It doesn't happen in democratic developed countries because they know better and ballots are secret. If you want to see what that's like, go to almost any country in Africa and watch a vote happen.
You enter the polling station and pick up a red ballot and a blue ballot. You were informed as you picked them up which ballot meant which candidate. You go into a concealed area and you secretly drop one of the ballots (completely your choice) into the voting box. Then you walk outside and hand the red ballot to the man with the machete poised over the chopping block. He'll only accept either your hand or the red ballot.
It doesn't matter if it's the mob, your employer, a local tough, or a corrupt government. Vote buying is seriously bad news, and the only thing preventing it from happening is that there is no way to tie you to a particular choice in the polling station.
Personally, I'm more curious about prenatal nutritional deficiency. Specifically, I'm very curious about the Vitamin D Hypothesis.
If true, it would explain the (1) black/white numerical disparity, the (2) latitude correlation, and the (3) male/female numerical disparity. Also, most women in developed countries are severely deficient in vitamin D (20ng/ml of 25(OH)D measured in blood) due to advice over the past 25 years to avoid sun/wear sunscreen, combined with a severe lack of dietary sources of bioavailable vitamin D. Those few adults who drink milk get very little benefit since it is supplemented with Vitamin D2, which is only about 20-33% as effective at raising 15(OH)D levels as Vitamin D3.
This particular possibility is a just hypothesis and not a theory (based on a complete lack of confirming/refuting observations), but there are now some studies being started and I'm extremely curious to hear about their preliminary results. Since chronic Vitamin D deficiency can be corrected in about two months, if there's any validity to the hypothesis, they should be able to establish a significant experimental dataset within just a year or two.
No offense, but your display is really too small to see a big difference. I assure you that a high-def movie looks far better than an upscaled DVD on my 92" 1080p screen. On a bigger screen the difference is even more obvious.
No offense taken. I tried larger screens, and I've sat really close to mine (the first row of seating is about six feet from the screen) and I'm still incredibly satisfied with SD DVD upconverted in the HD DVD player and sent via HDMI to the screen. It looks substantially better than progressive scan DVD to component video and upconverted in the TV (which looked darned good on the previous screen).
You may only have a 40" display now, but do you want to rebuy all your films when you get a 60" or larger display in the future?
You may not find it funny, but I use exactly that argument to argue that rebuying my existing films in HD or Blu Ray is a complete waste of time when the next revolutionary format will be available via download (and it's going to happen pretty quickly). Along those lines, I'm already converting my DVD's to electronic storage without spending an additional penny on the content.
I think you need to qualify what "fine" looks like. To me the difference is as obvious as standard vs HD cable channels...it's not annoying to watch a regular channel, but the difference is obvious and when given the choice of watching the same program on either channel, I'd prefer the HD content.
The quality difference between HD DVD and DVD (played by my high quality upscaling HD player) is much smaller than the quality difference between SD and HD OTA signals. Enough so that I'm more than satisfied with DVD on my shiny new HDTV (40" 1080p LCD). In fact, I would put the quality of a DVD played on a good player equal to or slightly better than HD OTA content (certainly more interesting than most OTA content) and absolutely better than HD satellite content.
Sure, people aren't going to be throwing away their SD-DVDs, but if you have an HDTV which type of DVD format are you going to buy when shopping for a new movie? Why would you buy a disc that doesn't get the most from your HDTV that you paid a substantial amount of money for?
I can't rip Blu Ray or HD DVD to my SAN. If I could, I'd have to sacrifice the space for 3-6 regular SD-DVD's to make space for each HD version. SD-DVD's also cost less, and when I'm buying 20 at a time, $5 here and $10 there begins to add up. At some point there, the marginal utility of SD-DVD's became higher than either HD format could offer, given their position on DRM, the additional size, etc.
As a result of that trade-off (cheaper, easier to back up, slightly less quality) I still buy almost everything as SD-DVD and I'm exceedingly happy with the improvements I get watching DVD's on my new HDTV and HD DVD player.
Even beyond the announcements being PR fluffery, this whole conflict is much ado about nothing.
My HD DVD player makes regular DVD's look absolutely amazing in my HD system (40" 1080p LCD). Enough so that I still buy almost everything on DVD. Take Ratatouille for instance. The fact that it's a "Blu Ray Only" title is completely and utterly irrelevant when I can still watch it on my HD DVD player, it looks great, and I saved a few bucks besides (currently a $5 difference on Amazon between the BluRay and DVD versions).
Actually, since I rip all of my movies to storage, I feel a little stupid when I spend money on an HD DVD since I don't have the software to rip HD DVD's, and if I did, I'd have to trade the space for 3-4 DVD's to save that one HD DVD. So, by several metrics, HD DVD's offer me less utility than DVD's in exchange for an incremental improvement in playback quality.
Until direct network distribution of HD movie content becomes the norm, DVD's are plenty good enough for me.
Let's be honest here. If athletes are cheating when they consume chemicals that will help them perform at their best, so are you, whenever you do something that others don't.
Not so fast. If he is doing something that is against the rules, or for whatever other reason, completely unavailable to others, then perhaps he is cheating. Making changes to a car before racing is cheating in some races, but not in others. "Stock" cars don't have a single stock part any more and that's no longer cheating. Most of these anti-doping rules are intended to prevent sports from becoming a rich-man's game, to pretend that "anyone" can compete, as long as their body has the natural ability. This is a fiction. The truth of the matter is that better physical coaching, training, and diet are still only available to those who have access to wealth.
Personally, I think that it's all a losing battle. Just as happened in auto racing, I think we should allow non-stock modifications to the underlying machinery and that the sports will eventually adapt to the reality of how people are competing.
Specifically, I think that we should have a transhuman olympics, or transhuman classes/events at the regular olympics. And for academic/intellectual competition, the same sort of tolerance or acceptance is already occuring.
In a large sense, anyone in a creative job (software, design, engineering, art, writing, etc.) is in competition with others to maximize their attractiveness to potential employers/clients/buyers. Is it cheating to get the job by taking a drug to be smarter than the other guy? The pressure to take these is not entirely negative, and may in fact become a dramatic positive for those with access and interest:
These substances are quite interesting in their ability to not only temporarily increase mental activity, creativity, focus, wakefulness, simultaneously compared details, etc. but in moderation, they're good for your long-term mental health, "curing" depression or OCD (by upregulating catecholamine neurotransmitters), preventing Alzheimer's and Parkinson's (by protecting the dopaminergic glial cells, raising PEA levels, and/or reversing age-related MAO increases), reversing mitochondrial markers of aging (increasing the number and reducing the size of mitochondria), solubilizing age-related intracellular pigments, helping your body eliminate advanced glycation endpoints (restoring flexibility and adaptability to aging tissues like arterial walls) or by any number of other means.
These drugs are the same drugs that may allow us to extend our middle age another ten or twenty years and may allow us to finally break through the theoretical maximum human lifespan. Preventing "mental athletes" from taking these substances may be preventing them from joining a class of people with increased quality and quantity of life. Which would be a destructive and horribly misguided policy decision.
I guess you can tell how I feel about nootropics. I'm still determining my own stack, but I'm taking those things that I can legally obtain without the cooperation of a doctor and many of them have notable positive effects. I am a creative person in a creative job and they help me with my productivity. My bonus this year is likely to increase by more than I have spent on the various supplements I started to take this year.
If you have Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) Vitamin D (D3, 4000-10000IU/day) is your friend. SAD appears to be a symptom of vitamin D deficiency and supplementation of D3 (not D2, which is harmful in large quantities and ineffective in small quantities) can be very effective at resolving it.
Vitamin D deficiency has been implicated in many other diseases of civilization and correcting the deficiency (getting the value above 60ng/ml) seems to help with lots of issues, from osteoporosis to low HDL levels to atherosclerosis to depression to cancer (reduces tumor growth rates).
There are more than 200 kinds of vitamin D receptors in the body. It does an astonishingly large number of things, and most people who don't work outside are severely deficient. Working on the South Pole is the extreme of that case.
First off, something got mixed up somewhere, because I'm no Democrat. To my wife's eternal frustration, I'm a registered Republican and have voted Republican or Libertarian since I was able to vote. But Bush and his neo-con cronies aren't Republicans that represent me or my brand of conservatism. If anything, I'm a libertarian. Less government. Smaller executive branch. Fewer big government agencies. No big brother agencies. No surveillance of US residents without warrants. Bush goes against all of those things.
Bush did great on gun rights, and I'm happy about that (since I'm also a gun owner of pistols, shotguns, and rifles, both hunting and "mean looking" guns), but I'm not a one issue voter, so that's not enough.
Bush has been against abortion, stem cell research, gay marriage (what possible reason is there to object?) and just about every moral issue that I feel strongly about. He wants to make sure that the government is highly involved in your private life.
I suppose we can be happy that he didn't increase taxes, but he radically increased spending, and we're just beginning to pay the price for that (the T-Bills issued to pay for the war spending in Iraq are one direct cause of the dollar's devaluation against other currencies). Clinton left office with a balanced budget. Bush has been the biggest spender (and biggest deficit spender) of any president, on the planet, ever. Can't at least one party be for limited government? Shouldn't it be the Republicans? So where's the frustration with the open checkbook that was the Republican executive and legislature?
Bush wants to eliminate FISA and the FISC for his massive wiretapping "big brother" campaign, despite the fact that the government can get warrants after the wiretaps have happened, and FISC is the most government-friendly court yet invented.
As you imply, Bush wants to be able to throw US troops around the world without any kind of congressional oversight and has essentially put the final nail in the "congress shall have the power to declare war" phrase of the constitution.
And yeah, the PATRIOT act is an enormous heaping pile of shit. The federal police weren't missing any powers that would have prevented 9/11. FBI agents were on top of the plan and most of the players but weren't getting any support from on high. The FBI was complacent and the FBI/CIA/NSA/etc. were not sharing data like they were already empowered (and supposed) to do. These expansions of police powers and use of the CIA for domestic monitoring is not literally unconstitutional, but certainly goes against the general theme of limited powers and "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" is getting awfully thin.
Then, there are all of the "faith based" initiatives, where government spending on social services has basically been sent to churches, mostly well-connected megachurches (the kind with McDonald's and ATM's in the back) and the accountability and performance expectations have been completely removed. This is direct funding of organized, fundamentalist Christianity, and it's directly against the first amendment as well as a horrific waste of already wasteful pork spending.
So, let's spin back around to the whole "I get spitting angry at people who voted twice for Bush" thing.
So, you want to beat people up for giving you more, and you claim that isn't violent? I think it is only logical that you would be shot in return.
Um, yeah. I have so much more. Let me count the ways. Also, drop the "tough armed guy" act. Trust me, it's really, really hard to shoot another person, even if they truly and deeply deserve it. I've been there and it's tough. I'm just not buying your tale that you're ready to shoot me because I'm angry enough at Bush voters to get into a fist fight over it. I have my CCW and carry whenever and wherever legal to do so, but
Interesting retort. Did you get some help with the big words?
Traitor? You're the one who supported and voted for the man who uses the Constitution of the US as toilet paper. If you thought this country was worth anything, you'd have recognized who was shitting on everything good about it and done something about it. Instead, you voted for him. Twice.
And then, to top off that gargantuan fuck-up, you're here defending your pathetic decision making with threats of lethal violence. I only want to beat some sense into those people who are responsible for the ruin of my civil rights, my privacy, and my liberties. Yeah, I'm funny that way.
If one of us is a traitor to the ideals of the USA, it's not me. So go fuck yourself, and your little fantasy with your rifle.
With all of the violence that the neo-cons are prepared to dish, a little personal violence from a libertarian who is utterly pissed off at the wreckage of a country called the US shouldn't be too much of a suprise.
If Hillary gets in office, I'm leaving. I've already got the resident visa applications in the mail, so I'll be ready.
I voted for Reagan twice, Dole once, abstained for H.W. voted libertarian in the last two.
I find it amusing that you approve of personal violence as a means of influencing the vote.
I find it amusing that you interpreted my remarks as attempting to influence how you vote. Find a lot of big conspiracies each and every day, do you?
I don't want you to change your vote. I just want to beat you to a pulp for fucking up the country I love. Bush and his neo-con handlers have done more damage to this country than a trained chimp would have done. Vote for G.W. one time because Gore is a Dem and you don't know much about G.W? Sure. I almost made the same mistake. Vote for him after four years of seeing what he's capable of? There's no fucking way. You've absolutely got to be shitting me.
You deserve to be beaten simply because you believed G.W's propaganda. The past three years? Privacy and civil rights on the chopping block of fear and cowering? It's your fault, retard. Take responsibility and cut your balls off before you breed and perpetuate the problem.
In the past "irregular combatants" were not considered any different than spies and were executed. Sounds like we just keep them in "Club Gitmo" until we find out what they know and find a place that will accept them.
Are these the same "irregulars" who are actually dirt farmers turned in by a stranger or a feuding neighbor for the reward equal to an Afghani life savings? Yeah, I didn't think you knew the answer to that. Too busy holding your cheeks open waiting for Bush's next civil rights triumph. About a dozen of the people in Gitmo are actually terrorist suspects. Most of the rest are random civilians who were in the wrong spot at the wrong time.
But we wouldn't want to make a decision and either charge them or let them go, now would we? Not unless Bush says so? Yeah, I thought that was your answer.
You probably voted for Bush. Twice. You'd better hope I don't meet you some day as my fists get a little uncontrollable when I hear people proudly claim they did that. You have no idea how people like you piss me off. Short-bus riding window-lickers, all of you.
I'm no "liberal". Not the way you mean it. But I'm no neo-con either.
I like to say I lean to the right on many issues...when did being on the 'right' stop meaning smaller government, fiscal responsibility, personal responsibility, and personal privacy and individual rights trumping the govt's rights?
Well said.
IMHO, the biggest problem about your observation is that there is currently no large political organization representing any of those ideals.
Does anyone really wonder why things are going down the toilet lately when we've set such fundamental principles aside in favor of evangelizing religion and ??? (whatever it is that the Democratic party stands for).
Things like General Relativity generally aren't covered in undergrad physics curriculums due to a lack of higher-level math.
My electrical engineering undergrad at the University of Cincinnati included a third year course called "Modern Physics" which included a mathematical understanding of both Special and General Relativity. Also included quantum physics (we didn't really go beyond 2-d infinite well cases) and was quite possibly the hardest course I took as an undergrad.
Ditto for the nuances of the Standard Model.
Yeah, we didn't go there. Probably not applied enough for the engineering curriculum.
You should probably check the prices again with an eye towards price/performance ratios. AMD hasn't been cheaper for a long time.
You should probably check the prices again with an eye towards price/"good enough" ratios. AMD has been cheaper for a long time.
For daily web browsing, I'm perfectly happy running Ubuntu or XP on an underclocked Sempron from two years ago. Actually, I am so rarely waiting for the computer to do anything that I could probably underclock it further and make it even quieter.
Even for software development, having enough memory counts for a lot more than an incrementally higher performance CPU and I can save enough going with an low performance Athlon dual core (savings over any Core 2 duo mobo+cpu) to add another 2GB to my dev machine and have enough left over for a nice sushi dinner with my wife.
I don't get twice as much utility from twice as much CPU horsepower. Not for about five years. So the linear price/performance comparison you mentioned is utterly irrelevant to my buying decisions.
I can tell you definitively that regulations have three major effects on pharmaceutical companies as opposed to those that don't have to follow them (i.e. herbal remedy companies):
1) Increased cost of development 2) Slower time to market 3) Increased cost of production
None of those prevent discoveries. They do raise the financial entry barriers for startups, however.
What about a drug that's easy to synthesize, already known about, or even worse, found in nature? Would there be money to pay for three human efficacy trials for that substance? Would doctors be provided free samples by salesmen? Would doctors provide free attendance (travel included) to conferences in major vacation spots?
The FDA's approval process, which defines "healthy" as "lacking symptoms of sickness", and which does not accept performance improvement or sickness prevention as categories of on-label prescription; coupled with the profit motive; ensure that 99% of people will be completely unaware of inexpensive, affordable, preventative drugs precisely because they are inexpensive and affordable or don't meet the FDA's filters for what deserves to be called a drug.
Wait a minute. The purpose of science is to discover objective truth.
No, it's not.
It's often good enough to have the "best current explanation" at objective truth. So that's what science claims it can deliver. The nice thing about claiming that you only have the "best current explanation" is that if a better explanation comes along (something which explains everything the previous theory described and a few other things as well), then people stop talking about the old statement and only consider the new statement.
Science and the scientific method just happen to provide the best framework for making reasonable judgments about the real world, based on theories, the only measure of the success of which, is their PREDICTIVE CAPACITY.
I do not believe many of your peers on the evolutionary side of the argument would, however.
I call B.S. I can't think of any scientist (evolutionary or otherwise) who wouldn't. Several evolutionary biologists and psychologists at MIT and Harvard are family friends.
If you're in science, it's basically your opinion that scientific theories are only useful if they're predictive. If you don't buy that, you're not in science.
I suspect it's 4096 = 8 * 8 * 8 * 8. As in three bits of color depth for each of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. At least, I hope the colorspace is CMYK.
I respect Asimov, but the three laws are pretty naive.
Well, sure.
Asimov's three laws were meant to be a thought experiment in hubris and unintended consequences. They were sold (in the context of the stories) as the perfect control system for robots, and then there were always "problems" that the USR management couldn't understand and which Susan Calvin needed to figure out and fix.
Asimov wasn't naive, but some of his characters were...
The US government is unbelievably not corrupt. We have a two party system, and if one party even gets slightly corrupt, it's a massive scandal. People who think the US has a corrupt government are invariably lacking real perspective.
You're observation is that when one member or another of the government breaks the rules, the others hold them to task. And that means that there's no corruption. Hm.
So it's your position that as long as the payoffs happen within the rules, it can't be counted as corruption? You are also aware that the rules are written by the same people receiving the money?
Corporations have written self-serving laws, handed them over to congress, paid the right congresscritters, and the laws were passed as originally written. But you're prepared to assert that because there are rules for that process and the companies followed those rules, that the US government is not corrupt.
Semantic bullshit. The US government is systematically corrupt. Just as illegal does not mean immoral, legal does not mean moral.
Well that makes Christian terrorism like blowing up abortion clinics or murdering gays okay then. Oh wait, NO IT DOESN'T.
Actual terrorism is horrible no matter which religious beliefs the terrorist holds.
However.
What fraction of Christians will publically support an abortion clinic bomber?
What fraction of Muslims will publically support the suicide bombing of uninvolved innocents?
In one situation, we have a cultural abberation. In the other situation, we have a cultural norm. I see a significant moral difference between modern Christian religions in the west and modern Islam in the middle east. Fundamentalist Islam is much worse and much more dangerous than fundamentalist Christianity.
In the big picture, they're vastly different, and you should discriminate with your scorn and ridicule.
YMMV indeed! Where I live and work, I know of three local companies in desperate searches for skilled software developers. Area is Santa Monica California (it's a sane part of the greater Los Angeles area), pay is $100k+, relocation covered. Indian, Chinese, USian, Canadian, European, doesn't matter (they'll sponsor H1B for foreign nationals). But you have to be able to demonstrate that you're way above average and do so in the interview.
All three companies have been searching for months. They get lots of resumes, but almost nobody who can pass a basic phone screen (Know what polymorphic means? What's ACID mean re: databases?). The issue isn't a lack of jobs. My theory: anyone with brains is already in a job and isn't looking right now.
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It doesn't happen in democratic developed countries because they know better and ballots are secret. If you want to see what that's like, go to almost any country in Africa and watch a vote happen.
You enter the polling station and pick up a red ballot and a blue ballot.
You were informed as you picked them up which ballot meant which candidate.
You go into a concealed area and you secretly drop one of the ballots (completely your choice) into the voting box.
Then you walk outside and hand the red ballot to the man with the machete poised over the chopping block. He'll only accept either your hand or the red ballot.
It doesn't matter if it's the mob, your employer, a local tough, or a corrupt government. Vote buying is seriously bad news, and the only thing preventing it from happening is that there is no way to tie you to a particular choice in the polling station.
Personally, I'm more curious about prenatal nutritional deficiency. Specifically, I'm very curious about the Vitamin D Hypothesis.
If true, it would explain the (1) black/white numerical disparity, the (2) latitude correlation, and the (3) male/female numerical disparity. Also, most women in developed countries are severely deficient in vitamin D (20ng/ml of 25(OH)D measured in blood) due to advice over the past 25 years to avoid sun/wear sunscreen, combined with a severe lack of dietary sources of bioavailable vitamin D. Those few adults who drink milk get very little benefit since it is supplemented with Vitamin D2, which is only about 20-33% as effective at raising 15(OH)D levels as Vitamin D3.
This particular possibility is a just hypothesis and not a theory (based on a complete lack of confirming/refuting observations), but there are now some studies being started and I'm extremely curious to hear about their preliminary results. Since chronic Vitamin D deficiency can be corrected in about two months, if there's any validity to the hypothesis, they should be able to establish a significant experimental dataset within just a year or two.
As a result of that trade-off (cheaper, easier to back up, slightly less quality) I still buy almost everything as SD-DVD and I'm exceedingly happy with the improvements I get watching DVD's on my new HDTV and HD DVD player.
Even beyond the announcements being PR fluffery, this whole conflict is much ado about nothing.
My HD DVD player makes regular DVD's look absolutely amazing in my HD system (40" 1080p LCD). Enough so that I still buy almost everything on DVD. Take Ratatouille for instance. The fact that it's a "Blu Ray Only" title is completely and utterly irrelevant when I can still watch it on my HD DVD player, it looks great, and I saved a few bucks besides (currently a $5 difference on Amazon between the BluRay and DVD versions).
Actually, since I rip all of my movies to storage, I feel a little stupid when I spend money on an HD DVD since I don't have the software to rip HD DVD's, and if I did, I'd have to trade the space for 3-4 DVD's to save that one HD DVD. So, by several metrics, HD DVD's offer me less utility than DVD's in exchange for an incremental improvement in playback quality.
Until direct network distribution of HD movie content becomes the norm, DVD's are plenty good enough for me.
My wedding ring is Tungsten Carbide. 9.5 on the Mohs scale. I'm pretty sure the sapphire screen would acquire a scratch.
Personally, I think that it's all a losing battle. Just as happened in auto racing, I think we should allow non-stock modifications to the underlying machinery and that the sports will eventually adapt to the reality of how people are competing.
Specifically, I think that we should have a transhuman olympics, or transhuman classes/events at the regular olympics. And for academic/intellectual competition, the same sort of tolerance or acceptance is already occuring.
In a large sense, anyone in a creative job (software, design, engineering, art, writing, etc.) is in competition with others to maximize their attractiveness to potential employers/clients/buyers. Is it cheating to get the job by taking a drug to be smarter than the other guy? The pressure to take these is not entirely negative, and may in fact become a dramatic positive for those with access and interest:
These substances are quite interesting in their ability to not only temporarily increase mental activity, creativity, focus, wakefulness, simultaneously compared details, etc. but in moderation, they're good for your long-term mental health, "curing" depression or OCD (by upregulating catecholamine neurotransmitters), preventing Alzheimer's and Parkinson's (by protecting the dopaminergic glial cells, raising PEA levels, and/or reversing age-related MAO increases), reversing mitochondrial markers of aging (increasing the number and reducing the size of mitochondria), solubilizing age-related intracellular pigments, helping your body eliminate advanced glycation endpoints (restoring flexibility and adaptability to aging tissues like arterial walls) or by any number of other means.
These drugs are the same drugs that may allow us to extend our middle age another ten or twenty years and may allow us to finally break through the theoretical maximum human lifespan. Preventing "mental athletes" from taking these substances may be preventing them from joining a class of people with increased quality and quantity of life. Which would be a destructive and horribly misguided policy decision.
I guess you can tell how I feel about nootropics. I'm still determining my own stack, but I'm taking those things that I can legally obtain without the cooperation of a doctor and many of them have notable positive effects. I am a creative person in a creative job and they help me with my productivity. My bonus this year is likely to increase by more than I have spent on the various supplements I started to take this year.
If you have Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) Vitamin D (D3, 4000-10000IU/day) is your friend. SAD appears to be a symptom of vitamin D deficiency and supplementation of D3 (not D2, which is harmful in large quantities and ineffective in small quantities) can be very effective at resolving it.
Vitamin D deficiency has been implicated in many other diseases of civilization and correcting the deficiency (getting the value above 60ng/ml) seems to help with lots of issues, from osteoporosis to low HDL levels to atherosclerosis to depression to cancer (reduces tumor growth rates).
There are more than 200 kinds of vitamin D receptors in the body. It does an astonishingly large number of things, and most people who don't work outside are severely deficient. Working on the South Pole is the extreme of that case.
First off, something got mixed up somewhere, because I'm no Democrat. To my wife's eternal frustration, I'm a registered Republican and have voted Republican or Libertarian since I was able to vote. But Bush and his neo-con cronies aren't Republicans that represent me or my brand of conservatism. If anything, I'm a libertarian. Less government. Smaller executive branch. Fewer big government agencies. No big brother agencies. No surveillance of US residents without warrants. Bush goes against all of those things.
Bush did great on gun rights, and I'm happy about that (since I'm also a gun owner of pistols, shotguns, and rifles, both hunting and "mean looking" guns), but I'm not a one issue voter, so that's not enough.
Bush has been against abortion, stem cell research, gay marriage (what possible reason is there to object?) and just about every moral issue that I feel strongly about. He wants to make sure that the government is highly involved in your private life.
I suppose we can be happy that he didn't increase taxes, but he radically increased spending, and we're just beginning to pay the price for that (the T-Bills issued to pay for the war spending in Iraq are one direct cause of the dollar's devaluation against other currencies). Clinton left office with a balanced budget. Bush has been the biggest spender (and biggest deficit spender) of any president, on the planet, ever. Can't at least one party be for limited government? Shouldn't it be the Republicans? So where's the frustration with the open checkbook that was the Republican executive and legislature?
Bush wants to eliminate FISA and the FISC for his massive wiretapping "big brother" campaign, despite the fact that the government can get warrants after the wiretaps have happened, and FISC is the most government-friendly court yet invented.
As you imply, Bush wants to be able to throw US troops around the world without any kind of congressional oversight and has essentially put the final nail in the "congress shall have the power to declare war" phrase of the constitution.
And yeah, the PATRIOT act is an enormous heaping pile of shit. The federal police weren't missing any powers that would have prevented 9/11. FBI agents were on top of the plan and most of the players but weren't getting any support from on high. The FBI was complacent and the FBI/CIA/NSA/etc. were not sharing data like they were already empowered (and supposed) to do. These expansions of police powers and use of the CIA for domestic monitoring is not literally unconstitutional, but certainly goes against the general theme of limited powers and "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" is getting awfully thin.
Then, there are all of the "faith based" initiatives, where government spending on social services has basically been sent to churches, mostly well-connected megachurches (the kind with McDonald's and ATM's in the back) and the accountability and performance expectations have been completely removed. This is direct funding of organized, fundamentalist Christianity, and it's directly against the first amendment as well as a horrific waste of already wasteful pork spending.
So, let's spin back around to the whole "I get spitting angry at people who voted twice for Bush" thing.
Um, yeah. I have so much more. Let me count the ways. Also, drop the "tough armed guy" act. Trust me, it's really, really hard to shoot another person, even if they truly and deeply deserve it. I've been there and it's tough. I'm just not buying your tale that you're ready to shoot me because I'm angry enough at Bush voters to get into a fist fight over it. I have my CCW and carry whenever and wherever legal to do so, but
Interesting retort. Did you get some help with the big words?
Traitor? You're the one who supported and voted for the man who uses the Constitution of the US as toilet paper. If you thought this country was worth anything, you'd have recognized who was shitting on everything good about it and done something about it. Instead, you voted for him. Twice.
And then, to top off that gargantuan fuck-up, you're here defending your pathetic decision making with threats of lethal violence. I only want to beat some sense into those people who are responsible for the ruin of my civil rights, my privacy, and my liberties. Yeah, I'm funny that way.
If one of us is a traitor to the ideals of the USA, it's not me. So go fuck yourself, and your little fantasy with your rifle.
With all of the violence that the neo-cons are prepared to dish, a little personal violence from a libertarian who is utterly pissed off at the wreckage of a country called the US shouldn't be too much of a suprise.
If Hillary gets in office, I'm leaving. I've already got the resident visa applications in the mail, so I'll be ready.
I don't want you to change your vote. I just want to beat you to a pulp for fucking up the country I love. Bush and his neo-con handlers have done more damage to this country than a trained chimp would have done. Vote for G.W. one time because Gore is a Dem and you don't know much about G.W? Sure. I almost made the same mistake. Vote for him after four years of seeing what he's capable of? There's no fucking way. You've absolutely got to be shitting me.
You deserve to be beaten simply because you believed G.W's propaganda. The past three years? Privacy and civil rights on the chopping block of fear and cowering? It's your fault, retard. Take responsibility and cut your balls off before you breed and perpetuate the problem.
But we wouldn't want to make a decision and either charge them or let them go, now would we? Not unless Bush says so? Yeah, I thought that was your answer.
You probably voted for Bush. Twice. You'd better hope I don't meet you some day as my fists get a little uncontrollable when I hear people proudly claim they did that. You have no idea how people like you piss me off. Short-bus riding window-lickers, all of you.
I'm no "liberal". Not the way you mean it. But I'm no neo-con either.
IMHO, the biggest problem about your observation is that there is currently no large political organization representing any of those ideals.
Does anyone really wonder why things are going down the toilet lately when we've set such fundamental principles aside in favor of evangelizing religion and ??? (whatever it is that the Democratic party stands for).
For daily web browsing, I'm perfectly happy running Ubuntu or XP on an underclocked Sempron from two years ago. Actually, I am so rarely waiting for the computer to do anything that I could probably underclock it further and make it even quieter.
Even for software development, having enough memory counts for a lot more than an incrementally higher performance CPU and I can save enough going with an low performance Athlon dual core (savings over any Core 2 duo mobo+cpu) to add another 2GB to my dev machine and have enough left over for a nice sushi dinner with my wife.
I don't get twice as much utility from twice as much CPU horsepower. Not for about five years. So the linear price/performance comparison you mentioned is utterly irrelevant to my buying decisions.
The FDA's approval process, which defines "healthy" as "lacking symptoms of sickness", and which does not accept performance improvement or sickness prevention as categories of on-label prescription; coupled with the profit motive; ensure that 99% of people will be completely unaware of inexpensive, affordable, preventative drugs precisely because they are inexpensive and affordable or don't meet the FDA's filters for what deserves to be called a drug.
The whole industry is badly broken.
It's often good enough to have the "best current explanation" at objective truth. So that's what science claims it can deliver. The nice thing about claiming that you only have the "best current explanation" is that if a better explanation comes along (something which explains everything the previous theory described and a few other things as well), then people stop talking about the old statement and only consider the new statement.
If you're in science, it's basically your opinion that scientific theories are only useful if they're predictive. If you don't buy that, you're not in science.
I suspect it's 4096 = 8 * 8 * 8 * 8. As in three bits of color depth for each of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. At least, I hope the colorspace is CMYK.
Asimov's three laws were meant to be a thought experiment in hubris and unintended consequences. They were sold (in the context of the stories) as the perfect control system for robots, and then there were always "problems" that the USR management couldn't understand and which Susan Calvin needed to figure out and fix.
Asimov wasn't naive, but some of his characters were...
Regards,
Ross
So it's your position that as long as the payoffs happen within the rules, it can't be counted as corruption? You are also aware that the rules are written by the same people receiving the money?
Corporations have written self-serving laws, handed them over to congress, paid the right congresscritters, and the laws were passed as originally written. But you're prepared to assert that because there are rules for that process and the companies followed those rules, that the US government is not corrupt.
Semantic bullshit. The US government is systematically corrupt. Just as illegal does not mean immoral, legal does not mean moral.
However.
What fraction of Christians will publically support an abortion clinic bomber?
What fraction of Muslims will publically support the suicide bombing of uninvolved innocents?
In one situation, we have a cultural abberation. In the other situation, we have a cultural norm. I see a significant moral difference between modern Christian religions in the west and modern Islam in the middle east. Fundamentalist Islam is much worse and much more dangerous than fundamentalist Christianity.
In the big picture, they're vastly different, and you should discriminate with your scorn and ridicule.
Ross (Church of FSM all the way!)
YMMV indeed! Where I live and work, I know of three local companies in desperate searches for skilled software developers. Area is Santa Monica California (it's a sane part of the greater Los Angeles area), pay is $100k+, relocation covered. Indian, Chinese, USian, Canadian, European, doesn't matter (they'll sponsor H1B for foreign nationals). But you have to be able to demonstrate that you're way above average and do so in the interview.
All three companies have been searching for months. They get lots of resumes, but almost nobody who can pass a basic phone screen (Know what polymorphic means? What's ACID mean re: databases?). The issue isn't a lack of jobs. My theory: anyone with brains is already in a job and isn't looking right now.