Those running Iran are not nationalists, they are internationalists. They have repeatedly expressed a desire to create an Islamic caliphate that encompasses the whole world.
Source please. I think you're confusing Iran's leadership with that of al Qaeda.
I am unaware of a significant number of Christians in the U.S. who believe that it is their religious duty to conquer the world.
Well, right, they're a minority. But that number is not zero, see e.g. George Grant:
"Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ -- to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness. But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice. It is dominion we are after. Not just influence. It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time. It is dominion we are after. World conquest. That's what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish.
(source), my bolding. In context he might mean non-violent conquest, but I think there's cause for concern.
If it comes from Ahmadinejad, it's saber-rattling propaganda. He's a nutjob, but he's a nutjob who (1) lacks substantial popular support (it's pretty clear that his first election was a protest-vote-gone-wrong and the recent one was stolen), and (2) doesn't actually have that much power, sort of like a mouthy Secretary of the Interior. The guy who's really in charge of everything is the Supreme Leader, Khamenei. Now, he's not terribly popular among the Church hierarchy, so he may be ousted at some point or another, but it is very unlikely he'd be replaced by someone as nutty as Ahmadinejad. To sum up, most of the radical anti-Israel statements coming out of Iran are coming from the President, not the actual authority figures. His position is not very popular, and he doesn't have much power, and basically the religious leadership is trying to get him to shut up, stop killing Iran's PR, and let the grownups do the talking instead. My only real concern is that A. might try to improve his stature domestically through some kind of war, but I think that anything of the kind would end disastrously for Iran, and deep down he probably knows it too.
Where are the Chinese middle-class masses, yearning for their freedom?
Under the paving stones in Tiananmen.
Though, actually, I think the real reason the Democratic Revolution hasn't occurred in China is that the government has been very clever about co-opting the most successful members of the rising wealthy class and granting them political power (by adopting them into the Party). I suspect what will happen is they'll wake up one day and realize that they've basically got the "democracy" of 18th-century Britain--the wealthy hold the votes and make the decisions, with only occasional disruption from the troublesome masses.
To be fair, I think it requires a fair bit of talent to strike a major blow at the international financial system in a way that still has them licking at your droppings.
Admittedly, it's not the kind of talent I'd choose, but it seems to be working out well enough for those greedy bozos...
By that logic, Israel shouldn't have its nuclear arms either. Nor China, nor India, nor Pakistan. Oh well. The problem with one side having nukes and the other not is that the unbalanced situation cries out for destruction. When both sides have nukes, neither one is willing to strike first; when only one side has them, both have a pretty strong incentive (the one to keep its advantage, the other to find a way to disarm its opponent).
Anyway, relations between Israel and other states in the region would greatly improve if Israel accepted the international consensus position on peace with Palestine. Instead everybody just seems to double down, and sooner or later someone will go broke...
Wouldn't be the first time Israel decided to go level somebody else's reactor. Israel's had that kind of belligerent no-one-else-may-acquire-parity foreign policy for at least 30 years (and probably more like since its inception). It's a major cause of instability in the region.
I suspect that the actual leaders are being perfectly rational; they're manipulating the public's fears in order to support a system in which the US and its ally have unquestioned hegemony, rather than being constrained to diplomacy by a MAD situation. Their preference is for hegemony, though the MAD standoff is probably the more stable scenario.
I appreciate the sentiment, but good luck winning the PR battle after the cops are dead. I'm not seeing corporate media reporting anything good out of that.
That's a heart-warming story, but surely you understand that the situation with your local government simply doesn't scale to larger localities, let alone state or federal level.
What works in a small town in North Carolina is completely impotent against big-city machine politics, for instance.
Incorrect. Someone who is tailgating you is not asking you anything. They are threatening your safety out of a ridiculous desire to shave fifteen seconds off their transit time, or rush an extra two hundred feet down a roadway to encounter another wall of traffic.
People without patience have no place behind the wheel of a car.
Wow. I'm surprised you have time for this slashdot claptrap. Maybe medicine doesn't have to eat your whole life after all... maybe there's time yet...
Re:Extra! Extra! Read here for the scoop!
on
Why Games Cost $60
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, except that there's been approximately zero effort put into price discovery on the part of the sellers. The market will pay $60 (apparently)... but when was the last time you saw a game priced at $70 to see if the market would pay that? What about $50 to see if it would increase sales? Are you getting the same quality play experience out of every game on the shelf? No? Then why does the market tolerate a fixed price for different-quality games?
It's not so much a question of "why is the price fixed" but "why is the price fixed at this particular point." That's the interesting part.
I voted for the president that would protect me better.
No you didn't. You voted for the president that scared you more.
If you wanted to be safe, you would have voted for the other side, which would have promoted friendlier relations with our nation's enemies, thereby reducing the level of support in those countries for people who want to hurt us, and strangling terrorism at its roots. Instead we got the folks who think that you can kill off the dandelions by blowing away the seeds...
...did you mean the demagogues? Because the pedagogues would be the schoolteachers, and last I checked nobody in this country actually took them seriously any more.
Hold on there cowboy. It's entirely possible that there are major differences between the political parties, and Obama is still selling us out.
The thing is, America has one party that's further right than the Spanish Inquisition, and another that in any other country would be a center-right, Christian-Democrat kind of party. Neither of these parties is particularly committed to either civil liberties or promoting the public welfare. Obviously if McCain were Prez, the world would be a much worse place (I picture decapitated kitten corpses falling from an unyielding smog-choked sky), but the party of Obama doesn't generally oppose increasingly centralized enforcement powers for government. To me that's a perversion of the real purpose of government, but what can you do...
You can't expect any company to have a moral compass. They're legally obliged not to.
ftfy. So long as the good of the Shareholders has to be held above the good of the society, all companies have a profoundly malformed incentive towards socially destructive behavior.
Government doesn't oppress people; people oppress people.
The underlying attitude/system of values that created the war on drugs is puritanical abstemiousness, a kind of horror at the thought that someone, somewhere, might be having fun instead of working hard and fearing God. Many in the last fifty years would substitute "communism" for Cod in that phrase, but the implication is the sameâ"in order to be socially valuable, you have to be productive, serious, focused. It's a set of attitudes which have deeply scarred American workplace culture, in addition to society more generally (why do you think all the "serious" and "important" books have to be bone-dry modern realism, with sci-fi shunted off to the literary ghetto?)
There are some problems for which government is the right answer, and general opposition to government can be very harmful. Environmental regulation (when done honestly); reducing systemic risk by establishing old-age pensions, national health care, fire departments; planning and construction of infrastructure projects (when we can keep the money interests out of those things) -- these are all excellent jobs for government and there really isn't a private industry or individual equivalent that could replace the governmental role. Where you run into problems is not with big government, but government that is used to oppress people by interfering with their private lives and decision-making. Big government is fine when government's a bridge; it's a problem when government's a gun. This is a perversion both of (some of) the Founders' intent (to protect civil liberties -- well, not that Hamilton guy so much) and of the real mission of collective governance in the interests of the governed.
OS X also gets bashed for being a terrible UI... by people who are used to Windows.
The real answer here is that different people are different. So the right thing to do is to provide options. (Other than "Install the other guy's software instead.")
large menu hierarchies like those found in Office 2003 may end up as cumbersome and hard to find what you're looking for.
I would argue that this is a fundamental usability problem associated with Office 2003 trying to do too many different things. Excel has a decent purpose-built set of functionality, but I don't know why in God's name they couldn't just give me a *real layout program* instead of trying to jam those features onto Word... using Word for the production of intelligent text with basic styling, and then arranging the text pieces with a separate program, would be VASTLY more intuitive and eliminate about 50% of Word's menu cruft (from a quick look at my ribbon).
Purpose-built tools are always more intuitive than Swiss Army Knives.
There is no such thing as an inalienable right -- such a thing has no objective existence.
A (legal) right is an action which the government is legally unable to prohibit you from taking. It has a specific, grounded, legal reality. "Inalienable rights" are alienated all the time (how inalienable is your right to free speech in Iran, or to own weapons in Britain?) What the statement "there is an inalienable right to freedom of speech" really means, is "I think all people everywhere should have a legal right to freedom of expression." I agree with you, of course, but I acknowledge that my opinion doesn't reflect an part of objective reality. It's a desire or goal. As a result, naturally, the scope of those "inalienable rights" varies from person to person. For instance, I believe in an "inalienable right" (i.e., I believe everyone should have the legal right) to marry anyone and everyone one chooses, as long as all parties involved are competent to consent and actually do consent. Many people in America would not acknowledge an inalienable right to gay marriage or polygamy. That disagreement isn't a disagreement about the nature of reality that can be solved by pointing to some objective evidence; it's an opinion.
If "inalienable rights" were an objective property of the universe, it would not be possible to have culturally specific, substantially divergent views of what they are.
Slashdot Mirror
Those running Iran are not nationalists, they are internationalists. They have repeatedly expressed a desire to create an Islamic caliphate that encompasses the whole world.
Source please. I think you're confusing Iran's leadership with that of al Qaeda.
I am unaware of a significant number of Christians in the U.S. who believe that it is their religious duty to conquer the world.
Well, right, they're a minority. But that number is not zero, see e.g. George Grant:
"Christians have an obligation, a mandate, a commission, a holy responsibility to reclaim the land for Jesus Christ -- to have dominion in civil structures, just as in every other aspect of life and godliness. But it is dominion we are after. Not just a voice. It is dominion we are after. Not just influence. It is dominion we are after. Not just equal time. It is dominion we are after. World conquest. That's what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish.
(source), my bolding.
In context he might mean non-violent conquest, but I think there's cause for concern.
If it comes from Ahmadinejad, it's saber-rattling propaganda. He's a nutjob, but he's a nutjob who (1) lacks substantial popular support (it's pretty clear that his first election was a protest-vote-gone-wrong and the recent one was stolen), and (2) doesn't actually have that much power, sort of like a mouthy Secretary of the Interior.
The guy who's really in charge of everything is the Supreme Leader, Khamenei. Now, he's not terribly popular among the Church hierarchy, so he may be ousted at some point or another, but it is very unlikely he'd be replaced by someone as nutty as Ahmadinejad.
To sum up, most of the radical anti-Israel statements coming out of Iran are coming from the President, not the actual authority figures. His position is not very popular, and he doesn't have much power, and basically the religious leadership is trying to get him to shut up, stop killing Iran's PR, and let the grownups do the talking instead. My only real concern is that A. might try to improve his stature domestically through some kind of war, but I think that anything of the kind would end disastrously for Iran, and deep down he probably knows it too.
So what you're saying is --
If sudo did not exist, it would be necessary to invent it.
Where are the Chinese middle-class masses, yearning for their freedom?
Under the paving stones in Tiananmen.
Though, actually, I think the real reason the Democratic Revolution hasn't occurred in China is that the government has been very clever about co-opting the most successful members of the rising wealthy class and granting them political power (by adopting them into the Party). I suspect what will happen is they'll wake up one day and realize that they've basically got the "democracy" of 18th-century Britain--the wealthy hold the votes and make the decisions, with only occasional disruption from the troublesome masses.
To be fair, I think it requires a fair bit of talent to strike a major blow at the international financial system in a way that still has them licking at your droppings.
Admittedly, it's not the kind of talent I'd choose, but it seems to be working out well enough for those greedy bozos...
By that logic, Israel shouldn't have its nuclear arms either. Nor China, nor India, nor Pakistan.
Oh well.
The problem with one side having nukes and the other not is that the unbalanced situation cries out for destruction. When both sides have nukes, neither one is willing to strike first; when only one side has them, both have a pretty strong incentive (the one to keep its advantage, the other to find a way to disarm its opponent).
Anyway, relations between Israel and other states in the region would greatly improve if Israel accepted the international consensus position on peace with Palestine. Instead everybody just seems to double down, and sooner or later someone will go broke...
Wouldn't be the first time Israel decided to go level somebody else's reactor. Israel's had that kind of belligerent no-one-else-may-acquire-parity foreign policy for at least 30 years (and probably more like since its inception). It's a major cause of instability in the region.
I suspect that the actual leaders are being perfectly rational; they're manipulating the public's fears in order to support a system in which the US and its ally have unquestioned hegemony, rather than being constrained to diplomacy by a MAD situation. Their preference is for hegemony, though the MAD standoff is probably the more stable scenario.
I appreciate the sentiment, but good luck winning the PR battle after the cops are dead. I'm not seeing corporate media reporting anything good out of that.
That's a heart-warming story, but surely you understand that the situation with your local government simply doesn't scale to larger localities, let alone state or federal level.
What works in a small town in North Carolina is completely impotent against big-city machine politics, for instance.
Incorrect. Someone who is tailgating you is not asking you anything. They are threatening your safety out of a ridiculous desire to shave fifteen seconds off their transit time, or rush an extra two hundred feet down a roadway to encounter another wall of traffic.
People without patience have no place behind the wheel of a car.
Wow. I'm surprised you have time for this slashdot claptrap. Maybe medicine doesn't have to eat your whole life after all... maybe there's time yet...
Yeah, except that there's been approximately zero effort put into price discovery on the part of the sellers. The market will pay $60 (apparently)... but when was the last time you saw a game priced at $70 to see if the market would pay that? What about $50 to see if it would increase sales? Are you getting the same quality play experience out of every game on the shelf? No? Then why does the market tolerate a fixed price for different-quality games?
It's not so much a question of "why is the price fixed" but "why is the price fixed at this particular point." That's the interesting part.
I thought they were just checking if they were still there.
I believe you mean "hire THEN high."
Honestly, the level of discourse on the Internet these days...
Yeah, I know mornings like that... oh well, looks like the mods liked what you had to say anyway!
I voted for the president that would protect me better.
No you didn't. You voted for the president that scared you more.
If you wanted to be safe, you would have voted for the other side, which would have promoted friendlier relations with our nation's enemies, thereby reducing the level of support in those countries for people who want to hurt us, and strangling terrorism at its roots. Instead we got the folks who think that you can kill off the dandelions by blowing away the seeds...
...did you mean the demagogues? Because the pedagogues would be the schoolteachers, and last I checked nobody in this country actually took them seriously any more.
Hold on there cowboy. It's entirely possible that there are major differences between the political parties, and Obama is still selling us out.
The thing is, America has one party that's further right than the Spanish Inquisition, and another that in any other country would be a center-right, Christian-Democrat kind of party. Neither of these parties is particularly committed to either civil liberties or promoting the public welfare. Obviously if McCain were Prez, the world would be a much worse place (I picture decapitated kitten corpses falling from an unyielding smog-choked sky), but the party of Obama doesn't generally oppose increasingly centralized enforcement powers for government. To me that's a perversion of the real purpose of government, but what can you do...
Sadly, not every enemy of my enemy is my friend.
You can't expect any company to have a moral compass. They're legally obliged not to.
ftfy.
So long as the good of the Shareholders has to be held above the good of the society, all companies have a profoundly malformed incentive towards socially destructive behavior.
Government doesn't oppress people; people oppress people.
The underlying attitude/system of values that created the war on drugs is puritanical abstemiousness, a kind of horror at the thought that someone, somewhere, might be having fun instead of working hard and fearing God. Many in the last fifty years would substitute "communism" for Cod in that phrase, but the implication is the sameâ"in order to be socially valuable, you have to be productive, serious, focused. It's a set of attitudes which have deeply scarred American workplace culture, in addition to society more generally (why do you think all the "serious" and "important" books have to be bone-dry modern realism, with sci-fi shunted off to the literary ghetto?)
There are some problems for which government is the right answer, and general opposition to government can be very harmful. Environmental regulation (when done honestly); reducing systemic risk by establishing old-age pensions, national health care, fire departments; planning and construction of infrastructure projects (when we can keep the money interests out of those things) -- these are all excellent jobs for government and there really isn't a private industry or individual equivalent that could replace the governmental role. Where you run into problems is not with big government, but government that is used to oppress people by interfering with their private lives and decision-making. Big government is fine when government's a bridge; it's a problem when government's a gun. This is a perversion both of (some of) the Founders' intent (to protect civil liberties -- well, not that Hamilton guy so much) and of the real mission of collective governance in the interests of the governed.
It takes my Debian system about 16 seconds to get to a login (well, it would if I weren't also starting up a web server and database server).
But why on earth would you start the X server before you get a login prompt?
You forgot the vasectomy.
OS X also gets bashed for being a terrible UI... by people who are used to Windows.
The real answer here is that different people are different. So the right thing to do is to provide options.
(Other than "Install the other guy's software instead.")
large menu hierarchies like those found in Office 2003 may end up as cumbersome and hard to find what you're looking for.
I would argue that this is a fundamental usability problem associated with Office 2003 trying to do too many different things. Excel has a decent purpose-built set of functionality, but I don't know why in God's name they couldn't just give me a *real layout program* instead of trying to jam those features onto Word... using Word for the production of intelligent text with basic styling, and then arranging the text pieces with a separate program, would be VASTLY more intuitive and eliminate about 50% of Word's menu cruft (from a quick look at my ribbon).
Purpose-built tools are always more intuitive than Swiss Army Knives.
Free Speech is an inalienable right
There is no such thing as an inalienable right -- such a thing has no objective existence.
A (legal) right is an action which the government is legally unable to prohibit you from taking. It has a specific, grounded, legal reality.
"Inalienable rights" are alienated all the time (how inalienable is your right to free speech in Iran, or to own weapons in Britain?) What the statement "there is an inalienable right to freedom of speech" really means, is "I think all people everywhere should have a legal right to freedom of expression." I agree with you, of course, but I acknowledge that my opinion doesn't reflect an part of objective reality. It's a desire or goal.
As a result, naturally, the scope of those "inalienable rights" varies from person to person. For instance, I believe in an "inalienable right" (i.e., I believe everyone should have the legal right) to marry anyone and everyone one chooses, as long as all parties involved are competent to consent and actually do consent. Many people in America would not acknowledge an inalienable right to gay marriage or polygamy. That disagreement isn't a disagreement about the nature of reality that can be solved by pointing to some objective evidence; it's an opinion.
If "inalienable rights" were an objective property of the universe, it would not be possible to have culturally specific, substantially divergent views of what they are.