Hmm, I wonder who or what you found that made you think that. Maybe Robert Morris? Anyway:

1) I don't speak for God. It seems He gave us instructions and the ability to follow them, or not. Mostly the same instructions the state Health Department gives us - don't eat improperly slaughtered meat, shellfish can be dangerous, and don't sleep around.

2) Jesus instructed that if a brother is doing something stupid and dangerous like fucking his neighbor's wife, tell him so. If he doesn't listen, three friends together tell him, so he knows it's not just one person's opinion. If he still doesn't listen, you might not want to be around him when the shit hiys the fan.

Liberals strongly disagree on #2. They think you should legally PREVENT him from working at the ice cream shop if he's too lazy/stupid/stoned/young to show up on time and get a job making more than $15 / hour. Better for him to sit home playing video games than work for $9 / hour, and you should FORCE that upon him.

American liberals think that if a man has sex with a a lady who decides six months later that she doesn't feel like taking care of her baby, you should not allow him to take care of his child. You should force him to sit helplessly as his child is killed because after all, it's his fault they didn't use a condom.

I've always thought programming is more like writing POETRY than just being literate - not everyone needs to do it. Both involve writing down words, but knowing the vocabulary and grammar isn't the really the point.

If you wanted everyone to be a programmer, you wouldn't teach them code, you'd teach them skills of system design, troubleshooting, etc. But why would you want everyone to be a programmer? That's like teaching everyone to be a diesel mechanic or poet. Kind of a waste of time.

The money in politics is a problem, obviously.

Also, I think I should be able to write about why I think this merger is bad and distribute flyers. Copying those flyers costs money. Therefore, in order to make my voice heard, I have to spend money to influence politics. If we're not allowed to spend money on politics, that means I can't print a flyer, I can mention politics on my blog that costs $5/month for hosting. A MAJORITY of Slashdot users think it should be illegal to make a video criticizing the current goons. Citizen's United did so, and most Slashdot users think that should be illegal. Fine for Michael Moore to do it, though.

Many people have said the solution is that COMPANIES shouldn't be allowed to spend money commenting on political issues. So for example Tesla shouldn't be allowed to talk about franchise laws? SpaceX can't make a YouTube video criticising the administration's handling of space contracts? Uber and Lyft spend money on their web sites, so it should be illegal for their sites to mention the taxi cartels' relationship to incumbent politicians?

If you decide that Tesla, Uber, and SpaceX should be allowed to have their voice heard, but it should be illegal for Citizens United to have their voice heard, I guess the rule is "it's illegal to disagree with me"?

It's a hard problem, with no obvious solution.

I see Comcast/TW's ads repeatedly, not NetFlix's counter-merger ads. Although granted, it's not a scientific sample.

Time Warner is the largest contributor to Hilary Clinton other than Wall Street firms, which make up her top six.

Cablevision is #10 on the list of top Clinton owners^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H contributors.

http://www.opensecrets.org/pol...

Democracy doesn't mean we get the government we want, just the government we voted for. The people in congress were elected in free and fair elections.

Technically, perhaps. Effectively, no. Contrast our typical ballot:

[__] Bribed Politician A.
[__] Bribed Politician B.
[__] No-name who has no chance of winning such that you are throwing away your vote.

with a typical dictatorship ballot for representatives:

[__] Dictator-selected Candidate A.
[__] Dictator-selected Candidate B.
[__] Dictator-selected Candidate C.

This difference is relatively minor. The plutocrats are pretty much fulfilling the same role as the dictator(s).

Not that I'm disagreeing with your point, but it should be noted that the Koch companies are somewhere around #15 on the list of top donors. The top 10 are names like Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, and Merrill Lynch who give millions to Hillary Clinton. The cable industry also spends more on Clinton than the Koch brothers spend opposing her.

That is all.

Why? I wouldn't want to adopt Stalman's eating habits, by why such an effort to avoid Gnu software?

I suppose the new GPL version can be problematic, the way the wrote the anti-patent stuff. It REALLY should apply only to patents related to a company's contributions, in my opinion. The fact that it can kill a patent from some other division, based on code that the company has never seen, creates an unnecessary risk for companies, which discourages them contributing.

I'm actually kind of happy what happened at the Bundy ranch. It shows you can still push back against the government.

That point is brought up every time EA fucks its customers over. I don't see them hurting for business.

Why doesn't NetFlix or smaller competitors chime in for the opposition? I suspect it's because they hope to merge one day also. Merging into oligopolies is a Get-Out-Of-Competition-For-Free card.

It's why Detroit became fat, dumb, and happy in the 1970's.

If you can find any of it, I think you might enjoy reading a guy from Colorado named Ray Morris. He was a big pot guy in Colorado , active with NORML in the early nineties.

It has become obvious that you're currently unable to grasp the concept that there can be a conversation about something other than weed ( too stoned?), so if you're in Colorado, please stay there. All we have down here is Mexican dirt weed anyway. You wouldn't like it.

The main advantage of subclassing over switch statements isn't the number of lines, it's that if you want to make a change in the future, you only have to change the decision point in one place, instead of once for every overridden function.

You can tell that subclassing is useful sometimes because people do it in C also, with structs filled with function pointers. It's just not useful to always force your code into a class hierarchy (and indeed, is counter-productive to attempt).

As for the 'useful' independent studies, I'll have to look again when I go home. But you didn't specify 'useful' in your original post. :)

What difference does it make? If it's not commerce, the federal government can create a tax that will confiscate all the man's grain. Problem solved.

If a majority of the people want a larger federal government over a long-enough period of time, no constitution ever written will prevent it.

I'm interested in your follow-up question, though.