Its not a theory, this is how Tom Delay (Rep Majority Leader) has established his "dictatorship" of the House. If moderate Reps do not vote with the party (on the important issues), they don't get party funding in their next election cycle. What the Reps are doing in the House is explained in the other article about One Party Rule.
Given another 4-8 years of controlling both the Legislature and the Executive, even your tin-foil hat won't be able to protect you.
Funny that the third branch of the government has to step in and make the second branch follow its own damn rules.
Its funny only until you ask yourself what happens when the Legislative, acheiving domination for several decades, manages to remake the Judiciary in its own image? Hmmm...
If you don't have the votes for a block, show your constituents some damn respect and accept it.
Sounds like you're justifying the 'Tyrrany of the Majority'. I suspect our Founding Fathers knew their business when they included a few "checks and balances" that required super-majorities (60% or 67%) of the legislature. Easy to see it as an annoyance... until the day the majority writes a bad law that targets you as the victim.
Everyone, take a lesson from this. If you write about politics, keep it short. Keep it simple. Use simple words. Short sentences are nice. Make your point quickly, and wrap it up.
Oh, and don't worry about the truth anymore either, it was always an annoying encumberence that we've now apparently dispensed with. Politics is so much more fun when you do away with that silly stuff called ethics.:)
Not disagreeing, just adding to your list of points.:)
Ten years ago the current minority party held the Presidency, House and Senate.
Yes, but they never resorted to the extreme level of gerrymandering Congressional districts, or contorting the rules of Congress in ways that allowed them to muzzle the opposition so thoroughly as the Reps are doing.
A recent study by California-Berkeley found that there is no connection between the current allowable Arsenic levels
This may very well be true for the specific case of Arsenic, but this doesn't defuse his main point: Bush has been consistently gutting environmental law, and rendering some regulations irrelevent by having the various agencies involved "reevaluate" the law and modify their regulations that implement that law, such that the end result is always making the real effect of the law weaker.
spent promoting something that a majority of Americans abhor.
Ahh, the hypocrisy of the religious right never ceases. The UN agency in question does *not* promote abortion, they never have. Their business is family planning, and that amounts basically to 2 things: educating poor rural women about AIDS and the other sexually transmitted diseases, and providing contraception devices, condoms, to help these poor women avoid unwanted pregnancies. This agency never paid for abortions nor performed any themselves, nor advocated them *in general*. Unfortunately, the one thing they did do thats made them an election year whipping boy, is not screaming bloody murder over China's use of forced abortions.
The irony here is that this agency, by reducing unwanted pregnancies, was actually responsible for a substantial decrease of abortions in rural China (the drop in pregnancies and the drop in abortions exactly coorelate to the time this agency began operations in China). Of course, the Reps never mention that. And by educating and providing medical services to poor women, they reduced the mortality rate for babies and their mothers. So between those 2 things they saved far more lives than were lost to China's forced abortion program. The Reps, of course, don't mention that either.
Please don't visit any state parks, then.
It is funny though that where they want to build these roads there is always one of 2 things: valuable timber or oil. Coincidence? After Haliburton, I don't think so.
What a whopper! FYI, Bush approved federal funding for stem cell research. He didn't "hobble" it. There was no federal funding for stem cell research before Bush came into office
"Research using stem cells had been authorized in Britain, but was initially halted in the U.S. by President George W. Bush. He decided on 2001-AUG-9 to allow research to resume in government labs, but restricted researchers to use only 72 existing lines of stem cells. By 2003-MAY, most of these lines had become useless; some of the lines are genetically identical to others; only 11 remain available for research. Research continues in U.S. private labs and in both government and private labs in the UK, Japan, France, Australia, and other countries."
....
Following former president Ronald Reagan's death due to Alzheimer's in 2004-JUN -- a slow, lingering death that took a decade to kill him, Nancy Reagan and all of her family, except for Michael Reagan, have mounted a campaign to encourage President Bush to relax restrictions on embryo stem cell research. Fifty-eight senators, almost all Democrats, sent a letter to President Bush, urging the same action.
So, yes, Bush did allow (federally funded) research to begin, after he himself banned it earlier, but no, his authorization does not allow research on new stem cells, only clones of old ones that already existed. As the article points out those clone lines are deteriorating, less than a quarter of them are left. This article also mentions another problem which is contamination of the remaining clone lines.
Check your sources there Tommy, either you're just making up this crap as you go along, or someone is feeding you this crap, and you're just munchin' down without even looking at what you're eating.
The difference this time is that a) the Reps are exploiting the situation to consolidate their power more then the Dems ever did, and b) the turnover in Congress is much less than it used to be because of gerrymandering. More of the seats are inherently "safe". Instead of 40 or 50 seats being contested every election cycle, we're down to less than 15 (where there is any chance that the challenger can defeat the incumbent). Narrowing the contest down to a small number of races, magnifies the power of money in the election process, because each contested race now gets more money than ever, because there are fewer races whose outcome is not already known and safe, and it also means of course with a deficit of around 15-20 seats already (for the Dems in the House) it would take an extraordinary event (some massive scandal that rocks the entire Rep party) for them gain many seats. Otherwise, it will require the Dems to be consistently successful in 3 or 4 straight election cycles to catch up, and that is very unlikely given how people vote. All it takes is one year were the Reps do well overall and their supporters vote the party line all the way down the ticket, and the Dems suffer a setback that puts them back nearly at their starting point.
Finally, given that the majority of states now are conservative controlled, the ongoing gerrymandering continues to reinforce the Reps control of Congress, by allowing the Reps to ensure that the majority of districts in the state are safe for conservatives.
The game goes like this: put most of the liberal territory in as few large districts as possible, then split up the rest of the territory into the majority of conservative districts. There are some safe Dem seats, yes, but they are always in a minority for the state as a whole. It is both simple and insidious. There are some places where its impossible for the conservatives to accomplish this (California, New York), and vice-versa for the Dems in some places, but its a viable strategy just about everywhere. The Reps are using this exploit in ways that the Dems never did or would have done. In this case, ethics and any sense of fair play has been thrown out the window. Its a no-holds-barred cage match, where once you get the advantage, its hard for your opponent to ever get back into the contest. To me, its not surprising that these neo-conservative, New Age Republicans are willing to be more ruthless when they have the advantage than the Deps. Its the nature of the new Beast.
The last election was exactly this way. Gore didn't excite anyone, and no one knew anything about Bush, except for who his father was. I can't count the number of times I saw comments on the Internet to the effect of "Yawn, whats the difference between 'em, there's no point in voting". Bush won because the Republican Party was able to mobilize the militant religious right better than the Democrats could mobilize they're own base. I don't see anyone saying there's no difference this time, except for those deliberately being sarcastic.
Nader isn't getting any support this time, not because nobody likes him, many people who are going to vote for Kerry like Nader, but they know that this time there are issues at stake, and real differences, so they have to make their vote work at defeating Bush, thus their voting for the only one with a realistic chance of beating him.
I never heard anyone call the last election "the most important one ever", but in conversations on the Internet and among relatives and friends, I've heard myself, and others say something like that numerous times recently. Maybe it doesn't look so important to the Right, but most of the Left knows it is extremely important (so there is at least some hope that this time the Left will mobilize its base better than the Right).
Before you assume that that is an easy thing to happen, you should read up, for example, on the super-gerrymandering of Texas Congressional districts. Yes, Dems have been guilty of this to (and are therefore partially responsible for the current mess), but the point of this article was not that the Reps are doing these things, but they're doing these things on a scale and severity that the Dems have never done themselves before.
IMHO, a republican/democratic form of government, even like ours, is at risk if the majority (50% + 1) is allowed to gerrymander Congressional districts as has been done in this country. America won't be safe (or at least much safer) until we outlaw gerrymandering, and replace it with some mechanism to draw district lines that can't be so easily abused.
Do I think we're in danger of "losing" our republic? Hell no.
A lot of Germans said the same thing when Hitler was elected Chancellor (or whatever his first title was called).
Everyone always believes the bad things happen to "others", nah, it can't happen here, America is *special*, the people/courts/executive/congress/army/left/right won't let it happen.
Of course I never believed Abu Graibh would happen either....
And I was sure we wouldn't be so stupid as to repeat the mistakes of Vietnam....
And power *never* corrupts....
The Right is now in the process of crippling the Left (the whole point of the article) through gerrymandering of Congressional districts and the abuse of the majority's control of the Rules Committee in both House and Senate. Both are possible because the Right has controlled the Congress for 20 of the last 28 years.
The apathy of the population, the corporatization and slow defanging of the media, and the overwhelming influence of commercial advertising on elections (which requires large amounts of money, which the conservatives always have more of then the liberals), is neutralizing (or already has neutralized) the people.
Whats left? The courts, executive, congress, and army.
Given another 4 to 8 years of controlling both Congress and the Executive, the Right will succeed in controlling the courts (I mentioned in another thread that the pundits expect the next President to get to pick 2, or even 3 new SCOTUS Justices this next term). Most of the lower Federal Courts are already stacked by extreme conservatives (Bush can get away with that because by the Right changing the rules in Congressional procedure, the Left can't block the appointment of even the obviously extreme judges now). Another 2 or three terms of militant conservative control of the Executive will allow the the Right to control all the lower court districts (now that the minority can't stop, or even slow down, any appointment). Keep in mind, we're talking about the Right appointing judges who believe (for example) that other things (like religious values) can trump Federal Law. I'm not sure which is worse, and activist judge who wants to use law too excessively, or one that believes following the law can sometimes be "optional" for certain people.
So the only unknown left is the army, but sadly the army is historically conservative, and has no experience, history, or precedents for directly interfering with the civilian government. The most likely thing they'll do is nothing.
Since neoconservatives are dominated by extreme social conservatives, I don't see how the end result of their dictatorship could be a utopia for most people, just a utopia for the ones in power.
ushering in an era of low taxes,
Only for the rich, if the rich are favored, somebody has to make up the difference. Since, historically, the Republicans like to "borrow and spend", I expect them to slightly increase the proportion of the burden carried by the middle class, and to pass the remaining costs onto future generations.
small government,
Thats not favored by neoconservatives, its the classical, intellectual conservatives of the last generation which always sought small government no matter what. Now, the neos have things they need to the government to do, like paying for the increased "internal security" we are told we now "need", the new wars we'll be involved in, and their own pork-barrel projects, for starters.
trickle down economics
Which produces a short term benefit, but several long term negatives, including massive deficits, stagnant quality of living for those not in the top 10% or 15% of the richest in the country, an accelerating gap in the incomes between the rich and the poor.
and an end to labor law disputes?
Sure, bust the unions and crack a few heads, its a proven winner at ending labor disputes.
"The bottom line is that attack ads won't necessarily stop 60 days before the general election on Nov. 2, even though McCain Feingold requires it. A 527 group, before the 60-day window, can use corporate, labor union, and individual contributions to fund ads. But if the group started a political action committee and raised its funds in the form "hard money" - dollars that are subjected to limits and don't come from union or corporate treasuries - they can continue to advertise through Election Day."
In other words, IMO, "McCain-Feingold" is pretty much useless, since both sides can raise both soft and hard money, with the soft money spent first, and hard money held back to be spent in the last 60 days.
At least someone in that court room still remember that Americans possess this thing called rights
Of course if we give Bush another 4 years and let him stack the Federal Courts(1) and SCOTUS(2) so they lean hard right, those "someones" who carried the day today, will be gone soon. They'll tell us its for our own good, of course, in the name of security and morality, to help "Law and Order", but once a government succeeds in taking a right away from the people, it is always very difficult and usually impossible for the people to ever recover it.
1: Bush has put people on Federal benches that are so extreme, they have in effect said publically that they believe Christian Values(TM) trump Federal Law. And everyone has said for years that it was the extreme left that was the threat to the Constitution....
2: Many pundits expect the next President to choose 2, or even 3 justices for the SCOTUS bench as retirements are looming. Another reason why this election really does matter.
Never happen, not for social or political reasons, but for technical reasons. Unfortunately, the Internet is the perfect solution for the porn consumer's "problem". There is only one cache in the world that can hold all the porn we have and continue to create, and that cache is the Internet.
I get hardly any spam just using the defaults on Spam Assasin. So, this does not seem like a major emergency
Huh? It doesn't matter how good your filter is, the parent is pointing out that a lot of bandwidth on the net is being wasted pushing junk around only to have it automatically deleted at its destination. Fine, its not a problem for you but it is a problem for the Internet.
Oh please. Global? Monopoly? The only thing I've ever used Paypal for was purchaces on EBay. All other online transactions I've used direct payment from my account or some plastic. No one is forced to use Paypal, anywhere. You went way too far out on the limb with this statement, no wonder the branch broke.:)
First, you're assuming the implication in your remark wasn't clear to anyone. Thats not true of course, I got it, and at least one other person agreed with me and modded you "Insightful".
Besides, IMO, there is a decent fiscal conservatism and/or minimal-government view point here on/.. I don't think that there is a massively profound difference there. The problem comes when trolls start throwing around old rhetoric that hasn't made sense in several years. On a lot of issues the party positions are mixed, or confusing, and perhaps more importantly, neither party is addressing the issues of fiscal policy, deficit reduction, or government spending. ATM, foreign policy and personal slander attacks about things from 30 years ago are their focus.
I suspect there is a broad consensus on the issue of limiting government spending (well, not too much blood-letting anyway). The really vicious fights only break out when you get down to dividing up the pie that you've decided to let the government have. It seems everybody and their mother has their own idea about how the money should be divided up and spent.
Great, but before that can happen the current system has to be torn down first. The current system doesn't go by the individual content, it goes by the channel, and with the big players using bundling to pass on crappy channels with the half dozen ones everybody wants, we end up with "57 channels and nothin' on". An even bigger problem though is that video on demand would effectively prevent the media providers from controlling what we watch, they won't be able to push crappy shows by scheduling them to air just before a popular show for example. Oh, and you think video on demand will mean the end of commercials? Think again....
My point is, unfortunately, that I believe it will be a long while before the nirvana we seek will ever happen, certainly not within my lifetime (next ~30 years), because as we all now know, the content owners are trying very hard to *increase* their control over their content even after its left their hands (think DRM controlled PCs being a requirement to see any content at all). The effects of this "imbalancing of rights" (between content owner and consumer) will probably have consequences in the next generation that none of us can see now, but a lack of flexibility in the usage of content is inevitable and easily predictable.
So lesse, you make a business of playing with molten rock in Hawaii, yet your handle is "Mr. Icee"?
Heh. I wish we could mod handles on/. the way we mod comments, although we'll probably need slightly different categories for them. Either way, yours would get "+1 [something]" from me.:)
Your basic point is understood, but it seems to me the larger problem is that the documentation, no matter how you get at it, varies wildly in quality, and also lacks coherency across different but related apps (in some cases). Knowing the 'man' command won't help you if all you get is a hastily written page that barely helps you understand what the command is for, much less how to use it effectively.
Slashdot Mirror
Its not a theory, this is how Tom Delay (Rep Majority Leader) has established his "dictatorship" of the House. If moderate Reps do not vote with the party (on the important issues), they don't get party funding in their next election cycle. What the Reps are doing in the House is explained in the other article about One Party Rule.
Given another 4-8 years of controlling both the Legislature and the Executive, even your tin-foil hat won't be able to protect you.
Its funny only until you ask yourself what happens when the Legislative, acheiving domination for several decades, manages to remake the Judiciary in its own image? Hmmm...
Sounds like you're justifying the 'Tyrrany of the Majority'. I suspect our Founding Fathers knew their business when they included a few "checks and balances" that required super-majorities (60% or 67%) of the legislature. Easy to see it as an annoyance... until the day the majority writes a bad law that targets you as the victim.
Well, something not being explicitly disallowed by the current rules has never stopped politicians from naked power grabs before.
Oh, and don't worry about the truth anymore either, it was always an annoying encumberence that we've now apparently dispensed with. Politics is so much more fun when you do away with that silly stuff called ethics.
Not disagreeing, just adding to your list of points.
Fine. Stick your head in the sand and keep telling yourself "It Can't Happen Here" over and over again. You certainly won't be alone.
Yes, but they never resorted to the extreme level of gerrymandering Congressional districts, or contorting the rules of Congress in ways that allowed them to muzzle the opposition so thoroughly as the Reps are doing.
This may very well be true for the specific case of Arsenic, but this doesn't defuse his main point: Bush has been consistently gutting environmental law, and rendering some regulations irrelevent by having the various agencies involved "reevaluate" the law and modify their regulations that implement that law, such that the end result is always making the real effect of the law weaker.
Ahh, the hypocrisy of the religious right never ceases. The UN agency in question does *not* promote abortion, they never have. Their business is family planning, and that amounts basically to 2 things: educating poor rural women about AIDS and the other sexually transmitted diseases, and providing contraception devices, condoms, to help these poor women avoid unwanted pregnancies. This agency never paid for abortions nor performed any themselves, nor advocated them *in general*. Unfortunately, the one thing they did do thats made them an election year whipping boy, is not screaming bloody murder over China's use of forced abortions.
The irony here is that this agency, by reducing unwanted pregnancies, was actually responsible for a substantial decrease of abortions in rural China (the drop in pregnancies and the drop in abortions exactly coorelate to the time this agency began operations in China). Of course, the Reps never mention that. And by educating and providing medical services to poor women, they reduced the mortality rate for babies and their mothers. So between those 2 things they saved far more lives than were lost to China's forced abortion program. The Reps, of course, don't mention that either.
It is funny though that where they want to build these roads there is always one of 2 things: valuable timber or oil. Coincidence? After Haliburton, I don't think so.
I call bullshit.
From here.
So, yes, Bush did allow (federally funded) research to begin, after he himself banned it earlier, but no, his authorization does not allow research on new stem cells, only clones of old ones that already existed. As the article points out those clone lines are deteriorating, less than a quarter of them are left. This article also mentions another problem which is contamination of the remaining clone lines.
Check your sources there Tommy, either you're just making up this crap as you go along, or someone is feeding you this crap, and you're just munchin' down without even looking at what you're eating.
RTFA.
The difference this time is that a) the Reps are exploiting the situation to consolidate their power more then the Dems ever did, and b) the turnover in Congress is much less than it used to be because of gerrymandering. More of the seats are inherently "safe". Instead of 40 or 50 seats being contested every election cycle, we're down to less than 15 (where there is any chance that the challenger can defeat the incumbent). Narrowing the contest down to a small number of races, magnifies the power of money in the election process, because each contested race now gets more money than ever, because there are fewer races whose outcome is not already known and safe, and it also means of course with a deficit of around 15-20 seats already (for the Dems in the House) it would take an extraordinary event (some massive scandal that rocks the entire Rep party) for them gain many seats. Otherwise, it will require the Dems to be consistently successful in 3 or 4 straight election cycles to catch up, and that is very unlikely given how people vote. All it takes is one year were the Reps do well overall and their supporters vote the party line all the way down the ticket, and the Dems suffer a setback that puts them back nearly at their starting point.
Finally, given that the majority of states now are conservative controlled, the ongoing gerrymandering continues to reinforce the Reps control of Congress, by allowing the Reps to ensure that the majority of districts in the state are safe for conservatives.
The game goes like this: put most of the liberal territory in as few large districts as possible, then split up the rest of the territory into the majority of conservative districts. There are some safe Dem seats, yes, but they are always in a minority for the state as a whole. It is both simple and insidious. There are some places where its impossible for the conservatives to accomplish this (California, New York), and vice-versa for the Dems in some places, but its a viable strategy just about everywhere. The Reps are using this exploit in ways that the Dems never did or would have done. In this case, ethics and any sense of fair play has been thrown out the window. Its a no-holds-barred cage match, where once you get the advantage, its hard for your opponent to ever get back into the contest. To me, its not surprising that these neo-conservative, New Age Republicans are willing to be more ruthless when they have the advantage than the Deps. Its the nature of the new Beast.
I have.
The last election was exactly this way. Gore didn't excite anyone, and no one knew anything about Bush, except for who his father was. I can't count the number of times I saw comments on the Internet to the effect of "Yawn, whats the difference between 'em, there's no point in voting". Bush won because the Republican Party was able to mobilize the militant religious right better than the Democrats could mobilize they're own base. I don't see anyone saying there's no difference this time, except for those deliberately being sarcastic.
Nader isn't getting any support this time, not because nobody likes him, many people who are going to vote for Kerry like Nader, but they know that this time there are issues at stake, and real differences, so they have to make their vote work at defeating Bush, thus their voting for the only one with a realistic chance of beating him.
I never heard anyone call the last election "the most important one ever", but in conversations on the Internet and among relatives and friends, I've heard myself, and others say something like that numerous times recently. Maybe it doesn't look so important to the Right, but most of the Left knows it is extremely important (so there is at least some hope that this time the Left will mobilize its base better than the Right).
Before you assume that that is an easy thing to happen, you should read up, for example, on the super-gerrymandering of Texas Congressional districts. Yes, Dems have been guilty of this to (and are therefore partially responsible for the current mess), but the point of this article was not that the Reps are doing these things, but they're doing these things on a scale and severity that the Dems have never done themselves before.
IMHO, a republican/democratic form of government, even like ours, is at risk if the majority (50% + 1) is allowed to gerrymander Congressional districts as has been done in this country. America won't be safe (or at least much safer) until we outlaw gerrymandering, and replace it with some mechanism to draw district lines that can't be so easily abused.
A lot of Germans said the same thing when Hitler was elected Chancellor (or whatever his first title was called).
Everyone always believes the bad things happen to "others", nah, it can't happen here, America is *special*, the people/courts/executive/congress/army/left/right won't let it happen.
The Right is now in the process of crippling the Left (the whole point of the article) through gerrymandering of Congressional districts and the abuse of the majority's control of the Rules Committee in both House and Senate. Both are possible because the Right has controlled the Congress for 20 of the last 28 years.
The apathy of the population, the corporatization and slow defanging of the media, and the overwhelming influence of commercial advertising on elections (which requires large amounts of money, which the conservatives always have more of then the liberals), is neutralizing (or already has neutralized) the people.
Whats left? The courts, executive, congress, and army.
Given another 4 to 8 years of controlling both Congress and the Executive, the Right will succeed in controlling the courts (I mentioned in another thread that the pundits expect the next President to get to pick 2, or even 3 new SCOTUS Justices this next term). Most of the lower Federal Courts are already stacked by extreme conservatives (Bush can get away with that because by the Right changing the rules in Congressional procedure, the Left can't block the appointment of even the obviously extreme judges now). Another 2 or three terms of militant conservative control of the Executive will allow the the Right to control all the lower court districts (now that the minority can't stop, or even slow down, any appointment). Keep in mind, we're talking about the Right appointing judges who believe (for example) that other things (like religious values) can trump Federal Law. I'm not sure which is worse, and activist judge who wants to use law too excessively, or one that believes following the law can sometimes be "optional" for certain people.
So the only unknown left is the army, but sadly the army is historically conservative, and has no experience, history, or precedents for directly interfering with the civilian government. The most likely thing they'll do is nothing.
Hell no, you say? I wouldn't bet my life on it.
Since neoconservatives are dominated by extreme social conservatives, I don't see how the end result of their dictatorship could be a utopia for most people, just a utopia for the ones in power.
Only for the rich, if the rich are favored, somebody has to make up the difference. Since, historically, the Republicans like to "borrow and spend", I expect them to slightly increase the proportion of the burden carried by the middle class, and to pass the remaining costs onto future generations.
Thats not favored by neoconservatives, its the classical, intellectual conservatives of the last generation which always sought small government no matter what. Now, the neos have things they need to the government to do, like paying for the increased "internal security" we are told we now "need", the new wars we'll be involved in, and their own pork-barrel projects, for starters.
Which produces a short term benefit, but several long term negatives, including massive deficits, stagnant quality of living for those not in the top 10% or 15% of the richest in the country, an accelerating gap in the incomes between the rich and the poor.
Sure, bust the unions and crack a few heads, its a proven winner at ending labor disputes.
Only "soft money" ads. From here:
In other words, IMO, "McCain-Feingold" is pretty much useless, since both sides can raise both soft and hard money, with the soft money spent first, and hard money held back to be spent in the last 60 days.
Of course if we give Bush another 4 years and let him stack the Federal Courts(1) and SCOTUS(2) so they lean hard right, those "someones" who carried the day today, will be gone soon. They'll tell us its for our own good, of course, in the name of security and morality, to help "Law and Order", but once a government succeeds in taking a right away from the people, it is always very difficult and usually impossible for the people to ever recover it.
1: Bush has put people on Federal benches that are so extreme, they have in effect said publically that they believe Christian Values(TM) trump Federal Law. And everyone has said for years that it was the extreme left that was the threat to the Constitution....
2: Many pundits expect the next President to choose 2, or even 3 justices for the SCOTUS bench as retirements are looming. Another reason why this election really does matter.
Never happen, not for social or political reasons, but for technical reasons. Unfortunately, the Internet is the perfect solution for the porn consumer's "problem". There is only one cache in the world that can hold all the porn we have and continue to create, and that cache is the Internet.
Don't hold your breath....
Wait, ok, I was just joking, breathe man, BREATHE!
C'mon man, stop fooling around, your face is turning purple! Suck in that H2O!!
Huh? It doesn't matter how good your filter is, the parent is pointing out that a lot of bandwidth on the net is being wasted pushing junk around only to have it automatically deleted at its destination. Fine, its not a problem for you but it is a problem for the Internet.
Oh please. Global? Monopoly? The only thing I've ever used Paypal for was purchaces on EBay. All other online transactions I've used direct payment from my account or some plastic. No one is forced to use Paypal, anywhere. You went way too far out on the limb with this statement, no wonder the branch broke.
What browser are you using? None of that happened when I went there with Firefox.
I'm not so sure...
First, you're assuming the implication in your remark wasn't clear to anyone. Thats not true of course, I got it, and at least one other person agreed with me and modded you "Insightful".
Besides, IMO, there is a decent fiscal conservatism and/or minimal-government view point here on
I suspect there is a broad consensus on the issue of limiting government spending (well, not too much blood-letting anyway). The really vicious fights only break out when you get down to dividing up the pie that you've decided to let the government have. It seems everybody and their mother has their own idea about how the money should be divided up and spent.
Great, but before that can happen the current system has to be torn down first. The current system doesn't go by the individual content, it goes by the channel, and with the big players using bundling to pass on crappy channels with the half dozen ones everybody wants, we end up with "57 channels and nothin' on". An even bigger problem though is that video on demand would effectively prevent the media providers from controlling what we watch, they won't be able to push crappy shows by scheduling them to air just before a popular show for example. Oh, and you think video on demand will mean the end of commercials? Think again....
My point is, unfortunately, that I believe it will be a long while before the nirvana we seek will ever happen, certainly not within my lifetime (next ~30 years), because as we all now know, the content owners are trying very hard to *increase* their control over their content even after its left their hands (think DRM controlled PCs being a requirement to see any content at all). The effects of this "imbalancing of rights" (between content owner and consumer) will probably have consequences in the next generation that none of us can see now, but a lack of flexibility in the usage of content is inevitable and easily predictable.
Swords and robots...
:)
oohhh-kaaay....
What is it with these MIT people anyway... is it the water up there? The air?
So lesse, you make a business of playing with molten rock in Hawaii, yet your handle is "Mr. Icee"?
/. the way we mod comments, although we'll probably need slightly different categories for them. Either way, yours would get "+1 [something]" from me. :)
Heh. I wish we could mod handles on
Your basic point is understood, but it seems to me the larger problem is that the documentation, no matter how you get at it, varies wildly in quality, and also lacks coherency across different but related apps (in some cases). Knowing the 'man' command won't help you if all you get is a hastily written page that barely helps you understand what the command is for, much less how to use it effectively.