That's an unrealistic expectation. People are greedy. Just as ambitious people gravitate towards positions of power, greedy people gravitate towards positions of wealth.
Just as the government is regulated by a complex series of checks and balances, so too much companies be regulated. A good first step to restoring order is to eliminate the state of anarchy.
But mudslinging, blind partisanship and unfounded accusation are the wrongs I'm referring to. We can do better than that.
The first step to fixing that is proper education. If people can't even spell the name of the person they want in office correctly, what chance do they have of being represented?
No, he's black. The fact that his mom is white doesn't mean squat to black people. The fact that his skin color is not white is all that counts.
My hope is that inner city kids will look to Obama as inspiration. And inner city parents will realize that they're not stuck in the hole they're born in if they work hard enough, and that their kids can become President of the United States with the right encouragement and upbringing. At the very least, minority children won't look at the past presidents and be discouraged by the lack of anyone not white. They won't think, "the white man is keeping me down, there's nothing I can do about it," and instead think, "if Barak Obama can do it, so can I" and seriously work towards the same goal.
A lot of minorities living in inner city ghettos and slums are the way they are because they've lost hope, because they don't think they can break out of their mold. Obama's rise to presidency completely changes that mentality. And that is a change that has happened.
Reagan is primarily to blame. Greenspan is to blame. Their form of free-market economics simply doesn't work. All corporate socialism does is consolidate wealth and power in the hands of a few. It doesn't create jobs, it doesn't raise the GDP.
We are seeing the fallout of this failed economic theory. Yes, Bush's incompetence didn't help the problem. But housing prices started going up during the tech boom while Clinton was in office. If the Democrats were running the show for the past 8 years, things might have been different. But in reality, the only assured difference between that alternate reality and this reality is that a few investment banks failing probably wouldn't have hit the world as hard.
So Bush Jr. and Clinton share the same amount of blame. Remember that Clinton kept Greenspan. While Clinton didn't champion corporate socialism, he certainly wasn't against free-market economics.
What we should learn from this turn of events is that Reaganomics is a farce, and that the Republicans no longer have a viable economic policy to run upon. Don't even start about the libertarian view of economics.
First, you don't start memes by announcing your intent to start one, and second, the site you're looking for is 4chan and that's on the other side of the internet.
No, but Sarah Palin would've been disastrous, and McCain isn't getting any healthier.
The amusing thing is, some Republicans are trotting out Sarah Palin for 2012. After 8 years of Bush/Cheney, it might be decades before the country's ready for another ultra-conservative idiot president again.
January 21 might be the last time you can exercise your second amendment rights in the same manner you can today!
Since Obama is about change, this is obviously true. But that's not saying much, if anything at all. You could've said the same about Bush, and still be correct.
This isn't true. Google by itself is only a part of the equation that led to the death of bookmarking. In truth, the more obscure stuff is still easier to get at via bookmarks and portals than Google.
What diminished the utility of bookmarks is a combination of Google, Wikipedia, blogs, and content aggregation (RSS/Atom).
What Google did is figure out a way to do zero-knowledge authentication. It will tell you that citibank.com is the site of Citibank, while citi-bank.com is probably not the site you're looking for, whitehouse.gov is the real official website of the executive branch, while whitehouse.org and whitehouse.com are not (though this example is a bit dated).
That feature, I think, is infinitely more valuable than a very marginal bit of convenience.
Currently, the technology required to make secure authentication ubiquitous is prohibitively expensive. Banks continue to employ a lot of legacy systems the for reliability purposes, because any downtime is simply unacceptable.
Unless you want everyone to go around doing authentication with shared secret-codes like they do in spy movies, or calculating in their heads their own public key for every transaction that requires authentication, some form of picture ID is the most practical method. Remember that while you might do everything online, in the real world, only a very small percentage of transactions in the world are done through computers. In fact, most things are done through cash, where the only authentication exists to confirm the veracity of the actuall bill.
It may be small fry, but a lawyer would get to bill the client and collect a part of those "settlements." It might not be terribly lucrative for a major law firm that's involved in 6- or 7-figure settlements and payouts, but it's still easy money for smaller private practices with smaller clients.
While what you say is true, it is also irrelevant.
The fact of the matter is, you bought and paid for the game. If they're going to take away your ability to use a product you paid for, they better refund you your money.
If Youtube goes down the (no pun intended) tube, there are dozens of other media sites, not of which are all hosted in the US, that will offer what it refuses to offer.
That's the beauty of the internet. For a society whose core values number "freedom of expression," the internet explosion is an already-opened pandora's box. So long as people continue to value the ideal of "freedom of expression," nothing can be censored.
Unfortunately, there are already a few taboo things that can no longer safely unanonymously be talked about. It is already a crime to admit to thinking certain things. The two subjects I can immediately think of off the top of my head are terrorism and pedophilia. So much for freedom of expression.
Only the US and possibly the British would have the audacity to be the "police" of the world. Everybody else sticks to their own business, negotiating where they need to.
It has nothing to do with being spineless, and everything to do with arrogance. It has to do with the idea that the ideologies that govern the US are the best and therefore should be exported to every other nation. And while it may be true, that's for every country and their people to decide, not for the US.
But the US is a young nation, and irrational idealism is a part of being young.
The cure to fanaticism is education, and progressive education at that. Unfortunately, the leaders of most countries (not just in the middle east) are against progressive education, as it completely eliminates their power base. What it takes is a diplomat, with enough clout and cunning, to get countries to slowly open up. Eventually, the extremists will be marginalized, their power will be diminished until they're no more than talking heads making a lot of noise. Look at the KKK or the neo-Nazis, or even groups like the Black Panther, or ALF. But the key is that it takes time, and it's not done within four or eight years.
It's like the King and I. You can't change the current leader's ideology, but you can try to slowly change the children's. It takes generations. And unfortunately, these changes can be undone in a matter of months (look at Iran in the 50's and Iraq now).
Going in and bombing a country back to the stone age does the same to the prevailing culture.
Considering that terrorism thrive in situations of chaos (contrast Iraq pre-Gulf II and after Gulf II), and you'll quickly realize that the terrorists are scared shitless of Obama.
If Obama can get the Pakistani government to grow bold enough to stand up to the pockets of terrorists hiding and festering in the north, or if he can get the Pakistanis to organize the anti-terrorist tribal leaders to stand against the terrorists, with a push by the US soldiers from the Afghan border, the terrorists have lost.
If he can bring stability to the middle east countries, and not give the impression that he's trying to shaft them at every turn, the terrorists have lost.
If he can return the US government to the level of openness, and its international standing to its level before 9/11, the terrorists have lost.
Bush has done nothing but further the terrorist agenda with all of his cowboy, knee-jerk reactions. By tightening his grip on citizens in the name of "homeland security," Bush is very close to destablilizing the US itself, and that's really the ultimate goal of Bin Laden and Al Queda.
Honestly, I can't see how McCain's erratic and poor decision-making ability (which has become blantant, between the Sarah Palin choice for VP to the sudden suspension of his campaign and then not suspended again) is going to dig us out of this hole. If anything, that display of uncertainty is enough for me to firmly support Obama. The country needs a steady hand at the tiller, and not to make fun of him, but McCain's is not.
And the people who are the most terrified and speak the loudest when it comes to "national security" are not even near New York City. It's funny how the rest of the country (especially the backwater parts where no sane terrorist would go after because it wouldn't make a difference) gets all paranoid while the people in New York City go on with their lives albeit with a little more vigilence.
I think enforcement as well as the rules and regulations vary significantly depending on region and possibly even on the internet cafe.
I know the so-called "Great Firewall" isn't one enormous system spanning the whole of China, but a disjointed group of systems running the same hardware for approximately the same purpose. But the sites filtered vary regionally, with certain local municipalities choosing to filter some sites and others choosing to filter others. There's probably a set of filters that exist on a national level, but I'm also sure certain local governments add their own restrictions on top of it.
At the same time, the laws regarding ID probably vary as well. There is a national law that requires patrons to show ID recently mentioned here, but I think the amount of information that qualifies as "ID" and the level of record-keeping legally required varies. In addition, the business owners might go overboard to cover their own asses.
If anyone thinks China is like the olympic ceremonies with a massive amount of people all acting in robotic unison, they really need to take a closer look. It's actually more fractured than the US, with the central government weilding broad powers but handling only the most general aspects of the law. Since the culture varies so greatly between areas, most of the day-to-day laws are enacted on a regional level. Sure the central government will issue certain edicts, and make requirements, and local heads will roll (literally) if those are disobeyed, but there's a lot of room to maneuver in between. Of course, the nation will rise as one to defend itself from outside intrusion, but even then there's a lot of infighting that's not seen by outsiders (read up on the Japanese invasion during WWII).
And I have to wonder if your friend's credentials were copied for more nerfarious purposes in the guise of security.
Slashdot Mirror
That's an unrealistic expectation. People are greedy. Just as ambitious people gravitate towards positions of power, greedy people gravitate towards positions of wealth.
Just as the government is regulated by a complex series of checks and balances, so too much companies be regulated. A good first step to restoring order is to eliminate the state of anarchy.
But mudslinging, blind partisanship and unfounded accusation are the wrongs I'm referring to. We can do better than that.
The first step to fixing that is proper education. If people can't even spell the name of the person they want in office correctly, what chance do they have of being represented?
No, he's black. The fact that his mom is white doesn't mean squat to black people. The fact that his skin color is not white is all that counts.
My hope is that inner city kids will look to Obama as inspiration. And inner city parents will realize that they're not stuck in the hole they're born in if they work hard enough, and that their kids can become President of the United States with the right encouragement and upbringing. At the very least, minority children won't look at the past presidents and be discouraged by the lack of anyone not white. They won't think, "the white man is keeping me down, there's nothing I can do about it," and instead think, "if Barak Obama can do it, so can I" and seriously work towards the same goal.
A lot of minorities living in inner city ghettos and slums are the way they are because they've lost hope, because they don't think they can break out of their mold. Obama's rise to presidency completely changes that mentality. And that is a change that has happened.
Reagan is primarily to blame. Greenspan is to blame. Their form of free-market economics simply doesn't work. All corporate socialism does is consolidate wealth and power in the hands of a few. It doesn't create jobs, it doesn't raise the GDP.
We are seeing the fallout of this failed economic theory. Yes, Bush's incompetence didn't help the problem. But housing prices started going up during the tech boom while Clinton was in office. If the Democrats were running the show for the past 8 years, things might have been different. But in reality, the only assured difference between that alternate reality and this reality is that a few investment banks failing probably wouldn't have hit the world as hard.
So Bush Jr. and Clinton share the same amount of blame. Remember that Clinton kept Greenspan. While Clinton didn't champion corporate socialism, he certainly wasn't against free-market economics.
What we should learn from this turn of events is that Reaganomics is a farce, and that the Republicans no longer have a viable economic policy to run upon. Don't even start about the libertarian view of economics.
First, you don't start memes by announcing your intent to start one, and second, the site you're looking for is 4chan and that's on the other side of the internet.
No, but Sarah Palin would've been disastrous, and McCain isn't getting any healthier.
The amusing thing is, some Republicans are trotting out Sarah Palin for 2012. After 8 years of Bush/Cheney, it might be decades before the country's ready for another ultra-conservative idiot president again.
Ban you from their forums?
January 21 might be the last time you can exercise your second amendment rights in the same manner you can today!
Since Obama is about change, this is obviously true. But that's not saying much, if anything at all. You could've said the same about Bush, and still be correct.
This isn't true. Google by itself is only a part of the equation that led to the death of bookmarking. In truth, the more obscure stuff is still easier to get at via bookmarks and portals than Google.
What diminished the utility of bookmarks is a combination of Google, Wikipedia, blogs, and content aggregation (RSS/Atom).
What Google did is figure out a way to do zero-knowledge authentication. It will tell you that citibank.com is the site of Citibank, while citi-bank.com is probably not the site you're looking for, whitehouse.gov is the real official website of the executive branch, while whitehouse.org and whitehouse.com are not (though this example is a bit dated).
That feature, I think, is infinitely more valuable than a very marginal bit of convenience.
The sheep is going to get eaten anyway. It's not as if the sheep can just walk away.
Better to die fighting than die hiding.
I'm just curious, but what kind of gel do you use to silence your wife and kids?
The Cat in the Hat fed 'em to Thing 1 and Thing 2 for breakfast.
Currently, the technology required to make secure authentication ubiquitous is prohibitively expensive. Banks continue to employ a lot of legacy systems the for reliability purposes, because any downtime is simply unacceptable.
Unless you want everyone to go around doing authentication with shared secret-codes like they do in spy movies, or calculating in their heads their own public key for every transaction that requires authentication, some form of picture ID is the most practical method. Remember that while you might do everything online, in the real world, only a very small percentage of transactions in the world are done through computers. In fact, most things are done through cash, where the only authentication exists to confirm the veracity of the actuall bill.
It may be small fry, but a lawyer would get to bill the client and collect a part of those "settlements." It might not be terribly lucrative for a major law firm that's involved in 6- or 7-figure settlements and payouts, but it's still easy money for smaller private practices with smaller clients.
You try building your own cell phone network.
Now try building your own game.
See the difference?
While what you say is true, it is also irrelevant.
The fact of the matter is, you bought and paid for the game. If they're going to take away your ability to use a product you paid for, they better refund you your money.
If Youtube goes down the (no pun intended) tube, there are dozens of other media sites, not of which are all hosted in the US, that will offer what it refuses to offer.
That's the beauty of the internet. For a society whose core values number "freedom of expression," the internet explosion is an already-opened pandora's box. So long as people continue to value the ideal of "freedom of expression," nothing can be censored.
Unfortunately, there are already a few taboo things that can no longer safely unanonymously be talked about. It is already a crime to admit to thinking certain things. The two subjects I can immediately think of off the top of my head are terrorism and pedophilia. So much for freedom of expression.
That's because you didn't use an electronic voting machine to do the calculations.
No, there's been an outbreak of common sense lately. It still hasn't become ubiquitous, but it's a serious improvement over two years ago.
Only the US and possibly the British would have the audacity to be the "police" of the world. Everybody else sticks to their own business, negotiating where they need to.
It has nothing to do with being spineless, and everything to do with arrogance. It has to do with the idea that the ideologies that govern the US are the best and therefore should be exported to every other nation. And while it may be true, that's for every country and their people to decide, not for the US.
But the US is a young nation, and irrational idealism is a part of being young.
The cure to fanaticism is education, and progressive education at that. Unfortunately, the leaders of most countries (not just in the middle east) are against progressive education, as it completely eliminates their power base. What it takes is a diplomat, with enough clout and cunning, to get countries to slowly open up. Eventually, the extremists will be marginalized, their power will be diminished until they're no more than talking heads making a lot of noise. Look at the KKK or the neo-Nazis, or even groups like the Black Panther, or ALF. But the key is that it takes time, and it's not done within four or eight years.
It's like the King and I. You can't change the current leader's ideology, but you can try to slowly change the children's. It takes generations. And unfortunately, these changes can be undone in a matter of months (look at Iran in the 50's and Iraq now).
Going in and bombing a country back to the stone age does the same to the prevailing culture.
Considering that terrorism thrive in situations of chaos (contrast Iraq pre-Gulf II and after Gulf II), and you'll quickly realize that the terrorists are scared shitless of Obama.
If Obama can get the Pakistani government to grow bold enough to stand up to the pockets of terrorists hiding and festering in the north, or if he can get the Pakistanis to organize the anti-terrorist tribal leaders to stand against the terrorists, with a push by the US soldiers from the Afghan border, the terrorists have lost.
If he can bring stability to the middle east countries, and not give the impression that he's trying to shaft them at every turn, the terrorists have lost.
If he can return the US government to the level of openness, and its international standing to its level before 9/11, the terrorists have lost.
Bush has done nothing but further the terrorist agenda with all of his cowboy, knee-jerk reactions. By tightening his grip on citizens in the name of "homeland security," Bush is very close to destablilizing the US itself, and that's really the ultimate goal of Bin Laden and Al Queda.
Honestly, I can't see how McCain's erratic and poor decision-making ability (which has become blantant, between the Sarah Palin choice for VP to the sudden suspension of his campaign and then not suspended again) is going to dig us out of this hole. If anything, that display of uncertainty is enough for me to firmly support Obama. The country needs a steady hand at the tiller, and not to make fun of him, but McCain's is not.
And the people who are the most terrified and speak the loudest when it comes to "national security" are not even near New York City. It's funny how the rest of the country (especially the backwater parts where no sane terrorist would go after because it wouldn't make a difference) gets all paranoid while the people in New York City go on with their lives albeit with a little more vigilence.
I think enforcement as well as the rules and regulations vary significantly depending on region and possibly even on the internet cafe.
I know the so-called "Great Firewall" isn't one enormous system spanning the whole of China, but a disjointed group of systems running the same hardware for approximately the same purpose. But the sites filtered vary regionally, with certain local municipalities choosing to filter some sites and others choosing to filter others. There's probably a set of filters that exist on a national level, but I'm also sure certain local governments add their own restrictions on top of it.
At the same time, the laws regarding ID probably vary as well. There is a national law that requires patrons to show ID recently mentioned here, but I think the amount of information that qualifies as "ID" and the level of record-keeping legally required varies. In addition, the business owners might go overboard to cover their own asses.
If anyone thinks China is like the olympic ceremonies with a massive amount of people all acting in robotic unison, they really need to take a closer look. It's actually more fractured than the US, with the central government weilding broad powers but handling only the most general aspects of the law. Since the culture varies so greatly between areas, most of the day-to-day laws are enacted on a regional level. Sure the central government will issue certain edicts, and make requirements, and local heads will roll (literally) if those are disobeyed, but there's a lot of room to maneuver in between. Of course, the nation will rise as one to defend itself from outside intrusion, but even then there's a lot of infighting that's not seen by outsiders (read up on the Japanese invasion during WWII).
And I have to wonder if your friend's credentials were copied for more nerfarious purposes in the guise of security.
That or the mod is just really, really sheltered in that basement.