> it will take a lot more than slogans to convince me that killing a man is the right thing to do in ANY situation.
and it will take a lot more than just opinions to convince me that your opinion is correct. IMO, the big problem with life-or-death situations is not that guns make it a bit easier, but that the people feel the need to enter into them at all.
> If it is illegal to defend my life with all I can bring to bear, then yes, I am for all intents and purposes a tax-paying serf.
Step it up to rocket-propelled weapons. If my attacker has a tank, they would be necessary. That does not mean I am a serf for not being allowed to possess one. (FYI, I am pro-gun, but I don't think this is the best argument for it).
> I had the distinct displeasure of witnessing a "glassing" in Edinburgh. > I'm very surprised that kind of thing doesn't go on in ghettoised inner-city-slum America
What, exactly, is that? I've never heard of that term, except for an excrutiating punishment on the male gentalia, which I can guarantee does not go on in the U.S. ghettos. However, I doubt it goes on in Edinburgh either... So what is glassing?
I hope that doesn't just mean breaking a glass over someone's head -- otherwise it's an extremely stupid term. And who the hell thought that handing out glass containers to a roomful of drunk people was a good idea? No, in the ghettos of the US, we use plastic cups (how's that for a simple solution?). Beer bottles, yeah, but not glasses.
> I've lived in London for 32 years and I've never been the victim of any personal crime
I've lived in the U.S. for 27 years and do not know anyone who was a victim of any violent crime either. It doesn't mean anything, just like your statement doesn't. You are one out of millions, as am I. Chances are pretty good that if you take a random person from either of our countries, they will be in the same situation.
> Our police use GATSOs a lot. Yours use automatic weapons a lot.
You must get a lot of your knowledge about the U.S. from television & movies. Or blindly ignorant America-haters. I have never seen a police officer with an automatic weapon. They do not use them "a lot," they hardly even use them "a little." The only time an automatic weapon comes out is in a big riot (or if some people decide to live together peacefully in a cabin in the woods -- then the tanks & flamethrowers come out, but that's usually military, not the police). Even in a riot situation, they usually use rubber bullets & tear gas over automatics.
> So you are equating gasoline with food in the heirarchy of human needs?
No, but without gasoline many people cannot get to a place to buy food, and would starve. Does that sound good to you?
> Civilization existed for thousands of years without the benefit of gasoline
Civilization existed for thousands of years without electricity. Do you claim that we should all just stop using it? Without it, our food would rot. Are you saying that fresh food is not a necessity? Or is electricity a necessity now also? Without it, millions would die.
> the price hasn't yet risen enough to force you to be more creative
Creativity has nothing to do with it. If I live 20 miles away from a store and cannot afford to move, how do you suggest I buy food? I could ride a bike, but since I have to work to make money, I don't have enough time to do that, except maybe on Weekends. However, if I am buying enough food to last through the week, it wouldn't be realistic to carry it all back that 20 miles on a bike -- not to mention that any perishable goods you buy could be spoiled by the time you get back, being packed tightly in the heat.
> riding a bike, or even go in a horsedrawn stagecoach.
Not all jobs lend themselves to telecommuting. Maybe you are a programmer, and can, but about 95% of the population CAN NOT DO THAT. It is NOT an option at all. Riding a bike to work is not an option either -- I would have to leave for the next day's work about the time I got home from work the previous night. I can't afford to mowe, so getting within bike range isn't an option either. If I rode in a carriage to work every day, the horses would be dead very soon.
If you can live without gasoline, you can live without stores. Of any kind. You seem to think that we can all go back to growing our own food. Sure we can, but we'd be pushing ourselves back in time about 40-50 years, at least.
Yes, we can live without gasoline, but then we might as well throw all technology out the window with it.
I can't understand how people can simply say "don't do this," when the results would be horrible and they have no ideas how to stop it.
To sum it up, in the U.S., unless you live in a very densely-populated area or an area with good public transportation, GASOLINE IS A NECESSITY.
> the American Military not only shoots civilians willy-nilly, they shoot themselves and our allies as well.
You must not understand what "willy-nilly" or my usage of it means or something, because they certainly do NOT just walk around towns shooting random people (that's what the phrase means) walking to work. If they shoot someone, it may be because they were running towards them, or felt "threatened" in some equally or less mundane way. (That would also mean that they routinely (ie, several times a day) shoot their fellow soldiers, which also does not happen) It may not be a valid threat coming from the eyes of an onlooker, but you have to remember that probably at least half of the soldiers there are real people who are not trying to kill everyone.
I would hope it's closer to 100%, but I realize that the people who choose military service tend to be more aggressive and many have ego "issues," to say the least.
Basically, you may not think there's a good reason for any deaths, but (ignoring that there's no good reason for war) you are not the one there trying to protect the lives of yourself & 5-50 men -- mostly yourself. If you were in a war zone, you have heard real reports of suicide bombers & the like in your area, some guy in baggy clothing is running up to you & doesn't respond to your shouts of "stop." Do you let someone kill you and your friends, or do you shoot an innocent person with no sense to stop when someone points a gun at him?
You talk about empathy and putting yourself in others' shoes... That's exactly what I am doing, except I am in the shoes of the one with a family a thousand miles away because his government felt like invading another counry. It's cliche, but I support our troops. I DO NOT, however, support the government action that put them there. The military personnel, for the most part, have no choice, and are subject to the whims of an idiot (or 10). These people have to make fast decisions and are real people, not mindless killing machines (as hard as the military tries to kill it, most of these people still have a grain of freewill & morality).
I think anyone who signs up for military service is a fool, but it is still their choice & I respect that they made such a hard decision.
Thanks for you informative & interesting post, but WTF is that all about? Do you believe that smoking pot leads to criminal activity (I mean other than the criminal activities of purchasing & smoking pot)? Hell, a pot smoker is probably less likely to take any initiative at all, let alone to do something like that, which requires covering up your steps. Heck no, if they wanted that, they could just sell pot!
Err, just so it doesn't look like I'm calling you anything you aren't, I want to correct that to say "As much as you may want to believe it." I don't claim to know what you believe.
Sure it is. An assertion is either true or untrue. The problem is that (almost?) noone has enough information to see the world completely and decide which it is.
But, of course, that doesn't address the issue at hand. The parent post made an extremely broad statement, and I made an extremely broad reply. He said "what would you do," without giving any details. To think that anyone could come up with a life/death answer without any facts is ludicrous. In that sense, I answered it perfectly. If the American Military came here & shot my brother for no reason, sure I'd be pissed off & might kill a thousand of them, if possible.
The poster, however, was trying to appeal to your sense of distress by making it personal. Puttinng yourself in their shoes. You can't put yourself in their shoes, you haven't lived their life, you cannot know all that they have gone through. And he cannot put himself in his brother's shoes. His brother may have been a spy for Canada, ready to give the go-ahead for an invasion into Greenland, but the Americans found out & cut it short. You say he would know his brother is a spy?
Most spies don't even tell their spouses that they are spies, you think he's gonna tell his brother (unless they are already working togethr)?
As much as you want to believe it, the American Military doesn't go around shooting civilians willy-nilly. If they shot your brother, they had a reason for it. Now, it may not be a good reason, but they had a reason nonetheless.
I didn't realize/. kept track of total posts. This is 3402 -- I had no idea I'd wasted that much time here. Thanks, now I'll have to leave for a few days:)
> my final grade should not just be a blind average of all my papers
Unfortunately, if you don't base a final grade on the previous grades given, it becomes wholly subjective again, and is therefore not a valid metric. There's enough problem today as-is, when different teachers of the same class give very different grades for the same work. I doubt that is not peculiar to the school I went to. Students dreaded getting certain teachers because they graded harder/unfairly(/gave better grades to girls with short dresses -- and that was a woman). This is another reason that electronic grading might be a good idea -- standardized not only across students, but across teachers as well -- which was the argument to begin with.
How the heck did I get on-topic again?
Boobies! Hee hee... took care of that little problem!
> So where in this did Americans invent something?
So when did TCP/IP become the Internet? It didn't, it isn't. Sure, someone wrote a protocol. Good for them. However, you can't just take that protocol, hook a bunch of computers up to it and say it's an Internet. Regardless where the parts of it were made, "The Internet" was spawned initially from a network of computers inside the United States. It doesn't matter if the protocol, the assembly language, the operating systems, and the PCs themselves were made in Hooziwassizistan, they were put together inside the U.S. It built upon preexisting ideas & hardware to create something new. The inventor of the automobile may be German, or French (depending on who you ask), but a car is just a logical extension of a boat, or at the very least, an engine. I'll bet the Combustion engine was not invented by the same person who invented the car, so if a protocol makes the Internet, an engine makes the car. They are not the same thing.
> Almost anything in the world, including gazing at your own navel, is more important than this discussion.
My problem is that your post is the last one on the first page, yet I have not seen a SINGLE on-topic post. Everyone is whining about terminology & the size of a byte & a word on a Univac, where we SHOULD be reading about a worst Tech-support answer. I thought this might be interesting, or at the least mildly humorous. *sigh*
> but the technologies they are build on were invented by non-Americans one and all.
And the technologies before that were based on technologies before that. Scientists build off of each other's work. Sure, some dude in India might have come up with transporting information as packets, but did he make the Internet? No, it led to a thing that led to a thing that... etc. If the first item that is recognizable as a fully working telephone was made by an American, then it is an "American invention." Otherwise, you can just take each step backwards & claim that Benjamin Franklin invented computers after "discovering" properties of electricity. After all, had that not taken place... someone else would have, but that's not the point. The point is that without all previous steps, current steps are not going to happen.
No great theories just came like a wind out of nowhere, they were built up on previous knowledge.
Y'know, that's one of those things where instantly I say "I can't believe someone would ask that," but then realize it's a good question, at least to calm some less-popular theories. One such theory proposed in these comments is the whole Clairavoyance thing (if you haven't seen it, it suggests that the "voices" aren't imagined at all). If there ARE instances of people, having been deaf from birth, hearing voices. If so, how do they recognize them as voices, considering they have no previous auditory data to compare to.
Someone who became deaf in life would have something to compare to, and therefore could just be "hearing" what their mind remembers as voices.
I have no idea how someone would test something like this, though.
I will put my name on this, unlike the AC. Despite the unnecessarily terse tone, the sentiment is sorta' right. He is responding, perhaps too harshly, to a very valid issue. It is not people "like him" that cause a problem. I don't want to insult you, but the problem is with people doing dangerous things that they don't need to do, just because they feel "it's my right." Or others encouraging them to do dangerous things because they think it will help the person's self-esteem, or some other reason. I'm glad that you aren't driving, it's probably much safer for you and everyone around you. Not everyone with schizophrenia is like you, though.
Slashdot Mirror
> it will take a lot more than slogans to convince me that killing a man is the right thing to do in ANY situation.
and it will take a lot more than just opinions to convince me that your opinion is correct. IMO, the big problem with life-or-death situations is not that guns make it a bit easier, but that the people feel the need to enter into them at all.
> If it is illegal to defend my life with all I can bring to bear, then yes, I am for all intents and purposes a tax-paying serf.
Step it up to rocket-propelled weapons. If my attacker has a tank, they would be necessary. That does not mean I am a serf for not being allowed to possess one. (FYI, I am pro-gun, but I don't think this is the best argument for it).
> I had the distinct displeasure of witnessing a "glassing" in Edinburgh.
> I'm very surprised that kind of thing doesn't go on in ghettoised inner-city-slum America
What, exactly, is that? I've never heard of that term, except for an excrutiating punishment on the male gentalia, which I can guarantee does not go on in the U.S. ghettos. However, I doubt it goes on in Edinburgh either... So what is glassing?
I hope that doesn't just mean breaking a glass over someone's head -- otherwise it's an extremely stupid term. And who the hell thought that handing out glass containers to a roomful of drunk people was a good idea? No, in the ghettos of the US, we use plastic cups (how's that for a simple solution?). Beer bottles, yeah, but not glasses.
Plastic bottles are even coming into style now.
> I've lived in London for 32 years and I've never been the victim of any personal crime
I've lived in the U.S. for 27 years and do not know anyone who was a victim of any violent crime either. It doesn't mean anything, just like your statement doesn't. You are one out of millions, as am I. Chances are pretty good that if you take a random person from either of our countries, they will be in the same situation.
> Our police use GATSOs a lot. Yours use automatic weapons a lot.
You must get a lot of your knowledge about the U.S. from television & movies. Or blindly ignorant America-haters. I have never seen a police officer with an automatic weapon. They do not use them "a lot," they hardly even use them "a little." The only time an automatic weapon comes out is in a big riot (or if some people decide to live together peacefully in a cabin in the woods -- then the tanks & flamethrowers come out, but that's usually military, not the police). Even in a riot situation, they usually use rubber bullets & tear gas over automatics.
> So you are equating gasoline with food in the heirarchy of human needs?
No, but without gasoline many people cannot get to a place to buy food, and would starve. Does that sound good to you?
> Civilization existed for thousands of years without the benefit of gasoline
Civilization existed for thousands of years without electricity. Do you claim that we should all just stop using it? Without it, our food would rot. Are you saying that fresh food is not a necessity? Or is electricity a necessity now also? Without it, millions would die.
> the price hasn't yet risen enough to force you to be more creative
Creativity has nothing to do with it. If I live 20 miles away from a store and cannot afford to move, how do you suggest I buy food? I could ride a bike, but since I have to work to make money, I don't have enough time to do that, except maybe on Weekends. However, if I am buying enough food to last through the week, it wouldn't be realistic to carry it all back that 20 miles on a bike -- not to mention that any perishable goods you buy could be spoiled by the time you get back, being packed tightly in the heat.
> riding a bike, or even go in a horsedrawn stagecoach.
Not all jobs lend themselves to telecommuting. Maybe you are a programmer, and can, but about 95% of the population CAN NOT DO THAT. It is NOT an option at all. Riding a bike to work is not an option either -- I would have to leave for the next day's work about the time I got home from work the previous night. I can't afford to mowe, so getting within bike range isn't an option either. If I rode in a carriage to work every day, the horses would be dead very soon.
If you can live without gasoline, you can live without stores. Of any kind. You seem to think that we can all go back to growing our own food. Sure we can, but we'd be pushing ourselves back in time about 40-50 years, at least.
Yes, we can live without gasoline, but then we might as well throw all technology out the window with it.
I can't understand how people can simply say "don't do this," when the results would be horrible and they have no ideas how to stop it.
To sum it up, in the U.S., unless you live in a very densely-populated area or an area with good public transportation, GASOLINE IS A NECESSITY.
> Would someone please explain to me why someone wishing others well, is a bad thing?
There is nothing wrong with it, except when that is the ONLY thing anyone does, such as in Christian Science.
> the American Military not only shoots civilians willy-nilly, they shoot themselves and our allies as well.
You must not understand what "willy-nilly" or my usage of it means or something, because they certainly do NOT just walk around towns shooting random people (that's what the phrase means) walking to work. If they shoot someone, it may be because they were running towards them, or felt "threatened" in some equally or less mundane way. (That would also mean that they routinely (ie, several times a day) shoot their fellow soldiers, which also does not happen) It may not be a valid threat coming from the eyes of an onlooker, but you have to remember that probably at least half of the soldiers there are real people who are not trying to kill everyone.
I would hope it's closer to 100%, but I realize that the people who choose military service tend to be more aggressive and many have ego "issues," to say the least.
Basically, you may not think there's a good reason for any deaths, but (ignoring that there's no good reason for war) you are not the one there trying to protect the lives of yourself & 5-50 men -- mostly yourself. If you were in a war zone, you have heard real reports of suicide bombers & the like in your area, some guy in baggy clothing is running up to you & doesn't respond to your shouts of "stop." Do you let someone kill you and your friends, or do you shoot an innocent person with no sense to stop when someone points a gun at him?
You talk about empathy and putting yourself in others' shoes... That's exactly what I am doing, except I am in the shoes of the one with a family a thousand miles away because his government felt like invading another counry. It's cliche, but I support our troops. I DO NOT, however, support the government action that put them there. The military personnel, for the most part, have no choice, and are subject to the whims of an idiot (or 10). These people have to make fast decisions and are real people, not mindless killing machines (as hard as the military tries to kill it, most of these people still have a grain of freewill & morality).
I think anyone who signs up for military service is a fool, but it is still their choice & I respect that they made such a hard decision.
> including alot of weed smokers
Thanks for you informative & interesting post, but WTF is that all about? Do you believe that smoking pot leads to criminal activity (I mean other than the criminal activities of purchasing & smoking pot)? Hell, a pot smoker is probably less likely to take any initiative at all, let alone to do something like that, which requires covering up your steps. Heck no, if they wanted that, they could just sell pot!
> As much as you want to believe it
Err, just so it doesn't look like I'm calling you anything you aren't, I want to correct that to say "As much as you may want to believe it." I don't claim to know what you believe.
> the World is not black and white.
/. kept track of total posts. This is 3402 -- I had no idea I'd wasted that much time here. Thanks, now I'll have to leave for a few days :)
Sure it is. An assertion is either true or untrue. The problem is that (almost?) noone has enough information to see the world completely and decide which it is.
But, of course, that doesn't address the issue at hand. The parent post made an extremely broad statement, and I made an extremely broad reply. He said "what would you do," without giving any details. To think that anyone could come up with a life/death answer without any facts is ludicrous. In that sense, I answered it perfectly. If the American Military came here & shot my brother for no reason, sure I'd be pissed off & might kill a thousand of them, if possible.
The poster, however, was trying to appeal to your sense of distress by making it personal. Puttinng yourself in their shoes. You can't put yourself in their shoes, you haven't lived their life, you cannot know all that they have gone through. And he cannot put himself in his brother's shoes. His brother may have been a spy for Canada, ready to give the go-ahead for an invasion into Greenland, but the Americans found out & cut it short. You say he would know his brother is a spy?
Most spies don't even tell their spouses that they are spies, you think he's gonna tell his brother (unless they are already working togethr)?
As much as you want to believe it, the American Military doesn't go around shooting civilians willy-nilly. If they shot your brother, they had a reason for it. Now, it may not be a good reason, but they had a reason nonetheless.
I didn't realize
> my final grade should not just be a blind average of all my papers
Unfortunately, if you don't base a final grade on the previous grades given, it becomes wholly subjective again, and is therefore not a valid metric. There's enough problem today as-is, when different teachers of the same class give very different grades for the same work. I doubt that is not peculiar to the school I went to. Students dreaded getting certain teachers because they graded harder/unfairly(/gave better grades to girls with short dresses -- and that was a woman). This is another reason that electronic grading might be a good idea -- standardized not only across students, but across teachers as well -- which was the argument to begin with.
How the heck did I get on-topic again?
Boobies! Hee hee... took care of that little problem!
> So where in this did Americans invent something?
So when did TCP/IP become the Internet? It didn't, it isn't. Sure, someone wrote a protocol. Good for them. However, you can't just take that protocol, hook a bunch of computers up to it and say it's an Internet. Regardless where the parts of it were made, "The Internet" was spawned initially from a network of computers inside the United States. It doesn't matter if the protocol, the assembly language, the operating systems, and the PCs themselves were made in Hooziwassizistan, they were put together inside the U.S. It built upon preexisting ideas & hardware to create something new. The inventor of the automobile may be German, or French (depending on who you ask), but a car is just a logical extension of a boat, or at the very least, an engine. I'll bet the Combustion engine was not invented by the same person who invented the car, so if a protocol makes the Internet, an engine makes the car. They are not the same thing.
> you wouldn't believe how many times me being "the tech guy" has gotten me laid
Guess what? You're right! I don't believe you!
> Almost anything in the world, including gazing at your own navel, is more important than this discussion.
My problem is that your post is the last one on the first page, yet I have not seen a SINGLE on-topic post. Everyone is whining about terminology & the size of a byte & a word on a Univac, where we SHOULD be reading about a worst Tech-support answer. I thought this might be interesting, or at the least mildly humorous. *sigh*
> story involved a Unisys mainframe at any point along the line, though?
Sure, my Unisys mainframe is my firewall, isn't yours?
> My DSL gets forty mebibytes to the fortnight, and that's the ways I likes it!
You get 40 Mebbis every two weeks? I wouldn't likes that much at all.
> > He may have just assumed the caller was a moron
> Then he was a jerk.
Don't call tech support much, do you? I guess that's a statement of your skill with a computer -- lucky you.
> but the technologies they are build on were invented by non-Americans one and all.
And the technologies before that were based on technologies before that. Scientists build off of each other's work. Sure, some dude in India might have come up with transporting information as packets, but did he make the Internet? No, it led to a thing that led to a thing that... etc. If the first item that is recognizable as a fully working telephone was made by an American, then it is an "American invention." Otherwise, you can just take each step backwards & claim that Benjamin Franklin invented computers after "discovering" properties of electricity. After all, had that not taken place... someone else would have, but that's not the point. The point is that without all previous steps, current steps are not going to happen.
No great theories just came like a wind out of nowhere, they were built up on previous knowledge.
> If someone killed your brother, would you be docile and take it?
If that was because my brother killed 20 of their people, fucking right I would.
> Do deaf schizophrenics... hear voices? :P
Y'know, that's one of those things where instantly I say "I can't believe someone would ask that," but then realize it's a good question, at least to calm some less-popular theories. One such theory proposed in these comments is the whole Clairavoyance thing (if you haven't seen it, it suggests that the "voices" aren't imagined at all). If there ARE instances of people, having been deaf from birth, hearing voices. If so, how do they recognize them as voices, considering they have no previous auditory data to compare to.
Someone who became deaf in life would have something to compare to, and therefore could just be "hearing" what their mind remembers as voices.
I have no idea how someone would test something like this, though.
> pronounced recovered in September 2004.
Tempting to make a joke here, but instead I'll just point out that 9/04 hasn't come yet. Did you mean 2003?
> *rolls eyes* It's people like you.
I will put my name on this, unlike the AC. Despite the unnecessarily terse tone, the sentiment is sorta' right. He is responding, perhaps too harshly, to a very valid issue. It is not people "like him" that cause a problem. I don't want to insult you, but the problem is with people doing dangerous things that they don't need to do, just because they feel "it's my right." Or others encouraging them to do dangerous things because they think it will help the person's self-esteem, or some other reason. I'm glad that you aren't driving, it's probably much safer for you and everyone around you. Not everyone with schizophrenia is like you, though.
> a long history of extremely bad practices... like psychotherapy with LSD... good one doctor.
Excuse me for making light of a serious situation, but I'd be friggin' thrilled if a doctor gave ME LSD... For ANY reason.
> he thought that everyone in the car was talking about her, saying that she was ugly, stupid, a slut, whatever
Hmm, I think I get something like that from time to time, so now I wonder if I'm slightly schizophrenic, or just a hypochondriac...
(1/3 serious, 2/3 joking)