If Chuck Norris roundhouse-kicked Charles Bronson in the face, would the mighty force of the kick take Charles Bronson's head off, or would he just chuckle as it bounced off his leathery hide?
Either way, Richard Branson would be there to make money off it, somehow, I'm sure.
Believe me, there are a lot of veterans who are pissed off about how things are going. It's a myth that veterans (or the active-duty military, for that matter) all march in lockstep, so to speak, behind Commander In Chief, By The Grace Of God, His Presidency George III. I think people may have that impression because the most visible face of veterans is the stand taken by veterans' organizations like the American Legion, VFW, etc., which since 9/11 have become Administration mouthpieces just as much as FOX News*. But most of us aren't down at the meeting hall drinking toasts to Beloved Leader; we're going about our daily lives, quietly fuming, until the daily trickle of information about just how fucked up things are raises our blood pressure to the point where we have to speak out or we'll explode.
*Would you guys like to take Rupert Murdoch back? I mean, you can have him, absolutely free. We won't charge a penny.
Armies which require their soldiers to behave like ants are at a considerable disadvantage against armies which expect their soldiers to behave like well-disciplined people. There's a difference.
Despite the absolutist language, the guidelines' author, Major Ray Ceralde, said there is some leeway in enforcement of the rules. "It is not practical to check all communication, especially private communication," he noted in an e-mail. "Some units may require that soldiers register their blog with the unit for identification purposes with occasional spot checks after an initial review. Other units may require a review before every posting."
In other words, if we like you, say anything you want. If you don't, we're going to dig through every single thing you do when your hands touch a keyboard and find something to hang you with.
This is going to sound like standard old-soldeir grumbling, but... the service is really a mess these days. When I was in (1989-1997, including service in Desert Storm) it was generally understood that one of the great strengths of the American military, as opposed to most other countries' militaries, was our the general American-ness of the way we talked with each other and with the civilian world. Soldiers (in the generic sense: soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines) were expected to bitch, quite loudly and often in public, when something wasn't working right. Because that's how things got fixed. Yeah, we were supposed to work through the chain of command, if possible, but everyone including the chain of command knew that wasn't always going to work. And this understanding, and the bitching that it allowed, was what led to constant improvement in tactics, weapons, logistics, and everything else that keeps an army fighting.
Now it seems like things are going more toward a Soviet model. Absolute obedience, top-down flow of information, shut up and do what you're told every single time; running the entire military like basic training. Well, guess what? Saddam Hussein's vaunted "fourth largest army in the world" was trained and equipped on Soviet lines, and we went through it like a hot knife through butter. Analysis after the end of the Cold War strongly suggests that if the balloon had ever gone up, the same thing would have happened on a grand scale in Europe. Authoritarian armies can win wars (Nazi Germany was just as authoritarian as the USSR, of course, but the German army was surprisingly flexible) but the cost is terrible -- as some German general is supposed to have remarked after the war, "We killed four of theirs for every one of ours they killed, but there was always a fifth Russian." Yeah, you can win wars like that, but (unless you're as bug-fuck insane as Stalin) you don't want to.
Also? Shit like Abu Ghraib flourishes in an atmosphere of secrecy. Now, I'm not going to claim with 100% certainty that there was no abuse of prisoners in Desert Storm; there probably was. I can say that, if it had been widespread and systematized as it clearly is in Iraq, as a medic I would probably have known it was going on. And I never saw anything like that. We took better care of Iraqi prisoners than their own army did, which is one reason so many of them were so quick to surrender. Keeping things open is the best way to ensure that everybody plays by the rules, and that in turn can reduce bitterness after the fighting is over and keep us from having to fight more wars in the future.
I look at those kids over there now, kids like I once was, and it seems to me they have more to fear from their own chain of command than they do from the enemy. That's fucked up.
They're not asserting, they're not theorizing, they're not even hypothesizing. Because before you can get to that point, you have to ask questions. You have to say, "I wonder if..."
For every scientist who actually makes an outrageous claim, there are a million idiots saying, "Those damn scientists, always claiming stuff they can't prove!" whether or not that bears any relation to what's really going on. Sure, unsupported claims in science are a problem. But a bigger problem is anti-scientists who deliberately fail to differentiate between theory, hypothesis, and that first-step sense of wonder which is at the root of discovery.
As another reply to your post pointed out, the reason to "shoot for the belly" is not to wound (vs. kill) the target, it's because by aiming for the "center of mass" you have the best chance of actually hitting your target. Snipers can go for the fancy head shots; regular grunts in the middle of a firefight don't have the time. And gut wounds are very often fatal.
Only in movies, soldiers continue shooting like madmen after being shot in the belly.
I have personally seen people with horrific wounds continue to fight.
I have also a medical corps man training and I know that the enemy will try to strain the medical logistics and other support units in a conflict.
Any combat will strain medical logistics, with or without a deliberate "shoot to wound" policy. Overall, "shoot to wound" would probably create less strain on logistics because if you're not trying to shoot to kill, you're much less likely not to hit your target at all. Any army which tried not to kill its opponents would find it itself at an enormous disadvantage on the battlefield against any army which tried (as in fact all armies do) to kill as many as possible; what the medics are doing is irrelavant if the infantrymen fail to accomplish their mission. And I speak as someone who's done both jobs -- I liked being a medic a lot more than I liked being a grunt, but the simple fact is that medics don't win wars.
Military ammo usually lacks quality (b) because it's better to disable an enemy soldier than to kill him, both for the psychological effect at the enemy, who has to watch him suffer; and because his buddies will be busy rescuing him instead of fighting. Oh, and because the Geneva convention says so, they seem to think it's somehow more "humane" to cripple soldiers than to kill them.
God, I wish this dumb myth would die.
First: there is no infantry weapons system (other than the "NLW" which are designed for crowd control, not combat) specifically intended to cripple rather than kill an enemy. One shot, one kill, is always the infantryman's goal. The best possible way to remove an enemy soldier from the fight is to kill him; wounded enemies often can and do keep shooting back. The "wounding is better than killing" meme is often repeated among soldiers as well as civilians, but it does not appear anywhere in Army doctrine.
Second: the LOAC's prohibition on "dum-dum" rounds is basically intended to make things easier on military surgeons; it's a matter of what's humane off the battlefield, not on it.
Third: FMJ rounds, as opposed to the wide variety of other types of rounds which would be acceptable under the LOAC, are used primarily for reliability and versatility. Reliability, because rounds with any exposed lead will foul a rifle under typical infantry combat conditions (dirt, mud, sand, and enormous volume of fire between cleanings.) Versatility, because softer rounds are better for use against unarmored human targets, but that's about it. Trying to stop a vehicle with soft-nose rounds? Good luck. And modern body armor is very very good, but you've still got a good chance of getting through it with a dead-on shot from a rifle of decent caliber if you're using FMJ; soft-nose will just go splat.
Stick a bunch of islamist fundamentalists, fundamentalist christians and fundamentalist jews in a big field with guns in the middle, and watch what happens.
Can we do it with all of them, instead of just "a bunch?"
Chimps live in nature, react to nature, and due to nature changing, evolve to meet nature. Human, uses brain plus opposable thumb to adapt nature, change nature, and basically shape the environment.
Define "nature." All large animals shape their environment quite a bit; humans do it the most, but others do it too. (All living things shape their environment to some degree, of course, and what we think of as "nature" is a dynamic system which results from millions of different types of life all trying to eat and reproduce.) A city is as much, or as little, a part of nature as, say, a beaver dam.
Without the eager push of natural selection a species doesn't get the weaker strains filtered out nearly as fast as the one who does.
"Weaker" being relative to environment, of course. Right now humans are doing a lot better than chimps. The idea that there is some abstract standard of fitness is a pernicious one, and I suspect it's behind a lot of the misunderstandings people have about evolution.
"WMD" has become almost as much a euphemism for "The Man can do anything he wants" as "terrorism" and "child pornography"; not the root password to the Constitution, say, but at least superuser. And it's been written into all kinds of state and local criminal codes which will never, ever, under any conceivable scenario, be applied to people actually using nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. It's been used to charge drug dealers on the absurd theory that drugs are WMD -- er, no, people don't generally wander the streets begging dealers to sell them sarin gas to use on themselves! And of course any explosive device (whether said device exists or not...) will be labeled WMD by some ambitious prosecutor, because it grabs headlines. The original meaning has been diluted to the point where the phrase is useless, and can therefore mean anything you want it to, which is exactly how the people who abuse it want things.
I mean, we wouldn't allow law enforcement to break burglary laws, just because they have a "warrant", right? So, we either have to take away the right of the police to make arrests on private property, or allow record labels to hire security personnel to do the same to suspected file sharers.
I think that most people would agree that a warrant, properly issued by a judge, is a compelling reason for police to break the laws aginst breaking and entering. (Or rather, the probable cause which leads to the warrant being issued is the compelling reason; the warrant is the law's certification that such a reason exists.) But GP is spot on -- without such reasons (warrants for entering people's homes, 911 calls for running through red lights, etc.) police have to obey the law like everybody else. In fact, I would argue that police, on or off duty, but especially on, who break the law should be punished more harshly than regular folks. Same for judges, DA's, and others* whose duty it is to enforce the law. Quis custodiet ipso custodes -- if the people who are watching the rest of us aren't watched themselves, they turn into the most dangerous kind of criminal.
*There is one individual who, in the US system, is ultimately responsible for the enforcement of Federal law. When that individual breaks the law in a way which leads to the death of others, the penalties should be the harshest which the law can inflict. But that's a whole 'nother argument waiting to happen.
Like a lot of the posters here, I grew up in an age when violence in video games consisted of pixelated blobs doing horrible things to other pixelated blobs, so I can't really speak to the effect (or, I suspect, lack of effect) of modern video games on tender young minds. But I loved books and movies that explored some of the worst things humanity is capable of (still do, as a matter of fact.) My parents, bless 'em, never tried to shield me from this stuff. If I had a problem with some of the things I learned about, we talked about it. It probably wasn't easy for them, explaining things like genocide and serial killers to a nine-year-old... but you know, raising a kid isn't supposed to be easy.
Was my "innocence" ruined? Did I grow up scarred, warped, lacking in moral sensibility? Hell no. I grew up understanding that there are some very bad people in the world, who do some very bad things, and that good people have both the opportunity and the obligation to ameliorate some of the damage. Which is, I think, a pretty "innocent" atttitude to carry into adulthood. Because innocence is not the same thing as ignorance.
I understand why the people who owned the store near your campus were bitter, but I think TFA provides a good counterargument. The downloaders didn't drive them out of business; the sickness in the music industry did, and a good portion of that sickness can be traced directly to the RIAA. If it hadn't been for the RIAA's stupidity, downloaded music and music bought on CD could have found a way to peacefully coexist. Now, it's too late.
A whole hell of a lot of working people with families, throughout the music industry, are going to lose their jobs over the next decade or two until this shakes out. The Recording Industry Association of America could have prevented this. Instead, they've done -- and continue to do -- their best to make it inevitable. Yeah, the store owners' anger is understandable, but it's aimed at the wrong target.
Except there's no guarantee of "getting back on track" with a revolution, at all. In fact, the odds are pretty well against it.
We got extraordinarily lucky once -- we could very easily have turned into the first in the long, sad series of colonies that have won their independence only to sink into a morass of dictatorship and self-inflicted poverty. The fact that we didn't is due to the group of great minds that happened to gather around the idea of independence at that particular moment; it's not the usual situation. And internal (as opposed to colonial) revolutions are usually even worse. France? Check. Russia? Check. Iran? Check. Honestly, it's hard to think of an internal revolution in a major country that's turned out well, ever.
America has come close to the brink before -- we very nearly made the monarchist mistake after the Revolution, the savage-suppression mistake after the Civil War, and either the fascist mistake or the communist mistake (or both at once; imagine the Spanish Civil War writ large...) during the Depression -- and every time we've pulled back. I'd like to think we can do the same this time around.
Frankly, I think this country would be better off the sooner we start *really* fucking it up than later. Shock people into realizing their fragile little world is on the brink of becoming glass shards...
It's very easy to say that, sitting in your office or bedroom, comfortable with a cup of coffee and your browser pointed at Slashdot...
Revolutions are ugly, ugly things, and so are the circumstances that create them. Anyone who seriously wants things to get much worse, much faster, is either a psychotic, or just isn't thinking things through. (Usually the latter, of course.)
Surely there's a point where failure to perform due diligence is itself an offense? I mean, come on; anyone in IT could tell them (and could have told them in 2005) that there's a ton of prior art. If I patent "a method of preserving food by keeping it cold" and try to excuse my stupidity by saying that I guess I just didn't do enough research to learn about the prior existence of something called a "refrigerator," would anyone buy it?
Slashdot Mirror
If Chuck Norris roundhouse-kicked Charles Bronson in the face, would the mighty force of the kick take Charles Bronson's head off, or would he just chuckle as it bounced off his leathery hide?
Either way, Richard Branson would be there to make money off it, somehow, I'm sure.
:) Thanks.
Believe me, there are a lot of veterans who are pissed off about how things are going. It's a myth that veterans (or the active-duty military, for that matter) all march in lockstep, so to speak, behind Commander In Chief, By The Grace Of God, His Presidency George III. I think people may have that impression because the most visible face of veterans is the stand taken by veterans' organizations like the American Legion, VFW, etc., which since 9/11 have become Administration mouthpieces just as much as FOX News*. But most of us aren't down at the meeting hall drinking toasts to Beloved Leader; we're going about our daily lives, quietly fuming, until the daily trickle of information about just how fucked up things are raises our blood pressure to the point where we have to speak out or we'll explode.
*Would you guys like to take Rupert Murdoch back? I mean, you can have him, absolutely free. We won't charge a penny.
Armies which require their soldiers to behave like ants are at a considerable disadvantage against armies which expect their soldiers to behave like well-disciplined people. There's a difference.
Despite the absolutist language, the guidelines' author, Major Ray Ceralde, said there is some leeway in enforcement of the rules. "It is not practical to check all communication, especially private communication," he noted in an e-mail. "Some units may require that soldiers register their blog with the unit for identification purposes with occasional spot checks after an initial review. Other units may require a review before every posting."
... the service is really a mess these days. When I was in (1989-1997, including service in Desert Storm) it was generally understood that one of the great strengths of the American military, as opposed to most other countries' militaries, was our the general American-ness of the way we talked with each other and with the civilian world. Soldiers (in the generic sense: soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines) were expected to bitch, quite loudly and often in public, when something wasn't working right. Because that's how things got fixed. Yeah, we were supposed to work through the chain of command, if possible, but everyone including the chain of command knew that wasn't always going to work. And this understanding, and the bitching that it allowed, was what led to constant improvement in tactics, weapons, logistics, and everything else that keeps an army fighting.
In other words, if we like you, say anything you want. If you don't, we're going to dig through every single thing you do when your hands touch a keyboard and find something to hang you with.
This is going to sound like standard old-soldeir grumbling, but
Now it seems like things are going more toward a Soviet model. Absolute obedience, top-down flow of information, shut up and do what you're told every single time; running the entire military like basic training. Well, guess what? Saddam Hussein's vaunted "fourth largest army in the world" was trained and equipped on Soviet lines, and we went through it like a hot knife through butter. Analysis after the end of the Cold War strongly suggests that if the balloon had ever gone up, the same thing would have happened on a grand scale in Europe. Authoritarian armies can win wars (Nazi Germany was just as authoritarian as the USSR, of course, but the German army was surprisingly flexible) but the cost is terrible -- as some German general is supposed to have remarked after the war, "We killed four of theirs for every one of ours they killed, but there was always a fifth Russian." Yeah, you can win wars like that, but (unless you're as bug-fuck insane as Stalin) you don't want to.
Also? Shit like Abu Ghraib flourishes in an atmosphere of secrecy. Now, I'm not going to claim with 100% certainty that there was no abuse of prisoners in Desert Storm; there probably was. I can say that, if it had been widespread and systematized as it clearly is in Iraq, as a medic I would probably have known it was going on. And I never saw anything like that. We took better care of Iraqi prisoners than their own army did, which is one reason so many of them were so quick to surrender. Keeping things open is the best way to ensure that everybody plays by the rules, and that in turn can reduce bitterness after the fighting is over and keep us from having to fight more wars in the future.
I look at those kids over there now, kids like I once was, and it seems to me they have more to fear from their own chain of command than they do from the enemy. That's fucked up.
Good thing it's not, 'cause otherwise we'd be invading Illinois first thing tomorrow.
Yes, they're speculating
..."
They're not asserting, they're not theorizing, they're not even hypothesizing. Because before you can get to that point, you have to ask questions. You have to say, "I wonder if
For every scientist who actually makes an outrageous claim, there are a million idiots saying, "Those damn scientists, always claiming stuff they can't prove!" whether or not that bears any relation to what's really going on. Sure, unsupported claims in science are a problem. But a bigger problem is anti-scientists who deliberately fail to differentiate between theory, hypothesis, and that first-step sense of wonder which is at the root of discovery.
As another reply to your post pointed out, the reason to "shoot for the belly" is not to wound (vs. kill) the target, it's because by aiming for the "center of mass" you have the best chance of actually hitting your target. Snipers can go for the fancy head shots; regular grunts in the middle of a firefight don't have the time. And gut wounds are very often fatal.
Only in movies, soldiers continue shooting like madmen after being shot in the belly.
I have personally seen people with horrific wounds continue to fight.
I have also a medical corps man training and I know that the enemy will try to strain the medical logistics and other support units in a conflict.
Any combat will strain medical logistics, with or without a deliberate "shoot to wound" policy. Overall, "shoot to wound" would probably create less strain on logistics because if you're not trying to shoot to kill, you're much less likely not to hit your target at all. Any army which tried not to kill its opponents would find it itself at an enormous disadvantage on the battlefield against any army which tried (as in fact all armies do) to kill as many as possible; what the medics are doing is irrelavant if the infantrymen fail to accomplish their mission. And I speak as someone who's done both jobs -- I liked being a medic a lot more than I liked being a grunt, but the simple fact is that medics don't win wars.
Bingo. In the US Army we called it "center of mass."
I think you're right, but man, those dying gasps can be a bitch.
Military ammo usually lacks quality (b) because it's better to disable an enemy soldier than to kill him, both for the psychological effect at the enemy, who has to watch him suffer; and because his buddies will be busy rescuing him instead of fighting. Oh, and because the Geneva convention says so, they seem to think it's somehow more "humane" to cripple soldiers than to kill them.
God, I wish this dumb myth would die.
First: there is no infantry weapons system (other than the "NLW" which are designed for crowd control, not combat) specifically intended to cripple rather than kill an enemy. One shot, one kill, is always the infantryman's goal. The best possible way to remove an enemy soldier from the fight is to kill him; wounded enemies often can and do keep shooting back. The "wounding is better than killing" meme is often repeated among soldiers as well as civilians, but it does not appear anywhere in Army doctrine.
Second: the LOAC's prohibition on "dum-dum" rounds is basically intended to make things easier on military surgeons; it's a matter of what's humane off the battlefield, not on it.
Third: FMJ rounds, as opposed to the wide variety of other types of rounds which would be acceptable under the LOAC, are used primarily for reliability and versatility. Reliability, because rounds with any exposed lead will foul a rifle under typical infantry combat conditions (dirt, mud, sand, and enormous volume of fire between cleanings.) Versatility, because softer rounds are better for use against unarmored human targets, but that's about it. Trying to stop a vehicle with soft-nose rounds? Good luck. And modern body armor is very very good, but you've still got a good chance of getting through it with a dead-on shot from a rifle of decent caliber if you're using FMJ; soft-nose will just go splat.
Stick a bunch of islamist fundamentalists, fundamentalist christians and fundamentalist jews in a big field with guns in the middle, and watch what happens.
Can we do it with all of them, instead of just "a bunch?"
Chimps live in nature, react to nature, and due to nature changing, evolve to meet nature. Human, uses brain plus opposable thumb to adapt nature, change nature, and basically shape the environment.
Define "nature." All large animals shape their environment quite a bit; humans do it the most, but others do it too. (All living things shape their environment to some degree, of course, and what we think of as "nature" is a dynamic system which results from millions of different types of life all trying to eat and reproduce.) A city is as much, or as little, a part of nature as, say, a beaver dam.
Without the eager push of natural selection a species doesn't get the weaker strains filtered out nearly as fast as the one who does.
"Weaker" being relative to environment, of course. Right now humans are doing a lot better than chimps. The idea that there is some abstract standard of fitness is a pernicious one, and I suspect it's behind a lot of the misunderstandings people have about evolution.
"WMD" has become almost as much a euphemism for "The Man can do anything he wants" as "terrorism" and "child pornography"; not the root password to the Constitution, say, but at least superuser. And it's been written into all kinds of state and local criminal codes which will never, ever, under any conceivable scenario, be applied to people actually using nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. It's been used to charge drug dealers on the absurd theory that drugs are WMD -- er, no, people don't generally wander the streets begging dealers to sell them sarin gas to use on themselves! And of course any explosive device (whether said device exists or not ...) will be labeled WMD by some ambitious prosecutor, because it grabs headlines. The original meaning has been diluted to the point where the phrase is useless, and can therefore mean anything you want it to, which is exactly how the people who abuse it want things.
I think that most people would agree that a warrant, properly issued by a judge, is a compelling reason for police to break the laws aginst breaking and entering. (Or rather, the probable cause which leads to the warrant being issued is the compelling reason; the warrant is the law's certification that such a reason exists.) But GP is spot on -- without such reasons (warrants for entering people's homes, 911 calls for running through red lights, etc.) police have to obey the law like everybody else. In fact, I would argue that police, on or off duty, but especially on, who break the law should be punished more harshly than regular folks. Same for judges, DA's, and others* whose duty it is to enforce the law. Quis custodiet ipso custodes -- if the people who are watching the rest of us aren't watched themselves, they turn into the most dangerous kind of criminal.
*There is one individual who, in the US system, is ultimately responsible for the enforcement of Federal law. When that individual breaks the law in a way which leads to the death of others, the penalties should be the harshest which the law can inflict. But that's a whole 'nother argument waiting to happen.
Define "innocent."
... but you know, raising a kid isn't supposed to be easy.
Like a lot of the posters here, I grew up in an age when violence in video games consisted of pixelated blobs doing horrible things to other pixelated blobs, so I can't really speak to the effect (or, I suspect, lack of effect) of modern video games on tender young minds. But I loved books and movies that explored some of the worst things humanity is capable of (still do, as a matter of fact.) My parents, bless 'em, never tried to shield me from this stuff. If I had a problem with some of the things I learned about, we talked about it. It probably wasn't easy for them, explaining things like genocide and serial killers to a nine-year-old
Was my "innocence" ruined? Did I grow up scarred, warped, lacking in moral sensibility? Hell no. I grew up understanding that there are some very bad people in the world, who do some very bad things, and that good people have both the opportunity and the obligation to ameliorate some of the damage. Which is, I think, a pretty "innocent" atttitude to carry into adulthood. Because innocence is not the same thing as ignorance.
We're talking about large, well known companies, which would think twice about their means if they started to get bad press.
We're talking about large, well known companies which hack people's computers and sue little kids. "Bad press" is pretty obviously not a deterrent.
I understand why the people who owned the store near your campus were bitter, but I think TFA provides a good counterargument. The downloaders didn't drive them out of business; the sickness in the music industry did, and a good portion of that sickness can be traced directly to the RIAA. If it hadn't been for the RIAA's stupidity, downloaded music and music bought on CD could have found a way to peacefully coexist. Now, it's too late.
A whole hell of a lot of working people with families, throughout the music industry, are going to lose their jobs over the next decade or two until this shakes out. The Recording Industry Association of America could have prevented this. Instead, they've done -- and continue to do -- their best to make it inevitable. Yeah, the store owners' anger is understandable, but it's aimed at the wrong target.
Except there's no guarantee of "getting back on track" with a revolution, at all. In fact, the odds are pretty well against it.
We got extraordinarily lucky once -- we could very easily have turned into the first in the long, sad series of colonies that have won their independence only to sink into a morass of dictatorship and self-inflicted poverty. The fact that we didn't is due to the group of great minds that happened to gather around the idea of independence at that particular moment; it's not the usual situation. And internal (as opposed to colonial) revolutions are usually even worse. France? Check. Russia? Check. Iran? Check. Honestly, it's hard to think of an internal revolution in a major country that's turned out well, ever.
America has come close to the brink before -- we very nearly made the monarchist mistake after the Revolution, the savage-suppression mistake after the Civil War, and either the fascist mistake or the communist mistake (or both at once; imagine the Spanish Civil War writ large ...) during the Depression -- and every time we've pulled back. I'd like to think we can do the same this time around.
Frankly, I think this country would be better off the sooner we start *really* fucking it up than later. Shock people into realizing their fragile little world is on the brink of becoming glass shards...
...
It's very easy to say that, sitting in your office or bedroom, comfortable with a cup of coffee and your browser pointed at Slashdot
Revolutions are ugly, ugly things, and so are the circumstances that create them. Anyone who seriously wants things to get much worse, much faster, is either a psychotic, or just isn't thinking things through. (Usually the latter, of course.)
*snort*
Good one.
Regrettably, I suspect you're right.
Frigidaire, watch out -- my lawyers are on the way!
only one thing I have difficulty understanding with evolutionism (which I am a strong proponent of)
You're lying. Seriously. Only creationists use phrases like "evolutionism" and "darwinistic evolution."
Surely there's a point where failure to perform due diligence is itself an offense? I mean, come on; anyone in IT could tell them (and could have told them in 2005) that there's a ton of prior art. If I patent "a method of preserving food by keeping it cold" and try to excuse my stupidity by saying that I guess I just didn't do enough research to learn about the prior existence of something called a "refrigerator," would anyone buy it?