okay, i'll write more because/. wants me to wait 2 mins before submitting. That kurzweil article really annoyed me, so i felt compelled to respond.
But the fact that he's not the segway inventor doesn't change my opinion on the article (I do respect his contributions to digital waveform synthesis). anyway, see my response to Saeger's response of my response for more info.
1) Dean Kamen's the Segway guy; not Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil's more known for bringing speech recognition to the market.
aah shit, i'm mixing up my inventors again... I play keyboards, so that's where my interest in Kurzweil stems from.
Anyway, see my reply to the parent of your post, that's kind of why i replied to your post in the first place.
Regarding 'the singularity', it's not the concept about it that i'm arguing against, but the way it's presented in Kurzweil's article. [in my opinion, based on my studies of both real and theoretical physical systems, I'd call it more of an nth-order phase transition than a singularity, where n would most likely be 1 or 2] And, fwiw, in high-energy physics circles (i'm condensed matter, not high energy, so I'm out of the circle, but i hear this from my friends) Michio Kaku is regarded as somewhat of a flake. Sure he's got a textbook on Quantum Field Theory, but it's chock full of errors. He's much more reknowned in the general scientific community for his popular science writings.
Anyway, I didn't mean to be so down on you in your post, it was more in response to kurzweil's article.:-)
And also, fyi, during my undergrad years I double-majored in physics and philosophy. And for the plethora of the philosophical BS (IMHO) like kurzweil's article, that's why I'm now much more interested in the hard science and increasingly less so in the philosophical aspects.
Not to mention lawsuits by stockholders for a particularly blunderous decision.
Eventually, very successfully public companies have to think more about their stockholders than their customers. In fact, they're legally obligated to their stockholders. This is why many big companies effectively 'sell out'.
Not having shareholders is awesome (at least from my point of view). You can do cool and interesting things that you want to do, and not have to constantly worry about making the decisions that will maximally increase the stock price.
That's great. Your argument is based off of a single article written 3 years ago by the guy who created the 'Segway'. That article was so pretentious and ridiculous, many of the plots are not well-defined, he constantly refers to 'rate of paradigm shift' and 'THE singularity', etc.
And then from this article you imply that world-destroying self-assembling nanobots are almost here (even though flying cars are not) because Ray Kurzweil claims technology grows exponentially.
Anyway, his article is too simplistic, he extrapolates from neolithic times into the future too readily, and assumes this so-called Singularity is at hand, without assuming any realisitic limits for rate of technological progress or other possible limits. His extrapolations are about as valid as saying I can keep dividing a block of wood in half and in half, until I get to pieces that are attometers in length. Of course individual atoms are manifested at the angstrom level, so that's an example of a limit where extrapolation breaks down.
That article was one of the worst POS I've seen, and it's a shame because I really do respect Kurzweil's other inventive contributions to society.
Re:Nanotech does NOT mean just nanobots
on
Nanotech or Nano-Not?
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Nanotechnology now means any process for determining structure or composition at a molecular scale.
From a condensed-matter physics grad student who's researching some aspects of 'nanotechnology' - Thank You!!!
It's ridiculous, how so many people on/. think of nanotechnology as nothing less than self-assembling nano-robots. This association is utterly naive, and is no more realistic than the standard 'Hollywoodification' of computer technology used in movies (eg, Hackers).
Sure, nanotechnology is a buzzword, and people in the field prefer to refer to it as research at the nanoscale, or self-assembling nanosctructures, etc. Just like spintronics is usually called magnetoelectronics by the researchers amongst themselves, and spintronics in the popular science media.
Basically, nanotechnology deals with anything at nanometer scale, which is in the realms of molecules. I'm studying carbon nanotubes, and superconducting nanowires of about the same size. I guess it's boring from a slashdot perspective because there's no robotics or selective biological processes going on. But for us physicists there's tons of interesting processes happening here. The systems really behave as one-dimensional (large superconducting wires would be three-dimensional), the standard statiscial-mechnanics starts to break down because of small system size, and there's other interesting quantum effects that manifest themselves. These factors make things act really weird and/or cool, and there's alot to discover. [If anybody thinks this research is pointless, concepts like GMR, which is now implemented in all new hard disk read heads, started the same way.]
Other nanotech researchers are looking at DNA (another guy in my lab is studying conductivity of various DNA systems). DNA is interesting because it can assemble itself, and some groups have made interesting self-assembling structures.
But this is nothing at all like the grey-goo concepts that are ever so popular and cliche here at slashdot. Every time 'nanotech' is mentioned on/. there's immediate posts about grey-goo and bio-enhancement nanites, yada yada yada. I'm actually relieved to hear of at least one other person here that gets past the hollywoodification of it all.
Yeah, I remember a few years ago my friend telling me about some special plants that have a high affinity for lead. These are planted at sites w/ possible lead contamination, and eventually the plants are harvested and smelted down to obtain the lead metal.
This was about 5 years ago, and she said this process has already been in use at that time.
What about flipbooks? You know, a 'pad' of pictures where you flip through it, controlling the flipping speed with your thumb. You get about a 2 second movie this way. I remember having some Disney ones when I was little.
In the Broadway Play 'Ragtime', they talk about an immigrant that invented such flipbooks (eventually making his fortune), but I don't know the year or how true to history the play was.
I've been using Kapton tape for years in electronics in the lab. It's a great insulator, and coming on a roll of tape with adhesive it's really easy to use.
And recently I've been using it in my cryogenic experiments. In the dilution fridge in my lab we can get to temperatures as low as 20 mK. Kapton tape is stable at these low temps, and provides a good way to ensure insulation between two conductors while still being 'removable'.
because YOU can feed the grid, and the power company (usually) has to credit you.
Yes, this is the best of both worlds. If there is enough current (water) flow, then you can power your house, and possibly even make some $$$ selling back to the electric company. Over time this could offset the cost of the generators etc.
Additionally, being on the grid will still let you get power from the grid if the water flow is too low or your turbine breaks, etc.
I don't think, unless you have strong political opinions, going off the grid entirely is a good move. You should definitely stay on as a power backup, and maybe even sell some power back.
On the other hand, does anyone know the legalities of extracing hydro power from a river? Specifically, I'd imagine the turbines and other things have to be on the user's specific property. So who owns 'the river'? I'd imagine all kinds of crazy protocols to do any construction there, to make sure boats don't get caught in anything, etc.
I've used IDL before, and I'd avoid doing any very intensive calculation on it (unless it was 'linkimage'd to an external C routine). Some of the specific IDL calculation routines are optimized (FFT for one), and i've FFT'd 64k arrays of floats, but that's about the limit.
Anyway, since you use IDL on a Beowulf I'm assuming they finally added multithreading. That's good, when I used it before my PhD (I'm doing condensed matter physics now, but used IDL at my research job prior to this) there was no multithreading in IDL, which was kind of annoying at the time.
IDL is good at visualization, and the interactive mode is really nice, but I would avoid using it directly for actual intensive calculations. But if you have alot of code written already, check out the external development guide, it's not that hard to link to external C programs. I did that to call low-level hardware IO routines, and run the high-level data-acquisition code from IDL w/ GUI and the niceness of IDL's display routines.
When my child is only 6 or 7 years old I don't want them saying things like "ass", "Shit", "damn".
Then if that bothers you, you shouldn't be taking your kids to a PG-13 (or even PG movie) in the first place.
But I do agree with you 100%. Regarding your kids cursing, that's why you should scold/punish them if they do curse. I knew about all those words, but if my parents ever heard me say a bad word then I got in big trouble.
Off-topic funny story. At some point when we were little my father got the brilliant idea that once every months he'd give us a small time (like 30 seconds) to say bad words to get it out of our system. I went first, and said stuff like "ass, damn, shit", etc. Then my brother went, he said "fuck pussy cunt" at which point my Mom intervened screaming "Enough, Enough!!" That ended my father's idea.
So you see, we all knew these words but knew enough manners (or fear of punishment) not to say them in front of parents, teachers, etc.
Now the question comes from what makes a PG movie PG. I remember HBO used to mention the factors like "profanity, violence, nudity" when listing movies. IIRC, the movie ET, which is phenomenal, was rated PG because of one line - when Eliot calls his brother 'penisbreath'.
So it's not all cut-and-dry. But if your goal is to shield your kid from violence, profanity, and nudity, then they should only be watching G movies, and maybe some PG movies.
But you might be surprised how many PG and PG-13 movies have language that many parents don't want their children to hear
Come on, there's nothing in a PG or PG-13 movie that a kid won't hear that he/she wouldn't hear in school.
The rating system is a rough guide so parents have some kind of understanding of what sort of movie their kid will be seeing. If there's something a parent doesn't want their 5 or 10 year-old to see, then this gives a rough idea of what to expect. Otherwise they'd have to screen the entire movie first to make sure they want their kids watching it.
that's because a normal land line plays part of your voice back into the receiver, so you can 'hear yourself', kind of like a musician's monitor at a show. Ie, try blowing into a normal phone, you'll hear it in the receiver.
Cell phones don't do this (i'm not sure why). So users typically overcompensate and speak much much louder.
The electron orbitals are much larger than the nucleous of an atom.
What you are describing are bound electrons (ie, in a Coulomb potential).
Electrons in a beam are free electrons, and would have an effective size limited by the uncertainty principle. So slower electrons would have an effectively higher beam width than fast electrons.
Actually, you can estimate the size of atomic electron orbitals using the uncertainty principle too. Back of the envelope calculation can get you the Bohr radius within a factor of 2 or so.
Your idea is interesting, but not as easily implemented as you make it seem, IMHO.
For example, IIRC, there's a section on the tax forms that legally blind people don't have to pay any taxes. Would you mandate, then, that legally blind people carry ID cards making them exempt from the sales tax? Would this get abused by their friends having them buy the expensive items to save the tax money?
Also, there's different tax rates for varying children. A family w/ no kids pays more tax than a family w/ 2 kids.
Also, there's alot of random programs for tax breaks. For example, my girlfriend and I just bought a house, and it's designated 'historical'. So in some cases, home improvements we do can be discounted (through taxes). This would be difficult for the plumbers and roofers to have to maintain in your system.
Another program is for students (I'm a graduate student now so I know about this). If a student spends up to $5000 on tuition, they are entitled to tax relief on that. How would this get effectively reduced for some students but not others, etc? (ie, if parents vs students paid)
Your plan would, though, easily allow charity donations to be tax-free, as no effective sales tax would be charged on the donation. That would cut down alot of overhead and also cheating.
The FDIC is of limited use as well. If you screw up your finances, you could still lose tons of money (FDIC only covers up to $100,000), but if the economy really tanked and all banks went belly-up, it has been estimated that FDIC would cover seven cents on the dollar (no source to cite that, I received it from a friend who was subscribed to an e-mail list).
I always thought the whole FDIC thing was in effect basically to create some sort of 'trust' in the bank. Ie, if your bank gets robbed your money is still safe. I don't know the history of this, but I bet that in the old days when banks were robbed, people could lose their savings and be SOL.
I never imagined FDIC covering ALL banks simultaneously. It something major caused all banks to go bellyup at once then I'd imagine we'd have much worse problems going on in our country than losing 93% of our savings.
Actually, what Americans should be thinking about is 2004, not 2008. Whether we want another 4 years of Bush or not. I didn't vote for him in 2000, and I'm definitely not in 2004.
How is that served by fingerprinting and photographing ?
Because fingerprinting is much much harder to spoof than faking a passport.
It won't do much against 9/11 stuff, but it will let the country know much better who's passing through it's borders (well, legally at least). Does a country have a right to know who goes through it's borders? Forget 9/11, just answer that question.
However, let's also think about this: name 1 person who has committed a terrorist act in this country who entered it illegally (not who was here illegally, but who enter here illegally.)
But the real question is this : does a country have the right to really know who enters its' borders?
Forget the whole terrorist thing for a minute. Fingerprinting is basically a much-harder-to-spoof passport. I'm not specifically advocating it, but I haven't heard of any actual reasons of why this is really such a bad thing?
What horrible things can be done with your fingerprints? What are the major concerns?
Is there fear of faking the fingerprints somehow to frame someone for a crime? If the government would go through this much effort then they'd find other ways to frame a person without the fingerprints.
But back to the borders. It's possible someone has a fake passport for some reason or another. Does a country have a right to get a way to identify this person passing through it's borders?
However in the longer term I imagine that a lot of people, myself included, will think again before getting involved in projects requiring travel to the US.
Why, because of a photo and a fingerprint?
I'm opening myself up to major flamage here, but really what is so bad about a fingerprint? It's not like a bank account number, where bad things can happen to you if it's abused. What will a country do with your fingerprints that can be bad? really? I don't really get it.
In my view this is basically a spoof-proof passport (well, much harder to spoof, at least).
This begs a question, though. Does a country have the right to know exactly who enters it's borders? Ie, does someone have the right to fake a passport to enter another country?
The next logical step of course, is to photograph and fingerprint all of us (citizens). Then we can have checkpoints everywhere to go through. And cameras, lots of cameras.
Do you have a driver's license? Were you fingerprinted when you were little (I was).
Anyway, you can make your same suppositions that they'll make checkpoints and cameras with the fact that we have passports, state ID's, social security numbers, etc.
no, roughly half the American voters. Remember, Gore got about 1/2% more votes than Bush, and to rough order you could say half the voters opted for Bush and the other half for Gore. But Bush won due to the electoral college system (ie, a person from Wyoming effectively has roughly 3x the voting power than someone from California).
There were actually several decent people nominated recently in the Democrat party, for example Kucinich. But he didn't make enough headway in the primaries and caucuses to be the final candidate.
In a way, it's already working, because the Americans are swallowing it hook, line, and sinker, and they're probably going to re-elect the guy responsable for the whole thing.
Please don't lump all Americans into one basket, I'd call that racist, but it's not an issue of race but of country.
Remember - half of the US voters voted for Gore. Actually, more than half. Off topic -
Best bumper sticker I saw after the 2000 election - "Re-elect Gore in 2004!" (And no, I didn't and won't vote for Bush).
Anyway, seriously, we are not all the same. We're really not this brainwashed mass that you make us out to be. Yeah, Fox News totally bites and some US TV programs aim for the lowest common intellectual denominator. Yeah, there's crappy stuff about any country's culture.
But extrapolating some things to the general populace is just as ridiculous and dangerous as claiming all Jews are cheap or all Arabs are terrorists.
Slashdot Mirror
I did no such thing. Please reread my post.
okay, i'll write more because /. wants me to wait 2 mins before submitting. That kurzweil article really annoyed me, so i felt compelled to respond.
But the fact that he's not the segway inventor doesn't change my opinion on the article (I do respect his contributions to digital waveform synthesis). anyway, see my response to Saeger's response of my response for more info.
aah shit, i'm mixing up my inventors again... I play keyboards, so that's where my interest in Kurzweil stems from.
Anyway, see my reply to the parent of your post, that's kind of why i replied to your post in the first place.
Regarding 'the singularity', it's not the concept about it that i'm arguing against, but the way it's presented in Kurzweil's article. [in my opinion, based on my studies of both real and theoretical physical systems, I'd call it more of an nth-order phase transition than a singularity, where n would most likely be 1 or 2] And, fwiw, in high-energy physics circles (i'm condensed matter, not high energy, so I'm out of the circle, but i hear this from my friends) Michio Kaku is regarded as somewhat of a flake. Sure he's got a textbook on Quantum Field Theory, but it's chock full of errors. He's much more reknowned in the general scientific community for his popular science writings.
Anyway, I didn't mean to be so down on you in your post, it was more in response to kurzweil's article. :-)
And also, fyi, during my undergrad years I double-majored in physics and philosophy. And for the plethora of the philosophical BS (IMHO) like kurzweil's article, that's why I'm now much more interested in the hard science and increasingly less so in the philosophical aspects.
Eventually, very successfully public companies have to think more about their stockholders than their customers. In fact, they're legally obligated to their stockholders. This is why many big companies effectively 'sell out'.
Not having shareholders is awesome (at least from my point of view). You can do cool and interesting things that you want to do, and not have to constantly worry about making the decisions that will maximally increase the stock price.
And then from this article you imply that world-destroying self-assembling nanobots are almost here (even though flying cars are not) because Ray Kurzweil claims technology grows exponentially.
Anyway, his article is too simplistic, he extrapolates from neolithic times into the future too readily, and assumes this so-called Singularity is at hand, without assuming any realisitic limits for rate of technological progress or other possible limits. His extrapolations are about as valid as saying I can keep dividing a block of wood in half and in half, until I get to pieces that are attometers in length. Of course individual atoms are manifested at the angstrom level, so that's an example of a limit where extrapolation breaks down.
That article was one of the worst POS I've seen, and it's a shame because I really do respect Kurzweil's other inventive contributions to society.
From a condensed-matter physics grad student who's researching some aspects of 'nanotechnology' - Thank You!!!
It's ridiculous, how so many people on /. think of nanotechnology as nothing less than self-assembling nano-robots. This association is utterly naive, and is no more realistic than the standard 'Hollywoodification' of computer technology used in movies (eg, Hackers).
Sure, nanotechnology is a buzzword, and people in the field prefer to refer to it as research at the nanoscale, or self-assembling nanosctructures, etc. Just like spintronics is usually called magnetoelectronics by the researchers amongst themselves, and spintronics in the popular science media.
Basically, nanotechnology deals with anything at nanometer scale, which is in the realms of molecules. I'm studying carbon nanotubes, and superconducting nanowires of about the same size. I guess it's boring from a slashdot perspective because there's no robotics or selective biological processes going on. But for us physicists there's tons of interesting processes happening here. The systems really behave as one-dimensional (large superconducting wires would be three-dimensional), the standard statiscial-mechnanics starts to break down because of small system size, and there's other interesting quantum effects that manifest themselves. These factors make things act really weird and/or cool, and there's alot to discover. [If anybody thinks this research is pointless, concepts like GMR, which is now implemented in all new hard disk read heads, started the same way.]
Other nanotech researchers are looking at DNA (another guy in my lab is studying conductivity of various DNA systems). DNA is interesting because it can assemble itself, and some groups have made interesting self-assembling structures.
But this is nothing at all like the grey-goo concepts that are ever so popular and cliche here at slashdot. Every time 'nanotech' is mentioned on /. there's immediate posts about grey-goo and bio-enhancement nanites, yada yada yada. I'm actually relieved to hear of at least one other person here that gets past the hollywoodification of it all.
This was about 5 years ago, and she said this process has already been in use at that time.
In the Broadway Play 'Ragtime', they talk about an immigrant that invented such flipbooks (eventually making his fortune), but I don't know the year or how true to history the play was.
And recently I've been using it in my cryogenic experiments. In the dilution fridge in my lab we can get to temperatures as low as 20 mK. Kapton tape is stable at these low temps, and provides a good way to ensure insulation between two conductors while still being 'removable'.
Yes, this is the best of both worlds. If there is enough current (water) flow, then you can power your house, and possibly even make some $$$ selling back to the electric company. Over time this could offset the cost of the generators etc.
Additionally, being on the grid will still let you get power from the grid if the water flow is too low or your turbine breaks, etc.
I don't think, unless you have strong political opinions, going off the grid entirely is a good move. You should definitely stay on as a power backup, and maybe even sell some power back.
On the other hand, does anyone know the legalities of extracing hydro power from a river? Specifically, I'd imagine the turbines and other things have to be on the user's specific property. So who owns 'the river'? I'd imagine all kinds of crazy protocols to do any construction there, to make sure boats don't get caught in anything, etc.
Anyway, since you use IDL on a Beowulf I'm assuming they finally added multithreading. That's good, when I used it before my PhD (I'm doing condensed matter physics now, but used IDL at my research job prior to this) there was no multithreading in IDL, which was kind of annoying at the time.
IDL is good at visualization, and the interactive mode is really nice, but I would avoid using it directly for actual intensive calculations. But if you have alot of code written already, check out the external development guide, it's not that hard to link to external C programs. I did that to call low-level hardware IO routines, and run the high-level data-acquisition code from IDL w/ GUI and the niceness of IDL's display routines.
Then if that bothers you, you shouldn't be taking your kids to a PG-13 (or even PG movie) in the first place.
But I do agree with you 100%. Regarding your kids cursing, that's why you should scold/punish them if they do curse. I knew about all those words, but if my parents ever heard me say a bad word then I got in big trouble.
Off-topic funny story. At some point when we were little my father got the brilliant idea that once every months he'd give us a small time (like 30 seconds) to say bad words to get it out of our system. I went first, and said stuff like "ass, damn, shit", etc. Then my brother went, he said "fuck pussy cunt" at which point my Mom intervened screaming "Enough, Enough!!" That ended my father's idea.
So you see, we all knew these words but knew enough manners (or fear of punishment) not to say them in front of parents, teachers, etc.
Now the question comes from what makes a PG movie PG. I remember HBO used to mention the factors like "profanity, violence, nudity" when listing movies. IIRC, the movie ET, which is phenomenal, was rated PG because of one line - when Eliot calls his brother 'penisbreath'.
So it's not all cut-and-dry. But if your goal is to shield your kid from violence, profanity, and nudity, then they should only be watching G movies, and maybe some PG movies.
Come on, there's nothing in a PG or PG-13 movie that a kid won't hear that he/she wouldn't hear in school.
The rating system is a rough guide so parents have some kind of understanding of what sort of movie their kid will be seeing. If there's something a parent doesn't want their 5 or 10 year-old to see, then this gives a rough idea of what to expect. Otherwise they'd have to screen the entire movie first to make sure they want their kids watching it.
Cell phones don't do this (i'm not sure why). So users typically overcompensate and speak much much louder.
What you are describing are bound electrons (ie, in a Coulomb potential).
Electrons in a beam are free electrons, and would have an effective size limited by the uncertainty principle. So slower electrons would have an effectively higher beam width than fast electrons.
Actually, you can estimate the size of atomic electron orbitals using the uncertainty principle too. Back of the envelope calculation can get you the Bohr radius within a factor of 2 or so.
For example, IIRC, there's a section on the tax forms that legally blind people don't have to pay any taxes. Would you mandate, then, that legally blind people carry ID cards making them exempt from the sales tax? Would this get abused by their friends having them buy the expensive items to save the tax money?
Also, there's different tax rates for varying children. A family w/ no kids pays more tax than a family w/ 2 kids.
Also, there's alot of random programs for tax breaks. For example, my girlfriend and I just bought a house, and it's designated 'historical'. So in some cases, home improvements we do can be discounted (through taxes). This would be difficult for the plumbers and roofers to have to maintain in your system.
Another program is for students (I'm a graduate student now so I know about this). If a student spends up to $5000 on tuition, they are entitled to tax relief on that. How would this get effectively reduced for some students but not others, etc? (ie, if parents vs students paid)
Your plan would, though, easily allow charity donations to be tax-free, as no effective sales tax would be charged on the donation. That would cut down alot of overhead and also cheating.
I always thought the whole FDIC thing was in effect basically to create some sort of 'trust' in the bank. Ie, if your bank gets robbed your money is still safe. I don't know the history of this, but I bet that in the old days when banks were robbed, people could lose their savings and be SOL.
I never imagined FDIC covering ALL banks simultaneously. It something major caused all banks to go bellyup at once then I'd imagine we'd have much worse problems going on in our country than losing 93% of our savings.
Actually, what Americans should be thinking about is 2004, not 2008. Whether we want another 4 years of Bush or not. I didn't vote for him in 2000, and I'm definitely not in 2004.
In that case you should be just as against issuing social security cards, drivers licenses, passports, etc.
Because fingerprinting is much much harder to spoof than faking a passport.
It won't do much against 9/11 stuff, but it will let the country know much better who's passing through it's borders (well, legally at least). Does a country have a right to know who goes through it's borders? Forget 9/11, just answer that question.
But the real question is this : does a country have the right to really know who enters its' borders?
Forget the whole terrorist thing for a minute. Fingerprinting is basically a much-harder-to-spoof passport. I'm not specifically advocating it, but I haven't heard of any actual reasons of why this is really such a bad thing? What horrible things can be done with your fingerprints? What are the major concerns?
Is there fear of faking the fingerprints somehow to frame someone for a crime? If the government would go through this much effort then they'd find other ways to frame a person without the fingerprints.
But back to the borders. It's possible someone has a fake passport for some reason or another. Does a country have a right to get a way to identify this person passing through it's borders?
That's the real question, IMHO.
Why, because of a photo and a fingerprint?
I'm opening myself up to major flamage here, but really what is so bad about a fingerprint? It's not like a bank account number, where bad things can happen to you if it's abused. What will a country do with your fingerprints that can be bad? really? I don't really get it.
In my view this is basically a spoof-proof passport (well, much harder to spoof, at least).
This begs a question, though. Does a country have the right to know exactly who enters it's borders? Ie, does someone have the right to fake a passport to enter another country?
Do you have a driver's license? Were you fingerprinted when you were little (I was).
Anyway, you can make your same suppositions that they'll make checkpoints and cameras with the fact that we have passports, state ID's, social security numbers, etc.
There were actually several decent people nominated recently in the Democrat party, for example Kucinich. But he didn't make enough headway in the primaries and caucuses to be the final candidate.
Please don't lump all Americans into one basket, I'd call that racist, but it's not an issue of race but of country.
Remember - half of the US voters voted for Gore. Actually, more than half. Off topic - Best bumper sticker I saw after the 2000 election - "Re-elect Gore in 2004!" (And no, I didn't and won't vote for Bush).
Anyway, seriously, we are not all the same. We're really not this brainwashed mass that you make us out to be. Yeah, Fox News totally bites and some US TV programs aim for the lowest common intellectual denominator. Yeah, there's crappy stuff about any country's culture.
But extrapolating some things to the general populace is just as ridiculous and dangerous as claiming all Jews are cheap or all Arabs are terrorists.