Do you really trust the average man to have the ability to objectively gather and evaluate data? Remember -- these are the people you went to school with.
Just because the other side does it, doesn't excuse your side from doing it. Dan Rather fucked up; you won't see me defending him over that issue. Yet here you are defending Hannity, O'Reilly, and Beck because, "well, Dan Rather did it too!" (And yes, despite what you say, they did give voice to and encourage the birthers -- fuck, Beck was the originator of the "I'm not saying he *is* a secret Muslim Kenyan terrorist plant, but why doesn't he just show us the birth certificate?" weasel line)
And I'll bet you were really up in arms about the Swift Boat ad campaign, too, because it was a lie -- right? I mean, you're such a defender of truth, and the reality is that that particular lie quite possibly cost Kerry the campaign; that's some major ramifications right there.
The difference between this and all of the stuff you listed? Evidence was found, the media covered it (in great detail), and very few people hold the belief that the Tea Party had anything to do with Loughner or the NYC car bombing -- and of those that do, NONE of them get any air time.
The birther issue has been debunked for years now, and 40% of Republicans *still* believe that Obama may be a secret Kenyan Muslim.
It's better than communism where people are punished for being better than their peers.
Wow, you actually believe this?
Like, say, in China, how the good gymnasts are punished by being forced to wait for their peers to catch up to them before they can move on to more difficult exercises? Oh wait, no, that's not how it works at all, and it doesn't have jack shit to do with communism.
Also, look up social mobility statistics. The USA really doesn't have it. It's feudalism all over again, except the serfs have access to much more entertainment now.
The folks whom are most motivated to ignore the elephant in the room, are traditionally the folks stuck with the philosophy that individuals are inherently meaningless and unproductive and only groups (led by them, of course) have ever accomplished anything, all the usual collectivist/statist stuff.
What folks are these? They sound like idiots. In fact, they sound exactly like the kind of straw man someone might set up to bolster their own point.
Compare and contrast this to the Windows world where the execute bit is tied to 3 letters in the file name and Windows will duly execute the file as soon as it's double-clicked. Malware in this system goes from machine to machine because Windows assumes that a file is permitted to execute if it whispers the correct shibboleth of "exe, com, scr" or what have you.
This hasn't been true for a *long* time. Go ahead; try downloading something and run it on any patched and updated XP, Vista, or Win7 box. At the very least, it will give you the "run unsigned application from ?", and you'll get multiple warnings on Vista or Win7.
The thing is, though, it doesn't matter how many warnings you throw up; users will simply keep clicking through everything until they get their shiny cursors. Of course, maybe Macs still have an advantage here, in that the OSX is the pinnacle of design perfection, so no user would ever *want* to download and install a purely cosmetic change.
I seem to recall Iraq being a country at one time. Or are we nitpicking a technicality that we were just going after Saddam, not Iraq, therefore the declaration of war was unnecessary?
Of course, this asshole thinks that America is more evil than the terrorists.
Wow, you really believe that? Maybe some of us just want to hold America (actually, the United States of America) to higher a standard than what we expect from terrorists?
Maybe try understanding what your debate opponent actually thinks before making assumptions. It's easy to think you've won an argument when you get to put words in someone else's mouth.
No, they really aren't. Children are precious to their parents and their families; to everyone else, they're just another one of the 7 billion people on the planet. Creating children isn't special either; we've got good evidence that that happens pretty much everywhere you have male and female people together, whether you want it to happen or not.
They deserve to live an unmolested childhood.
Certainly; but not because they're special. Adults deserve to live an unmolested adulthood, as well.
Child molestation, especially incest, statistics in the US are high-- and elsewhere, too.
And nearly all of it is perpetrated by someone close to the family of the molested children. Throwing people in jail because they downloaded naked pictures of a 5 year old isn't going to prevent that.
Really, I feel sorry for pedophiles. They clearly have mental issues; if it were a matter of choice, how could *anyone* come to the rational decision that, "oh hey, despite the demonization of the behavior, and the fact that getting even *accused* of it will completely ruin my life, I'm going to go ahead and like children."
Even worse is the equating of underage sex with pedophilia: someone who thinks a fully-developed 17-year-old is attractive is *not* a pedophile; the definition of pedophilia is an attraction to undeveloped children. If she's got a rack, that definition doesn't apply.
There are (and always will be) plenty economic overlords right here in the US. It's not just that China's buying us; someone else has to be doing the selling.
No, the problem is that *citizens* don't trust *anyone,* and ask the government to step in and protect them from the evil terrorists/pedophiles/drug addicts.
I'm interested to hear, what set of rights do you think liberals would take away from you?
I'd say right to bear arms, even though that hasn't been a campaign point for anyone for years, most of my conservative friends and relatives still think it's a big deal.
Also, the right to not let other people marry who they want. Believe it or not, a *lot* of people truly feel that they are somehow losing rights if someone else gains them. This actually applies to many things beyond just marriage.
B... but, they keep saying that the liberals/Democrats are in bed with big business! How can this be? Surely it must have really been the liberal judges that voted in favor of large corporations over the common man, and the liberal media is just distorting what really happened.
That's not the broadest definition that could be unreasonably imagined, we have a regime in the White House who thinks having some limited powers to regulate interstate commerce means they can force everyone to buy health insurance, as a cost of being alive.
No, you have a Republican congress that forced that issue into the health care bill (no single payer! No public option! That's soshulizm!), then turned around and decided that the issue they forced was bad. Republicans made 161 (passed; over 700 proposed) amendments to the health care bill to create the abomination we have now.
The sad thing is, this abomination is *still* better than what we had before, if your goal is to keep people from getting sick and/or dying from easily preventable things.
TL;DR: take your "regime in the White House" and shove it up your ass.
Doing 75 in a 25 is clearly dangerous. Doing 30 or 35 in a 25 less so, and in many circumstances, not really any more dangerous at all. However, the cop that's sitting in a speed trap to catch people doing a few miles over the limit to enforce "safety" isn't likely interested in how dangerous it is, he just wants to meet quotas.
My city just started work on a major arterial and put up a detour. The detour goes through a *school zone*. They've had cops patrolling it constantly since the detour went up. My friend (who lives only a few blocks away and drops her kids off at school every day) was doing 23 in the school zone and got a $216 ticket. Went to contest it in court and got a blanket, "we won't do anything about it because you were speeding in a school zone."
$216 for accidentally putting just a bit too much gas. It's ridiculous. That's more than a week's pay for some people. I can only imagine how much the cops have collected in the name of "safety." (suggestion: "safety" should involve NOT putting a detour through a school zone in the first place.)
Just because you want to go fast doesn't mean that it is safe. Civil engineers who work for the state Department of Transportation think quite a bit about things as mundane as speed limits and road gradients and lane sizes and line colors.
Oh bullshit. In central Idaho, on highway 95, there's a windy, low visibility stretch between Riggins and New Meadows that's 2 lanes with the side of a mountain on one edge and the Salmon River on the other side. The speed limit is 65.
In Washington, on I90 between Spokane and Seattle, it is 4-lanes, split. It is flat and basically straight for hundreds of miles. (Yes, you East Coasters -- hundreds of miles; stuff isn't very dense out here.) The speed limit? 70.
If you think that those limits were set by civil engineers, then at least *one* of the sets of civil engineers on those two roads is incompetent. Judging by the fact that the 65 mph stretch in Idaho isn't lined with burned out wrecks, even though it's traveled by thousands of college students driving from Boise to the University of Idaho over Thanksgiving/winter break every year, I'd guess that it's the Washington engineers -- or that the state of Washington likes the income from the traffic on I90.
I love it when people suggest possible fixes to the system and freetards come in and say that the best solution is to do nothing; conveniently ignoring things like child slave labor and exploitive employment practices of the past that were only solved by -- you guessed it -- restricting the free market. (the reply... "But those markets weren't really free! The children and employees weren't free to make choices, and if they had been, they would have never chosen those conditions! The market was already distorted by <insert some excuse> and those conditions no longer exist today!")
The free market is there to solve a problem. It only solves the problem in the way you want if you define the parameters of how you want it solved. It's called a constraint satisfaction problem. It will certainly find a solution. Whether that solution is worth shit or not depends ENTIRELY on the rules we set for it.
What version of IE were you running? You know that no IE released in the last 5 years just runs ActiveX controls off of the internet without asking, correct? Why did you grant it permission? Why would you even run it from an administrator account?
When the cable guy comes over and needs to "install" his stuff, I give him a limited account on a VM on little-used laptop. He installs his stuff there so that he can mark the checkbox on his sheet that says "I verified that everything was installed", I wipe the VM and we're done.
Good for you. You are not representative of the typical Apple customer base. You are not the customer that Apple is trying to capture with its advertising campaigns. You are not the clueless hipster that's been sold on image and says "it just works!" and then does logical gymnastics to justify why it's "just working!" when it clearly isn't.
They built the PS3, assumed that it would/could never be hacked, so then assumed that they could trust anything it sent them. They engineered their entire network around the fact that the client was trustworthy. They were lazy with security because they thought they had a secure path between themselves and the user.
Then someone hacked the PS3. Oops. Now the cat's out of the bag, and if you leave the network available, God knows what will happen. So their only option is to bring the entire thing down before anyone gets a chance to see just how badly they fucked it up.
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Let me ask you an honest question:
Do you really trust the average man to have the ability to objectively gather and evaluate data? Remember -- these are the people you went to school with.
--Jeremy
Just because the other side does it, doesn't excuse your side from doing it. Dan Rather fucked up; you won't see me defending him over that issue. Yet here you are defending Hannity, O'Reilly, and Beck because, "well, Dan Rather did it too!" (And yes, despite what you say, they did give voice to and encourage the birthers -- fuck, Beck was the originator of the "I'm not saying he *is* a secret Muslim Kenyan terrorist plant, but why doesn't he just show us the birth certificate?" weasel line)
And I'll bet you were really up in arms about the Swift Boat ad campaign, too, because it was a lie -- right? I mean, you're such a defender of truth, and the reality is that that particular lie quite possibly cost Kerry the campaign; that's some major ramifications right there.
--Jeremy
The difference between this and all of the stuff you listed? Evidence was found, the media covered it (in great detail), and very few people hold the belief that the Tea Party had anything to do with Loughner or the NYC car bombing -- and of those that do, NONE of them get any air time.
The birther issue has been debunked for years now, and 40% of Republicans *still* believe that Obama may be a secret Kenyan Muslim.
--Jeremy
Wow, you actually believe this?
Like, say, in China, how the good gymnasts are punished by being forced to wait for their peers to catch up to them before they can move on to more difficult exercises? Oh wait, no, that's not how it works at all, and it doesn't have jack shit to do with communism.
Also, look up social mobility statistics. The USA really doesn't have it. It's feudalism all over again, except the serfs have access to much more entertainment now.
--Jeremy
What folks are these? They sound like idiots. In fact, they sound exactly like the kind of straw man someone might set up to bolster their own point.
--Jeremy
This hasn't been true for a *long* time. Go ahead; try downloading something and run it on any patched and updated XP, Vista, or Win7 box. At the very least, it will give you the "run unsigned application from ?", and you'll get multiple warnings on Vista or Win7.
The thing is, though, it doesn't matter how many warnings you throw up; users will simply keep clicking through everything until they get their shiny cursors. Of course, maybe Macs still have an advantage here, in that the OSX is the pinnacle of design perfection, so no user would ever *want* to download and install a purely cosmetic change.
--Jeremy
I seem to recall Iraq being a country at one time. Or are we nitpicking a technicality that we were just going after Saddam, not Iraq, therefore the declaration of war was unnecessary?
--Jeremy
Wow, you really believe that? Maybe some of us just want to hold America (actually, the United States of America) to higher a standard than what we expect from terrorists?
Maybe try understanding what your debate opponent actually thinks before making assumptions. It's easy to think you've won an argument when you get to put words in someone else's mouth.
--Jeremy
And increase the price of the final product a bit; in the end, it's the customers that pay for everything.
--Jeremy
No, they really aren't. Children are precious to their parents and their families; to everyone else, they're just another one of the 7 billion people on the planet. Creating children isn't special either; we've got good evidence that that happens pretty much everywhere you have male and female people together, whether you want it to happen or not.
Certainly; but not because they're special. Adults deserve to live an unmolested adulthood, as well.
--Jeremy
And nearly all of it is perpetrated by someone close to the family of the molested children. Throwing people in jail because they downloaded naked pictures of a 5 year old isn't going to prevent that.
Really, I feel sorry for pedophiles. They clearly have mental issues; if it were a matter of choice, how could *anyone* come to the rational decision that, "oh hey, despite the demonization of the behavior, and the fact that getting even *accused* of it will completely ruin my life, I'm going to go ahead and like children."
Even worse is the equating of underage sex with pedophilia: someone who thinks a fully-developed 17-year-old is attractive is *not* a pedophile; the definition of pedophilia is an attraction to undeveloped children. If she's got a rack, that definition doesn't apply.
--Jeremy
There are (and always will be) plenty economic overlords right here in the US. It's not just that China's buying us; someone else has to be doing the selling.
--Jeremy
No, the problem is that *citizens* don't trust *anyone,* and ask the government to step in and protect them from the evil terrorists/pedophiles/drug addicts.
--Jeremy
I'd say right to bear arms, even though that hasn't been a campaign point for anyone for years, most of my conservative friends and relatives still think it's a big deal.
Also, the right to not let other people marry who they want. Believe it or not, a *lot* of people truly feel that they are somehow losing rights if someone else gains them. This actually applies to many things beyond just marriage.
--Jeremy
B... but, they keep saying that the liberals/Democrats are in bed with big business! How can this be? Surely it must have really been the liberal judges that voted in favor of large corporations over the common man, and the liberal media is just distorting what really happened.
--Jeremy
No, you have a Republican congress that forced that issue into the health care bill (no single payer! No public option! That's soshulizm!), then turned around and decided that the issue they forced was bad. Republicans made 161 (passed; over 700 proposed) amendments to the health care bill to create the abomination we have now.
The sad thing is, this abomination is *still* better than what we had before, if your goal is to keep people from getting sick and/or dying from easily preventable things.
TL;DR: take your "regime in the White House" and shove it up your ass.
--Jeremy
Doing 75 in a 25 is clearly dangerous. Doing 30 or 35 in a 25 less so, and in many circumstances, not really any more dangerous at all. However, the cop that's sitting in a speed trap to catch people doing a few miles over the limit to enforce "safety" isn't likely interested in how dangerous it is, he just wants to meet quotas.
My city just started work on a major arterial and put up a detour. The detour goes through a *school zone*. They've had cops patrolling it constantly since the detour went up. My friend (who lives only a few blocks away and drops her kids off at school every day) was doing 23 in the school zone and got a $216 ticket. Went to contest it in court and got a blanket, "we won't do anything about it because you were speeding in a school zone."
$216 for accidentally putting just a bit too much gas. It's ridiculous. That's more than a week's pay for some people. I can only imagine how much the cops have collected in the name of "safety." (suggestion: "safety" should involve NOT putting a detour through a school zone in the first place.)
--Jeremy
Oh bullshit. In central Idaho, on highway 95, there's a windy, low visibility stretch between Riggins and New Meadows that's 2 lanes with the side of a mountain on one edge and the Salmon River on the other side. The speed limit is 65.
In Washington, on I90 between Spokane and Seattle, it is 4-lanes, split. It is flat and basically straight for hundreds of miles. (Yes, you East Coasters -- hundreds of miles; stuff isn't very dense out here.) The speed limit? 70.
If you think that those limits were set by civil engineers, then at least *one* of the sets of civil engineers on those two roads is incompetent. Judging by the fact that the 65 mph stretch in Idaho isn't lined with burned out wrecks, even though it's traveled by thousands of college students driving from Boise to the University of Idaho over Thanksgiving/winter break every year, I'd guess that it's the Washington engineers -- or that the state of Washington likes the income from the traffic on I90.
--Jeremy
Cite a source where this happened or I call bullshit.
And booby traps have been illegal for a *long* time.
--Jeremy
Of course you don't think it's silly; you're a huge Apple fanboy.
--Jeremy
I love it when people suggest possible fixes to the system and freetards come in and say that the best solution is to do nothing; conveniently ignoring things like child slave labor and exploitive employment practices of the past that were only solved by -- you guessed it -- restricting the free market. (the reply... "But those markets weren't really free! The children and employees weren't free to make choices, and if they had been, they would have never chosen those conditions! The market was already distorted by <insert some excuse> and those conditions no longer exist today!")
The free market is there to solve a problem. It only solves the problem in the way you want if you define the parameters of how you want it solved. It's called a constraint satisfaction problem. It will certainly find a solution. Whether that solution is worth shit or not depends ENTIRELY on the rules we set for it.
--Jeremy
You have statistics to back up your anecdotes, I assume? No? You're just spewing bullshit?
Here's the closest thing I could find to statistics that compare the major shipping companies and the USPS:
USPS is actually better.
The rest of the links I could find were all just "U(S)PS/FedEx damaged my package!" bitching.
--Jeremy
What version of IE were you running? You know that no IE released in the last 5 years just runs ActiveX controls off of the internet without asking, correct? Why did you grant it permission? Why would you even run it from an administrator account?
When the cable guy comes over and needs to "install" his stuff, I give him a limited account on a VM on little-used laptop. He installs his stuff there so that he can mark the checkbox on his sheet that says "I verified that everything was installed", I wipe the VM and we're done.
--Jeremy
Good for you. You are not representative of the typical Apple customer base. You are not the customer that Apple is trying to capture with its advertising campaigns. You are not the clueless hipster that's been sold on image and says "it just works!" and then does logical gymnastics to justify why it's "just working!" when it clearly isn't.
--Jeremy
Here's my guess: Sony trusted their client.
They built the PS3, assumed that it would/could never be hacked, so then assumed that they could trust anything it sent them. They engineered their entire network around the fact that the client was trustworthy. They were lazy with security because they thought they had a secure path between themselves and the user.
Then someone hacked the PS3. Oops. Now the cat's out of the bag, and if you leave the network available, God knows what will happen. So their only option is to bring the entire thing down before anyone gets a chance to see just how badly they fucked it up.
--Jeremy