The greatest single guitar note/chord in rock and roll history? It's the first one Hendrix plays after the second verse of "Machine Gun". Utterly awesome. The rest of the solo is, too.
Second place goes to Jefferson Airplane, "The Ballad of You and Me and Poohneil".
Great comment. Here's another aspect to this - why would Alan Cranston, later to be a Senator, do something like this?
"He was sued by Adolf Hitler in 1939. Cranston, who had read "Mein Kampf" in the original, found a version being distributed in the U.S. that did not truly reveal the Nazi threat. He wrote an abridged but accurate tabloid version, interspersed with anti-Nazi explanatory notes. With a former Hearst editor, Amster Spiro, Cranston marketed it for 10-cents a copy. They were ordered to cease publication when Hitler's publishers sued for copyright infringement, but by then 500,000 copies had been sold."
http://www.gsinstitute.org/about/cranston.html
And if Osama Bin Laden writes a book, I would hope someone would translate it and publish it, rather than suppress it - one way to know an enemy is to read what he says for himself.
Right here, right now, teenagers are being seduced into neo-fascist ideological groups every day.
So, what you're saying here is that the people who are "seducing" them should be silenced because your society doesn't have the brains, the conviction, or the ability to refute what is being said. Can't you see that by outlawing this speech you are admitting that you can't counteract it with speech of your own? That you're telling people, "shut up, because we can't answer you?"
Let's see - there were communist and nazi propagandists in our country last century and we had unrestricted freedom of speech, while Germany and Russia didn't. Explain, therefore, how it is that Germany and Russia became controlled by totalitarian governments and we didn't.
But the other question is - would repressing this speech be harmful? Would it create martyrs? Would it radicalize people who believed in this speech into beleiving that their rights were violated and their viewpoints suppressed, so other means might be necessary to influence their society? Look at the Middle East and how repressive governments have refused to let Islamic fundamentalists speak - unable to speak, they turn to terror to get their point across. As long as we have an open dialogue then racist ideas can be openly ridiculed and debated down, resulting in some people actually changing their minds. If people aren't allowed to speak, then someone will say, "They won't allow us to speak because they can't argue against what we're saying; they're afraid of the truth, and we're going to MAKE them listen to us."
There's another point - how are you going to know what they're up to so you can fight against them and what they say, if they aren't allowed to say it?
Further, justifying what "most people" may or may not believe to be ethically bankrupt or justified by claiming that record companies are unethical is just silly. Record companies are not "denying musicians fair compensation"; the musicians voluntarily agreed to the compensation they are getting when they signed a contract.
Except that there's no real competition over what the terms of the contract are, the terms of the contract are generally misrepresented to the artist and, worst of all, the record companies are infamous for not abiding by the terms of these contracts when it suits them, which is 99% of the time. Do you know how impossible it is for an artist to get a fair and accurate audit of his business with a company? Books are cooked, forged or simply hidden from people who can only get an partial accounting if they have enough money to sue for it. How'd you like to work at a place where you couldn't get a good accounting of the hours you worked and had to hire a lawyer to pick up a paycheck that reflected what you had agreed to work for? The music industry is notorious for its rampant dishonesty. This is a good example of what goea around comes around.
"The Royal Family" was last year's book; a searing look through the underworld of the Tenderloin in San Fransisco, examining prostitutes, child molesters and homeless people, not to mention many others in a tapestry that has the breadth of Dickens and the spiritual intensity of a Kafka or a Kerouac. It's a moving and depressing book - there were moments that made me laugh and there were other moments that made me squirm in my chair with horror and loathing. Underneath it all is an obsession with the old Calvinist idea of the Elect and the Damned - and of course, Vollmann's compassion is for the Damned. 50 years from now people will not truly understand the American society of our day without reading him.
I'd also like to suggest a story he wrote in "The Rainbow Stories", dealing with a mad killer who stalks winos on the streets of San Fransisco and force feeds them Drano... It makes anything Stephen King's ever written read like Dr. Seuss. He's also written a brilliant series of novels dealing with North American history, a truly strange cyberpunk fable (You Bright and Risen Angels) describing the war between the inventors of electricity and insects, and "Butterfly Stories: A Novel" about a photo journalist who goes to Thailand to immerse himself in a world of prostitutes, AIDS, and slow self-destruction. Vollmann is a genius with heart and he may well be the best writer of his generation.
As far as other writers are concerned, I find it interesting that no one's mentioned Thomas Pynchon. People will be reading Gravity's Rainbow 50 years from now, simply because they still won't have figured it all out.
Oh, and there's a name a lot of people have mentioned who is definitely overrated - Ayn Rand. She's an interesting philosopher - anyone who wants to consider the questions of freedom and economics needs to pay attention to the questions she has raised and needs to be able to refute (or justify) her answers to them. But literature? Hardly.
And for the fantasy buffs out there, I would like to suggest James Branch Cabell's "The Cream of the Jest". It's a funny, sad and poignant book without the usual medieval war on steroids posing of most fantasy novels.
The Taliban has 45,000 soldiers, entrenched in bunkers, willing to die in suicide attacks. At Okin awa, the Japanese had 100,000 soldiers, entrenched in bunkers, willing to die in suicide attacks. We defeated the Japanese Empire at Okinawa, we will defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan. But not with token bombing raids.
Except that Afghanistan's a lot bigger than Okinawa, the native population there mostly supports the enemy and IS the enemy, unlike Okinawa, and the U.S. has to go 1,000 miles by land or air to get anything to the battlefield, where in Okinawa, they could just pull the ships right up. Major differences.
Sorry to interrupt the mutual-masturbation fest that's going on here, but isn't it high time we started seeing something new out of Sid Meier?
Like what? Sim Golf (the first one)? That was awful. Gettysburg? Alright, but I wasn't real impressed with it.
The guy's doing what he does best. There's a lot of room for refinement and new touches to the Civ genre and I'm going to buy Civ 3 as soon as possible.
I'd skipped Civ2
You missed a classic. It's better than the first one.
I know that Sid Meier has what it takes to make a really fun and creative and new game, so why is he limiting himself to sequels and knock-offs of his previous stuff? I mean, here was a guy who practically created his own genre of games -- and it's this sort of experimentation and risk that pushes the industry forward. Right now, though, he's just resting on his laurels.
Oh, come now - if he was just resting on his laurels, he'd have just sold the rights to someone else and let them grind out half assed versions of the game like Activision's Call to Power. There's a rumor going around that he may be working on something else.
I've seen the descriptions of Civ3 and I'll probably be all over it when it gets to the bargain bin
You know that's probably going to take 2 or 3 years, don't you? This is probably going to be the major smash hit of the year.
It's just like having to buy my Sony CDs from Camelot only and my Universal CDs from Sam Goody only. It doesn't make any sense. It's not what the customers want - they want to be able to subscribe to one service, among several choices, and pay to access mp3s from all companies, preferrably paying a flat fee, and certainly not paying CD prices, because after all, an mp3 isn't as good as a CD. They'd also like to be able to choose individual songs to buy, not have to buy 1 song they want and 10 dogs they don't. What gives the music industry the idea they can continue to ignore their market and their customers without hurting the bottom line? Maybe that's why CD sales are dropping.
Cringley falls into the same trap as everyone else when talking about what broadband is used for. It's not about speed.
I'm still online with phone lines that give me the equivalent of a 28.8. Web pages don't take that long to load, and I've discovered that even with a lousy dial-up account, I can download or
peer to peer trade one hell of a lot over the course of a month with the right software. Right now, it's costing me 19.95 to do this. I would pay 10 bucks more a month for 256 or 512K access, as long as I can do all that I can do with my dial-up access. Extra speed is just not worth all that much to me; I have reliable connectivity and patience, and only so much time in my life to mess with whatever I'm downloading.
The real problem with broadband is that it's a luxury for a lot of ordinary users and there's no compelling reason to cause them to upgrade. I'm not interested in having it unless it's inexpensive.
It's interesting that whenever the question of democracy comes up, that inevitably, the view is expressed that such a thing would be bad, as it would result in a tyranny of the majority, and that most people are too stupid to make good decisions.
I find this to be a logically flawed and elitist viewpoint. When throughout history, has there been an actual tyranny of an actual democratic majority? Haven't all tyrannies been run by very small minorities? (Don't try telling me about Athens or Rome - the electorate was a minority of the populace.) Yes, Hitler was elected - in a constitutional republic. Someone further down the thread defines democracy as a system where 51% of the people get to piss in 49% of the people's cornflakes - except that, in our country at least, the 49% would revolt and they'd be armed. You see, direct democracy or any other form of government has a natural check and balance - civil war, revolt, insurrection, disobediance. But none the less, let's put forth the proposition that pure democracy always results in tyranny of the majority - never mind that there are no examples in history to prove it, never mind that the idealised free market that is worshipped by the same critics IS a pure democracy of dollar bills, never mind that an ample case can be made for republics and government by the elite sliding quickly into tyranny. We can say it because we "know" it to be so. Give us our republic, but make sure that it doesn't interfere with our direct democracy of dollars known as the free market.
Hmmm, if the free market's a direct democracy, shouldn't we be experiencing some tyranny soon? Are we already?
On to the other half of the equation, which expresses the view that the majority of people are dumber than rocks and can't be trusted to put their pants on one leg at a time when they get up in the morning much less vote on issues. If 40% of them can't even be bothered to vote on who's representing them, why would they bother to vote on the issues? If a majority shouldn't be able to decide on things because they're too stupid, who gets to choose who the elite all-knowing all seeing decision-makers should be? Why, it's that same stupid majority, isn't it? Well, then, let's just let the elite vote. How are the elite identified? Why, the elite define for us what makes them elite. Why are those qualities elite? Because we're elite and we said so.
Doesn't anyone see the circular reasoning involved here? Here's an even more glaring contradiction - the majority decide what our language, our culture and so many aspects of our day to day lives should be like, without a formal vote, just through the mere act of living their lives, speaking and consuming. That takes in a LOT more power and consequence than our government doesn't it? If they're not smart enough to run our government, why the hell are we letting them run our culture, our language and our consumer economy? If 51% of them prefer Pepsi, does that mean I have to quit drinking Coke?
Everytime I see these arguments against direct democracy, I see red, becuase they are so illogical. Now, argue against it because it would be unwieldy and overwhelming for the average citizen to consider everything and you have a point. Argue against it because there would be too many proposals and alternate viewpoints to consider on each issue and you're making sense. Wonder if the media and the PR hacks wouldn't manipulate the process with propaganda like they already do to get the voters to put pressure on Congress, and that's a good point.
But don't tell me that direct democracy leads to tyranny of the majority; not unless you're also willing to admit we already may be living under it.
Hmmm - they'd have to open up the case to get to the ram. So, you'd first cut the power. Then your system could have a battery that would automatically click on when the first screw was unscrewed and begin writing tons of 0s and 1s to the RAM disk. By the time they got the RAM out, it would have nothing but garbage on it.
"The Bush administration's anti-terrorism legislation has stalled because of one senator's concern that it will erode civil liberties. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., tried to hurry the bill through Tuesday, but Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., refused Daschle's request to let the bill go through without debate or amendment."
I'm glad to see that one of our representatives feels a responsibility to have this discussed before it's passed. The article's available through Yahoo's home page - it would seem that Feingold wants to change several key provisions of the bill.
Even after all that sarcasm I posted, you still haven't figured out that saying that these people "don't have the common sense to live in a place with water" was a brutally ignorant and callous statement?
Quite bluntly, it's one of the stupidest things I've ever read on Slashdot. I have news for you. When we are born we do not get to choose where we live. Some of us get to live in a good place. Some of us get to live in a bad place. The ones who live in a good place should not say that the ones who live in a bad place are dumb when they are stuck there, and don't have food. If they can't help, then at least they should not say dumb things like, "You don't have the sense to move." There. I said it in words of one syllable in the hopes that you just might understand it. But you probably won't...
The public information I'm talking about was in reference to the trial transcripts dealing with previous terrorist attacks, and the link was already provided further up in the thread. He's already been proven to have committed enough crimes against the US that we could fairly demand that he be turned over. Our suspicion that he is likely involved in the WTC attack is an additional reason for our demands, not the sole one.
So let me get this straight- instead of defending ourselves against idiots like Osama and taking care of the needy people in our own country, you think it is our job to spend our money feeding people that dont have the common sense to live in a place with water?
Yeah, it's all their fault for not having the common sense to be born as Americans, isn't it? Then they could live in a place with water like Los Angeles or Phoenix. That way we wouldn't be forced to bankrupt ourselves giving them food and water while we're busy bombing Afghanistan. How dare they starve to death when we're trying to kill someone else; if they were considerate like we are, they'd wait a few days to starve until we could get around to saving them. The nerve!
I mean, like, can't they get a job at the mall or something?
They actually haven't been shown this batch of evidence.
It's public information that is available on the net. Funny, the Taliban were able to have their own web site, they are able to reply in a timely matter when the media and political leaders in the West denounce them for the things they have done, and they are able to make military preparations when they see we are about to attack us, but when it comes to looking at evidence of Bin Laden's attacks of several years ago, they are suddenly unable to find this information at all. No, if they were responsible world citizens they would have looked at this evidence and acted properly on it when they were asked to. The only reason they haven't "seen" it is because they don't want to see it. Can you really state that no one in the Taliban is aware that Osama bin Laden is on our 10 most wanted list, that trial transcripts have given good evidence for his involvement in several terrorist attacks, and that almost any other country in the world, including Muslim ones, would arrest him and extradite to be tried? No, what they're really saying is that none of that is "Islamic" evidence from an "Islamic" court and so it doesn't count. We're infidels to them and nothing we say has to be listened to. Just about every country in the world begged them not to destroy those Buddha statues and they completely ignored them. They have a track record of refusing to listen to anyone; if we'd provided them with videotape of bin Laden telling Mohammed Atta, "Now I wants youse to fly them planes into them towers, capiche?", they'd have told us it was no good because it wasn't taken by an "Islamic" camera. Reasonable leaders of a reasonable government would have considered carefully the harboring of a immigrant criminal such as bin Laden and the evidence that existed against him, before refusing to deport him. The Taliban knew they would be at war if they did not choose to listen to the world's demand for justice; they have chosen, and so be it.
Abiword and Opera can be run on the operating systems I already have. I have Star Office for Windows and Linux. The browser that came with BeOS was so-so. And the games you've listed can all be run on Windows and/or Linux.
Look, I tried it, I kept it on my hard drive for months and visited the popular web sites and dug deep for reasons I should spring for the full edition and I couldn't find one. I backed up the partition on a CDrom and deleted it. I still haven't found a compelling reason to put it back. I still look at bebits.com once in a while just to see. It was a nice OS, but my options in Windows and Linux are a lot broader.
If I'm going to mess with a 3rd operating system, I need a compelling reason to run it. BeOS didn't provide me with one.
Slashdot Mirror
The greatest single guitar note/chord in rock and roll history? It's the first one Hendrix plays after the second verse of "Machine Gun". Utterly awesome. The rest of the solo is, too.
Second place goes to Jefferson Airplane, "The Ballad of You and Me and Poohneil".
Great comment. Here's another aspect to this - why would Alan Cranston, later to be a Senator, do something like this?
"He was sued by Adolf Hitler in 1939. Cranston, who had read "Mein Kampf" in the original, found a version being distributed in the U.S. that did not truly reveal the Nazi threat. He wrote an abridged but accurate tabloid version, interspersed with anti-Nazi explanatory notes. With a former Hearst editor, Amster Spiro, Cranston marketed it for 10-cents a copy. They were ordered to cease publication when Hitler's publishers sued for copyright infringement, but by then 500,000 copies had been sold."
http://www.gsinstitute.org/about/cranston.html
And if Osama Bin Laden writes a book, I would hope someone would translate it and publish it, rather than suppress it - one way to know an enemy is to read what he says for himself.
Right here, right now, teenagers are being seduced into neo-fascist ideological groups every day.
So, what you're saying here is that the people who are "seducing" them should be silenced because your society doesn't have the brains, the conviction, or the ability to refute what is being said. Can't you see that by outlawing this speech you are admitting that you can't counteract it with speech of your own? That you're telling people, "shut up, because we can't answer you?"
Let's see - there were communist and nazi propagandists in our country last century and we had unrestricted freedom of speech, while Germany and Russia didn't. Explain, therefore, how it is that Germany and Russia became controlled by totalitarian governments and we didn't.
The question is - is this speech harmful?
But the other question is - would repressing this speech be harmful? Would it create martyrs? Would it radicalize people who believed in this speech into beleiving that their rights were violated and their viewpoints suppressed, so other means might be necessary to influence their society? Look at the Middle East and how repressive governments have refused to let Islamic fundamentalists speak - unable to speak, they turn to terror to get their point across. As long as we have an open dialogue then racist ideas can be openly ridiculed and debated down, resulting in some people actually changing their minds. If people aren't allowed to speak, then someone will say, "They won't allow us to speak because they can't argue against what we're saying; they're afraid of the truth, and we're going to MAKE them listen to us."
There's another point - how are you going to know what they're up to so you can fight against them and what they say, if they aren't allowed to say it?
It just goes to show you - work hard in the clothes industry and eventually you'll get somewhere.
Further, justifying what "most people" may or may not believe to be ethically bankrupt or justified by claiming that record companies are unethical is just silly. Record companies are not "denying musicians fair compensation"; the musicians voluntarily agreed to the compensation they are getting when they signed a contract.
Except that there's no real competition over what the terms of the contract are, the terms of the contract are generally misrepresented to the artist and, worst of all, the record companies are infamous for not abiding by the terms of these contracts when it suits them, which is 99% of the time. Do you know how impossible it is for an artist to get a fair and accurate audit of his business with a company? Books are cooked, forged or simply hidden from people who can only get an partial accounting if they have enough money to sue for it. How'd you like to work at a place where you couldn't get a good accounting of the hours you worked and had to hire a lawyer to pick up a paycheck that reflected what you had agreed to work for? The music industry is notorious for its rampant dishonesty. This is a good example of what goea around comes around.
"The Royal Family" was last year's book; a searing look through the underworld of the Tenderloin in San Fransisco, examining prostitutes, child molesters and homeless people, not to mention many others in a tapestry that has the breadth of Dickens and the spiritual intensity of a Kafka or a Kerouac. It's a moving and depressing book - there were moments that made me laugh and there were other moments that made me squirm in my chair with horror and loathing. Underneath it all is an obsession with the old Calvinist idea of the Elect and the Damned - and of course, Vollmann's compassion is for the Damned. 50 years from now people will not truly understand the American society of our day without reading him.
... It makes anything Stephen King's ever written read like Dr. Seuss. He's also written a brilliant series of novels dealing with North American history, a truly strange cyberpunk fable (You Bright and Risen Angels) describing the war between the inventors of electricity and insects, and "Butterfly Stories: A Novel" about a photo journalist who goes to Thailand to immerse himself in a world of prostitutes, AIDS, and slow self-destruction. Vollmann is a genius with heart and he may well be the best writer of his generation.
I'd also like to suggest a story he wrote in "The Rainbow Stories", dealing with a mad killer who stalks winos on the streets of San Fransisco and force feeds them Drano
As far as other writers are concerned, I find it interesting that no one's mentioned Thomas Pynchon. People will be reading Gravity's Rainbow 50 years from now, simply because they still won't have figured it all out.
Oh, and there's a name a lot of people have mentioned who is definitely overrated - Ayn Rand. She's an interesting philosopher - anyone who wants to consider the questions of freedom and economics needs to pay attention to the questions she has raised and needs to be able to refute (or justify) her answers to them. But literature? Hardly.
And for the fantasy buffs out there, I would like to suggest James Branch Cabell's "The Cream of the Jest". It's a funny, sad and poignant book without the usual medieval war on steroids posing of most fantasy novels.
The Taliban has 45,000 soldiers, entrenched in bunkers, willing to die in suicide attacks. At Okin awa, the Japanese had 100,000 soldiers, entrenched in bunkers, willing to die in suicide attacks. We defeated the Japanese Empire at Okinawa, we will defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan. But not with token bombing raids.
Except that Afghanistan's a lot bigger than Okinawa, the native population there mostly supports the enemy and IS the enemy, unlike Okinawa, and the U.S. has to go 1,000 miles by land or air to get anything to the battlefield, where in Okinawa, they could just pull the ships right up. Major differences.
1. Get horse and chariot hooked up.
2. Fill 2 liter bottle full of cayenne pepper solution.
3. Attach bicycle pump to bottle.
4. Attach hose from bottle into horse's ass.
5. Pay up life insurance, make out will and start pumping.
Germany and Japan. Which is not to say you don't have a point.
... wouldn't I have to get a waterproof computer case to do this?
Sorry to interrupt the mutual-masturbation fest that's going on here, but isn't it high time we started seeing something new out of Sid Meier?
Like what? Sim Golf (the first one)? That was awful. Gettysburg? Alright, but I wasn't real impressed with it.
The guy's doing what he does best. There's a lot of room for refinement and new touches to the Civ genre and I'm going to buy Civ 3 as soon as possible.
I'd skipped Civ2
You missed a classic. It's better than the first one.
I know that Sid Meier has what it takes to make a really fun and creative and new game, so why is he limiting himself to sequels and knock-offs of his previous stuff? I mean, here was a guy who practically created his own genre of games -- and it's this sort of experimentation and risk that pushes the industry forward. Right now, though, he's just resting on his laurels.
Oh, come now - if he was just resting on his laurels, he'd have just sold the rights to someone else and let them grind out half assed versions of the game like Activision's Call to Power. There's a rumor going around that he may be working on something else.
I've seen the descriptions of Civ3 and I'll probably be all over it when it gets to the bargain bin
You know that's probably going to take 2 or 3 years, don't you? This is probably going to be the major smash hit of the year.
I'm guessing linux is software which is capable of processing information in digital form.
Well, that lets Microsoft off the hook, doesn't it?
It's just like having to buy my Sony CDs from Camelot only and my Universal CDs from Sam Goody only. It doesn't make any sense. It's not what the customers want - they want to be able to subscribe to one service, among several choices, and pay to access mp3s from all companies, preferrably paying a flat fee, and certainly not paying CD prices, because after all, an mp3 isn't as good as a CD. They'd also like to be able to choose individual songs to buy, not have to buy 1 song they want and 10 dogs they don't. What gives the music industry the idea they can continue to ignore their market and their customers without hurting the bottom line? Maybe that's why CD sales are dropping.
Cringley falls into the same trap as everyone else when talking about what broadband is used for. It's not about speed.
I'm still online with phone lines that give me the equivalent of a 28.8. Web pages don't take that long to load, and I've discovered that even with a lousy dial-up account, I can download or
peer to peer trade one hell of a lot over the course of a month with the right software. Right now, it's costing me 19.95 to do this. I would pay 10 bucks more a month for 256 or 512K access, as long as I can do all that I can do with my dial-up access. Extra speed is just not worth all that much to me; I have reliable connectivity and patience, and only so much time in my life to mess with whatever I'm downloading.
The real problem with broadband is that it's a luxury for a lot of ordinary users and there's no compelling reason to cause them to upgrade. I'm not interested in having it unless it's inexpensive.
It's interesting that whenever the question of democracy comes up, that inevitably, the view is expressed that such a thing would be bad, as it would result in a tyranny of the majority, and that most people are too stupid to make good decisions.
I find this to be a logically flawed and elitist viewpoint. When throughout history, has there been an actual tyranny of an actual democratic majority? Haven't all tyrannies been run by very small minorities? (Don't try telling me about Athens or Rome - the electorate was a minority of the populace.) Yes, Hitler was elected - in a constitutional republic. Someone further down the thread defines democracy as a system where 51% of the people get to piss in 49% of the people's cornflakes - except that, in our country at least, the 49% would revolt and they'd be armed. You see, direct democracy or any other form of government has a natural check and balance - civil war, revolt, insurrection, disobediance. But none the less, let's put forth the proposition that pure democracy always results in tyranny of the majority - never mind that there are no examples in history to prove it, never mind that the idealised free market that is worshipped by the same critics IS a pure democracy of dollar bills, never mind that an ample case can be made for republics and government by the elite sliding quickly into tyranny. We can say it because we "know" it to be so. Give us our republic, but make sure that it doesn't interfere with our direct democracy of dollars known as the free market.
Hmmm, if the free market's a direct democracy, shouldn't we be experiencing some tyranny soon? Are we already?
On to the other half of the equation, which expresses the view that the majority of people are dumber than rocks and can't be trusted to put their pants on one leg at a time when they get up in the morning much less vote on issues. If 40% of them can't even be bothered to vote on who's representing them, why would they bother to vote on the issues? If a majority shouldn't be able to decide on things because they're too stupid, who gets to choose who the elite all-knowing all seeing decision-makers should be? Why, it's that same stupid majority, isn't it? Well, then, let's just let the elite vote. How are the elite identified? Why, the elite define for us what makes them elite. Why are those qualities elite? Because we're elite and we said so.
Doesn't anyone see the circular reasoning involved here? Here's an even more glaring contradiction - the majority decide what our language, our culture and so many aspects of our day to day lives should be like, without a formal vote, just through the mere act of living their lives, speaking and consuming. That takes in a LOT more power and consequence than our government doesn't it? If they're not smart enough to run our government, why the hell are we letting them run our culture, our language and our consumer economy? If 51% of them prefer Pepsi, does that mean I have to quit drinking Coke?
Everytime I see these arguments against direct democracy, I see red, becuase they are so illogical. Now, argue against it because it would be unwieldy and overwhelming for the average citizen to consider everything and you have a point. Argue against it because there would be too many proposals and alternate viewpoints to consider on each issue and you're making sense. Wonder if the media and the PR hacks wouldn't manipulate the process with propaganda like they already do to get the voters to put pressure on Congress, and that's a good point.
But don't tell me that direct democracy leads to tyranny of the majority; not unless you're also willing to admit we already may be living under it.
Hmmm - they'd have to open up the case to get to the ram. So, you'd first cut the power. Then your system could have a battery that would automatically click on when the first screw was unscrewed and begin writing tons of 0s and 1s to the RAM disk. By the time they got the RAM out, it would have nothing but garbage on it.
"Yes, but those are dog MB."
Now I know why my hard drive makes that funny sound - it's scratching itself.
"The Bush administration's anti-terrorism legislation has stalled because of one senator's concern that it will erode civil liberties. Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., tried to hurry the bill through Tuesday, but Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., refused Daschle's request to let the bill go through without debate or amendment."
I'm glad to see that one of our representatives feels a responsibility to have this discussed before it's passed. The article's available through Yahoo's home page - it would seem that Feingold wants to change several key provisions of the bill.
Even after all that sarcasm I posted, you still haven't figured out that saying that these people "don't have the common sense to live in a place with water" was a brutally ignorant and callous statement?
...
Quite bluntly, it's one of the stupidest things I've ever read on Slashdot. I have news for you. When we are born we do not get to choose where we live. Some of us get to live in a good place. Some of us get to live in a bad place. The ones who live in a good place should not say that the ones who live in a bad place are dumb when they are stuck there, and don't have food. If they can't help, then at least they should not say dumb things like, "You don't have the sense to move." There. I said it in words of one syllable in the hopes that you just might understand it. But you probably won't
The public information I'm talking about was in reference to the trial transcripts dealing with previous terrorist attacks, and the link was already provided further up in the thread. He's already been proven to have committed enough crimes against the US that we could fairly demand that he be turned over. Our suspicion that he is likely involved in the WTC attack is an additional reason for our demands, not the sole one.
So let me get this straight- instead of defending ourselves against idiots like Osama and taking care of the needy people in our own country, you think it is our job to spend our money feeding people that dont have the common sense to live in a place with water?
Yeah, it's all their fault for not having the common sense to be born as Americans, isn't it? Then they could live in a place with water like Los Angeles or Phoenix. That way we wouldn't be forced to bankrupt ourselves giving them food and water while we're busy bombing Afghanistan. How dare they starve to death when we're trying to kill someone else; if they were considerate like we are, they'd wait a few days to starve until we could get around to saving them. The nerve!
I mean, like, can't they get a job at the mall or something?
They actually haven't been shown this batch of evidence.
It's public information that is available on the net. Funny, the Taliban were able to have their own web site, they are able to reply in a timely matter when the media and political leaders in the West denounce them for the things they have done, and they are able to make military preparations when they see we are about to attack us, but when it comes to looking at evidence of Bin Laden's attacks of several years ago, they are suddenly unable to find this information at all. No, if they were responsible world citizens they would have looked at this evidence and acted properly on it when they were asked to. The only reason they haven't "seen" it is because they don't want to see it. Can you really state that no one in the Taliban is aware that Osama bin Laden is on our 10 most wanted list, that trial transcripts have given good evidence for his involvement in several terrorist attacks, and that almost any other country in the world, including Muslim ones, would arrest him and extradite to be tried? No, what they're really saying is that none of that is "Islamic" evidence from an "Islamic" court and so it doesn't count. We're infidels to them and nothing we say has to be listened to. Just about every country in the world begged them not to destroy those Buddha statues and they completely ignored them. They have a track record of refusing to listen to anyone; if we'd provided them with videotape of bin Laden telling Mohammed Atta, "Now I wants youse to fly them planes into them towers, capiche?", they'd have told us it was no good because it wasn't taken by an "Islamic" camera. Reasonable leaders of a reasonable government would have considered carefully the harboring of a immigrant criminal such as bin Laden and the evidence that existed against him, before refusing to deport him. The Taliban knew they would be at war if they did not choose to listen to the world's demand for justice; they have chosen, and so be it.
beOS has plenty of apps for it.
Abiword and Opera can be run on the operating systems I already have. I have Star Office for Windows and Linux. The browser that came with BeOS was so-so. And the games you've listed can all be run on Windows and/or Linux.
Look, I tried it, I kept it on my hard drive for months and visited the popular web sites and dug deep for reasons I should spring for the full edition and I couldn't find one. I backed up the partition on a CDrom and deleted it. I still haven't found a compelling reason to put it back. I still look at bebits.com once in a while just to see. It was a nice OS, but my options in Windows and Linux are a lot broader.
If I'm going to mess with a 3rd operating system, I need a compelling reason to run it. BeOS didn't provide me with one.