Is there any legitimate reason to think women would be any more ready for that sort of power or responsibility? Because women already have that power and responsibility - some handle it well, some don't.
A male pill would protect men against irresponsible women. For instance, let's say a responsible man is considering sleeping with a woman who claims she's on the pill. Now he's stuck, because either he believes her and risks her lying to him, or he doesn't believe her and risks losing her trust. If he trusts her and is wrong, then he'll be paying for that mistake the rest of his life. If he doesn't believe her, he may well never get laid.
It is a period of civil war. Rebel Linux admins, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Microsoft Empire. During the battle, GNU spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, ISS, a system that brings any self-respecting admin to tears. Pursued by the Empire’s sinister agents, Tove Torvalds races home aboard her starship, custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the network.
If auto configuration is done right and actually works, you shouldn't NEED to fuck around configuring things manually.
The good news is that the most popular desktop distros don't require you to do that. And the really remarkable thing is that X.org is moving towards auto-detection rather than configuration as well, so you can run X without a config and it will work often as well as if not better than X with a carefully crafted config.
"The registry isn't bad because it's stored in binary form,"
Actually, yes, that's part of what's wrong with it. For instance, let's say I have a registry problem that's preventing a proper boot of the machine, and a Linux CD. I can boot the machine using my Linux CD, mount the logical disk containing the registry, but then what? I'm limited in my ability to fix the registry because in order to do that I need the tool that the broken registry is preventing me from accessing. By contrast, if I have an alternate system capable of booting into Windows and accessing the hard drive with a broken/etc config file, I can go in with any text editor to fix the problem.
The other major problem with the registry is that it's centralized, so if it's hosed for one thing, it can easily be hosed for everything else. Compare that to a Unix system, where if you have a problem with a config, it affects only those things that the config controls (and any dependencies on those controls). So if there's a problem, you're more likely to get a partially functioning system, enough to be able to locate what's wrong, fire up your text edit, and fix the problem.
Specifically, Daggerfall had a bunch of notorious bugs, including instadeaths for no obvious reason, and "falling into the void", where there was a hole in the walls that would drop your character into the spaces between the walls with no way out.
Also important to mention is that serious advocates of socialized health care don't say they want "free" health care. Claiming they do say that is a straw man argument. The 3 serious arguments that usually come up:
1. The empirical argument: Countries that have socialized health care generally get better care overall for lower cost than the US system, so the closest thing we have to real-world experiments suggest that it would be an improvement. Studies by the World Health Organization and similar groups bear this out - if you're going to be sick, far better to do it in Britain or France than the US. In addition, the more socialistic health organizations within the US also bear this out - the VA with its government-run hospitals gets more bang for the health care buck than private insurers with private hospitals.
2. The theoretical argument: There are several features of health care which guarantee failures in free market economics to produce optimum results. The major ones:
a. Nobody can tell you the price of a treatment ahead of time. Under the private insurance system, you receive treatment, the provider then decides how much that cost, then the insurance company decides how much they're going to pay, then you get a bill for the rest. No pricing means no informed decisions for the buyer to make.
b. Buyers (patients) aren't really in a position to refuse treatment. If your choice is "pay $X or die", most everyone picks paying $X, regardless of what $X is and whether they are remotely capable of paying it. That means completely price-inelastic demand.
c. Buyers (patients) can't even effectively shop around. If a hospital across town could do the same treatment for less, that doesn't mean it's possible or cost-effective to transport a patient to that other hospital. That means massive barriers to switching sellers.
3. The moral argument: It's immoral to allow people to die because they couldn't afford a reasonably priced treatment, and socialized medicine generally guarantees that. That's the one that bleeding-heart liberals will like, and hard-nosed conservatives generally won't.
You added an interesting (and accurate) fourth argument, namely that the free market in health care distorts the free market in labor to the mix.
They're finally issuing a recall for that PoS software (and I don't mean point-of-sale)! Yay!
Oh, wait, they want us to remember Windows 1.0. I think it's a bit like a psychologist wanting kids to remember what the nice Catholic priest did to them - somehow I'm not convinced this is worth the effort.
The primary source of this entire argument that outsourcing everything to India or China is good for America is Larry Summers. Mr Summers served as Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, where he orchestrated NAFTA and the continued opening of the US market to China with the exact same arguments as now. During the Bush years, he served as the president of Harvard, where he supervised a massive drop in the endowment and massive annoyance to everybody who had to work with him, until he was booted out over some foolish remarks about the capabilities of women in science. And more recently under Obama, he served as the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, which I'm positive is where Obama got the ideas that he's spewing here.
He's been wrong throughout his entire career, but because his mistakes make a small group of people very rich, he manages to get more and more power. Compare that to someone like Paul Krugman, who regularly gets his forecasts correct but is ignored because his policy responses would involve giving ordinary people a helping hand.
1. When a US soldier shows up on your door, you usually don't start the interaction by shooting at him, unless you are planning on treason or rebellion. 2. Soldiers are not trained to politely stand around while you go and get your gun if they think you're being hostile. They have considerably more combat training than you do (unless you're a recent military veteran). 3. Soldiers are likely to have an assault rifle, several grenades, and body armor, while you are more likely to have a shotgun or pistol and no armor. That's not even close to a fair fight. 4. Even if you beat the odds and kill or drive off the 1 soldier, chances are very good that their commanding officer will know what has happened, and you'll now be facing a platoon instead of 1 guy. If you somehow beat that, you'll now be facing a larger unit.
When faced with illegal activity by the US army, your chances are better of beating it in court than they are with a gun. They aren't perfect chances like they should be, but they're much better than shooting.
And what agenda would that be, exactly? If you judge them by what they actually do, as opposed to what certain media figures say they do, you'll see that they are in fact pretty consistently on the side of protecting the rights of ordinary people and restricting the government based on the Constitution in general and the Bill of Rights in particular.
The ACLU doesn't handle every case that potentially involves civil liberties issues. They can't, and it would be unreasonable to expect them to without a lot more funding. That's why there are more specialized groups like the Thomas Jefferson Center for Free Expression and EPIC.
Right now, they've been putting most of their money and energy towards: - Stopping the massive illegal wiretaps carried out by the FBI and NSA under both the Obama and Bush administrations. - Forcing the Obama administration to try any US citizens locked up in Gitmo in a proper court. - Making sure those sentenced to death in unfair trials have their day in court before being executed.
None of those are liberal vs conservative issues, they're constitutional government vs unconstitutional government issues.
The hard part is the definition of "terrorist". By some standards, the first American terrorists might have been the guys in Massachusetts Bay Colony who killed people for being Quakers. Or alternately, the first American terrorist might have been Metacom, who attacked English settlements in Massachusetts and killed fairly indiscriminately in what is now usually called "King Phillip's War".
Actually, most infringements on civil liberties are bipartisan.
1st Amendment: Both major parties have embraced "Free Speech Zones", both have regularly beaten up and arrested protesters at their conventions since at least the 1970's, both have at various times suggested that saying or writing certain things is aiding and abetting the enemy. Also, the people targeted in violation of the 5th and 6th Amendments were universally adherents to a particular religion, which falls afoul of the Free Exercise clause.
2nd Amendment: On this one, you're right that Democrats are primarily behind bans on assault weapons and the like.
4th Amendment: Clinton started spying on Internet traffic, Bush increased it to a massive scale, Obama continues the practice and defends it in court. John Ashcroft captured people (including US citizens on US soil) and imprisoned them without ever showing probable cause to a judge. And of course the National Security Letters and other nonsense in the Patriot Act had massive support from both Democrats and Republicans.
5th Amendment: Both Bush and Obama have deprived people of liberty and sometimes life without due process of law by locking them up in Gitmo or sending them to foreign countries to be tortured. Both Dick Cheney and Barack Obama have targeted civilians for killing by the CIA without any sort of trial.
6th Amendment: Both Bush and Obama deprived "enemy combatants", including several US citizens, of the right to a speedy and public trial by a jury of their peers. In the BS military tribunals, the enemy combatants are not presented with the evidence or witnesses against them, have no access to witnesses in their defense, and no protection against double jeopardy.
7th Amendment: Both Democrats and Republicans are enthusiastic in their support for binding arbitration, replacing jury trials for civil matters by arbiters who are paid by one side of the arbitration. Judges regularly throw out lawsuits due to binding arbitration agreements.
8th Amendment: Gitmo prisoners, as well as prisoners in Abu Graib, and prisoners sent to foreign countries via "extraordinary rendition", all have received what any reasonable person would term cruel and unusual punishment.
9th and 10th Amendments: Might as well forget about those, since any other rights the people had are long gone.
So suffice to say, we the people are screwed, unless EPIC, the ACLU, and other groups like them start getting some legal successes. With one exception: If the government tries to force you to quarter troops in your home, you can probably win that case.
Another very likely reason for the breakup spike in mid-December: First-year college students come back to their hometowns and decide that their long-distance relationship with their high school sweetheart is unworkable. Any decent adult caretaker of a soon-to-be college student ought to make sure they know that, because plenty of first-year students spend a lot of time and money traveling to see their long-distance SOs.
You're sounding as though any regulations are the epitome of evil.
Most if not all businesses are regulated in some way, and it's a damn good thing they are. Otherwise, you'd get gas stations selling gallons of gas that were less than the standard gallon as a way of making prices appear low, you'd buy groceries and get human meat marketed as beef, or you'd go to the bank and find that the contents of your bank account had disappeared because the bank was going under. And these aren't theoretical, but exactly what was going on when there weren't regulations to the contrary.
In industries where these techniques for cheating customers become commonplace, it became difficult-to-impossible for sellers who weren't cheating their customers to compete, because they could always have their price undercut by the cheaters and an average customer couldn't easily tell the difference between the sellers who cheated and the sellers who didn't.
It's worth pointing out that while highly competitive markets (say, broccoli at a busy farmer's market) do result in all sorts of wonderful efficiencies, oligopolies (where there are only a few sellers) do not. Most ISPs that aren't monopolies are oligopolies, with competition limited to the cable company with a granted monopoly, the telephone company with a granted monopoly, or satellite.
One mis-definition of "net neutrality" that also comes up not infrequently is the idea that it's some sort fairness doctrine for the Internet that would force Matt Drudge to run stories about how wonderful Barack Obama is. Which of course any reasonable person who believes in the First Amendment would oppose.
Given the amount of money at stake, I highly doubt that this particular tidbit of misinformation is due to ignorance, but more likely due to propaganda.
Also, the 'another provider' doesn't work if: 3. The bad guy is not someone you do business with directly.
Let's say that I can choose to buy Internet access from ISPs A and B, and I'm trying to get good connections to server S. However, both A and B connect to S via another ISP C. If C imposes traffic shaping rules that make connections to S difficult or impossible, switching my service from A to B makes no difference. That's why the libertarian solution of "just switch ISPs" doesn't actually work.
Slashdot Mirror
They just need to call upon their superhero - Apache Chief Inyuk-chuk!
Is there any legitimate reason to think women would be any more ready for that sort of power or responsibility? Because women already have that power and responsibility - some handle it well, some don't.
A male pill would protect men against irresponsible women. For instance, let's say a responsible man is considering sleeping with a woman who claims she's on the pill. Now he's stuck, because either he believes her and risks her lying to him, or he doesn't believe her and risks losing her trust. If he trusts her and is wrong, then he'll be paying for that mistake the rest of his life. If he doesn't believe her, he may well never get laid.
It is a period of civil war. Rebel Linux admins, striking from a hidden base, have won their first victory against the evil Microsoft Empire. During the battle, GNU spies managed to steal secret plans to the Empire’s ultimate weapon, ISS, a system that brings any self-respecting admin to tears. Pursued by the Empire’s sinister agents, Tove Torvalds races home aboard her starship, custodian of the stolen plans that can save her people and restore freedom to the network.
If auto configuration is done right and actually works, you shouldn't NEED to fuck around configuring things manually.
The good news is that the most popular desktop distros don't require you to do that. And the really remarkable thing is that X.org is moving towards auto-detection rather than configuration as well, so you can run X without a config and it will work often as well as if not better than X with a carefully crafted config.
"The registry isn't bad because it's stored in binary form,"
Actually, yes, that's part of what's wrong with it. For instance, let's say I have a registry problem that's preventing a proper boot of the machine, and a Linux CD. I can boot the machine using my Linux CD, mount the logical disk containing the registry, but then what? I'm limited in my ability to fix the registry because in order to do that I need the tool that the broken registry is preventing me from accessing. By contrast, if I have an alternate system capable of booting into Windows and accessing the hard drive with a broken /etc config file, I can go in with any text editor to fix the problem.
The other major problem with the registry is that it's centralized, so if it's hosed for one thing, it can easily be hosed for everything else. Compare that to a Unix system, where if you have a problem with a config, it affects only those things that the config controls (and any dependencies on those controls). So if there's a problem, you're more likely to get a partially functioning system, enough to be able to locate what's wrong, fire up your text edit, and fix the problem.
Specifically, Daggerfall had a bunch of notorious bugs, including instadeaths for no obvious reason, and "falling into the void", where there was a hole in the walls that would drop your character into the spaces between the walls with no way out.
Also important to mention is that serious advocates of socialized health care don't say they want "free" health care. Claiming they do say that is a straw man argument. The 3 serious arguments that usually come up:
1. The empirical argument: Countries that have socialized health care generally get better care overall for lower cost than the US system, so the closest thing we have to real-world experiments suggest that it would be an improvement. Studies by the World Health Organization and similar groups bear this out - if you're going to be sick, far better to do it in Britain or France than the US. In addition, the more socialistic health organizations within the US also bear this out - the VA with its government-run hospitals gets more bang for the health care buck than private insurers with private hospitals.
2. The theoretical argument: There are several features of health care which guarantee failures in free market economics to produce optimum results. The major ones:
a. Nobody can tell you the price of a treatment ahead of time. Under the private insurance system, you receive treatment, the provider then decides how much that cost, then the insurance company decides how much they're going to pay, then you get a bill for the rest. No pricing means no informed decisions for the buyer to make.
b. Buyers (patients) aren't really in a position to refuse treatment. If your choice is "pay $X or die", most everyone picks paying $X, regardless of what $X is and whether they are remotely capable of paying it. That means completely price-inelastic demand.
c. Buyers (patients) can't even effectively shop around. If a hospital across town could do the same treatment for less, that doesn't mean it's possible or cost-effective to transport a patient to that other hospital. That means massive barriers to switching sellers.
3. The moral argument: It's immoral to allow people to die because they couldn't afford a reasonably priced treatment, and socialized medicine generally guarantees that. That's the one that bleeding-heart liberals will like, and hard-nosed conservatives generally won't.
You added an interesting (and accurate) fourth argument, namely that the free market in health care distorts the free market in labor to the mix.
They're finally issuing a recall for that PoS software (and I don't mean point-of-sale)! Yay!
Oh, wait, they want us to remember Windows 1.0. I think it's a bit like a psychologist wanting kids to remember what the nice Catholic priest did to them - somehow I'm not convinced this is worth the effort.
The primary source of this entire argument that outsourcing everything to India or China is good for America is Larry Summers. Mr Summers served as Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, where he orchestrated NAFTA and the continued opening of the US market to China with the exact same arguments as now. During the Bush years, he served as the president of Harvard, where he supervised a massive drop in the endowment and massive annoyance to everybody who had to work with him, until he was booted out over some foolish remarks about the capabilities of women in science. And more recently under Obama, he served as the chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, which I'm positive is where Obama got the ideas that he's spewing here.
He's been wrong throughout his entire career, but because his mistakes make a small group of people very rich, he manages to get more and more power. Compare that to someone like Paul Krugman, who regularly gets his forecasts correct but is ignored because his policy responses would involve giving ordinary people a helping hand.
I'm hunting wabbits!
Look, wabbit twacks ...
1. When a US soldier shows up on your door, you usually don't start the interaction by shooting at him, unless you are planning on treason or rebellion.
2. Soldiers are not trained to politely stand around while you go and get your gun if they think you're being hostile. They have considerably more combat training than you do (unless you're a recent military veteran).
3. Soldiers are likely to have an assault rifle, several grenades, and body armor, while you are more likely to have a shotgun or pistol and no armor. That's not even close to a fair fight.
4. Even if you beat the odds and kill or drive off the 1 soldier, chances are very good that their commanding officer will know what has happened, and you'll now be facing a platoon instead of 1 guy. If you somehow beat that, you'll now be facing a larger unit.
When faced with illegal activity by the US army, your chances are better of beating it in court than they are with a gun. They aren't perfect chances like they should be, but they're much better than shooting.
What's Costa Rica going to do?
That's easy - call up their pals at the US State Department, who will likely tell Nicaragua to knock it off.
And what agenda would that be, exactly? If you judge them by what they actually do, as opposed to what certain media figures say they do, you'll see that they are in fact pretty consistently on the side of protecting the rights of ordinary people and restricting the government based on the Constitution in general and the Bill of Rights in particular.
The ACLU doesn't handle every case that potentially involves civil liberties issues. They can't, and it would be unreasonable to expect them to without a lot more funding. That's why there are more specialized groups like the Thomas Jefferson Center for Free Expression and EPIC.
Right now, they've been putting most of their money and energy towards:
- Stopping the massive illegal wiretaps carried out by the FBI and NSA under both the Obama and Bush administrations.
- Forcing the Obama administration to try any US citizens locked up in Gitmo in a proper court.
- Making sure those sentenced to death in unfair trials have their day in court before being executed.
None of those are liberal vs conservative issues, they're constitutional government vs unconstitutional government issues.
The hard part is the definition of "terrorist". By some standards, the first American terrorists might have been the guys in Massachusetts Bay Colony who killed people for being Quakers. Or alternately, the first American terrorist might have been Metacom, who attacked English settlements in Massachusetts and killed fairly indiscriminately in what is now usually called "King Phillip's War".
Actually, most infringements on civil liberties are bipartisan.
1st Amendment: Both major parties have embraced "Free Speech Zones", both have regularly beaten up and arrested protesters at their conventions since at least the 1970's, both have at various times suggested that saying or writing certain things is aiding and abetting the enemy. Also, the people targeted in violation of the 5th and 6th Amendments were universally adherents to a particular religion, which falls afoul of the Free Exercise clause.
2nd Amendment: On this one, you're right that Democrats are primarily behind bans on assault weapons and the like.
4th Amendment: Clinton started spying on Internet traffic, Bush increased it to a massive scale, Obama continues the practice and defends it in court. John Ashcroft captured people (including US citizens on US soil) and imprisoned them without ever showing probable cause to a judge. And of course the National Security Letters and other nonsense in the Patriot Act had massive support from both Democrats and Republicans.
5th Amendment: Both Bush and Obama have deprived people of liberty and sometimes life without due process of law by locking them up in Gitmo or sending them to foreign countries to be tortured. Both Dick Cheney and Barack Obama have targeted civilians for killing by the CIA without any sort of trial.
6th Amendment: Both Bush and Obama deprived "enemy combatants", including several US citizens, of the right to a speedy and public trial by a jury of their peers. In the BS military tribunals, the enemy combatants are not presented with the evidence or witnesses against them, have no access to witnesses in their defense, and no protection against double jeopardy.
7th Amendment: Both Democrats and Republicans are enthusiastic in their support for binding arbitration, replacing jury trials for civil matters by arbiters who are paid by one side of the arbitration. Judges regularly throw out lawsuits due to binding arbitration agreements.
8th Amendment: Gitmo prisoners, as well as prisoners in Abu Graib, and prisoners sent to foreign countries via "extraordinary rendition", all have received what any reasonable person would term cruel and unusual punishment.
9th and 10th Amendments: Might as well forget about those, since any other rights the people had are long gone.
So suffice to say, we the people are screwed, unless EPIC, the ACLU, and other groups like them start getting some legal successes. With one exception: If the government tries to force you to quarter troops in your home, you can probably win that case.
Which suggests that the "Google Maps" explanation is probably a BS excuse for accidentally-on-purpose dumping stuff in Costa Rica.
In Soviet Russia, photo edits you!
Another very likely reason for the breakup spike in mid-December: First-year college students come back to their hometowns and decide that their long-distance relationship with their high school sweetheart is unworkable. Any decent adult caretaker of a soon-to-be college student ought to make sure they know that, because plenty of first-year students spend a lot of time and money traveling to see their long-distance SOs.
How about we turn it into a game show like Where in the World is Leo Apotheker?
You're sounding as though any regulations are the epitome of evil.
Most if not all businesses are regulated in some way, and it's a damn good thing they are. Otherwise, you'd get gas stations selling gallons of gas that were less than the standard gallon as a way of making prices appear low, you'd buy groceries and get human meat marketed as beef, or you'd go to the bank and find that the contents of your bank account had disappeared because the bank was going under. And these aren't theoretical, but exactly what was going on when there weren't regulations to the contrary.
In industries where these techniques for cheating customers become commonplace, it became difficult-to-impossible for sellers who weren't cheating their customers to compete, because they could always have their price undercut by the cheaters and an average customer couldn't easily tell the difference between the sellers who cheated and the sellers who didn't.
It's worth pointing out that while highly competitive markets (say, broccoli at a busy farmer's market) do result in all sorts of wonderful efficiencies, oligopolies (where there are only a few sellers) do not. Most ISPs that aren't monopolies are oligopolies, with competition limited to the cable company with a granted monopoly, the telephone company with a granted monopoly, or satellite.
One mis-definition of "net neutrality" that also comes up not infrequently is the idea that it's some sort fairness doctrine for the Internet that would force Matt Drudge to run stories about how wonderful Barack Obama is. Which of course any reasonable person who believes in the First Amendment would oppose.
Given the amount of money at stake, I highly doubt that this particular tidbit of misinformation is due to ignorance, but more likely due to propaganda.
Also, the 'another provider' doesn't work if:
3. The bad guy is not someone you do business with directly.
Let's say that I can choose to buy Internet access from ISPs A and B, and I'm trying to get good connections to server S. However, both A and B connect to S via another ISP C. If C imposes traffic shaping rules that make connections to S difficult or impossible, switching my service from A to B makes no difference. That's why the libertarian solution of "just switch ISPs" doesn't actually work.
NASA uses highly trained field service professionals, so I'm certain they're currently busy changing each tire to find out which one is flat.
She runs Alice's Restaurant in Stockbridge, MA, of course.