Note to mods: parent posting (my own posting) is *not* a +5 post. I expected to get hit for flamebait on this, but I am sick and tired of Republicans talking about how they and only they represent "American values" - especially now that we can see that the Emperor has no clothes (when he's IMing his pages).
Very nice repetition of Tucker Carlson's argument against The Daily Show on Crossfire in - what, 2004? Do you guys have some kind of handbook that you use to remind you what the Party Line is? Perhaps a Little Red Book?
Outright hatred of AMERICAN values? I've got news for you, buddy: Current Republican "values" are closer to al Qaeda's values than they are to American values. Most of your "values" issues are ones on which the average Wahabbist could nod his head in agreement.
And yet he insanely felt the need to have a bunch of his creatures break into the DNC headquarters . . . Yes, nothing the Watergate burglars did affected the 1972 election; but nevertheless, Nixon was caught trying to cheat in an election in Watergate, and so the claim that he was robbed of the 1960 election by Kennedy and "cheating" in Chicago seems, in hindsight, a little, well, lacking in depth of historical perception.
Funny, I thought I heard Patrick Buchanan on NPR the other night. And it wasn't an attack job, either (well, there were a lot of attacks from the listeners, but not so bad from the hosts - no worse, at least, than Chris Matthews.
My apologies, I was incorrect in one statement: the number of detainees released is more like 1/3, not more than half; and perhaps 20% of those released were genuine fighters who returned to Afghanistan and took up arms against coalition forces. Regardless, a largish percentage were never a threat to the US - at least, not before their detention.
You can make all the assertions you want, but the reality is that the MAJORITY of people detained at Gitmo as "terrorists" have been released; come to find out, a lot of them were detained on the basis of individual informants declaring them to be al Qaeda so they could collect bounties, and nobody really checked into the reliability of the informants. This administration accepts anything anyone says to them that they want to hear as "intelligence," whether it is the result of "vigorous interrogation," bounties, or out and out manipulation (ever hear of Ahmed Chalabi?).
Look, you can claim that everything you disagree with is "radical leftist" (I'm just a hair to the left of Alexander Hamilton, though of course to the ex-Trotskyite crowd running things in DC nowadays I'm a flaming commie), and that all I'm doing is parroting Michael Moore (is that the only liberal you've ever heard of? Actually, I'm basing my comments on wide reading of e.g. Bob Woodward (no liberal he, a good veteran and long time Republican; but take a look at his new book, State of Denial, to see just how much GWB really pays attention to the CIA, NSA, and FBI), Seymour Hersh, Tariq Ali, Fouad Ajami, Kenneth Pollack, David Fromkin, Madawi al-Rasheed, Albert Hourani, Bernard Lewis, etc. - not on watching Bill O'Reilly with my dick in my hand. And unlike some who get those CIA, NSA, and FBI briefings, I actually read the books available to me. Tell me - have you seen Michael Moore's movie, or are you just parroting what Bill O'Reilly had to say about it?
Now, about "outright deception of the American public" - this administration has been shown, time and again, to have said things in public that were directly contradicted by what their own experts were telling them (the African uranium, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi), and downright lying about things ("mission accomplished," extraordinary rendition, Jack Abramoff) they were doing. Usually it takes them a year or so to come up with a laughable excuse for why they said what they said - right now they're claiming that the government indeed did find large caches of WMD in Iraq as long ago as 2003, but failed to announce them because they didn't want to tell the terrorists where to find weapons they could use against Coalition forces - which is odd, because if our forces found these WMD caches, wouldn't they have removed them?
Finally, there's this whole bit you've picked up from the xenophobic media elite, "usually those with dissenting views are actively engaged in attempts to undermine this administration in every possible way, even if it means the deaths of many, many innocent people." Name ONE INNOCENT PERSON who has died because of the actions of a legitimate political dissenter (like John McCain, for instance, or Jack Murtha, or Colin Powell)! I do not mean Geraldo Rivera, who is in fact nowadays on your side - the side of the wild, woolly-minded radical right. This is precisely the sort of rhetoric Stalinists used to suppress dissent, and that China uses today. "If you disagree with the government, you are the enemy of the Homeland!!!" There's no logic to it: after all, weren't you lot trying to undermine the Clinton administration while we were at war with al Qaeda? (Can't have it both ways, boys: for all his inability to keep his pants zipped, Clinton did bomb the shit out of Sudan over their harboring of al Qaeda, captured the first bombers of the WTC, captured the loonie toons who were trying to shoot up LAX on New Year's 1999/2000; so he fought terrorism; therefore, the Repugnican attempt to oust his government because he lied to a grand jury about who he was screwing around with was an attack on America itself!!!)
Good god! I wish George Senior were back. At least back then you could hold your head up high in the knowledge that America was holding to its moral and ethical standards, working to unite the world community in common action.
By the way, I work for a living, I do not frequent coffee shops, and I'm probably twice your age.
In other words, instead of putting a massive number of troops on the ground to flush out and kill or (even better, capture) Osama Bin Laden, let's divert all those troops to overthrowing the regime of a bad guy who also happens to be Arab, whose government had maybe one or two meetings with Bin Laden but was widely considered (as a secular Ba'athist regime) to be effectively "infidel" by Bin Laden and his associates, and whose presence, while certainly very bad for his own people and a very minor threat to the US (slightly more serious than the threat of Syria, let's say, but far less serious a threat than al Qaeda, Iran, Korea, and China, just to name the four threats the current administration has allowed to grow over the past 6 years), was more importantly a serious threat to Iran and Syria, and thereby give Bin Laden's associates a rallying cry, something they can use as evidence of a "crusade" against Islam by the US and Israel ('cause let's face it, Bin Laden and his bunch probably blamed Israel for the earthquake in Pakistan), and then use all that as an excuse to revert to practices for which we long criticized, hey, that very same bad guy whose regime we overthrew!
Microsoft!!! The first thing that will happen is some clueless parent will buy his or her kid a Zune for Christmas to replace an overstuffed iPod, and after an hour or two of trying to get the kid's DRMed iTunes music to play on the thing, it will be "what the hell good is this?!!!" Rather like trying to install those Word for Windows floppies from work on your brand new Mac back in the early 1990s.
Fortunately, Americanism - not the Freedom Fries variety, but the *Federalist Papers* variety - is also an ideology, not an organization. They (the terrorists or the authoritarians) can't root us out, either.
Books have much higher production costs than you seem to think. With acquisitions, development, editing, and typesetting (i.e., data entry and formatting) costs, there's not that much difference between the production costs of music and those of print.
Anne? Charlie? Brian? Diane? Martin? Cynthia? Terry? Bob here. Good of you to join me for this quick, impromptu teleconference. I wanted to encourage you to do one investigative report on WalMart's employment and business practices EVERY DAY. That's right, every single day. For how long? Until the effers go under, that's how long! Eff with a media outlet will they . . .
While I don't agree that "progressive" is necessarily "another term for 'liberal,'" and certainly don't agree that "'neo-conservative' is just another term for 'totalitarian'," it is interesting that many of the neo-conservative theorists of today were Trotskyites in the earlier part of their political lives.
EyeTV Hybrid cannot record cable HDTV, period; only over air (don't believe me? read the FAQ). The CableCard provides not only unencrypted cable HDTV channels, but even encrypted channels. I use my EyeTV on my PowerMac as an adjunct to my TiVo, but don't consider it a replacement.
In the 1860s, the Democrats were the conservatives and the Republicans were the "liberals." Things got turned around in early part of the 20th century when Taft repudiated many of the progressive principles that helped Teddy Roosevelt win election to the Vice Presidency (and later to the Presidency). This annoyed Roosevelt so much that he ran against Taft on the Progressive Party ("Bull Moose") ticket; but the two split the vote allowing Wilson to be elected. In many ways, Wilson set the stage for what would become Democratic (Party) foreign policy for the rest of the century in his proposals for the Peace of Versailles and the creation of the League of Nations; on the other hand, there's a lot of dispute about his attitude toward civil rights and "race" in America. However, the turning point for the Democratic Party from what we might call "conservative" to what we might call "liberal" was the Great Depression, the New Deal policies of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration, the integration of the Army under Truman, and the split of the Dixiecrats in 1948 (and subsequent switch of many segregationists to the Republican Party in 1964 after Johnson's support of desegregation). While it is not quite possible to map anti-slavery and pro-Civil Rights sentiment together as either "liberal" or "progressive," it is possible to locate both sentiments in "anti-conservative" movements and also to see them as at least tenuously related.
Precisely. Microsoft doesn't care if you buy a copy of Vista and a copy of Office to run on your Mac, and Apple doesn't care if you buy your Mac to run Vista and office. Microsoft does care if you buy a Mac to run OS X without Office, and Apple does care if you buy an OS X disk to run on your Dell (because Apple's main profit margin is in the hardware). So I can see no reason whatsoever why Microsoft would cripple Vista from running on the Mac - it's another $300 for them, and no OEM discount!
Because for his requirements, an iMac is the best form factor, and a live cd is the best way to run the software; and because despite all the moaning and groaning about MacBook Pros overheating, MacBooks shutting down and random, etc., Apple still makes the most reliable hardware with the longest average useful life. OS X is not all things to all people (and I'm posting this from a G5 PowerMac under Safari, so I know whereof I speak). In this case, the user wants to be able to reset the whole system to its original configuration every time he uses it, without any hassles, and it is just possible to totally screw up a Mac OS X installation and make it unusuable (it's tough, but I've met users who could do it - not fould up the applications or system themselves without admin privileges, but screw up their user configuration, bookmarks, etc.). With a live CD, your OS configuration is fixed, and nothing is going to change that. Ideally, someone should come up with a nice stripped-down BSD or Linux specifically designed to mimic an internet appliance. Mind you, you wouldn't *have* a user profile to save bookmarks, etc., but you could think of that as one less thing to screw up.
Slashdot Mirror
Note to mods: parent posting (my own posting) is *not* a +5 post. I expected to get hit for flamebait on this, but I am sick and tired of Republicans talking about how they and only they represent "American values" - especially now that we can see that the Emperor has no clothes (when he's IMing his pages).
Very nice repetition of Tucker Carlson's argument against The Daily Show on Crossfire in - what, 2004? Do you guys have some kind of handbook that you use to remind you what the Party Line is? Perhaps a Little Red Book?
Outright hatred of AMERICAN values? I've got news for you, buddy: Current Republican "values" are closer to al Qaeda's values than they are to American values. Most of your "values" issues are ones on which the average Wahabbist could nod his head in agreement.
And yet he insanely felt the need to have a bunch of his creatures break into the DNC headquarters . . . Yes, nothing the Watergate burglars did affected the 1972 election; but nevertheless, Nixon was caught trying to cheat in an election in Watergate, and so the claim that he was robbed of the 1960 election by Kennedy and "cheating" in Chicago seems, in hindsight, a little, well, lacking in depth of historical perception.
Because as we all know, Richard Nixon would never do anything to rig an election.
Oh, wait a minute ...
Funny, I thought I heard Patrick Buchanan on NPR the other night. And it wasn't an attack job, either (well, there were a lot of attacks from the listeners, but not so bad from the hosts - no worse, at least, than Chris Matthews.
My apologies, I was incorrect in one statement: the number of detainees released is more like 1/3, not more than half; and perhaps 20% of those released were genuine fighters who returned to Afghanistan and took up arms against coalition forces. Regardless, a largish percentage were never a threat to the US - at least, not before their detention.
You can make all the assertions you want, but the reality is that the MAJORITY of people detained at Gitmo as "terrorists" have been released; come to find out, a lot of them were detained on the basis of individual informants declaring them to be al Qaeda so they could collect bounties, and nobody really checked into the reliability of the informants. This administration accepts anything anyone says to them that they want to hear as "intelligence," whether it is the result of "vigorous interrogation," bounties, or out and out manipulation (ever hear of Ahmed Chalabi?).
Look, you can claim that everything you disagree with is "radical leftist" (I'm just a hair to the left of Alexander Hamilton, though of course to the ex-Trotskyite crowd running things in DC nowadays I'm a flaming commie), and that all I'm doing is parroting Michael Moore (is that the only liberal you've ever heard of? Actually, I'm basing my comments on wide reading of e.g. Bob Woodward (no liberal he, a good veteran and long time Republican; but take a look at his new book, State of Denial, to see just how much GWB really pays attention to the CIA, NSA, and FBI), Seymour Hersh, Tariq Ali, Fouad Ajami, Kenneth Pollack, David Fromkin, Madawi al-Rasheed, Albert Hourani, Bernard Lewis, etc. - not on watching Bill O'Reilly with my dick in my hand. And unlike some who get those CIA, NSA, and FBI briefings, I actually read the books available to me. Tell me - have you seen Michael Moore's movie, or are you just parroting what Bill O'Reilly had to say about it?
Now, about "outright deception of the American public" - this administration has been shown, time and again, to have said things in public that were directly contradicted by what their own experts were telling them (the African uranium, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi), and downright lying about things ("mission accomplished," extraordinary rendition, Jack Abramoff) they were doing. Usually it takes them a year or so to come up with a laughable excuse for why they said what they said - right now they're claiming that the government indeed did find large caches of WMD in Iraq as long ago as 2003, but failed to announce them because they didn't want to tell the terrorists where to find weapons they could use against Coalition forces - which is odd, because if our forces found these WMD caches, wouldn't they have removed them?
Finally, there's this whole bit you've picked up from the xenophobic media elite, "usually those with dissenting views are actively engaged in attempts to undermine this administration in every possible way, even if it means the deaths of many, many innocent people." Name ONE INNOCENT PERSON who has died because of the actions of a legitimate political dissenter (like John McCain, for instance, or Jack Murtha, or Colin Powell)! I do not mean Geraldo Rivera, who is in fact nowadays on your side - the side of the wild, woolly-minded radical right. This is precisely the sort of rhetoric Stalinists used to suppress dissent, and that China uses today. "If you disagree with the government, you are the enemy of the Homeland!!!" There's no logic to it: after all, weren't you lot trying to undermine the Clinton administration while we were at war with al Qaeda? (Can't have it both ways, boys: for all his inability to keep his pants zipped, Clinton did bomb the shit out of Sudan over their harboring of al Qaeda, captured the first bombers of the WTC, captured the loonie toons who were trying to shoot up LAX on New Year's 1999/2000; so he fought terrorism; therefore, the Repugnican attempt to oust his government because he lied to a grand jury about who he was screwing around with was an attack on America itself!!!)
Good god! I wish George Senior were back. At least back then you could hold your head up high in the knowledge that America was holding to its moral and ethical standards, working to unite the world community in common action.
By the way, I work for a living, I do not frequent coffee shops, and I'm probably twice your age.
In other words, instead of putting a massive number of troops on the ground to flush out and kill or (even better, capture) Osama Bin Laden, let's divert all those troops to overthrowing the regime of a bad guy who also happens to be Arab, whose government had maybe one or two meetings with Bin Laden but was widely considered (as a secular Ba'athist regime) to be effectively "infidel" by Bin Laden and his associates, and whose presence, while certainly very bad for his own people and a very minor threat to the US (slightly more serious than the threat of Syria, let's say, but far less serious a threat than al Qaeda, Iran, Korea, and China, just to name the four threats the current administration has allowed to grow over the past 6 years), was more importantly a serious threat to Iran and Syria, and thereby give Bin Laden's associates a rallying cry, something they can use as evidence of a "crusade" against Islam by the US and Israel ('cause let's face it, Bin Laden and his bunch probably blamed Israel for the earthquake in Pakistan), and then use all that as an excuse to revert to practices for which we long criticized, hey, that very same bad guy whose regime we overthrew!
Microsoft!!! The first thing that will happen is some clueless parent will buy his or her kid a Zune for Christmas to replace an overstuffed iPod, and after an hour or two of trying to get the kid's DRMed iTunes music to play on the thing, it will be "what the hell good is this?!!!" Rather like trying to install those Word for Windows floppies from work on your brand new Mac back in the early 1990s.
Fortunately, Americanism - not the Freedom Fries variety, but the *Federalist Papers* variety - is also an ideology, not an organization. They (the terrorists or the authoritarians) can't root us out, either.
We did. In the 20th century, anyway.
It takes on average 6 years to translate Thucydides properly, so I for one don't have a problem with the translator making some cash.
Books have much higher production costs than you seem to think. With acquisitions, development, editing, and typesetting (i.e., data entry and formatting) costs, there's not that much difference between the production costs of music and those of print.
Anne? Charlie? Brian? Diane? Martin? Cynthia? Terry? Bob here. Good of you to join me for this quick, impromptu teleconference. I wanted to encourage you to do one investigative report on WalMart's employment and business practices EVERY DAY. That's right, every single day. For how long? Until the effers go under, that's how long! Eff with a media outlet will they . . .
Unless your name is Khomeni, he was probably a former ally of yours, too.
My very educated mother cleverly just showed us nine purple common quiet elephants
While I don't agree that "progressive" is necessarily "another term for 'liberal,'" and certainly don't agree that "'neo-conservative' is just another term for 'totalitarian'," it is interesting that many of the neo-conservative theorists of today were Trotskyites in the earlier part of their political lives.
Reception. Mine stinks.
EyeTV Hybrid cannot record cable HDTV, period; only over air (don't believe me? read the FAQ). The CableCard provides not only unencrypted cable HDTV channels, but even encrypted channels. I use my EyeTV on my PowerMac as an adjunct to my TiVo, but don't consider it a replacement.
In the 1860s, the Democrats were the conservatives and the Republicans were the "liberals." Things got turned around in early part of the 20th century when Taft repudiated many of the progressive principles that helped Teddy Roosevelt win election to the Vice Presidency (and later to the Presidency). This annoyed Roosevelt so much that he ran against Taft on the Progressive Party ("Bull Moose") ticket; but the two split the vote allowing Wilson to be elected. In many ways, Wilson set the stage for what would become Democratic (Party) foreign policy for the rest of the century in his proposals for the Peace of Versailles and the creation of the League of Nations; on the other hand, there's a lot of dispute about his attitude toward civil rights and "race" in America. However, the turning point for the Democratic Party from what we might call "conservative" to what we might call "liberal" was the Great Depression, the New Deal policies of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration, the integration of the Army under Truman, and the split of the Dixiecrats in 1948 (and subsequent switch of many segregationists to the Republican Party in 1964 after Johnson's support of desegregation). While it is not quite possible to map anti-slavery and pro-Civil Rights sentiment together as either "liberal" or "progressive," it is possible to locate both sentiments in "anti-conservative" movements and also to see them as at least tenuously related.
This is a good point, but I suspect that the current post-monopoly environment would make MS a little more cautious about such things.
Precisely. Microsoft doesn't care if you buy a copy of Vista and a copy of Office to run on your Mac, and Apple doesn't care if you buy your Mac to run Vista and office. Microsoft does care if you buy a Mac to run OS X without Office, and Apple does care if you buy an OS X disk to run on your Dell (because Apple's main profit margin is in the hardware). So I can see no reason whatsoever why Microsoft would cripple Vista from running on the Mac - it's another $300 for them, and no OEM discount!
Good god, you must work for an uptight company. Fine, put handwriten notes in their mailboxes, or get everyone's gmail account.
Because for his requirements, an iMac is the best form factor, and a live cd is the best way to run the software; and because despite all the moaning and groaning about MacBook Pros overheating, MacBooks shutting down and random, etc., Apple still makes the most reliable hardware with the longest average useful life. OS X is not all things to all people (and I'm posting this from a G5 PowerMac under Safari, so I know whereof I speak). In this case, the user wants to be able to reset the whole system to its original configuration every time he uses it, without any hassles, and it is just possible to totally screw up a Mac OS X installation and make it unusuable (it's tough, but I've met users who could do it - not fould up the applications or system themselves without admin privileges, but screw up their user configuration, bookmarks, etc.). With a live CD, your OS configuration is fixed, and nothing is going to change that. Ideally, someone should come up with a nice stripped-down BSD or Linux specifically designed to mimic an internet appliance. Mind you, you wouldn't *have* a user profile to save bookmarks, etc., but you could think of that as one less thing to screw up.
I'd go with a 17-in. iMac Core Duo with an Ubuntu Live CD distro and the new USB modem (if Ubuntu can handle that USB Modem, that is).