"Finally, the deeply flawed arguments used by pushers of these drugs leave a segment of the population distrusting "big pharma" as if the medical industry was out to get them...In other words, the long term effect is a loss of critical thinking skills and people who are poorer and sicker because some fools benefited from the placebo effect. "
Whoa whoa whoa... homeopaths and other nutcases aren't the only ones who think "big pharma" is out to get them. Plenty of us who follow along with mainstream medicine feel that way too. How the hell else would you explain requip, or the shenanigans that go on around pharma sales reps and doctors' offices? They do want us us addicted, they do want us to overpay, and they do want us to stay "sick" forever.
They could try, but since martial law had been declared, it would pretty much be an empty gesture. Martial law explicitly trumps civilian law, by virtue of being administrated by regular military troops and typically maintained using lethal force. "You aren't allowed to do that!" tends to be a much less effective defense than one might hope in such a context.
As a regular Win7 user, no, it doesn't, and you're talking out of your ass.
Or, rather, it only nags constantly for apps that constantly demand to do admin tasks. Such behavior wouldn't be tolerated in Linuxland, but a program that insists it should be allowed to connect with repositories and auto-update on every single load would trigger sudo requirements too. The real problem is with apps that have very poor manners, not with UAC.
One solution would be for Windows Update to allow 3rd-party apps to piggy back and check for updates on their own repositories through that interface as the result of a trusted/authorized installation. Then you wouldn't have programs phoning home every 30 seconds, constantly updating themselves without regard to the considerations of other programs, or each nagging you individually to update, and would instead have a consistent interface asking for periodic permission to resolve all update issues. Kind of like Synaptic.
That's not entirely true... the Civil War saw huge advances in weaponry, and was really the first war to be fought with what we would now consider to be modern weapons in terms of both range and accuracy. It was also one of the bloodiest wars ever fought, with enormous losses suffered by both sides, largely as a result of the fact that the tactics in use WEREN'T optimized for their weapons.
By the end of the Civil War, most soldiers were equipped with combat ready battle rifles utilizing jacketed cartridges and fully rifled barrels (rifling had existed for decades, and was fairly common on high-end firearms, but the technology to effectively mass-produce them came into being during the war... this is one of the reason that Confederate volunteer forces, with their heirloom quality guns so heavily dominated in the first few years, they were much more experienced and better-armed than their conscripted Union counterparts). Semi-automatic revolvers, repeater rifles and carbines, as well as early machine guns, were deployed among certain elite units and officers. These guns were quite accurate, even at range, and even the single round breach-loaded models carried by basic infantrymen had a decent rate of fire that made mass fire line battles obsolete and unnecessarily brutal.
Now the American Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, those required mass fire at point blank ranges, and the only forces to employ guerrilla-style tactics were local militias acting primarily to impede the progress of real forces. The Americans never could have won the Revolution if they'd kept using Minuteman tactics firing from behind cover and fleeing from return fire.
Point of order: Judges don't declare martial law. Ever. That's something that only a military officer (including the CINC) can do (hence "martial"), so unless the judge also happens to be an acting general, they have no ability or incentive to make that declaration, nor would they have any power to rescind the order.
The appropriate charge would be capital contempt of court, with expedited sentencing and a fast tracked execution. Firing squad is a little hard to justify in the US, but maybe if the bailiff shouted "he's coming right for us!" before shooting they could get around the details.
China is currently on track to produce a greater percentage of the energy with green technologies than the US within 20 years. I'd say that throwing them under the bus is largely a moot point.
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Your statement seems to be almost the corollary to statements like "If you don't have anything to hide what are you worried about?""
So in lieu of any reason to believe my rights are actually being violated and the "wrong" people are amassing a dossier about me, I should default to paranoia and assume they are? Sounds pretty stupid to me. I am a firm proponent of Occam's Razor, and in this stituation, the most likely explanation is that nobody is bothering to look.
"I would also suggest that you're not looking at the bigger picture."
What bigger picture? Just saying that one exists doesn't mean I'm ignorant of it.
The big picture is that THIS HAS ALWAYS BEEN POSSIBLE, the only difference is that, like everything else, it has gotten faster and easier. J Edgar Hoover never needed the internet to dig up dirt on people, Hitler didn't need access to genealogy.com user logs or friends-only Facebook updates to find the Jews. Get a grip and stop acting like this is some new and terrible danger, we make fun of people who pretend that putting an old service on the tubes is some great innovation, then turn around and act surprised when intelligence and law enforcement types do it too.
"What is preventing your friends from doing that for you? If I have an Android phone, and I have your contact info, along with perhaps your birth date, address, email, an ID picture of you, and some other interesting details in your contact, now I've given that data to Google, haven't I? What contract or understanding do you have with Google to govern how that data is being used and protected?"
I gave all of that information to Google myself, I use gmail... implied in this is that I do not consider any of that information to be private, merely obscure. If somebody wants to waste their time hunting down my birthday they're more than welcome to... of course, they could have just asked. The point you're actually making is that true privacy is only possible if you go completely off the grid, associate with nobody, and live in the woods like a hermit. That choice is always available to me, and until it isn't I'm not going to worry about somebody employing a high-tech means of asking the people I know about me any more than I'll worry about them using a low-tech means of doing so.
Or, just as likely, nobody can be bothered to connect the dots. Hell, the underwear bomber's father told a CIA official that he thought his son was up to no good... gave them pictures, travel plans, the whole nine, and they forgot to put it all together.
I spend a lot of time openly criticizing various powerful and influential people, and I've yet to see any negative repercussions from it. Maybe because I don't bother to hide they don't bother trying to track me down.
Sorry, I don't see the massive potential the internet has for making my life better by telling everyone what i had for lunch today. If there is something i wouldn't want people on the internet (ie. everyone) to know, then I don't put it there... I suppose that I could instead spend hundreds of hours wanking around with security and privacy measures of questionable integrity, but I find it much easier to just do that small number of things analog.
The fact is that you don't get to have it both ways. The internet is not intended to keep information private... in fact, it was designed to do PRECISELY the opposite. If you don't like it, then keep playing with your privacy settings, and godspeed you sir.
There's a difference between refusing to leave your house and choosing not to run down the street holding $60,000 worth of diamonds and cash in a bad neighborhood in the middle of the night. Sorry if that distinction is lost on you.
The right to privacy doesn't mean that nobody will ever know who you are, what you do or where you go, it means that that knowledge won't be actively sought or abused without strong legal cause.
Fighting the war in the way OP has chosen to isn't fighting for people to respect your privacy, it's fighting for them not to have a choice. I put virtually no effort into remaining anonymous or hiding my digital footprints, yet oddly enough I've never had the secret police bust down my door, or had any clear reason to believe that my privacy has been violated.
I also happen to believe that anything I do online, by nature of the internet, is public, and accordingly I choose not to put most of the details of my life onto it.
But what if, and this is a long shot, he's not just full of it? Sometimes people deny guilt because they're stupid, but every now and then people do it because they're actually innocent.
I can't help but feel like after this long, no sane person would still be proclaiming innocence if it wasn't true at all.
Uh, what? "Quaker" is to The Society of Friends what "Mormon" is to the Church of Latter Day Saints; a colloquial term for church members. I suppose that some Quakers out there might be offended by the term, but I've never heard of it, and there are actually a decent number of them in my area.
As for preaching against their fellow man... no, not really. The Quakers are pretty well known for teaching peace, tolerance, equality and universal love. They were one of the first groups to outright condemn slavery in the United Sates, and also one of the first to take direct action against it (Quaker craftsmen, particularly shipbuilders, refused to make anything that would be used for the purpose of slavery, including those used for the slave trade; they also ran many of the stops on the underground railroad, and often provided material assistance to escaped blacks once in the North). They were also one of the first modern sects to allow female ministers, and have long supported and worked for equal rights for men and women.
They're also shockingly badass for radical pacifists, throughout their history they have maintained a reputation for being downright fearless when it comes to issues of faith vs. the powers that be. It took some serious stones to tell the king of England that you will not remove your hat in his presence because the only authority which you respect is the Lord, even more when the circumstances are such that the king is pissed you're not following the state religion in which he is the voice of God.
GP implied that most SLASHDOT READERS are not American, I asserted that most, in fact, are. As evidenced by Slashdot's management and administrators saying so (and I don't see any good reason for them to lie about it).
Whether or not most internet users are American is another question entirely, and one that I have not seen any reliable means of measuring (especially given that connections != users).
Steampunk has a huge DIY element to it... people who buy spiffy mechanical do-dads or modified Nerf guns might be respected for their fashion sense, but the people who actually make that stuff are held in MUCH higher regard.
Full disclosure: I think steampunk is hugely overdone and overrated, that it's 90% nerd fashion and 10% shitty sci-fi, that it's just another shallow meme that everyone will forget about in another year and that it is, clearly, the cancer that is killing the con-scene. I also spend a lot of time around it, and have even acquired/made some of my own pieces in order to open up performance venues.
As to the actual "story": So what? This isn't even US-centric, it's California centric; I'm involved with 3 steampunk conventions just in February-May, all within the Northeast. Rightly, none of them made/.. This one sounds like basically the same thing, just on the west coast. Whoopty fucking doo.
"Why do you assume that 1) Most on here are American'
Because it is demonstrably true. And no, I will not give sources, this is common knowledge. I know that Taco periodically gives a bunch of random statistics on site usage, and at least once he broke it down by country: it was something like 75% American, 10% Canadian and 15% everyone else when I last saw it. Granted, a lot of/.ers are likely to be using proxies/TOR/other connections that will obfuscate their true location, but I think it's fair to say that the vast majority probably don't.
"No, you have it 100% backwards. It's the Democrats who run things into the ground."
Yeah, damn them for creating the S&L disaster... oh, wait. I mean damn them for the recession in 90-92... oh, wait. I mean damn them for mortgage meltdown... oh wait. I mean damn them for, um, JIMMY CARTER!
Never mind that he was president over 30 years ago, that he was inaugurated at the same time a bubble peaked (they only take about 3-4 months to pop after that), that it wasn't actually that terrible a situation (worst since the Depression at the time, but that's more a reflection on how well the economy did between the mid-40s and early 70s... it was a fairly minor market correction exacerbated by the beginning of the out-source movement and a labor glut due to the end of Vietnam), that things were largely fixed by the time he left office (note the distinction between "fixed" and "better", or that even most conservatives view him as practically a saint on moral, ethical and humanitarian issues.
Whatever you may think of Vista/7/Server2008, this isn't a problem for them. I agree that it's stupid for WD to make their drives lie for compatibility with what is effectively a legacy OS (by modernity, not use), but there's no call to tar newer releases for it.
"For someone who demands such a nuanced interpretation of liberal/democrat, you sure seem ignorant of what the tea party actually is. The tea party is a group of people, some crazy and some not, who are united by a desire for a sound fiscal policy. They are not happy with the Bush era policies (the people who are happy with that are the die hard Republicans, not the tea partiers; not the same thing) They also like dressing up in costume, which, if you live in San Francisco at least, shouldn't be too foreign to a liberal. In fact, your very next quote sounds exactly like it could come from a tea party:"
HAHAHAHAHA. No, not really. We have tea partiers here, I've met some... they're just mainstream Republicans who are ashamed (with good reason) to admit it. Seriously, they supported Scott Brown... he's an empty suit Romney clone, it doesn't get any more Karl Rove Republican than that.
How about this, follow the money: the Tea Party has a lot of corporate sponsors, just where do you think the money comes from to pay the various think tanks, lobbyist groups and advertisers? Personal donations? Poke around and you'll find that, among others, Koch Industries has been bank-rolling quite a bit of it. They founded both Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks (via the now defunct Citizens For A Sound Economy), which is where you'll find most of the Tea Party talking points and hype begin and end. For bonus points, Fred Koch was a founding Bircher (yep, one of those).
"Now, I am not a tea-partier, I am just someone who enjoys observing politics, which brings me to my next point, has anyone else noticed that liberals and conservatives are sounding more and more like each other?"
Democrats and Republicans sound very much the same. The bulk of Americans are in fact "centrists" (by our standards, not the world's... many Europeans see our "center" as "far right"), and those parties both cater predominantly to them... which is really how it should be. In any event, this has been true for centuries, and has not grown any more or less true. Look into political issues through history and you'll find that they were pretty much having the same arguments 120 years ago, and in very much the same manner.
"Not just this guy, but if you ignore the partisan fighting of congress in the last year, for example, and go back to the election, both McCain and Obama (and Clinton) had healthcare plans that were very similar. Same with Bush's and Obama's stimulus plans and auto company bailouts."
Obama actually campaigned to the left on single payer... so that one not so much. The current plan is nearly identical to what McCain wanted (and indeed has pretty much every Republican idea integrated), but they don't want to bite because that would give the Democrats some political capital. Of course, the Democrats have actually allowed it to stall IN SPITE of their overwhelming majority, so I have to suspect that the powers that be in both parties don't really want it. Conceding defeat on the *threat* of a filibuster is just lame. Frankly I no longer support the current plan, it doesn't move us any closer to an actual working single payer system... I was willing to compromise and have a public option instead, but now that even that is gone I've got very little to be excited about and quite a bit to oppose (mandating that I purchase private insurance through a for-profit corporation as a condition to live is BS).
Auto bailouts and stimulus... yeah, pretty much, although I think the idea of cutting huge checks to admittedly corrupt and irresponsible financial institutions with little or no conditions attached was a monumentally stupid idea, certainly in hindsight that should have been handled better.
"I think it's also safe to say that almost everyone in the US r
And in 2006 (actually 2007, but I'll give you a pass on that one, when Congress came under Democratic control... how long had it been under Republican control? How long had Bush already been president?
Eisenhower was a centrist, and for that matter so was Nixon. If either of them were alive today running for office, they'd have teabaggers screaming "you lie" at every event and fabricating evidence that they are actually communist spies born in foreign countries who hate "the troops" almost as much as they hate apple pie.
Furthermore, liberals and the Democrats (NOT the same thing) are all for building and maintaining roads... perhaps you've noticed that a huge chunk of the previous stimulus package went into just that, and that a huge chunk of the new jobs bill does more still.
The bottom line is that the current budget has far too many massive mandatory expenditures (read: interest on the debt accrued during the past 8 years, Medicare [especially Part D], Social Security), two very expensive foreign wars (which just this past year went onto the books rather than being funded with supplementals... we're a lot more in debt because now we're actually counting ALL of the money we spend, not just half of it), and an enormous revenue shortfall. And guess who's crying the loudest about it and pointing the finger at the other guys (hint: they were in charge when most of these expenses experienced astronomical growth in the '00s)?
It's a damn shame that there just isn't enough money for NASA right now, but blaming liberals for it is just asinine.
Limited skill set? Like hooking up a computer, setting up a basic network, installing a game and playing it? Really?
Maybe you meant the "limited skill set" of "making and retaining friends", or the "limited skill set" of "eating ramen and drinking Mountain Dew", but you can't seriously mean that setting up a LAN was too hard for most geeks to do.
Frankly, I've always been smarter than the average bear, but I'm no genius or child prodigy, and I was doing those by the end of 8th grade. Once the last of us got away from Win98 it wasn't even remotely difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
"I guess I should RTFA more often."
LOLOLOLOLOLOL!!! gud 1 brah!
"Finally, the deeply flawed arguments used by pushers of these drugs leave a segment of the population distrusting "big pharma" as if the medical industry was out to get them...In other words, the long term effect is a loss of critical thinking skills and people who are poorer and sicker because some fools benefited from the placebo effect. "
Whoa whoa whoa... homeopaths and other nutcases aren't the only ones who think "big pharma" is out to get them. Plenty of us who follow along with mainstream medicine feel that way too. How the hell else would you explain requip, or the shenanigans that go on around pharma sales reps and doctors' offices? They do want us us addicted, they do want us to overpay, and they do want us to stay "sick" forever.
They could try, but since martial law had been declared, it would pretty much be an empty gesture. Martial law explicitly trumps civilian law, by virtue of being administrated by regular military troops and typically maintained using lethal force. "You aren't allowed to do that!" tends to be a much less effective defense than one might hope in such a context.
As a regular Win7 user, no, it doesn't, and you're talking out of your ass.
Or, rather, it only nags constantly for apps that constantly demand to do admin tasks. Such behavior wouldn't be tolerated in Linuxland, but a program that insists it should be allowed to connect with repositories and auto-update on every single load would trigger sudo requirements too. The real problem is with apps that have very poor manners, not with UAC.
One solution would be for Windows Update to allow 3rd-party apps to piggy back and check for updates on their own repositories through that interface as the result of a trusted/authorized installation. Then you wouldn't have programs phoning home every 30 seconds, constantly updating themselves without regard to the considerations of other programs, or each nagging you individually to update, and would instead have a consistent interface asking for periodic permission to resolve all update issues. Kind of like Synaptic.
That's not entirely true... the Civil War saw huge advances in weaponry, and was really the first war to be fought with what we would now consider to be modern weapons in terms of both range and accuracy. It was also one of the bloodiest wars ever fought, with enormous losses suffered by both sides, largely as a result of the fact that the tactics in use WEREN'T optimized for their weapons.
By the end of the Civil War, most soldiers were equipped with combat ready battle rifles utilizing jacketed cartridges and fully rifled barrels (rifling had existed for decades, and was fairly common on high-end firearms, but the technology to effectively mass-produce them came into being during the war... this is one of the reason that Confederate volunteer forces, with their heirloom quality guns so heavily dominated in the first few years, they were much more experienced and better-armed than their conscripted Union counterparts). Semi-automatic revolvers, repeater rifles and carbines, as well as early machine guns, were deployed among certain elite units and officers. These guns were quite accurate, even at range, and even the single round breach-loaded models carried by basic infantrymen had a decent rate of fire that made mass fire line battles obsolete and unnecessarily brutal.
Now the American Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, those required mass fire at point blank ranges, and the only forces to employ guerrilla-style tactics were local militias acting primarily to impede the progress of real forces. The Americans never could have won the Revolution if they'd kept using Minuteman tactics firing from behind cover and fleeing from return fire.
Point of order: Judges don't declare martial law. Ever. That's something that only a military officer (including the CINC) can do (hence "martial"), so unless the judge also happens to be an acting general, they have no ability or incentive to make that declaration, nor would they have any power to rescind the order.
The appropriate charge would be capital contempt of court, with expedited sentencing and a fast tracked execution. Firing squad is a little hard to justify in the US, but maybe if the bailiff shouted "he's coming right for us!" before shooting they could get around the details.
Aw heeellll naw, foo! Don't be hatin' just cuz you're AC, yo.
Let's roll on Dubs. LL Cool J. Civics look good with racing stripes and wings.
China is currently on track to produce a greater percentage of the energy with green technologies than the US within 20 years. I'd say that throwing them under the bus is largely a moot point.
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Your statement seems to be almost the corollary to statements like "If you don't have anything to hide what are you worried about?""
So in lieu of any reason to believe my rights are actually being violated and the "wrong" people are amassing a dossier about me, I should default to paranoia and assume they are? Sounds pretty stupid to me. I am a firm proponent of Occam's Razor, and in this stituation, the most likely explanation is that nobody is bothering to look.
"I would also suggest that you're not looking at the bigger picture."
What bigger picture? Just saying that one exists doesn't mean I'm ignorant of it.
The big picture is that THIS HAS ALWAYS BEEN POSSIBLE, the only difference is that, like everything else, it has gotten faster and easier. J Edgar Hoover never needed the internet to dig up dirt on people, Hitler didn't need access to genealogy.com user logs or friends-only Facebook updates to find the Jews. Get a grip and stop acting like this is some new and terrible danger, we make fun of people who pretend that putting an old service on the tubes is some great innovation, then turn around and act surprised when intelligence and law enforcement types do it too.
"What is preventing your friends from doing that for you? If I have an Android phone, and I have your contact info, along with perhaps your birth date, address, email, an ID picture of you, and some other interesting details in your contact, now I've given that data to Google, haven't I? What contract or understanding do you have with Google to govern how that data is being used and protected?"
I gave all of that information to Google myself, I use gmail... implied in this is that I do not consider any of that information to be private, merely obscure. If somebody wants to waste their time hunting down my birthday they're more than welcome to... of course, they could have just asked. The point you're actually making is that true privacy is only possible if you go completely off the grid, associate with nobody, and live in the woods like a hermit. That choice is always available to me, and until it isn't I'm not going to worry about somebody employing a high-tech means of asking the people I know about me any more than I'll worry about them using a low-tech means of doing so.
Could be.
Or, just as likely, nobody can be bothered to connect the dots. Hell, the underwear bomber's father told a CIA official that he thought his son was up to no good... gave them pictures, travel plans, the whole nine, and they forgot to put it all together.
I spend a lot of time openly criticizing various powerful and influential people, and I've yet to see any negative repercussions from it. Maybe because I don't bother to hide they don't bother trying to track me down.
Sorry, I don't see the massive potential the internet has for making my life better by telling everyone what i had for lunch today. If there is something i wouldn't want people on the internet (ie. everyone) to know, then I don't put it there... I suppose that I could instead spend hundreds of hours wanking around with security and privacy measures of questionable integrity, but I find it much easier to just do that small number of things analog.
The fact is that you don't get to have it both ways. The internet is not intended to keep information private... in fact, it was designed to do PRECISELY the opposite. If you don't like it, then keep playing with your privacy settings, and godspeed you sir.
There's a difference between refusing to leave your house and choosing not to run down the street holding $60,000 worth of diamonds and cash in a bad neighborhood in the middle of the night. Sorry if that distinction is lost on you.
The penis mightier than swords.
The right to privacy doesn't mean that nobody will ever know who you are, what you do or where you go, it means that that knowledge won't be actively sought or abused without strong legal cause.
Fighting the war in the way OP has chosen to isn't fighting for people to respect your privacy, it's fighting for them not to have a choice. I put virtually no effort into remaining anonymous or hiding my digital footprints, yet oddly enough I've never had the secret police bust down my door, or had any clear reason to believe that my privacy has been violated.
I also happen to believe that anything I do online, by nature of the internet, is public, and accordingly I choose not to put most of the details of my life onto it.
But what if, and this is a long shot, he's not just full of it? Sometimes people deny guilt because they're stupid, but every now and then people do it because they're actually innocent.
I can't help but feel like after this long, no sane person would still be proclaiming innocence if it wasn't true at all.
Uh, what? "Quaker" is to The Society of Friends what "Mormon" is to the Church of Latter Day Saints; a colloquial term for church members. I suppose that some Quakers out there might be offended by the term, but I've never heard of it, and there are actually a decent number of them in my area.
As for preaching against their fellow man... no, not really. The Quakers are pretty well known for teaching peace, tolerance, equality and universal love. They were one of the first groups to outright condemn slavery in the United Sates, and also one of the first to take direct action against it (Quaker craftsmen, particularly shipbuilders, refused to make anything that would be used for the purpose of slavery, including those used for the slave trade; they also ran many of the stops on the underground railroad, and often provided material assistance to escaped blacks once in the North). They were also one of the first modern sects to allow female ministers, and have long supported and worked for equal rights for men and women.
They're also shockingly badass for radical pacifists, throughout their history they have maintained a reputation for being downright fearless when it comes to issues of faith vs. the powers that be. It took some serious stones to tell the king of England that you will not remove your hat in his presence because the only authority which you respect is the Lord, even more when the circumstances are such that the king is pissed you're not following the state religion in which he is the voice of God.
GP implied that most SLASHDOT READERS are not American, I asserted that most, in fact, are. As evidenced by Slashdot's management and administrators saying so (and I don't see any good reason for them to lie about it).
Whether or not most internet users are American is another question entirely, and one that I have not seen any reliable means of measuring (especially given that connections != users).
Steampunk has a huge DIY element to it... people who buy spiffy mechanical do-dads or modified Nerf guns might be respected for their fashion sense, but the people who actually make that stuff are held in MUCH higher regard.
Full disclosure: I think steampunk is hugely overdone and overrated, that it's 90% nerd fashion and 10% shitty sci-fi, that it's just another shallow meme that everyone will forget about in another year and that it is, clearly, the cancer that is killing the con-scene. I also spend a lot of time around it, and have even acquired/made some of my own pieces in order to open up performance venues.
As to the actual "story": So what? This isn't even US-centric, it's California centric; I'm involved with 3 steampunk conventions just in February-May, all within the Northeast. Rightly, none of them made /.. This one sounds like basically the same thing, just on the west coast. Whoopty fucking doo.
I think this one failed the Turing test.
"Why do you assume that 1) Most on here are American'
Because it is demonstrably true. And no, I will not give sources, this is common knowledge. I know that Taco periodically gives a bunch of random statistics on site usage, and at least once he broke it down by country: it was something like 75% American, 10% Canadian and 15% everyone else when I last saw it. Granted, a lot of /.ers are likely to be using proxies/TOR/other connections that will obfuscate their true location, but I think it's fair to say that the vast majority probably don't.
"No, you have it 100% backwards. It's the Democrats who run things into the ground."
Yeah, damn them for creating the S&L disaster... oh, wait. I mean damn them for the recession in 90-92... oh, wait. I mean damn them for mortgage meltdown... oh wait. I mean damn them for, um, JIMMY CARTER!
Never mind that he was president over 30 years ago, that he was inaugurated at the same time a bubble peaked (they only take about 3-4 months to pop after that), that it wasn't actually that terrible a situation (worst since the Depression at the time, but that's more a reflection on how well the economy did between the mid-40s and early 70s... it was a fairly minor market correction exacerbated by the beginning of the out-source movement and a labor glut due to the end of Vietnam), that things were largely fixed by the time he left office (note the distinction between "fixed" and "better", or that even most conservatives view him as practically a saint on moral, ethical and humanitarian issues.
s/windows/windowsxp
Whatever you may think of Vista/7/Server2008, this isn't a problem for them. I agree that it's stupid for WD to make their drives lie for compatibility with what is effectively a legacy OS (by modernity, not use), but there's no call to tar newer releases for it.
"For someone who demands such a nuanced interpretation of liberal/democrat, you sure seem ignorant of what the tea party actually is. The tea party is a group of people, some crazy and some not, who are united by a desire for a sound fiscal policy. They are not happy with the Bush era policies (the people who are happy with that are the die hard Republicans, not the tea partiers; not the same thing) They also like dressing up in costume, which, if you live in San Francisco at least, shouldn't be too foreign to a liberal. In fact, your very next quote sounds exactly like it could come from a tea party:"
HAHAHAHAHA. No, not really. We have tea partiers here, I've met some... they're just mainstream Republicans who are ashamed (with good reason) to admit it. Seriously, they supported Scott Brown... he's an empty suit Romney clone, it doesn't get any more Karl Rove Republican than that.
How about this, follow the money: the Tea Party has a lot of corporate sponsors, just where do you think the money comes from to pay the various think tanks, lobbyist groups and advertisers? Personal donations? Poke around and you'll find that, among others, Koch Industries has been bank-rolling quite a bit of it. They founded both Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks (via the now defunct Citizens For A Sound Economy), which is where you'll find most of the Tea Party talking points and hype begin and end. For bonus points, Fred Koch was a founding Bircher (yep, one of those).
"Now, I am not a tea-partier, I am just someone who enjoys observing politics, which brings me to my next point, has anyone else noticed that liberals and conservatives are sounding more and more like each other?"
Democrats and Republicans sound very much the same. The bulk of Americans are in fact "centrists" (by our standards, not the world's... many Europeans see our "center" as "far right"), and those parties both cater predominantly to them... which is really how it should be. In any event, this has been true for centuries, and has not grown any more or less true. Look into political issues through history and you'll find that they were pretty much having the same arguments 120 years ago, and in very much the same manner.
"Not just this guy, but if you ignore the partisan fighting of congress in the last year, for example, and go back to the election, both McCain and Obama (and Clinton) had healthcare plans that were very similar. Same with Bush's and Obama's stimulus plans and auto company bailouts."
Obama actually campaigned to the left on single payer... so that one not so much. The current plan is nearly identical to what McCain wanted (and indeed has pretty much every Republican idea integrated), but they don't want to bite because that would give the Democrats some political capital. Of course, the Democrats have actually allowed it to stall IN SPITE of their overwhelming majority, so I have to suspect that the powers that be in both parties don't really want it. Conceding defeat on the *threat* of a filibuster is just lame. Frankly I no longer support the current plan, it doesn't move us any closer to an actual working single payer system... I was willing to compromise and have a public option instead, but now that even that is gone I've got very little to be excited about and quite a bit to oppose (mandating that I purchase private insurance through a for-profit corporation as a condition to live is BS).
Auto bailouts and stimulus... yeah, pretty much, although I think the idea of cutting huge checks to admittedly corrupt and irresponsible financial institutions with little or no conditions attached was a monumentally stupid idea, certainly in hindsight that should have been handled better.
"I think it's also safe to say that almost everyone in the US r
And in 2006 (actually 2007, but I'll give you a pass on that one, when Congress came under Democratic control... how long had it been under Republican control? How long had Bush already been president?
"Tired" my ass.
Oh please.
Eisenhower was a centrist, and for that matter so was Nixon. If either of them were alive today running for office, they'd have teabaggers screaming "you lie" at every event and fabricating evidence that they are actually communist spies born in foreign countries who hate "the troops" almost as much as they hate apple pie.
Furthermore, liberals and the Democrats (NOT the same thing) are all for building and maintaining roads... perhaps you've noticed that a huge chunk of the previous stimulus package went into just that, and that a huge chunk of the new jobs bill does more still.
The bottom line is that the current budget has far too many massive mandatory expenditures (read: interest on the debt accrued during the past 8 years, Medicare [especially Part D], Social Security), two very expensive foreign wars (which just this past year went onto the books rather than being funded with supplementals... we're a lot more in debt because now we're actually counting ALL of the money we spend, not just half of it), and an enormous revenue shortfall. And guess who's crying the loudest about it and pointing the finger at the other guys (hint: they were in charge when most of these expenses experienced astronomical growth in the '00s)?
It's a damn shame that there just isn't enough money for NASA right now, but blaming liberals for it is just asinine.
Limited skill set? Like hooking up a computer, setting up a basic network, installing a game and playing it? Really?
Maybe you meant the "limited skill set" of "making and retaining friends", or the "limited skill set" of "eating ramen and drinking Mountain Dew", but you can't seriously mean that setting up a LAN was too hard for most geeks to do.
Frankly, I've always been smarter than the average bear, but I'm no genius or child prodigy, and I was doing those by the end of 8th grade. Once the last of us got away from Win98 it wasn't even remotely difficult.