I know it's Slashdot, but you could at least read the full post before responding.
You first. Parent said:
As opposed to the U.S. manned space program, which consists of making plans to get back to the stuff they were doing in the 1980s, which come to nothing.
The U.S. did not have a mission to Mars program in the 1980's. I know it's Slashdot, but you could at least read the post before trying to scold someone for not reading it.
Windows 2000. All the user benefits of XP, except for instant-user switching. But in exchange for that, you don't have to screw around with activation or Windows Genuine Bullllllllshit.
USG payed far more than that for a crap health care web site, which in itself is a drop in a bucket next to defense contracting pork. Odds are it will be far more than $11 odd million dollars, not less.
Quite simply to have a halfway decent gaming rig you are plunking down a minimum of $1200 with many doing a multiple of that.
Wut? Do you also complain about how Apple's operating system still has cooperative multitasking and no support for three button mice? Your post was doing great till it got to that...somewhat...dated...talking point. PC gamers no more need to spend that much money than a console gamer needs to spend $1500 on a TV and another $500 on a sound system. Especially since game engines have been dumbed down for PC/console releases.
Do you count the cost of the £500 TV in your lounge when you count the cost of your PS4?
Consistency. If console gamers get to write off most of the cost of doing business "because they already have a TV", then PC gamers get to do the same thing. Reused case, monitor, keyboard, mouse, power supply, motherboard, hard drive....
Apple got burnt in the 1990s by being a few weeks away from shuttering their doors.
Urban Legend. Apple had 2 billion in liquid assets at the time and weren't close to "shuttering their doors". Even if they hadn't managed a turn around when they did, they had enough customers, real estate and patents to hang around into the 00's at least.
But still, somehow, you know and it makes him even better in your eyes. Interesting that.
And just why do you find that interesting? If making himself look better was Jobs's game plan, he would have been public with the donations. What I will find interesting is how much of a dent this makes in the Jobs-never-gave-money-to-charity talking point. Sort of like how you could dig up the Apple -> XEROX stock receipts and it wouldn't make a dent in the "Apple stole from PARC" talking point.
They do not deprive the countries of money. They deprive the governments. This is a _good thing_ as governments are notoriously more inefficient than private companies since they don't have any incentive for saving and investing, but to spend and buy votes for the next election.
Like how socialized medicine provides better care at a third of the cost of a system based on profits and insurance?
No bigot admits to being a bigot. Ask any of them throughout human history, and they'll all say it's because of xyz reasons, all perfectly reasonable and rational, that they want to treat Group X as less than human.
I'm a Catholic
If you become a Catholic with a time machine, go back and talk to the various people that have murdered and tortured and massacred Catholics for being Catholic. It's not because they hate you, it's because you're a heretic according their religious beliefs.
It's all the same cowardly, bigoted bullshit.
But I will not vote for gay marriage licensing because my religion tells me homosexual acts are wrong. Not homosexuals.
Ah yes, because that would be immoral. A Good Christian Marriage can be between a man and his mother, a man and his sister, a rapist and his victim, a soldier and the surviving daughter of the family he's just wiped out, a king and hundreds of live-in whores, etc. But homosexual sex is wrong! Wrong I tell you! Wrong like eating pigs, shellfish, planting different crops side-by-side, working on the Sabbath, etc etc. Why you hacks try to keep using arguments that were shredded 5 and 14 years ago is beyond me.
Now, are you still in De Nile, or are you gonna go for the tired Christianist copout of "but but the New Testament wipes away all of my Old Testament sins, but you gays are still bound by the parts of Leviticus we decide still apply!"
But it's completely possible to not hate gays and yet not think gay marriage is a thing that exists.
Racists were huffing the same bullshit when they were pushing anti-miscegenation laws, using the exact same reasoning as homophobes with different victims. No, we don't hate black people! We just don't think interracial marriage is a thing that exists!
So will I continue to vote against so called marriage equality; you bet I will because the last thing I want to see is the expansion of what is already a special class which should not exist in secular society.
Idiot. People aren't "special" for finally having the rights you've always enjoyed. Blacks weren't "special" after the passage of the 13th Amendment or the Civil Rights Act. Non-property owning men and women weren't "special" after Universal Suffrage. Etc.
Actually same-sex couples already had legal recognition in California before Prop 8.
Actually then there would have been no purpose in passing Prop 8, if marriage and unions are the same thing. It was passed because they aren't the same thing at all; marriages comes with automatic rights that civil unions do not. Religion is not relevant as churches have nothing to do with marriage, which is between you your sweety and some forms you drop of at the courthouse. Churches perform weddings.
The flipside of that is that it's easy to discriminate the stuffing out of people so long as you keep quiet for your real reason for denying that person a promotion or placing them on the layoff list. Hard to trust that you're being treated fairly if your boss hates some religion/ethnicity/gender you belong to. Jew working for an antisemite? Muslim working for an islamophobe?
The problem with 99% of the defenses of Eich is that they pretend he was a working stiff instead of the boss. And also ignoring the power he had over other employees, including gay ones.
On the other hand if you didn't think that's an imaginary bar they would aim for and fall short of, then what... exactly did you figure intelligence agencies DO?
If you know where people were free to say we were tapping the entire communications structure of close allies and even their prime ministers and spying on the U.N. and using it for petty corporate espionage in polite conversation, please share with the rest of us so I can move there to be with such prescient people who are skeptical of the MIC.
Because anywhere else you would have been politely told to take a seat between the lunar conspiracy guys and the 911 truthers. Hell, you would get compared to the birthers for something as tame as suggesting that there was a federally organized crackdown against OWS protests, much less tapping Angela Merkel's personal cell phone.
You seem to be under the delusion that a single non-neocon-hit-piece from Human Hack Watch negates the dozens of naked propaganda pieces they do every few years on the NOT CAPITALIST!!!! country of Venezuela.
Why did Obama personally intervene to keep a Yemeni journalist brutalized and imprisoned for daring to report on U.S. bombings that kill innocent people? Why was an Al Jazeera office bombed by Bush? Why does anyone think that the U.S. would hesitate to take out Snowden if it's willing to murder 16 year olds based on who the kids father was?
Precisely what is so surprising about the NSA spying on political radicals?
By "radical", you mean "anyone to the left of Dick Cheney", right? Were you an FBI sniper all hot and bothered that he didn't get to go around shooting OWS protestors in the head, or something?
More to the point, if anyone had said that the NSA had a "full take" surveillance dragnet on every network on the planet it had access to BEFORE Snowden came along, you would have been sneering at them to sit next to the 911 Truthers.
Slashdot Mirror
You first. Parent said:
The U.S. did not have a mission to Mars program in the 1980's. I know it's Slashdot, but you could at least read the post before trying to scold someone for not reading it.
Windows 2000. All the user benefits of XP, except for instant-user switching. But in exchange for that, you don't have to screw around with activation or Windows Genuine Bullllllllshit.
Nobody cares. Your list is dominated by other small potatoes that simply don't matter to 99% of users out there.
USG payed far more than that for a crap health care web site, which in itself is a drop in a bucket next to defense contracting pork. Odds are it will be far more than $11 odd million dollars, not less.
Wut? Do you also complain about how Apple's operating system still has cooperative multitasking and no support for three button mice? Your post was doing great till it got to that...somewhat...dated...talking point. PC gamers no more need to spend that much money than a console gamer needs to spend $1500 on a TV and another $500 on a sound system. Especially since game engines have been dumbed down for PC/console releases.
It should, but console fanboys never count the cost of the TV, and pretend a single $400 trip to Wal-Mart is sufficient for all their gaming needs.
Consistency. If console gamers get to write off most of the cost of doing business "because they already have a TV", then PC gamers get to do the same thing. Reused case, monitor, keyboard, mouse, power supply, motherboard, hard drive....
No more than you have to have thousands invested in a 73" TV and 9.1 surround sound to play consoles. Stupid tautology is stupid.
Urban Legend. Apple had 2 billion in liquid assets at the time and weren't close to "shuttering their doors". Even if they hadn't managed a turn around when they did, they had enough customers, real estate and patents to hang around into the 00's at least.
And just why do you find that interesting? If making himself look better was Jobs's game plan, he would have been public with the donations. What I will find interesting is how much of a dent this makes in the Jobs-never-gave-money-to-charity talking point. Sort of like how you could dig up the Apple -> XEROX stock receipts and it wouldn't make a dent in the "Apple stole from PARC" talking point.
Like how socialized medicine provides better care at a third of the cost of a system based on profits and insurance?
No bigot admits to being a bigot. Ask any of them throughout human history, and they'll all say it's because of xyz reasons, all perfectly reasonable and rational, that they want to treat Group X as less than human.
If you become a Catholic with a time machine, go back and talk to the various people that have murdered and tortured and massacred Catholics for being Catholic. It's not because they hate you, it's because you're a heretic according their religious beliefs.
It's all the same cowardly, bigoted bullshit.
Ah yes, because that would be immoral. A Good Christian Marriage can be between a man and his mother, a man and his sister, a rapist and his victim, a soldier and the surviving daughter of the family he's just wiped out, a king and hundreds of live-in whores, etc. But homosexual sex is wrong! Wrong I tell you! Wrong like eating pigs, shellfish, planting different crops side-by-side, working on the Sabbath, etc etc. Why you hacks try to keep using arguments that were shredded 5 and 14 years ago is beyond me.
Now, are you still in De Nile, or are you gonna go for the tired Christianist copout of "but but the New Testament wipes away all of my Old Testament sins, but you gays are still bound by the parts of Leviticus we decide still apply!"
What part of "it's not 'special' to finally have the same rights that you've always enjoyed" did you not understand?
Racists were huffing the same bullshit when they were pushing anti-miscegenation laws, using the exact same reasoning as homophobes with different victims. No, we don't hate black people! We just don't think interracial marriage is a thing that exists!
You haven't said a word about how any of those people "took up arms against the United States", yet you're still here flapping your gums.
That means that even you know you're full of shit.
It all came out in the end:
Idiot. People aren't "special" for finally having the rights you've always enjoyed. Blacks weren't "special" after the passage of the 13th Amendment or the Civil Rights Act. Non-property owning men and women weren't "special" after Universal Suffrage. Etc.
Actually then there would have been no purpose in passing Prop 8, if marriage and unions are the same thing. It was passed because they aren't the same thing at all; marriages comes with automatic rights that civil unions do not. Religion is not relevant as churches have nothing to do with marriage, which is between you your sweety and some forms you drop of at the courthouse. Churches perform weddings.
In this country, it used to be socially acceptable to hate blacks and discriminate against them.
That is no longer the case.
In this country, it used to be socially acceptable to hate Jews and discriminate against them.
That is no longer the case.
In this country, it used to be socially acceptable to hate Italians/Irish/Chinese/Catholics and discriminate against them.
That is no longer the case.
Homophobia is at the place where racial or religious discrimination was at a long time ago: unacceptable in polite society.
The flipside of that is that it's easy to discriminate the stuffing out of people so long as you keep quiet for your real reason for denying that person a promotion or placing them on the layoff list. Hard to trust that you're being treated fairly if your boss hates some religion/ethnicity/gender you belong to. Jew working for an antisemite? Muslim working for an islamophobe?
The problem with 99% of the defenses of Eich is that they pretend he was a working stiff instead of the boss. And also ignoring the power he had over other employees, including gay ones.
If you know where people were free to say we were tapping the entire communications structure of close allies and even their prime ministers and spying on the U.N. and using it for petty corporate espionage in polite conversation, please share with the rest of us so I can move there to be with such prescient people who are skeptical of the MIC.
Because anywhere else you would have been politely told to take a seat between the lunar conspiracy guys and the 911 truthers. Hell, you would get compared to the birthers for something as tame as suggesting that there was a federally organized crackdown against OWS protests, much less tapping Angela Merkel's personal cell phone.
Whatever it is you're smoking, did you bring enough for everyone? Because in none of the cases I just cited could be described that way. Not. One.
Reporter showing it was a U.S. and not Yemeni bomb dropped on innocents? Nope.
Al Jazeera office in Iraq? Nope.
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki? Nope.
That, or you're sucking the kneejerck authoritarian Kool Aid if you think that sitting in a cafe with your cousin is "taking up arms" against anyone.
You seem to be under the delusion that a single non-neocon-hit-piece from Human Hack Watch negates the dozens of naked propaganda pieces they do every few years on the NOT CAPITALIST!!!! country of Venezuela.
Why did Obama personally intervene to keep a Yemeni journalist brutalized and imprisoned for daring to report on U.S. bombings that kill innocent people? Why was an Al Jazeera office bombed by Bush? Why does anyone think that the U.S. would hesitate to take out Snowden if it's willing to murder 16 year olds based on who the kids father was?
By "radical", you mean "anyone to the left of Dick Cheney", right? Were you an FBI sniper all hot and bothered that he didn't get to go around shooting OWS protestors in the head, or something?
More to the point, if anyone had said that the NSA had a "full take" surveillance dragnet on every network on the planet it had access to BEFORE Snowden came along, you would have been sneering at them to sit next to the 911 Truthers.