No, it's the fact that Apple has a damn-near monopoly on mobile purchases, which are done in their walled garden. This is a big area of user activity, and will become a much bigger area of economic activity. Apple, through iTunes, matters to the Internet. In a bad way, unfortunately.
The National Review? Lulz. The National Revue does not have a fucking problem what the issues are with California (hint - looters aren't it). Furthermore, a strong US president won't be able to avoid WW 3. The best he could do is to make sure the good guys win WW 3.
As for seeing an Abraham Lincoln, I can guarantee you that the Republicans of today would crucify him for not being pro-life, pro-Christian and anti-tax enough. You can't save anyone who doesn't want to be saved. And today's Republicans don't want to be saved (Jesus is already doing that), they want to destroy the other side.
Here's the thing: at this point, I don't really care anymore what Republicans say. They pretty much lost me for the foreseeable future with their stance on the tax holiday.
Note: I'm pretty fiscally conservative. In my own finances, I only spend money I have, plan for the future with a significant rainy day fund, and consider whether the purchase I'm about to make is a need vs a want, and what its ROI is. I expect my government to work with the same principles. In theory, this should align nicely with the republican platform of small budgets and low taxes.
But this latest position of the republicans is just laughable. Tax cuts for the rich are a great way to restart the economy, but tax cuts for middle class families is just a failed stimulus package? Cutting revenue when instituting tax cuts for the rich is fine, but tax cuts for the middle class need to be balanced by more taxes on the middle-class elsewhere? The entire republican party seems to be intent on opposing Obama so blindly that they're willing to sacrifice their own talking points. Not only that, but they're even failing their own platform by their mindless opposition. They're digging their own grave, and it's gonna be hard climb out.
As for your other points...
The bias of our media is pathetic.
The media have no bias. They are corporations, interested only in their own profit. As a result, the only bias you see is the bias that helps them sell their media.
The stupidity of our population is tragic.
Of course, this comes with the unspoken idea "If people would only listen to me..." I might be part of the tragic population, but at least I know that the problem we're facing is difficult with no easy solution. It's not stupidity that's the problem, it's that there is a very large set of competing priorities battling for limited resources in a system prone to adversarialism, designed for slowness and that is being gamed by individuals and groups with lots of money. the solution to our problem is neither political nor bureaucratic. It will have to be personal, which is much more difficult. The first two can be solved by a top-down approach. The third can only solved botttom-up.
Next year we elect the last President of the United States.
We face serious problems in the next five years, and the media has successfully kept anyone remotely competent out of the race.
Bullshit. This is the lament of the deluded and the pussies. The rabid conservative wing has successfully kept anyone competent out of the GOP primary. If the hard-core conservatives want to win the Presidency, they need to stop annoying the majority of Americans and piss off a rather significant minority.
The beauty of email is that it is asynchronous. I can send an email, and people will get to it when they can. It's worldwide, near instant, and pretty much perfect delivery. I don't have to worry about them sitting at their desk right this moment, or be working right this moment. Write detailed email, send, and wait for reply. If it's urgent, follow up with a phone call, but otherwise, it's fire and forget.
If Volkswagen is turning off the email servers, I can't even do that. I actually have to wait to send the email until they are working, and that might mean that I have to work while I'm supposed to be off. After all, my working hours might not coincide with theirs.
I can't see this last very long. Besides, the solution is obvious and much less technically complex: have people not answer their email after working hours. Yes, it takes practice, but I've learned to ignore my crackberry after hours. If it's urgent, people will call.
5-day forecasts are quite accurate. Check for probabilities, and if they're low, check back in a few days. I've been rarely surprised by weather in the last few years - as in, was expecting a warm, sunny day and got instead cold rain all day.
Oh, absolutely. But somehow, I don't expect that logical considerations are behind any opposition to whatever Obama wants to do these days. I mean, republican leaders managed to change their stance on lowering taxes from "it's good for the economy" when they argued for cuts to investment taxes and taxes on the rich to " it's an ineffective stimulus measure" when the democrats and Obama wanted to extend the current tax holiday.
No, they rejected it because the 2 month extension didn't contain the pet project of the Republicans, the Keystone pipeline. Keep up with the politics, if you want to rake people over the coals for inaccuracies in it.
Let's stop propagating the "government is omnipotent" meme.
When people stop propagating the "government is incompetent" meme.
Yes, I was there too. Do you remember the shock on everyone's faces when Hungary and Czechoslovakia stopped closing their borders? And the tense weeks when everybody was trying to figure out what Honecker and Gorbatchev were going to do? There were a lot of people who decided not to impose the force that their governments had imposed in the past.
Yep - you could. That's what I meant when I mentioned darknets and private networks. It might work like the Internet, but it won't be anything like it, and lose a very large amount of its benefits.
The problem is that this ratio still sucks, because there are thousands of patents in play. Thousands might be invalidated, but the ones that are upheld are still idiotic and still cost the industry and the consumer billions.
It IS something to take into consideration. And it doesn't even have to be some enviro-nut who is tying himself to trees to save the endangered fern.
Here's how it works in reality: many fjords are home to commercial fishing and aquaculture. All those species are adapted to cold water and don't do well in warm water. What happens if a data center warms the water around the effluent by a couple of degrees? Cold-water fish, shrimp, clams move away and the people who depend on them have to move with them. It's probably fine if there's just one data center in the Fjord, and the warming is highly localized. maybe a few hundred square meter of surface area. But what if there's more? What if there are ten data centers in the Fjord? Or other industries in need of cooling? Suddenly the entire fjord warms, and it's not only the fish, shrimp and clams that are gone, but the livelihood of the people in the area.
Environmentalism isn't about building absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone. It's making sure that what you build allows others to still live in the area in the foreseeable future and without having to dramatically adapt their lifestyle. Sometimes, it means that a data center using fjord water is ok. Sometimes it means that a data center using fjord water is not ok.
Yeah, life is full of grey and subtilities and hard decisions that aren't black and white. Sorry to disappoint you.
Probably because they figured that a) they had existing design specs to accommodate a human pilot, b) you can transport people that way, and c), if the enemy is using fancy jamming techniques, a pilot can hop in and to the task manually.
Wrong. Products are *in* markets. There are some very rare occasions where a product *is* the market (the iPad for the first year, the 747 until the 380 came along, etc), but those are the exception, and definitely signs of monopolies.
So you say. I'd love to know what background you have that would allow you to make such a statement of supposed "fact".
I'm basing my understanding of monopoly on this... uh, sorry, this, which contains the text book definition of monopoly: "A pure monopoly is an industry in which there is only one supplier of a product for which there are no close substitutes and in which is very difficult or impossible for another firm to coexist".
The EU is far less laissez-faire in its approach to capitalism than the US, which is why it levying anti-trust sanctions against a company has little to do with whether that company has a monopoly or not. The only thing I take away from it is that the company had some leverage in its market, and the EU thought competition would be helped by smacking the company around a bit. I find it also amusing that you think that market dominance has nothing to do with market share. Just for kicks, I'd like you to explain market dominance without using the terms "market", "share", or exact synonyms thereof.
The allegation is that Google is using it's alleged dominance in Search to affect its success in other markets.
Correct, this is the allegation. It's a fairly serious allegation, for which I'd like to see some evidence. So far, none of the evidence makes sense.
I am *not* in a position to make any statements of finding on whether Google is a monopoly in any market. That is for the feds to decide...not us.
Umm. Really? No. It is for the feds to decide, and for us to double-check whether the feds' decision was right, in need of an update, or requiring a complete overhaul of the entire system. I am not part of the "government is evil" crowd, but I would never assume that the government should do its work in an unchecked manner.
Or, alternatively, how Apple could set the default media player on the iPhone to be iTunes.... The only explanation is that this investigation is the result of some very clever lobbying.
Very true. Now look a bit further, and check why Google is burying those sites. You'll find a few laws passed by government bodies who listened more to people objecting to those sites than to Google.
I'd love to see some data around this. This is the only conceivable situation I've heard so far where Google could indeed run afoul of anti-trust laws. But nobody is arguing this - instead, it's "Google has a monopoly on the Internet" and similar nonsense.
Your analysis is correct, but it relies on one assumption: Google biases its results to favor its own sites. From what I've seen so far, the only argument in this direction is coming from people who claim that when doing things like searching for stock tickers, Google defaults to showing the graph from its own site, finance.google.com. Which is fine, but it's a) not a search result (it lives in the same space that calculation results do) and b) right next to its own link, it provides links to every other major stock charting site. If it's ok for MS to ship a browser in its OS by providing a list of browsers on initial boot-up, this setup should be entirely fine as well.
Erm. How do you plan to synch to Google contacts without use of a Google API? Now, if he would have said that he can't use contacts at all, fine. But he's complaining that he can't use easily access Google contacts when he removed the various Google hooks? *facepalm*
Search is not Google's market. Advertising is. It sells eyeballs to marketing departments. That's its cash cow. Here is its business model: offer a variety of services for free to attract users, then sell those users to marketing departments. It has a service for maps, for search and for email, all of which are doing very well. It has a variety of other services that are not doing nearly so well. Furthermore, only the search service can be considered as even approaching monopoly status, as maps and email are still very well served by competitors (MS just being one to offer both).
So where does that leave the claim of abuse of monopoly? It's a farce.
1) Google needs to have a monopoly. It doesn't, as there are plenty of ad agencies selling ads on the Internet. I would like to know how much ads Google sells as a percentage of the total ads sold on the Internet, but I'd be shocked if that was over 30%. 2) Even assuming it has a monopoly on search (or God forbid, the Internet), Google needs to be able to leverage one monopoly to force users into another product. It can't do that, because switching a map and search engine provider is a matter of clicking somewhere else on the Internet. Putting a link on its corporate pages cannot possibly qualify as abusing a monopoly. Not when other corporate pages are a few keyboard strokes or mouse clicks away.
Compare that with an actual monopoly like various Windows versions, where programs were either prohibited from running on the OS through various delaying strategies (see WordPerfect) or had to compete with similarly featured programs that came pre-installed, and could not be uninstalled.
All I can say here is: congratulations, Google competitors. You've demonstrated that it is easier to buy a Congress than it is to release polished software.
I'm also shocked that there is no sight of InsightIn140bbytes. Maybe his shift only starts at 8AM PT.
You misunderstand. I wasn't saying that generic Internet access is impossible in those countries. Even porn in countries like Iran isn't something that's hard to get. What is really, really hard to get is an Internet connection that won't prompt the visits of various burly men in street clothes if you decide to talk about how much better the country would be under a new political system.
VPN proxies are nice, but are the first things to be stopped when things get hairy (and yes, I also have friends in the countries I listed - except NK).
Finally, you are also operating under the assumption that countries won't be able to cooperate on these matters. Look at the US: it's implementing the same technologies that the most repressive countries are implementing. Yes, the goals are still somewhat different, but I can guarantee you that once these legal structures are available in all countries, the Internet will not be able to route around damage, because the damage will be applied to the entire Internet.
Read Lessig's book Code is Law. It makes the interesting observation that code is law - and that consequently, law is code.
The only alternatives will be encrypted darknets, private nets and other things, but those are not the Internet anymore.
Congress. Because they have more resources and weapons at their disposal than all the geeks in the world combined.
Here, let me give you another example. Do you know why the Berlin Wall fell? No, it wasn't because Reagan gave a speech at the Brandenburger Gate. Or because he managed to fool the USSR into bankrupting itself. It was because when push came to shove, Honecker and Krenz refused to shoot their own people on a scale similar to what China, North Korea or Syria did.
Oppressive regimes only fall if they're forcibly removed from power, or if they decide that there's a threshold of violence they won't cross.
On top of the health risks that others have mentioned, there's the money aspect. Everyone can afford a healthy diet, a pack of vitamin supplements, and gear that gets you close enough to compete. Cutting-edge drugs, implants and surgery, on the other hand, would be out of reach of anybody but the most well-funded athletes.
Compare it to F1 or, even better, NASCAR: there are a ton of rules in play that make sure that it's not just the richest team that wins, even if some of the modifications are really not that different. A big example is aerodynamics in F1: a huge expense that can lead to significant improvements, even if the overall shape of the car and its safety isn't that different from that of a much cheaper car.
In short, it's designed to keep the sport from degenerating into who has the most money, not who is the most gifted and dedicated athlete.
And if he's elected, you'd see someone in the office who will be even more communist than Obama (from the neocon perspective) and more neocon than Bush Jr (from the commu..., I mean whatever is left from the left perspective). Bachmann and Co are too dumb to do much damage, but Ron Paul could seriously fuck things up.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's the fact that Apple has a damn-near monopoly on mobile purchases, which are done in their walled garden. This is a big area of user activity, and will become a much bigger area of economic activity. Apple, through iTunes, matters to the Internet. In a bad way, unfortunately.
The National Review? Lulz. The National Revue does not have a fucking problem what the issues are with California (hint - looters aren't it). Furthermore, a strong US president won't be able to avoid WW 3. The best he could do is to make sure the good guys win WW 3.
As for seeing an Abraham Lincoln, I can guarantee you that the Republicans of today would crucify him for not being pro-life, pro-Christian and anti-tax enough. You can't save anyone who doesn't want to be saved. And today's Republicans don't want to be saved (Jesus is already doing that), they want to destroy the other side.
Here's the thing: at this point, I don't really care anymore what Republicans say. They pretty much lost me for the foreseeable future with their stance on the tax holiday.
Note: I'm pretty fiscally conservative. In my own finances, I only spend money I have, plan for the future with a significant rainy day fund, and consider whether the purchase I'm about to make is a need vs a want, and what its ROI is. I expect my government to work with the same principles. In theory, this should align nicely with the republican platform of small budgets and low taxes.
But this latest position of the republicans is just laughable. Tax cuts for the rich are a great way to restart the economy, but tax cuts for middle class families is just a failed stimulus package? Cutting revenue when instituting tax cuts for the rich is fine, but tax cuts for the middle class need to be balanced by more taxes on the middle-class elsewhere? The entire republican party seems to be intent on opposing Obama so blindly that they're willing to sacrifice their own talking points. Not only that, but they're even failing their own platform by their mindless opposition. They're digging their own grave, and it's gonna be hard climb out.
As for your other points...
The bias of our media is pathetic.
The media have no bias. They are corporations, interested only in their own profit. As a result, the only bias you see is the bias that helps them sell their media.
The stupidity of our population is tragic.
Of course, this comes with the unspoken idea "If people would only listen to me..." I might be part of the tragic population, but at least I know that the problem we're facing is difficult with no easy solution. It's not stupidity that's the problem, it's that there is a very large set of competing priorities battling for limited resources in a system prone to adversarialism, designed for slowness and that is being gamed by individuals and groups with lots of money. the solution to our problem is neither political nor bureaucratic. It will have to be personal, which is much more difficult. The first two can be solved by a top-down approach. The third can only solved botttom-up.
Next year we elect the last President of the United States.
We face serious problems in the next five years, and the media has successfully kept anyone remotely competent out of the race.
Bullshit. This is the lament of the deluded and the pussies. The rabid conservative wing has successfully kept anyone competent out of the GOP primary. If the hard-core conservatives want to win the Presidency, they need to stop annoying the majority of Americans and piss off a rather significant minority.
The beauty of email is that it is asynchronous. I can send an email, and people will get to it when they can. It's worldwide, near instant, and pretty much perfect delivery. I don't have to worry about them sitting at their desk right this moment, or be working right this moment. Write detailed email, send, and wait for reply. If it's urgent, follow up with a phone call, but otherwise, it's fire and forget.
If Volkswagen is turning off the email servers, I can't even do that. I actually have to wait to send the email until they are working, and that might mean that I have to work while I'm supposed to be off. After all, my working hours might not coincide with theirs.
I can't see this last very long. Besides, the solution is obvious and much less technically complex: have people not answer their email after working hours. Yes, it takes practice, but I've learned to ignore my crackberry after hours. If it's urgent, people will call.
5-day forecasts are quite accurate. Check for probabilities, and if they're low, check back in a few days. I've been rarely surprised by weather in the last few years - as in, was expecting a warm, sunny day and got instead cold rain all day.
Oh, absolutely. But somehow, I don't expect that logical considerations are behind any opposition to whatever Obama wants to do these days. I mean, republican leaders managed to change their stance on lowering taxes from "it's good for the economy" when they argued for cuts to investment taxes and taxes on the rich to " it's an ineffective stimulus measure" when the democrats and Obama wanted to extend the current tax holiday.
No, they rejected it because the 2 month extension didn't contain the pet project of the Republicans, the Keystone pipeline. Keep up with the politics, if you want to rake people over the coals for inaccuracies in it.
I love it when people cite studies, but fail to read them. It's fun.
Let's stop propagating the "government is omnipotent" meme.
When people stop propagating the "government is incompetent" meme.
Yes, I was there too. Do you remember the shock on everyone's faces when Hungary and Czechoslovakia stopped closing their borders? And the tense weeks when everybody was trying to figure out what Honecker and Gorbatchev were going to do? There were a lot of people who decided not to impose the force that their governments had imposed in the past.
Yep - you could. That's what I meant when I mentioned darknets and private networks. It might work like the Internet, but it won't be anything like it, and lose a very large amount of its benefits.
The problem is that this ratio still sucks, because there are thousands of patents in play. Thousands might be invalidated, but the ones that are upheld are still idiotic and still cost the industry and the consumer billions.
It IS something to take into consideration. And it doesn't even have to be some enviro-nut who is tying himself to trees to save the endangered fern.
Here's how it works in reality: many fjords are home to commercial fishing and aquaculture. All those species are adapted to cold water and don't do well in warm water. What happens if a data center warms the water around the effluent by a couple of degrees? Cold-water fish, shrimp, clams move away and the people who depend on them have to move with them. It's probably fine if there's just one data center in the Fjord, and the warming is highly localized. maybe a few hundred square meter of surface area. But what if there's more? What if there are ten data centers in the Fjord? Or other industries in need of cooling? Suddenly the entire fjord warms, and it's not only the fish, shrimp and clams that are gone, but the livelihood of the people in the area.
Environmentalism isn't about building absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone. It's making sure that what you build allows others to still live in the area in the foreseeable future and without having to dramatically adapt their lifestyle. Sometimes, it means that a data center using fjord water is ok. Sometimes it means that a data center using fjord water is not ok.
Yeah, life is full of grey and subtilities and hard decisions that aren't black and white. Sorry to disappoint you.
Probably because they figured that a) they had existing design specs to accommodate a human pilot, b) you can transport people that way, and c), if the enemy is using fancy jamming techniques, a pilot can hop in and to the task manually.
Watch A Scanner Darkly. Despite Keanu Reeves, it's actually a pretty good adaptation.
Products *are* markets.
Wrong. Products are *in* markets. There are some very rare occasions where a product *is* the market (the iPad for the first year, the 747 until the 380 came along, etc), but those are the exception, and definitely signs of monopolies.
So you say. I'd love to know what background you have that would allow you to make such a statement of supposed "fact".
I'm basing my understanding of monopoly on this... uh, sorry, this, which contains the text book definition of monopoly: "A pure monopoly is an industry in which there is only one supplier of a product for which there are no close substitutes and in which is very difficult or impossible for another firm to coexist".
The EU is far less laissez-faire in its approach to capitalism than the US, which is why it levying anti-trust sanctions against a company has little to do with whether that company has a monopoly or not. The only thing I take away from it is that the company had some leverage in its market, and the EU thought competition would be helped by smacking the company around a bit. I find it also amusing that you think that market dominance has nothing to do with market share. Just for kicks, I'd like you to explain market dominance without using the terms "market", "share", or exact synonyms thereof.
The allegation is that Google is using it's alleged dominance in Search to affect its success in other markets.
Correct, this is the allegation. It's a fairly serious allegation, for which I'd like to see some evidence. So far, none of the evidence makes sense.
I am *not* in a position to make any statements of finding on whether Google is a monopoly in any market. That is for the feds to decide...not us.
Umm. Really? No. It is for the feds to decide, and for us to double-check whether the feds' decision was right, in need of an update, or requiring a complete overhaul of the entire system. I am not part of the "government is evil" crowd, but I would never assume that the government should do its work in an unchecked manner.
Or, alternatively, how Apple could set the default media player on the iPhone to be iTunes.... The only explanation is that this investigation is the result of some very clever lobbying.
Very true. Now look a bit further, and check why Google is burying those sites. You'll find a few laws passed by government bodies who listened more to people objecting to those sites than to Google.
I'd love to see some data around this. This is the only conceivable situation I've heard so far where Google could indeed run afoul of anti-trust laws. But nobody is arguing this - instead, it's "Google has a monopoly on the Internet" and similar nonsense.
Your analysis is correct, but it relies on one assumption: Google biases its results to favor its own sites. From what I've seen so far, the only argument in this direction is coming from people who claim that when doing things like searching for stock tickers, Google defaults to showing the graph from its own site, finance.google.com. Which is fine, but it's a) not a search result (it lives in the same space that calculation results do) and b) right next to its own link, it provides links to every other major stock charting site. If it's ok for MS to ship a browser in its OS by providing a list of browsers on initial boot-up, this setup should be entirely fine as well.
Erm. How do you plan to synch to Google contacts without use of a Google API? Now, if he would have said that he can't use contacts at all, fine. But he's complaining that he can't use easily access Google contacts when he removed the various Google hooks? *facepalm*
I think you are confusing a few things here.
Search is not Google's market. Advertising is. It sells eyeballs to marketing departments. That's its cash cow. Here is its business model: offer a variety of services for free to attract users, then sell those users to marketing departments. It has a service for maps, for search and for email, all of which are doing very well. It has a variety of other services that are not doing nearly so well. Furthermore, only the search service can be considered as even approaching monopoly status, as maps and email are still very well served by competitors (MS just being one to offer both).
So where does that leave the claim of abuse of monopoly? It's a farce.
1) Google needs to have a monopoly. It doesn't, as there are plenty of ad agencies selling ads on the Internet. I would like to know how much ads Google sells as a percentage of the total ads sold on the Internet, but I'd be shocked if that was over 30%.
2) Even assuming it has a monopoly on search (or God forbid, the Internet), Google needs to be able to leverage one monopoly to force users into another product. It can't do that, because switching a map and search engine provider is a matter of clicking somewhere else on the Internet. Putting a link on its corporate pages cannot possibly qualify as abusing a monopoly. Not when other corporate pages are a few keyboard strokes or mouse clicks away.
Compare that with an actual monopoly like various Windows versions, where programs were either prohibited from running on the OS through various delaying strategies (see WordPerfect) or had to compete with similarly featured programs that came pre-installed, and could not be uninstalled.
All I can say here is: congratulations, Google competitors. You've demonstrated that it is easier to buy a Congress than it is to release polished software.
I'm also shocked that there is no sight of InsightIn140bbytes. Maybe his shift only starts at 8AM PT.
You misunderstand. I wasn't saying that generic Internet access is impossible in those countries. Even porn in countries like Iran isn't something that's hard to get. What is really, really hard to get is an Internet connection that won't prompt the visits of various burly men in street clothes if you decide to talk about how much better the country would be under a new political system.
VPN proxies are nice, but are the first things to be stopped when things get hairy (and yes, I also have friends in the countries I listed - except NK).
Finally, you are also operating under the assumption that countries won't be able to cooperate on these matters. Look at the US: it's implementing the same technologies that the most repressive countries are implementing. Yes, the goals are still somewhat different, but I can guarantee you that once these legal structures are available in all countries, the Internet will not be able to route around damage, because the damage will be applied to the entire Internet.
Read Lessig's book Code is Law. It makes the interesting observation that code is law - and that consequently, law is code.
The only alternatives will be encrypted darknets, private nets and other things, but those are not the Internet anymore.
Congress. Because they have more resources and weapons at their disposal than all the geeks in the world combined.
Here, let me give you another example. Do you know why the Berlin Wall fell? No, it wasn't because Reagan gave a speech at the Brandenburger Gate. Or because he managed to fool the USSR into bankrupting itself. It was because when push came to shove, Honecker and Krenz refused to shoot their own people on a scale similar to what China, North Korea or Syria did.
Oppressive regimes only fall if they're forcibly removed from power, or if they decide that there's a threshold of violence they won't cross.
On top of the health risks that others have mentioned, there's the money aspect. Everyone can afford a healthy diet, a pack of vitamin supplements, and gear that gets you close enough to compete. Cutting-edge drugs, implants and surgery, on the other hand, would be out of reach of anybody but the most well-funded athletes.
Compare it to F1 or, even better, NASCAR: there are a ton of rules in play that make sure that it's not just the richest team that wins, even if some of the modifications are really not that different. A big example is aerodynamics in F1: a huge expense that can lead to significant improvements, even if the overall shape of the car and its safety isn't that different from that of a much cheaper car.
In short, it's designed to keep the sport from degenerating into who has the most money, not who is the most gifted and dedicated athlete.
And if he's elected, you'd see someone in the office who will be even more communist than Obama (from the neocon perspective) and more neocon than Bush Jr (from the commu..., I mean whatever is left from the left perspective). Bachmann and Co are too dumb to do much damage, but Ron Paul could seriously fuck things up.