I've had zero problems with NVIDIA video drivers. I do some really strange things, too. Now the horribly outdated and buggy ATI drivers, that was a whole pile of fun. ATI has *always* had horrible software, and this is no exception.
I get burned by the bad ATI software every time I make the mistake of buying something that has an ATI chip in it. Either it's their crap Windows drivers, crap Linux drivers, stupid control panel apps, restrictions on video card order, and on and on and on. You get the occasional random STOP on NT from the ATI driver, you get multimedia apps that refuse to start because you have another vendor card in the system.
Really, their hardware isn't bad. They've improved their hardware a great deal since 486s were new. They still haven't figured out how to make software that doesn't suck.
Also, there isn't nearly complete support for ATI with acceleration, just as there isn't 3D support for nVIDIA. They both have 2d support with open source drivers. Seriously, neither vendor will likely ever offer documentation on their cards, and so there will probably never be open drivers that fully support their cards.
Sorry, I wasn't really being on topic to the article, but was specifically responding to just you. I think you are entirely correct in saying that videogames aren't the cause. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's just parenting, but I would agree that parenting is the biggest reason, by far.
I don't think I could compare those two crime rates. There is certainly more crime in an urban area than in a suburban area. I would agree that much of that crime is directly related to bad parenting, though.
Having both parents work is just an easy way to get bad parenting. As you pointed out, though, just because there is a parent that isn't working doesn't mean they will parent well. Overall, far too many parents ignore their children, or set a terrible example for them, and that is a huge reason that children grow up with bad attitudes, little respect for others, and an inability to do for themselves.
"Kids have played videogames and smoked joints while both parents were away working since the big business 80s. Somehow I missed the huge jump in, what, suburban thuggery?"
Yes, you did miss it. However, if you're curious, just read up on how kids in K-12 act and are treated. Go visit a middle school and watch how the kids act. I see this in varying degrees every time I visit a school. You can see it in college now, too; I remember how different I thought my fellow students acted compared to what I thought was normal.
Also, I do believe, in fact, that a neighborhood where all the children have a parent that stays at home would have less crime. Well, I believe it, as long as the parents are responsible and respect other people.
Some children will end up being responsible and respectable people without supervision and guidance. Many children will not, though. While I agree that correlation is not causation, there is a lot of correlation with various parts of society that have changed over the last fifty years. The problem is not isolated to middle-class suburbs.
In general, a child will learn more, faster, if they have support at home. They will take on many of the parent's values to use a basis for their own. They will have constant exposure to those values, and if the parent's values repect, the child will be more respectful. If there is no parent, then the child learns everything on their own. That isn't bad by itself, but it means there isn't anyone to tell them when what they are doing is "wrong".
Look at children from broken homes... you will notice a trend that many children of divorced parents do not get along so well as children from a stable family. There is a tendancy for considerable social problems. They have more problems in schools, they have problem with relationships, etc. Not exactly the same topic as what you were commenting on, but similar.
Just because it is how we've been doing it doesn't make it automatically fine. Not having a parent around is not as good as having a parent around. If a child *can* have a parent stay home, they will be better off for it. It's just that as time went on, parents outwardly became more concerned with themselves than with their children. Seriously, if both parents want a career, they shouldn't be having children; it's unhealthy for those children. If you have to both work to afford your lifestyle, then why would you bring the huge additional expense of having a child? The parents that don't care have children that don't care.
The whole problem is that region coding *DOESN'T* reduce infringment, and it isn't a method to do so. There is nothing illegal about buying a region 2 movie to play in region 1 because it hasn't been released or just because it is cheaper that way. Sure, they would love to have people believe that, but it isn't the case.
So first, it isn't a form of piracy, and second, it doesn't prevent that anyway. Region codes try to make it inconvenient, and that's why there are so many players that will ignore it. Almost anyone that might have bought an out of region DVD also will know to get around it.
Besides, if you're going to make a copy of a movie, you aren't going to leave region codes enabled anyway. Their existence is irrelevant to where the duplicate is distributed. To make it worse, the lack of region codes on the copy make the copy better than the original. This is extremely common where copy restriction is involved.
Despite what the MPAA says, their members wouldn't stop selling movies to the home market for anything. That's a huge portion of their revenue, and they would take a bigger hit by not selling any than they would from infringing copies. Even if 50% of the people with a movie have an illicit copy, that still leaves the other 50% that did pay. Under your assumption, that would be 0% that pay, since the item wouldn't be for sale. The rampant infringment from an easily copied medium still makes them a whole lot more money than the scenario where they sell no copies because of the easily copied medium.
The assumption that most people would get infringing copies is just silly, anyway. That doesn't happen with software or music, and it is unrealistic to think that it would happen with movies. If that did start to happen, then they need to drop their prices to try to recapture their audience, since their model obviously has issues. Copyright infringment is still a market force, even if it isn't a legal force. It tells you that your former customers aren't willing to pay your price.
The MPAA members are also not releasing things to DVD because of the ability to prevent copies, they're doing it because it's cheaper than VHS, and they can sell you another copy of the movies you have. The popularity of the format has nothing to do with the restrictions. It wasn't successful because of that at all. Copyright has always been enforced, so I don't see what your point is. DVD is nothing special here, except as a better looking alternative to video tape.
It's more likely that you're getting modded down because you still aren't correct. I'm not considering you "the enemy", just wrong.
OK, to be quite blunt, you're an asshole. Computer: take DVD, rip on computer, play from wherever; that's really easy. Consumer elec.: take DVD, press duplicate button, swap in blank media, have a copy, also really easy. Doing it on the computer is better than doing on the stand alone recorder, because it offer more flexibility, but that's not useful for most home users. They are going to prefer the stand alone unit that is easier to operate. That the DVD isn't playable on the computer or other players is really annoying and should not ever be the case. I would be pissed enough to return the recorder, write the company a nasty letter, and tell other people to not buy from them because their stuff is broken.
Region coding is 100% about profitting the max off each region. It does not curb copyright infringment or anything else like it, and it is certainly not effective. Hell, it probably makes copyright infringment more prevelant, because they don't release in all regions simultaneously. That means you have people who want to watch the move that was just released to DVD in the US, but they can't because they're in Germany. However, they can get a ripped copy and it works, or they can get an unauthorized player that doesn't do region coding, or they can buy a region 1 player. So basically, region coding just annoys people, and anyone that wants to can get around it trivially.
BTW, you see people selling infringing copies of movies all the time. When I was in college, there was a guy selling thousands of them, and he showed up on campus a few times a year. I would go into the city, and I saw tons of people selling dups. That was all VHS, because it was easy to copy the damned things.
DVDs are even *easier* to duplicate than VHS. You can make more and better copies of the things. Of course they would release home copies of movies if they couldn't do the technological measures, and the consumer would love it. Their equipment would work better, there would be less stupid restriction to worry about. People wouldn't have to wonder if this disc will work in their car, or this other one will lock up their computer, oh, is this one really audio, how about the region code on this movie? Can I make a copy of this to take on vacation, or does this recorder have some stupid digital restriction thing on it? Will I be able to record this show, or will my recorder tell me that I'm not allowed? Technological restrictions not only do not prevent people from copying, they in fact only serve to make the technology work less.
Also, releasing a DVD will never lose a studio money. It is nearly guaranteed profit, and it doesn't matter how easy it is to copy the daft movie. Most people don't do that, and so most people that want the movie will buy a copy. *The Studios Would Not Abandon The Market* You are full of it on this.
Jeez, your arguments do not hold any water. Most of them fly in the face of all evidence on the topic, and oppose even some of what the MPAA has said on the topic. You don't know what you're talking about, everyone continually is saying you're wrong, you oppose common sense and direct statements from the industry, ignore the financials of the situation, and just generally are making things up.
The EU putting up a positioning constellation is a whole lot different. The US GPS system and the EU Galileo project do the same thing with the same data. They will both tell you your current position. The EU just decided to spend a huge amount of money to make another system, when all of the current hardware is pre-set to be use just GPS. They'll have to convince people to use it, at all. However, big deal; it's the EU's money and I don't care how they spend it. I don't live there.
Now, having another set of root DNS servers, on the other hand, will quickly give you out different data. It will *break* DNS, because now there would not be authoritative root servers. There would be the US servers, which most of the world would be using and almost all of the world is using now, and then there would be the EU/UN servers, which people would have to purposefully reconfigure their systems to use. If the EU wants to *run* a few of the nameservers, they could try to do that, instead of working so publicly to screw up the existing system because of their arrogance.
Plus, you can't just assign an address at the root level. That's complete bunk and shows a lack of understanding on what a root server is. The root contains records to servers for things like ".com" and ".uk". It is the final '.' in an address, which we don't usually include. "slashdot.org." is the real address to here. You would query '.' for what the servers for ".org" are. Then you would query ".org" for what authoritative server is for "slashdot.org", and then you would query *that* server and then have the address.
Ultimately, of course, the EU can do whatever they want. So if they decide to set up their own DNS servers, most of the Internet will decide they don't care. So let the EU throw a hissy fit temper tantrum. The government body obviously doesn't understand how DNS works, but they sure don't have a problem screwing with it anyway.
Blarg, DNS is not IP address delegation. The whole point is that these countries want the UN to run DNS *naming*. The UN would decide if you were allowed to have that domain name, and the UN would solve domain name disputes. They would decide who was a root nameserver, how often zone files were refreshed, etc.
IP block delegation is completely separate from DNS. It's even handled by an entirely different set of people, like ARIN.
Also, to reiterate the thousand times stated truth, the US does not control the Internet. The US has oversight of ICANN, which delegates the root DNS servers. DNS isn't the Internet, either, it's just a system to translate IP address to symbolic names, and vice versa.
Re:Integration versus Bundling, Choice
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Pepping Up Windows
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· Score: 1
Where exactly did I say that MS *should* ship third party software? I said there was a difference between shipping a competitors software and a competitors hardware. I said it wouldn't cost money to ship the software, unless there was licensing to worry about, but that it would cost a substantial amount to ship hardware. *YOU* said they were the same thing. I also specifically said that I didn't think MS should have to ship competitors software.
Seriously, start reading posts before you comment; that was the issue I initially responded to you about. You managed to say the same thing as I did, while simultaneously saying that I was wrong.
Re:Integration versus Bundling, Choice
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Pepping Up Windows
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· Score: 1
Actually, no, I wouldn't complain. But if Windows only did run MS software, we wouldn't be running Windows, would we? That would be a horrible business decision, since they would never have gained market share. Almost everyone out there wants to run non-MS software for something, either because the MS version isn't good enough, or because there simply isn't a MS version.
What part of my argument is garbage? The part where I kept saying that the original post I was talking about wasn't saying what the response insisted? Maybe the part where I was saying that MS has increasingly gone with the default "install everything" approach? Perhaps the part where I said that too many users try hard to not learn anything about their computers?
All of those things are true. The only part of my post that is an argument is that there is a fundamental difference between a physical object and some additional data on a CD-ROM. Aside from that, it was a collection of facts.
Re:Integration versus Bundling, Choice
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Pepping Up Windows
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· Score: 2, Interesting
No, those comparisions are NOT valid. One costs the company money to produce, the other does not. One is physical, the other is not. They are related only in that both are products that someone else came up with. It would cost Microsoft nothing additional to put Firefox on their Windows CDs over what they pay to make the CDs right now. It would cost Microsoft hundreds of dollars per unit to ship a PS3 and a Nintendo with each XBox. How can you say the two are comparable? The comparison would be valid if Playstations and Nintendos were free, had no weight, and took up no physical space in the packaging.
The "copyright infringment is ok" argument comes from people that are trying to rationalise that they aren't doing anything wrong; they are incorrect and they know it.
I was complaining about how MS goes out of their way to make it exceeding difficult to *not* have their software installed on your computer, set to be used by default, and hooked into the OS so that all Windows functions must use it. I was informing you that the GP *also* was saying that, and not what you decided that s/he said.
Ultimately, the reason that computer users are "stupid" is because so many of them try quite hard to not learn anything. To do a real world comparision, the way most computer users are is like having the same problem with your car every week, being capable of fixing it in two or three minutes for free, but having to get a mechanic to come and fix it because you never learn the procedure to fix it, even though he tells it to you every time. You can tell someone how to stop a computer from screwing up, how to install a USB device, how to duplex a print job, etc, but a lot of them will never bother to actually learn it.
Providing choice does not equate to the same problem. When I install Linux, I can typically choose between a few programs that do the same thing, right off from the installer. That's not as important as the fact that I can choose to have *no* web browser, from the installer. That is what we were saying to you, and that is the larger problem. Microsoft *doesn't* let you pick the "no program" option anymore.
The US doesn't want to give something up to the UN. That's a good enough answer to "why" as you really need. The US is run by its citizens (in theory). The UN is run by a bunch of countries that have no accountability to the US or its citizens.
Because not everyone thinks that socialism is a good idea, that's why it is wrong. Also because the UN has absolutely no authority, it has no ability to use force, and generally can't do anything right that it *does* try to do.
You have quite an interesting perspective on "noone will miss them". If by nobody you mean every country in the world will be screwed for a good while, or you mean that the global economy will crash that nobody will miss them, then yes. Maybe you mean that there won't be any trouble, what with all those countries that are unable to defend themselves, currently, without US aid. I'm sure Japan won't care, for example. It would be quite diluted to think that nobody would miss the US. Now if you said that nobody *needs* the US, that would be a different story; any country could break their dependance on the US if they tried.
The US doesn't have to tell your country why not. It is a sovereign nation, and it does not have to do what the EU or the UN tells it to do. Besides, in general, if the EU wants it, there is probably something wrong with it anyway. I'll give you a few tidbits on some of the other things, though. The EU likely built their own GPS because the US version is *controlled by the US military*. It was a US project, funded with US money, just like the Internet. That means the US has control over it because they paid for it and built it. There is nothing being held hostage at all.
Futhermore, no country should have control over another country, because that means you don't have countries, you have provinces or states. You seem to lack a basic understand of government. Socialism and communism put control of everything into the easily corruptable main body of big government. They remove the freedom of the populace under the assumption that government does it best. History shows that assumption to be quite incorrect.
You really hit a good idea there at the end. Most users will only be using the US controlled ones, so they won't be able to query your servers. Companies won't risk only going with your servers, since so many people don't use them. You'll have collisions and other issues, same as the current alternative roots have.
Wow, so you're just like those "ignorant [American] citizens" that you're bitching about, correct? Perhaps not that bad, but you're certainly being naive.
The Internet was a US creation, funded and operated by the US for twenty years. Then it became controlled by the US, but essentially operated by various companies. Then it was controlled by ICANN with oversight by the US government, and operated by various companies. That is the way it is today. That puts it as both operated and controlled by US interests. There is actually only international cooperation when it comes down to ccTLDs.
It *can* and *would* be worse than the way the US is doing it. The UN can barely make a decision on what to have for dinner, and you want them in charge of DNS? What sort of ridiculousness would that lead to is not something I want to see. The US has done a bang up good job with DNS so far.
That poster seems like someone that knows a bit about how well the UN operates. Also seemed like the poster doesn't like the UN. Well that's fine. I'm someone that hates the idea of giving up control of my country to some international body. I really hate the idea of that body being something as incompetent and neutered as the UN. You might think the EU or the UN is a great idea, but I think the whole concept is inane. History is siding with me, so far.
The whole world is no more the US than it is the EU. Seeing as to how the US built the Internet, and runs the Internet, it would seem that it is the US' ball a lot more than anyone else's. If the US wants it to stay that way, then fine. As has been said a hundred times already, use your own DNS servers if you don't like it.
Re:Integration versus Bundling, Choice
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Pepping Up Windows
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· Score: 1
No, it doesn't let you select any of the applications when you install XP. You can remove them after they are installed, or make a custom CD without them. During the initial XP setup, you can change what networking options get installed, and that's it.
Re:Integration versus Bundling, Choice
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Pepping Up Windows
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Dude, did you actually *read* the GP? It did not propose to make MS included competing applications. It said that MS gives you no control over the applications that get installed. You can't choose to not have WMP, IE, or anything else, installed with the OS. With each release of Windows, MS gave you less and less choice over what gets installed on the computer. You have to let it install everything, and then uninstall what you don't want. Then if you want to get rid of the rest of what you don't want, you have to jump through flaming hoops. You get to mess around with "system file protection" to get rid of the remainder of OE, you *can't* get rid of IE, etc.
Not to mention that your comparisons are completely invalid. Including a bunch of physical things when you buy something is quite different than throwing a few extra things on a CD. As in the former costs a lot of money and the latter costs no money, unless you have to pay licensing fees. Damn, try to make a *little* sense at least.
Blah blah blah, so we should squander our resources just because they are a lot of them? That's an idiotic mentality, to be blunt. We have more RAM, HDD, and bandwidth now, so lets *do more* with them, instead of doing the same thing less efficiently.
What tangible benefit do you get out of having a fully binary text format? What detractions are there to having such a format? Well, the main benefit would be faster I/O, and the main disadvantages would be a more easily corrupted, larger, harder to work with format that is less likely to be application independant, requires more code to parse, and is much more difficult to directly manipulate.
Also, there are problems with DOC files all the time. They get too big for a floppy (this actually does matter still), they get too big to reasonably email, they start taking a long time to open, and eventually, Word corrupts them in a way that prevents it from loading the file again.
And I really can't stand people who make incorrect assumptions just because they don't like what they hear. I'm sorry, but credit where it's due would not be to give Microsoft credit. There were systems like AD around before them, and they were better. The most well known one was Novell's NDS. It was then, and is today, better than AD, and you'll find no end of information supporting that. You'll also find no end of information about the shortcomings and problems with AD. What you can say about AD is that it generally works, and it's generally not too bad to deal with, until something goes wrong, and then it's hell.
OpenLDAP is *NOT* anywhere near the same thing as AD. You can use it to make it do the same thing, but that is not the point. OpenLDAP comes with nothing more than an LDAP server and a few schema. There is no management tools, no pre-made applications that support it, nothing. Tools have grown into using it as a backend data storage system. However, OpenLDAP itself is not a network management system, or computer management, or user management. Compare apples to apples...
The point is that if you buy a solution, you expect it to work. There are a lot of things that you can't do right with MS products without third party software. This is generally because MS didn't finish the software before deciding to throw a huge number of additional, also incomplete, "features" into their products. MS is like the Sony of the software world; it only works if you use all MS products, and as soon as you throw something else, it all breaks. They also have a tendancy to make the design for a particular product crap in the beginning, good in the middle, and crap at the end.
It is quite difficult to get AD to work with anything that wasn't written specifically for AD. It is quite easy to get most other solutions to do the same. It is hard to do anything different with Exchange, but quite easy with most other systems. It is trivial to move data between formats with things that aren't MS Office. MS is pretty much the worst out there for working with other software.
VSS is similar to LVM. It is not nearly as flexible, and it's nowhere near as mature. It works fine, though, and you can certainly do your backups with it. The problem is that you still need your database to be in a consistent state or your snapshot still has junk data in it. It'll just be junk data that you can back up without access errors.
Yes, you can back up Exchange with NT Backup. However, NT Backup isn't exactly a good backup system; it just does the basics. That might be good enough, but it's quite annoying that you have to pander to an application by writing custom software to deal with it properly.
Just to point out, I never was talking about OpenLDAP. I said that there are a *lot* of solutions out there that outperform Exchange on less hardware, that cost less money, and were more reliable.
For free software, you have OpenGroupware, Horde, and the just mentioned Zimbra. They will all provide the functionality that Exchange does. I'm sure there are others, too.
For commercial alternative designs, you have Novell GroupWise and Lotus Notes. There are others, but I am familiar with those.
For commercial Exchange compatible, you have OpenXchange and openmail. Again, there are very likely others.
I can't think of any free software Exchange compatible server platforms. Personally, my research was targetted at being able to do email, group calendars, and contact lists. I wanted to do so without touching Outlook, and without requiring Windows Server.
All of the platforms that I've mentioned are less expensive in licensing than Exchange/Outlook are. Some of them require more expertise to set up well, like Notes, and all of them will run without Windows. I can't vouch from experience for the reliability of the open source software, but all of the commercial software is *very* reliable.
The GP probably was trying to prevent that, but the parent understood that fine.
"While there should be a national minimum educational requirement, families and communities ought to be allowed a great deal of leeway in regards to what they are allowed to teach."
That's why he was talking about a minimum requirement.
First thing first, why in the hell are you running KDE on a server, and more important, why are you running an X server on one at all?
A huge number of people that got stuck with Exchange servers want to get rid of them. That's why these articles keep coming up.
What you meant was that you need the address book and directory services. Scheduling tends to be done by secretaries, and forms/IMAP folder sharing is generally not needed. Now if you say you *want* scheduling, etc, then fine, there are a number of quality products from which you can choose. If you define "what you need" to be the exact feature set of Exchange, then it isn't surprising that you think you need it. You can implement everything that Exchange/Outlook does with other software, cheaper, with more reliability, and on less hardware.
1. As for AD management software... let's see. You bought Windows Server because it's easy to use and admin, Exchange because it's easy to admin, and are using AD because it's easy to admin. So to do it right, you have to buy third party software? Sounds more like somebody screwed up their research and choose a bad solution based on broken assumptions. You have to do basically the same thing on any platform, so that's not a good reason to choose one over another. The UNIX solutions are much more reliable than Exchange, too, and less expensive. They also provide all the same functionality. Unless you go out of your way to ignore the solutions that work, anyway.
2. That's because Windows' does not provide functionality such as LVM. An application can also lock a file and prevent any app with any access level from even reading it. Exchange also keeps quite a lot open and locked when it doesn't need to. If the app was written well, it wouldn't be a problem. However, your backup explaination is an excellent example of why Windows is a huge pain in the ass.
3. BS, that is a perfectly valid comparison; backing up email is backing up email. If the application is written properly, the database will be fine. Exchange isn't written well, so it has problems. That software doesn't even provide a way to do a backup without either getting third party software or shutting Exchange down. Also, your VSS stuff is essentially the *exact same thing* as LVM snapshots. Why would your way work when LVM wouldn't? If the database is inconsistent, then it's inconsistent either way.
So what you're saying is that Windows/Exchange is better because it requires more jumping through hoops, buying more random software, and more dealing with random BS like bad data formats and bad storage techniques?
The Federal does not have authority under the Constitution to do most of what it is doing today. The Constitution lists a number of function which the Federal is limited to doing. Our government has made use of the inter-state commerce clause and the general welfare clause to enact all sorts of legislation. If you read those clauses, however, you realize that they do not allow the Federal to expand their powers past those enumerated in the Constitution.
If you properly enforced the Constitution, any power the Federal has created that is not enumerated in the Constitution would have to be removed.
One mention of general welfare allows the Federal to use monies they have collected to pay for things that in the general welfare of the country. The other mention of it, which is in the preamble, states that one of the purposes for the Constitution is to promote the general welfare of the country.
One mention of commerce allows the Federal to regulate commerce that takes places across a State border. The other mention says that the Federal may not regulate commerce in an unequal fashion; if they regulate, they must regulate every party the same.
1) You assume that the US is a democracy... it is not. In our style of government, the populace is only partially responsible for the election of leaders. We are a federalist republic, which is quite different from democracy.
2) Yes, a majority of electors did vote for Pres. Bush. This is separate from the number of citizens that voted. We had around 30% of people that are able to vote actually participate in the last election, so at most 30% of people were involved. The President only needs more than a certain number of electoral votes to win, which does not mean anything about the number of people voting. So if 20 people voted in a state, and 5 voted for Pres. Bush, and the rest were evenly split between four candidates, with one candidate getting only 3 votes, then Pres. Bush wins the state with only 25% of the vote. You could make the numbers worse if you wanted.
3) Yes, that is a big part of it, but the problem is much larger than just that. Most people actually don't seem to think there is a problem at all.
Yes, I know who was being talked about. I know about the topic and the formula they discovered, too. Just because it had an effect on economics does not make it the fault of the US government. Why would this have anything to do with world affairs? It was an advance in game theory, not a political agenda.
When someone starts blaming random things on the government, and coming up with all sorts of crazy connections that aren't really there, then yes, it starts to be conspiracy theory at work. It's talking about the government secretly working to effect world economics through secret agreements with other parties.
I also can't see the other comment, because you posted as "Anonymous Coward".
I wasn't trying to hide anything, nor obscure anything. I was saying that my body is the same as my house and my desk. I should be able to do what I want to any of these things.
In the case of pregnancy, you have a fetus that depends on the woman's property (her body). If you take the stance that it is a part of her body, then it is her property, and she should be able to do as she pleases with it. If you take the stance that it is not part of her body, then it is depending on her property, and what she does to her property is tough for the fetus.
Strong belief in personal freedom is not always a picnic. When people bring up some topics, like abortion, it is not always easy to maintain that strong belief. However, for people to be as free as they should be, you can't start making special cases; that just leads to other abuses by government. So, unfortunately, people would have abortions. I would prefer they did not have abortions, but I do not believe that force should be used to prevent it. I cannot justify forcing my morals on someone else, and I cannot justify you forcing yours on someone. That is a limitation of freedom.
As far as what you notice, you don't have to support or not support abortion to see the effect you're talking about. This happens almost everywhere in politics and media. The major part is that everyone that is pro-choice has *already* said that it is just OK, and that wasn't good enough for a lot of people. If you're saying that doing something is fine, and another group is trying to say what you're doing should be illegal, you now really have to pursue other avenues of persuation to ensure that it doesn't become illegal. This involves changing tactics.
Don't blame the populace for the actions of the government. Quite a few of the people here did not vote to put these people in power. You're welcome to say what you want to about the country, just please don't encourage lumping everyone together.
Everything you talk about in your first paragraph is actually illegal for the US to do, by the US' own laws. If I had my way, I'd not only throw out most of the people in power, but I'd throw out most of the laws that have been passed in the last hundred years.
I want to know how we've managed to elect such incompetence for so long. I want to know how so many of the people here managed to get so shortsighted and complacent. I want to know know why we stopped learning and creating things. I want to know how we stopped caring about anything.
Anyway, there are people here that are trying to change things for the better. It's just slow and painful when most of your countrymen and nearly all of your leadership seem to be working against you. Although, honestly, I wouldn't want people fixing things because the country is getting criticised... I want them to fix it because it's broken.
The US does have problems using nuclear weapons. If you notice, it was done twice, against the same enemy, within three days of each other. It was the first time a nuclear weapon was *ever* used against people. That was 50 years ago, and a nuclear weapon has not been used since. So yes, the US does have a problem with using nukes.
There is also only the rumored possibility that the US is using phosphor weapons. You go on about it being fact, when I doubt you have any.
The US track record on ethics is about the same as everyone else's. Don't let the TV or the whining of other governments convince you otherwise. Just about everyone is capable of being brutal. Look at the history of France, England, China, Vietnam, etc, for examples. That it's common does not make it right, but don't go on about the US being the great unprecedented evil like some idiot.
The vast majority of the Armed Forces wouldn't go along with these "fucked-up things". In any group you have some screw-ups; people with serious mental disorders that got past screening. You have people that have breakdowns while their on active duty. It happens, and you try to limit the damage they cause. The difference is that today, the media publicises it big every time something happens that is slightly off.
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I've had zero problems with NVIDIA video drivers. I do some really strange things, too. Now the horribly outdated and buggy ATI drivers, that was a whole pile of fun. ATI has *always* had horrible software, and this is no exception.
I get burned by the bad ATI software every time I make the mistake of buying something that has an ATI chip in it. Either it's their crap Windows drivers, crap Linux drivers, stupid control panel apps, restrictions on video card order, and on and on and on. You get the occasional random STOP on NT from the ATI driver, you get multimedia apps that refuse to start because you have another vendor card in the system.
Really, their hardware isn't bad. They've improved their hardware a great deal since 486s were new. They still haven't figured out how to make software that doesn't suck.
Also, there isn't nearly complete support for ATI with acceleration, just as there isn't 3D support for nVIDIA. They both have 2d support with open source drivers. Seriously, neither vendor will likely ever offer documentation on their cards, and so there will probably never be open drivers that fully support their cards.
Sorry, I wasn't really being on topic to the article, but was specifically responding to just you. I think you are entirely correct in saying that videogames aren't the cause. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's just parenting, but I would agree that parenting is the biggest reason, by far.
I don't think I could compare those two crime rates. There is certainly more crime in an urban area than in a suburban area. I would agree that much of that crime is directly related to bad parenting, though.
Having both parents work is just an easy way to get bad parenting. As you pointed out, though, just because there is a parent that isn't working doesn't mean they will parent well. Overall, far too many parents ignore their children, or set a terrible example for them, and that is a huge reason that children grow up with bad attitudes, little respect for others, and an inability to do for themselves.
"Kids have played videogames and smoked joints while both parents were away working since the big business 80s. Somehow I missed the huge jump in, what, suburban thuggery?"
Yes, you did miss it. However, if you're curious, just read up on how kids in K-12 act and are treated. Go visit a middle school and watch how the kids act. I see this in varying degrees every time I visit a school. You can see it in college now, too; I remember how different I thought my fellow students acted compared to what I thought was normal.
Also, I do believe, in fact, that a neighborhood where all the children have a parent that stays at home would have less crime. Well, I believe it, as long as the parents are responsible and respect other people.
Some children will end up being responsible and respectable people without supervision and guidance. Many children will not, though. While I agree that correlation is not causation, there is a lot of correlation with various parts of society that have changed over the last fifty years. The problem is not isolated to middle-class suburbs.
In general, a child will learn more, faster, if they have support at home. They will take on many of the parent's values to use a basis for their own. They will have constant exposure to those values, and if the parent's values repect, the child will be more respectful. If there is no parent, then the child learns everything on their own. That isn't bad by itself, but it means there isn't anyone to tell them when what they are doing is "wrong".
Look at children from broken homes... you will notice a trend that many children of divorced parents do not get along so well as children from a stable family. There is a tendancy for considerable social problems. They have more problems in schools, they have problem with relationships, etc. Not exactly the same topic as what you were commenting on, but similar.
Just because it is how we've been doing it doesn't make it automatically fine. Not having a parent around is not as good as having a parent around. If a child *can* have a parent stay home, they will be better off for it. It's just that as time went on, parents outwardly became more concerned with themselves than with their children. Seriously, if both parents want a career, they shouldn't be having children; it's unhealthy for those children. If you have to both work to afford your lifestyle, then why would you bring the huge additional expense of having a child? The parents that don't care have children that don't care.
The whole problem is that region coding *DOESN'T* reduce infringment, and it isn't a method to do so. There is nothing illegal about buying a region 2 movie to play in region 1 because it hasn't been released or just because it is cheaper that way. Sure, they would love to have people believe that, but it isn't the case.
So first, it isn't a form of piracy, and second, it doesn't prevent that anyway. Region codes try to make it inconvenient, and that's why there are so many players that will ignore it. Almost anyone that might have bought an out of region DVD also will know to get around it.
Besides, if you're going to make a copy of a movie, you aren't going to leave region codes enabled anyway. Their existence is irrelevant to where the duplicate is distributed. To make it worse, the lack of region codes on the copy make the copy better than the original. This is extremely common where copy restriction is involved.
Despite what the MPAA says, their members wouldn't stop selling movies to the home market for anything. That's a huge portion of their revenue, and they would take a bigger hit by not selling any than they would from infringing copies. Even if 50% of the people with a movie have an illicit copy, that still leaves the other 50% that did pay. Under your assumption, that would be 0% that pay, since the item wouldn't be for sale. The rampant infringment from an easily copied medium still makes them a whole lot more money than the scenario where they sell no copies because of the easily copied medium.
The assumption that most people would get infringing copies is just silly, anyway. That doesn't happen with software or music, and it is unrealistic to think that it would happen with movies. If that did start to happen, then they need to drop their prices to try to recapture their audience, since their model obviously has issues. Copyright infringment is still a market force, even if it isn't a legal force. It tells you that your former customers aren't willing to pay your price.
The MPAA members are also not releasing things to DVD because of the ability to prevent copies, they're doing it because it's cheaper than VHS, and they can sell you another copy of the movies you have. The popularity of the format has nothing to do with the restrictions. It wasn't successful because of that at all. Copyright has always been enforced, so I don't see what your point is. DVD is nothing special here, except as a better looking alternative to video tape.
It's more likely that you're getting modded down because you still aren't correct. I'm not considering you "the enemy", just wrong.
OK, to be quite blunt, you're an asshole. Computer: take DVD, rip on computer, play from wherever; that's really easy. Consumer elec.: take DVD, press duplicate button, swap in blank media, have a copy, also really easy. Doing it on the computer is better than doing on the stand alone recorder, because it offer more flexibility, but that's not useful for most home users. They are going to prefer the stand alone unit that is easier to operate. That the DVD isn't playable on the computer or other players is really annoying and should not ever be the case. I would be pissed enough to return the recorder, write the company a nasty letter, and tell other people to not buy from them because their stuff is broken.
Region coding is 100% about profitting the max off each region. It does not curb copyright infringment or anything else like it, and it is certainly not effective. Hell, it probably makes copyright infringment more prevelant, because they don't release in all regions simultaneously. That means you have people who want to watch the move that was just released to DVD in the US, but they can't because they're in Germany. However, they can get a ripped copy and it works, or they can get an unauthorized player that doesn't do region coding, or they can buy a region 1 player. So basically, region coding just annoys people, and anyone that wants to can get around it trivially.
BTW, you see people selling infringing copies of movies all the time. When I was in college, there was a guy selling thousands of them, and he showed up on campus a few times a year. I would go into the city, and I saw tons of people selling dups. That was all VHS, because it was easy to copy the damned things.
DVDs are even *easier* to duplicate than VHS. You can make more and better copies of the things. Of course they would release home copies of movies if they couldn't do the technological measures, and the consumer would love it. Their equipment would work better, there would be less stupid restriction to worry about. People wouldn't have to wonder if this disc will work in their car, or this other one will lock up their computer, oh, is this one really audio, how about the region code on this movie? Can I make a copy of this to take on vacation, or does this recorder have some stupid digital restriction thing on it? Will I be able to record this show, or will my recorder tell me that I'm not allowed? Technological restrictions not only do not prevent people from copying, they in fact only serve to make the technology work less.
Also, releasing a DVD will never lose a studio money. It is nearly guaranteed profit, and it doesn't matter how easy it is to copy the daft movie. Most people don't do that, and so most people that want the movie will buy a copy. *The Studios Would Not Abandon The Market* You are full of it on this.
Jeez, your arguments do not hold any water. Most of them fly in the face of all evidence on the topic, and oppose even some of what the MPAA has said on the topic. You don't know what you're talking about, everyone continually is saying you're wrong, you oppose common sense and direct statements from the industry, ignore the financials of the situation, and just generally are making things up.
The EU putting up a positioning constellation is a whole lot different. The US GPS system and the EU Galileo project do the same thing with the same data. They will both tell you your current position. The EU just decided to spend a huge amount of money to make another system, when all of the current hardware is pre-set to be use just GPS. They'll have to convince people to use it, at all. However, big deal; it's the EU's money and I don't care how they spend it. I don't live there.
Now, having another set of root DNS servers, on the other hand, will quickly give you out different data. It will *break* DNS, because now there would not be authoritative root servers. There would be the US servers, which most of the world would be using and almost all of the world is using now, and then there would be the EU/UN servers, which people would have to purposefully reconfigure their systems to use. If the EU wants to *run* a few of the nameservers, they could try to do that, instead of working so publicly to screw up the existing system because of their arrogance.
Plus, you can't just assign an address at the root level. That's complete bunk and shows a lack of understanding on what a root server is. The root contains records to servers for things like ".com" and ".uk". It is the final '.' in an address, which we don't usually include. "slashdot.org." is the real address to here. You would query '.' for what the servers for ".org" are. Then you would query ".org" for what authoritative server is for "slashdot.org", and then you would query *that* server and then have the address.
Ultimately, of course, the EU can do whatever they want. So if they decide to set up their own DNS servers, most of the Internet will decide they don't care. So let the EU throw a hissy fit temper tantrum. The government body obviously doesn't understand how DNS works, but they sure don't have a problem screwing with it anyway.
Blarg, DNS is not IP address delegation. The whole point is that these countries want the UN to run DNS *naming*. The UN would decide if you were allowed to have that domain name, and the UN would solve domain name disputes. They would decide who was a root nameserver, how often zone files were refreshed, etc.
IP block delegation is completely separate from DNS. It's even handled by an entirely different set of people, like ARIN.
Also, to reiterate the thousand times stated truth, the US does not control the Internet. The US has oversight of ICANN, which delegates the root DNS servers. DNS isn't the Internet, either, it's just a system to translate IP address to symbolic names, and vice versa.
Where exactly did I say that MS *should* ship third party software? I said there was a difference between shipping a competitors software and a competitors hardware. I said it wouldn't cost money to ship the software, unless there was licensing to worry about, but that it would cost a substantial amount to ship hardware. *YOU* said they were the same thing. I also specifically said that I didn't think MS should have to ship competitors software.
Seriously, start reading posts before you comment; that was the issue I initially responded to you about. You managed to say the same thing as I did, while simultaneously saying that I was wrong.
Actually, no, I wouldn't complain. But if Windows only did run MS software, we wouldn't be running Windows, would we? That would be a horrible business decision, since they would never have gained market share. Almost everyone out there wants to run non-MS software for something, either because the MS version isn't good enough, or because there simply isn't a MS version.
What part of my argument is garbage? The part where I kept saying that the original post I was talking about wasn't saying what the response insisted? Maybe the part where I was saying that MS has increasingly gone with the default "install everything" approach? Perhaps the part where I said that too many users try hard to not learn anything about their computers?
All of those things are true. The only part of my post that is an argument is that there is a fundamental difference between a physical object and some additional data on a CD-ROM. Aside from that, it was a collection of facts.
No, those comparisions are NOT valid. One costs the company money to produce, the other does not. One is physical, the other is not. They are related only in that both are products that someone else came up with. It would cost Microsoft nothing additional to put Firefox on their Windows CDs over what they pay to make the CDs right now. It would cost Microsoft hundreds of dollars per unit to ship a PS3 and a Nintendo with each XBox. How can you say the two are comparable? The comparison would be valid if Playstations and Nintendos were free, had no weight, and took up no physical space in the packaging.
The "copyright infringment is ok" argument comes from people that are trying to rationalise that they aren't doing anything wrong; they are incorrect and they know it.
I was complaining about how MS goes out of their way to make it exceeding difficult to *not* have their software installed on your computer, set to be used by default, and hooked into the OS so that all Windows functions must use it. I was informing you that the GP *also* was saying that, and not what you decided that s/he said.
Ultimately, the reason that computer users are "stupid" is because so many of them try quite hard to not learn anything. To do a real world comparision, the way most computer users are is like having the same problem with your car every week, being capable of fixing it in two or three minutes for free, but having to get a mechanic to come and fix it because you never learn the procedure to fix it, even though he tells it to you every time. You can tell someone how to stop a computer from screwing up, how to install a USB device, how to duplex a print job, etc, but a lot of them will never bother to actually learn it.
Providing choice does not equate to the same problem. When I install Linux, I can typically choose between a few programs that do the same thing, right off from the installer. That's not as important as the fact that I can choose to have *no* web browser, from the installer. That is what we were saying to you, and that is the larger problem. Microsoft *doesn't* let you pick the "no program" option anymore.
The US doesn't want to give something up to the UN. That's a good enough answer to "why" as you really need. The US is run by its citizens (in theory). The UN is run by a bunch of countries that have no accountability to the US or its citizens.
Because not everyone thinks that socialism is a good idea, that's why it is wrong. Also because the UN has absolutely no authority, it has no ability to use force, and generally can't do anything right that it *does* try to do.
You have quite an interesting perspective on "noone will miss them". If by nobody you mean every country in the world will be screwed for a good while, or you mean that the global economy will crash that nobody will miss them, then yes. Maybe you mean that there won't be any trouble, what with all those countries that are unable to defend themselves, currently, without US aid. I'm sure Japan won't care, for example. It would be quite diluted to think that nobody would miss the US. Now if you said that nobody *needs* the US, that would be a different story; any country could break their dependance on the US if they tried.
The US doesn't have to tell your country why not. It is a sovereign nation, and it does not have to do what the EU or the UN tells it to do. Besides, in general, if the EU wants it, there is probably something wrong with it anyway. I'll give you a few tidbits on some of the other things, though. The EU likely built their own GPS because the US version is *controlled by the US military*. It was a US project, funded with US money, just like the Internet. That means the US has control over it because they paid for it and built it. There is nothing being held hostage at all.
Futhermore, no country should have control over another country, because that means you don't have countries, you have provinces or states. You seem to lack a basic understand of government. Socialism and communism put control of everything into the easily corruptable main body of big government. They remove the freedom of the populace under the assumption that government does it best. History shows that assumption to be quite incorrect.
You really hit a good idea there at the end. Most users will only be using the US controlled ones, so they won't be able to query your servers. Companies won't risk only going with your servers, since so many people don't use them. You'll have collisions and other issues, same as the current alternative roots have.
Wow, so you're just like those "ignorant [American] citizens" that you're bitching about, correct? Perhaps not that bad, but you're certainly being naive.
The Internet was a US creation, funded and operated by the US for twenty years. Then it became controlled by the US, but essentially operated by various companies. Then it was controlled by ICANN with oversight by the US government, and operated by various companies. That is the way it is today. That puts it as both operated and controlled by US interests. There is actually only international cooperation when it comes down to ccTLDs.
It *can* and *would* be worse than the way the US is doing it. The UN can barely make a decision on what to have for dinner, and you want them in charge of DNS? What sort of ridiculousness would that lead to is not something I want to see. The US has done a bang up good job with DNS so far.
That poster seems like someone that knows a bit about how well the UN operates. Also seemed like the poster doesn't like the UN. Well that's fine. I'm someone that hates the idea of giving up control of my country to some international body. I really hate the idea of that body being something as incompetent and neutered as the UN. You might think the EU or the UN is a great idea, but I think the whole concept is inane. History is siding with me, so far.
The whole world is no more the US than it is the EU. Seeing as to how the US built the Internet, and runs the Internet, it would seem that it is the US' ball a lot more than anyone else's. If the US wants it to stay that way, then fine. As has been said a hundred times already, use your own DNS servers if you don't like it.
No, it doesn't let you select any of the applications when you install XP. You can remove them after they are installed, or make a custom CD without them. During the initial XP setup, you can change what networking options get installed, and that's it.
Dude, did you actually *read* the GP? It did not propose to make MS included competing applications. It said that MS gives you no control over the applications that get installed. You can't choose to not have WMP, IE, or anything else, installed with the OS. With each release of Windows, MS gave you less and less choice over what gets installed on the computer. You have to let it install everything, and then uninstall what you don't want. Then if you want to get rid of the rest of what you don't want, you have to jump through flaming hoops. You get to mess around with "system file protection" to get rid of the remainder of OE, you *can't* get rid of IE, etc.
Not to mention that your comparisons are completely invalid. Including a bunch of physical things when you buy something is quite different than throwing a few extra things on a CD. As in the former costs a lot of money and the latter costs no money, unless you have to pay licensing fees. Damn, try to make a *little* sense at least.
Blah blah blah, so we should squander our resources just because they are a lot of them? That's an idiotic mentality, to be blunt. We have more RAM, HDD, and bandwidth now, so lets *do more* with them, instead of doing the same thing less efficiently.
What tangible benefit do you get out of having a fully binary text format? What detractions are there to having such a format? Well, the main benefit would be faster I/O, and the main disadvantages would be a more easily corrupted, larger, harder to work with format that is less likely to be application independant, requires more code to parse, and is much more difficult to directly manipulate.
Also, there are problems with DOC files all the time. They get too big for a floppy (this actually does matter still), they get too big to reasonably email, they start taking a long time to open, and eventually, Word corrupts them in a way that prevents it from loading the file again.
And I really can't stand people who make incorrect assumptions just because they don't like what they hear. I'm sorry, but credit where it's due would not be to give Microsoft credit. There were systems like AD around before them, and they were better. The most well known one was Novell's NDS. It was then, and is today, better than AD, and you'll find no end of information supporting that. You'll also find no end of information about the shortcomings and problems with AD. What you can say about AD is that it generally works, and it's generally not too bad to deal with, until something goes wrong, and then it's hell.
OpenLDAP is *NOT* anywhere near the same thing as AD. You can use it to make it do the same thing, but that is not the point. OpenLDAP comes with nothing more than an LDAP server and a few schema. There is no management tools, no pre-made applications that support it, nothing. Tools have grown into using it as a backend data storage system. However, OpenLDAP itself is not a network management system, or computer management, or user management. Compare apples to apples...
The point is that if you buy a solution, you expect it to work. There are a lot of things that you can't do right with MS products without third party software. This is generally because MS didn't finish the software before deciding to throw a huge number of additional, also incomplete, "features" into their products. MS is like the Sony of the software world; it only works if you use all MS products, and as soon as you throw something else, it all breaks. They also have a tendancy to make the design for a particular product crap in the beginning, good in the middle, and crap at the end.
It is quite difficult to get AD to work with anything that wasn't written specifically for AD. It is quite easy to get most other solutions to do the same. It is hard to do anything different with Exchange, but quite easy with most other systems. It is trivial to move data between formats with things that aren't MS Office. MS is pretty much the worst out there for working with other software.
VSS is similar to LVM. It is not nearly as flexible, and it's nowhere near as mature. It works fine, though, and you can certainly do your backups with it. The problem is that you still need your database to be in a consistent state or your snapshot still has junk data in it. It'll just be junk data that you can back up without access errors.
Yes, you can back up Exchange with NT Backup. However, NT Backup isn't exactly a good backup system; it just does the basics. That might be good enough, but it's quite annoying that you have to pander to an application by writing custom software to deal with it properly.
Just to point out, I never was talking about OpenLDAP. I said that there are a *lot* of solutions out there that outperform Exchange on less hardware, that cost less money, and were more reliable.
For free software, you have OpenGroupware, Horde, and the just mentioned Zimbra. They will all provide the functionality that Exchange does. I'm sure there are others, too.
For commercial alternative designs, you have Novell GroupWise and Lotus Notes. There are others, but I am familiar with those.
For commercial Exchange compatible, you have OpenXchange and openmail. Again, there are very likely others.
I can't think of any free software Exchange compatible server platforms. Personally, my research was targetted at being able to do email, group calendars, and contact lists. I wanted to do so without touching Outlook, and without requiring Windows Server.
All of the platforms that I've mentioned are less expensive in licensing than Exchange/Outlook are. Some of them require more expertise to set up well, like Notes, and all of them will run without Windows. I can't vouch from experience for the reliability of the open source software, but all of the commercial software is *very* reliable.
Perhaps other people can fill in even more info?
The GP probably was trying to prevent that, but the parent understood that fine.
"While there should be a national minimum educational requirement, families and communities ought to be allowed a great deal of leeway in regards to what they are allowed to teach."
That's why he was talking about a minimum requirement.
First thing first, why in the hell are you running KDE on a server, and more important, why are you running an X server on one at all?
A huge number of people that got stuck with Exchange servers want to get rid of them. That's why these articles keep coming up.
What you meant was that you need the address book and directory services. Scheduling tends to be done by secretaries, and forms/IMAP folder sharing is generally not needed. Now if you say you *want* scheduling, etc, then fine, there are a number of quality products from which you can choose. If you define "what you need" to be the exact feature set of Exchange, then it isn't surprising that you think you need it. You can implement everything that Exchange/Outlook does with other software, cheaper, with more reliability, and on less hardware.
1. As for AD management software... let's see. You bought Windows Server because it's easy to use and admin, Exchange because it's easy to admin, and are using AD because it's easy to admin. So to do it right, you have to buy third party software? Sounds more like somebody screwed up their research and choose a bad solution based on broken assumptions. You have to do basically the same thing on any platform, so that's not a good reason to choose one over another. The UNIX solutions are much more reliable than Exchange, too, and less expensive. They also provide all the same functionality. Unless you go out of your way to ignore the solutions that work, anyway.
2. That's because Windows' does not provide functionality such as LVM. An application can also lock a file and prevent any app with any access level from even reading it. Exchange also keeps quite a lot open and locked when it doesn't need to. If the app was written well, it wouldn't be a problem. However, your backup explaination is an excellent example of why Windows is a huge pain in the ass.
3. BS, that is a perfectly valid comparison; backing up email is backing up email. If the application is written properly, the database will be fine. Exchange isn't written well, so it has problems. That software doesn't even provide a way to do a backup without either getting third party software or shutting Exchange down. Also, your VSS stuff is essentially the *exact same thing* as LVM snapshots. Why would your way work when LVM wouldn't? If the database is inconsistent, then it's inconsistent either way.
So what you're saying is that Windows/Exchange is better because it requires more jumping through hoops, buying more random software, and more dealing with random BS like bad data formats and bad storage techniques?
The Federal does not have authority under the Constitution to do most of what it is doing today. The Constitution lists a number of function which the Federal is limited to doing. Our government has made use of the inter-state commerce clause and the general welfare clause to enact all sorts of legislation. If you read those clauses, however, you realize that they do not allow the Federal to expand their powers past those enumerated in the Constitution.
If you properly enforced the Constitution, any power the Federal has created that is not enumerated in the Constitution would have to be removed.
One mention of general welfare allows the Federal to use monies they have collected to pay for things that in the general welfare of the country. The other mention of it, which is in the preamble, states that one of the purposes for the Constitution is to promote the general welfare of the country.
One mention of commerce allows the Federal to regulate commerce that takes places across a State border. The other mention says that the Federal may not regulate commerce in an unequal fashion; if they regulate, they must regulate every party the same.
1) You assume that the US is a democracy... it is not. In our style of government, the populace is only partially responsible for the election of leaders. We are a federalist republic, which is quite different from democracy.
2) Yes, a majority of electors did vote for Pres. Bush. This is separate from the number of citizens that voted. We had around 30% of people that are able to vote actually participate in the last election, so at most 30% of people were involved. The President only needs more than a certain number of electoral votes to win, which does not mean anything about the number of people voting. So if 20 people voted in a state, and 5 voted for Pres. Bush, and the rest were evenly split between four candidates, with one candidate getting only 3 votes, then Pres. Bush wins the state with only 25% of the vote. You could make the numbers worse if you wanted.
3) Yes, that is a big part of it, but the problem is much larger than just that. Most people actually don't seem to think there is a problem at all.
Yes, I know who was being talked about. I know about the topic and the formula they discovered, too. Just because it had an effect on economics does not make it the fault of the US government. Why would this have anything to do with world affairs? It was an advance in game theory, not a political agenda.
When someone starts blaming random things on the government, and coming up with all sorts of crazy connections that aren't really there, then yes, it starts to be conspiracy theory at work. It's talking about the government secretly working to effect world economics through secret agreements with other parties.
I also can't see the other comment, because you posted as "Anonymous Coward".
I wasn't trying to hide anything, nor obscure anything. I was saying that my body is the same as my house and my desk. I should be able to do what I want to any of these things.
In the case of pregnancy, you have a fetus that depends on the woman's property (her body). If you take the stance that it is a part of her body, then it is her property, and she should be able to do as she pleases with it. If you take the stance that it is not part of her body, then it is depending on her property, and what she does to her property is tough for the fetus.
Strong belief in personal freedom is not always a picnic. When people bring up some topics, like abortion, it is not always easy to maintain that strong belief. However, for people to be as free as they should be, you can't start making special cases; that just leads to other abuses by government. So, unfortunately, people would have abortions. I would prefer they did not have abortions, but I do not believe that force should be used to prevent it. I cannot justify forcing my morals on someone else, and I cannot justify you forcing yours on someone. That is a limitation of freedom.
As far as what you notice, you don't have to support or not support abortion to see the effect you're talking about. This happens almost everywhere in politics and media. The major part is that everyone that is pro-choice has *already* said that it is just OK, and that wasn't good enough for a lot of people. If you're saying that doing something is fine, and another group is trying to say what you're doing should be illegal, you now really have to pursue other avenues of persuation to ensure that it doesn't become illegal. This involves changing tactics.
Don't blame the populace for the actions of the government. Quite a few of the people here did not vote to put these people in power. You're welcome to say what you want to about the country, just please don't encourage lumping everyone together.
Everything you talk about in your first paragraph is actually illegal for the US to do, by the US' own laws. If I had my way, I'd not only throw out most of the people in power, but I'd throw out most of the laws that have been passed in the last hundred years.
I want to know how we've managed to elect such incompetence for so long. I want to know how so many of the people here managed to get so shortsighted and complacent. I want to know know why we stopped learning and creating things. I want to know how we stopped caring about anything.
Anyway, there are people here that are trying to change things for the better. It's just slow and painful when most of your countrymen and nearly all of your leadership seem to be working against you. Although, honestly, I wouldn't want people fixing things because the country is getting criticised... I want them to fix it because it's broken.
The US does have problems using nuclear weapons. If you notice, it was done twice, against the same enemy, within three days of each other. It was the first time a nuclear weapon was *ever* used against people. That was 50 years ago, and a nuclear weapon has not been used since. So yes, the US does have a problem with using nukes.
There is also only the rumored possibility that the US is using phosphor weapons. You go on about it being fact, when I doubt you have any.
The US track record on ethics is about the same as everyone else's. Don't let the TV or the whining of other governments convince you otherwise. Just about everyone is capable of being brutal. Look at the history of France, England, China, Vietnam, etc, for examples. That it's common does not make it right, but don't go on about the US being the great unprecedented evil like some idiot.
The vast majority of the Armed Forces wouldn't go along with these "fucked-up things". In any group you have some screw-ups; people with serious mental disorders that got past screening. You have people that have breakdowns while their on active duty. It happens, and you try to limit the damage they cause. The difference is that today, the media publicises it big every time something happens that is slightly off.