"If you have cable, dish, or FiOS television, then you need not worry about the over-the-air transition. It does not affect you."
Unless of course when your service goes out. You should ALWAYS have a way to receive over-the-air signals. This way when the cable, FIOS, or whatever is your favorite way to pay for programming goes offline (and it does during a hurricane, flood, and severe thunderstorms) you are still able to receive important information.
Nothing sucks like having your generator running and not having a clue because you depended on cable to look after you...
Besides all you are doing is encouraging "lock-in". The cable companies would love to be the sole provider of broadcast content.
Stop giving that shitty advice, and tell your friends to get a converter box while they can still get a discount on them.
Well for one, it would be nice to see those red boxes when the weather man goes "there is a tornado warning for the communities within blah blah blah..."
EBS isn't worth a shit. All it does is replay a canned warning message with the counties under the warning, and at the end of the message it says tune to your local channels for more information...
What irritates me about the switch (which I still see as completely without merit - unless you are a telecommunications company or a DTV manufacturer), is the fact that they keep saying "If you have cable or satellite, you need not to worry about the conversion. Only people who uses traditional off-the-air television have to make the switch". Even worse is when your local cable company advertises that to avoid the switch just get cable...
Problem being that when the cable goes out (and it does during a hurricane) you are screwed and must resort to listening to the weatherman on the radio who continues to say "if you look in this area of the screen..."
Of course not. But Red Hat does include the Perl packages, so therefore they should support them. I mean we complain about not getting "unlimited" bandwidth from our cable system, but it's OK not to get complete support for a product that we paid for, especially given the fact that the product itself is free.
I know it hurts, but let me lay out the issue for you:
Instead of downloading Linux for free, an enterprise pays Red Hat to provide an actively supported distribution with an expected level of reliability and performance. Red Hat does not charge one-time fees, instead they offer subscription based support.
So if a company is paying Red Hat yearly subscription fees per seat, shouldn't they expect Red Hat to fix the problem?
As for the source of the bug report.... That's lame. I would hope that Red Hat is proactive with their issue resolution...
It's below sea level in one of the most hurricane prone places on earth. Why are rebuilding and living there?
I wonder why people in California are allowed to rebuild their homes on hilltops only to have them slide off again? Or why are they allowed to rebuild their homes only to have them burn down during the next fire season?...
In my view, you get the support contract for the things that aren't central to the business and you don't have 15+ people hired for.
I disagree. You pay Red Hat to provide a baseline server with all of the provided applications and languages. You pay Red Hat to provide timely updates for their distribution.
You pay your 15+ staff to work on a custom application that may depend on something Red Hat provides.
Now you may need to custom compile something as a short-term solution, but if Red Hat can't do something as simple as keeping their Perl interpreter working correctly I would seriously reconsider paying them any more money.
Think about it. If your paid staff has to make a custom compilation of a vendor supplied application (and consequently keep it updated) then what are you paying Red Hat for? The days of paying Red Hat out of the goodness of our hearts are over. It's time for Red Hat to act like one of the big boys and earn their money.
Perl is not an operating system and is open sourced no matter the operating system you choose to run it on.
Open source zealotry does not apply to the issue at hand.
A better question is are you getting your money's worth from Red Hat's support? The distribution being open sourced doesn't relieve Red Hat from the responsibility of fixing an issue contained within their product that an end user is paying for.
No, they don't. They try to use a subversion of copyright law to force licensing on people. If they want licensing, they should do it properly with signed contracts, and etc. If they want to avoid the hassle and use the pre-packaged version provded by the government known as "copyright", then that's fine too. What they shouldn't do is try to turn one in to the other on the cheap.
So what mechanism does GPL use? Copyright establish ownership and distribution terms. Apple uses copyright to establish that they own their IP, and they set the terms of its distribution.
You are arguing that since I didn't sign any contracts with FSF, I should be able to distribute GPL code without providing any source code. Oh how will FSF be able to enforce the GPL terms?
just like the GPL licenses to those who distribute
You see that word "distribute"? That's what copyright is about. That's all the GPL addresses. Other than distribution (what copyright is about), the GPL makes no extra demands. None. And neither should it. You can also read about this on the FSF webpage, which includes a section about why it is not an EULA and why users should not be required to agree.
Why are you arguing EULA, when Psystar is not the end-user? They are a reseller of beige box PCs and a distributor of Apple software against the terms Apple.
Apple is arguing that in order to run Apple software you have to have Apple hardware. Psystar is selling you non-Apple hardware with Apple software. This make it a clear case of copyright infringement, due the fact that Psystar is loading Apple's software onto their computers, modifying the code to allow it to run on non-Apple hardware, and then distributing the software on their machines.
You are right about arguing that copyright is about distribution and use it to justify GPL. Yet you conveniently disregard it when it comes to Psystar Vs. Apple. This severely weakens your argument.
I suppose Reagan, and Clinton for that matter, were fully experienced and ready to take the helm from the moment they took office. All this talk of experience is driving me nuts.
Well Reagan and Clinton were both governors and therefore had experience in a executive position at state level. They had budgets, local legislation, environmental agencies, defense, basically a mini-version of the US government (without the currency). They also had to work with other states and negotiate over limited resources and regional concerns (eg. water rights, pollution, etc.)
Obama being in politics for a very short time, and only serving as a delegate for all of his political life is vastly inexperienced when compared to Reagan and Clinton.
While McCain has never served as governor, he has a much larger number of years of experience as a senator and senior positions within committees that deal with most of our federal concerns (eg. Foreign Relations and National Security).
You think because McCain was beaten in Vietnam that he is somehow more qualified to be the President?
No, but he has way more experience in foreign relations, economic policies, national security, campaign finance reform, than Obama. Face it beating up on McCain with these lame attacks is not going to change the fact that McCain is more qualified than Obama.
For fairness, let me make a statement about Obama:
Obama has already shown his willingness to break promises. He turned his back on Campaign Finance Reform when he became drunk with the large amount of campaign contributions (remember in the beginning he pledged to use public funding like McCain). He turned his back on his supporters and flip-flopped by voting for a bill that granted telecommunications companies immunity. Oh what? we should over look his faults? The only experience I see Obama having is saying anything necessary to get votes...
I personally like clustering, I just don't totally agree with your assertion that they are always a replacement for mainframes.
This has some powerful implications as far as being dynamically scalable -- more power on demand for a Slashdotting, less power when they leave. Or, for a financial app, more power on payday and tax day, and less power the rest of the time. Or, for an app popular in a particular reason, more power during the day, less at night.
Power management can be used on mainframes.
By "more power" and "less power", with regards to, say, EC2, I can fire up more instances as needed, and bring them down when I'm done -- freeing those resources to be claimed by someone else -- and I pay by the hour, only for what I actually use.
Hello? This is 1960's technology that was originally implemented on mainframes. Except back then it was called timesharing, and instead of "clouds" they had "service bureaus".
Virtual machines are nothing new on the mainframe. What's new is virtual machines using desktop computers...
There are MANY cases where a mainframe trumps a cluster of PCs where availability and lower power consumption are a requirement. A cluster of PCs are great when the computing power required doesn't quite rise to the level of needing a mainframe...
I'll add a disclaimer, too: I work on a project which is currently deployed via Amazon EC2.
I'll add a disclaimer of my own (grin): I don't work for a mainframe company, and I am free to choose the best computing architecture needed for the task (be it mainframe, cluster, or cloud).
Anyway all joking aside, cloud computing is currently unproven. In fact Google had an embarrassing incident earlier this month where Google Mail and Apps were down for 15 hours. Amazon had a similar embarrassing incident back in February that took many sites offline.
I have seen a number of stories this week that questions the concept of cloud computing. Hell even NPR had a story about cloud computing and the pitfalls not associated with availability such as privacy and data ownership.
My point being: Mainframes are a proven technology that most of financial and governmental infrastructure rely on, while clustering and "cloud computing" (which is basically off-site clustering) have yet to be proven as reliable.
I do understand what you are trying to say. But again it penalizes party voters.
Vote straight ticket republican? Beware of that democrat who just voted against you twice (once as a democrat and once as a green party).
The other problem being, it literally forces the voter to choose a lesser of two evils. You are creating the very problem that you think that you're solving.
How?
The current system assumes that we are voting for the best candidate that represents our ideas (After all we had a lengthy primary season and vetted out all the party odd balls).
Your system forces us to pick the lesser of two evils after we cast our intended vote. Chose not to cast that second vote, then someone else had more of a say than you.
The ONLY thing your idea does is guarantee votes for a third party (that is nobody's first choice) and place an unfair disadvantage on the incumbent since there will always be more votes against the incumbent than for the incumbent.
The current system works. The current officials represents the majority of the views of their constituents. If you feel that your views are not adequately represented by the 2 major parties then support an alternative party that does. You're mad because your alternative party can't garner enough votes to get out of the noise, well it sucks to be you.
It's up to your candidate to get elected. We should not change the rules to make it easier for him.
In the parent comment I mentioned the House vote, but neglected to mention the Senate..
The original senate vote was 77 Ayes (48 republicans and 29 democrats) and 23 Nays (1 republican, 1 independent, and 21 democrats). If the democrats voted together then the vote would have been 48 Ayes and 52 Nays which would have killed the authorization for war with Iraq...
Again another example of one party trying to place the blame on the other when in fact both are to blame...
Now how in the hell did I get the war vote in the conversation? Oh yea, the real power of the president and how third parties need to garner congressional seats first...
Of course, Cheney would break the tie in favor of the war but 216 v 215 sends a better signal than the 296 v 133 that was recorded.
I was thinking senate when I should have been thinking house of representatives... The above should have read:
Of course, Hastert would break the tie in favor of the war but 216 v 215 sends a better signal than the 296 v 133 that was recorded
John Dennis Hastert (R-IL) was speaker of the house in 2002. In the house of representatives the speaker of the house casts the tie-breaker not the vice-president... whoops.
...If you'd change it to an approval voting system, you could vote for the non-incumbent republicrat, and for the green/libertarian that you'd rather have in office.
This would allow third-party candidates to get a lot more votes, without drawing votes away from the main-party candidates...
The problems with that idea are:
1. It allows a voter who votes against the incumbent to cast 2 votes versus the incumbent supporters single vote. This violates the idea of 1 voter casts 1 vote, and the equal protection clause.
2. It assumes that voter supports the other non-incumbent candidate, and I know a lot more people who voted for a democrat who rather see the republican win over a green party candidate because both the republican and democratic parties appeal to the mainstream where the green party and libertarians do not. (Gee I wonder if that is why the third-party supporters complain that republicans and democrats are too much alike? Representing the ideas of your constituents -- what a concept!)
3. There are independents in congress. The election system works. The mainstream candidates have more money? Then make your platform appeal to more people and raise more money. Your party candidate is stuck in the "spoiler" category? Then again make your platform appeal to more people and garner more votes.
4. Our system of government has safe guards built in like:
a. A president can only serve two 4-year terms.
b. There are 535 members, 4 delegates, and 1 resident commissioner in congress that hold the REAL power. The president may be able to grab the lime light but congress is the one signing the checks. This is where a third-party candidate can do the most in the least amount of time. They can have a presence, attach amendments to bills, and negotiate with other parties to promote their "pet" projects...
c. The president may be able to choose the supreme court judges and political appointees, but congress has to approve them. (Well at least the non-cabinet positions).
d. While the president has the power to start a short-term war, only congress has the power to fund it. (81 Democrats voted (plus 1 non-vote) to authorize the war in Iraq. Neat fact, if the 82 democrats had voted with the rest of their party and the 6 republicans, The authorization bill would have had 215 votes support and 215 votes against. Of course, Cheney would break the tie in favor of the war but 216 v 215 sends a better signal than the 296 v 133 that was recorded)
e. Another neat factoid We do not directly vote for the president. We vote for the electors within the electoral college. Technically, the electors are not bound by federal law to vote for their pledged candidate (However some states do have laws that require the elector to vote as pledged). What this means is that the third-party could technically negotiate with the other non-incumbent party after the November elections and have their electors change their support to help the other non-incumbent defeat the incumbent during the electoral college vote in December. Of course, the third-party would have to win some electoral votes first...
The fact that each branch of government can successfully blame the other for all our problems is proof people need to do more than listen to sound bites on the boob-tube.
By voting libertarian, he is helping the viable candidate most dissimilar to his own views. If you were foolish enough to vote for Nader if Gore was your second choice, then you have, in fact, got exactly what you deserve.
I'm not Libertarian. I don't think any Libertarian voter deserves any scorn from bitter democrats. Just as Perot voters didn't deserve any scorn for "helping" Clinton become president against the elder Bush.
The losers in the election are responsible for their own loss. They should have appealed to more voters, and more democrats and republicans should have actually voted.
What is insufferable is that by voting Libertarian, he's showing lack of responsibility for his choices
He is showing his right as an American to vote for the candidate of his choice NOT YOURS. It is you that is showing some lack of responsibility by trying to justify a 2 party system because your candidate can't seem to win.
If you vote Libertarian, aren't you already voting against the incumbent?
Some will say that by voting Libertarian he is in fact helping the incumbent. At least this is what the other party will always whine about.
Personally I think this is silly. Look at the last presidential election:
There is nothing wrong with Ralph Nader or anyone else running as a third party. The reason the democrats didn't win the last presidential election wasn't because of Ralph Nader but because they failed to appeal to the people who voted for Ralph Nader. Of course, it's always easier to blame someone else for their shortcomings...
You can't draw any conclusions on the average American (or any nationality for that matter) based on the news media. They tend to dumb down their content too much and they like to over sensationalize a story. The cynic in me believes that the news media like to gravitate to more down trodden of our population for stories to fulfill our innate need to see someone worse off than ourselves.
I have travelled to the middle of Mississippi (a state that has many stereotypes), and talked to blue collar workers who where not only up on current events, but also on "scientific knowledge". The reason for the quotes, is that for some reason we at slashdot become elitist and assume people without Internet access are backwood flat earthers...
Some of the best conversations I've had about astronomy, electrical engineering, or physics have been with people that you would not normally associate with knowing these topics. A farmer who is an amateur astronomer, a mill worker who is building his own amateur radio transmitter, or a truck driver who builds yagi antennas...
Anyway, Don't fall into the trap of believing that everybody else is dumber than you. (Well not *you*... argh you know what I mean). Believe it or not, we are a world of free thinkers. Just because someone doesn't agree with your world views, doesn't mean they are dumb (again not *you*).
Now I am concerned about the growing population of twenty-something people who appear to not be as savvy as the previous generation...
But then if your license server is down the software won't run, creating an artificial and unnecessary dependency. Similarly if people leave it running they can denial of service other users.
Plus you have the additional unnecessary cost of the license server, the hardware it runs on, the os it runs on (assuming its not free), the power it consumes and the time required to keep it running and updated.
For the type of companies that run these types of license servers, the associated costs are in the noise level. Besides, the money saved by purchasing floating licenses, more than makes up for the additional server...
As for the rest of your comment, the types of programs that require these license servers are expensive and have a per seat charge. Piracy isn't much of a concern, since their client base would be foolish to risk the penalties.
Same with BMW. Great irony - it's cheaper for foreign auto makers to assemble here in the USA than it is for the Big Three...mostly because of overbearing union activity.
I believe the reason that the foreign companies choose the Southeast US versus the Midwest is because of the auto-worker unions. However, I think moving production to the US has more to do with the need to meet overwhelming demand for a product that can't be shipped via car carriers fast enough. Differences in currency exchange rates, lower transportation fees, and no import duties is also nice...
Slashdot Mirror
Unless of course when your service goes out. You should ALWAYS have a way to receive over-the-air signals. This way when the cable, FIOS, or whatever is your favorite way to pay for programming goes offline (and it does during a hurricane, flood, and severe thunderstorms) you are still able to receive important information.
Nothing sucks like having your generator running and not having a clue because you depended on cable to look after you...
Besides all you are doing is encouraging "lock-in". The cable companies would love to be the sole provider of broadcast content.
Stop giving that shitty advice, and tell your friends to get a converter box while they can still get a discount on them.
Well for one, it would be nice to see those red boxes when the weather man goes "there is a tornado warning for the communities within blah blah blah..."
EBS isn't worth a shit. All it does is replay a canned warning message with the counties under the warning, and at the end of the message it says tune to your local channels for more information...
What irritates me about the switch (which I still see as completely without merit - unless you are a telecommunications company or a DTV manufacturer), is the fact that they keep saying "If you have cable or satellite, you need not to worry about the conversion. Only people who uses traditional off-the-air television have to make the switch". Even worse is when your local cable company advertises that to avoid the switch just get cable...
Problem being that when the cable goes out (and it does during a hurricane) you are screwed and must resort to listening to the weatherman on the radio who continues to say "if you look in this area of the screen..."
I think you meant "No such problems were detected with ReiserFS.
Of course not. But Red Hat does include the Perl packages, so therefore they should support them. I mean we complain about not getting "unlimited" bandwidth from our cable system, but it's OK not to get complete support for a product that we paid for, especially given the fact that the product itself is free.
I know it hurts, but let me lay out the issue for you:
Instead of downloading Linux for free, an enterprise pays Red Hat to provide an actively supported distribution with an expected level of reliability and performance. Red Hat does not charge one-time fees, instead they offer subscription based support.
So if a company is paying Red Hat yearly subscription fees per seat, shouldn't they expect Red Hat to fix the problem?
As for the source of the bug report.... That's lame. I would hope that Red Hat is proactive with their issue resolution...
I wonder why people in California are allowed to rebuild their homes on hilltops only to have them slide off again? Or why are they allowed to rebuild their homes only to have them burn down during the next fire season?...
How about mandating that insurance companies must actually pay for damages and stop trying to find a reason not to.
I disagree. You pay Red Hat to provide a baseline server with all of the provided applications and languages. You pay Red Hat to provide timely updates for their distribution.
You pay your 15+ staff to work on a custom application that may depend on something Red Hat provides.
Now you may need to custom compile something as a short-term solution, but if Red Hat can't do something as simple as keeping their Perl interpreter working correctly I would seriously reconsider paying them any more money.
Think about it. If your paid staff has to make a custom compilation of a vendor supplied application (and consequently keep it updated) then what are you paying Red Hat for? The days of paying Red Hat out of the goodness of our hearts are over. It's time for Red Hat to act like one of the big boys and earn their money.
Perl is not an operating system and is open sourced no matter the operating system you choose to run it on.
Open source zealotry does not apply to the issue at hand.
A better question is are you getting your money's worth from Red Hat's support? The distribution being open sourced doesn't relieve Red Hat from the responsibility of fixing an issue contained within their product that an end user is paying for.
The problem being that the accounting department has been grinding productivity marks all day, and now are fully clothed in epic accounting gear.
Now we in the engineering department can't go to the water cooler without being ganked. :P
So what mechanism does GPL use? Copyright establish ownership and distribution terms. Apple uses copyright to establish that they own their IP, and they set the terms of its distribution.
You are arguing that since I didn't sign any contracts with FSF, I should be able to distribute GPL code without providing any source code. Oh how will FSF be able to enforce the GPL terms?
Why are you arguing EULA, when Psystar is not the end-user? They are a reseller of beige box PCs and a distributor of Apple software against the terms Apple.
Apple is arguing that in order to run Apple software you have to have Apple hardware. Psystar is selling you non-Apple hardware with Apple software. This make it a clear case of copyright infringement, due the fact that Psystar is loading Apple's software onto their computers, modifying the code to allow it to run on non-Apple hardware, and then distributing the software on their machines.
You are right about arguing that copyright is about distribution and use it to justify GPL. Yet you conveniently disregard it when it comes to Psystar Vs. Apple. This severely weakens your argument.
Please accept my apologies. The "new forums" has prevented me from seeing your earlier posts..
This should have read:
Those two words clarify the intent more.
Well Reagan and Clinton were both governors and therefore had experience in a executive position at state level. They had budgets, local legislation, environmental agencies, defense, basically a mini-version of the US government (without the currency). They also had to work with other states and negotiate over limited resources and regional concerns (eg. water rights, pollution, etc.)
Obama being in politics for a very short time, and only serving as a delegate for all of his political life is vastly inexperienced when compared to Reagan and Clinton.
While McCain has never served as governor, he has a much larger number of years of experience as a senator and senior positions within committees that deal with most of our federal concerns (eg. Foreign Relations and National Security).
No, but he has way more experience in foreign relations, economic policies, national security, campaign finance reform, than Obama. Face it beating up on McCain with these lame attacks is not going to change the fact that McCain is more qualified than Obama.
For fairness, let me make a statement about Obama:
Obama has already shown his willingness to break promises. He turned his back on Campaign Finance Reform when he became drunk with the large amount of campaign contributions (remember in the beginning he pledged to use public funding like McCain). He turned his back on his supporters and flip-flopped by voting for a bill that granted telecommunications companies immunity. Oh what? we should over look his faults? The only experience I see Obama having is saying anything necessary to get votes...
I personally like clustering, I just don't totally agree with your assertion that they are always a replacement for mainframes.
Power management can be used on mainframes.
Hello? This is 1960's technology that was originally implemented on mainframes. Except back then it was called timesharing, and instead of "clouds" they had "service bureaus".
Virtual machines are nothing new on the mainframe. What's new is virtual machines using desktop computers...
There are MANY cases where a mainframe trumps a cluster of PCs where availability and lower power consumption are a requirement. A cluster of PCs are great when the computing power required doesn't quite rise to the level of needing a mainframe...
I'll add a disclaimer of my own (grin): I don't work for a mainframe company, and I am free to choose the best computing architecture needed for the task (be it mainframe, cluster, or cloud).
Anyway all joking aside, cloud computing is currently unproven. In fact Google had an embarrassing incident earlier this month where Google Mail and Apps were down for 15 hours. Amazon had a similar embarrassing incident back in February that took many sites offline.
I have seen a number of stories this week that questions the concept of cloud computing. Hell even NPR had a story about cloud computing and the pitfalls not associated with availability such as privacy and data ownership.
My point being: Mainframes are a proven technology that most of financial and governmental infrastructure rely on, while clustering and "cloud computing" (which is basically off-site clustering) have yet to be proven as reliable.
Just don't look at the graffiti with your remaining eye...
I do understand what you are trying to say. But again it penalizes party voters.
Vote straight ticket republican? Beware of that democrat who just voted against you twice (once as a democrat and once as a green party).
The other problem being, it literally forces the voter to choose a lesser of two evils. You are creating the very problem that you think that you're solving.
How?
The current system assumes that we are voting for the best candidate that represents our ideas (After all we had a lengthy primary season and vetted out all the party odd balls).
Your system forces us to pick the lesser of two evils after we cast our intended vote. Chose not to cast that second vote, then someone else had more of a say than you.
The ONLY thing your idea does is guarantee votes for a third party (that is nobody's first choice) and place an unfair disadvantage on the incumbent since there will always be more votes against the incumbent than for the incumbent.
The current system works. The current officials represents the majority of the views of their constituents. If you feel that your views are not adequately represented by the 2 major parties then support an alternative party that does. You're mad because your alternative party can't garner enough votes to get out of the noise, well it sucks to be you.
It's up to your candidate to get elected. We should not change the rules to make it easier for him.
In the parent comment I mentioned the House vote, but neglected to mention the Senate..
The original senate vote was 77 Ayes (48 republicans and 29 democrats) and 23 Nays (1 republican, 1 independent, and 21 democrats). If the democrats voted together then the vote would have been 48 Ayes and 52 Nays which would have killed the authorization for war with Iraq...
Again another example of one party trying to place the blame on the other when in fact both are to blame...
Now how in the hell did I get the war vote in the conversation? Oh yea, the real power of the president and how third parties need to garner congressional seats first...
Correction:
I was thinking senate when I should have been thinking house of representatives... The above should have read:
Of course, Hastert would break the tie in favor of the war but 216 v 215 sends a better signal than the 296 v 133 that was recorded
John Dennis Hastert (R-IL) was speaker of the house in 2002. In the house of representatives the speaker of the house casts the tie-breaker not the vice-president... whoops.
The problems with that idea are:
1. It allows a voter who votes against the incumbent to cast 2 votes versus the incumbent supporters single vote. This violates the idea of 1 voter casts 1 vote, and the equal protection clause.
2. It assumes that voter supports the other non-incumbent candidate, and I know a lot more people who voted for a democrat who rather see the republican win over a green party candidate because both the republican and democratic parties appeal to the mainstream where the green party and libertarians do not. (Gee I wonder if that is why the third-party supporters complain that republicans and democrats are too much alike? Representing the ideas of your constituents -- what a concept!)
3. There are independents in congress. The election system works. The mainstream candidates have more money? Then make your platform appeal to more people and raise more money. Your party candidate is stuck in the "spoiler" category? Then again make your platform appeal to more people and garner more votes.
4. Our system of government has safe guards built in like:
a. A president can only serve two 4-year terms.
b. There are 535 members, 4 delegates, and 1 resident commissioner in congress that hold the REAL power. The president may be able to grab the lime light but congress is the one signing the checks. This is where a third-party candidate can do the most in the least amount of time. They can have a presence, attach amendments to bills, and negotiate with other parties to promote their "pet" projects...
c. The president may be able to choose the supreme court judges and political appointees, but congress has to approve them. (Well at least the non-cabinet positions).
d. While the president has the power to start a short-term war, only congress has the power to fund it. (81 Democrats voted (plus 1 non-vote) to authorize the war in Iraq. Neat fact, if the 82 democrats had voted with the rest of their party and the 6 republicans, The authorization bill would have had 215 votes support and 215 votes against. Of course, Cheney would break the tie in favor of the war but 216 v 215 sends a better signal than the 296 v 133 that was recorded)
e. Another neat factoid We do not directly vote for the president. We vote for the electors within the electoral college. Technically, the electors are not bound by federal law to vote for their pledged candidate (However some states do have laws that require the elector to vote as pledged). What this means is that the third-party could technically negotiate with the other non-incumbent party after the November elections and have their electors change their support to help the other non-incumbent defeat the incumbent during the electoral college vote in December. Of course, the third-party would have to win some electoral votes first...
The fact that each branch of government can successfully blame the other for all our problems is proof people need to do more than listen to sound bites on the boob-tube.
I'm not Libertarian. I don't think any Libertarian voter deserves any scorn from bitter democrats. Just as Perot voters didn't deserve any scorn for "helping" Clinton become president against the elder Bush.
The losers in the election are responsible for their own loss. They should have appealed to more voters, and more democrats and republicans should have actually voted.
He is showing his right as an American to vote for the candidate of his choice NOT YOURS. It is you that is showing some lack of responsibility by trying to justify a 2 party system because your candidate can't seem to win.
Some will say that by voting Libertarian he is in fact helping the incumbent. At least this is what the other party will always whine about.
Personally I think this is silly. Look at the last presidential election:
There is nothing wrong with Ralph Nader or anyone else running as a third party. The reason the democrats didn't win the last presidential election wasn't because of Ralph Nader but because they failed to appeal to the people who voted for Ralph Nader. Of course, it's always easier to blame someone else for their shortcomings...
Media != People
You can't draw any conclusions on the average American (or any nationality for that matter) based on the news media. They tend to dumb down their content too much and they like to over sensationalize a story. The cynic in me believes that the news media like to gravitate to more down trodden of our population for stories to fulfill our innate need to see someone worse off than ourselves.
I have travelled to the middle of Mississippi (a state that has many stereotypes), and talked to blue collar workers who where not only up on current events, but also on "scientific knowledge". The reason for the quotes, is that for some reason we at slashdot become elitist and assume people without Internet access are backwood flat earthers...
Some of the best conversations I've had about astronomy, electrical engineering, or physics have been with people that you would not normally associate with knowing these topics. A farmer who is an amateur astronomer, a mill worker who is building his own amateur radio transmitter, or a truck driver who builds yagi antennas...
Anyway, Don't fall into the trap of believing that everybody else is dumber than you. (Well not *you* ... argh you know what I mean). Believe it or not, we are a world of free thinkers. Just because someone doesn't agree with your world views, doesn't mean they are dumb (again not *you*).
Now I am concerned about the growing population of twenty-something people who appear to not be as savvy as the previous generation...
For the type of companies that run these types of license servers, the associated costs are in the noise level. Besides, the money saved by purchasing floating licenses, more than makes up for the additional server...
As for the rest of your comment, the types of programs that require these license servers are expensive and have a per seat charge. Piracy isn't much of a concern, since their client base would be foolish to risk the penalties.
I believe the reason that the foreign companies choose the Southeast US versus the Midwest is because of the auto-worker unions. However, I think moving production to the US has more to do with the need to meet overwhelming demand for a product that can't be shipped via car carriers fast enough. Differences in currency exchange rates, lower transportation fees, and no import duties is also nice...