His very existence totally undermines some of the basic tenets of capitalism.
...or else his existence is the epitome of the greatness of capitalism.
On the other hand, fidelslist and jungilslist are both pretty good, except that A) they do have banner ads, and B) Fidel and Jung Il are the only ones allowed to post to them.
Ignorant nonsense, but a common defense of the status quo. Do you truly think that attempts at gender equality can only accomplish the promotion of mediocrity, and nothing else whatsoever?
It mostly just promotes mediocrity, but it does also promote injustice, a warped sense of entitlement, and insensitivity -- if not outright denial -- about gender differences. (or "diversity" if that sounds less ignorant to you. [people who call philosophies they disagree with "ignorant", btw, flag themselves as arrogant non-thinkers.])
Are you certain that:
Currently, women's positions in the field accurately matches their skills and qualifications?
Girls and young women are given adequate education, motivation, and acceptance when it comes to even considering entering the field? Given that you don't know, for a fact, that the answer to both of those questions is 'yes', then how can you possibly know that addressing those issues cannot help, but can only promote mediocrity?
Because anyone not blinded by a communist-era mono-gender ideological prejudice can easily see that among all free, functional human beings, the sexes are very different from each other, and are generally interested in different things -- and that efforts to degrade that diversity, whether by policy, force, law, or indoctrination, can and does only lead to harm to the human condition.
So ask yourself what beliefs, assumptions, prejudices or predilections you have which lead to such a circumvention of logic and rationality.
If there were 180 (or however many) women here and they tried to bring in some men, I think almost everyone would find it acceptable.
Sure, the only people who would have a problem with it are the sane ones. If no women give a crap about GNOME, is that really such a threat to your world-view that you think the world has to be set back in proper order through propaganda??? What's next, outreach programs to achieve gender equality at football games? strip clubs? prisons? hair loss clinics? Communism is so last century - snap out of it!!!
The only really significant point is how the government acts on the information it has. There's nothing wrong with data mining public data for valuable information. Academic institutions benefit from it, potential employers benefit from it, potential boyfriends/girlfriends benefit from it, and if the U.S. government and the public defense can benefit from it, then unless you're rooting for the overthrow of the U.S. government and/or the American people, you should be for it.
Talking about a "chilling effect" in the U.S. is silly. No one in the U.S. gives a second thought about broadcasting the most extreme and outrageous anti-government rhetoric in the most public way possible, or even considers masking their identity before doing so. If you don't believe me, search on "barbara streisand blog".
By the way, both House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and DNC Chairman Howard Dean are clinically insane. Al Gore too. These people hate America, desparately want either the Al Queada Caliphate or the Bathist remnants to triumph over our troops in Iraq, and are guilty of treason.
Well, not addict so much as captive. My career path went from C++ (pre-windows) to VB to Delphi to finally Java. VB is pure hell in an enterprise environment. Of all the many problems, the biggest is deployment. If you have to deploy a VB app to a large number of non-standardized machines, you might as well just kill yourself now. Once any one microsoft-owned DLLs from the entire twisted conglomeration of DLLs on the target machine gets modified to the wrong version, (like, for example, if some other VB program gets installed) you might as well format the drive and reinstall Windows. Add to that that the actual language structure is infantile, and it takes a genius to use it to write really well structured code (which is paradoxical, because geniuses are too smart to use it).
Delphi is great for Windows RAD. Deployment is the polar opposite of VB, as it will make a well-optimized standalone self-contained EXE which requires no DLLs at all. It's safer than C, but like C, it lets you use pointers and inline assembly.
IMHO, of the many develpment platform I've had any experience with, Java is by far the best for the enterprise development. The language structure itself makes it natural, if not necessary, to write well-structure object-oriented code. It's designed to be safe. It's easily ported to any OS. For most purposes it runs just as fast or nearly as fast as compiled C++, though if you really need a native implementation of something, you can easily incorporate a DLL. You are no longer dependent on the Windows API, and you don't have to worry if your program will run under the next version of Windows. As opposed to the Windows API, Java implements things like threading in a logical, safe, efficient and object oriented manner. Java and everything you could possibly need for it, are free, and what amazed me the most when I started Java, nearly every common functionality that you would want to add to your project is out there as a free open source java library..Net is Java eaten and puked back up and charged for. GET OFF THE MICROSOFT CRACKPIPE.
Or to summarize: There's a chance that DDT won't work forever, so lets let 2 million African children die every year. After all there's a theory that one of those 2 million saved children might get sick later -- so just to be safe......and anyway, 2 people died of West Nile Virus in New York last summer, so we're going to need the world's supply of DDT over here.
"Patent law unambiguously grants owners of intellectual property the same rights as regular property holders."
actually mean, as you say,
"Patent law unambiguously grants owners of [copyright, trademarks, etc] the same rights as regular property holders."
which, as you say, is false, or does it actually mean,
"Patent law unambiguously grants owners of [the] intellectual property [at issue] the same rights as regular property holders."
which is true? Hmmmm. Philosophically, (while I agree that the sentence should have been better written) I would say that the only actual meaning that can be predicated of an ambiguous sentence is the meaning which conveys what the speaker intended, or possibly the meaning which happens to reflect the truth. (As long as we're picking nits.)
P.S., if one is in an arguement with one's wife, this is not a nit, but a key concept.
The information the NSA is getting is illegal. There is a very specific legal process for obtaining wiretaps, and they aren't using it.
The process to which you refer is for criminal investigations. The NSA does not get involved in criminal investigations, or if they do, that's not what they use these wiretaps for.
If they can't obtain this ability through legitimate legislation, why should they be able to do it?...There are checks and balances built into our system for a reason. The executive branch should not be able to disregard that in the name of security, because it is illegal..."
A thousand people on the Internet shouting that something is illegal does not make it so. As you say we have checks and balances, among which is the division of the will of the people between their elected representatives in Congress and in the White House. If Congress passes a law telling the president how to pursue a military strategy, then that law is void under the constitution. To whatever degree NSA activity is executed under the role of commander-in-cheif of the military, Congress cannot interfere with that activity by the laws they make. If they want to interfere, they can do it by defunding the NSA. Otherwise, if they want substancially more power over the president's actions, there's a mechanism in place for amending the Constitution for just that sort of thing.
If you want to get up in arms over the destruction of the democratic process in America, you should be talking about who it was who decided on behalf of the American people, apart from any sort of democratic process or checks and balances, that ordinary murder and rape may not be regarded as serious enough crimes for capital punishment; that unborn children may not be considered alive, or people, or in any other way protected by law; that blacks may not be considered people, or in any other way protected by the law, except as property; completely ignoring amendments they don't like; inventing amendments they wish existed... etc, etc.
I am incredulous whenever I hear people claim that Bush is somehow subverting the Constitution. I think maybe they take comfort in villainizing someone they know they actually have the power to remove. Representitive government has meanwhile become a sideshow, while the Supreme Court makes all the decisions that effect us the most, regardless of whether we love it or hate it. Meanwhile the grand prize of the electorial process is that if you win the presidency, there's a chance that one of the Nine Overlords will die during your term, and then you'll get to appoint a new one. What a joke!
Personally I think only "the blood of tyrants and patriots" will save this country at this point.
RB definitely has the price advantage, being only about $100, whereas BB will a be around $5,000 after taxes. However RB will still have trouble competing since
1) It doesn't actually recieve the emails via r/f, rather to get your emails, you have to wait in line every morning, and then you're rationed to one email per day, and
2) Their tech support stinks, in that shortly after you call them, you are taken to a rice farm where you are re-educated over the course of a year to love your RB unconditionally.
Oh well, at least they're trying.
Much better word, except for the fact that you apply it to the ISP market, which has, in the US, at least 300 national providers (not including regional ISPs). And if any ISP were to start restricting bandwidth to Google, all the ISPs with lower numbers would jump for joy as their numbers increased. Any ISP foolish enough to collude with such a scheme, would meet the same sad fate.
As for the backbone providers, there are over 30 of them. AT&T is a very distant third, and Level3 is 4th. And Level3 is probably overjoyed about the published comments from the AT&T chairman, because competition is even stronger at that level, as huge amounts of bandwidth can be bought and sold quickly if ISPs start losing faith in AT&T.
But as Democrats are wont, you charge that all these companies should be under all sorts of government control, because otherwise they will probably collude with each other to bad things to us, and that Republicans don't want that because they're also bad. The most glaring flaw in your argument is that collusion is already illegal. So whatever the intent of Democrats, it's not to prevent collusion.
My theory concerning the thinking of Democrats is this: They distrust corporations, and they trust government -- perhaps because they think that money makes people bad, but power doesn't necessarily. However one would have to be a fool to trust either a corporation or government. Therefore a well-run society keeps its government in check and in balance through competition between executive, legislative and judicial, competition between federal and state, and copetition, as it were, between the elected and the electors. And it must similarly keep its economy in check and in balance through competition between sellers and other sellers, and between buyers and other buyers, and it falls to the government to enforce that balance so that no one buyer or seller can operate without competition or compete in inherently dishonest ways. And it therefore also falls to the government to restrain itself in its regulation of the market, so that it doesn't destroy the independence and competition which is its duty to preserve.
Some people, indeed, have only one (or zero) cable or DSL provider in their area. And while that's too bad for those, it doesn't free that ISP from competition. And in the US economy, any company vulnerable to competition, gets competition -- except where the government forbids it (thanks Democrats). It would be extremely difficult -- probably imposible -- for any corporation to acheive an ISP monopoly in the US. It would, however, be exeedingly easy for the government to establish an ISP monopoly through regulation. If this is the first time you're hearing of these strange concepts, then chances are you're living outside the US, and perhaps still paying hourly for your Internet access, at a rate negotiated between your ISP and your government. Perhaps one day we'll send Republican missionaries to your country, and they will teach you about limited government and free markets. Until then, see if you can find an uncensored copy of the Federalist Papers. It's a great place to start.
I wasn't commenting on the intended effect of the amendment, I was commenting on amendment itself. If that amendment was law, and that law was followed as it was written, the effect would be just what I said. The realistic scenario, considering that the would-be law is ridiculously restrictive, is that the FCC/courts would disregard it where they pleased, and enforce it were they please, thereby moving us yet further away from a society governed by laws.
The president who ultimately ended the crisis of monopolies/trusts was Republican Teddy Roosevelt. Ever since then, it's basically been a national consensus that it's the proper role of the federal government to prevent any one man or corporation from amassing enough economic power to be able to threaten the national security or the freedom of the market economy. There's nothing remotely similar to such concerns here. Instead, a few Democrats are trying to engage in a massive premtive war against ISPs, exerting extreme controls over how they route data and who they route it to. And this based upon the possibility that one of them might do something its customers don't like at some point in the future. When a government is addressing a problem, new legislation and creation of new powers should be its last resort, not its first. And it certainly shouldn't be done before the problem even exists.
And if you buy into the whole corporations-are-evil dogma, then read the amendment, imagining that the FCC has exercised their power to declare you as an ISP. Here's a couple of gems from that amendment, which would presumably become law if the Democrats ever controlled Congress:
"[An ISP shall] not interfere with, block, degrade, alter, modify, impair, or change any bits, content, application or service transmitted over [its network]."
An exception is provided later for stopping malware and spam, but on its face, this law would prohibit ISPs from offering customers email accounts, since standards require email servers to add headers to the email content being transmitted.
"[An ISP shall] not discriminate in favor of itself or any other person, including any affiliate or company with which such operator has a business relationship in A) allocating bandwidth; and B) transmitting content or applications or services to or from a subscriber."
Since I am trying to run my own business based from a server colocated with an ISP, and that ISP therefore provides bandwidth to and from my server according to how much money I pay them, if the Democrats had their way, I, and thousands of others, would be legislated out of business.
And their crowning achievment:
Section 4.a.6: "[An ISP shall] treat all data traveling over or on communications in a non-discriminatory way."
Yes, that's right, by the plain meaning of the law, ISPs would be prohibited from operating routers, switches, or firewalls. Equitable treatment for all data packets! Sure, communism brings disaster for economic systems, but for information systems it wil bring UTOPIA! PACKETS OF THE WORLD UNITE!!!
Take a look at what the government actually tries to do, and you too can become a Republican. (...illustrating that, besides Lincoln, the Republican party is also the party of Jefferson.)
The news looks a lot different after it stops spinning. Despite the Democrats' initial votes in support of their buddy's amendment, after that failed, the majority of them voted to pass the bill without any further modification.
If cockroaches are indeed the crowning acheivement of evolution, then human sentience, which is by far the least understood phenomenon studied by science, and the things which proceed from it such as philosophy, reason itself, and love, must either A) be caused by something other than the forces of evolution, or B) be an accidental divertion of evolution, driven by no special overwhelming cause -- so just one of those unique things to pop up by selection, like an extra-long beak.
To argue A is, I think, flawed, because we shouldn't attribute to separate causes things adequately explained by a common cause. I'm inferring that you side with A, since you limit your praise for the cockroach to "an evolutionary perspective," implying there's another perspective, and you also express a concept of what we "should" do which is unconnected to evolution. But to argue B, as many do, is I think, utterly contrary to both reason and experience. I suppose it's a justifyable argument for someone who has never yet experienced love or reason. But for those who have experienced them yet make that arguement, by all indications I think, argue not from reason, but from reason's age-old adversary, dogma.
So you have no moral objections to doing whatever crosses your mind with other consenting women, and that makes you attractive to your wife? I think I'll need to hear that from her.
and stop denying that there is a regular cycle of ice ages, and that we are due for one? Unless we want 95% of the population to die a painful death of dehydration and starvation, we had better start planning for the future. If today's fashionable science is correct about the effectiveness of CO2 as a greenhouse agent, we should start building massive CO2 generators around the globe now.
The worst that can happen from global warming is that we have to rebuild our coastal cities on higher ground. In the best-case scenario for an ice age, half of those cities would be destroyed and covered over by glaciers, and the rest would be mass graves for people without enough water or food.
Dude, we are sex-hungry animals....The point is, you look at any major human accomplishment, from the Pyramids to the Space Shuttle, and you'll find that its motivation was a bunch of guys trying to climb the social heirarchy, so that they could score the best and hottest women possible.
Dude, you're talking to nerds. We're fairly certain that people who spend their lives building spaceships, or telepathic burial devices, or computer programs, are not doing it because they think it will increase their ability to get women -- let alone the best women. Anyone who thought that would be too stupid to do any of those things. People who believe in an evolution that driven by nothing but fitness for reproduction and survival simply do not have a plausible explanation for humanity. The crowning acheivement of such a system would be bacteria or cockroaches, not Mozart and Confucius and Jessica Alba.
----The sole genetic purpose for our existence is breeding
Then why aren't we rabbits?
----The sole genetic purpose for our existence is breeding
Then why are you posting when you should be breeding?
----The sole genetic purpose for our existence is breeding
Then why shouldn't we outlaw porn, thereby encouraging young men to fulfill their purpose instead.
----Stop denying our nature and making it a bigger deal than it is.
If sexual immorality either doesn't exist or is no big deal, then why has mankind evolved to so strongly believe otherwise, and to impose norms and laws to restrain it, according to their understanding of it, in every civilization that has ever existed?
But no need arguing, let's perform an experiment to test the nature of evolution. Continue to speak openly of your disbelief in the concept of sexual morality -- especially in the presence of women -- and lets see whether or not your produce any offspring.
THANK YOU, New York Times, for suing the U.S. Government to make them have to say who they're spying on. You are sooo brave and smart and we love you sooo much. Oh, and who are you investigating right now?
Yeah, but it's hard to fault the futurists/sci-fi writers -- well except to the degree that they have the arrogance to think they can figure out what the future will be like.
But after the technology technological advances, e.g. over the 15 years from 1960 to 1975, particularly with computers and space-travel, how could anyone doubt that by 2001 we'd be taking manned trips to Jupiter and bringing along our sentient computer companions?
But shouldn't we by now get the fact that changes aren't happening as quickly now as they did back then? It's a real pet peeve for me when they set up sci-fi stories with radically different societies and technologies only 50 years in the future. E.g. Minority Report.
The best thing that this has for developing countries is not even the electricity or the clean water, but the economical model.
Instead of putting up a 500-megawatt power plant in a developing country, he argues, it would be much better to place 500,000 one-kilowatt power plants in villages all over the place, because then you would create 500,000 entrepreneurs.
If this thing breaks up near the top, with the earth spinning beneath it, it's going to get all wound up around the earth and stop it's rotation, like when you vacuum up a long piece of string and it winds around the spinny thing. People are gonna be pissed.
(yes, i'm joking)
I had a PCjr at one point. It wasn't all bad. It came standard with an infrared keyboard, and it could play up to three different notes simultaneously through the system speaker, so you could program it to play chords. It even had a 256 color video mode, if you didn't mind reading text in 20x10 characters. It also came with standard support for tape drives to lure users of tsr's and c64's with their collection of tapes, which -- though useless to me in it's designed function -- meant that there was a built-in relay (for starting and stopping the tape player) which you could control programmatically. I hooked up a low voltage lantern, and wrote an alarm clock program that turned on the light and played an alarm in the morning.
Oh, I knew what I was missing. My dad, an IBM employee, bought the pre-release version of the IBM PC. I taught myself "basica", and I still remember when I figured out that you could say "x=x+1" in programming, even though it would be quite wrong in math. It made all the difference in the world in the development of my ascii-character action games.
But my friends all had trs-80s or commodore64s. I would watch them type in a load command, press play on a cassette recorder, and sit and hope. I was like, "Dude, where's your disk drive?" It was sad.
Slashdot Mirror
On the other hand, fidelslist and jungilslist are both pretty good, except that A) they do have banner ads, and B) Fidel and Jung Il are the only ones allowed to post to them.
Because anyone not blinded by a communist-era mono-gender ideological prejudice can easily see that among all free, functional human beings, the sexes are very different from each other, and are generally interested in different things -- and that efforts to degrade that diversity, whether by policy, force, law, or indoctrination, can and does only lead to harm to the human condition.
So ask yourself what beliefs, assumptions, prejudices or predilections you have which lead to such a circumvention of logic and rationality.
The only really significant point is how the government acts on the information it has. There's nothing wrong with data mining public data for valuable information. Academic institutions benefit from it, potential employers benefit from it, potential boyfriends/girlfriends benefit from it, and if the U.S. government and the public defense can benefit from it, then unless you're rooting for the overthrow of the U.S. government and/or the American people, you should be for it.
Talking about a "chilling effect" in the U.S. is silly. No one in the U.S. gives a second thought about broadcasting the most extreme and outrageous anti-government rhetoric in the most public way possible, or even considers masking their identity before doing so. If you don't believe me, search on "barbara streisand blog".
By the way, both House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and DNC Chairman Howard Dean are clinically insane. Al Gore too. These people hate America, desparately want either the Al Queada Caliphate or the Bathist remnants to triumph over our troops in Iraq, and are guilty of treason.
See? No chilling effect.
Well, not addict so much as captive. My career path went from C++ (pre-windows) to VB to Delphi to finally Java. VB is pure hell in an enterprise environment. Of all the many problems, the biggest is deployment. If you have to deploy a VB app to a large number of non-standardized machines, you might as well just kill yourself now. Once any one microsoft-owned DLLs from the entire twisted conglomeration of DLLs on the target machine gets modified to the wrong version, (like, for example, if some other VB program gets installed) you might as well format the drive and reinstall Windows. Add to that that the actual language structure is infantile, and it takes a genius to use it to write really well structured code (which is paradoxical, because geniuses are too smart to use it).
.Net is Java eaten and puked back up and charged for. GET OFF THE MICROSOFT CRACKPIPE.
Delphi is great for Windows RAD. Deployment is the polar opposite of VB, as it will make a well-optimized standalone self-contained EXE which requires no DLLs at all. It's safer than C, but like C, it lets you use pointers and inline assembly.
IMHO, of the many develpment platform I've had any experience with, Java is by far the best for the enterprise development. The language structure itself makes it natural, if not necessary, to write well-structure object-oriented code. It's designed to be safe. It's easily ported to any OS. For most purposes it runs just as fast or nearly as fast as compiled C++, though if you really need a native implementation of something, you can easily incorporate a DLL. You are no longer dependent on the Windows API, and you don't have to worry if your program will run under the next version of Windows. As opposed to the Windows API, Java implements things like threading in a logical, safe, efficient and object oriented manner. Java and everything you could possibly need for it, are free, and what amazed me the most when I started Java, nearly every common functionality that you would want to add to your project is out there as a free open source java library.
Or to summarize: There's a chance that DDT won't work forever, so lets let 2 million African children die every year. After all there's a theory that one of those 2 million saved children might get sick later -- so just to be safe... ...and anyway, 2 people died of West Nile Virus in New York last summer, so we're going to need the world's supply of DDT over here.
P.S., if one is in an arguement with one's wife, this is not a nit, but a key concept.
If you want to get up in arms over the destruction of the democratic process in America, you should be talking about who it was who decided on behalf of the American people, apart from any sort of democratic process or checks and balances, that ordinary murder and rape may not be regarded as serious enough crimes for capital punishment; that unborn children may not be considered alive, or people, or in any other way protected by law; that blacks may not be considered people, or in any other way protected by the law, except as property; completely ignoring amendments they don't like; inventing amendments they wish existed... etc, etc.
I am incredulous whenever I hear people claim that Bush is somehow subverting the Constitution. I think maybe they take comfort in villainizing someone they know they actually have the power to remove. Representitive government has meanwhile become a sideshow, while the Supreme Court makes all the decisions that effect us the most, regardless of whether we love it or hate it. Meanwhile the grand prize of the electorial process is that if you win the presidency, there's a chance that one of the Nine Overlords will die during your term, and then you'll get to appoint a new one. What a joke!
Personally I think only "the blood of tyrants and patriots" will save this country at this point.
RB definitely has the price advantage, being only about $100, whereas BB will a be around $5,000 after taxes. However RB will still have trouble competing since
1) It doesn't actually recieve the emails via r/f, rather to get your emails, you have to wait in line every morning, and then you're rationed to one email per day, and
2) Their tech support stinks, in that shortly after you call them, you are taken to a rice farm where you are re-educated over the course of a year to love your RB unconditionally.
Oh well, at least they're trying.
Much better word, except for the fact that you apply it to the ISP market, which has, in the US, at least 300 national providers (not including regional ISPs). And if any ISP were to start restricting bandwidth to Google, all the ISPs with lower numbers would jump for joy as their numbers increased. Any ISP foolish enough to collude with such a scheme, would meet the same sad fate.
As for the backbone providers, there are over 30 of them. AT&T is a very distant third, and Level3 is 4th. And Level3 is probably overjoyed about the published comments from the AT&T chairman, because competition is even stronger at that level, as huge amounts of bandwidth can be bought and sold quickly if ISPs start losing faith in AT&T.
But as Democrats are wont, you charge that all these companies should be under all sorts of government control, because otherwise they will probably collude with each other to bad things to us, and that Republicans don't want that because they're also bad. The most glaring flaw in your argument is that collusion is already illegal. So whatever the intent of Democrats, it's not to prevent collusion.
My theory concerning the thinking of Democrats is this: They distrust corporations, and they trust government -- perhaps because they think that money makes people bad, but power doesn't necessarily. However one would have to be a fool to trust either a corporation or government. Therefore a well-run society keeps its government in check and in balance through competition between executive, legislative and judicial, competition between federal and state, and copetition, as it were, between the elected and the electors. And it must similarly keep its economy in check and in balance through competition between sellers and other sellers, and between buyers and other buyers, and it falls to the government to enforce that balance so that no one buyer or seller can operate without competition or compete in inherently dishonest ways. And it therefore also falls to the government to restrain itself in its regulation of the market, so that it doesn't destroy the independence and competition which is its duty to preserve.
Some people, indeed, have only one (or zero) cable or DSL provider in their area. And while that's too bad for those, it doesn't free that ISP from competition. And in the US economy, any company vulnerable to competition, gets competition -- except where the government forbids it (thanks Democrats). It would be extremely difficult -- probably imposible -- for any corporation to acheive an ISP monopoly in the US. It would, however, be exeedingly easy for the government to establish an ISP monopoly through regulation. If this is the first time you're hearing of these strange concepts, then chances are you're living outside the US, and perhaps still paying hourly for your Internet access, at a rate negotiated between your ISP and your government. Perhaps one day we'll send Republican missionaries to your country, and they will teach you about limited government and free markets. Until then, see if you can find an uncensored copy of the Federalist Papers. It's a great place to start.
I wasn't commenting on the intended effect of the amendment, I was commenting on amendment itself. If that amendment was law, and that law was followed as it was written, the effect would be just what I said. The realistic scenario, considering that the would-be law is ridiculously restrictive, is that the FCC/courts would disregard it where they pleased, and enforce it were they please, thereby moving us yet further away from a society governed by laws.
And if you buy into the whole corporations-are-evil dogma, then read the amendment, imagining that the FCC has exercised their power to declare you as an ISP. Here's a couple of gems from that amendment, which would presumably become law if the Democrats ever controlled Congress:
An exception is provided later for stopping malware and spam, but on its face, this law would prohibit ISPs from offering customers email accounts, since standards require email servers to add headers to the email content being transmitted."[An ISP shall] not interfere with, block, degrade, alter, modify, impair, or change any bits, content, application or service transmitted over [its network]."
"[An ISP shall] not discriminate in favor of itself or any other person, including any affiliate or company with which such operator has a business relationship in A) allocating bandwidth; and B) transmitting content or applications or services to or from a subscriber."
Since I am trying to run my own business based from a server colocated with an ISP, and that ISP therefore provides bandwidth to and from my server according to how much money I pay them, if the Democrats had their way, I, and thousands of others, would be legislated out of business.And their crowning achievment:
Section 4.a.6: "[An ISP shall] treat all data traveling over or on communications in a non-discriminatory way."
Yes, that's right, by the plain meaning of the law, ISPs would be prohibited from operating routers, switches, or firewalls. Equitable treatment for all data packets! Sure, communism brings disaster for economic systems, but for information systems it wil bring UTOPIA! PACKETS OF THE WORLD UNITE!!!Take a look at what the government actually tries to do, and you too can become a Republican. (...illustrating that, besides Lincoln, the Republican party is also the party of Jefferson.)
You keep using that word... I do not think it means what you think it means...
The news looks a lot different after it stops spinning. Despite the Democrats' initial votes in support of their buddy's amendment, after that failed, the majority of them voted to pass the bill without any further modification.
If cockroaches are indeed the crowning acheivement of evolution, then human sentience, which is by far the least understood phenomenon studied by science, and the things which proceed from it such as philosophy, reason itself, and love, must either A) be caused by something other than the forces of evolution, or B) be an accidental divertion of evolution, driven by no special overwhelming cause -- so just one of those unique things to pop up by selection, like an extra-long beak.
To argue A is, I think, flawed, because we shouldn't attribute to separate causes things adequately explained by a common cause. I'm inferring that you side with A, since you limit your praise for the cockroach to "an evolutionary perspective," implying there's another perspective, and you also express a concept of what we "should" do which is unconnected to evolution. But to argue B, as many do, is I think, utterly contrary to both reason and experience. I suppose it's a justifyable argument for someone who has never yet experienced love or reason. But for those who have experienced them yet make that arguement, by all indications I think, argue not from reason, but from reason's age-old adversary, dogma.
So you have no moral objections to doing whatever crosses your mind with other consenting women, and that makes you attractive to your wife? I think I'll need to hear that from her.
and stop denying that there is a regular cycle of ice ages, and that we are due for one? Unless we want 95% of the population to die a painful death of dehydration and starvation, we had better start planning for the future. If today's fashionable science is correct about the effectiveness of CO2 as a greenhouse agent, we should start building massive CO2 generators around the globe now.
The worst that can happen from global warming is that we have to rebuild our coastal cities on higher ground. In the best-case scenario for an ice age, half of those cities would be destroyed and covered over by glaciers, and the rest would be mass graves for people without enough water or food.
----The sole genetic purpose for our existence is breeding
Then why aren't we rabbits?
----The sole genetic purpose for our existence is breeding
Then why are you posting when you should be breeding?
----The sole genetic purpose for our existence is breeding
Then why shouldn't we outlaw porn, thereby encouraging young men to fulfill their purpose instead.
----Stop denying our nature and making it a bigger deal than it is.
If sexual immorality either doesn't exist or is no big deal, then why has mankind evolved to so strongly believe otherwise, and to impose norms and laws to restrain it, according to their understanding of it, in every civilization that has ever existed?
But no need arguing, let's perform an experiment to test the nature of evolution. Continue to speak openly of your disbelief in the concept of sexual morality -- especially in the presence of women -- and lets see whether or not your produce any offspring.
THANK YOU, New York Times, for suing the U.S. Government to make them have to say who they're spying on. You are sooo brave and smart and we love you sooo much. Oh, and who are you investigating right now?
Yeah, but it's hard to fault the futurists/sci-fi writers -- well except to the degree that they have the arrogance to think they can figure out what the future will be like.
But after the technology technological advances, e.g. over the 15 years from 1960 to 1975, particularly with computers and space-travel, how could anyone doubt that by 2001 we'd be taking manned trips to Jupiter and bringing along our sentient computer companions?
But shouldn't we by now get the fact that changes aren't happening as quickly now as they did back then? It's a real pet peeve for me when they set up sci-fi stories with radically different societies and technologies only 50 years in the future. E.g. Minority Report.
If this thing breaks up near the top, with the earth spinning beneath it, it's going to get all wound up around the earth and stop it's rotation, like when you vacuum up a long piece of string and it winds around the spinny thing. People are gonna be pissed. (yes, i'm joking)
I had a PCjr at one point. It wasn't all bad. It came standard with an infrared keyboard, and it could play up to three different notes simultaneously through the system speaker, so you could program it to play chords. It even had a 256 color video mode, if you didn't mind reading text in 20x10 characters. It also came with standard support for tape drives to lure users of tsr's and c64's with their collection of tapes, which -- though useless to me in it's designed function -- meant that there was a built-in relay (for starting and stopping the tape player) which you could control programmatically. I hooked up a low voltage lantern, and wrote an alarm clock program that turned on the light and played an alarm in the morning.
Oh, I knew what I was missing. My dad, an IBM employee, bought the pre-release version of the IBM PC. I taught myself "basica", and I still remember when I figured out that you could say "x=x+1" in programming, even though it would be quite wrong in math. It made all the difference in the world in the development of my ascii-character action games.
But my friends all had trs-80s or commodore64s. I would watch them type in a load command, press play on a cassette recorder, and sit and hope. I was like, "Dude, where's your disk drive?" It was sad.