Stats from the last congressional election:

o 14% approval rate -- that was a poll
o 94% re-election rate -- that was actual voters.
o In the same election, national turnout was 36.3%.

I think the advent of the net's new accessibility to information outside of the laundered and agitprop driven channels, the money-based reasoning of SCOTUS, the lobbyist factor, the obvious malfeasance of Fox news, MSNBC, the blatantly unconstitutional legislation coming out of congress... and so on... all combine to give a very large portion of the people who might otherwise vote a sense that the system is so massively corrupt that there just is no point to it.

When you ask them -- polling asks them -- they tell you that. That's why the 14% approval rate.

But the only people voting are the droolers who watch MSNBC and Fox. They're agenda- and plank-driven (abortion! guns! perverts! terrorists! taxes! etc.) and that's driving them to or from one party or the other. And *they* are controlling the narrative here; that's why the polls just aren't -- and won't be -- working in the current context.

It's just an idea. But the data is hard data. Something has to explain it. It's too skewed to be any kind of random happening.

I actually do vote, but I have to say, it's pretty damned fruitless. This is a red (very red) state, and so that's the way the pendulum swings here, regardless of how I vote. If I vote progressive on something, it's not going to happen. If I vote conservative on something, it would have happened any way. This is not encouraging.

The only thing less productive than voting for progressive ideas here is voting for a third party candidate. Neither one does any good at all in terms of biasing the political system, but at least the progressive vote isn't buried or simply not mentioned. Sneered at, I think might be the most accurate term around here, actually. But they at least talk about it.

-1? Plus five ironic, more like. :)

If you want to open a business in a free country like the United States and advertise your business as a communication platform there is NO problem requiring that business allow open communication by all.

"Private." "Requiring." I do not think those words mean what you seem to think they mean. Free speech, as the constitution mentions it, applies to what the feds are not allowed to do with regard to the speech of the citizens. It's not a mandate enabling them to force the citizens to participate in things they aren't interested in. It just means that the government can't stifle you. A private entity is something else entirely. You may not like it, but there it is.

You should go read Facebook's terms of service. It'll be educational. I promise.

I didn't come here to read what Dice wrote. I came here to read what you wrote.

For better or worse, slashdot attracts a collection of some very smart, and well-informed, and funny, people. And trolls, but hell, trolls are everywhere. Many places seem to only have trolls.

Knights. Huh. Not for me. I'm just a

shrubber

What hump?

So. How is life in a bubble?

The last time I looked into using Objective C on a Linux system the documentation of both Objective C and GnuStep were lamentable. So bad I picked up something else.

I'll agree it's a difficult problem, but Python, Ruby, D, and even Smalltalk (well Squeak, anyway) and Scheme (Racket anyway) have addressed it reasonably. Objective C documentation seems to only work if you're on an Apple, and GnuStep documentation doesn't seem to work anywhere. It's great if you just want something to remind you of how to do something that you already basicly know how to do, otherwise not.

I'm sorry, but I don't get the reasoning behind your evaluation. I'm not greatly familiar with Objective C, but the only reason that I didn't pick it up in the past was that other languages had better documentation. (I'm not using an Apple).

Even GnuStep wasn't that bad. It was better at handling unicode than C libraries were. But too many pieces assumed that you had someone at hand to explain basics to you.

So I used Python and D and Java. I looked at Vala, but it seems too tightly bound up with gtk, and when the maniacs began pushing gnome3 I gave up on it. I avoid C because of excessive use of pointers. That's also a problem with C++, but it's really a matter of excessive ambiguity (and poor handling of unicode) that cause me to avoid it. (The unicode problem also affects C and Java, and possibly objective-C, though I never really checked. Java doesn't even HAVE a unicode aware ispunct() function. I needed to fake one up using the general character classification, which Java made numeric for some stupid reason. The unicode version would have made things a lot easier as I could just have checked the first character of the classification.)

So, objective-C has problems with documentation (if you aren't on a Mac), and I'm not thrilled with the GnuStep choice of 16-bit unicode (unless they've changed that since I looked), but what's wrong with the language?

Read your history. If you want to say it's been brutal, unpleasant, agressive, domineering, etc. I'll agree. But relative to past empires it's been peaceful. And, again, I think this is a matter of economics.

The Democrats were defenders of individual rights when they needed to subdue the power of the states. Now that the states have been effectively subdued...

The question is, how could they possibly restore trust?

They had trust, the secretly betrayed it, using techniques that were not evident. So if they reform, how do you know that they've actually reformed rather than just changed their techniques?

And for that matter, there is plain evidence of shipments being intercepted and altered without the manufacturers knowledge. So you also need to verifiably reform the methods of shipping. How do you verify their security? The only thing I can think of is something analogous to key signing for hardware, but I can see no way to implement that.

So you say "they need to resolve this issue", and I agree that the need is present, but I don't see a possible mechanism.

No. Read your history. Actually the US has been remarkably peaceful for a dominant world power. Compare it to Imperial Rome or Alexandrian Greece or the Persian Empire. I suspect that this is because wars are no longer profitable. Trade driven empires were rare in ancient times, Egypt is the only one I can think of. (Sorry, I don't know enough Chinese or Indian history to include them in this summary.) But this US "empire" is more similar the the Egyptian empire than even the the British Empire. And the British Empire was peaceful compared to it's predecessors (though wars were still slightly profitable up until around WWI).

My hope is that the sucessor to the US will be even more trade driven that is the US "empire". But that *is* only a hope, and would be quite unusual historically. OTOH, wars are now much more costly and less rewarding that they have ever before been.

Depends. If you are a company doing business with your government, you buy locally. If you want to be secure from your government, you buy as foreign as possible, i.e. from a company in an area controlled by a government that has as little interaction locally (to you) as possible. And you still can't trust it, because the shipment could have been intercepted during importation.

I'm not sure you're right, though it's certainly possible. It's also possible that the current owner of the site has some default opinions that are automatically emplaced. Certainly, though, there are plenty of astroturfers on various topics. There's little evidence that it's even often the government. This, of course, doesn't mean that it isn't. It merely means that it's an unnecessary hypothesis.