An architecture switch breaking x86 ISA compatibility (i.e. emulation is noticeably slower than the original item) would put it on a level playing field with other 64-bit workstation/server-class chips, yet they never seemed to offer either world-beating design improvements or substantial price benefits, or appear as though they would in the future.
This looked like a loser from the first minute I saw it, and I obviously wasn't the only one: I mean, the chip has been "The Itanic" in Register parlance for years now.
Intel, for all their flaws, is a smart company with a lot of smart people working for it. I must just not be seeing the whole picture. They must have had some good reason not to have flushed this project years ago, right?
1) This is a great idea; Nasa should scrap the shuttles and build one.
2) The government shouldn't have a space program. (Maybe the government shouldn't have too many programs at all.) This will be an outrageously expensive boondoggle, and we should just let private industry handle it.
3) Dude, when is private industry going to get around to doing that?
4) When it's good and ready.
5) Dude, private industry wouldn't even build the interstate highway system - a fulcrum of America's economy. What makes you think it will build a space elevator?
Libertarianism is part of what keeps America healthy. But does anyone else think that its "true blue" advocates are often too in love with the simple answers of ideology to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of the position they advocate?
I've often thought a "moderate Libertarian" could do extraordinarily well in a clean race. I've been told that there's no such thing, but still.:)
One thing that has become apparent to me in studying American political history is that the country's architects clearly expected healthy compromise between not only different interests, but different political philosophies. The idea must have been that representatives from across the spectrum of political theory could each encounter, debate, and learn from one another through the process of governing. That's as opposed to what we actually ended up with in America, where more and more there's a sick, winner-take-all, Civil War II approach to governing.
The Libertarian's gift to us is, in many ways, the best vision of a citizen (self-reliant, tolerant, and fiercely independent) and a state (simple, efficient, circumspect). I respect their rejection of xenophobia, their clear sight on issues of drugs and morality regulation, their concern for privacy, and ultimately I appreciate their vision of humanity. I also thank god Libertarians have never exerted real power in this country, or we would be just like Central and South America, only colder.
It actually makes me sad to say it. I greatly respect my friends who believe these ideas deeply. For my own part, the Objectivist or Libertarian's overweening faith in Laissez Faire markets and free enterprise seems as obviously misguided as the Communist's faith in human morality and generosity. The Libertarian's comprehensive vision of society is as unlikely as a hippie commune - a free market somehow free of monopolies, or the exigencies of geography, engineering, the prisoner's delimma, or any of the other unfortunate, well-traveled spoilers of universal privatization. It is a brutal, thrive-or-die darwinian experiment that I hope we continue, in the future, to have to take a long trip by plane to see first hand.
And yet I love Libertarians, and I am very happy they are here. I want to see them in every debate, and on every ballot in every election. The thing to remember is that perhaps every distinct, unvarnished political philosophy is flawed. But flaws and all, theirs brings us something that is vitaly important, more so now than ever: the profound respect for freedom and independence that (I think) have made America what it is.
The extremes bracket the middle; 3rd parties have always pushed the two in the center, even if they never win. 2004, with its ugly war and its 50/50 race probably won't be the year for independents, but they will always be there, and as they move in the polls, so do the Majors.
...release specs and/or open-source device drivers, and become "Linux compliant"?
I guess if the big companies want to lend a hand, that'd be my suggestion.
Let's be serious, drivers are one of the biggest issues, crossing all of the common uses of Linux. Why are we, in 2004, still stuck in the 1994 mentality, still begging most hardware manufacturers for specs and open drivers, and still reverse-engineering? I mean, it's probably fair to say Linux is over the hump in terms of name recognition at this point.
Sure, it's a lot better than it was, but our mindshare in the PC hardware world is abyssmal compared to what it should be. Even hardware vendors that "support" us still often do so with binary drivers; often shitty, scary ones that never get rev'd.
Can the myth that closed-source drivers, or secret specs, are somehow good for a hardware business still be thriving in 2004? Is it really that much more important than the sales you miss out on when your competitors embrace Linux before you do?
There is absolutely zero value proposition for anyone to let MS own, encumber, or otherwise threaten, by act or by fear of an act, the email standard.
They need to be kept 1000 feet away from any standards setting. Microsoft should only encounter the email standard when they send an email. Anything else is an absurdly bad idea.
If you had to bet, could you honestly bet they wouldn't exploit their license to shut out open source, or (more likely) GPL, now or (more likely) later?
I'd bet your well-cushioned ass they would.
It is hardly a conspiracy theory, when you can open any business section and read about their new patent portfolio manager or the SCO lawsuit. They play dirty, they do it in exactly this way, and everybody knows it.
Letting them taint the standard is bad for other vendors. It's bad for service providers. It's bad for users (read: most of the world's population, individuals and businesses). It's even bad for Microsoft itself.
It is absolutely absurd to have a standards war over email. But now we have to consider it.
Standards bodies may do the right thing. That's great. But what I fear now is that Microsoft will say "OK, you don't want to play our game? That's fine. Have it your way. Just don't bother sending any emails to @microsoft.com or @hotmail.com (and everywhere else we can buy or control) without a patented Caller/Sender ID record."
When they do this, we have to stand in a big line facing them, stare back, grin, and say "your loss."
I'm glad you replied. Slamming both candidates equally is only honest when both candidates are equal. There's a myth going around that this kind of "balance" is a bigger virtue than honesty or accuracy. Just because some conmen like to use "bias" as a knee-jerk weapon-word, doesn't mean you have an excuse to take your critical faculties offline.
For the record, I don't belong to any party, and find plenty to dislike with both "sides of the aisle." It doesn't make the candidates, or my opinion of them, in any way equal.
The fact is, you stand apart dramatically from the crowd by claiming that you were concerned about Kerry's record before SBVFT.
I am interested in how you became concerned with Kerry's war record long before the current smear campaign, and in general, how we could, under the present circumstances, reach any kind of believable new conclusion about Kerry's service.
Given what I've read so far, absenting credible witnesses forming any kind of consensus (which there appears to be none) the people who awarded the medals were in the best position to know what happened. And then on the other side we have the paymasters for the SBVFT, who have means, motive, and a long, well-storied history of staggeringly dishonest and audacious smear campaigns.
To put that side by side with a criticism of Bush's service is a bit unequal, I think - in fact, just being in the comparison hurts the actual veteran considerably.
But nonetheless I am open to your ideas on this. Please, and show me how you reached this conclusion. I am willing to be convinced.
...is like internal medicine several hundred years ago. We have some things figured out, we know how to check the pulse and we've learned how to amputate, but we're also on the level of leeches, cauterization, and bloodletting. There are smart men advancing the field, and they are outnumbered by phrenologists, patent medicine salesmen and outright quacks.
To pass this study off as if it can suggest conclusions, of any kind, about the way one kind of party member thinks versus another is exactly the kind of grandstanding, irresponsible and basically incoherent brain science I am sadly used to hearing about.
We don't really understand the role of the amygdala in our consciousness - in fact, we don't understand consciousness even slightly. Even if we don't hear an apologetic revolution in a year or two stemming from one of the many competing theories about other parts of our brain anatomy that may be equally important to our "limbic system," the methodology of the study itself may easily be flawed, if for instance those operating the survey (interviewing and handlnig subjects) or the survey materials (questionaries, etc) caused subjects from one party to feel differently than the other during examinations...
Were it not for the matte gloss of UCLA science, this article would be a much more obvious fit in the New York Post or the National Enquirer than the New York Times.
You didn't get those figures from the Congressional Quarterly. You got them from an arch-conservative liar named Addison Ross.
I suppose this kind of propaganda passes for sophisticated these days. Republicans were at one point actually democrats (the two parties have mutated and switched positions over time). Lots of things "were." Right now, even unto Saint Reagan, Republicans are not, statistically or in any other way, more likely to support civil rights. They are, however, as these efforts show, becoming embarrassed about it.
Instead, from the party of David Duke (whose Klan credentials are to Robert Byrd's what John Kerry's war record is to G. W. Bush's) and Pat Buchanan, we get screeds hoping people are ignorant enough of history to believe that, despite everything that's happened in the last 30 years... Robert Byrd somehow defines anything.
I will now eviscerate this propaganda. Foruntaly, all of this work has been done before (since, sadly, no lie has been too outrageous for the GOP to keep repeating ad nauseum), so I will largely rely on quotes of existing materials.
Set your wayback machine to the 1960's.
"With the passage of [Kennedy's and Johnson's] Civil Rights legislation [1964, 65], the last remaining segregationist & racist 'Dixiecrats' (southern segregationist Democrats of the racist bent) like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms jumped from the Democratic Party to join the Republican Party. And by the late '70s, both Democratic and Republican Parties had switched regional power bases. No longer was New England the stronghold of the GOP. The Republican Party had become the party of the South and the Pacific Northwest and the Democratic Party had become the party of the Northeast, the Midwest and the Southwest." -S. Rex
Let's be more specific. This didn't coincide with Republican Eisenhower's largely symbolic precursors, but with the vastly more substantial work of (northern, liberal) Democrats Kennedy and Johnson, together with a coalition of northern, "moderate" legislators from both sides of the aisle. The coalition of liberal and conservative (northern and southern) democrats shattered. Republicans picked up the racist slack, ditched black and liberal moderate members, and accepted the defecting southern conservatives. Picture Nelson Rockefeller losing the GOP nomination to Barry Goldwater - the racist McCarthyite. The GOP Southern Strategy was born.
Excerpts from the book "1964: The Last Innocent Year" by John Margolis (1999, William Morrow & Company):
From page 334:
Senator Strom Thurmond announced his "really basic decision" on Wednesday, September 16, 1964: He was declaring himself a Republican. . . . Thurmond said that the Civil Rights Act amounted to "another Reconstruction, [and] freedom as we have known it in this country is doomed."
Excerpts from the book "PILLAR OF FIRE: America in the Martin Luther King Years, 1963-65" by Taylor Brand (1998, Touchstone/Simon & Schuster Books):
From pages 403-406:
Newsweek pronounced the 1964 National GOP Convention at the San Francisco Cow Palace convention center as "stunningly total -- an authentic party revolution born of deep-seated frustration with the existing order executed by a new breed of pros with a ruthless skill."
Other mainstream outlets speculated about how former President Eisenhow must have felt about it, about the rejection of Wall Street Republicans, or Goldwater's poor prospects against Lyndon B. Johnson. But their excitements were mild beside the accute distress of the events reported by Negro publications.
"GOP Convention Spurns Negroes" cried the Cleveland Call and Post newspaper.
Look at the silly monkey. Look at the silly monkey.
Oh wait. I almost didn't notice. You didn't answer what I asked - because you can't.
Conservatives have almost always voted racist. Liberals usually vote for fairness and equality. Oops, you better try another funny technique to change history. Maybe like a time machine.
Sure both parties have plenty of crackpots, lunatics, and jackasses. It's the U.S. government, after all. The difference with Republicans is that, with them, it's party policy. At least until Karl Rove got too chicken to keep it up, and started convincing people like you to try these incredibly funny attempts to whitewash it...
Take a little friendly advice. The less you people talk about racism and politics, the better off you are.
Wow. You will certainly convince me to become a dyed-in-the-wool conservative if you can only back this up by posting the voting history (by party) on a few important pieces of civil rights legislation.
Or would that make it too obvious what a liar you are?
Not my intention to perpetuate that myth. I hope I clearly separated the concepts of protest versus violence or other senseless law-breaking, and if I did not, I failed to express myself properly.
The sad irony is that this is a political party that has clearly earned a massive, angry protest if there ever was one. But they are quite attuned to sad ironies, I think.
Would I be blowing hot air if I said civil rights protestors knew they would be considered "provacative" when they bussed themselves down to the American "heartland?"
New York City, by the numbers, not only does not like the GOP, but has many reasons to powerfully hate it. They don't like it because it's the party of Strom Thuromond, and there are a lot of minorities there - many who can spot a whitewash and a hastily-assembled attempt at diversity and be even more outraged at its temerity. They don't like it because its unabashedly the party of homophobia, and NYC is a hub of gay culture. Let's not even get into the Christian Religious Extremism, which plays great in Alabama but doesn't fly in a diverse city with plenty of people who are threatened by a party clearly striving for the dominance of a religion that's not their own.
They don't like the GOP because - and this is just picking one of their more innocent stunts - they used homeland security money drummed up after the devastating 9/11 attack in that city as political pork all over the country, leaving far less for the many places that (according to the news) are under immediate threat... and they're clearly coming back to wave the flag and cynically pose as the city's best defenders anyway.
NYC has a Republican mayor - not quite as loyal a party member as Zell Miller. He has been quite public about the slight, since the city (apparently still in the midst of a budget crisis) is now bearing large new security costs that the GOP promised to help with, and then blatantly shirked.
Yes, some New Yorkers read the paper, and probably are mad about that too.
But if you really want to know what hot air is, just try repeating your post out loud while watching video of the recent enormous, anti-war protests that more-or-less shut down half the city.
Leaving aside the party's many other issues - which is really all too charitable - how much hot air do you have to be filled with not to understand what those protests would have looked like if the war's architects had been on hand, at a convenient location, during those demonstrations?
I've seen the increasing drumbeat of anti-GOP protestors everywhere, clearly building towards a childish orgy of vandalism and street violence. It is monumentally naive.
The GOP occupation of NYC is not just designed to exploit 9/11. It is a careful and deliberate attempt to provoke protest. Preferably large, frightening, unruly protest. The more masturbatory rage they can stir up in the city, the louder they'll be laughing on their way back to the white house.
This election will be won with moderates and swing voters. Those are people like your parents. They will not identify with "CrimethInc" and "scruffy, unattractive" street protestors. They will see this event covered from inside the convention looking out.
Every act of violence, provocation, and unruly or disorderly behavior will scare those moderates right into the GOP's arms. Whether it be showing up on 6th Ave. with a mask and a shield, or DDOS'ing a GOP website, this kind of bad conduct is exactly what Republican strategists urgently want. And it will hand them the election on a silver platter.
Don't be a goddamn lemming. Save your "violence" for the voting booth!
Yes, that's exactly right. The waste of our hybrid socialist/capitalist society is bad news. It fails all the time. It's just a lot better than Laissez Faire. Of course, the more vigilant our citizens and the more participatory our democracy, the better our system works.
But I'm glad you landed sqaure on one of laissez faire capitalism's many flaws
The (immediate) benefit of many roads in rural Montana didn't justify their costs. Telephone service was unjustified by the economics of the rural community. Airports should never be built anywhere near them.
While an objectivist would sit around waiting for the Market Fairy to wave her wand and create a utopia, money would go where the money already is. Capital will flee to New York City or Los Angeles or Denver or Atlanta, where it will build another few toll bridges or skyscrapers or tract housing developments. Poor and rural communities will stagnate and wither, while wealthy and urban communities will grow.
This is a perfect metaphor for the general process of laissez faire, with its beaten-wife's-embrace of capitalism's tendency to reward those who need it the least, and abandon those who need it most. Or to put it another way, to sink into the prisoner's dillemma of modern pracitcal economics, and find the many expedient, deadly local maxima we know so well.
Fortunately laissez faire capitalists have never had much power in this country, but unfortunately a few whiners have been along for the ride as we've extracted them from the 3rd world. Because government's not perfect, they would rather pay less taxes and live in the 3rd world. You first. The border is that way. You can spend your time at the plantation ruminating on your philosophy's reputation in all the wealthier nations of the world.
When you build a road, we realized, people start driving on it. New opportunities, new profits. Not for an individual investor, and not this week, maybe not even this year. Heaven forfend. Now, what happens when you build a broadband line?
If we let Microsoft, through some machinations during our anti-spam re-engineering or in any other manner, take any measure of control over what has, until now, been an 100% open-standard email infrastructure, email will be fragmented and ultimately ruined, far worse than any cadre of spammers could ruin it.
It is trivial to do what "caller ID" does in an open fashion. And it is absolutely crucial that we do exactly that. No "complicated" licenses, no fancy agreements, no lawyers. Just pick a standard, and follow it.
Letting Microsoft have any involvement in the email infrastructure - other than using it - will be a disaster. And it wll be all the more terrible because of how easily it can be prevented.
It's a pragmatic test. Should I go to 64-bit yet? If I do, what OS should I run? What applications are ready?
And the answer is, not surprisingly, go with an operating system where the sources are almost always open or at least generally available, so the migration to 64-bit will be vastly faster and better.
Slashdot Mirror
+1 Smack in the forehead.
What was Intel thinking?
An architecture switch breaking x86 ISA compatibility (i.e. emulation is noticeably slower than the original item) would put it on a level playing field with other 64-bit workstation/server-class chips, yet they never seemed to offer either world-beating design improvements or substantial price benefits, or appear as though they would in the future.
This looked like a loser from the first minute I saw it, and I obviously wasn't the only one: I mean, the chip has been "The Itanic" in Register parlance for years now.
Intel, for all their flaws, is a smart company with a lot of smart people working for it. I must just not be seeing the whole picture. They must have had some good reason not to have flushed this project years ago, right?
Mmm. So your position is that the interstate highway system is an unnecessary, even "absurd," mistake?
And that no other nation has a comprable system?
1) This is a great idea; Nasa should scrap the shuttles and build one.
2) The government shouldn't have a space program. (Maybe the government shouldn't have too many programs at all.) This will be an outrageously expensive boondoggle, and we should just let private industry handle it.
3) Dude, when is private industry going to get around to doing that?
4) When it's good and ready.
5) Dude, private industry wouldn't even build the interstate highway system - a fulcrum of America's economy. What makes you think it will build a space elevator?
6) Communist.
Libertarianism is part of what keeps America healthy. But does anyone else think that its "true blue" advocates are often too in love with the simple answers of ideology to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of the position they advocate?
:)
I've often thought a "moderate Libertarian" could do extraordinarily well in a clean race. I've been told that there's no such thing, but still.
One thing that has become apparent to me in studying American political history is that the country's architects clearly expected healthy compromise between not only different interests, but different political philosophies. The idea must have been that representatives from across the spectrum of political theory could each encounter, debate, and learn from one another through the process of governing. That's as opposed to what we actually ended up with in America, where more and more there's a sick, winner-take-all, Civil War II approach to governing.
The Libertarian's gift to us is, in many ways, the best vision of a citizen (self-reliant, tolerant, and fiercely independent) and a state (simple, efficient, circumspect). I respect their rejection of xenophobia, their clear sight on issues of drugs and morality regulation, their concern for privacy, and ultimately I appreciate their vision of humanity. I also thank god Libertarians have never exerted real power in this country, or we would be just like Central and South America, only colder.
It actually makes me sad to say it. I greatly respect my friends who believe these ideas deeply. For my own part, the Objectivist or Libertarian's overweening faith in Laissez Faire markets and free enterprise seems as obviously misguided as the Communist's faith in human morality and generosity. The Libertarian's comprehensive vision of society is as unlikely as a hippie commune - a free market somehow free of monopolies, or the exigencies of geography, engineering, the prisoner's delimma, or any of the other unfortunate, well-traveled spoilers of universal privatization. It is a brutal, thrive-or-die darwinian experiment that I hope we continue, in the future, to have to take a long trip by plane to see first hand.
And yet I love Libertarians, and I am very happy they are here. I want to see them in every debate, and on every ballot in every election. The thing to remember is that perhaps every distinct, unvarnished political philosophy is flawed. But flaws and all, theirs brings us something that is vitaly important, more so now than ever: the profound respect for freedom and independence that (I think) have made America what it is.
The extremes bracket the middle; 3rd parties have always pushed the two in the center, even if they never win. 2004, with its ugly war and its 50/50 race probably won't be the year for independents, but they will always be there, and as they move in the polls, so do the Majors.
...release specs and/or open-source device drivers, and become "Linux compliant"?
I guess if the big companies want to lend a hand, that'd be my suggestion.
Let's be serious, drivers are one of the biggest issues, crossing all of the common uses of Linux. Why are we, in 2004, still stuck in the 1994 mentality, still begging most hardware manufacturers for specs and open drivers, and still reverse-engineering? I mean, it's probably fair to say Linux is over the hump in terms of name recognition at this point.
Sure, it's a lot better than it was, but our mindshare in the PC hardware world is abyssmal compared to what it should be. Even hardware vendors that "support" us still often do so with binary drivers; often shitty, scary ones that never get rev'd.
Can the myth that closed-source drivers, or secret specs, are somehow good for a hardware business still be thriving in 2004? Is it really that much more important than the sales you miss out on when your competitors embrace Linux before you do?
There is absolutely zero value proposition for anyone to let MS own, encumber, or otherwise threaten, by act or by fear of an act, the email standard.
They need to be kept 1000 feet away from any standards setting. Microsoft should only encounter the email standard when they send an email. Anything else is an absurdly bad idea.
If you had to bet, could you honestly bet they wouldn't exploit their license to shut out open source, or (more likely) GPL, now or (more likely) later?
I'd bet your well-cushioned ass they would.
It is hardly a conspiracy theory, when you can open any business section and read about their new patent portfolio manager or the SCO lawsuit. They play dirty, they do it in exactly this way, and everybody knows it.
Letting them taint the standard is bad for other vendors. It's bad for service providers. It's bad for users (read: most of the world's population, individuals and businesses). It's even bad for Microsoft itself.
It is absolutely absurd to have a standards war over email. But now we have to consider it.
Standards bodies may do the right thing. That's great. But what I fear now is that Microsoft will say "OK, you don't want to play our game? That's fine. Have it your way. Just don't bother sending any emails to @microsoft.com or @hotmail.com (and everywhere else we can buy or control) without a patented Caller/Sender ID record."
When they do this, we have to stand in a big line facing them, stare back, grin, and say "your loss."
Get ready...
How can a burglar rob your house, if it's protected by cameras?
:D
How can you be mugged, if the cameras have you covered?
I'm glad you replied. Slamming both candidates equally is only honest when both candidates are equal. There's a myth going around that this kind of "balance" is a bigger virtue than honesty or accuracy. Just because some conmen like to use "bias" as a knee-jerk weapon-word, doesn't mean you have an excuse to take your critical faculties offline.
For the record, I don't belong to any party, and find plenty to dislike with both "sides of the aisle." It doesn't make the candidates, or my opinion of them, in any way equal.
The fact is, you stand apart dramatically from the crowd by claiming that you were concerned about Kerry's record before SBVFT.
I am interested in how you became concerned with Kerry's war record long before the current smear campaign, and in general, how we could, under the present circumstances, reach any kind of believable new conclusion about Kerry's service.
Given what I've read so far, absenting credible witnesses forming any kind of consensus (which there appears to be none) the people who awarded the medals were in the best position to know what happened. And then on the other side we have the paymasters for the SBVFT, who have means, motive, and a long, well-storied history of staggeringly dishonest and audacious smear campaigns.
To put that side by side with a criticism of Bush's service is a bit unequal, I think - in fact, just being in the comparison hurts the actual veteran considerably.
But nonetheless I am open to your ideas on this. Please, and show me how you reached this conclusion. I am willing to be convinced.
They said there were some people who actually believed any part of what SBVFT is saying, but I've never actually seen one before.
Good points! Thank you.
...is like internal medicine several hundred years ago. We have some things figured out, we know how to check the pulse and we've learned how to amputate, but we're also on the level of leeches, cauterization, and bloodletting. There are smart men advancing the field, and they are outnumbered by phrenologists, patent medicine salesmen and outright quacks.
To pass this study off as if it can suggest conclusions, of any kind, about the way one kind of party member thinks versus another is exactly the kind of grandstanding, irresponsible and basically incoherent brain science I am sadly used to hearing about.
We don't really understand the role of the amygdala in our consciousness - in fact, we don't understand consciousness even slightly. Even if we don't hear an apologetic revolution in a year or two stemming from one of the many competing theories about other parts of our brain anatomy that may be equally important to our "limbic system," the methodology of the study itself may easily be flawed, if for instance those operating the survey (interviewing and handlnig subjects) or the survey materials (questionaries, etc) caused subjects from one party to feel differently than the other during examinations...
Were it not for the matte gloss of UCLA science, this article would be a much more obvious fit in the New York Post or the National Enquirer than the New York Times.
Yeah. Right. Some answers.
But fact checking is not exactly your forte, is it.
You didn't get those figures from the Congressional Quarterly. You got them from an arch-conservative liar named Addison Ross.
I suppose this kind of propaganda passes for sophisticated these days. Republicans were at one point actually democrats (the two parties have mutated and switched positions over time). Lots of things "were." Right now, even unto Saint Reagan, Republicans are not, statistically or in any other way, more likely to support civil rights. They are, however, as these efforts show, becoming embarrassed about it.
Instead, from the party of David Duke (whose Klan credentials are to Robert Byrd's what John Kerry's war record is to G. W. Bush's) and Pat Buchanan, we get screeds hoping people are ignorant enough of history to believe that, despite everything that's happened in the last 30 years... Robert Byrd somehow defines anything.
I will now eviscerate this propaganda. Foruntaly, all of this work has been done before (since, sadly, no lie has been too outrageous for the GOP to keep repeating ad nauseum), so I will largely rely on quotes of existing materials.
Set your wayback machine to the 1960's.
"With the passage of [Kennedy's and Johnson's] Civil Rights legislation [1964, 65], the last remaining segregationist & racist 'Dixiecrats' (southern segregationist Democrats of the racist bent) like Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms jumped from the Democratic Party to join the Republican Party. And by the late '70s, both Democratic and Republican Parties had switched regional power bases. No longer was New England the stronghold of the GOP. The Republican Party had become the party of the South and the Pacific Northwest and the Democratic Party had become the party of the Northeast, the Midwest and the Southwest." -S. Rex
Let's be more specific. This didn't coincide with Republican Eisenhower's largely symbolic precursors, but with the vastly more substantial work of (northern, liberal) Democrats Kennedy and Johnson, together with a coalition of northern, "moderate" legislators from both sides of the aisle. The coalition of liberal and conservative (northern and southern) democrats shattered. Republicans picked up the racist slack, ditched black and liberal moderate members, and accepted the defecting southern conservatives. Picture Nelson Rockefeller losing the GOP nomination to Barry Goldwater - the racist McCarthyite. The GOP Southern Strategy was born.
Excerpts from the book "1964: The Last Innocent Year" by John Margolis (1999, William Morrow & Company):
From page 334:
Senator Strom Thurmond announced his "really basic decision" on Wednesday, September 16, 1964: He was declaring himself a Republican. . . . Thurmond said that the Civil Rights Act amounted to "another Reconstruction, [and] freedom as we have known it in this country is doomed."
Excerpts from the book "PILLAR OF FIRE: America in the Martin Luther King Years, 1963-65" by Taylor Brand (1998, Touchstone/Simon & Schuster Books):
From pages 403-406:
Newsweek pronounced the 1964 National GOP Convention at the San Francisco Cow Palace convention center as "stunningly total -- an authentic party revolution born of deep-seated frustration with the existing order executed by a new breed of pros with a ruthless skill."
Other mainstream outlets speculated about how former President Eisenhow must have felt about it, about the rejection of Wall Street Republicans, or Goldwater's poor prospects against Lyndon B. Johnson. But their excitements were mild beside the accute distress of the events reported by Negro publications.
"GOP Convention Spurns Negroes" cried the Cleveland Call and Post newspaper.
Look at the silly monkey. Look at the silly monkey.
Oh wait. I almost didn't notice. You didn't answer what I asked - because you can't.
Conservatives have almost always voted racist. Liberals usually vote for fairness and equality. Oops, you better try another funny technique to change history. Maybe like a time machine.
Better hope no one reads the news. Even "the Holy Saint Reagan" was a known racist.
Sure both parties have plenty of crackpots, lunatics, and jackasses. It's the U.S. government, after all. The difference with Republicans is that, with them, it's party policy. At least until Karl Rove got too chicken to keep it up, and started convincing people like you to try these incredibly funny attempts to whitewash it...
Take a little friendly advice. The less you people talk about racism and politics, the better off you are.
Wow. You will certainly convince me to become a dyed-in-the-wool conservative if you can only back this up by posting the voting history (by party) on a few important pieces of civil rights legislation.
Or would that make it too obvious what a liar you are?
Not my intention to perpetuate that myth. I hope I clearly separated the concepts of protest versus violence or other senseless law-breaking, and if I did not, I failed to express myself properly.
The sad irony is that this is a political party that has clearly earned a massive, angry protest if there ever was one. But they are quite attuned to sad ironies, I think.
Would I be blowing hot air if I said civil rights protestors knew they would be considered "provacative" when they bussed themselves down to the American "heartland?"
New York City, by the numbers, not only does not like the GOP, but has many reasons to powerfully hate it. They don't like it because it's the party of Strom Thuromond, and there are a lot of minorities there - many who can spot a whitewash and a hastily-assembled attempt at diversity and be even more outraged at its temerity. They don't like it because its unabashedly the party of homophobia, and NYC is a hub of gay culture. Let's not even get into the Christian Religious Extremism, which plays great in Alabama but doesn't fly in a diverse city with plenty of people who are threatened by a party clearly striving for the dominance of a religion that's not their own.
They don't like the GOP because - and this is just picking one of their more innocent stunts - they used homeland security money drummed up after the devastating 9/11 attack in that city as political pork all over the country, leaving far less for the many places that (according to the news) are under immediate threat... and they're clearly coming back to wave the flag and cynically pose as the city's best defenders anyway.
NYC has a Republican mayor - not quite as loyal a party member as Zell Miller. He has been quite public about the slight, since the city (apparently still in the midst of a budget crisis) is now bearing large new security costs that the GOP promised to help with, and then blatantly shirked.
Yes, some New Yorkers read the paper, and probably are mad about that too.
But if you really want to know what hot air is, just try repeating your post out loud while watching video of the recent enormous, anti-war protests that more-or-less shut down half the city.
Leaving aside the party's many other issues - which is really all too charitable - how much hot air do you have to be filled with not to understand what those protests would have looked like if the war's architects had been on hand, at a convenient location, during those demonstrations?
I've seen the increasing drumbeat of anti-GOP protestors everywhere, clearly building towards a childish orgy of vandalism and street violence. It is monumentally naive.
The GOP occupation of NYC is not just designed to exploit 9/11. It is a careful and deliberate attempt to provoke protest. Preferably large, frightening, unruly protest. The more masturbatory rage they can stir up in the city, the louder they'll be laughing on their way back to the white house.
This election will be won with moderates and swing voters. Those are people like your parents. They will not identify with "CrimethInc" and "scruffy, unattractive" street protestors. They will see this event covered from inside the convention looking out.
Every act of violence, provocation, and unruly or disorderly behavior will scare those moderates right into the GOP's arms. Whether it be showing up on 6th Ave. with a mask and a shield, or DDOS'ing a GOP website, this kind of bad conduct is exactly what Republican strategists urgently want. And it will hand them the election on a silver platter.
Don't be a goddamn lemming. Save your "violence" for the voting booth!
Yes, that's exactly right. The waste of our hybrid socialist/capitalist society is bad news. It fails all the time. It's just a lot better than Laissez Faire. Of course, the more vigilant our citizens and the more participatory our democracy, the better our system works.
But I'm glad you landed sqaure on one of laissez faire capitalism's many flaws
The (immediate) benefit of many roads in rural Montana didn't justify their costs. Telephone service was unjustified by the economics of the rural community. Airports should never be built anywhere near them.
While an objectivist would sit around waiting for the Market Fairy to wave her wand and create a utopia, money would go where the money already is. Capital will flee to New York City or Los Angeles or Denver or Atlanta, where it will build another few toll bridges or skyscrapers or tract housing developments. Poor and rural communities will stagnate and wither, while wealthy and urban communities will grow.
This is a perfect metaphor for the general process of laissez faire, with its beaten-wife's-embrace of capitalism's tendency to reward those who need it the least, and abandon those who need it most. Or to put it another way, to sink into the prisoner's dillemma of modern pracitcal economics, and find the many expedient, deadly local maxima we know so well.
Fortunately laissez faire capitalists have never had much power in this country, but unfortunately a few whiners have been along for the ride as we've extracted them from the 3rd world. Because government's not perfect, they would rather pay less taxes and live in the 3rd world. You first. The border is that way. You can spend your time at the plantation ruminating on your philosophy's reputation in all the wealthier nations of the world.
When you build a road, we realized, people start driving on it. New opportunities, new profits. Not for an individual investor, and not this week, maybe not even this year. Heaven forfend. Now, what happens when you build a broadband line?
All true, but we can probably stop address forging.
If no one's done it yet, then this is basically the call to arms. If we don't do it now, Microsoft will coopt and destroy email.
If we let Microsoft, through some machinations during our anti-spam re-engineering or in any other manner, take any measure of control over what has, until now, been an 100% open-standard email infrastructure, email will be fragmented and ultimately ruined, far worse than any cadre of spammers could ruin it.
It is trivial to do what "caller ID" does in an open fashion. And it is absolutely crucial that we do exactly that. No "complicated" licenses, no fancy agreements, no lawyers. Just pick a standard, and follow it.
Letting Microsoft have any involvement in the email infrastructure - other than using it - will be a disaster. And it wll be all the more terrible because of how easily it can be prevented.
Mod chips are used 99% of the time to play imported games. Period.
It's a pragmatic test. Should I go to 64-bit yet? If I do, what OS should I run? What applications are ready?
And the answer is, not surprisingly, go with an operating system where the sources are almost always open or at least generally available, so the migration to 64-bit will be vastly faster and better.