use the google cache. we have lots of sites blocked. u don't get any pictures from the google cache but i'm usually just looking for the text of an article anyway.
Consumers should decide what they want in their car and vote with their own hard earned cash. Who are you to make that decision?
It should not be the tv companies' fault that a driver decided to put one in his car and then crashed into someone. How about a little personal responsibility? If a driver can't handle driving and watching tv, maybe just maybe its the driver's fault and the driver should be sued. If a driver can handle it, then leave them alone. We already have laws in place to deal with people who cause accidents. Why do we want to add new laws that do the exact same thing?
Creating laws to keep out an industry like this means less jobs and a poorer standard of living. How on earth can anyone be for that? In the end, this is just yet another example of how do gooders want to impose their idea of what is best on the rest of us. You may think you are helping victims, the poor, and consumers, but the result is just the opposite: less choice and more regulation mean prices go up and there are less jobs out there. And its not the rich and the big corporations who get hurt when there are high prices and less jobs. Its the poor, the middle class, and small business that get hurt.
This is the same tired argument regardless of whether you are talking about guns, encryption, cigarettes, mcdonald's hamburgers, hammers, or boxcutters. Just about anything can be abused. Stop trying to protect us from ourselves and stay the hell out of my life.
i had no idea. none of the schools i went to ever let us read that stuff. i guess i mostly went to small suburban conservative schools... but not even in college did i see science fiction and i went to a very liberal college.
what neal doesn't address and what drives me nuts is the fact that science fiction is never taught in schools. there are many bad science fiction novels but there are many good ones as well with themes relating to racism or love or whatever you want. everything in school is either from novels that are hundreds of years old or sanitized politically correct and therefore incredibly boring modern works about tribesmen in africa. either way its difficult to get young students interested in reading with literature that they can't relate to. students should explore new things, so i'm not saying everything should be science fiction, but if we want our kids to be interested in reading, give them something they want to read!
Lowering taxes for the rich only make rich people richer. Poorer people are the ones who spend their tax credits not the rich people.
i couldn't agree more. for example, i'm a rich fsck and i never buy anything. why just yesterday i got on my lear jet (which i didn't buy, i just inherited it) and flew down to the caymen islands to deposit my enormous paycheck (which i don't deserve -- i just got really lucky one day and somehow luckily got this great job where i don't really do anything except look out my big window and occasionally fire people after outsourcing their job to a 5 year old girl in bangladesh who would be far happier if she were still at home starving and too weak to swat at the flies in her nose but is instead slaving away in my corporate air conditioned sweat shop call center). i rolled my wheelbarrow (i inherited that too) full of $100 bills up to the teller and told her to be sure and place my money under a nice king sized serta mattress and not some cheapo little air mattress from kmart or whatever store the lower classes shop at down there in the caymen's.
clue: the bank takes you're money and invests it in the market (ie other companies) and those companies take the money and either hire people or buy equipment or give it to their "benedict arnold" ceo who --guess what? puts it in the bank!
Pretty often, we're trading in some pretty nice species and habitat, say an entire continent of elm trees, for some pretty 'nothing' replacement, like a bug or a fungus.
i agree that dutch elm was terrible. it destroyed a whole industry. my point is that its not like "nature" is worse off because of it. (after all we may have lost the elm tree but we got kudzu from japan.) this kind of thing happens in nature naturally all the time.
what if the invasive species is a human parasite
are you accusing me of being speciesist? its true i am. elm trees don't have feelings. i think the contradiction lies more with you. why is it you want to save elm trees and panda bears and other "pretty" species, but want to destroy "natural" organisms like HIV and SARS? it is just natural selection. what good be more natural than that?
Bush has gotten slammed again and again for unfair trade practices, e.g. putting tariffs on steel.
bush has endorsed outsourcing. kerry has spoken out against outsourcing. much of kerry's support comes from unions. if you are against protectionist policies, you won't be voting for kerry.
well i've never heard of kudzu before and i don't live in the south. but i read your link and actually this is exactly what i'm talking about. i see kudzu vines kill trees, but there are good things that have resulted from it as well.
positive things your article mentions:
-- it has sweet smelling blossoms so people planted it because they liked it -- during the great depression the soil conservation service used kudzu for erosion control. -- people have "raised Angora goats in fields of kudzu which would otherwise be considered wasted land. The goats keep the kudzu from spreading further while producing profitable milk and wool products." -- Diane Hoots of Dahlonega, Georgia has developed a company to market her kudzu products which include kudzu blossom jelly and syrup, kudzu baskets, and books. -- Henry and Edith Edwards of Rutherfordton, North Carolina have found many uses for kudzu over the past 30 years. Henry produces over 1,000 bales of kudzu hay each year on his Kudzu Cow Farm. The hay is high in nutritive value -- Current research may lead to new medicines made from kudzu, but for now only hamsters and mice can benefit from these drugs. Research with laboratory animals at Harvard Medical School has revealed that a drug extracted from kudzu root may help in the treatment of alcoholism. The drug is based on a 2,000 year old Chinese herbal medicine.
my point is that things change. old things are destroyed and new things are brought in. maybe you don't like the new thing but maybe someone else does.
the invasive species thing environmentalists get excited about is the weird. if you don't like a bug or an animal, i don't have a problem with you trying to keep it out of an area or calling it a pest and trying to kill it. but to say that its not natural or humans are destroying the environment is just weird. horses aren't native to north america but i don't hear environmentalists complaining about them.
right because no time in the history of the planet has one species moved from one area to another. in no time in the history of the planet has one species out competed and destroyed another. change is always bad and never brings anything good. nature is entirely communist and animals and rocks live together in spirtual harmany working together for the good of the whole.
its called evolution and survival of the fittest. the only good reason to have a list like this is if these are pests messing with the economy. otherwise who cares?
frankly i could care less about reputation. i don't understand this obsession. this isn't a high school popularity contest. i just want the right thing to get done. if you want to tell me the wrong thing is being done we can argue about that, but i could care less about whether you are ashamed or not.
this attitude on slashdot that all conservatives are bible thumpers is weird. i would guess a large minority are not even religious. the far right certainly has its bible thumpers. but the far right has a lot more in common with the far left than the middle of either party.
for example: - both are protectionist (pat buchanon and ralph nader/unions) - "right-wing" nativists and "left-wing" environmentalists opposing immigration - both fear technology - both hate walmart etc.
there are certainly a lot of things i don't like about the president's record. mostly i am hoping he won't be as bad as kerry.
specifically i am hoping he won't be as protectionist as kerry and he won't grow the size of government as much as kerry. i think these things are vital to the economy and the well being of americans.
probably the 2 things he has done which i feel fairly happy about are:
1. the invasion of afghanistan. i think it needed to be done. maybe there were some bad choices made, but i don't see kerry or anyone else doing better. mostly i expect mediocre results from government, and generally i thought this response to sept 11 was pretty well done. i really like harmad karzai or however the hell you spell his name.
2. tax cuts. i saved a few hundred dollars i suppose. mostly i'm happy about the dividend tax cut. i don't have a huge amount of money in the stock market but i hopefully will someday. people say this is a tax cut for the rich, but i think something like 60% of americans have money in the market so i still think its an important, fairly broad cut. nothing is perfect. at least he didn't raise taxes like democrats wanted to do. democrats complain about the deficit and i'm not happy with that either. bush cut taxes and grew the size of the government when he should have cut more taxes and shrunk government. still i figure kerry would have grown government more than bush and not cut taxes at all or worse. i'll take what i can get.
bush isn't my ideal candidate. i just think he will do better than kerry. and really who is an ideal candidate anyway? i mean other than myself.
i generally hate all your posts including this one, but you aren't usually angry which i appreciate and i'm curious what someone on the left would think:
what if the tax system had no loop holes at all. everyone paid the same graduated tax rate. that goes for people and corporations and charities and nonprofits and every other legal entity. (note i'm not talking about a flat tax.)
i think that this would make things more fair and simple and reduce the tax code to 10 pages. and it would raise government revenue a lot. (so we could then cut taxes, yeah!) also when we had tax cuts or tax increases it would be a lot more obvious who was getting screwed and who wasn't. politicians would be more likely to just pass a general 1% increase or 1% decrease or something like that.
not that this will ever happen.
but i'm curious. what do all you kerry freaks think about this?
you can't set your preferences to ignore the politics section actually. or rather you can, but it doesn't do anything. i guess i should just ignore those arcticles. its weird though.. somehow i can't. i keep clicking on them. which is freaking annoying. instead i just started coming to slashdot less.
well maybe if the germans hadn't invaded half the planet there wouldn't be 16 bases there. same goes for iraq and the terrorists there.
sheesh its not really that complicated folks. but oh its all a big conspiracy to steal oil. hello! the US wants to BUY the oil. iraqis will be rich. the US will get their oil. everyone is happy except the far left who think money and oil (and therefore any sort of success or progress) are evil.
just because france and germany are in the 30 country coalition doesn't mean there isn't a coalition. the first gulf war had a 35 country coalition. this war has 30 countries. there are other countries out there that aren't france you know.
we used diplomacy for 10 years. how long do you want to use diplomacy for?
thats an interesting idea. i would support trying that. for a few billion dollars that might be enough to create an industry of companies. people might be willing to put up venture capital to a company with enough experts and ex cia and ex marines who had a decent chance at pulling such an operation off. of course then one of his sons would probably just become the next dictator. but hey do the same thing there... its certainly worth trying. if no one can pull it off, then we don't have to pay the reward, no harm done.
i think they should do the same with osama bin laden. $25 million isn't enough to create an industry of companies where people are willing to put up venture capital. if we had teams of professional hunters harrassing al quaeda... well offering a reward that large certainly wouldn't hurt anything because we are certainly spending more than that right now.
Slashdot Mirror
try the google cache.
use the google cache. we have lots of sites blocked. u don't get any pictures from the google cache but i'm usually just looking for the text of an article anyway.
Consumers should decide what they want in their car and vote with their own hard earned cash. Who are you to make that decision?
It should not be the tv companies' fault that a driver decided to put one in his car and then crashed into someone. How about a little personal responsibility? If a driver can't handle driving and watching tv, maybe just maybe its the driver's fault and the driver should be sued. If a driver can handle it, then leave them alone. We already have laws in place to deal with people who cause accidents. Why do we want to add new laws that do the exact same thing?
Creating laws to keep out an industry like this means less jobs and a poorer standard of living. How on earth can anyone be for that? In the end, this is just yet another example of how do gooders want to impose their idea of what is best on the rest of us. You may think you are helping victims, the poor, and consumers, but the result is just the opposite: less choice and more regulation mean prices go up and there are less jobs out there. And its not the rich and the big corporations who get hurt when there are high prices and less jobs. Its the poor, the middle class, and small business that get hurt.
This is the same tired argument regardless of whether you are talking about guns, encryption, cigarettes, mcdonald's hamburgers, hammers, or boxcutters. Just about anything can be abused. Stop trying to protect us from ourselves and stay the hell out of my life.
i had no idea. none of the schools i went to ever let us read that stuff. i guess i mostly went to small suburban conservative schools... but not even in college did i see science fiction and i went to a very liberal college.
what neal doesn't address and what drives me nuts is the fact that science fiction is never taught in schools. there are many bad science fiction novels but there are many good ones as well with themes relating to racism or love or whatever you want. everything in school is either from novels that are hundreds of years old or sanitized politically correct and therefore incredibly boring modern works about tribesmen in africa. either way its difficult to get young students interested in reading with literature that they can't relate to. students should explore new things, so i'm not saying everything should be science fiction, but if we want our kids to be interested in reading, give them something they want to read!
i agree
my dad is 70 and he switched to firefox a year ago. all on his own. not my suggestion. read about it in the newspaper or something.
i think the business community is even more worried that kerry will be elected and raise their taxes. that would cause them to be cautious in hiring.
oil prices are also high because of demand in china, problems in russia, and yes the insecurity premium caused by al quaeda attacks.
that was funny. :)
Lowering taxes for the rich only make rich people richer. Poorer people are the ones who spend their tax credits not the rich people.
i couldn't agree more. for example, i'm a rich fsck and i never buy anything. why just yesterday i got on my lear jet (which i didn't buy, i just inherited it) and flew down to the caymen islands to deposit my enormous paycheck (which i don't deserve -- i just got really lucky one day and somehow luckily got this great job where i don't really do anything except look out my big window and occasionally fire people after outsourcing their job to a 5 year old girl in bangladesh who would be far happier if she were still at home starving and too weak to swat at the flies in her nose but is instead slaving away in my corporate air conditioned sweat shop call center). i rolled my wheelbarrow (i inherited that too) full of $100 bills up to the teller and told her to be sure and place my money under a nice king sized serta mattress and not some cheapo little air mattress from kmart or whatever store the lower classes shop at down there in the caymen's.
clue: the bank takes you're money and invests it in the market (ie other companies) and those companies take the money and either hire people or buy equipment or give it to their "benedict arnold" ceo who --guess what? puts it in the bank!
Pretty often, we're trading in some pretty nice species and habitat, say an entire continent of elm trees, for some pretty 'nothing' replacement, like a bug or a fungus.
i agree that dutch elm was terrible. it destroyed a whole industry. my point is that its not like "nature" is worse off because of it. (after all we may have lost the elm tree but we got kudzu from japan.) this kind of thing happens in nature naturally all the time.
what if the invasive species is a human parasite
are you accusing me of being speciesist? its true i am. elm trees don't have feelings. i think the contradiction lies more with you. why is it you want to save elm trees and panda bears and other "pretty" species, but want to destroy "natural" organisms like HIV and SARS? it is just natural selection. what good be more natural than that?
Bush has gotten slammed again and again for unfair trade practices, e.g. putting tariffs on steel.
bush has endorsed outsourcing. kerry has spoken out against outsourcing. much of kerry's support comes from unions. if you are against protectionist policies, you won't be voting for kerry.
well i've never heard of kudzu before and i don't live in the south. but i read your link and actually this is exactly what i'm talking about. i see kudzu vines kill trees, but there are good things that have resulted from it as well.
positive things your article mentions:
-- it has sweet smelling blossoms so people planted it because they liked it
-- during the great depression the soil conservation service used kudzu for erosion control.
-- people have "raised Angora goats in fields of kudzu which would otherwise be considered wasted land. The goats keep the kudzu from spreading further while producing profitable milk and wool products."
-- Diane Hoots of Dahlonega, Georgia has developed a company to market her kudzu products which include kudzu blossom jelly and syrup, kudzu baskets, and books.
-- Henry and Edith Edwards of Rutherfordton, North Carolina have found many uses for kudzu over the past 30 years. Henry produces over 1,000 bales of kudzu hay each year on his Kudzu Cow Farm. The hay is high in nutritive value
-- Current research may lead to new medicines made from kudzu, but for now only hamsters and mice can benefit from these drugs. Research with laboratory animals at Harvard Medical School has revealed that a drug extracted from kudzu root may help in the treatment of alcoholism. The drug is based on a 2,000 year old Chinese herbal medicine.
my point is that things change. old things are destroyed and new things are brought in. maybe you don't like the new thing but maybe someone else does.
the invasive species thing environmentalists get excited about is the weird. if you don't like a bug or an animal, i don't have a problem with you trying to keep it out of an area or calling it a pest and trying to kill it. but to say that its not natural or humans are destroying the environment is just weird. horses aren't native to north america but i don't hear environmentalists complaining about them.
right because no time in the history of the planet has one species moved from one area to another. in no time in the history of the planet has one species out competed and destroyed another. change is always bad and never brings anything good. nature is entirely communist and animals and rocks live together in spirtual harmany working together for the good of the whole.
its called evolution and survival of the fittest. the only good reason to have a list like this is if these are pests messing with the economy. otherwise who cares?
frankly i could care less about reputation. i don't understand this obsession. this isn't a high school popularity contest. i just want the right thing to get done. if you want to tell me the wrong thing is being done we can argue about that, but i could care less about whether you are ashamed or not.
this attitude on slashdot that all conservatives are bible thumpers is weird. i would guess a large minority are not even religious. the far right certainly has its bible thumpers. but the far right has a lot more in common with the far left than the middle of either party.
for example:
- both are protectionist (pat buchanon and ralph nader/unions)
- "right-wing" nativists and "left-wing" environmentalists opposing immigration
- both fear technology
- both hate walmart
etc.
there are certainly a lot of things i don't like about the president's record. mostly i am hoping he won't be as bad as kerry.
specifically i am hoping he won't be as protectionist as kerry and he won't grow the size of government as much as kerry. i think these things are vital to the economy and the well being of americans.
probably the 2 things he has done which i feel fairly happy about are:
1. the invasion of afghanistan. i think it needed to be done. maybe there were some bad choices made, but i don't see kerry or anyone else doing better. mostly i expect mediocre results from government, and generally i thought this response to sept 11 was pretty well done. i really like harmad karzai or however the hell you spell his name.
2. tax cuts. i saved a few hundred dollars i suppose. mostly i'm happy about the dividend tax cut. i don't have a huge amount of money in the stock market but i hopefully will someday. people say this is a tax cut for the rich, but i think something like 60% of americans have money in the market so i still think its an important, fairly broad cut. nothing is perfect. at least he didn't raise taxes like democrats wanted to do. democrats complain about the deficit and i'm not happy with that either. bush cut taxes and grew the size of the government when he should have cut more taxes and shrunk government. still i figure kerry would have grown government more than bush and not cut taxes at all or worse. i'll take what i can get.
bush isn't my ideal candidate. i just think he will do better than kerry. and really who is an ideal candidate anyway? i mean other than myself.
i generally hate all your posts including this one, but you aren't usually angry which i appreciate and i'm curious what someone on the left would think:
what if the tax system had no loop holes at all. everyone paid the same graduated tax rate. that goes for people and corporations and charities and nonprofits and every other legal entity. (note i'm not talking about a flat tax.)
i think that this would make things more fair and simple and reduce the tax code to 10 pages. and it would raise government revenue a lot. (so we could then cut taxes, yeah!) also when we had tax cuts or tax increases it would be a lot more obvious who was getting screwed and who wasn't. politicians would be more likely to just pass a general 1% increase or 1% decrease or something like that.
not that this will ever happen.
but i'm curious. what do all you kerry freaks think about this?
i have the same problem. and i've seen posts from other people with that problem as well.
whats really weird is that i can't stop clicking on these politics links even though they're stories about insignificant garbage.
you can't set your preferences to ignore the politics section actually. or rather you can, but it doesn't do anything. i guess i should just ignore those arcticles. its weird though.. somehow i can't. i keep clicking on them. which is freaking annoying. instead i just started coming to slashdot less.
whatever.
well maybe if the germans hadn't invaded half the planet there wouldn't be 16 bases there. same goes for iraq and the terrorists there.
sheesh its not really that complicated folks. but oh its all a big conspiracy to steal oil. hello! the US wants to BUY the oil. iraqis will be rich. the US will get their oil. everyone is happy except the far left who think money and oil (and therefore any sort of success or progress) are evil.
just go away
just because france and germany are in the 30 country coalition doesn't mean there isn't a coalition. the first gulf war had a 35 country coalition. this war has 30 countries. there are other countries out there that aren't france you know.
we used diplomacy for 10 years. how long do you want to use diplomacy for?
bah, this is rediculous.
no kidding. this crazy. linux, natalie portman these are the important things in life. all this venom here is silly. i am hungry.
thats an interesting idea. i would support trying that. for a few billion dollars that might be enough to create an industry of companies. people might be willing to put up venture capital to a company with enough experts and ex cia and ex marines who had a decent chance at pulling such an operation off. of course then one of his sons would probably just become the next dictator. but hey do the same thing there... its certainly worth trying. if no one can pull it off, then we don't have to pay the reward, no harm done.
i think they should do the same with osama bin laden. $25 million isn't enough to create an industry of companies where people are willing to put up venture capital. if we had teams of professional hunters harrassing al quaeda... well offering a reward that large certainly wouldn't hurt anything because we are certainly spending more than that right now.