Since most electricity is still generated by burning fossil fuels, an all-electric car would most likely be worse than one burning the fuel directly
With the dependency on gasoline removed, and the input energy freely convertible from anything that generates electricity, an all-electric car makes switching our fuel source a thousand billion times easier. This is very likely why it scares the bejeesus out of energy monopolists.
All the fossil fuels that are economically reachable will be burned
I eagerly await your explanation of who will be burning them in cities that are three to six feet underwater.
If you mod me down 'Troll' when what I've actually done is very pointedly dissected the parent argument, you're telling me I've struck a nerve. I will continue to do so.
You don't need to be proven that Global Warming doesn't exist, you should force people to prove it does exist. That's how science works, you start assuming what you've always assumed and the new theories must be proven.
OK. You're asking the wrong question. Global Warming isn't a thing that may or may not exist. It's a phenomenon, whose occurrance is already proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. The question (which isn't really a question) is, is it happening here and now?
The "already proven" part of GW, the statement that greenhouse gases trap heat and cause a feedback cycle that leads a climate system as a whole to run away to some higher temperature is in stark and indisputable evidence on the nearby planet Venus. It's more than just being closer to the Sun -- even on the night side of Venus, where night lasts for months, it's 800 degrees plus.
The question is, are we in danger of modestly displacing our own climate in the here and now? And the answer (except from a few paid shills, who I suspect the parent article is one of) is a resounding yes.
Personally, I've never cared much about this 'Global Warming' because even the alarmists (like Greenpeace and Gore) give incredibly non-frightening information. They say we're warming up at an unprecedented level, but the worst figures I've seen say we've increase one degree Fahrenheit in the last two-hundred years.
That's because you don't understand what you're talking about. Your credibility on this issue is plumetting already. Global temperatures don't fluctuate very rapidly. When they do, we observe in the historical record coincident events like mass extinctions.
But the biggest problem in proving 'Global Warming' is not conflicting evidence like this article. It's not the fact that the same theories and reasoning and 'researchers' told us that we were headed for an ice-age thirty years ago.
Please, since you're so well-read, can we see what articles you're talking about? Get dates on them, too.
Even if you do, however, it's irrelevant. Science changes because we learn more. Thirty years ago, we did not understand certain things. That we didn't then and do now, and that our understanding of thirty years ago conflicts with our understanding of now does not mean there's a mutual equivalence of doubt. Something like five times the amount of scientific information has been gathered by the human species in the last thirty years than had been gathered in all of human history previous. I believe our most recent recorded rate of information doubling was every seven years. Is that too complicated for you to understand?
It's the fact that even non-scientifically minded people can poke holes in the alarmists' theories. 'Global Warming is caused by humans' - how? How do we know that? Do cars give off a unique chemical that we can see directly makes the Earth warmer?
It's amazing how stupid people can be. Look up carbon dioxide.
Warming has caused more natural disasters than any previous year and it will only get worse' - really? I don't see how one degree could possibly cause more hurricanes, I mean, perhaps there are other causes to such a development. 'Global Warming will destroy civilisation' - uh, perhaps not Nervous Joe.
So, you're not dealing with Katrina refugees, I see. Must be nice to be wherever you are, Smartass Pollyanna. I'm not bothering you with a fact-based explanation of how warmer water increases hurricane energy because you plainly aren't intelligent enough to understand it, because if you were you'd have absorbed it at least once during the thousands of times that explanation has been published in the last year or so.
Anyone, anyone, looking even half logically at this 'Global Warming' hype can see through it.
I'm starting to suspect, as I see right through you, that you're a shill trying to pump brain-dead talking points into the conversation. I'll be happy to match my logical wits against yours any time. Be prepared to be logically beaten to a rhetorical pulp.
Well, there's more than a false dichotomy going on here, but that's a start.
For one, there's more than two responses to Iran. Our current likely response (the one apparently advocated by you) is "Do something aggressive." Something that is also by the way short-sighted and likely ineffective.
The false alternative you propose that replacement politicians will do is "do nothing."
The other alternatives are along the line of gradually do something that might possibly get the desired result, but won't be an immediate political 'gotcha.' In other words, the right thing.
The other problem with your statement is the notion that we are "standing up" to "militant Islam."
Before going off in that direction try bothering yourself to read up on the history of Iran. ~50 years ago, prior to our intervention, Iran had a blossoming democracy. It was intentionally destabilized, by us, for the most imbecilic reason one can currently imagine: Iran had just nationalized their oilfields. In short, it was about fucking money.
So, for a minimum short-term gain we wrecked Iran's democracy, replaced it with the thuggish Shah, who was in turn overthrown by a highly resentful Muslim/nationalist movement who naturally want America to keep our fucking hands off their politics from now on. Who'da thunk it?
Regardless of what kind of people are in charge in Iran now, we are little more than the victims of our selfish short-sightedness. Given that, I'd quite bluntly prefer that we as a nation drop the aggressive posture (because to Iranians we look like nothing more than arrogant meddlers and nothing we do in that realm could possibly look friendly) and do our best to let things evolve as naturally as they can. I know that most neocons are big fans of "letting the market decide" and maybe it's too brusque to shove that logic in their faces when it comes to foreign political systems as well, but to be even blunter we've made a fucking mess of our last couple of attempts to impose our (new) democratic values on a Middle Eastern country so it's not like we can claim any credible record of success at it. Things are as they are, and there's goddamn little we can do to change them, and certainly not with an aggressive cowboy mentality as we've been doing.
I remember Broussard in an interview stating quite distinctly that DNF would require, for a really high-end gaming experience, 6 MB of video memory tops. I am eagerly expecting that statement to be honored. Seriously.
Really -- if I were a BofA employee, and I had my money in the bank, and this was being done to me, I'd close my account pronto. Let them know -- there's no more where that came from, assholes!
1. This is the base that wants amnesty for all illegal immigrants and their families brought over as well ?
This is the base who's wondering why Bush slept at the switch for six years and then suddenly discovered this highly-divisive issue when his poll numbers were tanking. They're here. They are part of the economy. They are here SOLELY because they have discovered that employers will hire them -- and it is to the exploitative employers that the "base" directs our ire. These employers have lived in an atmosphere of wink-and-nod enforcement of immigration. We've had a global amnesty before -- it's a way to reset the system and make it honest. If you think you can jerk 11 or 12 million people out of our country without a noticable economic impact and also without initiating a concentration-camp style deathmarch you're dreaming. But what's going on has nothing to do with any kind of "gathering threat" and everything to do with pushing people's panic buttons to get them to the polls. See last year's gay marriage threat.
2. This is the base that wants immedi
This is the base that wants their public leaders to speak in complete, intelligible sentences.
3. This is the base that wants abortion on demand for underage girls without parental or legal notification
This is the base that wonders why the same people who insist we ban abortion won't stand up for readily-available birth control. This is the same base that views with something approaching complete revulsion the recent statements by scions of the religious community that vaccines for STD's are tantamount to a greenlight for sex. This is the base that can pretty easily see that the issue has nothing to do with "pro-life" and everything to do with people of one religion inserting their moral views into the legal code in violation of just about everything this country stands for.
This is the base that deplores legalized abortion but despises even more the inevitibility of illegal abortion that a full ban would bring, and would like to see some evidence-based strategy to reduce unwanted pregancy, rather than "abstience-only" programs based on religious flummery and wishful thinking.
4. This is the base that wants to raise taxes to promote economic growth
Clinton raised taxes. It certainly didn't kill economic growth. Don't tell me the 90's boom had anything to do with Reagan because that's been repeatedly debunked.
Bush cut taxes. We're stuck in stagflation now, and the dollar is crashing, and the national debt will be paid off by my children and their children. And in real terms, wages have been dropping. Don't tell me what a great economy this is. Go out into your community and ask your neighbors if they're better off now than they were six years ago. A clear majority of them will not agree.
5. This is the base that applauds when dick durbin and jack murtha compare american troops to nazis
Give me a source of both the quotes you imply and an opinion poll of the "base" agreeing with said quotes. Then we can talk about that statement.
You should be thankfull you have the DLC to mask your base from the rest of the country.
Currently the opinions of "my" base are in tune with the opinions of 71% of the rest of the country. The DLC is out of touch, and so are you.
I don't think you're following very closely. One of the main things going on at DailyKos is not so much routine criticism of the right and its very clearly failed policies -- although that does happen. It's also a self-examination of the Democratic party -- ostensibly the party representing the needs of the left and the whole spectrum of greater (public) interest vs. concentrated (corporate) interests -- and why it has routinely failed to deliver any credible alternative. Very broadly, the people who assemble on DailyKos are of the opinion that the inside-the-beltway mentality of the DLC has given us a Democratic party with no cojones to stand up and oppose things that their base opposes. They have a strategy of backing down because they're more afraid of offending people than losing elections because they held to a principle. It's why one of the most important Kos discussions is not whether or not we can put a Democrat in the Oval Office -- it's whether or not we can remove people like Joe Lieberman, who registers Democrat but votes Republican, and replace them with actual Democrats. So in that context you completely miss what is going on with Mr. McCurry, who is in the opinion of the KosOSphere either a shill or a sellout.
But the discussion of what is going on in this nation has become so distorted that I suppose people on the right can't even figure out what people on the left are talking about anymore, and it may be mostly because you're letting Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly tell you what we think.
The source of the comment is enough for your outright dismissal, I see. I can understand that: getting all sticky having an actual argument is so gauche.
If the cost to the company for buggy software is a refund of the purchase price? I can see one model that works really well -- you get the bits for free, and the vendor charges you for a support contract. OSS wins. In fact, it would make OSS the default business model.
Frank Black wrote not one but two songs about Mulholland: "Ole Mulholland," and "The St. Francis Dam Disaster." Apparently he made quite an impression on the guy. I didn't connect these two until I saw this article, by the way.
Maybe it is possible that with some more configuration work you can get all the machines to show up, without any centralized servers, but who the hell is going to go mess with the configuration of every machine to get this to work?
OK, even if I don't have centralized servers I can typically get a small peer-to-peer network setup in a few minutes. And when did peer-to-peer mean zero configuration? I don't get that. If you want your machines to be able to see each other, you have to agree on a couple of things, and that involves configuring your system. If you don't know how to do it or can't be bothered to spend a couple of minutes figuring it out, of course it's not going to work right.
In an office of 100 machines, in multiple workplaces I've found it is normal to see a random subset of the machines actually on the network at a given time. I remember having to transfer a file to someone's shared directory and asking the people nearby, "who can see Bob's desktop?" and then getting them to transfer the file to him.
In a correctly-configured network of 11,000 machines, I can get to about 90% of them at any given time. The other 10% are generally offline. What the parent post of this thread isn't saying is this: "If you think Windows peer networking is balky, you likely aren't setting something up correctly." And what's under the category of likely is name resolution.
It's more like photocopying the entire book and taking the copy home with you.
Speaking as a published (albeit POD self-published weenie) author myself, I believe I'll take free readers over no readers any day. I think that's what most people don't get -- the more widely your content is being spread, the more enthusiastic people are about it. Annoying, useless crap typically doesn't get pirated. The challenge is for the creators of content (that sounds so sterile!) to figure out ways to encourage people to support them.
Actually, in my limited time of martial arts sparring when I was young, I noticed that it was the novices and not the experts that seemed to hurt and get hurt more often than the experts
Additionally, it's more painful to spar a novice than a seasoned veteran . . . the novices can barely get out of their own way.
The amusing aspect of this is that we as society were conditioned to believe that Communism == all the totalitarian, oppresive aspects of society that had manifested themselves in the Soviet Union, and that what made us a great alternative were our precepts of intellectual and personal freedom. So what's really funny is that you (along with several generations of misled Americans) have equated Capitalism == 'freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of movement, freedom of choice.' You've all been the victims of a bait-and-switch. In reality, one's economic system probably doesn't have all that much to do with one's civil liberties and rights. It just happened to be so that we had Capitalism and the Soviets had Communism, while we had freedom and they had totalitarianism. Now without their totalitarianism to compare against our freedom, and without any logical counterweight to the power in our system, it's tilting quite naturally to the natural state of all systems where too much power is concentrated in the hands of those who feel they answer to no one.
Here is a website just chock fucking full of interesting facts about how our auto and energy interests have colluded to keep the costs of energy high enough to be massively profitable to them, and the barriers to meaningful competition from cheaper, more efficient energy sources outrageously high. In fact, as you can probably tell from the link title, there's shortly going to be a little film about the untimely death of the electric car, which would have for 90% of us suited just fine as an around-the-town vehicle. I would say that a car that kept demand for gasoline low and improved energy efficiency would have neutralized the phony "threat" from oil-bearing Iraq by kicking the props out from under Saddam's economy, had we started to implement it 10 years ago when it was introduced. Wouldn't that have been nice? We could have used meaningful economic sanctions against the bastard and forced him to come into the modern world. I'm sure 2,600 dead American soldiers would have been happy with that choice, as well.
I think you made some spelling mistakes. I'v corrected them: This brought to you by the same people who HAVE PROVEN global warming is man-made and think we should fix it by improving our energy efficiency, not incidentally generating thousands of jobs and improving our socioeconomic status a thousandfold.
I'm really fucking tired of this canard being spouted by people with no understanding of the issue. So let's get it straight, shall we: the issue is that YES we are causing global warming. The evidence is on the table. If you are qualified as a climate scientist and NOT in the pay of a major oil company, you may rebut. Otherwise, shut your pie-hole. You know nothing.
The other part of your statement, regarding killing the economy, is utter horse malarkey. The only reason it is uttered is to cause confusion and fear. The stance of 95% of the people who are worried about global warming is that we should be improving our energy efficiency as a matter of national policy. I have yet to see anyone credibly address how using fuel more efficiently can cause harm to our economy. I have yet to see anyone credibly address how using cleaner fuels could cause harm to our economy. I have yet to see anyone credibly address how it would cost our economy to invest in renewables. There are a number of easily-demonstrated examples where energy efficiency and CO2 reduction is easily attained, but of course that's at the expense of the retirement packages of charming individuals like this so of course we can't be doing THAT here!
The only people who are benefiting from our inefficient energy economy are a handful of undeservedly wealthy robber barons whose sum total contribution to our society isn't worth a fart in the wind. The rest of us won't miss them if they're cut loose and forced back into actually working for a living. They benefit because of the unique circumstances of having gotten into the business on the ground floor, and believe for some unknown reason that it's their right and privledge to always control the spigots of our energy flow. They are wrong.
I'm so tired of this. You're not just wrong, you're living in space. You have literally no interest in the real issue of what's going on. The only thing you're about is making sure that people imbibe the meme "GOVERMENT IS EVIL" from your libertarian crack pipe. Five years of libertarian crack-pipe dreams have given us a society that lurches between fascism and corporate dicatorship. Here's what government is: people. Government in a representative democracy is the will of the people. The will of the people in a majority-rules democracy should ideally reflect the greatest possible common good, and in this case that is an internet that is guaranteed to be open and free. We grant these corporations their near-monopoly status on the basis that they give us something back. The need for Net Neutrality came about because of a land-grab being attempted by ATTT&T and other members of the corporophagia, which you bloody well know about and if you don't you certainly don't deserve to be elected to a public office.
The market is not, cannot, and will not be fixing this problem for us, and not one thing any libertarian says anymore can possibly convince me otherwise. I've watched for five years as the libertarian neo-con wing of the Republican party has had its way: reducing taxes (but actually just shifting them around -- notably to people who currently can't vote), slashing regulations, giving away public property to big businesses. I've had enough. Libertarianism is bullshit. It's wrong, and it's no way to run a civilized society. End of story. Pull the plug.
Of course, I also run Firefox and have a firewall and antivirus setup. But I haven't had to deal with worms or viruses ever. Above posters have noted that it's hard to get some apps to run right. I usually have to set their individual directories to have user write access, and then it works. Once or twice I had to set registry permissions.
But I log in as admin to install software, and neither of my kids knows or will ever know that password.
Rights tend to be removed peicemeal, Rebublicans and Democrats both have been heading down the Authoritarian road for some time...
Again, let's see some examples. I'm not trying to be pedantic or anything, but I keep seeing this assertion and I don't see any documentation to back it up. At what point in his term of office did Clinton behave as if the Constitution did not apply to him? When did he do anything remotely resembling the following: Bush's signing statements (700+ affixed to every single bill he signs); the Patriot Act?; warrantless wiretapping; extraordinary rendition; condoning torture?
Give me examples or frankly shut your piehole. I've been paying attention to things like this through (late) Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II. And I have NEVER seen anything like this in my lifetime. The closest it's ever gotten in my memory was Bush I's "operation pipe" where they went around arresting headshop owners for selling legal smoking accessories. I still have some of those newspaper articles . . .
And if there are people willing to pay that price, why shouldn't they be sold the tickets?
Because in many cases the band would like to actually get their fans at the show. They don't choose Ticketmaster -- they simply have to use them. It's the simple definition of a monopoly and one that's long past due to be busted up six ways from Sunday.
There are a lot of bands that, I'm sure, would like to be able to play smaller shows where the audience can actually see them, but because of the warping of the economics of Ticketmaster they have to play only huge, expensive shows spaced few and far between. I've watched in dismay as the concert circuit has become bifrucated into two spheres -- a. gigantic, expensive shows largely by one-hit-wonder supermegasmash bands or tired old farts, and b. little tiny club tours by bands that just barely eke out an existence. Between RIAA and Ticketmaster the actual music industry is dying.
Slashdot Mirror
With the dependency on gasoline removed, and the input energy freely convertible from anything that generates electricity, an all-electric car makes switching our fuel source a thousand billion times easier. This is very likely why it scares the bejeesus out of energy monopolists.
All the fossil fuels that are economically reachable will be burned
I eagerly await your explanation of who will be burning them in cities that are three to six feet underwater.
If you mod me down 'Troll' when what I've actually done is very pointedly dissected the parent argument, you're telling me I've struck a nerve. I will continue to do so.
OK. You're asking the wrong question. Global Warming isn't a thing that may or may not exist. It's a phenomenon, whose occurrance is already proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. The question (which isn't really a question) is, is it happening here and now?
The "already proven" part of GW, the statement that greenhouse gases trap heat and cause a feedback cycle that leads a climate system as a whole to run away to some higher temperature is in stark and indisputable evidence on the nearby planet Venus. It's more than just being closer to the Sun -- even on the night side of Venus, where night lasts for months, it's 800 degrees plus.
The question is, are we in danger of modestly displacing our own climate in the here and now? And the answer (except from a few paid shills, who I suspect the parent article is one of) is a resounding yes.
Personally, I've never cared much about this 'Global Warming' because even the alarmists (like Greenpeace and Gore) give incredibly non-frightening information. They say we're warming up at an unprecedented level, but the worst figures I've seen say we've increase one degree Fahrenheit in the last two-hundred years.
That's because you don't understand what you're talking about. Your credibility on this issue is plumetting already. Global temperatures don't fluctuate very rapidly. When they do, we observe in the historical record coincident events like mass extinctions.
But the biggest problem in proving 'Global Warming' is not conflicting evidence like this article. It's not the fact that the same theories and reasoning and 'researchers' told us that we were headed for an ice-age thirty years ago.
Please, since you're so well-read, can we see what articles you're talking about? Get dates on them, too.
Even if you do, however, it's irrelevant. Science changes because we learn more. Thirty years ago, we did not understand certain things. That we didn't then and do now, and that our understanding of thirty years ago conflicts with our understanding of now does not mean there's a mutual equivalence of doubt. Something like five times the amount of scientific information has been gathered by the human species in the last thirty years than had been gathered in all of human history previous. I believe our most recent recorded rate of information doubling was every seven years. Is that too complicated for you to understand?
It's the fact that even non-scientifically minded people can poke holes in the alarmists' theories. 'Global Warming is caused by humans' - how? How do we know that? Do cars give off a unique chemical that we can see directly makes the Earth warmer?
It's amazing how stupid people can be. Look up carbon dioxide.
Warming has caused more natural disasters than any previous year and it will only get worse' - really? I don't see how one degree could possibly cause more hurricanes, I mean, perhaps there are other causes to such a development. 'Global Warming will destroy civilisation' - uh, perhaps not Nervous Joe.
So, you're not dealing with Katrina refugees, I see. Must be nice to be wherever you are, Smartass Pollyanna. I'm not bothering you with a fact-based explanation of how warmer water increases hurricane energy because you plainly aren't intelligent enough to understand it, because if you were you'd have absorbed it at least once during the thousands of times that explanation has been published in the last year or so.
Anyone, anyone, looking even half logically at this 'Global Warming' hype can see through it.
I'm starting to suspect, as I see right through you, that you're a shill trying to pump brain-dead talking points into the conversation. I'll be happy to match my logical wits against yours any time. Be prepared to be logically beaten to a rhetorical pulp.
For one, there's more than two responses to Iran. Our current likely response (the one apparently advocated by you) is "Do something aggressive." Something that is also by the way short-sighted and likely ineffective.
The false alternative you propose that replacement politicians will do is "do nothing."
The other alternatives are along the line of gradually do something that might possibly get the desired result, but won't be an immediate political 'gotcha.' In other words, the right thing.
The other problem with your statement is the notion that we are "standing up" to "militant Islam."
Before going off in that direction try bothering yourself to read up on the history of Iran. ~50 years ago, prior to our intervention, Iran had a blossoming democracy. It was intentionally destabilized, by us, for the most imbecilic reason one can currently imagine: Iran had just nationalized their oilfields. In short, it was about fucking money.
So, for a minimum short-term gain we wrecked Iran's democracy, replaced it with the thuggish Shah, who was in turn overthrown by a highly resentful Muslim/nationalist movement who naturally want America to keep our fucking hands off their politics from now on. Who'da thunk it?
Regardless of what kind of people are in charge in Iran now, we are little more than the victims of our selfish short-sightedness. Given that, I'd quite bluntly prefer that we as a nation drop the aggressive posture (because to Iranians we look like nothing more than arrogant meddlers and nothing we do in that realm could possibly look friendly) and do our best to let things evolve as naturally as they can. I know that most neocons are big fans of "letting the market decide" and maybe it's too brusque to shove that logic in their faces when it comes to foreign political systems as well, but to be even blunter we've made a fucking mess of our last couple of attempts to impose our (new) democratic values on a Middle Eastern country so it's not like we can claim any credible record of success at it. Things are as they are, and there's goddamn little we can do to change them, and certainly not with an aggressive cowboy mentality as we've been doing.
I remember Broussard in an interview stating quite distinctly that DNF would require, for a really high-end gaming experience, 6 MB of video memory tops. I am eagerly expecting that statement to be honored. Seriously.
Really -- if I were a BofA employee, and I had my money in the bank, and this was being done to me, I'd close my account pronto. Let them know -- there's no more where that came from, assholes!
This is the base who's wondering why Bush slept at the switch for six years and then suddenly discovered this highly-divisive issue when his poll numbers were tanking. They're here. They are part of the economy. They are here SOLELY because they have discovered that employers will hire them -- and it is to the exploitative employers that the "base" directs our ire. These employers have lived in an atmosphere of wink-and-nod enforcement of immigration. We've had a global amnesty before -- it's a way to reset the system and make it honest. If you think you can jerk 11 or 12 million people out of our country without a noticable economic impact and also without initiating a concentration-camp style deathmarch you're dreaming. But what's going on has nothing to do with any kind of "gathering threat" and everything to do with pushing people's panic buttons to get them to the polls. See last year's gay marriage threat.
2. This is the base that wants immedi
This is the base that wants their public leaders to speak in complete, intelligible sentences.
3. This is the base that wants abortion on demand for underage girls without parental or legal notification
This is the base that wonders why the same people who insist we ban abortion won't stand up for readily-available birth control. This is the same base that views with something approaching complete revulsion the recent statements by scions of the religious community that vaccines for STD's are tantamount to a greenlight for sex. This is the base that can pretty easily see that the issue has nothing to do with "pro-life" and everything to do with people of one religion inserting their moral views into the legal code in violation of just about everything this country stands for.
This is the base that deplores legalized abortion but despises even more the inevitibility of illegal abortion that a full ban would bring, and would like to see some evidence-based strategy to reduce unwanted pregancy, rather than "abstience-only" programs based on religious flummery and wishful thinking.
4. This is the base that wants to raise taxes to promote economic growth
Clinton raised taxes. It certainly didn't kill economic growth. Don't tell me the 90's boom had anything to do with Reagan because that's been repeatedly debunked.
Bush cut taxes. We're stuck in stagflation now, and the dollar is crashing, and the national debt will be paid off by my children and their children. And in real terms, wages have been dropping. Don't tell me what a great economy this is. Go out into your community and ask your neighbors if they're better off now than they were six years ago. A clear majority of them will not agree.
5. This is the base that applauds when dick durbin and jack murtha compare american troops to nazis
Give me a source of both the quotes you imply and an opinion poll of the "base" agreeing with said quotes. Then we can talk about that statement.
You should be thankfull you have the DLC to mask your base from the rest of the country.
Currently the opinions of "my" base are in tune with the opinions of 71% of the rest of the country. The DLC is out of touch, and so are you.
But the discussion of what is going on in this nation has become so distorted that I suppose people on the right can't even figure out what people on the left are talking about anymore, and it may be mostly because you're letting Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly tell you what we think.
The source of the comment is enough for your outright dismissal, I see. I can understand that: getting all sticky having an actual argument is so gauche.
If the cost to the company for buggy software is a refund of the purchase price? I can see one model that works really well -- you get the bits for free, and the vendor charges you for a support contract. OSS wins. In fact, it would make OSS the default business model.
This would be in line with stating expected fitness of use. Bug vs. feature is not much of a debate.
Frank Black wrote not one but two songs about Mulholland: "Ole Mulholland," and "The St. Francis Dam Disaster." Apparently he made quite an impression on the guy. I didn't connect these two until I saw this article, by the way.
OK, even if I don't have centralized servers I can typically get a small peer-to-peer network setup in a few minutes. And when did peer-to-peer mean zero configuration? I don't get that. If you want your machines to be able to see each other, you have to agree on a couple of things, and that involves configuring your system. If you don't know how to do it or can't be bothered to spend a couple of minutes figuring it out, of course it's not going to work right.
OK, amended: unpopular content does not get pirated. Value judgments are in the eyes of the beholder.
In a correctly-configured network of 11,000 machines, I can get to about 90% of them at any given time. The other 10% are generally offline. What the parent post of this thread isn't saying is this: "If you think Windows peer networking is balky, you likely aren't setting something up correctly." And what's under the category of likely is name resolution.
Speaking as a published (albeit POD self-published weenie) author myself, I believe I'll take free readers over no readers any day. I think that's what most people don't get -- the more widely your content is being spread, the more enthusiastic people are about it. Annoying, useless crap typically doesn't get pirated. The challenge is for the creators of content (that sounds so sterile!) to figure out ways to encourage people to support them.
Additionally, it's more painful to spar a novice than a seasoned veteran . . . the novices can barely get out of their own way.
The amusing aspect of this is that we as society were conditioned to believe that Communism == all the totalitarian, oppresive aspects of society that had manifested themselves in the Soviet Union, and that what made us a great alternative were our precepts of intellectual and personal freedom. So what's really funny is that you (along with several generations of misled Americans) have equated Capitalism == 'freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of movement, freedom of choice.' You've all been the victims of a bait-and-switch. In reality, one's economic system probably doesn't have all that much to do with one's civil liberties and rights. It just happened to be so that we had Capitalism and the Soviets had Communism, while we had freedom and they had totalitarianism. Now without their totalitarianism to compare against our freedom, and without any logical counterweight to the power in our system, it's tilting quite naturally to the natural state of all systems where too much power is concentrated in the hands of those who feel they answer to no one.
Here is a website just chock fucking full of interesting facts about how our auto and energy interests have colluded to keep the costs of energy high enough to be massively profitable to them, and the barriers to meaningful competition from cheaper, more efficient energy sources outrageously high. In fact, as you can probably tell from the link title, there's shortly going to be a little film about the untimely death of the electric car, which would have for 90% of us suited just fine as an around-the-town vehicle. I would say that a car that kept demand for gasoline low and improved energy efficiency would have neutralized the phony "threat" from oil-bearing Iraq by kicking the props out from under Saddam's economy, had we started to implement it 10 years ago when it was introduced. Wouldn't that have been nice? We could have used meaningful economic sanctions against the bastard and forced him to come into the modern world. I'm sure 2,600 dead American soldiers would have been happy with that choice, as well.
I'm really fucking tired of this canard being spouted by people with no understanding of the issue. So let's get it straight, shall we: the issue is that YES we are causing global warming. The evidence is on the table. If you are qualified as a climate scientist and NOT in the pay of a major oil company, you may rebut. Otherwise, shut your pie-hole. You know nothing.
The other part of your statement, regarding killing the economy, is utter horse malarkey. The only reason it is uttered is to cause confusion and fear. The stance of 95% of the people who are worried about global warming is that we should be improving our energy efficiency as a matter of national policy. I have yet to see anyone credibly address how using fuel more efficiently can cause harm to our economy. I have yet to see anyone credibly address how using cleaner fuels could cause harm to our economy. I have yet to see anyone credibly address how it would cost our economy to invest in renewables. There are a number of easily-demonstrated examples where energy efficiency and CO2 reduction is easily attained, but of course that's at the expense of the retirement packages of charming individuals like this so of course we can't be doing THAT here!
The only people who are benefiting from our inefficient energy economy are a handful of undeservedly wealthy robber barons whose sum total contribution to our society isn't worth a fart in the wind. The rest of us won't miss them if they're cut loose and forced back into actually working for a living. They benefit because of the unique circumstances of having gotten into the business on the ground floor, and believe for some unknown reason that it's their right and privledge to always control the spigots of our energy flow. They are wrong.
The market is not, cannot, and will not be fixing this problem for us, and not one thing any libertarian says anymore can possibly convince me otherwise. I've watched for five years as the libertarian neo-con wing of the Republican party has had its way: reducing taxes (but actually just shifting them around -- notably to people who currently can't vote), slashing regulations, giving away public property to big businesses. I've had enough. Libertarianism is bullshit. It's wrong, and it's no way to run a civilized society. End of story. Pull the plug.
But I log in as admin to install software, and neither of my kids knows or will ever know that password.
Again, let's see some examples. I'm not trying to be pedantic or anything, but I keep seeing this assertion and I don't see any documentation to back it up. At what point in his term of office did Clinton behave as if the Constitution did not apply to him? When did he do anything remotely resembling the following: Bush's signing statements (700+ affixed to every single bill he signs); the Patriot Act?; warrantless wiretapping; extraordinary rendition; condoning torture?
Give me examples or frankly shut your piehole. I've been paying attention to things like this through (late) Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II. And I have NEVER seen anything like this in my lifetime. The closest it's ever gotten in my memory was Bush I's "operation pipe" where they went around arresting headshop owners for selling legal smoking accessories. I still have some of those newspaper articles . . .
I did read your response, and throughout much of it you blithely ignored the primary statements of the parent comment.
Because in many cases the band would like to actually get their fans at the show. They don't choose Ticketmaster -- they simply have to use them. It's the simple definition of a monopoly and one that's long past due to be busted up six ways from Sunday.
There are a lot of bands that, I'm sure, would like to be able to play smaller shows where the audience can actually see them, but because of the warping of the economics of Ticketmaster they have to play only huge, expensive shows spaced few and far between. I've watched in dismay as the concert circuit has become bifrucated into two spheres -- a. gigantic, expensive shows largely by one-hit-wonder supermegasmash bands or tired old farts, and b. little tiny club tours by bands that just barely eke out an existence. Between RIAA and Ticketmaster the actual music industry is dying.