynamo. That makes a lot of the advancement much easier, since electricity is rather easy to control.
Playing that game does show how little people know of the basics of technology, though. Kind of sucks that we have all this cool stuff around, yet so few know how it all works.
Aw, don't rain too heavily on that parade. They could do a lot of basic things, but nothing had been refined. You could have steel fairly quickly, and from that you could make machines. It might take you 10 or 20 years, but you could have an ICE and a real plane capable of more significant lift.
Think of how much progress was made between 1910 and 1970. How long would it take to simply make a huge cannon, like Big Bertha? Your materials wouldn't have to be that grand even.
Or you could just play more with chemistry and use better explosives. Those materials are also not too difficult to make. You could get yourself TNT pretty easily, but you'd probably want someone else to strain off the nitro for you.
I don't care so much about *my* app taking 10s or 15s to start. Typical users expect it to be done shortly after they click the little pictures, though. It's been the biggest problem in my deployments of OOo, for example. It's hard to get people to believe that a product which takes 15s is better than one that takes 2s, especially if they have nearly duplicate feature sets. Also, it gets really annoying when you open a document, view something, close it, and then go to open another one.
BTW, I run Azureus with default settings and a Synaptic package install of latest Java5 on Ubuntu 5.10 (32bit). The system is an Athlon64 3000+ with 1GB PC3200 CAS2 RAM on a 7200RPM drive with 16MB cache. In addition to the default GNOME environment, Gaim is the only thing running. Azureus takes 10-15s to start after a fresh reboot, and 5-7s to restart from an update. The UI still lags slightly, too. It's perfectly usable, though, since I don't do more than let it sit in the background. I'm running the latest release of Azureus, which still crashes very occasionally.
I would go even further than that. Cut the Federal more than you say by repealing the 16th amendment; only allow them programs that can be paid for with excise and tariff. You won't even have to do much work to get those Federal programs cut. Then, get the States to cut their taxes considerably and let the local governments pick it up. Then make the local governments responsible for roads, school, and other infrastructure.
Actually, local governments do most of this already, they just depend on State and Federal monies flowing back to pay for it. You tend to only have a school paid for by a higher level in the case of state colleges. Even with school districts, the money is from several municipalities putting up the money.
Don't get in mind that the Federal took responsibility for anything by taking a larger share of tax revenues. They still make the lower levels do most of that work. Interstate roads are maintained by State government, for example, they just get additional Federal money to do it.
Some version of Java runs on all those things. However, J2ME is very stripped down, so that you have Java on your cell phone is a bit irrelevant; it can't run any of the Java apps you have on your J2SE installs.
By that token, you can write C code to run on almost anything, you just have to run it with "gcc" instead of "java". (Yes I know it isn't the same thing, etc, etc.)
Anyway, you can run Mono on most places that you would likely run J2SE.
Not really true at all. Java still has all the problems it did in 1996, they're just less of a problem on an Athlon64 with 1GB RAM. Startup time is marginally better than old JREs, which is of some concern for applications. Look at OOo, where the most common tip is "turn off Java in the preferences". That should tell you that people *do* think Java is slow, because JRE startup *is* slow.
There are other annoyances, like the default 128MB RAM limit. There is that you still have to load the C libraries for the JRE, then you have to load the JRE, then you have to load the app. That means it consumes quite a lot more memory than if that app just was linked to the C libs.
Java code is also only faster for code paths that gain additional optimization from runtime profiling. For most applications that people use day to day, it will run slower or, occasionally, the same as a native app. This is impossible to avoid with additional layers of abstraction, and runtime translated code.
As for the touted excellent Java apps people like to go on about... Azureus has a horribly slow UI and takes 10s+ to start on high-end hardware. OOo starts in under half the time w/o JRE support enabled. Eclipse really isn't very fun to use just because it is only almost responsive.
My favorite desktop on UNIX has still been FVWM, but I don't find GNOME and KDE to be bad, just a little heavy. I'd use them more if I didn't have to load such a ridiculous amount of backend trash to do anything; there are too many apps that are written to use all the backend from one or the other. It makes choosing between them annoying.
Java will be much more useful when you can have multiple apps share one in-memory copy of the JRE.
Government in England is comprised of several regional governments. To quote myself here, "Are you going to start on about how London doesn't have its own government next? Hell, counties still have their own governments, though very weak ones.". Well, in England, you have London, and the administrative counties. That's the government under the UK. I admit that except for London, that government is very weak, though.
Yes, I am aware that the Labour people have been pushing for a formal government that would exert authority over all of England. That is why there aren't vehicle tracking cameras in every country, let alone every county.
This is why I was saying it is messy. England has something like 50 governments, and any given part of the country is under the jurisdiction of county, and maybe a town government, plus the UK government with authority from the countries that send MPs, and then the EU carries some authority. I suppose you could count the UN, too, but they don't really do anything as far as this is concerned. That's a mess.
England has it's own government, as does Scotland and Wales, for example. Scotland has a Parliament, and Wales has the Assembly. Just because these governments are more regional to the more federal UK government does not mean they do not have a government. You could liken it to local (town/city) government, State government, and Federal government in the US. I never said GB has its own government. Each country that's a part of the UK has their own government, under the UK government. Are you going to start on about how London doesn't have its own government next? Hell, counties still have their own governments, though very weak ones.
England is a part of Great Britain and the UK, just as you said. If something happens in England, it has also happened in GB and the UK. I used UK or England in the way I did becuase some things do not happen across the UK as a whole, but only happen in England.
You were right about principality being the wrong word. Not that you couldn't figure out what I was saying from context, but still. You could consider England, Scotland, Wales, N. Ireland, etc, to be provinces under the national UK government. That's how it works, after all, just like Canada, considering Canada modelled after the UK.
England is messy because it is a random assortment of overlapping governments with no clear boundaries. It sometimes rules itself, and sometimes is ruled by the UK, taxation is patchwork, and there is little identity to itself, except as part of the UK, and there is even some mixing with Wales. Politically, it's very messy.
It *should* be insulting to be compared to fascism! I made the comparison because that's what is happening. Since you're responding mostly about the US, I'll stick with that.
You have a Federal that is overpowering, and has forced the States and municipalities to rely on it for their budgets. The States force the municipalities to rely on them for budget. They then lose this money if they don't do what they're told. The Federal is so far outside of its Constitutional boundaries that it's sickening. The President can currently do just about anything he wants to. (We'll see how bad that is at the end of this term.) There are laws like PATRIOT that let the government walk all over the populace. Education gets worse every year, and much of the populace is unable to survive without the government "helping" them.
I agree that the People can generally disagree with the government. However, if you *do* something about your disagreement, rather than slapping a sticker on your car and calling it done, bad things tend to start happening to you. If you dig deeper into Pres. Clinton's terms, you find that there were much worse things going on than a sex scandel and regular lying to Congress. There were those ~30 "suicides" and "accidents" of people close to him, and there was the FBI file theft incidents (all his political opponents), for example. With Pres. Bush, there are many more abuses, mostly related to PATRIOT. You had things like Waco and Ruby Ridge going on with Reno.
Just because it doesn't happen to people you know does not mean it doesn't happen.
The laws are out of reach of the populace, the taxation makes you dependant on government, and the government that you can do something about has little power now.
As for racism, while I think it's horrible, it should not be up to the government to tell me I can't be racist. This is a fundamental failing of the Civil Rights Act. To say the government can't discriminate is fine (and was the intent of the movement), but to tell me that *I* can't is to limit my freedom. It means I can no longer choose who I associate with. It means the government is exerting control over who I can do business with, who I can hire, who I can choose to educate. You cannot legislate a social problem.
Also, the populace *does* put nation above individual, when it comes to foreign policy. It is OK to wage war on Iraq or Afghanistan, because they are savages? That's what you hear from TV, and it's what I hear from many random people. The US is right, because they are the greatest country? I hear that all the time too.
Regardless, the idea of #1 was not what you took from it, I think. The idea is that the populace considers their race or their nation as more important than themselves. Their life for their country/race sort of thing, like the Japanese during WWII.
I said that the UK *didn't* have a dictator, just that it had something akin to it one the past. You're reinforcing that, is all, and I agree with you. As a whole, the UK has done quite a bit of suppression, like in Ireland, though it has certainly toned down a whole lot. England, on the other hand, is a surveillence society now. I've always been disgusted that the people let it go on, and especially that they sometimes even believe that it is good for them.
No, government isn't about social and economic controls. They are an end result, and are usually done badly. Government provides a framework and protection. Ideally, there shouldn't be economic controls at all, but that doesn't work in the real world. The social limits should be limited to crime where someone is non-censentually forced to do something. Neither, however, are really "controls". A control is more directing the economy or setting what is moral and enforcing it.
Those controls *are* a facet of fascism, but it doesn't make something fascist by itself. I didn't disagree with you that it is a characteristic of fascism; quite the contrary, that was my point.
Britain, UK, or England: it's the same place. I do not call it the UK because I don't want to use "kingdom" to refer to it. The country that takes up most of that one island in the British Isles is England. That's where things are happening. Not Wales, Scotland, or N. Ireland. I'm just talking about that place south of Scotland and east of Wales. That part is not the UK, it is England. I got the name of the place right, you got the name wrong.
Aside from that, just because someone has done something for a long time, it doesn't mean they will always do it. What do you do if the crown refuses to sign something? Pretend they don't have the power to do so? England has quite a messy and unorganized structure, much more so than any of the other countries in the UK. Seems to me that *you* don't know how the UK works.
What I said was accurate. As I said before, try not ignoring the point of my original comment rather than going off because you are unable to objectively look at your favorite country. My point was that the UN has a large number of dictatorships, or their equivalent. You, on the other hand, have ignore commenting on that and instead have chosing to go on and on about how I wouldn't call it x if I knew what I was talking about, or that y isn't true (except by the definition of the word), or some other thing irrelevant to my point.
In short, the UN has a lot of dictatorships, the country is England, the principality is the UK, and you're still ignoring the point.
If the state law says you have to list who paid for the trip, and you list the conference, then where is the problem? If you go to E3 as a speaker, EA did not pay for your trip, the E3 conference did. If you are an Olympic athelete, the Olympic committeee pays for your trip, not Coke.
When you ask for reimbursement, you document why and where you went, the costs, mileage (if applicable), and the applicable code. Often the agency will reimburse you, and then the event will reimburse the agency.
I really doubt that this is anything but The Globe making stuff up on this one.
First off, the Federal government is *not* there to bail you out. That is not one of the enumerated powers in the Constitution. That job is up to the city of New Orleans, and the state of Louisiana. I choose to not live in a flood plain, hurricane track, under sea level, in an earthquake/mudslide common area, near a volcano, etc. It is not right to force me to pay for the people that choose to do so, which is what having the Federal do it would mean.
If New Orleans is entirely rebuilt, then it should be by the people and businesses located there, perhaps State aid, and voluntary contributions from elsewhere.
Also, pick a viable anology for the situation. I happen to carry a spare tire in my car, because I *might* end up with a flat. I also pay for AAA in case there is a another problem, or a problem with my spare, etc, just in case. New Orleans did not carry a spare seawall, or anything similar. It had no plan for dealing with this highly likely situation.
New Orleans was built once, and it didn't require massive amounts of Federal aid, forcing me to put up money for it, or any of the other "help" that you're talking about. It would be smart to not build it the same way a second time. It would be sheer stupidity to rebuilt the city without first building a seawall that can be guaranteed to stand up to whatever nature will throw at it. In the time that takes, you could've relocated the effected people, and the at-risk structures.
BTW - help sort of tends to be voluntary. Again, your version of help is to use government force to make people "help".
While the idea of not having any levy because a bad one can ruin all your stuff is silly, the idea of having such a massive single point of failure *is* really quite stupid. This should've been the top priority to insure the safety of all the residents of the area. It's a slight bit more important than stadiums, road repairs, *or* schools.
Ah, another AC that doesn't know how to read a dictionary. How wonderful it must be to not bother learning anything. Considering my comment was refuting an ignorant claim that there were not a large number of dictatorships in the UN, do everyone a favor and at least pretend like you actual read the comment, instead of simply pissing with me for disagreeing with you.
If you want my *opinion* on the UK, it would be that the citizens are just as much sheep as many Americans, and most of the rest of Europe. The entire country is misguided, has an outdated and somewhat pathetic government, and would rather track and spy on the populace than do something useful. Of course, if I were to believe those few news stories that would imply such, I'd actually have thought that the entire country was so obsessed with the random trists of the royal family that they didn't both leaving their homes. However, my post was actually about the facts of world governments, so my opinion of the UK really has no bearing.
Fascism (as defined by both the OED and Mirriam-Webster): 1: Putting nation or race above the individual 2: Dictatorship 3: Utilization of government force to suppress dissent 4: Economic and social controls
The US has three (1,3,4), and nearly all four, of these. The UK has two easily (3,4) though not really #1 currently. It *did* have #2, though that has somewhat faded. The people in England certainly don't have much free thought, though, much like the typical American; instead they rely on TV and the government to tell them what to think. As far as I'm concerned, if the government, acting as a body, exercises absolute control, it might as well be a dictator. That would mean both the US and the UK have #2. That gives 3/4 to England, and 4/4 to the US.
Seems more to me that you prefer to keep your head in the sand and sing nursery rhymes rather than look around you. Government makes a very obvious, and very incompetant, set of parents.
France/Germany/Italy might as well just be the EU at this point, so they're as bad as what the EU manages to be. At this point, you can't really call them dictatorial, though, but certainly authoritarian. The UK is authoritarian, if not fascist, as is the US.
Just a quick look gives me quite a few dictatorships, though. Just going by the founding members, you have China, Iran, Iraq, Lybia, N. Korea, and Cuba. Bolivia is close, as is Brazil and Egypt. I apologize, but I got bored and stopped at 'E'.
You also pick up most of the African members, a few of the South American members, and several other Middle-East countries. There really are quite a few dictatorships in the UN, and many of them have considerable power.
If you don't mind spending money on a solution, there are also things like Novell eDirectory that will likely do what you want. There are vendors that implement group policy the way the MS Active Directory does it, too. Most of those packages will work fine on Windows, Linux, or whatever. It is possible to have all the niceties of Windows servers without any Microsoft software.
I have a rather setup similar to this, too. Integrated mail/web/file server logins, groupware, a nice CMS for web content, issue tracking, etc, and I don't need a Windows server for any of it. I can quickly have a server running as a BDC or mail server, though it isn't nearly as smooth as what the GP was talking about.
Yes, you should see a psychiatrist. You seem to have a problem where you're making up things that I supposedly said and then presenting them as fact. That shows a distorted view of reality, at least mild psychosis. You should get that checked out.
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Democrats and the same thing as Republicans. The blinders are well in effect for you, too, with your ignoring all the ridiculous crap that Democrats have done. BTW, I think both parties are pathetic and the people that go on and on about one being better than the other are blind to the real world.
Carter screwed up big and repeatedly, as did Reagan, both Bush's, and Clinton. Carter is the only one that probably isn't a criminal, but he was trying to be an honest man in a profession that requires deception, which makes him foolish. Just because he wasn't a lying, stealing, asshole doesn't make him a *good* president, it just makes him less of a bad president than the other four.
Your belief that Reagan and Bush orchestrated a massive multinational conspiracy to have terrorists keeping hostages, to overthrow governments, and to ruin the economy - just so that Carter lost the election - sounds like something a crackpot website would go on about. It is ridiculous in magnitude, and even more ridiculous in value. If they wanted Carter out of the White House, they only had to ruin him personally, and it would've been much easier. Plus, it wouldn't have screwed a whole region over, as well as nearly throwing the US into another depression. Seriously here, how can *anyone* believe this kind of filth; if they had the resources to arrange all the conspiracy-nut things, they had far more than the necessary resources to much more easily and permanantly ruin just Carter, or even the entire Democrat party.
Bub, first off I said "Almost everything the US has done", not everything. If you take a multiple choice test and answer 'A' for everything, you'll still tend to get some answers correct. Not that everything the US has done right has been by accident, but it looks bad given the track record.
Germany and Japan were already industrialized first-world countries *before* the US got involved. The US was also largely responsible for blowing their stuff up, and then coming in to rebuild it and "fix" their governments. Have to give the US credit for that, they aren't sore winners like some other countries are, such as France is.
Iraq *is* doing terribly right now. It will improve, and then we'll see what their government ends up like. Maybe they'll end up being another Iran, maybe not.
S. Korea has been successful because the US never left. It can practically be considered a US territory, considering the US military presence there. That is not a success, even if it's better than it was.
You missed an important point. If you see someone cooking their food wrong, so you kick in their front door, take away their utensils, and then cook for them, they will resent you. They'll probably try to beat the hell out of you and throw you out first, but they'll resent you. The US keeps smashing their way into other countries and taking over. That builds a great deal of resentment, and from that, a lot of terrorists. It is a bad policy to try to force someone to have you run their show. The US runs the US, and that's all it *should* run.
You aren't going to get my agreement on you there. I hate Pres. Kennedy with a passion, and think we're lucky to be alive after his presidency. He played things loose and fast, and that caused a lot of problems. He didn't really understand consequences.
Pres. Reagan had some good ideas, and maybe they worked, or maybe we got lucky. I don't know enough about all the economic factors to make an informed statement about it. He did do a number of things that were rather nasty, though, and have been mentioned repeatedly by others in this thread.
They were, however, both very likeable people. To that end, they tended to both get their way, good or bad.
I honestly don't consider us to have had a good president for over 100 years.
Never said he wasn't either of those things, just that he wasn't a good president. You know the saying "The path to Hell is paved with good intentions."? Pres. Carter is not a bad person by any means, but he ended up doing, supporting, or causing a lot of bad things, and I'm sure he didn't intend for them to be that way. He's just too trusting and too honest for his own good.
There are a lot of things that if it had worked out we would've been better. That might be one of them, but we'll never know. Pres. Carter managed to get Congress so upset with him that he accomplished nothing. The most telling part of how bad that was is that Congress was completely Democrat controlled, and yet he still was at odds with it on just about everything he pushed.
If we were more concerned with pushing for alternative energy R&D instead of lowest possible cost and maintaining status quo, we wouldn't need something like Carter's energy programs. It's important to remember that conservation is only a temporary stop-gap measure. You still have the same problems, they're just shifted a little into the future. (I'm not saying that we shouldn't conserve, of course.)
Our terrorist problem goes back a lot futher than even Reagon. Not that he didn't screw up badly, too, but you have to go back to WWII even. We were screwing around in Africa, and then pretty constantly involved politically and militarily the entire time after that. We created a lot of enemies with Korea and Vietnam. We were involved in messing about with USSR bloc nations. Then you have the nearly continual involvement in the Middle East. We've also been heavily influencing South American countries, and regularly having little operations down there.
You're right about Reagan doing the very wrong thing with appeasing though. That's why the US always had the policy of not negotiating with terrorists.
We're going to have constant enemies like this until we pull back our direct involvment in foreign countries. Almost everything the US has done with putting people in power and destabilizing governments has ended up worse than what was already there...
I actually find that it doesn't make my brain shut up at all. It just makes me focus more on whatever is in front of me. Sometimes that means I get a whole lot of work done, and sometimes it means I've gone on about physics, history or politics, and sometimes it means I had an hours long meandering conversation with one person.
A bunch of people mentioned having multiple concurrent lines of thought... is that the common way? I have a hard time telling someone what I'm thinking, because I never feel like there is anything bouncing around. It's always like whatever it is, it's just suddenly there! As in, when I stop and consider it, my mind feels blank. Seems odd.
Looks like the unpopular opinion is struck down as flamebait/troll yet again...
If Pres. Carter had done nothing other than messing with the IRS, he would still have been a one of the more terrible presidents in the last 100 years. But no, we also endured the Iran hostage crisis, the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the horrid handling of the oil shortages, the terrible economic conditions, the absolute failure to accomplish any of his campaign promises, the continuation/reinstatment of the draft programs, and the policy to consider Taiwan as a part of China.
An amusing thought game is trying to figure out how far you could get technologically if you were transported to some past period. You have to take for granted that you wouldn't die of disease and that you could enlist help, but it's still kind of fun. I know that if I had a few willing people that I could get to steel and an ICE within a decade. Getting electricity is even easier, since you can use water or wind to directly drive a dynamo. That makes a lot of the advancement much easier, since electricity is rather easy to control.
Playing that game does show how little people know of the basics of technology, though. Kind of sucks that we have all this cool stuff around, yet so few know how it all works.
Aw, don't rain too heavily on that parade. They could do a lot of basic things, but nothing had been refined. You could have steel fairly quickly, and from that you could make machines. It might take you 10 or 20 years, but you could have an ICE and a real plane capable of more significant lift.
Think of how much progress was made between 1910 and 1970. How long would it take to simply make a huge cannon, like Big Bertha? Your materials wouldn't have to be that grand even.
Or you could just play more with chemistry and use better explosives. Those materials are also not too difficult to make. You could get yourself TNT pretty easily, but you'd probably want someone else to strain off the nitro for you.
I don't care so much about *my* app taking 10s or 15s to start. Typical users expect it to be done shortly after they click the little pictures, though. It's been the biggest problem in my deployments of OOo, for example. It's hard to get people to believe that a product which takes 15s is better than one that takes 2s, especially if they have nearly duplicate feature sets. Also, it gets really annoying when you open a document, view something, close it, and then go to open another one.
BTW, I run Azureus with default settings and a Synaptic package install of latest Java5 on Ubuntu 5.10 (32bit). The system is an Athlon64 3000+ with 1GB PC3200 CAS2 RAM on a 7200RPM drive with 16MB cache. In addition to the default GNOME environment, Gaim is the only thing running. Azureus takes 10-15s to start after a fresh reboot, and 5-7s to restart from an update. The UI still lags slightly, too. It's perfectly usable, though, since I don't do more than let it sit in the background. I'm running the latest release of Azureus, which still crashes very occasionally.
I would go even further than that. Cut the Federal more than you say by repealing the 16th amendment; only allow them programs that can be paid for with excise and tariff. You won't even have to do much work to get those Federal programs cut. Then, get the States to cut their taxes considerably and let the local governments pick it up. Then make the local governments responsible for roads, school, and other infrastructure.
Actually, local governments do most of this already, they just depend on State and Federal monies flowing back to pay for it. You tend to only have a school paid for by a higher level in the case of state colleges. Even with school districts, the money is from several municipalities putting up the money.
Don't get in mind that the Federal took responsibility for anything by taking a larger share of tax revenues. They still make the lower levels do most of that work. Interstate roads are maintained by State government, for example, they just get additional Federal money to do it.
Some version of Java runs on all those things. However, J2ME is very stripped down, so that you have Java on your cell phone is a bit irrelevant; it can't run any of the Java apps you have on your J2SE installs.
By that token, you can write C code to run on almost anything, you just have to run it with "gcc" instead of "java". (Yes I know it isn't the same thing, etc, etc.)
Anyway, you can run Mono on most places that you would likely run J2SE.
Not really true at all. Java still has all the problems it did in 1996, they're just less of a problem on an Athlon64 with 1GB RAM. Startup time is marginally better than old JREs, which is of some concern for applications. Look at OOo, where the most common tip is "turn off Java in the preferences". That should tell you that people *do* think Java is slow, because JRE startup *is* slow.
There are other annoyances, like the default 128MB RAM limit. There is that you still have to load the C libraries for the JRE, then you have to load the JRE, then you have to load the app. That means it consumes quite a lot more memory than if that app just was linked to the C libs.
Java code is also only faster for code paths that gain additional optimization from runtime profiling. For most applications that people use day to day, it will run slower or, occasionally, the same as a native app. This is impossible to avoid with additional layers of abstraction, and runtime translated code.
As for the touted excellent Java apps people like to go on about... Azureus has a horribly slow UI and takes 10s+ to start on high-end hardware. OOo starts in under half the time w/o JRE support enabled. Eclipse really isn't very fun to use just because it is only almost responsive.
My favorite desktop on UNIX has still been FVWM, but I don't find GNOME and KDE to be bad, just a little heavy. I'd use them more if I didn't have to load such a ridiculous amount of backend trash to do anything; there are too many apps that are written to use all the backend from one or the other. It makes choosing between them annoying.
Java will be much more useful when you can have multiple apps share one in-memory copy of the JRE.
Government in England is comprised of several regional governments. To quote myself here, "Are you going to start on about how London doesn't have its own government next? Hell, counties still have their own governments, though very weak ones.". Well, in England, you have London, and the administrative counties. That's the government under the UK. I admit that except for London, that government is very weak, though.
Yes, I am aware that the Labour people have been pushing for a formal government that would exert authority over all of England. That is why there aren't vehicle tracking cameras in every country, let alone every county.
This is why I was saying it is messy. England has something like 50 governments, and any given part of the country is under the jurisdiction of county, and maybe a town government, plus the UK government with authority from the countries that send MPs, and then the EU carries some authority. I suppose you could count the UN, too, but they don't really do anything as far as this is concerned. That's a mess.
England has it's own government, as does Scotland and Wales, for example. Scotland has a Parliament, and Wales has the Assembly. Just because these governments are more regional to the more federal UK government does not mean they do not have a government. You could liken it to local (town/city) government, State government, and Federal government in the US. I never said GB has its own government. Each country that's a part of the UK has their own government, under the UK government. Are you going to start on about how London doesn't have its own government next? Hell, counties still have their own governments, though very weak ones.
England is a part of Great Britain and the UK, just as you said. If something happens in England, it has also happened in GB and the UK. I used UK or England in the way I did becuase some things do not happen across the UK as a whole, but only happen in England.
You were right about principality being the wrong word. Not that you couldn't figure out what I was saying from context, but still. You could consider England, Scotland, Wales, N. Ireland, etc, to be provinces under the national UK government. That's how it works, after all, just like Canada, considering Canada modelled after the UK.
England is messy because it is a random assortment of overlapping governments with no clear boundaries. It sometimes rules itself, and sometimes is ruled by the UK, taxation is patchwork, and there is little identity to itself, except as part of the UK, and there is even some mixing with Wales. Politically, it's very messy.
It *should* be insulting to be compared to fascism! I made the comparison because that's what is happening. Since you're responding mostly about the US, I'll stick with that.
You have a Federal that is overpowering, and has forced the States and municipalities to rely on it for their budgets. The States force the municipalities to rely on them for budget. They then lose this money if they don't do what they're told. The Federal is so far outside of its Constitutional boundaries that it's sickening. The President can currently do just about anything he wants to. (We'll see how bad that is at the end of this term.) There are laws like PATRIOT that let the government walk all over the populace. Education gets worse every year, and much of the populace is unable to survive without the government "helping" them.
I agree that the People can generally disagree with the government. However, if you *do* something about your disagreement, rather than slapping a sticker on your car and calling it done, bad things tend to start happening to you. If you dig deeper into Pres. Clinton's terms, you find that there were much worse things going on than a sex scandel and regular lying to Congress. There were those ~30 "suicides" and "accidents" of people close to him, and there was the FBI file theft incidents (all his political opponents), for example. With Pres. Bush, there are many more abuses, mostly related to PATRIOT. You had things like Waco and Ruby Ridge going on with Reno.
Just because it doesn't happen to people you know does not mean it doesn't happen.
The laws are out of reach of the populace, the taxation makes you dependant on government, and the government that you can do something about has little power now.
As for racism, while I think it's horrible, it should not be up to the government to tell me I can't be racist. This is a fundamental failing of the Civil Rights Act. To say the government can't discriminate is fine (and was the intent of the movement), but to tell me that *I* can't is to limit my freedom. It means I can no longer choose who I associate with. It means the government is exerting control over who I can do business with, who I can hire, who I can choose to educate. You cannot legislate a social problem.
Also, the populace *does* put nation above individual, when it comes to foreign policy. It is OK to wage war on Iraq or Afghanistan, because they are savages? That's what you hear from TV, and it's what I hear from many random people. The US is right, because they are the greatest country? I hear that all the time too.
Regardless, the idea of #1 was not what you took from it, I think. The idea is that the populace considers their race or their nation as more important than themselves. Their life for their country/race sort of thing, like the Japanese during WWII.
I said that the UK *didn't* have a dictator, just that it had something akin to it one the past. You're reinforcing that, is all, and I agree with you. As a whole, the UK has done quite a bit of suppression, like in Ireland, though it has certainly toned down a whole lot. England, on the other hand, is a surveillence society now. I've always been disgusted that the people let it go on, and especially that they sometimes even believe that it is good for them.
No, government isn't about social and economic controls. They are an end result, and are usually done badly. Government provides a framework and protection. Ideally, there shouldn't be economic controls at all, but that doesn't work in the real world. The social limits should be limited to crime where someone is non-censentually forced to do something. Neither, however, are really "controls". A control is more directing the economy or setting what is moral and enforcing it.
Those controls *are* a facet of fascism, but it doesn't make something fascist by itself. I didn't disagree with you that it is a characteristic of fascism; quite the contrary, that was my point.
Britain, UK, or England: it's the same place. I do not call it the UK because I don't want to use "kingdom" to refer to it. The country that takes up most of that one island in the British Isles is England. That's where things are happening. Not Wales, Scotland, or N. Ireland. I'm just talking about that place south of Scotland and east of Wales. That part is not the UK, it is England. I got the name of the place right, you got the name wrong.
Aside from that, just because someone has done something for a long time, it doesn't mean they will always do it. What do you do if the crown refuses to sign something? Pretend they don't have the power to do so? England has quite a messy and unorganized structure, much more so than any of the other countries in the UK. Seems to me that *you* don't know how the UK works.
What I said was accurate. As I said before, try not ignoring the point of my original comment rather than going off because you are unable to objectively look at your favorite country. My point was that the UN has a large number of dictatorships, or their equivalent. You, on the other hand, have ignore commenting on that and instead have chosing to go on and on about how I wouldn't call it x if I knew what I was talking about, or that y isn't true (except by the definition of the word), or some other thing irrelevant to my point.
In short, the UN has a lot of dictatorships, the country is England, the principality is the UK, and you're still ignoring the point.
If the state law says you have to list who paid for the trip, and you list the conference, then where is the problem? If you go to E3 as a speaker, EA did not pay for your trip, the E3 conference did. If you are an Olympic athelete, the Olympic committeee pays for your trip, not Coke.
When you ask for reimbursement, you document why and where you went, the costs, mileage (if applicable), and the applicable code. Often the agency will reimburse you, and then the event will reimburse the agency.
I really doubt that this is anything but The Globe making stuff up on this one.
First off, the Federal government is *not* there to bail you out. That is not one of the enumerated powers in the Constitution. That job is up to the city of New Orleans, and the state of Louisiana. I choose to not live in a flood plain, hurricane track, under sea level, in an earthquake/mudslide common area, near a volcano, etc. It is not right to force me to pay for the people that choose to do so, which is what having the Federal do it would mean.
If New Orleans is entirely rebuilt, then it should be by the people and businesses located there, perhaps State aid, and voluntary contributions from elsewhere.
Also, pick a viable anology for the situation. I happen to carry a spare tire in my car, because I *might* end up with a flat. I also pay for AAA in case there is a another problem, or a problem with my spare, etc, just in case. New Orleans did not carry a spare seawall, or anything similar. It had no plan for dealing with this highly likely situation.
New Orleans was built once, and it didn't require massive amounts of Federal aid, forcing me to put up money for it, or any of the other "help" that you're talking about. It would be smart to not build it the same way a second time. It would be sheer stupidity to rebuilt the city without first building a seawall that can be guaranteed to stand up to whatever nature will throw at it. In the time that takes, you could've relocated the effected people, and the at-risk structures.
BTW - help sort of tends to be voluntary. Again, your version of help is to use government force to make people "help".
While the idea of not having any levy because a bad one can ruin all your stuff is silly, the idea of having such a massive single point of failure *is* really quite stupid. This should've been the top priority to insure the safety of all the residents of the area. It's a slight bit more important than stadiums, road repairs, *or* schools.
Ah, another AC that doesn't know how to read a dictionary. How wonderful it must be to not bother learning anything. Considering my comment was refuting an ignorant claim that there were not a large number of dictatorships in the UN, do everyone a favor and at least pretend like you actual read the comment, instead of simply pissing with me for disagreeing with you.
If you want my *opinion* on the UK, it would be that the citizens are just as much sheep as many Americans, and most of the rest of Europe. The entire country is misguided, has an outdated and somewhat pathetic government, and would rather track and spy on the populace than do something useful. Of course, if I were to believe those few news stories that would imply such, I'd actually have thought that the entire country was so obsessed with the random trists of the royal family that they didn't both leaving their homes. However, my post was actually about the facts of world governments, so my opinion of the UK really has no bearing.
Fascism (as defined by both the OED and Mirriam-Webster):
1: Putting nation or race above the individual
2: Dictatorship
3: Utilization of government force to suppress dissent
4: Economic and social controls
The US has three (1,3,4), and nearly all four, of these. The UK has two easily (3,4) though not really #1 currently. It *did* have #2, though that has somewhat faded. The people in England certainly don't have much free thought, though, much like the typical American; instead they rely on TV and the government to tell them what to think. As far as I'm concerned, if the government, acting as a body, exercises absolute control, it might as well be a dictator. That would mean both the US and the UK have #2. That gives 3/4 to England, and 4/4 to the US.
Seems more to me that you prefer to keep your head in the sand and sing nursery rhymes rather than look around you. Government makes a very obvious, and very incompetant, set of parents.
France/Germany/Italy might as well just be the EU at this point, so they're as bad as what the EU manages to be. At this point, you can't really call them dictatorial, though, but certainly authoritarian. The UK is authoritarian, if not fascist, as is the US.
Just a quick look gives me quite a few dictatorships, though. Just going by the founding members, you have China, Iran, Iraq, Lybia, N. Korea, and Cuba. Bolivia is close, as is Brazil and Egypt. I apologize, but I got bored and stopped at 'E'.
You also pick up most of the African members, a few of the South American members, and several other Middle-East countries. There really are quite a few dictatorships in the UN, and many of them have considerable power.
If you don't mind spending money on a solution, there are also things like Novell eDirectory that will likely do what you want. There are vendors that implement group policy the way the MS Active Directory does it, too. Most of those packages will work fine on Windows, Linux, or whatever. It is possible to have all the niceties of Windows servers without any Microsoft software.
I have a rather setup similar to this, too. Integrated mail/web/file server logins, groupware, a nice CMS for web content, issue tracking, etc, and I don't need a Windows server for any of it. I can quickly have a server running as a BDC or mail server, though it isn't nearly as smooth as what the GP was talking about.
Yes, you should see a psychiatrist. You seem to have a problem where you're making up things that I supposedly said and then presenting them as fact. That shows a distorted view of reality, at least mild psychosis. You should get that checked out.