I love responses like this. When first read they sound profound and insightful but when considered for even a moment by anyone with even a small amount of intelligence they melt into the kind of drivel that alway draws a chuckle.
The armed man can replicate the evil of course but nothing says he has to or even will. You don't bother to mention that he can also prevent the evil from happening.
"Sir! What is that on your hand? Yes, right there on your hand. Is that.... ugh, disgusting. Put your hand down and be seated please. Could someone please bring autopr0n some tissue paper! Yes, yes you're excused autopr0n. Just get out of here now"
Cause I've downloaded internet porn while smoking crack and so I can say from first hand experience (and later, second hand) that when my DSL went down I was pissed BUT I didn't get out of my chair until the crack ran out.
Seriously though this is just some more alarmist bullshit from those special folks out there who live in mortal terror that someone, somewhere might be getting a nut or even enjoying something a little bit. They're just busy trying to save us from ourselves again. Nothing new here.
Re:Netscape backed by firefox??
on
Netscape Reborn?
·
· Score: 1
Netscape->Mozilla->FireFox->Netscape!?!?!....next? I dunno, "Profit!" maybe?
Hypothetical time of course but if the United States chose to close those bases down and bring those soldiers back to the United States, stationing them at some of the many bases inside our borders why would that happen as a result of the weakening of our might?
I can see how an argument might be made that doing this could result in a weakening of our relative might or of our ability to project that might but nothing in the world says that we could not close those bases down for no other reason than "we want to". That's what I'm saying and that's what you're missing.
Close them today, spend the money here in the United States. Simple as that. The size of the military and the amount of money it sucks from US coffers is my primary motivation. Trust me on that.
I do indeed place some concern on the feelings of people in other countries. I don't believe that there's a carved in stone rule out there saying that a large part of the rest of the world must inevitable hate the United States. I know (how could I not know) that "x" number of people across the globe will always have or find some reason to hate America. Someone hates everything. Someone hates puppies and cotton candy somewhere, I swear they do.
Still, there's no reason to go about actively prodding that hatred. No reason to go giving people and nations a reason to be pissed off at us all the time. The United States doesn't "need" a free South Korea. A free South Korea is a good thing. It's the best thing next to a free Korea from top to bottom but it's not one of our needs. Graduating students who are educated is for example one of our needs.
And I'm not saying that the US shouldn't be prepared to stand with those countries if they are threatened. Coming to the aid of a free nation or nations is a good thing to do but those nations should be able to defend themselves first. Providing a military umbrella for other countries at no cost to those countries is a losing proposition.
Japan can defend itself make no mistake about that.
Taiwan is not a country. It's a part of China and eventually Taiwan is going to have to accept that. The war ended long ago and the communists won it. The best they can hope for is a solution not unlike the one Hong Kong managed. They should be hoping that their new "Red flag bearing overlords" want to make every effort not to kill the goose that laid the golden egg and that's about as good as it gets. Maybe, just maybe there's an outside chance that they can prolong this far enough and slip off China's plate but they've got decades to go before that's even on the horizon.
I don't really care if Japan and Germany are good with a US military presence. It doesn't belong there. A German military presence should be enough for Germany. A Japanese military presence ought to take care of Japan.
The Middle East is a whole other can of worms entirely. This is nothing more than the primary view of one shortsighted American I'm sure but I want my country to have nothing to with the Middle East aside from the purchase of crude oil. This is in all reality the only thing that region produces with any value.
I don't want to enslave muslims, I don't want to steal their oil, I don't want to step a dirty western foot on their precious "holy land". I just want to do business with them for a commodity we need that they have. In return they get fat cash and we get "go-juice". End of story. To quote Marsellus Wallace from Pulp Fiction "There is no you and me".
Why in the world we're in the process of trying to turn Iraq into a civilized nation I will never understand. Who the hell cares if Saddam was filling mass graves with the Iraqi people? I certainly don't and obviously niether did they. They'd take a brutal dictator killing them hand over fist over a democracy that we helped build so why bother to try? The answer of course lies with Israel (another extraordinary can of worms).
I don't really care how it happens (The US gets weaker or the rest of the world becomes stronger) because in the end it's the same thing.
I simply believe that a US military presence in countries like South Korea, Japan, and of course Germany is no longer needed. Prior to WWII we didn't have soldiers stationed in those countries (though of course we had them in the Philipines as we owned them at that time) and now that things in those areas are more than stable I see no reason to continue it.
Sure North Korea is a friggin nightmare but honestly isn't that the problem of the nations in that particular region? What keeps their army from coming south again? Is it the physical presence of US troops stationed in the south? I no longer think that's true. The players in that part of the world are interdependant now. NK's biggest (and maybe only) friend is China. China's biggest market is the US. SK's biggest friend is of course the US and economically we're tied tightly to China. Nothing is going to happen and if anyone should be hard at work keeping a lid on Kim Il it's China, not the United States.
Japan and Germany can easily defend themselves and both do. The defense budget in the US has been exceedingly large for far too long. I'm not espousing isolationism either. One can be involved in the affairs of the rest of the world to a reasonable and not inflamatory degree without keeping soldiers around the globe. The money spent doing this would be better spent elsewhere.
On the US being big I know exactly what you're talking about. Before the first Gulf war a friend of mine and I drove out to San Diego to pick up a bunch of stuff for his sister who was in the navy and had her discharge halted at the last moment. She of course had an apartment off base and a pile of personal posessions that she had no place to store. There were a bunch of better solutions than going to get the stuff but my friends dad asked us to go pick it up and we were up for a road trip.
Turned out to be a semi-bad plan. We live in Houston Texas. Know what? When you drive from Houston to San Diego and you reach the halfway point you're still in Texas.
Well of course nobody thinks the US will remain the leading superpower forever. Nobody who gives it any thought at least. At one point damned near ever real "power" on the earth was located in Europe. Now there's not a single nation in Europe that equals the United States. Together they do the job quite nicely though.
That's just it. Despite what we've seen from the former USSR there is life after being a superpower. Most Americans aren't living under the impression that the ride's going to last forever and only the small percentage of real paranoids think it has to at any cost.
I can't wait for us to return to being one of the pack so to speak. Then maybe our leaders wouldn't feel like it's necessary to station troops all over the planet. A military that can protect the United States is fine by me. An economy in the upper half of the world is more than many could ask for. Damn I'd like to see us get out of the world police business and back to the "working on making America better" business.
"invaded one of the more civilized of their nations in the middle east"
Huh? Explain how Iraq can gas their own citizens, invade their neighbors, and dot their landscape with mass graves while still falling under your idea of a civilized nation? I want to hear this.
"X rays pass easily through plastics, and they are absorbed by lead. Gamma Rays pass through most kinds of material."
Plus you failed to mention that exposure to Gamma Rays leads to large, angry green men in super stretchy purple pants and that my friend is where "Cosmic Rays" come in.
They're totally safe (I think) and there's no telling what we can do with them once they're harnessed. Probably get 500TB on a disc with those babies!
I'm taking my girlfriend, her brother, and a test pilot I know on a mission into orbit to study them very soon. It's going to be totally sweet and when I get back I'll submit the story so you guys can all read about it.
No it's not. They don't need to "attempt to dumb down consumers". Consumers are (in general) easily dumb enough for them to work their mojo on.
And there's no reason here to deny them your business if they're selling what you want at a price you find acceptable. You be you and let the sheep be sheep because that's what they're going to be no matter what you, or I, or any number of discerning customers do.
Besides, if the sheep and unwashed masses are their target audience then they're going to have to tussle over them with someone else who's making a fine living off of them. That would be Mr Wal-Mart.
You really don't have a clue about this do you? Sure the roads you drive on, libraries you use, schools you attend, and courts that uphold our laws as well as the military that defend us all get taken care of and they're each and every one a worthy reason to pay your taxes. But if you think the end of the year "Find something to do with this money quick!" effect doesn't happen then you're wrong.
It's the result of the culture of government. Work in it and you'll see it in person. I can only speak to local government and a little bit to state level but I think it would be shocking if the same things didn't happen on the Fed level.
From the start of the fiscal year management guards their funds like the money is coming out of their own checking account. At the start of our fiscal year you can't order a pack of friggin CDR's without three signatures. The department managers all turned in budgets that were approved and that included these expenses. They've been approved once before you even ask for them. But when the time comes to buy them it's an ordeal. They're like this over most anything you can imagine needing and big items like Servers involve piles of paper justifying their purchase. "It's the taxpayers money" is the phrase of the day. Then a funny thing happens near the end of the fiscal year. All these money hoarding managers start to figure out that they've still got money available that's "use or lose". See, all of them padded the shit out of their budgets when they turned them in for approval and they haven't used 3/4 of the total yet.
Suddenly you can get anything that you can think of for about a month. It's a spending frenzy and some of the stupidest shit you can think of gets bought. Some good gets done from time to time but usually it's spent on stuff we don't need to do things we're never going to do.
So very, very true. I work in government (local level so we waste plenty of money but nowhere near the amount that the Fed is capable of) and it's the same thing every single year.
Fiscal year ends, management people start looking at what's left of their budget, and then realize that they're going to lose "x" amount next year if they don't use it on something. Madcap antics ensue most of the time. Every once in a while though they actually come down and ask us what we need that we didn't get this year. That happened two years ago and I got some new servers which was nice.
It's every year though. You could set your watch by it.
Lets look at the idea that getting your news from the internet as opposed to television makes that news somehow more informative. That's absolute rubish. The vast majority of internet news services are nothing more than websites that ape (and advertise) the content that the networks are running on their own news broadcasts. Of course not all of them do this but a majority of them do. News websites from newspapers (adults read lots of newspapers) are word for word duplicates for the most part. The exact same content.
Internet news isn't better or more comprehensive than the news found on television and in the newspapers. It's the same damned thing. Add to that the 24 hour news channels and you can gorge yourself on news if you wish without ever going online. News stories appear on the internet and on these 24 hour news channels at almost the exact same time so Internet based news isn't even more timely in most cases. It's convienient and it's useful but it isn't in any way better.
None of this clearly states that kids are more informed than adults nor does it say that adults are more informed than kids. All it says is that news is available from a wide variety of sources for both groups to access. You say that kids socialize with their peers more than adults do but that's not based on anything either. It's an opinion. Show me a statistic, any statistic from anywhere other than off the top of your head, that says kids spend more time discussing the issues than adults because "socializing doesn't meant they're talking about anything more important than last nights episode of "The OC".
Adults don't socialize at work? How do you know which group spends more time talking about upcoming elections or politics in general? You don't.
If you're "a kid" then you have no idea what percentage of time adults spend discussing political issues at work and if you're an adult (as I am, about to turn 40) then you can't really say how involved kids today are with current affairs, the upcoming election, or politics in general. You just don't know because you aren't spending any time at all in their circles. If you are then I'd call into question how well you are qualified to comment on the adult side of the issue regardless of your actual age.
It's not something that you're qualified to comment on. You can if you want but you don't know what you're talking about and someone (like me) is going to call you an idiot for doing it unless you can produce a reason with some facts behind it.
You know they really should consider making it a really big star and not just the standard "sidewalk size" star. Maybe do something in the middle of an intersection or something along those lines.
Slashdot Mirror
My mistake, Obviously something is "New Here".
I love responses like this. When first read they sound profound and insightful but when considered for even a moment by anyone with even a small amount of intelligence they melt into the kind of drivel that alway draws a chuckle.
The armed man can replicate the evil of course but nothing says he has to or even will. You don't bother to mention that he can also prevent the evil from happening.
"Sir! What is that on your hand? Yes, right there on your hand. Is that.... ugh, disgusting. Put your hand down and be seated please. Could someone please bring autopr0n some tissue paper! Yes, yes you're excused autopr0n. Just get out of here now"
Shortest testimony ever.
Cause I've downloaded internet porn while smoking crack and so I can say from first hand experience (and later, second hand) that when my DSL went down I was pissed BUT I didn't get out of my chair until the crack ran out.
Seriously though this is just some more alarmist bullshit from those special folks out there who live in mortal terror that someone, somewhere might be getting a nut or even enjoying something a little bit. They're just busy trying to save us from ourselves again. Nothing new here.
Netscape->Mozilla->FireFox->Netscape!?!?! ....next? I dunno, "Profit!" maybe?
How is that?
Hypothetical time of course but if the United States chose to close those bases down and bring those soldiers back to the United States, stationing them at some of the many bases inside our borders why would that happen as a result of the weakening of our might?
I can see how an argument might be made that doing this could result in a weakening of our relative might or of our ability to project that might but nothing in the world says that we could not close those bases down for no other reason than "we want to". That's what I'm saying and that's what you're missing.
Close them today, spend the money here in the United States. Simple as that. The size of the military and the amount of money it sucks from US coffers is my primary motivation. Trust me on that.
I do indeed place some concern on the feelings of people in other countries. I don't believe that there's a carved in stone rule out there saying that a large part of the rest of the world must inevitable hate the United States. I know (how could I not know) that "x" number of people across the globe will always have or find some reason to hate America. Someone hates everything. Someone hates puppies and cotton candy somewhere, I swear they do.
Still, there's no reason to go about actively prodding that hatred. No reason to go giving people and nations a reason to be pissed off at us all the time. The United States doesn't "need" a free South Korea. A free South Korea is a good thing. It's the best thing next to a free Korea from top to bottom but it's not one of our needs. Graduating students who are educated is for example one of our needs.
And I'm not saying that the US shouldn't be prepared to stand with those countries if they are threatened. Coming to the aid of a free nation or nations is a good thing to do but those nations should be able to defend themselves first. Providing a military umbrella for other countries at no cost to those countries is a losing proposition.
Japan can defend itself make no mistake about that.
Taiwan is not a country. It's a part of China and eventually Taiwan is going to have to accept that. The war ended long ago and the communists won it. The best they can hope for is a solution not unlike the one Hong Kong managed. They should be hoping that their new "Red flag bearing overlords" want to make every effort not to kill the goose that laid the golden egg and that's about as good as it gets. Maybe, just maybe there's an outside chance that they can prolong this far enough and slip off China's plate but they've got decades to go before that's even on the horizon.
I don't really care if Japan and Germany are good with a US military presence. It doesn't belong there. A German military presence should be enough for Germany. A Japanese military presence ought to take care of Japan.
The Middle East is a whole other can of worms entirely. This is nothing more than the primary view of one shortsighted American I'm sure but I want my country to have nothing to with the Middle East aside from the purchase of crude oil. This is in all reality the only thing that region produces with any value.
I don't want to enslave muslims, I don't want to steal their oil, I don't want to step a dirty western foot on their precious "holy land". I just want to do business with them for a commodity we need that they have. In return they get fat cash and we get "go-juice". End of story. To quote Marsellus Wallace from Pulp Fiction "There is no you and me".
Why in the world we're in the process of trying to turn Iraq into a civilized nation I will never understand. Who the hell cares if Saddam was filling mass graves with the Iraqi people? I certainly don't and obviously niether did they. They'd take a brutal dictator killing them hand over fist over a democracy that we helped build so why bother to try? The answer of course lies with Israel (another extraordinary can of worms).
Don't you mean "that churns out the stuff that smells"?
I don't really care how it happens (The US gets weaker or the rest of the world becomes stronger) because in the end it's the same thing.
I simply believe that a US military presence in countries like South Korea, Japan, and of course Germany is no longer needed. Prior to WWII we didn't have soldiers stationed in those countries (though of course we had them in the Philipines as we owned them at that time) and now that things in those areas are more than stable I see no reason to continue it.
Sure North Korea is a friggin nightmare but honestly isn't that the problem of the nations in that particular region? What keeps their army from coming south again? Is it the physical presence of US troops stationed in the south? I no longer think that's true. The players in that part of the world are interdependant now. NK's biggest (and maybe only) friend is China. China's biggest market is the US. SK's biggest friend is of course the US and economically we're tied tightly to China. Nothing is going to happen and if anyone should be hard at work keeping a lid on Kim Il it's China, not the United States.
Japan and Germany can easily defend themselves and both do. The defense budget in the US has been exceedingly large for far too long. I'm not espousing isolationism either. One can be involved in the affairs of the rest of the world to a reasonable and not inflamatory degree without keeping soldiers around the globe. The money spent doing this would be better spent elsewhere.
On the US being big I know exactly what you're talking about. Before the first Gulf war a friend of mine and I drove out to San Diego to pick up a bunch of stuff for his sister who was in the navy and had her discharge halted at the last moment. She of course had an apartment off base and a pile of personal posessions that she had no place to store. There were a bunch of better solutions than going to get the stuff but my friends dad asked us to go pick it up and we were up for a road trip.
Turned out to be a semi-bad plan. We live in Houston Texas. Know what? When you drive from Houston to San Diego and you reach the halfway point you're still in Texas.
Well of course nobody thinks the US will remain the leading superpower forever. Nobody who gives it any thought at least. At one point damned near ever real "power" on the earth was located in Europe. Now there's not a single nation in Europe that equals the United States. Together they do the job quite nicely though.
That's just it. Despite what we've seen from the former USSR there is life after being a superpower. Most Americans aren't living under the impression that the ride's going to last forever and only the small percentage of real paranoids think it has to at any cost.
I can't wait for us to return to being one of the pack so to speak. Then maybe our leaders wouldn't feel like it's necessary to station troops all over the planet. A military that can protect the United States is fine by me. An economy in the upper half of the world is more than many could ask for. Damn I'd like to see us get out of the world police business and back to the "working on making America better" business.
Well, now that you've cleared all that up that's a load off my mind.
Thanks
George W. Bush
"invaded one of the more civilized of their nations in the middle east"
Huh? Explain how Iraq can gas their own citizens, invade their neighbors, and dot their landscape with mass graves while still falling under your idea of a civilized nation? I want to hear this.
"X rays pass easily through plastics, and they are absorbed by lead. Gamma Rays pass through most kinds of material."
Plus you failed to mention that exposure to Gamma Rays leads to large, angry green men in super stretchy purple pants and that my friend is where "Cosmic Rays" come in.
They're totally safe (I think) and there's no telling what we can do with them once they're harnessed. Probably get 500TB on a disc with those babies!
I'm taking my girlfriend, her brother, and a test pilot I know on a mission into orbit to study them very soon. It's going to be totally sweet and when I get back I'll submit the story so you guys can all read about it.
No it's not. They don't need to "attempt to dumb down consumers". Consumers are (in general) easily dumb enough for them to work their mojo on.
And there's no reason here to deny them your business if they're selling what you want at a price you find acceptable. You be you and let the sheep be sheep because that's what they're going to be no matter what you, or I, or any number of discerning customers do.
Besides, if the sheep and unwashed masses are their target audience then they're going to have to tussle over them with someone else who's making a fine living off of them. That would be Mr Wal-Mart.
You really don't have a clue about this do you? Sure the roads you drive on, libraries you use, schools you attend, and courts that uphold our laws as well as the military that defend us all get taken care of and they're each and every one a worthy reason to pay your taxes. But if you think the end of the year "Find something to do with this money quick!" effect doesn't happen then you're wrong.
It's the result of the culture of government. Work in it and you'll see it in person. I can only speak to local government and a little bit to state level but I think it would be shocking if the same things didn't happen on the Fed level.
From the start of the fiscal year management guards their funds like the money is coming out of their own checking account. At the start of our fiscal year you can't order a pack of friggin CDR's without three signatures. The department managers all turned in budgets that were approved and that included these expenses. They've been approved once before you even ask for them. But when the time comes to buy them it's an ordeal. They're like this over most anything you can imagine needing and big items like Servers involve piles of paper justifying their purchase. "It's the taxpayers money" is the phrase of the day. Then a funny thing happens near the end of the fiscal year. All these money hoarding managers start to figure out that they've still got money available that's "use or lose". See, all of them padded the shit out of their budgets when they turned them in for approval and they haven't used 3/4 of the total yet.
Suddenly you can get anything that you can think of for about a month. It's a spending frenzy and some of the stupidest shit you can think of gets bought. Some good gets done from time to time but usually it's spent on stuff we don't need to do things we're never going to do.
So very, very true. I work in government (local level so we waste plenty of money but nowhere near the amount that the Fed is capable of) and it's the same thing every single year.
Fiscal year ends, management people start looking at what's left of their budget, and then realize that they're going to lose "x" amount next year if they don't use it on something. Madcap antics ensue most of the time. Every once in a while though they actually come down and ask us what we need that we didn't get this year. That happened two years ago and I got some new servers which was nice.
It's every year though. You could set your watch by it.
Oh yeah, that's important.
YOU FOOL! Don't you see the mesmerizing blue backlight? Who cares about OGG when you've got the mesmerizing blue backlight?
Creepy.... It's ALREADY a Windows app!
It just didn't realize it at first.
You have IT skills and have posted to newsgroups since 1996?
We'd like to arrange a meeting with you to discuss some "things"...
- Sincerly, The Dept. of Homeland Security.
Gladly and with relative ease.
Lets look at the idea that getting your news from the internet as opposed to television makes that news somehow more informative. That's absolute rubish. The vast majority of internet news services are nothing more than websites that ape (and advertise) the content that the networks are running on their own news broadcasts. Of course not all of them do this but a majority of them do. News websites from newspapers (adults read lots of newspapers) are word for word duplicates for the most part. The exact same content.
Internet news isn't better or more comprehensive than the news found on television and in the newspapers. It's the same damned thing. Add to that the 24 hour news channels and you can gorge yourself on news if you wish without ever going online. News stories appear on the internet and on these 24 hour news channels at almost the exact same time so Internet based news isn't even more timely in most cases. It's convienient and it's useful but it isn't in any way better.
None of this clearly states that kids are more informed than adults nor does it say that adults are more informed than kids. All it says is that news is available from a wide variety of sources for both groups to access. You say that kids socialize with their peers more than adults do but that's not based on anything either. It's an opinion. Show me a statistic, any statistic from anywhere other than off the top of your head, that says kids spend more time discussing the issues than adults because "socializing doesn't meant they're talking about anything more important than last nights episode of "The OC".
Adults don't socialize at work? How do you know which group spends more time talking about upcoming elections or politics in general? You don't.
If you're "a kid" then you have no idea what percentage of time adults spend discussing political issues at work and if you're an adult (as I am, about to turn 40) then you can't really say how involved kids today are with current affairs, the upcoming election, or politics in general. You just don't know because you aren't spending any time at all in their circles. If you are then I'd call into question how well you are qualified to comment on the adult side of the issue regardless of your actual age.
It's not something that you're qualified to comment on. You can if you want but you don't know what you're talking about and someone (like me) is going to call you an idiot for doing it unless you can produce a reason with some facts behind it.
Saying that kids nowdays are more informed than their parents is almost exactly as idiotic as saying that they're going to vote randomly.
There IS nothing wrong with a campaign aimed at young voters though. It's hard to disagree with that.
You know they really should consider making it a really big star and not just the standard "sidewalk size" star. Maybe do something in the middle of an intersection or something along those lines.
You see and this is why this promotion "Missed it by THAT much"
It should have come preloaded with Spinal Tap's new album or even better their whole catalog.
No, it's not a sign or anything. It's a typo.
They left off one word "...yet."
Scott Evil: But dad, we just had a breakthrough in the RAID array
Dr Evil: I've had the RAID array liguidated you little shit. The drives were insolent!