Usually the bigger the blogger is, the less original content they produce. The same is also true for many of them on the lower ends. It's absurd to see the popularity of a lot of these bloggers who, in the words of Pajamas Media, "take on a subject" by quoting a lot of someone else's text and adding a little bit of extra stuff to it. That's called a few casual remarks, not really "taking on a subject."
In fact, my biggest struggle to get into it was that it was too much like pseudocode in flexibility. If you cannot look at Python, as a programmer, and figure out what half of it is doing instantly, something is wrong with you. It's the closest I've ever seen to writing an algorithm in English and executing it in a way that wasn't in near plain English like AppleScript.
That you are in favor of allowing the mainstream media to publish troop locations and strategy on international news in a state of declared war? Some of this stuff is limited for a reason, you know.
Double or triple the cost of the application and then offer up half of the money to anyone who can conclusively prove that a patent is invalid. Sort of a reverse user fee, someone proves that the government "should not do its job."
Hire top notch people from the private sector for the USPTO instead? $50M a year to hire hundreds of PhDs and people with a decade or more of great experience in programming, biotech, etc.
Leftist leaders even more than right wing leaders tend to have a hard time accepting the fact that you can do bad things with different tools. They also have a hard time blaming the person for their use of it. Conservatives do it with drugs by blaming the drugs for the armed robbery to feed the habit. Leftists do it with weapons. It's easy to blame a drug, a gun or a scripting language for a crime. It allows you to not be "judgemental" toward a person who is just an asshole. Neither side likes to admit that these things are totally the person's fault, derived from some inner flaw in the person's character that causes them to get high and rob, shoot to murder someone or hack to steal a person's money.
A lot of people are casual gamers or weren't raised on PS2/Xbox and have problems with the controls. Maybe they ought to consider things like autoaim that Quake had for FPS and action games so you don't have to work 2 thumbsticks to aim... Of course that would require them to compensate by making the AI more difficult.
Governments today try to be everything to everybody and all they're good at is keeping the peace/killing people and breaking things. Don't believe me, just compare the quality of life in the Soviet Union in the 1980s to the United States. The more that government focuses on keeping the peace, arbitrating disputes, the more smoothly the economy can function.
You know why we're having an issue with the borders right now? Bush was so carried away with winning on domestic spending that he couldn't find the time or money to hire 10,000 new border patrol agents. Border security is a core function of the government. If you can't keep outsiders out of your country when they're not going through official channels, you have no real national security. Some defend him by saying we've not been attacked in years, so don't be paranoid, but I say, with that little security and that much distraction, how do you know we don't have a lot of sleeper cells in here now?
Limited government is advocated by us (classical) liberals/libertarians for a reason. The government can barely give two shits about the life, liberty and property of those outside the ruling class in the best of conditions. When it's trying to bribe people into loving it, then all bets are off and it frequently doesn't do its job or outright sides with the very people it ought to be pursuing (illegal immigrants, cybercriminals, etc.).
This is what is so fundamentally wrong with our "democracy." It has become a system of looting people people, not working for people. The government is more concerned about ensuring that a single mother has healthcare for her kids these days than making sure they don't get their heads blown off by thugs and corrupt cops (often they overlap these days). That's how far even the best have fallen. First principles like keeping the streets safe from vermin have given way to pandering to voters with shameless tactics.
This goes back to an argument my someone I know and I have had over this. She's mostly pro-Bush, I... voted for Badnarik because of Bush. I support law and order... real law and order. I think that national security is never a justification for attacking due process of law. Even if we have to have secret trials by jury because the evidence is so dangerous, I don't think things should be hidden from the courts.
Like a lot of Bush supporters, she cites the leaks of information as reasons to not take this to court, but I say just prosecute people who leak information that needs to be confidential and that the public really doesn't need to know about. However, national security is never grounds to hide from judicial review attacks on the Constitution. People who bring evidence of criminal or unconstitutional actions need to be protected by the courts.
Something has to be done to protect these people. If I were governor, I would give him a state police protection detail and make it be known that any federal agent who tries to arrest him will be charged with felony kidnapping in a state court. The states need to stand up and protect their citizens. My state, VA, has an obligation to me to protect me from unconstitutional federal abuse because if the feds act outside of the enumerated powers, it's state jurisdiction and any federal coercion in that respect is criminal conduct. Federal agents who abuse, injur or kill people, especially outside of the Constitution's limits on their jurisdictions are criminals, not law enforcement agents and ought to be prosecuted by the the states accordingly.
In theory, Tony Blair writes, traditional court processes and attitudes to civil liberties could work. But the modern world is different from the world for which these court processes were designed. This view that due process is obsolete explains the Prime Ministers conduct; it explains the connection between extradition without safeguards, detention without trial, Asbos without criminal offences, subjective and discretionary judgments, police powers to arrest, and increasing ministerial powers. They are all characteristic of Blair legislation; they all avoid due process of law.
I've never understood why American conservatives support him as a leader, rather than simply appreciate his support in the war on terror. He has many anti-conservative positions and is a member of the Fabian Society. He's Britain's problem, but it's high time that American conservatives realize what American libertarians have known about Blair for a while: he's not our ally at all beyond the War on Terror. In fact, Blair was not only a close supporter of Clinton, but is far worse as a leader than Clinton in most respects. I'd take the latter over the former any day (as long as it's Bill, not Hillary).
Ya gotta hand it to Blair, though. He's honest about holding a totally "fuck you" attitude toward civil liberties whereas Bush still genuflects before that "God damn piece of paper" (as Bush supposedly called the US Constitution) that those "dead white men" with their libruhl idears wrote up after kicking out Blair's predecessors 2 centuries ago.
Where does the law allow CEOs to do the following:
1) Take money from you at arbitrary rates and through arbitrary means (taxes). 2) Regulate your public and private right to speak. 3) Control your use of your own property without any contract being signed. 4) Allow you to be detained in secret prisons and tried in secret courts outside of the US Constitution. 5) Allow their agents (law enforcement) to spy on you, record everything you do online or say over the phone, kick your door in on flimsy evidence and do all of the following carrying military-grade armaments that you have to have permission from them (machine gun license) to own. 6) Draft you from your home, ripping you away from your spouse and children who might be materially dependent on you to send you off to fight against someone who you might not even consider your enemy. 7) Regulate everything from the chemicals you put in your body to the type of music you can lawfully make or sell. 8) Make you subject to all manner of liability in how you conduct your business, allowing your life's work to be ripped from you by a single, pissed off employee whose only harm may be hurt feelings.
Yes, those CEOs are a mighty powerful class. Congress and the President don't have shit on them.
People like Rep. Sensenbrenner in Congress who advocate totalitarian controls over your internet use or a private business that can't legally tell you what to do except through a contract you signed with them? Quite frankly with the way that Congress is these days, I wouldn't trust them to regulate our local parking meters, let alone our section of the Internet.
As far as anti-competitive behavior, like the Madison River issue, goes, there are existing federal legal mechanisms for handling them. It's not anti-competitive for Verizon to only sell 25% of their network. It's their loss if their customers want to pay for better access, but can't get it because Verizon is reserving too much of its network for its own service.
The problem is, as always, government regulation at every level. There are enormous government-imposed costs on starting your own broadband or television service. The best way to create a competitive market is genuine deregulation, like ending all taxes and regulations on the construction and development of local private networks. All of them. Toss that spawn of satan out with the bathwater and be done with it.
Now let me ask y'all this. If Sensenbrenner gets his way, raise your hand all of you who want the government to be your ISP via municipal services. That's a straight ticket to getting no sympathy from the court when your privacy rights are screwed by the government.
J2EE before things like EJB 3.0 is pure crap. Convoluted, difficult to grasp crap. Research the lightweight frameworks and give them a shot first. They're much more straight-forward and Javaesque than old J2EE. Java was supposed to be a simplified C++, but older J2EE actually made it quite complicated, and really unnecessarily so.
I'm not trying to troll, as I actually like Java and think it's a solid language. I'm just not going to lie to you and say that the JCP people were sobre when writing up the older J2EE specs.
I've thought about buying a SSL setup for my blog so that people coming and going from it can do so in encryption-provided peace. It would be a bold move for civil liberties if hosting services would provide cheap access to SSL for their shared hosting customers. I'd pay an extra $5-$10/month for it, even if the certificate was shared with 20 other blogs at my host. The government just doesn't need to know these things. It's sick and perverted that they would even ask. The only place that it's considered doing your job to be a peeping tom is in the federal government.
When people aren't listening to music, they'll need a good charge in case they have to make a long phone call. I think that is reason enough to not worry about "one device to rule them all."
Microsoft wins if JBoss is hosted on a Windows Server and the database backend is SQL Server 2005. They couldn't care less if you're running Java, so long as it's on their server platforms. Would they prefer you to go all the way with.NET? Sure, but they aren't going to piss away customers willing to buy expensive server software just because they prefer different development tools. Same thing with Oracle. Who cares if the box is Linux, the application servers open source as long as the database is Oracle? They aren't going to tell customers, "buy all our products or we're going to go home and pout."
Things change too much and break too often. A computer is just a tool for most people. It needs to just work out of the box, and Linux is very far behind in that respect for a lot of people.
I keep hearing how hard it is to get things working out of the box with Windows and it leaves me wondering how long it's been since most Linux users have used Windows on a good home PC. It still sucks in some respects, but Windows XP is very good about "just working" for most hardware and software that average people want.
It's really quite depressing to see how sluggish the mainstream distros can be today. I have a PC that I just had to bring up to 768MB of RAM that can run XP, BeOS Dev Edition and HaikuOS (yep, I boot into HaikuOS from time to time) and Linux is the only slow OS it's run before. SuSE is a beast. XP multitasks just fine with Folding@Home, Firefox, iTunes and a few other apps open.
The only things they ever did pretty well at were devising new ways to kill and maim people. The Soviets used to try to steal most of our technology because they couldn't do things like design their own mainframes. It just goes to show that our ruling class doesn't learn from history. If it did, we'd be placing trade barriers on allowing American companies to set up manufacturing capabilities in China.
Congress passes laws all of the time that it has no constitutional authority to enact. The states should just flat out ignore these laws and go on their merry way. If the feds try anything, many states have more than enough law enforcement capabilities to overpower federal law enforcement and the loyalty of the guardsmen in the NG is going to be first and foremost with their families and communities.
The states need to start knocking the feds down a few notches on the totem poll through things like not taking mandates, arresting DEA agents on capital murder charges for killing people in no-knock raids and things like that.
Stocks are reasonably priced, salaries are reasonable, VCs aren't throwing money around in big fist fulls of $100 bills. I'd say that maybe things are maturing this time.
Where is the outrage over limits on free speech that were passed in the name of campaign finance reform? How about the restrictions on firearm ownership? The primary beneficiaries of gun control are criminals and corrupt cops, neither groups now have to worry about armed citizens fighting back. How about the mess that is the War on Drugs? Where is the left-wing outrage over speech codes that let individuals decide that since they were offended, that someone can lose their job, get expelled from school or any other number of totalitarian powers over others for merely being offensive?
This is like getting royally pissed off that no one cares about a criminal kicking your dog after no one cared that every woman in your family got brutally raped, your family got robbed, your sons sent to prison for sticking their tongues out at a cop and the police get to put security cameras all around your property because they don't like you. Both of you groups, liberals and conservatives, had brought us to this point. The last 14 years have proved that neither liberals or conservatives give a damn about letting Americans live non-regimented lives as everything from MySpace to phone records are getting regulated in the name of creating a more "orderly and safe society."
If you think that the state has any role beyond securing life, liberty and property you are part of the problem, not the solution.
The reason that Apple and Microsoft are so much more successful is that there is a single place to go to for Windows or OSX. There is no distribution, just one company. It's not perfect, as witnessed by the upgrade paths of their platforms, but try explaining to a soccer mom or country club dad why you can have two distributions with nearly the same kernel and library versions and yet the software isn't guaranteed to just work.
And I sure as hell support this domain. Why? It's the only way to let us conservative Christians block porn that won't get struck down by the courts.
I'm tired of the pornographers whining about the "ghettoization of their free speech." Why don't we just let them sell their goods in the kids' section of a book store? Pornography is not sexual speech. Should it be outlawed? No, each adult has to work on their own morality and forcing them won't make the right moral changes to fix society.
Let's call a spade a spade. Pornography is only art if you consider a picture of the virgin Mary painted in elephant dung to be art. I consider Playboy's photos to be low class art. A typical porn site is not even remotely art or expressive except in the lowest, most attavistic sense. There are two good reasons for not banning porn: we don't want judges and legislators legally defining what is and isn't art and it's a private moral issue that cannot be stopped by the stroke of a pen.
The problem with your argument is that one of the first things that every proto-police state does is register firearms, or in some cases outright seize them. Not every country with gun control is a bonafide police state, but every police state has had major problems with letting the average citizen carry a weapon capable of posting any credible threat to its police.
In the 20th century, over 150,000,000 people were murdered by their governments or by foreign governments. I think the case for why governments cannot be trusted with a monopoly on the ability to use deadly force has been made very clearly by history.
Besides, without firearms, the only way you can disarm the state is moral persuasion, and that... well... doesn't have any past impact on politicians dedicated to gaining power. The only "non-violent resistance" movements that have worked were in countries where the government wasn't sufficiently committed to maintaining power that it couldn't stomach killing large numbers of people, or the government was being isolated by almost all foreign governments and was already internally weak.
One of the great things about the public education system is that it doesn't teach a critical understanding of historical events. Take police states for example. Most people in the US think they're built in a day and that a police state only exists when thugs in snazzy uniforms goosestep down the street. They not only don't know, but don't even want to know what leads up to the formation of a police state.
You know what does? People railing against one socio-political-economic class as the root problem of society. Newsflash, most classes are where they are for reasons they could have helped or legitimately earned. A pluralist society needs that class diversity to reinforce individualism. And let's not forget perceived enemies of all types. Then there's the "just give up part of your liberty and you'll be safe, if you've got nothing to hide of course." It's like gun control. There are a lot of cops out there who can't shoot worth a damn and police departments are legendary for resistance to change. Do you trust them with your daily safety? I don't.
When people say to you "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear," you can respond (which I usually do) with "no decent, civilized person would ever have grounds to criticize the basic checks and balances that you oppose."
Slashdot Mirror
Usually the bigger the blogger is, the less original content they produce. The same is also true for many of them on the lower ends. It's absurd to see the popularity of a lot of these bloggers who, in the words of Pajamas Media, "take on a subject" by quoting a lot of someone else's text and adding a little bit of extra stuff to it. That's called a few casual remarks, not really "taking on a subject."
In fact, my biggest struggle to get into it was that it was too much like pseudocode in flexibility. If you cannot look at Python, as a programmer, and figure out what half of it is doing instantly, something is wrong with you. It's the closest I've ever seen to writing an algorithm in English and executing it in a way that wasn't in near plain English like AppleScript.
That you are in favor of allowing the mainstream media to publish troop locations and strategy on international news in a state of declared war? Some of this stuff is limited for a reason, you know.
Double or triple the cost of the application and then offer up half of the money to anyone who can conclusively prove that a patent is invalid. Sort of a reverse user fee, someone proves that the government "should not do its job."
Hire top notch people from the private sector for the USPTO instead? $50M a year to hire hundreds of PhDs and people with a decade or more of great experience in programming, biotech, etc.
Leftist leaders even more than right wing leaders tend to have a hard time accepting the fact that you can do bad things with different tools. They also have a hard time blaming the person for their use of it. Conservatives do it with drugs by blaming the drugs for the armed robbery to feed the habit. Leftists do it with weapons. It's easy to blame a drug, a gun or a scripting language for a crime. It allows you to not be "judgemental" toward a person who is just an asshole. Neither side likes to admit that these things are totally the person's fault, derived from some inner flaw in the person's character that causes them to get high and rob, shoot to murder someone or hack to steal a person's money.
A lot of people are casual gamers or weren't raised on PS2/Xbox and have problems with the controls. Maybe they ought to consider things like autoaim that Quake had for FPS and action games so you don't have to work 2 thumbsticks to aim... Of course that would require them to compensate by making the AI more difficult.
Governments today try to be everything to everybody and all they're good at is keeping the peace/killing people and breaking things. Don't believe me, just compare the quality of life in the Soviet Union in the 1980s to the United States. The more that government focuses on keeping the peace, arbitrating disputes, the more smoothly the economy can function.
You know why we're having an issue with the borders right now? Bush was so carried away with winning on domestic spending that he couldn't find the time or money to hire 10,000 new border patrol agents. Border security is a core function of the government. If you can't keep outsiders out of your country when they're not going through official channels, you have no real national security. Some defend him by saying we've not been attacked in years, so don't be paranoid, but I say, with that little security and that much distraction, how do you know we don't have a lot of sleeper cells in here now?
Limited government is advocated by us (classical) liberals/libertarians for a reason. The government can barely give two shits about the life, liberty and property of those outside the ruling class in the best of conditions. When it's trying to bribe people into loving it, then all bets are off and it frequently doesn't do its job or outright sides with the very people it ought to be pursuing (illegal immigrants, cybercriminals, etc.).
This is what is so fundamentally wrong with our "democracy." It has become a system of looting people people, not working for people. The government is more concerned about ensuring that a single mother has healthcare for her kids these days than making sure they don't get their heads blown off by thugs and corrupt cops (often they overlap these days). That's how far even the best have fallen. First principles like keeping the streets safe from vermin have given way to pandering to voters with shameless tactics.
This goes back to an argument my someone I know and I have had over this. She's mostly pro-Bush, I... voted for Badnarik because of Bush. I support law and order... real law and order. I think that national security is never a justification for attacking due process of law. Even if we have to have secret trials by jury because the evidence is so dangerous, I don't think things should be hidden from the courts.
Like a lot of Bush supporters, she cites the leaks of information as reasons to not take this to court, but I say just prosecute people who leak information that needs to be confidential and that the public really doesn't need to know about. However, national security is never grounds to hide from judicial review attacks on the Constitution. People who bring evidence of criminal or unconstitutional actions need to be protected by the courts.
Something has to be done to protect these people. If I were governor, I would give him a state police protection detail and make it be known that any federal agent who tries to arrest him will be charged with felony kidnapping in a state court. The states need to stand up and protect their citizens. My state, VA, has an obligation to me to protect me from unconstitutional federal abuse because if the feds act outside of the enumerated powers, it's state jurisdiction and any federal coercion in that respect is criminal conduct. Federal agents who abuse, injur or kill people, especially outside of the Constitution's limits on their jurisdictions are criminals, not law enforcement agents and ought to be prosecuted by the the states accordingly.
I've never understood why American conservatives support him as a leader, rather than simply appreciate his support in the war on terror. He has many anti-conservative positions and is a member of the Fabian Society. He's Britain's problem, but it's high time that American conservatives realize what American libertarians have known about Blair for a while: he's not our ally at all beyond the War on Terror. In fact, Blair was not only a close supporter of Clinton, but is far worse as a leader than Clinton in most respects. I'd take the latter over the former any day (as long as it's Bill, not Hillary).
Ya gotta hand it to Blair, though. He's honest about holding a totally "fuck you" attitude toward civil liberties whereas Bush still genuflects before that "God damn piece of paper" (as Bush supposedly called the US Constitution) that those "dead white men" with their libruhl idears wrote up after kicking out Blair's predecessors 2 centuries ago.
Where does the law allow CEOs to do the following:
1) Take money from you at arbitrary rates and through arbitrary means (taxes).
2) Regulate your public and private right to speak.
3) Control your use of your own property without any contract being signed.
4) Allow you to be detained in secret prisons and tried in secret courts outside of the US Constitution.
5) Allow their agents (law enforcement) to spy on you, record everything you do online or say over the phone, kick your door in on flimsy evidence and do all of the following carrying military-grade armaments that you have to have permission from them (machine gun license) to own.
6) Draft you from your home, ripping you away from your spouse and children who might be materially dependent on you to send you off to fight against someone who you might not even consider your enemy.
7) Regulate everything from the chemicals you put in your body to the type of music you can lawfully make or sell.
8) Make you subject to all manner of liability in how you conduct your business, allowing your life's work to be ripped from you by a single, pissed off employee whose only harm may be hurt feelings.
Yes, those CEOs are a mighty powerful class. Congress and the President don't have shit on them.
People like Rep. Sensenbrenner in Congress who advocate totalitarian controls over your internet use or a private business that can't legally tell you what to do except through a contract you signed with them? Quite frankly with the way that Congress is these days, I wouldn't trust them to regulate our local parking meters, let alone our section of the Internet.
As far as anti-competitive behavior, like the Madison River issue, goes, there are existing federal legal mechanisms for handling them. It's not anti-competitive for Verizon to only sell 25% of their network. It's their loss if their customers want to pay for better access, but can't get it because Verizon is reserving too much of its network for its own service.
The problem is, as always, government regulation at every level. There are enormous government-imposed costs on starting your own broadband or television service. The best way to create a competitive market is genuine deregulation, like ending all taxes and regulations on the construction and development of local private networks. All of them. Toss that spawn of satan out with the bathwater and be done with it.
Now let me ask y'all this. If Sensenbrenner gets his way, raise your hand all of you who want the government to be your ISP via municipal services. That's a straight ticket to getting no sympathy from the court when your privacy rights are screwed by the government.
J2EE before things like EJB 3.0 is pure crap. Convoluted, difficult to grasp crap. Research the lightweight frameworks and give them a shot first. They're much more straight-forward and Javaesque than old J2EE. Java was supposed to be a simplified C++, but older J2EE actually made it quite complicated, and really unnecessarily so.
I'm not trying to troll, as I actually like Java and think it's a solid language. I'm just not going to lie to you and say that the JCP people were sobre when writing up the older J2EE specs.
I've thought about buying a SSL setup for my blog so that people coming and going from it can do so in encryption-provided peace. It would be a bold move for civil liberties if hosting services would provide cheap access to SSL for their shared hosting customers. I'd pay an extra $5-$10/month for it, even if the certificate was shared with 20 other blogs at my host. The government just doesn't need to know these things. It's sick and perverted that they would even ask. The only place that it's considered doing your job to be a peeping tom is in the federal government.
When people aren't listening to music, they'll need a good charge in case they have to make a long phone call. I think that is reason enough to not worry about "one device to rule them all."
Microsoft wins if JBoss is hosted on a Windows Server and the database backend is SQL Server 2005. They couldn't care less if you're running Java, so long as it's on their server platforms. Would they prefer you to go all the way with .NET? Sure, but they aren't going to piss away customers willing to buy expensive server software just because they prefer different development tools. Same thing with Oracle. Who cares if the box is Linux, the application servers open source as long as the database is Oracle? They aren't going to tell customers, "buy all our products or we're going to go home and pout."
Things change too much and break too often. A computer is just a tool for most people. It needs to just work out of the box, and Linux is very far behind in that respect for a lot of people.
I keep hearing how hard it is to get things working out of the box with Windows and it leaves me wondering how long it's been since most Linux users have used Windows on a good home PC. It still sucks in some respects, but Windows XP is very good about "just working" for most hardware and software that average people want.
It's really quite depressing to see how sluggish the mainstream distros can be today. I have a PC that I just had to bring up to 768MB of RAM that can run XP, BeOS Dev Edition and HaikuOS (yep, I boot into HaikuOS from time to time) and Linux is the only slow OS it's run before. SuSE is a beast. XP multitasks just fine with Folding@Home, Firefox, iTunes and a few other apps open.
The only things they ever did pretty well at were devising new ways to kill and maim people. The Soviets used to try to steal most of our technology because they couldn't do things like design their own mainframes. It just goes to show that our ruling class doesn't learn from history. If it did, we'd be placing trade barriers on allowing American companies to set up manufacturing capabilities in China.
Congress passes laws all of the time that it has no constitutional authority to enact. The states should just flat out ignore these laws and go on their merry way. If the feds try anything, many states have more than enough law enforcement capabilities to overpower federal law enforcement and the loyalty of the guardsmen in the NG is going to be first and foremost with their families and communities.
The states need to start knocking the feds down a few notches on the totem poll through things like not taking mandates, arresting DEA agents on capital murder charges for killing people in no-knock raids and things like that.
Stocks are reasonably priced, salaries are reasonable, VCs aren't throwing money around in big fist fulls of $100 bills. I'd say that maybe things are maturing this time.
Where is the outrage over limits on free speech that were passed in the name of campaign finance reform? How about the restrictions on firearm ownership? The primary beneficiaries of gun control are criminals and corrupt cops, neither groups now have to worry about armed citizens fighting back. How about the mess that is the War on Drugs? Where is the left-wing outrage over speech codes that let individuals decide that since they were offended, that someone can lose their job, get expelled from school or any other number of totalitarian powers over others for merely being offensive?
This is like getting royally pissed off that no one cares about a criminal kicking your dog after no one cared that every woman in your family got brutally raped, your family got robbed, your sons sent to prison for sticking their tongues out at a cop and the police get to put security cameras all around your property because they don't like you. Both of you groups, liberals and conservatives, had brought us to this point. The last 14 years have proved that neither liberals or conservatives give a damn about letting Americans live non-regimented lives as everything from MySpace to phone records are getting regulated in the name of creating a more "orderly and safe society."
If you think that the state has any role beyond securing life, liberty and property you are part of the problem, not the solution.
The reason that Apple and Microsoft are so much more successful is that there is a single place to go to for Windows or OSX. There is no distribution, just one company. It's not perfect, as witnessed by the upgrade paths of their platforms, but try explaining to a soccer mom or country club dad why you can have two distributions with nearly the same kernel and library versions and yet the software isn't guaranteed to just work.
And I sure as hell support this domain. Why? It's the only way to let us conservative Christians block porn that won't get struck down by the courts.
I'm tired of the pornographers whining about the "ghettoization of their free speech." Why don't we just let them sell their goods in the kids' section of a book store? Pornography is not sexual speech. Should it be outlawed? No, each adult has to work on their own morality and forcing them won't make the right moral changes to fix society.
Let's call a spade a spade. Pornography is only art if you consider a picture of the virgin Mary painted in elephant dung to be art. I consider Playboy's photos to be low class art. A typical porn site is not even remotely art or expressive except in the lowest, most attavistic sense. There are two good reasons for not banning porn: we don't want judges and legislators legally defining what is and isn't art and it's a private moral issue that cannot be stopped by the stroke of a pen.
The problem with your argument is that one of the first things that every proto-police state does is register firearms, or in some cases outright seize them. Not every country with gun control is a bonafide police state, but every police state has had major problems with letting the average citizen carry a weapon capable of posting any credible threat to its police.
In the 20th century, over 150,000,000 people were murdered by their governments or by foreign governments. I think the case for why governments cannot be trusted with a monopoly on the ability to use deadly force has been made very clearly by history.
Besides, without firearms, the only way you can disarm the state is moral persuasion, and that... well... doesn't have any past impact on politicians dedicated to gaining power. The only "non-violent resistance" movements that have worked were in countries where the government wasn't sufficiently committed to maintaining power that it couldn't stomach killing large numbers of people, or the government was being isolated by almost all foreign governments and was already internally weak.
One of the great things about the public education system is that it doesn't teach a critical understanding of historical events. Take police states for example. Most people in the US think they're built in a day and that a police state only exists when thugs in snazzy uniforms goosestep down the street. They not only don't know, but don't even want to know what leads up to the formation of a police state.
You know what does? People railing against one socio-political-economic class as the root problem of society. Newsflash, most classes are where they are for reasons they could have helped or legitimately earned. A pluralist society needs that class diversity to reinforce individualism. And let's not forget perceived enemies of all types. Then there's the "just give up part of your liberty and you'll be safe, if you've got nothing to hide of course." It's like gun control. There are a lot of cops out there who can't shoot worth a damn and police departments are legendary for resistance to change. Do you trust them with your daily safety? I don't.
When people say to you "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear," you can respond (which I usually do) with "no decent, civilized person would ever have grounds to criticize the basic checks and balances that you oppose."