We all signed on to the same game: that is a representative democracy, the candidates know the rules and they know they go for electoral votes and not popular votes. Bush was the last person I wanted to see in office, but it's stupid to say it was invalid because you can't use the correct metric.
There were other issues that occurred in the US elections that make them suspect, but that does not excuse irregularities (especially much larger ones) in other people's elections.
I generally dislike Hatch, but this is one of the few things he did right (assuming there are no other gotchyas in this act). Government employees are there to serve the people not to serve the interests of some politician. When they are at home they can do as they wish, but bureaucracy is messy enough without bringing the politics in.
On the other hand, this person should be quite proud of his/her-self it takes some doing to get fired from a government job:P.
Except.... Ron Paul is not a 3rd party candidate so any talk of supporting him to improve the LP party is complete crock. I guess he may still end up being the LP candidate but I doubt it for two reasons:
1) He seems to have strayed from what my (and I think many other's) vision of what Libertarian is i.e. he believes in State's Rights at the cost of citizen's rights. He either fails to see that the States and the Fed govt are both equally capable of evil, or he has another agenda. and
2) It would probably cost him his Republican support, and possibly his seat in the House, because after all this is the party that likes to hang together.
Just having done my taxes today, I know Virginia already has an Internet tax. It is called the consumer tax and it applies to any purchases not paid sales tax on (but only if you spent more than $100 in such purchases a year). It's 5% (compared to a 4.5% sales tax) on purchases except for food which is only 2.5%.
The problem as I see it is that it is not very enforceable; it is up to the consumer to claim purchases and I don't think it shows up on the basic VA tax form, which most people use. I am not sure how many people even realize it exists, I only noticed it because a tax program asked me for any major non-sales taxed purchases.
He didn't amend it to make people vote for it, he amended it to make it less wrong. Politics isn't about winning absolutely it's about winning as much as you can. You have to look at a situation decide what you can and can't get out of it and get the best you can.
Obama pushed for the SAFE act (the EFF even endorsed this one), which had even stronger protections for civil liberties than the final PATRIOT Act Re-Authorization bill had. That failed. The House passed Bush's re-authorization bill and when it got to the Senate, he did filibuster it that time and it stopped there. So he and other senators amended it to look more like the SAFE act and it passed the Senate whereupon a committee had to merge the changes into the House version of the bill. When that happened some of his amendments were removed but enough were left in to bring people over and prevent a filibuster (hey politicians are smart like that!). At this point the game is over, he had probably promised to vote for it to bring in Republican support for his amendments, he didn't have enough support for a filibuster but at least some changes had been made.
Yes, exactly these things came to the federal level because they were being infringed upon. RP's bill is an attempt to override the previous findings in the court cases and prevent them from ever being heard at the federal level again. In affect RP is trying to legislate away parts of the constitution.
If the people in Alabama are too bible thumping then I might consider leaving (assuming they're only being annoying and not infringing upon my rights). If the government of Alabama is too bible thumping and wants to discriminate against me and restrict my rights that should be given to me as a citizen of the United Stats of America then THEY need to change, not I.
Filibustering is not the end all be all solution. The vote passed with 89 ayes, so there definitely wasn't support for a filibuster. It was a republican held congress, so that didn't help things either. If Obama had tried to filibuster and failed, he would have had no bargaining power to add those amendments.
I agree with you, the republicans are very good at sticking together and and the democrats are not so good at it. In general I prefer people who vote their conscience instead of their party and I wish everyone would play that way, but if the other guys do it then the Dems need to do it also to stop such crap. Anyways, at this point I think we're talking about blaming the Dems and not Obama and I am really not up for that because while, in general, I like the Dems more than the Republicans I can't and won't stand up for everything they do.
I don't see how it's the same. It's not the complete duplication of infrastructure. I grant you that everyone has farms, everyone has a packaging plant, everyone has a truck service. The difference here is that on farms they work to capacity so they're not wasting they're just producing more as they're all working at capacity (in theory). Furthermore, buying a farm and hiring a packaging plant and a distributor won' cost you billions of dollars, so they buy in for new companies is reasonable. In other words the situation itself does not necessarily hamper competition. With power lines it doesn't make sense to run 2(or more) power lines to every house, it doesn't make sense to use up twice the amount of land to run them other, twice the amount of copper (expensive stuff) to make the wires, twice the amount of wood to make poles. Laying lines would literally cost billions of dollars and the chance to make a profit would be so far down the road that it's likely that any company that tried would go bankrupt.
Don't be a fool. Obama only voted for it after working to take a lot of the teeth out of it. It's nice that Ron Paul can say he took ideological stance but the reality is that it was going to get passed so instead of sticking his fingers in his ears, Obama worked with other other legislators to do what he could do to reduce it's "evil"-ness.
Let me be clear: this compromise is not as good as the Senate version of the bill, nor is it as good as the SAFE Act that I have cosponsored. I suspect the vast majority of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle feel the same way. But, it's still better than what the House originally proposed. --http://obama.senate.gov/speech/060216-floor_statement_2/
Yes it sucks that it got renewed at all, but it was still a republican held congress at that point and Obama probably traded his support for for those changes, and without them we'd have a much worse law on the books.
But the practical effects of his policies are important. For instance if he had his way with his "We The People" Act he'd remove federal protection of separation of church and state, abortion, right to privacy in the bedroom, and gay marriage. It's nice to claim that it's all about states' rights, but the truth is, these things come up at national level, because these groups are having their rights limited by the states. Gay people don't infringe upon the state by having sex with each other (or in the case of my state two straight people having sex in any position other than the missionary position). In effect states' rights advocates are putting the states over the citizens in these issues. Should the states have the right to restrict how we have sex? Should the states be able to deny me a political office in Texas because I am atheist? It's okay to have a strong federal government and in fact is important especially when the states become trigger happy.
Doesn't that make it worse? It's insulting considering the internet is how he has rallied his fan base, and among the internet, some of the strongest libertarians are geeks. I didn't like RP's policies before, but I think the hollowness of his answers here and the very politic manner in which they are answered without giving a single real answer is insulting. Don't apologize for him, that's his job.
I mean, wouldn't it be liberating to wake up and get an electric bill for 50c/KW hour because of complete de-regulation of the electricity generation market?
Such a huge premium wouldn't attract new companies wishing to profit? More companies in the same market doesn't cause competition to increase? Increased competition doesn't cause prices to fall? Repeat the cycle some times and you'll reach the correct offer vs. demand price for electricity.
Are you daft? If the government pulls out of regulating the electricity market, the power lines have to belong to someone and you can be damn sure that without regulation no power company is going to allow competition. The same with ISPs and roadways. I guess you'd propose that these new companies spend billions of dollars digging new power lines laying new data lines and roadways, just so that they can compete, it wouldn't happen and people would be horribly exploited. Not to mention having two of everything would create a huge sink in both economic and natural resources. This just wouldn't work and there's no way to enforce competition in such a system without government intervention.
We could go into hospitals as that as the perennial examples against free market systems, but I am sure everyone has heard these, besides I think the electricity/roadways/data lines make a an even better example.
The truth is free market is a very limited idea like trying to solve a physics problem assuming the problem exists in an environment without air and without friction, it's happy thoughts all the way until you really that it's not real life.
Please explain how is support of "Defense of Marriage Act" is not one based in religious views. He said it was okay to legislate away the "Full Faith and Credit Clause" of the constitution. Furthermore, please explain how his "We the People Act" is not an attempt to overturn Lawrence v. Texas which is wholy a religion versus govt issue. It also has the potential to overturn Scopes Monkey since it limits the courts ability to protect separation of church and state.
Now I know you're gonna say "RP OMG STATES RIGHTS LULZ", except we know that the states want to restrict the citizens from those rights that's why those court cases occurred. States' rights are fine but not when they are put before the rights of the citizens.
But... Playing sports improves your physical endurance. Working on a car improves your knowledge of mechanics, electronics, etc. Hiking a new trail every week lets you see new things in the world. Getting married and having a baby is procreation (do I need to explain how that is useful?). Going to school and getting a degree means being smarter, richer, better of in all ways. (I know you didn't mention this one, but this is the #1 thing I see people screw over for MMORPGs)
Self-improvement is not worthless to one's self. Sure it's worthless to the world, but you have to balance civic "worth" vs. personal worth. WoW offers almost no chance for self-improvement. While you can argue the social aspect of the game gives you a way of meeting new people or interacting with old friends, it turns out that most people when offered an anonymous mask act like drama queens and morons, so even that aspect is quite limited.
But I'll agree with you that WoW has about the usefulness of watching TV.
While he the grandparent was uncouth about it, he is right, Ron Paul has a lot of bad ideas.
Ron Paul runs on a platform of states rights and openly says it is so the states can remove those rights currently protected by the Federal government. There is nothing in the earth or the stars that proclaims a state government would be any more sane with guaranteeing our freedoms than a federal government. In fact if you go into the South you'll find state's rights as an excuse for racism as much as anything else, if you go to the bible belt you'll find state's rights as an excuse to teach creationism Christianity using public funds while ignoring the scientific aspects of evolution that would be just as if not more important to a growing mind. Ron Paul doesn't want to limit the government to protect the citizen he wants to limit it to restrict the citizen.
Ron Paul runs on a platform of strict-constitutionalism but he supports amendments to tear down the Full Faith and Credit clause (src: http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul207.html). He wants to limit the ability of the supreme court to protect separation of church and state, the right to an abortion, the right for people to have sex with whomever they wish (be it man and women out of wedlock, or woman and woman, or a married couple getting a little freaky) and even the right to marry. (src: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:H.R.300.IH:;)
Ron Paul wants to return the legislating of environmental policies to states, but fails to recognize that pollution in one state can cause serious or worse implications in other states.
Ron Paul wants to remove the IRS, but seems to have no firm plan on how to make up lost funds. In some places he has said he won't replace it with anything, in some places he claims to use what amounts to a regressive tax policy to replace it meaning people who make less end up paying more percentage-wise (this is in direct contradiction to reforms suggested by billionaire Warren Buffet).
Again in his currency policy he is unclear, he wants to return us to a system similar to the gold standard and even endorsing multiple currencies. He seems not to recognize the strength of having one clear currency and the fact hat our economy has been for the most part more resilient because we stopped using the gold standard.
There are a number of other issues with his platform, but I'll end on a conciliatory note with the parent. If all RP does is stop the drug war we will be better off, because if he does even 1/10th of the other things we will not be better off.
Apple doesn't cover hinges or plastics under warranty either (there are a few lines that had issues, that are exceptions - but that is the same with every manufacturer). Most manufacturers will also replace a machine that has issues that seem to be unresolvable (4 or 5 unrelated problems).
I can't speak for hinges, but I can speak for the plastic. I had an original Rev. A G4 Powerbook, the one that was eventually replaced, in which they replaced the plastic bezel twice. I guess I should explain what my problems where. The Rev. A Powerbooks were really made of Titanium, with a very minimal internal skeleton. Well the problem with Titanium, and the reason it is good for use in airplanes is that it's a very flexible metal. I like to be able to put my laptop in a neoprene sleeve and then toss it in my backpack and go. I had 2 re-occurring issues with the powerbook: some connectors in the top of the screen would come loose causing a column of pixels to fail, and the plastic bezel, right where the headphone jack is drilled into it had a weak spot and would crack from time to time. The LCD screen issue was much more common and IIRC I sent it in for repairs on that 6 or 7 times.
Embarrassingly, I never asked for outright replacement, until I talked to the campus Apple rep who told me I should ask for an outright replacement and that Apple was generally good with such matters. At this point I thought he was kidding me because I was and still am a cynic. Anyways, he had me write up a quick email of the issues I had and he forwarded it on to the QA dept and I had someone call me in a day or so. They set up me up with the closest equivalent to what I had which was a machine with was much faster as they had been through a few upgrades in the mean time.
Regardless, as much as I love Macs (and I honestly do), though their service is usually exceptional, even their standard warranty doesnt cover broken plastics, hinges, abuse, damage from drops or liquid spills.
I don't expect them to cover a drop or liquid spills, unless the computer can run, jump, and play with the neighborhood kids. The truth is, it is a warranty and not an insurance program. I do have insurance, because I once did drop my laptop and had to replace the screen -- the most costly single mistake I have ever made -- but it wasn't Apple's fault so I couldn't expect a warranty program to cover it.
Soooo glad, I have an Apple and most of my family has Dell's. It's been so easy to get repairs done, none of the hassles you're describing. I have had Apple return my machine from their repair facility literally over the weekend (sent out on Friday and got it on Monday afternoon), although normally it took about a week. I had lemon that got sent off many times, so I have a lot of experience with them. In the end they even replaced the machine with a much faster model when I pointed out all the trouble it had been giving me.
I have never had problems with dual booting or running this or that (even when they were PPC, before this boot camp stuff when it was ALL unsupported). They always took the machine, as long as they had an OSX partition to work with they were happy and didn't care what else was on the machine.
And that's fine by me, I don't expect them to learn Linux to repair my machine. I think if they had run into a Linux only system and needed to boot it up, they might have restored OSX or sent it back asking me to do so, which again is okay, because they warned me that they might lose my data. None of this voided warranty BS. Of course Apple is smart enough to make OSX install CDs have all the diagnostic stuff built in, so they may not even have done that.
My family's experience with Dell's customer service has been equally good. I had a friend get room service repair on his laptop, which I admit I was envious of:).
HP is much as you describe, they don't even offer backup service (I believe Dell does, I know Apple does). I can't see why not, it's immensely useful to paranoids who don't know how to back things up (as in image), plus I am sure that the companies that offer the service for $50 a pop make a fairly decent extra profit.
"Excuse me" but you know nothing about processes involved with ozone-CFC interaction. The reason it is a "seasonal" thing is because two things only happen during the Antarctic winter: polar stratospheric clouds(PSCs), and the Anarctic seasonal vortex. The former acts as a catalyst greatly increasing the chemical processes and the latter serves to concentrate CFCs in an area where things like PSCs happen.
I have pointed out the flaws in these Anti-Ozone-Hole mythologies before and it's a waste of my time to rehash it. Feel free to go back in my comment history a ways and find them, or read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_hole. That is if you are willing to consider all of the data out there.
I will cover the Mt. Pinatubo argument though. Chlorine does not equal CFCs, Chlorine by itself rarely makes it up to the ozone layer. Now by shear quantity Mt. Pinatubo was able to have an effect on the Ozone layer, but not nearly as much chlorine actually got up there as you think, nothing on the order of "more REACTIVE Chlorine into the upper atmosphere than we ever dumped into the environment with Freons."
Yes the researchers who have spent months either flying over the South Pole or living near it know about lack of sun. In fact, the amount of ozone in the ozone layer has generally decreased over years, which shows that any sort of seasonal oscillations are BROKEN. The truth is, Ozone is a very stable compound and we should not be seeing the sort of dips that we do now if it were just seasonal oscillations.
To be honest there is A LOT of good science behind the 'freon theory'. It is one of the most well known and understood chemical process in the atmosphere. These people have years of experience and research to back up what they say. They are not crazy. Just because you have a mass of neurons in your skull doesn't mean that it automatically makes you smart enough to just "know" better than them(*). Nor does this mean that a talk show host has enough experience to debunk them. I invite you to actually read papers and do research rather than spout some conspiracy theorist or "bad science" line. (When was the last time you produced good science, much less in the field of atmospheric science? Anyways)
It takes years to repair the dips in the ozone layer (in fact if we stopped creating CFCs now it would take a century or more to return to natural levels).
(*) I am not saying you should turn your brain off either, just actually read all the data out there before you go on a crazy misguided attempted debunking spree.
It's nice that you can make money working on open source software, it's even nicer that I can make money working on it, but in truth it is not a universally successful business model. Most open source models that make money, make money off of support. There are so many little apps that are extremely useful to me that would just not make money off of this kind of business model. Donation-ware is nice but human beings are generally either lazy or cheap and these models rarely ever offer the developer enough money to live on. And right now I am blanking on other open source business models, so I'll just leave it at that.
There are also plenty of reasons to keep proprietary systems closed source. Yes, I know that binary can be disassembled and eventually nearly every system can be reverse-engineered, but it does help give the company an edge for some amount of time. I do realize that many companies use this as an excuse to do bad things, but sometimes it is valid.
Now, I am not arguing that open source is a crappy model. In truth, it works in a lot of places, but it's not for every software project. It's nice that RMS can claim that he's living his version of the high life on the open source model, but in truth his money is made from speaking engagements where he spouts a rather black and white fundamentalist view.
The FSF wants RMS to be equated to the Martin Luther King or Abraham Lincoln of software, but in reality to those of us in the middle he comes off more as a Louis Farrakhan. The truth is closed source is not a crime against humanity, it might be rude but it is not a killing offense.
The license you choose is a deeply personal choice as the software belongs to you, but you should not be using that leverage to hurt your users, make your software stable and compatible and I'll be happy
Fair enough. I doubt they had such a system in place at the time as they were not standard issue. The issue then is now you have confidential/classified information on an easily losable/stealable device. I am not sure how the system works, are locally stored emails stored encrypted? Does a password have to be entered every time you look at email? If either of these is anything but "No" then it shouldn't be trusted for secure information
Of course none of this/really/ secure to the extent that Secret/Top Secret information requires. Anything that's outside a skiff and hence a faraday cage or on a public network is not safe in the sense that the law requires. But that level is (hopefully) another level above any sorts of emails getting forwarded anywhere.
I am not surprised. The US Government does not particularly like them either. They are not considered secure devices by anyone's standard. I used to work at a large contractor and whenever some idiot manager had accidentally forwarded their classified emails to their to a blackberry there was always a lot of yelling and head rolling. The person had to basically give up their PDA for a week while the security guys sanitized the device. I believe the emails are actually stored on blackberry's emails servers so they even had to contact them to remove said emails.
If I were worried about security I wouldn't think twice about banning them, no matter what country the mail servers were in. That being said, our govt and I am sure the French govt have skiffs for the really higher classification stuff.
But see NASA isn't a dead end. No company is going to operate at a $119 Billion loss(assuming it only costs $120B, but that could be as bad as the trillions) to get to mars, when it has no current current practical value. NASA exists because there is no company that could operate with such losses when there is no immediate commercial gain. That's not to say that going to Mars doesn't have amazing repercussions for science or giving the human race a place to expand to. It is a good goal for sometime in the future but NASA has more practical considerations that should not be dropped just for Mars.
NASA makes contributions into aeronautical research both in safety and in generating new technology and in environmental science. The first is how we stay competitive with other nations who's aerospace industries are heavily supported by their government (China, Europe, et al). The second is extremely important for anyone who believes that we have air, water, dirt and life on planet Earth irregardless of climate change.
So if you're willing to see our aerospace industry collapse, our knowledge of the Earth stagnate AND real space exploration fail then we can go your way, otherwise you're just not being realistic. Of course we could just give NASA the money it needs for all jobs, but this is probably not feasible at the moment considering the mismanagement of our taxes either fighting wars that we probably should not be in, or through pork barrel BS.
His previous work does not guarantee his correctness on this issue. But I, nor you, nor 99% of the people posting here, have the expertise to discern the absolute correctness of his statements. Instead, as a skeptical reader it is our job to find as many things wrong with his article as possible and then compare that with other accepted works. Some of the things I look for in a paper: works cited, previous work in the area, and how it compares to the mainstream theories (which could be wrong but they are usually mainstream for a reason).
In the end, one of the best ways to tell if his ideas hold any weight among his "peers" (in the climatology community) is if he is well quoted in other papers.
Admittedly, I have only read the above article and not the paper itself, but this wreaks of the same sort of silliness as the numerous emails I used to get from random people trying to get their papers read about how Einstein was wrong about the speed of light or relativity or some such.
Searching through for his previous works he has never published anything on climatology. This would be make his speculations well outside his field of study. Now, being a physicist myself I know that knowing physics gives you better understanding many other things. But, his one article doesn't get precedence over the mounds and mounds of other published work by people in the fields of climatology, environmental sciences, atmospheric sciences, etc. who are considered experts and are well published.
If anything he might just be mentioning global warming to get money, as some/.'ers assumed about the deep sea temperature oddities article a while ago. Both sides can do it you know:).
Patrik
Slashdot Mirror
We all signed on to the same game: that is a representative democracy, the candidates know the rules and they know they go for electoral votes and not popular votes. Bush was the last person I wanted to see in office, but it's stupid to say it was invalid because you can't use the correct metric.
There were other issues that occurred in the US elections that make them suspect, but that does not excuse irregularities (especially much larger ones) in other people's elections.
Ah, probably explains why I am not completely reviled by it then...
I generally dislike Hatch, but this is one of the few things he did right (assuming there are no other gotchyas in this act). Government employees are there to serve the people not to serve the interests of some politician. When they are at home they can do as they wish, but bureaucracy is messy enough without bringing the politics in.
:P.
On the other hand, this person should be quite proud of his/her-self it takes some doing to get fired from a government job
Except.... Ron Paul is not a 3rd party candidate so any talk of supporting him to improve the LP party is complete crock. I guess he may still end up being the LP candidate but I doubt it for two reasons:
1) He seems to have strayed from what my (and I think many other's) vision of what Libertarian is i.e. he believes in State's Rights at the cost of citizen's rights. He either fails to see that the States and the Fed govt are both equally capable of evil, or he has another agenda. and
2) It would probably cost him his Republican support, and possibly his seat in the House, because after all this is the party that likes to hang together.
Just having done my taxes today, I know Virginia already has an Internet tax. It is called the consumer tax and it applies to any purchases not paid sales tax on (but only if you spent more than $100 in such purchases a year). It's 5% (compared to a 4.5% sales tax) on purchases except for food which is only 2.5%.
The problem as I see it is that it is not very enforceable; it is up to the consumer to claim purchases and I don't think it shows up on the basic VA tax form, which most people use. I am not sure how many people even realize it exists, I only noticed it because a tax program asked me for any major non-sales taxed purchases.
He didn't amend it to make people vote for it, he amended it to make it less wrong. Politics isn't about winning absolutely it's about winning as much as you can. You have to look at a situation decide what you can and can't get out of it and get the best you can.
Obama pushed for the SAFE act (the EFF even endorsed this one), which had even stronger protections for civil liberties than the final PATRIOT Act Re-Authorization bill had. That failed. The House passed Bush's re-authorization bill and when it got to the Senate, he did filibuster it that time and it stopped there. So he and other senators amended it to look more like the SAFE act and it passed the Senate whereupon a committee had to merge the changes into the House version of the bill. When that happened some of his amendments were removed but enough were left in to bring people over and prevent a filibuster (hey politicians are smart like that!). At this point the game is over, he had probably promised to vote for it to bring in Republican support for his amendments, he didn't have enough support for a filibuster but at least some changes had been made.
http://www.barackobama.com/factcheck/2008/01/05/fact_check_obamas_consistent_p_1.php
Yes, exactly these things came to the federal level because they were being infringed upon. RP's bill is an attempt to override the previous findings in the court cases and prevent them from ever being heard at the federal level again. In affect RP is trying to legislate away parts of the constitution.
If the people in Alabama are too bible thumping then I might consider leaving (assuming they're only being annoying and not infringing upon my rights). If the government of Alabama is too bible thumping and wants to discriminate against me and restrict my rights that should be given to me as a citizen of the United Stats of America then THEY need to change, not I.
Filibustering is not the end all be all solution. The vote passed with 89 ayes, so there definitely wasn't support for a filibuster. It was a republican held congress, so that didn't help things either. If Obama had tried to filibuster and failed, he would have had no bargaining power to add those amendments.
I agree with you, the republicans are very good at sticking together and and the democrats are not so good at it. In general I prefer people who vote their conscience instead of their party and I wish everyone would play that way, but if the other guys do it then the Dems need to do it also to stop such crap. Anyways, at this point I think we're talking about blaming the Dems and not Obama and I am really not up for that because while, in general, I like the Dems more than the Republicans I can't and won't stand up for everything they do.
I don't see how it's the same. It's not the complete duplication of infrastructure. I grant you that everyone has farms, everyone has a packaging plant, everyone has a truck service. The difference here is that on farms they work to capacity so they're not wasting they're just producing more as they're all working at capacity (in theory). Furthermore, buying a farm and hiring a packaging plant and a distributor won' cost you billions of dollars, so they buy in for new companies is reasonable. In other words the situation itself does not necessarily hamper competition. With power lines it doesn't make sense to run 2(or more) power lines to every house, it doesn't make sense to use up twice the amount of land to run them other, twice the amount of copper (expensive stuff) to make the wires, twice the amount of wood to make poles. Laying lines would literally cost billions of dollars and the chance to make a profit would be so far down the road that it's likely that any company that tried would go bankrupt.
Yes it sucks that it got renewed at all, but it was still a republican held congress at that point and Obama probably traded his support for for those changes, and without them we'd have a much worse law on the books.
But the practical effects of his policies are important. For instance if he had his way with his "We The People" Act he'd remove federal protection of separation of church and state, abortion, right to privacy in the bedroom, and gay marriage. It's nice to claim that it's all about states' rights, but the truth is, these things come up at national level, because these groups are having their rights limited by the states. Gay people don't infringe upon the state by having sex with each other (or in the case of my state two straight people having sex in any position other than the missionary position). In effect states' rights advocates are putting the states over the citizens in these issues. Should the states have the right to restrict how we have sex? Should the states be able to deny me a political office in Texas because I am atheist? It's okay to have a strong federal government and in fact is important especially when the states become trigger happy.
Doesn't that make it worse? It's insulting considering the internet is how he has rallied his fan base, and among the internet, some of the strongest libertarians are geeks. I didn't like RP's policies before, but I think the hollowness of his answers here and the very politic manner in which they are answered without giving a single real answer is insulting. Don't apologize for him, that's his job.
Are you daft? If the government pulls out of regulating the electricity market, the power lines have to belong to someone and you can be damn sure that without regulation no power company is going to allow competition. The same with ISPs and roadways. I guess you'd propose that these new companies spend billions of dollars digging new power lines laying new data lines and roadways, just so that they can compete, it wouldn't happen and people would be horribly exploited. Not to mention having two of everything would create a huge sink in both economic and natural resources. This just wouldn't work and there's no way to enforce competition in such a system without government intervention.
We could go into hospitals as that as the perennial examples against free market systems, but I am sure everyone has heard these, besides I think the electricity/roadways/data lines make a an even better example.
The truth is free market is a very limited idea like trying to solve a physics problem assuming the problem exists in an environment without air and without friction, it's happy thoughts all the way until you really that it's not real life.
Please explain how is support of "Defense of Marriage Act" is not one based in religious views. He said it was okay to legislate away the "Full Faith and Credit Clause" of the constitution. Furthermore, please explain how his "We the People Act" is not an attempt to overturn Lawrence v. Texas which is wholy a religion versus govt issue. It also has the potential to overturn Scopes Monkey since it limits the courts ability to protect separation of church and state.
Now I know you're gonna say "RP OMG STATES RIGHTS LULZ", except we know that the states want to restrict the citizens from those rights that's why those court cases occurred. States' rights are fine but not when they are put before the rights of the citizens.
But...
Playing sports improves your physical endurance.
Working on a car improves your knowledge of mechanics, electronics, etc.
Hiking a new trail every week lets you see new things in the world.
Getting married and having a baby is procreation (do I need to explain how that is useful?).
Going to school and getting a degree means being smarter, richer, better of in all ways. (I know you didn't mention this one, but this is the #1 thing I see people screw over for MMORPGs)
Self-improvement is not worthless to one's self. Sure it's worthless to the world, but you have to balance civic "worth" vs. personal worth. WoW offers almost no chance for self-improvement. While you can argue the social aspect of the game gives you a way of meeting new people or interacting with old friends, it turns out that most people when offered an anonymous mask act like drama queens and morons, so even that aspect is quite limited.
But I'll agree with you that WoW has about the usefulness of watching TV.
While he the grandparent was uncouth about it, he is right, Ron Paul has a lot of bad ideas.
Ron Paul runs on a platform of states rights and openly says it is so the states can remove those rights currently protected by the Federal government. There is nothing in the earth or the stars that proclaims a state government would be any more sane with guaranteeing our freedoms than a federal government. In fact if you go into the South you'll find state's rights as an excuse for racism as much as anything else, if you go to the bible belt you'll find state's rights as an excuse to teach creationism Christianity using public funds while ignoring the scientific aspects of evolution that would be just as if not more important to a growing mind. Ron Paul doesn't want to limit the government to protect the citizen he wants to limit it to restrict the citizen.
Ron Paul runs on a platform of strict-constitutionalism but he supports amendments to tear down the Full Faith and Credit clause (src: http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul207.html). He wants to limit the ability of the supreme court to protect separation of church and state, the right to an abortion, the right for people to have sex with whomever they wish (be it man and women out of wedlock, or woman and woman, or a married couple getting a little freaky) and even the right to marry. (src: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c110:H.R.300.IH:;)
Ron Paul wants to return the legislating of environmental policies to states, but fails to recognize that pollution in one state can cause serious or worse implications in other states.
Ron Paul wants to remove the IRS, but seems to have no firm plan on how to make up lost funds. In some places he has said he won't replace it with anything, in some places he claims to use what amounts to a regressive tax policy to replace it meaning people who make less end up paying more percentage-wise (this is in direct contradiction to reforms suggested by billionaire Warren Buffet).
Again in his currency policy he is unclear, he wants to return us to a system similar to the gold standard and even endorsing multiple currencies. He seems not to recognize the strength of having one clear currency and the fact hat our economy has been for the most part more resilient because we stopped using the gold standard.
There are a number of other issues with his platform, but I'll end on a conciliatory note with the parent. If all RP does is stop the drug war we will be better off, because if he does even 1/10th of the other things we will not be better off.
I can't speak for hinges, but I can speak for the plastic. I had an original Rev. A G4 Powerbook, the one that was eventually replaced, in which they replaced the plastic bezel twice. I guess I should explain what my problems where. The Rev. A Powerbooks were really made of Titanium, with a very minimal internal skeleton. Well the problem with Titanium, and the reason it is good for use in airplanes is that it's a very flexible metal. I like to be able to put my laptop in a neoprene sleeve and then toss it in my backpack and go. I had 2 re-occurring issues with the powerbook: some connectors in the top of the screen would come loose causing a column of pixels to fail, and the plastic bezel, right where the headphone jack is drilled into it had a weak spot and would crack from time to time. The LCD screen issue was much more common and IIRC I sent it in for repairs on that 6 or 7 times.
Embarrassingly, I never asked for outright replacement, until I talked to the campus Apple rep who told me I should ask for an outright replacement and that Apple was generally good with such matters. At this point I thought he was kidding me because I was and still am a cynic. Anyways, he had me write up a quick email of the issues I had and he forwarded it on to the QA dept and I had someone call me in a day or so. They set up me up with the closest equivalent to what I had which was a machine with was much faster as they had been through a few upgrades in the mean time.
I don't expect them to cover a drop or liquid spills, unless the computer can run, jump, and play with the neighborhood kids. The truth is, it is a warranty and not an insurance program. I do have insurance, because I once did drop my laptop and had to replace the screen -- the most costly single mistake I have ever made -- but it wasn't Apple's fault so I couldn't expect a warranty program to cover it.
Patrik
Soooo glad, I have an Apple and most of my family has Dell's. It's been so easy to get repairs done, none of the hassles you're describing. I have had Apple return my machine from their repair facility literally over the weekend (sent out on Friday and got it on Monday afternoon), although normally it took about a week. I had lemon that got sent off many times, so I have a lot of experience with them. In the end they even replaced the machine with a much faster model when I pointed out all the trouble it had been giving me.
:).
I have never had problems with dual booting or running this or that (even when they were PPC, before this boot camp stuff when it was ALL unsupported). They always took the machine, as long as they had an OSX partition to work with they were happy and didn't care what else was on the machine.
And that's fine by me, I don't expect them to learn Linux to repair my machine. I think if they had run into a Linux only system and needed to boot it up, they might have restored OSX or sent it back asking me to do so, which again is okay, because they warned me that they might lose my data. None of this voided warranty BS. Of course Apple is smart enough to make OSX install CDs have all the diagnostic stuff built in, so they may not even have done that.
My family's experience with Dell's customer service has been equally good. I had a friend get room service repair on his laptop, which I admit I was envious of
HP is much as you describe, they don't even offer backup service (I believe Dell does, I know Apple does). I can't see why not, it's immensely useful to paranoids who don't know how to back things up (as in image), plus I am sure that the companies that offer the service for $50 a pop make a fairly decent extra profit.
Patrik
"Excuse me" but you know nothing about processes involved with ozone-CFC interaction. The reason it is a "seasonal" thing is because two things only happen during the Antarctic winter: polar stratospheric clouds(PSCs), and the Anarctic seasonal vortex. The former acts as a catalyst greatly increasing the chemical processes and the latter serves to concentrate CFCs in an area where things like PSCs happen.
I have pointed out the flaws in these Anti-Ozone-Hole mythologies before and it's a waste of my time to rehash it. Feel free to go back in my comment history a ways and find them, or read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozone_hole. That is if you are willing to consider all of the data out there.
I will cover the Mt. Pinatubo argument though. Chlorine does not equal CFCs, Chlorine by itself rarely makes it up to the ozone layer. Now by shear quantity Mt. Pinatubo was able to have an effect on the Ozone layer, but not nearly as much chlorine actually got up there as you think, nothing on the order of "more REACTIVE Chlorine into the upper atmosphere than we ever dumped into the environment with Freons."
Yes the researchers who have spent months either flying over the South Pole or living near it know about lack of sun. In fact, the amount of ozone in the ozone layer has generally decreased over years, which shows that any sort of seasonal oscillations are BROKEN. The truth is, Ozone is a very stable compound and we should not be seeing the sort of dips that we do now if it were just seasonal oscillations.
To be honest there is A LOT of good science behind the 'freon theory'. It is one of the most well known and understood chemical process in the atmosphere. These people have years of experience and research to back up what they say. They are not crazy. Just because you have a mass of neurons in your skull doesn't mean that it automatically makes you smart enough to just "know" better than them(*). Nor does this mean that a talk show host has enough experience to debunk them. I invite you to actually read papers and do research rather than spout some conspiracy theorist or "bad science" line. (When was the last time you produced good science, much less in the field of atmospheric science? Anyways)
It takes years to repair the dips in the ozone layer (in fact if we stopped creating CFCs now it would take a century or more to return to natural levels).
(*) I am not saying you should turn your brain off either, just actually read all the data out there before you go on a crazy misguided attempted debunking spree.
Patrik
It's nice that you can make money working on open source software, it's even nicer that I can make money working on it, but in truth it is not a universally successful business model. Most open source models that make money, make money off of support. There are so many little apps that are extremely useful to me that would just not make money off of this kind of business model. Donation-ware is nice but human beings are generally either lazy or cheap and these models rarely ever offer the developer enough money to live on. And right now I am blanking on other open source business models, so I'll just leave it at that.
There are also plenty of reasons to keep proprietary systems closed source. Yes, I know that binary can be disassembled and eventually nearly every system can be reverse-engineered, but it does help give the company an edge for some amount of time. I do realize that many companies use this as an excuse to do bad things, but sometimes it is valid.
Now, I am not arguing that open source is a crappy model. In truth, it works in a lot of places, but it's not for every software project. It's nice that RMS can claim that he's living his version of the high life on the open source model, but in truth his money is made from speaking engagements where he spouts a rather black and white fundamentalist view.
The FSF wants RMS to be equated to the Martin Luther King or Abraham Lincoln of software, but in reality to those of us in the middle he comes off more as a Louis Farrakhan. The truth is closed source is not a crime against humanity, it might be rude but it is not a killing offense.
The license you choose is a deeply personal choice as the software belongs to you, but you should not be using that leverage to hurt your users, make your software stable and compatible and I'll be happy
Patrik
Fair enough. I doubt they had such a system in place at the time as they were not standard issue. The issue then is now you have confidential/classified information on an easily losable/stealable device. I am not sure how the system works, are locally stored emails stored encrypted? Does a password have to be entered every time you look at email? If either of these is anything but "No" then it shouldn't be trusted for secure information
/really/ secure to the extent that Secret/Top Secret information requires. Anything that's outside a skiff and hence a faraday cage or on a public network is not safe in the sense that the law requires. But that level is (hopefully) another level above any sorts of emails getting forwarded anywhere.
Of course none of this
Patrik
I am not surprised. The US Government does not particularly like them either. They are not considered secure devices by anyone's standard. I used to work at a large contractor and whenever some idiot manager had accidentally forwarded their classified emails to their to a blackberry there was always a lot of yelling and head rolling. The person had to basically give up their PDA for a week while the security guys sanitized the device. I believe the emails are actually stored on blackberry's emails servers so they even had to contact them to remove said emails.
If I were worried about security I wouldn't think twice about banning them, no matter what country the mail servers were in. That being said, our govt and I am sure the French govt have skiffs for the really higher classification stuff.
Patrik
But see NASA isn't a dead end. No company is going to operate at a $119 Billion loss(assuming it only costs $120B, but that could be as bad as the trillions) to get to mars, when it has no current current practical value. NASA exists because there is no company that could operate with such losses when there is no immediate commercial gain. That's not to say that going to Mars doesn't have amazing repercussions for science or giving the human race a place to expand to. It is a good goal for sometime in the future but NASA has more practical considerations that should not be dropped just for Mars.
NASA makes contributions into aeronautical research both in safety and in generating new technology and in environmental science. The first is how we stay competitive with other nations who's aerospace industries are heavily supported by their government (China, Europe, et al). The second is extremely important for anyone who believes that we have air, water, dirt and life on planet Earth irregardless of climate change.
So if you're willing to see our aerospace industry collapse, our knowledge of the Earth stagnate AND real space exploration fail then we can go your way, otherwise you're just not being realistic. Of course we could just give NASA the money it needs for all jobs, but this is probably not feasible at the moment considering the mismanagement of our taxes either fighting wars that we probably should not be in, or through pork barrel BS.
Patrik
His previous work does not guarantee his correctness on this issue. But I, nor you, nor 99% of the people posting here, have the expertise to discern the absolute correctness of his statements. Instead, as a skeptical reader it is our job to find as many things wrong with his article as possible and then compare that with other accepted works. Some of the things I look for in a paper: works cited, previous work in the area, and how it compares to the mainstream theories (which could be wrong but they are usually mainstream for a reason).
In the end, one of the best ways to tell if his ideas hold any weight among his "peers" (in the climatology community) is if he is well quoted in other papers.
Admittedly, I have only read the above article and not the paper itself, but this wreaks of the same sort of silliness as the numerous emails I used to get from random people trying to get their papers read about how Einstein was wrong about the speed of light or relativity or some such.
Patrik
Searching through for his previous works he has never published anything on climatology. This would be make his speculations well outside his field of study. Now, being a physicist myself I know that knowing physics gives you better understanding many other things. But, his one article doesn't get precedence over the mounds and mounds of other published work by people in the fields of climatology, environmental sciences, atmospheric sciences, etc. who are considered experts and are well published. If anything he might just be mentioning global warming to get money, as some /.'ers assumed about the deep sea temperature oddities article a while ago. Both sides can do it you know :).
Patrik