Sure, but the US also arrests more people each year, and the overwhelming majority of people arrested and subsequently imprisoned in this country never receive a trial (not that China is much better when it comes to court trials, but that is not really the standard we should be seeking in the USA). There is also the fact that China does not execute nearly enough people to close the gap, and that American prisons have an even greater profit motive than Chinese prisons (here in America, prisons are a "growth industry" that are giving big paydays to their investors; the Chinese are sticking to "selling organs and labor" when it comes to making imprisoning people a profitable activity).
If that's Romney that will likely mean overturning Roe v Wade (ie banning abortion), validating the Defense of Marriage Act barring same sex unions, overturning any possible attempt to ban assault rifles, allowing warrantless wiretapping and surveillance of US citizens, deciding on the legality of any immigration reform, and any chance at gender equality laws or affirmative action.
I highlighted the part that actually matters. See, all those other things would be nice to have (well, except the assault weapons ban, which ignores the fact that criminal use of assault rifles is negligible compared to handguns, but we would never have a "handguns ban" with the major parties) if we were not busy worrying about a government that does not bother to follow the law; right now, those things are a distraction. Funny how the warrantless wiretap program has not stopped in the past four years. Funny how the TSA has simply ignored a court order. Funny how Mitt Romney is not interested in calling his opponent out on those issues.
Not to mention the power of Congress to declare war has been completely subverted by executive order
Yes, it is clear that Obama would never oversee the use of the US military without first asking Congress to declare war:
Oh, sorry, that was "law enforcement," except that it is carried out using anti-aircraft weapons.
Calling these two candidates "similar individuals" is completely cynical and naive
They are clearly different -- one is black and one is white! No, really, this is not about them as individuals, it is about them as politicians who will make important decisions. On the one hand, you have Mitt Romney, whose 2002 gubernatorial campaign was loaded with false promises ("I support comprehensive sex ed!" followed by promoting abstinence-only education once he was elected), and on the other, Barack Obama, whose 2008 presidential campaign was loaded with false promises ("We are going to stop the war on drugs!" followed by more paramilitary raids on medical marijuana dispensaries in California in his first two years in office than all eight Bush years combined).
Which do you think affects more Americans: gay marriage, or the loss of constitutional rights? Now, which one of those issues have you heard the major party candidates talk about more? Do you think that the choice should be between lower interest rates on student loans or lower tuition fees so that students take out smaller loans, or between having to take our loans and having the government fund education as a public good (again, what are the candidates avoiding talking about)? So before you say, "The two parties are totally different!" ask yourself this: are you really looking at all possibilities, or have you narrowed your field of view to the point where two fascist parties appear to be worlds apart?
One party is more inclined to try to "eat the rich", the other to create opportunities for more to become new rich (and pay taxes).
Both parties work for the benefit of the rich and powerful, they just do it in minutely different ways. Neither party is going to improve the lives of "commoners" like you and me, except in superficial ways. We have 3 decades of switching between Democrat and Republican control of various branches of government to prove that point.
What they don't bother to talk about at all matters a lot more. Which candidate is brave enough to bring up the fact that America has more prisoners than China? Which candidate is brave enough to bring up the fact that the TSA is currently operating outside of the law? Which candidate is brave enough to bring up the fact that we are using drone strikes to kill American citizens without a trial?
See, there are some issues (some call them "the important issues") that neither major party candidate is even willing to mention. Which is why I do not vote for the major parties.
I mean, I guess this war was started before Obama, but it is not as though our military and paramilitary forces are not being utilized for pointless and destructive ends by the Obama administration.
Both candidates have the same platform: make sure corporations continue to run the show, make sure the people being exploited continue to believe the system is working for them, and make sure the people being exploited are too distracted with minute details about issues that do not really affect them (gay marriage) to question policies that really do affect them (the war on drugs).
Don't listen to what the candidates major party say, it is just a side show. Look at what they actually did in the past, and look at what they don't say. Has Mitt Romney criticized Obama for failing to demand that the TSA actually follow the law (seriously, how much more effective of a criticism can one make than pointing out their opponent's failure to uphold the law while serving in the highest political office in the country)? The debates are a waste of your time, designed to reinforce the view the the Democrats are "liberals" and the Republicans are "conservative" (both parties, in fact, are fascist, hawkish, and pro-corporate).
The fact is you get rich and success by working hard.
...and by being in the right place at the right time, and by being lucky, and by finding some rich friends to fund your business, and so forth. Most people who work hard never become rich.
What you really meant was, "People become successful by working hard on the right things." Unfortunately, the first thing graduate students discover when they begin their research careers is that they are not going to be working on "the right things," that research work is not what they thought, and that the likelihood that their PhD work will be worth mentioning (beyond the fact that they did PhD work) is very low. Here are some characteristics of research as a graduate student:
Your adviser tells you what to do, you do it, and then you publish it. Then you tweak it and publish it again. Then you tweak it and publish it yet again. Then you write 200 pages about it and get your PhD.
You have an idea for something truly novel. You are told that your grant does not cover that, so you will have to either modify it to fall under the grant, or put it off for "later" (which actually means, "never").
When you go home for Thanksgiving, your great aunt Sally asks you what you do. You try to make it sound cool, but it is hard to explain why it matters. You conclude with, "I am published in three journals" and everyone thinks you are a genius.
There are exceptions, but the reality of research is that it is mostly incremental, it is mostly determined by what NSF/NIH/DARPA want to see researched, and it is loaded with overstatements of results. Most outsiders do not notice this, because the only way to learn enough about a topic to even notice this trend is to become a researcher in that field. Most graduate students are embarrassed to be part of such a system, so they convince themselves that they are not actually doing it (but they really are, with a few rare exceptions).
Not in graduate school; I get paid less than the custodial staff at my school (and in this "right to work" state, they are not really getting paid much).
our employers give us time off when we want it
Some professors demand that their grad students never go on vacation, or threaten them if they dare to do so.
The number of people who drop out of graduate school is staggeringly high, even at second and third tier schools, despite that fact that most PhD students believe that any work other than research constitutes a personal failure. There is a reason for that: whatever goals people have going in to the program start to seem less and less worth it as they endure the treatment that is typical in graduate school. Some professors think this is a good thing, because it "weeds out" the people who "can't handle the demands of research," which is ironic since professors take vacations and have days off. This situation is made worse by "publish or perish," since some professors shift the publishing load to their graduate students so that they can have more free time (usually for things that have nothing to do with research or teaching, like taking vacations with their families, pursuing a side business, etc.).
If I were serious about blogging then I'd host my own. I wonder why more people don't?
You need an Internet connection that is suitable for hosting your blog (static or rarely changing IP address, decent upload throughput, nothing in the contract that forbids hosting a webserver, etc.).
You need a computer that you can leave on all the time.
You need the technical expertise needed to install and configure a blogging system (and by extension, a web server and database server).
For us on Slashdot, the only problem is with the first one, and even then, most of us probably know a place that will let us run a server for our blog. For most people, the combination of those three is a daunting task, and so they just pay some hosting company somewhere to take care of it for them.
I agree with the bottom up approach to learning programming & CS.
This is not necessarily a "bottom up" approach. Digital logic winds up being pretty important to know for writing very high level programs -- secure multiparty computation, model checking and formal verification systems, automated theorem proving, and so forth. This is not a stack, it is a cycle.
I suppose you could hire someone to fight on your behalf,
It is called "voting," at least for those of us who can vote. In this case, that means voting for a politician who is not bought and paid for by the copyright lobbyists, so if you are an American, you can forget about the major parties.
The funny thing is that the media is not going around painting a picture of Christians as lunatics who will kill people over a film. The media portrays extremist Christians as what they are: extremists.
This is not just about what you do online, it is about what you and all the people you associate with do online. I am not on Facebook, yet Facebook still manages to collect information about me (and spread it around): people "tag" me in photos, sometimes people invite me to join Facebook, and people might mention me in messages they send to each other on Facebook (including public messages). So despite the fact that I have no Facebook account, at least part of my personal life is being collected by that system.
That is the point of TFA. These people did not announce their sexual orientation on Facebook, someone else did, without their permission.
I have to wonder about parents who haven't figured out their child is gay.
Here is some insight: a large number of people believe that homosexuality is something that a person chooses, and that like all "sinful behaviors," that choice is motivated by a lack of Christianity in a person's life. For many people, the concept of their children -- who come to church every week, who do not watch television, who threw away the condoms their school gave them, and so forth -- being gay is beyond the scope of possibility. They firmly believe that their children are no more likely to be gay than to rob an elderly woman to get money for heroin.
Sexual orientation is becoming less important, especially to the younger generation
You are hanging out with too many hipsters. Try hanging out with some working class youth before making these sorts of comments. Fear and hatred of homosexuals is still very much alive, even among the younger generation.
Those people are the problem, not Facebook. Facebook is just one more avenue for a person's orientation to be revealed.
Meanwhile, in reality, there are people whose homosexuality is a closely guarded secret that only their closest friends know about, because they fear being harassed or even disowned by their families.
One of the nice things about having a PC is that you can set your privacy level as you see fit. If you do not want to be on Facebook, you can...not be on Facebook. If you want to encrypt your email such that your email provider cannot read it, that's within your power. You can even browse the web anonymously if you want.
Now, all bets are off when you lose control of your computing. How would you like a cell phone that required a Facebook account to use?
Sure, but the people who make important policy decisions are, in all likelihood, not very devout. I suspect that the truly devout believers never make it beyond state-level politics, and that even there they are a minority. The kind of people who get votes from devout Christians in America are people who understand how to exploit religion as a way to rally political supporters -- not exactly the sort of thing that religions teach people to do (find me the holy book that says, "You can trick people into thinking they have a moral obligation to support your political ambitions" and I will be impressed).
At what point did anyone say that browsers should refuse to connect to websites? Stallman is saying that Ubuntu should not be putting advertisements for Amazon on people's desktops as a default. If people want this functionality, they can install it -- it should be opt-in. Ubuntu putting it there is basically an endorsement of Amazon.
It is not different than saying that we should not be putting Chic-Fil-A advertisements on the Unity desktop, unless people opt-in.
Frankly, New York City can do more to improve its citizens' health than banning certain sizes of HFCS drinks (because calling them "sugary" simply ignores the fact that soda can be made using real sugar).
Stallman lives by a particular ethical code. Despite the widespread belief that people should separate their ethical beliefs from their work, Stallman does not actually do so, and thus if he believes that Amazon is doing unethical things (which is not really a stretch), he is not going to support the idea of taking his software (which is part of the basis of Ubuntu) and using it to support Amazon financially. I do not see why he should be criticized for that, any more than people should be criticized for refusing to seek employment with companies whose behavior they object to.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, but the US also arrests more people each year, and the overwhelming majority of people arrested and subsequently imprisoned in this country never receive a trial (not that China is much better when it comes to court trials, but that is not really the standard we should be seeking in the USA). There is also the fact that China does not execute nearly enough people to close the gap, and that American prisons have an even greater profit motive than Chinese prisons (here in America, prisons are a "growth industry" that are giving big paydays to their investors; the Chinese are sticking to "selling organs and labor" when it comes to making imprisoning people a profitable activity).
Who is the best alternative in 2012?
Since you say you voted for Nader, I'll point you here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jill_Stein_presidential_campaign,_2012
If that's Romney that will likely mean overturning Roe v Wade (ie banning abortion), validating the Defense of Marriage Act barring same sex unions, overturning any possible attempt to ban assault rifles, allowing warrantless wiretapping and surveillance of US citizens, deciding on the legality of any immigration reform, and any chance at gender equality laws or affirmative action.
I highlighted the part that actually matters. See, all those other things would be nice to have (well, except the assault weapons ban, which ignores the fact that criminal use of assault rifles is negligible compared to handguns, but we would never have a "handguns ban" with the major parties) if we were not busy worrying about a government that does not bother to follow the law; right now, those things are a distraction. Funny how the warrantless wiretap program has not stopped in the past four years. Funny how the TSA has simply ignored a court order. Funny how Mitt Romney is not interested in calling his opponent out on those issues.
Not to mention the power of Congress to declare war has been completely subverted by executive order
Yes, it is clear that Obama would never oversee the use of the US military without first asking Congress to declare war:
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/13/world/americas/in-honduras-deaths-make-us-rethink-drug-war.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Oh, sorry, that was "law enforcement," except that it is carried out using anti-aircraft weapons.
Calling these two candidates "similar individuals" is completely cynical and naive
They are clearly different -- one is black and one is white! No, really, this is not about them as individuals, it is about them as politicians who will make important decisions. On the one hand, you have Mitt Romney, whose 2002 gubernatorial campaign was loaded with false promises ("I support comprehensive sex ed!" followed by promoting abstinence-only education once he was elected), and on the other, Barack Obama, whose 2008 presidential campaign was loaded with false promises ("We are going to stop the war on drugs!" followed by more paramilitary raids on medical marijuana dispensaries in California in his first two years in office than all eight Bush years combined).
Which do you think affects more Americans: gay marriage, or the loss of constitutional rights? Now, which one of those issues have you heard the major party candidates talk about more? Do you think that the choice should be between lower interest rates on student loans or lower tuition fees so that students take out smaller loans, or between having to take our loans and having the government fund education as a public good (again, what are the candidates avoiding talking about)? So before you say, "The two parties are totally different!" ask yourself this: are you really looking at all possibilities, or have you narrowed your field of view to the point where two fascist parties appear to be worlds apart?
Both parties would like to see the economy grow - attacking businesses doesn't really help that.
Therefore, we should attack people, to ensure that large corporate monopolies remain profitable!
Neither party wants to see Americans attacked, especially on American soil.
Nonsense:
http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/overkill-rise-paramilitary-police-raids-america
The size of government will probably continue to grow under both parties, as well as the debt, but much faster under one party than the other.
Good thing we have a choice:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_party_(United_States)
One party is more inclined to try to "eat the rich", the other to create opportunities for more to become new rich (and pay taxes).
Both parties work for the benefit of the rich and powerful, they just do it in minutely different ways. Neither party is going to improve the lives of "commoners" like you and me, except in superficial ways. We have 3 decades of switching between Democrat and Republican control of various branches of government to prove that point.
Actually, a well-run country maintains some amount of unemployment:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Full_employment
I guess you missed that part of the post you were replying to. Who you choose on election day does matter, which is why I vote third party.
...who will work against this:
http://cdn.theweedblog.com/wp-content/uploads//Raid-21.jpg
what they lie about is what matters.
What they don't bother to talk about at all matters a lot more. Which candidate is brave enough to bring up the fact that America has more prisoners than China? Which candidate is brave enough to bring up the fact that the TSA is currently operating outside of the law? Which candidate is brave enough to bring up the fact that we are using drone strikes to kill American citizens without a trial?
See, there are some issues (some call them "the important issues") that neither major party candidate is even willing to mention. Which is why I do not vote for the major parties.
The best that can be said about Obama is that he didn't plunge the US in another needless
Really?
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/22/world/africa/us-expands-drug-fight-in-africa.html?_r=0
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/americas/honduran-drug-raid-deaths-wont-alter-us-policy.html
http://mwcnews.net/focus/politics/20760-war-on-drugs.html
I mean, I guess this war was started before Obama, but it is not as though our military and paramilitary forces are not being utilized for pointless and destructive ends by the Obama administration.
Both candidates have the same platform: make sure corporations continue to run the show, make sure the people being exploited continue to believe the system is working for them, and make sure the people being exploited are too distracted with minute details about issues that do not really affect them (gay marriage) to question policies that really do affect them (the war on drugs).
Don't listen to what the candidates major party say, it is just a side show. Look at what they actually did in the past, and look at what they don't say. Has Mitt Romney criticized Obama for failing to demand that the TSA actually follow the law (seriously, how much more effective of a criticism can one make than pointing out their opponent's failure to uphold the law while serving in the highest political office in the country)? The debates are a waste of your time, designed to reinforce the view the the Democrats are "liberals" and the Republicans are "conservative" (both parties, in fact, are fascist, hawkish, and pro-corporate).
The fact is you get rich and success by working hard.
What you really meant was, "People become successful by working hard on the right things." Unfortunately, the first thing graduate students discover when they begin their research careers is that they are not going to be working on "the right things," that research work is not what they thought, and that the likelihood that their PhD work will be worth mentioning (beyond the fact that they did PhD work) is very low. Here are some characteristics of research as a graduate student:
There are exceptions, but the reality of research is that it is mostly incremental, it is mostly determined by what NSF/NIH/DARPA want to see researched, and it is loaded with overstatements of results. Most outsiders do not notice this, because the only way to learn enough about a topic to even notice this trend is to become a researcher in that field. Most graduate students are embarrassed to be part of such a system, so they convince themselves that they are not actually doing it (but they really are, with a few rare exceptions).
the pay is good
Not in graduate school; I get paid less than the custodial staff at my school (and in this "right to work" state, they are not really getting paid much).
our employers give us time off when we want it
Some professors demand that their grad students never go on vacation, or threaten them if they dare to do so.
The number of people who drop out of graduate school is staggeringly high, even at second and third tier schools, despite that fact that most PhD students believe that any work other than research constitutes a personal failure. There is a reason for that: whatever goals people have going in to the program start to seem less and less worth it as they endure the treatment that is typical in graduate school. Some professors think this is a good thing, because it "weeds out" the people who "can't handle the demands of research," which is ironic since professors take vacations and have days off. This situation is made worse by "publish or perish," since some professors shift the publishing load to their graduate students so that they can have more free time (usually for things that have nothing to do with research or teaching, like taking vacations with their families, pursuing a side business, etc.).
If I were serious about blogging then I'd host my own. I wonder why more people don't?
For us on Slashdot, the only problem is with the first one, and even then, most of us probably know a place that will let us run a server for our blog. For most people, the combination of those three is a daunting task, and so they just pay some hosting company somewhere to take care of it for them.
I agree with the bottom up approach to learning programming & CS.
This is not necessarily a "bottom up" approach. Digital logic winds up being pretty important to know for writing very high level programs -- secure multiparty computation, model checking and formal verification systems, automated theorem proving, and so forth. This is not a stack, it is a cycle.
I suppose you could hire someone to fight on your behalf,
It is called "voting," at least for those of us who can vote. In this case, that means voting for a politician who is not bought and paid for by the copyright lobbyists, so if you are an American, you can forget about the major parties.
I seem to remember Christians lining up to protest a movie a few years ago:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Da_Vinci_Code_(film)#Protests
The funny thing is that the media is not going around painting a picture of Christians as lunatics who will kill people over a film. The media portrays extremist Christians as what they are: extremists.
This is not just about what you do online, it is about what you and all the people you associate with do online. I am not on Facebook, yet Facebook still manages to collect information about me (and spread it around): people "tag" me in photos, sometimes people invite me to join Facebook, and people might mention me in messages they send to each other on Facebook (including public messages). So despite the fact that I have no Facebook account, at least part of my personal life is being collected by that system.
That is the point of TFA. These people did not announce their sexual orientation on Facebook, someone else did, without their permission.
I have to wonder about parents who haven't figured out their child is gay.
Here is some insight: a large number of people believe that homosexuality is something that a person chooses, and that like all "sinful behaviors," that choice is motivated by a lack of Christianity in a person's life. For many people, the concept of their children -- who come to church every week, who do not watch television, who threw away the condoms their school gave them, and so forth -- being gay is beyond the scope of possibility. They firmly believe that their children are no more likely to be gay than to rob an elderly woman to get money for heroin.
Sexual orientation is becoming less important, especially to the younger generation
You are hanging out with too many hipsters. Try hanging out with some working class youth before making these sorts of comments. Fear and hatred of homosexuals is still very much alive, even among the younger generation.
Those people are the problem, not Facebook. Facebook is just one more avenue for a person's orientation to be revealed.
Meanwhile, in reality, there are people whose homosexuality is a closely guarded secret that only their closest friends know about, because they fear being harassed or even disowned by their families.
One of the nice things about having a PC is that you can set your privacy level as you see fit. If you do not want to be on Facebook, you can...not be on Facebook. If you want to encrypt your email such that your email provider cannot read it, that's within your power. You can even browse the web anonymously if you want.
Now, all bets are off when you lose control of your computing. How would you like a cell phone that required a Facebook account to use?
The USA is highly religious
Sure, but the people who make important policy decisions are, in all likelihood, not very devout. I suspect that the truly devout believers never make it beyond state-level politics, and that even there they are a minority. The kind of people who get votes from devout Christians in America are people who understand how to exploit religion as a way to rally political supporters -- not exactly the sort of thing that religions teach people to do (find me the holy book that says, "You can trick people into thinking they have a moral obligation to support your political ambitions" and I will be impressed).
The question is whether religion leads to oppressive politics and low technology
I think the question is the other way around: do politicians seeking to push oppressive policies turn to religion as a way to rally supporters?
At what point did anyone say that browsers should refuse to connect to websites? Stallman is saying that Ubuntu should not be putting advertisements for Amazon on people's desktops as a default. If people want this functionality, they can install it -- it should be opt-in. Ubuntu putting it there is basically an endorsement of Amazon.
It is not different than saying that we should not be putting Chic-Fil-A advertisements on the Unity desktop, unless people opt-in.
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504763_162-57506856-10391704/nyc-school-lunches-fall-below-minimum-calorie-requirement/
Frankly, New York City can do more to improve its citizens' health than banning certain sizes of HFCS drinks (because calling them "sugary" simply ignores the fact that soda can be made using real sugar).
Stallman lives by a particular ethical code. Despite the widespread belief that people should separate their ethical beliefs from their work, Stallman does not actually do so, and thus if he believes that Amazon is doing unethical things (which is not really a stretch), he is not going to support the idea of taking his software (which is part of the basis of Ubuntu) and using it to support Amazon financially. I do not see why he should be criticized for that, any more than people should be criticized for refusing to seek employment with companies whose behavior they object to.