While science isn't a democracy, would you, say, take an extreme minority position on the Big Bang or human evolution, because you know what, there are a few scientists in those fields who disagree.
One thing I'm see right now is the eagerness to believe in global warming. You're so eager in fact, that you're claiming one year's weather in your local area as evidence of it. One year's weather isn't the "climate", and Southern Ontario isn't "global". Maybe if the global warming proponents would try to be scientists rather than advocates, more people would take them seriously. Stop pimping it so much.
This is a true statement: there are gullible people who believe lots of outlandish things; some of them believe that the Earth is doomed to massive upheaval by climate change.
This is a true statement: there are reputable scientists - the vast majority, in fact - who believe that the Earth has serious problems due to climate change.
This is a true statement: there are reputable scientists - a minority - who have problems with some of the methodologies and observations. This group does not deny that climate change is real.
This is a true statement: there are people who work for large industrial interests who go to great lengths to discredit any firm opinion on the matter.
a little shrill. It matters not. And it should not affect your opinion either way.
Real honest science doesn't make good press.
Has it occured to you that Lovelock et al use grandiose, sweeping language because of this reason - that people don't pay much attention to real science on a day-to-day basis?
If there are negative effects of global warming, they are at least partially balanced by the positive effects -- mild winters in Ontario is a good example.
Right. The blind guy who lives next to me saves a fortune on light bulbs.
With both China and India gearing up their economies nothing we do in the West is going to have a measurable impact.
Get the whole world involved or blame the whole world. Singling out the US gets very tiring.
The audacity of these statements is breathtaking.
WORLD TO USA: STOP BURNING UP ALL THE FUCKING ENERGY.
"no measurable impact"... that is just... wow. I am agog. We all know about China's rise, but do you really, truly think that nothing the US does will make a difference?!
Exactly, what are these folks not seeing when it comes to denying global warming?
"...we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield." - Orwell
(I throw this quote around a lot. I'd make it a sig if it wasn't so long.)
Nuclear power is cheap, safe, and efficient. Pebble bed reactors, which the Chinese have been playing with for a few years now, are especially safe. So long as a viable method of transporting and storing the waste material is found (many options for which exist now), it's the easiest way of moving away from coal and oil dependency for electrical energy generation on the grid. Admittedly, disposing of the waste from the plant is an issue, but most of the UN's IPCC contributors are big proponents of using nuclear power.
Your point is well-taken. I wanted to offer two things:
- I really wish we knew how much Uranium we have
- Nuclear doesn't do anything for our vehicles, which are 50% of the emissions problem
(Also, while I have no link, as I understand it the 'bird problem' with windmills isn't really a problem at all.)
News flash: The earth has been a lot warmer than it is now, even within the span of human history, and the biosphere survived.
You've voiced one of my favourite silly arguments.
Newsflash: you have no details about the sort of havoc this inflicted on the human poulation. We're talking a long time ago, in human terms. We know people survived through the last Ice Age cycle, but I bet it was a pretty hard, difficult existence. Arguing about whether or not "the Earth will survive" is not the same thing as arguing that these climate changes are completely inconsequential.
In these climate change scenarios, sure, some places will become more usable (see: Northwest Passage); others will become inhospitable. The ramifications that this brings to our (historically-speaking) astronomical current population is the true matter at hand.
I agree, I think the Earth will recover eventually. Us, who knows.
Sorry, it's only apparent to the Left, and the more radical sections of it at that. OBL is a rich kid from a very rich family. I haven't heard any estimates of how much it costs to fund "the base" (not the database) that would seriously tax his personal or family wealth and there were always more money men than the bin Laden's involved. So why take money from the CIA when you can fund it yourself? Try Occam's razor. It'll give a nice clean shave.
Yes yes, of course I am a radical lefty. Of course. I can certainly tell where you are coming from.
I'm too tired to rehash this. Google for "Afghan Trap" or "CIA and Mujahadeen". Zbigniew Brzezinski detailed all of this. I doubt you'll bother, though. I'm "radical". (google the meaning of that too, while you are at it.)
And by the way, there is no Arabic word for 'database', genius. Hence 'the base'.
What's ridiculous is that the IDs I use everywhere are ones I make. I never lie. I never use them to defraud anything. But if I can do this with a $200 Epson Printer... I think well funded terrorists can do better. Seriously, this isn't about terrorism... it's about getting Americans used to exactly what you said: showing their Nazi fucking papers.
Man, you are like a 60 Minutes segment waiting to happen.
Is this what you want? A dictatorship? Because that's exactly what you are talking about. And I'm not using that word lightly.
Perhaps your little friend there is using some kind of Straussian 'esoteric' reading of article II. You know, where you get to make stuff up and claim that it is mystically imbued in text that says otherwise.
After 9/11, President Bush authorized government wiretaps on some phone calls between the U.S. and specific foreign countries without getting court warrants, saying it was necessary to reduce the threat of terrorism. Do you approve or disapprove of this?
That would be more accurate, as the truth is that even according to the original NY Times article, this is what the wiretaps were used for. In seems that has graduated to "domestic wiretapping" for the NY Times, Clinto News Network (CNN), etc. It does not represent reality.
There are two problems with this. First, if Bush was actually monitoring calls between international suspects and domestic civilians, we would not be having this conversation. They would issue a mea culpa, FISA would admonish them and we probably wouldn't hear anything about it. He doesn't need to dodge the FISA courts to do this, so why did he dodge them if it was all above-board? There's just no good reason at all.
Secondly, we have no proof of what the calls actually were, i.e. to and from whom, either way. The NSA won't ever let that info out willingly. So to assert that it must be innocent is disingenuous.
We have reason to believe it is in fact illegal wiretapping since what the NSA claims to have been doing was above-board and covered by FISA. And yet they dodged it. Why?
Hmm, I was going to try and describe the most unbeleivable crime imaginable that could be plausibly used to "defend against terr'ists", but we already allow torture under presidential approval. Oh well.
Let me take a stab at it.
"Compared to the "bunker buster" and some of the other high yield weapons in the U.S. arsenal which are ten, fifty, or even one hundred times larger than Hiroshima, the "mini nuke" is much smaller. Its purpose can range from use to take out an underground facility that is not too deeply buried, to use on the battlefield as part of a war fighting strategy. It is more like another tool in the kit box.
That was Dr. Bruce Blair, President of the Center for Defense Information, October 2005. Does that qualify?
Despite your "Freak" status in my window;) I also whole heartedly agree with you and find your comment to be quite insightful. (Tentative friendship begins?)?
Yeah, I can't remember what that was for. Consider yourself Neutralized.:)
I'd never heard that Franklin quote, but it certainly seems to me that a lot of what he said did indeed hint at what he feared to be the temporary nature of what he had just help craft - or to serve as a warning against what he feared would contribute to the demise of the Republic.
It certainly seems that way. I've been reading a lot of American History lately, mostly for the Constitutional refresher, but there are a number of things that really leap out at you, when re-visiting this material. For one, as they went through the process, the framers certainly seemed to be all-too-aware of the potential shortcomings and 'fluid' nature of such Declarations. I have little doubt they would subscribe to the 'living document' theory, were they alive today. Also apparant is their strict Dominionism, which was quite surprising to me; almost to a man they believed that God did indeed create the world, but he has long since left, and now it is left forever in the hands of Men. Interesting stuff. Franklin in particular was really cynical and expressed doubt in the whole process all the way through, only to leave that chamber and utter the aforementioned quote in what was described as a kind of dazed incredulity.
When you think about Republics and Democracy as necessarily being a temporary construct, it really alters your perception of such things. Of course, anyone would tell you that nothing is forever but we certainly treat our current first world society as if it really is 'forever'... and worse, that capitalism and democracy have reached their self-evident zenith. I believe that less and less every day. (And I'm not even an American.)
So please, stop promoting the left wing dogma that your rights are somehow being violated...unless you have some kind of proof that specifally YOUR rights have been violated.
Bush admitted it. He admitted to spying on Americans who were engaging in domestic conversaions. Not international terrorists, Americans talking to other Americans. What more do you want?
So to answer your question - Privacy. 4th amendment.
The president makes the laws. Therefore, anything he deems to be legal is legal.
Sounds like one of those goddamn activist judges to me. What happened to all this "strict constructionism" they used to flog? Was that not a convenient rationale in this case?
Ya know, I guess this is why this country was set up as a Republic to begin with, because as I get older, its becoming readily apparent that the people don't always know what's best for them. Marketing of this "War on Terror" is done so well that people are readily willing to hand over their freedoms for an obviously flawed perception of additional security. Those who rally against this government abuse and overreaching Big Brother attitude are labeled as unpatriotic.
Shudder.
You know, we've disagreed on things before, but you and I see exactly eye-to-eye on this. It is truly frightening. And for more reasons than that... I've been thinking lately a lot about a Ben Franklin quote:
At the close of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on September 18, 1787, a Mrs. Powel anxiously awaited the results, and as Benjamin Franklin emerged from the long task now finished, asked him directly: "Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" "A republic if you can keep it" responded Franklin.
Sometimes, in my more cynical moments, I think Ben was really on to something there. I fear what he meant was that all Republics are, at best, a temporary construct. That a free Republic of Men can only, in the best case scenario, last a few hundred years at most, and provide that brief of security... before it must be 'refreshed'. I'm not sure if I agree that this is strictly true, but it makes you wonder.
I'd like to append your Goering quote with a bit of Orwell (who cites Goering in this passage):
There is no use in multiplying examples. The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
When one looks at the all-prevailing schizophrenia of democratic societies, the lies that have to be told for vote-catching purposes, the silence about major issues, the distortions of the press, it is tempting to believe that in totalitarian countries there is less humbug, more facing of the facts. There, at least, the ruling groups are not dependent on popular favour and can utter the truth crudely and brutally. Goering could say 'Guns before butter', while his democratic opposite numbers had to wrap the same sentiment up in hundreds of hypocritical words.
Actually, however, the avoidance of reality is much the same everywhere, and has much the same consequences. The Russian people were taught for years that they were better off than everybody else, and propaganda posters showed Russian families sitting down to abundant meal while the proletariat of other countries starved in the gutter. Meanwhile the workers in the western countries were so much better off than those of the U.S.S.R. that non-contact between Soviet citizens and outsiders had to be a guiding principle of policy. Then, as a result of the war, millions of ordinary Russians penetrated far into Europe, and when they return home the original avoidance of reality will inevitably be paid for in frictions of various kinds. The Germans and the Japanese lost the war quite largely because their rulers were unable to see facts which were plain to any dispassionate eye.
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one's opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it. Political predictions are usually wrong. But even when one makes a correct one, to discover why one was right can be very illuminating. In general, one is only right when either wish or fear coincides with reality. If one recognizes this, one cannot, of course, get rid of one's subjective feelings, but one can to some extent insulate them from one's thinking and make predictions cold-bloodedly, by the book of arithmetic. In private life most people are fairly realistic. When one is making out one's weekly budget, two and two invariably make four. Politics, on the other hand, is a sort of sub-atomic or non-Euclidean word where it is quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously. Hence the contradictions and absurdities I have chronicled above, all finally traceable to a secret belief that one's political opinions, unlike the weekly budget, will not have to be tested against solid reality.
Even when the question is framed in the most positive manner for the President (relating wiretaps to fighting terrorism), nearly half of the population still is against it? This is a very encouraging sign... Good for us.
Considering the numerous wars and soldiers lost throughout your country's storied history upholding these very specific principles, I think that having only half the population disagree is a disgrace. I'll say Good For You if you actually manage to fix it.
a vague discription of the current NSA
program being "another valuable tool", or needing "every tool
available" to keep the American people safe.
This is something I have noticed in White House and Justice Department press briefings.
If a new law is phrased as a "tool", it is practically guaranteed to be some kind of draconian overreach. "Tool" seems to be the Orwellian doublespeak du jour for invasive laws that erode civil liberties.
This is my Cuba Theory - if instead of the stupid policy we have now the US opened up our borders to Cuba, allowed free trade and free communication even within the limitations of Castro's murderous regime, Cuba would be a free and prosperous democracy in months, not years, and Castro would live out his days happily doddering away in retirement.
The same IS WORKING NOW from China. Because we opened our doors, China is a better and freer place every day.
Interesting theory, but why do you say that about China? What is the evidence of improvement?
So, when it comes down to it, all Google is doing is obeying the law, just as they would have to do if the US government passed some horribly boneheaded law. It's either that or go out of business. Are you so foolish as to think that Google could resist the censorship and somehow manage to bully the Chinese government into allowing Google access from within China anyway? Come back when you have your head out of your ass.
Don't be ridiculous. Google is not going to 'go out of business' if they stayed out of the Chinese market entirely. Its a pittance. Sure they may be doing some strategic triangulation but that makes the charge even more damning. The article states that search engine revenue in China is really low overall at the moment. Google is not doing this for any reason but potential future money.
As to your point that 'Google could be so foolish as to change the Chinese government' - pragmatically speaking you are right. Pragmatically speaking, you are also an asshole. You do what you can. Don't give me this bullshit about 'ooh maybe their values are different'; they publically decapitate people in Saudi Arabia and I don't give them a pass for their values, either.
It is better to leave China with no Google whatsoever, because 1) they know how to find real information if they want it right now, and 2) strategic holes regarding Taiwan and other issues of Chinese import in Google's database adds legitimacy to Chinese historical claims and antagonizes another would-be nation at the same time. Google taking a stand would have also added pressure to MSN, AOL and other heavy hitters.
My point is, if you are 'pragmatic' and capitulate to pure greed all the time while throwing your arms in the air, you are no better than any other psychopathic corporation. Google made a conscious and public decision to not act that way, and it appears they have changed their minds.
You are looking at it from a flawed perspective. "If I don't do it, somebody else will" is a pragmatic argument, not a moral argument. You're still doing evil.
This is exactly right.
Google should have, could have, and according to the 'values' they laid out for themselves originally, they shouldn't have. An incomplte/filtered search is more dmamging in this case. And it gives legitimacy to China's claims on Taiwan. Google should have bailed.
It would have been worth more in PR anyways to oppose; I'm not convinced that 'no go' in China wasn't the smartest business move for Google, besides.
How do you make these things like middle button paste work? I searched high and low, but couldn't find anything, so it's probably something blindingly obvious that I've just overlooked.
USB Overdrive can be configured to do pretty much anything. (Including AppleScripts, so literally anything.)
Is there some webpage on how to *nixify OS X, do you know?
Really depends on how you want to approach it - x11 is there, or you can just tweak Aqua to suit your habits. MacUpdate.com and Versiontracker.com are your friends.
Interesting. How *nixy can you make it? Can you get middle-button paste and stuff? Scroll-up (hidden) windows? (I think the old MacOS could do that, so surely, but I could never find the shiny button?). How about rearranging the buttons? Jobs was on to something when he made the first NeXTSTEP and put the close button far away from the minimise/maximise, but went mad on OS X and put them right next to each other, meaning I kept clicking the wrong one till I installed GNU/Linux on my rev A iMac G5. Can that be "fixed" (so to speak)?
Mainstrain *nixy stuff, ala middle-click-paste, is all do-able, and you don't even need commandline tools for that - in fact it was fairly trivial to make a pre-OS X Mac behave that way. The button arrangement, however, is a very good question - I confess that I have yet to see that done, although I haven't looked specifically for that ability. The various themes I've seen (interfacelift.com if you want to look) typically skin the buttons but leave them in place. But now you have my curiosity tweaked, I shall have to investigate.
Slashdot Mirror
dude!... ixnay on the ntelligentay esignday....
This is a true statement: there are gullible people who believe lots of outlandish things; some of them believe that the Earth is doomed to massive upheaval by climate change.
This is a true statement: there are reputable scientists - the vast majority, in fact - who believe that the Earth has serious problems due to climate change.
This is a true statement: there are reputable scientists - a minority - who have problems with some of the methodologies and observations. This group does not deny that climate change is real.
This is a true statement: there are people who work for large industrial interests who go to great lengths to discredit any firm opinion on the matter.
a little shrill. It matters not. And it should not affect your opinion either way.
Real honest science doesn't make good press.
Has it occured to you that Lovelock et al use grandiose, sweeping language because of this reason - that people don't pay much attention to real science on a day-to-day basis?
If there are negative effects of global warming, they are at least partially balanced by the positive effects -- mild winters in Ontario is a good example.
Right. The blind guy who lives next to me saves a fortune on light bulbs.
Get the whole world involved or blame the whole world. Singling out the US gets very tiring.
The audacity of these statements is breathtaking.
WORLD TO USA: STOP BURNING UP ALL THE FUCKING ENERGY.
"no measurable impact"... that is just... wow. I am agog. We all know about China's rise, but do you really, truly think that nothing the US does will make a difference?!
"...we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield." - Orwell
(I throw this quote around a lot. I'd make it a sig if it wasn't so long.)
Your point is well-taken. I wanted to offer two things:
- I really wish we knew how much Uranium we have
- Nuclear doesn't do anything for our vehicles, which are 50% of the emissions problem
(Also, while I have no link, as I understand it the 'bird problem' with windmills isn't really a problem at all.)
You've voiced one of my favourite silly arguments.
Newsflash: you have no details about the sort of havoc this inflicted on the human poulation. We're talking a long time ago, in human terms. We know people survived through the last Ice Age cycle, but I bet it was a pretty hard, difficult existence. Arguing about whether or not "the Earth will survive" is not the same thing as arguing that these climate changes are completely inconsequential.
In these climate change scenarios, sure, some places will become more usable (see: Northwest Passage); others will become inhospitable. The ramifications that this brings to our (historically-speaking) astronomical current population is the true matter at hand.
I agree, I think the Earth will recover eventually. Us, who knows.
No comment necessary.
Yes yes, of course I am a radical lefty. Of course. I can certainly tell where you are coming from.
I'm too tired to rehash this. Google for "Afghan Trap" or "CIA and Mujahadeen". Zbigniew Brzezinski detailed all of this. I doubt you'll bother, though. I'm "radical". (google the meaning of that too, while you are at it.)
And by the way, there is no Arabic word for 'database', genius. Hence 'the base'.
Man, you are like a 60 Minutes segment waiting to happen.
And I agree.
Perhaps your little friend there is using some kind of Straussian 'esoteric' reading of article II. You know, where you get to make stuff up and claim that it is mystically imbued in text that says otherwise.
That would be more accurate, as the truth is that even according to the original NY Times article, this is what the wiretaps were used for. In seems that has graduated to "domestic wiretapping" for the NY Times, Clinto News Network (CNN), etc. It does not represent reality.
There are two problems with this. First, if Bush was actually monitoring calls between international suspects and domestic civilians, we would not be having this conversation. They would issue a mea culpa, FISA would admonish them and we probably wouldn't hear anything about it. He doesn't need to dodge the FISA courts to do this, so why did he dodge them if it was all above-board? There's just no good reason at all.
Secondly, we have no proof of what the calls actually were, i.e. to and from whom, either way. The NSA won't ever let that info out willingly. So to assert that it must be innocent is disingenuous.
We have reason to believe it is in fact illegal wiretapping since what the NSA claims to have been doing was above-board and covered by FISA. And yet they dodged it. Why?
Let me take a stab at it.
"Compared to the "bunker buster" and some of the other high yield weapons in the U.S. arsenal which are ten, fifty, or even one hundred times larger than Hiroshima, the "mini nuke" is much smaller. Its purpose can range from use to take out an underground facility that is not too deeply buried, to use on the battlefield as part of a war fighting strategy. It is more like another tool in the kit box.
That was Dr. Bruce Blair, President of the Center for Defense Information, October 2005. Does that qualify?
Yeah, I can't remember what that was for. Consider yourself Neutralized. :)
I'd never heard that Franklin quote, but it certainly seems to me that a lot of what he said did indeed hint at what he feared to be the temporary nature of what he had just help craft - or to serve as a warning against what he feared would contribute to the demise of the Republic.
It certainly seems that way. I've been reading a lot of American History lately, mostly for the Constitutional refresher, but there are a number of things that really leap out at you, when re-visiting this material. For one, as they went through the process, the framers certainly seemed to be all-too-aware of the potential shortcomings and 'fluid' nature of such Declarations. I have little doubt they would subscribe to the 'living document' theory, were they alive today. Also apparant is their strict Dominionism, which was quite surprising to me; almost to a man they believed that God did indeed create the world, but he has long since left, and now it is left forever in the hands of Men. Interesting stuff. Franklin in particular was really cynical and expressed doubt in the whole process all the way through, only to leave that chamber and utter the aforementioned quote in what was described as a kind of dazed incredulity.
When you think about Republics and Democracy as necessarily being a temporary construct, it really alters your perception of such things. Of course, anyone would tell you that nothing is forever but we certainly treat our current first world society as if it really is 'forever'... and worse, that capitalism and democracy have reached their self-evident zenith. I believe that less and less every day. (And I'm not even an American.)
Thanks for the response.
Bush admitted it. He admitted to spying on Americans who were engaging in domestic conversaions. Not international terrorists, Americans talking to other Americans. What more do you want?
So to answer your question - Privacy. 4th amendment.
Sounds like one of those goddamn activist judges to me. What happened to all this "strict constructionism" they used to flog? Was that not a convenient rationale in this case?
Shudder.
You know, we've disagreed on things before, but you and I see exactly eye-to-eye on this. It is truly frightening. And for more reasons than that... I've been thinking lately a lot about a Ben Franklin quote:
At the close of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on September 18, 1787, a Mrs. Powel anxiously awaited the results, and as Benjamin Franklin emerged from the long task now finished, asked him directly: "Well Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" "A republic if you can keep it" responded Franklin.
Sometimes, in my more cynical moments, I think Ben was really on to something there. I fear what he meant was that all Republics are, at best, a temporary construct. That a free Republic of Men can only, in the best case scenario, last a few hundred years at most, and provide that brief of security... before it must be 'refreshed'. I'm not sure if I agree that this is strictly true, but it makes you wonder.
There is no use in multiplying examples. The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
When one looks at the all-prevailing schizophrenia of democratic societies, the lies that have to be told for vote-catching purposes, the silence about major issues, the distortions of the press, it is tempting to believe that in totalitarian countries there is less humbug, more facing of the facts. There, at least, the ruling groups are not dependent on popular favour and can utter the truth crudely and brutally. Goering could say 'Guns before butter', while his democratic opposite numbers had to wrap the same sentiment up in hundreds of hypocritical words.
Actually, however, the avoidance of reality is much the same everywhere, and has much the same consequences. The Russian people were taught for years that they were better off than everybody else, and propaganda posters showed Russian families sitting down to abundant meal while the proletariat of other countries starved in the gutter. Meanwhile the workers in the western countries were so much better off than those of the U.S.S.R. that non-contact between Soviet citizens and outsiders had to be a guiding principle of policy. Then, as a result of the war, millions of ordinary Russians penetrated far into Europe, and when they return home the original avoidance of reality will inevitably be paid for in frictions of various kinds. The Germans and the Japanese lost the war quite largely because their rulers were unable to see facts which were plain to any dispassionate eye.
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one's opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it. Political predictions are usually wrong. But even when one makes a correct one, to discover why one was right can be very illuminating. In general, one is only right when either wish or fear coincides with reality. If one recognizes this, one cannot, of course, get rid of one's subjective feelings, but one can to some extent insulate them from one's thinking and make predictions cold-bloodedly, by the book of arithmetic. In private life most people are fairly realistic. When one is making out one's weekly budget, two and two invariably make four. Politics, on the other hand, is a sort of sub-atomic or non-Euclidean word where it is quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously. Hence the contradictions and absurdities I have chronicled above, all finally traceable to a secret belief that one's political opinions, unlike the weekly budget, will not have to be tested against solid reality.
Considering the numerous wars and soldiers lost throughout your country's storied history upholding these very specific principles, I think that having only half the population disagree is a disgrace. I'll say Good For You if you actually manage to fix it.
This is something I have noticed in White House and Justice Department press briefings.
If a new law is phrased as a "tool", it is practically guaranteed to be some kind of draconian overreach. "Tool" seems to be the Orwellian doublespeak du jour for invasive laws that erode civil liberties.
Volkswagens too.
The same IS WORKING NOW from China. Because we opened our doors, China is a better and freer place every day.
Interesting theory, but why do you say that about China? What is the evidence of improvement?
Don't be ridiculous. Google is not going to 'go out of business' if they stayed out of the Chinese market entirely. Its a pittance. Sure they may be doing some strategic triangulation but that makes the charge even more damning. The article states that search engine revenue in China is really low overall at the moment. Google is not doing this for any reason but potential future money.
As to your point that 'Google could be so foolish as to change the Chinese government' - pragmatically speaking you are right. Pragmatically speaking, you are also an asshole. You do what you can. Don't give me this bullshit about 'ooh maybe their values are different'; they publically decapitate people in Saudi Arabia and I don't give them a pass for their values, either.
It is better to leave China with no Google whatsoever, because 1) they know how to find real information if they want it right now, and 2) strategic holes regarding Taiwan and other issues of Chinese import in Google's database adds legitimacy to Chinese historical claims and antagonizes another would-be nation at the same time. Google taking a stand would have also added pressure to MSN, AOL and other heavy hitters.
My point is, if you are 'pragmatic' and capitulate to pure greed all the time while throwing your arms in the air, you are no better than any other psychopathic corporation. Google made a conscious and public decision to not act that way, and it appears they have changed their minds.
This is exactly right.
Google should have, could have, and according to the 'values' they laid out for themselves originally, they shouldn't have. An incomplte/filtered search is more dmamging in this case. And it gives legitimacy to China's claims on Taiwan. Google should have bailed.
It would have been worth more in PR anyways to oppose; I'm not convinced that 'no go' in China wasn't the smartest business move for Google, besides.
USB Overdrive can be configured to do pretty much anything. (Including AppleScripts, so literally anything.)
Is there some webpage on how to *nixify OS X, do you know?
Really depends on how you want to approach it - x11 is there, or you can just tweak Aqua to suit your habits. MacUpdate.com and Versiontracker.com are your friends.
Mainstrain *nixy stuff, ala middle-click-paste, is all do-able, and you don't even need commandline tools for that - in fact it was fairly trivial to make a pre-OS X Mac behave that way. The button arrangement, however, is a very good question - I confess that I have yet to see that done, although I haven't looked specifically for that ability. The various themes I've seen (interfacelift.com if you want to look) typically skin the buttons but leave them in place. But now you have my curiosity tweaked, I shall have to investigate.