While you make an interesting point, the claim that "they are NEVER the bad guys" is just plain silly. When dealing with so many controversial issues, how can anyone ALWAYS get it right, from another person's perspective? Even among columnists, talk show hosts, elected officials, supreme court justices, etc. that I generally agree with, I wouldn't make such a unequivocol statement. And unlike such people, the ACLU is made up of many voices - the national organization, the state-level organizations, idealists, partisans with axes to grind, lawyers out for fame, you name it. To say that among this chorus of voices the wisest always prevail and become the policy of the group as a whole is quite a claim. How do you run a group infallibly?
Don't say they are always right because they always take the side of civil liberties, because look how many cases involve person A's right to do X vs. person B's right to do Y. Then there are no good guys or bad guys, only priorities and hard choices.
Do they really protect offensive speech regardless of anyone else's sensibilites? Not always, especially if it's religious speech. Do they uphold "ALL the other amendments". No, their official policies on the Second are actually on the anti civil liberties side of that particular argument. So you can't even define good guys and bad guys in terms of who is promoting an interpretation of the Constitution that gives people more freedom.
In the end, saying someone else always gets it right, with so many controversial, conflicting principles at stake, doesn't really imply sagacity on their part so much as you being a fanboy who will agree with any position they decide to take. Since you have a similar philosophy to the organization, I could see if you found them to be the good guys, say 95% of the time, but ALWAYS?
While I can see allegations of copyright infringement, if the user was in fact sharing a copyrighted movie, I'm a bit confused by the DMCA aspect. No encryption was being circumvented (it was a camera rip), nor was the copy made from a digital source of any kind, and it's not even clear that the user is the one who made originally made the rip of the movie, so I would think standard copyright law would cover the situation - it was a copyrighted movie, he was allegedly distributing it. What provision of the DMCA was supposedly being violated here?
I thought the choice was rather odd too. In the original context, a creature made of rock calls humans "ugly bags of mostly water", and it makes sense, because compared to a rock, we are. Coming from a Klingon, however, who are carbon-based humanoids like us and appear to have a similar level of water content in their tissue to humans, the phrase is very out of place.
Get up off their network, you didn't have permission to be accessing with and/or generating traffic on it.
What is their "network"? Does it mean connecting to Sharman's servers? No, this is P2P, there are no servers. Does it use their bandwidth? No, the bandwidth is the users'. The "network" is just the collective set of all the Kazaa clients out there that people are using. So what if someone wants to write a program that's compatible with those clients? Is Apache evil because it's compatible with Internet Explorer's "network" of clients?
There have been several posts to the effect of "what a big target, anyone with a gun could shoot these down". Consider the physics of this for a moment.
A Magnum-powered hunting rifle has a muzzle velocity of around 2,000 mph (You could try using an AK or such, but these are going to be considerably lower velocity). With the high-altitude blimps flying at 65,000 feet per the article, your shot would hit it in about 22 seconds, were it not for two things:
The first is gravity. 32.2 feet per second squared downward acceleration. Vith v^2/2*g = 131,400 feet maximum height, there is high enough initial velocity to hit the blimp.
The second problem, however, is air resistance. The aforementioned bullet loses half its velocity within the first 1,800 feet or so even in level flight, and continues to slow down from there.
Between these two considerations, there is no way for a bullet (except maybe from a huge cannon) to hit something that is 65,000 feet up in the air.
Even if you did hit it, a blimp is not going to suddenly pop like a rubber balloon. You might get lucky and hit a motor or some other critical component, but just hitting the surface of the blimp (which is what makes it such a big target) is just going to put a 1/3" hole in something as big as a skyscraper, and make it leak at a negligible rate.
Vim would be high on my list whether it's Unix or Windows. It's a good editor all around, and once you're used to the vi key layout, going back to junk like Notepad is downright painful.
The Stallman article is interesting, at least the last five paragraphs. The rest of the article is a rant about saying "GNU/Linux" instead of "Linux" and how Bitkeeper is evil. At least we know it was definitely written by RMS.
Most of the arguments here against port knocking are along the lines of "but someone could just do a replay attack" or "this is vulnerable to spoofing" or whatever. These things are true about a naive implmentation of port knocking that uses a static knock, but it's not hard to come up with variants on the port knocking idea that offer much better security than that. For instance:
Connect to server on some constant, always-open port.
Server sends back a string, then closes connection.
Using this string and a secret password, determine the current knock sequence.
Connect to server using this knock sequence.
Once a knock sequence has been used, serevr invalidates it, creates a new sequence, and begins publishing the string corresponding to the new knock sequence.
The secret key of course has to be kept secret, and the underlying crypto must be good enough that if the attacker sees the challenge and the knock sequence used to reply, the key itself cannot be deduced.
This would completely protect from replay attacks, as knocks are not reused. Spoofing could potentially be used to DOS someone by interfering with their knock sequence, but not to gain unauthorized access oneself.
Sure, at first glance port knocking may seem to be of limited usefulness, but if you combine the idea with a little cryptographic thinking, the possibilities start to become a lot more exciting.
At one point, Lindows had been taking the position that Lindows could not be infringing upon the Windows trademark, because Windows was itself an invalid trademark (already being a common term within the computer industry before MS started using it). I had really wanted to see how this played out. I think Lindows was correct on this assessment; MS was improperly granted a trademark on an already-existing term from that field. On the other hand, there is now so much business, brand recognition, and so forth built upon that trademark by now that the situation would be very difficult to correct, even if MS's hordes of attorneys failed to convince the judge to leave the situation be. The legal questions raised in that particular side of the case was what I was most interested in hearing the answers to, but now it's not something we're likely to see addressed.
Even if you don't click on it, many browsers pre-fetch linked pages to the cache for faster response. Check your settings and be ready when some guys in suits come buy saying something about "Guantanamo".
It's situations like this guy's that make me wish I had a mini-PCI GPS card inside my laptop, imagine the possibilities. Once an hour, it could report its exact coordinates to a hidden log on your web server.
Of course, just checking in periodically has its benefits, even without extra hardware. If the laptop sees some "stolen" flag on the server has been set, it turns on keylogging and sends you all the thief's keystrokes. The laptop could also turn on its microphone (yes, they have built in ones) and send a realtime audio stream of everything being said around it.
I believe they are right and the court is wrong on Eldred, but until a Democratic president can get in for another 8 years and Kennedy and Scalia get the boot, they won't win.
Clinton signed the DMCA and SBCEA, Eldred v. Ashcroft was originally Eldred v. Reno. What makes you think a Democratic president would be any more likely to appoint copyright-reforming Justices than a Republican would? Positions on IP issues seem to be fairly independent of party affiliation. Sure, Republicans have a reputation for siding with big business, but Democrats are similarly in thrall to entertainment industry special interests and trial lawyers, who love oppressive copyright laws. And you'll find people who "get it" on both sides of the aisle, in about equal numbers, which sadly are too uncommon.
At the macroscopic level, that's true, but at the quantum level the type of determinism you describe ("For everything there is an equation") breaks down. Consider Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: the more precisely the position is known, the less precisely the momentum can be known. Even with instruments advanced enough to measure one of these values with infinite precision, the other would be unknown, and no equation could be created to describe the particle's state. It could be anything, and there is no way to predict what its exact value will be.
This is very useful for true randomness, unlike the sack of blocks. If you measured the state of the blocks, you would find that they obey Newtonian mechanics, and you could predict which block was on top, given enough information about their state at some point and the forces acting upon them. With quantum particles, gathering that much information about the state is precluded by the laws of quantum physics, so the answer is effectively random.
Yeah, but if I remember, they always say the persons FIRST name only (usually). What if two people have the same first name?
If Outlook can figure out who to send my email to from a first name (by checking personal address book first then corporate directory), I'm thinking an advanced communications network from centuries in the future can probably do the same. In Star Trek, I suspect the computer would resolve ambiguity based on who you work with and talk to a lot, with some way to override this if you needed to.
The Star Trek spinoffs already did a lot of this "ponder the ethical ramifications of new technology" type of thing. The genetically enhanced Dr. Bashir of DS9 raised the same issues as the bionic baseball player this show will have. Picard's arbitrations in various alien disputes were essentially legal drama in space. Janeway's constant ethical delimmas come to mind, particularly the way she always tried to follow her principles even when it was not the best thing for the crew -- much as the justice system must uphold legal principles, even when it is not the best outcome for the specific litigants. In Enterprise, the episode where Tripp is cloned to harvest his brain has obvious parallels to the current debates on human cloning, stem cell research, and so forth.
I'd expect something that puts forth these same kinds of delimmas, but with technology much closer to our own, and an emphasis on resolving them through the legal system. No starship battles, Borg, or aliens with funny latex foreheads. Sci-fi often uses futuristic settings to explore hypothetical ethical issues -- consider The 6th Day (what would widespread cloning do to society?), Minority Report (is knowing someone WILL commit a crime, does that justify preemptive punishment?), or Star Wars (if you have a big spacecraft, is it okay to blow up Alderaan?). Just kidding about the last one. This show sounds like it will be sci-fi lite, taking the same approach to exploring the questions new technology brings, but set in a society that is still a lot closer to our own.
You make a well-presented case, but I must disagree with a couple of your points. While a Kerry repeal of the tax cuts on dividents and capital gains may most obviously hurt the well off, we live in a time when investing is not just something the rich do. More and more middle class people build a portfolio to prepare for the future, and Kerry's policies could be detrimental to this trend, and undermine the economic growth that results from such investment. The middle class do invest, and investor-hostile policies hurt them.
Regarding Kerry's income tax rollbacks, true, hat he has proposed is targetted at the upper tax brackets (hike 33% to 36% and 35% to 39.5%) which certainly doesn't affect me, but also, as far as I can tell, he has never committed to making the tax cuts on the other tax brackets (i.e. the middle class) permanent, which would lead to a middle class tax hike in 2006.
Do you make over $130k/yr? If not then you're not in the 5%. I figure that voting for Kerry is more than worth the $500 I'm likely not to see, and I wager that the same hold for the people that make $35k and shop at walmart to make ends meet.
From a strictly tax burden standpoint, Bush is clearly the most advantageous choice for anyone who is a taxpayer. He has already lowered taxes, so the "not likely to see" stipulation makes no sense. Kerry openly acknowledges planning a tax hike, so people can expect to pay more taxes under an administration of his.
Phrases like "the top 5%" are thrown into such arguments just to prey on people's jealousy of those with more resources, in the hope that they will then vote for democrats. In reality, under the Bush tax plan, everyone who pays taxes saves money. Sure, those who pay a larger dollar figure in taxes stand to save a larger dollar figure, so what? That's like saying offering a sale of "half off any Dodge car" is unfair because a guy buying a Viper saves more than one buying a Neon.
That being said, there are of course more criteria to picking a presidential candidate than who will give you a better deal on your income tax, or Kerry would only get the non-taxpayer vote. You might think Bush will hurt you financially when factors other than income tax (jobs, economy, etc.) are taken into account, or that some other issue is more important to you than personal finance. Those are valid arguments. But implying that only the rich benefit under Bush's tax cuts is just plain silly.
Maybe I'm being ignorant here, but what do cell phones and PDAs need with DNS names anyway? What are people running on them that they need a special domain to handle all the demand for? I guess if I had a DNS name I could see whether my cell phone could handle a Slashdotting... "Grab the latest Fedora ISOs from my cell phone -- http://experiment626.attwireless.mobile". Most people don't even run servers from their home PCs that they need domain names for, what are they going to do on PDAs and cell phones? I guess it would be fun to ftp to cowboyneal.cingular.mobile and see what ring tones he has or something.
I used to use the program the parent speaks of, and it really did work. The format tool let you adjust the number of tracks and sectors on a floppy, with the 1.72 Meg combination working well but anything beyond that not working right. The space gains were quite real, back when my hard drive was a mere 40 megs I used this to offload things and make room. It used a small TSR program (i.e., a memory-resident driver) which had to be loaded, or you would get errors trying to read the disks.
The Clinton/Gore administration did bring us the Clipper chip, DMCA, Mickey Mouse copyright extention act etc. As Vice President he may not have quite as much influence in such short-sighted policies as the President, but in the absense of policy statements to the contrary during his campaign, it's not unreasonable to expect more of the same if Gore moved into the Oval Office. Unfortunately, Bush isn't really any better on IP reform either - when is the last time you heard him call for an overturning of the DMCA?
These kinds of tests comparing codecs always seem to be something involving playing two versions of the song and asking someone which in their opinion sounded better. Isn't there a more quantitative way to measure the effect of the lossy compression? For instance:
Start with the digitized CD recording
Make a copy of it
Compress the copy with the codec to be analyzed
Do a lossless uncompression of the MP3 or whatever it is back to CD-resolution
At each sample point (44k per second) on the resulting track, compare the 16-bit sample value of the compressed-and-back version to the control version.
Sum the absolute value of the differences across all sample points.
In other words, whichever codec introduces the least error into the track in a closed loop encode and decode test did the best job of faithfully reproducing the original signal. No subjective human testing required. You might have to tweak it a bit (say, sum the squares of the error or something) but would an approach like this work to settle the codec debates, or is there a fundamental flaw in this technique?
And what is "free speech" if your actors cannot give their personal opinions about current events when accepting awards?
The kinds of comments you refer to are the entertainment industry equivalent of flamebait or offtopic digressions (like this one, I'm afraid). Such comments add nothing of value to the debate over current events - does skill at acting really confer any special sagacity about foreign policy? Is the opinion being expressed going to be in any way better informed than a soundbite on the issue from the janitor who sweeps the floors after the awards ceremony is over would be?
Also, such offtopic and inappropriate comments from actors open up a can of worms. Should they be able to make controversial comments that generate lots of backlash against the studios they work for? What if the speech is so controversial it would generally be viewed as insensetive, racist, or hate speech? If some spouting of political comments is good and other types would be bad, what political correctness censoring authority determines how free speech should really be?
Famous people already have a much louder voice for their personal opinion than their expertise on the matters being discussed would merit. They can give interviews, issue press releases, and often testify before congress about topic they have no particular knowledge about. Does having once played a doctor really make someone an expert on health care policy? Newspaper columnists don't go around claiming their political commentaries entitle them to a role in a film, why do entertainers think being good at acting makes their political opinions worth listening to?
funding? what are your sources? i've noticed that the cry of the pro-dubyas is that any disagreement with the dubya's policies must in fact be from liberal sources.
There is nothing wrong with identifying what the agenda of someone who puts forth a study, article, recommendation, or whatever is in order to better discern the bias and fallacies that agenda leads to. If tomorrow's Slashdot headline read, "Proprietary software superior, Microsoft study finds" would everyone ditch Linux, or view the report with a healthy dose of skepticism? Even highly respected scientists, who are supposed to personify objectivity, can have the interpretation of their results influenced by peer opinion, personal beliefs, need for funding, and so on.
A rational approach to this news would be to:
Examine the Bush Administration policies in question for their own scientific merit.
Consider any factors other than science that may have influenced the policy, such as special interest lobbying, budget concerns, or the will of the voters, who may collectively prefer a solution that is not the best from a strict scientific perspective but must be respected in a democracy.
Examine the counterarguments to the Bush Administration policy put forth by these scientists.
Consider any other reasons besides science that they may have reached these conclusions. Are they affiliated with the Democratic party? How about special interest lobbies such as environmentalists or trial lawyers that stand to gain from having the Administration's policies refuted? In short, beyond looking at the arguments at face value as was done in the step above, consider the angle or agenda it is coming from.
Having considered all these things, make up your own damn mind. Form an educated and informed opinon about the matter.
No, step #4 is not a "severe deficiency in logical thinking", but rather an important component of rational thought.
Fastest-growing seems very vague, without some clarification of terminology. Fastest growing from when to now? Does one measure the increase in number of users, installations, processors it is running on, market share percentage, sales, or what? Or could "growing" imply growing in maturity and feature set rather than in proliferation of users? Growth could even denote the physical size of the distribution in bytes (how many discs is Debian these days?) One could make a case for just about any distribution, just through the right interpretation of such an ambiguous question.
Slashdot Mirror
While you make an interesting point, the claim that "they are NEVER the bad guys" is just plain silly. When dealing with so many controversial issues, how can anyone ALWAYS get it right, from another person's perspective? Even among columnists, talk show hosts, elected officials, supreme court justices, etc. that I generally agree with, I wouldn't make such a unequivocol statement. And unlike such people, the ACLU is made up of many voices - the national organization, the state-level organizations, idealists, partisans with axes to grind, lawyers out for fame, you name it. To say that among this chorus of voices the wisest always prevail and become the policy of the group as a whole is quite a claim. How do you run a group infallibly?
Don't say they are always right because they always take the side of civil liberties, because look how many cases involve person A's right to do X vs. person B's right to do Y. Then there are no good guys or bad guys, only priorities and hard choices.
Do they really protect offensive speech regardless of anyone else's sensibilites? Not always, especially if it's religious speech. Do they uphold "ALL the other amendments". No, their official policies on the Second are actually on the anti civil liberties side of that particular argument. So you can't even define good guys and bad guys in terms of who is promoting an interpretation of the Constitution that gives people more freedom.
In the end, saying someone else always gets it right, with so many controversial, conflicting principles at stake, doesn't really imply sagacity on their part so much as you being a fanboy who will agree with any position they decide to take. Since you have a similar philosophy to the organization, I could see if you found them to be the good guys, say 95% of the time, but ALWAYS?
So, MP3.com is trying to be the place to go to search for music, none of which is actually in MP3 format. It all makes sense now.
While I can see allegations of copyright infringement, if the user was in fact sharing a copyrighted movie, I'm a bit confused by the DMCA aspect. No encryption was being circumvented (it was a camera rip), nor was the copy made from a digital source of any kind, and it's not even clear that the user is the one who made originally made the rip of the movie, so I would think standard copyright law would cover the situation - it was a copyrighted movie, he was allegedly distributing it. What provision of the DMCA was supposedly being violated here?
I thought the choice was rather odd too. In the original context, a creature made of rock calls humans "ugly bags of mostly water", and it makes sense, because compared to a rock, we are. Coming from a Klingon, however, who are carbon-based humanoids like us and appear to have a similar level of water content in their tissue to humans, the phrase is very out of place.
Get up off their network, you didn't have permission to be accessing with and/or generating traffic on it.
What is their "network"? Does it mean connecting to Sharman's servers? No, this is P2P, there are no servers. Does it use their bandwidth? No, the bandwidth is the users'. The "network" is just the collective set of all the Kazaa clients out there that people are using. So what if someone wants to write a program that's compatible with those clients? Is Apache evil because it's compatible with Internet Explorer's "network" of clients?
There have been several posts to the effect of "what a big target, anyone with a gun could shoot these down". Consider the physics of this for a moment.
A Magnum-powered hunting rifle has a muzzle velocity of around 2,000 mph (You could try using an AK or such, but these are going to be considerably lower velocity). With the high-altitude blimps flying at 65,000 feet per the article, your shot would hit it in about 22 seconds, were it not for two things:
The first is gravity. 32.2 feet per second squared downward acceleration. Vith v^2/2*g = 131,400 feet maximum height, there is high enough initial velocity to hit the blimp.
The second problem, however, is air resistance. The aforementioned bullet loses half its velocity within the first 1,800 feet or so even in level flight, and continues to slow down from there.
Between these two considerations, there is no way for a bullet (except maybe from a huge cannon) to hit something that is 65,000 feet up in the air.
Even if you did hit it, a blimp is not going to suddenly pop like a rubber balloon. You might get lucky and hit a motor or some other critical component, but just hitting the surface of the blimp (which is what makes it such a big target) is just going to put a 1/3" hole in something as big as a skyscraper, and make it leak at a negligible rate.
Vim would be high on my list whether it's Unix or Windows. It's a good editor all around, and once you're used to the vi key layout, going back to junk like Notepad is downright painful.
The Stallman article is interesting, at least the last five paragraphs. The rest of the article is a rant about saying "GNU/Linux" instead of "Linux" and how Bitkeeper is evil. At least we know it was definitely written by RMS.
Most of the arguments here against port knocking are along the lines of "but someone could just do a replay attack" or "this is vulnerable to spoofing" or whatever. These things are true about a naive implmentation of port knocking that uses a static knock, but it's not hard to come up with variants on the port knocking idea that offer much better security than that. For instance:
The secret key of course has to be kept secret, and the underlying crypto must be good enough that if the attacker sees the challenge and the knock sequence used to reply, the key itself cannot be deduced.
This would completely protect from replay attacks, as knocks are not reused. Spoofing could potentially be used to DOS someone by interfering with their knock sequence, but not to gain unauthorized access oneself.
Sure, at first glance port knocking may seem to be of limited usefulness, but if you combine the idea with a little cryptographic thinking, the possibilities start to become a lot more exciting.
At one point, Lindows had been taking the position that Lindows could not be infringing upon the Windows trademark, because Windows was itself an invalid trademark (already being a common term within the computer industry before MS started using it). I had really wanted to see how this played out. I think Lindows was correct on this assessment; MS was improperly granted a trademark on an already-existing term from that field. On the other hand, there is now so much business, brand recognition, and so forth built upon that trademark by now that the situation would be very difficult to correct, even if MS's hordes of attorneys failed to convince the judge to leave the situation be. The legal questions raised in that particular side of the case was what I was most interested in hearing the answers to, but now it's not something we're likely to see addressed.
Even if you don't click on it, many browsers pre-fetch linked pages to the cache for faster response. Check your settings and be ready when some guys in suits come buy saying something about "Guantanamo".
It's situations like this guy's that make me wish I had a mini-PCI GPS card inside my laptop, imagine the possibilities. Once an hour, it could report its exact coordinates to a hidden log on your web server.
Of course, just checking in periodically has its benefits, even without extra hardware. If the laptop sees some "stolen" flag on the server has been set, it turns on keylogging and sends you all the thief's keystrokes. The laptop could also turn on its microphone (yes, they have built in ones) and send a realtime audio stream of everything being said around it.
I believe they are right and the court is wrong on Eldred, but until a Democratic president can get in for another 8 years and Kennedy and Scalia get the boot, they won't win.
Clinton signed the DMCA and SBCEA, Eldred v. Ashcroft was originally Eldred v. Reno. What makes you think a Democratic president would be any more likely to appoint copyright-reforming Justices than a Republican would? Positions on IP issues seem to be fairly independent of party affiliation. Sure, Republicans have a reputation for siding with big business, but Democrats are similarly in thrall to entertainment industry special interests and trial lawyers, who love oppressive copyright laws. And you'll find people who "get it" on both sides of the aisle, in about equal numbers, which sadly are too uncommon.
At the macroscopic level, that's true, but at the quantum level the type of determinism you describe ("For everything there is an equation") breaks down. Consider Heisenberg's uncertainty principle: the more precisely the position is known, the less precisely the momentum can be known. Even with instruments advanced enough to measure one of these values with infinite precision, the other would be unknown, and no equation could be created to describe the particle's state. It could be anything, and there is no way to predict what its exact value will be.
This is very useful for true randomness, unlike the sack of blocks. If you measured the state of the blocks, you would find that they obey Newtonian mechanics, and you could predict which block was on top, given enough information about their state at some point and the forces acting upon them. With quantum particles, gathering that much information about the state is precluded by the laws of quantum physics, so the answer is effectively random.
Yeah, but if I remember, they always say the persons FIRST name only (usually). What if two people have the same first name?
If Outlook can figure out who to send my email to from a first name (by checking personal address book first then corporate directory), I'm thinking an advanced communications network from centuries in the future can probably do the same. In Star Trek, I suspect the computer would resolve ambiguity based on who you work with and talk to a lot, with some way to override this if you needed to.
The Star Trek spinoffs already did a lot of this "ponder the ethical ramifications of new technology" type of thing. The genetically enhanced Dr. Bashir of DS9 raised the same issues as the bionic baseball player this show will have. Picard's arbitrations in various alien disputes were essentially legal drama in space. Janeway's constant ethical delimmas come to mind, particularly the way she always tried to follow her principles even when it was not the best thing for the crew -- much as the justice system must uphold legal principles, even when it is not the best outcome for the specific litigants. In Enterprise, the episode where Tripp is cloned to harvest his brain has obvious parallels to the current debates on human cloning, stem cell research, and so forth.
I'd expect something that puts forth these same kinds of delimmas, but with technology much closer to our own, and an emphasis on resolving them through the legal system. No starship battles, Borg, or aliens with funny latex foreheads. Sci-fi often uses futuristic settings to explore hypothetical ethical issues -- consider The 6th Day (what would widespread cloning do to society?), Minority Report (is knowing someone WILL commit a crime, does that justify preemptive punishment?), or Star Wars (if you have a big spacecraft, is it okay to blow up Alderaan?). Just kidding about the last one. This show sounds like it will be sci-fi lite, taking the same approach to exploring the questions new technology brings, but set in a society that is still a lot closer to our own.
You make a well-presented case, but I must disagree with a couple of your points. While a Kerry repeal of the tax cuts on dividents and capital gains may most obviously hurt the well off, we live in a time when investing is not just something the rich do. More and more middle class people build a portfolio to prepare for the future, and Kerry's policies could be detrimental to this trend, and undermine the economic growth that results from such investment. The middle class do invest, and investor-hostile policies hurt them.
Regarding Kerry's income tax rollbacks, true, hat he has proposed is targetted at the upper tax brackets (hike 33% to 36% and 35% to 39.5%) which certainly doesn't affect me, but also, as far as I can tell, he has never committed to making the tax cuts on the other tax brackets (i.e. the middle class) permanent, which would lead to a middle class tax hike in 2006.
Do you make over $130k/yr? If not then you're not in the 5%. I figure that voting for Kerry is more than worth the $500 I'm likely not to see, and I wager that the same hold for the people that make $35k and shop at walmart to make ends meet.
From a strictly tax burden standpoint, Bush is clearly the most advantageous choice for anyone who is a taxpayer. He has already lowered taxes, so the "not likely to see" stipulation makes no sense. Kerry openly acknowledges planning a tax hike, so people can expect to pay more taxes under an administration of his.
Phrases like "the top 5%" are thrown into such arguments just to prey on people's jealousy of those with more resources, in the hope that they will then vote for democrats. In reality, under the Bush tax plan, everyone who pays taxes saves money. Sure, those who pay a larger dollar figure in taxes stand to save a larger dollar figure, so what? That's like saying offering a sale of "half off any Dodge car" is unfair because a guy buying a Viper saves more than one buying a Neon.
That being said, there are of course more criteria to picking a presidential candidate than who will give you a better deal on your income tax, or Kerry would only get the non-taxpayer vote. You might think Bush will hurt you financially when factors other than income tax (jobs, economy, etc.) are taken into account, or that some other issue is more important to you than personal finance. Those are valid arguments. But implying that only the rich benefit under Bush's tax cuts is just plain silly.
Maybe I'm being ignorant here, but what do cell phones and PDAs need with DNS names anyway? What are people running on them that they need a special domain to handle all the demand for? I guess if I had a DNS name I could see whether my cell phone could handle a Slashdotting... "Grab the latest Fedora ISOs from my cell phone -- http://experiment626.attwireless.mobile". Most people don't even run servers from their home PCs that they need domain names for, what are they going to do on PDAs and cell phones? I guess it would be fun to ftp to cowboyneal.cingular.mobile and see what ring tones he has or something.
I used to use the program the parent speaks of, and it really did work. The format tool let you adjust the number of tracks and sectors on a floppy, with the 1.72 Meg combination working well but anything beyond that not working right. The space gains were quite real, back when my hard drive was a mere 40 megs I used this to offload things and make room. It used a small TSR program (i.e., a memory-resident driver) which had to be loaded, or you would get errors trying to read the disks.
The Clinton/Gore administration did bring us the Clipper chip, DMCA, Mickey Mouse copyright extention act etc. As Vice President he may not have quite as much influence in such short-sighted policies as the President, but in the absense of policy statements to the contrary during his campaign, it's not unreasonable to expect more of the same if Gore moved into the Oval Office. Unfortunately, Bush isn't really any better on IP reform either - when is the last time you heard him call for an overturning of the DMCA?
These kinds of tests comparing codecs always seem to be something involving playing two versions of the song and asking someone which in their opinion sounded better. Isn't there a more quantitative way to measure the effect of the lossy compression? For instance:
In other words, whichever codec introduces the least error into the track in a closed loop encode and decode test did the best job of faithfully reproducing the original signal. No subjective human testing required. You might have to tweak it a bit (say, sum the squares of the error or something) but would an approach like this work to settle the codec debates, or is there a fundamental flaw in this technique?
And what is "free speech" if your actors cannot give their personal opinions about current events when accepting awards?
The kinds of comments you refer to are the entertainment industry equivalent of flamebait or offtopic digressions (like this one, I'm afraid). Such comments add nothing of value to the debate over current events - does skill at acting really confer any special sagacity about foreign policy? Is the opinion being expressed going to be in any way better informed than a soundbite on the issue from the janitor who sweeps the floors after the awards ceremony is over would be?
Also, such offtopic and inappropriate comments from actors open up a can of worms. Should they be able to make controversial comments that generate lots of backlash against the studios they work for? What if the speech is so controversial it would generally be viewed as insensetive, racist, or hate speech? If some spouting of political comments is good and other types would be bad, what political correctness censoring authority determines how free speech should really be?
Famous people already have a much louder voice for their personal opinion than their expertise on the matters being discussed would merit. They can give interviews, issue press releases, and often testify before congress about topic they have no particular knowledge about. Does having once played a doctor really make someone an expert on health care policy? Newspaper columnists don't go around claiming their political commentaries entitle them to a role in a film, why do entertainers think being good at acting makes their political opinions worth listening to?
funding? what are your sources? i've noticed that the cry of the pro-dubyas is that any disagreement with the dubya's policies must in fact be from liberal sources.
There is nothing wrong with identifying what the agenda of someone who puts forth a study, article, recommendation, or whatever is in order to better discern the bias and fallacies that agenda leads to. If tomorrow's Slashdot headline read, "Proprietary software superior, Microsoft study finds" would everyone ditch Linux, or view the report with a healthy dose of skepticism? Even highly respected scientists, who are supposed to personify objectivity, can have the interpretation of their results influenced by peer opinion, personal beliefs, need for funding, and so on.
A rational approach to this news would be to:
No, step #4 is not a "severe deficiency in logical thinking", but rather an important component of rational thought.
Fastest-growing seems very vague, without some clarification of terminology. Fastest growing from when to now? Does one measure the increase in number of users, installations, processors it is running on, market share percentage, sales, or what? Or could "growing" imply growing in maturity and feature set rather than in proliferation of users? Growth could even denote the physical size of the distribution in bytes (how many discs is Debian these days?) One could make a case for just about any distribution, just through the right interpretation of such an ambiguous question.