I still think the news from the North Africa and the Middle East is some of the best news I've heard since the fall of the Berlin Wall and Soviet Russia, it makes me hopeful for us as a species.
It just wouldn't say that they are mostly successful yet. Hopefully they will be, and hopefully the revolutionary spirit spreads to the bigger, nastier, fish in the region (Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iran), and hopefully most of these revolutions don't get taken over by people worse than the governments that they're attempting to overthrow.
True, but you don't see Assange going after those other governments.
I don't think Wikileaks "goes after" governments, I think they publish what other people give them. I'm sure if there was a someone who had access to the Chinese or French dirty laundry, they'd also publish that. No one has approached them with those, so they can't "go after" them. If you browse around their site, you'll find that they also cover leaks from places other than the U.S., they just haven't had any leaks quite as big as Cablegate or the Iraq war leak.
Wikileaks doesn't create leaks, they just facilitate people who want to leak information.
Also, the US is a very big, unpopular, target right now. We have tentacles in pretty much everything, and our government has managed to do some very unpopular things, both to foreigners and to our own. Hell, most of the people I know in the military disagree with our current wars, or at least how we're carrying them out. This creates a highly elevated chance of people leaking information. The more you upset peoples ethics and morals, the more likely they are to rebel.
I'm not arguing in favor of Google not releasing the source, I'm just correcting the previous poster who claimed its about "individuals installing bad Honeycomb mods".
Personally I'm not a fan of keeping Honeycomb closed, even if it will be released (in part) late under whatever release that combines it back with the phone-oriented trunk. It sets a bad precedent, even if I understand their motivations. There probably is a way of keeping the Android image and branding untarnished while still playing nicely with open source. Probably the best way of doing this would to be completely remove the phone bits from the code so it can't function on phones without a fair amount of work (or otherwise render it a major hastle to get running on unintended hardware types), then releasing the source with large disclaimers all over it.
I think their actions are supported by their license though. IANAL, but Apache does allow you to restrict the source. But while they might be within the letter of the law, they are probably violating its spirit something fierce.
I'm saying sometimes the ones in power can be hard of hearing (read: fascist). In such cases, a coup is often the only remaining recourse.
Sadly the policies and ideology of many of the people advocating coups and violence ("second amendment solutions") are as abhorrent as the current policies and ideologies of the current government to me. That is one of the problems I have, to be motivated enough to advocate a coup you must have a very strong ideological stake. People with very strong ideological stakes are generally tyrants in training, who find issue with competing ideologies.
If I managed to overthrow the government and instilled one that was more in line with my ideology, you'd probably hate it (I'm more in favor of European style light socialism than Slashdotty Libertarianism). If the Fungelicals managed a coup, everyone but Fungelicals would hate it. If the Tea Parties managed to overthrow the government pretty much everyone would hate it outside of the Tea Partiers. If Libertarians won, everyone would hate it but... you get the idea.
If we were in a truly repressive regime, Like Egypt, Tunisia, or Libya (or the other current hotspots) I would be hooting a different horn, obviously. Our government isn't doing so well, but we have leagues to go before we actually hit the point where we might need to pick up arms. There still remain non-violent "legitimate" solutions to our problems.
The other problem is practical. Its the "what now?" problem. Most coups might start with very noble goals (actually most coups are started by would-be despots who want a bigger slice of the pie, but thats neither here nor there), but after the offending government is removed things collapse. Coups that end better than the old regime for the public are very rare.
If you still believe the vote has any power or meaning, well I'm afraid I am wasting my words on you.
It would be more meaningful if people actually did it. It would be more meaningful if the American people stopped being ignorant, ill-informed, and apathetic. That is the largest problem we face politically, the American people. We, like all ill democracies (or other governments founded on those principles) have the government we, collectively, deserve. Hell, a large step forward would be people voting for their own interests, and not the interests fed to them by politicos and the media.
Another big step forward would be adopting rational, informed, debate on a national scale; and burying the current rapid, dogmatic, partisanship in a shallow grave. The day a "Tea Party" type can sit down with a "Socialist" and have a decent conversation on ideals without resorting to slurs, insults, and calls to ideological purity, is the day America starts turning around (its a small step, but a good one). Also the day we realize that things aren't about "me and my benefit and ideals" and are instead about "us Americans in general".
He wanted to blow up the government in enact a theocracy.
I don't really find either act very honorable. And even if your blowing up a "legitimate" target, if your intention is to cause terror, fear, or disruption; your a terrorist. If they just would have attacked the Pentagon, and not the WTC on 9/11, it still would have been an act of terrorism. If we were occupying their country, and they attacked a military base, or a patrol, it would be a legitimate action, and not terrorism.
I can relate to the idea of challenging/attacking a nation's leaders. We entrust those people with the power to run the country on our behalf, and if they abuse that power and turn it against us, they should expect retribution.
Yep... the government doesn't do what I want it to do, so I'm going to go murder people. Makes sense. And in Fawkes case, the government isn't doing what I want it to do, so I'm going to blow it up in hopes that we can replace it with the Pope ruling us.
Notice the "I" and "us" terms, since they aren't equivalent. The government shouldn't do what you or I want it to do, it should do what "we" want it to do, in the case of democracies and republics. This is what pisses me off about modern politics... Somehow the government should only look out for me and my best interests or petty desires... Everyone else be damned.
Its especially absurd when people think not getting their way is somehow justification of murder. Its like being ruled by two year olds.
Also... retribution, as our country is set up, means "voting". If you don't think your government is doing its job, within your personal opinion of such matters, then DON'T VOTE FOR THE OFFENSIVE PEOPLE. It is really simple. If more people vote for the people, tough shit. People disagree with you. You disagree with people. Wonderful. You aren't special. Your opinions aren't special. They aren't magically objective fact just because you believe them. Government also represents those of us whose opinions are different than yours. Government, further, exists to protect us from people who think their opinion is such that they should be able to enforce it on others. Extremists, in other words... People who think that the ends (murder) justify the means (you personal pet ideal for governance).
After that people will start to download these custom roms and put them on phones and have a poor user experience and possibly get turned off android..
I think your almost on the mark, but not quite. This isn't about individuals, its about manufacturers of cheap knock-offs further diluting the market, and tarnishing Android's image. Motorola, and other first tier distributors won't release Honeycomb on phones because their partners and know better (and might be under contractual obligations). Second tier distributors probably won't release it because they have some brand image to preserve, and might have management with a brain. Third tier manufacturers are the big problem, since they'll release crappy phones with Honeycomb which will be terrible user-wise. A couple story coming out from bad customers, or bad reviews based on third tier phones using a tablet (not phone) OS would hurt Android, and the first tier producers (who are privy to the source).
Here, in Phoenix the land of the popping bubble, there are tons of empty store fronts... But most of these weren't empty until a couple years ago when things when bust. They wouldn't have empty either if the bubble didn't pop. People were building at the rate of estimated future demand, that demand dropped, so now we have a glut of space, more space than we can use. The cost of moving to a better location is very cheap now, so a lot of companies who were shackled by high prices have moved to better places, leaving a glut of empty real estate.
They weren't, though, building for the sake of building (there is no economic sense for that, in our mostly private economy), they were building because the forcasted growth said that x spaces were likely to be needed in the future if growth continues at the current rate. The current rate changed, but people build for the future and not now, so we end up with tons of superfluous spaces.
It is a very different scenario in China, since we're dealing with both public works, and the government forcing private building. Also your missing a matter of scale, in the US we have empty store fronts and office space, in china they have HUGE newly constructed empty skyscrapers, malls, and other entire edifices.
IF all you want is an e-reader, the Kindle is much better than the nook or anything else.
He's talking about the Nook Color, so comparing it to a Kindle is a bit senseless.
And how is the Kindle "much better" than the original Nook? The only significant differences are a slight boost on battery times for the Kindle, and support for open formats and local Libraries on the Nook. Oh, and the Kindle's 3G connection isn't restricted to just Amazon (though using a browser with eInk is just painful anyways) I used my father's Kindle for a week, and then tried the Nook. I ended up buying the Nook. I5+ days of battery life is good enough for me, I don't want to use it for internet access (I have a phone for that), and I like being able to grab books from my library system, and not having to convert all sorts of files to Amazon's stupid format via Calibre. All of that was a matter of preference.
I'll grab a color ebook reader the second they make color eInk displays. No sooner.
But then again I'm not the market that tablets are for, whatever market that may actually be.
In the end though, there is no real difference between the two. Get either one, both are pretty much equal, and you'll probably love whichever one you get.
Tablets, on the otherhand, are stupid for ebooks. You get all the of the features of an ebook reader, with none of the benefits. eInk is amazing. I thought the big thing about eBook readers were to actually emulate the experience of paper; meaning less eye-strain, less sleep problems, and longer "read" times.
I suppose ebook readers are just like netbooks. I loved it when they came out, but then they migrated so far from the features I found attractive, and which justified the device (very small, very long battery life, underpowered and Linuxy, and cheap), as to be almost useless. I'll go for color the second someone invents colored eInk, so I can still avoid the problems you get from reading off an illuminated screen.
But then again I'm not the in the market that tablets are geared towards... whatever that market may be.
Is it to be encouraged? Probably not. What are you going to do to stop it though?
Laugh at them and not take them at all seriously?
Unlike the rest of the internet, who, for some reason, really thinks that they are clever and somehow meaningful to the grand scheme of things.
The best reaction to have when encountering/b/-ese is to think "look a 14 year old boy escape from his chatroom and thinks he has something to say, how cute; now run along until you grow up and have something to say little boy", and then ignore them.
This always confused me when I used to play WoW. Why rush? I always enjoyed the exploration and seeing the story (and in WoW effects of the previous games on the world). Half the people I know rush to the end, and once they're there do the same repetitive tasks and grinding over and over and over just for a shiny thing that lets other players know how "awesome" they are, and perhaps unlock other equally repetitive tasks for other equally pointless rewards. You don't even get to experiement with your character anymore, since there are exactly 3 builds per class, and each one needs the exact same items as everyone else.
And from what I read, they made this even worse now.
I generally quit WoW for a couple months after my main hit the level cap, and I hit a couple low level raids. Then I'd fall back in love (obsession) once I got my free time and rolled a decent alt, only to quit once I realized that it stops being a game after the cap, and turns into a job again.
It's a matter of what one has experienced one's fellow men to be. And to me there's a very clear trend: Those who talk about altruism and "meaning it well" most while blaming "sociopaths" for the evils of the world are the worst.
No, people who want to force their ideals on the world are the worst. People with 100% conviction based on the same facts as everyone else are the worst.
You're not reasonable and nice at all. Would you hand out T-shirts to ridicule some religious minority? You are stodge, dogmatic and authoritarian, and you can afford that because you hold largely mainstream opinions. To the majority, you are indeed the nice guy.
I would, if it illustrated something idiotic about that minority. I might be stodge, but I'm not very dogmatic since I think the world is a very complex place and no one theory will ever explain it all, and if there was I sure as hell don't have that theory. Everything I know as "true" has a very good chance of being wrong.
And now I'm authoritarian because I don't want to impose my views on others? I'm authoritarian because I think everyone should live their lives as they see fit as long as it causes no harm to others?
You, sir, have a very odd definition of that word.
Also, the "mainstream" is a myth, especially in a place as large and diverse as the U.S. (much less the world). People in my city probably agree with you far more than they'll ever agree with me. There are other places where people would agree with me more than you... etc... Investingactual merit into subjective fictions is cool like that.
But the "know better" is nonsense, and that's "the other side" I'm talking about. You don't even believe that anybody can know better:
Politically, no they really can't. Obviously in the realm of actual, empirical, knowledge people can. A physicist "knows better" than me within his limited domain. A doctor "knows better" than me, in his limited domain. Etc... A politician doesn't know better than me once we enter the land of ideology and philosophy and depart the land of facts. We don't know better in that domain... Or at least everyone who ever claimed to, and then acted on it, while ignoring human consequence, did great deals of harm.
We all are capable of the same flaws of reasoning that lead to people like Hitler, Stalin, and Chairman Mao. All of out beautiful subjective ideologies have the potential of causing great harm when we allow them to become more important than anything else. Every terrible even in human history was caused by someone 100% convinced that they are correct.
How can we know anything, right?
This question opens a very, very, deep can of worms. It is a question we haven't found any answer to despite over 2500 years of trying.
That's what the liberals and intellectuals are, you guys: No convictions, no principles, no good and evil. Conformism.
I have boatloads of convictions. I probably have as many convictions as you do. I just try not to accept them as fact. I have tons of principles, but I try not to enforce them on others. Good and evil are trickier, since they are ontologically meaningless terms based almost completely on culture. Again, a huge swatch of human history has been spent pondering an objective meaning of those terms, with no real answer in the making. The definition of those terms depend on where you come from... Demonstrate them as facts with an empirical basis, and I can can start to see them. My current theory is that ethics and morality are evolved traits, or rather a loose template which we fill in based on the circumstance. I generally ascribe evil as "harm", and good as "utility".
I am sad for the intellectuals... Those poor souls have learned that the world is a complicated place and that utter certainty is very, very, unobtainable, and probably chimerical.
...because by her definition is basically wasting resources on things that are worthless, or destroying something that's valuable for no good reason.
With charity, within that definition, aren't you just shuttling around worth, and not necessarily destroying things? And what makes something "worthless" within her philosophy?
The terms "worth" and "value" are hugely subjective.
When I was younger I relied on the bus to get everywhere (in Phoenix this is quite a statement), I was on around 4 buses a day for years, sometimes much, much more.. I've never been robbed or assaulted on a bus, even when I had to ride, and transfer, in the worst part of town. I've been uncomfortable, I've been the best friend of schizopheniacs, I've developed a strong hatred of overly-loud high school kids, I've learned to hate cell-phones (your sex life isn't public business), but I've never been robbed.
My mother still depends on buses (and our joke of a light rail system) completely. In 15 years of heavy use, she has never been robbed or assaulted either, even when we lived in a rough part of town.
That then implies that you do it in secret so that you don't get recompense in the form of social credit.
A lot of times people don't. Well I suppose they might, but in such a small way that it is pretty much meaningless. People do small acts of altruistic kindness all the time, and don't expect a thing from it. Altruism isn't just large public acts.
Also, a fun paradox... Perfect altruism is only possible in Rand's utopia (where altruism is rewarded with social disdain).
Let's not forget that you get your kicks out of posting here and being perceived as "the good guy" who's reasonable and nice.
Right, since being reasonable is a negative character trait, as opposed to being stodge, dogmatic, and authoritarian. What happens if I actually am reasonable and nice? Should I be re-educated into being unreasonable and vile? Its as dumb as the modern hate for "intellectuals"... I'd rather be "intellectual" than the opposite any day; perhaps my parents raised me wrong.
American liberals like you were cheering to the criminals that did this to them, because, unlike Hitler, they "meant it well". They did it out of "compassion" and "pity for the less fortunate".
Actually Hitler "meant well" too, every idiotic, horrible, or beautiful and noble action in the history of humanity was committed by someone who "meant well". Actually anyone who "means well" are about as dangerous as anyone who claims to "know better", or do things "for your own good". This is the language of tyranny. Its just a semantic codification of the idiotic old hedge of authoritarianism everywhere; "the ends justify the means". Randians and Libertarians are just as guilty of this as anyone else... Anyone who actively strives to inflict their utopia on someone else is in the same boat. Randroids, Libertarians, Communists, PETA, the radical left, fundamentalists of all stripes, they're all the same in my eyes.
Every time I hear this sort of talk I want to break out my old, beaten, copy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and bash them aside the head.
Your subjective theory of being as as valid as any other. Its all just mapping some purely subjective ideological world onto the real one, ignoring the costs of doing so. Valuing an ideology above reality just causes pain and suffering.
Beyond the rant; I wasn't alive at the time, so I couldn't cheer them if I wanted to. With the gift of hindsight I'd like to say I wouldn't have... But who knows? You really can't assign attitudes and motivations to me, you don't know anything about my inner states and philosophies. Most people are far more complex beasts than is convenient to us. I'm a liberal, I'm a libertarian (social and otherwise, all lowercase "l"), I'm progressive, I'm conservative, I'm a hawk and a dove, depending on the issues. Further, I'm fallible, and lack a grand-unified-theory-of-what-ought-to-be, since I don't think that its possible to have one that is based on the real world, and human existence (since we don't really understand either). I might be, as someone here recently called me, a radical moderate.
You guys are evil, there's just no other word for it.
Who is "us guys"? And how are we evil? Are we evil because we don't agree with you? Nothing good has ever emerged from that flavor of reasoning, either. Us vs. them is one of the greatest cognitive idiocies of humanity.
And then I hear the other side again and it reminds me how bad it gets.
The other side? I'm glad that there is only a duality of view points available.
It is surprising how many people do not understand this. Rather than getting a bleeding edge CPU (and mobo+RAM to go with it) you will often see much more benefit saving some on the CPU-et-al and spending a but more on the graphics card...
Completely agreed; if you are a gamer. I'm a moderate gamer now, I used to be much more into the scene when I was younger and the upgrading habits remain, and decided that the Phenom 965 was enough. On a pure CPU/mobo/RAM picture, with no GPU bottle neck, the gain in gaming performance would be negligible, and I really doubt that my day-to-day computing needs (processing RAWs, mild video transcoding) would really be that much better with the beefier, and more expensive processor.
My old processor was a Core 2 Duo running at something like 2.6ghz, and truth be told outside of the benefits of having more cores, things don't run that much faster. Its barely noticeable. Much less noticeable from when I upgraded from a Athalon 2800(or perhaps it was a 3xxx, it been awhile or such) to a multi-core chip.
The Radeon 5770 made much more of a difference. But then again I was able to play most games at 1080 with high, or max, settings with my Radeon 48xx.
What gets me is "normal" users going for big chips. My father recently upgraded his old Athalon (at the very end of the single core epoch, so I think it was a 3800, or such)... He asked my advice, and I told him to get some cheap bundle with, at best, a low end i5. I pointed out a couple of low priced bundles with monitors (he has an ancient 12", not wide-screen), with decent Core 2 Duos and 4Gb. He got a Phenom x4 840 ( 3.2ghz clock, I think) with 8Gb.
He uses his computer for checking his (web based) email, and browsing the web. That's it. But this one, as he likes to say, has "moar powah!".
He recently grabbed a rather decent i5 based laptop form his stepdaughter, with a beefy graphics set-up, for her to use on webmail and such... Neither of these computers will ever see a game, or doing video processing, or compile code, or basically use more than 5% of their capabilities... I don't know why I find that so annoying. Outside of the fact that my advice is always insisted on, and then completely ignored.
When I was shopping around for a new processor (around a year and a half ago), I could get myself a Phenom II x4 965, or a comparable i7 for around $50 more. The i7 trounced the Phenom on most benchmarks (though I doubt I'd ever notice in real life computing). I was tempted, and then I realized I'd have to spend around $70 more for a comparable mother board, and possibly have to replace my perfectly good 6Gb of DDR2 with DDR3 (which at that time would have cost another $100+)... So that $70 turned into $170 more... for probably a 10 fps difference in most games, and a completely negligible increase in day to day use. I took that $100 and put it towards a decent video card instead.
Processors really aren't that much of a big deal anymore...
Rand didn't redefine anything, she just phrased the definition according to the usage of those words - in harsh contrast to the dictionaries which are again written by altruists.
Altruism is also donating to charity, generally helping those less fortunate, doing any "good works" without expectation of recompense (monitary or otherwise), sustaining risk for the betterment, or protection of others... etc..
Actually when I hear the term"Altruism" I think of the above... The bible never comes to mind, neither does people with money spending it on their family (there is no problem with that, and I'm a liberal who thinks Rand is laughable) . I think that you, personally, don't understand the term, either that or your trying to twist it to agree with a meaning your comfortable with (since it fits your ideas).
Objectivism is nothing more than a post hoc intellectual excuse for sociopaths to feel morally justified. They hold the same intellectual footing as scientologists and other fundamentalists when it comes down to it. You want to be a greedy, completely self-serving, worthless human? Ayn Rand's got you covered, you can feel superior now. Sadly the rest of the race will find you to be a greedy, self-serving, worthless individual... but what do they know? Your special... Your somehow doing something while contributing nothing... Your better than people strictly because you act like an asshole!
Ayn Rand was nothing but over-reacting to her upbringing. She came from a society ruled by the worst bits of "collectivism", so dismissed it completely, deciding that sociopathic extreme individualism was the only answer. Her whole "philosophy" is basically an endorsement of the fallacy of the excluded middle.
I recently had a party, and handed out free t-shirts. One of them had a picture of Ayn Rand, with the caption "Ayn Rand Makes Me Randy!" So... I gave it out for free... is that irony?
On the other hand, who's currently doing a shit-ton of damage to the US? Take one guess.
Both?
I'm neither - I have no love for the left-wing nutcases (the "open borders, one world government, woohoo communism" types) nor do I have any love for the Retardican/Ree Tardier types.
In my experience no one really lives up to the full list of those stereotypes. Living in Arizona I know tons of "open borders" types, but not a single one of them wants a "one world government", and I don't think any of them are "woohoo communism" types, though many of them are more socialist than is strictly fashionable in the U.S. at the moment (i.e. real, single payer public healthcare, not Obamacare).
I know several people on the right-to-far-right too; though not a single one of them will accept the Tea Party designation since it doesn't reflect good on the right/conservatives. Some of them are atheists, I know a Randroid who supports limited gun control, I know a hardcore hawk who supports the gays, and is critical of Israel. Etc...
Most (informed) people aren't the caricature that the media paints them as, or as much as we want them to be.
Allowing people to regulate industries that they know nothing about can create all kinds of unintended consequences and is bound to do more harm than good.
I agree with this. Regulators should have experience within the field, but shouldn't have an active financial stake in it. This is the rule, but it is so ignored as to be pretty much non-existent.
Really the system and rules we currently have would work very well if we actually wanted them to work well. I'm not that much in favor of expanding power, but in using the power we already have wisely.
What it boils down to, for me, is that you have to ask who is being served - the producers or the consumers?
Again, agreed 100%. I don't believe a purely governmental solution would ever work, to much waste, too much chance for corruption and "rights erosion", or mission creep. The government is too likely to think it "knows better" and act on this impulse. I think we all agree on this.
I also think that the (mostly) free market can, often, do a decent job. And if humans were perfect, it would be a perfect system. I also distrust human nature as much as I distrust corporations or government, though.
The problem I have is that I distrust corporate self-regulation as much as I distrust the government.
The gist, I don't trust any body to keep the markets working for the common good. And before you attack that phrase, I mean it in the sense of an aggregate of individuals and not some giant communal collective. When I say "society" I mean US, the cumulative rights of every enrighted individual within the larger society.
The free market is the best system for working those things out. It puts consumers in charge instead of producers. If a company can't provide what consumers want, they should fail, and if another business can do it better and cheaper, they should succeed. Why is there still a Record Industry that fails to provide what consumers want? Because the government has expanded what was once a 14-year monopoly for works into one that is practically forever, and use of justice department resources to enforce it. Recent FDA rules favor Big Ag over everyone else. What started as an idea for universal health care ended up as nothing but a racket that favors insurance corporations.
In the modern economy this becomes a problem. I can't stop buying Sony products (for example) without a huge amount of research, and there will be certain niches that I would be completely barred from buying. Sony, and other giant multi-nationals, have millions of tentacles, subsidiaries, etc... You can't ever avoid them all.
Information is another problem. If information was free-flowing consumers could make rational, informed choices. But corporations have the power to withhold this information, and thus restrict the ability to make informed choices. This is made worse by the media being largely controlled by giant corporations who generally hold hundreds of other interests. There is a massive power-imbalance between corporations and us little people.
Copyright... This is another example of letting the foxes run the henhouse.
I'm not arguing for some total anarchistic "freemarket" theory that has never existed, only that we already have so much regulation that we are micro-managing industries, and it is picking winners and losers and suppressing the ability of entrepreneurs to try new ideas without being crushed by the incumbents.
Sorry, then, for mentally turning you into a anarcho-capitalist, then. I agree with your sentiment. In a lot of areas the government has overstepped. My favorite is farm subsidies, and the amount of harm they actually cause in the bigger picture, while benefiting farmers in the short term, little picture.
The market should be allowed to function as autonomously as possible. I won't argue against that. I think we just disagree on what should be done when
Back in the day, say 1950-1960, there was NO African 'race'.
But he is of actual, bonafide, realdeal, African decent; as in his father is a real, actual, bonafide African. Not an African American, not a Nego (which could means domestic, multi-generational person who has roots in Africa but is about as American, time wise, as any Caucasian). Obama isn't the great-great-grandson of slaves, he's actually half African as in his father is born there and lives there.
I personally don't care one bit. I'm 99% certain he's a citizen. And if you really can't find anything real (policy wise) to critique, I think he's doing pretty damn good them. I, on the otherhand, accept his citizenship and still think he's a crappy president (and I'm generally a liberal).
Yes, but people are stupid. I've actually had someone tell me that Steven Colbert was a conservative and his program was meant to be a counterpoint to John Stewart. Yes, he actually believed that Colbert, an obvious parody of Bill O'Reilly was serious.
There actually was a fun study awhile back on the Colbert Report. The more conservative a person was the more likely they were to think that Colbert was a serious conservative, the more liberal the more likely they were to think we was being purely sarcastic.
Basically, it is amazing how much cognitive biases color the world.
I used to live in a very liberal college town, and people routinely called me a fascist, neo-con freemarketeer. Now I live in a very conservative city and I'm a leftist, socialist, Mao worshiper. I've been called an "evangelical" on atheist boards (for disagreeing with pure materialism), while every single one of my religious friends think I'm a godless heathen.
I'm guilty of this too. One of my friends I haven't seen since high school came back from Afghanistan where he worked as an interrigator, and espoused being a Libertarian. I quickly dismissed him as being some flavor of Tea Party loon. After a bit of discussion I realized that we have a fair bit in common, though we disagree on core issues. He probably though I was a leftist pinko.
We only see the world in black and white, and it colors our perceptions of others. If you don't agree with my subjective opinion you must be diametrically opposed to everything I see as "good and true", and therefore the enemy. Sadly we let this trend take over, and it has become the whole basis of our debate. It isn't about whats best for people, its about furthering my ideology and banishing those I view as being its enemy.
This is why I completely stopped watching broadcast news. This is why I dread the upcoming primary season. This is why Slashdot is even getting tedious... here, as the perceptions go, you either are a Tea Partying, evangelical with a giant Ayn Rand tattoo; or a Communist, Pinko, Commie red only in favor of the government taking over everything. There is no middle, and this no room for actual conversation.
If I had one wish, it would be for the rebirth of rational civil discourse, or at least a higher standard of it.
Never met a government program you didn't like, eh?
Odd, I don't recall ever claiming that. There are plenty of things the government does that I don't like, actually, and several programs that are far more harmful than good. I am distrustful of the government as I am of corporations, actually. But the government, at least in theory, is something I can change.
It doesn't seem to bother you that corporations get handouts and protection from the agencies you think are working for you.
" I know this. I never claimed that anything was perfect. Things could be much better, no one will argue against that. Right now the system is broken, but I wasn't talking about what is, I was talking about what should be. Its a theory, a philosophy, often times those are future oriented and not merely observations. The government should act as a check, this doesn't mean that it currently is.
The whole system is broken. A lot of that is because of the various anti-regulation movements stripping actual regulatory power, and placing self-interested people into the position to regulate themselves.
I honestly can't think of a better solution though, and things still are better than they were 100 years ago. If I could make one sweeping change it would involve giving regulatory bodies teeth and removing their heads and replacing them with people who aren't directly involved in the industries they are regulating, or at least people with no financial stake in said industries.
And it will never be perfect. But the real question is, "is it better than the alternatives?" Nothing has ever been perfect, nothing is perfect, nothing will ever be perfect.
As long as corporations have the ethos "maximize profit no matter the costs", government will be a necessary check. No, the government shouldn't rule markets, but they should keep individuals from being exploited, and try their damnest to keep things like the last big crisis from happening.
An example of incremental oppression, yes. While the idea may have been good intentioned when people thought they were getting rat feces with their canned ham, nowadays it's just code for "reducing consumer choice." The little people can't be trusted to not kill themselves by shear stupidity, so we must decide what products they can purchase. Oh, and what a great opportunity to decide which corporations should survive and which ones won't....
I agree. We should immediately get rid of OSHA and those pesky child labor laws, the freemarket didn't necessitate them, and indeed makes them redundant! Hell, we need to remove the EPA since unregulated companies have such a good track record with environmental concerns. We need to kill the FDA too, since obviously these corporations were trustworthy enough to never necessitate its creation in the first place.
Only after these vile socialist plots are removed from the honorable and honest backs of corporations may we finally live in a utopia like China, Mexico or Singapore. I want my very life to depend on the demonstrated benevolence of corporations.
Ah.... Utopia.
(in all honesty your vision is just as heinous as communism, as far as the conditions for normal people go... People should always, 100%, come before corporations or markets. Always.)
blah, blah, blah SOMALIA blah blah
Go back to sleep. Oh, you still are.
Your ability to argue like a mature, rational, adult astounds me. Your rhetorical skills have earned my respect and have elevated your point to a place of irrefutable beauty. Truly, the classical thinkers of old have many things to learn from you.
WTF? How is that not Marxism? So we should have free markets (which you some how think are mythical, despite the prosperity they have produced throughout history), but the collective "society" should be considered before any individual? "Social contract"? Really? "I've go mine and you've got yours" isn't good enough for you?
Perhaps you should actually read some Marx.
Also, can you give me a positive example of a "free market", one free from outside influence and regulation? The early industrial revolution comes to mind (it was close, but still lightly regulated), Somalia might be the best example, though. There might be some in early history, as well. Most markets and economies throughout history have had some form of regulation. Don't confuse "freemarketism" is "capitalism". One is a form of trade, and the other is an ideology.
Whose ideal of "societal good" should we follow? Yours? Should we set up some dictator to decide for us? Or is it majority rule? So 51% of the people can decided that everything the other 49% owns should be taken and given to someone else? If 99% of the people decide that some people should not be allowed to have food and water is that okay too? Or will some grand ruler make those decisions?
Exaggerate much? Also, exclude the middle much? Child labor laws are a perfect example of what I'm talking about. As are the various banking and finance laws that we had, and stripped away, that kept financial catastrophes like the current at bay. Consumer protection laws are another example. Laws keeping powerful corporations from intruding, and interfering, with the lives of normal people are another. Or keeping them from amassing to much power, by breaking up and regulating harmful monopolies.
Notice how I emphasized balance?
Also, I don't understand your fear of democracy, and the public choosing the public good. Yes, there are risks. But I'd rather accept those risks than just allow rich and powerful corporations to work wholly in their own good, at the potential cost to the real people out there. Would I rather have Sony rule my life, or the tyranny of the masses? Neither, we could form a type of government called a "republic", or a 'representative democracy", and then use this government to look out for our societal good, ala various "social contract" theories. It could then support such tenets as "your rights end when they inflict upon the rights of another", and apply this to corporations and businesses. Perhaps said government could also learn what practices within the market lead to large scale problem in enact laws to avoid these problems in the future.
Ah, so you are the worst kind of statist. "Capitalism" is okay, because then all capital can be controlled by a central bank and it can be doled out to only the "proper kind" of Corporations. Anyone else must petition the rulers for the privilege of participating in commerce. Yea, we're very close to that kind of crony capitalism already. And it sucks.
Could you please find, and quote, where I said any of this, or endorsed any bit of it? Reading over my previous reply I don't see any mention of this whatsoever. Please enlighten me to my true intentions.
You never heard of the Renaissance? Yes, government was around, but they totally left the merchants alone. Their only involvement was to draw taxes from the land use and hang the thieves. That's what created the middle class in the first place.
And times have changed quite a bit since then. The renaissance didn't have corporations that rivaled some governments in funds. The renissance didn't have globalism on any scale even approaching our current times. The renaissance didn't have corporations with a vast history of abuse. Int he renaissance the acts of a small group of individuals couldn't bring down global economies. In the renaissance most people lived very short, dreary, lives. In the renaissanc
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I wasn't saying it isn't worth it.
I still think the news from the North Africa and the Middle East is some of the best news I've heard since the fall of the Berlin Wall and Soviet Russia, it makes me hopeful for us as a species.
It just wouldn't say that they are mostly successful yet. Hopefully they will be, and hopefully the revolutionary spirit spreads to the bigger, nastier, fish in the region (Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Iran), and hopefully most of these revolutions don't get taken over by people worse than the governments that they're attempting to overthrow.
True, but you don't see Assange going after those other governments.
I don't think Wikileaks "goes after" governments, I think they publish what other people give them. I'm sure if there was a someone who had access to the Chinese or French dirty laundry, they'd also publish that. No one has approached them with those, so they can't "go after" them. If you browse around their site, you'll find that they also cover leaks from places other than the U.S., they just haven't had any leaks quite as big as Cablegate or the Iraq war leak.
Wikileaks doesn't create leaks, they just facilitate people who want to leak information.
Also, the US is a very big, unpopular, target right now. We have tentacles in pretty much everything, and our government has managed to do some very unpopular things, both to foreigners and to our own. Hell, most of the people I know in the military disagree with our current wars, or at least how we're carrying them out. This creates a highly elevated chance of people leaking information. The more you upset peoples ethics and morals, the more likely they are to rebel.
I wouldn't say most; 2 of them have gone well (so far), around 4-5 of them are being met with harsh resistance and loss of life.
And where is "open" source in all of this?
I'm not arguing in favor of Google not releasing the source, I'm just correcting the previous poster who claimed its about "individuals installing bad Honeycomb mods".
Personally I'm not a fan of keeping Honeycomb closed, even if it will be released (in part) late under whatever release that combines it back with the phone-oriented trunk. It sets a bad precedent, even if I understand their motivations. There probably is a way of keeping the Android image and branding untarnished while still playing nicely with open source. Probably the best way of doing this would to be completely remove the phone bits from the code so it can't function on phones without a fair amount of work (or otherwise render it a major hastle to get running on unintended hardware types), then releasing the source with large disclaimers all over it.
I think their actions are supported by their license though. IANAL, but Apache does allow you to restrict the source. But while they might be within the letter of the law, they are probably violating its spirit something fierce.
I'm saying sometimes the ones in power can be hard of hearing (read: fascist). In such cases, a coup is often the only remaining recourse.
Sadly the policies and ideology of many of the people advocating coups and violence ("second amendment solutions") are as abhorrent as the current policies and ideologies of the current government to me. That is one of the problems I have, to be motivated enough to advocate a coup you must have a very strong ideological stake. People with very strong ideological stakes are generally tyrants in training, who find issue with competing ideologies.
If I managed to overthrow the government and instilled one that was more in line with my ideology, you'd probably hate it (I'm more in favor of European style light socialism than Slashdotty Libertarianism). If the Fungelicals managed a coup, everyone but Fungelicals would hate it. If the Tea Parties managed to overthrow the government pretty much everyone would hate it outside of the Tea Partiers. If Libertarians won, everyone would hate it but... you get the idea.
If we were in a truly repressive regime, Like Egypt, Tunisia, or Libya (or the other current hotspots) I would be hooting a different horn, obviously. Our government isn't doing so well, but we have leagues to go before we actually hit the point where we might need to pick up arms. There still remain non-violent "legitimate" solutions to our problems.
The other problem is practical. Its the "what now?" problem. Most coups might start with very noble goals (actually most coups are started by would-be despots who want a bigger slice of the pie, but thats neither here nor there), but after the offending government is removed things collapse. Coups that end better than the old regime for the public are very rare.
If you still believe the vote has any power or meaning, well I'm afraid I am wasting my words on you.
It would be more meaningful if people actually did it. It would be more meaningful if the American people stopped being ignorant, ill-informed, and apathetic. That is the largest problem we face politically, the American people. We, like all ill democracies (or other governments founded on those principles) have the government we, collectively, deserve. Hell, a large step forward would be people voting for their own interests, and not the interests fed to them by politicos and the media.
Another big step forward would be adopting rational, informed, debate on a national scale; and burying the current rapid, dogmatic, partisanship in a shallow grave. The day a "Tea Party" type can sit down with a "Socialist" and have a decent conversation on ideals without resorting to slurs, insults, and calls to ideological purity, is the day America starts turning around (its a small step, but a good one). Also the day we realize that things aren't about "me and my benefit and ideals" and are instead about "us Americans in general".
He wanted to blow up the government in enact a theocracy.
I don't really find either act very honorable. And even if your blowing up a "legitimate" target, if your intention is to cause terror, fear, or disruption; your a terrorist. If they just would have attacked the Pentagon, and not the WTC on 9/11, it still would have been an act of terrorism. If we were occupying their country, and they attacked a military base, or a patrol, it would be a legitimate action, and not terrorism.
I can relate to the idea of challenging/attacking a nation's leaders. We entrust those people with the power to run the country on our behalf, and if they abuse that power and turn it against us, they should expect retribution.
Yep... the government doesn't do what I want it to do, so I'm going to go murder people. Makes sense. And in Fawkes case, the government isn't doing what I want it to do, so I'm going to blow it up in hopes that we can replace it with the Pope ruling us.
Notice the "I" and "us" terms, since they aren't equivalent. The government shouldn't do what you or I want it to do, it should do what "we" want it to do, in the case of democracies and republics. This is what pisses me off about modern politics... Somehow the government should only look out for me and my best interests or petty desires... Everyone else be damned.
Its especially absurd when people think not getting their way is somehow justification of murder. Its like being ruled by two year olds.
Also... retribution, as our country is set up, means "voting". If you don't think your government is doing its job, within your personal opinion of such matters, then DON'T VOTE FOR THE OFFENSIVE PEOPLE. It is really simple. If more people vote for the people, tough shit. People disagree with you. You disagree with people. Wonderful. You aren't special. Your opinions aren't special. They aren't magically objective fact just because you believe them. Government also represents those of us whose opinions are different than yours. Government, further, exists to protect us from people who think their opinion is such that they should be able to enforce it on others. Extremists, in other words... People who think that the ends (murder) justify the means (you personal pet ideal for governance).
After that people will start to download these custom roms and put them on phones and have a poor user experience and possibly get turned off android..
I think your almost on the mark, but not quite. This isn't about individuals, its about manufacturers of cheap knock-offs further diluting the market, and tarnishing Android's image. Motorola, and other first tier distributors won't release Honeycomb on phones because their partners and know better (and might be under contractual obligations). Second tier distributors probably won't release it because they have some brand image to preserve, and might have management with a brain. Third tier manufacturers are the big problem, since they'll release crappy phones with Honeycomb which will be terrible user-wise. A couple story coming out from bad customers, or bad reviews based on third tier phones using a tablet (not phone) OS would hurt Android, and the first tier producers (who are privy to the source).
Here, in Phoenix the land of the popping bubble, there are tons of empty store fronts... But most of these weren't empty until a couple years ago when things when bust. They wouldn't have empty either if the bubble didn't pop. People were building at the rate of estimated future demand, that demand dropped, so now we have a glut of space, more space than we can use. The cost of moving to a better location is very cheap now, so a lot of companies who were shackled by high prices have moved to better places, leaving a glut of empty real estate.
They weren't, though, building for the sake of building (there is no economic sense for that, in our mostly private economy), they were building because the forcasted growth said that x spaces were likely to be needed in the future if growth continues at the current rate. The current rate changed, but people build for the future and not now, so we end up with tons of superfluous spaces.
It is a very different scenario in China, since we're dealing with both public works, and the government forcing private building. Also your missing a matter of scale, in the US we have empty store fronts and office space, in china they have HUGE newly constructed empty skyscrapers, malls, and other entire edifices.
IF all you want is an e-reader, the Kindle is much better than the nook or anything else.
He's talking about the Nook Color, so comparing it to a Kindle is a bit senseless.
And how is the Kindle "much better" than the original Nook? The only significant differences are a slight boost on battery times for the Kindle, and support for open formats and local Libraries on the Nook. Oh, and the Kindle's 3G connection isn't restricted to just Amazon (though using a browser with eInk is just painful anyways) I used my father's Kindle for a week, and then tried the Nook. I ended up buying the Nook. I5+ days of battery life is good enough for me, I don't want to use it for internet access (I have a phone for that), and I like being able to grab books from my library system, and not having to convert all sorts of files to Amazon's stupid format via Calibre. All of that was a matter of preference.
I'll grab a color ebook reader the second they make color eInk displays. No sooner.
But then again I'm not the market that tablets are for, whatever market that may actually be.
In the end though, there is no real difference between the two. Get either one, both are pretty much equal, and you'll probably love whichever one you get.
Tablets, on the otherhand, are stupid for ebooks. You get all the of the features of an ebook reader, with none of the benefits. eInk is amazing. I thought the big thing about eBook readers were to actually emulate the experience of paper; meaning less eye-strain, less sleep problems, and longer "read" times.
I suppose ebook readers are just like netbooks. I loved it when they came out, but then they migrated so far from the features I found attractive, and which justified the device (very small, very long battery life, underpowered and Linuxy, and cheap), as to be almost useless. I'll go for color the second someone invents colored eInk, so I can still avoid the problems you get from reading off an illuminated screen.
But then again I'm not the in the market that tablets are geared towards... whatever that market may be.
Is it to be encouraged? Probably not. What are you going to do to stop it though?
Laugh at them and not take them at all seriously?
Unlike the rest of the internet, who, for some reason, really thinks that they are clever and somehow meaningful to the grand scheme of things.
The best reaction to have when encountering /b/-ese is to think "look a 14 year old boy escape from his chatroom and thinks he has something to say, how cute; now run along until you grow up and have something to say little boy", and then ignore them.
I know that I'll be rushing to get there...
This always confused me when I used to play WoW. Why rush? I always enjoyed the exploration and seeing the story (and in WoW effects of the previous games on the world). Half the people I know rush to the end, and once they're there do the same repetitive tasks and grinding over and over and over just for a shiny thing that lets other players know how "awesome" they are, and perhaps unlock other equally repetitive tasks for other equally pointless rewards. You don't even get to experiement with your character anymore, since there are exactly 3 builds per class, and each one needs the exact same items as everyone else.
And from what I read, they made this even worse now.
I generally quit WoW for a couple months after my main hit the level cap, and I hit a couple low level raids. Then I'd fall back in love (obsession) once I got my free time and rolled a decent alt, only to quit once I realized that it stops being a game after the cap, and turns into a job again.
It's a matter of what one has experienced one's fellow men to be. And to me there's a very clear trend: Those who talk about altruism and "meaning it well" most while blaming "sociopaths" for the evils of the world are the worst.
No, people who want to force their ideals on the world are the worst. People with 100% conviction based on the same facts as everyone else are the worst.
You're not reasonable and nice at all. Would you hand out T-shirts to ridicule some religious minority? You are stodge, dogmatic and authoritarian, and you can afford that because you hold largely mainstream opinions. To the majority, you are indeed the nice guy.
I would, if it illustrated something idiotic about that minority. I might be stodge, but I'm not very dogmatic since I think the world is a very complex place and no one theory will ever explain it all, and if there was I sure as hell don't have that theory. Everything I know as "true" has a very good chance of being wrong.
And now I'm authoritarian because I don't want to impose my views on others? I'm authoritarian because I think everyone should live their lives as they see fit as long as it causes no harm to others?
You, sir, have a very odd definition of that word.
Also, the "mainstream" is a myth, especially in a place as large and diverse as the U.S. (much less the world). People in my city probably agree with you far more than they'll ever agree with me. There are other places where people would agree with me more than you... etc... Investingactual merit into subjective fictions is cool like that.
But the "know better" is nonsense, and that's "the other side" I'm talking about. You don't even believe that anybody can know better:
Politically, no they really can't. Obviously in the realm of actual, empirical, knowledge people can. A physicist "knows better" than me within his limited domain. A doctor "knows better" than me, in his limited domain. Etc... A politician doesn't know better than me once we enter the land of ideology and philosophy and depart the land of facts. We don't know better in that domain... Or at least everyone who ever claimed to, and then acted on it, while ignoring human consequence, did great deals of harm.
We all are capable of the same flaws of reasoning that lead to people like Hitler, Stalin, and Chairman Mao. All of out beautiful subjective ideologies have the potential of causing great harm when we allow them to become more important than anything else. Every terrible even in human history was caused by someone 100% convinced that they are correct.
How can we know anything, right?
This question opens a very, very, deep can of worms. It is a question we haven't found any answer to despite over 2500 years of trying.
That's what the liberals and intellectuals are, you guys: No convictions, no principles, no good and evil. Conformism.
I have boatloads of convictions. I probably have as many convictions as you do. I just try not to accept them as fact. I have tons of principles, but I try not to enforce them on others. Good and evil are trickier, since they are ontologically meaningless terms based almost completely on culture. Again, a huge swatch of human history has been spent pondering an objective meaning of those terms, with no real answer in the making. The definition of those terms depend on where you come from... Demonstrate them as facts with an empirical basis, and I can can start to see them. My current theory is that ethics and morality are evolved traits, or rather a loose template which we fill in based on the circumstance. I generally ascribe evil as "harm", and good as "utility".
I am sad for the intellectuals... Those poor souls have learned that the world is a complicated place and that utter certainty is very, very, unobtainable, and probably chimerical.
Those people
...because by her definition is basically wasting resources on things that are worthless, or destroying something that's valuable for no good reason.
With charity, within that definition, aren't you just shuttling around worth, and not necessarily destroying things? And what makes something "worthless" within her philosophy?
The terms "worth" and "value" are hugely subjective.
When I was younger I relied on the bus to get everywhere (in Phoenix this is quite a statement), I was on around 4 buses a day for years, sometimes much, much more.. I've never been robbed or assaulted on a bus, even when I had to ride, and transfer, in the worst part of town. I've been uncomfortable, I've been the best friend of schizopheniacs, I've developed a strong hatred of overly-loud high school kids, I've learned to hate cell-phones (your sex life isn't public business), but I've never been robbed.
My mother still depends on buses (and our joke of a light rail system) completely. In 15 years of heavy use, she has never been robbed or assaulted either, even when we lived in a rough part of town.
That then implies that you do it in secret so that you don't get recompense in the form of social credit.
A lot of times people don't. Well I suppose they might, but in such a small way that it is pretty much meaningless. People do small acts of altruistic kindness all the time, and don't expect a thing from it. Altruism isn't just large public acts.
Also, a fun paradox... Perfect altruism is only possible in Rand's utopia (where altruism is rewarded with social disdain).
Let's not forget that you get your kicks out of posting here and being perceived as "the good guy" who's reasonable and nice.
Right, since being reasonable is a negative character trait, as opposed to being stodge, dogmatic, and authoritarian. What happens if I actually am reasonable and nice? Should I be re-educated into being unreasonable and vile? Its as dumb as the modern hate for "intellectuals"... I'd rather be "intellectual" than the opposite any day; perhaps my parents raised me wrong.
American liberals like you were cheering to the criminals that did this to them, because, unlike Hitler, they "meant it well". They did it out of "compassion" and "pity for the less fortunate".
Actually Hitler "meant well" too, every idiotic, horrible, or beautiful and noble action in the history of humanity was committed by someone who "meant well". Actually anyone who "means well" are about as dangerous as anyone who claims to "know better", or do things "for your own good". This is the language of tyranny. Its just a semantic codification of the idiotic old hedge of authoritarianism everywhere; "the ends justify the means". Randians and Libertarians are just as guilty of this as anyone else... Anyone who actively strives to inflict their utopia on someone else is in the same boat. Randroids, Libertarians, Communists, PETA, the radical left, fundamentalists of all stripes, they're all the same in my eyes.
Every time I hear this sort of talk I want to break out my old, beaten, copy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and bash them aside the head.
Your subjective theory of being as as valid as any other. Its all just mapping some purely subjective ideological world onto the real one, ignoring the costs of doing so. Valuing an ideology above reality just causes pain and suffering.
Beyond the rant; I wasn't alive at the time, so I couldn't cheer them if I wanted to. With the gift of hindsight I'd like to say I wouldn't have... But who knows? You really can't assign attitudes and motivations to me, you don't know anything about my inner states and philosophies. Most people are far more complex beasts than is convenient to us. I'm a liberal, I'm a libertarian (social and otherwise, all lowercase "l"), I'm progressive, I'm conservative, I'm a hawk and a dove, depending on the issues. Further, I'm fallible, and lack a grand-unified-theory-of-what-ought-to-be, since I don't think that its possible to have one that is based on the real world, and human existence (since we don't really understand either). I might be, as someone here recently called me, a radical moderate.
You guys are evil, there's just no other word for it.
Who is "us guys"? And how are we evil? Are we evil because we don't agree with you? Nothing good has ever emerged from that flavor of reasoning, either. Us vs. them is one of the greatest cognitive idiocies of humanity.
And then I hear the other side again and it reminds me how bad it gets.
The other side? I'm glad that there is only a duality of view points available.
It is surprising how many people do not understand this. Rather than getting a bleeding edge CPU (and mobo+RAM to go with it) you will often see much more benefit saving some on the CPU-et-al and spending a but more on the graphics card...
Completely agreed; if you are a gamer. I'm a moderate gamer now, I used to be much more into the scene when I was younger and the upgrading habits remain, and decided that the Phenom 965 was enough. On a pure CPU/mobo/RAM picture, with no GPU bottle neck, the gain in gaming performance would be negligible, and I really doubt that my day-to-day computing needs (processing RAWs, mild video transcoding) would really be that much better with the beefier, and more expensive processor.
My old processor was a Core 2 Duo running at something like 2.6ghz, and truth be told outside of the benefits of having more cores, things don't run that much faster. Its barely noticeable. Much less noticeable from when I upgraded from a Athalon 2800(or perhaps it was a 3xxx, it been awhile or such) to a multi-core chip.
The Radeon 5770 made much more of a difference. But then again I was able to play most games at 1080 with high, or max, settings with my Radeon 48xx.
What gets me is "normal" users going for big chips. My father recently upgraded his old Athalon (at the very end of the single core epoch, so I think it was a 3800, or such)... He asked my advice, and I told him to get some cheap bundle with, at best, a low end i5. I pointed out a couple of low priced bundles with monitors (he has an ancient 12", not wide-screen), with decent Core 2 Duos and 4Gb. He got a Phenom x4 840 ( 3.2ghz clock, I think) with 8Gb.
He uses his computer for checking his (web based) email, and browsing the web. That's it. But this one, as he likes to say, has "moar powah!".
He recently grabbed a rather decent i5 based laptop form his stepdaughter, with a beefy graphics set-up, for her to use on webmail and such... Neither of these computers will ever see a game, or doing video processing, or compile code, or basically use more than 5% of their capabilities... I don't know why I find that so annoying. Outside of the fact that my advice is always insisted on, and then completely ignored.
The i5 spanked the X4, for only $10 more
When I was shopping around for a new processor (around a year and a half ago), I could get myself a Phenom II x4 965, or a comparable i7 for around $50 more. The i7 trounced the Phenom on most benchmarks (though I doubt I'd ever notice in real life computing). I was tempted, and then I realized I'd have to spend around $70 more for a comparable mother board, and possibly have to replace my perfectly good 6Gb of DDR2 with DDR3 (which at that time would have cost another $100+)... So that $70 turned into $170 more... for probably a 10 fps difference in most games, and a completely negligible increase in day to day use. I took that $100 and put it towards a decent video card instead.
Processors really aren't that much of a big deal anymore...
Rand didn't redefine anything, she just phrased the definition according to the usage of those words - in harsh contrast to the dictionaries which are again written by altruists.
Altruism is also donating to charity, generally helping those less fortunate, doing any "good works" without expectation of recompense (monitary or otherwise), sustaining risk for the betterment, or protection of others... etc..
Actually when I hear the term"Altruism" I think of the above... The bible never comes to mind, neither does people with money spending it on their family (there is no problem with that, and I'm a liberal who thinks Rand is laughable) . I think that you, personally, don't understand the term, either that or your trying to twist it to agree with a meaning your comfortable with (since it fits your ideas).
Objectivism is nothing more than a post hoc intellectual excuse for sociopaths to feel morally justified. They hold the same intellectual footing as scientologists and other fundamentalists when it comes down to it. You want to be a greedy, completely self-serving, worthless human? Ayn Rand's got you covered, you can feel superior now. Sadly the rest of the race will find you to be a greedy, self-serving, worthless individual... but what do they know? Your special... Your somehow doing something while contributing nothing... Your better than people strictly because you act like an asshole!
Ayn Rand was nothing but over-reacting to her upbringing. She came from a society ruled by the worst bits of "collectivism", so dismissed it completely, deciding that sociopathic extreme individualism was the only answer. Her whole "philosophy" is basically an endorsement of the fallacy of the excluded middle.
I recently had a party, and handed out free t-shirts. One of them had a picture of Ayn Rand, with the caption "Ayn Rand Makes Me Randy!" So... I gave it out for free... is that irony?
On the other hand, who's currently doing a shit-ton of damage to the US? Take one guess.
Both?
I'm neither - I have no love for the left-wing nutcases (the "open borders, one world government, woohoo communism" types) nor do I have any love for the Retardican/Ree Tardier types.
In my experience no one really lives up to the full list of those stereotypes. Living in Arizona I know tons of "open borders" types, but not a single one of them wants a "one world government", and I don't think any of them are "woohoo communism" types, though many of them are more socialist than is strictly fashionable in the U.S. at the moment (i.e. real, single payer public healthcare, not Obamacare).
I know several people on the right-to-far-right too; though not a single one of them will accept the Tea Party designation since it doesn't reflect good on the right/conservatives. Some of them are atheists, I know a Randroid who supports limited gun control, I know a hardcore hawk who supports the gays, and is critical of Israel. Etc...
Most (informed) people aren't the caricature that the media paints them as, or as much as we want them to be.
Allowing people to regulate industries that they know nothing about can create all kinds of unintended consequences and is bound to do more harm than good.
I agree with this. Regulators should have experience within the field, but shouldn't have an active financial stake in it. This is the rule, but it is so ignored as to be pretty much non-existent.
Really the system and rules we currently have would work very well if we actually wanted them to work well. I'm not that much in favor of expanding power, but in using the power we already have wisely.
What it boils down to, for me, is that you have to ask who is being served - the producers or the consumers?
Again, agreed 100%. I don't believe a purely governmental solution would ever work, to much waste, too much chance for corruption and "rights erosion", or mission creep. The government is too likely to think it "knows better" and act on this impulse. I think we all agree on this.
I also think that the (mostly) free market can, often, do a decent job. And if humans were perfect, it would be a perfect system. I also distrust human nature as much as I distrust corporations or government, though.
The problem I have is that I distrust corporate self-regulation as much as I distrust the government.
The gist, I don't trust any body to keep the markets working for the common good. And before you attack that phrase, I mean it in the sense of an aggregate of individuals and not some giant communal collective. When I say "society" I mean US, the cumulative rights of every enrighted individual within the larger society.
The free market is the best system for working those things out. It puts consumers in charge instead of producers. If a company can't provide what consumers want, they should fail, and if another business can do it better and cheaper, they should succeed. Why is there still a Record Industry that fails to provide what consumers want? Because the government has expanded what was once a 14-year monopoly for works into one that is practically forever, and use of justice department resources to enforce it. Recent FDA rules favor Big Ag over everyone else. What started as an idea for universal health care ended up as nothing but a racket that favors insurance corporations.
In the modern economy this becomes a problem. I can't stop buying Sony products (for example) without a huge amount of research, and there will be certain niches that I would be completely barred from buying. Sony, and other giant multi-nationals, have millions of tentacles, subsidiaries, etc... You can't ever avoid them all.
Information is another problem. If information was free-flowing consumers could make rational, informed choices. But corporations have the power to withhold this information, and thus restrict the ability to make informed choices. This is made worse by the media being largely controlled by giant corporations who generally hold hundreds of other interests. There is a massive power-imbalance between corporations and us little people.
Copyright... This is another example of letting the foxes run the henhouse.
I'm not arguing for some total anarchistic "freemarket" theory that has never existed, only that we already have so much regulation that we are micro-managing industries, and it is picking winners and losers and suppressing the ability of entrepreneurs to try new ideas without being crushed by the incumbents.
Sorry, then, for mentally turning you into a anarcho-capitalist, then. I agree with your sentiment. In a lot of areas the government has overstepped. My favorite is farm subsidies, and the amount of harm they actually cause in the bigger picture, while benefiting farmers in the short term, little picture.
The market should be allowed to function as autonomously as possible. I won't argue against that. I think we just disagree on what should be done when
Back in the day, say 1950-1960, there was NO African 'race'.
But he is of actual, bonafide, realdeal, African decent; as in his father is a real, actual, bonafide African. Not an African American, not a Nego (which could means domestic, multi-generational person who has roots in Africa but is about as American, time wise, as any Caucasian). Obama isn't the great-great-grandson of slaves, he's actually half African as in his father is born there and lives there.
I personally don't care one bit. I'm 99% certain he's a citizen. And if you really can't find anything real (policy wise) to critique, I think he's doing pretty damn good them. I, on the otherhand, accept his citizenship and still think he's a crappy president (and I'm generally a liberal).
Yes, but people are stupid. I've actually had someone tell me that Steven Colbert was a conservative and his program was meant to be a counterpoint to John Stewart. Yes, he actually believed that Colbert, an obvious parody of Bill O'Reilly was serious.
There actually was a fun study awhile back on the Colbert Report. The more conservative a person was the more likely they were to think that Colbert was a serious conservative, the more liberal the more likely they were to think we was being purely sarcastic.
Basically, it is amazing how much cognitive biases color the world.
I used to live in a very liberal college town, and people routinely called me a fascist, neo-con freemarketeer. Now I live in a very conservative city and I'm a leftist, socialist, Mao worshiper. I've been called an "evangelical" on atheist boards (for disagreeing with pure materialism), while every single one of my religious friends think I'm a godless heathen.
I'm guilty of this too. One of my friends I haven't seen since high school came back from Afghanistan where he worked as an interrigator, and espoused being a Libertarian. I quickly dismissed him as being some flavor of Tea Party loon. After a bit of discussion I realized that we have a fair bit in common, though we disagree on core issues. He probably though I was a leftist pinko.
We only see the world in black and white, and it colors our perceptions of others. If you don't agree with my subjective opinion you must be diametrically opposed to everything I see as "good and true", and therefore the enemy. Sadly we let this trend take over, and it has become the whole basis of our debate. It isn't about whats best for people, its about furthering my ideology and banishing those I view as being its enemy.
This is why I completely stopped watching broadcast news. This is why I dread the upcoming primary season. This is why Slashdot is even getting tedious... here, as the perceptions go, you either are a Tea Partying, evangelical with a giant Ayn Rand tattoo; or a Communist, Pinko, Commie red only in favor of the government taking over everything. There is no middle, and this no room for actual conversation.
If I had one wish, it would be for the rebirth of rational civil discourse, or at least a higher standard of it.
Never met a government program you didn't like, eh?
Odd, I don't recall ever claiming that. There are plenty of things the government does that I don't like, actually, and several programs that are far more harmful than good. I am distrustful of the government as I am of corporations, actually. But the government, at least in theory, is something I can change.
It doesn't seem to bother you that corporations get handouts and protection from the agencies you think are working for you.
"
I know this. I never claimed that anything was perfect. Things could be much better, no one will argue against that. Right now the system is broken, but I wasn't talking about what is, I was talking about what should be. Its a theory, a philosophy, often times those are future oriented and not merely observations. The government should act as a check, this doesn't mean that it currently is.
The whole system is broken. A lot of that is because of the various anti-regulation movements stripping actual regulatory power, and placing self-interested people into the position to regulate themselves.
I honestly can't think of a better solution though, and things still are better than they were 100 years ago. If I could make one sweeping change it would involve giving regulatory bodies teeth and removing their heads and replacing them with people who aren't directly involved in the industries they are regulating, or at least people with no financial stake in said industries.
And it will never be perfect. But the real question is, "is it better than the alternatives?" Nothing has ever been perfect, nothing is perfect, nothing will ever be perfect.
As long as corporations have the ethos "maximize profit no matter the costs", government will be a necessary check. No, the government shouldn't rule markets, but they should keep individuals from being exploited, and try their damnest to keep things like the last big crisis from happening.
Please stop erecting strawmen, though.
An example of incremental oppression, yes. While the idea may have been good intentioned when people thought they were getting rat feces with their canned ham, nowadays it's just code for "reducing consumer choice." The little people can't be trusted to not kill themselves by shear stupidity, so we must decide what products they can purchase. Oh, and what a great opportunity to decide which corporations should survive and which ones won't....
I agree. We should immediately get rid of OSHA and those pesky child labor laws, the freemarket didn't necessitate them, and indeed makes them redundant! Hell, we need to remove the EPA since unregulated companies have such a good track record with environmental concerns. We need to kill the FDA too, since obviously these corporations were trustworthy enough to never necessitate its creation in the first place.
Only after these vile socialist plots are removed from the honorable and honest backs of corporations may we finally live in a utopia like China, Mexico or Singapore. I want my very life to depend on the demonstrated benevolence of corporations.
Ah.... Utopia.
(in all honesty your vision is just as heinous as communism, as far as the conditions for normal people go... People should always, 100%, come before corporations or markets. Always.)
blah, blah, blah SOMALIA blah blah
Go back to sleep. Oh, you still are.
Your ability to argue like a mature, rational, adult astounds me. Your rhetorical skills have earned my respect and have elevated your point to a place of irrefutable beauty. Truly, the classical thinkers of old have many things to learn from you.
WTF? How is that not Marxism? So we should have free markets (which you some how think are mythical, despite the prosperity they have produced throughout history), but the collective "society" should be considered before any individual? "Social contract"? Really? "I've go mine and you've got yours" isn't good enough for you?
Perhaps you should actually read some Marx.
Also, can you give me a positive example of a "free market", one free from outside influence and regulation? The early industrial revolution comes to mind (it was close, but still lightly regulated), Somalia might be the best example, though. There might be some in early history, as well. Most markets and economies throughout history have had some form of regulation. Don't confuse "freemarketism" is "capitalism". One is a form of trade, and the other is an ideology.
Whose ideal of "societal good" should we follow? Yours? Should we set up some dictator to decide for us? Or is it majority rule? So 51% of the people can decided that everything the other 49% owns should be taken and given to someone else? If 99% of the people decide that some people should not be allowed to have food and water is that okay too? Or will some grand ruler make those decisions?
Exaggerate much? Also, exclude the middle much? Child labor laws are a perfect example of what I'm talking about. As are the various banking and finance laws that we had, and stripped away, that kept financial catastrophes like the current at bay. Consumer protection laws are another example. Laws keeping powerful corporations from intruding, and interfering, with the lives of normal people are another. Or keeping them from amassing to much power, by breaking up and regulating harmful monopolies.
Notice how I emphasized balance?
Also, I don't understand your fear of democracy, and the public choosing the public good. Yes, there are risks. But I'd rather accept those risks than just allow rich and powerful corporations to work wholly in their own good, at the potential cost to the real people out there. Would I rather have Sony rule my life, or the tyranny of the masses? Neither, we could form a type of government called a "republic", or a 'representative democracy", and then use this government to look out for our societal good, ala various "social contract" theories. It could then support such tenets as "your rights end when they inflict upon the rights of another", and apply this to corporations and businesses. Perhaps said government could also learn what practices within the market lead to large scale problem in enact laws to avoid these problems in the future.
Ah, so you are the worst kind of statist. "Capitalism" is okay, because then all capital can be controlled by a central bank and it can be doled out to only the "proper kind" of Corporations. Anyone else must petition the rulers for the privilege of participating in commerce. Yea, we're very close to that kind of crony capitalism already. And it sucks.
Could you please find, and quote, where I said any of this, or endorsed any bit of it? Reading over my previous reply I don't see any mention of this whatsoever. Please enlighten me to my true intentions.
You never heard of the Renaissance? Yes, government was around, but they totally left the merchants alone. Their only involvement was to draw taxes from the land use and hang the thieves. That's what created the middle class in the first place.
And times have changed quite a bit since then. The renaissance didn't have corporations that rivaled some governments in funds. The renissance didn't have globalism on any scale even approaching our current times. The renaissance didn't have corporations with a vast history of abuse. Int he renaissance the acts of a small group of individuals couldn't bring down global economies. In the renaissance most people lived very short, dreary, lives. In the renaissanc