Considering how utterly horrible todays news media actually is I sure hope something replaces it and I don't really care what.
ALSO: I happened to catch the O'reilly factor the other night and good ol' bill was predicting how Fox news would be the number one news source in 3 years. At which point we will all be fed our news by morons, slack jawed yokels, or inbreds(or any combination of the three). Not that its much different with CBS, NBC, ABC except on those stations the primary mode of talking is not screaming to drive a flimsy point home...
Switchs station to fox news... urge to kill RISING
Since the process for extracting and multiplying stem cell lines is essentially cloning I don't know how you could say this is false. Whether you like to admit it or not, that treaty would have hindered(by hindered i mean make impossible) private embryonic stem cell research. Whether or not Bush said explicitly has no bearing on the fact that it would have been effectively banned embryonic stem cell research.
2. There has never been proposed or discussed a ban on stem cell research in the US.
While this is technically correct it is at least misleading. While Bush has never supported a ban on stem cell research here in the US as in, a US law that would ban it he did in fact support and push for a UN Treaty that would have banned it. Had the UN adopted this treaty getting new embryonic stem cell lines would have been banned in the US...
At least with iTunes&look-a-likes, you get instant access to the music you want. Pay-for-P2P is slow, requires searching for music you may want, and requires money? Worst of all worlds.
Does iTunes work in some way that doesnt require searching? It telepathetically knows what song i want and gives it to me? Of course there is going to be searching I'd hate to use a service that didn't incoporate that simple style of interface. Now with that said and done why couldn't this service simply allow you to search or browse all the available songs and transparently to you gets parts of that from other members who have that song via p2p style... Thats what I'd expect this service to do...
Now this would be good for a number of reasons one increases profit margins for the company. Apple afaik doesnt make any money on the downloads when its all said and done. Another good reason is that it gives legitmacy to the P2P way of doing things, which is important in order to squash stupid laws that try to make P2P illegal on the grounds that they are all havens of copyright and ip infringement. Your entire post is just a decent summary but your attitude is that of why they trying to lie to me? When they never were. No one disputted that this was a pay for download service the P2P part just means they plan on saving money buy pwning your connection..
I guess it is legal, and for the small portion of the public of which the legality of music sharing is a big deal, this may matter. But that demographic is a small part of slashdot, and I'm betting that its an even smaller part of the world at large.
I think your wrong, the majority of people buy legal music regularly. Judging by the success of even the crappy legal services there is signifigant demand. The P2P model makes perfect sense and I hope they succeed.
And another thing, I'm sorry but I'm happy paying 1$ per song, I consider that fair. So you can take your I'm too cheap to ever pay for something that I could steal attitude and not be involved in a legitimate service that is doing some good to resolve the problem of how music will be sold in the future.
Think about how many computer power supplies have shorted out and caught fire (i have had 2 at my job in the last year, and we only have 17 computers). It is a shame, and I am sure it is painful for the people and i do feel bad, but lets not get out of hand with this.
Sure that may be true but most of us don't hold computer power supplys up against our head for long periods of time. Basically a few of these cases are bound to happen, but with counterfeit chargers and batterys being the majority of the cause something needs to be done about it. Not about warning people, but about keeping counterfeits off the shelves...
Without a 401k or a 403b, how do I take care of retirement?
you seem like a nice guy so ill give you some great retirement advice. Take 10% of your pay and buy as much SCOX stock as possible, I hear they own Linux...
Where did we start to hold the assumption that the police are not civilians?
Not that this has anything to do with whats going on... but the moment they were handed guns and given special powers over civilians. That is the instant they are not civilians... Lets be honest now, our police is no different than the military it might as well be a branch and we should dispense with any notions that the police shouldn't be held to a higher standard than "civilians". Again not that this has anything to do with this but... a cop getting caught for the same crime as a civilian should immediately be forced to serve double the sentence. After all they have a greater responsibility to uphold the law than normal civilians do.
City buses and taxi cabs will come next, other commercial vehicles such as delivery vans and trucks, then finally personal automobiles.
Give me one good reason why I should buy a personal one of these? Initially car companies would sell lots of them, but the individual market is next to nothing on vehicles like these. Car companys get ready to take a huge hit from this...
I can understand the iPod not being able to play WMA/OGG/FLAC/etc. for now due to limited CPU power (even though lots of other MP3 players can do it just fine), but I don't see any reason why iTunes shouldn't be able to play them.
I can say definitively that the reason why OGG/WMA/FLAC/etc isn't playable on the iPod has absolutely nothing to do with limited CPU power. The iPod video story clearly shows that the iPod definitely has some power behind it(being able to change images quick enough to have the resemblance of fluid motion). I'm willing to bet its simply because its not a priority for them at the moment. The iPod is capable of playing videos, ogg whatever, but they haven't gotten around to it, or want to do those things one at a time or perhaps never.
For example, if I download/rip some songs outside of iTunes, how do you make iTunes rescan your music folder? You can't... you have to manually add all the new tracks or folders. You can add the whole music folder again, but it takes forever, and then all of your tracks will be listed twice and there's no easy way to delete them.
I can see your point but the way I assume they meant you to add new songs into the library is to simply double click on it, it starts playing and adds it to your library. I haven't found what your talking about to be a problem, when i download new songs if there are multiples I highlight them right click and then hit play. Problem solved.
I've tried several versions of iTunes now, and I just don't like it. Where are the customization options? I'm not just talking about skins and interface and such... everything just seems very inflexible. If you use iTunes and only iTunes for all of your ripping/downloads, then I'm sure its great. But if you're using other programs to aquire and manage music, it sucks.
I use audio grabber and lame to rip/encode my music and only iTunes to play it and I don't seem to have any difficulties. Once you rip the file, get the track data from freedb, and encode in one single step there is hardly a reason to "manage" music after that other than to slap it in a player and listen. The reason why I like iTunes is i'm not constantly screwing around with the player like I was when i used winamp, now i open up iTunes and listen and don't think about the player at all, it works and is transparent to me.
The problem with all of this is how stupid we are being about electronic voting. For some damn reason we think touch screens are the way to go instead of buttons with text display. Why do we need touch screens, first they are very expensive compared to text displays and very much less accurate if planned carefully(I do find some ATM's to be misleading which button is pointing at which option but thats just foolish design of the physical box). I know that small towns can't afford multiple thousand dollar voting machines that require modern CPU and vast ram requirements when they are doing the simplest of activities.
What we need to do is create accurate and easy to use voting machines that are extremely cheap to produce and are maintianed via an open source model. Preferably we write it for a physical chip that is archaic by todays standards so that its extremely easy to emulate, extremely cheap to produce, and will have less script kiddies using it on a daily basis. If i was designing a voting machine it would be simply 5 buttons, (4 candidates per screen and a more button). Also a big green/red/whatever button elsewhere that says "Record votes" You make your selection it moves to the next. At the end it tells you your choices and lets you go back as much as you want. When done you hit that record vote button and it prints a receipt. Id probably use a single 6502(i like these chips they are neat) cpu to accomplish this because thats all i NEED, I dont need no p4 running winblows or anything running linux to record my votes what is all that wasted functionality doing? I'll tell you what its doing providing hundreds and thousands of lines of unnecessary code that basically amounts to a huge liability. I don't trust linux or windows alike in that respect. What i do trust however is some miniscule "VoteOS" that was designed with nothing but voting and auditing in mind.
Its time we stop trying to produce canned solutions for things from piles of unnecessary code(linux, windows, qnx whatever).
He wasn't trying to be sarcastic or funny, he seemed serious about it.
Did he "seem" serious about it because he repeatedly said he wasn't there to be funny. Of course he was serious.
That was a ridiculous performance of somebody who has been reading too much of his own press and overplaying his own importance.
I'm not sure how he could be overplaying his own performance. It was fairly well known that a short time before the viewers of his fake news show were more likely to be informed about the real news than viewers of shows like Hardball, and the O'reilly factor. He came on to say hey listen guys how come my viewers are more informed than yours? I thought it was your job to inform you obviously aren't doing your job.
He made himself look like ass who knew everything.
Thats funny, he didn't claim to know the answer because it wasn't his job to come up with that answer. He is pointing out a problem, people who watch my fake news know more than people who watch your "real" news? Why is that? shouldn't we fix that?
As long as they continue to FAIL to inform their viewers they are hurting america. So try again, but next time yuo should watch the daily show, its been shown via polls that you would have been more likely to know your armpit from your asshole if you had.
No. This is exactly what we need. Scientific advancement has stagnated without adequate competition.
I would really like for China to join the ISS
The ISS is a floating garbage heap that costs billions but produces little to no scientific advancements other than practice for longer space missions. You should be glad China isn't bankrupting themselves on something so useless. When China overtakes the US is space technology and we are still clinging to ISS you can have your laugh over the stupidity and stubborness of the US administration.
Thats funny have you read my previous comments and my journal? I thought I started that Idea when I tried to get people on/. to respond to me with a troll like request to find people willing to swap votes with me some 3 months ago. I recently traded my vote to someone in PA, I vote Badnarik, they vote Kerry.
No unfortunately it doesn't. Voting for a 3rd party candidate does absolutely nothing for getting them on the ballot next time. You want them on a ballot you sign a petition or register as that party to inflate the numbers of that party in your state.
gives them a chance to force the Republican/Democratic party to adopt some of their issues.
Wrong again. As long as they aren't included in the debates and aren't taken seriously they will be ignored as they have been. In order to get them to be taken seriously you need to get them elected to local positions so they arent seen as distant whack jobs and more as people with a different point of view.
My whole point is that voting for them in local elections is much more beneficial for future acceptance into the mainstream and easier for you to affect as local elections in alot of towns are decided frequently by fewer than 100 votes. The reason why you would want to ignore them in the national elections(for now) is that they have no chance and voting for them produces no huge benefit when compared to what you lose. Someone wanting change enough to vote for Nader or Cobb or Badnarik can surely want enough change to decide to vote against Bush(ie for Kerry).
Sure. Vote third party.
Sure thats what I said, except in the national election where your ability to help the 3rd parties has been diminished. In that instance vote someone who is winnable but not the incumbent and so Kerry.
Alot of people here at/. would have you think that tossing your vote to a 3rd party candidate would effect some change and make a statement. This is true, but for the presidential election it actually does little to nothing. If you want more 3rd party candidates toss your local election votes to them, help a green be your mayor, or on your city council. The more greens or whatever 3rd party people that elected to these positions the larger there support base gets and positions them better for future national elections. This presidential election however will not be affected so much by your vote for a 3rd party candidate.
With this in mind it is obvious you want some change since you are undecided and would like to see more/better candidates. Your best bet to do this is to vote against the incumbent at every election. For each position on your ballot find the incumbent and vote against him/her. Failing to get re-elected sends a huge message to the party. If bush gets re-elected for instance his ideas become the parties main platform and ideas if he fails however they will seek to change themselves in order to correct Bush's mistake. This is the same for all local chapters of these parties as well.
So clearly and simply, vote against all incumbents no matter what. In local elections vote for 3rd party candidates at random if your too lazy to learn what they stand for. But for presidential elections your best bet is to just vote for Kerry and bitch about him when he fucks up.
Linux could be Apple's bigest enemy because it could potentially steal the "think different" market place.
Wrong. I love linux but I don't see it ever taking the desktop market by storm. Unfortunately for the linux zealots, linux moves too slowly. Apple on the otherhand moves very quickly to open up new markets and produce new technology. Furthermore Apple always had a distinct advantage over there competetors in that they are able to successful design and implement both hardware and software solutions creating a complete package.
Macintosh rules those niches now but give it ten years.
Apple is dying BSD is dying... blah blah blah blah blah.. Next?
The bigest thing that Apple has right now is their IPOD. If they screw that up, then there may not be another Microsoft to invest in a floundering company.
Your right. The iPod is very important to Apple, but it has already boosted laptop and desktop sales. The iPod strategy wasn't to turn apple into a digital music company it was to get people to buy Apple computers and its working. If the iPod was reduced to less than 10% market share in 3 years, it wouldnt matter that much. The iPod already did its damage by enticing more users to try Mac.
Funny, I'd expect conformism to follow along with the popular mass trend which happens to be PC's. I just think you don't want to label yourself as a conformist. Lets face it most pro MS arguments are pure conformist ones, everyone uses MS so I should too, or nobody uses Mac they ahve a small market share!! My advice to readers of the parent post is move along nothing to see here...
Re:A cult? Puhleeze
on
The Cult of Mac
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'd have to say that without its "cult" following which definitely exists Apple would have died as predicted. However, there are those fanatics that are at the base of the Mac culture and as such alot of the fringe Mac users are driven towards loyalty to fit in with the core crowd of Mac users.
A good comparison would be against VW, which has a very similiar cult following in its own right and as such even casual VW drivers are somewhat more fanatic than say your average ford driver.
PC users should read this...
on
The Cult of Mac
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The PC users that constantly come on here with dell quotes talking about how you can get a "Better" machine for cheaper should be forced to read this book. Maybe then they will understand that price is not the end all be all factor in why someone would want a Mac. I know that the culture is probably the number one reason I own a Mac. I pay the extra price because I am proud of this high quality product. Furthermore by paying "more" i find I'm supporting a company and a group of people that are doing an excellent job. Even at 1/2 the price I wouldn't feel the same way about buying a PC or MS software. I just don't feel like they earned my money but Apple on the otherhand has.
This is where the culture comes in bringing in a sense of loyalty to the product you use. I don't feel like PC users have that same phenomenon and maybe if they understood it they wouldn't rant and piss and flame on here about price differences and single mouse buttons.
Whats wrong with objective-c. I would consider that to be a much more viable option for adding object support into the linux kernel because thats basically what we are talking about. Without objects C++ offers no real benefit over C and in fact with the absence of objects is a detrement. Objective-C on the other hand is pure C with some nifty object support stapled on. Way better and in my opinion much more likely to be accepted by them kernel folks.
Jedidiah is right you are statiscally insignifigant.
I don't like agnostics, they are flip-floppers and most of them smell like poopy.
On a more serious note, decency laws are designed to inhibit this countrys sexual revolution. Conservatives(a nice word for fat white men who are afraid of change, stereo type, but statistically accurate) are afraid of open sexual talk/display because of mainly sexist ideals. Deep down they still see women as property and their property should be kept from ideas that woman can be sexually free to explore their own bodies or to enjoy sex with men. Fundamentalist christian ideals are rampant with the sexism that creates these ideas that decency laws are good and they produce spin that sadly others get caught up in.
Thats odd considering probably less that 1% of the population is atheist. I'd be hard pressed to believe you've seen lots of atheist politicians at all let alone militant ones. While the parent post is over the top he is mostly accurate. The republicans have basically made spreading christian ideals/laws a part of their platform. And all the indecent language and imagery stuff is entirely a fundamentalist christian lets silence those who dont share our ideals campaign.
Re:The whole one-button mouse thing has to go...
on
Jef Raskin On The Mac
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The whole point is that Apple isn't telling you you can't have your multi button mouse, in fact they are saying you want one, add it to your cart and we will ship it with your computer. What you people want is very different you want Apple to sacrifice their image and package because your too cheap to buy another mouse.
When you buy an apple you are expecting an appliance like computer, it comes in a pretty box, with all matching peripherals(dell does this too but in an ugly fashion). Apple gives you what you need to use your computer as they intended. Now you want something special or want that to be different than the pretty package they provide you. Sure we will let you here you go, we will even sell it to you. The problem is that you people think everyone wants and needs a 2 button mouse because PC's have two buttons, its what I'm used too, I'm afraid of change, I don't understand things that are different. Get over it. An apple is what it is, you want the extras buy them, but to piss and moan because your 2 button mouse doesnt have an apple logo on it is stupid.
However, I live in Connecticut and sure as hell dont want Utah to be able to influence how my fishing industry is conducted or how much money we need for the coast guard
Shouldn't these type of laws belong to states ? I know that for a long time federal has grown in power while states have lost it, but isn't this the real main problem ?
Sure ideally they do, but the point that I was getting at without clarifying is that the president indirectly affects these things through passing federal funding back to the states in order to do those duties. Now the fed government currently helps out in these local concerns because its in their best interest to do so. Coast guard protects borders and is the top group in illegal drug smuggling seizures. Now feds also help the fishing industry because it creates lots of jobs and helps spread food throughout the country.
Our current voting system addresses some of my concerns rather well, for instance, the president and the vice president cannot be from the same state. This is good for keeping one state from gaining all the influence in the federal government.
Another reason why not to have direct election is influence on the election from fraud is very minimal as a person who tries to do so could only affect a few states and wouldnt gain very much. In a direct election voter fraud is much easier and much more beneficial.
Slashdot Mirror
ALSO: I happened to catch the O'reilly factor the other night and good ol' bill was predicting how Fox news would be the number one news source in 3 years. At which point we will all be fed our news by morons, slack jawed yokels, or inbreds(or any combination of the three). Not that its much different with CBS, NBC, ABC except on those stations the primary mode of talking is not screaming to drive a flimsy point home...
Switchs station to fox news... urge to kill RISING
Since the process for extracting and multiplying stem cell lines is essentially cloning I don't know how you could say this is false. Whether you like to admit it or not, that treaty would have hindered(by hindered i mean make impossible) private embryonic stem cell research. Whether or not Bush said explicitly has no bearing on the fact that it would have been effectively banned embryonic stem cell research.
While this is technically correct it is at least misleading. While Bush has never supported a ban on stem cell research here in the US as in, a US law that would ban it he did in fact support and push for a UN Treaty that would have banned it. Had the UN adopted this treaty getting new embryonic stem cell lines would have been banned in the US...
Does iTunes work in some way that doesnt require searching? It telepathetically knows what song i want and gives it to me? Of course there is going to be searching I'd hate to use a service that didn't incoporate that simple style of interface. Now with that said and done why couldn't this service simply allow you to search or browse all the available songs and transparently to you gets parts of that from other members who have that song via p2p style... Thats what I'd expect this service to do...
Now this would be good for a number of reasons one increases profit margins for the company. Apple afaik doesnt make any money on the downloads when its all said and done. Another good reason is that it gives legitmacy to the P2P way of doing things, which is important in order to squash stupid laws that try to make P2P illegal on the grounds that they are all havens of copyright and ip infringement. Your entire post is just a decent summary but your attitude is that of why they trying to lie to me? When they never were. No one disputted that this was a pay for download service the P2P part just means they plan on saving money buy pwning your connection..
I guess it is legal, and for the small portion of the public of which the legality of music sharing is a big deal, this may matter. But that demographic is a small part of slashdot, and I'm betting that its an even smaller part of the world at large.
I think your wrong, the majority of people buy legal music regularly. Judging by the success of even the crappy legal services there is signifigant demand. The P2P model makes perfect sense and I hope they succeed.
And another thing, I'm sorry but I'm happy paying 1$ per song, I consider that fair. So you can take your I'm too cheap to ever pay for something that I could steal attitude and not be involved in a legitimate service that is doing some good to resolve the problem of how music will be sold in the future.
Sure that may be true but most of us don't hold computer power supplys up against our head for long periods of time. Basically a few of these cases are bound to happen, but with counterfeit chargers and batterys being the majority of the cause something needs to be done about it. Not about warning people, but about keeping counterfeits off the shelves...
you seem like a nice guy so ill give you some great retirement advice. Take 10% of your pay and buy as much SCOX stock as possible, I hear they own Linux...
Not that this has anything to do with whats going on... but the moment they were handed guns and given special powers over civilians. That is the instant they are not civilians... Lets be honest now, our police is no different than the military it might as well be a branch and we should dispense with any notions that the police shouldn't be held to a higher standard than "civilians".
Again not that this has anything to do with this but... a cop getting caught for the same crime as a civilian should immediately be forced to serve double the sentence. After all they have a greater responsibility to uphold the law than normal civilians do.
Stop stealing so much damn music...
Give me one good reason why I should buy a personal one of these? Initially car companies would sell lots of them, but the individual market is next to nothing on vehicles like these. Car companys get ready to take a huge hit from this...
I can say definitively that the reason why OGG/WMA/FLAC/etc isn't playable on the iPod has absolutely nothing to do with limited CPU power. The iPod video story clearly shows that the iPod definitely has some power behind it(being able to change images quick enough to have the resemblance of fluid motion). I'm willing to bet its simply because its not a priority for them at the moment. The iPod is capable of playing videos, ogg whatever, but they haven't gotten around to it, or want to do those things one at a time or perhaps never.
For example, if I download/rip some songs outside of iTunes, how do you make iTunes rescan your music folder? You can't... you have to manually add all the new tracks or folders. You can add the whole music folder again, but it takes forever, and then all of your tracks will be listed twice and there's no easy way to delete them.
I can see your point but the way I assume they meant you to add new songs into the library is to simply double click on it, it starts playing and adds it to your library. I haven't found what your talking about to be a problem, when i download new songs if there are multiples I highlight them right click and then hit play. Problem solved.
I've tried several versions of iTunes now, and I just don't like it. Where are the customization options? I'm not just talking about skins and interface and such... everything just seems very inflexible. If you use iTunes and only iTunes for all of your ripping/downloads, then I'm sure its great. But if you're using other programs to aquire and manage music, it sucks.
I use audio grabber and lame to rip/encode my music and only iTunes to play it and I don't seem to have any difficulties. Once you rip the file, get the track data from freedb, and encode in one single step there is hardly a reason to "manage" music after that other than to slap it in a player and listen. The reason why I like iTunes is i'm not constantly screwing around with the player like I was when i used winamp, now i open up iTunes and listen and don't think about the player at all, it works and is transparent to me.
What we need to do is create accurate and easy to use voting machines that are extremely cheap to produce and are maintianed via an open source model. Preferably we write it for a physical chip that is archaic by todays standards so that its extremely easy to emulate, extremely cheap to produce, and will have less script kiddies using it on a daily basis. If i was designing a voting machine it would be simply 5 buttons, (4 candidates per screen and a more button). Also a big green/red/whatever button elsewhere that says "Record votes" You make your selection it moves to the next. At the end it tells you your choices and lets you go back as much as you want. When done you hit that record vote button and it prints a receipt. Id probably use a single 6502(i like these chips they are neat) cpu to accomplish this because thats all i NEED, I dont need no p4 running winblows or anything running linux to record my votes what is all that wasted functionality doing? I'll tell you what its doing providing hundreds and thousands of lines of unnecessary code that basically amounts to a huge liability. I don't trust linux or windows alike in that respect. What i do trust however is some miniscule "VoteOS" that was designed with nothing but voting and auditing in mind.
Its time we stop trying to produce canned solutions for things from piles of unnecessary code(linux, windows, qnx whatever).
Did he "seem" serious about it because he repeatedly said he wasn't there to be funny. Of course he was serious.
That was a ridiculous performance of somebody who has been reading too much of his own press and overplaying his own importance.
I'm not sure how he could be overplaying his own performance. It was fairly well known that a short time before the viewers of his fake news show were more likely to be informed about the real news than viewers of shows like Hardball, and the O'reilly factor. He came on to say hey listen guys how come my viewers are more informed than yours? I thought it was your job to inform you obviously aren't doing your job.
He made himself look like ass who knew everything.
Thats funny, he didn't claim to know the answer because it wasn't his job to come up with that answer. He is pointing out a problem, people who watch my fake news know more than people who watch your "real" news? Why is that? shouldn't we fix that?
As long as they continue to FAIL to inform their viewers they are hurting america. So try again, but next time yuo should watch the daily show, its been shown via polls that you would have been more likely to know your armpit from your asshole if you had.
No. This is exactly what we need. Scientific advancement has stagnated without adequate competition.
I would really like for China to join the ISS
The ISS is a floating garbage heap that costs billions but produces little to no scientific advancements other than practice for longer space missions. You should be glad China isn't bankrupting themselves on something so useless. When China overtakes the US is space technology and we are still clinging to ISS you can have your laugh over the stupidity and stubborness of the US administration.
Thats funny have you read my previous comments and my journal? I thought I started that Idea when I tried to get people on /. to respond to me with a troll like request to find people willing to swap votes with me some 3 months ago. I recently traded my vote to someone in PA, I vote Badnarik, they vote Kerry.
No unfortunately it doesn't. Voting for a 3rd party candidate does absolutely nothing for getting them on the ballot next time. You want them on a ballot you sign a petition or register as that party to inflate the numbers of that party in your state.
gives them a chance to force the Republican/Democratic party to adopt some of their issues.
Wrong again. As long as they aren't included in the debates and aren't taken seriously they will be ignored as they have been. In order to get them to be taken seriously you need to get them elected to local positions so they arent seen as distant whack jobs and more as people with a different point of view.
My whole point is that voting for them in local elections is much more beneficial for future acceptance into the mainstream and easier for you to affect as local elections in alot of towns are decided frequently by fewer than 100 votes. The reason why you would want to ignore them in the national elections(for now) is that they have no chance and voting for them produces no huge benefit when compared to what you lose. Someone wanting change enough to vote for Nader or Cobb or Badnarik can surely want enough change to decide to vote against Bush(ie for Kerry).
Sure. Vote third party.
Sure thats what I said, except in the national election where your ability to help the 3rd parties has been diminished. In that instance vote someone who is winnable but not the incumbent and so Kerry.
With this in mind it is obvious you want some change since you are undecided and would like to see more/better candidates. Your best bet to do this is to vote against the incumbent at every election. For each position on your ballot find the incumbent and vote against him/her. Failing to get re-elected sends a huge message to the party. If bush gets re-elected for instance his ideas become the parties main platform and ideas if he fails however they will seek to change themselves in order to correct Bush's mistake. This is the same for all local chapters of these parties as well.
So clearly and simply, vote against all incumbents no matter what. In local elections vote for 3rd party candidates at random if your too lazy to learn what they stand for. But for presidential elections your best bet is to just vote for Kerry and bitch about him when he fucks up.
Wrong. I love linux but I don't see it ever taking the desktop market by storm. Unfortunately for the linux zealots, linux moves too slowly. Apple on the otherhand moves very quickly to open up new markets and produce new technology. Furthermore Apple always had a distinct advantage over there competetors in that they are able to successful design and implement both hardware and software solutions creating a complete package.
Macintosh rules those niches now but give it ten years.
Apple is dying BSD is dying... blah blah blah blah blah.. Next?
The bigest thing that Apple has right now is their IPOD. If they screw that up, then there may not be another Microsoft to invest in a floundering company.
Your right. The iPod is very important to Apple, but it has already boosted laptop and desktop sales. The iPod strategy wasn't to turn apple into a digital music company it was to get people to buy Apple computers and its working. If the iPod was reduced to less than 10% market share in 3 years, it wouldnt matter that much. The iPod already did its damage by enticing more users to try Mac.
Funny, I'd expect conformism to follow along with the popular mass trend which happens to be PC's. I just think you don't want to label yourself as a conformist. Lets face it most pro MS arguments are pure conformist ones, everyone uses MS so I should too, or nobody uses Mac they ahve a small market share!!
My advice to readers of the parent post is move along nothing to see here...
A good comparison would be against VW, which has a very similiar cult following in its own right and as such even casual VW drivers are somewhat more fanatic than say your average ford driver.
This is where the culture comes in bringing in a sense of loyalty to the product you use. I don't feel like PC users have that same phenomenon and maybe if they understood it they wouldn't rant and piss and flame on here about price differences and single mouse buttons.
Whats wrong with objective-c. I would consider that to be a much more viable option for adding object support into the linux kernel because thats basically what we are talking about. Without objects C++ offers no real benefit over C and in fact with the absence of objects is a detrement. Objective-C on the other hand is pure C with some nifty object support stapled on. Way better and in my opinion much more likely to be accepted by them kernel folks.
I don't like agnostics, they are flip-floppers and most of them smell like poopy.
On a more serious note, decency laws are designed to inhibit this countrys sexual revolution. Conservatives(a nice word for fat white men who are afraid of change, stereo type, but statistically accurate) are afraid of open sexual talk/display because of mainly sexist ideals. Deep down they still see women as property and their property should be kept from ideas that woman can be sexually free to explore their own bodies or to enjoy sex with men. Fundamentalist christian ideals are rampant with the sexism that creates these ideas that decency laws are good and they produce spin that sadly others get caught up in.
Thats odd considering probably less that 1% of the population is atheist. I'd be hard pressed to believe you've seen lots of atheist politicians at all let alone militant ones. While the parent post is over the top he is mostly accurate. The republicans have basically made spreading christian ideals/laws a part of their platform. And all the indecent language and imagery stuff is entirely a fundamentalist christian lets silence those who dont share our ideals campaign.
When you buy an apple you are expecting an appliance like computer, it comes in a pretty box, with all matching peripherals(dell does this too but in an ugly fashion). Apple gives you what you need to use your computer as they intended. Now you want something special or want that to be different than the pretty package they provide you. Sure we will let you here you go, we will even sell it to you. The problem is that you people think everyone wants and needs a 2 button mouse because PC's have two buttons, its what I'm used too, I'm afraid of change, I don't understand things that are different. Get over it. An apple is what it is, you want the extras buy them, but to piss and moan because your 2 button mouse doesnt have an apple logo on it is stupid.
Sure ideally they do, but the point that I was getting at without clarifying is that the president indirectly affects these things through passing federal funding back to the states in order to do those duties. Now the fed government currently helps out in these local concerns because its in their best interest to do so. Coast guard protects borders and is the top group in illegal drug smuggling seizures. Now feds also help the fishing industry because it creates lots of jobs and helps spread food throughout the country.
Our current voting system addresses some of my concerns rather well, for instance, the president and the vice president cannot be from the same state. This is good for keeping one state from gaining all the influence in the federal government.
Another reason why not to have direct election is influence on the election from fraud is very minimal as a person who tries to do so could only affect a few states and wouldnt gain very much. In a direct election voter fraud is much easier and much more beneficial.