Cool, I'm going to sow one of those 1% patches motorcyclists have onto my jacket now.

You are a fucking tool.

"This is A Violation of Privacy!"

-Captain Obvious

SO you mean like how /. has been tanking hard? The I could go sleding on the alexa results,

I wondered about the same thing, all the people who started reading /. in their 20's in 99 are now in their thirties, middle managers, who's entry pay was far higher than now, and it really shows. /. is becoming the website your boss reads and the users are becoming more old, grumpy, and greedy. perhaps news will become more like coffee shops? and will be open for a few decades but become unhip and fade away as the only people who still hang around are 35 year olds smoking cigarettes you can't afford.

Or the self indulgent narration of things I'm to cool to do, like how I'm too cool to respond to your post.

Aww crap...

Hehe, read a book, I did, it was the text for Econ 101, which is obviously more than you have read. Or would you rather I read Michael Moore and "nickeled and dimed."

That right their shows you aren't even worth arguing with, your understanding of how the world works is so simplistic that nothing but well meaning harm can ever come from you.Your "idea" of how things work has killed well over 120 million people in the last century alone. You live in a fantasy world, I suppose Fanny and Freddy weren't government meddling by buying up all those bad bundles, and the fact that the SEC and every other agency conveniently looked away during the boom wasn't meddling? No, it was greedy people, who need to be rectified by the new, gooooood, government.

The people do not run this country, The Law runs it. The laws guarantee liberty and private property as a right. I am usually the first to argue against the interpretations of the 14th that give limited liability and corporate personhood, but the right to form a business through contract and be free of coercion by the state(without due process) is as clear as crystal. If you don't like it get an amendment passed. Of course that won't ever happen because most people see your ideology for what it is, failed statism, hell even Obama has sharply left the far left.

No one ever said anything about "communism", maybe you have a persecution complex? I said statist, and I meant it, because that is what you are. Someone who believes a tyranny of the majority(middle-class in your case) should have the ability to use federal power to abridge the liberties of a minority group. Spin it how you want, but That Is What You Said, and in that sense you are no different than George Bush and the Neo-Con scum.

Your position lacks historical perspective. Badly.

No, those rights are guaranteed in the constitution and law, written and set in stone with very restrictive requirements to change. They are a right.

The people have very little to do with it. This was done by the founding fathers for a very specific reason: they saw what happens when you give individuals the ability to revoke rights at random. They knew what happens when you have people going around saying things like "the right to property is not a right" if "the crown" or "the people" or "the supreme soviet" says it isn't.

What you have just advocated, and I'm sure you don't even realize it, is patently false Statism. "The people" do not rule this country, the law rules it, and the law guarantees rights.

No you can not, by law or by practice. It doesn't work, like water up a hill. No state in the history of the world has ever been able to put demands on one section of society to finance the expected living standards of another and had any measurer of success for very long. This is why America revolted against the crown, The USSR is a memory, Rome collapsed and the feudal system never got above subsistence agriculture, serfdom and the wanton violation of individuals rights, doesn't work.

Nope that is wrong, hate to say it, but the wage earners do not run any country, never have and never will. If they did they wouldn't be wage earners any more. You have had countries in the past where only the worker existed and things didn't work out to well. Wealth is created, it isn't taken, unless the government does it. people mostly get rich by doing something better, the basics and benefits of a market economy are so simple that it's hard to understand how you can make a statement like that.

The middle class doesn't exist statistically, it is a rhetorical device. The people who fall into the middle quantiles of income get their income mostly through utility added to their labour, through mechanization, education, ect. To use the government power to benefit this group because it is "the back bone of America" is just more pork and vote buying. A strong and healthy middle class has absolutely no relation to ones standard of living, in a market economy individuals human capital and the value of labour does. The problems of today, such as the housing bubble, are mostly caused by the government trying to distort the market for privet gain.

You are obviously a middle-class person. I am sorry, but it is not the governments job to benefit you at the cost of everyone else. The laws are written so that you can not bend the legislature towards your privet profit. I know that the gop has been doing this, but two wrongs don't make a right, we must end corruption and federal power, not bend it towards our benefit.

Our legislature is bought and sold. Many of the problems we have today are caused, as I'm sure you are aware, by the corruption of our government. Corporate welfare, selling of public goods for private profit. The solution to this isn't to turn that corruption toward the group you belong to, it is to eliminate it. Otherwise you will only increase the violence of the swings in Washington, with the dems giving bigger and bigger chunks to their supporters and the gop doing the same, until the country is ripped apart.

Yep, because training by spending years sitting at desk means that they are now Ivory members of the intellectual elite well beyond us unwashed.

Little anecdote for you: Two experts are walking along, and one sees a $100 bill in the gutter and he asks his friend "Is that a $100 bill?" to which the friend replies """well it looks like it, but if it were obviously someone walking by before us must have seen it, so the fact that they didn't take it proves that it must not be," and off they walk.

Science works through falsifiability and the idea of a null hypothesis, so if your going to criticise that stupid comment, do it based on the general lack of knowledge it displayed, but don't do it by attributing special value to archaeologists in a way that implies he is ignorant for questioning their dogma.

And just like craigslist, 2/3 of it deals with sex and some kind of disturbing fetish.

Are you from the teachers Union? That is a fat load of bullshit. Since they have been running that line, geting more and more people shut out of the schools, the quality of education has dropped.

That's because privet enterprise isn't staffed with idiots, who after having spent 9/10 of their resources escaping a steep gravity well aren't going to go back down another. the future of space is in the asteroids with robots, not on planets with humans.
Government doesn't have the resources they have the power to take them from you. If the government decides to "create jobs" in a non profitable industry all that is happening is society is being impoverished for the benefit of a few people.
Also there are several very rich people interested in resource's from space since one small Near Earth Object has roughly 15 trillion dollars worth of high grade ore.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics
I guess they won't exhaust them, they just will be in a form that can't be used.

And that is why "our" criminal system has the most people in jail in the world.

I don't think most people agree that the criminal system should be binary with "right" and "wrong" being the only two states. The fact that an individual is conditioned towards extreme violence should factor into his sentencing and be corrected. They shouldn't be thrown into a box for the rest of their life at the expense of the state. I don't think the law exist as a means merely to get revenge on individuals.

Besides "the Quick-e-mart guy" is a false analogy, it would be more accurate to compare torture and the "it doesn't count because I didn't know better" defense to the vilonce such an individual would inflict on those around him and his children. Actions that are reinforced at every angle by his community.

But you're right, we should hold people to abstract lofty ideals in the legal system rather than actually account for human behavior and create a system that works. No body is talking about moral relativism, I know that would be your next response. I am are talking about humans, and a humanist system for law, not high moral fantasy. Humans follow a set system of actions based on their environment and situation, the people who manipulate that environment are the ones guilty. It's very easy for you siting at home to judge other humans based on your high moral codes, but your codes are just based on fantasy.

When I had to write academic articles for school the first place I always went was Wikipedia, not for the article, but for the collection of sources at the end. Usually there were more relevant and peer reviewed scores there than on Ebesco host. The citation sections of Wikipedia are probably one of the greatest overlooked resources on the web.

Just look at the sources for one simple comm theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_of_silence not to mention the primary and secondary sources linked for anything historic. I got to Wikipedia first, and to library catalogs second when gathering sources is involved.

People keep looking at this in the context of right or wrong from am absolutist moral perspective. They need to look at this from the perspective of the people involved.

A soldier far away from home surrounded by other soldiers, conditioned with a set of values that is reinforced in every aspect by the others in his community. These people didn't commit torture as defined as one human to another, they commuted an act of torture from a member of a community against an animal. Nothing they did was wrong by the morals of their community, which were fostered by command. To charge them would be wrong. They do not have the power to question the ethical framework they are put in, that power has been purposely and systematically striped from them by command. Soldiers are not men of ordinary sense and understanding, no one of ordinary sense and understanding would go over a hill into certain death when ordered.

The leadership of this country purposely fostered an environment that was conductive towards this behavior, they reduce solders to equipment, and enemys to animals. To charge a solider with torture when they return to the states is like charging you for murder for eating meat today 10 years from now.

The social reinforcement and environment and community fostered by command is stronger incentive to follow orders than any punishment of treason. The punishment for questioning is social isolation and removal and shunning from ones community. These are the most powerful incentives in the human mind, add to that that every one around reaffirmed the belief that what they were doing was not only acceptable but right and noble. I'd venture that less than 1 in 1000 people have the moral fiber or dedication to human rights to either understand the coercion that is being allied or to resist it. This applies to Gitmo, Nam, and any other war. Command are the guilty ones.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment