"I'm suggesting the GOP elite, indeed, is pretty much the caricature painted by the Left."

I can find no sensical interpretation of that. It's the further Right folk that are caricatured the most, not the establishment.

I had to chew on this one for a little bit. When any of our "things" can be replaced with the press of a button, we'd probably adopt a cultural of (voluntarily) loose ownership. Where what we created for ourselves we would still say we own, but most of us would be willing to give away most kinds of things if someone asked. I wouldn't call that communism, I would call that one of the effects of a rising tide lifting all boats: an increasing generosity.

Now if you're talking about an abusive (i.e. controlling) state, where the people are deprived of all the replicator technology and it's only in the hands of the government for it to dole out the output of, then also assuming a near-infinite energy source to run and I guess be the raw material for these machines, you could say that that thorny issue with Leftist economics of "eventually running out of other people's money" would be overcome.

I guess in that sense it would "work".

p.s. An interesting (to me at least) thought just occurred: Mr. Roddenberry didn't swap Right-wing economics for Left-wing economics in his made-up universe, he did away with economics?

I think the Republican party has already been losing half the votes they have. With nominations of presidential candidates who are social Liberals, like McCain and Romney, most of that half of the base stays home.

Really now, we've got a situation in America of Holocaust proportions (millions of innocents being tortured and put to death), and the Left wails over one lion and thinks playing music for extended periods is what is barbarism.

But from what I'm hearing, the GOP establishment is saying let's stay away from the social issues. So they'll probably nominate another McRomney; rinse, lather, repeat.

Vichy vichy ya ya whatever. If you're suggesting the GOP is a puppet party -- a Conservative party, co-opted by moderates -- sorry, no. The GOP is firmly a neo-con party (resisting being co-opted by Conservatives). It had Conservative outbursts, like in the Jack Kemp and Ralph Reed eras, where the establishment went along with what was happening because it meant winning. At the time. But that won't happen again any time in the near future in America's current cultural climate.

The nominee will be someone who's militarily interventionist in foreign policy, who'll keep up and advance the Surveillance State, who's innocuously religious or not at all, and who has no desire to pick fights with the Left in doing anything about the border or Obamacare. Or the national debt. The GOP will not be able to bank the votes of the Trump mini-swell. Really, who is the party's constituency nowadays? One half of the 1 percent?

The Dems have the poor, the criminals, and the deviants. And the dumbass half of the middle class that likes how they feel about themselves thinking that they're part of the opposition to "meanness". The rest of the middle class stays home. I'm about to join them. The GOP appeals to a tiny slice of populace. This country needs a Conservative party, as a kind of hospice, where that philosophy can go while it lives out its dying days here.

...you define "buffoon" as someone who's not a politician and who doesn't apologize for speaking their mind, then yeah, I'm with ya. Was John McCain unconscious when he was captured, or did he surrender?

p.s. Stop saying "Vichy". It sounds gay, no one knows what the fuck it means, and I'm pretty sure no one cares.

Unfortunately my "executives" are my fellow developers and our "chief engineer". I can make allowances for misapplication of technology from suits, but not from techies who aren't interested in their field.

And it's frightening to see that there are still articles on the ole Information Superhighway, from this decade, promoting the pursuit of pixel-perfect web design (when Style Tiles are considered the better practice these days, over full-page mockups). Then again, my coworkers still do table-based layouts.

Major thanks to http://www.trishtech.com/2012/04/disable-html5-media-in-mozilla-firefox/ for stopping that cursed auto-scrolling. Now in that space it just says Flash or HTML5 needed for video playback. And a special FU to Mozilla for making such a shitty browser, that scrolls the user away from what they're doing.

Every time I install something, I think "I wonder how long it will take before I have something useful?(TM)" And then it's "oh wait, I use Windows".

p.s. I think the auto-scroll-away-from-what-you're-reading-or-typing "feature" of /. recently is an ad rotator in the upper right above one's slashbox, when it loads the next ad.

p.p.s. Holy cow, I just went into Firebug (yes I'm stuck using shitty Firefox until I update my system from Windows version Vista) and look at all the "Cross-Origin Request Blocked" warnings. "This can be fixed by moving the resource to the same domain or enabling CORS." One irony I've always loved about /., for a web site about technology, the people who run it seem to know about neither.

Friends don't let friends use Winblows! Teh har har har!

tl;dr: Consider eventually growing up.

My acute spidey sense tells me you have a point in there somewhere...

"I am not quite libertarian enough to think that there is no place for secret investigations in our legal system."

I am. For what the FAuthor means, that is: against anyone. The government can go ahead and secretly investigate all the non-citizens it wants, but U.S. citizens are^Wshould be a protected class (under the Constitution). [And the only protected class in this country, BTW.] It should be *extremely* difficult for the govt. to get a citizen on a crime. That should be considered a good thing. Instead of perverting our system and making it easier for the government to go after its own citizenry, the non-corrupt way is to do both of:
1) Granting citizenship (including and especially de facto!) judiciously and limited in numbers, and
2) Incarcerating longer.
If mass govt. surveillance and other abuses were removed, along with the attitude that everyone is a potential criminal, and they had to instead operate as if everyone is innocent, and will always be, until it was evident that someone wasn't, there'd be some healthy resistance to expanding our ranks, and if they had to prosecute someone, it would take so much work, they'd want to make it really count.

"Is the FBI investigating a terrorist cell that is likely to steal softly and silently away into the night if they are notified that their banker is onto them?"

Too bad. If the terrorists are U.S. citizens, arrest them on suspicion, and if a judge denies them bail for being a flight risk, then so be it, if not, tough titties. Flipping through the channels on Fri I think it was some host on FNC asked "what do we do about lone wolf terrorists". The answer is nothing. Not everything has something that can be done about it. That oftentimes won't make the overall situation worse. We need to rekindle our pride in ours being a "shit happens" country. For what that means in a broader sense.

...suitable only for the harvesting of your organs and lower extremities.