Is it any better to be enslaved to the market and your customers than to be enslaved to your boss?
Unless they get lucky, and hit it big, most entrepenuers seems to have a lot less freedom than those those that work for "the man".
It's even worse if your passion is not business. Working for a company means letting someone else deal with that crap. Working for "yourself" means you deal with it and have little time for your own passion.
Welcome to freedom.
Freedom of will means that people are free to choose their own masters, or to choose to forego masters altogether.
But if you choose to let someone else do your worrying for you, then don't turn around and bitch and moan that you had to sign away your intellectual property rights.
If you wanna keep your intellectual property rights, THEN DON'T GIVE THEM AWAY IN EXCHANGE FOR A BOWL OF HOT GRITS AND A PLATE OF CHITLUNS!!!
...it's that small, entrepreneurial businesses simply can't survive the competition with corporations. Walmart alone has devastated the American heartland, crushing many, many formerly prosperous small-town main streets.
Yet another thing that the entrepreneur must fear: Someone who builds a better mousetrap and sells it at an even more aggressive price.
There's always gonna be something to worry about when you're free: There will always be someone who's smarter, stronger, faster, prettier, or better-financed than you.
People who love freedom shrug these things off, and figure out a way to adapt. People who hate freedom get down on their hands and knees and beg Massuh not to take away their hot grits and chitluns.
I think this is the primary effect of copyright and patent law. It becomes more important to be the person who controls the output of scientists than it is to be a scientist yourself.
People who specialize in making money are called "businessmen" [or "entrepreneurs," or "the self-employed"]. Their careers require freedom from intervention, and a system of property rights which protects the fruits of their labor.
Oddly enough, the vast, overwhelming majority of almost every population of people to be found in any locale on the face of the earth, at almost any point in human history, want nothing whatsoever to do with freedom. Rather, they choose, of their own free will, to live in a state of slavery, i.e. they choose to be employees, rather than entrepreneurs ["employment" being a polite euphemism for slavery]. As long as Massuh keeps the checks coming every two weeks, they're happy.
Entrepreneurism is terrifying - an entrepreneur never knows where his next meal ticket is coming from, and he lies awake at night worrying about little more than revenue streams [or waking up in a cold sweat when he's had another nightmare about them]. And biweekly paychecks? One of the entrepreneur's greatest worries is not that he won't get a check, but that the checks people write to him will fail to clear the bank.
The left, which would encompass pretty much 100% of all university professors, and a substantial number of those who claim to worship at the altar of the pagan religion known as "science," is terrified of the very idea of freedom - they want nothing to do with it.
But you've got a choice - if you don't like the intellectual property agreement that your employer is trying to shove down your throat, then don't sign it. Take your ideas and set out on your own. Start your own company. Own your own ideas. Tell "the man" to go screw himself.
Of course, the vast majority of people reading this missive won't have the balls to take me up on my challenge. I know who you are - you're the wage slaves who just want Massuh to keep your belly full. Well screw you - move to North Korea and let Kim Jong Il be your fearless leader.
Listen folks, despite what the left would have you believe, you've still got freedom of the will. Exercise it.
Circa 1995, they retired the VAX, and lucky folks got an account on the Convex "supercomputer."
Then the Convex's motherboard ["backplane," whatever] started acting all flaky [right around the time that Hewlett Packard purchased Convex], and they migrated everyone to an IBM AIX box [or cluster of boxes], known as isis.unc.edu, which is where they remain.
But back in the day, all the action was on the VAX.
I think it's impossible for my Slashdot-oriented brain to process "software" and "Utah" and "domination" all in the same sentence, and have it end up positive.
Positive or Negative: Novell NetWare, version 2.x, circa 1988, almost 100% market share
Positive or Negative: Novell SuSE Linux/Ximian "dotGNU", version 10.x, circa 2008, almost 100% market share
If I'm going to get a database, I want one that focuses on being a database... not something that is a "backup-enabled mirroring RAID-based load sharing encrypted connection AD-integrated solution". That's not a product, that's 10 pounds of overblown marketing drivel stuffed into a 5-pound bag.
But that's why Oracle [or DB2, or Informix, or SQL Server, or whatever] costs, oh, $50,000, and a C++ compiler costs, oh, $500.
You can be a cheapskate, buy your own C++ compiler, and write all that stuff from scratch, or you can ante up, purchase the pre-packaged product from Oracle, and save the twenty years of your life that you would have spent writing it from scratch.
I just want something like "Oracle" [or "DB2" or "SQLServer" or whatever] that's truly 64-bit, i.e. that's got at least ONE interface that's truly 64-bit, not a bunch of 32-bit bullshit [like SQL-92, or Java 1.5.x] masquerading as 64-bit.
And strong typing of primitives would be really swell, too. [Yes, we do scientific computing out here in flyover country!!!]
Does "C++" have a tape backup package? [As in Seagate-Veritas Backup Exec? Or CA-Cheyenne ARCserve?]
Does "C++" have seamless background mirroring to a failsafe mirror server? [Preferably in a peer-to-peer relationship, but Master-Slave will do in a pinch.]
Does "C++" distribute loads across multiple redundant servers?
Does "C++" have a querying capability? [I.e. can C++ "query" itself the way a relation database can "query" itself?]
Does "C++" have data transfer protocols? With encryption?
Can "C++" authenticate against something like Novell Directory Services, or Microsoft Active Directory?
Or do I have to write all this stuff by hand?
Dude, I want the whole nine yards, but, to get it, I practically have to re-invent a multibillion dollar company like Oracle, or Informix.
Surely there's somebody out there with prepackaged database product that's truly 64-bit and that has native support for strongly typed primitives!?!
Remember the Swedish rock group ABBA? How many instances of the substring ABBA occur in the following string [and what should your generic "find" function have as a return value]?
ABBABBA
Extra Credit: Tell me what a generic "replace" function should do when told to replace "ABBA" with "The Bee Gees".
PS: I learned just the other night that ABBA soloist Anni-Frid Lyngstad was the product of Nazi Aryan eugenics experiment [dubbed "the Lebensborn"].
1) An honest-to-goodness, floor-to-ceiling, cradle-to-grave, first-to-last, night-n-day 64-bit environment, with
2) Strongly-typed data primitives.
For the first criteria, if, at any point, you are forced to make contact with a 32-bit environment, then the platform fails the test.
For instance, if the platform requires you to use either Java or SQL, then it fails.
SQL fails because it is essentially an ASCII-based language that has almost no sense of primitive data types whatsoever, and its only undefined binary type, the binary BLOB, maxes out at 2^32 = 4 Billion bytes [so much for high-quality MPEGs of, e.g., Gone With The Wind].
Java fails because, as recently as the Java 1.5.x Beta, it cannot take long ints as array indices. For instance, the following will not even "compile" [i.e. "javac," whatever that is] under the Java 1.5.x Beta:
public class SixtyFourBit
{
public static void main (String args[])
{
long theLong = 1;
theLong
theLong += 1;
System.out.println("theLong = " + theLong);
double [] theDoubleArray = new double[theLong];
}
}
So your "middleware" for this hypothetical 64-bit platform is forbidden to touch either SQL or Java.
As for the strong data typing, I want the environment to be natively aware of
A) IEEE 96-bit Extended Doubles
B) IEEE 128-bit Extended Doubles
C) [Bonus for Extra Credit] LabVIEW 128-bit TIMESTAMPs
According to Professor Kahan, Matlab has [or has had] some serious problems here:
I thought that was one of the neater twists in the recent Batttlestar Galactica remake - that the only Vipers immune to the Cylon override of their control codes were the ones that had been sitting down in the Galactica museum next to the gift shop.
That, and, of course, the über-hot Cylon chicks...
I know your post was taken as FUNNY, but I lost several hours last week installing, then uninstalling, an "important security patch" that took down the my client's Exchange Server.
Uhh, don't know about you, but out here in flyover country, thems is what we call "billable hours".
Of course, rumor has it that youse big city guys perform your "favors" for free...
GM crop protestors attempting to destroy your crops whilst wearing fake biohazard suits (do you get these people in the US?)
You're kidding, right?
I saw the film on friday and was really impressed. But while it speaks much truth, and has many funny parts as well as truly heartbreaking ones, I don't know how many votes it will sway. But since there is very little other news so far today, why not talk amongst yourselves!
I can't imagine having the claim that $995 for development fees (after the trial period) is "inexpensive" especially when this is an obvious attempt to compete with Linux in the PDA market.
The world of embedded devices is only now starting to emerge. The consumer end of things, which might be called "PDAs" [or "Cell Phones" or whatnot], is just the tip of the iceberg.
The potential for business use of embedded OSes is just staggering, however, and Microsoft [as opposed to Sony, or Ericsson] has tradtionally made their money in business [not consumer] sales.
I think you fail to understand the kind of shift that will happen when international dialing codes and area codes simply go away. When you can rely on underlying systems like DynDNS married to a directory system that will allow you to plug a SIP phone anywhere, get a DHCP address - register to a directory server - and start taking calls immediately. Or what will happen when cellular providers go IP behind the scenes.
His insight that Domain Naming services tie it all together is quite important. Despite what you think.
You may very well be correct. That is one approach to locating services on the internet: Know the name of the service a priori. Curiously, it is also precisely the approach that Microsoft took with Active Directory.
There are other approaches, however. The world's oldest and largest directory provider, Novell, bet the farm on the Service Location Protocl, or SLP. Sun & IBM are also very prominent in the SLP community [as well as the closely aligned Project Liberty initiative].
Bottom line: There are multiple, competing approaches to the problem of finding resources on the internet. Heck, when you get right down to it, there's nothing wrong with the old Altavista PeopleSearch. Over time, one of these initiatives will win the greatest market share, and all of the survivors will almost certainly become "compatible" to some extent or another. And it may very well be that Microsoft's approach [DynDNS in conjunction with Kerberos] will be the winner. But there's been an awful lot of resistance to Redmond thus far, and their Passport initiative has, to date, been just shy of an utter and complete disaster.
However, there are two enormous stumbling blocks to further adoption of DNS: Classically, it is an unencrypted protocol with no proper sense of authentication whatsoever. If it is to move forward, the industry will have to move towards encrypted, authenticatible versions of it.
The second stumbling block is much more ominous, however: Against what database [i.e. directory] is DNS to be authenticated? Who will hold the master keys to the server-side authentication and who will hold the master keys to the client-side authentication? Once you require authentication, you give up every ounce of your anonymity on the internet. [Obviously Project Liberty suffers from the same fundamental flaw.] Once you lose anonymity, Big Brother knows who you are, where you are, and precisely what you are doing for the remainder of your life on the web.
Now you could argue that the telecomms already have that power over you when it comes to classical POTS, and that a court order [or "warrant"] is required for the telecomms to release your telephone dialing history, but in all truth: How many times have you used classical POTS to post a political tirade anonymously on a web bulletin board? Or download some pr0n, or place an off-shore bet on a sports team, or purchase a nice Mosel riesling from Wine Commune?
You are misinterpreting that part of the Constitution, which is referring to the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court.
Two points:
1) The relevant excerpts are:
A)
The judicial Power of the United States shall be vested in one supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.
B) In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.
So with [50% + Episilon] of the House, [50% + Epsilon] of the Senate, and the signature of the Executive, the lower courts cease to exist, and the only constitutionally mandated court [i.e. the Supremem Court itself] is forbidden to hear cases involving copyright [unless said case involves an Ambassador, another "public Minister" or "Consul," or a State as a party].
2) Point two is far more important however: This whole Marbury -v- Madison nonsense is the source of most of the tyranny that afflicts us in our era: There is not so much as a word within a clause within a phrase in The Constitution which even hints at the possibility that the Supreme Court might possess the right to "interpret" the constitution, much less declare a law to be "unconstitutional."
If you wanna be a serf to nine lords in robes, be my guest, but I think I'll decline the invite, thank you very much.
What the hell do you see in Republicans these days? They've become a bunch of right-wing socialists at this point.
Believe me, the grass roots ain't happy. If it weren't for 9-11, and Dubyah's very minimal response to the threat of Islam [aka Islamofascism, but that's redundant], there would be a heckuva revolt going on in the ranks.
Congress can't overturn a decision by the Supreme Court, thats a convenience of having a well-designed government.
Your "well-designed government" was designed by this thing called The United States Constitution, which states, in no uncertain terms:
In all Cases affecting Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, and those in which a State shall be Party, the supreme Court shall have original Jurisdiction. In all the other Cases before mentioned, the supreme Court shall have appellate Jurisdiction, both as to Law and Fact, with such Exceptions, and under such Regulations as the Congress shall make.
Of course, The Constitution ain't the most politically correct document these days, and goodness knows the courts don't give a damn about it...
Furthermore, fundamentalists sects are a common element of American history and literature. Your assertion that most people know them from the distorted lens of the media is a distortion in its own right.
When was the last time you heard a Mennonite lobbying for anything? When was the last time you heard a Seventh Day Adventist lobbying for anything? When was the last time you heard an angry mob of home schoolers lobbying for anything, much less screaming at the top of their lungs, "WE'RE HERE! WE'RE QUEER! AND WE NOT GOING AWAY!!!"
By and large, these people just want to be left alone. It's the tyranny we call "The Government" [aided by its allies in the media, the universities, the unions, and the professions] which seeks to destroy them, not the other way around.
Christian Fundamentalists are about the most quiet, reserved, introspective people the world has ever known.
Course, you wouldn't know that if all you heard about them was what the lamestream media told you, but hey: That's the way things have always been, and the way things will always be...
Slashdot Mirror
Is it any better to be enslaved to the market and your customers than to be enslaved to your boss?
Unless they get lucky, and hit it big, most entrepenuers seems to have a lot less freedom than those those that work for "the man".
It's even worse if your passion is not business. Working for a company means letting someone else deal with that crap. Working for "yourself" means you deal with it and have little time for your own passion.
Welcome to freedom.
Freedom of will means that people are free to choose their own masters, or to choose to forego masters altogether.
But if you choose to let someone else do your worrying for you, then don't turn around and bitch and moan that you had to sign away your intellectual property rights.
If you wanna keep your intellectual property rights, THEN DON'T GIVE THEM AWAY IN EXCHANGE FOR A BOWL OF HOT GRITS AND A PLATE OF CHITLUNS!!!
Yet another thing that the entrepreneur must fear: Someone who builds a better mousetrap and sells it at an even more aggressive price.
There's always gonna be something to worry about when you're free: There will always be someone who's smarter, stronger, faster, prettier, or better-financed than you.
People who love freedom shrug these things off, and figure out a way to adapt. People who hate freedom get down on their hands and knees and beg Massuh not to take away their hot grits and chitluns.
I think this is the primary effect of copyright and patent law. It becomes more important to be the person who controls the output of scientists than it is to be a scientist yourself.
People who specialize in making money are called "businessmen" [or "entrepreneurs," or "the self-employed"]. Their careers require freedom from intervention, and a system of property rights which protects the fruits of their labor.
Oddly enough, the vast, overwhelming majority of almost every population of people to be found in any locale on the face of the earth, at almost any point in human history, want nothing whatsoever to do with freedom. Rather, they choose, of their own free will, to live in a state of slavery, i.e. they choose to be employees, rather than entrepreneurs ["employment" being a polite euphemism for slavery]. As long as Massuh keeps the checks coming every two weeks, they're happy.
Entrepreneurism is terrifying - an entrepreneur never knows where his next meal ticket is coming from, and he lies awake at night worrying about little more than revenue streams [or waking up in a cold sweat when he's had another nightmare about them]. And biweekly paychecks? One of the entrepreneur's greatest worries is not that he won't get a check, but that the checks people write to him will fail to clear the bank.
The left, which would encompass pretty much 100% of all university professors, and a substantial number of those who claim to worship at the altar of the pagan religion known as "science," is terrified of the very idea of freedom - they want nothing to do with it.
But you've got a choice - if you don't like the intellectual property agreement that your employer is trying to shove down your throat, then don't sign it. Take your ideas and set out on your own. Start your own company. Own your own ideas. Tell "the man" to go screw himself.
Of course, the vast majority of people reading this missive won't have the balls to take me up on my challenge. I know who you are - you're the wage slaves who just want Massuh to keep your belly full. Well screw you - move to North Korea and let Kim Jong Il be your fearless leader.
Listen folks, despite what the left would have you believe, you've still got freedom of the will. Exercise it.
Can't seem to remember the host name, though.
Circa 1995, they retired the VAX, and lucky folks got an account on the Convex "supercomputer."
Then the Convex's motherboard ["backplane," whatever] started acting all flaky [right around the time that Hewlett Packard purchased Convex], and they migrated everyone to an IBM AIX box [or cluster of boxes], known as isis.unc.edu, which is where they remain.
But back in the day, all the action was on the VAX.
Sounds like the way people at UNC-Chapel Hill accessed the internet, circa 1994 - via dialup shells, PINE, and FTP, all through a single VAX box.
I think it's impossible for my Slashdot-oriented brain to process "software" and "Utah" and "domination" all in the same sentence, and have it end up positive.
Positive or Negative: Novell NetWare, version 2.x, circa 1988, almost 100% market share
Positive or Negative: Novell SuSE Linux/Ximian "dotGNU", version 10.x, circa 2008, almost 100% market share
If I'm going to get a database, I want one that focuses on being a database... not something that is a "backup-enabled mirroring RAID-based load sharing encrypted connection AD-integrated solution". That's not a product, that's 10 pounds of overblown marketing drivel stuffed into a 5-pound bag.
But that's why Oracle [or DB2, or Informix, or SQL Server, or whatever] costs, oh, $50,000, and a C++ compiler costs, oh, $500.
You can be a cheapskate, buy your own C++ compiler, and write all that stuff from scratch, or you can ante up, purchase the pre-packaged product from Oracle, and save the twenty years of your life that you would have spent writing it from scratch.
I just want something like "Oracle" [or "DB2" or "SQLServer" or whatever] that's truly 64-bit, i.e. that's got at least ONE interface that's truly 64-bit, not a bunch of 32-bit bullshit [like SQL-92, or Java 1.5.x] masquerading as 64-bit.
And strong typing of primitives would be really swell, too. [Yes, we do scientific computing out here in flyover country!!!]
Huh. How odd. C/C++ can do this just fine...
Does "C++" have a tape backup package? [As in Seagate-Veritas Backup Exec? Or CA-Cheyenne ARCserve?]
Does "C++" have seamless background mirroring to a failsafe mirror server? [Preferably in a peer-to-peer relationship, but Master-Slave will do in a pinch.]
Does "C++" distribute loads across multiple redundant servers?
Does "C++" have a querying capability? [I.e. can C++ "query" itself the way a relation database can "query" itself?]
Does "C++" have data transfer protocols? With encryption?
Can "C++" authenticate against something like Novell Directory Services, or Microsoft Active Directory?
Or do I have to write all this stuff by hand?
Dude, I want the whole nine yards, but, to get it, I practically have to re-invent a multibillion dollar company like Oracle, or Informix.
Surely there's somebody out there with prepackaged database product that's truly 64-bit and that has native support for strongly typed primitives!?!
A nice example is a generic "find" function
Remember the Swedish rock group ABBA? How many instances of the substring ABBA occur in the following string [and what should your generic "find" function have as a return value]?
Extra Credit: Tell me what a generic "replace" function should do when told to replace "ABBA" with "The Bee Gees".PS: I learned just the other night that ABBA soloist Anni-Frid Lyngstad was the product of Nazi Aryan eugenics experiment [dubbed "the Lebensborn"].
I excrement you not:
The java code should have read as follows [I didn't notice that the shift operator had been caught by the
This is what I want: For the first criteria, if, at any point, you are forced to make contact with a 32-bit environment, then the platform fails the test.
For instance, if the platform requires you to use either Java or SQL, then it fails.
SQL fails because it is essentially an ASCII-based language that has almost no sense of primitive data types whatsoever, and its only undefined binary type, the binary BLOB, maxes out at 2^32 = 4 Billion bytes [so much for high-quality MPEGs of, e.g., Gone With The Wind].
Java fails because, as recently as the Java 1.5.x Beta, it cannot take long ints as array indices. For instance, the following will not even "compile" [i.e. "javac," whatever that is] under the Java 1.5.x Beta:
So your "middleware" for this hypothetical 64-bit platform is forbidden to touch either SQL or Java.As for the strong data typing, I want the environment to be natively aware of
According to Professor Kahan, Matlab has [or has had] some serious problems here: So: Any takers?Atyiah-MacDonald, Introduction to Commutative Algebra: Dym-McKean, Fourier Series and Integrals: Not exactly PC, but this is one's also a good read - it's the history of the world, as seen through the eyes of a tax collector:
I thought that was one of the neater twists in the recent Batttlestar Galactica remake - that the only Vipers immune to the Cylon override of their control codes were the ones that had been sitting down in the Galactica museum next to the gift shop.
That, and, of course, the über-hot Cylon chicks...
I know your post was taken as FUNNY, but I lost several hours last week installing, then uninstalling, an "important security patch" that took down the my client's Exchange Server.
Uhh, don't know about you, but out here in flyover country, thems is what we call "billable hours".
Of course, rumor has it that youse big city guys perform your "favors" for free...
GM crop protestors attempting to destroy your crops whilst wearing fake biohazard suits (do you get these people in the US?)
You're kidding, right?
These people are everywhere, dude - they're like cockroaches.Or what you might call "frogs"...
[PS: You don't s'pose that's genetically modified corn in them thar Taco shells, do ya'?]
I can't imagine having the claim that $995 for development fees (after the trial period) is "inexpensive" especially when this is an obvious attempt to compete with Linux in the PDA market.
The world of embedded devices is only now starting to emerge. The consumer end of things, which might be called "PDAs" [or "Cell Phones" or whatnot], is just the tip of the iceberg.
The potential for business use of embedded OSes is just staggering, however, and Microsoft [as opposed to Sony, or Ericsson] has tradtionally made their money in business [not consumer] sales.
+Infinity insightful.
I think you fail to understand the kind of shift that will happen when international dialing codes and area codes simply go away. When you can rely on underlying systems like DynDNS married to a directory system that will allow you to plug a SIP phone anywhere, get a DHCP address - register to a directory server - and start taking calls immediately. Or what will happen when cellular providers go IP behind the scenes.
His insight that Domain Naming services tie it all together is quite important. Despite what you think.
You may very well be correct. That is one approach to locating services on the internet: Know the name of the service a priori. Curiously, it is also precisely the approach that Microsoft took with Active Directory.
There are other approaches, however. The world's oldest and largest directory provider, Novell, bet the farm on the Service Location Protocl, or SLP. Sun & IBM are also very prominent in the SLP community [as well as the closely aligned Project Liberty initiative].
Bottom line: There are multiple, competing approaches to the problem of finding resources on the internet. Heck, when you get right down to it, there's nothing wrong with the old Altavista PeopleSearch. Over time, one of these initiatives will win the greatest market share, and all of the survivors will almost certainly become "compatible" to some extent or another. And it may very well be that Microsoft's approach [DynDNS in conjunction with Kerberos] will be the winner. But there's been an awful lot of resistance to Redmond thus far, and their Passport initiative has, to date, been just shy of an utter and complete disaster.
However, there are two enormous stumbling blocks to further adoption of DNS: Classically, it is an unencrypted protocol with no proper sense of authentication whatsoever. If it is to move forward, the industry will have to move towards encrypted, authenticatible versions of it.
The second stumbling block is much more ominous, however: Against what database [i.e. directory] is DNS to be authenticated? Who will hold the master keys to the server-side authentication and who will hold the master keys to the client-side authentication? Once you require authentication, you give up every ounce of your anonymity on the internet. [Obviously Project Liberty suffers from the same fundamental flaw.] Once you lose anonymity, Big Brother knows who you are, where you are, and precisely what you are doing for the remainder of your life on the web.
Now you could argue that the telecomms already have that power over you when it comes to classical POTS, and that a court order [or "warrant"] is required for the telecomms to release your telephone dialing history, but in all truth: How many times have you used classical POTS to post a political tirade anonymously on a web bulletin board? Or download some pr0n, or place an off-shore bet on a sports team, or purchase a nice Mosel riesling from Wine Commune?
You are misinterpreting that part of the Constitution, which is referring to the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court.
Two points:
1) The relevant excerpts are:
So with [50% + Episilon] of the House, [50% + Epsilon] of the Senate, and the signature of the Executive, the lower courts cease to exist, and the only constitutionally mandated court [i.e. the Supremem Court itself] is forbidden to hear cases involving copyright [unless said case involves an Ambassador, another "public Minister" or "Consul," or a State as a party].2) Point two is far more important however: This whole Marbury -v- Madison nonsense is the source of most of the tyranny that afflicts us in our era: There is not so much as a word within a clause within a phrase in The Constitution which even hints at the possibility that the Supreme Court might possess the right to "interpret" the constitution, much less declare a law to be "unconstitutional."
If you wanna be a serf to nine lords in robes, be my guest, but I think I'll decline the invite, thank you very much.
What the hell do you see in Republicans these days? They've become a bunch of right-wing socialists at this point.
Believe me, the grass roots ain't happy. If it weren't for 9-11, and Dubyah's very minimal response to the threat of Islam [aka Islamofascism, but that's redundant], there would be a heckuva revolt going on in the ranks.
Republicans are not Socialists. There's a bunch of right-wing Fascists, minus the public hangings.
Repeat after me:
Fascism, like Marxism, Bolshevism, Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, Potism, and every other -ism, is a flavor of socialism.Congress can't overturn a decision by the Supreme Court, thats a convenience of having a well-designed government.
Your "well-designed government" was designed by this thing called The United States Constitution, which states, in no uncertain terms:
Of course, The Constitution ain't the most politically correct document these days, and goodness knows the courts don't give a damn about it...When was the last time you heard a Mennonite lobbying for anything? When was the last time you heard a Seventh Day Adventist lobbying for anything? When was the last time you heard an angry mob of home schoolers lobbying for anything, much less screaming at the top of their lungs, "WE'RE HERE! WE'RE QUEER! AND WE NOT GOING AWAY!!!"
By and large, these people just want to be left alone. It's the tyranny we call "The Government" [aided by its allies in the media, the universities, the unions, and the professions] which seeks to destroy them, not the other way around.
Sheesh. Please don't associate us with them.
Christian Fundamentalists are about the most quiet, reserved, introspective people the world has ever known.
Course, you wouldn't know that if all you heard about them was what the lamestream media told you, but hey: That's the way things have always been, and the way things will always be...