At that point I wasn't referring to political parties at all. Maybe I should of said the principals who control them or simple the people who control them. I see how I later went on to mention right leaning or left leaning groups so that might of seem implied. Many grass roots organizations put out their own newsletter/etc so your point is well taken. But most main stream news outlets have bigger backers.

Wish I had points to mod this comment up. The fact is that newspapers always have been and always will be a means for the parties that control them to tell people what to think. Any real news, not to mention comics, puzzles, and horoscopes have always been a secondary concern meant to make the rest seem more legit and sell papers. But for some reason most people really don't get it. News outlets aren't thinking how can we report better. They are thinking how can we sell our services to more people so we can spread our message.

There's this thing called the internet, it's new. You can go to a "website" and post videos of your own debates. You may not reach all the population but you could reach a good portion of it. A Youtube account and some quality production equipment could get you "underground" debates by the 3rd party's. They could even talk about real issues. Gasp! If people care about what they debate at some point they could not be ignored. Could you imagine a write in candidate winning the presidency. You can keep claiming the system is against you or try to do something about it. As other posters have said don't play by their rules.

"Does that chart not already show it flatten out and drop a bit in the last decade?"
You're obviously doing it wrong. You have to be a climate scientist to read that chart properly. Believe the scientist don't believe what you see ignore that man behind the curtain. lol

"...one party full of fundamentalist Christians wanting to control how other people live their lives. On the other side you've got a bunch of pretend-Christians, who'll let media companies get whatever they want..."

And that's just the Democrats you never even mentioned the Republicans. All kidding aside you seem to be buying into a lot of the hype the parties here spew out. I would say it is more like The Republican party members are looking out for personal interest and the Democrats are looking out for personal interest. Then the party leadership and candidates of both parties are looking out for personal interest which just so happens to mean corporate interests since that pays best. The great experiment in the United States was to limit government so people could live their lives without harassment. What we are seeing is the inevitable failure of said experiment. The question we have to ask ourselves is was it any better than other forms of government. So when we rebuild will we keep certain aspects of it or not.

But does it run Linux...?

I like your post Dog +1 Insightful. Sorry I don't have mod points. What everyone on here seems to be missing is that the debate is not scientific it is political or perhaps sociopolitical in nature. High IQ thinkers are often frustrated by those with high social IQ's. Because their arguments make no sense to us and are almost always full of logical fallacies. Then everyone follows them. Unfortunately they still outnumber us and for various reasons likely always will. Until we perfect space travel/living in space or other planets we have to live with them. They will most likely try to follow us even then. Hopefully someone will have the foresight to set that ship on autopilot to the sun. I kid :0) all in fun.

Use Google to search for torrent files. Thanks for the heads up. :) Honestly though Torrentz have jumped the shark so to speak. Most people I know have moved on to other means of file sharing. Anytime I download a torrent file I get a nasty email from my ISP stating that I was flagged for copyright infringement by a third party.
[rant]As for the people at isoHunt I wish them well and hope they aren't treated to badly. I say that because the powers that be seem to really over react to what they were doing. I think a lot of it is that they don't understand what it is so they fear it. On the other side of the coin technicalities aside they had to know that they were doing something that was not completely legit. Should they be publicly executed hell no. Should they be put out of business perhaps. That should be determined on the merits of sharing other peoples work without monetary compensation.
We may justify downloading some things that we haven't paid the asking price for by saying I can't afford it anyway so I am not hurting them. But if it is free what motivation do we have as a society on a whole to get out there and earn the asking price so we can afford it. I really think the music industry especially shot themselves in the foot by gouging in the 90's for CD's. If they had lowered prices instead of raising them I doubt the majority of their customers would have even given file sharing a second thought. Except for the occasional sneaker net sharing it would have been something that only happened on college campuses. They could have kept customers by innovating like including collectible coins or 3d album art that could not be easily scanned. But no they raised the prices even more and then start litigating. [/rant]
I agree the fines they charge file sharers are ridiculous and I realize isoHunt is not even actually sharing the files just pointers. I think their argument is meant to point out that what they are doing is not that different from Google. Honestly if they can implicate Google then some really good lawyers are most likely going to be coming to bat. The name does not imply illegal torrents ISO's are disk images that could be anything. Many Linux distributions are legitimately available through torrent as ISO files.

No... you shouldn't get the flu shot for many reasons of which that is only one. But since you brought it up that is an excellent example of a special interest group creating a non existent problem and then selling it successfully to all the sheeple. Much like net neutrality this was created by people who don't even know how the science/technology works.

So your saying that we could use them to track a persons age. That would be fine at first. No more wondering if that special someone you pick up for the night is really of age or not. Don't worry about remembering your ID when going on a beer run. We'll all know if your eligible to be president. Until the mandatory "retirement" age is lowered to 30 and anyone not reporting for recycling is labeled a runner.

You make a very good point. I was worried that I came across a little snarky. But that wasn't my intention. They rarely include us in decisions.
As far as respecting our input we got lucky. Being easier to give them an excuse to do nothing we already spent long meetings bashing Vista to keep them away from it. The only reason we are moving to 7 so "fast" is because we made the decision while 7 was in beta. The decision was mostly based on fear of losing support for XP. Now that that is extended we are once again taking our time even though we have purchased all the licensing we need. There is also an enterprise app that has no vista/win7 support holding us up. We don't have any "production" 7 boxes. "Testing" win7 is one of the perks of being in IT.
Having said that I agree that Vista will probably be a thorn in the side of many an IT admin for years to come.

...if Win8 won't have a build-in app store ;)

Will it be cloud based? Will we "rent" a virtual session every time we boot into the cloud on our thin device? Haha! Can we access our app store from any connected terminal? Oh please oh please oh please! There were rumors that office 10 would be like this or was it office 11? I'll join you for lunch I'll be having shoe.

Except that Vista is considered a pariah by most IT support personnel where as we all fell in love with win7. My mid to large organization is already planning on moving straight from XP to 7. Vista was literally banned from our network. I am probably biased but I would consider any admin that deployed ME/Vista in mass to be an ID10t.
We are also trying to avoid windows server 2008 and go straight to win2k8R2 for many of the same reasons. There are a couple exceptions we had to make for compatibility reasons that are gleefully proving why we were right to avoid them. As soon as the vendors catch up we will be getting rid of those as well.
My crystal ball is telling me that Win7 is going to be the new XP unless win8 has some serious compatibility fixes. Because that is really what made us jump on win7 not new bells and whistles.

Somehow I doubt they thought it through that much. They probably pictured going downtown and busting the perps in their den of inequity. Perhaps someone tried to explain how the Internets worked to them but I doubt that as well. Anyone who tried would probably just frighten them into thinking they were a hacker/pirate.

I can understand why you might dislike religion. However I think most of the problems with religion can be traced to political roots. In today's American society I see it as more of a social necessity than anything. Stupid people would go nuts without it. I think when we no longer need religion there won't be a revolution. I believe it will just no longer be something people need and will slowly fad away till no one even notices it is gone.