BBT:Geeks::Al Jolson:Africans

the problem is the only way to overturn it would either be through the supreme court or through an amendment.

Or a long overdue revolution.

Citation please.

Citation here.

Taste is subjective

Taste is subjective, but discrimiation is not. Whether a $15 red wine is better than a $60 white wine is subjective. But if they have different flavors, a human should be able to discriminate between the two.

Yes. If you slap a higher price tag on a cheap bottle of wine it "tastes" better. There is no price receptor on your tongue, so there must be something else at work. That's confirmation bias.

Freedom is a nebulous notion, those who defend this kind of action don't exactly see how it affects their freedom. If they don't have anything to hide...

I think a better way to phrase this is "I will happily trade your fascist fear-mongering for a government that obeys the law". Everyone can understand that a government that doesn't obey the law is a threat.

Ignorance and laziness are the true enemies of liberty. A healthy fear of your own government is essential for liberty.

It was supposedly approved by the FISA courts.

And the FISA courts are approved by Congress which is constitutionally prohibited from approving searches without probable cause.

Im not sure if it was legal, but if you're not a lawyer I imagine you are also not in a position to determine that.

If you know English, you can read the fucking 4th amendment. The Constitution is valid because it was ratified by The People. If The People aren't capable of understanding it, then they aren't capable of consenting to it. Either the Constitution is understandable in plain English by the common person, or it is not valid at all.

I can do anything I need to do on a Linux desktop and the only place I find the need to use another OS is in video editing.

Nearly identical experience except for me it's video editing and Lightroom 4. I use AfterShot Pro on Ubuntu but like the color tools better in Lightroom. That and Netflix, but that's available on Android now.

It's not going to be Linux that kills Windows, Android is the real killer. And as soon as video and photo editing are available, there won't be anyone using Windows at home and Excel is not going to change that.

Bring on the Microsoft astroturfers. That's the surest sign ever of dead company walking.

How is that not a "No True Scotsman" fallacy?

They have no problem with electricity

You're right, their problem is with logic and applying it to the real world.

If it weren't for the 5th, Congress could pass a law making it illegal to refuse to confess to a crime, even if you didn't commit it.

This is one of the problems with Open Source in general: the engineers are expert in coding, and believe that this is all one needs for a great product.

And this has been borne out by experience. Open source products are generally better than closed source products.

There are acknowledged experts in usability and presentation (and documentation and testing and installation procedures and marketing) who have spent many years of study and have experience in these things.

If all that expertise were worth anything, they would have come up with something better than the UNIX shell. It's been 30 years and it's yet to be surpassed.

So if I don't have anything to hide, I shouldn't have anything to fear? That never made any other residents of any other police states any safer.

You assume spending to keep citizens alive has the same economic impact as spending to make non-citizens dead. That's clearly not the case.

But you do have a point. There's nothing in the ACA to address costs of care. The ACA should be repealed, and replaced with single payer. But since we can't do that, I'll take universal coverage any way we can get it.

Bin Laden's stated goal was to goad the US into a prolonged and expensive war that would cripple the US. He achieved that.

"All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al Qaeda, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private corporations," bin Laden said.