Oddly enough, the US used to have a robust rail system (at least in the northeast sector).
What happened? Well, the US government started subsidizing roadways. Once the massive interstate highway system was in place, most companies found it cheaper to ship by truck. Trucks didn't have to pay for their infrastructure, and their infrastructure goes to more cities and more directly (you can shortcut *most* requirements to go through a central "hub" and get a moderately straight path to your destination).
Interstate rail simply ceased to be competitive for all but the largest cargo shipments. Without some of the smaller shipping, they took in less money... which led to less maintenance of the rail lines... which meant cutting routes... which led to less income... etc.
If the US had subsidized rail infrastructure as much as they subsidized roadways, we'd probably have good passenger rail from more suburbs to urban centers, as well as between cities. Unfortunately, we don't, because the US didn't subsidize that way.
Live in an apartment anywhere in an American city (including your precious Shittle): be locked into a monopoly.
Live in Chicago? Enjoy your monopoly. Live in Milwaukee? Enjoy your monopoly. Live in Houston? Enjoy your monopoly. Live in Austin? Enjoy your monopoly. Live in New York? 99% chance of apartment living (see above). Live in Jersey? Enjoy your monopoly. Live in Atlanta? Enjoy your monopoly.
You get the picture. Fuck you. Enjoy Shittle. The rest of us are tired of this monopoly crap and trust me, you do NOT want us all trying to crowd into your rainy-ass, crapass town.
Nothing so crazy. Just look at the list of personal donations, the donators to his associated slush-fund groups, the "collectors", and the people who put together his various fundraising dinners.
Not at all. There are two types of rights - the "inalienable" type (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, etc), and the "alienable" type, which are "rights" society has decided to grant based on there being a societal benefit to them (such as the "right" we extend to all children to an education at the public expense, unless their parents choose to home-school or send them to a private school instead).
Attempting to conflate the "gay rights" agenda/propaganda, with the "civil rights" struggles to remove laws that enshrined discrimination based on skin color, is disingenuous at best. The questions involved are simply not the same.
Separate is not equal.
That was meaningless to the discussion. The question being asked is whether society sees a benefit in extending promotion - in the form of public registration and benefits such as inherent tax/legal proxy/inheritance/survivorship rights - to homosexual pairings, or whether the current status quo (in which a homosexual pairing is treated the same as would a cohabiting, unmarried hetero pairing or mere roommates) is what serves society best.
Obviously there are plenty of pro-gay activists who claim that the answer is yes, out of selfish self-benefit or for other reasons. Obviously the answer you want to give is yes. However, that may not be the answer that society (as a whole) eventually comes to.
The fact that you're blithering on throwing those words around shows me you're one step away from Godwinning yourself, and that nothing I might say, quote, or show to you will make any dent on your opinion.
Name me one law on the books that says gay people are entitled to some benefit that straight people are legally prohibited from having.... You think that gay marriage is somehow more favorable to gays than straight marriage?
That's not what is being discussed. The question is, in context of the legal arguments taking place in places such as California currently, whether it is to society's best interest to extend tax and other benefits to gay pairings.
The question is not whether "gay marriage is somehow more favorable to gays than straight marriage", the question is is gay marriage a benefit to society?
I assure you, the answer is not nearly as clear-cut as your "bias and ignorance" lead you to believe.
As for sexuality being a choice - I challenge you to (assuming you're straight and male, adjust genders as appropriate if not) look up some gay porn and find it arousing.
Here's an experiment for you - find some random object/picture and stare at it while jacking off. Do that enough times, and you'll start to get horny when you see the object. It's a conditioned response involving brain chemistry and hormones. See also: Pavlov.
Homosexuality is not "acceptable"?
A viewpoint held by a large number of people in society, is that homosexuality is not a good lifestyle choice.
You remind me of a guy I used to work with, who said that gay couples shouldn't be allowed to adopt because "then the kids would grow up thinking it's OK".
Hmm. There are a number of disqualifying criteria for adoption, in various states. For example, if someone's primary occupation is as the owner of a strip club or as an exotic dancer, they're likely to be rejected. Some states only look for married couples to adopt. If someone has a history of being a gang member, I'd probably rather they not adopt because they have a higher likelihood of teaching the kid that gang membership and associated behavior (drug use, crimes, etc) is ok. Again, if someone's position is that homosexuality is not something society has vested interest in promoting, then the question of handing kids off to gays (as single or pair) is somewhat dicey is it not?
This is a scary viewpoint.
Have you ever considered that it is possible to examine a subject dispassionately, and put yourself in the other person's shoes to see things from their perspective, rather than having to attack anyone who disagrees with you and call them names or insult them?
Here's a not-so-subtle hint: if you approach people who disagree with you by calling them names, dropping epithets like "scary" and dismissing their viewpoint out of hand, they are quite likely to treat you in the same manner.
Maybe so that those kids are more likely to think "bob likes holding hands with other boys, because he's gay, but he's still a person just like everyone else" rather than "look! it's a faggot, lets kill it!"
Interesting. Where would a kid have learned the phrase "faggot"? For that matter, there are plenty of grade-schoolers (or younger or older) who hold hands. At that age, the gender differences between kids, left to their own devices, pretty much boil down to "boys can write their name in the snow in pee, and girls can't." Until puberty or later pre-pubsecence, the rest of any "gender preferences" in terms of toys/games/recreation seem to be the result of cultural expectations enforced implicitly or explicitly by the surrounding adults (example: the women wear dresses, therefore the girls want to wear dresses), rather than anything hard-wired.
It sounds more to me like the problem is in exposing the youngest minds to sexual propaganda in general, including the pro-gay stuff.
The main thrust of the pro-gay crusade these days is about gaining favored status ("protected class" listings, tax benefits for "civil unions" and "gay marriage") for gays. At very least, the second half of that qualifies as promotion.
I object to violence against anyone, as a general rule. I don't see where it makes a difference as to the skin color, gender, or any other component of the person on the receiving end of the violence.
I find that the word "discrimination", on the other hand, is thrown around far too often. My workplace has had to defend claims by people who insisted they were "discriminated against" in hiring, when the reality is that they were (a) completely unqualified for the position they applied for and (b) showed up for the interview dressed, behaving, and speaking entirely inappropriately. The US has seen lawsuits by people trying to get into jobs they had no business doing, physically (such as emergency rescue personnel, firefighters, lifeguards). At a certain point, the "crying wolf" aspect of these causes the term "discrimination" to lose all meaning, and I'm sorry to say I lack the ability to take it seriously any more thanks to the number of times it's been invoked without the backing of reality.
To GLBTs, it is as if society asked, "Is being blue-eyed a choice" as a precursor to determining whether or not blue-eyed individuals should be held to a lower social and legal status than non-blue-eyed individuals.
Interesting. What if the more analogous question were instead, say, the choice to join a cult full of and/or run by abusive nutjobs and its relation to the social/legal status of the individual and their "rights" in regard to affairs and civil constructs such as marriage, divorce and child custody?
Your statement above is misleading, because we have three categories to contend with. We have things that cannot (absent GREAT medical intervention or not at all in most cases) be changed about people. These include things like inherent eye color, tendency toward baldness, height, and medical conditions like diabetes. We have things that can be changed to a certain degree, either with intervention or practice - mode of dress, posture, speech patterns, hair/skin/eye coloration (with makeup or dyes or colored contact lenses). We then have things that people have, inasmuch as their mental state allows, complete control over - what religion to follow, how observant they are, whether they obey traffic laws, and on.
The question under debate (which we do not have an answer on, unlike the eye color question) is actually two questions in sequence: - Whether homosexuality falls into the first, second, or third category from above. - Whether, dependent somewhat on the answer to the previous question, society has an interest (based on there being more good than harm, overall, to society) in the promotion of homosexual pairings.
You insist that the answer to the primary question is "first cagetory", as evidenced by your (faulty) analogy prior. However, the question is not yet settled scientifically, nor is the rest of society yet convinced. Until that happens, answering the second question is going to remain very difficult.
First of all, the poster was brave enough to go against the obvious groupthink. That's worth some "interesting" points, unless you're abusing the moderation system by modding "flamebait" simply to deny eyeballs to a non-groupthink point of view.
Second of all, there are genuine good points within the post. The question of "framing the debate" isn't just involved in the pro/anti-gay debates, it happens in just about every debate. Abortion debaters mark themselves as "pro-choice" or "pro-life" because that tars their opponents as "anti-choice" or "anti-life" by implication. Democrats and Republicans regularly tar each other with all sorts of epithets. PETA seems to switch its nomenclature on a weekly basis, trying to figure out something that doesn't expose them as just a bunch of goat-fuckers. Environmental activists always push themselves as being "pro-environment" or "pro-earth" rather than "anti-" whatever their target of the day is.
The point made by parent, questioning whether the "choice" versus "not a choice" language is a tactic that may or may not have basis in fact, is very valid.
There is considerable debate within the "homosexual community", as well as scientific researchers, on whether homosexuality is innate, a choice, or somewhere in between. We know that there are people who claim to be "only gay", "only straight", and "bi-sexual" (or as some might say jokingly or not, "too horny to care"). We know that there are people who go to incredible lengths to mutilate their bodies in the name of either "beauty" or "identity" - some trying to look like animals, some trying to achieve unrealistic self-imposed beauty standards, some just nutcases, some trying to rewrite their "sexual identity".
It's entirely valid to question the assertion that a group of people, at least some of whom choose (rather than are forced) to be a part of the group, deserve some form of "protected class" consideration.
Culture influences what you think of as "attractive" as much as anything else. Compare Indian pornography to Japanese, to Chinese, to European, to American, to South American, to African, and compare not only from the 20th/21st century but also go back in history in the various places.
Compare modern Persian culture from Iran (heavily influenced/controlled by Islamic "thought") to the much richer, more vibrant Persian culture prior. You'll find that the Persians were much more open about sexuality and what they considered erotic, and you'll find just as much that the "tastes" have been changed.
Consider the cultural issues that made Westerners have such a weird place when the Japanese first saw them - to a culture where moderately dark skin and hair are the norm, but where the art forms venerated the lightest skin and hair tones as beautiful, to all of a sudden see very pale people and a number of red and gold hair tones among them.
Take the phenomenon of black males in America (as opposed to most African nations) who carry a sexual fetish for paler, light haired women. Amazing amounts of pornography are devoted to this, but only in America. Why is this? Because in America, those women are put forth as the ideal of "beauty", and with very few exceptions, even the successful models of black/african heritage have lighter than normal (for their genotype) skin tone and tend to do things like color their hair, towards either golden tones or golden highlights.
Now, take even a second-generation (child of immigrant parents but born in, or imported before say age 5) individual. What do you find? More likely than not, they do not as a rule share their parents' cultural kinks, either in regard to sexuality or otherwise, unless they've been held in an environment that is very similar to where their parents grew up (for instance, chinese raised in a "chinatown" area, or latino raised in a largely latino neighborhood).
Given the preceding, why is it unfair that parents (whose interest is in seeing their kids marry and produce the next generation) would be worried about their kids being told that homosexuality was "perfectly normal", "acceptable", or something else? You can propagandize impressionable minds into thinking that "sexual attractiveness" is a schoolgirl in a fuku. Or, for that matter, something a little more realistic of most of the population. Why, if homosexuality is "fixed", are pro-gay groups working so hard to get books promoting their lifestyle into kindergartens if not that they're trying to propagandize kids the same way and pick up some numbers?
They did so knowing that they were violating the law, and did so deliberately to influence the result of an election.
The election results, at the very least, deserve to be thrown out. This was despicable. Moreover, as far as Democrats, this was just business as usual.
If you want to get hardware developers to hand over their specs/source, eventually there has to be more motivation than "the kindness of their hearts." Maybe it's 5% market share. Maybe it's 10%. Maybe it's 20%. I don't know which, and I suspect the threshold for each developer is going to be different.
It's either that, or Linux can remain unadopted. You just have to remember that then, Linux will remain unadopted. And there is a better-than-even chance that down the road, some variety of hardware you want to use under linux - maybe a scanner, or a camera, or a TV tuner, or something else - simply won't have Linux support.
Maybe that's all the Linux community is destined to be, a collection of head-in-the-sand "developers" and a bunch of kool-aid drinking, deluded "evangelists" talking about the glories of their Chosen OS while everyone else goes around using something else that actually works for what they need it to work for in their day-to-day lives on the hardware of their choice.
I just needed to add the medibuntu repos, and then "apt-get install w64codecs libdvdcss2" and poof, it all works.
And the second part of that bullshit is why a normal user is scared as fuck of Linux. They don't understand it; to them it's just arcane gobbledygook magic words, like a shyster "holistic healer" doing a magic dance and tossing around some colored powders before feeding a sick kid some powdered willow bark mixed into hot chicken broth (willow bark = aspirin for the fever, hot liquid chicken broth = natural expectorant, also helps to hydrate to stimulate appetite) to "cure" the common cold.
YOU know what you are doing and why the "magic words" - e.g. w64codecs and libdvdcss2 - work. THEY look at that, freak out, decide they couldn't ever have figured that out by themselves, and run back to the safe realm of Windows where they can eventually puzzle things out without having to memorize a whole dictionary of command line codes.
Win2k is a niche spot for retirees for three reasons:
#1 - Retirees don't "need to upgrade." The fact that Win2K won't support DirectX Whatever for games, for instance, is meaningless to them. If they can get the machine to run email, videos, and maybe World of Warcraft or whatever else their grandkids installed for them, they're ok.
#2 - It's frighteningly easy for a halfway tech-savvy individual to "pass on" their Win2K box to their parents when they upgrade to something new.
#3 - It's easier to look at for older eyes. Trust me, people in the age 55+ age bracket APPRECIATE the aesthetics of functionality vs form. The reduction in number of colors actually helps those with slightly diminished vision as well (The "Classic" look of Win2K is higher-contrast than the standard WinXP, and Vista's even worse than XP in that regard).
Which could be accomplished by expanding Cygwin's compatibility too...
2) They want an easier to maintain system when things go wrong
Easier in what way? A copy of Norton Ghost (or another backup solution) and a monthly/weekly backup will make my system "easy" to fix in the event of catastrophic h/d failure or data corruption problem... anything else is just "go replace the failed component" or "well shit, time to reinstall the OS" anyways.
3) They want more control over apps and the system at all levels
Fair enough. Though this is actually an incredibly small subset of the overall desktop userbase.
4)They want scripting heavily integrated with apps and the system
Again, what sort of scripting? "Integrated scripting" isn't half as important as the purpose you want each individual script to accomplish.
5)They want to distribute their desktop i.e. network transparency
I think we've gone beyond the bounds of the average home user, or the average corporate network user, or even the average developer at this point.
I attempted to parse your car analogy. Then I realized you are either high on crack, or stoned out of your gourd, and gave up trying to understand you.
Here's a better one, one which makes more sense:
I'm a guy driving down the road, stopping off to fill up on gasoline. My car runs gasoline. It runs gasoline rather well. It was designed for gasoline, in fact, though if you feed it anything else with enough energy density and burn speed (push raw hydrogen directly into the carburetor, for instance) it'll run on that too.
I get told by a bunch of mechanics standing around the service station how much "better" this new bio-linfuel is. They claim it's "perfectly compatible" with gasoline engines. They fail to mention that to get your engine "bio-linfuel compatible", you actually need to have about $2000 worth of modification parts bolted to your engine, or else buy a new car that is "pre-modified" to accept bio-linfuel.
So I fill up. I try the new bio-linfuel. Half a mile down the road, my engine chokes out. I come back with the tow truck, fuming because the shit made my car break down, and they start laughing about how I bought a "crap car" and "should have made sure you bought a car that was compatible" when I was buying my now 7-year-old car before bio-linfuel was even being offered to the public.
This is only true if people make choices differently based on Linux support. But you are refusing to do that.
I already own the hardware I am using. You expect me to go out and purchase something different, which is arguably a waste of money? How fiscally irresponsible do you think I am?
You refuse the suggestions of the quickest most effective way to solve a basic incompatibility problem: use different hardware.
No, I call it what it is: a waste of money for something that could very easily be just on a trial basis anyways.
You clearly made the choice to buy it based on the fact it works with Windows and without any consideration of using it in Linux.
You're right. Years ago, when I bought the hardware, LINUX WAS NOT A FUCKING OPTION as far as solutions for what I was trying to create.
THE FREE SOFTWARE COMMUNITY WAS HARMED BY YOU.
If you and your behavior represent "the free software community", then I guess they can go suck something suitably gross.
Feedback to the vendor, in the form of a letter explaining why you will be buying your future cards from nvidia/hauppage has actually proven to be effective.
Funny. Being a rational person, I'm going to base my choice of next hardware purchase on the following things: - price - performance - ease of use for the solution I am trying to achieve
Now, if Linux (by that point) is the best way to go, then maybe I will make my choice of hardware based on Linux compatibility. Knowing what I do now, and how you've behaved? I'm halfway tempted to write a letter to some of the companies detailing how ass-hattish you people are, and urging them to CUT OFF any support and ignore the "free software community" entirely.
You seem unable to grasp a simple concept: like it or not, "free software", Linux/etc, are still in competition with the "non-free" solutions. Linux, like it or not, is in competition with Windows/OSX. Firefox is quite obviously in direct competition with Opera, Internet Explorer, and Safari.
The sad reality which raving lunatics like you are completely unable to grasp is that being in competition means you need to be competitive. Not just in the sense of foul-mouthedly attacking anyone who isn't one of your kool-aid drinking nitwit fellow travellers, but in eventually turning around and making something that is user-friendly and a better software solution so that it sees wider-spread adoption.
I'm gonna make this simple for you: Firefox is the "best example" of an open-source product, and it is so because the developers set goals, paid attention to what needed doing, and focused their efforts in an organized fashion rather than all working on their own little widgets, fucking up the interface, and ignoring critical needs.
IF the goal of any part of the Linux community is to get Linux to expand, IF your goal is to convince hardware developers to hand over the specs and driver source (or even write the drivers themselves... though with so many fractured Linux distros that's a nightmare "plug-and-pray" problem even now) then you need adopters. You need feedback not just from the twitchy "contributors" sitting in their parents' basements, but from real-world users. You need people willing to sit down and test usability. You need them to sit their grandmother in front of it, their uncle, their aunt, their kid sister. You need your interfaces to be simple. You need it to be so that they can get a simple list of the hardware in their machine and update it by simple means.
This is the reality. If Linux doesn't work as a solution for someone who CAN sit down and tinker and tinker, then when it comes to the real world, you can forget it. And like it or not, convincing companies to release spec won't come from a letter-writing campaign, it'll come from companies seeing "Oh shit, these guys have 10% market share, we'd better support them or we will lose sales."
Since you have now proven you can't read (or at least didn't choose to read the post you were replying to) let me clear up a few things:
I'll assume you told a friend, or someone, that you wanted to build your own DVR and they suggested Linux and MythTV.
Nope. I've had my DVR built for years, and have upgraded the components in it a few times (processor/ram/mobo and drives, never the capture hardware). Every couple years a few of my Linux-user friends bug me about how I should "try linux on it" again because "it's gotten so much better", and have a suggestion on what distro to use, etc.
That's not a bad suggestion on its own, but it should have probably been qualified with, "as long as you don't mind some trial-and-error, lots of tweaking, and getting your hands dirty."
There's a certain amount of "getting your hands dirty" that I'm willing to do. The horrendous trials involved in even basic things like getting Ubuntu to recognize an IR remote control? Sorry, but that is ridiculous.
But it sounds to me like you wanted something that you could just install, configure, and be done with in a few hours.
I allocated 8 days of working time (four weekends, 12 hour days each).
Notice in particular that neither of those is, "flame the software and its developers on some random message board."
I never "flamed" anyone. THIS particular Slashdot thread is devoted to needed criticisms of Linux. So, I handed out my criticisms of the software:
- Fractionalized and nonstandardized distributions and driver structures - Lack of compatibility certain COMMONLY USED hardware
There are plenty of sane respondents to these. Then there are the marginal replies (like yours, showing that you obviously didn't take the time to read before responding) and the flaming retard monkeys like "Braino420" who think that anyone who says their software isn't God's piss meant to be drunk at all times, is "flaming" or "trashing" them.
And for the record: in every implementation I have ever had to accomplish, Linux has never been the ideal solution. Therefore, I take issue with your claim it is "obviously superior" above.
Slashdot Mirror
Oddly enough, the US used to have a robust rail system (at least in the northeast sector).
What happened? Well, the US government started subsidizing roadways. Once the massive interstate highway system was in place, most companies found it cheaper to ship by truck. Trucks didn't have to pay for their infrastructure, and their infrastructure goes to more cities and more directly (you can shortcut *most* requirements to go through a central "hub" and get a moderately straight path to your destination).
Interstate rail simply ceased to be competitive for all but the largest cargo shipments. Without some of the smaller shipping, they took in less money... which led to less maintenance of the rail lines... which meant cutting routes... which led to less income... etc.
If the US had subsidized rail infrastructure as much as they subsidized roadways, we'd probably have good passenger rail from more suburbs to urban centers, as well as between cities. Unfortunately, we don't, because the US didn't subsidize that way.
Fuck you, asstard.
No, seriously: FUCK YOU.
Live in an apartment anywhere in an American city (including your precious Shittle): be locked into a monopoly.
Live in Chicago? Enjoy your monopoly.
Live in Milwaukee? Enjoy your monopoly.
Live in Houston? Enjoy your monopoly.
Live in Austin? Enjoy your monopoly.
Live in New York? 99% chance of apartment living (see above).
Live in Jersey? Enjoy your monopoly.
Live in Atlanta? Enjoy your monopoly.
You get the picture. Fuck you. Enjoy Shittle. The rest of us are tired of this monopoly crap and trust me, you do NOT want us all trying to crowd into your rainy-ass, crapass town.
Nothing so crazy. Just look at the list of personal donations, the donators to his associated slush-fund groups, the "collectors", and the people who put together his various fundraising dinners.
Once he's been bought off, he STAYS bought off.
I wonder how much "donation money" we'd need to offer him to get this policy to "change."
Not at all. There are two types of rights - the "inalienable" type (life, liberty, pursuit of happiness, etc), and the "alienable" type, which are "rights" society has decided to grant based on there being a societal benefit to them (such as the "right" we extend to all children to an education at the public expense, unless their parents choose to home-school or send them to a private school instead).
Attempting to conflate the "gay rights" agenda/propaganda, with the "civil rights" struggles to remove laws that enshrined discrimination based on skin color, is disingenuous at best. The questions involved are simply not the same.
Separate is not equal.
That was meaningless to the discussion. The question being asked is whether society sees a benefit in extending promotion - in the form of public registration and benefits such as inherent tax/legal proxy/inheritance/survivorship rights - to homosexual pairings, or whether the current status quo (in which a homosexual pairing is treated the same as would a cohabiting, unmarried hetero pairing or mere roommates) is what serves society best.
Obviously there are plenty of pro-gay activists who claim that the answer is yes, out of selfish self-benefit or for other reasons. Obviously the answer you want to give is yes. However, that may not be the answer that society (as a whole) eventually comes to.
bias and ignorance
The fact that you're blithering on throwing those words around shows me you're one step away from Godwinning yourself, and that nothing I might say, quote, or show to you will make any dent on your opinion.
Name me one law on the books that says gay people are entitled to some benefit that straight people are legally prohibited from having. ...
You think that gay marriage is somehow more favorable to gays than straight marriage?
That's not what is being discussed. The question is, in context of the legal arguments taking place in places such as California currently, whether it is to society's best interest to extend tax and other benefits to gay pairings.
The question is not whether "gay marriage is somehow more favorable to gays than straight marriage", the question is is gay marriage a benefit to society?
I assure you, the answer is not nearly as clear-cut as your "bias and ignorance" lead you to believe.
As for sexuality being a choice - I challenge you to (assuming you're straight and male, adjust genders as appropriate if not) look up some gay porn and find it arousing.
Here's an experiment for you - find some random object/picture and stare at it while jacking off. Do that enough times, and you'll start to get horny when you see the object. It's a conditioned response involving brain chemistry and hormones. See also: Pavlov.
Homosexuality is not "acceptable"?
A viewpoint held by a large number of people in society, is that homosexuality is not a good lifestyle choice.
You remind me of a guy I used to work with, who said that gay couples shouldn't be allowed to adopt because "then the kids would grow up thinking it's OK".
Hmm. There are a number of disqualifying criteria for adoption, in various states. For example, if someone's primary occupation is as the owner of a strip club or as an exotic dancer, they're likely to be rejected. Some states only look for married couples to adopt. If someone has a history of being a gang member, I'd probably rather they not adopt because they have a higher likelihood of teaching the kid that gang membership and associated behavior (drug use, crimes, etc) is ok. Again, if someone's position is that homosexuality is not something society has vested interest in promoting, then the question of handing kids off to gays (as single or pair) is somewhat dicey is it not?
This is a scary viewpoint.
Have you ever considered that it is possible to examine a subject dispassionately, and put yourself in the other person's shoes to see things from their perspective, rather than having to attack anyone who disagrees with you and call them names or insult them?
Here's a not-so-subtle hint: if you approach people who disagree with you by calling them names, dropping epithets like "scary" and dismissing their viewpoint out of hand, they are quite likely to treat you in the same manner.
Maybe so that those kids are more likely to think "bob likes holding hands with other boys, because he's gay, but he's still a person just like everyone else" rather than "look! it's a faggot, lets kill it!"
Interesting. Where would a kid have learned the phrase "faggot"? For that matter, there are plenty of grade-schoolers (or younger or older) who hold hands. At that age, the gender differences between kids, left to their own devices, pretty much boil down to "boys can write their name in the snow in pee, and girls can't." Until puberty or later pre-pubsecence, the rest of any "gender preferences" in terms of toys/games/recreation seem to be the result of cultural expectations enforced implicitly or explicitly by the surrounding adults (example: the women wear dresses, therefore the girls want to wear dresses), rather than anything hard-wired.
It sounds more to me like the problem is in exposing the youngest minds to sexual propaganda in general, including the pro-gay stuff.
Oh?
The main thrust of the pro-gay crusade these days is about gaining favored status ("protected class" listings, tax benefits for "civil unions" and "gay marriage") for gays. At very least, the second half of that qualifies as promotion.
I object to violence against anyone, as a general rule. I don't see where it makes a difference as to the skin color, gender, or any other component of the person on the receiving end of the violence.
I find that the word "discrimination", on the other hand, is thrown around far too often. My workplace has had to defend claims by people who insisted they were "discriminated against" in hiring, when the reality is that they were (a) completely unqualified for the position they applied for and (b) showed up for the interview dressed, behaving, and speaking entirely inappropriately. The US has seen lawsuits by people trying to get into jobs they had no business doing, physically (such as emergency rescue personnel, firefighters, lifeguards). At a certain point, the "crying wolf" aspect of these causes the term "discrimination" to lose all meaning, and I'm sorry to say I lack the ability to take it seriously any more thanks to the number of times it's been invoked without the backing of reality.
I'm sure you're smart enough to use google.
To GLBTs, it is as if society asked, "Is being blue-eyed a choice" as a precursor to determining whether or not blue-eyed individuals should be held to a lower social and legal status than non-blue-eyed individuals.
Interesting. What if the more analogous question were instead, say, the choice to join a cult full of and/or run by abusive nutjobs and its relation to the social/legal status of the individual and their "rights" in regard to affairs and civil constructs such as marriage, divorce and child custody?
Your statement above is misleading, because we have three categories to contend with. We have things that cannot (absent GREAT medical intervention or not at all in most cases) be changed about people. These include things like inherent eye color, tendency toward baldness, height, and medical conditions like diabetes. We have things that can be changed to a certain degree, either with intervention or practice - mode of dress, posture, speech patterns, hair/skin/eye coloration (with makeup or dyes or colored contact lenses). We then have things that people have, inasmuch as their mental state allows, complete control over - what religion to follow, how observant they are, whether they obey traffic laws, and on.
The question under debate (which we do not have an answer on, unlike the eye color question) is actually two questions in sequence:
- Whether homosexuality falls into the first, second, or third category from above.
- Whether, dependent somewhat on the answer to the previous question, society has an interest (based on there being more good than harm, overall, to society) in the promotion of homosexual pairings.
You insist that the answer to the primary question is "first cagetory", as evidenced by your (faulty) analogy prior. However, the question is not yet settled scientifically, nor is the rest of society yet convinced. Until that happens, answering the second question is going to remain very difficult.
First of all, the poster was brave enough to go against the obvious groupthink. That's worth some "interesting" points, unless you're abusing the moderation system by modding "flamebait" simply to deny eyeballs to a non-groupthink point of view.
Second of all, there are genuine good points within the post. The question of "framing the debate" isn't just involved in the pro/anti-gay debates, it happens in just about every debate. Abortion debaters mark themselves as "pro-choice" or "pro-life" because that tars their opponents as "anti-choice" or "anti-life" by implication. Democrats and Republicans regularly tar each other with all sorts of epithets. PETA seems to switch its nomenclature on a weekly basis, trying to figure out something that doesn't expose them as just a bunch of goat-fuckers. Environmental activists always push themselves as being "pro-environment" or "pro-earth" rather than "anti-" whatever their target of the day is.
The point made by parent, questioning whether the "choice" versus "not a choice" language is a tactic that may or may not have basis in fact, is very valid.
There is considerable debate within the "homosexual community", as well as scientific researchers, on whether homosexuality is innate, a choice, or somewhere in between. We know that there are people who claim to be "only gay", "only straight", and "bi-sexual" (or as some might say jokingly or not, "too horny to care"). We know that there are people who go to incredible lengths to mutilate their bodies in the name of either "beauty" or "identity" - some trying to look like animals, some trying to achieve unrealistic self-imposed beauty standards, some just nutcases, some trying to rewrite their "sexual identity".
It's entirely valid to question the assertion that a group of people, at least some of whom choose (rather than are forced) to be a part of the group, deserve some form of "protected class" consideration.
Interesting thought.
Culture influences what you think of as "attractive" as much as anything else. Compare Indian pornography to Japanese, to Chinese, to European, to American, to South American, to African, and compare not only from the 20th/21st century but also go back in history in the various places.
Compare modern Persian culture from Iran (heavily influenced/controlled by Islamic "thought") to the much richer, more vibrant Persian culture prior. You'll find that the Persians were much more open about sexuality and what they considered erotic, and you'll find just as much that the "tastes" have been changed.
Consider the cultural issues that made Westerners have such a weird place when the Japanese first saw them - to a culture where moderately dark skin and hair are the norm, but where the art forms venerated the lightest skin and hair tones as beautiful, to all of a sudden see very pale people and a number of red and gold hair tones among them.
Take the phenomenon of black males in America (as opposed to most African nations) who carry a sexual fetish for paler, light haired women. Amazing amounts of pornography are devoted to this, but only in America. Why is this? Because in America, those women are put forth as the ideal of "beauty", and with very few exceptions, even the successful models of black/african heritage have lighter than normal (for their genotype) skin tone and tend to do things like color their hair, towards either golden tones or golden highlights.
Now, take even a second-generation (child of immigrant parents but born in, or imported before say age 5) individual. What do you find? More likely than not, they do not as a rule share their parents' cultural kinks, either in regard to sexuality or otherwise, unless they've been held in an environment that is very similar to where their parents grew up (for instance, chinese raised in a "chinatown" area, or latino raised in a largely latino neighborhood).
Given the preceding, why is it unfair that parents (whose interest is in seeing their kids marry and produce the next generation) would be worried about their kids being told that homosexuality was "perfectly normal", "acceptable", or something else? You can propagandize impressionable minds into thinking that "sexual attractiveness" is a schoolgirl in a fuku. Or, for that matter, something a little more realistic of most of the population. Why, if homosexuality is "fixed", are pro-gay groups working so hard to get books promoting their lifestyle into kindergartens if not that they're trying to propagandize kids the same way and pick up some numbers?
Corrosion.
Being repowered while the internal circuit board is still damp with soap-contaminated water (shorting).
Physical stress ("agitate" cycle, "spin" cycle, Tumble Dry...).
Heat stress (which heat cycle did you use/did it go through the dryer too).
Need I go on?
See response to "PopeRatzo."
The prosecutors involved in this malicious, illegal prosecution "just so happen" to be lifelong Democrats. The "Bush DOJ" had nothing to do with it.
Here we have an example of a pure idiot who cannot grasp the simple fact that the prosecutors in the case are all lifelong Democrats.
Then again, I've never known PopeRatzo to let these pesky "facts" get in the way of his insane ramblings.
Prosecutors withheld evidence from the defense.
They did so knowing that they were violating the law, and did so deliberately to influence the result of an election.
The election results, at the very least, deserve to be thrown out. This was despicable. Moreover, as far as Democrats, this was just business as usual.
"Change"... is all you'll have left in your pocket or bank account once Obama is done.
How about right here for starters.
If you want to get hardware developers to hand over their specs/source, eventually there has to be more motivation than "the kindness of their hearts." Maybe it's 5% market share. Maybe it's 10%. Maybe it's 20%. I don't know which, and I suspect the threshold for each developer is going to be different.
It's either that, or Linux can remain unadopted. You just have to remember that then, Linux will remain unadopted. And there is a better-than-even chance that down the road, some variety of hardware you want to use under linux - maybe a scanner, or a camera, or a TV tuner, or something else - simply won't have Linux support.
Maybe that's all the Linux community is destined to be, a collection of head-in-the-sand "developers" and a bunch of kool-aid drinking, deluded "evangelists" talking about the glories of their Chosen OS while everyone else goes around using something else that actually works for what they need it to work for in their day-to-day lives on the hardware of their choice.
"Get X and then type gobbleygookytookytoo while standing on one leg and whistling the star spangled banner" is cryptic.
"Google 'latest ffdshow', download it, and double-click the installer" is not.
I just needed to add the medibuntu repos, and then "apt-get install w64codecs libdvdcss2" and poof, it all works.
And the second part of that bullshit is why a normal user is scared as fuck of Linux. They don't understand it; to them it's just arcane gobbledygook magic words, like a shyster "holistic healer" doing a magic dance and tossing around some colored powders before feeding a sick kid some powdered willow bark mixed into hot chicken broth (willow bark = aspirin for the fever, hot liquid chicken broth = natural expectorant, also helps to hydrate to stimulate appetite) to "cure" the common cold.
YOU know what you are doing and why the "magic words" - e.g. w64codecs and libdvdcss2 - work. THEY look at that, freak out, decide they couldn't ever have figured that out by themselves, and run back to the safe realm of Windows where they can eventually puzzle things out without having to memorize a whole dictionary of command line codes.
Win2k is a niche spot for retirees for three reasons:
#1 - Retirees don't "need to upgrade." The fact that Win2K won't support DirectX Whatever for games, for instance, is meaningless to them. If they can get the machine to run email, videos, and maybe World of Warcraft or whatever else their grandkids installed for them, they're ok.
#2 - It's frighteningly easy for a halfway tech-savvy individual to "pass on" their Win2K box to their parents when they upgrade to something new.
#3 - It's easier to look at for older eyes. Trust me, people in the age 55+ age bracket APPRECIATE the aesthetics of functionality vs form. The reduction in number of colors actually helps those with slightly diminished vision as well (The "Classic" look of Win2K is higher-contrast than the standard WinXP, and Vista's even worse than XP in that regard).
1) They want to use Unix apps
Which could be accomplished by expanding Cygwin's compatibility too...
2) They want an easier to maintain system when things go wrong
Easier in what way? A copy of Norton Ghost (or another backup solution) and a monthly/weekly backup will make my system "easy" to fix in the event of catastrophic h/d failure or data corruption problem... anything else is just "go replace the failed component" or "well shit, time to reinstall the OS" anyways.
3) They want more control over apps and the system at all levels
Fair enough. Though this is actually an incredibly small subset of the overall desktop userbase.
4)They want scripting heavily integrated with apps and the system
Again, what sort of scripting? "Integrated scripting" isn't half as important as the purpose you want each individual script to accomplish.
5)They want to distribute their desktop i.e. network transparency
I think we've gone beyond the bounds of the average home user, or the average corporate network user, or even the average developer at this point.
I attempted to parse your car analogy. Then I realized you are either high on crack, or stoned out of your gourd, and gave up trying to understand you.
Here's a better one, one which makes more sense:
I'm a guy driving down the road, stopping off to fill up on gasoline. My car runs gasoline. It runs gasoline rather well. It was designed for gasoline, in fact, though if you feed it anything else with enough energy density and burn speed (push raw hydrogen directly into the carburetor, for instance) it'll run on that too.
I get told by a bunch of mechanics standing around the service station how much "better" this new bio-linfuel is. They claim it's "perfectly compatible" with gasoline engines. They fail to mention that to get your engine "bio-linfuel compatible", you actually need to have about $2000 worth of modification parts bolted to your engine, or else buy a new car that is "pre-modified" to accept bio-linfuel.
So I fill up. I try the new bio-linfuel. Half a mile down the road, my engine chokes out. I come back with the tow truck, fuming because the shit made my car break down, and they start laughing about how I bought a "crap car" and "should have made sure you bought a car that was compatible" when I was buying my now 7-year-old car before bio-linfuel was even being offered to the public.
This discussion sound familiar?
Wow. What a deranged ass-hat you are.
This is only true if people make choices differently based on Linux support. But you are refusing to do that.
I already own the hardware I am using. You expect me to go out and purchase something different, which is arguably a waste of money? How fiscally irresponsible do you think I am?
You refuse the suggestions of the quickest most effective way to solve a basic incompatibility problem: use different hardware.
No, I call it what it is: a waste of money for something that could very easily be just on a trial basis anyways.
You clearly made the choice to buy it based on the fact it works with Windows and without any consideration of using it in Linux.
You're right. Years ago, when I bought the hardware, LINUX WAS NOT A FUCKING OPTION as far as solutions for what I was trying to create.
THE FREE SOFTWARE COMMUNITY WAS HARMED BY YOU.
If you and your behavior represent "the free software community", then I guess they can go suck something suitably gross.
Feedback to the vendor, in the form of a letter explaining why you will be buying your future cards from nvidia/hauppage has actually proven to be effective.
Funny. Being a rational person, I'm going to base my choice of next hardware purchase on the following things:
- price
- performance
- ease of use for the solution I am trying to achieve
Now, if Linux (by that point) is the best way to go, then maybe I will make my choice of hardware based on Linux compatibility. Knowing what I do now, and how you've behaved? I'm halfway tempted to write a letter to some of the companies detailing how ass-hattish you people are, and urging them to CUT OFF any support and ignore the "free software community" entirely.
You seem unable to grasp a simple concept: like it or not, "free software", Linux/etc, are still in competition with the "non-free" solutions. Linux, like it or not, is in competition with Windows/OSX. Firefox is quite obviously in direct competition with Opera, Internet Explorer, and Safari.
The sad reality which raving lunatics like you are completely unable to grasp is that being in competition means you need to be competitive. Not just in the sense of foul-mouthedly attacking anyone who isn't one of your kool-aid drinking nitwit fellow travellers, but in eventually turning around and making something that is user-friendly and a better software solution so that it sees wider-spread adoption.
I'm gonna make this simple for you: Firefox is the "best example" of an open-source product, and it is so because the developers set goals, paid attention to what needed doing, and focused their efforts in an organized fashion rather than all working on their own little widgets, fucking up the interface, and ignoring critical needs.
IF the goal of any part of the Linux community is to get Linux to expand, IF your goal is to convince hardware developers to hand over the specs and driver source (or even write the drivers themselves... though with so many fractured Linux distros that's a nightmare "plug-and-pray" problem even now) then you need adopters. You need feedback not just from the twitchy "contributors" sitting in their parents' basements, but from real-world users. You need people willing to sit down and test usability. You need them to sit their grandmother in front of it, their uncle, their aunt, their kid sister. You need your interfaces to be simple. You need it to be so that they can get a simple list of the hardware in their machine and update it by simple means.
This is the reality. If Linux doesn't work as a solution for someone who CAN sit down and tinker and tinker, then when it comes to the real world, you can forget it. And like it or not, convincing companies to release spec won't come from a letter-writing campaign, it'll come from companies seeing "Oh shit, these guys have 10% market share, we'd better support them or we will lose sales."
Since you have now proven you can't read (or at least didn't choose to read the post you were replying to) let me clear up a few things:
I'll assume you told a friend, or someone, that you wanted to build your own DVR and they suggested Linux and MythTV.
Nope. I've had my DVR built for years, and have upgraded the components in it a few times (processor/ram/mobo and drives, never the capture hardware). Every couple years a few of my Linux-user friends bug me about how I should "try linux on it" again because "it's gotten so much better", and have a suggestion on what distro to use, etc.
That's not a bad suggestion on its own, but it should have probably been qualified with, "as long as you don't mind some trial-and-error, lots of tweaking, and getting your hands dirty."
There's a certain amount of "getting your hands dirty" that I'm willing to do. The horrendous trials involved in even basic things like getting Ubuntu to recognize an IR remote control? Sorry, but that is ridiculous.
But it sounds to me like you wanted something that you could just install, configure, and be done with in a few hours.
I allocated 8 days of working time (four weekends, 12 hour days each).
Notice in particular that neither of those is, "flame the software and its developers on some random message board."
I never "flamed" anyone. THIS particular Slashdot thread is devoted to needed criticisms of Linux. So, I handed out my criticisms of the software:
- Fractionalized and nonstandardized distributions and driver structures
- Lack of compatibility certain COMMONLY USED hardware
There are plenty of sane respondents to these. Then there are the marginal replies (like yours, showing that you obviously didn't take the time to read before responding) and the flaming retard monkeys like "Braino420" who think that anyone who says their software isn't God's piss meant to be drunk at all times, is "flaming" or "trashing" them.
And for the record: in every implementation I have ever had to accomplish, Linux has never been the ideal solution. Therefore, I take issue with your claim it is "obviously superior" above.