Yes, actually, and the rest. VGA for a projector, RCA composite (which is what I assume he meant) for an old TV, and component video for a new TV. I once borrowed an S-video one for an old-ish-but-newer TV, but I don't personally own it.
I read what I posted. He wrote the High Performance Computing Act, also known as the "Gore bill". It built off ARPANET and NSFnet towards a more general-purpose general-availability fast network. It also included funding for the NCSA, which used it to write Mosaic, which was really the jumping-off point of the Internet as we know it today. Marc Andreessen left NCSA to found Netscape, and as they say the rest is history.
The Internet is not NSFNet nor ARPANET. It's a logical evolution of those, and used many of the same technologies, but like most technical people you forget that there's more to an idea than simply the technology. Al Gore really was the guy who took the idea of a internetwork, accessible to all and used for everything, and made it a reality. Were it not for his efforts, there would still be internetworks, but they may very well not be general-utility and public-access. We might even have web browsers, but there wouldn't have been any money in writing them for a long, long time. It's a chicken-and-egg problem, and the government put the egg in the incubator on spec. A perfect example of government done right, really - which is of course why the Murdoch Street Journal ran the article.
Which, funnily enough, is almost exactly what he said. People love to misremember what he said, and then hold them accountable for what they wish he said.
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.
Vint Cerf and Bob Khan (who know something about Internet history) had this to say:
"No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President."
and
"as far back as the 1970s, Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship [...] the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication."
Frankly, I think Obama believed his own rhetoric. As commander-in-chief, he also could've forced the states to accept the Gitmo prisoners (don't you remember he was working with governors a few months into his presidency?) but was unwilling to hand down orders and instead tried to compromise. Like he said he would do in his campaign.
Unfortunately, I think it took him until the 2010 midterms to realize that the Republicans really meant it when they said they'd rather torpedo the country than work with him on anything, and by then it was too late.
That was the thing about Stuxnet that people don't seem to get. It's a brilliant chess move; if you accept the premise that those centrifuges need to go (which frankly I did, but it's up to you), it's hard to argue that the "strike" that destroys every centrifuge without so much as an injury is inferior in any respect to a bomb which is almost certain to kill people.
But the real thing is that the evidence that it was US/Israel that wrote Stuxnet/Flame only rises to the level of "likely, but rumor", and Iran would have a very hard time starting a war over that. Bombs are a lot easier to justify in that respect - "they invaded our sovereignty and bombed us" vs "they set us back a few months and made us spend money".
Pretty much, yeah. Entrapment is a pretty specific thing; if you watch those shows like Cops, they occasionally do drug stings (take down the guy, then use his house). The conversation is very careful -
and then the transaction takes place. The suspect has to be the one who broaches the subject of illegality, the cops can't ask. The idea is they can't entice somebody to commit a crime that otherwise wouldn't have taken place. They can't walk up to a dude and suggest he steal a car, but they can leave a "bait car" unlocked and running. An undercover pretending to be a prostitute can't ask a john if he wants a good time, but she can go along with it when he asks. Basically they can facilitate the situation that would attract somebody already looking to commit a crime, but they can't put the idea into someone's head.
Last time I tried to say something along those lines (in response to a guy in our CS program who wanted to make a "brogrammer" shirt for the undergrad campus-wide spring party) I got shouted down. I think "minority" groups of all flavors can be over-sensitive. Apparently the only group you can make fun of are white Christian hetero-normative males from relatively well-off backgrounds. If you don't quite match that specific group, you're not "fair game". For reference, just look at all the TV commercials where the woman is smart and savvy and tolerating her idiot husband. If someone were to reverse the roles, they'd be up against the wall so fast it'd make their head spin.
It's truly disgusting what happened to you, and that's not the first time I've heard of things like that happening. I hope (like to think) that we don't produce people like that in my little corner of the world. I try my damndest to treat people equally, and go out of my way to avoid offending anybody - but I'm not afraid to. Walking on eggshells is never a good thing.
Replacing the battery on an iPhone/iTouch is pretty straightforward, as is the dock connector and several other components. Frankly, I wouldn't expect doing the screen to be easy on any device, from your laptop to your TV. It's a pretty key component, and almost always buried under pretty much every other component.
A car analogy is like changing the oil (easy, nonintrusive maintenance) or putting on a spare tire, being analogous to a pop-off battery cover. Not too difficult, and you don't have to get "into" the car. Apple's batteries are like replacing the radio or getting inside the door panels - still an easy job if you know what you're doing, but it requires some effort. The screen is like the oil pump - crucial, and might need replacement, but I wouldn't do it. I'd send it to a shop that specializes in it, rather than risk irreparably damaging the entire thing by taking it all apart.
Same here, did that with my iPhone 4 a few weeks ago. It's several years old and the battery life is down to two days, so it was time. Took 5 minutes of searching online and cost only $5, with free shipping. Two screws, a slide-off cover, and a plug later, you're done. I don't know why people seem to think the iDevice batteries are hard to replace; they need tools to remove but it means you can have a bigger battery that goes longer before a replacement is needed so it seems like a worthwhile tradeoff.
I don't know why you seem to think that LaTeX is designed to compete with Office. In fact, they were written nearly simultaneously (about 1983).
Frankly, the cost of learning LaTeX (and there is one) was outweighed by the time I saved working on my first paper. Not even an engineering one with formulas - just a normal, cited research paper for a history class. It was only about 10 pages - not even that long - but not having to screw with my citations or formatting saved me more time than it took to learn. Plus, it's not a binary blob and thus you can actually put it in revision control, and not expect your document format to be change-tracking or collaborative or anything other than formatting. And you can write it in any text editor (I use a highlighting editor, specifically Emacs, but it's not necessary) and generate really gloriously good PDFs with a hyperlinked TOC, and clickable footnotes that take you right to the citation. Not to mention, it properly justifies the text so that it fills the whole page. With Word you have to jump through some hoops and it doesn't work quite right even then.
Yes and no. You're about half right. The thing about bin Laden was that he wanted us out of there so he could re-establish a caliphate and bring the region backwards about a thousand years. It wasn't all freedom and non-interference with him. Not saying that US intervention is always, or even often a good thing in that region, but bin Laden was dangerous to everybody, especially the Muslims in the area.
It will be, if you have a reasonable router (AirPort is one, but not the only, example) and your ISP uses something like DHCPv6 with prefix delegation. One day your ISP will say "hey, here's a v6 subnet!" and your router will go "alright, you guys (your devices) go ahead and pick one from this range". And it'll just work. If you don't have a new enough router, this won't happen, but it shouldn't affect v4 connectivity.
FWIW I've been running v6 at home for 5-6 years (through a tunnel), my university has it for all wired and wireless connections, and there's not a problem. Not one, literally, anywhere that I've heard about. It just uses v6 for any enabled service, and falls back to NATted v4 otherwise.
Net Neutrality just means they can't charge more for one kind of data than another, especially not for business reasons. FaceTime traffic is just normal Internet traffic, but they want to make it a separate "service" and charge more for it. The doom-and-gloom analogy from a few years back (that's actually happening now!) was Comcast charging Netflix more than their own VOD solution, which is what they've gone and done. You're already paying for the connectivity, and so is the provider, and now they want to double-dip that.
It looks like they're saying the grid powers the motor, and the majority of the local generation is NG. Powering the compressors with locally-generated electricity would just be a fantastically stupid power plant.
That's definitely one approach, at least it'll make them associate that particular symbol with 'unexplainable death' even if they don't have the skull and crossbones symbology. But people don't tend to like the idea of letting a few hundred/thousand people die so they can learn their lesson; that's why they're trying to prevent people going there in the first place!
I think the best approach is to make sure that the only way to find it is to make the access mechanism itself depend on an understanding of strong ionizing radiation. Barring that, simply make it so damn impossible to get into that it requires a civilization as advanced as we are to be able to even get in, assuming that if a civilization got really good at digging, cutting, and otherwise "gaining access", they'd also have stumbled on radiation.
Think about it. What if we found, with our most advanced techniques, some sort of buried underground vault that was clearly intentional? You know we'd be going inside, but we'd be so scared shitless about what might be in there that we'd run literally every test we know of, which is a lot. We've pretty much sussed out the elemental forces of the universe by now. If we can make sure that a civilization that was able to find it couldn't help but know something about radioactivity, no symbols should be necessary. Either it wouldn't bother them (some sort of weird mutant alien race or something), or they'd know to look for it.
Your job now, is to apply more alcohol till she will do things she wouldn't normally do. Not too much, or they don't participate well.
Be careful. Even if she's there to get drunk precisely so she does things she wouldn't normally do (which is why she's drinking at a bar), if she decides it's a bad idea the next day you're slapped with a rape charge and a sex offender label. No coercion needs to be involved, just an ex-post-facto decision that it was a bad idea.
It's hilarious that you think everybody but Fox News is left-wing. All it really shows is that you consider the real moderate to be some extremist position way the hell on the left somewhere. On an international stage, and even an American stage of about 20 years ago, Obama is a moderate Republican. It's only in the current warped, neo-Fascist political landscape of even the last 6 years or so that Obama is a liberal, and only in the fevered ramblings of Rush Limbaugh and the like that he's anywhere near a socialist
Would today's Republicans vote for Reagan? Probably not. Look at what they did to Romney in the primary, and even Massachusetts Romney was more conservative than Reagan (despite passing Romneycare, which admittedly Reagan probably wouldn't have done).
What makes you think that there wouldn't be other options in a single payer system? The NHS in the UK covers everybody, but some people pay out of pocket for better/faster care. Same with Medicare, some elderly people go "above and beyond" Medicare. Nobody's suggesting preventing that. There's no loss of choice in a single-payer system, except that taxes go up marginally to pay for it (substantially less than insurance costs are currently). But that's not a loss of freedom; it's actually why we have the Constitution (that explicitly grants power to tax) instead of the Articles of Confederation (which didn't, and thus didn't work). We wouldn't let people duck the tax because universal healthcare benefits everybody, even if it's not directly used. Same as universal education; assuming you can see through even one level of indirection, it's obvious that everybody in society is better off if everybody is educated.
Forgive me for slipping into opinion - but your attitude is very typical of contemporary politics. That is, a lot of high rhetoric about freedoms and the "surrender of rights" and so on, despite the fact that there's no such impingement. People are very loud about things they don't care to actually know anything about, which wouldn't be a problem except that people believe them. I'm not saying this is you, but you did go and write your whole "but freedom!" post on top of the false assumption that people would actually be prevented from doing something.
I wish there were more conservatives like you. I'm sure I disagree with you about many issues (I'm definitely in the camp of "this president is basically a moderate conservative, wish he was a liberal") but there are valid conversations to have as a nation about government intervention in the private sector and individual lives, social safety nets, etc. But we don't seem to have the concept of a loyal opposition anymore. Nobody can do or say a damn thing without being called a traitor, socialist, fascist, etc. Politics in this country has never been great, but in my studies of history I haven't really come across such an extreme "us-vs-them" mentality.
Although frankly I think the Republicans are being traitors at the moment. Explicitly declining to govern the country in furtherance of their political goals is pretty fucked up in my book. Even as recently as 10 years ago, people at least claimed to put "running the country", aka "doing their job", over political goals.
You forgot that the DRM is mostly in furtherance of the primary benefit to consumers, namely that it allows you to redownload your games anywhere you want, as quickly as your internet will go. Without DRM, it's effectively a free-for-all, since Steam works by basically allowing anybody to get the files, but not be able to use them unless the account is authorized. A friend can log into your machine with his account, download and play one of his games, and it'll still show up in the list on your machine, but your account can't play it. That's the extent of (Valve's) DRM on Steam, and without it they'd have to massively redesign the service (to strongly authenticate downloads) or just give their games away.
tl;dr - Valve's DRM is really a consequence of their download-easily-and-everywhere model. Even if you don't agree with it, you can't deny that Valve gives you a desirable feature with their DRM, where most companies just take things away.
That's true, but the fact of the matter is that the bill doesn't work without it. People never like the price tag on something. And other states have tried to implement the popular provisions without the mandate, and what happens is exactly what you'd expect - only risky folks get insurance, since everybody else can get it if they need it, and the costs are through the roof. Put simply, insurance works best with a large risk pool. I personally think that one single pool would be the largest of all, and thus cheapest per member, but the single-payer system got voted down.
Precisely. It doesn't matter what the facts are, the country holds the President accountable. I know the Congress is the body that makes and passes laws, but either most people don't, or they don't care.
That's not the point, same way as house locks and the Kensington lock on a laptop doesn't offer any real security. If somebody wants *your* car/house/laptop, you need much substantially stronger security to keep them out. But most thefts are crimes of opportunity, and it is sufficient to make it more of a hassle than something else, whether it's another theft or walking home instead of stealing a ride and driving. Steering-wheel locks and Kensington locks have a secondary purpose, which is to force the thief to damage the item in a way only stolen property would be. A meth head can't sell a stolen laptop with a busted kensington slot; no pawn shop or even quasi-reputable dealer will take it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, actually, and the rest. VGA for a projector, RCA composite (which is what I assume he meant) for an old TV, and component video for a new TV. I once borrowed an S-video one for an old-ish-but-newer TV, but I don't personally own it.
I read what I posted. He wrote the High Performance Computing Act, also known as the "Gore bill". It built off ARPANET and NSFnet towards a more general-purpose general-availability fast network. It also included funding for the NCSA, which used it to write Mosaic, which was really the jumping-off point of the Internet as we know it today. Marc Andreessen left NCSA to found Netscape, and as they say the rest is history.
The Internet is not NSFNet nor ARPANET. It's a logical evolution of those, and used many of the same technologies, but like most technical people you forget that there's more to an idea than simply the technology. Al Gore really was the guy who took the idea of a internetwork, accessible to all and used for everything, and made it a reality. Were it not for his efforts, there would still be internetworks, but they may very well not be general-utility and public-access. We might even have web browsers, but there wouldn't have been any money in writing them for a long, long time. It's a chicken-and-egg problem, and the government put the egg in the incubator on spec. A perfect example of government done right, really - which is of course why the Murdoch Street Journal ran the article.
Which, funnily enough, is almost exactly what he said. People love to misremember what he said, and then hold them accountable for what they wish he said.
During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet.
Vint Cerf and Bob Khan (who know something about Internet history) had this to say:
"No one in public life has been more intellectually engaged in helping to create the climate for a thriving Internet than the Vice President."
and
"as far back as the 1970s, Congressman Gore promoted the idea of high speed telecommunications as an engine for both economic growth and the improvement of our educational system. He was the first elected official to grasp the potential of computer communications to have a broader impact than just improving the conduct of science and scholarship [...] the Internet, as we know it today, was not deployed until 1983. When the Internet was still in the early stages of its deployment, Congressman Gore provided intellectual leadership by helping create the vision of the potential benefits of high speed computing and communication."
Frankly, I think Obama believed his own rhetoric. As commander-in-chief, he also could've forced the states to accept the Gitmo prisoners (don't you remember he was working with governors a few months into his presidency?) but was unwilling to hand down orders and instead tried to compromise. Like he said he would do in his campaign.
Unfortunately, I think it took him until the 2010 midterms to realize that the Republicans really meant it when they said they'd rather torpedo the country than work with him on anything, and by then it was too late.
That was the thing about Stuxnet that people don't seem to get. It's a brilliant chess move; if you accept the premise that those centrifuges need to go (which frankly I did, but it's up to you), it's hard to argue that the "strike" that destroys every centrifuge without so much as an injury is inferior in any respect to a bomb which is almost certain to kill people.
But the real thing is that the evidence that it was US/Israel that wrote Stuxnet/Flame only rises to the level of "likely, but rumor", and Iran would have a very hard time starting a war over that. Bombs are a lot easier to justify in that respect - "they invaded our sovereignty and bombed us" vs "they set us back a few months and made us spend money".
Pretty much, yeah. Entrapment is a pretty specific thing; if you watch those shows like Cops, they occasionally do drug stings (take down the guy, then use his house). The conversation is very careful -
cop:"what's up?"
suspect:"you got anything"
c:"what you looking for?"
s:"coke/smack/pot/dope/weed/etc"
c:"oh yeah sure"
and then the transaction takes place. The suspect has to be the one who broaches the subject of illegality, the cops can't ask. The idea is they can't entice somebody to commit a crime that otherwise wouldn't have taken place. They can't walk up to a dude and suggest he steal a car, but they can leave a "bait car" unlocked and running. An undercover pretending to be a prostitute can't ask a john if he wants a good time, but she can go along with it when he asks. Basically they can facilitate the situation that would attract somebody already looking to commit a crime, but they can't put the idea into someone's head.
Last time I tried to say something along those lines (in response to a guy in our CS program who wanted to make a "brogrammer" shirt for the undergrad campus-wide spring party) I got shouted down. I think "minority" groups of all flavors can be over-sensitive. Apparently the only group you can make fun of are white Christian hetero-normative males from relatively well-off backgrounds. If you don't quite match that specific group, you're not "fair game". For reference, just look at all the TV commercials where the woman is smart and savvy and tolerating her idiot husband. If someone were to reverse the roles, they'd be up against the wall so fast it'd make their head spin.
It's truly disgusting what happened to you, and that's not the first time I've heard of things like that happening. I hope (like to think) that we don't produce people like that in my little corner of the world. I try my damndest to treat people equally, and go out of my way to avoid offending anybody - but I'm not afraid to. Walking on eggshells is never a good thing.
Funnily enough, you can actually install Android on your iPhone without too much trouble. It even works alright, by the sound of it.
Replacing the battery on an iPhone/iTouch is pretty straightforward, as is the dock connector and several other components. Frankly, I wouldn't expect doing the screen to be easy on any device, from your laptop to your TV. It's a pretty key component, and almost always buried under pretty much every other component.
A car analogy is like changing the oil (easy, nonintrusive maintenance) or putting on a spare tire, being analogous to a pop-off battery cover. Not too difficult, and you don't have to get "into" the car. Apple's batteries are like replacing the radio or getting inside the door panels - still an easy job if you know what you're doing, but it requires some effort. The screen is like the oil pump - crucial, and might need replacement, but I wouldn't do it. I'd send it to a shop that specializes in it, rather than risk irreparably damaging the entire thing by taking it all apart.
Same here, did that with my iPhone 4 a few weeks ago. It's several years old and the battery life is down to two days, so it was time. Took 5 minutes of searching online and cost only $5, with free shipping. Two screws, a slide-off cover, and a plug later, you're done. I don't know why people seem to think the iDevice batteries are hard to replace; they need tools to remove but it means you can have a bigger battery that goes longer before a replacement is needed so it seems like a worthwhile tradeoff.
I don't know why you seem to think that LaTeX is designed to compete with Office. In fact, they were written nearly simultaneously (about 1983).
Frankly, the cost of learning LaTeX (and there is one) was outweighed by the time I saved working on my first paper. Not even an engineering one with formulas - just a normal, cited research paper for a history class. It was only about 10 pages - not even that long - but not having to screw with my citations or formatting saved me more time than it took to learn. Plus, it's not a binary blob and thus you can actually put it in revision control, and not expect your document format to be change-tracking or collaborative or anything other than formatting. And you can write it in any text editor (I use a highlighting editor, specifically Emacs, but it's not necessary) and generate really gloriously good PDFs with a hyperlinked TOC, and clickable footnotes that take you right to the citation. Not to mention, it properly justifies the text so that it fills the whole page. With Word you have to jump through some hoops and it doesn't work quite right even then.
Yes and no. You're about half right. The thing about bin Laden was that he wanted us out of there so he could re-establish a caliphate and bring the region backwards about a thousand years. It wasn't all freedom and non-interference with him. Not saying that US intervention is always, or even often a good thing in that region, but bin Laden was dangerous to everybody, especially the Muslims in the area.
It will be, if you have a reasonable router (AirPort is one, but not the only, example) and your ISP uses something like DHCPv6 with prefix delegation. One day your ISP will say "hey, here's a v6 subnet!" and your router will go "alright, you guys (your devices) go ahead and pick one from this range". And it'll just work. If you don't have a new enough router, this won't happen, but it shouldn't affect v4 connectivity.
FWIW I've been running v6 at home for 5-6 years (through a tunnel), my university has it for all wired and wireless connections, and there's not a problem. Not one, literally, anywhere that I've heard about. It just uses v6 for any enabled service, and falls back to NATted v4 otherwise.
Net Neutrality just means they can't charge more for one kind of data than another, especially not for business reasons. FaceTime traffic is just normal Internet traffic, but they want to make it a separate "service" and charge more for it. The doom-and-gloom analogy from a few years back (that's actually happening now!) was Comcast charging Netflix more than their own VOD solution, which is what they've gone and done. You're already paying for the connectivity, and so is the provider, and now they want to double-dip that.
It looks like they're saying the grid powers the motor, and the majority of the local generation is NG. Powering the compressors with locally-generated electricity would just be a fantastically stupid power plant.
You're talking about something called gimbal lock, and yes that is generally the concern.
That's definitely one approach, at least it'll make them associate that particular symbol with 'unexplainable death' even if they don't have the skull and crossbones symbology. But people don't tend to like the idea of letting a few hundred/thousand people die so they can learn their lesson; that's why they're trying to prevent people going there in the first place!
I think the best approach is to make sure that the only way to find it is to make the access mechanism itself depend on an understanding of strong ionizing radiation. Barring that, simply make it so damn impossible to get into that it requires a civilization as advanced as we are to be able to even get in, assuming that if a civilization got really good at digging, cutting, and otherwise "gaining access", they'd also have stumbled on radiation.
Think about it. What if we found, with our most advanced techniques, some sort of buried underground vault that was clearly intentional? You know we'd be going inside, but we'd be so scared shitless about what might be in there that we'd run literally every test we know of, which is a lot. We've pretty much sussed out the elemental forces of the universe by now. If we can make sure that a civilization that was able to find it couldn't help but know something about radioactivity, no symbols should be necessary. Either it wouldn't bother them (some sort of weird mutant alien race or something), or they'd know to look for it.
Your job now, is to apply more alcohol till she will do things she wouldn't normally do. Not too much, or they don't participate well.
Be careful. Even if she's there to get drunk precisely so she does things she wouldn't normally do (which is why she's drinking at a bar), if she decides it's a bad idea the next day you're slapped with a rape charge and a sex offender label. No coercion needs to be involved, just an ex-post-facto decision that it was a bad idea.
It's hilarious that you think everybody but Fox News is left-wing. All it really shows is that you consider the real moderate to be some extremist position way the hell on the left somewhere. On an international stage, and even an American stage of about 20 years ago, Obama is a moderate Republican. It's only in the current warped, neo-Fascist political landscape of even the last 6 years or so that Obama is a liberal, and only in the fevered ramblings of Rush Limbaugh and the like that he's anywhere near a socialist
Would today's Republicans vote for Reagan? Probably not. Look at what they did to Romney in the primary, and even Massachusetts Romney was more conservative than Reagan (despite passing Romneycare, which admittedly Reagan probably wouldn't have done).
What makes you think that there wouldn't be other options in a single payer system? The NHS in the UK covers everybody, but some people pay out of pocket for better/faster care. Same with Medicare, some elderly people go "above and beyond" Medicare. Nobody's suggesting preventing that. There's no loss of choice in a single-payer system, except that taxes go up marginally to pay for it (substantially less than insurance costs are currently). But that's not a loss of freedom; it's actually why we have the Constitution (that explicitly grants power to tax) instead of the Articles of Confederation (which didn't, and thus didn't work). We wouldn't let people duck the tax because universal healthcare benefits everybody, even if it's not directly used. Same as universal education; assuming you can see through even one level of indirection, it's obvious that everybody in society is better off if everybody is educated.
Forgive me for slipping into opinion - but your attitude is very typical of contemporary politics. That is, a lot of high rhetoric about freedoms and the "surrender of rights" and so on, despite the fact that there's no such impingement. People are very loud about things they don't care to actually know anything about, which wouldn't be a problem except that people believe them. I'm not saying this is you, but you did go and write your whole "but freedom!" post on top of the false assumption that people would actually be prevented from doing something.
I wish there were more conservatives like you. I'm sure I disagree with you about many issues (I'm definitely in the camp of "this president is basically a moderate conservative, wish he was a liberal") but there are valid conversations to have as a nation about government intervention in the private sector and individual lives, social safety nets, etc. But we don't seem to have the concept of a loyal opposition anymore. Nobody can do or say a damn thing without being called a traitor, socialist, fascist, etc. Politics in this country has never been great, but in my studies of history I haven't really come across such an extreme "us-vs-them" mentality.
Although frankly I think the Republicans are being traitors at the moment. Explicitly declining to govern the country in furtherance of their political goals is pretty fucked up in my book. Even as recently as 10 years ago, people at least claimed to put "running the country", aka "doing their job", over political goals.
You forgot that the DRM is mostly in furtherance of the primary benefit to consumers, namely that it allows you to redownload your games anywhere you want, as quickly as your internet will go. Without DRM, it's effectively a free-for-all, since Steam works by basically allowing anybody to get the files, but not be able to use them unless the account is authorized. A friend can log into your machine with his account, download and play one of his games, and it'll still show up in the list on your machine, but your account can't play it. That's the extent of (Valve's) DRM on Steam, and without it they'd have to massively redesign the service (to strongly authenticate downloads) or just give their games away.
tl;dr - Valve's DRM is really a consequence of their download-easily-and-everywhere model. Even if you don't agree with it, you can't deny that Valve gives you a desirable feature with their DRM, where most companies just take things away.
(copied from my other post)
That's true, but the fact of the matter is that the bill doesn't work without it. People never like the price tag on something. And other states have tried to implement the popular provisions without the mandate, and what happens is exactly what you'd expect - only risky folks get insurance, since everybody else can get it if they need it, and the costs are through the roof. Put simply, insurance works best with a large risk pool. I personally think that one single pool would be the largest of all, and thus cheapest per member, but the single-payer system got voted down.
Precisely. It doesn't matter what the facts are, the country holds the President accountable. I know the Congress is the body that makes and passes laws, but either most people don't, or they don't care.
That's not the point, same way as house locks and the Kensington lock on a laptop doesn't offer any real security. If somebody wants *your* car/house/laptop, you need much substantially stronger security to keep them out. But most thefts are crimes of opportunity, and it is sufficient to make it more of a hassle than something else, whether it's another theft or walking home instead of stealing a ride and driving. Steering-wheel locks and Kensington locks have a secondary purpose, which is to force the thief to damage the item in a way only stolen property would be. A meth head can't sell a stolen laptop with a busted kensington slot; no pawn shop or even quasi-reputable dealer will take it.