But while not soft, they are softer targets than say the national Presidential election. The Republicans and Democrats both have large, well-funded, and sophisticated machines for advertising, turnout efforts, etc. Nobody else has that kind of infrastructure.
And say it's the Libertarians trying to pull something like this off. They could partially mitigate the gerrymandering by selecting candidates to fit the demographics of the district. Even of folks of a fairly libertarian bent, there is still quite a conservative/liberal spectrum.
Actually I'd seen Democrats being the ones blaming our problems on Gramm-Leach-Bliley. Gramm was a McCain advisor, so the Democrats thought they could make an issue of it. The fact that it was passed by Clinton was conveniently ignored.
Hate to remind you, but it's the Congress, not the President, that passes spending bills. So to have any meaning, you need to look at which party controlled Congress during those times.
Under Clinton, it was the Republicans controlling Congress. Back then, Republicans still believed in fiscal responsibility.
The polls are so variable it's hard to know which are accurate. Some show Obama up by 14. Others show him up by just 1. The difference lies in differing assumptions about who is likely to turn out to vote on Election Day. See for example, this explanation.
If turnout is demographically similar to previous elections, polls show it will be a very close election. If as some pollsters expect, we have larger-than-usual turnout among blacks and the young, then Obama will probably have a large margin of victory.
I agree that the media can often be morons. But it's not stupid to question the accuracy of the polls, given how hugely dependent they are upon what are little more than guesses about voter turnout.
Ultimately the questions for conservatives is whether they believe that people have an inherent right to live, even if at the lowest standards of living, or if people that can work or can find work do have that right. Because if they do have a right to live, then we must be prepared to give those people some amount of charity.
First, charity is something you give of your own free will. Conservatives do a lot of this (in fact, studies have shown they give more to charity than liberals). Taxes and the government programs they fund are not charity, because taxes are taken against your will under penalty of imprisonment.
Second, I think you will find few if any conservatives who oppose helping people get back on their feet. We're generally all for giving temporary assistance to get someone through a tough time, because we realize everyone has bad luck sometimes.
However, I think you will find most conservatives do oppose handouts for folks who are not working but could. There's no reason to support freeloading for those who could work.
So in that sense, I think conservatives would support taxpayer funding for a "right to live" limited to food, clothing, very basic medical care, and shelter; provided that the person is doing their best to improve their own situation. In no way should we be taxing someone to pay someone else's cable TV bills though. A right to live does not equate to a right to live well on the public dole.
The 'social' in social security means 'the people' as in no matter what happens people shouldn't starve to death or freeze out in the cold in their old age. It does NOT mean 'your social status' as in what circles you can afford to hang out in and what diamond jewelry you can afford to wear. That's why a progressive 'social' security system makes a lot of sense.
Preventing starvation in old age was the original intent of the program. However, people now live much longer (thus withdrawing more from Social Security than they used to), but we haven't redefined "old age" to mean the same level of ability to work as it meant back then. So now SS is paying for general retirement of folks for decades of their lives, rather than helping the neediest and very oldest. That's a huge scope creep that presents a much larger bill than intended.
With the graying of the population, we also have many fewer people paying into the system for each person taking money out.
So the question is whether we can even afford to allow SS to continually grow as a welfare program for more and more able-bodied people, or whether we should put it back to its stated purpose of preventing the truly elderly from becoming destitute.
First, just because something is not Constitutionally forbidden, does not mean that it is good policy, or that it should not be outlawed.
Second, such an invasion of American citizens' privacy by their government, if it were to be performed, should be justified by some overriding government interest. I have seen no good argument that searching ordinary people's laptops has contributed to the security of our border or nation at all, much less to a degree that it would take to justify the burden imposed.
Third, the contents of your laptop are fundamentally different than the contents of your suitcase, making the invasion of privacy far worse than the loss of privacy from a suitcase search.
The laptop is a huge vault of information about your life and thoughts, including lots of things completely unrelated to your travels. Those things are really none of the government's business - information on your political leanings, reading materials, intimate email letters to/from your wife, etc. These are all things over which inside the border, the government would have no authority to obtain (barring court-authorized surveillance).
In contrast, what physical items you bring across the border are the government's business, as they could be truly dangerous to public safety - illegal weaponry, drugs, dangerous biological items, etc.
Fourth, sanitizing your laptop before crossing the border is a much more difficult and error-prone process than leaving a physical item at home. This makes it a greater hardship for travelers.
So to answer your question of "what frightens you", it's that our government seems so willing to invade its citizens' privacy for so little, if any, gain. What also frightens me is the argument that if current law allows something, it must be OK, because hey at least we're not a fascist state, or because Europe (from which our forefathers fled in search of freedom) is making similarly poor decisions. The lowest common denominator is not something we should aspire to.
I'm perfectly calm and rational, and I call you "liar" with good cause. You are a liar, as I've explained, and may explain again until you tell the truth or stop speaking. Take your pick.
If you think I'm mistaken, that's one thing. If you think I'm deliberately misleading people, that would be a case of lying. You have demonstrated absolutely no evidence to back up your assertion that I'm lying. Which leads me to believe that your goal is simply to make those with whom you disagree "stop speaking". Very illiberal of you.
McCain's ties to the fiend Phil Gramm, of Gramm-Leach-Biley infamy
Ah yes, the Gramm-Leach-Biley law, signed into law by Bill Clinton. Innuendo on your part does not prove any misdeeds on the part of either Gramm or McCain.
McCain's proven, continuing employment of corrupt lobbyists
For someone concerned with slandering "the best man in this contest", you seem willing to do so with abandon. There is no evidence that the folks McCain employed were ever engaged in any corrupt activity.
If you want to go into guilt-by-association, Obama's far more vulnerable than McCain. Just look at Jeremiah Wright, after whose sermons Obama named his book. Or his real estate dealings with Tony Rezko. Those might be a little harder to explain away.
Every application is a potential security risk, as you very accurately noted. With that risk comes an associated cost.
But denying a user the tool they feel is best suited to their job also incurs a cost. It may be lost productivity while the employee retrains on whatever the "approved" tool is. Or it could be lost productivity because there is no approved tool. Or it could be lowered morale, and increased employee attrition, because the machines are so locked down it creates an unpleasant work environment.
There needs to be a balance, such that employees are happy and productive, but the network is secure. There isn't going to be a one-size-fits-all approach, because different businesses have different employees and differing security requirements. Where I work, we can get administrative rights simply by signing a thou-shalt-not-do-stupid-things agreement with IT. Which works pretty well in a security-conscious group of software developers, but would probably be a disaster in many other environments.
I would argue that that is too narrow of an interpretation of IT's role.
Information technology exists to promote productivity. No business with any brains buys hardware or pays IT folks just for bragging rights. They buy things and pay people to make their business more productive. Therefore, if a technology, or technology policy, is limiting employee's productivity, that's an IT problem.
And it's in the IT department's interests to own this problem. Would you rather be seen by management as active problem-solvers that increase productivity, or as a reactive cost center that impedes productivity? The former will get you more prestige and maybe more resources with which to do your job. The latter means you may not have a job for very long.
I'm not saying you drop all control. Sometimes user requests cannot be satisfied. But there are all too many IT folks that won't work with a user in good faith to find a solution that meets both the user's needs and corporate security requirements. Because they don't think it's their job. Or maybe they're just short-staffed, so they just say no to requests, rather than going to management and saying "here's the level of demand from our employees, and here's what we could provide if we had more resources". Maybe you get them, maybe you don't. But at least if you're trying your best to help your users, the company will see you as part of the team, rather than an obstacle to be circumvented.
I don't recall the media hating Gore's guts. But they were certainly skeptical of many of his claims, and not completely without justification, given his involvement with Clinton's scandals. Though in hindsight we might wish they gave Bush a harder time.
If the media has such a liberal bias, why was it so gung ho on the Iraq war?
Because whatever biases it has, the press also tends to be gullible about any sensational claims about risks to public safety. They don't tend to question the "authorities" when said authorities are providing a good story. This will generally override any liberal leaning they have - which IMO is why news stories about "warrantless wiretapping" quickly morphed into stories about the "terrorist surveillance program", and from there into obscurity.
So do, please, explain how that ad was not racist
Because taking note of Obama's celebrity is not racist. It is traditional for Republicans to paint Democrats as elitists. Obama's own words and actions have played right into that elitist stereotype. There's nothing wrong with highlighting that in an ad, and certainly nothing racial. Showing him in places like Washington and foreign countries is meant to reinforce this "out of touch" image.
Taking Obama's campaign to task for their "disrespectful" treatment of Palin is not racist. It was a response to Obama's belittling a Governor as being just a "small-town mayor". These ads were not racial in character - if anything, it was an attempt to connect with women who saw Obama's primary campaign against Hillary Clinton as sexist.
I think we need to be very careful about throwing charges of racism or sexism around. I had hoped that the ugliness of the Democratic primary would have shown everyone that. It was almost comical, except that it was so sad, to see Hillary and Obama's partisans throwing accusations of racism and sexism back and forth, with very little basis in reality. I really don't think either one of them was trying to be racist or sexist, but their partisans seemed to think so. Which makes me think these ads are somewhat of a Rorschach test - how folks view the ad is more a function of their personal sensitivities than of the ad itself.
Let's take a deep breath here. No need to go name-calling without cause.
We can argue over how bad/close the association with Franklin Raines is. But note that the Washington Post stood by their reporting, and even Raines is not denying, that Raines took calls from the Obama campaign to give advice on "general housing, economy issues".
Once the furor erupted, they were quick to distance themselves from each other, and say he was never an official advisor. I couldn't care less whether he had an official status. If they're asking for the opinions of a shady character like Raines, that says something about their judgment.
Re: James Johnson, it's true he wasn't fined millions like Raines. But neither is he a paragon of virtue. The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight found that when he was CEO, Fannie improperly deferred millions of expenses, allowing Johnson to reap a 1.9 million dollar bonus he otherwise would not have received. Either he knew about that (in which case "corrupt" is apt) or didn't, in which case he was simply asleep at the helm. Take your pick.
Former CEOs are not automatically corrupt. Read up on Franklin Raines before you accuse me of knee-jerk leftism.
When federal regulators take you to court for accounting irregularities, including the shifting of Fannie Mae's losses so that you and other executives could "earn" large bonuses, and as a result you pay millions in fines and forfeit millions of your previous compensation... I think it's safe to call that a case of corruption.
Regarding your NY Times article - sure, McCain has a lobbyist working for him who also worked for Fannie/Freddie. But it's one thing to be a hired advocate for a firm - that's what lawyers and lobbyists do. It's another thing to be running the company.
Calling Iran a democracy is a joke when the theocrats can arbitrarily disqualify any reformist candidates that pose a threat, based on nothing more than an allegation that a candidate lacks a sufficient commitment to Islam. In other words, when they disagree with the rulers.
I am the first to admit that conservatives tend to hyperventilate about media bias more than they should (in many cases, the bias of the mainstream media has been only mildly left, no worse than Fox's bias rightwards). But even a broken clock is right twice a day, and this is one of those times.
Take, for example, the Fannie/Freddie debacle. Consider that Obama had 2 corrupt former CEOs of Fannie as economic advisors, one of which was the head of his VP search committee. We didn't hear about that until McCain ran ads about it. And then, did the media focus on the story? No - they attacked McCain for supposedly running a racist ad (apparently you can't mention close associations with corrupt CEOs if they happen to be black).
You could also consider the media's attacks on some of McCain's more dubious ads (e.g. sketchy claims about Obama's sex ed bill). The media went on for days about how McCain was such a scoundrel. And hyperbole notwithstanding, he deserved some serious criticism for those ads. But then when Obama played equally dirty (e.g. scaring Florida seniors with falsehoods about McCain's Social Security plans) you barely hear a peep from those same folks (with the notable exception of Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post).
I don't doubt many in the media are trying to be fair, because they are aware that they and their colleagues are overwhelmingly liberal. A handful succeed in being neutral. But for the rest, the prospect of an eloquent, black, highly liberal senator (the anti-Bush as it were) becoming President is such a seductive dream that they can't help but look more critically at his opponent. Love really is blind.
We're looking at the candidate who has spoken for and stood for change and integrity from before his political career started, and the candidate who has resorted to making bald faced, demonstrably false and misleading lies that in a non-political context would be grounds for a successful slander/libel suit.
Alright, I'll take the bait.
Let's start with the "bald faced, demonstrably false and misleading lies". Perhaps you're referring to Obama's whopper of a lie that McCain wants 100 years of war in Iraq? Or maybe his bald-faced lie that under McCain's plan, Florida's seniors would have lost their Social Security in the recent stock market troubles?
When considering technology specifically, your choices are Obama, who at least understands technology well enough to have created a successful social networking style community site, and McCain who admits he barely even knows how to turn his computer on.
Also not true. McCain's war injuries make typing painful for him (though he can do it), so he usually asks someone such as his wife to serve as his typist. This one got started because McCain has a self-deprecating sense of humor, which to Obama seems to be an invitation to falsely claim McCain can't send email. In fact he does email daily.
We're looking at the candidate who has spoken for and stood for change and integrity
To me, actions speak louder than words. McCain has on numerous occasions risked his political prospects and fought with his own party to achieve bipartisan agreements/legislation on controversial issues. He did it on campaign finance reform, immigration, judicial confirmations, tobacco legislation, and education. As Hillary reminded us, Obama just has a nice speech he trots out periodically. He doesn't stand up to the special interests within his party, nor has he worked in a bipartisan way on any controversial issues. If you want real change, given that the President is not a dictator and must work through Congress, you've got a far better chance under a President McCain than you would with a President Obama.
Yay! McCain's position on patents basically shows him as a protectionist 1800-era politician who won't bat an eyelid while raising barriers to trade, tariffs, and taxes.
Except that it doesn't. McCain has long been ardently in favor of free trade, and wants lower taxes.
It's Obama that wants to renege (oops, I mean unilaterally "renegotiate") on our trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, and who opposes a trade deal with Colombia even though all it changes nothing in terms of imports to the US, but improves US exports by eliminating heavy tariffs. Even when the deal is lopsidedly pro-US he opposes free trade. That's beyond protectionist.
So do the campaigns have to ask Adobe special permission to use their legitimately licensed copies Photoshop for campaign posters?
Clearly not. Adobe offers Photoshop under a certain license. People who buy a license are under no moral obligation to only create works whose content Adobe would agree with. Similarly, the artists agreed to license their works via ASCAP, and reap the financial benefits thereof. That license does not require that the artist approve of licensees' political values.
If the artist was unwilling to have their products used like this, they should not agreed to it by joining ASCAP. But they did. Seller's remorse is not McCain's fault.
This is tantamount to telling his supporters "You are too stupid to discuss my campaign without help."
Not at all. It's simply an acknowledgment that a full-time, professional staff which spends countless hours honing a message is probably going to be more effective at it than anyone else. That's true for Obama and McCain supporters alike - it doesn't seem like such a bad idea to encourage your supporters to make use of that professional work.
Choice of phrasing/argument has less to do with raw intellect than with communications skills. I've known plenty of bright people who couldn't communicate clearly to save their life.
And to be honest, political fervor is usually an emotional rather than a purely intellectual phenomenon. Just check out 90% of the comments on political website forums. If the "Spread the Word" program has no other effect than to get a supporter to calm down long enough to think before they speak, it's probably worthwhile. A well-considered argument or phrase - even if the considering was done by someone else;-) - is usually better than a knee-jerk response.
I understand why they do the things they do. Yes, the carriers are guilty of some of the same tactics. Regardless of who's doing it, I'm just saying that these practices are harmful to their customers.
For #1, there's nothing wrong with selling ringtones, or selling service, or selling combinations of the two. But you can do these things without locking down the phone. Amazon can sell you MP3s without controlling your PC. Apple and the carriers could do the same, probably in a more user-friendly way since they have access to the device. The only reason they lock down the ability to transfer ringtones to the phone is to limit competition - rather than getting the data elsewhere, you have to buy it through them. Switch carriers/phones? Looks like you have to buy those exact same bits again.
For #2, there is something to be said for keeping it simple. And here we could give Apple the benefit of the doubt regarding their motives.
But you can achieve reduced support costs without steps as radical as Apple has taken. While tying someone up is a good way to prevent them from shooting themselves, it also prevents them from doing many other desirable things. Even if they just allowed the customer to opt-out of Stupid-User Mode, thus explicitly agreeing to forgo any official support in exchange for being able to run what they want, I'd be fine with that. Most people probably would never opt out, for the same reason most people use Internet Explorer on their PC. But they'd have a choice if they cared to exercise it, which is important for the same reasons Firefox is. Even IE users benefit from the existence of a Firefox they never use, because the competition causes Microsoft to improve IE.
Having a built in application store to ensure ease of use is also fine. That doesn't mean they can't allow you to download an installer from a mobile website. That's hardly a difficult task, and if they provided a packaging tool to make iPhone app installers everyone would just use it, which would make the process just about as easy as their app store. Unless the goal is really to make sure Apple gets a cut of every software sale, thus requiring limits on the ability of other software to compete for those sales.
Re: options vs. stability, that doesn't have to be the choice. That's the choice we have on PCs because A) Microsoft made several poor design decisions, B) Microsoft has to support umpteen billion hardware devices, and C) many of those hardware devices have drivers written by untrusted third parties yet run in a privileged mode. None of those need be true on a cell phone.
Rules do change when you hit monopoly status. But just because some shady business practice is legal doesn't make it right, something that should escape criticism, or something that we want to support by purchasing Apple's products.
Some of us don't want to give our money to any company that tries to force you into a contractual relationship just to develop your own software, thus stifling open source development. Much like we don't want to give our money to companies that try to shackle their customers - why should a customer have to "jailbreak" their iPhone?
A company is supposed to be about providing value to its customers, not luring them with a little value, then turning around and denying the customer fair use of their own property just to extract their pound of flesh from a largely captive audience. Some phone carriers do this kind of nonsense by crippling the Bluetooth profiles on phones its customers use. Heaven forbid you add your own ringtones, even though the phone is capable of it, rather than pay the carrier for the exact same data you've already bought elsewhere. Apple does it by limiting your ability to put files on the phone, limiting what software can be developed for the phone, and generally trying to prevent you from using your own device in any way Apple doesn't like. It's like GM selling cars that won't drive near a Midas shop.
These sorts of things are all very legal but also anti-consumer. The GP is right that these tactics aren't going to go away as long as people continue to tolerate and encourage them by patronizing such companies.
I am currently shopping for a phone. The iPhone would have been one of my leading candidates if it wasn't for this kind of nonsense. I'll probably end up getting an HTC model instead. If more people took that approach, maybe Apple would get the message that what it's doing isn't acceptable.
I got my start programming the TI-85 (and later TI-92) calculators we used in our math classes. It's easy to learn, lets you automate some of the calculations in science classes, and if you make games you can share them with your friends.:-)
Then you can move on to programming more complicated things, like cell phones or computers.
An ideal CS degree would be very close to a very applied math degree, because of the similarities between the two subjects
There is this endless debate about what Computer Science is or should be. Theoretically-minded folks tend to want to turn it into a math degree. Application-minded folks want it to be a programming/engineering degree.
There is obviously a spectrum of skills involved in Computer Science. You need to understand math (it is a science), and you need to be able to program (since "computers" are kind of the whole point). Any "computer scientist" without some skills in both areas is probably not going to be a good computer scientist, IMO.
I do not believe there is One True Answer to what Computer Science "should be". But I will note that the vast majority of folks studying Computer Science are doing so in order to get programming jobs upon graduation. So I don't see Computer Science schools dropping programming curricula anytime soon - both to help their graduates find jobs in industry, and also for the pragmatic reason that having to apply a theory in a program is often a great way to ensure you really understand the theory.
Anyone can be a programmer - hell, even physicists program
Anyone can program, but not everyone can program well. Not everyone can solve very complex programming problems, much less do so in a maintainable way. By your logic, anyone could be a mathematician, because even physicists, programmers, and high school kids do math. That's just not the way it is.
And contraceptives are not even remotely the same thing. They don't terminate a life - they simply prevent it from occuring in the first place.
Technically speaking, contraceptives like "the pill" prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine wall, thus causing the embryo's death.
Which is part of why this is such a difficult moral question for people. Many people oppose abortion when the embryo is further developed, and certainly after the baby is born, because they view it as killing something they recognize as a person. Yet some of those same people are fine with the pill, whose major difference is that it kills the embryo much earlier on in its development cycle. So at what point does that clump of cells called an embryo become a person whose life is worth protecting?
Those who are opposed to contraceptives have a straightforward and logical answer - it's always a person worth protecting. For the rest of us, it's difficult to come up with an answer that doesn't feel arbitrary, more rationalization than principle. Do you say it's a person when it has a heartbeat? A nervous system? When it could survive on its own?
But on the other hand, if every embryo is a person worth saving, should couples feel they're murderers in the frequent occasions where their sex produces embryos that naturally fail to implant? Aren't they creating life willy-nilly and allowing it do die? If every embryo is a person worth protecting, then natural sex and current in-vitro fertilization techniques make murderers of their practitioners. Which to me sounds ludicrous.
Slashdot Mirror
Certainly true.
But while not soft, they are softer targets than say the national Presidential election. The Republicans and Democrats both have large, well-funded, and sophisticated machines for advertising, turnout efforts, etc. Nobody else has that kind of infrastructure.
And say it's the Libertarians trying to pull something like this off. They could partially mitigate the gerrymandering by selecting candidates to fit the demographics of the district. Even of folks of a fairly libertarian bent, there is still quite a conservative/liberal spectrum.
Actually I'd seen Democrats being the ones blaming our problems on Gramm-Leach-Bliley. Gramm was a McCain advisor, so the Democrats thought they could make an issue of it. The fact that it was passed by Clinton was conveniently ignored.
Hate to remind you, but it's the Congress, not the President, that passes spending bills. So to have any meaning, you need to look at which party controlled Congress during those times.
Under Clinton, it was the Republicans controlling Congress. Back then, Republicans still believed in fiscal responsibility.
The polls are so variable it's hard to know which are accurate. Some show Obama up by 14. Others show him up by just 1. The difference lies in differing assumptions about who is likely to turn out to vote on Election Day. See for example, this explanation.
If turnout is demographically similar to previous elections, polls show it will be a very close election. If as some pollsters expect, we have larger-than-usual turnout among blacks and the young, then Obama will probably have a large margin of victory.
I agree that the media can often be morons. But it's not stupid to question the accuracy of the polls, given how hugely dependent they are upon what are little more than guesses about voter turnout.
Ultimately the questions for conservatives is whether they believe that people have an inherent right to live, even if at the lowest standards of living, or if people that can work or can find work do have that right. Because if they do have a right to live, then we must be prepared to give those people some amount of charity.
First, charity is something you give of your own free will. Conservatives do a lot of this (in fact, studies have shown they give more to charity than liberals). Taxes and the government programs they fund are not charity, because taxes are taken against your will under penalty of imprisonment.
Second, I think you will find few if any conservatives who oppose helping people get back on their feet. We're generally all for giving temporary assistance to get someone through a tough time, because we realize everyone has bad luck sometimes.
However, I think you will find most conservatives do oppose handouts for folks who are not working but could. There's no reason to support freeloading for those who could work.
So in that sense, I think conservatives would support taxpayer funding for a "right to live" limited to food, clothing, very basic medical care, and shelter; provided that the person is doing their best to improve their own situation. In no way should we be taxing someone to pay someone else's cable TV bills though. A right to live does not equate to a right to live well on the public dole.
The 'social' in social security means 'the people' as in no matter what happens people shouldn't starve to death or freeze out in the cold in their old age. It does NOT mean 'your social status' as in what circles you can afford to hang out in and what diamond jewelry you can afford to wear. That's why a progressive 'social' security system makes a lot of sense.
Preventing starvation in old age was the original intent of the program. However, people now live much longer (thus withdrawing more from Social Security than they used to), but we haven't redefined "old age" to mean the same level of ability to work as it meant back then. So now SS is paying for general retirement of folks for decades of their lives, rather than helping the neediest and very oldest. That's a huge scope creep that presents a much larger bill than intended.
With the graying of the population, we also have many fewer people paying into the system for each person taking money out.
So the question is whether we can even afford to allow SS to continually grow as a welfare program for more and more able-bodied people, or whether we should put it back to its stated purpose of preventing the truly elderly from becoming destitute.
First, just because something is not Constitutionally forbidden, does not mean that it is good policy, or that it should not be outlawed.
Second, such an invasion of American citizens' privacy by their government, if it were to be performed, should be justified by some overriding government interest. I have seen no good argument that searching ordinary people's laptops has contributed to the security of our border or nation at all, much less to a degree that it would take to justify the burden imposed.
Third, the contents of your laptop are fundamentally different than the contents of your suitcase, making the invasion of privacy far worse than the loss of privacy from a suitcase search.
The laptop is a huge vault of information about your life and thoughts, including lots of things completely unrelated to your travels. Those things are really none of the government's business - information on your political leanings, reading materials, intimate email letters to/from your wife, etc. These are all things over which inside the border, the government would have no authority to obtain (barring court-authorized surveillance).
In contrast, what physical items you bring across the border are the government's business, as they could be truly dangerous to public safety - illegal weaponry, drugs, dangerous biological items, etc.
Fourth, sanitizing your laptop before crossing the border is a much more difficult and error-prone process than leaving a physical item at home. This makes it a greater hardship for travelers.
So to answer your question of "what frightens you", it's that our government seems so willing to invade its citizens' privacy for so little, if any, gain. What also frightens me is the argument that if current law allows something, it must be OK, because hey at least we're not a fascist state, or because Europe (from which our forefathers fled in search of freedom) is making similarly poor decisions. The lowest common denominator is not something we should aspire to.
I'm perfectly calm and rational, and I call you "liar" with good cause. You are a liar, as I've explained, and may explain again until you tell the truth or stop speaking. Take your pick.
If you think I'm mistaken, that's one thing. If you think I'm deliberately misleading people, that would be a case of lying. You have demonstrated absolutely no evidence to back up your assertion that I'm lying. Which leads me to believe that your goal is simply to make those with whom you disagree "stop speaking". Very illiberal of you.
McCain's ties to the fiend Phil Gramm, of Gramm-Leach-Biley infamy
Ah yes, the Gramm-Leach-Biley law, signed into law by Bill Clinton. Innuendo on your part does not prove any misdeeds on the part of either Gramm or McCain.
McCain's proven, continuing employment of corrupt lobbyists
For someone concerned with slandering "the best man in this contest", you seem willing to do so with abandon. There is no evidence that the folks McCain employed were ever engaged in any corrupt activity.
If you want to go into guilt-by-association, Obama's far more vulnerable than McCain. Just look at Jeremiah Wright, after whose sermons Obama named his book. Or his real estate dealings with Tony Rezko. Those might be a little harder to explain away.
Every application is a potential security risk, as you very accurately noted. With that risk comes an associated cost.
But denying a user the tool they feel is best suited to their job also incurs a cost. It may be lost productivity while the employee retrains on whatever the "approved" tool is. Or it could be lost productivity because there is no approved tool. Or it could be lowered morale, and increased employee attrition, because the machines are so locked down it creates an unpleasant work environment.
There needs to be a balance, such that employees are happy and productive, but the network is secure. There isn't going to be a one-size-fits-all approach, because different businesses have different employees and differing security requirements. Where I work, we can get administrative rights simply by signing a thou-shalt-not-do-stupid-things agreement with IT. Which works pretty well in a security-conscious group of software developers, but would probably be a disaster in many other environments.
I would argue that that is too narrow of an interpretation of IT's role.
Information technology exists to promote productivity. No business with any brains buys hardware or pays IT folks just for bragging rights. They buy things and pay people to make their business more productive. Therefore, if a technology, or technology policy, is limiting employee's productivity, that's an IT problem.
And it's in the IT department's interests to own this problem. Would you rather be seen by management as active problem-solvers that increase productivity, or as a reactive cost center that impedes productivity? The former will get you more prestige and maybe more resources with which to do your job. The latter means you may not have a job for very long.
I'm not saying you drop all control. Sometimes user requests cannot be satisfied. But there are all too many IT folks that won't work with a user in good faith to find a solution that meets both the user's needs and corporate security requirements. Because they don't think it's their job. Or maybe they're just short-staffed, so they just say no to requests, rather than going to management and saying "here's the level of demand from our employees, and here's what we could provide if we had more resources". Maybe you get them, maybe you don't. But at least if you're trying your best to help your users, the company will see you as part of the team, rather than an obstacle to be circumvented.
I don't recall the media hating Gore's guts. But they were certainly skeptical of many of his claims, and not completely without justification, given his involvement with Clinton's scandals. Though in hindsight we might wish they gave Bush a harder time.
If the media has such a liberal bias, why was it so gung ho on the Iraq war?
Because whatever biases it has, the press also tends to be gullible about any sensational claims about risks to public safety. They don't tend to question the "authorities" when said authorities are providing a good story. This will generally override any liberal leaning they have - which IMO is why news stories about "warrantless wiretapping" quickly morphed into stories about the "terrorist surveillance program", and from there into obscurity.
So do, please, explain how that ad was not racist
Because taking note of Obama's celebrity is not racist. It is traditional for Republicans to paint Democrats as elitists. Obama's own words and actions have played right into that elitist stereotype. There's nothing wrong with highlighting that in an ad, and certainly nothing racial. Showing him in places like Washington and foreign countries is meant to reinforce this "out of touch" image.
Taking Obama's campaign to task for their "disrespectful" treatment of Palin is not racist. It was a response to Obama's belittling a Governor as being just a "small-town mayor". These ads were not racial in character - if anything, it was an attempt to connect with women who saw Obama's primary campaign against Hillary Clinton as sexist.
I think we need to be very careful about throwing charges of racism or sexism around. I had hoped that the ugliness of the Democratic primary would have shown everyone that. It was almost comical, except that it was so sad, to see Hillary and Obama's partisans throwing accusations of racism and sexism back and forth, with very little basis in reality. I really don't think either one of them was trying to be racist or sexist, but their partisans seemed to think so. Which makes me think these ads are somewhat of a Rorschach test - how folks view the ad is more a function of their personal sensitivities than of the ad itself.
Let's take a deep breath here. No need to go name-calling without cause.
We can argue over how bad/close the association with Franklin Raines is. But note that the Washington Post stood by their reporting, and even Raines is not denying, that Raines took calls from the Obama campaign to give advice on "general housing, economy issues".
Once the furor erupted, they were quick to distance themselves from each other, and say he was never an official advisor. I couldn't care less whether he had an official status. If they're asking for the opinions of a shady character like Raines, that says something about their judgment.
Re: James Johnson, it's true he wasn't fined millions like Raines. But neither is he a paragon of virtue. The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight found that when he was CEO, Fannie improperly deferred millions of expenses, allowing Johnson to reap a 1.9 million dollar bonus he otherwise would not have received. Either he knew about that (in which case "corrupt" is apt) or didn't, in which case he was simply asleep at the helm. Take your pick.
Former CEOs are not automatically corrupt. Read up on Franklin Raines before you accuse me of knee-jerk leftism.
When federal regulators take you to court for accounting irregularities, including the shifting of Fannie Mae's losses so that you and other executives could "earn" large bonuses, and as a result you pay millions in fines and forfeit millions of your previous compensation... I think it's safe to call that a case of corruption.
Regarding your NY Times article - sure, McCain has a lobbyist working for him who also worked for Fannie/Freddie. But it's one thing to be a hired advocate for a firm - that's what lawyers and lobbyists do. It's another thing to be running the company.
The Democratic primary, in which the candidate is chosen in a free election.
Calling Iran a democracy is a joke when the theocrats can arbitrarily disqualify any reformist candidates that pose a threat, based on nothing more than an allegation that a candidate lacks a sufficient commitment to Islam. In other words, when they disagree with the rulers.
I am the first to admit that conservatives tend to hyperventilate about media bias more than they should (in many cases, the bias of the mainstream media has been only mildly left, no worse than Fox's bias rightwards). But even a broken clock is right twice a day, and this is one of those times.
Take, for example, the Fannie/Freddie debacle. Consider that Obama had 2 corrupt former CEOs of Fannie as economic advisors, one of which was the head of his VP search committee. We didn't hear about that until McCain ran ads about it. And then, did the media focus on the story? No - they attacked McCain for supposedly running a racist ad (apparently you can't mention close associations with corrupt CEOs if they happen to be black).
You could also consider the media's attacks on some of McCain's more dubious ads (e.g. sketchy claims about Obama's sex ed bill). The media went on for days about how McCain was such a scoundrel. And hyperbole notwithstanding, he deserved some serious criticism for those ads. But then when Obama played equally dirty (e.g. scaring Florida seniors with falsehoods about McCain's Social Security plans) you barely hear a peep from those same folks (with the notable exception of Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post).
I don't doubt many in the media are trying to be fair, because they are aware that they and their colleagues are overwhelmingly liberal. A handful succeed in being neutral. But for the rest, the prospect of an eloquent, black, highly liberal senator (the anti-Bush as it were) becoming President is such a seductive dream that they can't help but look more critically at his opponent. Love really is blind.
We're looking at the candidate who has spoken for and stood for change and integrity from before his political career started, and the candidate who has resorted to making bald faced, demonstrably false and misleading lies that in a non-political context would be grounds for a successful slander/libel suit.
Alright, I'll take the bait.
Let's start with the "bald faced, demonstrably false and misleading lies". Perhaps you're referring to Obama's whopper of a lie that McCain wants 100 years of war in Iraq? Or maybe his bald-faced lie that under McCain's plan, Florida's seniors would have lost their Social Security in the recent stock market troubles?
When considering technology specifically, your choices are Obama, who at least understands technology well enough to have created a successful social networking style community site, and McCain who admits he barely even knows how to turn his computer on.
Also not true. McCain's war injuries make typing painful for him (though he can do it), so he usually asks someone such as his wife to serve as his typist. This one got started because McCain has a self-deprecating sense of humor, which to Obama seems to be an invitation to falsely claim McCain can't send email. In fact he does email daily.
We're looking at the candidate who has spoken for and stood for change and integrity
To me, actions speak louder than words. McCain has on numerous occasions risked his political prospects and fought with his own party to achieve bipartisan agreements/legislation on controversial issues. He did it on campaign finance reform, immigration, judicial confirmations, tobacco legislation, and education. As Hillary reminded us, Obama just has a nice speech he trots out periodically. He doesn't stand up to the special interests within his party, nor has he worked in a bipartisan way on any controversial issues. If you want real change, given that the President is not a dictator and must work through Congress, you've got a far better chance under a President McCain than you would with a President Obama.
Yay! McCain's position on patents basically shows him as a protectionist 1800-era politician who won't bat an eyelid while raising barriers to trade, tariffs, and taxes.
Except that it doesn't. McCain has long been ardently in favor of free trade, and wants lower taxes.
It's Obama that wants to renege (oops, I mean unilaterally "renegotiate") on our trade agreement with Canada and Mexico, and who opposes a trade deal with Colombia even though all it changes nothing in terms of imports to the US, but improves US exports by eliminating heavy tariffs. Even when the deal is lopsidedly pro-US he opposes free trade. That's beyond protectionist.
So do the campaigns have to ask Adobe special permission to use their legitimately licensed copies Photoshop for campaign posters?
Clearly not. Adobe offers Photoshop under a certain license. People who buy a license are under no moral obligation to only create works whose content Adobe would agree with. Similarly, the artists agreed to license their works via ASCAP, and reap the financial benefits thereof. That license does not require that the artist approve of licensees' political values.
If the artist was unwilling to have their products used like this, they should not agreed to it by joining ASCAP. But they did. Seller's remorse is not McCain's fault.
This is tantamount to telling his supporters "You are too stupid to discuss my campaign without help."
Not at all. It's simply an acknowledgment that a full-time, professional staff which spends countless hours honing a message is probably going to be more effective at it than anyone else. That's true for Obama and McCain supporters alike - it doesn't seem like such a bad idea to encourage your supporters to make use of that professional work.
Choice of phrasing/argument has less to do with raw intellect than with communications skills. I've known plenty of bright people who couldn't communicate clearly to save their life.
And to be honest, political fervor is usually an emotional rather than a purely intellectual phenomenon. Just check out 90% of the comments on political website forums. If the "Spread the Word" program has no other effect than to get a supporter to calm down long enough to think before they speak, it's probably worthwhile. A well-considered argument or phrase - even if the considering was done by someone else ;-) - is usually better than a knee-jerk response.
I understand why they do the things they do. Yes, the carriers are guilty of some of the same tactics. Regardless of who's doing it, I'm just saying that these practices are harmful to their customers.
For #1, there's nothing wrong with selling ringtones, or selling service, or selling combinations of the two. But you can do these things without locking down the phone. Amazon can sell you MP3s without controlling your PC. Apple and the carriers could do the same, probably in a more user-friendly way since they have access to the device. The only reason they lock down the ability to transfer ringtones to the phone is to limit competition - rather than getting the data elsewhere, you have to buy it through them. Switch carriers/phones? Looks like you have to buy those exact same bits again.
For #2, there is something to be said for keeping it simple. And here we could give Apple the benefit of the doubt regarding their motives.
But you can achieve reduced support costs without steps as radical as Apple has taken. While tying someone up is a good way to prevent them from shooting themselves, it also prevents them from doing many other desirable things. Even if they just allowed the customer to opt-out of Stupid-User Mode, thus explicitly agreeing to forgo any official support in exchange for being able to run what they want, I'd be fine with that. Most people probably would never opt out, for the same reason most people use Internet Explorer on their PC. But they'd have a choice if they cared to exercise it, which is important for the same reasons Firefox is. Even IE users benefit from the existence of a Firefox they never use, because the competition causes Microsoft to improve IE.
Having a built in application store to ensure ease of use is also fine. That doesn't mean they can't allow you to download an installer from a mobile website. That's hardly a difficult task, and if they provided a packaging tool to make iPhone app installers everyone would just use it, which would make the process just about as easy as their app store. Unless the goal is really to make sure Apple gets a cut of every software sale, thus requiring limits on the ability of other software to compete for those sales.
Re: options vs. stability, that doesn't have to be the choice. That's the choice we have on PCs because A) Microsoft made several poor design decisions, B) Microsoft has to support umpteen billion hardware devices, and C) many of those hardware devices have drivers written by untrusted third parties yet run in a privileged mode. None of those need be true on a cell phone.
Rules do change when you hit monopoly status. But just because some shady business practice is legal doesn't make it right, something that should escape criticism, or something that we want to support by purchasing Apple's products.
Some of us don't want to give our money to any company that tries to force you into a contractual relationship just to develop your own software, thus stifling open source development. Much like we don't want to give our money to companies that try to shackle their customers - why should a customer have to "jailbreak" their iPhone?
A company is supposed to be about providing value to its customers, not luring them with a little value, then turning around and denying the customer fair use of their own property just to extract their pound of flesh from a largely captive audience. Some phone carriers do this kind of nonsense by crippling the Bluetooth profiles on phones its customers use. Heaven forbid you add your own ringtones, even though the phone is capable of it, rather than pay the carrier for the exact same data you've already bought elsewhere. Apple does it by limiting your ability to put files on the phone, limiting what software can be developed for the phone, and generally trying to prevent you from using your own device in any way Apple doesn't like. It's like GM selling cars that won't drive near a Midas shop.
These sorts of things are all very legal but also anti-consumer. The GP is right that these tactics aren't going to go away as long as people continue to tolerate and encourage them by patronizing such companies.
I am currently shopping for a phone. The iPhone would have been one of my leading candidates if it wasn't for this kind of nonsense. I'll probably end up getting an HTC model instead. If more people took that approach, maybe Apple would get the message that what it's doing isn't acceptable.
I got my start programming the TI-85 (and later TI-92) calculators we used in our math classes. It's easy to learn, lets you automate some of the calculations in science classes, and if you make games you can share them with your friends. :-)
Then you can move on to programming more complicated things, like cell phones or computers.
An ideal CS degree would be very close to a very applied math degree, because of the similarities between the two subjects
There is this endless debate about what Computer Science is or should be. Theoretically-minded folks tend to want to turn it into a math degree. Application-minded folks want it to be a programming/engineering degree.
There is obviously a spectrum of skills involved in Computer Science. You need to understand math (it is a science), and you need to be able to program (since "computers" are kind of the whole point). Any "computer scientist" without some skills in both areas is probably not going to be a good computer scientist, IMO.
I do not believe there is One True Answer to what Computer Science "should be". But I will note that the vast majority of folks studying Computer Science are doing so in order to get programming jobs upon graduation. So I don't see Computer Science schools dropping programming curricula anytime soon - both to help their graduates find jobs in industry, and also for the pragmatic reason that having to apply a theory in a program is often a great way to ensure you really understand the theory.
Anyone can be a programmer - hell, even physicists program
Anyone can program, but not everyone can program well. Not everyone can solve very complex programming problems, much less do so in a maintainable way. By your logic, anyone could be a mathematician, because even physicists, programmers, and high school kids do math. That's just not the way it is.
why can't you order the coins like you ordered the bits?
And contraceptives are not even remotely the same thing. They don't terminate a life - they simply prevent it from occuring in the first place.
Technically speaking, contraceptives like "the pill" prevent a fertilized egg from implanting in the uterine wall, thus causing the embryo's death.
Which is part of why this is such a difficult moral question for people. Many people oppose abortion when the embryo is further developed, and certainly after the baby is born, because they view it as killing something they recognize as a person. Yet some of those same people are fine with the pill, whose major difference is that it kills the embryo much earlier on in its development cycle. So at what point does that clump of cells called an embryo become a person whose life is worth protecting?
Those who are opposed to contraceptives have a straightforward and logical answer - it's always a person worth protecting. For the rest of us, it's difficult to come up with an answer that doesn't feel arbitrary, more rationalization than principle. Do you say it's a person when it has a heartbeat? A nervous system? When it could survive on its own?
But on the other hand, if every embryo is a person worth saving, should couples feel they're murderers in the frequent occasions where their sex produces embryos that naturally fail to implant? Aren't they creating life willy-nilly and allowing it do die? If every embryo is a person worth protecting, then natural sex and current in-vitro fertilization techniques make murderers of their practitioners. Which to me sounds ludicrous.
It's a complicated issue.