American laws almost universally obliterate the rights of minors. If you're a kid, you basically have the right to not be molested, and that's it. Well, you have the right to have Big Brother prosecute whoever molests you. Otherwise? If you're a kid, bend over, the system is raping you.
The stick you in public schools which are staffed with biased teachers. They're actively indoctrinating students to the Holy Politically Correct way, fuck what parents think. In Massachusetts a parent didn't want his child taught about gay marriage in school (pretty reasonable request, right? Our family respectfully disagrees, please don't teach our kid this!) The court decided that no, parents have no right to teach their kid bullshit. The Mighty State has All Rights.
You want America for freedom? You have every freedom, so long as it conforms to what Big Brother wants. Big Brother is more often than not enforcing the tyranny of the minority. Bend over, you're getting raped by the system.
The more liberal this goddamn place gets, the less freedoms I end up having. If you disagree, kiss my (heavily taxed) car's bumper sticker: "LESS GOVERNMENT IS GOOD!"
Assuming you're in college, the instructor doesn't have any power to take your stuff.
I seem to remember something about there being a requirement for "due process" to deprive someone of property. You should at the very least threaten to sue for a breach of your rights.
A lot of that problem is that many apps forget to close their files when they're done. They'll be good and done with the file, but because no one remembered to call fclose() when they were done, the program is still using that file (technically.) Read about the file descriptor table.
So what you want is a reinvented file descriptor table with a kind of garbage collection built in that closes files when no more references to them remain.
UAC is no different than Linux permissions. It should stay there. It's the beginnings of a Unix-like permission system that will ultimately make Windows more secure and better for everyone.
Coming from the perspective of an IT gremlin (which I play occassionally, though it's not my main job), I do NOT want any troglodyte user to be able to arbitrarily install anything on a system I maintain. Machine care means everyone needs to be on the same page. Not a hundred idiot users installing Microsoft Bob or that evil purple gorilla because "he's funny and he gives me teh gigglez!"
UAC prevents this. Unix permissions have always prevented this. It's a GOOD thing.
UAC is (right now) implemented badly. Give it a few versions and it'll get better.
Microsoft needs to bury NTFS. It slows down their systems significantly. They use all that RAM because reading and writing to disk takes so long that caching is their only hope. But then their memory manager sucks and leaks all over the place. Even the Windows Vista kernel leaks memory. About 5 MB per hour on my system.
UAC is going in the right direction, it's just not all the way there yet.
Windows explorer itself needs an overhaul (again). Dies quite frequently for me when doing simple and mundane file management tasks. Like moving directories, or deleting ZIP files. It's sad when you have to do file manipulation from a command prompt because Windows Explorer quit on you three times in a row.
Given the new Microsoft push towards virtualization, you might just get your wish of an XP VM, as well as a 98/95 VM, perhaps even a DOS VM. I hope to God they don't try emulating Vista on Windows 7. I don't think I could stomach having to buy another 4 GB of RAM to keep Windows happy. At that rate, I'll just keep the cash and buy a Mac, dual boot XP/OS X and run just about every *NIX I could want in a VM.
Maybe Microsoft should just run their OS via Wine? It would certainly go faster...;-)
It's like Ballmer said, "Applications! Applications! Applications"! Personally, as an
He's got zounds of applications. No one knows where they are. You can browse CNet for ages and find tons of outdated or poorly maintained, half-baked apps for free. Or you can easily sink $3000 into trialware or other things like that. Linux? Browse through troves of software built for your OS, for no charge. All right there, no need to get the savvy to knew which sites to go to or what looks like adware.
Ballmer isn't a terribly bright fellow, either. I wouldn't put too much faith in the many breathings from his mouth.
important executive in a Fortune 500 company, I don't have time to waste recompiling kernel after kernel and then installing software from raw source. I want things to work and I want them to work RIGHT NOW!
Have you ever heard of a Linux Kernel Module? You might try one some time. No recompiling, no rebooting, no nothing. Just plug it in and go.
My time is worth a lot of money and I need programs like Photoshop and Flash so I can write betas of databases my company creates so I can get the imagination-free coders under my charge to build things like normal people want. (Never let a database developer start coding until you have the prototype fully functional in Flash!)
If you're an "executive," why the heck are you doing the job of a senior software engineer?
On top of that, Linux has ZERO support for system and application sounds. If there is one thing that will kill a database application making it in the rough and tumble market, it's a lack of action sounds. Our database sports 1400 sounds for every activity imaginable in the database. My personal favorite is the heartbeat sound when you go into bullet-time mode while scrolling through the database itself. I had to fight a few non-visionaries about putting the sound (fired them actually) into the database! I'll never understand why developers are so bad at grasping the importance of flashiness in a database application. Can you do that in Linux? HELL no! Linux just sucks for databases.
ALSA. GStreamer. Ever heard of 'em? Don't feel like writing against one of those? Use OpenAL. Then it's even 3D.
Also, with 1400 sounds, I would imagine your users have no idea whether they're using a database or a monkey on a synthesizer. Sounds should be used sparingly. Lathering them out there is just going to confuse people.
I wouldn't touch Linux with a ten foot barge pole otherwise it might infect my beautiful and innovative mind.
My mind took off when I started with Linux. Perhaps you have caught the closed-mindedness of a genuine Unix hater?
It seems like people who use and like Linux, lack vision and lack creativity. Instead they're perfectly happy with their grey screens from 1984 and all text data.
My Linux workstation had 3D GUIs and cool 3D visual effects a year and a half before Vista reared its ugly head. OS X has been doing it for longer than I can quantify. You are wrong, a moron, and stupid. Or very good at playing devil's idi... advocate.
Ugh! NO ONE in their right mind likes that kind of thing.
Unless you're running on a cheap-o postage stamp of a server 'cause you can't afford anything more. Then you really appreciate not having all the extra bloat of a Microsoft "solution" following you around.
We need the kind of flashiness you see in Vista's Aero Glass interface.
Xgl. AIGLX. 'nuff said.
That is the pinnacle of innovation in the computer world.
Nay, the pinnacle is a garbage collector. Frees up my time to do other stuff. Creative stuff.
NO ONE has ever done anything like that on any other OS.
I'm a freaking historian. I should know, it's my business. Stalin killed at the very least 75 million of his own countrymen. He liquidated the kulaks you moron! If you cannot accept that Stalin was an evil evil individual and that he was ten times the evil that Hitler was, you don't deserve to quote dictators in history.
Now piss off before the NKVD comes after YOU! And what makes you think that the NKVD kept records of every person shot, starved, tortured, gassed, electrocuted, hanged, or even just beaten to death? You are daft. You are stupid. You are deluded and mislead by God knows what, but you are dense.
Hitler killed 12 million Jews and ethnic minorities outside of war-related deaths. Stalin killed 75+ million Russians and everyone else in Russia outside of war-related deaths.
If you continue to resist truth, you deserve to be shot by the "Great Leader" and buried right with the 75 million other innocents whose blood cry for justice to be brought to every tryannical despot.
It's not the least bit harsh. People who drive cars without educating themselves about safety deserve to be hurt. People who do stupid things get hurt. Period.
People need to learn to have redundancy for their data:
o Most important files need to be backed up to flash drives. Those flash drives are cheap. A 4 GiB drive goes for about $40 or less now. Carry them on your person everywhere. You will always have your data anywhere in the world. If your person isn't safe, well, you have worse problems than your data. o Buy a NAS drive array. Two 250GiB drives in RAID 1 will work wonders for keeping your data safe. It's not expensive to keep your data safe. A $600 investment will last you a long time. o Purchase an online backup service. People like iDrive and Carbonite will keep live backups of all your stuff in the event that all hell breaks loose. They aren't accessible as network drives, either, so the likelihood that a virus will identify and screw with it is very low.
You buy insurance for your car, your house, your life, your medical... why the hell are these people deluding themselves into thinking that they can get away without protecting their important data as well? It doesn't make sense...
Perhaps we need to have a national program of digital education to bring these people up to speed? Digital data is money, and if someone came up and froze your assets illegally there would be hell to pay for someone. How is our data any different?
Have you heard the following names? Ida B. Wells? Frederick Douglas? A. Philip Randolph? W. E. B. DuBois? Emmett Till?
Do you know their significance? Most people don't. They are the reason there's a Black Student Union.
Have you heard the following names? Caesar Chavez? Gregorio Cortez? Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz?
Do you know their significance? Most people don't. They are the reason there's a Latino Student Union.
Ironically enough, I have.
Have you seen the movie "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" or "The Salt of the Earth?" Have you even heard of them?
The reason there is no White Student Union is because we all know who George Washington was. We all know who Napolean was. We all know Descartes, Lewis & Clark, Benjamin Franklin, Robert E. Lee, and Davy Crockett. We learned of them and their significance in high school during US History and World History and Government and English etc.
Yet I meet people almost every day who have no idea who those people are. They don't know what the Tuskegee Institute is or who founded it, they don't know who George Washington Carver is (the smart ones say "was that George Washington's middle name?). There is a complete lack of education all around, it's not focused on specific ethnicities or racial groups.
Getting it now?
No, not really. More education is needed everywhere. People walk around thinking that Hitler was evil because he killed Jews. Never mind the blacks, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the countless other minorities that died along with the Jews. They don't even know who Josef Stalin is, and if they do, they don't know what he did. They don't know that Stalin was ten times the murderer that Hitler ever was.
They don't know who Benito Mussolini was.
Karl Marx.
Vladimir Lenin.
Erwin Rommel.
Hidecki Tojo.
Hirohito.
They don't know where Nanking is, or what took place there.
The don't know where Taiwan is, that it used to be called Formosa, and they certainly don't know why US Carrier Battlegroups have a hotroute to that place in the event that China again tries squishing Taiwan before we can get there.
They don't know who King George III was. Or Queen Elizabeth. William the Conquerer. They don't know who Charlemange was.
Ignorance is not racial. It's pandemic.
You are so firmly in a privileged position, you can't even visualize what it's like for others. You think your life is rough because you can't have a club like everyone else. THANK YOUR LUCKY STARS a White Student Union isn't necessary. A Student Union usually implies you are in an assailed position. If the only reason you want a White Student Union is so you and other white kids can hang out with each other and lick each other's wounded pride, that's a problem.
I don't really care if there is or isn't a White Student's Union. I was just amazed that it was shot down as being racist.
Why should I thank my lucky stars when I should be thanking my God? Thank the cold and inanimate universe all you wish, by all means, go ahead! But as for me, I shall practice my beliefs, and you cannot stop me from doing it with people who think likewise.
Go to the movie theater. Look at the movies listed. If the cast to a movie is more than 50% black, people usually consider it a "black movie." Ditto for latino. Ditto for east asian. However, take a movie like "Scream." Did you think that was a "white movie?" Of the movies out right now, how many have a non-white lead? One notable exception is the "Harold and Kumar" sequel: a movie all about being stereotyped based on ethnicity.
I don't watch many movies at all. They're boring, useless, and utterly uninteresting. They don't depict real human interactions.
Real humans in real American society do not interact with just white people or just black people or just Latinos or just Asians or just
Your narrow opinion of its purposes suggests that you do not fully understand what it's "all about."
Yes, there is a difference. At my school there was a recent movement to start a White Student's Union. It was barred as being "racist."
Now do you understand? Injustices happen all the time, and often they are state-sponsored. If you're so mad, run for office. I just might vote for you if the rest of your campaign is sane as well.
As it stands, you don't actually appreciate the purpose of the BSA, and as such you are not making correct conclusions about its policies. I would also hope that you recognize that any organization run by human beings is subject to a certain degree of misadventure as well. I honestly do not think that there is any desire in the BSA to be directly antagonistic to atheists or homesexuals. As it stands, they are strictly against homosexuality to prevent any possible kind of faux paus on any level. My troop does not persecute atheists, either, so I cannot attest to the unsanctioned actions of other troops that perhaps are not operating according to BSA guidelines.
No matter what may or may not be messed up at the BSA national office, the "problem" of government funding is the government's problem. You can't honestly expect any organization to reject a check from Uncle Sam, can you?
Yes, Yes, No, No answer. I cannot speak for the actions of individual troops and teams in the BSA, and last time I checked they do not have the authority to dictate policy for the rest of the BSA as a whole.
My troop has never performed any of the despicable acts which you speak of. We even had one member of Jewish belief at one time. Now, to continue:
Yes (there's a Black Student Union at my school. Do I care? No. Nor do I care about the Latino Student Union. They have just as much right to exist and freely and peacefully organize as I do with people of my race.)
As for the rain and tents, you seem to be under the impression that BSA is exclusively about wilderness survival and how to shoot guns and other "Republican" ideals.
You are wrong.
BSA is founded on morals and inner faith, not a nihilistic fatwa declaring God dead. BSA's great reputation is because of its unwillingness to back away from its beliefs, and parents have a right to allow their kids to participate in BSA if they wish to utilize its resources to help instill values into their children which they agree with.
If you're so mad about the government funding, perhaps you should look into the National Endowment for the Arts. They throw millions into paintings, plays, and theaters that will never be able to benefit the entire country on an individual by individual basis. Would you cut their funding, too?
The fact of the matter is that government grants to the Boy Scouts of America us just as ethical as the National Endowment for the Arts. It's a social program to help keep what is turning into a dying set of moral values alive. The ratio of atheistic existentialists to theistic existentialists on this very web site attests to that (though this is not by any stretch of the imagination a statistically random sampling).
Yeah, and I hear that driver patches in the Linux kernel are done on the basis of he who pays the most money to force the work up to the top of the pile. How is BSA any different from Linus Torvalds? Under that light, I think BSA and Open-Source might be a match made in Heaven/Nirvana/Infinity.
So you would destroy the right of the BSA as a private organization to regulate who they associate with and who they do not? BSA is "ye olde schoole" man, and that's the way it rolls. If you don't like it, make a newer and "better" one. It is as simple as that.
So, basically they're saying that Windows itself is a massively convoluted wad of code that looks like a high-school AP computer science class hacked it together over the course of a semester?
Geez, they keep slamming Linux for being "unprofessionally" coded...
Personally, I have no problem with the cap if it's implemented similarly to the caps I have with my VPS provider.
I pay for 100 GB per month in bandwidth. It's not speed capped, but I have to pay if I use more. Alternatively, I can pay for a 1 Mb line, which rate caps it so that I'll never be able to exceed my 100 GB - or so they tell me. I'm not actually concerned enough to do the math yet.
If Comcast did something similar, offering the ability to have blazing speeds or protection from overage charges, I could stomach them for a while longer.
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It's never too late to start.
Having been forced to go through other Java programmer's code, I'd have to agree that being aware of memory management is good.
Having also learned how to program, I'd have to disagree that C++ is a good place to start.
Why not Objective-C? It's like C, and you can use GnuStep if you don't have a Mac Lab.
American laws almost universally obliterate the rights of minors. If you're a kid, you basically have the right to not be molested, and that's it. Well, you have the right to have Big Brother prosecute whoever molests you. Otherwise? If you're a kid, bend over, the system is raping you.
The stick you in public schools which are staffed with biased teachers. They're actively indoctrinating students to the Holy Politically Correct way, fuck what parents think. In Massachusetts a parent didn't want his child taught about gay marriage in school (pretty reasonable request, right? Our family respectfully disagrees, please don't teach our kid this!) The court decided that no, parents have no right to teach their kid bullshit. The Mighty State has All Rights.
You want America for freedom? You have every freedom, so long as it conforms to what Big Brother wants. Big Brother is more often than not enforcing the tyranny of the minority. Bend over, you're getting raped by the system.
The more liberal this goddamn place gets, the less freedoms I end up having. If you disagree, kiss my (heavily taxed) car's bumper sticker: "LESS GOVERNMENT IS GOOD!"
Assuming you're in college, the instructor doesn't have any power to take your stuff.
I seem to remember something about there being a requirement for "due process" to deprive someone of property. You should at the very least threaten to sue for a breach of your rights.
A lot of that problem is that many apps forget to close their files when they're done. They'll be good and done with the file, but because no one remembered to call fclose() when they were done, the program is still using that file (technically.) Read about the file descriptor table.
So what you want is a reinvented file descriptor table with a kind of garbage collection built in that closes files when no more references to them remain.
UAC is no different than Linux permissions. It should stay there. It's the beginnings of a Unix-like permission system that will ultimately make Windows more secure and better for everyone.
Coming from the perspective of an IT gremlin (which I play occassionally, though it's not my main job), I do NOT want any troglodyte user to be able to arbitrarily install anything on a system I maintain. Machine care means everyone needs to be on the same page. Not a hundred idiot users installing Microsoft Bob or that evil purple gorilla because "he's funny and he gives me teh gigglez!"
UAC prevents this. Unix permissions have always prevented this. It's a GOOD thing.
UAC is (right now) implemented badly. Give it a few versions and it'll get better.
UAC should stay.
DRM should go. I totally agree there.
What then distinguishes the new "Windows" from Unix?
Firefox isn't technically standards compliant.
Microsoft needs to bury NTFS. It slows down their systems significantly. They use all that RAM because reading and writing to disk takes so long that caching is their only hope. But then their memory manager sucks and leaks all over the place. Even the Windows Vista kernel leaks memory. About 5 MB per hour on my system.
UAC is going in the right direction, it's just not all the way there yet.
Windows explorer itself needs an overhaul (again). Dies quite frequently for me when doing simple and mundane file management tasks. Like moving directories, or deleting ZIP files. It's sad when you have to do file manipulation from a command prompt because Windows Explorer quit on you three times in a row.
Given the new Microsoft push towards virtualization, you might just get your wish of an XP VM, as well as a 98/95 VM, perhaps even a DOS VM. I hope to God they don't try emulating Vista on Windows 7. I don't think I could stomach having to buy another 4 GB of RAM to keep Windows happy. At that rate, I'll just keep the cash and buy a Mac, dual boot XP/OS X and run just about every *NIX I could want in a VM.
Maybe Microsoft should just run their OS via Wine? It would certainly go faster... ;-)
Because Microsoft, whenever they run across something good, immediately pick themselves up and scurry off like nothing had happened.
Yes, I am paraphrasing Churchill.
Maybe Microsoft should use their lawyers to get Hans Reiser out of jail? I'm sure he could write a nice FS for them if they asked politely.
It's like Ballmer said, "Applications! Applications! Applications"! Personally, as an
He's got zounds of applications. No one knows where they are. You can browse CNet for ages and find tons of outdated or poorly maintained, half-baked apps for free. Or you can easily sink $3000 into trialware or other things like that. Linux? Browse through troves of software built for your OS, for no charge. All right there, no need to get the savvy to knew which sites to go to or what looks like adware.
Ballmer isn't a terribly bright fellow, either. I wouldn't put too much faith in the many breathings from his mouth.
important executive in a Fortune 500 company, I don't have time to waste recompiling kernel after kernel and then installing software from raw source. I want things to work and I want them to work RIGHT NOW!
Have you ever heard of a Linux Kernel Module? You might try one some time. No recompiling, no rebooting, no nothing. Just plug it in and go.
My time is worth a lot of money and I need programs like Photoshop and Flash so I can write betas of databases my company creates so I can get the imagination-free coders under my charge to build things like normal people want. (Never let a database developer start coding until you have the prototype fully functional in Flash!)
If you're an "executive," why the heck are you doing the job of a senior software engineer?
On top of that, Linux has ZERO support for system and application sounds. If there is one thing that will kill a database application making it in the rough and tumble market, it's a lack of action sounds. Our database sports 1400 sounds for every activity imaginable in the database. My personal favorite is the heartbeat sound when you go into bullet-time mode while scrolling through the database itself. I had to fight a few non-visionaries about putting the sound (fired them actually) into the database! I'll never understand why developers are so bad at grasping the importance of flashiness in a database application. Can you do that in Linux? HELL no! Linux just sucks for databases.
ALSA. GStreamer. Ever heard of 'em? Don't feel like writing against one of those? Use OpenAL. Then it's even 3D.
Also, with 1400 sounds, I would imagine your users have no idea whether they're using a database or a monkey on a synthesizer. Sounds should be used sparingly. Lathering them out there is just going to confuse people.
I wouldn't touch Linux with a ten foot barge pole otherwise it might infect my beautiful and innovative mind.
My mind took off when I started with Linux. Perhaps you have caught the closed-mindedness of a genuine Unix hater?
It seems like people who use and like Linux, lack vision and lack creativity. Instead they're perfectly happy with their grey screens from 1984 and all text data.
My Linux workstation had 3D GUIs and cool 3D visual effects a year and a half before Vista reared its ugly head. OS X has been doing it for longer than I can quantify. You are wrong, a moron, and stupid. Or very good at playing devil's idi... advocate.
Ugh! NO ONE in their right mind likes that kind of thing.
Unless you're running on a cheap-o postage stamp of a server 'cause you can't afford anything more. Then you really appreciate not having all the extra bloat of a Microsoft "solution" following you around.
We need the kind of flashiness you see in Vista's Aero Glass interface.
Xgl. AIGLX. 'nuff said.
That is the pinnacle of innovation in the computer world.
Nay, the pinnacle is a garbage collector. Frees up my time to do other stuff. Creative stuff.
NO ONE has ever done anything like that on any other OS.
Xgl. OS X. Go away you
Strangely enough, yes. Perhaps I've been doing this too long?
You might want to translate that into a more readable language, like C or C++.
Mod that one up as funny! Ah, that was good laugh.
Yes, I know I am laughing at me. History laughs at he who cannot laugh at himself, you know.
Why? You're wrong.
I'm a freaking historian. I should know, it's my business. Stalin killed at the very least 75 million of his own countrymen. He liquidated the kulaks you moron! If you cannot accept that Stalin was an evil evil individual and that he was ten times the evil that Hitler was, you don't deserve to quote dictators in history.
Now piss off before the NKVD comes after YOU! And what makes you think that the NKVD kept records of every person shot, starved, tortured, gassed, electrocuted, hanged, or even just beaten to death? You are daft. You are stupid. You are deluded and mislead by God knows what, but you are dense.
Hitler killed 12 million Jews and ethnic minorities outside of war-related deaths. Stalin killed 75+ million Russians and everyone else in Russia outside of war-related deaths.
If you continue to resist truth, you deserve to be shot by the "Great Leader" and buried right with the 75 million other innocents whose blood cry for justice to be brought to every tryannical despot.
You are wrong. Go away.
When shit hits the fan, it has a tendency to spray everywhere.
When a virus hit your computer, it sprayed all over your backups.
Misfortune is all the same, no matter what incarnation it is taking in your life.
It's not the least bit harsh. People who drive cars without educating themselves about safety deserve to be hurt. People who do stupid things get hurt. Period.
People need to learn to have redundancy for their data:
o Most important files need to be backed up to flash drives. Those flash drives are cheap. A 4 GiB drive goes for about $40 or less now. Carry them on your person everywhere. You will always have your data anywhere in the world. If your person isn't safe, well, you have worse problems than your data.
o Buy a NAS drive array. Two 250GiB drives in RAID 1 will work wonders for keeping your data safe. It's not expensive to keep your data safe. A $600 investment will last you a long time.
o Purchase an online backup service. People like iDrive and Carbonite will keep live backups of all your stuff in the event that all hell breaks loose. They aren't accessible as network drives, either, so the likelihood that a virus will identify and screw with it is very low.
You buy insurance for your car, your house, your life, your medical... why the hell are these people deluding themselves into thinking that they can get away without protecting their important data as well? It doesn't make sense...
Perhaps we need to have a national program of digital education to bring these people up to speed? Digital data is money, and if someone came up and froze your assets illegally there would be hell to pay for someone. How is our data any different?
Without lookup them up in Google...
Have you heard the following names? Ida B. Wells? Frederick Douglas? A. Philip Randolph? W. E. B. DuBois? Emmett Till?
Do you know their significance? Most people don't. They are the reason there's a Black Student Union.
Have you heard the following names? Caesar Chavez? Gregorio Cortez? Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz?
Do you know their significance? Most people don't. They are the reason there's a Latino Student Union.
Ironically enough, I have.
Have you seen the movie "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song" or "The Salt of the Earth?" Have you even heard of them?
The reason there is no White Student Union is because we all know who George Washington was. We all know who Napolean was. We all know Descartes, Lewis & Clark, Benjamin Franklin, Robert E. Lee, and Davy Crockett. We learned of them and their significance in high school during US History and World History and Government and English etc.
Yet I meet people almost every day who have no idea who those people are. They don't know what the Tuskegee Institute is or who founded it, they don't know who George Washington Carver is (the smart ones say "was that George Washington's middle name?). There is a complete lack of education all around, it's not focused on specific ethnicities or racial groups.
Getting it now?
No, not really. More education is needed everywhere. People walk around thinking that Hitler was evil because he killed Jews. Never mind the blacks, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the countless other minorities that died along with the Jews. They don't even know who Josef Stalin is, and if they do, they don't know what he did. They don't know that Stalin was ten times the murderer that Hitler ever was.
They don't know who Benito Mussolini was.
Karl Marx.
Vladimir Lenin.
Erwin Rommel.
Hidecki Tojo.
Hirohito.
They don't know where Nanking is, or what took place there.
The don't know where Taiwan is, that it used to be called Formosa, and they certainly don't know why US Carrier Battlegroups have a hotroute to that place in the event that China again tries squishing Taiwan before we can get there.
They don't know who King George III was. Or Queen Elizabeth. William the Conquerer. They don't know who Charlemange was.
Ignorance is not racial. It's pandemic.
You are so firmly in a privileged position, you can't even visualize what it's like for others. You think your life is rough because you can't have a club like everyone else. THANK YOUR LUCKY STARS a White Student Union isn't necessary. A Student Union usually implies you are in an assailed position. If the only reason you want a White Student Union is so you and other white kids can hang out with each other and lick each other's wounded pride, that's a problem.
I don't really care if there is or isn't a White Student's Union. I was just amazed that it was shot down as being racist.
Why should I thank my lucky stars when I should be thanking my God? Thank the cold and inanimate universe all you wish, by all means, go ahead! But as for me, I shall practice my beliefs, and you cannot stop me from doing it with people who think likewise.
Go to the movie theater. Look at the movies listed. If the cast to a movie is more than 50% black, people usually consider it a "black movie." Ditto for latino. Ditto for east asian. However, take a movie like "Scream." Did you think that was a "white movie?" Of the movies out right now, how many have a non-white lead? One notable exception is the "Harold and Kumar" sequel: a movie all about being stereotyped based on ethnicity.
I don't watch many movies at all. They're boring, useless, and utterly uninteresting. They don't depict real human interactions.
Real humans in real American society do not interact with just white people or just black people or just Latinos or just Asians or just
Your narrow opinion of its purposes suggests that you do not fully understand what it's "all about."
Yes, there is a difference. At my school there was a recent movement to start a White Student's Union. It was barred as being "racist."
Now do you understand? Injustices happen all the time, and often they are state-sponsored. If you're so mad, run for office. I just might vote for you if the rest of your campaign is sane as well.
As it stands, you don't actually appreciate the purpose of the BSA, and as such you are not making correct conclusions about its policies. I would also hope that you recognize that any organization run by human beings is subject to a certain degree of misadventure as well. I honestly do not think that there is any desire in the BSA to be directly antagonistic to atheists or homesexuals. As it stands, they are strictly against homosexuality to prevent any possible kind of faux paus on any level. My troop does not persecute atheists, either, so I cannot attest to the unsanctioned actions of other troops that perhaps are not operating according to BSA guidelines.
No matter what may or may not be messed up at the BSA national office, the "problem" of government funding is the government's problem. You can't honestly expect any organization to reject a check from Uncle Sam, can you?
Yes, Yes, No, No answer. I cannot speak for the actions of individual troops and teams in the BSA, and last time I checked they do not have the authority to dictate policy for the rest of the BSA as a whole.
My troop has never performed any of the despicable acts which you speak of. We even had one member of Jewish belief at one time. Now, to continue:
Yes (there's a Black Student Union at my school. Do I care? No. Nor do I care about the Latino Student Union. They have just as much right to exist and freely and peacefully organize as I do with people of my race.)
As for the rain and tents, you seem to be under the impression that BSA is exclusively about wilderness survival and how to shoot guns and other "Republican" ideals.
You are wrong.
BSA is founded on morals and inner faith, not a nihilistic fatwa declaring God dead. BSA's great reputation is because of its unwillingness to back away from its beliefs, and parents have a right to allow their kids to participate in BSA if they wish to utilize its resources to help instill values into their children which they agree with.
If you're so mad about the government funding, perhaps you should look into the National Endowment for the Arts. They throw millions into paintings, plays, and theaters that will never be able to benefit the entire country on an individual by individual basis. Would you cut their funding, too?
The fact of the matter is that government grants to the Boy Scouts of America us just as ethical as the National Endowment for the Arts. It's a social program to help keep what is turning into a dying set of moral values alive. The ratio of atheistic existentialists to theistic existentialists on this very web site attests to that (though this is not by any stretch of the imagination a statistically random sampling).
Yeah, and I hear that driver patches in the Linux kernel are done on the basis of he who pays the most money to force the work up to the top of the pile. How is BSA any different from Linus Torvalds? Under that light, I think BSA and Open-Source might be a match made in Heaven/Nirvana/Infinity.
So you would destroy the right of the BSA as a private organization to regulate who they associate with and who they do not? BSA is "ye olde schoole" man, and that's the way it rolls. If you don't like it, make a newer and "better" one. It is as simple as that.
That's because a High-school student can do in Java what it takes 12 Certified engineers to do in .NET. Duh!
Geez, they keep slamming Linux for being "unprofessionally" coded...
I pay for 100 GB per month in bandwidth. It's not speed capped, but I have to pay if I use more. Alternatively, I can pay for a 1 Mb line, which rate caps it so that I'll never be able to exceed my 100 GB - or so they tell me. I'm not actually concerned enough to do the math yet.
If Comcast did something similar, offering the ability to have blazing speeds or protection from overage charges, I could stomach them for a while longer.