Further research shows that these hateful kooks are mainstream there, while the holocaust deniers are laughed at or shunned here. Clearly, this is a place that has a problem with rabid ethnic hatred (as the Palestinian "foreign policy" shows).
"You attributed denial of the holocaust to Palestinians which is a lie."
Do you wish me to cite numerous sources on this? Holocaust denial "scholarship" grows quite easily in places that commonly teach antisemitism. I can if you want. What about the fact that, the Palestinians (by voting for Hamas) recently affirmed that they wanted a new Holocaust by exterminating the Israelis?
"So, apparently you believe socialism and communism == totalitarianism and plutocracies. Congratulations, you're a (insert mindless insult here)
As I mentioned in the earlier one, I did not even say a thing about plutocracy, which is a "a political system governed by the wealthy people". Well, as just about all politicians and rulers are are rich, I guess plutocracy is the rule over the world, for better or worse.
Comunism/socialism produces the worst (i.e. relatively the most rich) plutocrats around, however. The personal wealth and power of Kim Jong Il and Castro, relative to their legions of slaves, is to be considered.
I never mentioned plutocracies. However, I have spent much time researching communism and socialism (and from this, I know that all communist states are totalitarian even if not all totalitarian states are communist. And that socialism goes hand in hand with totalitarianism). Do you have anything to counter the facts I have presented? Other than lame insults? Or are you a "typically uneducated brainwashed" Slashdot troll? Prove me wrong.
So, basically, you have a large-scale military invasion all over Baghdad. Such is necessary to "implant" and secure the benefits distribution centers and the stores where checks are cashed. You can be certain that Saddam and his Republican Guard would have fought this "violation of Iraqi sovereignty" with any means necessary. The covert cover would have been blown quickly due to the many secret police.
Someone else suggested just dropping food (and other good stuff) on the place. Wouldn't that work better?
I am no absolutist, by the way. I just recognize that government is too pervasive. Let's say we knocked taxation back to no more than 10% for anyone; you'd still have a large government with many billions of dollars.
However, we could do without some of the meddling in the affairs of consenting adults (if an adult wants to work at $3.00 an hour for 70 hours a week, why the hell is it anyone's business other than the worker and the person paying him??? It's not!) while keeping protections from child labor (the children are not consenting adults). Certainly we can do without government giving hundreds of millions to private sports teams for stadiums. Or the terrible regulations that made it so modern toilets don't flush right at all. Where do you draw the line?
Yes, correct, democracy is best used to control government, not to control the people. Government controlling people is fascism, even if the government cloaks itself in the justification that it was chosen by a democratic process. The less fascism, the better.
"How we choose to exploit the poor slobs we employ is off limits"
Free trade is not exploitation.
" Who is placing blind trust in rulers? (aside from conservative Bush supporters)."
Who is? Anyone who wants the government to have more power. The Bush supporters do this, as do the Nader and Kerry supporters. Each of them supported, to varying degrees, the rulers having more power and the people having less power. The two are inversely proportional. What the rulers gain the people lose.
" there are good reasons for limitations on Disney, there are good reasons for limitations on FoxNewscorp or CNN."
What sort of limitations? The First Amendment sort of frowns on interfering with the freedom of the press.
"By the way. ..if you don't like a government policy. ..use democratic methods to change it. ..don't try to destroy the organs of democracy altogather! That's. ..well . ..antidemocratic!"
But if you don't like it and can't get it changed, you have to suffer for it if it is something the government controls. Now, if the government happened to butt out and leave the matters for the people to decide, then you gain power. Gay marriage AND whether or not you like to drive a Corvair. Good examples of things the government should not butt into and make decisions for everyone on.
"The government took us to the moon"
Government also brought is the Cultural Revolution. If I was faced with losing the moon landing along with the Cultural Revolution (by limiting the power of ruling elites), I'd do it.
It certainly is. Negativity and positivity are merely two qualities of an assertion, just like whether or not the wording of an assertion has E's in it or R's. More to the specific of the topic, it is easy to prove the "negative" of nuclear bomb building if inspectors are allowed into the nuclear facilities. Or they could prove the positive. Either way.
As for me, I'm a little skeptical that Iran's nuclear bomb factory is for "peaceful" purposes. I believe they think that their President's announced intention of genocide against the nation of Israel is a "peaceful" act too. Does this justify a hamfisted approach by Bush? Can't make that connection.
"This sounds odd to me, do you have any references to back up your claim? Thanks"
Don't even bother to ask for references from him. His sig quotes "infowars.com". You know, the place that has invisible elephants blowing up buildings in New York and martians at Ruby Ridge....and don't forget CHEMTRAILS!!!! Suffice it to say that I have checked also, and there is no credence to the idea that you need nuclear bombs to create nuke-proof hardened bunkers.
"I know they're Microsoft and they're stupid/evil but you have to see at least some sort of benefit from these (all be they poorly implemented) security features."
You know, you can either train the guy cowering in the room in the middle of the house on how to use a blunderbuss to deal with intruders..... Or you can address the fact that there are no actual windows or doors in the empty door/windowframes of the house, and maybe consider the removing the big "FREE FURNITURE - COME ON IN" sign that is on the lawn.
Maybe when you do the latter, it might not be so important that the guy keep his itchy trigger finger on the blunderbuss.
You are right about having three buttons. I wish Firefox came instead configured by default "no popups at ALL". Worthless Firefox-generated popups like the password one are just as annoying as the X-10 camera ones. The way is is now, with an obscure setting buried in a menu, does not cut it.
"How about having system prompts popping up in tha status bar instead of popup. And put the contents of the Bookmarks on the menu at the top."
In keeping with my request to allow for intuitive suppression of the nasty ""do you want to remember password for this site?" popups, they should put an option on the system prompts that you can click to make them go to the status bar from then on: "Do you want future such popups on the status bar instead?"
I love how Firefox nicely diminishes popups that come from intentional design of web programmers, but the way Firefox itself throws annoying hard-to-get rid of popups needs some work.
All I want is a simple option on the "Do you want to remember passwords for this site?" popups that says "no, and never ask EVER for ANY site". The only way to get rid of these worthless annoyances is some obscure setting buried in a menu. While it would be even better not to ever have been asked this in the first place, an option to get rid of all of these on the popup should not be too much to ask for. Other than that, no complaints. Nice clean UI, especially compared to IE7 !!!
"Communism is an economic system, not a political system. I believe the word you are looking for is "totalitarianism"."
Communism is equally and completely both: economic and political. Communist economics requires totalitarian government. Yes, it is "totalitarian", which raises the question of "what is the difference between communism and other forms of totalitarianism"? Actually, you'd be hard pressed to find any substantive difference between communism and other forms of totalitarianism. Other than superficial differences (such as communist dictators justifying themselves through the pseudo-science of Marxism, and non-communists justifying themselves through the pseudo-science of theology or other means).
"That's a lie, Saddam fully complied with the UN inspections"
I read the Hans Blix reports. Saddam Hussein never ever did allow the complete, unfettered access required in the cease-fire at the end of the first Gulf War. The "negotiations" over allowing inspections in the palaces and other sites made major news a while ago (a famous instance of Saddam Hussein not complying at all, let alone "fully complying". I'm surprised you didn't hear of it at the time.
Glad that you mentioned Hans Blix. His own reports detailed how Hussein had in the past not complied with UN inspections, and was still not complying. He did, however, say that compliance was improving.
Let us look at Blix's own words on this in his report from February 2003 (from un.org): "If Iraq had provided the necessary cooperation in 1991, the phase of disarmament - under resolution 687 (1991) - could have been short and a decade of sanctions could have been avoided. Today, three months after the adoption of resolution 1441 (2002), the period of disarmament through inspection could still be short, if "immediate, active and unconditional cooperation" with UNMOVIC and the IAEA were to be forthcoming."
The first "Bold" words show how Iraq did not comply with inspections when the process started. The second "bold" words show how CURRENT (Feb 2003) compliance with UN inspections was a future possibility, an "if". He's quite clear that in February of 2003, the compliance had not yet happened. Who cares what Bush said. Look at the Blix reports.
Does this justify Bush's response? No. It merely points out that the statement "Saddam fully complied with the UN inspections" was false. Blix himself disagreed. He was looking forward to future cooperation and compliance that had not happened.
"Sorry, but you missed the point. ..The cash would be good old US legal tender. ..The point to the operation would be, well, bluntly, mass bribery. You'd be surprised (or perhaps not) how effective that can be."
I did consider the option but chose not to explore it in my respose. Would this be freshly-minted money? In this case, Saddam would find a way to quickly secure the bales and use them to buy more palaces, or perhaps try to cook up some scheme to miss with the US economy.
So, tell me, how does outright giving Saddam Hussein US dollars, no strings attached, help a thing?
That's a pretty good example, thank you very much. Those that like it stay with it. Those that don't go to Linux and Apple.
"The only tool available to the public is the boycott."
Which is refusing to deal with a company because you don't like it, right? That's what I was referring to. Very powerful, used all the time in our decisions, even when it is not called an "organized boycott". You simply don't have this option with the government (the cops will kill you if you try).
"Far better to just legislate that the supplier can supply, but just not by doing X, Y and Z."
I think I disagree with that on general principles (why have the legislature force its decision on all), but would like some specific examples? I agree with regulation, but only as a last resort. Leave as many decisions to the people as possible.
"Sorry, but your perspective of the market is viewed through..."
I'm looking at it through how it works now, not through some utopian vision.
"you capitalist idealists really need to wake up and smell the incinerated liberties"
That is true: we need to be concerned every time the government gets involved in personal economic decisions. That truly burns liberty.
"Giving corporations free reign is NOT the answer."
Who said anything about giving them free reign? Not me.
"Your diatribe against the government is quite telling. You don't believe in democracy."
I believe strongly in democracy as a way to control government. I do not believe in democracy as a way to control people's private lives. Opposition to sbusive power by government is not opposition to democracy.
"mechanisms like the 'invisible hand' of the market can meet the needs of the people.
It is less an "invisible hand" than it is allowing the people themselves to make informed decisions about their lives. Rather than have the fascist jackboot of government kick the "one size fits few" decree into them. There are some matters that should be left to the people, and not the government. Giving government too much has resulted in huamnity's lowest achievements. The only "mysticism" here is placing blind trust in rulers.
"The people can not possibly deliberate their needs in open and democratic debate?"
"One nuke could mean an american aircraft carrier down, or 1000s of troops wiped out, in case of an attack. Thats enough deterrent to prevent an invasion."
That's one nuke that hits its target. Even with the best technology the US has, a surprisingly low percent of ballistic weapons actually hit their targets. Now consider North Korea's technology and their even worse grasp of accuracy. Yes, there's a danger from their "one nuke", but them having it does not correspond to a certainly that they can both deliver AND exploded it anywhere, anytime they want to.
"These alerts and popups may be the thing needed to prevent my computer ignorant siblings from obediantly installing viruses on my parent's computer."
You mean the ignorant siblings who always click "OK" every time they see a popup, so when you go home you find a desktop filled with bonzi buddies and casino shortcuts, 3 toolbars on the browser, and full-screen ads that pop-up at any time at random?
"I know they're Microsoft and they're stupid/evil but you have to see at least some sort of benefit from these (all be they poorly implemented) security features."
Real security involves preventing the security crisis in the FIRST place, rather than bombarding the user with a blizzard of poorly-worded popups.
"You must restart your computer. Would you like to do it now, or would you like me to display this same dialog 30 seconds from now, while you're doing something else like typing a slashdot comm"
Did that end with "NO CARRIER"? hahaha. Often accompanied by a badly-designed message window that has two or three options, NONE of which you want (one reason being is that they are poorly described). So you decide to ignore the popup and minimize it. Oh look, it breaks windows-design standards by not having "minimize" enabled! So the only choice left is to bring up "Task Manager" and kill the popup that way (or drag it to a corner of the screen where it sits with other unstoppable inscrutable popup windows until you reboot). Why is this stuff in Microsoft's OS when if you programmed this way in a freshman class you'd get failed?
"Additionally, youtube has annoying ads, while google video has no ads at all"
I've never noticed that Youtube even HAS ads in the first place. Let me go check right now: no ads on the main page...oh wait, there's some on the right side in an area of the screen I've never looked at before when using Youtube. Yes, there are ads there, but I had to specifically hunt to find that it even had then. That's pretty low on my annoyance meter.
"designed to bar access to the Windows kernel. Microsoft said it would create an API to let third-party vendors access the kernel and to disable the Windows Security Center so that users would not be prompted by multiple alerts about operating system security"
Perhaps all the alert popups that Windows is more and more cluttered with are a problem? As an XP user, I'd be sorely tempted to use a simple option if available that suppressed ALL of these popups. They are just as annoying in an OS as they are in a browser, especially that one about hard disk free space being too small.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the actual situation:
Description of "Holocaust denial" antisemitism in the middle east including among the Palestinians.
Further research shows that these hateful kooks are mainstream there, while the holocaust deniers are laughed at or shunned here. Clearly, this is a place that has a problem with rabid ethnic hatred (as the Palestinian "foreign policy" shows).
"You attributed denial of the holocaust to Palestinians which is a lie."
Do you wish me to cite numerous sources on this? Holocaust denial "scholarship" grows quite easily in places that commonly teach antisemitism. I can if you want. What about the fact that, the Palestinians (by voting for Hamas) recently affirmed that they wanted a new Holocaust by exterminating the Israelis?
Have a nice life. Hope you learn to overcome your rabid hatred of Jews.
"So, apparently you believe socialism and communism == totalitarianism and plutocracies. Congratulations, you're a (insert mindless insult here)
As I mentioned in the earlier one, I did not even say a thing about plutocracy, which is a "a political system governed by the wealthy people". Well, as just about all politicians and rulers are are rich, I guess plutocracy is the rule over the world, for better or worse.
Comunism/socialism produces the worst (i.e. relatively the most rich) plutocrats around, however. The personal wealth and power of Kim Jong Il and Castro, relative to their legions of slaves, is to be considered.
I never mentioned plutocracies. However, I have spent much time researching communism and socialism (and from this, I know that all communist states are totalitarian even if not all totalitarian states are communist. And that socialism goes hand in hand with totalitarianism). Do you have anything to counter the facts I have presented? Other than lame insults? Or are you a "typically uneducated brainwashed" Slashdot troll? Prove me wrong.
So, basically, you have a large-scale military invasion all over Baghdad. Such is necessary to "implant" and secure the benefits distribution centers and the stores where checks are cashed. You can be certain that Saddam and his Republican Guard would have fought this "violation of Iraqi sovereignty" with any means necessary. The covert cover would have been blown quickly due to the many secret police.
Someone else suggested just dropping food (and other good stuff) on the place. Wouldn't that work better?
I am no absolutist, by the way. I just recognize that government is too pervasive. Let's say we knocked taxation back to no more than 10% for anyone; you'd still have a large government with many billions of dollars.
However, we could do without some of the meddling in the affairs of consenting adults (if an adult wants to work at $3.00 an hour for 70 hours a week, why the hell is it anyone's business other than the worker and the person paying him??? It's not!) while keeping protections from child labor (the children are not consenting adults). Certainly we can do without government giving hundreds of millions to private sports teams for stadiums. Or the terrible regulations that made it so modern toilets don't flush right at all. Where do you draw the line?
Yes, correct, democracy is best used to control government, not to control the people. Government controlling people is fascism, even if the government cloaks itself in the justification that it was chosen by a democratic process. The less fascism, the better.
.if you don't like a government policy. . .use democratic methods to change it. . .don't try to destroy the organs of democracy altogather! That's. . .well . . .antidemocratic!"
"How we choose to exploit the poor slobs we employ is off limits"
Free trade is not exploitation.
" Who is placing blind trust in rulers? (aside from conservative Bush supporters)."
Who is? Anyone who wants the government to have more power. The Bush supporters do this, as do the Nader and Kerry supporters. Each of them supported, to varying degrees, the rulers having more power and the people having less power. The two are inversely proportional. What the rulers gain the people lose.
" there are good reasons for limitations on Disney, there are good reasons for limitations on FoxNewscorp or CNN."
What sort of limitations? The First Amendment sort of frowns on interfering with the freedom of the press.
"By the way. .
But if you don't like it and can't get it changed, you have to suffer for it if it is something the government controls. Now, if the government happened to butt out and leave the matters for the people to decide, then you gain power. Gay marriage AND whether or not you like to drive a Corvair. Good examples of things the government should not butt into and make decisions for everyone on.
"The government took us to the moon"
Government also brought is the Cultural Revolution. If I was faced with losing the moon landing along with the Cultural Revolution (by limiting the power of ruling elites), I'd do it.
I can't see why anyone would even want this "feature".
"It is not possible to prove a negative"
It certainly is. Negativity and positivity are merely two qualities of an assertion, just like whether or not the wording of an assertion has E's in it or R's. More to the specific of the topic, it is easy to prove the "negative" of nuclear bomb building if inspectors are allowed into the nuclear facilities. Or they could prove the positive. Either way.
As for me, I'm a little skeptical that Iran's nuclear bomb factory is for "peaceful" purposes. I believe they think that their President's announced intention of genocide against the nation of Israel is a "peaceful" act too. Does this justify a hamfisted approach by Bush? Can't make that connection.
"This sounds odd to me, do you have any references to back up your claim? Thanks"
Don't even bother to ask for references from him. His sig quotes "infowars.com". You know, the place that has invisible elephants blowing up buildings in New York and martians at Ruby Ridge....and don't forget CHEMTRAILS!!!! Suffice it to say that I have checked also, and there is no credence to the idea that you need nuclear bombs to create nuke-proof hardened bunkers.
"I know they're Microsoft and they're stupid/evil but you have to see at least some sort of benefit from these (all be they poorly implemented) security features."
You know, you can either train the guy cowering in the room in the middle of the house on how to use a blunderbuss to deal with intruders..... Or you can address the fact that there are no actual windows or doors in the empty door/windowframes of the house, and maybe consider the removing the big "FREE FURNITURE - COME ON IN" sign that is on the lawn.
Maybe when you do the latter, it might not be so important that the guy keep his itchy trigger finger on the blunderbuss.
You are right about having three buttons. I wish Firefox came instead configured by default "no popups at ALL". Worthless Firefox-generated popups like the password one are just as annoying as the X-10 camera ones. The way is is now, with an obscure setting buried in a menu, does not cut it.
"How about having system prompts popping up in tha status bar instead of popup. And put the contents of the Bookmarks on the menu at the top."
In keeping with my request to allow for intuitive suppression of the nasty ""do you want to remember password for this site?" popups, they should put an option on the system prompts that you can click to make them go to the status bar from then on: "Do you want future such popups on the status bar instead?"
I love how Firefox nicely diminishes popups that come from intentional design of web programmers, but the way Firefox itself throws annoying hard-to-get rid of popups needs some work.
All I want is a simple option on the "Do you want to remember passwords for this site?" popups that says "no, and never ask EVER for ANY site". The only way to get rid of these worthless annoyances is some obscure setting buried in a menu. While it would be even better not to ever have been asked this in the first place, an option to get rid of all of these on the popup should not be too much to ask for. Other than that, no complaints. Nice clean UI, especially compared to IE7 !!!
"Communism is an economic system, not a political system. I believe the word you are looking for is "totalitarianism"."
Communism is equally and completely both: economic and political. Communist economics requires totalitarian government. Yes, it is "totalitarian", which raises the question of "what is the difference between communism and other forms of totalitarianism"? Actually, you'd be hard pressed to find any substantive difference between communism and other forms of totalitarianism. Other than superficial differences (such as communist dictators justifying themselves through the pseudo-science of Marxism, and non-communists justifying themselves through the pseudo-science of theology or other means).
"That's a lie, Saddam fully complied with the UN inspections"
I read the Hans Blix reports. Saddam Hussein never ever did allow the complete, unfettered access required in the cease-fire at the end of the first Gulf War. The "negotiations" over allowing inspections in the palaces and other sites made major news a while ago (a famous instance of Saddam Hussein not complying at all, let alone "fully complying". I'm surprised you didn't hear of it at the time.
Glad that you mentioned Hans Blix. His own reports detailed how Hussein had in the past not complied with UN inspections, and was still not complying. He did, however, say that compliance was improving.
Let us look at Blix's own words on this in his report from February 2003 (from un.org): "If Iraq had provided the necessary cooperation in 1991, the phase of disarmament - under resolution 687 (1991) - could have been short and a decade of sanctions could have been avoided. Today, three months after the adoption of resolution 1441 (2002), the period of disarmament through inspection could still be short, if "immediate, active and unconditional cooperation" with UNMOVIC and the IAEA were to be forthcoming."
The first "Bold" words show how Iraq did not comply with inspections when the process started. The second "bold" words show how CURRENT (Feb 2003) compliance with UN inspections was a future possibility, an "if". He's quite clear that in February of 2003, the compliance had not yet happened. Who cares what Bush said. Look at the Blix reports.
Does this justify Bush's response? No. It merely points out that the statement "Saddam fully complied with the UN inspections" was false. Blix himself disagreed. He was looking forward to future cooperation and compliance that had not happened.
"Sorry, but you missed the point. . .The cash would be good old US legal tender. . .The point to the operation would be, well, bluntly, mass bribery. You'd be surprised (or perhaps not) how effective that can be."
I did consider the option but chose not to explore it in my respose. Would this be freshly-minted money? In this case, Saddam would find a way to quickly secure the bales and use them to buy more palaces, or perhaps try to cook up some scheme to miss with the US economy.
So, tell me, how does outright giving Saddam Hussein US dollars, no strings attached, help a thing?
"Hmmm. . .like Microsoft, right? "
That's a pretty good example, thank you very much. Those that like it stay with it. Those that don't go to Linux and Apple.
"The only tool available to the public is the boycott."
Which is refusing to deal with a company because you don't like it, right? That's what I was referring to. Very powerful, used all the time in our decisions, even when it is not called an "organized boycott". You simply don't have this option with the government (the cops will kill you if you try).
"Far better to just legislate that the supplier can supply, but just not by doing X, Y and Z."
I think I disagree with that on general principles (why have the legislature force its decision on all), but would like some specific examples? I agree with regulation, but only as a last resort. Leave as many decisions to the people as possible.
"Sorry, but your perspective of the market is viewed through..."
I'm looking at it through how it works now, not through some utopian vision.
"you capitalist idealists really need to wake up and smell the incinerated liberties"
That is true: we need to be concerned every time the government gets involved in personal economic decisions. That truly burns liberty.
"Giving corporations free reign is NOT the answer."
Who said anything about giving them free reign? Not me.
"Your diatribe against the government is quite telling. You don't believe in democracy."
I believe strongly in democracy as a way to control government. I do not believe in democracy as a way to control people's private lives. Opposition to sbusive power by government is not opposition to democracy.
"mechanisms like the 'invisible hand' of the market can meet the needs of the people.
It is less an "invisible hand" than it is allowing the people themselves to make informed decisions about their lives. Rather than have the fascist jackboot of government kick the "one size fits few" decree into them. There are some matters that should be left to the people, and not the government. Giving government too much has resulted in huamnity's lowest achievements. The only "mysticism" here is placing blind trust in rulers.
"The people can not possibly deliberate their needs in open and democratic debate?"
What does this mean? Poorly worded.
"One nuke could mean an american aircraft carrier down, or 1000s of troops wiped out, in case of an attack. Thats enough deterrent to prevent an invasion."
That's one nuke that hits its target. Even with the best technology the US has, a surprisingly low percent of ballistic weapons actually hit their targets. Now consider North Korea's technology and their even worse grasp of accuracy. Yes, there's a danger from their "one nuke", but them having it does not correspond to a certainly that they can both deliver AND exploded it anywhere, anytime they want to.
"These alerts and popups may be the thing needed to prevent my computer ignorant siblings from obediantly installing viruses on my parent's computer."
You mean the ignorant siblings who always click "OK" every time they see a popup, so when you go home you find a desktop filled with bonzi buddies and casino shortcuts, 3 toolbars on the browser, and full-screen ads that pop-up at any time at random?
"I know they're Microsoft and they're stupid/evil but you have to see at least some sort of benefit from these (all be they poorly implemented) security features."
Real security involves preventing the security crisis in the FIRST place, rather than bombarding the user with a blizzard of poorly-worded popups.
"You must restart your computer. Would you like to do it now, or would you like me to display this same dialog 30 seconds from now, while you're doing something else like typing a slashdot comm"
Did that end with "NO CARRIER"? hahaha. Often accompanied by a badly-designed message window that has two or three options, NONE of which you want (one reason being is that they are poorly described). So you decide to ignore the popup and minimize it. Oh look, it breaks windows-design standards by not having "minimize" enabled! So the only choice left is to bring up "Task Manager" and kill the popup that way (or drag it to a corner of the screen where it sits with other unstoppable inscrutable popup windows until you reboot). Why is this stuff in Microsoft's OS when if you programmed this way in a freshman class you'd get failed?
"Additionally, youtube has annoying ads, while google video has no ads at all"
I've never noticed that Youtube even HAS ads in the first place. Let me go check right now: no ads on the main page...oh wait, there's some on the right side in an area of the screen I've never looked at before when using Youtube. Yes, there are ads there, but I had to specifically hunt to find that it even had then. That's pretty low on my annoyance meter.
"designed to bar access to the Windows kernel. Microsoft said it would create an API to let third-party vendors access the kernel and to disable the Windows Security Center so that users would not be prompted by multiple alerts about operating system security"
Perhaps all the alert popups that Windows is more and more cluttered with are a problem? As an XP user, I'd be sorely tempted to use a simple option if available that suppressed ALL of these popups. They are just as annoying in an OS as they are in a browser, especially that one about hard disk free space being too small.
"But there are plenty of other murderous dictators in power around the world, some of which are our allies"
Not really. But if you are thinking of the guys in Pakistan and Egypt, they are saints compared to their political opponents who champ at their heels.