No, by _definition_ "conservative" means you want to maintain the status quo and believe that changes to it should be made slowly and gradually. If you want a good antonym, try "radical".

That's what the word means. You either use the word correctly, use a different word if you mean something different, or you're wrong. I don't subscribe to this "but but languages evolve!" nonsense, at least not when it's used to defend stupidity. We live in an age where kids are made to play soccer games without keeping score so "everyone's a winner!" The "languages evolve" excuse is like that. To say that wrongly using words is proof that languages evolve is a nice, sweet, sugary-coated way of saying that ignorance tends to establish itself and become institutionalized.

Languages evolve when new words are created to explain new concepts that did not previously exist. All the terms we have now like "bit, nibble, byte, megabyte, et al" or "laser", and terms like "fiber optic" that did not exist 100 years ago is bona fide evolution of language. This isn't the same as redefining useful words to suit the widespread ignorance of those who utter them. Something novel that didn't previously exist is evolution; confusing two things which both previously existed is neither creative nor evolutionary.

Anyway, a great deal of Newspeak has occurred in the last couple of decades in politics. "Liberal" used to mean what we now call a "classical liberal" -- the most similar word for it today would be "libertarian".* Now it is wrongly used to describe "Communist with a happy face" the same way ""Conservative" is often used to describe "Fascist who claims to want your prosperity".

Speaking of free markets, you probably realize they don't work in a situation that naturally tends to create a monopoly, or where companies in an industry realize it's in their best interests to collude and not to compete. There's not such a free market for electrical utilities, nor for cell phones. Elsewhere, you also won't ever have a free market until the average person is incredibly shrewd and wouldn't consider doing business without first learning all about who they're doing business with. Effectively that means we'd have to eliminate public schooling, at least as we know it today, because that system regards inquisitive, diligent minds as failure to achieve its goals.


* I am talking to those who understand what "libertarian" means, not to those who think a minor political party has a monopoly on the idea that consenting adults should be free to live their lives and reap the consequences. I am especially not talking to the mindless people who seem to have been traumatized by some kind of Soviet-style mind conditioning and have unreasonable emotional reactions to it -- it is never portrayed favorably in the media and that's the upper limit of their ability to think for themselves (though it sure is funny how average people only ever have this kind of irrational response to things which are pro-freedom, meanwhile they will happily sell their liberty to anyone who promises security or some kind of hand-out).

That's absolutely true. The only way to avoid being racist is to simply treat everyone by the same fair and equitable standard. If you give special favor to anyone based on race, that policy is inherently racist. In the long term, the only way to ever defeat racism in a real way is stop participating in racism in any form. That creates less racism. Responding with a different flavor of racism still creates more racism.

What's really racist is to fail to understand this, and then to pretend to be a particular race's "friend" by assisting them in ways you assist few others. Of course you want to look nice and to present yourself as a real friend in terms of how much you're willing to do, how many double standards and other corrupt things you're willing to champion. Anything you do for them they learn to stop doing for themselves. It will atrophy. It's like what happens to a muscle when you stop using it, except on a larger scale.

In most other contexts, this is called dependency. A friend you've come to need isn't really so friendly. The relationship has then shifted; it is now based on power. It's not the mutual benevolence you were sold -- if it were that, it would come from a level of consciousness which isn't so petty as to divide by group identity. It's petty because it's an emotional, feeling-based approach to life that ignores reason because it is not appreciated. Most Liberal types are well-meaning but fall into traps like believing reverse-racism to be a solution to racism. It certainly does have the intended effect on votes, with many Democrat politicians taking "the black vote" for granted.

You can see how that couldn't work except that they see themselves as fundamentally different from whites and vice-versa. That's the part that is a lie. That speech by Martin Luther King Jr. is so famous that they had to have heard it. I think they forgot that part about the content of someone's character.

Most Conservatives are worired about things like financial matters, with vocal minorities concerned about things like abortion and gay marriage to the point of obsession. That sucks but it's not their main problem. Their main problem is that they understand enough not to play that particular dependency game, but too little to offer anything much better. They have little more than their own set of unreasonable demands, dividing the entire political landscape into two camps which each find one set slightly less repulsive than the other.

Albert Einstein gave us some good quotes. Ever heard this one? "The world we have made, as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far, creates problems we cannot solve at the same level of thinking at which we created them." That's what the average person will realize once they finally unplug from this self-limiting matrix of left-right politics.

I have two suggestions that are close to staying with Java:

(1) Check out Spring (http://www.springsource.org/); Spring has a bunch of goodies that make developing web apps easier, and the guys from spring (Adrian Colyer, Richard MacDougall) are thinking really hard about scalable web services. This is a foundation that will let you write in Java but still be prepared for the future.

(2) Even better, don't go with Java, but leverage some of what you learned and pick up Scala. See http://www.scala-lang.org/, or pick up Martin Odersky's book. Think of Scala as what Java would be if someone who appreciated terse, expressive syntax and great convention redesigned Java. Odersky wrote a reference JVM implementation while at Sun, and Scala compiles into Java bytecode and can directly use Scala libraries. (My first Scala project, for example, I used unboundid's LDAP libs directly in my Scala code.) Odersky along with some other luminaries (Viktor Klang, Paul Phillips, etc) have formed Typesafe, and are producing Scala the language + Akka (an actor framework) + Play (a web framework). Outside of play, many people are huge fans of Lift, and it does have some magic that no other framework has.

Remember how you said "modern" web application? Well, Scala supports functional programming, and you can fix functional and imperative code in the same application, which means you can support massively scalable sites by writing clean, idempotent code where needed.

If all this sounds bad, then I'd recommend Django+Python, as it is, imo, the best way for a relative web novice to produce decent code, and the amount you can do with a few hours reading docs and then digging in is shocking.

This is generally incorrect advice at least for a VMware environment. Best practice is to virtualize vCenter Server and its database, and use them with HA/DRS. The way that vCenter interacts with ESXi (the hypervisor it administers), ESXi is "preconfigured" with HA/DRS rules; if the server running vcenter does down, a different hypervisor will actually bring the management VM back up. (In other words, the vMotion and HA stuff, while CONFIGURED by vCenter server, doesn't not need the vCenter server online to actually carry out an HA restore.

Absolutely. The difference is simple, too: it's marketing if you "love" something that cannot love you back.

You could not have more thoroughly failed to understand what I said. If it were spoken verbally I could understand that, but it is text. You can re-read it as many times as it takes to comprehend it. Perhaps you would like to take a few deep, relaxing breaths and become nice and calm, maybe think of your own personal happy place? That way you can shut down your emotions and activate your logic and reason to let those do the thinking? Section by section, then:

If Youtube wants to say "we will selectively censor what we dislike depending on our mood at that moment on that day, and not according to a policy that is applied equally to everyone", that would be different. Youtube has made no such claim. What they have claimed is that they will not tolerate hate speech.

They were given multiple examples of hate speech. They censored the one that wasn't even intended to be hateful while allowing replies that were specifically designed to make that child feel bad. If they wish to rewrite their policy so that it reads "no hate speech allowed ... except the hate speech we decide to accept" that would be different. That would be fucked up, but at least it would not be hypocritical.

There are only two logically consistent, non-hypocritical way to handle things: either censor both the girl AND her hateful responders, or censor none of them. I don't care what emotions your endocrine system is making you to feel at this moment. I also don't care if you personally favor one kind of hate speech over another kind. That's the simple truth.

I do not believe this sixteen-year-old girl is a legislator. Neither is she in an executive position where she can veto a bill or sign that bill into law. She is not trying to pass any law. She is merely trying to express an opinion. Do you see how simple that is, and how ridiculous you are for suggesting otherwise?

This is why you cannot separate your emotion from reason here. You have this desperate need to make the girl into a figurehead representing some radical Christians who really do try to pass oppressive laws. Naturally you then hate this creation you have made. That is why you want her to suffer. That is why you like one kind of hate speech, namely that which makes her suffer, while disliking another. You feel so justified applying your double standard because you really don't like her. It's still a double standard.

You are just as much of a hypocrite as Google. Don't play this game with me. I see things quite clearly and am not someone you can blind with emotion.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

At some point the copyright cartels need to learn to be satisifed with the billions they are already making. Why, if they quit spending so many tens of millions to run anti-piracy campaigns, filtering, lawsuits against grandmas and children, and to purchase new draconian laws, they'd have even more cash in their pockets!

And who says old people have left the workforce?

Amen. If Youtube is "infringing copyright" then so is every ISP, hard drive manufacturer, monitor maker, and speaker manufacturer.

"Who cares about costs," some say? Obviously hard drive manufacturers should include hardware-based filtering software to make sure nothing copyright is stored on the drives without prior authorization from the media cartels. Yes this would drive up the costs of hard drives, but ... but ... externalities!

Yeah. I'd rather every copyright be invalidated than live in that world. Far as I am concerned, the copyright cartels already receive enough special treatment. While it's low-brow of me, and I admit that freely, I derive a certain enjoyment from watching how much they scream and cry when they don't get their way. They're really not used to that.

And you should have that right even though this is reprehensible.

The rest of us are also free to decide not to associate with you. That's how it should be handled. I do not want some authority punishing you for it. You simply won't have too many friends and lots of people may decide not to do business with you and that's enough.