what do you have against copyright? Why would a content creator make content if they can't make money off of it?
Why do you assume the only way for a content creator to make money is to charge for copies? If the work he's doing -- creating content -- is valuable, then why can't he get paid directly for doing that?
He shouldn't need to worry about how many people end up using the content eventually: he did a fixed amount of work, he deserves a fixed payment for that. If he wants to get paid some more in the future, he can do some more work, just like everyone else.
Copyright restricts our speech and technology in order to promote the fiction that labor (creating content) can be chopped up, packaged, and sold as a good (copies of content). It's unnecessary, cumbersome, and has a host of negative side effects: every time a mashup artist is sued or silenced, every time an old TV show is released on DVD with a terrible new soundtrack, every time a cool project is never made because someone can't secure the rights to some component of it, you can thank copyright.
A combination of government interference through CAFE standards, EPA emissions standards, a host of other regulations going far past the point of reasonableness [...] killed/is killing the US car companies.
There are many things wrong with that statement, but the most obvious is that those regulations apply equally to all automakers who want to sell in the US. GM and Chrysler didn't have to meet higher standards than Honda, Toyota, or even Ford. They failed because of their own poor management (plus rising health care costs and legacy obligations from contracts signed decades ago).
When giving a state-specific answer, please also say the state your answer applies to.
When reading a potentially state-specific answer in a thread about a particular state, please assume that the answer applies to the state which is the subject of the thread.
For example, in Florida where I live, if you buy something by mailorder (including internet purchases of real physical items) and the vendor does not charge you sales tax, you are required by state law to file and pay proper sales tax at the end of the calendar year.
Washingtons budget would be fine if we didn't throw money down the toilet every day. If they raise an income tax to fly more "click it or ticket" banners, expect a rebellion.
Surely you don't think we can save the budget simply by getting rid of the "click it or ticket" banners. So come on, what else should we cut? Education? Food stamps? Services for the disabled? Highway maintenance? Law enforcement?
Spending money on proping up industries that are not, and will never again be self sufficient is a total waste of money regardless of the economy.
We're talking about state government here, not federal. Washington State, as far as I can tell, is not propping up industries that are not self-sufficient.
Some programs should have their budgets decreased, and other programs either put on hold or eliminated. It may suck for some in the short term, but it will help a greater proportion of the tax paying population in the long run if they learn to live within their means.
Will it? Cutting programs in a recession is the opposite of economic stimulus, and many experts believe it makes the problem worse, not better.
What I believe C64 is getting at is that the government is spending money to support some industries and programs that have limited if any real payback. They probably require more government money to stay in business than is created directly or indirectly by taxing the related commerce. Cutting those funding programs can have a net benefit of saving money.
OK, so, which programs? It's easy to make vague general statements about trimming the fat. It's much harder to identify specific programs to slash.
The US fought for indepedance from Britain over taxation of less than 10% annually. Now the US governments combined (state+federal) takes up to 50% of someones annual income.
The US fought for independence from Britain because we weren't represented in Parliament, not because 10% taxation was too high. Remember "no taxation without representation"? The key part was the last two words, not the first two.
For Apple's iPod/iTunes ecosystem to be considered a monopoly they would have to be doing things like offering discounts to vendors for not carrying other portable music players or making music bought from iTunes deliberately unplayable by other portable music players [...] or possibly by locking iTunes down to only provide syncing functionality to the iPod.
Incorrect. Those are the sort of things that could get them in trouble once they already had a monopoly -- leveraging their music monopoly into a hardware monopoly. Having a monopoly in the first place isn't illegal; using your monopoly position to block potential competitors is.
Maybe instead of raising taxes, they should stop wasting money studying the migrations of butterflies, or providing subsidies to the basket-weavers guild.
Unfortunately, the money isn't being wasted on such frivolous and expendable things. Do you have a list of actual state programs you'd like to cut?
I count every penny and cancel services so I can survive, but they don't.
You don't cancel the services that you depend on for your income -- for instance, you don't stop going to work just to save money on gas.
The state depends for its income on tax revenue. Tax revenue depends on commerce, and commerce depends on state services.
First, sales tax is owed by the seller, not the buyer.
Second, there's only a sale if money changes hands. If you give something away for free, you don't owe sales tax on it. The recipient might owe income tax on the gift, but there's an exemption up to a certain amount anyway: when was the last time you paid tax on a present someone gave you?
Anytime you receive something of value you usually are required to pay taxes on it regardless of how you acquired it, and no, you do not get to assign the value.
But there's usually also an exception for gifts up to a certain amount. You don't pay tax on every sweater you get for Christmas, right? If someone gives you a file, why would that be any different?
"Gets by fine" is an overstatement. Washington is facing somewhat of a budget crisis, nothing like California but still worrisome, and people have been tossing around the idea of an income tax to continue paying for services.
Speaking as an Apple critic, I think there's a possibility you missed:
3. Apple's system of approving apps has no objective guidelines, no oversight, and no accountability; the result is total fucking chaos. Individual testers are allowed to make decisions based on "offensiveness" criteria they make up themselves, and this particular app happened to be tested by an uptight moron who went to great lengths to find some reason to ban it.
Based on the stories I've heard about rejected apps being approved simply by resubmitting them, this might even be true. If so, Apple needs to fire a bunch of people, and then write a real set of guidelines so everyone inside and outside the company is on the same page.
This is a textbook example of a strawman. I make a statement that says children have no privacy or expectation of privacy like adolescents or adults do, and you extrapolate that to mean that I advocate the idea that government should not allow any human being the rights to their privacy.
No, that's not what I extrapolated. Once again, you're building your own strawman while accusing me of doing the same.
You wrote that children have no privacy, no expectation of privacy, and no psychological yearning for privacy. I assumed, reasonably I think, that you intended a connection between those statements, that you aren't in the habit of posting non sequiturs. Perhaps I was wrong, but I gave you the benefit of the doubt.
If those statements are indeed connected, and consistent with what you've stated previously, the connection must be that children have no privacy and that's proper because they have no expectation or yearning for it (after all, you haven't given anything else that resembles a reason). And that's what led me to wonder if you only assign rights to people who ask for them.
You then took my comment and imagined that I had accused you of advocating "the idea that government should not allow any human being the rights to their privacy." That is not what I said and certainly not what I meant, but it is awfully similar to another strawman you posted earlier, when you claimed someone had said that "keeping children under the watch of their parents leads to Orwellian governments keeping overbearing watch over its people".
The reason I'd hate to see how you interpret the 4th Amendment is that I suspect you'd rule in favor of any search where the defendant didn't explicitly request to be left alone, just like you seem to be arguing that children shouldn't have privacy because they don't expect it or yearn for it. (Go ahead, read my comment again, and see if the clue "Do people only deserve rights if they ask for them?" helps you understand it a little better this time.)
Hope that's cleared up now. And, since I'm still concerned about you embarrassing yourself by constantly attacking arguments that no one has raised, I hope you'll take some time away from picking at the mote in my eye to deal with the plank in your own.
And quit building up so many strawmen, you're embarassing yourself.
Thanks for your concern. I'll return the favor: you might want to look up what the term "strawman" means before using it again.
You've repeatedly accused me of something which you have actually done in every post here; it pains me to see you digging yourself deeper into that hole. Just looking out for you, buddy!
I don't know if it's the best solution, but I do think something had to be done to fix the situation where the survivors just hide in a corner during a crescendo, punching over and over. It's a strategy that requires basically no sophistication from the survivors (other than following each other to the same corner), while the infected have to be a lot more sophisticated to break it -- the hunter, boomer, and smoker are all useless against it individually.
It's still a strawman to say that keeping children under the watch of their parents leads to Orwellian governments keeping overbearing watch over its people.
Yes, but once again, that's a strawman you've created.
The original poster never said that monitoring children would lead to any government actions whatsoever. He simply referred to it as "Big-Brother-like monitoring", which (1) is accurate and (2) you apparently agreed with, since you used the same phrase yourself when you advocated it: "If you're not Big-Brother-like monitoring your kid, you're not a parent."
You obviously haven't spent thousands of hours taking care of children, or you would know that they have no privacy and have no expectation of privacy.
They only "have no privacy" if you deny them privacy. And what a shock, they don't expect privacy if no one ever gives them privacy. Do people only deserve rights if they ask for them? Is that how it works now? Good thing you're not a judge, because I'd hate to see how you interpret the 4th Amendment.
Apps are not allowed to run in the background. It sucks, mostly... but it's also part of what makes it a very stable platform (compared to win mobile phones)
Not compared to Android, though, and Android allows background processes.
2. Background processes are allowed in the newest generations of iPhones.
Not quite. They allow "push notifications", which would work for this situation (university sends a ping through the cell network; phone receives it, reads its GPS location, and replies; university records attendance), but they aren't a general substitute for background processes.
It doesn't work perfectly, but I can see why they wanted it that way; you can either join a random game with random strangers, or you can find a group of friends to play with.
It's a nice idea, but Halo 2 did it right, years ago. It's disappointing that Valve's implementation of basically the same idea is so bad.
In Halo, you can join a party with your friends, and then when you start a game, the system matches you up with enough players to fill the game. If you have 4 people in your party and you want an 8 player game, you might get matched up with another 4 person party, or two 2 person parties, or a 3 person party and an individual, etc. -- the system knows who's looking for a game and tries to match groups of similar sizes and skill levels.
Left 4 Dead, on the other hand, has no group matchmaking. If you want to play an 8 player versus game with three friends, you have to start a lobby with them, then wait for 4 more individuals to randomly join.
That sucks for you because it might take a long time, which is partly because people who join early like to leave if the lobby doesn't fill up quickly enough. And that's if it works at all: when I start a friends-only lobby and then switch it to public to fill it up, very often I don't get any more players no matter how long I wait.
It also sucks for the other players because they're playing with strangers (who might be unskilled, uncooperative, or have no mic) while you're playing with the same friends you always play with. There's currently no way to match your team up against another team; it's always a team vs. a bunch of random individuals.
The dismissal is coming mainly from the other side of the argument, by people who react to ANY attempt to even look after their kids with screams about nanny states and toughening up kids.
Oh, bullshit. No one is objecting to "ANY attempt to even look after their kids"; what they're objecting to is constant remote GPS monitoring.
Here's the dismissal you keep ignoring: "If you're not Big-Brother-like monitoring your kid, you're not a parent. Kids below middle-school age have no privacy."
Oh, now you have a problem with strawmen? You didn't seem to mind them when you wrote this: "The one who has lost perspective is the one who thinks that children are fully-cogent, underaged adults."
You may recall that the person you were replying to never said children were "fully-cogent, underaged adults": that's a silly position you made up in order to argue against it, i.e. a strawman. He just said that subjecting children to remote monitoring is an overreaction.
As for me, I admit that I exaggerated a little. I should've said:
Don't forget about the one who thinks only "fully-cogent... adults" deserve any privacy rights. He's lost quite a bit of perspective too.
Children have less of certain rights than an adult, but more of others.
Technically, that's true, but it's true of prisoners as well (and for essentially the same reasons). I hope you aren't suggesting that those two categories balance each other out.
They do not have the right of complete freedom of movement without monitoring. Are you seriously arguing that a 6 year old has the right to go somewhere without the knowledge of their parents?
I am seriously arguing that a child's right to privacy shouldn't be dismissed offhand. In particular cases, sure, it's debatable. But to suggest, as the GP did, that "kids below middle-school age have no privacy" -- that there's no moral or ethical question whatsoever about turning anyone below age 12 into a 24x7 homing beacon, or indeed that "you're not a parent" unless you're taking such draconian measures -- is simply ignorant.
This thing may be an issue for kids over the age of 12, but when they're still developmental grubs, advocating their rights to privacy is ignorance and dangerous for the child's development. The one who has lost perspective is the one who thinks that children are fully-cogent, underaged adults.
Don't forget about the one who thinks only "fully-cogent... adults" deserve any rights. He's lost quite a bit of perspective too.
Do you know what is most interesting about why it is so complex to program fro windows. It is not by accident or by incompetence, it is doe on purpose so that you will buy M$'s proprietary tools, you will pay M$ to check your program across versions and you will also pay M$ for licence fees for access to various DLLs to reduce your programming load and to be able to properly access hidden and proprietary interfaces.
... uh huh.
You haven't ever written a program for Windows, have you?
I'm glad you brought up the most common misconception.
Thanks, but it wasn't in the part you quoted. The common misconception I addressed (although I guess you brought it up first) is the idea that the two parties are indistinguishable because they use similar tactics to pursue very different goals.
The only question is whether they will prefer to restrict economic freedoms (Democrats) or personal freedoms (Republicans) when dealing with these issues, but freedom is freedom so I see little meaningful difference there.
Again, that's because you're completely ignoring the outcome; you're only focusing on the tactics used to achieve it.
One party wants you to have rights or privileges A, B, and C. The other wants you not to have those, but the unrelated rights or privileges X, Y, and Z instead. If you're one of the vast majority of Americans who cares where our country ends up on any of those issues, then you'll see a clear difference between the parties, even though they both want to (gasp!) pass more laws in order to get there.
Get back to me when your Saturn is 20 years old and has at least 250,000 miles on it... you know, about when my $2600 Mercedes reached its break-in point.
If he's at ~200k now, he'll be at 250k in just a few years.
Your Saturn is built like every other piece of shit made in this era, and will go away with the rest of them. It's a GM Toyota.
Heh. You do realize Toyotas are known for being exceptionally reliable, don't you?
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what do you have against copyright? Why would a content creator make content if they can't make money off of it?
Why do you assume the only way for a content creator to make money is to charge for copies? If the work he's doing -- creating content -- is valuable, then why can't he get paid directly for doing that?
He shouldn't need to worry about how many people end up using the content eventually: he did a fixed amount of work, he deserves a fixed payment for that. If he wants to get paid some more in the future, he can do some more work, just like everyone else.
Copyright restricts our speech and technology in order to promote the fiction that labor (creating content) can be chopped up, packaged, and sold as a good (copies of content). It's unnecessary, cumbersome, and has a host of negative side effects: every time a mashup artist is sued or silenced, every time an old TV show is released on DVD with a terrible new soundtrack, every time a cool project is never made because someone can't secure the rights to some component of it, you can thank copyright.
A combination of government interference through CAFE standards, EPA emissions standards, a host of other regulations going far past the point of reasonableness [...] killed/is killing the US car companies.
There are many things wrong with that statement, but the most obvious is that those regulations apply equally to all automakers who want to sell in the US. GM and Chrysler didn't have to meet higher standards than Honda, Toyota, or even Ford. They failed because of their own poor management (plus rising health care costs and legacy obligations from contracts signed decades ago).
When giving a state-specific answer, please also say the state your answer applies to.
When reading a potentially state-specific answer in a thread about a particular state, please assume that the answer applies to the state which is the subject of the thread.
For example, in Florida where I live, if you buy something by mailorder (including internet purchases of real physical items) and the vendor does not charge you sales tax, you are required by state law to file and pay proper sales tax at the end of the calendar year.
That's use tax, not sales tax.
Washingtons budget would be fine if we didn't throw money down the toilet every day. If they raise an income tax to fly more "click it or ticket" banners, expect a rebellion.
Surely you don't think we can save the budget simply by getting rid of the "click it or ticket" banners. So come on, what else should we cut? Education? Food stamps? Services for the disabled? Highway maintenance? Law enforcement?
Spending money on proping up industries that are not, and will never again be self sufficient is a total waste of money regardless of the economy.
We're talking about state government here, not federal. Washington State, as far as I can tell, is not propping up industries that are not self-sufficient.
Some programs should have their budgets decreased, and other programs either put on hold or eliminated. It may suck for some in the short term, but it will help a greater proportion of the tax paying population in the long run if they learn to live within their means.
Will it? Cutting programs in a recession is the opposite of economic stimulus, and many experts believe it makes the problem worse, not better.
What I believe C64 is getting at is that the government is spending money to support some industries and programs that have limited if any real payback. They probably require more government money to stay in business than is created directly or indirectly by taxing the related commerce. Cutting those funding programs can have a net benefit of saving money.
OK, so, which programs? It's easy to make vague general statements about trimming the fat. It's much harder to identify specific programs to slash.
The US fought for indepedance from Britain over taxation of less than 10% annually. Now the US governments combined (state+federal) takes up to 50% of someones annual income.
The US fought for independence from Britain because we weren't represented in Parliament, not because 10% taxation was too high. Remember "no taxation without representation"? The key part was the last two words, not the first two.
For Apple's iPod/iTunes ecosystem to be considered a monopoly they would have to be doing things like offering discounts to vendors for not carrying other portable music players or making music bought from iTunes deliberately unplayable by other portable music players [...] or possibly by locking iTunes down to only provide syncing functionality to the iPod.
Incorrect. Those are the sort of things that could get them in trouble once they already had a monopoly -- leveraging their music monopoly into a hardware monopoly. Having a monopoly in the first place isn't illegal; using your monopoly position to block potential competitors is.
Maybe instead of raising taxes, they should stop wasting money studying the migrations of butterflies, or providing subsidies to the basket-weavers guild.
Unfortunately, the money isn't being wasted on such frivolous and expendable things. Do you have a list of actual state programs you'd like to cut?
I count every penny and cancel services so I can survive, but they don't.
You don't cancel the services that you depend on for your income -- for instance, you don't stop going to work just to save money on gas.
The state depends for its income on tax revenue. Tax revenue depends on commerce, and commerce depends on state services.
First, sales tax is owed by the seller, not the buyer.
Second, there's only a sale if money changes hands. If you give something away for free, you don't owe sales tax on it. The recipient might owe income tax on the gift, but there's an exemption up to a certain amount anyway: when was the last time you paid tax on a present someone gave you?
Anytime you receive something of value you usually are required to pay taxes on it regardless of how you acquired it, and no, you do not get to assign the value.
But there's usually also an exception for gifts up to a certain amount. You don't pay tax on every sweater you get for Christmas, right? If someone gives you a file, why would that be any different?
"Gets by fine" is an overstatement. Washington is facing somewhat of a budget crisis, nothing like California but still worrisome, and people have been tossing around the idea of an income tax to continue paying for services.
Speaking as an Apple critic, I think there's a possibility you missed:
3. Apple's system of approving apps has no objective guidelines, no oversight, and no accountability; the result is total fucking chaos. Individual testers are allowed to make decisions based on "offensiveness" criteria they make up themselves, and this particular app happened to be tested by an uptight moron who went to great lengths to find some reason to ban it.
Based on the stories I've heard about rejected apps being approved simply by resubmitting them, this might even be true. If so, Apple needs to fire a bunch of people, and then write a real set of guidelines so everyone inside and outside the company is on the same page.
This is a textbook example of a strawman. I make a statement that says children have no privacy or expectation of privacy like adolescents or adults do, and you extrapolate that to mean that I advocate the idea that government should not allow any human being the rights to their privacy.
No, that's not what I extrapolated. Once again, you're building your own strawman while accusing me of doing the same.
You wrote that children have no privacy, no expectation of privacy, and no psychological yearning for privacy. I assumed, reasonably I think, that you intended a connection between those statements, that you aren't in the habit of posting non sequiturs. Perhaps I was wrong, but I gave you the benefit of the doubt.
If those statements are indeed connected, and consistent with what you've stated previously, the connection must be that children have no privacy and that's proper because they have no expectation or yearning for it (after all, you haven't given anything else that resembles a reason). And that's what led me to wonder if you only assign rights to people who ask for them.
You then took my comment and imagined that I had accused you of advocating "the idea that government should not allow any human being the rights to their privacy." That is not what I said and certainly not what I meant, but it is awfully similar to another strawman you posted earlier, when you claimed someone had said that "keeping children under the watch of their parents leads to Orwellian governments keeping overbearing watch over its people".
The reason I'd hate to see how you interpret the 4th Amendment is that I suspect you'd rule in favor of any search where the defendant didn't explicitly request to be left alone, just like you seem to be arguing that children shouldn't have privacy because they don't expect it or yearn for it. (Go ahead, read my comment again, and see if the clue "Do people only deserve rights if they ask for them?" helps you understand it a little better this time.)
Hope that's cleared up now. And, since I'm still concerned about you embarrassing yourself by constantly attacking arguments that no one has raised, I hope you'll take some time away from picking at the mote in my eye to deal with the plank in your own.
And quit building up so many strawmen, you're embarassing yourself.
Thanks for your concern. I'll return the favor: you might want to look up what the term "strawman" means before using it again.
You've repeatedly accused me of something which you have actually done in every post here; it pains me to see you digging yourself deeper into that hole. Just looking out for you, buddy!
Oh, and the melee cooldown sucks balls.
I don't know if it's the best solution, but I do think something had to be done to fix the situation where the survivors just hide in a corner during a crescendo, punching over and over. It's a strategy that requires basically no sophistication from the survivors (other than following each other to the same corner), while the infected have to be a lot more sophisticated to break it -- the hunter, boomer, and smoker are all useless against it individually.
It's still a strawman to say that keeping children under the watch of their parents leads to Orwellian governments keeping overbearing watch over its people.
Yes, but once again, that's a strawman you've created.
The original poster never said that monitoring children would lead to any government actions whatsoever. He simply referred to it as "Big-Brother-like monitoring", which (1) is accurate and (2) you apparently agreed with, since you used the same phrase yourself when you advocated it: "If you're not Big-Brother-like monitoring your kid, you're not a parent."
You obviously haven't spent thousands of hours taking care of children, or you would know that they have no privacy and have no expectation of privacy.
They only "have no privacy" if you deny them privacy. And what a shock, they don't expect privacy if no one ever gives them privacy. Do people only deserve rights if they ask for them? Is that how it works now? Good thing you're not a judge, because I'd hate to see how you interpret the 4th Amendment.
Apps are not allowed to run in the background. It sucks, mostly... but it's also part of what makes it a very stable platform (compared to win mobile phones)
Not compared to Android, though, and Android allows background processes.
2. Background processes are allowed in the newest generations of iPhones.
Not quite. They allow "push notifications", which would work for this situation (university sends a ping through the cell network; phone receives it, reads its GPS location, and replies; university records attendance), but they aren't a general substitute for background processes.
It doesn't work perfectly, but I can see why they wanted it that way; you can either join a random game with random strangers, or you can find a group of friends to play with.
It's a nice idea, but Halo 2 did it right, years ago. It's disappointing that Valve's implementation of basically the same idea is so bad.
In Halo, you can join a party with your friends, and then when you start a game, the system matches you up with enough players to fill the game. If you have 4 people in your party and you want an 8 player game, you might get matched up with another 4 person party, or two 2 person parties, or a 3 person party and an individual, etc. -- the system knows who's looking for a game and tries to match groups of similar sizes and skill levels.
Left 4 Dead, on the other hand, has no group matchmaking. If you want to play an 8 player versus game with three friends, you have to start a lobby with them, then wait for 4 more individuals to randomly join.
That sucks for you because it might take a long time, which is partly because people who join early like to leave if the lobby doesn't fill up quickly enough. And that's if it works at all: when I start a friends-only lobby and then switch it to public to fill it up, very often I don't get any more players no matter how long I wait.
It also sucks for the other players because they're playing with strangers (who might be unskilled, uncooperative, or have no mic) while you're playing with the same friends you always play with. There's currently no way to match your team up against another team; it's always a team vs. a bunch of random individuals.
The dismissal is coming mainly from the other side of the argument, by people who react to ANY attempt to even look after their kids with screams about nanny states and toughening up kids.
Oh, bullshit. No one is objecting to "ANY attempt to even look after their kids"; what they're objecting to is constant remote GPS monitoring.
Here's the dismissal you keep ignoring: "If you're not Big-Brother-like monitoring your kid, you're not a parent. Kids below middle-school age have no privacy."
That's a strawman.
Oh, now you have a problem with strawmen? You didn't seem to mind them when you wrote this: "The one who has lost perspective is the one who thinks that children are fully-cogent, underaged adults."
You may recall that the person you were replying to never said children were "fully-cogent, underaged adults": that's a silly position you made up in order to argue against it, i.e. a strawman. He just said that subjecting children to remote monitoring is an overreaction.
As for me, I admit that I exaggerated a little. I should've said:
Children have less of certain rights than an adult, but more of others.
Technically, that's true, but it's true of prisoners as well (and for essentially the same reasons). I hope you aren't suggesting that those two categories balance each other out.
They do not have the right of complete freedom of movement without monitoring. Are you seriously arguing that a 6 year old has the right to go somewhere without the knowledge of their parents?
I am seriously arguing that a child's right to privacy shouldn't be dismissed offhand. In particular cases, sure, it's debatable. But to suggest, as the GP did, that "kids below middle-school age have no privacy" -- that there's no moral or ethical question whatsoever about turning anyone below age 12 into a 24x7 homing beacon, or indeed that "you're not a parent" unless you're taking such draconian measures -- is simply ignorant.
This thing may be an issue for kids over the age of 12, but when they're still developmental grubs, advocating their rights to privacy is ignorance and dangerous for the child's development. The one who has lost perspective is the one who thinks that children are fully-cogent, underaged adults.
Don't forget about the one who thinks only "fully-cogent ... adults" deserve any rights. He's lost quite a bit of perspective too.
Do you know what is most interesting about why it is so complex to program fro windows. It is not by accident or by incompetence, it is doe on purpose so that you will buy M$'s proprietary tools, you will pay M$ to check your program across versions and you will also pay M$ for licence fees for access to various DLLs to reduce your programming load and to be able to properly access hidden and proprietary interfaces.
... uh huh.
You haven't ever written a program for Windows, have you?
I'm glad you brought up the most common misconception.
Thanks, but it wasn't in the part you quoted. The common misconception I addressed (although I guess you brought it up first) is the idea that the two parties are indistinguishable because they use similar tactics to pursue very different goals.
The only question is whether they will prefer to restrict economic freedoms (Democrats) or personal freedoms (Republicans) when dealing with these issues, but freedom is freedom so I see little meaningful difference there.
Again, that's because you're completely ignoring the outcome; you're only focusing on the tactics used to achieve it.
One party wants you to have rights or privileges A, B, and C. The other wants you not to have those, but the unrelated rights or privileges X, Y, and Z instead. If you're one of the vast majority of Americans who cares where our country ends up on any of those issues, then you'll see a clear difference between the parties, even though they both want to (gasp!) pass more laws in order to get there.
Get back to me when your Saturn is 20 years old and has at least 250,000 miles on it... you know, about when my $2600 Mercedes reached its break-in point.
If he's at ~200k now, he'll be at 250k in just a few years.
Your Saturn is built like every other piece of shit made in this era, and will go away with the rest of them. It's a GM Toyota.
Heh. You do realize Toyotas are known for being exceptionally reliable, don't you?