Do you live in the DC area? I do. I remember exactly what happened with Occupy. They camped out in a park for months, pissing off people who actually live here and being a general nuisance. Most of them had no idea what they were demonstrating for. Some did, but they were radicals who didn't exactly represent most of the DC area, much less the United States at large. They were left alone for months, until the stink got so bad (and they'd assaulted enough locals) that the police finally ran them off. They're still in DC, mind you, just not in the same parks. They were not totally peaceful, nor were they totally unarmed. They'd left their homes months prior, and many of them are what you'd call professional protesters. We don't want them here, but they won't leave.

I have my own opinions about guns, which I suspect differ from yours, but that's what I know about Occupy.

I've recently been put in a position where I've had to do development and administration using solely FOSS software. It's awful. It can be done, and done well, but there are cost systems that make the process much easier and more efficient. From a practical standpoint, I would prefer not to have to use FOSS. I'm being intentionally vague, but suffice it to say that I'm mostly using command line stuff, running CentOS. Most of my time is spent figuring out how to use the environment. Some of that time is spent trying to get a version of Wine running that will let me install Office 2010 so that I can rewrite a manual. Yes, I'm aware of OOo, and I've used it, and it's not capable of doing what I need it to do, frankly.

I'm painting with a broad brush here, and I know it, but my issue with FOSS has and continues to be that there isn't enough attention paid to the UI. It's unnecessarily difficult to do very basic things that users need to do. Installing necessary software (and yes, I'm aware of security considerations), copying and pasting, and basic productivity. I can do all of these things from the command line, and do, but it's faster in a GUI. I'm aware that I'm going to be crucified for this, but Windows does this so much better it's not even funny.

Prior to needing to do all my development on a Linux box, I'd been ambivalent about FOSS; now, I'm sold on paid software, frankly. While the capabilities may be there (and that's arguable), it's still a hobby environment. I can't afford to spend two hours figuring out how to do twenty minutes of development when I also have other responsibilities. I say that to say this: if Steam can bring paid software to Linux, God bless them. Maybe it'll get the Linux communities to start thinking about moving past the dedicated audience and the hobby crowd.

...like Contra, Rush N' Attack, Combat, and Ikari Warriors. Sad that today's games are so obsessed with violence and the military.

but if this was being purchased for scurrilous reasons, couldn't Iranian intelligence go to, say, anywhere else to buy an iPad? I know that the employee is bound by Apple rules, but still. How much of this is Iranian vs. Iranian beef? Or, I'm sorry, Persian vs. Iranian beef?

That's as coherent as it gets. Capitalism is an economic system wherein private interests own all capital, i.e. means of production. Means of production are things like tools, factories, etc., basically any durable good that is used to manufacture something else for profit. The definition doesn't get much simpler without losing some accuracy, so if you're having a hard time with it you might read a bit of basic economics.

Centrally-controlled socialist economies can also be based on the "selfish desire to make money." After all, they use the power of law and their ability to enforce laws with violence to remain the dominant (or only) economic actor. I always think it's funny that people see corporations as big, evil, monolithic robber-barons, but have no problem with an entire government controlling your access to resources with tanks and assault rifles. I mean, do you think your one vote has more impact on your happy smileville socialist government than my spending or not spending money on something has on a company?

There's also the issue of sovereignty and enforcement. A state can't remain a state and abdicate sovereignty at the same time, and a key element of sovereignty is the sole legitimate right to the use of force. In order for an entire state to be subject to a law made by another entity, it would by default had to have relinquished its own sovereignty to the entity in question. That's why the UN doesn't actually make "laws"; a law implies enforcement, and the UN lacks the authority to enforce anything.

That's different than states using violence or other forms of compulsion to force other states to comply with agreements or treaties. A sovereign has a positive right to use force to compel a subject entity to follow laws it has established, and the subject has an obligation to adhere to laws passed by the sovereign. Other obligations may at times outweigh the citizenship duty, but it's way up there. On the other hand, the highest responsibility a state has is to 1. maintain sovereignty, and 2. protect its citizens. International agreements always fall below that in terms of ethical force.

So, yeah, in addition to the UDHR (which is a little bit of a misnomer, because not everyone on Earth, let alone the Universe, signed) not being ratified by Congress, the strength of the binds that hold any country to a treaty or agreement are tenuous at best.

Well, Chris Dodd was implicated in a lot of sketchy business involving the subprime mortgage stuff. A lot of conflict of interest type things that seem to happen pretty often in Congress. Like he took a bunch of money from Fannie and Freddie, then trumpeted how financially healthy they were, right before they had to be entirely taken over by the Fed. He had some kind of involvement with Countrywide Financial, he had some tie to Bear-Stearns, and there was some flap about the AIG bailout, the details of which I don't recall. But, basically, during his time in Congress he had a lot of ties to a lot of financial institutions that have been under scrutiny for being awful, and he himself has benefited from these ties in ways that look at least a little bit sleazy. Granted, that could describe a lot of Congress, but that's the deal with him in particular. He's been a little bit of a scumbag well before he left Congress, and it's no surprise he remains a bit of a scumbag.

Honestly, if the Pirate Party could pay off his mortgage, he'd probably scupper the MPAA. The nice thing about people who can be bought is that they can be bought by anyone.

That prohibits the establishment of one form of religion over another, but not the promotion of religion in general. The actual phrasing is something like "blah blah blah shall make no law regarding the establishment of a religion, or the free exercise thereof", and then there's something about not requiring a religious test for public office, but that's it. There's no separation of religion and state, per se, just a prohibition against the favoring of one religion over another.

I'm not just being argumentative, either. That's the reasoning behind the government being involved in marriage legislation, school prayer, giving tax exemptions to religious institutions, etc. People forget sometimes that the reason most of the early colonists came to this country, at least in the mid-Atlantic and New England, was because they wanted to practice their particular religion freely, and in some cases establish communities where their religion would be able to exclude all others.

This all day. I'm a freelance writer, and I couldn't live without Word. I don't know how it is in other parts of the world, but I've only ever worked for American clients, and, aside from one who wanted RTFs, they all want DOC or DOCX. I used OOo for a little bit out of a combination of contrariness and poverty, and I remember spending too much time wrestling with formatting, and then losing all the formatting when I saved it as a DOC file.

And I don't know if this applies universally, but the days of a room full of typesetters are long gone. Yeah, your copy is going to be formatted by a copy editor or layout editor if you're working with a fairly large publisher, but they still want it to be as close to their end formatting as possible. They'll be using InDesign or Quark to do the layout, or they'll have some CMS that they use for online. In either case, they'll be expecting a standard format so that there are no hiccups when it's imported.

And, particularly if you're freelance, the editing is going to be removing text and some light formatting. If they've got to spend more than two minutes proofreading, they're not buying your piece. Which means they'll expect a standard format (Times, Courier, or sometimes Arial, 12 pt, double-spaced, 1" margins) so they can breeze through it, and they'll want a DOC file so that their copy of Word will open it without any issues. Because I guarantee you they'll be using Word 2003, or maybe 2007 if they had a really good couple of years.

Noam Chomsky as a linguist? Incomparable. Like Newton, Einstein, and Hawking to physics, all rolled into one. Even beyond linguistics, the stuff this guy has done has rippled through everything from psychology to computer science. He's a legend.

Noam Chomsky as a political theorist? Bit of a whack-a-doo. Sort of lives out on the socialist/anarchist fringe. Likes to be outrageous, a little bit of a bomb-thrower. Like other people who spend a lot of time in the theoretical world, he tends to oversimplify foreign policy, international political economy, and economics in order to promote his own views "logically," while glossing over or missing entirely facts that don't quite fit his framework. He's kind of found his unifying theory for the world, and it's sort of a labor-oriented anarcho-communist struggle against authority, tradition, and convention. I struggle with Chomsky because there are a lot of things that he says with which I agree, and there are some things he says with which I disagree but can understand and respect his views, but then there are things that he says that are just tinfoil hat, howl-at-the-moon loopy.

All of this is my opinion, of course. I'm sure a lot of people find Chomsky's political beliefs totally reasonable. But when he said that Obama ordering the hit on bin Laden was equivalent to al Qaeda attacking George W. Bush's "compound" (his words, and I believe it's called a "ranch"), killing him, and dumping his body in the sea, he just sounded like a crazy old man to me, desperate to be seen as a "dangerous, radical outsider." He actually compared Bush to the Nazis, and claimed that Bush was responsible for all of the sectarian conflict in the Middle East. Funny that the equivalence wasn't between Obama (who signed off on the hit) and bin Laden, but not terribly shocking considering the source. That's pretty much textbook Chomsky. He tends to view anything that a Western, 1st world power does as sinister, fascist, and immoral, while unconditionally embracing any non-Western, developing nations regardless of the deeds (or misdeeds) of their governments. It's a shame that he doesn't apply the same intellectual rigor to his political views, but, whatever. Any time something can be crammed into the radical revolutionary narrative, he's on board, facts or morality be damned.

As a matter fact, I'd be curious to hear what his thoughts on Syria are.

You're either thinking of a line from the Declaration of Independence: "...that all men are created equal..." or the "Equal Protection" clause of the 14th Amendment, which basically just says that a state has to apply all of its laws to all of its citizens equally. So you can vote for or against someone based on their race, and you can talk as much trash about their race as you like. It's just that a state can't pass a law that doesn't apply equally to all people in the state. Naturally, it's a broad clause that gets debated and interpreted all over the place, but it usually has to do with race and sex, and sometimes in obscure instances to corporations (since they're "people" for some legal purposes).

The religion bit is just that the government can't establish an official religion. The actual separation of church and state doesn't AFAIK have an actual basis in the Constitution, and is sort of an outgrowth of stuff Thomas Jefferson was writing about at the time. That winds up meaning that you can't make laws regarding a particular religion, because that can be interpreted as the government establishing a particular religion or religions as authorized. But, I'm pretty sure that if a progressive tax doesn't violate the 14th, then a law against a particular religion wouldn't, either.

Respectfully, I couldn't disagree more. Strategy and, to some degree, tactics have not changed fundamentally since Alexander. Technology has altered the way that strategy is applied, and changed how tactics are implemented, but the fundamentals remain the same. Military doctrine, if by that you mean a sort of understanding of the role of various elements of the military and their proper application, tends to change as technology alters capability. Even so, it doesn't change that much.

Consider the role of armored cavalry (by which I mean everything from mounted knights to modern tanks). It has always played the traditional role of cavalry. It screens moving columns, light cavalry scouts ahead of a main army, heavier cavalry breaks defensive lines. Whether you're talking about lancers or tanks, the role is basically the same. It is as true today as it was four hundred years ago that cavalry is only effective when it support infantry. Equally true is that infantry is the basic unit of warfare. You've gotta have boots on the ground to occupy territory, and you have to occupy territory to control it. If you call asymmetrical warfare by it's more traditional name, i.e. guerrilla warfare, you will see that it hasn't changed much, either. Whether you're talking about American revolutionaries harassing British troops during the Revolutionary War, or insurgents in Iraq detonating IEDs, asymmetrical warfare is the only way a smaller, weaker combatant can fight against a stronger, larger combatant. And even then, the goal isn't to defeat the enemy, but to make occupation more trouble than it's worth.

The only real thing that changed after WWII was the geopolitical structure of the world, and even that wasn't something completely alien in the history of international relations. To claim that the only warfare left is asymmetric warfare is to propose that all future conflicts will be between a state and a non-state actor, or between two dramatically mismatched states. I think that such a viewpoint ignores the potential for interstate conflict between rivals in the near and distant futures.

Yeah, you know, I've always wondered why there isn't a mod option for "Spam", considering how often it shows up.

No, the specious argument is that this park alone supports the entire tourist income of the RGV, which is clearly what the press release implied. To say that this one park, one out of many parks in the area, is the lynchpin of Brownsville tourism income, is grossly overestimating the impact of the place. It's not the only park, it's not the only beach, and it's not even the best of the bunch, apparently.

First, you keep posting a link to the group's own press release. That's not exactly an unbiased source. But let's just go ahead and use their numbers, because they're still very obviously wrong about the overall argument.

Second, the Rio Grande Valley is much bigger than the 49 acres of land SpaceX is asking for, and the Boca Chica site is at the very farthest eastern end of the river. In fact, it's probably more accurate to think of Boca Chica as part of the Gulf Coast rather than part of the Rio Grande Valley. For reference, the Rio Grande Valley is the southern bottom of Texas, and Boca Chica is pretty much a dot on the Gulf Coast just above the Rio Grande. I don't have the exact numbers, but I'd guess that it doesn't quite make up 1% of the land area of the RGV.

Third, Boca Chica State Park is completely undeveloped, and is only open during the day. There are no, repeat, no facilities in the park. The road doesn't even stay paved up to the beach. Your precious hotel taxes? Not from Boca Chica, because there are no hotels there. Sales taxes? Not from Boca Chica; there isn't so much as a lemonade stand. So the money that your group is mentioning does not even a little bit come from Boca Chica, unless you count any parking fees, of which there appear to be none, as there don't appear to be any parking spaces at the park. It is literally just a beach.

So, no, it doesn't affect jobs, and I wish you'd quit tossing out the same link to the same damn article from TFA above. Here, here's a link from Texas Parks and Wildlife: http://www.tpwd.state.tx.us/huntwild/wildlife/wildlife-trails/coastal/lower/boca-chica-loop. Boca Chica is #43 on the map.

Here's a link to the Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boca_Chica_State_Park. You can see some pictures of the place. The only development appears to be two old wooden fenceposts which show where the road stops, and a rusted-out oil drum for trash. Unless Texas hired someone specifically to drive out, straighten the fenceposts, and empty the trash, Boca Chica does not currently offer any significant employment opportunities.