pcollins

Necromancy?

My guess is it's just you. And not every statement you find objectionable is a strawman.

I'm assuming you don't want to go down the road towards solipsism. Consider this the least idiotic path this tangent may follow. Presumably they'd consult their conscience. What in this life is intrinsically right? Easy. In the case of a man who rejects solipsism. So why should we be concerned with the latter? This is not surprising. I'm definitely not considering the insane, so why would you think that I'm trying to reach "everyone" in the strictest sense of the term? How so?

If the Patriot Act is the core of your underlying reasoning, then the US is only as fascist and possibly less so than it was under most of the Carter Administration.

Actually, the term would be "entitlement," not "right." There is no country in the world which provides a defined benefit on terms that can be tested in open court. The only difference between the American system and that of more civilized countries is the structure and scope of the publicly offered entitlement.

There's no trading of insults here, just two grown men engaging in some banter in the midst of a discussion. That said, bascule picked an arbitrary model of political ideology--like you--and declared it valid by fiat. Tell me how this isn't going to descend into yet another "conservative/liberal" label debate? Sounds good to me. They could use the handicap.

She calls you out on the BS, too? Cool. Either way, the fact remains you responded to Pangloss' one blanket assertion with a bunch of your own.

Wow, those are just a whole bunch of blanket assertions.

COINTELPRO didn't end until 1971. American involvement in the Vietnam War persisted until 1973. FISA wasn't enacted until 1978. Care to revise your position?

Compared to 1947?

That's your look out. You can at least acknowledge that normal do. Then you should probably do something about that.

I'm trying to figure out how anyone can possibly answer yes to this question, at least now that you've qualified it with a time gate.

So you're asking if country is more or less fascist since before the end segregation of the military, let alone Jim Crow?

Can you name some of the mysteries of physics you've dispelled?

Google is your friend.

And after when?

In response to the thread title: compared to when?

Mock outrage is the Chipolte sauce of American politics. I say more is better.

A solution which sacrifices terseness, imposes legal types on a signature, and dirties up error handling by increasing the number of type exceptions vis a vis functional ones. It also leaves unsolved the readability problem faced by developers new to a large, complicated code-base. Not sure what you mean here. Perl and Python both support closures. This is a style choice, and quite frankly an arbitrary one. The most common place you'll find explicitly passing self in Python and Perl is in inheritance and you are offered an explicit way of passing functionality as well as attributes that might be handled instantiation of inherited state. Of course, that pattern is used so infrequently it's simply a matter of habit to write Parent.Parent(self) or bless $something_to_be_self, $class. You're going to have to be a little more specific here. "Expressive" is a remarkably subjective term, especially when we're considering that Ruby has to build in hooks into its object model whereas Perl all you have to do is access the appropriate reference to the backing hash. Whether or not it's more appropriate to define some solely legal convention to do this is more a matter of style than anything, and anyone who prefers a clean evolution from primitives to structs to objects is going to appreciate the Perl way more than the Ruby one. This is precisely what Perl B and Python parser are for. Pickaxe is Ruby's Camel with a standard library reference, granted. Except perldoc isn't CPAN anymore than ri is ruby-forge. The "lowest common denominator" is still the most efficient way to marry UI developers with graphic designers. Yeah. Cocoon-lite. I'll grant you this one. Why is it an advantage to have one DAO--or more accurately two similar DAOs--rule them all? For the most part, you want to treat ActiveRecord and ActiveResource as plain old objects with some underlying machinery to grab state. Process management in most any dynamic language is a nightmare, I'm not going to get so petty as to try and fault or comp one over another in that department. I don't expect great things from YARV. For one, its development has dragged on so long I don't expect its pthread support to offer significant improvements over that in Python. In this area, Perl is significantly more mature (which isn't saying much). Bringing Ruby up to speed with Python isn't much of an accomplishment.

The latter, which is why I brought it up.

At Yale Law School. The top law school in the country. At a school where the lowest graduating grade is historically a B-.

Until, of course, we get to the climate model bottleneck. Not many of those out there.

It's more people than its worth, especially when you can deflect criticism better by just tossing up your hands and pleading "hey, blame those guys." You are not, however, free to record the conversation in most states without your neighbor's consent. This is just one way in which voice communications carry a greater expectation of privacy than electronic text of even a personal nature. Of course, if we were to replace your friend with an enterprise like a business or an advocacy group, we step into an entirely new realm. Doesn't really matter. The question is whether or not Verizon's efforts to keep its brand at both end points raises its exposure to critics who'd prefer they do more to regulate content across their networks. Verizon clearly disagrees with you. Doesn't mean their not suspicious. Hell, why not? We question the motives of anyone involved even tangentially in controversial issues. I'm not above it, NARAL isn't above it, Right to Life isn't above it, and I like to think that all of us are fairly bright people. Verizon would do well to plead bullying rather than stand up as martyr for the pro-choice cause. For the same reason that folks still using AOL's walled garden expect AOL to monitor content that might be too racy for their children yet give a pass to an ISP that just gives you a tap and an IP address. The branding itself increases people's expectations in the regulation of broadcast content--subscriber or not. This isn't unusual, even cable broadcasters have Standards and Practices. Even Cinemax waits until late night before showing nothing more than softcore porn. Because people expected the same from the walled gardens when they were the rage. Mobile phone carriers are essentially their descendants. You get the Showtime brand at your end, so you complain to Showtime. In fact, you go the extra mile to pay for Showtime. Now if they started broadcasting it on basic cable, you'd expect them to go after both the broadcaster and carrier. Hell, the more the broadband carriers get involved in the end to end business, the more consumers expect from them--pop up blocker and kid protection software bundles and whatnot. Verizon doesn't even offer a clean branding distinction between itself and partner broadcasters; considering the cash they rake in from signing up SMSCs, I don't see them ever compromising that business model in favor of something less lucrative that divorces them more completely from SMS content. The precedent for attacking the carrier emerged recently as the telecoms started vertically integrating to the end points. Think about it, at one point their sole responsibility to you was the line (you might get a dinky little touchtone phone worth roughly its weight in manure). That pretty much stayed the same throughout the 1990s. Now they're actually bundling the devices and applications for you and providing their own value added content. On top of that, their brand is all over the place.

Then take it up with America. If you buy a radio or a TV, or a package with the necessary stations. This doesn't change the fact that the Verizon brand pops up every time you turn on the phone or stop people from making the association. One, where's the expectation of privacy? Subscription is indiscriminate, and anyone receiving is free to report the content to the rest of the world. Two, bulk SMS finds its business precedent in direct mail--the same goes for email spammers. Verizon didn't decline to offer phone service to NARAL. They declined to offer SMS services across a network with their brand prominent at the end points. Can't recall a time in recent history when NAMBLA was listed in the yellow pages. It is a broadcast service. The only difference is its subscriber-driven. The same goes for any pay cable station.

Doesn't it? TBS brands pop up in every other commercial break. You think they don't edit the content of shows and movies they carry?