People have a short list of priorities and in the USA thanks to the American Dream TM, that is making your car payments, mortgage payments and credit card payments. Someone who has a debit card, a bus pass and rents, can move jobs at a moments notice and only needs a small amount of money to do so. A home owner with two credit cards living on credit? Tied to his job, to his area.
So people might care about privacy or the environment but what they care about most is being able to make their debt payments next month. Long term planning? Hell, if they could plan long term, they would never have saddled themselves with all this debt. But they did and now they either pay each month or lose everything.
Chris Christie or whatever his name is is now being pushed forward as the moderate republican choice... he isn't moderate at all, just not totally insane compared to the tea party funny farm. The next president after this will be to the right of Obama since Americans are scared shitless that taxing the rich will rob those poor millionairs of their second sports car. That is if the country isn't going to bankrupt itself this week (unlikely but when you elect crazies (not just people with outlandish ideas but people who can easily be diagnosed with a mental illness) you can never be certain).
Remember that Romney almost made it in and that those republican voters who have some sensibility left insist we should forget about how crazy and evil Romney was because he lost so everything is alright... yeah. He lost, by a tiny margin. All this tells us the next crazy republican just needs to refrain from biting of babies heads in public to get in. That is a scary thought.
The US is hardly alone in its trouble. The Netherlands just had "prinsjesdag" the day that the budget for the next year is presented. And it was immiedialty followed by a not yet ended dance to get enough approval from non-governing parties to get it through both parlements. Because the two coalition parties don't have a majority in both. No it isn't a two party system, we got LOTS and it isn't exactly a deadlock but it does result in a compromise that nobody hates and several government in succession that haven't finished their terms. This government likely won't make it either.
The Belgians recently spend a year without a government because the sub-frenchies and the sub-dutchies hated each others guts. England is being ruled by two parties where one party is withering away because it gets the flack for supporting the other party. What people are going to vote in the next election is anybodies guess. Maybe they will punish the tories again by voting labor.... because voters never ever learn (that is how labor got in to power in the first place, only for blair to upset people so much they voted tory to punish labor).
Germany too has seen the collpase of a coalition with one party not even making the voting treshhold. To Merkel is look for another party to rule with so that party too can lose all their voters... sounds like a good plan right?
Southern Europe mostly votes for whatever guy promises the most and blames all the wrongs on nothern Europe for refusing to subsidize the south after decades of subsidies that were squandered.
Canada hates its leader but refuses to elect anyone else. New Zealand is a puppet state and Australia seems to elect people the people online hate.
The problem might be that elections are simply to simple a tool to decide with how to govern a country.
Take for instance privacy. One privacy issue that Americans often mention is their medical history since an insurance agency might reject you if they know you have ill health. But Obamacare cures that. If an insurance agency can't reject you for your medical history, neither will they want to find out your medical history. Bam! Socialism saves privacy! How is that for a twist? Every privacy freak support Obama!
A bit silly perhaps but this shows that issues don't stand alone yet during elections they are presented like they are and most elections boil down to a handful of issues and then everybody bitching about how party X who promised Y is not doing Y and totally screwing you over on Z as well.
Or maybe democracy is alright and it is just needs a better class of human beings.
But the US is not alone in being screwed up and suffering gridlock. It is just dealing with it in the most immature way possible. But hey, that is Americans for you and we love them for it. Makes for an entertaining way to end the news, first 10 minutes of how your own country is falling apart, then a 1 minute "silly yanks" bit to show that no matter how silly your own leaders, there are sillier people on this planet.
USA, showing the world things can always get sillier!
Germany post WW2 is NOT a democracy for very obvious reasons. It is an "rechtstaat" or however that is spelled. Which means the law is the absolute ruler in Germany.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechtsstaat
To be a modern liberal democracy, you first got to have the rule of law to curb the excesses of democracy. Democracy got to be curtailed, to survive.
But what is a rechtstaat? What is a law? A law is anything that is enforced. Good or bad. You can have a rechtstaat that sends people to the gas chambers. There is no law that says laws got to be good to be counted as laws.
Democracy is even worse, far to often people seem to assume that democracy == good. NO! In reality elections are won because people think the other candidate is a poopyhead. Or the candidate just doesn't understand that he should promise lower taxes, lower spending and increased services!
Neither democracy nor the rechtstaat are under attack from surveillance because the rechtstaat doesn't care what the laws are as long as they are enforced and democracy is to busy watching American Idol. Freedom and human rights might be under attack but what election has even been about those?
True democracy is HORRIBLE! Do you REALLY want to live in a society where the majority has absolute and total control? So you need a law state to curtail democracy to protect individuals and minorities from the majority. Democracy, to survive, to prosper must be controlled.
It is a paradox but real life outside the classroom is full of them. Surveillance really does not matter. What matters is what is done with the surveillance.
To godwin this post, what matters is not a register of who is or who is not Jewish, what matters is that it matters whether you are or not. Most privacy nuts worry to much about the list and to little about the gas chambers. To translate, if you wish to use drugs you can protest against searches OR you can attempt to legalize drugs. Which do you think creates the better world?
There is a scene in Shindler's list were jewish prison laborers are constructing the baracks of a concentration camp. One of them, a young woman, goes to some nazi overseers and tells them the constructions are being done wrong, she is apparently an engineer.
She is shot for daring to talk to them.
Who do YOU blame for the outcome of that scene? The woman or the nazi? You might think that if she had kept quiet she would have been fine... but that just shows you have a lousy grasp of history. But if someone had pulled her back, she would not have died that day. And that is the message being send by this article. Don't make waves because the powers that be might kill you.
It is after all common sense to let sleeping dogs lie. I used to think of that saying as "let that otherwise friendly dog sleep" not "let the guard dog keeping you in the prison compound sleep". Possibly because that last one hardly rolls of the tongue.
Was Swartz naive in assuming there would be no consequence to disrupting the status quo? To easily panicked when he threw the snow ball and he got caught in the avalanche? Maybe but is the lesson to learn from this to never question the status quo? That would be terrible, for us all to turn into sheep because we might get slaughtered if we don't behave like sleep.
Yes Swartz was naive. Yes those around him should have been more supportive of him but the fault for his death lies solely and alone with those who prosecuted him.
Since the person in the car was female, with a child in the car and the car was involved in a high speed pursuit I am guessing this is NOT political but someone who tried to flee from the police for whatever reason and did it in a really silly place. Either the woman was the driver, or was a passenger and the driver is the man mentioned by some new sources who was fleeing the scene.
Even terrorist don't take kids with them on a suicide run. Well, not without a bomb strapped to them.
Pfff, please, you Americans suck! Belgium is where it is at, 1 year with NO GOVERNMENT! Because reject frenchies and reject dutchies couldn't agree they BOTH are the joke for other countries and just agree that they have insane accents and just hate the german speakers in their country like normal people.
Yeah yeah except the small detail that the Meego phone actually sold better despite not being available in most countries then the heavily advertised Lumnia 800.
But hey, why let facts get in the way.
When did MS exactly extend Nokia? The Windows Phone adventure has been a complete disaster, even Steve Ballmer has to admit recently their market share went from very small to very small. And they been trying for over a decade. HTC only survived by escaping the stigma off making Windows phones.
I am fine with you not getting a ticket for drunk driving. But when YOU murder someone drink driving, it is murder, 1st degree and you volunteer to get the chair. That is the deal. No other deal is on offer.
Especially when you are hit in face by one of those spiders and the wild flaying of your arms and spastic twisting proof a great deal of current must be involved because there is no way a grown man could be that freaked out by a tiny spider baby.
The TRUE horror of how corrupt the system is will become clear if Elop really does become the next MS CEO. Because that would be the smoking gun. Despite what everyone seems to think Elop is far from a shoe-in for next CEO of MS. And ruining your previous company is hardly a good thing to be considered for such a position.
UNLESS of course he didn't screw up at Nokia but did exactly what his bosses at MS wanted him to do. But then rewarding him with the CEO title would be all the evidence even the most rabid wallstreet fan would need.
If you hire a hitman to kill your wife you can't then reward that hitman in full public view without providing evidence there is a link between the two of you. That is why brown envelopes exist, you pay your assasin in secret, away from prying eyes. You don't pay them in your financial report.
Personally I think something much simpler is going on, Ballmer and Elop are just the type to fully belief that this was the best thing. That Elop did NOT kill of Nokia but rather saved IT!
When people live in ivory towers for to long, they really start to believe their yes-men.
You rant a nice rant but which license is the most widely adopted and whose code is the mode widely used again?
It ain't BSD powering Android.
The BSD advocates are all "Our license encourages sharing, ignore the fact nobody uses it and nobody shares it, waah why is Linux so much more popular!". BSD is a good license for example and throwaway code but for code you value and for which you want people to continute back their chances, for a community effort, the GPL is the license to choose.
And so far, historic evidence, the examples of who likes BSD (MS and Apple) and who like GPL (everyone else) shows me exactly what each license achieves in the real world.
The entire point about avoiding a ghetto says something about an area you do not want to go to. It says NOTHING about race or do you think every ghetto in the world is about black people? Plenty of white areas you want to avoid as well. Or brown, or yellow or other brown.
But you are right, people often aren't aware they are racist. Like YOU, you automatically assume a ghetto area is all about race. You cannot even consider the idea that a ghetto area might NOT be about black people. That is how deep racism goes. When you can hear the word ghetto and not immediately assume the inhabitants are black, then you can claim not to be racist.
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Preventative care doesn't do much because in your example all it does is prevent you from dying earlier... eh... duh?
What next, learning to swim doesn't help because it only prevents you from drowning and dying earlier?
Big news flash! We are all going to die, the idea is to do it as late as possible in as good health as possible.
Preventative care doesn't work because it only keeps you alive longer.
Please tell me you are unable to vote.
http://dearblankpleaseblank.com/permalink.php?viewid=121526 Dear Fox News, So far, no news about foxes. Sincerely, Unimpressed
Wanted to see what brand my old cat liked best. So I placed two bowls of cat food next to each other and then observed which one was emptied.
Answer: Both.
Twist: Mice hate Oreos so they eat it first and reserve the rice cake as dessert and to wash the taste away.
People have a short list of priorities and in the USA thanks to the American Dream TM, that is making your car payments, mortgage payments and credit card payments. Someone who has a debit card, a bus pass and rents, can move jobs at a moments notice and only needs a small amount of money to do so. A home owner with two credit cards living on credit? Tied to his job, to his area.
So people might care about privacy or the environment but what they care about most is being able to make their debt payments next month. Long term planning? Hell, if they could plan long term, they would never have saddled themselves with all this debt. But they did and now they either pay each month or lose everything.
Chris Christie or whatever his name is is now being pushed forward as the moderate republican choice... he isn't moderate at all, just not totally insane compared to the tea party funny farm. The next president after this will be to the right of Obama since Americans are scared shitless that taxing the rich will rob those poor millionairs of their second sports car. That is if the country isn't going to bankrupt itself this week (unlikely but when you elect crazies (not just people with outlandish ideas but people who can easily be diagnosed with a mental illness) you can never be certain).
Remember that Romney almost made it in and that those republican voters who have some sensibility left insist we should forget about how crazy and evil Romney was because he lost so everything is alright... yeah. He lost, by a tiny margin. All this tells us the next crazy republican just needs to refrain from biting of babies heads in public to get in. That is a scary thought.
The US is hardly alone in its trouble. The Netherlands just had "prinsjesdag" the day that the budget for the next year is presented. And it was immiedialty followed by a not yet ended dance to get enough approval from non-governing parties to get it through both parlements. Because the two coalition parties don't have a majority in both. No it isn't a two party system, we got LOTS and it isn't exactly a deadlock but it does result in a compromise that nobody hates and several government in succession that haven't finished their terms. This government likely won't make it either.
The Belgians recently spend a year without a government because the sub-frenchies and the sub-dutchies hated each others guts. England is being ruled by two parties where one party is withering away because it gets the flack for supporting the other party. What people are going to vote in the next election is anybodies guess. Maybe they will punish the tories again by voting labor.... because voters never ever learn (that is how labor got in to power in the first place, only for blair to upset people so much they voted tory to punish labor).
Germany too has seen the collpase of a coalition with one party not even making the voting treshhold. To Merkel is look for another party to rule with so that party too can lose all their voters... sounds like a good plan right?
Southern Europe mostly votes for whatever guy promises the most and blames all the wrongs on nothern Europe for refusing to subsidize the south after decades of subsidies that were squandered.
Canada hates its leader but refuses to elect anyone else. New Zealand is a puppet state and Australia seems to elect people the people online hate.
The problem might be that elections are simply to simple a tool to decide with how to govern a country.
Take for instance privacy. One privacy issue that Americans often mention is their medical history since an insurance agency might reject you if they know you have ill health. But Obamacare cures that. If an insurance agency can't reject you for your medical history, neither will they want to find out your medical history. Bam! Socialism saves privacy! How is that for a twist? Every privacy freak support Obama!
A bit silly perhaps but this shows that issues don't stand alone yet during elections they are presented like they are and most elections boil down to a handful of issues and then everybody bitching about how party X who promised Y is not doing Y and totally screwing you over on Z as well.
Or maybe democracy is alright and it is just needs a better class of human beings.
But the US is not alone in being screwed up and suffering gridlock. It is just dealing with it in the most immature way possible. But hey, that is Americans for you and we love them for it. Makes for an entertaining way to end the news, first 10 minutes of how your own country is falling apart, then a 1 minute "silly yanks" bit to show that no matter how silly your own leaders, there are sillier people on this planet.
USA, showing the world things can always get sillier!
Germany post WW2 is NOT a democracy for very obvious reasons. It is an "rechtstaat" or however that is spelled. Which means the law is the absolute ruler in Germany.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rechtsstaat
To be a modern liberal democracy, you first got to have the rule of law to curb the excesses of democracy. Democracy got to be curtailed, to survive.
But what is a rechtstaat? What is a law? A law is anything that is enforced. Good or bad. You can have a rechtstaat that sends people to the gas chambers. There is no law that says laws got to be good to be counted as laws.
Democracy is even worse, far to often people seem to assume that democracy == good. NO! In reality elections are won because people think the other candidate is a poopyhead. Or the candidate just doesn't understand that he should promise lower taxes, lower spending and increased services!
Neither democracy nor the rechtstaat are under attack from surveillance because the rechtstaat doesn't care what the laws are as long as they are enforced and democracy is to busy watching American Idol. Freedom and human rights might be under attack but what election has even been about those?
True democracy is HORRIBLE! Do you REALLY want to live in a society where the majority has absolute and total control? So you need a law state to curtail democracy to protect individuals and minorities from the majority. Democracy, to survive, to prosper must be controlled.
It is a paradox but real life outside the classroom is full of them. Surveillance really does not matter. What matters is what is done with the surveillance.
To godwin this post, what matters is not a register of who is or who is not Jewish, what matters is that it matters whether you are or not. Most privacy nuts worry to much about the list and to little about the gas chambers. To translate, if you wish to use drugs you can protest against searches OR you can attempt to legalize drugs. Which do you think creates the better world?
That these people will ON TOP of normal exposure to radiation suffer additional exposure?
Gosh, it is a good thing radiation isn't cumulative... oh wait.
They got people in Japan who can read Japanese signs. Chinese vistors!
That is a LOT of bug detectors who got 1 dollar from MS.
There is a scene in Shindler's list were jewish prison laborers are constructing the baracks of a concentration camp. One of them, a young woman, goes to some nazi overseers and tells them the constructions are being done wrong, she is apparently an engineer.
She is shot for daring to talk to them.
Who do YOU blame for the outcome of that scene? The woman or the nazi? You might think that if she had kept quiet she would have been fine... but that just shows you have a lousy grasp of history. But if someone had pulled her back, she would not have died that day. And that is the message being send by this article. Don't make waves because the powers that be might kill you.
It is after all common sense to let sleeping dogs lie. I used to think of that saying as "let that otherwise friendly dog sleep" not "let the guard dog keeping you in the prison compound sleep". Possibly because that last one hardly rolls of the tongue.
Was Swartz naive in assuming there would be no consequence to disrupting the status quo? To easily panicked when he threw the snow ball and he got caught in the avalanche? Maybe but is the lesson to learn from this to never question the status quo? That would be terrible, for us all to turn into sheep because we might get slaughtered if we don't behave like sleep.
Yes Swartz was naive. Yes those around him should have been more supportive of him but the fault for his death lies solely and alone with those who prosecuted him.
Since the person in the car was female, with a child in the car and the car was involved in a high speed pursuit I am guessing this is NOT political but someone who tried to flee from the police for whatever reason and did it in a really silly place. Either the woman was the driver, or was a passenger and the driver is the man mentioned by some new sources who was fleeing the scene.
Even terrorist don't take kids with them on a suicide run. Well, not without a bomb strapped to them.
Sure, lovely people like Henry Ford could be in charge. Only the terminally insane think legal means nice.
Pfff, please, you Americans suck! Belgium is where it is at, 1 year with NO GOVERNMENT! Because reject frenchies and reject dutchies couldn't agree they BOTH are the joke for other countries and just agree that they have insane accents and just hate the german speakers in their country like normal people.
Come back when the shutdown lasted a year.
Like I need a reason to wear foil underpants. Crispy!
Is this the same honor system that keeps artists from becoming tax dodgers the moment they got it make?
Yeah yeah except the small detail that the Meego phone actually sold better despite not being available in most countries then the heavily advertised Lumnia 800. But hey, why let facts get in the way.
When did MS exactly extend Nokia? The Windows Phone adventure has been a complete disaster, even Steve Ballmer has to admit recently their market share went from very small to very small. And they been trying for over a decade. HTC only survived by escaping the stigma off making Windows phones.
Great idea, lets the offenders pay for the police.
I am fine with you not getting a ticket for drunk driving. But when YOU murder someone drink driving, it is murder, 1st degree and you volunteer to get the chair. That is the deal. No other deal is on offer.
Especially when you are hit in face by one of those spiders and the wild flaying of your arms and spastic twisting proof a great deal of current must be involved because there is no way a grown man could be that freaked out by a tiny spider baby.
FTFY
Check the price of an Apple charger/cable and a perfectly okay ordinary USB charger/cable.
And who can blame them? They know their audience and that they will pay for it.
The TRUE horror of how corrupt the system is will become clear if Elop really does become the next MS CEO. Because that would be the smoking gun. Despite what everyone seems to think Elop is far from a shoe-in for next CEO of MS. And ruining your previous company is hardly a good thing to be considered for such a position.
UNLESS of course he didn't screw up at Nokia but did exactly what his bosses at MS wanted him to do. But then rewarding him with the CEO title would be all the evidence even the most rabid wallstreet fan would need.
If you hire a hitman to kill your wife you can't then reward that hitman in full public view without providing evidence there is a link between the two of you. That is why brown envelopes exist, you pay your assasin in secret, away from prying eyes. You don't pay them in your financial report.
Personally I think something much simpler is going on, Ballmer and Elop are just the type to fully belief that this was the best thing. That Elop did NOT kill of Nokia but rather saved IT!
When people live in ivory towers for to long, they really start to believe their yes-men.
You rant a nice rant but which license is the most widely adopted and whose code is the mode widely used again?
It ain't BSD powering Android.
The BSD advocates are all "Our license encourages sharing, ignore the fact nobody uses it and nobody shares it, waah why is Linux so much more popular!". BSD is a good license for example and throwaway code but for code you value and for which you want people to continute back their chances, for a community effort, the GPL is the license to choose.
And so far, historic evidence, the examples of who likes BSD (MS and Apple) and who like GPL (everyone else) shows me exactly what each license achieves in the real world.
Me: I got a patent for connecting a man and a woman together to create a new item!
Patent office: We are going to need evidence you actually put this idea into practice.
Me: Damn!
The entire point about avoiding a ghetto says something about an area you do not want to go to. It says NOTHING about race or do you think every ghetto in the world is about black people? Plenty of white areas you want to avoid as well. Or brown, or yellow or other brown.
But you are right, people often aren't aware they are racist. Like YOU, you automatically assume a ghetto area is all about race. You cannot even consider the idea that a ghetto area might NOT be about black people. That is how deep racism goes. When you can hear the word ghetto and not immediately assume the inhabitants are black, then you can claim not to be racist.