for normalizing relations with Castro's dictatorship, You'd think they'd be a little more polite.

Oh, wait... never mind.

There are some results from LibreOffice Calc at the bottom of this page.

Are you saying this is a bad thing? I would replace "rich enough" with "with enough earnings potential", but once you do that, I don't see this as being unequivocally bad. I don't want my daughters choosing mates based solely on maximizing earnings potential, but I certainly don't want them ignoring that factor completely either. That is, if they do choose someone who does not have much in the way of earnings potential, they should be aware of what they're getting into, and aware that this will mean that they'll have to settle for a lower standard of living and/or not have the option of being a stay-at-home mom (whether that's something they want or not).

Meanwhile, the more women factor earnings potential into mate selection, the more incentive there is for young men to pursue education and careers rather than move into their parents' basements and play Xbox. Of course, it's more complicated than that---that education and those careers have to be attainable--but certainly men will do just about anything to gain favor in the eyes of women, and it would be good to channel this incentive into economic productivity.

That's a convenient theory, but if you'd bother to check, you'd find that Panetta is also a Democrat. He served as Clinton's Chief of Staff and was CIA Director and Secretary of Defense under Obama himself. There's no apparent reason for him to want to critizize Democrats.

It really makes the criticism that much more damning, IMO. And then there's your knee-jerk assumption that anyone who would criticize Obama must be a Republican...

FTFY. True that not paying back our debts would screw our borrowers, but (1) a lot of US debt is held by Americans, so we would partially be screwing ourselves directly, and (2) people and countries that don't pay their debts generally find it a lot harder to borrow in the future, so there'd be some slightly less direct self-screwing going on too.

Yea, cause it's unthinkable that interests rate would ever go up.

I don't have the data handy, but I believe that the term of US debt has been shrinking as the debt has gone up, so we actually have to refinance a pretty substantial fraction of our debt every year. So when interest rates start to rise, we're screwed...

So where's the line between "active manipulation" and merely "disseminating information"? Maybe we should just ban political ads entirely, on the principle that an uninformed electorate is better than a misinformed electorate. Or if we're going to distinguish between "informative" and "manipulative" advertising, who gets to be the judge of that?

Also, tf corporations don't have free speech rights, or can't spend above a certain amount of money on those rights, where does that leave The New York Times Co.? And if you think the NYT is "special" because it's part of the "press", then who gets to decide which companies are officially sanctioned "press" companies and which aren't? What about Comcast, would they get special corporate free-speech benefits by virtue of owning NBC?

The reality is that overturning Citizens United would mean that the government would have to get very involved in making a lot of subjective calls along these lines, which I would think would be very troubling for someone who "detest[s] all forms of censorship".

True, but you're saying that the people can't even be trusted to elect their representatives democratically without someone watching out that their weak minds don't get poisoned....

You've just made a great argument for why democracy is a bad idea... if people are y too dumb to be trusted, we should just give up on democracy now.

But the key is that there's a tangible difference between the immediate physical harm of shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater and the more abstract and amorphous harm of unlimited campaign spending, and the First Amendment bias is that we protect speech, and only carve out narrow exceptions for the most egregious situations.

It's like the question of who has rights... does everyone have full rights by default, and we only take them away in narrow and exceptional cases (like taking Second Amendment rights away from felons), or do we look at people on a case-by-case basis and decide whether they're worthy of rights or not? In either case, you end up with some people having rights and some not having rights, but it colors your perspective on where that line should be drawn.

Also, I think the whole Citizens United outcry is insulting to average Americans, acting like they can be easily swayed by advertising dollars. While that can be true, the Cantor primary loss is an interesting counterpoint. I think if as much energy went into finding ways to defeat well-funded candidates without spending comparable amounts of money (as was done with Brat) as went into complaining about Citizens United, we'd all be much better off.

And then there's the "money as speech" canard... I don't have time to debunk that right now, but to me it's another sign that you've been brainwashed by the left-wing media, much as you think conservatives have been brainwashed by Fox. Think for yourself! Don't take the Daily Kos as gospel!

From a practical perspective, we're basically agreeing... some speech is protected, and some is not. From a philosophical perspective, though, there's a big gap, and I think this gap explains the difference in attitudes toward things like Citizens United.

Specifically, it seems to me like you're setting up categories of "protected speech" and "non-protected speech", implying that there's some process that must be followed to decide which category a particular type of speech falls into. In contrast, the First Amendment does no such thing; it just says "freedom of speech", with no qualifications. Of course, the Supreme Court has subsequently declared a number of exceptions that we've already gone over. But the key idea is that, by default, all speech is protected, and only in some (ideally narrowly defined) cases do we make an exception to that default.

I think the former view makes it easier to say that restricting campaign-related speech is just a natural part of categorizing speech into these two varieties, while the latter emphasizes that their really needs to be a very compelling interest to add campaign-related speech to the very short list of First Amendment exceptions.

I believe that the false part of your original definition of "specific applicability" was not the "protect citizens against government" part (which is true) but the "targeted at some aspect of government" part. Other than the short list of exceptions you list, which have to do with speech that incites imminent physical danger, the First Amendment protects any speech, not just speech that is "targeted at some aspect of government".

Also, Godwin's Law involves comparing "someone or something to Hitler or Nazism". Merely drawing an analogy to an incident involving Nazis doesn't count; no one is being compared to the Nazis in this case.

That may be what you think it means, but that's not what it means. Instruction set and ISA are synonyms. In fact "architecture" by itself can mean "instruction set", but people also use "architecture" in other ways, so the term ISA came around to clarify that we're talking about "architecture" in the sense of "instruction set".

As in my other post, I'm not really trying to argue with drinkypoo, just hoping to keep others from being misled.

Since drinkypoo is done with this thread, I won't bother to try and change his/her mind---but for the benefit of other readers, you may safely assume that drinkypoo is wrong. If you really care to learn more, there's plenty of information out there, say here or here.

Or if you really want to go back to the start of it all, the IBM 360:

All the code names listed above are different implementations of the AMD64 architecture.

The x86 ISA is not holding us back. IMO, the only thing that motivates people to turn to ARM for servers is that AMD is not giving Intel sufficient competition in the server space. No one wants an Intel monopoly, and if AMD is not going to be an effective alternative, then people are forced to look beyond x86 for one. But that has nothing to do with the relative technical merits of x86 vs. ARM.

Also, no way is ARMv8 and inferior design to Itanium. I think the fate of Itanium should make it clear that there were very few things in this world inferior to Itanium ;-).