Not even close. The spec doesn't document Sorenson Spark or On2, so tons of SWFs that embed video are out. Until very recently you weren't even allowed to look at the spec unless you signed an agreement saying you wouldn't develop player software (only export filters), and it's still about as far from an implementation white paper as you can get.
Moreover, Adobe controls the format, not an open standards body, so they're free to add new things and not tell other developers how to do them later on to give themselves an advantage (which they've done in the past with major releases like v9 and 10).
If Flash were completely open, why isn't there a 100% compliant open-source player out there? Gnash is the closest but it has serious problems with later versions of the spec (probably due to underdocumentation).
"But look! They released a spec! It must be an open standard!" Yeah, I've heard that before.
This whole argument is pot and kettle to the extreme.
Adobe doesn't have any business telling Apple that they're acting too proprietary because they refuse to open up the Flash spec. Your device's participation in the Flashverse is dependent on whether Adobe thinks you're important enough to deserve a Flash plugin. Effectively they are holding the Web hostage.
Apple doesn't have any business telling Adobe that they're acting too proprietary when you have to pass Checkpoint Charlie to execute so much as a single line of native code on iPhone OS, and even then you can't use a third-party compiler anymore.
I respect that Adobe is trying to make a living, but Flash is probably the worst thing to happen to the Web since the early days of Java. It's slow, buggy, it crashes constantly, support is inconsistent, and its bread and butter (video embedding) has been eaten by a much better way of doing things (HTML5 + Theora/H.264).
I respect that Apple is concerned about feature-completeness in the APIs, but seriously, there are plenty of good programmers out there dying to use Java and Python to write iPhone apps. I'm not one of them, but I know it must feel really obnoxious to be denied a viable programming language.
In ancient Greece and Rome, it wasn't unusual for someone to claim either that a new star appeared in the sky to herald a great person's birth or that they became a star following their death. This latter claim is known as catasterism and was pretty popular from the time of the Hellenistic kings to the Julio-Claudian dynasty at Rome.
Catasterism is a frequent subject on coin portraits, with a star positioned about the portrait of the ruler. There is a very famous series of coins depicting Augustus fastening a star above the head of Marcellus, the man he had hoped would succeed him.
Of course the import of all of this is that, as with so much else, North Korea is about 2,000 years behind the times.
Government funding of space travel? I dunno, sounds mighty socialist to me. If we didn't cut funding I bet Obama would launch a statue of Lenin into orbit to gaze down disapprovingly at our capitalist paradise!
In all seriousness, without a good heavy launcher we'll be at a strategic disadvantage, and the constant scuppering of next-generation space vehicle development is starting to look really stupid. Between VentureStar and Constellation, exactly how many tax dollars have been wasted because some penny-pinching bureaucrat decided it would be "cheaper in the long run?"
This just in!
on
The Apple Two
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· Score: 4, Insightful
A personal computer is a computer that _does what you want it to do._ For a shockingly large number of people, Apple's present product line does exactly that, which explains their present high popularity and booming market share, especially among consumer media devices.
Back in Woz's day, it was important to have a BASIC interpreter on your personal computer, but not because it made the computer more "open" in some vague ideological terms. It was important because that was how a lot of useful computer software was transmitted. As a kid I remember typing in BASIC source listings from computer magazines for things like games and other cool stuff. Of course I also learned to write my own software, but nowadays there are about a million different ways of doing that. It sucks that Apple won't let you have a sandboxed Logo or Python interpreter on your iDevice, but it doesn't mean that the device is somehow not "personal."
For better or for worse, the walled garden is the future of consumer electronics. It's good for security, good for the consumer, and not so good for tinkerers. But don't make the mistake of assuming that means the computer isn't "personal" anymore.
The Nokia-Apple cross-complaint is a monster of a suit and if it goes all the way will take years to litigate. Nokia and Apple are each accusing the other of infringing their patents. My assumption is that they do both use each other's technology to some extent and the lawsuit happened because neither company was satisfied with the result of their patent negotiations.
The Kodak thing is a complete crock. Kodak didn't embrace digital until everyone else was doing it better than they were, so now they behave like a patent troll to stave off bankruptcy (they were pulled off DJIA in 2004 and they posted a $150 million loss last year). They've also sued RIM for the same ridiculous patent.
The Fujitsu iPad thing was the second time Apple has stepped on someone's toes for using an "i" name; others here will remember that Linksys/Cisco got into a spat with Apple over the iPhone name. Both situations were resolved when Apple essentially bought the trademarks outright. Also, trademarks aren't the same thing as patents.
What I want to know is this: why isn't there a compulsory license system for patents? No one should be able to hoard technological innovation. You don't necessarily need to publish all the steps to make your secret sauce so everyone else can do it, but if someone independently works out how to do whatever you're doing there ought to be (A) a standard formula for royalties and (B) absolute freedom to use anybody's patent so long as you pay them what you're supposed to.
Wow, that's a species of dissembling I've not often seen. The quotation I alleged was (and is) false is the FIRST one you cited, viz.:
"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not." -- your First TJ quote.
This is not a quotation of Jefferson. It is, evidently, a very very loose paraphrase of an unpublished marginal note. But you deliberately ignored this and pretended that I was denying the truth of the SECOND quote.
If you'd bothered to read my first post you would see that I did, in fact, point out that the SECOND quote comes from the First Inaugural. I also pointed out that it was a backhanded attack on John Adams' Alien and Sedition Act, the eighteenth-century equivalent of the Patriot Act.
It must be shocking to you that the Founders were so capable of turning their backs on the philosophical principles involved in the creation of the Constitution. They were politicians. Adams, Jefferson, Washington, Madison, the whole lot of them. Just like modern politicians, they abandoned principle for expediency when it suited their purposes. Appealing to their intellectual authority is therefore a very dangerous game.
You had best stick to proper political philosophers. Most of them weren't directly involved in politics (or served as bureaucrats and therefore knew the system from the inside out without having to delude themselves about its underpinnings).
It's interesting that you try to defend your inclusion of Kant's epistemology because it was unknown to most of the Founders (possibly Franklin was aware of it) and therefore not uniquely meaningful to a discussion of Revolutionary political philosophy. He does theorize the basis of human knowledge of the universe but he's not at all the only philosopher to do this. Plato (esp. in the Meno), Aristotle, Descartes, Foucault, Levi-Strauss, and even Godel are just a small handful of the many, many other great philosophers who have engaged the topic. I'm only a dilettante but these are all excellent starting points.
De Tocqueville was a great believer in the Founders' "natural aristocracy," what we would call a meritocracy. They gave money to found free schools on the one hand and established estate taxes with a marginal rate of 100% above a certain estate value on the other hand. He recognized that the effect of this system was to suppress the formation of a moneyed/landed aristocracy on the level of the European kingdoms.
de Tocqueville had two important lessons that we in the US need to relearn in a Big Damn Hurry. The first is the fact that the separation of the church from the state (as was the case in the early 1800s, before Pat Robertson and the Religious Right) made politics a much less personal practice for everyone involved and hence much less susceptible to emotionally-driven extremism. This was a sharp contrast to France during the Revolution, where the democrats (especially the Jacobins) had antagonized the church through the official adoption of an "enlightened" atheism, the so-called Cult of Reason. The result was absolutely intolerable civil strife, and it's the direction this country is headed in right now. Those who want to inject their religious sentiments into national legislation would do well to remember that all it would take would be a single swing of the pendulum back to the other party not only to wipe out their political influence but also to get the state involved in religious affairs in a way that would be highly undesirable to them. The present crisis on gay marriage would be much less significant if churches simply recognized that they need not perform or recognize any marriage they choose not to.
The second lesson is the tyranny of the majority. It seems nowadays as though once one party has control of at least two branches of national government they feel as though they can just walk all over the other party. To some extent the Democrats passed the health care reform bill without the approbation or support of the Re
My Facebook profile identifies my religious and political views, my intellectual interests, and past and present occupations. What part of any of that obtains in "shallowness?"
A computer isn't a trivial toy, even though you can use one to play video games and argue on Slashdot all day. By the same token, Facebook isn't "endless navel gazing" even though you can use it to trumpet your superiority to your fellow man, whether that comes from flashy clothes or smug overgeneralizations like yours. Facebook is a powerful tool for social organization of all kinds, from sex to business to international politics and everything in between.
If you don't like the tool, or you don't like its privacy policy, that's fine; don't use it, and feel free to criticize the shortcomings you have problems with. But get off your high horse. You aren't a better person than I am because you avoid "shallowness," or because you refuse to acknowledge the value of your individuality. We are all interesting in different ways to different people, and there's nothing wrong with making that available to the rest of the world. Maybe you aren't the kind of guy to care about what kind of clothing I wear, but if my friend or her sister does that doesn't make her "worse" than you are in some metaphysical sense.
PS. The fact that you refuse to acknowledge that the first of your alleged quotes of Jefferson is pseudepigraphical proves that you're only interested in scoring "talking points" and not in actually having a reasoned discussion.
Your snarky and insulting Glenn Beck-esque commentary on my breadth of reading knowledge and skill is completely out of line. If you're going to try to participate in a civilized discussion between reasonable adults then you need to act like one.
I suspect that you have some bizarre formalist definition of what a republic is. Obviously you didn't get it "from a book" because Kant is not a political philosopher (he deals in metaphysics) and Paine was the Emanuel Bronner of his age.
Have you read any of the classics on republic theory? This would include John Locke's Two Treatises and other works, Rousseau's Social Contract, Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, to a lesser extent Alexis De Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and Ernst Renan's essay "What is a Nation?". One of the big undercurrents in most of these works is the idea that a republic has to have the power of self-determination -- that's to say you can have a government with elected officials and a bicameral legislature and all the other appurtenances of government, but if you lack the power of self-determination with respect to other nation-states, you aren't a republic. This is a big distinction that historians tend to make about Rome after the rise of Augustus -- there was still a Senate and consuls and more or less every other political office that had existed a hundred years earlier, but Rome was no longer a republic because these state organs had lost their ability to determine the national will.
If it had been FDR's objective to socialize the country he wouldn't have permitted bankruptcy proceedings to go forward; he would have stepped in and nationalized the assets of the failing banks/companies/etc. on some quasi-legal basis. Don't be obtuse.
Are you denying that the states are subordinate in authority to the federal government in the ways outlined in the Constitution? Do you think that each state has the power to levy an army, declare war, conclude treaties with foreign governments, run a postal service, and so on? These powers are explicitly delegated to the federal government, and denied to the states. Therefore they can't be republics, at least not in the sense of determining a national consensus and will to govern.
But you have one misquoted reference from Wikipedia, so obviously I'm a fool. Under the Rules of Internet Argumentation, all of my other unrelated arguments are therefore invalidated for some inadequately explored reason.
To start, I checked into your Teddy J quotes and discovered the following:
#1 is a lie. Jefferson never said that and I challenge you to show me the original publication where he did.
#2 is found in his First Inaugural Address. It was probably a slap at John Adams' Alien and Sedition Act, a law that looked a lot more like the Patriot Act than the health care bill.
#3 is from another private letter. It's regularly trotted out during any controversial social legislation. Read Hirschfield (The Power of the presidency: concepts and controversy, 1982, p.311) on how this is a red herring.
#4 is from a political tract from 1779. You will note that it could just as easily be applied to the Patriot Act, the military-industrial complex, or just about any other Republican-built object of left-wing derision as it can be to social legislation.
#5 is a paraphrase of a section in a letter from 1802. The true quote reads "If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy." Here is the following quote: "Their finances are now under such a course of application as nothing could derange but war or federalism. The gripe of the latter has shown itself as deadly as the jaws of the former." In other words, he would have winced had he seen the bill for Iraq War II, or read the justifications of the neocons.
#6 was in a letter shortly before his death about how the federal government was "consolidating power" by, get this, using the power granted to it by the Constitution (namely the commerce clause). The states are not individual republics. We tried that under the Articles of Confederation and it went over like a a lead balloon. Like it or lump it, they are subordinate in power in the regards enumerated in the Constitution to the power of the federal government. If the Fed chooses to wield that power in a heavy-handed way, it's probably stupid and possibly unethical but not unconstitutional.
The present deficit is a function of the fact that the Republicans by and large write the tax laws whereas the Democrats by and large write the social legislation. The Republicans refuse to raise taxes to pay for the social legislation, and the Democrats refuse to cut spending in the social legislation to match the current tax income. It's being caused by the present political climate of obstructionism, not by your insane theories about the gradual communization of the US. If FDR had wanted to make the US into a socialist state he would have done nothing, waited for the economic climate to bottom out, then blame all the Wall Street fat cats, order their imprisonment, seize their assets, and nationalize them. Poof. Now we're a socialist state, and it didn't take all that sneaking around!
Do you know why Roosevelt created the social safety net? It was partly to stabilize society so we didn't have happen here what happened in Germany and the Soviet Union, where agitators appealed to the people's suffering to gain their complicity in revolutionary policy. It was partly to expand the number of consumers to encourage a restart in the production economy. But mostly it was because it was the right thing to do, because a lot of average Americans were starving to death, working like slaves, and your beloved "free market" wasn't doing a goddamned thing to help them. FDR's problem was actually that he didn't spend enough -- it took the massive deficit spending associated with the war to finally terminate the crisis.
The present health care situation is a national crisis on the order of the food and work crisis provoked by the Great Depression. Thousands of people die every year because they can't afford basic medicines like penicillin and Nitrostat, or they can't afford to see a doctor to prescribe these medicines. Health care decisions are being made by bureaucrats whose only concern is protecting the value of the shareholders, and this excuse rubber-stamps their denial of benefits to thousands more Americans who then go bank
Of course, I completely forgot! Slashdot is only for Americans; that's why it blocks the IPs of anyone outside the US. Oh, wait.
American English is not spoken by the majority of English speakers on Earth. It is absolutely not okay to insist that everyone who wants to use English on this site must employ American idiom, and it's just silly that you piss and moan at an article summary that is perfectly cogent and comprehensible even if it doesn't measure up to your particular standards.
By your logic The Canterbury Tales is trash because it's not written in an English that makes sense to you at first glance.
This summary is a fine example of British English prose style; the only flaw I can find is that it uses appositional clauses a bit excessively.
There isn't one universal English style that will communicate any idea to anyone else who speaks English. For that matter, there aren't one or even two languages called English, but a whole host of them. I had a student from Singapore last year who was surprised to find out that American usage requires the verb "reply" to have an indirect object. He, and all his fellow Singaporeans, are very comfortable saying "I replied his message."
That you put down reasonably good English style as "regional colloquialism" shows that you aren't very well-read in any English other than the American dialect, which is a bit depressing.
I hate idiot grammar trolls who don't understand that International English sometimes works differently from the American dialect. It's confusing to many English speakers from outside the US to use a naked modal verb without an auxiliary, and thus they use expressions like "I can do" or "I might do" rather than "I can" or "I might." In these cases "do" marks the absence of a true auxiliary. It's by no means ungrammatical or even unusual syntax.
Hasn't the runaway success of services like iTunes and Amazon MP3 and all the rest of them mitigated the need to play this game where we supposedly all obtain our music illegally and have to pay for it with levies on media and devices?
Right, sorry, I forgot, the Soviet Socialist Republic of Record Labels wants its $20 cut of my iPhone/Nexus One/Pre/etc. And boy do they deserve it, considering the depth and genius of the cultural patrimony they've contributed. Like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.
But wait! Apple forces you to join their new social network system without any opt-in notice, exposing the names of everyone you've ever emailed to any idiot with a mail account from them!
Don't get me wrong, I love a lot of Google's services (especially Google Books) and I use it every day like every other yutz on the Internet. But don't make the mistake of assuming that your favorite hardware/software/Web company isn't a massive corporate nightmare that would happily sell your porn-viewing habits to the Fed for a nickel if it were legal. It's not Big Brother, it's Big Business-- all about the dollar signs. There's no money in privacy.
Doesn't the Tumbleweed prototype in this photo look suspiciously like a certain Number 6-devouring border guard? What are these scientists really planning?
Is this like a cottage industry for you Apple haters? You post every possible negative comment about the new product you can find, drum it up into some kind of grand pronouncement on the future of the device, then complain that there's too much media coverage and everyone should just shut up now!
But... but... if Iceland becomes a journalism haven, how will people file baseless libel suits in British courts?!! Everyone who says homeopathy and chiropractic are junk sciences will be able to just get away with it!
Slashdot Mirror
Great! So much for "a choice of platforms." Now it's "a choice of platforms that Adobe has deigned to support."
Not even close. The spec doesn't document Sorenson Spark or On2, so tons of SWFs that embed video are out. Until very recently you weren't even allowed to look at the spec unless you signed an agreement saying you wouldn't develop player software (only export filters), and it's still about as far from an implementation white paper as you can get.
Moreover, Adobe controls the format, not an open standards body, so they're free to add new things and not tell other developers how to do them later on to give themselves an advantage (which they've done in the past with major releases like v9 and 10).
If Flash were completely open, why isn't there a 100% compliant open-source player out there? Gnash is the closest but it has serious problems with later versions of the spec (probably due to underdocumentation).
"But look! They released a spec! It must be an open standard!" Yeah, I've heard that before.
This whole argument is pot and kettle to the extreme.
Adobe doesn't have any business telling Apple that they're acting too proprietary because they refuse to open up the Flash spec. Your device's participation in the Flashverse is dependent on whether Adobe thinks you're important enough to deserve a Flash plugin. Effectively they are holding the Web hostage.
Apple doesn't have any business telling Adobe that they're acting too proprietary when you have to pass Checkpoint Charlie to execute so much as a single line of native code on iPhone OS, and even then you can't use a third-party compiler anymore.
I respect that Adobe is trying to make a living, but Flash is probably the worst thing to happen to the Web since the early days of Java. It's slow, buggy, it crashes constantly, support is inconsistent, and its bread and butter (video embedding) has been eaten by a much better way of doing things (HTML5 + Theora/H.264).
I respect that Apple is concerned about feature-completeness in the APIs, but seriously, there are plenty of good programmers out there dying to use Java and Python to write iPhone apps. I'm not one of them, but I know it must feel really obnoxious to be denied a viable programming language.
In ancient Greece and Rome, it wasn't unusual for someone to claim either that a new star appeared in the sky to herald a great person's birth or that they became a star following their death. This latter claim is known as catasterism and was pretty popular from the time of the Hellenistic kings to the Julio-Claudian dynasty at Rome.
Catasterism is a frequent subject on coin portraits, with a star positioned about the portrait of the ruler. There is a very famous series of coins depicting Augustus fastening a star above the head of Marcellus, the man he had hoped would succeed him.
Of course the import of all of this is that, as with so much else, North Korea is about 2,000 years behind the times.
Why did you think a big balloon would stop people?
Government funding of space travel? I dunno, sounds mighty socialist to me. If we didn't cut funding I bet Obama would launch a statue of Lenin into orbit to gaze down disapprovingly at our capitalist paradise!
In all seriousness, without a good heavy launcher we'll be at a strategic disadvantage, and the constant scuppering of next-generation space vehicle development is starting to look really stupid. Between VentureStar and Constellation, exactly how many tax dollars have been wasted because some penny-pinching bureaucrat decided it would be "cheaper in the long run?"
A personal computer is a computer that _does what you want it to do._ For a shockingly large number of people, Apple's present product line does exactly that, which explains their present high popularity and booming market share, especially among consumer media devices.
Back in Woz's day, it was important to have a BASIC interpreter on your personal computer, but not because it made the computer more "open" in some vague ideological terms. It was important because that was how a lot of useful computer software was transmitted. As a kid I remember typing in BASIC source listings from computer magazines for things like games and other cool stuff. Of course I also learned to write my own software, but nowadays there are about a million different ways of doing that. It sucks that Apple won't let you have a sandboxed Logo or Python interpreter on your iDevice, but it doesn't mean that the device is somehow not "personal."
For better or for worse, the walled garden is the future of consumer electronics. It's good for security, good for the consumer, and not so good for tinkerers. But don't make the mistake of assuming that means the computer isn't "personal" anymore.
Where were you when I had mod points? ... that's not such a good question, is it.
The Nokia-Apple cross-complaint is a monster of a suit and if it goes all the way will take years to litigate. Nokia and Apple are each accusing the other of infringing their patents. My assumption is that they do both use each other's technology to some extent and the lawsuit happened because neither company was satisfied with the result of their patent negotiations.
The Kodak thing is a complete crock. Kodak didn't embrace digital until everyone else was doing it better than they were, so now they behave like a patent troll to stave off bankruptcy (they were pulled off DJIA in 2004 and they posted a $150 million loss last year). They've also sued RIM for the same ridiculous patent.
The Fujitsu iPad thing was the second time Apple has stepped on someone's toes for using an "i" name; others here will remember that Linksys/Cisco got into a spat with Apple over the iPhone name. Both situations were resolved when Apple essentially bought the trademarks outright. Also, trademarks aren't the same thing as patents.
What I want to know is this: why isn't there a compulsory license system for patents? No one should be able to hoard technological innovation. You don't necessarily need to publish all the steps to make your secret sauce so everyone else can do it, but if someone independently works out how to do whatever you're doing there ought to be (A) a standard formula for royalties and (B) absolute freedom to use anybody's patent so long as you pay them what you're supposed to.
Wow, that's a species of dissembling I've not often seen. The quotation I alleged was (and is) false is the FIRST one you cited, viz.:
"The democracy will cease to exist when you take away from those who are willing to work and give to those who would not." -- your First TJ quote.
This is not a quotation of Jefferson. It is, evidently, a very very loose paraphrase of an unpublished marginal note. But you deliberately ignored this and pretended that I was denying the truth of the SECOND quote.
If you'd bothered to read my first post you would see that I did, in fact, point out that the SECOND quote comes from the First Inaugural. I also pointed out that it was a backhanded attack on John Adams' Alien and Sedition Act, the eighteenth-century equivalent of the Patriot Act.
It must be shocking to you that the Founders were so capable of turning their backs on the philosophical principles involved in the creation of the Constitution. They were politicians. Adams, Jefferson, Washington, Madison, the whole lot of them. Just like modern politicians, they abandoned principle for expediency when it suited their purposes. Appealing to their intellectual authority is therefore a very dangerous game.
You had best stick to proper political philosophers. Most of them weren't directly involved in politics (or served as bureaucrats and therefore knew the system from the inside out without having to delude themselves about its underpinnings).
It's interesting that you try to defend your inclusion of Kant's epistemology because it was unknown to most of the Founders (possibly Franklin was aware of it) and therefore not uniquely meaningful to a discussion of Revolutionary political philosophy. He does theorize the basis of human knowledge of the universe but he's not at all the only philosopher to do this. Plato (esp. in the Meno), Aristotle, Descartes, Foucault, Levi-Strauss, and even Godel are just a small handful of the many, many other great philosophers who have engaged the topic. I'm only a dilettante but these are all excellent starting points.
De Tocqueville was a great believer in the Founders' "natural aristocracy," what we would call a meritocracy. They gave money to found free schools on the one hand and established estate taxes with a marginal rate of 100% above a certain estate value on the other hand. He recognized that the effect of this system was to suppress the formation of a moneyed/landed aristocracy on the level of the European kingdoms.
de Tocqueville had two important lessons that we in the US need to relearn in a Big Damn Hurry. The first is the fact that the separation of the church from the state (as was the case in the early 1800s, before Pat Robertson and the Religious Right) made politics a much less personal practice for everyone involved and hence much less susceptible to emotionally-driven extremism. This was a sharp contrast to France during the Revolution, where the democrats (especially the Jacobins) had antagonized the church through the official adoption of an "enlightened" atheism, the so-called Cult of Reason. The result was absolutely intolerable civil strife, and it's the direction this country is headed in right now. Those who want to inject their religious sentiments into national legislation would do well to remember that all it would take would be a single swing of the pendulum back to the other party not only to wipe out their political influence but also to get the state involved in religious affairs in a way that would be highly undesirable to them. The present crisis on gay marriage would be much less significant if churches simply recognized that they need not perform or recognize any marriage they choose not to.
The second lesson is the tyranny of the majority. It seems nowadays as though once one party has control of at least two branches of national government they feel as though they can just walk all over the other party. To some extent the Democrats passed the health care reform bill without the approbation or support of the Re
My Facebook profile identifies my religious and political views, my intellectual interests, and past and present occupations. What part of any of that obtains in "shallowness?"
A computer isn't a trivial toy, even though you can use one to play video games and argue on Slashdot all day. By the same token, Facebook isn't "endless navel gazing" even though you can use it to trumpet your superiority to your fellow man, whether that comes from flashy clothes or smug overgeneralizations like yours. Facebook is a powerful tool for social organization of all kinds, from sex to business to international politics and everything in between.
If you don't like the tool, or you don't like its privacy policy, that's fine; don't use it, and feel free to criticize the shortcomings you have problems with. But get off your high horse. You aren't a better person than I am because you avoid "shallowness," or because you refuse to acknowledge the value of your individuality. We are all interesting in different ways to different people, and there's nothing wrong with making that available to the rest of the world. Maybe you aren't the kind of guy to care about what kind of clothing I wear, but if my friend or her sister does that doesn't make her "worse" than you are in some metaphysical sense.
PS. The fact that you refuse to acknowledge that the first of your alleged quotes of Jefferson is pseudepigraphical proves that you're only interested in scoring "talking points" and not in actually having a reasoned discussion.
Your snarky and insulting Glenn Beck-esque commentary on my breadth of reading knowledge and skill is completely out of line. If you're going to try to participate in a civilized discussion between reasonable adults then you need to act like one.
I suspect that you have some bizarre formalist definition of what a republic is. Obviously you didn't get it "from a book" because Kant is not a political philosopher (he deals in metaphysics) and Paine was the Emanuel Bronner of his age.
Have you read any of the classics on republic theory? This would include John Locke's Two Treatises and other works, Rousseau's Social Contract, Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, to a lesser extent Alexis De Tocqueville's Democracy in America, and Ernst Renan's essay "What is a Nation?". One of the big undercurrents in most of these works is the idea that a republic has to have the power of self-determination -- that's to say you can have a government with elected officials and a bicameral legislature and all the other appurtenances of government, but if you lack the power of self-determination with respect to other nation-states, you aren't a republic. This is a big distinction that historians tend to make about Rome after the rise of Augustus -- there was still a Senate and consuls and more or less every other political office that had existed a hundred years earlier, but Rome was no longer a republic because these state organs had lost their ability to determine the national will.
Well, I mean, re-entry would probably qualify as an "emergency intelligence incinerator..."
If it had been FDR's objective to socialize the country he wouldn't have permitted bankruptcy proceedings to go forward; he would have stepped in and nationalized the assets of the failing banks/companies/etc. on some quasi-legal basis. Don't be obtuse.
Are you denying that the states are subordinate in authority to the federal government in the ways outlined in the Constitution? Do you think that each state has the power to levy an army, declare war, conclude treaties with foreign governments, run a postal service, and so on? These powers are explicitly delegated to the federal government, and denied to the states. Therefore they can't be republics, at least not in the sense of determining a national consensus and will to govern.
But you have one misquoted reference from Wikipedia, so obviously I'm a fool. Under the Rules of Internet Argumentation, all of my other unrelated arguments are therefore invalidated for some inadequately explored reason.
To start, I checked into your Teddy J quotes and discovered the following:
#1 is a lie. Jefferson never said that and I challenge you to show me the original publication where he did.
#2 is found in his First Inaugural Address. It was probably a slap at John Adams' Alien and Sedition Act, a law that looked a lot more like the Patriot Act than the health care bill.
#3 is from another private letter. It's regularly trotted out during any controversial social legislation. Read Hirschfield (The Power of the presidency: concepts and controversy, 1982, p.311) on how this is a red herring.
#4 is from a political tract from 1779. You will note that it could just as easily be applied to the Patriot Act, the military-industrial complex, or just about any other Republican-built object of left-wing derision as it can be to social legislation.
#5 is a paraphrase of a section in a letter from 1802. The true quote reads "If we can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretence of taking care of them, they must become happy." Here is the following quote: "Their finances are now under such a course of application as nothing could derange but war or federalism. The gripe of the latter has shown itself as deadly as the jaws of the former." In other words, he would have winced had he seen the bill for Iraq War II, or read the justifications of the neocons.
#6 was in a letter shortly before his death about how the federal government was "consolidating power" by, get this, using the power granted to it by the Constitution (namely the commerce clause). The states are not individual republics. We tried that under the Articles of Confederation and it went over like a a lead balloon. Like it or lump it, they are subordinate in power in the regards enumerated in the Constitution to the power of the federal government. If the Fed chooses to wield that power in a heavy-handed way, it's probably stupid and possibly unethical but not unconstitutional.
The present deficit is a function of the fact that the Republicans by and large write the tax laws whereas the Democrats by and large write the social legislation. The Republicans refuse to raise taxes to pay for the social legislation, and the Democrats refuse to cut spending in the social legislation to match the current tax income. It's being caused by the present political climate of obstructionism, not by your insane theories about the gradual communization of the US. If FDR had wanted to make the US into a socialist state he would have done nothing, waited for the economic climate to bottom out, then blame all the Wall Street fat cats, order their imprisonment, seize their assets, and nationalize them. Poof. Now we're a socialist state, and it didn't take all that sneaking around!
Do you know why Roosevelt created the social safety net? It was partly to stabilize society so we didn't have happen here what happened in Germany and the Soviet Union, where agitators appealed to the people's suffering to gain their complicity in revolutionary policy. It was partly to expand the number of consumers to encourage a restart in the production economy. But mostly it was because it was the right thing to do, because a lot of average Americans were starving to death, working like slaves, and your beloved "free market" wasn't doing a goddamned thing to help them. FDR's problem was actually that he didn't spend enough -- it took the massive deficit spending associated with the war to finally terminate the crisis.
The present health care situation is a national crisis on the order of the food and work crisis provoked by the Great Depression. Thousands of people die every year because they can't afford basic medicines like penicillin and Nitrostat, or they can't afford to see a doctor to prescribe these medicines. Health care decisions are being made by bureaucrats whose only concern is protecting the value of the shareholders, and this excuse rubber-stamps their denial of benefits to thousands more Americans who then go bank
Of course, I completely forgot! Slashdot is only for Americans; that's why it blocks the IPs of anyone outside the US. Oh, wait.
American English is not spoken by the majority of English speakers on Earth. It is absolutely not okay to insist that everyone who wants to use English on this site must employ American idiom, and it's just silly that you piss and moan at an article summary that is perfectly cogent and comprehensible even if it doesn't measure up to your particular standards.
By your logic The Canterbury Tales is trash because it's not written in an English that makes sense to you at first glance.
This summary is a fine example of British English prose style; the only flaw I can find is that it uses appositional clauses a bit excessively.
There isn't one universal English style that will communicate any idea to anyone else who speaks English. For that matter, there aren't one or even two languages called English, but a whole host of them. I had a student from Singapore last year who was surprised to find out that American usage requires the verb "reply" to have an indirect object. He, and all his fellow Singaporeans, are very comfortable saying "I replied his message."
That you put down reasonably good English style as "regional colloquialism" shows that you aren't very well-read in any English other than the American dialect, which is a bit depressing.
I hate idiot grammar trolls who don't understand that International English sometimes works differently from the American dialect. It's confusing to many English speakers from outside the US to use a naked modal verb without an auxiliary, and thus they use expressions like "I can do" or "I might do" rather than "I can" or "I might." In these cases "do" marks the absence of a true auxiliary. It's by no means ungrammatical or even unusual syntax.
Hasn't the runaway success of services like iTunes and Amazon MP3 and all the rest of them mitigated the need to play this game where we supposedly all obtain our music illegally and have to pay for it with levies on media and devices?
Right, sorry, I forgot, the Soviet Socialist Republic of Record Labels wants its $20 cut of my iPhone/Nexus One/Pre/etc. And boy do they deserve it, considering the depth and genius of the cultural patrimony they've contributed. Like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.
Yes, it's ironic because Apple spies on its users, recording their Web searches and most of the URLs they visit via the tendrils of their ad network.
Whoops, sorry, that's Google.
But wait! Apple forces you to join their new social network system without any opt-in notice, exposing the names of everyone you've ever emailed to any idiot with a mail account from them!
Nope, that's Google again.
Don't get me wrong, I love a lot of Google's services (especially Google Books) and I use it every day like every other yutz on the Internet. But don't make the mistake of assuming that your favorite hardware/software/Web company isn't a massive corporate nightmare that would happily sell your porn-viewing habits to the Fed for a nickel if it were legal. It's not Big Brother, it's Big Business-- all about the dollar signs. There's no money in privacy.
Doesn't the Tumbleweed prototype in this photo look suspiciously like a certain Number 6-devouring border guard? What are these scientists really planning?
Is this like a cottage industry for you Apple haters? You post every possible negative comment about the new product you can find, drum it up into some kind of grand pronouncement on the future of the device, then complain that there's too much media coverage and everyone should just shut up now!
But... but... if Iceland becomes a journalism haven, how will people file baseless libel suits in British courts?!! Everyone who says homeopathy and chiropractic are junk sciences will be able to just get away with it!