This is the most worthless straw man argument I've ever seen.
According to most on the left, the USA is not a Christian nation. So why did it become one just to prop up your argument that Christians are killing for oil?
Also according to most on the left, we shouldn't even fucking be there.
Ahem. What is also wrong with your strawman argument is that whether or not the USA is a Christian nation, many in the military are Christians. Many in the military, stationed in Iraq, are Christians. And many of them are killing for oil. (let's just assume this one, while I don't personally believe oil is the only reason we're there, it's sorta assumed in this part of the thread) Therefore Christians are killing for oil.
I do think Bush was more effective in communicating with people - his message is painfully simple. Kerry needed to take more of a stand and leave the nuance for later.
Ack. Did we actually think it would be that easy to unseat an incumbent? The incumbent's message is always "I'm gonne keep doing what I did, which is what I said I'd do when you elected me the last time." It doesn't get any simpler than that.
Take heart, Kerry came pretty close. Most elections were very very close. It's hard to unseat the incumbent, and Kerry wasn't the right man for it. Wouldn't surprise me if Gore would have won this time, had he ran. He was a much more likable guy.;)
What really pisses me off is the assumption that because I dont agree with every thing you say that I dont want the same things as you and that you have a monopoly on both compassion and intelligence.
Hmmmm.....
This is where the party ends
I can't how youuuuuu, can stand by your racist friend
I know politics bore you, but I feel like a hypocrite talking to youuuuuuuuuuu
You and your racist friend
Yeah, that shit gets on my nerves too. I'm with you. I still like TMBG, but I'm with you.:)
The root problem is that we are not organized ourselves. How many issues do we see politicians tackling just because they want the endorsement of some special interest group or other? If the endorsement means votes, then they want it. We *are* a big enough group to have votes worth getting. We could have held sway in the last Presidential election, but we didn't, because we're not organized.
We need someone that a candidate can go to, give a speech or three, and ask for our endorsement. And this someone would ask the candidate what he will do about the issues that matter to us. The candidates don't have to make it a big part of their platform, they don't have to go waaaaay out of their way to bring our issues to the forefront. What they need to do is see us as a large, organized group whose votes are worth winning, and that they can win those votes efficiently by going to the group that represents us.
That's what the NRA is. Or rather, it's what they started as. Politicians go for union endorsements all the time. How do you think Bush managed to win Ohio, anyway? He hit up unions, among other things.
Since we are a large international group, we can have an influence in many places. So when a politician in the US wins our endorsement, he also wins some "political capital he can spend" abroad. Doesn't matter a lot early on, but think about what happens in 20 years. The city councilman that's been careful to get our endorsement every time he ran could be running for President in 20 years, and how useful will all this international goodwill he's built up be to him?
We are a large group. The only thing stopping us from having the influence we can have is our own stupid low geeky self-esteems. The playground bullies have all gone to jail, your lunch money is safe. We are a group whose votes count and are worth winning.
These companies made a perfectly legal product available. There are warnings all over the place, even on the product.
Granted, I opposed the suits on the grounds of commonsense. See, I've been smoking for about 11 years now, and when the suits were going on I couldn't help but think "Gee, you smoke this, your lungs hurt, you cough, you wake up and your lungs feel like they're burning, and you thought this was benign? Idiot".
Anyway, the basis of the suits had something to do with many years in which tobacco companies lied to their customers, suppressed information that showed smoking might be harmful to your health, and so forth. Warnings on cigarette packs and stuff are fairly new in the tobacco industry, considering the industry itself is several hundred years old. So they were suing for damages incurred before the warnings, because your argument holds up for after the warnings.
Of course, I still thought it was dumb. You can die in a burning house from smoke damage, what made these people think smoking cigarettes was safe? It's all addiction, I think. You're addicted, so you want to believe that your behavior is good so you can continue the behavior. You see it in alcoholism and various other drug addictions.
And as I mentioned, I've been smoking for awhile now.:)
The real difference here is that Bittorrent is used for all sorts of legal stuff. Mandrake distributions, for example. Redhat, etc. In the case of other P2P software, the lawyers kinda roll their eyes and say "Um, well, you see, it *can* be used for legal uses, even if it isn't". With Bittorrent, they'd be able to easily say "Look, this stuff is used to distribute all sorts of legal software, movies, and so forth."
Going after the Bittorrent guys will be a whole different ballgame than going after the other P2P programs has been.
You know, I really enjoy this "don't change horsemen mid-apocalypse" gag, but I can't for the life of me put my finger on where it came from. Would you (or somebody) mind telling me? I almost want to say it's Red Dwarf or Douglas Adams...
It's strange, but too many Americans no longer understand the strengths of the U.S. Constitution, and fail to realize that those strengths actually allow the country to function in a time of 'war', and change presidents.
Well, guess what? They *WILL* have to do that in four years.
YOu know, I never seriously thought Bush could get this particular election canceled. He didn't have enough power behind him. Now it's a serious possibility that this will be our last presidential election of this sort. Not serious as in "it's as good as done", but serious as in "I don't think I'm as big a nutcase for saying it as I would have been 4 years ago".
What will happen in four years? I wonder if the Presidential changeover will go smoothly at all. Will it run from Bush to the Demoncrat (typo was accidental, but I liked it enough to keep it), or will it just be Bush to Cheney?
The country functioned well in WWII, did ok in WWI (we weren't exactly in it long enough). Naturally it was a complete disaster area in the second Revolutionary War. BUt my how the sides have changed. In Lincoln's last election, he was the Republican, and he had the support of the Northern states. In the Republicans' last election, they did not have the support of the Northern states at all.
As one poster pointed out, you wouldn't have caught Timothy McVeigh with your scheme.
You also wouldn't have caught the dude that burned all those churches in the South a few years back, nor any of the abortion-clinic bombers, nor would you have prevented the Columbine Massacre, not to mention the Kittamer Massacre.
Unfortunately, in the USA, we have cheapened citizenship so much that there is almost no difference in privileges and rights claimed by non-citizens and a citizens in the USA.
The declaration of independence sorta sets the stage. It is a legal document that declares our freedom from Britain. Personally, I'd like to see the Brits point out how we've failed to meet our promises in said Declaration, and that means ownership of the country reverts back to them. Wouldn't that be fun? Anyway, the Declaration of Independence says something about holding certain rights to be inalienable, and says *nothing* about "inalienable only for american citizens, but foreigners don't enjoy these rights in our land".
This country was built by immigrants. To treat foreigners like you would treat them is to spit on our own roots, and then, of course, we can never go home again.
Fool.:) You don't ask for evidence when the very first word of the sentence to whcih you are replying is "imagine". If you're having trouble with it, you should ask for imagination, but not evidence.
The main problem with that is that it's then possible for someone to win without a majority of the population supporting them. You'd get people voting strategically still, choosing to vote for only one person to prevent the other guys from winning.
How about a system that requires something like 70% of the population or so to approve the winner? Not necessarily as their first choice, mind you, just that they approve. If you can't find a candidate that can win that much approval, throw out all the candidates and run the election again.
And to address the inevitable complaint that small states would not get enough attention in such a scenario, let me say this: I don't think democracy should be about giving representation to territory, it should be about giving representation to people.
Which would move the government to focus on urban issues and ignore rural issues entirely. Considering how short-sighted our government is, how long before they'd have to collectivize farming to keep the food supply going?
The electoral college is better than just going with the popular vote, but I agree it is no panacea. I'm more interested in a ranked voting system at the Electoral College level than I am in a ranked voting system for the popular vote.
The obvious right way to handle electronic voting is to stick a pressure-sensitive switch in a series of punching bags. Each bag would carry the likeness of one of the candidates on the ballot. You would go in and hit each one with as much hatred and angst as you have against them.
The one you hit the least hard, or the one you don't hit at all is the one you voted for.
OpenOffice.org's pdf filter isn't a print filter, it's an export filter, and supports all the linking and crap you're talking about. Furthermore, LyX supports it very directly, by using LaTeX in its backend. So if that's what you're looking for, it's already there.
Audacity does everything CoolEdit 2000 does, and most of it it does better (the only exception being export to mp3, and that's debateable, and also the pop'n'click filter). I don't know how Audacity compares to the newer versions that have been rebranded since CoolEdit got bought by Adobe (or was it Apple? Someone with an A-name).
I wasn't specifically trying to refute your examples. I was trying to make a completely different point, which is that many times people hold up a few examples and say "Linux isn't good enough", and all the examples demonstrate is that whatever the poster was trying to say, he hasn't actually checked to see if it's true, because it wasn't.
The only sense in which Linux is weak in the area of multimedia authoring apps is the sense that some of the key apps are still unstable. Once stability has arrived (coming soon), Linux will be quite superior to Windows simply because the multimedia programmers for Linux have taken the time to build an extremely powerful architecture (the first A in ALSA means "Advanced". There's also Jack, and a few other things). So we're just waiting for stability. And for many of us, stability is already here where we need it.
As for word processors and pdf support, it's been here for awhile as well. And I'm not just talking about a print filter. LyX has had excellent pdf support for several years, OpenOffice.org got it in the 1.1 branch. So I'm not entirely certain what you're looking for, especially since I've *never* managed to coerce Acrobat to do anything for me. Maybe I'm too dumb to use Adobe applications, but I'm not too dumb for Linux. Go figure that one.
Linux doesn't cut it, for a lot of uses that a lot of people find important. Until there's a full WYSIWYG PDF editor like Adobe Acrobat (no, 'print to PDF' and 'PDF viewer' doesn't do it), until there's a powerful Sound editor like Cool Edit, it won't suffice for me. And those are just two instances.
OpenOffice.org and Audacity. You can test both of them on your Windows machine without making the switch.
Um, I don't actually know if there's an import pdf filter for OpenOffice.org. I keep my source material so I don't have to deal with editing the PDF, I just generate new ones.
Lessig also complained about the Copyright Term Extension Act, which adds several years to the terms of protected works. I countered: Farmers can leave their property to their children; why shouldn't songwriters be able to leave their songs to their children?
So does she figure that the particular portion of the Constitution that gives Congress the power to secure for a limited time the rights to Creative Works to Artists, for the long-term goal of securing them for society has anything at all to do with property law? It doesn't. There's no comparison.
The deal is, you can have your copyright, but you must give us your work. Copyright isn't some way to make kids that haven't been born yet rich off their asses. It's a way to provide creative types with an opportunity to make money from their work as an incentive to do more work. Copyright is all about the benefit to society, and has very little to do with Artists' Rights.
Blah, she doesn't get it. She's a puppet of the record industry, not the musicians. The labels the RIAA represents, the ones that actually make money, own the copyrights to the music they distribute (with a few exceptions). Peel away the bullshit, and she was right about one thing.
In a contest of greed versus theft, I suppose I chose greed as the morally superior position.
And allowing only registered executables to run is a bad thing. Who should decide?
On my computer, I should decide, and the registration dealie should provide me with the information I need to make the decision.
The two parts of Microsoft's weird DRM thing I disagree with (with regards to running executables) are that the key is inaccessible to me, stashed somewhere in the BIOS, and that Microsoft is the one who decides what is safe and what isn't.
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This is the most worthless straw man argument I've ever seen.
According to most on the left, the USA is not a Christian nation. So why did it become one just to prop up your argument that Christians are killing for oil?
Also according to most on the left, we shouldn't even fucking be there.
Ahem. What is also wrong with your strawman argument is that whether or not the USA is a Christian nation, many in the military are Christians. Many in the military, stationed in Iraq, are Christians. And many of them are killing for oil. (let's just assume this one, while I don't personally believe oil is the only reason we're there, it's sorta assumed in this part of the thread) Therefore Christians are killing for oil.
Strawmen can't stand in the face of facts. :)
Looks like the solution to the problem, then, is to convince the middle-easterners that Mohammed is really from Utah.
Kill two birds with one, er, airplane?
I do think Bush was more effective in communicating with people - his message is painfully simple. Kerry needed to take more of a stand and leave the nuance for later.
Ack. Did we actually think it would be that easy to unseat an incumbent? The incumbent's message is always "I'm gonne keep doing what I did, which is what I said I'd do when you elected me the last time." It doesn't get any simpler than that.
Take heart, Kerry came pretty close. Most elections were very very close. It's hard to unseat the incumbent, and Kerry wasn't the right man for it. Wouldn't surprise me if Gore would have won this time, had he ran. He was a much more likable guy. ;)
What really pisses me off is the assumption that because I dont agree with every thing you say that I dont want the same things as you and that you have a monopoly on both compassion and intelligence.
Hmmmm.....
Yeah, that shit gets on my nerves too. I'm with you. I still like TMBG, but I'm with you. :)
Have any of you blockheads ever asked for a recipe from a restauraunt before? I have, several times, and every time, they've given it to me, for free!
The root problem is that we are not organized ourselves. How many issues do we see politicians tackling just because they want the endorsement of some special interest group or other? If the endorsement means votes, then they want it. We *are* a big enough group to have votes worth getting. We could have held sway in the last Presidential election, but we didn't, because we're not organized.
We need someone that a candidate can go to, give a speech or three, and ask for our endorsement. And this someone would ask the candidate what he will do about the issues that matter to us. The candidates don't have to make it a big part of their platform, they don't have to go waaaaay out of their way to bring our issues to the forefront. What they need to do is see us as a large, organized group whose votes are worth winning, and that they can win those votes efficiently by going to the group that represents us.
That's what the NRA is. Or rather, it's what they started as. Politicians go for union endorsements all the time. How do you think Bush managed to win Ohio, anyway? He hit up unions, among other things.
Since we are a large international group, we can have an influence in many places. So when a politician in the US wins our endorsement, he also wins some "political capital he can spend" abroad. Doesn't matter a lot early on, but think about what happens in 20 years. The city councilman that's been careful to get our endorsement every time he ran could be running for President in 20 years, and how useful will all this international goodwill he's built up be to him?
We are a large group. The only thing stopping us from having the influence we can have is our own stupid low geeky self-esteems. The playground bullies have all gone to jail, your lunch money is safe. We are a group whose votes count and are worth winning.
Actually, the proper term is thoughtcrime. Think about it.
These companies made a perfectly legal product available. There are warnings all over the place, even on the product.
Granted, I opposed the suits on the grounds of commonsense. See, I've been smoking for about 11 years now, and when the suits were going on I couldn't help but think "Gee, you smoke this, your lungs hurt, you cough, you wake up and your lungs feel like they're burning, and you thought this was benign? Idiot".
Anyway, the basis of the suits had something to do with many years in which tobacco companies lied to their customers, suppressed information that showed smoking might be harmful to your health, and so forth. Warnings on cigarette packs and stuff are fairly new in the tobacco industry, considering the industry itself is several hundred years old. So they were suing for damages incurred before the warnings, because your argument holds up for after the warnings.
Of course, I still thought it was dumb. You can die in a burning house from smoke damage, what made these people think smoking cigarettes was safe? It's all addiction, I think. You're addicted, so you want to believe that your behavior is good so you can continue the behavior. You see it in alcoholism and various other drug addictions.
And as I mentioned, I've been smoking for awhile now. :)
The death ray, definitely, because death rays are cool. I'd buy even more if the death ray cooked kittens...
The real difference here is that Bittorrent is used for all sorts of legal stuff. Mandrake distributions, for example. Redhat, etc. In the case of other P2P software, the lawyers kinda roll their eyes and say "Um, well, you see, it *can* be used for legal uses, even if it isn't". With Bittorrent, they'd be able to easily say "Look, this stuff is used to distribute all sorts of legal software, movies, and so forth."
Going after the Bittorrent guys will be a whole different ballgame than going after the other P2P programs has been.
You know, I really enjoy this "don't change horsemen mid-apocalypse" gag, but I can't for the life of me put my finger on where it came from. Would you (or somebody) mind telling me? I almost want to say it's Red Dwarf or Douglas Adams...
It's strange, but too many Americans no longer understand the strengths of the U.S. Constitution, and fail to realize that those strengths actually allow the country to function in a time of 'war', and change presidents.
Well, guess what? They *WILL* have to do that in four years.
YOu know, I never seriously thought Bush could get this particular election canceled. He didn't have enough power behind him. Now it's a serious possibility that this will be our last presidential election of this sort. Not serious as in "it's as good as done", but serious as in "I don't think I'm as big a nutcase for saying it as I would have been 4 years ago".
What will happen in four years? I wonder if the Presidential changeover will go smoothly at all. Will it run from Bush to the Demoncrat (typo was accidental, but I liked it enough to keep it), or will it just be Bush to Cheney?
The country functioned well in WWII, did ok in WWI (we weren't exactly in it long enough). Naturally it was a complete disaster area in the second Revolutionary War. BUt my how the sides have changed. In Lincoln's last election, he was the Republican, and he had the support of the Northern states. In the Republicans' last election, they did not have the support of the Northern states at all.
As one poster pointed out, you wouldn't have caught Timothy McVeigh with your scheme.
You also wouldn't have caught the dude that burned all those churches in the South a few years back, nor any of the abortion-clinic bombers, nor would you have prevented the Columbine Massacre, not to mention the Kittamer Massacre.
Unfortunately, in the USA, we have cheapened citizenship so much that there is almost no difference in privileges and rights claimed by non-citizens and a citizens in the USA.
The declaration of independence sorta sets the stage. It is a legal document that declares our freedom from Britain. Personally, I'd like to see the Brits point out how we've failed to meet our promises in said Declaration, and that means ownership of the country reverts back to them. Wouldn't that be fun? Anyway, the Declaration of Independence says something about holding certain rights to be inalienable, and says *nothing* about "inalienable only for american citizens, but foreigners don't enjoy these rights in our land".
This country was built by immigrants. To treat foreigners like you would treat them is to spit on our own roots, and then, of course, we can never go home again.
Fool. :) You don't ask for evidence when the very first word of the sentence to whcih you are replying is "imagine". If you're having trouble with it, you should ask for imagination, but not evidence.
But three do.
The main problem with that is that it's then possible for someone to win without a majority of the population supporting them. You'd get people voting strategically still, choosing to vote for only one person to prevent the other guys from winning.
How about a system that requires something like 70% of the population or so to approve the winner? Not necessarily as their first choice, mind you, just that they approve. If you can't find a candidate that can win that much approval, throw out all the candidates and run the election again.
(I know, not perfect either)
And to address the inevitable complaint that small states would not get enough attention in such a scenario, let me say this: I don't think democracy should be about giving representation to territory, it should be about giving representation to people.
Which would move the government to focus on urban issues and ignore rural issues entirely. Considering how short-sighted our government is, how long before they'd have to collectivize farming to keep the food supply going?
The electoral college is better than just going with the popular vote, but I agree it is no panacea. I'm more interested in a ranked voting system at the Electoral College level than I am in a ranked voting system for the popular vote.
The obvious right way to handle electronic voting is to stick a pressure-sensitive switch in a series of punching bags. Each bag would carry the likeness of one of the candidates on the ballot. You would go in and hit each one with as much hatred and angst as you have against them.
The one you hit the least hard, or the one you don't hit at all is the one you voted for.
Simple enough, right?
OpenOffice.org's pdf filter isn't a print filter, it's an export filter, and supports all the linking and crap you're talking about. Furthermore, LyX supports it very directly, by using LaTeX in its backend. So if that's what you're looking for, it's already there.
Audacity does everything CoolEdit 2000 does, and most of it it does better (the only exception being export to mp3, and that's debateable, and also the pop'n'click filter). I don't know how Audacity compares to the newer versions that have been rebranded since CoolEdit got bought by Adobe (or was it Apple? Someone with an A-name).
I wasn't specifically trying to refute your examples. I was trying to make a completely different point, which is that many times people hold up a few examples and say "Linux isn't good enough", and all the examples demonstrate is that whatever the poster was trying to say, he hasn't actually checked to see if it's true, because it wasn't.
The only sense in which Linux is weak in the area of multimedia authoring apps is the sense that some of the key apps are still unstable. Once stability has arrived (coming soon), Linux will be quite superior to Windows simply because the multimedia programmers for Linux have taken the time to build an extremely powerful architecture (the first A in ALSA means "Advanced". There's also Jack, and a few other things). So we're just waiting for stability. And for many of us, stability is already here where we need it.
As for word processors and pdf support, it's been here for awhile as well. And I'm not just talking about a print filter. LyX has had excellent pdf support for several years, OpenOffice.org got it in the 1.1 branch. So I'm not entirely certain what you're looking for, especially since I've *never* managed to coerce Acrobat to do anything for me. Maybe I'm too dumb to use Adobe applications, but I'm not too dumb for Linux. Go figure that one.
Linux doesn't cut it, for a lot of uses that a lot of people find important. Until there's a full WYSIWYG PDF editor like Adobe Acrobat (no, 'print to PDF' and 'PDF viewer' doesn't do it), until there's a powerful Sound editor like Cool Edit, it won't suffice for me. And those are just two instances.
OpenOffice.org and Audacity. You can test both of them on your Windows machine without making the switch.
Um, I don't actually know if there's an import pdf filter for OpenOffice.org. I keep my source material so I don't have to deal with editing the PDF, I just generate new ones.
No, but one of the scientists did disappear soon after the find was made. *gasp* Do you really think there could there be a connection?
Preaching to the choir, eh? :) From the article:
Lessig also complained about the Copyright Term Extension Act, which adds several years to the terms of protected works. I countered: Farmers can leave their property to their children; why shouldn't songwriters be able to leave their songs to their children?
So does she figure that the particular portion of the Constitution that gives Congress the power to secure for a limited time the rights to Creative Works to Artists, for the long-term goal of securing them for society has anything at all to do with property law? It doesn't. There's no comparison.
The deal is, you can have your copyright, but you must give us your work. Copyright isn't some way to make kids that haven't been born yet rich off their asses. It's a way to provide creative types with an opportunity to make money from their work as an incentive to do more work. Copyright is all about the benefit to society, and has very little to do with Artists' Rights.
Blah, she doesn't get it. She's a puppet of the record industry, not the musicians. The labels the RIAA represents, the ones that actually make money, own the copyrights to the music they distribute (with a few exceptions). Peel away the bullshit, and she was right about one thing.
In a contest of greed versus theft, I suppose I chose greed as the morally superior position.
Nothing to see here. Move along. ;)
Heh, I didn't say it would be foolproof, just useful.
And allowing only registered executables to run is a bad thing. Who should decide?
On my computer, I should decide, and the registration dealie should provide me with the information I need to make the decision.
The two parts of Microsoft's weird DRM thing I disagree with (with regards to running executables) are that the key is inaccessible to me, stashed somewhere in the BIOS, and that Microsoft is the one who decides what is safe and what isn't.
Hmmm.
I picked the wrong day to quit amphetamines.