1) Hispanics commit crimes in the US disproportionate to their numbers.
2) There is little to no genetic difference between American Hispanics, and the Spanish in Spain, because the populations diverged such a short time ago.
3) Spain has one of the lowest crime rates in Europe.
4) Ergo, Hispanics cannot be genetically predisposed to committing crimes.
Nobody is touting anything. I'm not a gamer, haven't played a game in months, and couldn't care less about the console pissing wars. I'm just pointing out that, speaking technically, the original poster is wrong about the GC being more powerful than the PS2.
It has nothing to do with what Sony said. Just read up on the architectures of the PS2 and Gamecube. The PS2 is far more powerful.
That said, I have played both the Gamecube and PS2, and Gamecube games do tend to look much better than you'd expect given just the power of the hardware. There are two reasons for that:
1) The GC is far easier to program, which allows developers to achieve higher efficiency in their games. It's a whole lot easier to take the GC to 90% than to take the PS2 to 90%.
2) The GC does a lot of special effects, plus anti-aliasing, in hardware. Thus, GC games tend to mask low-complexity geometry with bright colors and special effects. PS2 games tend to have extremely detailed geometry (because the system has so much FPU power), but output quality suffers a bit because of the limitations of the GS.
First, you're confusing fill rates with polygon rate. Second, I'm citing peak numbers for both quantities. The GC's peak fill rate is ~700M pixels/sec, while the PS2's is ~2.4G pixels/sec. The GC's *peak* polygon rate is ~33M polys/sec, while the PS2's *peak* polygon rate is ~70M polys/sec.
When advertising, Nintendo did cite the achievable rate, which was 10M-12M polys/sec (compared to ~20M polys/sec for the PS2).
In windows, it was plug and play. Except it isn't. The NVIDIA drivers don't come standard with either Windows or Linux. You have to install them manually in both cases. You can use whatever comes with XP or XFree86 (without having to do anything), but nobody who uses their cards to actually play games does that. Everyone goes to nvidia.com to download the drivers.
"All I had to do:" is misleading because no sane human being (i.e. not an operating system hobbiest) I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. "No sane human being?" We're talking about gamers here. They know how to edit text files (at least historically, many games could be tweeked this way), and anybody who uses Gentoo knows how to use emerge (just like anyone who runs Windows knows how to run a driver installer). Hell, there are even graphical tools to do what he did! As long as the driver is known to Portage (or APT or YaST, depending on your distro), installation is a highly automated process, unlike in Windows. On SuSE, his steps are even unnecessary, YaST *asks* you to install the driver, downloads and unpacks it automatically, and configures X for you.
Hence, in driver installation, linux sucks and windows rocks What you fail to understand is that all the fancy packaging you see in driver installers is provided by the vendor. If your driver vendor takes the care to provide a good installer (NVIDIA), or your distro takes the care to repackage the driver with a good installer, the process is transparent. If they don't, it can be painful, but the exact same thing is true of Windows drivers. There is no way to fix this on the Linux end, because it's the vendors' crappy installer.
How's the GameCube less powerful? The PS2 just has a lot of hardware. 3 vector FPUs, 16-pipeline graphics unit, graphics memory connected via a 2048-bit bus, etc. It's total geometry rate is twice as much as the Gamecubes, and it's fill rate is four times as much. It's just much harder to program for than either the GC or the XBox.
The biggest problem with gaming on Linux is that manufacturers don't put any effort into it. For stuff that people pay attention to, things are really nice. Eg, installing NVIDIA's drivers in SuSE is as easy as clicking a button in YaST, changing settings is as easy as using the provided nvidia-settings graphical app, and installing provided games is as easy as selecting them in YaST.
Unfortunately, the commercial vendors (with some exceptions) don't put the kind of effort they put into their Linux products that they put into their Windows products. They write fancy graphical installers for Windows, then ship some lame buggy shell-script for Linux. ATI writes a gadget-filled graphical control panel for Windows, but makes you edit XF86Config on Linux.
Okay. She can follow a manual to open a case, plug in the IDE cable, and make sure the jumpers are right, but she couldn't follow a manual that told her to "download and run this installer" then open up a file and change "nv" to "nvidia"?
And got to www.nvidia.com, download the drivers, find where you put them, click on the executable, click next a half a dozen times, then reboot. I seriously doubt your way was quicker...
Um, this is mainly a reason why ATI's drivers suck. NVIDIA's drivers are absolutely painless in this area. Many mainstream distros today handle installing the NVIDIA drivers automatically. If you're on SuSE, for example, all you have to do is say "yes" when YaST update prompts you to install the driver. Recent versions of the NVIDIA driver come with a nice GUI tool that let's you do stuff like change anti-aliasing settings, digital vibrance control, etc.
The situation on Windows and Linux is the same here. You think that NVIDIA control panel in Windows comes with the OS? The vendors supply the tool, just like they have to supply it for Windows. NVIDIA allows you to set the parameters through the GUI or through XF86Config, while ATI only allows you to do it through XF86Config. The fact that you have to dig around in XF86Config is ATI's fault, not XFree's or Linux's.
1) Mutually assured destruction referred to actions between nation-states. No nation-states attacked us on 9/11.
2) Mutually assured destruction reffered to "full scale use of nuclear weapons", not conventional attacks.
MAD was never meant to be "we will blindly lash out at the world with nuclear weapons in response to any and all attacks on our soil." MAD was, instead, a deterrence based on the idea that in any full-scale nuclear attack, both the attacker and the target would be destroyed. In a twisted, eye-for-an-eye way, MAD is an inherently just doctrine.
The distinction is that a cotton gin is an application of mathematics. A computer program is just a mathematical description.
If I devise some equations for modeling the behavior of a weather system, I cannot patent that. If, however, I write a computer program following those equations, should that be patentable?
You say yes, but there is no distinction between the description expressed in equations and the actual computer program. Programs themselves are just mathematical descriptions. Programming languages are just specializied calculi that are all equivilent to the lambda calculus.
The "drug laws" are written and intended to criminalize the traffic of illegal narcotics. That's a circular argument. Narcotics would not be illegal if there were no drug laws. It's exactly like prohibition --- government making laws to dictate what people should do, rather than to just protect the rights of the people.
Of course, eventually people realized that some ideas are just plain lousy, no matter how long the ideas have been around. I don't know. Are we better off now that we've gotten involved with the world's sundry politics? Are we better off now that we've made it our goal to promote democracy around the world? I would say we are not.
Sending in troops to assist in stabilizing the area can help. Personally, I don't really believe it's our duty to send troops to the Sudan to stop genocide. This isn't because I'm insensitive, but because I don't want us to make a habit of intervening in local matters. If we could confine it to extreme situations like preventing genocide, I'd be fine with that. But where does it stop? How far of a step is that from helping rebels establish a more democratic government in their country? How about backing an unpopular democratic government in the face of a popular theocratic opposition? Intervening in the political destiny of sovereign nations does not sit well with me.
I meant that the military is an important and necessary part of an effective foreign policy Yes, a military is important. But the job of our military is to protect us, not our numerous local interests abroad. Our military should be based *here*, not scattered in military bases around the world.
those in a position of advantage ought to alleviate the suffering of others who lack the same advantage, How decides what is "alleviating the suffering of others"? Fighting genocide, fighting poverty, those are easy ones. But where do you draw the line, and how do you draw it? How about fighting for democracy? Many people don't *want* democratic governments. According to recent polls, 41% of Iraqi's want Saddam back. Decades ago, most of Vietnam wanted a Communist society. In the most recent revolution in Iraq, the people installed a theocracy. Should we fight for democracy, against the wishes of the people?
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable rights. Those are *our* inaliable rights. They are not universal. Just consider Christian societies a few centuries ago. Many thought that the ideal was not a free society, but a society where everyone followed "God's laws." For them, the promise of a godly society that would allow them to get to heaven was more important than some abstract ideas some people had about freedom. Many people today still think like that. To many Asian peoples', personal liberty takes a back-seat to social harmony.
It is the responsibility of a free people to do everything in their power to share that freedom It is contrary to the beliefs of a free people to impose a form of society on people that don't want it. Democracy is inherently *not* an evangelical belief. It can't be, because it is couched in the ideal that people should control their own destiny.
In the United States, we have freedom of speech, and Mr. Cobb is able to voice his criticisms of our true democracy precisely because this right is guaranteed to him by the First Amendment. Freedom of speech is not the sole criteria for judging a democracy. Inherently, a democracy is a society in which the government reflects the will of the people. Just from a mathematical analysis (read Wikipedia's entry on voting systems) our current system of voting limits how the will of the people is reflected. It gives more power to certain people (those in smaller states have an advantage), and less to other people. It encourages tactical voting, which forces people to hide their true preferences in order to avoid large political risks. If you look at the voting systems of many countries abroad (eg: Israel, Australia), they use more sophisticated systems that preserve more information about voter preferences.
Well, it's not all that different now. How often does a Democrat come campaign in Georgia? How often does a Republican presidential candidate come campaign in California? The current situation just flips things, causing the major population centers to be taken from granted, and most of the effort focused on marginal areas. I don't think that's really "better" in any way.
There is a flip-side to that. The current electoral college gives far too much benefit to the small states. Each 1 million voters in New York count for 1.6 electoral votes, while each 1 million voters in Wyoming counts for 6 electoral votes. That's almost 4x more.
This is having substantial impact on national politics. Take a look at the current electoral poll statistics. The average "solid Kerry" state has about 16 electoral votes and 9.24 million people. The average "solid Bush" state has 8.125 electoral votes and 4.04 million people. If you do the math, that comes out to 2.01 votes per million people for strong Bush states, but only 1.73 electoral votes per million people for strong Kerry states.
We're going to have to come to terms with the fact that we're a polarized country, with only two major political parties. Right now, the electoral college doesn't just protect the rights of small states, but rather allows the small states to push their own agenda at the expense of everyone else. The concerns of smaller areas and rural populations seems to dominate the political debate, while simultaniously creating an atmosphere of anti-intellectualism. Isn't it interesting how, in an election about terrorism, that the people who actually got attacked (those in New York and DC), and those who are most likely to get attacked (major cities like Los Angels), favor a different person than those in rural and suburban America? Isn't it ironic that it is the latter that is having the loudest voice about the matter?
I'd also take a look at the statistics in poor white areas around the country. In parts of the South, it's not uncommon for 1/4 of teenage girls in a high-school to become pregnant at some point. The root cause of this is probably low income levels and education, not any inherent racial issues.
The problem with that is that you're looking at symptoms, not causes. What would make more sense is to study level of literacy and level of income vs drug use and crime. That'll be far more enlightening, and will be much more likely to show a causal relationship than a racial study.
At the end of the day, having black skin doesn't *cause* you to be a criminal. From a biological standpoint, that makes no sense. It is logical, however, to say that being poor or being uneducated causes you to be a criminal, or subscribing to a particular set of cultural values causes you to be a criminal.
The problem with the electoral college now is that it gives too much clout to small states, at the expense of larger states. It has gone from protecting the interests of smaller states, to allowing them to push their particular agenda at the expense of everyone else.
The electoral college, as it stands now, unbalances the system. The system gives small states the advantage in the Senate, and the Executive. It made sense back when the president elected by the state legislatures, and back when the office of president was a fairly weak role with the major centers of power being in the House and Senate, but it doesn't make sense now.
I don't really like the green party (libertarian-leaning democrat myself), but Mr. Cobb did make some salient points.
Although drug addiction is a health problem, the drug laws don't put people in jail for being addicts. Yes they do. The put people in jail for using something that harms only themselves, and not the public at large. This is extremely contrary to the principles of our society. Consider Abraham Lincoln's comments about prohibition (essentially the same thing as the "war on drugs"):
"Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded."
The logic behind this is thus: the government exists to protect the rights of the people. Crimes are those things that deprive free individuals of their rights. Government should not criminalize those things that do not deprive anyone of their rights. The government should not legislate what is good and bad, rather, only what is right and wrong.
This comment smacks of isolationism. Well, the country *was* originally concieved to be isolationist.
We cannot protect our country, meaning our homeland or our interests throughout the globe, if we do not remain engaged with the world at large. First, we should not use the military to protect our "interests." That is not just a justifiable use of force. Western thought accepts that the only legitimate use of force is to protect your self, and your liberty. To do this, our country does not need military bases around the world. We do not need to prop up petty dictators (first Saddam, now Musharraf) to protect ourselves. To protect ourselves, our troops need to be here, where they can defend us on our own land.
If anything, we need to increase the size of our armed forces, because we are currently overextended. We're only over-extended because some have this belief that it is our job to bring freedom to people around the world, and combat injustice and oppression wherever it may exist. That's not our job. The war against all evil is not something that can be won, and it is not something we need to fight. The more we try to evangelize our democracy, the more we endanger ourselves. It is a failed policy, not unlike those policies in the past that tried to evangelize a particular religion.
That the Green Party is able to make this claim is sufficient evidence of the claim's fallaciousness. Of course it isn't. For much of the reign of Wilhelm I, the socialist party in Germany flourished openly. This was even though the authoritarian government and the socialists were at odds, and the socialist party was at times technically illegal.
This is not to say that we have an authoritarian regime, but rather that your line of logic isn't sensical.
What you call "type safety" is what wikipedia defines as "strongly typed." Using the strong/weak distinction to refer to type safety is the traditional usage of the terms.
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No you don't, for obvious reasons. Proof:
1) Hispanics commit crimes in the US disproportionate to their numbers.
2) There is little to no genetic difference between American Hispanics, and the Spanish in Spain, because the populations diverged such a short time ago.
3) Spain has one of the lowest crime rates in Europe.
4) Ergo, Hispanics cannot be genetically predisposed to committing crimes.
Nobody is touting anything. I'm not a gamer, haven't played a game in months, and couldn't care less about the console pissing wars. I'm just pointing out that, speaking technically, the original poster is wrong about the GC being more powerful than the PS2.
PS: I own a Gamecube. I can count the number of decent games on one hand. My brother's PS2 is far superior in that department.
It has nothing to do with what Sony said. Just read up on the architectures of the PS2 and Gamecube. The PS2 is far more powerful.
That said, I have played both the Gamecube and PS2, and Gamecube games do tend to look much better than you'd expect given just the power of the hardware. There are two reasons for that:
1) The GC is far easier to program, which allows developers to achieve higher efficiency in their games. It's a whole lot easier to take the GC to 90% than to take the PS2 to 90%.
2) The GC does a lot of special effects, plus anti-aliasing, in hardware. Thus, GC games tend to mask low-complexity geometry with bright colors and special effects. PS2 games tend to have extremely detailed geometry (because the system has so much FPU power), but output quality suffers a bit because of the limitations of the GS.
First, you're confusing fill rates with polygon rate. Second, I'm citing peak numbers for both quantities. The GC's peak fill rate is ~700M pixels/sec, while the PS2's is ~2.4G pixels/sec. The GC's *peak* polygon rate is ~33M polys/sec, while the PS2's *peak* polygon rate is ~70M polys/sec.
When advertising, Nintendo did cite the achievable rate, which was 10M-12M polys/sec (compared to ~20M polys/sec for the PS2).
In windows, it was plug and play.
Except it isn't. The NVIDIA drivers don't come standard with either Windows or Linux. You have to install them manually in both cases. You can use whatever comes with XP or XFree86 (without having to do anything), but nobody who uses their cards to actually play games does that. Everyone goes to nvidia.com to download the drivers.
"All I had to do:" is misleading because no sane human being (i.e. not an operating system hobbiest)
I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. "No sane human being?" We're talking about gamers here. They know how to edit text files (at least historically, many games could be tweeked this way), and anybody who uses Gentoo knows how to use emerge (just like anyone who runs Windows knows how to run a driver installer). Hell, there are even graphical tools to do what he did! As long as the driver is known to Portage (or APT or YaST, depending on your distro), installation is a highly automated process, unlike in Windows. On SuSE, his steps are even unnecessary, YaST *asks* you to install the driver, downloads and unpacks it automatically, and configures X for you.
Hence, in driver installation, linux sucks and windows rocks
What you fail to understand is that all the fancy packaging you see in driver installers is provided by the vendor. If your driver vendor takes the care to provide a good installer (NVIDIA), or your distro takes the care to repackage the driver with a good installer, the process is transparent. If they don't, it can be painful, but the exact same thing is true of Windows drivers. There is no way to fix this on the Linux end, because it's the vendors' crappy installer.
How's the GameCube less powerful?
The PS2 just has a lot of hardware. 3 vector FPUs, 16-pipeline graphics unit, graphics memory connected via a 2048-bit bus, etc. It's total geometry rate is twice as much as the Gamecubes, and it's fill rate is four times as much. It's just much harder to program for than either the GC or the XBox.
There is no trend here, because the Gamecube is less powerful than the PS2. It's big upside was that it is a lot easier to develop for than the PS2.
The biggest problem with gaming on Linux is that manufacturers don't put any effort into it. For stuff that people pay attention to, things are really nice. Eg, installing NVIDIA's drivers in SuSE is as easy as clicking a button in YaST, changing settings is as easy as using the provided nvidia-settings graphical app, and installing provided games is as easy as selecting them in YaST.
Unfortunately, the commercial vendors (with some exceptions) don't put the kind of effort they put into their Linux products that they put into their Windows products. They write fancy graphical installers for Windows, then ship some lame buggy shell-script for Linux. ATI writes a gadget-filled graphical control panel for Windows, but makes you edit XF86Config on Linux.
Okay. She can follow a manual to open a case, plug in the IDE cable, and make sure the jumpers are right, but she couldn't follow a manual that told her to "download and run this installer" then open up a file and change "nv" to "nvidia"?
And got to www.nvidia.com, download the drivers, find where you put them, click on the executable, click next a half a dozen times, then reboot. I seriously doubt your way was quicker...
Um, this is mainly a reason why ATI's drivers suck. NVIDIA's drivers are absolutely painless in this area. Many mainstream distros today handle installing the NVIDIA drivers automatically. If you're on SuSE, for example, all you have to do is say "yes" when YaST update prompts you to install the driver. Recent versions of the NVIDIA driver come with a nice GUI tool that let's you do stuff like change anti-aliasing settings, digital vibrance control, etc.
The situation on Windows and Linux is the same here. You think that NVIDIA control panel in Windows comes with the OS? The vendors supply the tool, just like they have to supply it for Windows. NVIDIA allows you to set the parameters through the GUI or through XF86Config, while ATI only allows you to do it through XF86Config. The fact that you have to dig around in XF86Config is ATI's fault, not XFree's or Linux's.
You're completely off-base. Two reasons:
1) Mutually assured destruction referred to actions between nation-states. No nation-states attacked us on 9/11.
2) Mutually assured destruction reffered to "full scale use of nuclear weapons", not conventional attacks.
MAD was never meant to be "we will blindly lash out at the world with nuclear weapons in response to any and all attacks on our soil." MAD was, instead, a deterrence based on the idea that in any full-scale nuclear attack, both the attacker and the target would be destroyed. In a twisted, eye-for-an-eye way, MAD is an inherently just doctrine.
The distinction is that a cotton gin is an application of mathematics. A computer program is just a mathematical description.
If I devise some equations for modeling the behavior of a weather system, I cannot patent that. If, however, I write a computer program following those equations, should that be patentable?
You say yes, but there is no distinction between the description expressed in equations and the actual computer program. Programs themselves are just mathematical descriptions. Programming languages are just specializied calculi that are all equivilent to the lambda calculus.
The "drug laws" are written and intended to criminalize the traffic of illegal narcotics.
That's a circular argument. Narcotics would not be illegal if there were no drug laws. It's exactly like prohibition --- government making laws to dictate what people should do, rather than to just protect the rights of the people.
Of course, eventually people realized that some ideas are just plain lousy, no matter how long the ideas have been around.
I don't know. Are we better off now that we've gotten involved with the world's sundry politics? Are we better off now that we've made it our goal to promote democracy around the world? I would say we are not.
Sending in troops to assist in stabilizing the area can help.
Personally, I don't really believe it's our duty to send troops to the Sudan to stop genocide. This isn't because I'm insensitive, but because I don't want us to make a habit of intervening in local matters. If we could confine it to extreme situations like preventing genocide, I'd be fine with that. But where does it stop? How far of a step is that from helping rebels establish a more democratic government in their country? How about backing an unpopular democratic government in the face of a popular theocratic opposition? Intervening in the political destiny of sovereign nations does not sit well with me.
I meant that the military is an important and necessary part of an effective foreign policy
Yes, a military is important. But the job of our military is to protect us, not our numerous local interests abroad. Our military should be based *here*, not scattered in military bases around the world.
those in a position of advantage ought to alleviate the suffering of others who lack the same advantage,
How decides what is "alleviating the suffering of others"? Fighting genocide, fighting poverty, those are easy ones. But where do you draw the line, and how do you draw it? How about fighting for democracy? Many people don't *want* democratic governments. According to recent polls, 41% of Iraqi's want Saddam back. Decades ago, most of Vietnam wanted a Communist society. In the most recent revolution in Iraq, the people installed a theocracy. Should we fight for democracy, against the wishes of the people?
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are inalienable rights.
Those are *our* inaliable rights. They are not universal. Just consider Christian societies a few centuries ago. Many thought that the ideal was not a free society, but a society where everyone followed "God's laws." For them, the promise of a godly society that would allow them to get to heaven was more important than some abstract ideas some people had about freedom. Many people today still think like that. To many Asian peoples', personal liberty takes a back-seat to social harmony.
It is the responsibility of a free people to do everything in their power to share that freedom
It is contrary to the beliefs of a free people to impose a form of society on people that don't want it. Democracy is inherently *not* an evangelical belief. It can't be, because it is couched in the ideal that people should control their own destiny.
In the United States, we have freedom of speech, and Mr. Cobb is able to voice his criticisms of our true democracy precisely because this right is guaranteed to him by the First Amendment.
Freedom of speech is not the sole criteria for judging a democracy. Inherently, a democracy is a society in which the government reflects the will of the people. Just from a mathematical analysis (read Wikipedia's entry on voting systems) our current system of voting limits how the will of the people is reflected. It gives more power to certain people (those in smaller states have an advantage), and less to other people. It encourages tactical voting, which forces people to hide their true preferences in order to avoid large political risks. If you look at the voting systems of many countries abroad (eg: Israel, Australia), they use more sophisticated systems that preserve more information about voter preferences.
It's an accepted part of patent law. Mathematics is considered a matter of fact, something which cannot be patented.
Well, it's not all that different now. How often does a Democrat come campaign in Georgia? How often does a Republican presidential candidate come campaign in California? The current situation just flips things, causing the major population centers to be taken from granted, and most of the effort focused on marginal areas. I don't think that's really "better" in any way.
There is a flip-side to that. The current electoral college gives far too much benefit to the small states. Each 1 million voters in New York count for 1.6 electoral votes, while each 1 million voters in Wyoming counts for 6 electoral votes. That's almost 4x more.
This is having substantial impact on national politics. Take a look at the current electoral poll statistics. The average "solid Kerry" state has about 16 electoral votes and 9.24 million people. The average "solid Bush" state has 8.125 electoral votes and 4.04 million people. If you do the math, that comes out to 2.01 votes per million people for strong Bush states, but only 1.73 electoral votes per million people for strong Kerry states.
We're going to have to come to terms with the fact that we're a polarized country, with only two major political parties. Right now, the electoral college doesn't just protect the rights of small states, but rather allows the small states to push their own agenda at the expense of everyone else. The concerns of smaller areas and rural populations seems to dominate the political debate, while simultaniously creating an atmosphere of anti-intellectualism. Isn't it interesting how, in an election about terrorism, that the people who actually got attacked (those in New York and DC), and those who are most likely to get attacked (major cities like Los Angels), favor a different person than those in rural and suburban America? Isn't it ironic that it is the latter that is having the loudest voice about the matter?
I'd also take a look at the statistics in poor white areas around the country. In parts of the South, it's not uncommon for 1/4 of teenage girls in a high-school to become pregnant at some point. The root cause of this is probably low income levels and education, not any inherent racial issues.
The problem with that is that you're looking at symptoms, not causes. What would make more sense is to study level of literacy and level of income vs drug use and crime. That'll be far more enlightening, and will be much more likely to show a causal relationship than a racial study.
At the end of the day, having black skin doesn't *cause* you to be a criminal. From a biological standpoint, that makes no sense. It is logical, however, to say that being poor or being uneducated causes you to be a criminal, or subscribing to a particular set of cultural values causes you to be a criminal.
The problem with the electoral college now is that it gives too much clout to small states, at the expense of larger states. It has gone from protecting the interests of smaller states, to allowing them to push their particular agenda at the expense of everyone else.
The electoral college, as it stands now, unbalances the system. The system gives small states the advantage in the Senate, and the Executive. It made sense back when the president elected by the state legislatures, and back when the office of president was a fairly weak role with the major centers of power being in the House and Senate, but it doesn't make sense now.
I don't really like the green party (libertarian-leaning democrat myself), but Mr. Cobb did make some salient points.
Although drug addiction is a health problem, the drug laws don't put people in jail for being addicts.
Yes they do. The put people in jail for using something that harms only themselves, and not the public at large. This is extremely contrary to the principles of our society. Consider Abraham Lincoln's comments about prohibition (essentially the same thing as the "war on drugs"):
"Prohibition will work great injury to the cause of temperance. It is a species of intemperance within itself, for it goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man's appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes. A Prohibition law strikes a blow at the very principles upon which our government was founded."
The logic behind this is thus: the government exists to protect the rights of the people. Crimes are those things that deprive free individuals of their rights. Government should not criminalize those things that do not deprive anyone of their rights. The government should not legislate what is good and bad, rather, only what is right and wrong.
This comment smacks of isolationism.
Well, the country *was* originally concieved to be isolationist.
We cannot protect our country, meaning our homeland or our interests throughout the globe, if we do not remain engaged with the world at large.
First, we should not use the military to protect our "interests." That is not just a justifiable use of force. Western thought accepts that the only legitimate use of force is to protect your self, and your liberty. To do this, our country does not need military bases around the world. We do not need to prop up petty dictators (first Saddam, now Musharraf) to protect ourselves. To protect ourselves, our troops need to be here, where they can defend us on our own land.
If anything, we need to increase the size of our armed forces, because we are currently overextended.
We're only over-extended because some have this belief that it is our job to bring freedom to people around the world, and combat injustice and oppression wherever it may exist. That's not our job. The war against all evil is not something that can be won, and it is not something we need to fight. The more we try to evangelize our democracy, the more we endanger ourselves. It is a failed policy, not unlike those policies in the past that tried to evangelize a particular religion.
That the Green Party is able to make this claim is sufficient evidence of the claim's fallaciousness.
Of course it isn't. For much of the reign of Wilhelm I, the socialist party in Germany flourished openly. This was even though the authoritarian government and the socialists were at odds, and the socialist party was at times technically illegal.
This is not to say that we have an authoritarian regime, but rather that your line of logic isn't sensical.
Oh, I get it. Yeah, that was a typo on my part. Instead of "you," I should have said "a citizen."
What you call "type safety" is what wikipedia defines as "strongly typed." Using the strong/weak distinction to refer to type safety is the traditional usage of the terms.
You don't need to be alive at a given time to understand what rights you've lost since then. It's a matter of public record, after all.