Surely you jest. The PUBLIC argument the US made was that Iraq had WMDs and needed to be stopped, citing their stockpiling and use of chemical weapons as proof. But when their talking heads eventually waved around some aluminum tubes and claimed they were proof of the WMD charges, they looked like fools.
The US likes to ignore the fact that they trained the Taliban to fight the USSR in the cold war, and then abandoned them completely. When you treat former allies that way, you damn right they're going to have a bone to pick with you. Calling the attack on the towers terrorism downplays the fact that to the attackers, it was an act of war -- a war that had gone on undeclared for decades.
The whole "war against terrorism" is a bullshit smokescreen, a manipulation of public opinion through fear, uncertainty, and doubt. George Orwell was an optimist.
Iran is just the latest target of the propaganda machine.
The Iranian diatribe about eradicating Israel does not negate the fact that Israel sits close to them, armed with a healthy fleet of nukes, some of the most advanced military hardware on the planet, and the US backing them with hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars per year.
I HATE Israeli politics. Not the Israeli or Jewish people, but the politics of their government. They've hemmed in the Palestinians for decades, denying them basic human rights without a trial or any opportunity to resolve the issue. Sure Israel claims to be trying to negotiate, but when they keep restarting the construction in the disputed territories, it's obvious to anyone with a functioning brain cell that the "negotiations" are just gums flapping in the breeze with no intent to actually resolve the disputes.
The fact that the US SUPPORTS this behaviour by Israel and even pays them for it is sickening. Israel does NOT need the money that gets sent to them -- the nation has a healthy economy and is quite capable of paying their own way. Many Israelis have even written blog and forum articles decrying the US funding as insulting to their independance, but their government keeps sucking at the US teat.
If it sounds like I'm getting off track, welcome to the complexity of international politics. It's a complex system of inter-related action and reaction, policy, and an awful lot of propaganda on all sides.
Anyone who thinks a university degree is about getting a job needs to give their head a shake. For some careers it's a check mark on the start of a career, but that's because of the industry those students plan to work in, not an inherent benefit of the degree itself.
Getting a degree is about getting an education, no more, no less. It's about becoming a more well-rounded person.
If your goal is just to get a job, save your money and go to a tech school or a local college instead.
Worse, there's a tendency in government on both sides of the border to IGNORE the advice of any critics and proceed with a goose-step down the dogmatic path the politician's vision has laid before them. It's been a long time since rational thought and evidence-based decision making had anything to do with government.
Roughly a decade, in Canada's case.
I'm talking about politicians making their education and experience a core part of their platform to prove to the people that they have the skills and qualifications to do the job. It would still be up to the people to learn about who they're voting for, but at least the focus might shift to a skills based assessment instead of an "I like his dogma" decision.
By the way, if it weren't for watching "pirated" downloads, I'd never buy a DVD. I don't buy a DVD unless I enjoyed the download first. I'm a media hound -- I collect media of all kinds. But that doesn't mean I'm willing to part with my hard earned money for a CD I've never heard or a movie I've never watched. The harsh reality is I've felt ripped off more often than not when I did so.
Should the *AA succeed in their attempts to completely block torrents, they'll find people like me don't return to the theater or start buying more CDs and DVDs -- we'll just stop consuming their crap AT ALL. The "lost sale" doctrine assumes the content was WORTH PAYING FOR IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Pay $15-20 to see a movie at a theater where I'll have to put up with texting teens, guffawing drunks, and the stench of perfumed ho's giving me migraines?
When I can wait a few months and BUY the DVD for the same price and watch it as many times as I like?
When the odds are greatly in favour of the movie turning out to be drek and me wanting to leave early to demand a refund?
Puh-leaze -- why would I want to bother? There's a REASON box-office receipts have been dropping.
Your position makes perfect sense for movie theatres, but I think it would be interesting to take a different approach for streaming movies and downloads. Instead of charging up front for the movie, let people watch it and pay what they think it was worth.
This has been tried rather successfully for music and book distribution already, sometimes with surprisingly profitable results.
Unfortunately for Hollywood, that means I would have paid about $5 a piece for the 3-4 movies I downloaded and watched that I didn't think were an insulting waste of my time when I was done with them. I've lost count of how many I downloaded and stopped watching after 15-20 minutes of drivel, bad acting, bad scripting, and bad storytelling.
I'm bringing up the NDAA as an example of how the public can be affected by bad legislation until a ruling by the Supremes can overturn it. As the most popular topic of the day, I thought it was a good example of the problem.
Would you rather I use one from my medical cannabis argument arsenal? While those issues aren't as popular as NDAA, they're perfectly valid examples for the point.
The Greek "politicians" were actually philosophers. They knew they didn't understand everything, so arguments were structured to expose their own ignorance through the statement of assumptions: "Assuming X is true."
This inevitably can lead to more discussion about whether the assumptions are valid, but the approach at least documents the process of working through the details of what eventually would become legislation.
Right now politicians make decisions based on ideology and dogma, not on logic and reasoning. At a bare minimum, Parliament and Congress should be held to a philosophical evaluation of law that starts with "Assuming the Constitution is true" and "Assuming the Charter of Rights is valid". Those foundational documents should always be the core of testing the validity of an argument for encoding something as law.
As long as politicians are chosen by a popularity contest instead of an assessment of their skills, experience, and knowledge, that leads me to conclude that politicians should not make laws at all.
Instead, they should be responsible for collecting evidence from the public, industry, and others concerned about the legislation they propose to prove it's good legislation meeting the needs of the people, not serving the will of dogma and corporate influence.
they/we also tend to design overly complex solutions
I'd say rather than people with an engineering or programming mentality aren't comfortable with proposing a solution that doesn't cover all the requirements. The subsequent complexity of solution is a function of the complexity of requirements.
Politics, social isuses, and the legal system are far from simple, so anyone who thinks there are simple "just do this" solutions to the world's problems is being hopelessly idealistic and simplistic.
Yet at the same time, sometimes a brilliantly elegant solution will come to mind that results in everyone else slapping their forehead and saying "Damn! Why didn't I think of that?"
You have the right to a fair and speedy trial. That precludes waiting for other decisions that may not even prove relevant.
It's unfortunate that this means sometimes people who will eventually be determined innocent may be unduly punished, but we can hardly ignore current law just because it might change.
I have far greater concerns about people who might be swept up in the NDAA clause. We know it's unconstitutional. We know the Supremes will eventually reject that legislation. It's unfair to the population at large to allow that bad clause to become law for any period of time, no matter how brief -- and it may take YEARS for the Supremes to hear a case that overturns it.
NDAA presumes that "We The People" refers only to citizens, not the population as a whole. With the number of work visa and landed immigrant people in the US who are not citizens, the arbitrary reinterpretation of over a century of case law is far too radical to be allowed without a Constitutional referendum. Much as the militant psychopaths might hate it, terrorists are people too, and deserving of human rights protection. That's why they were enshrined as HUMAN rights, not citizen rights.
Agreed. Until the Supremes rule, the Federal judge has no prior cases on which to base a ruling. The Federal judge has to make a decision now which may be overturned on appeal based on subsequent Supreme Court rulings, but until the Supremes rule on the issue, all bets are off.
Some professors engage their classes in discussion of questions raised during lectures, others just throw up overheads and blab the same speech as the past five years.
I've always been a proponent of class discussion and group learning as opposed to the dissemination of information from on high as being fact.
The most important things you can do in University are to take courses in Logic, Philosophy, and Critical Thinking. Those will teach you to learn and to argue like a civilized human being, preparing you to convince your boss to implement your ideas, your customers to engage your services, and the government to hear your concerns.
Not that I've got anything against Windows. My own experience over the years has shown most of the security issues people scream about are the result of being targetted as the most popular platform, not an inherently flawed design. Though it would be nice if Microsoft would get off their butts and fix some of the security holes that have been there through multiple iterations of Windows as it evolved.
I will be buying a Win7 Pro laptop at some point. It's too big a market segment to ignore, and I'd rather use Quickbooks Pro in the long term for my accounting than GNU Cash. Cash will get me by for now, but it'll be a lot easier to get data to the accountant when I migrate to Quickbooks.
The other reason I need a Win7 box is.Net/C# development and support. Mono just doesn't cut it, and when it comes to non-windows platforms, I'd strongly recommend Java over Mono/.Net any day of the week.
Yeah, yeah, traitor to the ideals of open source. I'm not an idealist, I'm a programmer. I use the best tool for the job.
Unless we're talking Apple. Then I let ideology drive my decisions because I'm so dead set against the walled garden and patent-monopoly approach to business.
Some statistics don't tell you anything useful. Knowing that some percentage of programmers tend to espouse a particular ideology doesn't tell you what their thoughts on the issues are. Knowing that some percentage of the population fits a pigeon-hole doesn't mean they don't have fundamental rights.
Now your points about why a particular segment of the population favours a viewpoint is a much more useful application of the statistics, because it means those interested in the numbers are trying to understand what the mean.
Your desire to pigeon hole society and the views of the individual does not make it rational or reasonable.
I see labelling someone a "Libertarian" (for example) as no more viable than assuming the personality of someone just because they're Black, Hispanic, etc.
The labels themselves are bigotry, regardless of whether they're based on race, creed, or profession.
My XP partition finally had to be nuked to clear out an infection after 8 years of stable service, so I shifted to Ubuntu 10.04.1 (can't use a newer version due to hardware incompatabilities.)
I had been planning to upgrade to Win7, but when I realized I could get a whole laptop with Win7 Pro and more memory and CPU horsepower than my old box for under $600, I scrapped the idea of an upgrade. Why pay close to $200 for a copy of Win7 when $400 more will get me a whole machine?
Bill Gates proposed a global satellite network, too. If I recall, he wanted to launch 24 geostationary platforms.
But even though he could have afforded to do it, Bill scrapped the idea. Why?
Because accessing the internet over a satellite link SUCKS. You have huge delays due to lag time, and you can forget anything that requires a time-sensitive data stream like skype.
I know several people stuck with satellite internet, and they all HATE it. The only reason satellite internet has any foothold at all is there are some people who have no other choice.
And "uncensorable"? Puh-leaze.
There are many nations who can take out your satellite with a missile at any time, and it's not that hard to jam a satellite uplink from the ground if you're not trying to take out the link completely.
JEE with Java 6 provides me virtually unlimited flexibility and much greater scalability than any of the scripting toolkits could ever dream of.
But my only experience with web site development has been on systems that have to deal with hundreds of thousands of concurrent users, if not millions during the load peaks.
Sure it's a lot more code and a lot more work to use JEE than a scripting tool, but whether that development effort is worthwhile depends on your scalability needs. Screaming about how great your favourite web tool is won't make it scale.
I have nothing but contempt for MySQL on the same basis. It's a toy database with bare-minimum functionality and not suitable for complex business applications. The fact that there are hundreds of thousands of websites built on MySQL doesn't mean that organizations like Facebook haven't realized they made a bad decision putting their eggs in that underpowered basket.
I design and develop systems with FUTURE needs in mind, not just a bare-bones implementation for the current requirements. In the long run, it saves you millions for large systems because you don't need to toss out v 1.0 and rewrite it completely to produce 2.0; instead, 2.0 is an evolution of sound decisions made in 1.0's design and tool selections.
Because of the pigeon holing aspect, I completely disagree with the whole concept of party-based politics.
I'd like to see parties abolished completely. I want to vote DIRECTLY for the Prime Minister without the baggage of party ideology. I want to vote DIRECTLY for my Member of Parliament without worrying about whether they're going to blindly follow party dogma or represent ME in Parliament as they're supposed to.
Party politics on both sides of the border have produced nations where we are subjected to surges of ideology instead of real dialogue of the issues and useful progress as a society on those issues.
And talk about a way to neuter the lobbyists if they have to lobby every single politician individually instead of making a big party donation!
Over the years of arguments, people have tried to pigeon hole and label me a Conservative, a Liberal, an NDP supporter, a Libertarian, a Socialist, a Communist, and pretty much every other label you can think of.
Anyone who tries to simplify my stance with a buzzword is trying to appease their own desire to label me so they can dismiss my arguments out of hand as "he's just a XXX". Labeling stances and assuming that support of a party means blind support of their theoretical ideologies is an insult to any citizen who actually THINKS about social issues and politics.
The idea of taking that a step further and assuming that my career choice pre-labels me as having some particular viewpoint is so far out to lunch it's unreal.
What the hell was the article writer smoking? I want some!
I agree completely. When I clicked on the link that's supposed to be the English translation of the legislation, it took me to an article about how to boycott any artists who'd supported the legislation. I still don't know what the legislation actually SAYS, and I'm not going to judge it based on the paranoia of someone who obviously pre-judges in favour of freetard downloading any more than I'm going to accept the claims of the *AA without question.
I know about the "risk" of nuclear proliferation, but as we did nothing about Kim Il Jong for decades in North Korea, I think the fears of Iran having nukes are over-rated. If a blustering blow-hard like Kim could threaten his neighbours repeatedly with invasion and war without reprise, why is the Iranian rhetoric considered any worse?
Certainly Iran executes a lot of people for violating a strict interpretation of Islamic law, so anyone who's against religion in government has a fundamental problem with Iran. But invasion is a poor way of protecting the people from a government that places dogma over reason. Surely diplomatic discourse would be more effective than the threat of invasion.
And that's really the problem I see. The US keeps beating the invasion and war drums. Iran refuses to back down, the mouse that roared at the lion. Neither side seems willing to act rationally.
If you're going to constantly go on about invading a nation, yeah, they're gonna get paranoid about BEING invaded. They're going to want to build up their military and their armaments to fight back, including nukes.
And with Israel and it's nukes so close to Iran and clearly a darling of US policy, the threat to Iran is imminent, at least from their perspective. Mind you, the Iranian government doesn't help that situation with their ongoing diatribe against Israel. More bluster that escalates instead of negotiates.
Recent US history is a track record of invasion and attack for reasons that turned out to be unjustified in the end. It doesn't give me a comfortable feeling to see them dictating policy to Iran when the US handling of Cuba has shown that appeasing the US does NOT mean the sanctions will be dropped.
Maybe if someone were to take a serious step like disarming Israel's nuclear arsenal, things could settle down in the middle east.
Slashdot Mirror
Surely you jest. The PUBLIC argument the US made was that Iraq had WMDs and needed to be stopped, citing their stockpiling and use of chemical weapons as proof. But when their talking heads eventually waved around some aluminum tubes and claimed they were proof of the WMD charges, they looked like fools.
The US likes to ignore the fact that they trained the Taliban to fight the USSR in the cold war, and then abandoned them completely. When you treat former allies that way, you damn right they're going to have a bone to pick with you. Calling the attack on the towers terrorism downplays the fact that to the attackers, it was an act of war -- a war that had gone on undeclared for decades.
The whole "war against terrorism" is a bullshit smokescreen, a manipulation of public opinion through fear, uncertainty, and doubt. George Orwell was an optimist.
Iran is just the latest target of the propaganda machine.
The Iranian diatribe about eradicating Israel does not negate the fact that Israel sits close to them, armed with a healthy fleet of nukes, some of the most advanced military hardware on the planet, and the US backing them with hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars per year.
I HATE Israeli politics. Not the Israeli or Jewish people, but the politics of their government. They've hemmed in the Palestinians for decades, denying them basic human rights without a trial or any opportunity to resolve the issue. Sure Israel claims to be trying to negotiate, but when they keep restarting the construction in the disputed territories, it's obvious to anyone with a functioning brain cell that the "negotiations" are just gums flapping in the breeze with no intent to actually resolve the disputes.
The fact that the US SUPPORTS this behaviour by Israel and even pays them for it is sickening. Israel does NOT need the money that gets sent to them -- the nation has a healthy economy and is quite capable of paying their own way. Many Israelis have even written blog and forum articles decrying the US funding as insulting to their independance, but their government keeps sucking at the US teat.
If it sounds like I'm getting off track, welcome to the complexity of international politics. It's a complex system of inter-related action and reaction, policy, and an awful lot of propaganda on all sides.
Anyone who thinks a university degree is about getting a job needs to give their head a shake. For some careers it's a check mark on the start of a career, but that's because of the industry those students plan to work in, not an inherent benefit of the degree itself.
Getting a degree is about getting an education, no more, no less. It's about becoming a more well-rounded person.
If your goal is just to get a job, save your money and go to a tech school or a local college instead.
Worse, there's a tendency in government on both sides of the border to IGNORE the advice of any critics and proceed with a goose-step down the dogmatic path the politician's vision has laid before them. It's been a long time since rational thought and evidence-based decision making had anything to do with government.
Roughly a decade, in Canada's case.
I'm talking about politicians making their education and experience a core part of their platform to prove to the people that they have the skills and qualifications to do the job. It would still be up to the people to learn about who they're voting for, but at least the focus might shift to a skills based assessment instead of an "I like his dogma" decision.
By the way, if it weren't for watching "pirated" downloads, I'd never buy a DVD. I don't buy a DVD unless I enjoyed the download first. I'm a media hound -- I collect media of all kinds. But that doesn't mean I'm willing to part with my hard earned money for a CD I've never heard or a movie I've never watched. The harsh reality is I've felt ripped off more often than not when I did so.
Should the *AA succeed in their attempts to completely block torrents, they'll find people like me don't return to the theater or start buying more CDs and DVDs -- we'll just stop consuming their crap AT ALL. The "lost sale" doctrine assumes the content was WORTH PAYING FOR IN THE FIRST PLACE.
Pay $15-20 to see a movie at a theater where I'll have to put up with texting teens, guffawing drunks, and the stench of perfumed ho's giving me migraines?
When I can wait a few months and BUY the DVD for the same price and watch it as many times as I like?
When the odds are greatly in favour of the movie turning out to be drek and me wanting to leave early to demand a refund?
Puh-leaze -- why would I want to bother? There's a REASON box-office receipts have been dropping.
Your position makes perfect sense for movie theatres, but I think it would be interesting to take a different approach for streaming movies and downloads. Instead of charging up front for the movie, let people watch it and pay what they think it was worth.
This has been tried rather successfully for music and book distribution already, sometimes with surprisingly profitable results.
Unfortunately for Hollywood, that means I would have paid about $5 a piece for the 3-4 movies I downloaded and watched that I didn't think were an insulting waste of my time when I was done with them. I've lost count of how many I downloaded and stopped watching after 15-20 minutes of drivel, bad acting, bad scripting, and bad storytelling.
I'm bringing up the NDAA as an example of how the public can be affected by bad legislation until a ruling by the Supremes can overturn it. As the most popular topic of the day, I thought it was a good example of the problem.
Would you rather I use one from my medical cannabis argument arsenal? While those issues aren't as popular as NDAA, they're perfectly valid examples for the point.
The Greek "politicians" were actually philosophers. They knew they didn't understand everything, so arguments were structured to expose their own ignorance through the statement of assumptions: "Assuming X is true."
This inevitably can lead to more discussion about whether the assumptions are valid, but the approach at least documents the process of working through the details of what eventually would become legislation.
Right now politicians make decisions based on ideology and dogma, not on logic and reasoning. At a bare minimum, Parliament and Congress should be held to a philosophical evaluation of law that starts with "Assuming the Constitution is true" and "Assuming the Charter of Rights is valid". Those foundational documents should always be the core of testing the validity of an argument for encoding something as law.
As long as politicians are chosen by a popularity contest instead of an assessment of their skills, experience, and knowledge, that leads me to conclude that politicians should not make laws at all.
Instead, they should be responsible for collecting evidence from the public, industry, and others concerned about the legislation they propose to prove it's good legislation meeting the needs of the people, not serving the will of dogma and corporate influence.
I'd say rather than people with an engineering or programming mentality aren't comfortable with proposing a solution that doesn't cover all the requirements. The subsequent complexity of solution is a function of the complexity of requirements.
Politics, social isuses, and the legal system are far from simple, so anyone who thinks there are simple "just do this" solutions to the world's problems is being hopelessly idealistic and simplistic.
Yet at the same time, sometimes a brilliantly elegant solution will come to mind that results in everyone else slapping their forehead and saying "Damn! Why didn't I think of that?"
You have the right to a fair and speedy trial. That precludes waiting for other decisions that may not even prove relevant.
It's unfortunate that this means sometimes people who will eventually be determined innocent may be unduly punished, but we can hardly ignore current law just because it might change.
I have far greater concerns about people who might be swept up in the NDAA clause. We know it's unconstitutional. We know the Supremes will eventually reject that legislation. It's unfair to the population at large to allow that bad clause to become law for any period of time, no matter how brief -- and it may take YEARS for the Supremes to hear a case that overturns it.
NDAA presumes that "We The People" refers only to citizens, not the population as a whole. With the number of work visa and landed immigrant people in the US who are not citizens, the arbitrary reinterpretation of over a century of case law is far too radical to be allowed without a Constitutional referendum. Much as the militant psychopaths might hate it, terrorists are people too, and deserving of human rights protection. That's why they were enshrined as HUMAN rights, not citizen rights.
Agreed. Until the Supremes rule, the Federal judge has no prior cases on which to base a ruling. The Federal judge has to make a decision now which may be overturned on appeal based on subsequent Supreme Court rulings, but until the Supremes rule on the issue, all bets are off.
Some professors engage their classes in discussion of questions raised during lectures, others just throw up overheads and blab the same speech as the past five years.
I've always been a proponent of class discussion and group learning as opposed to the dissemination of information from on high as being fact.
The most important things you can do in University are to take courses in Logic, Philosophy, and Critical Thinking. Those will teach you to learn and to argue like a civilized human being, preparing you to convince your boss to implement your ideas, your customers to engage your services, and the government to hear your concerns.
Not that I've got anything against Windows. My own experience over the years has shown most of the security issues people scream about are the result of being targetted as the most popular platform, not an inherently flawed design. Though it would be nice if Microsoft would get off their butts and fix some of the security holes that have been there through multiple iterations of Windows as it evolved.
I will be buying a Win7 Pro laptop at some point. It's too big a market segment to ignore, and I'd rather use Quickbooks Pro in the long term for my accounting than GNU Cash. Cash will get me by for now, but it'll be a lot easier to get data to the accountant when I migrate to Quickbooks.
The other reason I need a Win7 box is .Net/C# development and support. Mono just doesn't cut it, and when it comes to non-windows platforms, I'd strongly recommend Java over Mono/.Net any day of the week.
Yeah, yeah, traitor to the ideals of open source. I'm not an idealist, I'm a programmer. I use the best tool for the job.
Unless we're talking Apple. Then I let ideology drive my decisions because I'm so dead set against the walled garden and patent-monopoly approach to business.
Exactly. The labels are a bigot's tool for dismissing the arguments made by an individual.
I see calling someone as Socialist as reprehensible as calling them a Nigger. It's not meant to understand, but to insult and denigrate.
There's lies, damned lies, and statistics.
Some statistics don't tell you anything useful. Knowing that some percentage of programmers tend to espouse a particular ideology doesn't tell you what their thoughts on the issues are. Knowing that some percentage of the population fits a pigeon-hole doesn't mean they don't have fundamental rights.
Now your points about why a particular segment of the population favours a viewpoint is a much more useful application of the statistics, because it means those interested in the numbers are trying to understand what the mean.
So with a party system you don't think you should ask your candidate what they think before the election?
Your desire to pigeon hole society and the views of the individual does not make it rational or reasonable.
I see labelling someone a "Libertarian" (for example) as no more viable than assuming the personality of someone just because they're Black, Hispanic, etc.
The labels themselves are bigotry, regardless of whether they're based on race, creed, or profession.
My XP partition finally had to be nuked to clear out an infection after 8 years of stable service, so I shifted to Ubuntu 10.04.1 (can't use a newer version due to hardware incompatabilities.)
I had been planning to upgrade to Win7, but when I realized I could get a whole laptop with Win7 Pro and more memory and CPU horsepower than my old box for under $600, I scrapped the idea of an upgrade. Why pay close to $200 for a copy of Win7 when $400 more will get me a whole machine?
Bill Gates proposed a global satellite network, too. If I recall, he wanted to launch 24 geostationary platforms.
But even though he could have afforded to do it, Bill scrapped the idea. Why?
Because accessing the internet over a satellite link SUCKS. You have huge delays due to lag time, and you can forget anything that requires a time-sensitive data stream like skype.
I know several people stuck with satellite internet, and they all HATE it. The only reason satellite internet has any foothold at all is there are some people who have no other choice.
And "uncensorable"? Puh-leaze.
There are many nations who can take out your satellite with a missile at any time, and it's not that hard to jam a satellite uplink from the ground if you're not trying to take out the link completely.
It's an unworkable if noble idea.
JEE with Java 6 provides me virtually unlimited flexibility and much greater scalability than any of the scripting toolkits could ever dream of.
But my only experience with web site development has been on systems that have to deal with hundreds of thousands of concurrent users, if not millions during the load peaks.
Sure it's a lot more code and a lot more work to use JEE than a scripting tool, but whether that development effort is worthwhile depends on your scalability needs. Screaming about how great your favourite web tool is won't make it scale.
I have nothing but contempt for MySQL on the same basis. It's a toy database with bare-minimum functionality and not suitable for complex business applications. The fact that there are hundreds of thousands of websites built on MySQL doesn't mean that organizations like Facebook haven't realized they made a bad decision putting their eggs in that underpowered basket.
I design and develop systems with FUTURE needs in mind, not just a bare-bones implementation for the current requirements. In the long run, it saves you millions for large systems because you don't need to toss out v 1.0 and rewrite it completely to produce 2.0; instead, 2.0 is an evolution of sound decisions made in 1.0's design and tool selections.
Because of the pigeon holing aspect, I completely disagree with the whole concept of party-based politics.
I'd like to see parties abolished completely. I want to vote DIRECTLY for the Prime Minister without the baggage of party ideology. I want to vote DIRECTLY for my Member of Parliament without worrying about whether they're going to blindly follow party dogma or represent ME in Parliament as they're supposed to.
Party politics on both sides of the border have produced nations where we are subjected to surges of ideology instead of real dialogue of the issues and useful progress as a society on those issues.
And talk about a way to neuter the lobbyists if they have to lobby every single politician individually instead of making a big party donation!
Over the years of arguments, people have tried to pigeon hole and label me a Conservative, a Liberal, an NDP supporter, a Libertarian, a Socialist, a Communist, and pretty much every other label you can think of.
Anyone who tries to simplify my stance with a buzzword is trying to appease their own desire to label me so they can dismiss my arguments out of hand as "he's just a XXX". Labeling stances and assuming that support of a party means blind support of their theoretical ideologies is an insult to any citizen who actually THINKS about social issues and politics.
The idea of taking that a step further and assuming that my career choice pre-labels me as having some particular viewpoint is so far out to lunch it's unreal.
What the hell was the article writer smoking? I want some!
The suggestion that my career determines my political and social viewpoints is absolutely asinine.
I agree completely. When I clicked on the link that's supposed to be the English translation of the legislation, it took me to an article about how to boycott any artists who'd supported the legislation. I still don't know what the legislation actually SAYS, and I'm not going to judge it based on the paranoia of someone who obviously pre-judges in favour of freetard downloading any more than I'm going to accept the claims of the *AA without question.
I know about the "risk" of nuclear proliferation, but as we did nothing about Kim Il Jong for decades in North Korea, I think the fears of Iran having nukes are over-rated. If a blustering blow-hard like Kim could threaten his neighbours repeatedly with invasion and war without reprise, why is the Iranian rhetoric considered any worse?
Certainly Iran executes a lot of people for violating a strict interpretation of Islamic law, so anyone who's against religion in government has a fundamental problem with Iran. But invasion is a poor way of protecting the people from a government that places dogma over reason. Surely diplomatic discourse would be more effective than the threat of invasion.
And that's really the problem I see. The US keeps beating the invasion and war drums. Iran refuses to back down, the mouse that roared at the lion. Neither side seems willing to act rationally.
If you're going to constantly go on about invading a nation, yeah, they're gonna get paranoid about BEING invaded. They're going to want to build up their military and their armaments to fight back, including nukes.
And with Israel and it's nukes so close to Iran and clearly a darling of US policy, the threat to Iran is imminent, at least from their perspective. Mind you, the Iranian government doesn't help that situation with their ongoing diatribe against Israel. More bluster that escalates instead of negotiates.
Recent US history is a track record of invasion and attack for reasons that turned out to be unjustified in the end. It doesn't give me a comfortable feeling to see them dictating policy to Iran when the US handling of Cuba has shown that appeasing the US does NOT mean the sanctions will be dropped.
Maybe if someone were to take a serious step like disarming Israel's nuclear arsenal, things could settle down in the middle east.