But does directdraw work again? I had it before, then my harddrive crashed and I've never been able to match that configuration since then because they're always changing versions and implementations. I miss starcraft under linux. And yes, I enabled opengl rendering for all the good it does me.
And yet, none of these improvements brings me any closer to getting starcraft running at a reasonable speed. They kept messing with the directdraw implementation and now the common web information on it is too outdated to make sense of.
Keep in mind that every release requires you to upgrade if you want any help from the community, so there is in fact a limit on how fast is too fast, especially when you run gentoo.
You're thinking of government. I don't think anyone believes the world would be a better place with total transparency of personal information for corporate benefit.
> "Now to your question: the point of the combo BSD+GPL would be that the contributed code can be merged back to the BSD codebase."
I don't see the difference though. Either you're making non-substantial changes to the file itself, in which case you are unable to modify the copyright notice on the file and the contributions aren't even copyrightable anyway, or you're encasing the original code in a larger program that is GPL. Whether or not the original code is BSD, or BSD+GPL, changes to it seem to remain BSD-accessible, and its use as a whole seems to remain GPL-locked.
> "Everybody crying "dual license" "dual license" is like a five year old child who's mother told him to sit on the sofa or play video games, but not eat cookies. When his mother catches him sitting on the sofa eating cookies he says "but you told me to sit on the sofa.""
I'm sorry, can you rephrase that in the form of a car analogy?
Seriously, I fail to see any relevance to this situation. And in fact, depending on the hypothetical mother's wording, the child may have well been within the bounds of the rules set upon him. That's the nature of legalese.
Can you explain how forking from BSD to GPL works? Because the diff showed what appeared to be relicensing, and removed a clause that purported to be unremovable. So how does one take a BSD work and re-release it under GPL without violating the BSD?
I know that it's possible, by design; I'm just getting really confused as to how it works.
> "What the GPL fans miss is that they are required to dual license the resulting code."
I'm having trouble understanding this part. My understanding was that a dual license means that there are two, totally independent pieces of the same code available to you, under two totally independent terms. It's as if the author had two different source trees available on a server, with two different licenses for their use.
Put it this way: If it were true that derivative works of dual-licensed code must be dual-licensed, what is the point in a BSD+GPL combo? Since BSD is the less restrictive of the two, it would seem that the net effect is exactly the same as having a pure-BSD licensed project. Everyone who received the source would be required to license modifications under the combo, and would be free to redistribute their changes under BSD. Care to enlighten me?
The argument was more along the lines of, if you accept the GPL and agree to be bound by its terms as opposed to the other license's, you are still bound by both because the GPL would require you to respect all the terms under which you originally received the software. Which I don't believe to be true, but that was what they claimed.
It also appears that Theo is now claiming dual licensing is required by law to be preserved. More on this in that article's thread I suppose.
Also, how does the attribution clause play into this? Isn't the existence of a piece of code licensed under BSD (as opposed to BSD-like) incompatible with the GPL? How is it that you can include conditions on the redistribution of source - specifically that an additional notice must be maintained - and still be GPL compliant?
Since you seem to have a good handle on this I'll ask you: Sifting through the linked discussion and Theo's flames, I ran across an argument about the nature of dual-licensing. Someone mentioned that the GPL has wording to the effect of "You must give others the same freedoms that you had when you received the software" - I presume that's from the preamble or something higher-level than legalese. Still, could that be properly interpreted to mean that, under the terms of the GPL itself, if you receive a piece of software that is dual-licensed, you are required to preserve both licenses in your redistribution? I kind of doubt it, but I wonder what the argument in that case would be.
I also have him pegged as an idiot. A few weeks ago, for the first time, I picked up a copy of PC Magazine because it was lying around and I had nothing better to do. I open up to the article that interests me, one about bandwidth from US ISPs, and the first paragraph claims that a gigabit per second is 100 times faster than megabit/s and 1000 times faster than a kilobit/s. A little later on they imply that a couple hundred kilobits a second is a good speed for the New York region, when I occasionally get as high as 8 megabits/s. Even if they meant to say bytes they were still glaringly wrong, and I was left to wonder what kind of proof reading, if any, they did.
So I guess I'm saying I couldn't care less what this man has to say about his choice of operating system.
Two companies screw you over, and you blame the competition between them? This line of reasoning baffles me. False advertising in a desperate attempt to get an edge I can believe, but the solution isn't to give one side even more of a monopoly.
I mean, that's just slashdot group-ego 101.
And what do you mean Cablevision laid down fiber? Surely you're not talking about the last mile connection, are you? If so, I'd really like to see a link. I have Cablevision and I'm on Long Island; I've never heard of them competing with FiOS with anything besides more and more coax, neglecting their ads about being the "Optimum network".
I almost had to fight back a tear as I read that. Yes, Wing Commander 2 was one of my favorite games of all time, and I loved the story and characters (ignoring how they later ruined Hobbes in WCIII). It would be amazing if Blizzard were to allow us to get so attached to the characters of the Starcraft universe through this kind of story-enhancing control.
Or Nintendo. If you've played through Twilight Princess, I'm sure you've noticed that the second half of the game, as fantastic as it is, is a bit disappointing after the first. I assume this is because they had so much time to work on the beginning, after the game was pushed back so many times, and that they didn't have as much liberty with the second half.
The whole "your phone defines who you are" (or at least who you want to be) mentality is a damn good reason for me to get the Neo. That is, as transparent a line as it is, it makes a good point.
If they reinstated the draft, I'd do the whole "Hell no, we won't go" thing, I'm sure. But that's not the point.
I'm saying the system sucks and I'm done fighting about it. If you make it a matter of life and death for me, then I guess I'll go back to fighting some more.
> "Maybe I have misunderstood your comment and if so, I apologize in advance. Are you saying the 60's accomplished nothing?"
I wasn't making any comment, one way or the other, on the accomplishments of activists in the 60s. I was merely saying that they were indeed committed activists, whereas I am not.
But I don't know if I'd attribute all those accomplishments you listed above to the activists, rather than a kind of inanimate determinism.
Maybe it's that I look at the idea of an event today, like an anti-Iraq-war protest, and think, "What good is this doing anyone right now." But you're right, it would probably seem the same way to look upon a 60s civil rights protest at the time. Maybe I should reconsider the long-term good in action. But it's so very hard to look at the demoralizing state of society and believe something can be done.
Well, in any case, I maintain my disdain and righteous apathy, but thank you for your comment.
> "Your attitude is what is wrong with the country"
A part of me was almost hoping for this kind of reply, and you put it right in the title. I feel like I need to reply with some sort of non-sequitur and act superior about it. Oh, I know:
Your FACE is what's wrong with this country! Burn!
Ahem, yes, that feels better.
> "You are so wrong. What happened in 2004 (and 2006) wasn't lack of power, it was lack of will."
I haven't traveled outside the country, so forgive me if I'm mistaken about this, but that kind of statement strikes me as a uniquely American point of view. That all successes and failures can be traced back to willpower and strong character, or lack thereof. We're not pragmatic or scientific, we're individualists. We like to believe that everything is under our control, even if only at a subconscious level, and that everyone gets what's coming to him. So when a crummy politician gets elected, it's not because* he manipulates the system, rigs an election, is a member of a stronger political party, has more money, or is just in the right place at the right time; rather we place the blame or credit on people, not inanimate systems, and somehow take comfort in that conclusion.
It bothers me.
> "99% of the voters decided that corruption was ok."
(First thought: "97.2% of all statistics are just made up on the fly") (Second thought: "99% of actual or registered voters? Because you're either saying that only third party candidates aren't corrupt (I wouldn't talk too kindly of them either), or only 1% of America voted.") (Third thought: "Damn! My bad, I accidentally marked the YES checkbox next to proposition #666, 'Corruption'. Can I have another ballot?.")
Er, let's go with thought #3.
> "That's lack of wisdom and lack of desire to serve self-interest."
See previous about American values and emphasis on character traits. Also insert here a smartass comment about self-serving people.
> "But it's not lack of power; it's rejection of power. If people actually cared enough to show up and vote, and then when they did show up, they cared enough to vote against corruption, then things would be different today."
You know, it's been said a million times that one of the biggest problem with democratic participation is the lack of choice in the candidates and parties. I guess what I was getting at with my point is that I'm pissed off at our lack of choice in general, which is imposed upon us as a direct result of the flaws in our system.
The system blows. It doesn't really matter which system I'm referring to because most systems do in fact blow, but I'll specify in particular the legal system, the legislative system, the democratic system, and the Constitution. Don't get relativistic on me and point out their successes, because I'm not interested in being content and cutting our losses right now. I'm talking about how the Constitution has been warped beyond belief, yet we're powerless to change it, because it and the many thousands of interpretations and principles that are based on common sense and justified through the document's loopholes and literal wordings, are too critical to tamper with in a divided society. I'm talking about how capitalism sometimes provides more incentive to screw over the public than provide a service. I'm talking about how plea bargains encourage the covering-up of criminal behavior. I'm talking about how the things that need to be said don't get said, because neither political party can afford to lose face or ground to the other.
You know the common phrase "the system isn't perfect but its the only one we've got"? There are two problematic points contained in that statement. The first is "it's good enough so shut up and deal with it". The second is "if that's not enough, fix it and stop complaining" as if that were somehow a reasonable expectation from an individual. You partly reduce the matter down to people showing up to vote, but my objection is that blaming the pers
> "Don't let the obnoxious arrogance of one president make you a sheep."
That's the funny thing though - I think I would feel like a sheep if I became an activist. I'd be playing into the cliche, into the game. I'd be more easily dismissed by the opposition. I'd be a stereotype instead of an individual. Think Haley from American Dad.
It's kind of like the act of participating constitutes an acceptance of the problem, since the problem is the superficial nature of participation itself. Yes, I know that sounds stupid. But like the joke goes, "Nah, I don't vote. It only encourages them."
Also, because your post deserves a serious answer (although it's a shame you're an AC):
I clarified that point in another post but I'll reply here too: What I meant was that throughout Bush's term, politics to me became more superficial than ever before. This may have been an illusion, limited to my perception, or it may have been an actual result of a changing political climate.
For instance, the first thing I noticed was Bush's speeches back in the early days. I took note of their simplicity not just as a vector for ridiculing him, but because there was something telling in how... honest, it was. Honest in the sense that there was no cloud of clever (or non-Biblical) analogies or metaphors, to pollute the truth of how lousy government is.
My observations continued throughout the early parts of the Age of Terror, and I took note of how many similarities there were to 1984 (I know it may sound passe, but that doesn't mean it isn't true). And I listened to arguments among real people, and heard them say with conviction ideas which were exaggerated and even downright absurd. And I listened to how the media played the events, and watched the crapfest that was the presidential debates. This was the error in which I learned to recognize bullshit.
But it doesn't matter now. Bush got his two terms, America's finally deciding to get pissed off at him now that it's too late to act, and I'm done trying to comprehend the world of government.
Too many people have been making that analogy. I must say I think it is totally unfair to compare the Presidency of the United States of America to choosing a beverage as important as your cola. I mean, the soft drink impacts a portion of your life, and unlike politics, your choice is actually tangible and causal.
> "as it is the American people for not even trying to give a shit about important matters"
Well that's a bit unfair. A lot of people try but are royally fucked over by the combination of the media and an inability to critically analyze claims for BS.
> "Are you still clinging to the myth that the 2004 election was illegitimately won by Bush?"
I'm ambivalent about that particular claim. I'm not a fan of election policies and procedures, but any outrage I have about that kind of thing is directed at DieBold, Microsoft, and Florida.
> "Or are you saying that the democratic process is broken because you didn't get the result you wanted?"
I can see I'd better elaborate. I'm not referring to the outcome so much as the process itself.
The Fall of 2004 was the start of my senior year of highschool, and I was still somewhat young and idealistic. By which I mean, I knew most of it was a load of crap, but I held onto a belief that they had the decency to hide it well. Maybe that veil had deteriorated, or maybe for the first time I was paying attention, but the presidential campaigns and debates should me how futile it all is. On the one hand, you had a man in power that was only slightly more intelligent than the fictional president from Harrison Bergeron (a movie I highly recommend, BTW). His responses were shallow and unsatisfying. He even literally confused, on live television, Saddam and Osama. Kerry wasn't significantly better, but unfortunately I can't remember enough about the content of the debates to comment.
I remember more clearly the mudslinging. Kerry haters used the word "waffle" so many fucking times it made Gore's "lockbox" pale in comparison. And it seemed that the most important factor people used to judge Kerry was whether or not he won a fucking medal. And Edwards, that son of a bitch, by the time the vice presidential debate was over I liked Cheney better. This was particularly because Edwards had the gall to actually bring the sexuality of Cheney's daughters into the discussion.
But back to the point. What I meant by my comment was that the system is bigger than any individual. Free thought is crap because there are millions of drones to amortize the fairness of your decision. The act of voting itself is crap because unless you live in a swing state, the weight of your vote drops to zero. And finally, the incumbent, who provided his own satire, was somehow deemed better than the opposition because America didn't like his personality.
> "Too many people these days justify their apathy and lack of conviction with excuses like yours."
The fact is I shouldn't even have to justify it, or give an excuse. You might as well start interrogating random people on the street as to why they aren't opposed to frivolous software patents. Why should anyone be required to have the energy to become outraged at a subject that doesn't interest them?
> "Things are the way they are, in part, because people today simply give up when things get tough."
The individual is irrelevant. Unless you change the behavior patterns of large populations, you're not making a difference.
Slashdot Mirror
But does directdraw work again? I had it before, then my harddrive crashed and I've never been able to match that configuration since then because they're always changing versions and implementations. I miss starcraft under linux. And yes, I enabled opengl rendering for all the good it does me.
And yet, none of these improvements brings me any closer to getting starcraft running at a reasonable speed. They kept messing with the directdraw implementation and now the common web information on it is too outdated to make sense of.
Keep in mind that every release requires you to upgrade if you want any help from the community, so there is in fact a limit on how fast is too fast, especially when you run gentoo.
You're thinking of government. I don't think anyone believes the world would be a better place with total transparency of personal information for corporate benefit.
> "Now to your question: the point of the combo BSD+GPL would be that the contributed code can be merged back to the BSD codebase."
I don't see the difference though. Either you're making non-substantial changes to the file itself, in which case you are unable to modify the copyright notice on the file and the contributions aren't even copyrightable anyway, or you're encasing the original code in a larger program that is GPL. Whether or not the original code is BSD, or BSD+GPL, changes to it seem to remain BSD-accessible, and its use as a whole seems to remain GPL-locked.
> "Everybody crying "dual license" "dual license" is like a five year old child who's mother told him to sit on the sofa or play video games, but not eat cookies. When his mother catches him sitting on the sofa eating cookies he says "but you told me to sit on the sofa.""
I'm sorry, can you rephrase that in the form of a car analogy?
Seriously, I fail to see any relevance to this situation. And in fact, depending on the hypothetical mother's wording, the child may have well been within the bounds of the rules set upon him. That's the nature of legalese.
Can you explain how forking from BSD to GPL works? Because the diff showed what appeared to be relicensing, and removed a clause that purported to be unremovable. So how does one take a BSD work and re-release it under GPL without violating the BSD?
I know that it's possible, by design; I'm just getting really confused as to how it works.
> "What the GPL fans miss is that they are required to dual license the resulting code."
I'm having trouble understanding this part. My understanding was that a dual license means that there are two, totally independent pieces of the same code available to you, under two totally independent terms. It's as if the author had two different source trees available on a server, with two different licenses for their use.
Put it this way: If it were true that derivative works of dual-licensed code must be dual-licensed, what is the point in a BSD+GPL combo? Since BSD is the less restrictive of the two, it would seem that the net effect is exactly the same as having a pure-BSD licensed project. Everyone who received the source would be required to license modifications under the combo, and would be free to redistribute their changes under BSD. Care to enlighten me?
The argument was more along the lines of, if you accept the GPL and agree to be bound by its terms as opposed to the other license's, you are still bound by both because the GPL would require you to respect all the terms under which you originally received the software. Which I don't believe to be true, but that was what they claimed.
It also appears that Theo is now claiming dual licensing is required by law to be preserved. More on this in that article's thread I suppose.
Also, how does the attribution clause play into this? Isn't the existence of a piece of code licensed under BSD (as opposed to BSD-like) incompatible with the GPL? How is it that you can include conditions on the redistribution of source - specifically that an additional notice must be maintained - and still be GPL compliant?
Since you seem to have a good handle on this I'll ask you: Sifting through the linked discussion and Theo's flames, I ran across an argument about the nature of dual-licensing. Someone mentioned that the GPL has wording to the effect of "You must give others the same freedoms that you had when you received the software" - I presume that's from the preamble or something higher-level than legalese. Still, could that be properly interpreted to mean that, under the terms of the GPL itself, if you receive a piece of software that is dual-licensed, you are required to preserve both licenses in your redistribution? I kind of doubt it, but I wonder what the argument in that case would be.
I also have him pegged as an idiot. A few weeks ago, for the first time, I picked up a copy of PC Magazine because it was lying around and I had nothing better to do. I open up to the article that interests me, one about bandwidth from US ISPs, and the first paragraph claims that a gigabit per second is 100 times faster than megabit/s and 1000 times faster than a kilobit/s. A little later on they imply that a couple hundred kilobits a second is a good speed for the New York region, when I occasionally get as high as 8 megabits/s. Even if they meant to say bytes they were still glaringly wrong, and I was left to wonder what kind of proof reading, if any, they did.
So I guess I'm saying I couldn't care less what this man has to say about his choice of operating system.
Two companies screw you over, and you blame the competition between them? This line of reasoning baffles me. False advertising in a desperate attempt to get an edge I can believe, but the solution isn't to give one side even more of a monopoly.
I mean, that's just slashdot group-ego 101.
And what do you mean Cablevision laid down fiber? Surely you're not talking about the last mile connection, are you? If so, I'd really like to see a link. I have Cablevision and I'm on Long Island; I've never heard of them competing with FiOS with anything besides more and more coax, neglecting their ads about being the "Optimum network".
I almost had to fight back a tear as I read that. Yes, Wing Commander 2 was one of my favorite games of all time, and I loved the story and characters (ignoring how they later ruined Hobbes in WCIII). It would be amazing if Blizzard were to allow us to get so attached to the characters of the Starcraft universe through this kind of story-enhancing control.
Or Nintendo. If you've played through Twilight Princess, I'm sure you've noticed that the second half of the game, as fantastic as it is, is a bit disappointing after the first. I assume this is because they had so much time to work on the beginning, after the game was pushed back so many times, and that they didn't have as much liberty with the second half.
The whole "your phone defines who you are" (or at least who you want to be) mentality is a damn good reason for me to get the Neo. That is, as transparent a line as it is, it makes a good point.
If they reinstated the draft, I'd do the whole "Hell no, we won't go" thing, I'm sure. But that's not the point.
I'm saying the system sucks and I'm done fighting about it. If you make it a matter of life and death for me, then I guess I'll go back to fighting some more.
I made the above comment forgetting the topic of the entire on-topic article.
> "Maybe I have misunderstood your comment and if so, I apologize in advance. Are you saying the 60's accomplished nothing?"
I wasn't making any comment, one way or the other, on the accomplishments of activists in the 60s. I was merely saying that they were indeed committed activists, whereas I am not.
But I don't know if I'd attribute all those accomplishments you listed above to the activists, rather than a kind of inanimate determinism.
Maybe it's that I look at the idea of an event today, like an anti-Iraq-war protest, and think, "What good is this doing anyone right now." But you're right, it would probably seem the same way to look upon a 60s civil rights protest at the time. Maybe I should reconsider the long-term good in action. But it's so very hard to look at the demoralizing state of society and believe something can be done.
Well, in any case, I maintain my disdain and righteous apathy, but thank you for your comment.
> "Your attitude is what is wrong with the country"
A part of me was almost hoping for this kind of reply, and you put it right in the title. I feel like I need to reply with some sort of non-sequitur and act superior about it. Oh, I know:
Your FACE is what's wrong with this country! Burn!
Ahem, yes, that feels better.
> "You are so wrong. What happened in 2004 (and 2006) wasn't lack of power, it was lack of will."
I haven't traveled outside the country, so forgive me if I'm mistaken about this, but that kind of statement strikes me as a uniquely American point of view. That all successes and failures can be traced back to willpower and strong character, or lack thereof. We're not pragmatic or scientific, we're individualists. We like to believe that everything is under our control, even if only at a subconscious level, and that everyone gets what's coming to him. So when a crummy politician gets elected, it's not because* he manipulates the system, rigs an election, is a member of a stronger political party, has more money, or is just in the right place at the right time; rather we place the blame or credit on people, not inanimate systems, and somehow take comfort in that conclusion.
It bothers me.
> "99% of the voters decided that corruption was ok."
(First thought: "97.2% of all statistics are just made up on the fly")
(Second thought: "99% of actual or registered voters? Because you're either saying that only third party candidates aren't corrupt (I wouldn't talk too kindly of them either), or only 1% of America voted.")
(Third thought: "Damn! My bad, I accidentally marked the YES checkbox next to proposition #666, 'Corruption'. Can I have another ballot?.")
Er, let's go with thought #3.
> "That's lack of wisdom and lack of desire to serve self-interest."
See previous about American values and emphasis on character traits. Also insert here a smartass comment about self-serving people.
> "But it's not lack of power; it's rejection of power. If people actually cared enough to show up and vote, and then when they did show up, they cared enough to vote against corruption, then things would be different today."
You know, it's been said a million times that one of the biggest problem with democratic participation is the lack of choice in the candidates and parties. I guess what I was getting at with my point is that I'm pissed off at our lack of choice in general, which is imposed upon us as a direct result of the flaws in our system.
The system blows. It doesn't really matter which system I'm referring to because most systems do in fact blow, but I'll specify in particular the legal system, the legislative system, the democratic system, and the Constitution. Don't get relativistic on me and point out their successes, because I'm not interested in being content and cutting our losses right now. I'm talking about how the Constitution has been warped beyond belief, yet we're powerless to change it, because it and the many thousands of interpretations and principles that are based on common sense and justified through the document's loopholes and literal wordings, are too critical to tamper with in a divided society. I'm talking about how capitalism sometimes provides more incentive to screw over the public than provide a service. I'm talking about how plea bargains encourage the covering-up of criminal behavior. I'm talking about how the things that need to be said don't get said, because neither political party can afford to lose face or ground to the other.
You know the common phrase "the system isn't perfect but its the only one we've got"? There are two problematic points contained in that statement. The first is "it's good enough so shut up and deal with it". The second is "if that's not enough, fix it and stop complaining" as if that were somehow a reasonable expectation from an individual. You partly reduce the matter down to people showing up to vote, but my objection is that blaming the pers
> "Don't let the obnoxious arrogance of one president make you a sheep."
That's the funny thing though - I think I would feel like a sheep if I became an activist. I'd be playing into the cliche, into the game. I'd be more easily dismissed by the opposition. I'd be a stereotype instead of an individual. Think Haley from American Dad.
It's kind of like the act of participating constitutes an acceptance of the problem, since the problem is the superficial nature of participation itself. Yes, I know that sounds stupid. But like the joke goes, "Nah, I don't vote. It only encourages them."
Not to troll, but I think it's kind of funny that you say that in the wake of Scooter's slap on the wrist.
Also, because your post deserves a serious answer (although it's a shame you're an AC):
I clarified that point in another post but I'll reply here too: What I meant was that throughout Bush's term, politics to me became more superficial than ever before. This may have been an illusion, limited to my perception, or it may have been an actual result of a changing political climate.
For instance, the first thing I noticed was Bush's speeches back in the early days. I took note of their simplicity not just as a vector for ridiculing him, but because there was something telling in how... honest, it was. Honest in the sense that there was no cloud of clever (or non-Biblical) analogies or metaphors, to pollute the truth of how lousy government is.
My observations continued throughout the early parts of the Age of Terror, and I took note of how many similarities there were to 1984 (I know it may sound passe, but that doesn't mean it isn't true). And I listened to arguments among real people, and heard them say with conviction ideas which were exaggerated and even downright absurd. And I listened to how the media played the events, and watched the crapfest that was the presidential debates. This was the error in which I learned to recognize bullshit.
But it doesn't matter now. Bush got his two terms, America's finally deciding to get pissed off at him now that it's too late to act, and I'm done trying to comprehend the world of government.
Too many people have been making that analogy. I must say I think it is totally unfair to compare the Presidency of the United States of America to choosing a beverage as important as your cola. I mean, the soft drink impacts a portion of your life, and unlike politics, your choice is actually tangible and causal.
> "as it is the American people for not even trying to give a shit about important matters"
Well that's a bit unfair. A lot of people try but are royally fucked over by the combination of the media and an inability to critically analyze claims for BS.
> "Are you still clinging to the myth that the 2004 election was illegitimately won by Bush?"
I'm ambivalent about that particular claim. I'm not a fan of election policies and procedures, but any outrage I have about that kind of thing is directed at DieBold, Microsoft, and Florida.
> "Or are you saying that the democratic process is broken because you didn't get the result you wanted?"
I can see I'd better elaborate. I'm not referring to the outcome so much as the process itself.
The Fall of 2004 was the start of my senior year of highschool, and I was still somewhat young and idealistic. By which I mean, I knew most of it was a load of crap, but I held onto a belief that they had the decency to hide it well. Maybe that veil had deteriorated, or maybe for the first time I was paying attention, but the presidential campaigns and debates should me how futile it all is. On the one hand, you had a man in power that was only slightly more intelligent than the fictional president from Harrison Bergeron (a movie I highly recommend, BTW). His responses were shallow and unsatisfying. He even literally confused, on live television, Saddam and Osama. Kerry wasn't significantly better, but unfortunately I can't remember enough about the content of the debates to comment.
I remember more clearly the mudslinging. Kerry haters used the word "waffle" so many fucking times it made Gore's "lockbox" pale in comparison. And it seemed that the most important factor people used to judge Kerry was whether or not he won a fucking medal. And Edwards, that son of a bitch, by the time the vice presidential debate was over I liked Cheney better. This was particularly because Edwards had the gall to actually bring the sexuality of Cheney's daughters into the discussion.
But back to the point. What I meant by my comment was that the system is bigger than any individual. Free thought is crap because there are millions of drones to amortize the fairness of your decision. The act of voting itself is crap because unless you live in a swing state, the weight of your vote drops to zero. And finally, the incumbent, who provided his own satire, was somehow deemed better than the opposition because America didn't like his personality.
> "Too many people these days justify their apathy and lack of conviction with excuses like yours."
The fact is I shouldn't even have to justify it, or give an excuse. You might as well start interrogating random people on the street as to why they aren't opposed to frivolous software patents. Why should anyone be required to have the energy to become outraged at a subject that doesn't interest them?
> "Things are the way they are, in part, because people today simply give up when things get tough."
The individual is irrelevant. Unless you change the behavior patterns of large populations, you're not making a difference.