Okay, that *is* interesting and kind of awful, but I stand by my criticism of the Constitution Party. The day a political party can get a thumbs up because "the Republicans are almost as bad as we are" is the day that I start pricing sandbags and guns.
Why would Badnarik, who campaigns bitterly against such government intrusions on private citizens and corporations, take part in such an intrusion?
Because somewhere around (i.e. pulled from my ass) 97% of Americans have never heard of the Libertarian Party and 99.9% of Americans have never heard of Michael Badnarik.
He now gets prominent headlines and a nice association with freedom of speech. He's making himself impossible to ignore. The right thing to do, IMHO.
It should shake the debate up a bit.
I have a number of issues with the Libertarian platform, but at least Badnarik (and Cobb) are doing the right thing to get the boat moving.
Yes, but aside from the fact that the Constitution Party *does* advocate not changing the Consitution, their entire remaining platform appears to me to be stupid, short-sighted, and offensive. They dislike foreigners, free trade, and homosexuals (I must admit, when a party's platform says that a party is "anti-homosexual", images of the KKK and Nazi party start floating by). They have ties to anti-female equality ideas.
The closest organization in the US to the Consitution Party is the KKK.
basically, the more ive worked with SNMP, the more ive realized that the "S" is the key letter. it is fantastic for some quick chores ona local reliable network, but just plain doesn't scale. there is a vast array of management and monitoring problems that just arent simple enough for SNMP to handle well.
Okay, I'm curious. SNMP allows for polling and for requesting feedback on events (traps). It provides exposed data structures that can present scalar values, trees, and multidimensional arrays. I can't really think of any network monitoring/management system that can't be built using this. What specific problems does SNMP have?
I'll buy a lack of encryption as an issue, but I don't think that it's really feasible issue to fix -- many embedded devices don't have the CPU time to handle it.
Microsoft capitalizes "Web Services" and seems to use it as if it refers to some set of protocols or something. To someone who doesn't bother to keep up on the latest Microsoft buzzwords (the FLOSS world lets you avoid much of that), the idea of "Web Services" being equivalent to "web services" seems unlikely.
Is "Web Services" just the latest way to say "implemented using SOAP"?
Just like we were starting to see the affects of Clinton's policies (or rather lack of action) as he left office.
You're posting on an Internet that owes a lot of its rapid growth to Clinton-Gore work. Maybe the Internet funding and policies weren't worthwhile on the whole (I think they were, but I don't know what else could have been done with the funds), but I think that Clinton-Gore helped the US public become Internet-connected ahead of other nations and thus gave the country an edge up on establishing itself. Clinton's policies generally didn't hurt me too much. They placed less emphasis on increasing police powers of federal agencies, and more on transparency and oversight, which I like.
Why would you wrap Dirac in QuickTime when there are good, non-proprietary wrappers like.ogg?
Optimize compression algorithms for individual CPUs. Is Dirac running on a Pentium 4? HyperThread it. Is it running on a PowerPC G4/G5? Optimize for AltiVec. Same applies for Sun's VMX, MIPS' MME, etc.
That's the last thing you do. Least performance gain, hardest to recode.
Release the codec under an Open Source license but one that will disallow forking or total appropriation (re: Not BSD or GPL).
Why would you do that? What's wrong with BSD/GPL?
(Though I *do* think that GPL is inappropriate -- LGPL or BSD should be used, since there's a lot of closed source software that needs to use this, and fighting closed source with file format incompatibility smacks of Microsoft's tactics).
Remember that the famous Lena image, which was cut from a Playboy magazine, was a *major* still image compression benchmark for a long time. It was a pretty bad choice -- it has a duplicate line at the top, it doesn't necessarily have the ideal color range, and worst of all, it was copyrighted.
The urge to benchmark with smut is strong, but should be resisted.
Open Source may provide security *benefits* -- that does not make it immune to holes. The same thing could happen to an Open Source package with a broken API.
Have you ever seen Linux software using tmpnam(), for instance? That's an API bug right there.
Look, this is a darn large security hole. It'll result in some *huge* breakins for years to come. *However*, this is not a Microsoft- or closed-source- specific problem. It could happen just as easily to, say, the perl community.
They're still finding bufer overflows in Sendmail, for crying out loud.
To be fair, Sendmail is very old code. Old C code that I've seen seems to have a much greater affinity for buffer overflows and the like than modern code.
I rather prefer FLOSS, actually. It is slightly longer, but it's easier to say and makes it *very* clear what is intended -- no company is going to misappropriate "FLOSS" as Microsoft tried with "open source" to refer to "shared source".
It's actually a valid point. I think that it isn't as much an issue because it's *really* easy to go to another web site -- the lock-in factor is almost zero. However, if you control a popular website, putting up links to more of your services will tend to draw people in.
Google is on their way to being the holder of all the information making up the modern world.
First it was the web, then usenet, then everyones email, and now the sum of our written words as well.
Ah, but see, Google still isn't evil. Microsoft is evil, because they use their position to establish lock-in -- producing services that don't interoperate and so forth. However, Google just makes better systems than their competitors. Google has no exclusive deals or access that would prevent anyone from setting up a web server somewhere on the Internet (Possible exception: the Deja newsgroup archive -- while news posts are public, I don't believe that anyone has been archiving posts for as long as Deja has). I could set up a Google competitor tomorrow. They don't establish barriers to entry -- they just make such a good set of products that nobody can compete.
What's wrong with me digging that old celeron-400 out of the corner, installing smoothwall on it, and shoving it away in the cupboard to serve out it's days?
Nothing -- doing so is great if you just want a personal server/firewall.
It's less good if you want to build and sell small-run embedded systems of some sort. These boxes can be purchased, have a system slapped on them, and be resold.
Writing to your representatives (Senate and House) has nothing to do with the presidential election. You can ask that your representatives do anything that you want. The party of the President is entirely irrelevant to that. You need not waste your Presidential vote on a third party to do so.
The problem is that (a) Bush and Kerry may be further from your ideal than you like, but comparing them to lethal injection and the electric chair is just silly. (b) Badnarik isn't going to win. No percentage. Especially not in this election. Even if 1% of voters vote for him, he doesn't have a "1% chance of winning" -- the President is not chosen by choosing a random ballot and using that ballot. The President will either be Kerry or Bush, unless one gets killed before the election.
Badnarik has exactly two ways to win:
(1) The Republican Party drifts fiscal liberal (done) and/or the Democratic Party drifts social conservative (not done), thus increasing dissatisfaction among potential Libertarian voters. Then, one of the parties needs to get landslide wins for a while (definitely not done) so that voters from the majority party feel comfortable voting for a third party. This is unlikely to happen, because if one party gets really popular, they feel that they have freedom to abuse the system, which tends to reduce their popularity and keep a relatively even system.
(2) IRV or a similar system is adopted. This takes vote reform. This is not a trivial change, and will probably take a while to come in. IRV might start being adopted at the local level and trickle up if people steadily petition their legislative representatives. Being a single-issue voter on vote reform is a way to get this through. That will greatly empower third parties. Still, the dominant two parties are going to be dead set against any kind of vote reform, since it weakens them.
Slashdot, as well as most Internet forums, is predominantly liberal.
If the poster can convince a number of people to vote third party, he will tend to hurt the Democrats more than the Republicans, and hence strengthen the Republican party in this election.
Now that I've trolled for your attention, I want to say that there's no such thing as a wasted vote.
I disagree.
The election process is about more than just who wins.
No, the lobbying, polling, debate, and forum process is about expressing wants. The election process is simply there to choose a president. During polling and so forth, you get to say "I want someone who pushes anti-abortion more strongly than Bush does".
A vote is a statement of your general favor for a given candidate. It's a winner-take-all proposition; you don't get to divide it among three candidates you like. It's assumed that you don't believe the candidate is perfect for you; he was just good enough to get your vote.
Yup. And this is exactly why we need IRV or some similar system instead of the existing first-choice-only. If such a system was adopted, a vote for a third party wouldn't be wasted. Under today's system, however, it is a waste.
Voting for a third party or write-in candidate sends the signal that A) you care enough to vote and B) neither of the two major party clowns was good enough for you. To the extent that your vote matters at all, you have used it to tell the major parties that if their policies were more like the one for whom you voted, they might get your vote.
I don't buy it. Consider what you're trying to say: that if "Party X" had just changed their politics, they would have gotten your vote. Presumably, this is to try and convince "Party X" to adopt your politics for the next election. However, we can demonstrate that this approach doesn't work. The 2000 elections were incredibly close, and the 2004 elections are shaping up to be the same way. This is the *ideal situation* for your claim to be coming true, if it ever was going to do so. If you didn't like, say, the Demms in 2000 and voted against them, but they didn't change to your favored policies in their running for the 2004 election (and they cannot have done so, or you wouldn't be voting against them now), it will *never* happen, as this is the time that they are most likely to need to bend over for your policies.
A vote for a third party encourages that party, and also the other minor parties. They see the number of people who voted for them, and know where their support is.
These parties can run polls if they want public opinion. Voting is there to choose the next President, not to express feelings -- there are better forums for that, where one can give out more detailed information, like *why* one prefers a different candidate.
But, it might be argued, doesn't that split the support for one of the major parties, causing the Most Evil Party to win instead of the Not Quite So Evil Party? Possibly, and that is part of the choice. Unless your tiny party is at one extreme of the spectrum occupied by the two majors, support for it will come proportionately from both of them.
A vote for a third party is one-half of a vote for your less-liked mainstream party. I hate to say it, but that's how it is. I'd be estatic if IRV or a similar voting reform gets adopted, but that's the only way to fix the system. Trying to come on Slashdot and get a majority of Americans to vote for a third party just isn't going to happen. Vote reform is a prerequisite.
Finally, voting for a third party encourages those who don't want to "waste" their vote that it's not such a waste. Voting is a herd phenomenon. When others see your party's vote total rising from past elections, they'll be more likely to vote that way themselves.
*If* this is actually true, it would simply strengthen your less-liked of the major parties.
As far as reading the news on the internet - okay so it looks like in print, they say "President Bush" - but when they're saying it on the news on the T.V., they say Mr. Bush very frequently, and they have been since he was elected - I'm not just making this up, it shouldn't take you anything more than one-two sessions of the nightly news to see what I'm talking about, but I haven't recorded data on this - and it's difficult to quote seeing as how I would have to get a recording, put it on an mp3 and post it somewhere for you, and I have no web-space to do that - but it really shouldn't take anything more than a session or two of the nightly news. If you don't watch T.V. news that's probably why you never heard that - and that's fine, T.V.'s mostly just a bunch of garbage anyway, it's reassuring to know that you read more to get your news.
One other possibility is that the isolated last name is used to denote something associated with Bush. You'd have "the Bush administration", not "President Bush's administration". That's a pretty standard usage.
Condoms don't prevent AIDS, they just decrease the probablity, they do fail. The only way to prevent 99% (jsut a quessed percent) of AIDS is to be abstinent until marriage, and then be monogamous. And yes there are people that still do that, I did that, my wife did that, and there are hundreds of thousands of people world wide that do that. There would be more, if it were promoted as the only way to prevent 100% of STD's, and prevent teen pregnancy.
That's probably true. However, there are a number of problems.
First, you're talking about trying to keep people from having sex. Frankly, sex is pretty enjoyable, and aside from maybe heroin, it's one of the hardest things to keep people from wanting to do. Perhaps a conservative Christian might refrain from premarital sex because he has strong religious beliefs condemning premarital sex. However, even in the United States, one of the most Christian nations out there, the majority of people do have premarital sex.
My concern is not how to spread Christian values (if people want to do missionary work, that's great, but it should be recognized that missionary work and epidemic prevention *are* different), but how to keep a dangerous disease from spreading. I absolutely agree with your claim that if people would stop having anything other than monogamous sex, it would pretty much halt the growth of AIDS. The problem? It's hard to keep people from having sex. Say you manage to convince 5% of the Nigerian population not to have premarital sex. Sure, that's great -- but if 60% of the population can be convinced to use condoms, even though a condom might be less effective than abstinence, condoms wind up doing more to help stem the spread of AIDS. This is a population in which a recent problem was that rumors had been going around that the way to cure AIDS was to have sex with a virgin.
Beside that though, Bush poured more money than any other president, into defeating the actual virus through scientific research that could produce a vaccine or a cure, but he gets no credit, just ignored or criticized. What's better to have a condom, or a cure? A cure can prevent all AIDS, with or without a condom.
[Shrug] I admit that I wasn't aware that he had done so. That's good -- I think that federal medical research is one of the best ways to spend federal funds. However, my argument is that the second does not solve the problems introduced by the first -- we're talking about an epidemic, which grows exponentially over time, and Bush eliminating something that would reduce the growth factor (for poor reasons, to my way of thinking). That's not great.
I stopped using google or any of their services, because of their obvious political views. Now I know they actually search the news, and just repost articles, but I'd rather search through the news sights myself.
Fair enough. I started reading Google News originally for Middle East
Slashdot Mirror
Okay, that *is* interesting and kind of awful, but I stand by my criticism of the Constitution Party. The day a political party can get a thumbs up because "the Republicans are almost as bad as we are" is the day that I start pricing sandbags and guns.
Okay, fair enough. That *is* kind of appalling.
To be fair, I doubt many political prisoners are arrested "because they are political opposition".
Why would Badnarik, who campaigns bitterly against such government intrusions on private citizens and corporations, take part in such an intrusion?
Because somewhere around (i.e. pulled from my ass) 97% of Americans have never heard of the Libertarian Party and 99.9% of Americans have never heard of Michael Badnarik.
He now gets prominent headlines and a nice association with freedom of speech. He's making himself impossible to ignore. The right thing to do, IMHO.
It should shake the debate up a bit.
I have a number of issues with the Libertarian platform, but at least Badnarik (and Cobb) are doing the right thing to get the boat moving.
Yes, but aside from the fact that the Constitution Party *does* advocate not changing the Consitution, their entire remaining platform appears to me to be stupid, short-sighted, and offensive. They dislike foreigners, free trade, and homosexuals (I must admit, when a party's platform says that a party is "anti-homosexual", images of the KKK and Nazi party start floating by). They have ties to anti-female equality ideas.
The closest organization in the US to the Consitution Party is the KKK.
basically, the more ive worked with SNMP, the more ive realized that the "S" is the key letter. it is fantastic for some quick chores ona local reliable network, but just plain doesn't scale. there is a vast array of management and monitoring problems that just arent simple enough for SNMP to handle well.
Okay, I'm curious. SNMP allows for polling and for requesting feedback on events (traps). It provides exposed data structures that can present scalar values, trees, and multidimensional arrays. I can't really think of any network monitoring/management system that can't be built using this. What specific problems does SNMP have?
I'll buy a lack of encryption as an issue, but I don't think that it's really feasible issue to fix -- many embedded devices don't have the CPU time to handle it.
Microsoft capitalizes "Web Services" and seems to use it as if it refers to some set of protocols or something. To someone who doesn't bother to keep up on the latest Microsoft buzzwords (the FLOSS world lets you avoid much of that), the idea of "Web Services" being equivalent to "web services" seems unlikely.
Is "Web Services" just the latest way to say "implemented using SOAP"?
The article notes that while academia may rightly be considered leftist (heh)
The educated and knowledgeable tend toward the left?
I agree that this is a significant point, but I read it a bit differently than the article author does.
Just like we were starting to see the affects of Clinton's policies (or rather lack of action) as he left office.
You're posting on an Internet that owes a lot of its rapid growth to Clinton-Gore work. Maybe the Internet funding and policies weren't worthwhile on the whole (I think they were, but I don't know what else could have been done with the funds), but I think that Clinton-Gore helped the US public become Internet-connected ahead of other nations and thus gave the country an edge up on establishing itself. Clinton's policies generally didn't hurt me too much. They placed less emphasis on increasing police powers of federal agencies, and more on transparency and oversight, which I like.
What's a Yahoo Bookmark?
* Release Dirac for QuickTime.
.ogg?
Why would you wrap Dirac in QuickTime when there are good, non-proprietary wrappers like
Optimize compression algorithms for individual CPUs. Is Dirac running on a Pentium 4? HyperThread it. Is it running on a PowerPC G4/G5? Optimize for AltiVec. Same applies for Sun's VMX, MIPS' MME, etc.
That's the last thing you do. Least performance gain, hardest to recode.
Release the codec under an Open Source license but one that will disallow forking or total appropriation (re: Not BSD or GPL).
Why would you do that? What's wrong with BSD/GPL?
(Though I *do* think that GPL is inappropriate -- LGPL or BSD should be used, since there's a lot of closed source software that needs to use this, and fighting closed source with file format incompatibility smacks of Microsoft's tactics).
Remember that the famous Lena image, which was cut from a Playboy magazine, was a *major* still image compression benchmark for a long time. It was a pretty bad choice -- it has a duplicate line at the top, it doesn't necessarily have the ideal color range, and worst of all, it was copyrighted.
The urge to benchmark with smut is strong, but should be resisted.
Open Source may provide security *benefits* -- that does not make it immune to holes. The same thing could happen to an Open Source package with a broken API.
Have you ever seen Linux software using tmpnam(), for instance? That's an API bug right there.
Look, this is a darn large security hole. It'll result in some *huge* breakins for years to come. *However*, this is not a Microsoft- or closed-source- specific problem. It could happen just as easily to, say, the perl community.
They're still finding bufer overflows in Sendmail, for crying out loud.
To be fair, Sendmail is very old code. Old C code that I've seen seems to have a much greater affinity for buffer overflows and the like than modern code.
First off, if someone reports a bug, it should be ASSUMED that there is a potential security issue there, until proven otherwise.
Okay, just a moment. Consider the feasibility of this. Even small FLOSS projects may have a hundred bugs open.
I mean, you *could* consider it a "security hole", but if you take such a policy, you won't be able to actually do much about "security holes".
I rather prefer FLOSS, actually. It is slightly longer, but it's easier to say and makes it *very* clear what is intended -- no company is going to misappropriate "FLOSS" as Microsoft tried with "open source" to refer to "shared source".
I've read about researchers finding African women that exhibited the same thing. This isn't a first, though it is a good thing.
It's actually a valid point. I think that it isn't as much an issue because it's *really* easy to go to another web site -- the lock-in factor is almost zero. However, if you control a popular website, putting up links to more of your services will tend to draw people in.
Google is on their way to being the holder of all the information making up the modern world.
First it was the web, then usenet, then everyones email, and now the sum of our written words as well.
Ah, but see, Google still isn't evil. Microsoft is evil, because they use their position to establish lock-in -- producing services that don't interoperate and so forth. However, Google just makes better systems than their competitors. Google has no exclusive deals or access that would prevent anyone from setting up a web server somewhere on the Internet (Possible exception: the Deja newsgroup archive -- while news posts are public, I don't believe that anyone has been archiving posts for as long as Deja has). I could set up a Google competitor tomorrow. They don't establish barriers to entry -- they just make such a good set of products that nobody can compete.
What's wrong with me digging that old celeron-400 out of the corner, installing smoothwall on it, and shoving it away in the cupboard to serve out it's days?
Nothing -- doing so is great if you just want a personal server/firewall.
It's less good if you want to build and sell small-run embedded systems of some sort. These boxes can be purchased, have a system slapped on them, and be resold.
Writing to your representatives (Senate and House) has nothing to do with the presidential election. You can ask that your representatives do anything that you want. The party of the President is entirely irrelevant to that. You need not waste your Presidential vote on a third party to do so.
The problem is that (a) Bush and Kerry may be further from your ideal than you like, but comparing them to lethal injection and the electric chair is just silly. (b) Badnarik isn't going to win. No percentage. Especially not in this election. Even if 1% of voters vote for him, he doesn't have a "1% chance of winning" -- the President is not chosen by choosing a random ballot and using that ballot. The President will either be Kerry or Bush, unless one gets killed before the election.
Badnarik has exactly two ways to win:
(1) The Republican Party drifts fiscal liberal (done) and/or the Democratic Party drifts social conservative (not done), thus increasing dissatisfaction among potential Libertarian voters. Then, one of the parties needs to get landslide wins for a while (definitely not done) so that voters from the majority party feel comfortable voting for a third party. This is unlikely to happen, because if one party gets really popular, they feel that they have freedom to abuse the system, which tends to reduce their popularity and keep a relatively even system.
(2) IRV or a similar system is adopted. This takes vote reform. This is not a trivial change, and will probably take a while to come in. IRV might start being adopted at the local level and trickle up if people steadily petition their legislative representatives. Being a single-issue voter on vote reform is a way to get this through. That will greatly empower third parties. Still, the dominant two parties are going to be dead set against any kind of vote reform, since it weakens them.
The original poster is doing the same thing.
Slashdot, as well as most Internet forums, is predominantly liberal.
If the poster can convince a number of people to vote third party, he will tend to hurt the Democrats more than the Republicans, and hence strengthen the Republican party in this election.
Now that I've trolled for your attention, I want to say that there's no such thing as a wasted vote.
I disagree.
The election process is about more than just who wins.
No, the lobbying, polling, debate, and forum process is about expressing wants. The election process is simply there to choose a president. During polling and so forth, you get to say "I want someone who pushes anti-abortion more strongly than Bush does".
A vote is a statement of your general favor for a given candidate. It's a winner-take-all proposition; you don't get to divide it among three candidates you like. It's assumed that you don't believe the candidate is perfect for you; he was just good enough to get your vote.
Yup. And this is exactly why we need IRV or some similar system instead of the existing first-choice-only. If such a system was adopted, a vote for a third party wouldn't be wasted. Under today's system, however, it is a waste.
Voting for a third party or write-in candidate sends the signal that A) you care enough to vote and B) neither of the two major party clowns was good enough for you. To the extent that your vote matters at all, you have used it to tell the major parties that if their policies were more like the one for whom you voted, they might get your vote.
I don't buy it. Consider what you're trying to say: that if "Party X" had just changed their politics, they would have gotten your vote. Presumably, this is to try and convince "Party X" to adopt your politics for the next election. However, we can demonstrate that this approach doesn't work. The 2000 elections were incredibly close, and the 2004 elections are shaping up to be the same way. This is the *ideal situation* for your claim to be coming true, if it ever was going to do so. If you didn't like, say, the Demms in 2000 and voted against them, but they didn't change to your favored policies in their running for the 2004 election (and they cannot have done so, or you wouldn't be voting against them now), it will *never* happen, as this is the time that they are most likely to need to bend over for your policies.
A vote for a third party encourages that party, and also the other minor parties. They see the number of people who voted for them, and know where their support is.
These parties can run polls if they want public opinion. Voting is there to choose the next President, not to express feelings -- there are better forums for that, where one can give out more detailed information, like *why* one prefers a different candidate.
But, it might be argued, doesn't that split the support for one of the major parties, causing the Most Evil Party to win instead of the Not Quite So Evil Party? Possibly, and that is part of the choice. Unless your tiny party is at one extreme of the spectrum occupied by the two majors, support for it will come proportionately from both of them.
A vote for a third party is one-half of a vote for your less-liked mainstream party. I hate to say it, but that's how it is. I'd be estatic if IRV or a similar voting reform gets adopted, but that's the only way to fix the system. Trying to come on Slashdot and get a majority of Americans to vote for a third party just isn't going to happen. Vote reform is a prerequisite.
Finally, voting for a third party encourages those who don't want to "waste" their vote that it's not such a waste. Voting is a herd phenomenon. When others see your party's vote total rising from past elections, they'll be more likely to vote that way themselves.
*If* this is actually true, it would simply strengthen your less-liked of the major parties.
As far as reading the news on the internet - okay so it looks like in print, they say "President Bush" - but when they're saying it on the news on the T.V., they say Mr. Bush very frequently, and they have been since he was elected - I'm not just making this up, it shouldn't take you anything more than one-two sessions of the nightly news to see what I'm talking about, but I haven't recorded data on this - and it's difficult to quote seeing as how I would have to get a recording, put it on an mp3 and post it somewhere for you, and I have no web-space to do that - but it really shouldn't take anything more than a session or two of the nightly news. If you don't watch T.V. news that's probably why you never heard that - and that's fine, T.V.'s mostly just a bunch of garbage anyway, it's reassuring to know that you read more to get your news.
One other possibility is that the isolated last name is used to denote something associated with Bush. You'd have "the Bush administration", not "President Bush's administration". That's a pretty standard usage.
Condoms don't prevent AIDS, they just decrease the probablity, they do fail. The only way to prevent 99% (jsut a quessed percent) of AIDS is to be abstinent until marriage, and then be monogamous. And yes there are people that still do that, I did that, my wife did that, and there are hundreds of thousands of people world wide that do that. There would be more, if it were promoted as the only way to prevent 100% of STD's, and prevent teen pregnancy.
That's probably true. However, there are a number of problems.
First, you're talking about trying to keep people from having sex. Frankly, sex is pretty enjoyable, and aside from maybe heroin, it's one of the hardest things to keep people from wanting to do. Perhaps a conservative Christian might refrain from premarital sex because he has strong religious beliefs condemning premarital sex. However, even in the United States, one of the most Christian nations out there, the majority of people do have premarital sex.
My concern is not how to spread Christian values (if people want to do missionary work, that's great, but it should be recognized that missionary work and epidemic prevention *are* different), but how to keep a dangerous disease from spreading. I absolutely agree with your claim that if people would stop having anything other than monogamous sex, it would pretty much halt the growth of AIDS. The problem? It's hard to keep people from having sex. Say you manage to convince 5% of the Nigerian population not to have premarital sex. Sure, that's great -- but if 60% of the population can be convinced to use condoms, even though a condom might be less effective than abstinence, condoms wind up doing more to help stem the spread of AIDS. This is a population in which a recent problem was that rumors had been going around that the way to cure AIDS was to have sex with a virgin.
Beside that though, Bush poured more money than any other president, into defeating the actual virus through scientific research that could produce a vaccine or a cure, but he gets no credit, just ignored or criticized. What's better to have a condom, or a cure? A cure can prevent all AIDS, with or without a condom.
[Shrug] I admit that I wasn't aware that he had done so. That's good -- I think that federal medical research is one of the best ways to spend federal funds. However, my argument is that the second does not solve the problems introduced by the first -- we're talking about an epidemic, which grows exponentially over time, and Bush eliminating something that would reduce the growth factor (for poor reasons, to my way of thinking). That's not great.
I stopped using google or any of their services, because of their obvious political views. Now I know they actually search the news, and just repost articles, but I'd rather search through the news sights myself.
Fair enough. I started reading Google News originally for Middle East