You know what bothers me about the Democratic party?
They could have spent the last two years dragging everyone and anyone who was involved with the Bush administration's more questionable policies (wiretapping, suspending habeus corpus, extraordinary rendition, Halliburton, bogus intelligence and so forth) and probably had a PR field day tearing the ethics of their predecessors apart. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld alone would have been pure gold, and we'd all have been better for having the spotlights turned on the dark, dusty corners of that era.
But oh no. Either they were idiots and thought that, after eight years of dirty pool, the Republican party's powerbrokers would respond well to bipartisanship (you'd think they'd notice how that was going after six months?), or they were hoping to pull some of the same stuff, in which case they pissed away the moral high ground which would have served them pretty well a few days ago.
I swear, the Democrats have, certainly since Clinton and possibly since Kennedy, been completely spineless and cripplingly un-unified in the face of a much more disciplined Republican machine. How they managed to piss away the single biggest political advantage of all time in two years is astounding. How they've silenced their conscience (and anyone else on the Left who has one) is even more shameful
They really are past their sell-by date, and the few who have principles (Kucinich comes to mind) need to put some respectful distance between the rest of the chumps, endorse Nader (or someone like him) and start work on a progressive, thinking version of the Tea Party.
I'm actually using the binary nVidia driver and a (fairly) new card. If I use Compiz or KWin, I get tearing. It's gotten better, but it's still there.
Intel cards work flawlessly.
And this attitude is precisely why people get frustrated about reporting bugs.
Not all of us can or have the time to code, but we do have the time to fill out a bug report, thinking we're helping you find an issue. It seems a great system, and the various projects are generally pretty open about taking bug reports.
And then the bug sits there, gets reassigned, gets flagged as WORKSFORME, gets pushed back or obviated for the next version, etc, etc. I've caught bugs, gone to report them, noted that there's a similar bug that's been open since 2007 and, at that point just given up.
And you know, it's made all the worse by developers who either brush it off or, worse, make comments like the above. Experienced users who can't or don't code will work around it, but new users will just go away and never come back.
Not that closed source is necessarily much better, but at least it's more professional and less egotistical. Heck, I won't even say that this is the defining characteristic of all OSS projects (Zimbra, for example, does a pretty good job at this) but it's too common, and both Ubuntu's LaunchPad and Gnome's Bug Tracker are prime examples.
Is that the "open source way"? Or are you not fixing a bug that scores of users have taken the trouble to report over three years out of laziness, or is it some kind of nerd pride? What must we go, oh master?
I'd feel more amenable to the GNOME developers plight if they'd give some attention to some of the three-plus year old bugs that don't seem to get any attention. Some of the bugs aren't serious, but they're so simple and yet so annoying you'd figure someone would have fixed them years ago.
I actually prefer GNOME to KDE because it seems cleaner, simpler and less cluttered, but the KDE people seem much more willing to fix bugs. Mind you, KDE 4 gave them ample opportunity to fix lots.
X isn't actually that good at remote desktop, at least not by comparison. You have to install a fairly thick local client, and if you lose connection your apps die.
Holistically speaking, Citrix et al completely eclipsed X in terms of network-retargetable display a long time ago and for those times when you want to run an app remotely but don't want to lose the app if your connection dies (which is pretty much all the time) you end up running X over VNC anyway.
Me, though, I'd like to know if this change will finally allow me to have use a compositing window manager without tearing (you know, like MacOS and Windows have been doing for years now) and without having to restrict myself to an ancient or gutless graphics card.
3. Extension of tax cuts, namely on estates and dividends.
You have a multi-trillion dollar deficit. You have huge unemployment numbers, especially among the lower-middle class. You have a falling median wage. In short, you have no revenue. And yet the Tea Party and, by extension, the Republicans don't want to cut the three big programs (Social Security, Defense, Medicare) because that's what the old folks consider sacred.
You are going to have to raise taxes, especially on the "rich". Cutting anything else is peanuts, so unless you're planning to back-stab the old white folks that voted in this congress you are going to have to raise taxes.
This is probably quite true. The Democrats have far, far less spine and far more internal dissention: witness how they where whipped into Iraq, into most of the Bush administration's less amusing power grabs, into caving on Health Care, etc.
Now, that said, most of the conservative Democrats got kicked out this time around. You'd hope that this might see actual liberal Democrats (and by liberal I mean actually liberal, not the centre-rightism that the more shrill members of the American ultra-right characterize as "liberal") step up the plate.
If I were an American liberal I'd be disheartened, too. Two years of hoping and wishing that you'd see actual liberal/leftist/social democratic policies, only to have your representatives dragged right-of-centre and screamed into submission by a pack of tone-deaf populist baby boomers who are afraid of "losing their country". Mind you, I'm not surprised: Obama, thoughtout the 2008 primaries and the campaign was centrist at best and centre-right by most metrics. If Democrats wanted an actual liberal---and actual hope and change---they would have put forth Kucinich.
The US needs a real left-wing option. Greens, Social Democrats, whatever---someone would be nice. Currently, the US is the only western nation with a great, big gaping hole in it's political spectrum and the state of governance and discourse is suffering for it.
Maybe I'm being obtuse, but how does Bell get to do this? They already sell and make money off the last mile, and it's the wholesale buyer's backbone that's being tapped out, not Bell's. Why should it matter how much traffic is going over these lines when it's not Bell's traffic to route?
Between being able to throttle down wholesale DSL rates below what Sympatico can sell and this it really doesn't make a lot of sense.
Most of that population lives in three cities, and 90% of it within a few kilometers of the American border. The capital costs are really not that high.
Linux people wont buy them because they can't figure out who to use Handbrake to convert a movie into a format that iTunes can sync, or because they're too cheap to cough up for the developer license or sign the enterprise agreement that lets you put your own software on the iPad?
And this is why "left" and "right" don't really work: they're descriptors of economic policy, not social. Only the US does this happen because only in the US has the libertarian left been completely destroyed and economic leftism linked so tightly with a fear of tyranny.
You can be leftist and socially libertarian (though such an entity doesn't exist in the US). You can be a right-wing and very authoritarian, and there are plenty of examples of this.
"Big" and "small" government having inherent meaning are also intrinsically American terms. A better discussion is "does the government exert social control", which is not at all synonymous with "does the government provide a social safety net". Nazi Germany wasn't appreciably "big government" in the American sense: you could still make money and weren't taxed overly much.
A similar hatchet-job has been done on the word "progressive" (and for that matter, on the word "liberal"). All it means is "someone who pushes for social or economic change". That change could, and often is, socially liberal, which American libertarians would probably embrace.
Americans would do well to think about why the language they use differs so greatly from everyone else's use, and who worked to redefine it. Nowhere else in the world is "liberal" a slur.
I don't think you understand what left-wing economic policies actually are, never mind that you're forgetting what people like Rockefeller did to get their fortune in the first place. even Buffett is only coming to this realization very, very late in his career, as is Gates.
I mean, Rockefeller? Mr. Standard Oil Monopoly?
Soros is about the only one who comes even close to left-wing economic policy.
You're operating from a very American perspective: that all social liberalism and leftist economic policy are in lockstep. This is very, very wrong: you can be a rampant capitalist without being a social conservative. Heck, you can even do it while being a philathropist. What you can't do is start talking about upper-to-lower-class income redistribution and cradle-to-grave social programs.
I'll give you hint: when any of these guys are start seriously proposing a return to 1950s income taxation levels, or when they start pushing for a Scandinavian-style social safety net, I'll believe we dealing with leftists. Right now, there's thousands of people making millions of dollars who very much do not want either of those (and especially the former) to happen.
And can we please stop bringing up George Soros like he's some kind of counterbalance? As a very wealthy person who advocates for economic (not social, there's a difference) left-wing he is very, very much the exception to the rule, and vastly outnumbered.
No one ever went to jail for not filling out the census. Not only that, no one even complained about the possibility of it.
The government said they got thousands of complaints per day, but when people actually looked into what the government was told by citizens, they got about twenty in total, most of which were people complaining about offshoring census data crunching to a firm in US. Everyone, from citizens to businesses to provincial and municipal government to academia said it was a stupid idea. The only people than agree with them are their own echo-chamber supporters and libertarian wing-nut think-tanks who don't want government to do anything at all---again, neither of whom had complained before all this mess.
The whole "OMGTEHJAILTIMEFORNOTHAVINGYRPAPERSPLZ!!!" was the Conservative Party trying to make a tempest in a teapot, a wedge ideological issue because they'd just taken a pillorying on several other issues. When they were caught on fudging numbers, the tune suddenly change from "thousands of complaints per day" to "it's a matter or principle", at which point the problem wasn't the census but jail time. Now it's being spun as "just a K1A (Ottawa postal code) issue that isn't relevant to Canadians".
It was blatant, naked politicking; an attempt to make hay by looking ideologically pure after a several tarnishing moments over the past few months. What's surprising is that, usually, this government isn't this stupid and shortsighted, from the perspective of their past political strategy.
We had a pretty awful failure rate with HP's t5135 and t5145 units: they'd fail reasonably regularly and/or lose their config. Not impressive machines by a longshot, not when you add the poor performance they'd exhibit (can't handle bitmap caching, slow response).
Replaced with Wyse C10LEs, which aren't high-power machines either, but they're reviewing much better and, thusfar, aren't erasing themselves periodically.
There's a difference between "What is good, ethically", "What is good, commercially?" and "What is good, from a design perspective".
Android is harder to develop for because of the number of variants. It has a less unified presence in the market, and less brand identity, and has more trouble "selling" itself. Individual makers of handsets aren't making as much money per unit as Apple.
This is all aside from the philosophy of the matter. If philosophy is important to you, great, wonderful, but Android's design and go-to-market decisions are proving problematic. It's the same tradeoff Linux makes: you get the freedom to make the system open, but you lose the cohesive environment and marketing power.
I'm sorry that reality offends you so much.
I do derive a not-small amount of schadenfreude from watching Android fans crow endlessly about freedom, only to have the carriers and handset-makers cripple their offerings in ways Apple doesn't even broach.
For the record, I have Nokia E71, so no, not an Apple fan. But it's nice to see that we can have a rational discussion about a platform without devolving into petty bickering. Or not.
Libertarianism has the same flaws as communism: it doesn't really work--especially on a large scale---because actual people are involved, and people are not neat little Randian or Marxist entities but complex, real-world things. Arguing that "it's better" or "real libertarianism has never been tried" is exactly the same kind of self-delusional wankery that Marxists exercise.
You couldn't guarantee that "a libertarian would have put out the fire" because it's equally likely that a libertarian might buy the fire department and then go around starting fires in order to make money. Libertarians are people, too, and subject to the same nobility and failings as people everywhere.
This is why democratic socialism will win every single damn time: it's not perfect (far from it) but it's built assuming that people will be people, whereas know-it-all totalitarism or anarchism are divorced from how people actually act.
Straw man much? Besides, if you want "free" health care, move to Canada. You know, the place where provincial leaders fly to Miami, FL, US of A for heart surgery because health care in Canada is so great.
No time to address the whole post, but this got me as I actually live in Canada. And yes, rich people here go to the US because they can jump the queue, just as rich people can anywhere.
Tell me, where do poor and middle-class Americans without coverage go again? Can they go to Canada?
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Canonical.
You know what bothers me about the Democratic party?
They could have spent the last two years dragging everyone and anyone who was involved with the Bush administration's more questionable policies (wiretapping, suspending habeus corpus, extraordinary rendition, Halliburton, bogus intelligence and so forth) and probably had a PR field day tearing the ethics of their predecessors apart. Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld alone would have been pure gold, and we'd all have been better for having the spotlights turned on the dark, dusty corners of that era.
But oh no. Either they were idiots and thought that, after eight years of dirty pool, the Republican party's powerbrokers would respond well to bipartisanship (you'd think they'd notice how that was going after six months?), or they were hoping to pull some of the same stuff, in which case they pissed away the moral high ground which would have served them pretty well a few days ago.
I swear, the Democrats have, certainly since Clinton and possibly since Kennedy, been completely spineless and cripplingly un-unified in the face of a much more disciplined Republican machine. How they managed to piss away the single biggest political advantage of all time in two years is astounding. How they've silenced their conscience (and anyone else on the Left who has one) is even more shameful
They really are past their sell-by date, and the few who have principles (Kucinich comes to mind) need to put some respectful distance between the rest of the chumps, endorse Nader (or someone like him) and start work on a progressive, thinking version of the Tea Party.
I'm actually using the binary nVidia driver and a (fairly) new card. If I use Compiz or KWin, I get tearing. It's gotten better, but it's still there. Intel cards work flawlessly.
And this attitude is precisely why people get frustrated about reporting bugs.
Not all of us can or have the time to code, but we do have the time to fill out a bug report, thinking we're helping you find an issue. It seems a great system, and the various projects are generally pretty open about taking bug reports.
And then the bug sits there, gets reassigned, gets flagged as WORKSFORME, gets pushed back or obviated for the next version, etc, etc. I've caught bugs, gone to report them, noted that there's a similar bug that's been open since 2007 and, at that point just given up.
And you know, it's made all the worse by developers who either brush it off or, worse, make comments like the above. Experienced users who can't or don't code will work around it, but new users will just go away and never come back.
Not that closed source is necessarily much better, but at least it's more professional and less egotistical. Heck, I won't even say that this is the defining characteristic of all OSS projects (Zimbra, for example, does a pretty good job at this) but it's too common, and both Ubuntu's LaunchPad and Gnome's Bug Tracker are prime examples.
Is that the "open source way"? Or are you not fixing a bug that scores of users have taken the trouble to report over three years out of laziness, or is it some kind of nerd pride? What must we go, oh master?
I had forgotten about NX, thanks!
I'd feel more amenable to the GNOME developers plight if they'd give some attention to some of the three-plus year old bugs that don't seem to get any attention. Some of the bugs aren't serious, but they're so simple and yet so annoying you'd figure someone would have fixed them years ago.
I actually prefer GNOME to KDE because it seems cleaner, simpler and less cluttered, but the KDE people seem much more willing to fix bugs. Mind you, KDE 4 gave them ample opportunity to fix lots.
X isn't actually that good at remote desktop, at least not by comparison. You have to install a fairly thick local client, and if you lose connection your apps die.
Holistically speaking, Citrix et al completely eclipsed X in terms of network-retargetable display a long time ago and for those times when you want to run an app remotely but don't want to lose the app if your connection dies (which is pretty much all the time) you end up running X over VNC anyway.
Me, though, I'd like to know if this change will finally allow me to have use a compositing window manager without tearing (you know, like MacOS and Windows have been doing for years now) and without having to restrict myself to an ancient or gutless graphics card.
You have a multi-trillion dollar deficit. You have huge unemployment numbers, especially among the lower-middle class. You have a falling median wage. In short, you have no revenue. And yet the Tea Party and, by extension, the Republicans don't want to cut the three big programs (Social Security, Defense, Medicare) because that's what the old folks consider sacred.
You are going to have to raise taxes, especially on the "rich". Cutting anything else is peanuts, so unless you're planning to back-stab the old white folks that voted in this congress you are going to have to raise taxes.
You want real change? You want corporatism broken? You should have voted for Nader.
This is probably quite true. The Democrats have far, far less spine and far more internal dissention: witness how they where whipped into Iraq, into most of the Bush administration's less amusing power grabs, into caving on Health Care, etc.
Now, that said, most of the conservative Democrats got kicked out this time around. You'd hope that this might see actual liberal Democrats (and by liberal I mean actually liberal, not the centre-rightism that the more shrill members of the American ultra-right characterize as "liberal") step up the plate.
If I were an American liberal I'd be disheartened, too. Two years of hoping and wishing that you'd see actual liberal/leftist/social democratic policies, only to have your representatives dragged right-of-centre and screamed into submission by a pack of tone-deaf populist baby boomers who are afraid of "losing their country". Mind you, I'm not surprised: Obama, thoughtout the 2008 primaries and the campaign was centrist at best and centre-right by most metrics. If Democrats wanted an actual liberal---and actual hope and change---they would have put forth Kucinich.
The US needs a real left-wing option. Greens, Social Democrats, whatever---someone would be nice. Currently, the US is the only western nation with a great, big gaping hole in it's political spectrum and the state of governance and discourse is suffering for it.
I believe the term is "gynoid".
Maybe I'm being obtuse, but how does Bell get to do this? They already sell and make money off the last mile, and it's the wholesale buyer's backbone that's being tapped out, not Bell's. Why should it matter how much traffic is going over these lines when it's not Bell's traffic to route?
Between being able to throttle down wholesale DSL rates below what Sympatico can sell and this it really doesn't make a lot of sense.
Most of that population lives in three cities, and 90% of it within a few kilometers of the American border. The capital costs are really not that high.
Linux people wont buy them because they can't figure out who to use Handbrake to convert a movie into a format that iTunes can sync, or because they're too cheap to cough up for the developer license or sign the enterprise agreement that lets you put your own software on the iPad?
And this is why "left" and "right" don't really work: they're descriptors of economic policy, not social. Only the US does this happen because only in the US has the libertarian left been completely destroyed and economic leftism linked so tightly with a fear of tyranny.
You can be leftist and socially libertarian (though such an entity doesn't exist in the US). You can be a right-wing and very authoritarian, and there are plenty of examples of this.
"Big" and "small" government having inherent meaning are also intrinsically American terms. A better discussion is "does the government exert social control", which is not at all synonymous with "does the government provide a social safety net". Nazi Germany wasn't appreciably "big government" in the American sense: you could still make money and weren't taxed overly much.
A similar hatchet-job has been done on the word "progressive" (and for that matter, on the word "liberal"). All it means is "someone who pushes for social or economic change". That change could, and often is, socially liberal, which American libertarians would probably embrace.
Americans would do well to think about why the language they use differs so greatly from everyone else's use, and who worked to redefine it. Nowhere else in the world is "liberal" a slur.
The Rockefellers? Buffett? Gates? Really?!
I don't think you understand what left-wing economic policies actually are, never mind that you're forgetting what people like Rockefeller did to get their fortune in the first place. even Buffett is only coming to this realization very, very late in his career, as is Gates.
I mean, Rockefeller? Mr. Standard Oil Monopoly?
Soros is about the only one who comes even close to left-wing economic policy.
You're operating from a very American perspective: that all social liberalism and leftist economic policy are in lockstep. This is very, very wrong: you can be a rampant capitalist without being a social conservative. Heck, you can even do it while being a philathropist. What you can't do is start talking about upper-to-lower-class income redistribution and cradle-to-grave social programs.
I'll give you hint: when any of these guys are start seriously proposing a return to 1950s income taxation levels, or when they start pushing for a Scandinavian-style social safety net, I'll believe we dealing with leftists. Right now, there's thousands of people making millions of dollars who very much do not want either of those (and especially the former) to happen.
There's an American Left? Really? Because what it really looks like is that there's a Right and an Ultra-Right
And can we please stop bringing up George Soros like he's some kind of counterbalance? As a very wealthy person who advocates for economic (not social, there's a difference) left-wing he is very, very much the exception to the rule, and vastly outnumbered.
No one ever went to jail for not filling out the census. Not only that, no one even complained about the possibility of it.
The government said they got thousands of complaints per day, but when people actually looked into what the government was told by citizens, they got about twenty in total, most of which were people complaining about offshoring census data crunching to a firm in US. Everyone, from citizens to businesses to provincial and municipal government to academia said it was a stupid idea. The only people than agree with them are their own echo-chamber supporters and libertarian wing-nut think-tanks who don't want government to do anything at all---again, neither of whom had complained before all this mess.
The whole "OMGTEHJAILTIMEFORNOTHAVINGYRPAPERSPLZ!!!" was the Conservative Party trying to make a tempest in a teapot, a wedge ideological issue because they'd just taken a pillorying on several other issues. When they were caught on fudging numbers, the tune suddenly change from "thousands of complaints per day" to "it's a matter or principle", at which point the problem wasn't the census but jail time. Now it's being spun as "just a K1A (Ottawa postal code) issue that isn't relevant to Canadians".
It was blatant, naked politicking; an attempt to make hay by looking ideologically pure after a several tarnishing moments over the past few months. What's surprising is that, usually, this government isn't this stupid and shortsighted, from the perspective of their past political strategy.
We had a pretty awful failure rate with HP's t5135 and t5145 units: they'd fail reasonably regularly and/or lose their config. Not impressive machines by a longshot, not when you add the poor performance they'd exhibit (can't handle bitmap caching, slow response).
Replaced with Wyse C10LEs, which aren't high-power machines either, but they're reviewing much better and, thusfar, aren't erasing themselves periodically.
Proof of that claim? If you're talking about the Suzuki Samurai case then no, that isn't proof.
There's a difference between "What is good, ethically", "What is good, commercially?" and "What is good, from a design perspective".
Android is harder to develop for because of the number of variants. It has a less unified presence in the market, and less brand identity, and has more trouble "selling" itself. Individual makers of handsets aren't making as much money per unit as Apple.
This is all aside from the philosophy of the matter. If philosophy is important to you, great, wonderful, but Android's design and go-to-market decisions are proving problematic. It's the same tradeoff Linux makes: you get the freedom to make the system open, but you lose the cohesive environment and marketing power.
I'm sorry that reality offends you so much.
I do derive a not-small amount of schadenfreude from watching Android fans crow endlessly about freedom, only to have the carriers and handset-makers cripple their offerings in ways Apple doesn't even broach.
For the record, I have Nokia E71, so no, not an Apple fan. But it's nice to see that we can have a rational discussion about a platform without devolving into petty bickering. Or not.
That people have the opportunity to confuse who has what (Sense? Blur?) is one of Android's more significant failings.
Libertarianism has the same flaws as communism: it doesn't really work--especially on a large scale---because actual people are involved, and people are not neat little Randian or Marxist entities but complex, real-world things. Arguing that "it's better" or "real libertarianism has never been tried" is exactly the same kind of self-delusional wankery that Marxists exercise.
You couldn't guarantee that "a libertarian would have put out the fire" because it's equally likely that a libertarian might buy the fire department and then go around starting fires in order to make money. Libertarians are people, too, and subject to the same nobility and failings as people everywhere.
This is why democratic socialism will win every single damn time: it's not perfect (far from it) but it's built assuming that people will be people, whereas know-it-all totalitarism or anarchism are divorced from how people actually act.
No time to address the whole post, but this got me as I actually live in Canada. And yes, rich people here go to the US because they can jump the queue, just as rich people can anywhere.
Tell me, where do poor and middle-class Americans without coverage go again? Can they go to Canada?