So, what you are saying is that you want to regulate political speech?
Only political speech that has to be paid for.
I know that the Supreme Court currently disagrees with me, but I will firmly maintain despite any opposition that equating speech to money goes against the First Amendment because while we all have the same ability to speak, we do not all have the same amount of money. It disenfranchises those with less money, and thus violates the spirit of "free political speech."
As long as the super-rich and mega-corporations are allowed to spend billions of dollars advertising for the candidate or ballot measure they want to win, they will be able to get richer and richer at our expense.
The only way to break the cycle is to take the money out of politics.
Ack! Mac users suffer that? My condolences to them...
No, Mac users like that.
Unlike you backwards Windows folks, we are not locked into a mindset of "one window on the screen". We are used to having many windows open and overlapping, which is, after all, kind of the point of multitasking. I have never understood why Windows pushes so hard to make you fill your screen with one window.
Furthermore, I absolutely, utterly despise the MDI paradigm that Office and Photoshop (among many others) for Windows lock you into. Look, if I have 5 different documents open and they're hiding everything in the background, that's one thing, but for God's sake, why do you have to put a stupid gray background window behind them all and lock me into that, not letting me have *your* windows interleaved with *other* applications' windows??
...I guess it's all a matter of what you're used to, but like I said, your way doesn't make sense to us, and we really honestly like it better our way.
Frankly, I'd rather that a 15-year-old have some say than that religious fundamentalists hellbent on turning America into a Christian state have near total control.
You are seriously, or possibly willfully, missing the point.
They shouldn't be there in the first place because they are not our laws. Thus, they have no place in a court of law (or prominently in front of it, etc).
If you want to put 10 articles of law on a big stone tablet outside a courthouse, why not the Bill of Rights? That's actually got some relevance, and it would be nice if more of our people remembered them. Heck, it would be nice if more of our lawyers remembered them...
A simple test to see if people actually know the rules of the constitution would go a long way to ensuring that people stop getting elected on unconstitutional principles.
Ah, so the right to self-governance only extends to people who agree with your principles, then.
Please point to the portion where he says "a test to see if people agree with the rules of the Constitution."
The basic rules of the country are supposed to be taught in High School civics/social studies/government/whatever classes. Knowing them does not require agreeing with them.
In fact, I would say that it behooves those who do not agree with them to know them at least as well as those who do. There are few things more embarrassing than declaring loudly, "I disagree with your (X)! It is an abomination and needs to be scrapped!" only to discover that there are large portions of it which are, in fact, exactly what you believe...
It's all very well to try that, but I can't in good conscience recommend against Verizon for the friends & family I support, knowing what I know of the coverage of every other cell carrier in my area.
Get some real competition on coverage, then we'll talk.
So no, I don't think the photos were any kind of deciding factor for anyone.
Not for anyone actually involved, no—but they certainly lost us a lot of sympathy (not to mention respect) from the rest of the world where our own people are concerned.
Richard Dawkins makes a very good argument against this often-used one in his book "The God Delusion".
Now, see, this is where you start to run into problems, Tom.
I don't entirely disagree with your premises—personally, I'm more or less an agnostic, though I was raised in a very open-minded Episcopalian tradition, and I think that the way many children are raised in a particular church does amount to child abuse. Particularly many devout Catholics, who basically raise their children to believe that they're going to Hell if they put so much as a toe out of line.
But—and this is one of the problems I see with the approach of most atheists when dealing with theists—you will never gain any traction with people with any real belief in God when citing someone like Richard Dawkins—or, indeed, anyone who uses phrases like "the God delusion" in all sincerity. Telling people point-blank that one of their most fundamental beliefs is a delusion is really no way to make converts. If you want people who aren't already atheists or serious agnostics to take you seriously, you really ought to take a somewhat more...ah...diplomatic approach.
Um, dude, you're just wrong. Microsoft has been legally found to be a monopoly, Apple has not. End of story.
Even aside from that, "monopoly" doesn't mean strictly "There is absolutely no one else in the world you can buy the product from." If they have a dominant market position, and are able to abuse that dominant market position to gain dominant positions in other markets, push other companies around, etc, that is what's illegal.
According to my non-lawyery understanding, anyway.
So no, Apple is not a monopoly, however much you might want it to be, shill.
That's like asking, "What's so important about WiFi? Can't you just put an Ethernet port on it and plug it into the wall?"
The one thing that drives me nuts more than anything else with my computer and my iPod is the wires. They get tangled every single day, and I truly do not know how. Either the headphones get knotted up in the computer bag overnight, or they snag on my shirt, or the power cord snags on my foot...
We're probably not going to get real wireless power in laptops any time soon, but Bluetooth headphones and stereo audio standards already exist. I had some from Logitech for a while, but I guess I have a bigger head than average, because they kept breaking in the back.
I would LOVE an iPod that has A2DP Bluetooth support. Not having to deal with the headphone cord every day would (once again) make my life much, much easier. If you don't want to use it, just turn it off, and it's not wasting any power at all.
the only thing really sustaining any balance at all in this country is the fact the poor people have guns, the rich people have guns, the religious people have guns... at a fundamental level the government has no choice but to fear the people - exactly the recipe for liberty as envisioned by our patriots.
This is exactly the fallacy that most gun-rights advocates seem to be blind to.
See, America has this standing army that's got enough weapons to reduce pretty much the whole country to smoldering ash. Even without such scorched-earth tactics, I dare say they could pretty easily deal with a mob of civilians armed with their legally-owned handguns. All it takes is one tank to sit in their way and fire into the crowd, and you'll see who's afraid of whose weapons.
OK, so you're an engineer. If you'd said so in the first place, instead of just the generic "tech job", I wouldn't have made the assumption that you were looking for a standard IT-type job. You know, the most common kind of tech job.
Well, I don't know for certain if it's still there, but I know that as recently as 5 years ago, Lockheed Martin had a major presence in the area—along with various other tech companies, at the former Griffiss Air Force Base, which is now a technology park. That's just about 1/2 hour's drive from my house.
So, like I said before, you self-important idiot: there are tech jobs of all kinds outside of major metropolitan areas. You just have to be willing to look.
I have a tech job—not at a tech company, but as a member of the IT department of a small insurance company. Everyone needs IT.
You seem to have a seriously skewed view of what life outside the city is like. There is a lot of America that is not part of a Major Metropolitan Area. I live about 15 minutes from an aging city (its heyday was about 50 years ago) that's pretty small, for a city. And there are plenty of jobs out here. I mean, not enough that I could quit my job right now and get snapped up in an instant, but enough that if I lost my job now I wouldn't be overly worried about finding a new one.
And the lower cost of living is very real. I know that in some MMAs the "middle class" is around $100K (or so I've heard). Here, you can live very comfortably on more like $60K.
If you like the city life, that's fine: that's purely a matter of personal preference. Personally, I can't stand cities. But I'm telling you, the whole country is not rural Montana. Upstate NY is hardly the most economically booming area in the country, and there's plenty of jobs here outside cities.
Open your eyes, and open your mind, and you'll be surprised at what you see.
Yeah, you just have to go to a community without a HOA. Whoops! They don't exist unless you want to drive 2 hours to work every day.
Oh, don't be a moron. Of course they do. I live in a house on a (small) plot of land I own (no HOA in sight) and I have a 15-20 minute drive to work every day.
Or did you mean "if you want to work in a big city"? 'Cause that's entirely your choice. If you're willing to live like us, out in the sticks (Oh no! We don't have a Starbucks on every corner! We only get 4Mbps/768Kbps cable internet!), you can live a lot closer to where you work, have a comfortable standard of living, and still not live crushed by debt your whole life.
People who assume that everyone lives in a city—or, worse, that everyone wants to live in a city—really bug me...
Yeah, I don't know what sorts of computer models they make out of whatever data they gather, so I have no idea if this is an artist's rendition or something more "real" either...
I know a hole like this cannot possibly be...possible
Pardon me, but you're full of it.
I'm not an astrophysicist, or anything fancy like that (though I know some), but I do know this:
The best and brightest minds on Earth cannot say with certainty that something like this is "impossible" under the laws of physics, because all we've got is a highly imperfect model.
Refining that model is what science is all about. But we just haven't been able to study enough of the Universe in detail to be able to say what can't be out there.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something, whether it be ego or product.
See, even if company V (rolling their eyes and sighing in exasperation) decides to be nice and let company C keep its promises, company A over there, though whose pipes 75% of the traffic from companies V & C must flow, is still trying to make a few extra (million) bucks screwing everybody else in the world, and they're throttling YouTube, but prioritizing MySpace because they paid up.
I heard this on NPR this morning, and they were reporting something rather different.
According to the story on the radio, J&J was suing not simply because the Red Cross is using the symbol—as they have for a century and more—but because they are licensing it to for-profit companies, breaking an agreement J&J made with them in 1895 or so.
...And, on checking the article, that's more or less exactly what it says. Congratulations to Swampash for being a total troll and not even reading the article he submitted. Or possibly kdawson for posting a self-written summary that utterly fails to grasp the point of the article.
Slashdot Mirror
Only political speech that has to be paid for.
I know that the Supreme Court currently disagrees with me, but I will firmly maintain despite any opposition that equating speech to money goes against the First Amendment because while we all have the same ability to speak, we do not all have the same amount of money. It disenfranchises those with less money, and thus violates the spirit of "free political speech."
As long as the super-rich and mega-corporations are allowed to spend billions of dollars advertising for the candidate or ballot measure they want to win, they will be able to get richer and richer at our expense.
The only way to break the cycle is to take the money out of politics.
Dan Aris
No, Mac users like that.
Unlike you backwards Windows folks, we are not locked into a mindset of "one window on the screen". We are used to having many windows open and overlapping, which is, after all, kind of the point of multitasking. I have never understood why Windows pushes so hard to make you fill your screen with one window.
Furthermore, I absolutely, utterly despise the MDI paradigm that Office and Photoshop (among many others) for Windows lock you into. Look, if I have 5 different documents open and they're hiding everything in the background, that's one thing, but for God's sake, why do you have to put a stupid gray background window behind them all and lock me into that, not letting me have *your* windows interleaved with *other* applications' windows??
...I guess it's all a matter of what you're used to, but like I said, your way doesn't make sense to us, and we really honestly like it better our way.
Dan Aris
Frankly, I'd rather that a 15-year-old have some say than that religious fundamentalists hellbent on turning America into a Christian state have near total control.
Dan Aris
You are seriously, or possibly willfully, missing the point.
They shouldn't be there in the first place because they are not our laws. Thus, they have no place in a court of law (or prominently in front of it, etc).
If you want to put 10 articles of law on a big stone tablet outside a courthouse, why not the Bill of Rights? That's actually got some relevance, and it would be nice if more of our people remembered them. Heck, it would be nice if more of our lawyers remembered them...
Dan Aris
And what if it were not a community of Muslims, but a Muslim judge—and not a local park, but the local county courthouse?
Dan Aris
Please point to the portion where he says "a test to see if people agree with the rules of the Constitution."
The basic rules of the country are supposed to be taught in High School civics/social studies/government/whatever classes. Knowing them does not require agreeing with them.
In fact, I would say that it behooves those who do not agree with them to know them at least as well as those who do. There are few things more embarrassing than declaring loudly, "I disagree with your (X)! It is an abomination and needs to be scrapped!" only to discover that there are large portions of it which are, in fact, exactly what you believe...
Dan Aris
It's all very well to try that, but I can't in good conscience recommend against Verizon for the friends & family I support, knowing what I know of the coverage of every other cell carrier in my area.
Get some real competition on coverage, then we'll talk.
Dan Aris
Not for anyone actually involved, no—but they certainly lost us a lot of sympathy (not to mention respect) from the rest of the world where our own people are concerned.
Dan Aris
Huh? Where? Man, all I ever get are stupid Viagra spam and "O3M S0FTWARE!" (and variants thereupon).
Humpfh. Everyone gets pr0n spam but me.
Dan Aris
Now, see, this is where you start to run into problems, Tom.
I don't entirely disagree with your premises—personally, I'm more or less an agnostic, though I was raised in a very open-minded Episcopalian tradition, and I think that the way many children are raised in a particular church does amount to child abuse. Particularly many devout Catholics, who basically raise their children to believe that they're going to Hell if they put so much as a toe out of line.
But—and this is one of the problems I see with the approach of most atheists when dealing with theists—you will never gain any traction with people with any real belief in God when citing someone like Richard Dawkins—or, indeed, anyone who uses phrases like "the God delusion" in all sincerity. Telling people point-blank that one of their most fundamental beliefs is a delusion is really no way to make converts. If you want people who aren't already atheists or serious agnostics to take you seriously, you really ought to take a somewhat more...ah...diplomatic approach.
Dan Aris
No...it was just too early in the morning for responsible, well-thought-out posting :-P
Dan Aris
Have you ever heard of a little legal doctrine called "innocent until proven guilty"?
By your logic, you should be locked up for life because you have never been tried for murder and found innocent.
Dan Aris
What are you talking about??
You've been able to buy every version of OS X separately. And there's no such thing as an OS X upgrade CD; they're all full installers.
Dan Aris
Um, dude, you're just wrong. Microsoft has been legally found to be a monopoly, Apple has not. End of story.
Even aside from that, "monopoly" doesn't mean strictly "There is absolutely no one else in the world you can buy the product from." If they have a dominant market position, and are able to abuse that dominant market position to gain dominant positions in other markets, push other companies around, etc, that is what's illegal.
According to my non-lawyery understanding, anyway.
So no, Apple is not a monopoly, however much you might want it to be, shill.
Dan Aris
What's so important? What's so important??
That's like asking, "What's so important about WiFi? Can't you just put an Ethernet port on it and plug it into the wall?"
The one thing that drives me nuts more than anything else with my computer and my iPod is the wires. They get tangled every single day, and I truly do not know how. Either the headphones get knotted up in the computer bag overnight, or they snag on my shirt, or the power cord snags on my foot...
We're probably not going to get real wireless power in laptops any time soon, but Bluetooth headphones and stereo audio standards already exist. I had some from Logitech for a while, but I guess I have a bigger head than average, because they kept breaking in the back.
I would LOVE an iPod that has A2DP Bluetooth support. Not having to deal with the headphone cord every day would (once again) make my life much, much easier. If you don't want to use it, just turn it off, and it's not wasting any power at all.
Dan Aris
This is exactly the fallacy that most gun-rights advocates seem to be blind to.
See, America has this standing army that's got enough weapons to reduce pretty much the whole country to smoldering ash. Even without such scorched-earth tactics, I dare say they could pretty easily deal with a mob of civilians armed with their legally-owned handguns. All it takes is one tank to sit in their way and fire into the crowd, and you'll see who's afraid of whose weapons.
Dan Aris
OK, so you're an engineer. If you'd said so in the first place, instead of just the generic "tech job", I wouldn't have made the assumption that you were looking for a standard IT-type job. You know, the most common kind of tech job.
Well, I don't know for certain if it's still there, but I know that as recently as 5 years ago, Lockheed Martin had a major presence in the area—along with various other tech companies, at the former Griffiss Air Force Base, which is now a technology park. That's just about 1/2 hour's drive from my house.
So, like I said before, you self-important idiot: there are tech jobs of all kinds outside of major metropolitan areas. You just have to be willing to look.
Dan Aris
Not to mention ignorant.
I have a tech job—not at a tech company, but as a member of the IT department of a small insurance company. Everyone needs IT.
You seem to have a seriously skewed view of what life outside the city is like. There is a lot of America that is not part of a Major Metropolitan Area. I live about 15 minutes from an aging city (its heyday was about 50 years ago) that's pretty small, for a city. And there are plenty of jobs out here. I mean, not enough that I could quit my job right now and get snapped up in an instant, but enough that if I lost my job now I wouldn't be overly worried about finding a new one.
And the lower cost of living is very real. I know that in some MMAs the "middle class" is around $100K (or so I've heard). Here, you can live very comfortably on more like $60K.
If you like the city life, that's fine: that's purely a matter of personal preference. Personally, I can't stand cities. But I'm telling you, the whole country is not rural Montana. Upstate NY is hardly the most economically booming area in the country, and there's plenty of jobs here outside cities.
Open your eyes, and open your mind, and you'll be surprised at what you see.
Dan Aris
Oh, don't be a moron. Of course they do. I live in a house on a (small) plot of land I own (no HOA in sight) and I have a 15-20 minute drive to work every day.
Or did you mean "if you want to work in a big city"? 'Cause that's entirely your choice. If you're willing to live like us, out in the sticks (Oh no! We don't have a Starbucks on every corner! We only get 4Mbps/768Kbps cable internet!), you can live a lot closer to where you work, have a comfortable standard of living, and still not live crushed by debt your whole life.
People who assume that everyone lives in a city—or, worse, that everyone wants to live in a city—really bug me...
Dan Aris
Ah, OK. I misunderstood. My apologies.
Yeah, I don't know what sorts of computer models they make out of whatever data they gather, so I have no idea if this is an artist's rendition or something more "real" either...
Dan Aris
Pardon me, but you're full of it.
I'm not an astrophysicist, or anything fancy like that (though I know some), but I do know this:
The best and brightest minds on Earth cannot say with certainty that something like this is "impossible" under the laws of physics, because all we've got is a highly imperfect model.
Refining that model is what science is all about. But we just haven't been able to study enough of the Universe in detail to be able to say what can't be out there.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something, whether it be ego or product.
Dan Aris
It's worse than that, ShaunC.
See, even if company V (rolling their eyes and sighing in exasperation) decides to be nice and let company C keep its promises, company A over there, though whose pipes 75% of the traffic from companies V & C must flow, is still trying to make a few extra (million) bucks screwing everybody else in the world, and they're throttling YouTube, but prioritizing MySpace because they paid up.
Dan Aris
Oh, I'm not saying I particularly endorse what they're doing; I just have a fetish for accuracy ;-)
Dan Aris
Public domain and copyright have nothing whatsoever to do with this, anonymous twit.
This is about trademarks.
Dan Aris
I heard this on NPR this morning, and they were reporting something rather different.
According to the story on the radio, J&J was suing not simply because the Red Cross is using the symbol—as they have for a century and more—but because they are licensing it to for-profit companies, breaking an agreement J&J made with them in 1895 or so.
...And, on checking the article, that's more or less exactly what it says. Congratulations to Swampash for being a total troll and not even reading the article he submitted. Or possibly kdawson for posting a self-written summary that utterly fails to grasp the point of the article.
Dan Aris