The Kaleidescape is an enormously overpriced beast ($20k+ for the lowest end model). It's so controversial that the DVD consortium (those diefied few who deign to control such lofty things as DVD technology licensing) still won't even publicly admit they granted Kaleidescape a license.
I serioulsy doubt that this other company is legally allowed to save DVDs to disk.
That said, maybe they think they can get away with disregarding the legality...in which case, not paying for a legal DivX license isn't so terribly unlikely.
As it stands, you can quote Encyclopedia Britannica in any school essay.
Maybe in high school, but in any rigorous academic setting dictionaries and encyclopedias are shunned sources. Both are facile overviews of the material. That has its place, but very little critical thought goes into encyclopedias or dictionaries.
Of course, I'll get some replies telling me I'm wrong...but try to use Britannica as a source in a Yale Religious Studies grad class or a Harvard Law grad class and see what the professor has to say. Like it or not, real academics value encyclopdias as layman sources but not as legit academic sources.
And as a layman source, Wikipedia is friggin great!
Socialism? Karl Marx did not invent sharing. At the end of the day, sharing is the heart of RMS's philosophy.
Communism and socialism both encompass a great many things that I've never heard RMS advocating.
"[...] but it is still charity. The OSS community is a socialist community."
Um, I hate to be argumentetive about this, but honestly if you equate charity with socialism then you don't understand one or the other.
"Now go ahead and mark me a troll for having an unpopular opinion."
I'd be just fine with an 'unpopular' opinion, but a flat out misinformed opinion is pretty unacceptable.
"I don't drink RMS's cool aid"
How could you when you are already drunk on Gates' champagne? Your arguments betray a profound misunderstanding if the nature of charity and philanthropy and it's role in a capitalist society.
I blogged about the same inevitable trend myself just a month ago.
The format wars are going to fall at the feet of the codec wars. It is obvious, given the cost savings, that the consumer will migrate to the easiest to maintain and cheapest to upgrade system he can get.
If the consumer can drop his receiver, dvd player, dvr, cd player, tape deck, laser disc player, hdvcr player and all the rest of the mess current taking up a wall in his home theater and replace it all with one box that does everything, and is software upgradable (remember that THIS IS SOMETHING WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY TO ROLL OUT TOMORROW!) he will do so.
The new hub will be a media PC, esentially (though not really like the ones you see now). Give people this option, and they will go for it in a heartbeat.
The problem is that we have competing standards for streaming/downloading media. That needs to change, but doesn't look like it will for a while.
The real question isn't "Is Bill Gates right?" but rather "How can we get Linux to fill a niche in this new media economy?"
So, do you know any open source groups pushing for a standardization of the online media purchasing commerce? If not, we need to ask ourselves why not? This is gonna be HUGE, and it would sure be nice if I didn't need to have specific hardware or software to buy somthing from iTunes, for example. There should be a standard client protocol that I can connect to any standards compliant eStore with and browse/purchase media.
It doesn't surprise me one bit that Linus is an atheist -- I already knew he was smart and educated.
Without exception, the smartest and best educated people that I know personally are all religious.
I hold a degree in religious studies. I have an I.Q. that places me well above the norm. I believe in God.
Of the atheists I know, the smartest of them ackowledges the leap of faith that they too must make in the skeptical debate. The best Skeptical thinkers in history have done the same.
This entire thread is riddled with half-truths and unsound arguments.
The whole thing began with a reference to the Celebrity Atheist list, which, if you will notice lists the Dalai Lama, of all people, as ambigious on the topic. The validity of this list is questionable at best and deceptive at worst. The critieria used to establish the Dalai Lama's ambiguity betrays an astounding misunderstanding of the terms "atheist", "agnostic", "religion", and "God".
People in this thread claim that "A large portion of Americans believe [in literal creationism]." Bullshit. Very few people, Christian or otherwise, believe the earth is only a few thousand years old. Better would have been to argue that Christians don't believe in evolution. Still not true of the whole, but at least a few more Christians are of that bent than those that only believe in a 4000 year old earth.
Of course, later you claim, with surprising innocence given your earlier tone, that you "merely expressed lack of surprise that Linus is not" a believer. Bullshit. You expressed that because he is smart and educated, it logically follows that he would also be an atheist. It was an insult, pure and simple, and you cannot now pretend you weren't trying to troll the thread.
I will put my intellect and education against any atheist you can muster. It doesn't do any good (and I should know, since I've had these debates ad naseum) but make no mistake that whereever atheists want to spread FUD, I'll be more than happy to beat them back a few steps. I couldn't care less whether someone believes or doesn't believe. Makes no difference to me, but when they tell lies to others (like the idea that only the less intelligent and less educated masses hold faith in God) I will gladly stand up to take the challenge.
DBs like this have a habit of publicising vulnerabilities without telling the software authors first.
Seems like they could fill a niche need here by allowing people to report vulnerabilities, but not automatically posting them until a set time after the report date. Then having it automatically notify the vendor of the vulnerability. The vendor could ignore it (in which case after a set interval the issue would go public) or fix it and let it go public sooner.
...until I can get real a la carte selection of what I want (i.e., the shows themselves) then we haven't really gotten where we need to be.
Why should I pay for TechTV when all I want is Screen Savers? Why should I pay for SciFi when all I want is ST:DS9? You get the idea.
This is a great move, but the whole industry needs to change to support subscription to individual shows if we are to see real a la carte selection of what we want.
Well, that word "absolution" contains another word that's equally important: "solution."
I agree with your sentiment, but I feel compelled to point out that the word absolution, comes from the Latin ab (meaning "away from") and solvere (meaning "to loosen"), so actually, if we break the word down, it would be more etymologically accurate to say that in this context it means to forgive without solution (to be "away from solution").
While I agree that there must be some chicanery involved in Diebold's success as a company in the face of their profound incompetence, the fact that a handful of employees gave to policital campaigns, of which slightly more than half may have favored republicans is not really much of a smoking gun.
Still, I repeat that I agree that something is going on.
The article is referring to the recent claim that Miguel said that "C is dead". The problem is that it's quoted out of context and is getting rehashed so much that people are gonna forget that it was never actually said.
This article implies a great deal, but the reality is that Miguel never said C was dead. He said that to him C was dead, meaning that he intended to focus his programming time on C#. Pretty reasonable statement given that he's in charge of a project that's porting it to linux.
Surprisingly to the language zealots among us, Miguel is allowed to write code in whatever language pleases him.
Because you can only elect from those people on the list that is essentially chosen for you.
In the United States, you may vote for whomever you'd like, regardless of the choices presented on the ballot. They may not be likely to win, but you needn't vote for the people that the Republicans and Democrats field just because they are the biggest, boldest names on the ballot. Write in your own choice.
I plan on voting for Howard Dean anyway. Screw the establishment fucks that decided I should rather have to choose between Kerry and Bush. Both are Skull and Bones members. Both have no interest in representing me. Neither inspires me to go to the polls. What am I gonna say this November..."Dean Anyway".
Whoa, let a little reality intrude on your screed...
Firstly, it ain't a screed. I am not tirading on the topic, just trying to introduce some balance. That's all. It's funny how people are all about Free Speech til someone uses it to say something disagreeable. Suddenly the naysayer is spouting a screed or ranting or whatever.:(
Secondly, The list you gave was a drop in the bucket for the number of police actions we've been involved in and if you recall, I did say "almost every time", not "every time".
Thirdly, since when was the Bay of Pigs a police action?!?! The Soviets dropped nukes on our doorstep and expected us to accept it! Unlike Iraq, there WERE WMD and they WERE an imminent threat. That was self-preservation, pure and simple. Anyone that doesn't think we were at war with the USSR, doesn't really understand the times. I'm not suggesting that we didn't do the same back to them, but I am saying that the rules of war are/very/ different from the rules of a police action or other less-hostile activity.
I'm just saying that the political direction of your govern has lost me. I'm not bashing the "american ppl".
Glad to hear it.:) Mostly, I don't disagree with your sentiment....that Bush isn't the best president we've had.
I will say though, that he's done some good stuff too, but it gets buried and goes unreported becuase it's funner for the media and the audience to insult and decry than to praise.
Even Hitler wasn't totally wrong/evil. He did, after all, feed his people. At the expense of six million dead Jews, but hey, let's not go overboard...Bush is the same way.
As I said in another post in this thread. If you really think Bush is as bad as Hitler, or even in the same league, ask a Jew what they think. I suspect you'll get either anger or laughter, depending on ho wclose to the Holocaust they were.
Bush is no saint, nor is he even a good president, but he is no Hitler.
Why don't you explain that to mr. "Evil axis" guy instead of the parent post, which seems very reflected.
I would if I ever got a chance to. Sadly President Bush doesn't post to slashdot.:(
Seriously, I'm no supporter of the prick in office. He's made some real mistakes in my opinion. I likely won't be voting for him in the upcoming election. Still, my only point is that it's getting popular to whitewash the shades of grey on both sides. The people on one side want, for example, to make the Iraq affair out to be a great liberation with no ill effects and the other side wants to make it out to be a purely evil act of agression akin to the atrocities of Hitler.
Yes, someone in this very thread actually compared Bush to Hitler...if that's not losing sight of reality, I don't know what is. Don't agree? Ask the average Jew if Bush is as evil as Hitler and see what they have to say.
I agree that he is fucking up, but not everything he does is wrong or evil. Sometimes he gets things right.
When I was young, I though about America as presented by Hollywood: land of opportunity, freedom and "the good ones". Now, every day, week, month that passes I just realize that you're becoming a really strange country where words like privacy and liberty mean nothing, and I find really hard to figure out if the US are still on the "good" side.
Which means you are still listening to what Hollywood and the Media have to say about us. Things are rarely, if ever, as black-and-white as you've described. I'm no advocate of Bush, per se, but at least half the list you present in your post has another, more reasonable side to it that people disregard because it's become popular accross the world (and the US) to hate Bush and malign everything he's done.
Noone, even President Bush, is either totally wrong/evil or totally right/good.
You talk about the wrongness of the US boycotting the Kyoto Accord, but you don't mention that while we didn't sign it, neither did a single other country. In fact, not only did President Bush take issue with it, but several members of Former President Clinton's staff also felt it was unacceptable. These and other facts suggest that in its then-current form, it had some fundamental flaws that needed addressing.
You talk about us acting like protectors of the world, but never mention that almost every 'police action' we engage in (with the notable exception of Iraq, admittedly) has been done AT THE REQUEST OF THE COUNTRY WE HELPED. We get attacked for being the policemen of the world, but countries keep asking us to police their neck of the woods. While we do sometimes go overboard---I don't deny that---many of our police actions have been a great help to the people in the area. We helped the people of Somolia. We helped the people of Korea. Hell, we have even helped the people of Iraq (though at a high cost!). I mean, no one is arguing that Saddam was a nice guy who deserved to stay in office. We may not have found WMD, but we've found rape and torture rooms, and other evidence of a truly brutal regime.
We have our problems, but let's not go overboard and start asking whose side we are on! Almost every American I know (that's a lot, by the way, since I live here ) is a decent, hard-working person who honestly wants to make the world a better place. We don't always make the right decisions, but hell, no one does.
the idea to let the armed forces have anything to do with overseeing voting seems both ridiculous and dangerous.
The Pentagon has an interest in this because these votes are the overseas ballots for the men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces. The Pentagon's job is to make sure there is a reasonable way for their people to get a say in the government back home. They are not involved in the vote tally itself. This is just the Pentagon saying that this method is not acceptable to them. A legitimate and sane response, given the known security risks.
"Justice Douglas, writing the opinion of the Court, asserted that the 'specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.' Thus, while privacy is nowhere mentioned, it is one of the values served and protected by the First Amendment, through its protection of associational rights, and by the Third, the Fourth, and the Fifth Amendments as well. The Justice recurred to the text of the Ninth Amendment, apparently to support the thought that these penumbral rights are protected by one Amendment or a complex of Amendments despite the absence of a specific reference. Justice Goldberg, concurring, devoted several pages to the Amendment."
So you see, according to many legal scholars including the Supreme Court of the United States, giving the government the right to void my privacy DOES abate my Freedom of Speech.
Re:What is the *source* of the "RMS" controversy?
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Stallman Goes to India
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The programs that provide "unemployment checks" are paid for out of your paycheck and not taxpayer monies. [...] Considering this, it seems wrong to call "unemployment checks" a social program, and to equate "employment checks" with "welfare" checks.
I won't disagree that unemployment checks are in some ways qualitatively different from other forms of social welfare (I think you make a valid distinction), but to be clear, unemployment is not paid for out of your paycheck. It's paid for out of unemployment insurance that each employer must, by law, carry.
The employee is not getting the money he put into the system. He's getting the money his employer put into the system as forced on them by our government. As a governmentally-enforced program designed to help those unfortunate enough to lose their jobs, it seems to meet the criteria for a social program, albeit not one financed from our taxes.
Someone who honestly receives unemployment checks for a short time should not feel any shame.
As someone who has taking an unemployment check in the past, I should hope you are right! I can't tell if you are just making this observation or suggesting that I said otherwise, but so as to keep us on the same page here, re-reading my original post, you will note that I never said unemployment checks and welfare ought to be shameful, but that they are time-limited. We help people in need, but we do so with the intent of getting them back to a position of self-sustenance. They needn't feel shamed in America for drawing unemployment or welfare unless they intend to find some way to do so as a career. That, in the American public's opinion, would be shameful.
Re:What is the *source* of the "RMS" controversy?
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What chance would he have of doing that in the US? How many people would consider him insane?
Not many. I know a/large/ number of people who make the money/free time trade off in their jobs. As long as they can sustain themselves, no one says a word. The minute those same people ask for help, people will complain.
Common attitudes in slashdot threads include "because you're being paid to do X, you have no right to complain", "refusing to work for some employer on ethical grounds is immature" and other similar styles of commentary, none of which I've ever heard from a European.
Slashdot threads aren't a fair representation of the American public. Not by a long shot. Likewise, the media does a poor job of conveying the American people to the people of other nations. I've never heard a reasonable adult say such things in the workplace. Both suggest an immaturity on the part of the quoted person. As for never hearing such things from a European, all I can say is that you aren't reading the same slashdot posts as me. Still, I don't think that slashdot posts properly conveys any real understanding of the typical European or American.
Re:What is the *source* of the "RMS" controversy?
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· Score: 4, Insightful
It's shameful for an American to be without money. Success is tied with being rich. Poor people are "losers".
I get what you are saying, but as an American, I feel the need to clarify your point.
Americans have a strong drive to succeed. We have a drive to compete with ourselves. It's the basis of what we call the "American Dream" (to become strong and independent). As a society, we embrace the ideal of constant self-improvement. We strive for one goal: Self-Sustenance.
It's not that we look down on people who are poor. Almost every American you ask will agree that a person isn't less of a person for being poorer than another. No, our real issue is with people who cannot live in a reasonably (note I did not say fully) self-sustaining manner. We do look down on people who/need/ handouts and who otherwise appear capable. We, as a society, don't begrudge people who cannot be self-sustaining, like children, some elderly, or the sick, as evidenced by our social programs to help those people. But our other social programs, like unemployment checks, welfare, and the such are time-limited.
We firmly stand by our conviction that if you can become more self-sustaining, then you should.
So you see, it isn't money which drives us. Money is just one way of many to gain a measure of self-sustenance. It's the desire to minimize our external dependencies. You can be dirt-poor in America, but grow your own food and manage your own needs and we will only admire you. Likewise, you can be filthy-rich in America but constantly seek government grants and the such ans we will despise you. This has it's own ancillary set of problems, but they are different from those that we would have if money were our obsession.
I'm not making a judgement here as to whether that's better or worse than what you claimed, but rather just clarifying for you the real pathos of the American Dream.
In Edwin Muir's Autobiography, (a must-read!) he described a pretty bad working experience as an office clerk in a bone factory. Bones from all over Scotland, some no longer fresh, were reduced to charcoal that was later used to purify sugar. "The bones, decorated with festoons of slowly writhing, fat yellow maggots" lay outside the building in a railway siding until the furnace was ready for them. The smell of the roasting bones, Muir wrote, "was a gentle, clinging, sweet stench, suggesting dissolution and hospitals and slaughter-houses, the odour of drains, and the rancid stink of bad, roasting meat." A room Muir rented around this time looked out on a graveyard; nothing could have been more apt. "Absorbed in my own dissociation," Muir observed of his Glasgow period, "the world retreated from me in all its shapes."
In effort of understatment, I'll just add that that would kinda suck.
Slashdot Mirror
The DivX codec itself requires a license does it not? [...] If any compression is going on, it will probably be to an open format such as XviD.
Saving a DVD to disk requires one as well. Currently there is only one product on the market that is legally allowed to do so.
http://www.kaleidescape.com/
The Kaleidescape is an enormously overpriced beast ($20k+ for the lowest end model). It's so controversial that the DVD consortium (those diefied few who deign to control such lofty things as DVD technology licensing) still won't even publicly admit they granted Kaleidescape a license.
I serioulsy doubt that this other company is legally allowed to save DVDs to disk.
That said, maybe they think they can get away with disregarding the legality...in which case, not paying for a legal DivX license isn't so terribly unlikely.
As it stands, you can quote Encyclopedia Britannica in any school essay.
Maybe in high school, but in any rigorous academic setting dictionaries and encyclopedias are shunned sources. Both are facile overviews of the material. That has its place, but very little critical thought goes into encyclopedias or dictionaries.
Of course, I'll get some replies telling me I'm wrong...but try to use Britannica as a source in a Yale Religious Studies grad class or a Harvard Law grad class and see what the professor has to say. Like it or not, real academics value encyclopdias as layman sources but not as legit academic sources.
And as a layman source, Wikipedia is friggin great!
"The problem with socialism is that [...]"
Socialism? Karl Marx did not invent sharing. At the end of the day, sharing is the heart of RMS's philosophy.
Communism and socialism both encompass a great many things that I've never heard RMS advocating.
"[...] but it is still charity. The OSS community is a socialist community."
Um, I hate to be argumentetive about this, but honestly if you equate charity with socialism then you don't understand one or the other.
"Now go ahead and mark me a troll for having an unpopular opinion."
I'd be just fine with an 'unpopular' opinion, but a flat out misinformed opinion is pretty unacceptable.
"I don't drink RMS's cool aid"
How could you when you are already drunk on Gates' champagne? Your arguments betray a profound misunderstanding if the nature of charity and philanthropy and it's role in a capitalist society.
I blogged about the same inevitable trend myself just a month ago.
The format wars are going to fall at the feet of the codec wars. It is obvious, given the cost savings, that the consumer will migrate to the easiest to maintain and cheapest to upgrade system he can get.
If the consumer can drop his receiver, dvd player, dvr, cd player, tape deck, laser disc player, hdvcr player and all the rest of the mess current taking up a wall in his home theater and replace it all with one box that does everything, and is software upgradable (remember that THIS IS SOMETHING WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY TO ROLL OUT TOMORROW!) he will do so.
The new hub will be a media PC, esentially (though not really like the ones you see now). Give people this option, and they will go for it in a heartbeat.
The problem is that we have competing standards for streaming/downloading media. That needs to change, but doesn't look like it will for a while.
The real question isn't "Is Bill Gates right?" but rather "How can we get Linux to fill a niche in this new media economy?"
So, do you know any open source groups pushing for a standardization of the online media purchasing commerce? If not, we need to ask ourselves why not? This is gonna be HUGE, and it would sure be nice if I didn't need to have specific hardware or software to buy somthing from iTunes, for example. There should be a standard client protocol that I can connect to any standards compliant eStore with and browse/purchase media.
It doesn't surprise me one bit that Linus is an atheist -- I already knew he was smart and educated.
Without exception, the smartest and best educated people that I know personally are all religious.
I hold a degree in religious studies. I have an I.Q. that places me well above the norm. I believe in God.
Of the atheists I know, the smartest of them ackowledges the leap of faith that they too must make in the skeptical debate. The best Skeptical thinkers in history have done the same.
This entire thread is riddled with half-truths and unsound arguments.
The whole thing began with a reference to the Celebrity Atheist list, which, if you will notice lists the Dalai Lama, of all people, as ambigious on the topic. The validity of this list is questionable at best and deceptive at worst. The critieria used to establish the Dalai Lama's ambiguity betrays an astounding misunderstanding of the terms "atheist", "agnostic", "religion", and "God".
People in this thread claim that "A large portion of Americans believe [in literal creationism]." Bullshit. Very few people, Christian or otherwise, believe the earth is only a few thousand years old. Better would have been to argue that Christians don't believe in evolution. Still not true of the whole, but at least a few more Christians are of that bent than those that only believe in a 4000 year old earth.
Of course, later you claim, with surprising innocence given your earlier tone, that you "merely expressed lack of surprise that Linus is not" a believer. Bullshit. You expressed that because he is smart and educated, it logically follows that he would also be an atheist. It was an insult, pure and simple, and you cannot now pretend you weren't trying to troll the thread.
I will put my intellect and education against any atheist you can muster. It doesn't do any good (and I should know, since I've had these debates ad naseum) but make no mistake that whereever atheists want to spread FUD, I'll be more than happy to beat them back a few steps. I couldn't care less whether someone believes or doesn't believe. Makes no difference to me, but when they tell lies to others (like the idea that only the less intelligent and less educated masses hold faith in God) I will gladly stand up to take the challenge.
DBs like this have a habit of publicising vulnerabilities without telling the software authors first.
Seems like they could fill a niche need here by allowing people to report vulnerabilities, but not automatically posting them until a set time after the report date. Then having it automatically notify the vendor of the vulnerability. The vendor could ignore it (in which case after a set interval the issue would go public) or fix it and let it go public sooner.
Just a thought.
...until I can get real a la carte selection of what I want (i.e., the shows themselves) then we haven't really gotten where we need to be.
Why should I pay for TechTV when all I want is Screen Savers? Why should I pay for SciFi when all I want is ST:DS9? You get the idea.
This is a great move, but the whole industry needs to change to support subscription to individual shows if we are to see real a la carte selection of what we want.
Well, that word "absolution" contains another word that's equally important: "solution."
I agree with your sentiment, but I feel compelled to point out that the word absolution, comes from the Latin ab (meaning "away from") and solvere (meaning "to loosen"), so actually, if we break the word down, it would be more etymologically accurate to say that in this context it means to forgive without solution (to be "away from solution").
While I agree that there must be some chicanery involved in Diebold's success as a company in the face of their profound incompetence, the fact that a handful of employees gave to policital campaigns, of which slightly more than half may have favored republicans is not really much of a smoking gun.
Still, I repeat that I agree that something is going on.
-Tom
...when John Dvorak said precisely the same thing in his column. I guess this guy liked what he read there too.
The article is referring to the recent claim that Miguel said that "C is dead". The problem is that it's quoted out of context and is getting rehashed so much that people are gonna forget that it was never actually said.
This article implies a great deal, but the reality is that Miguel never said C was dead. He said that to him C was dead, meaning that he intended to focus his programming time on C#. Pretty reasonable statement given that he's in charge of a project that's porting it to linux.
Surprisingly to the language zealots among us, Miguel is allowed to write code in whatever language pleases him.
Because you can only elect from those people on the list that is essentially chosen for you.
In the United States, you may vote for whomever you'd like, regardless of the choices presented on the ballot. They may not be likely to win, but you needn't vote for the people that the Republicans and Democrats field just because they are the biggest, boldest names on the ballot. Write in your own choice.
I plan on voting for Howard Dean anyway. Screw the establishment fucks that decided I should rather have to choose between Kerry and Bush. Both are Skull and Bones members. Both have no interest in representing me. Neither inspires me to go to the polls. What am I gonna say this November..."Dean Anyway".
Whoa, let a little reality intrude on your screed...
:(
/very/ different from the rules of a police action or other less-hostile activity.
Firstly, it ain't a screed. I am not tirading on the topic, just trying to introduce some balance. That's all. It's funny how people are all about Free Speech til someone uses it to say something disagreeable. Suddenly the naysayer is spouting a screed or ranting or whatever.
Secondly, The list you gave was a drop in the bucket for the number of police actions we've been involved in and if you recall, I did say "almost every time", not "every time".
Thirdly, since when was the Bay of Pigs a police action?!?! The Soviets dropped nukes on our doorstep and expected us to accept it! Unlike Iraq, there WERE WMD and they WERE an imminent threat. That was self-preservation, pure and simple. Anyone that doesn't think we were at war with the USSR, doesn't really understand the times. I'm not suggesting that we didn't do the same back to them, but I am saying that the rules of war are
I'm just saying that the political direction of your govern has lost me. I'm not bashing the "american ppl".
:) Mostly, I don't disagree with your sentiment....that Bush isn't the best president we've had.
Glad to hear it.
I will say though, that he's done some good stuff too, but it gets buried and goes unreported becuase it's funner for the media and the audience to insult and decry than to praise.
Even Hitler wasn't totally wrong/evil. He did, after all, feed his people. At the expense of six million dead Jews, but hey, let's not go overboard...Bush is the same way.
As I said in another post in this thread. If you really think Bush is as bad as Hitler, or even in the same league, ask a Jew what they think. I suspect you'll get either anger or laughter, depending on ho wclose to the Holocaust they were.
Bush is no saint, nor is he even a good president, but he is no Hitler.
Why don't you explain that to mr. "Evil axis" guy instead of the parent post, which seems very reflected.
:(
I would if I ever got a chance to. Sadly President Bush doesn't post to slashdot.
Seriously, I'm no supporter of the prick in office. He's made some real mistakes in my opinion. I likely won't be voting for him in the upcoming election. Still, my only point is that it's getting popular to whitewash the shades of grey on both sides. The people on one side want, for example, to make the Iraq affair out to be a great liberation with no ill effects and the other side wants to make it out to be a purely evil act of agression akin to the atrocities of Hitler.
Yes, someone in this very thread actually compared Bush to Hitler...if that's not losing sight of reality, I don't know what is. Don't agree? Ask the average Jew if Bush is as evil as Hitler and see what they have to say.
I agree that he is fucking up, but not everything he does is wrong or evil. Sometimes he gets things right.
When I was young, I though about America as presented by Hollywood: land of opportunity, freedom and "the good ones". Now, every day, week, month that passes I just realize that you're becoming a really strange country where words like privacy and liberty mean nothing, and I find really hard to figure out if the US are still on the "good" side.
Which means you are still listening to what Hollywood and the Media have to say about us. Things are rarely, if ever, as black-and-white as you've described. I'm no advocate of Bush, per se, but at least half the list you present in your post has another, more reasonable side to it that people disregard because it's become popular accross the world (and the US) to hate Bush and malign everything he's done.
Noone, even President Bush, is either totally wrong/evil or totally right/good.
You talk about the wrongness of the US boycotting the Kyoto Accord, but you don't mention that while we didn't sign it, neither did a single other country. In fact, not only did President Bush take issue with it, but several members of Former President Clinton's staff also felt it was unacceptable. These and other facts suggest that in its then-current form, it had some fundamental flaws that needed addressing.
You talk about us acting like protectors of the world, but never mention that almost every 'police action' we engage in (with the notable exception of Iraq, admittedly) has been done AT THE REQUEST OF THE COUNTRY WE HELPED. We get attacked for being the policemen of the world, but countries keep asking us to police their neck of the woods. While we do sometimes go overboard---I don't deny that---many of our police actions have been a great help to the people in the area. We helped the people of Somolia. We helped the people of Korea. Hell, we have even helped the people of Iraq (though at a high cost!). I mean, no one is arguing that Saddam was a nice guy who deserved to stay in office. We may not have found WMD, but we've found rape and torture rooms, and other evidence of a truly brutal regime.
We have our problems, but let's not go overboard and start asking whose side we are on! Almost every American I know (that's a lot, by the way, since I live here ) is a decent, hard-working person who honestly wants to make the world a better place. We don't always make the right decisions, but hell, no one does.
the idea to let the armed forces have anything to do with overseeing voting seems both ridiculous and dangerous.
The Pentagon has an interest in this because these votes are the overseas ballots for the men and women of the U.S. Armed Forces. The Pentagon's job is to make sure there is a reasonable way for their people to get a say in the government back home. They are not involved in the vote tally itself. This is just the Pentagon saying that this method is not acceptable to them. A legitimate and sane response, given the known security risks.
government owned and respected
I'll take "Two Adjectives that don't make sense together" for $1000, Alex.
"Justice Douglas, writing the opinion of the Court, asserted that the 'specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance.' Thus, while privacy is nowhere mentioned, it is one of the values served and protected by the First Amendment, through its protection of associational rights, and by the Third, the Fourth, and the Fifth Amendments as well. The Justice recurred to the text of the Ninth Amendment, apparently to support the thought that these penumbral rights are protected by one Amendment or a complex of Amendments despite the absence of a specific reference. Justice Goldberg, concurring, devoted several pages to the Amendment."
So you see, according to many legal scholars including the Supreme Court of the United States, giving the government the right to void my privacy DOES abate my Freedom of Speech.
The programs that provide "unemployment checks" are paid for out of your paycheck and not taxpayer monies. [...] Considering this, it seems wrong to call "unemployment checks" a social program, and to equate "employment checks" with "welfare" checks.
I won't disagree that unemployment checks are in some ways qualitatively different from other forms of social welfare (I think you make a valid distinction), but to be clear, unemployment is not paid for out of your paycheck. It's paid for out of unemployment insurance that each employer must, by law, carry.
The employee is not getting the money he put into the system. He's getting the money his employer put into the system as forced on them by our government. As a governmentally-enforced program designed to help those unfortunate enough to lose their jobs, it seems to meet the criteria for a social program, albeit not one financed from our taxes.
Someone who honestly receives unemployment checks for a short time should not feel any shame.
As someone who has taking an unemployment check in the past, I should hope you are right! I can't tell if you are just making this observation or suggesting that I said otherwise, but so as to keep us on the same page here, re-reading my original post, you will note that I never said unemployment checks and welfare ought to be shameful, but that they are time-limited. We help people in need, but we do so with the intent of getting them back to a position of self-sustenance. They needn't feel shamed in America for drawing unemployment or welfare unless they intend to find some way to do so as a career. That, in the American public's opinion, would be shameful.
What chance would he have of doing that in the US? How many people would consider him insane?
/large/ number of people who make the money/free time trade off in their jobs. As long as they can sustain themselves, no one says a word. The minute those same people ask for help, people will complain.
Not many. I know a
Common attitudes in slashdot threads include "because you're being paid to do X, you have no right to complain", "refusing to work for some employer on ethical grounds is immature" and other similar styles of commentary, none of which I've ever heard from a European.
Slashdot threads aren't a fair representation of the American public. Not by a long shot. Likewise, the media does a poor job of conveying the American people to the people of other nations. I've never heard a reasonable adult say such things in the workplace. Both suggest an immaturity on the part of the quoted person. As for never hearing such things from a European, all I can say is that you aren't reading the same slashdot posts as me. Still, I don't think that slashdot posts properly conveys any real understanding of the typical European or American.
It's shameful for an American to be without money. Success is tied with being rich. Poor people are "losers".
/need/ handouts and who otherwise appear capable. We, as a society, don't begrudge people who cannot be self-sustaining, like children, some elderly, or the sick, as evidenced by our social programs to help those people. But our other social programs, like unemployment checks, welfare, and the such are time-limited.
I get what you are saying, but as an American, I feel the need to clarify your point.
Americans have a strong drive to succeed. We have a drive to compete with ourselves. It's the basis of what we call the "American Dream" (to become strong and independent). As a society, we embrace the ideal of constant self-improvement. We strive for one goal: Self-Sustenance.
It's not that we look down on people who are poor. Almost every American you ask will agree that a person isn't less of a person for being poorer than another. No, our real issue is with people who cannot live in a reasonably (note I did not say fully) self-sustaining manner. We do look down on people who
We firmly stand by our conviction that if you can become more self-sustaining, then you should.
So you see, it isn't money which drives us. Money is just one way of many to gain a measure of self-sustenance. It's the desire to minimize our external dependencies. You can be dirt-poor in America, but grow your own food and manage your own needs and we will only admire you. Likewise, you can be filthy-rich in America but constantly seek government grants and the such ans we will despise you. This has it's own ancillary set of problems, but they are different from those that we would have if money were our obsession.
I'm not making a judgement here as to whether that's better or worse than what you claimed, but rather just clarifying for you the real pathos of the American Dream.
In Edwin Muir's Autobiography, (a must-read!) he described a pretty bad working experience as an office clerk in a bone factory. Bones from all over Scotland, some no longer fresh, were reduced to charcoal that was later used to purify sugar. "The bones, decorated with festoons of slowly writhing, fat yellow maggots" lay outside the building in a railway siding until the furnace was ready for them. The smell of the roasting bones, Muir wrote, "was a gentle, clinging, sweet stench, suggesting dissolution and hospitals and slaughter-houses, the odour of drains, and the rancid stink of bad, roasting meat." A room Muir rented around this time looked out on a graveyard; nothing could have been more apt. "Absorbed in my own dissociation," Muir observed of his Glasgow period, "the world retreated from me in all its shapes."
In effort of understatment, I'll just add that that would kinda suck.
eat a lump of cold poison
They let you eat?!?! Luxury!