She refuse to stop doing something she was not supposed to be doing, after being told to stop.
She lied about even having the phone.
I'd say that since nothing had worked to get her to behave up to this point, that police and court time was not wasted at all.
At what point do you just throw up your hands and give up? I understand that this is what YOU think should have happened... that the adults should have just given up and let her do as she pleased... because this is what you want people to let YOU do.
The fact is, she had to learn that if you disobey, you face punishment.
I think more people need to go to jail for speeding. Nothing else seems to be doing the trick in stopping it.
You had me with you until the last line. "Speeding" is most often a victimless crime, a result of draconian zoning regulations designed to do little more than generate revenue for a municipality by setting an artificially low and ridiculous limit on traffic.
This is specially so in this day and age, when everything is rush rush rush and there's so much to do, who feels comfortable driving 25mph down a fat 2 lane highway where 35 or 40mph is far more reasonable? Granted, someone doing 70 down a 25mph hour street is insanity, but the majority of speeding occurs at something like 5 to 20 over the limit - hardly dangerous, especially on the freeway - there's little difference between going 60 and 80 there. Speed only kills when it's excessive and in a rural zone with kids at play.
Maybe you know someone who got hit due to "speeding", but it was probably more likely due to careless or reckless driving, or maybe a reckless pedestrian.
I've always felt that civilians ought to be able to take the same obstacle and defensive driving courses that police and troopers take, and if they pass, should be issued special licenses permitting them to exceed speed limits by a certain percentage - just like troopers do. They all drive 90mph on the interstate even when it's just to go out to lunch. I know, I'm often with them when they do it. If speeding was that important a law, why does law enforcement constantly break it themselves?
That's the thing that's killing me! On one hand, I'm extremely pleased to see some serious R&D go into battery research, it's long overdue. Portable power technology has been lame for years, IMO, and is lagging far behind the rest of electronic tech, comparatively speaking. It's been the bottleneck to more advanced electronic technology.
On the other hand, what has this go to do with short term economic stimulus? Nothing. It should've gone into it's own bill, and one where the American people could've had their "5 days" or whatever it is to look it over - an ability which Obama has promised to give the American people in his push for more gov't transparency. By shoehorning so many unrelated bills and projects into this "stimulus" package (which, as an "emergency bill" the transparency proposal is waived), the 111th Congress has circumvented that ability and as a result all kinds of bills have been "smuggled" into becoming reality.
Personally, I think this is very telling of Congress. They don't want or need our "input" and they don't want us to see how they're conducting business. It's ironic, but I see a Democratic led congress fighting Obama as much as the Republican minority, in this regard. Then again, Obama has already repeatedly broken that promise himself.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/promise/234/allow-five-days-of-public-comment-before-signing-b/
but the "liberal media" myth has been pretty thoroughly debunked and is, in fact, as old as the nostalgia you're currently experiencing.
Uh, no, it hasn't. Let's stop the denial already, this is silly. The big media is not as blatant about it as Fox is, it happens more subtlety - or more slyly, is perhaps the better word, but it's real. I see it more in the papers than the big 3 broadcasters though. It's done via story priority, (stories are upfront or buried) it's done through the particular wording used in headlines, keywords that trigger images and responses, used to try to shape public opinion. It's almost subliminal, and in some ways, it is.
The mere fact that newspapers, as a whole, as an entity, endorse candidates should tell you something (and notably the majority of endorsees are in the democratic party). How can you say an entity that endorses a political candidate is neutral? In fact, I don't see what business newspapers have endorsing anyone anyway - for either party.
But, just as a recent example, how many people knew Obama's brother George was busted for marijuana possession just a few weeks ago? The local paper (Philadelphia Inquirer - a pretty much left-leaning paper) buried it on page A6, a tiny little 2 paragraph blurb at the bottom of the page. I'm a little surprised they reported it at all. Okay, so maybe his nobody brother in Africa isn't front page material, but page 6?? The same thing happened with Gore's son's DWI years back, it was buried too. But when the Bush girls got involved in what amounted to basically, typical college antics that nearly everyone has engaged in at some time (underage drinking), the media was all over it - front page news.
And sometimes, the bias is more blatant. How about Rolling Stone's complete character assassination of McCain last October? There's "dirt" on Obama too (as there is on any politician - or human, for that matter) but they didn't even attempt to "provide" that "service" to their readers by unearthing any of it. Rolling Stone isn't the New York Times, true, but nevertheless, it has a readership of millions, they're part of the media, and it's perfectly reasonable to believe that article helped to sway many voters in various capacities. There are neutral media out there. Just not many.
Yes...the past 8 years have seen lots of limited government...yep. Saw lots of government downsizing under a Republican administration.
True, the opposite happened. Why? Dept of Homeland Security was created. A little thing called 9/11 happened. The War on Terror happened. Not because it's an idealogical Republican desire to create larger government, it was a response to crisis and the realization that we're a lot more vulnerable to terrorism than we used to think we were.
Not to say we're not still vulnerable, but we're a lot better prepared than we were 10 years ago, and that came at a high cost.
IANAL, but I'd imagine the purpose of the read out loud right is to protect playwrights from having people perform their plays without permission or compensation. In that context, it makes sense. In the context of a text to speech computer intended for personal use, it makes no sense.
Sure, if someone starts hooking their Kindle up to a PA system and staging public performances of an electronic reading of someone's book, I could see an issue. However, the device itself having the ability to read text back is not in itself any kind of violation.
Exactly. This is the same as saying parents are violating copyright laws if they read aloud bedtime stories to their children at night. Two people are getting the benefit of one book simultaneously, oh my!! This claim is equivalent to saying that all us parents will (legally) have to purchase two copies of each children's book, one for us and one for the child. Oh, and a third copy if we have two children or our SO happens to be in the room too.
Preposterous. IP represents an idea or concept, it shouldn't matter what form it takes, it's the message that's copyrighted, not the medium. I don't mind the concept of IP, but when IP proponents want their cake and to eat it too, that's greed run amok.
If you reduce taxation, more job creation and more spending happens.
Nope. That has never worked. The only reason Republicans want tax cuts is to blindly follow Grover Norquist to a world where the people have no more say in what actually happens in this country. Drowning government in a bathtub leads to one thing: oligarchy.
We saw this starting to happen once the Republicans finally had the power to implement their full agenda under Bush. Look what happened.
The tax cuts aren't about putting money in your pocket or stimulating the economy. They're about destroying our representative democracy.
Giving the government more money (and thus power) is what erodes our personal power and free will, not the other way around. You seriously think that paying more taxes is equivalent to getting more "say" in Government? You think Congress will somehow feel more beholden to us? They're beholden to us no matter how much or how little we pay in taxes, that's their job. If any party, it's the Democrats, not the Republicans, who favor huge powerful federal government and thus, centralized control (read: power over everything), including how to spend [i]our[/i] money - because apparently they think they know better than we do.
Just look at the stimulus package fiasco, and the role of the constituents - senators and congressmen, both left and right, are getting swamped with calls and emails questioning and criticising the current state of the proposal. Initially, however, the Democrats [i]lambasted[/i] the House Republicans for essentially what amounted to listening to their constituency and opposing the current draft - IOW, doing their job.
More or less when the Whitehouse press secretary gave the MSM their news stories for the day. This has been shown to be a fact, though exactly what they were encouraged to mislead the world with is not fully clear.
That sounds more to me like the discrete dissemination of facts during a time of war, than any unspoken challenge or thwarting of criticism, per se.
It's not the west that exploits them, for the most part anymore, it's their own leaders who do that - kings, presidents, nobles, whomever. The west imposes no stipulations on those leaders that mandates that they not share their wealth with their people, or that they must starve and deprive them and treat them like less than cattle.
As stated by someone several posts up, the west are the scapegoats. Unfortunately, the poor and uninformed have little choice but to believe their so-called leaders.
Saying that any criticism of Obama is racism is exactly the kind of thinking that Bush used: Any criticism of the Executive branch is unamerican. This, my friends, is what fascism looks like.
Not that I disagree with the gist of your post, but when did Bush ever say or imply that?
Our servers have pretty blase names here, but at least I name my workstations creatively.
Being in networking, my windows boxen are named:
LANshark
LANlord
and the laptop is
LANmine
My Linux boxes all get their names because of Tux, who lives in a cold climate:
Main workstations are:
Igloo
Iceberg
My Laptops are "Icecube" and "Icicle";
Any future personal servers will be named "Glacier"
Hey, we gotta do whatever it takes to remain amused, right?
If at any point in this process (say you stop it at 50%) the 'waste' is now weapons grade this will never be allowed in the US.
If it's still 'radioactive' you can still get energy from it. You can refine it, clean it up and shove it back through again.
Generations ago we were masters of waste not want not. If you burned candles for light, you collected your drippings, remelted them into new candles. Imagine if the 13 Colonies outlawed this because you could also remelt them into canon wicks... absolute stupidity.
You're seriously comparing beeswax to radioactive nuclear waste?? The waste by itself doesn't even need to be fashioned into anything to be deadly.
And I'd argue that years ago we were not masters of waste-not-want-not, just ask the Native American Indians what they thought of the "white man's" wasteful behavior. (Unless of course, you're native American Indian?)
If so, it will be the first version of Windows that makes computers run faster than the previous version.
Nooo...computers are running at exactly the same speed. They just won't have to chew through bloated software. Microsoft is (supposedly) making their software more efficient.
Can't stand writers who don't understand tech.
Ehh, semantics. I think this is what he meant, all along, he just didn't word it (technically) correctly. I took it to mean, the computer will "be more responsive in a timely fashion", not that the CPU is actually going to run faster.
Less bloat, quicker response.
My opinion is that attitude and philosophy towards government, such as yours, is the underlying problem.
stop thinking of government as a necessary evil, it's the completely wrong way of looking at it and it allows people like Bush to get into power who have no interest in anything but filling his own pocket.
Republicans think of government as necessary evil, that's why every time they're in power, they screw it up.
Yes, because the Democrats get it right everytime, right? Even the currrent Congress which is and has been a clean sweep of the left? Stop blaming one man (and one party) for everything wrong in this country, it makes you look like a simple minded ideologist with a personal axe to grind. Politicians are politicians.
I really was waiting for Bush to ignore the 8 year deadline and just continue as president, but thankfully that didn't happen.
You people always praise the private industry for having the solutions, even though the private industry has never-ever been able to self regulate to the benefit of the people they serve.
Mostly you're praising that individuals of great achievement can get things done, guess what, you finally elected one as the head of government, and I sincerely hope you not only allow him to clean up the mess that "necessary evil" thinkers got us into, but also CHANGE so you won't ever allow someone as grossly incompetent as Bush gets to power.
Acting as though Bush was an evil dictator and poor ol' Congress was helpless to stop him indicates you live in a fantasy world.
And history has shown again and again just how well Governments treat their people when it gets too large and powerful. Governments are a necessary evil. If people were perfect and always generous and kind towards each other, and selfishness was eradicated, (ie, a Utopian state) there would be no need for governments.
So what has Obama actually achieved to date? He's called for reviews, , started some processes, but "achieved" nothing just yet. Well, except maybe for going back on his word about appointing lobbyists.
Oops, there's one thing he's done - he sided with Bush to continue warrantless wire taps: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/01/obama-sides-wit.html
I'm mostly onboard with the idea that our society has remained almost unbelievably prudish about sex. But regarding this:
In earlier centuries, it was normal for a 15 year old girl (sometimes younger) to get married. Personally, if she does it consensually, then it's none of my business as far as I'm concerned.
The thing is, we have age-of-consent laws because it's sort of meaningless for a 15 year old girl to give "consent" to marriage. At that age, neither girls nor boys know enough about what they're getting into to truly consent to a marriage.
And sure, mores do change with the times. In earlier centuries, it was also pretty common for those 15 year olds to be literally purchased from their parents. So while we're far from utopia, I think that things are a whole lot better now on balance than they were back then. I vote for increasing sexual freedom for grownups, with continued protection for kids.
Not to mention, the average life expectancy back in say, medieval times was quite less than it is today, so 15 years old then and 15 years old of today are quite different matters, from that perspective. You were an old maid if you weren't married by 20, then.
I don't know what fanatic modded down a post as "overrated" that was only originally scored at "1" to begin with (shameful abuse of moderation!), but maybe he/she/it should read some history.
Most of the wars in Europe, from 1100CE to 1600CE, including the 100 years war, the witch hunts, and the Crusades, were driven or facilitated by organized religion, not clashes over territory. I stand by what I said: much evil in the world was caused by organized religion.
I'm in a similar situation. I always buy the CDs of artists I like to support them. I first heard of Type O Negative and Lacuna Coil by getting mp3s from Usenet. I liked what I heard, and promptly went out and bought just about every CD those artists put out. They probably never would've seen a dime from me if I hadn't DL'd some of their songs first.
I've DL'd and listened to other mp3s that sucked, and those get deleted. Why eat up hard drive space with crap I'm not going to listen to?
Now, not that everyone does this or is as honest, but it certainly proves not *every* download is a loss, and can in fact be used as free advertising.
The biggest joke regarding the RIAA is how they claim to be trying to primarily protect the artists.
Riiight, when the artist only gets a lousy $0.05 a song on a CD that costs $15, the measly royalty possibly "lost" from even several thousand downloads isn't "killing" the artists; the real entity downloads are really capable of hurting badly is the record companies themselves, because they put all that money into promotion, distribution, and materials, and (presumably) the CD sits on a shelf instead of being bought because people already have the music in digital format. They could at least attempt to be more honest about that.
The one thing that gets me though is, if you already purchased a CD, or even a vinyl album back in the '70s, then, to my mind, you've paid for the "license" or privilege to listen to that artist's song(s). IMO, downloading a digital version shouldn't be construed as wrongdoing in that event, but that's not exactly how copyright works, is it?
Blacks do not have a monopoly on slavery.
Not all blacks were slaves even at the height of black slavery.
Many other groups (including huge numbers of whites) have been slaves.
Our current culture is evolving into a form a wage slavery (where you are free to not work--- if you don't want to own property and are willing to die when you get sick).
The first half of your statement is entirely true, but in what culture anywhere on earth do you deserve *anything* if you aren't willing to work for it? You expect other people to work hard and just give you what you want without earning it? Or did I misunderstand something? I mean, that's just life. Call it nature's slavery, even, if you want, but you don't get something for nothing, that's just the natural law. (Unless you're a brutal dictator or monarch born into power like Kim II Jong)
I don't own any Belkin products except for an 8-way power adapter but really are they that bad a brand? I would have thought a company with the visibility of Belkin would be producing fairly decent equipment which did what it said
....
Anyway my experience is mostly of Netgear and so far I don't have any complaints about the router or the wifi/firewall/adsl modem that I purchased from them. Everything works exactly as intended which all right by me.
Personally I think Belkin is garbage. I've had the misfortune (or stupidity, depending on how you look at it) to buy Belkin before, and their stuff is always so mediocre to poor you'd think they'd cornered the market on mediocre.
I can see why the executive felt he had to resort to this type of crap, but of course there's no excuse for it regardless. I think it speaks volumes about them and their corporate attitude that they're trying to downplay this thing and deny any real culpability.
Leave it to the Democrats and their Nanny Government to save us from ourselves.
You're right, because no republican ever tried to outlaw violent videogames. I mean, Jack Thompson is clearly a democrat
You're right - it just goes to show that both parties aren't so different on a number of matters, but a lot of people naively cling to the belief that dems are some kind of "champions for the people".
To just make a little commentary on/. here, what I find amusing is, had Joe Baca been a Republican, the parent article would've been written thusly:
"California Rep. Joe Baca (R) has proposed a bill which would mandate placing health warning labels on any video game rated T (13+) or higher by the ESRB...
But since he's a democrat, there's no (D) indicator there, it's just left off entirely, perhaps hoping some readers will just assume he's a Republican? I've noticed this before, it's a definite trend on./ Whenever it's a Republican politician doing something wonky, their party affiliation is always indicated on the parent article; when it's a Democrat politician in the hot seat, however, it almost never is.
WARNING: Excessive exposure to violent video games and other violent media has been linked to aggressive behavior.
Exactly true.
In just the same way that Sadaam Hussein was linked to 9/11 and Weapons of Mass Destruction, necessitating the preemptive invasion if Iraq.
If a politician or group has a hidden agenda, and wants to make it happen, he will find the research to support it and ignore the rest.
Who actually linked Saddam Hussein to 9/11? I constantly hear this but have never found a valid source. It's a classic strawman argument.
Iraq was attacked on the premise that it had, after a decade of violated no-fly zones and thwarted attempts at proper monitoring during the cease-fire of the Gulf war, several WMD programs hidden within his country. Sure, our awareness and fear of threats greatly increased due to 9/11, but I don't recall anyone in the Bush admin accusing Iraq of direct complicity in 9/11 itself.. or even indirectly, for that matter. Iraq was considered a different but parallel threat, or one that *might* link with AQ in the future due to their shared hatred of the US and being in the same region of the world.
This is first thing in a long time from Microsoft that has truly impressed me. Amazing what you can accomplish with a little fear of competition. If this is truly novel, nice job!
Dammit, you just said exactly what I wanted to say.
This is impressive.
I was recently wondering how they'd get around the size barrier, and I think we have an answer.
I can imagine little devices/screens that mount around your wrist such that you can operate the whole thing easily with one hand.
Really, this is totally insane. In todays world, nuclear submarines are a country's ultimate weapon. The UK has just about destroyed their capability to attack or retaliate should WW-III ever break out. Didn't they get the hint from the US Navy's disastrous experiment with Windows NT? The Windows kernel has no business being directly involved in military control or life/death environments.
It's scary enough being holed up in a cramped area thousands of leagues under the sea for months, but to trust your very life to Windows 2000? WTF were they thinking?
I'd rather be on a Russian sub.
And isn't it common knowledge that Bush _ordered_ his intelligence offices to come up with proof of WMD's in Iraq?
Bush did not order anyone to fabricate intelligence. Neither did Cheney or the others. What they did do was put extraordinary pressure onto the intelligence agencies to come up with something, anything, that would show that Saddam was working on a nuclear weapon. This pressure, combined with the practice of appointing people to positions based on their political ideas, made sure that only intelligence that would please the leaders found its way to the media. Even though it was bad intelligence, it was the only stuff out there. The leaders then used a media tour to promote their war and drown any dissent with the fears of a nuclear Saddam.
That, my friend, is much more sinister than simply ordering someone to come up with intelligence supporting a war.
How is that more sinister? You're essentially saying that exaggeration is worse than outright lying.
Slashdot Mirror
What a waste?
She refuse to stop doing something she was not supposed to be doing, after being told to stop.
She lied about even having the phone.
I'd say that since nothing had worked to get her to behave up to this point, that police and court time was not wasted at all.
At what point do you just throw up your hands and give up? I understand that this is what YOU think should have happened... that the adults should have just given up and let her do as she pleased... because this is what you want people to let YOU do.
The fact is, she had to learn that if you disobey, you face punishment.
I think more people need to go to jail for speeding. Nothing else seems to be doing the trick in stopping it.
You had me with you until the last line. "Speeding" is most often a victimless crime, a result of draconian zoning regulations designed to do little more than generate revenue for a municipality by setting an artificially low and ridiculous limit on traffic.
This is specially so in this day and age, when everything is rush rush rush and there's so much to do, who feels comfortable driving 25mph down a fat 2 lane highway where 35 or 40mph is far more reasonable? Granted, someone doing 70 down a 25mph hour street is insanity, but the majority of speeding occurs at something like 5 to 20 over the limit - hardly dangerous, especially on the freeway - there's little difference between going 60 and 80 there. Speed only kills when it's excessive and in a rural zone with kids at play.
Maybe you know someone who got hit due to "speeding", but it was probably more likely due to careless or reckless driving, or maybe a reckless pedestrian.
I've always felt that civilians ought to be able to take the same obstacle and defensive driving courses that police and troopers take, and if they pass, should be issued special licenses permitting them to exceed speed limits by a certain percentage - just like troopers do. They all drive 90mph on the interstate even when it's just to go out to lunch. I know, I'm often with them when they do it. If speeding was that important a law, why does law enforcement constantly break it themselves?
That's the thing that's killing me! On one hand, I'm extremely pleased to see some serious R&D go into battery research, it's long overdue. Portable power technology has been lame for years, IMO, and is lagging far behind the rest of electronic tech, comparatively speaking. It's been the bottleneck to more advanced electronic technology.
On the other hand, what has this go to do with short term economic stimulus? Nothing. It should've gone into it's own bill, and one where the American people could've had their "5 days" or whatever it is to look it over - an ability which Obama has promised to give the American people in his push for more gov't transparency. By shoehorning so many unrelated bills and projects into this "stimulus" package (which, as an "emergency bill" the transparency proposal is waived), the 111th Congress has circumvented that ability and as a result all kinds of bills have been "smuggled" into becoming reality.
Personally, I think this is very telling of Congress. They don't want or need our "input" and they don't want us to see how they're conducting business. It's ironic, but I see a Democratic led congress fighting Obama as much as the Republican minority, in this regard. Then again, Obama has already repeatedly broken that promise himself. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/promise/234/allow-five-days-of-public-comment-before-signing-b/
but the "liberal media" myth has been pretty thoroughly debunked and is, in fact, as old as the nostalgia you're currently experiencing.
Uh, no, it hasn't. Let's stop the denial already, this is silly. The big media is not as blatant about it as Fox is, it happens more subtlety - or more slyly, is perhaps the better word, but it's real. I see it more in the papers than the big 3 broadcasters though. It's done via story priority, (stories are upfront or buried) it's done through the particular wording used in headlines, keywords that trigger images and responses, used to try to shape public opinion. It's almost subliminal, and in some ways, it is.
The mere fact that newspapers, as a whole, as an entity, endorse candidates should tell you something (and notably the majority of endorsees are in the democratic party). How can you say an entity that endorses a political candidate is neutral? In fact, I don't see what business newspapers have endorsing anyone anyway - for either party.
But, just as a recent example, how many people knew Obama's brother George was busted for marijuana possession just a few weeks ago? The local paper (Philadelphia Inquirer - a pretty much left-leaning paper) buried it on page A6, a tiny little 2 paragraph blurb at the bottom of the page. I'm a little surprised they reported it at all. Okay, so maybe his nobody brother in Africa isn't front page material, but page 6?? The same thing happened with Gore's son's DWI years back, it was buried too. But when the Bush girls got involved in what amounted to basically, typical college antics that nearly everyone has engaged in at some time (underage drinking), the media was all over it - front page news.
And sometimes, the bias is more blatant. How about Rolling Stone's complete character assassination of McCain last October? There's "dirt" on Obama too (as there is on any politician - or human, for that matter) but they didn't even attempt to "provide" that "service" to their readers by unearthing any of it. Rolling Stone isn't the New York Times, true, but nevertheless, it has a readership of millions, they're part of the media, and it's perfectly reasonable to believe that article helped to sway many voters in various capacities. There are neutral media out there. Just not many.
Yes...the past 8 years have seen lots of limited government...yep. Saw lots of government downsizing under a Republican administration.
True, the opposite happened. Why? Dept of Homeland Security was created. A little thing called 9/11 happened. The War on Terror happened. Not because it's an idealogical Republican desire to create larger government, it was a response to crisis and the realization that we're a lot more vulnerable to terrorism than we used to think we were.
Not to say we're not still vulnerable, but we're a lot better prepared than we were 10 years ago, and that came at a high cost.
IANAL, but I'd imagine the purpose of the read out loud right is to protect playwrights from having people perform their plays without permission or compensation. In that context, it makes sense. In the context of a text to speech computer intended for personal use, it makes no sense.
Sure, if someone starts hooking their Kindle up to a PA system and staging public performances of an electronic reading of someone's book, I could see an issue. However, the device itself having the ability to read text back is not in itself any kind of violation.
Exactly. This is the same as saying parents are violating copyright laws if they read aloud bedtime stories to their children at night. Two people are getting the benefit of one book simultaneously, oh my!! This claim is equivalent to saying that all us parents will (legally) have to purchase two copies of each children's book, one for us and one for the child. Oh, and a third copy if we have two children or our SO happens to be in the room too.
Preposterous. IP represents an idea or concept, it shouldn't matter what form it takes, it's the message that's copyrighted, not the medium. I don't mind the concept of IP, but when IP proponents want their cake and to eat it too, that's greed run amok.
Nope. That has never worked. The only reason Republicans want tax cuts is to blindly follow Grover Norquist to a world where the people have no more say in what actually happens in this country. Drowning government in a bathtub leads to one thing: oligarchy.
We saw this starting to happen once the Republicans finally had the power to implement their full agenda under Bush. Look what happened.
The tax cuts aren't about putting money in your pocket or stimulating the economy. They're about destroying our representative democracy.
Giving the government more money (and thus power) is what erodes our personal power and free will, not the other way around. You seriously think that paying more taxes is equivalent to getting more "say" in Government? You think Congress will somehow feel more beholden to us? They're beholden to us no matter how much or how little we pay in taxes, that's their job. If any party, it's the Democrats, not the Republicans, who favor huge powerful federal government and thus, centralized control (read: power over everything), including how to spend [i]our[/i] money - because apparently they think they know better than we do.
Just look at the stimulus package fiasco, and the role of the constituents - senators and congressmen, both left and right, are getting swamped with calls and emails questioning and criticising the current state of the proposal. Initially, however, the Democrats [i]lambasted[/i] the House Republicans for essentially what amounted to listening to their constituency and opposing the current draft - IOW, doing their job.
More or less when the Whitehouse press secretary gave the MSM their news stories for the day. This has been shown to be a fact, though exactly what they were encouraged to mislead the world with is not fully clear.
That sounds more to me like the discrete dissemination of facts during a time of war, than any unspoken challenge or thwarting of criticism, per se.
It's not the west that exploits them, for the most part anymore, it's their own leaders who do that - kings, presidents, nobles, whomever. The west imposes no stipulations on those leaders that mandates that they not share their wealth with their people, or that they must starve and deprive them and treat them like less than cattle.
As stated by someone several posts up, the west are the scapegoats. Unfortunately, the poor and uninformed have little choice but to believe their so-called leaders.
Saying that any criticism of Obama is racism is exactly the kind of thinking that Bush used: Any criticism of the Executive branch is unamerican. This, my friends, is what fascism looks like.
Not that I disagree with the gist of your post, but when did Bush ever say or imply that?
Our servers have pretty blase names here, but at least I name my workstations creatively.
Being in networking, my windows boxen are named:
LANshark
LANlord
and the laptop is
LANmine
My Linux boxes all get their names because of Tux, who lives in a cold climate:
Main workstations are:
Igloo
Iceberg
My Laptops are "Icecube" and "Icicle";
Any future personal servers will be named "Glacier"
Hey, we gotta do whatever it takes to remain amused, right?
Homo-erectus?
I bet stone age circumcisions were a bitch, and this just proved it
If at any point in this process (say you stop it at 50%) the 'waste' is now weapons grade this will never be allowed in the US.
If it's still 'radioactive' you can still get energy from it. You can refine it, clean it up and shove it back through again.
Generations ago we were masters of waste not want not. If you burned candles for light, you collected your drippings, remelted them into new candles. Imagine if the 13 Colonies outlawed this because you could also remelt them into canon wicks... absolute stupidity.
You're seriously comparing beeswax to radioactive nuclear waste?? The waste by itself doesn't even need to be fashioned into anything to be deadly.
And I'd argue that years ago we were not masters of waste-not-want-not, just ask the Native American Indians what they thought of the "white man's" wasteful behavior. (Unless of course, you're native American Indian?)
If so, it will be the first version of Windows that makes computers run faster than the previous version.
Nooo...computers are running at exactly the same speed. They just won't have to chew through bloated software. Microsoft is (supposedly) making their software more efficient.
Can't stand writers who don't understand tech.
Ehh, semantics. I think this is what he meant, all along, he just didn't word it (technically) correctly. I took it to mean, the computer will "be more responsive in a timely fashion", not that the CPU is actually going to run faster.
Less bloat, quicker response.
My opinion is that attitude and philosophy towards government, such as yours, is the underlying problem.
stop thinking of government as a necessary evil, it's the completely wrong way of looking at it and it allows people like Bush to get into power who have no interest in anything but filling his own pocket.
Republicans think of government as necessary evil, that's why every time they're in power, they screw it up.
Yes, because the Democrats get it right everytime, right? Even the currrent Congress which is and has been a clean sweep of the left? Stop blaming one man (and one party) for everything wrong in this country, it makes you look like a simple minded ideologist with a personal axe to grind. Politicians are politicians.
I really was waiting for Bush to ignore the 8 year deadline and just continue as president, but thankfully that didn't happen.
You people always praise the private industry for having the solutions, even though the private industry has never-ever been able to self regulate to the benefit of the people they serve.
Mostly you're praising that individuals of great achievement can get things done, guess what, you finally elected one as the head of government, and I sincerely hope you not only allow him to clean up the mess that "necessary evil" thinkers got us into, but also CHANGE so you won't ever allow someone as grossly incompetent as Bush gets to power.
Acting as though Bush was an evil dictator and poor ol' Congress was helpless to stop him indicates you live in a fantasy world.
And history has shown again and again just how well Governments treat their people when it gets too large and powerful. Governments are a necessary evil. If people were perfect and always generous and kind towards each other, and selfishness was eradicated, (ie, a Utopian state) there would be no need for governments.
So what has Obama actually achieved to date? He's called for reviews, , started some processes, but "achieved" nothing just yet. Well, except maybe for going back on his word about appointing lobbyists.
Oops, there's one thing he's done - he sided with Bush to continue warrantless wire taps:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2009/01/obama-sides-wit.html
I'm mostly onboard with the idea that our society has remained almost unbelievably prudish about sex. But regarding this:
The thing is, we have age-of-consent laws because it's sort of meaningless for a 15 year old girl to give "consent" to marriage. At that age, neither girls nor boys know enough about what they're getting into to truly consent to a marriage.
And sure, mores do change with the times. In earlier centuries, it was also pretty common for those 15 year olds to be literally purchased from their parents. So while we're far from utopia, I think that things are a whole lot better now on balance than they were back then. I vote for increasing sexual freedom for grownups, with continued protection for kids.
Not to mention, the average life expectancy back in say, medieval times was quite less than it is today, so 15 years old then and 15 years old of today are quite different matters, from that perspective. You were an old maid if you weren't married by 20, then.
I don't know what fanatic modded down a post as "overrated" that was only originally scored at "1" to begin with (shameful abuse of moderation!), but maybe he/she/it should read some history. Most of the wars in Europe, from 1100CE to 1600CE, including the 100 years war, the witch hunts, and the Crusades, were driven or facilitated by organized religion, not clashes over territory. I stand by what I said: much evil in the world was caused by organized religion.
I'm in a similar situation. I always buy the CDs of artists I like to support them. I first heard of Type O Negative and Lacuna Coil by getting mp3s from Usenet. I liked what I heard, and promptly went out and bought just about every CD those artists put out. They probably never would've seen a dime from me if I hadn't DL'd some of their songs first.
I've DL'd and listened to other mp3s that sucked, and those get deleted. Why eat up hard drive space with crap I'm not going to listen to?
Now, not that everyone does this or is as honest, but it certainly proves not *every* download is a loss, and can in fact be used as free advertising.
The biggest joke regarding the RIAA is how they claim to be trying to primarily protect the artists.
Riiight, when the artist only gets a lousy $0.05 a song on a CD that costs $15, the measly royalty possibly "lost" from even several thousand downloads isn't "killing" the artists; the real entity downloads are really capable of hurting badly is the record companies themselves, because they put all that money into promotion, distribution, and materials, and (presumably) the CD sits on a shelf instead of being bought because people already have the music in digital format. They could at least attempt to be more honest about that.
The one thing that gets me though is, if you already purchased a CD, or even a vinyl album back in the '70s, then, to my mind, you've paid for the "license" or privilege to listen to that artist's song(s). IMO, downloading a digital version shouldn't be construed as wrongdoing in that event, but that's not exactly how copyright works, is it?
Blacks do not have a monopoly on slavery.
Not all blacks were slaves even at the height of black slavery.
Many other groups (including huge numbers of whites) have been slaves.
Our current culture is evolving into a form a wage slavery (where you are free to not work--- if you don't want to own property and are willing to die when you get sick).
The first half of your statement is entirely true, but in what culture anywhere on earth do you deserve *anything* if you aren't willing to work for it? You expect other people to work hard and just give you what you want without earning it? Or did I misunderstand something? I mean, that's just life. Call it nature's slavery, even, if you want, but you don't get something for nothing, that's just the natural law. (Unless you're a brutal dictator or monarch born into power like Kim II Jong)
I don't own any Belkin products except for an 8-way power adapter but really are they that bad a brand? I would have thought a company with the visibility of Belkin would be producing fairly decent equipment which did what it said
....
Anyway my experience is mostly of Netgear and so far I don't have any complaints about the router or the wifi/firewall/adsl modem that I purchased from them. Everything works exactly as intended which all right by me.
Personally I think Belkin is garbage. I've had the misfortune (or stupidity, depending on how you look at it) to buy Belkin before, and their stuff is always so mediocre to poor you'd think they'd cornered the market on mediocre.
I can see why the executive felt he had to resort to this type of crap, but of course there's no excuse for it regardless. I think it speaks volumes about them and their corporate attitude that they're trying to downplay this thing and deny any real culpability.
Leave it to the Democrats and their Nanny Government to save us from ourselves.
You're right, because no republican ever tried to outlaw violent videogames. I mean, Jack Thompson is clearly a democrat
You're right - it just goes to show that both parties aren't so different on a number of matters, but a lot of people naively cling to the belief that dems are some kind of "champions for the people".
/. here, what I find amusing is, had Joe Baca been a Republican, the parent article would've been written thusly:
To just make a little commentary on
"California Rep. Joe Baca (R) has proposed a bill which would mandate placing health warning labels on any video game rated T (13+) or higher by the ESRB...
But since he's a democrat, there's no (D) indicator there, it's just left off entirely, perhaps hoping some readers will just assume he's a Republican? I've noticed this before, it's a definite trend on ./ Whenever it's a Republican politician doing something wonky, their party affiliation is always indicated on the parent article; when it's a Democrat politician in the hot seat, however, it almost never is.
Exactly true.
In just the same way that Sadaam Hussein was linked to 9/11 and Weapons of Mass Destruction, necessitating the preemptive invasion if Iraq.
If a politician or group has a hidden agenda, and wants to make it happen, he will find the research to support it and ignore the rest.
Who actually linked Saddam Hussein to 9/11? I constantly hear this but have never found a valid source. It's a classic strawman argument. .. or even indirectly, for that matter. Iraq was considered a different but parallel threat, or one that *might* link with AQ in the future due to their shared hatred of the US and being in the same region of the world.
Iraq was attacked on the premise that it had, after a decade of violated no-fly zones and thwarted attempts at proper monitoring during the cease-fire of the Gulf war, several WMD programs hidden within his country. Sure, our awareness and fear of threats greatly increased due to 9/11, but I don't recall anyone in the Bush admin accusing Iraq of direct complicity in 9/11 itself
On balance, organized religion has been a net cause of significant evil in the world.
Fixed that for you. ;)
This is first thing in a long time from Microsoft that has truly impressed me. Amazing what you can accomplish with a little fear of competition. If this is truly novel, nice job!
Dammit, you just said exactly what I wanted to say.
This is impressive. I was recently wondering how they'd get around the size barrier, and I think we have an answer.
I can imagine little devices/screens that mount around your wrist such that you can operate the whole thing easily with one hand.
Really, this is totally insane. In todays world, nuclear submarines are a country's ultimate weapon. The UK has just about destroyed their capability to attack or retaliate should WW-III ever break out.
Didn't they get the hint from the US Navy's disastrous experiment with Windows NT? The Windows kernel has no business being directly involved in military control or life/death environments.
It's scary enough being holed up in a cramped area thousands of leagues under the sea for months, but to trust your very life to Windows 2000?
WTF were they thinking? I'd rather be on a Russian sub.
And isn't it common knowledge that Bush _ordered_ his intelligence offices to come up with proof of WMD's in Iraq?
Bush did not order anyone to fabricate intelligence. Neither did Cheney or the others. What they did do was put extraordinary pressure onto the intelligence agencies to come up with something, anything, that would show that Saddam was working on a nuclear weapon. This pressure, combined with the practice of appointing people to positions based on their political ideas, made sure that only intelligence that would please the leaders found its way to the media. Even though it was bad intelligence, it was the only stuff out there. The leaders then used a media tour to promote their war and drown any dissent with the fears of a nuclear Saddam.
That, my friend, is much more sinister than simply ordering someone to come up with intelligence supporting a war.
How is that more sinister? You're essentially saying that exaggeration is worse than outright lying.