The only way you can make real change is to convince yourselves and your friends to get deeply involved in politics and parties and force your candidates through by selecting candidates right for the job and who you know isn’t in the pocket of the elites.

Unfortunately the people who are most attracted to power are psychotic sociopathic control freaks with delusions of grandeur. The rest of us just want to live peaceful lives.

The only change you will see from Obama is that he will be much better at hiding his evil malice than Dick and Bush ever were. You will gladly follow your new messiah onto the FEMA trains.

Use Gnu/Linux because the elite want you to use Windows/OSx.

Hugo Chavez is a strong leader. He says what he means and means what he says. He’s not afraid to fight, nor does he fail to acknowledge the bitter struggle.

I still feel a general goodwill towards Obama, even though he’s done and said so many disappointing things before his first day as president.

My patience will eventually wear out if he doesn’t do something different from previous administrations.

The Democrats have been Republicans for decades now, and we don’t need another god-damned Republican. We elected a Democrat (D), we didn’t vote for a Republican.

The government doesn’t even bother to pretend to represent us. They treat us like “noblemen” treat peasants. Will that change with Obama?

Opening of the process ought to be broader.

The Democrats have already made some discouraging appointments.

It makes sense to campaign for these small and simple changes of transparency matters that do shift power.

This criticism has nothing to do with Obama or Democrats; it’s to do with an inherently broken system and procurement that is irrational and discriminatory.

Sure, it’s issue #1 in the minds of tunnel-visioned zealouts who measure him by this, but this is a storm in a tea-cup.

And suggesting sedition only makes one sound like a world-class jackass. On the priority list for fixing America, streaming format for an event that will also be on every channel on the tele is pretty low, and some of these arguments border on the sublimely absurd

And furthermore, suggesting some “I’ll scratch your back, you scratch mine” relationship because of streaming format is unfounded, unsupported by *any* fact, libelous, ill-researched, ill-thought, and frankly, so absurd I’m having a hard time putting the absurdity into meaningful words…

“In one piece of mail people were suggesting that Office had to work equally well with all browsers and that we shouldn’t force Office users to use our browser. This Is wrong and I wanted to correct this,” said Bill Gates [PDF]

After all, what’s happening here is a case of an external and, some would say, hostile interest grabbing control over public communications and positioning itself as gate-keeper and bottle neck between the citizens of the US and their elected officials.

The crap they worked so hard to pound through only reaches a fraction of the US computer-using population, albeit a large fraction, but significantly less than the whole. Thus it is deliberately exclusionary and against openness and democracy.

Of the streaming methods that can reach 100% of the computer-using population, most tools are even open source. Though you can have open standards even without open source, if “pork” is required of the project.

Right now, Quicktime and MPEG are the way to support democracy. Theora streams should be offered on the side to further the growth of a useful open video standard.

In some cases change is bad, as we see in the incoming administration’s change away from open standards and protocols for online communication. Staying with open standards and protocols for video streaming would allow the potential to reach 100% of the computer-using population, rather than just some of it.

People are rarely offered choice wrt issues that matter — policies. It’s mostly branding.

Big Boss: Boss… you were right. It’s not about changing the world. It’s about doing our best to leave the world… the way it is.

And if Roy read political sites like he does tech website, he’d find out that support for Linux and Open Source and opposition to it are completely uncorrelated with political stance. When discussion turn to operating systems on right-wing websites and left-wing websites, you’ll find that roughly the same argument occurs.