I'll go even further. I want to ask a question of all actually.
If a scientist does an experiment and the result doesn't correlate with the predictions his preferred theory made... we expect him to revise the theory. Such a revision may vary in scope - sometimes it is merely a restriction on which cases this theory is applicable to, sometimes it's a major rewrite of what was previously believed to be a fundamental principle of how the universe worked. Einstein ended up rewriting most of Newton because and thermodynamics ended up being largely restricted to gasses and liquids because solids (at least on observable timelines) just do not work like that - my shoes are not busy rearranging themselves to be more chaotically spread about the room...
Now when a politician sees that an experiment isn't working - and changes his sociopolitical theory to adjust for this new evidence - you call him a flipflopper. Why is it that we slashdotters, all of whom have at least basic science training/interest when it comes to politics are blind to the single biggest flaw in the world's political systems - that we crucify any politician who doesn't 'stick to his guns'. It is one thing if a politician promises to do X, and then does Y - you had that with Bush. But if a politician says 'it looks like the answer to this problem is X', then TRIES X, and comes back and says 'X isn't working, let's try Y before X makes any MORE of you suffer' - he SHOULD get a bloody medal for BRAVERY - instead of being instantly assured of losing the next election ! If anything economic and socio-political strategy is a much more complex thing than chemistry or physics. There are no universal laws for human behavior, even in groups. You have to try and draw conclusions from averages that are massively smeared out, and try and act in the best interest of the highest number of people without actually being able to conclusively predict the results of your actions.
Now, lets use a real example to clarify. So lets say a politician was asked in January how he felt about Iraq. Senator Foo is opposed to the war, always has been - he believes it to be an expensive (in money and lives) and also highly ineffective way to achieve the goal it's meant to achieve. So when asked in January he states that he would support the immediate removal of troops - all of them on a plane or a boat TOMORROW. In February he reads a study of military withdrawal tactics citing solid historical facts that a withdrawal plan should be more spaced out, and coincide with a series of diplomatic steps to help Iraq ensure the stability of it's new government post-withdrawal. He realises that this paper raises solid points. In March he is asked about his policy toward Iraq. He states that he would like to see the immediate enactment of a phased withdrawal plan - and why he now believes this to be better. This is NOT a case of flipflopping, this is a solid case of the exact same openmindedness we REQUIRE from scientists ! It should be lauded, not critisized ! On the other hand - if he promises to start a phased withdrawal, and then post-election refuses to do so without VERY solid evidence that ending the war would have disastrous consequences he could not have foreseen earlier - then he should be instantly barred from office for betraying his duty as a servant of the public.
>I'm sorry but it's simply unbelievable that you wouldn't lose anything.
And you think cultures don't lose bits and piece anyway ? Cultures grow and evolve with every generation. Those that do not, die out anyway - so if cultures will grow, mix and evolve naturally - why can it not be love that drives this rather than money (which currently is the norm).
Coca-cola billboards do more to destroy small cultures than intermarriage does anyway. My kids will have strong influences on their culture from Japan, from Brazil, From Protestant Germanics and from African cultures (that representing the 4 cultures mixed into their parents). Of course they will not be EVERYTHING that is Japanese, but *I* am not everything that is Afrikaner, nobody is. We each choose to conform to some parts of our cultures, to embrace somethings that aren't our culture and some things from other cultures. Growing up in a multicultural home is likely to make my children much more accepting of OTHER cultures than children who did not, being multilingual is likely to improve their education and job opportunities immensely. Knowing how to do a Brazilian OR an African BBQ and ALSO knowing how to make sushi will make them people with greatly opened minds and horizons.
I cannot see how knowing how to make sushi will prevent them knowing how to make an Afrikaners style braai. Sorry, I just cannot see how they will have LOST anything. Indeed, culturally they will be richer than either of US can ever imagine !
>A mere opinion or argument cannot be racist; it's only were I to act on it that this would be so.
What ? Are you nuts ? I know people who think the following "Black people are lazy" - are you telling me that, that is NOT a racist opinion ? A character generalization on people, based purely on race - is not racist because it's just an argument or opinion ? Sorry, that IS a racist sentiment. It isn't racist treatment of a person - but it is certainly racism, and it is simply impossible to hold an opinion like that and still treat black people as equals - so not only is the opinion itself racist, it is guaranteed to lead to behavior which is just as racist.
>And while you may have a right to hold a discriminatory opinion, neither you nor any government do or should have any right to enforce such an opinion.
>Well, I disagree on that. If a certain behaviour is definitely strongly harmful to society then it is the government's right and indeed duty to outlaw it. (Of course this is nowhere near being the case > for mixed-race marriage; there is no evidence I know of that the disadvantages outweigh the benefits. But in principle, I don't think a right to have sex with who you like is more important than the >overwhelming good of society).
Sorry - how is this possible ? How can who anybody has sex with have ANY influence on society WHATSOEVER ? The concept of a free society is simple: anything that does not infringe on the rights of others, is by definition legal. Whether it is morally acceptable by many people, whether it is popular or common, whether it is considered obscene or beautiful - NONE of these things actually MATTER. To let them influence the decision is to NOT be a free society - now no society fully lives up to the ideal of being free, it is after all an ideal - which humans aren't. But we SHOULD try to get ever closer to it, freedom loving people should oppose all attempts to make any law that does not meet this definition. If you are not infringing on the rights of others, whatever you are doing should simply be legal - without exception. And no, nobody has the right to NOT be offended.
I can do math you know - I said myself that right now, it is almost certainly still true. Three major air crashes is probably about a thousand deaths. The number of major aircrashes per year is on the increase. The number of FATAL auto crashes is on the DECREASE as newer cars are ever LESS likely to have accidents with FATALITIES. Sooner or later, that means cars will become SAFER than planes, because plane deaths are becoming MORE common, car deaths are DECREASING. Even though ACCIDENTS are getting MORE common, number of people INSIDE CARS who die are getting LESS every year. If we can cure the pedestrian-death problem - cars would be close to equaling planes right now.
Anyway, I wasn't really comparing cars to planes, merely pointing out that even THAT statistic is changing. My point was that dirigibles done right would be far safer than EITHER - near zero risk in fact. True it would be slower, but then again it's also much CHEAPER. You aren't wasting ANY energy to get lift, the atmosphere is giving you lift for FREE - helium at ground level has enormous potential energy which you don't need ANY difficulty to tap into. Almost all your energy expense is purely for going forward, you ONLY use a bit of energy to counteract the helium in order to land again. Your craft can survive almost any crash with nothing more than a light bounce happening. It's like a giant airbag ! The worst thing turbulence can do is shake your about a bit, maybe make you late - it cannot smash you out of the sky. It's just a pity that one (fairly minor) tragedy seems to have permanently made people afraid of lighter-than-air travel.
A much more logical prediction of the future (prior to the Hindenburg) would have been that most passenger trips over medium-distances was handled by dirigibles which would be more comfortable, cheaper and safer. Airplanes would be used where speed was crucial. You probably wouldn't have a passenger dirigible over the atlantic as the time and associated costs (like food) wouldn't be worth it - so Jumbos would do that, but it doesn't make ANY sense to fly a jet from L.A. to New York - THAT trip would be much more sensibly done in a dirigible, even if it did take a few hours longer.
Strangely, the titanic didn't end the luxury cruise business and no aircraft crash has yet ended the passenger-flight industry. The only real difference is that the Hindenburg happened at a critical time in history, right when dirigibles and airplanes were both entering the mass-transit-market - the dirigibles had a major and much publicized accident which the airlines cashed in on. The dirigibles as a technology never really recovered from that blow at that critical time. Bringing us back to my original point - the fact that we, right now have ONLY planes to choose for medium-distance airtravel has nothing to do with logic - it's a pure matter of emotion combined with established-market position (much the same reason some would say why Linux doesn't rule the desktop yet perhaps ?). I would actually like to see this change. Dirigibles are safer, cleaner and cheaper. Whether it WILL or CAN change I can't speak about. I just think that it's illogical it ever ended up the way things ARE. Oh, and it's interesting that the medium distance planes have by FAR the worst track record for safety - exactly the market sphere where dirigibles would have been at their best.
Well you corrected me on the cause, fair enough - I was quoting the book though and I hadn't exactly made a study. I agree though that dirigibles would have been MUCH safer as a mass-transit technology than airplanes are.
We are always told how statistically airplanes are the safest form of travel, since accidents are so rare. I am pretty sure this is not true anymore though. 20-30 years ago, the survival rate of any severe car accident was extremely low, 10% maybe. So it was probably true because there are a LOT more car accidents than plane crashes. But the average survival rate of a plane-crash is ZERO - and the amount of people inside are in the hundreds.
There were 3 major air crashes last year !
By contrast, modern cars have a very HIGH survival rate in bad accidents, airbags, crumplezones etc. had a huge impact.. Most people these days walk away from a car crash. Deaths are mostly caused when one of the cars is very old, or one of the parties is a pedestrian (of course in countries where there are lots of old cars - the death-tolls are much higher).
Air-crash survival figures haven't gone down though.
I don't think it's happened yet - but if the trend persists (and everything suggests it must) then we will SOON reach a point where that statistic will be outright wrong- I think it's been a bit deceiving for a long time anyway.
Dirigibles with Helium inside and a few other benefits of modern design would be a lot slower but I'm willing to bet that the risk of accident will be lower, and the deathtoll IN an accident could be greatly reduced as well.
Oh well, we're logical - sadly, not many other people are.
In which the boys investigates a series of murders at a new startup launching Lighter-than-air travel from New York. The company in that line however was seriously trying to recreate the commercial travel market that was destroyed by the Zeppelin disaster (unfairly I may add, if the Zeppelin had been running on Helium like it should have it would almost certainly have survived - greed is a terrible thing - quoth the book). Anyway, I can't remember the specific title, but it was one of the better Hardy Boys books if I recall - man this takes me back many years. I remember the CEO of the startup in the booking quoting that lighter-than-air is safer, more comfortable and cheaper than airplanes could ever be - and were it not for the Zeppelin crash would almost certainly have ruled the market because even though it's slower, every working stiff could afford a ticket. Far be it from me to question Franklin W. Dixon's research:p
I was raised in a time when my marriage would have been illegal in my country. That did change in the early 90's but sorry - I've SEEN with my own eyes what your kind of thinking does. There wasn't a single example anywhere of any effect it had that wasn't bad.
Cultural heritage is nice (and I repeat - go see Brazilians they didn't lose one IOTA of ANYBODY's herritages in the process). When interracial couples marry, we generally respect each others born cultures, and expand our own with elements of one another's that we like (I speak from personal experience here). It is by itself a typical example of the fear behind racism to imagine that you cannot become more than the culture you were born into, without losing that culture.
As for your final line. Racism's exact definition must depend on what you are talking about, in some contexts it is judging a person by colour. When it comes to mixing of races the answer is simple. Anybody, who in the slightest way thinks he has any right to even FORM an opinion about who somebody else chooses to have sex with is by definition prejudicial. If that prejudice is based on race - then it is racism. If it's based on sexual orientation then it's homophobia. But no matter what it is based on - it is wrong. Who somebody else chooses to have sex with, get married to, have babies with or any related matter has absolutely nothing to do with anybody except the consenting adults doing it. You could claim that celibacy might harm the population's growth - but it doesn't give you the right to judge or attempt to stop devout catholics from becoming nuns and priests. So I see no reason why they should have the right to judge or attempt to stop gay people from choosing their sex and love lives.
In short, I flat out disagree. You have the right to an opinion. Even a right to an opinion about who I am allowed to fuck - but you have to accept that any such opinion MUST by ipso facto BE a prejudicial one. Either you support the right of any consenting adults to do whatever they want to whomever they want, or you are discriminating against somebody - so even your apparently well thought out arguments remain racist - they discriminate based on race. And while you may have a right to hold a discriminatory opinion, neither you nor any government do or should have any right to enforce such an opinion.
>There is no "nuance" here. "Public" and "private" are opposites. You can't twist one around to include the other.
Right, actually the other arguer was right - it's not that simple. Public may be an opposite of private, but public as in 'public location' opposes private as in 'private location'(no pun intended), it does not oppose private as in private INFORMATION. That would be opposed by.... you guessed it.... public information.
If you testify in an open court, generally the content of your testimony is public information. Due to the nature of justice and the rights of the accused, you have no right to anonymity there, and your testimony is private - you cannot (at least, except for very special circumstances) demand the court not let anybody else know what you testified.
Now the information about where I choose to go, when I choose to go there etc. these are all examples of PRIVATE information. The fact that I have to move across a public LOCATION (the street) in order to go to a place, does NOT remove the fact that my having gone there is private. If somebody sees me, fair enough - but a recording JUST IN CASE I COMMIT A CRIME !?!!?
Sorry. That is an outrageous abuse of the citizenry, tantamount to a presumption of guilt, a flagrant invasion of personal privacy and anonymity and against all the fundamental concepts of a free society. Do you really want to tell us that you cannot figure out the difference between a public space and public information ? Sure, some information is private, and you have no right to know it unless I choose to share it. Some are public and I cannot keep it secret even if I want to. That is an opposite. Some places are public and you cannot stop anybody from going there, some places are private and you cannot go there without the permission of the owners. The 'public' of a 'public place' has absolutely nothing to do with the 'private' of 'private information'. Frankly, there is very little private information that cannot be learned by filming people as they traverse public spaces - so yes you do have the right to privacy in public places - or you don't have it at all.
It's interesting how attitudes differ. People (including in the UK) seem to think the CCTV there is a terrible violation of privacy and the justifications for it, even if true, would be weak.
In South Africa, CCTV is profligating faster than that and our tech is actually MORE advanced now. Here, it has gotten nothing but praise. People just don't care about privacy.
There is a twofold reason for that I think. The first is that just a generation ago we were living under what was little less than a military dictatorship. A dictatorship that had propaganda SO effective that some people to this day yearn for their rule ! What's worse, people here seem to chaos and order as a black/white thing. Either everybody does what they are told all the time, nothing more, nothing less- or you have complete chaos.
The idea of a free society in between those extremes, where the individual's rights matter is basically non-existent.
Throw in a massive crime wave, and putting up CCTV will get you hailed as heroes, with nobody wondering if it may be abused. It is scary to see the same thing happening in the UK though -
because it removes from the rest of us yet another example of liberty being respected - if the UK with their relatively small crime problems lose it... how will we with a crime wave possibly convince
people that the little extra security you may or may not get out of CCTV may not be worth the incredible price we are paying ?
We already live in a country where it is now a crime for teenagers under the age of 16 to HUG OR KISS. How long before we have teenagers arrested for making out - and CCTV used to find them/as evidence ? It's no less of a minor crime than dogpoop (of course, the kissing should never have been a crime at all but at least it's classified as minor).
The biggest irony of all is, even in South Africa the camera's have not actually had a real positive effect, the criminals simply moved to other neighbourhoods. So the cycle ends up with every street everywhere being under surveillance in the end. 1984 Was not so far fetched.
You oughta see Brazil sometime. I've been there a few times. In Brazil - same-race couples are the EXCEPTION, mixed-race are the rule. My wife is also not the same race as me, she is Japanese-Brazilian, I'm African-Caucausian. Brazil's next generation is going to be pretty far along to having no racial identity at all (since practically nobody in the whole country is bothering to marry somebody who is the same race) - keep it up for four or five generations and race completely stops existing - you end up with a mixture of all races - which I think would be chaotically impossible for us now to predict what they will look like. Now I know a lot of people may wonder if this is a good thing - that is what I call racism. I love the concept - I really hope Brazil is just ahead of the curve here and the rest of the world will be there within 50 years or so. It would suck if Brazil is the only place this happens - because it will be the best thing that could happen to the human race. And as a bonus, we get to eradicate racial differences with sex:) Not to mention that a human nation made up of a roughly even mixture of all races will be essentially superhuman (I use the super- prefix in it's proper mathematical meaning, not it's comic book meaning). We're talking about combining the greatest genetic strengths of every race and combining them into one race. A race that, like black people, don't get skin cancer easily. Is immune to every disease that ANY race is currently immune to... And that is just the pure scientific genetic benefits - now try to imagine the socio-economic benefits of a world where everybody looks the same- and nobody had to get slaughtered to make it happen ?
PS. Since my children will be mixed-race, I am obviously a bit biased in favor of racial mixing. Then again, I think only a racist could possibly even WANT to argue against it so being biassed would mean I'm a good person - I don't have any plans to change that:)
Shees, this could get long. Biggest project I ever did was openlab but that's dead now, these days my most important project would be OutKafe. The other few hundred were all small things that came and went.
There is about a thousand reasons. Thin-clients depend on it for one. Sometimes I create a sepperate instance of my desktop running a seperate environment, sometimes as the same user, sometimes as another one. My wife often accesses some features from my machine by ssh-ing into it while I'm logged in (creating another login session) then running an app (using X-forwarding) for a few things I don't want running on her machine. Oh - my wife is trained as a diplomat, she is about as tech-savvy as your grandmother - and she adores her linux desktop (pclinuxOS). Not to mention that hundreds of server apps user dedicated users to run under, very limited users that can't even GET a desktop, if you run just a few server features (like a printer-queue) these things make your whole system MUCH more secure than under windows - and couldn't work if you didn't have many users logged in all at once. Not all users are human you know.
This means that if there IS an exploit in cups - the exploit can't root my machine - it can only become the cupsd user - who owns... oh right NO FILES WHATSOEVER.
Just because you don't understand it - doesn't mean that it doesn't make sense - all it means is you don't understand it (and you should seek the blame in your own mental capacity).
You do know that large share-purchases pushes the value of the shares up right ? The moment anybody tries your plan - lots of people will want to have a ride-along and they will buy more - and the price will skyrocket (for a while anyway).
The current execs will sell just before/as it peaks and cash in nicely while leaving us with a worthless company.
Yep, sounds like a great business plan to me. How about when we're done, we use the company's remaining cash and "invest" it in high-stakes roulette ?
There was case here in South Africa a while back. A film crew was shooting a commercial on top of a building when they heard a scream from the street below. The ran to the edge of the building and filmed a crime in progress (a woman being killed with a screwdriver) while many people just walked past and did nothing to help.
The police were able to identify a lot of the people filmed (by adding other substantiating evidence of their whereabouts at the time - you can't get 100% face recognition in a top-down film after-all) - and everyone they found was charged and convicted as accomplices to the murder - serving as much time as the murderer (life sentences all around). Did a lot to get this country a little less complacent about crime.
Your friend saw a crime in progress (violent assault) - attempting to stop it is citizens arrest (a citizen when witnessing a crime immediately gains all the rights of a peace officer in South Africa, I assume in the US as well, but at the very least they DO have the right to perform a citizens arrest), if they didn't immediately stop and came with him quietly - that is resisting arrest, no less of a crime than if he was a cop - and he had every right to use (minimum required) force to subdue them.
If indeed he got the punishment you claim - you are leaving something out. Probably he didn't shout out any warning before he attacked them (cops have to shout "Stop" before they are allowed to shoot and there is no reason a civilian shouldn't be subject to the same law) ?
I don't dispute that the judge said what you quoted (it's hard to believe but I have no evidence to the contrary and judges are only human after all) - but I seriously dispute that your could have been guilty of any crime unless you are leaving something out. Quite the contrary, failing to protect the boy would have been a crime - he would be an accomplice to the crime he refused to try and stop.
Sidenote: I have 3 lawyers in my family but I am not a lawyer myself. Also my country uses the Dutch-roman legal system, not the Anglo-Saxon legal system America uses which does have several important differences.
>Misc.: If a man is trying to kill you, don't you have a right to kill him first? Freedom and government corruption? Aren't they mutually exclusive?
Yes, and if a country is trying to kill your people, you have a right to defend them... but then... why has EVERY war America has had for over a century been fought on foreign soil ? If DEFENSE was the purpose, you wouldn't have fired a shot until the enemy was approaching YOUR shores. The last war where you behaved in something approaching a moral fashion was World War 2 - where you were fighting somebody who invaded you FIRST.
> Freedom and government corruption? Aren't they mutually exclusive?
No. The fact that the odd minister takes a bribe (and goes to jail for it... mostly) does not change the fact that our laws are more liberal than yours, and that I have more personal freedoms in many ways than you (less in a few others). The fact is that the highest power in our land is NOT the government, it's the constitutional court which can and has forced the government to not only change laws but actually enact altered policies. That is why in our country one court-case was all it took to make same-sex marriage legal - the government may or may not have liked it, but their opinions simply didn't matter. Somebody went to the constitutional court, proved that preventing it is discriminatory - and called on the constitutional protection against discrimination by the government - and the court decided they were right. Gave the government one year to legislate and enact a law that would be equal to the law for different-sex couples. This law, known as the 'civil union' law, was enacted last year.
Oh and constitutional court judges are voted for by the judiciary, not elected by the same president they are supposed to be watchdogs over.
>The Iraq war started because the U.S. government said that Iraq posed a threat. Enough people still believe that there is a reason for us to be there. If there wasn't, we'd be in an impeachment process, have massive protests in the streets >of major cities, and a completely new Congress. We don't have any of those things.
That is what is wrong with America today. You can't make WAR on somebody just because they look like a 'threat'. The fact is, Bush's approval ratings are SO low, that frankly he should be impeached already - but there IS a movement to do so (for this and several other crimes, including falsifying of evidence) sadly, people are scared to impeach their president in the middle of a war -and your media doesn't really report this much. You probably don't know that Bush's famous Africa visits (you probably saw the sound-bites promising aid) was in fact welcomed by exactly the kind of protests you describe.
The fact that Americans are too lazy to care about innocent people being killed (even when a large number of them are your sons and brothers) does not mean that there isn't anything to care about !
Now for the point you keep ignoring. I can live with 'follow orders because of the need to', but when a boss in a company expects me to do something I find m morally reprehensible - I can quit, walk out and never come back. Of course I have to deal with the consequences of those actions (I now need a new job to live, and I probably don't have a reference) - but he cannot force me to keep working when I no longer agree with him (I did exactly this a year ago).
In the military though, if I join up because I agree with the way it is run in one time (as a DEFENSE force), and later a war is declared I do NOT agree with - I can't quit. I cannot refuse to fight an unjust war. I cannot quit,. I cannot walk out. More-over, if I sign a contract joining up for 2 years - your government claims the right to call you back over and over as many times as they WANT. If you breach the contract, it's jailtime, when they breach it, nobody can do anything. This is morally justifiable to you ?
I could live with a system of voluntary military membership - PROVIDED that all the soldiers have the right, before every battle to decide "Do I still ag
Well I wasn't specifically reffering to the US military when I made those statements. I made it clear that I was describing my experience based on the Military of South Africa in the 1980s (when joining up was NOT optional. You either went to war or to jail - once there, if you threatened suicide, you went to jail - the only way out was the few people brave enough to actually shoot themselves in the leg). Training here was one whole year, before deployment for another year (at least again).
Finally, am I really the only person who thinks the purpose of the (ANY) military should be to PREVENT wars, not MAKE them ? If that is your fundamental approach then it changes the way you work. I state that the US military being so continously prepared to attack sovereign foreign nations without provocation (which is why your military has bases in places like Ireland is it not ?), complete lack of respect for human rights (how can you claim to believe in human rights when you take a job that requires waiving your own and then forcefully removing the most important human right (at the very least) from other people ? A soldier who claims to believe in human rights is as much contradiction in terms as an atheist who claims to be prophet of $DEITY.) and your continued clinging to that patriotism (which Oscar Wilde correctly labeled 'the virtue of the vicious') for a nation that has betrayed the very ideas it was built on at least a hundred years ago (which is not to say that other nations are perfect, my own is much free-er than yours - sadly it is also corrupt and badly managed) and has become the single worst aggressor in the world over the past 50 years... well maybe THAT is why you are constantly at war now... because you forgot how NOT to be.
If somebody says to me "Go kill that guy over there" and I can't reply "Fuck you" - I have already lost the right to think for myself, about perhaps the single most important reason we need freedom of thought in the first place !
I know a LOT of ex soldiers from the bush war... not ONE of them is NOT fucked in the head now... it's very easy to pull a trigger when you are 18 and have been getting 'whipped into shape' by propagandising drill seargeants for a few months until they convince you that having no personality is 'duty' and thinking for yourself is 'treachorous dissent' - and that the 'enemy' is some faceless monster and not really a person at all.
Let's face it - military discipline is DESIGNED to destroy individual thought (you don't need THAT for studying physics you know - only to ADVANCE it). So yeah, they do lose freedom of thought, just like ours did. And most of them, will one day sit and look at you over their whiskey (usually about 5 after they really should have stopped) and say: "To this day I keep the macho face about it, because that is what they drilled us to do... but every night I see the faces I put bullets into..."
There is no such thing as a good reason to join the military. At least in America you have the choice NOT to. I boggles the mind that any country without a conscription law actually HAS any military AT ALL. Are people really that fucking STUPID.
PS. Sorry, I usually don't swear so much in posts - but I have seen this too much... I get very angry at the people who still pretend soldiers are heroes. I think the people who refuse to join up are the real heroes. Human life is worth more than having your college tuition paid off.
I own a copy of the DVD release of that show. I found it immensely cool. Now I never expected it to be true- it said right on the cover that it was a fictional idea. What it IS is a very well done thought-experiment (you do know what those are right ?) which takes an unreal situation and explores what would be needed for it to have been real. There are about a thousand such things out there everyday. Science of the discworld is only a small step away - and that was a hit with/.'ers. Now if some people are too dumb to realize that this thought-experiment is not meant to be deemed as a factual account then those people probably just lack the basic skills needed to understand what science even is. I have to agree with a previous poster - a philosophy course should be mandatory to all degrees, one arts or language course made mandatory could only be a bonus as well. I did my degree in English Literature with Philosophy and Computer Science as co-majors.
Thing is, I use what I learned in philosophy class far more often (a few thousand times a day) than anything I learned in the largely java oriented comp-sci course - and I own a software company ! Knowing the actual rules of logic means you can actually construct logical arguments - and for that matter logical algorithms.
Most people sadly cannot tell the difference between 'common-sense' and logic, let alone grasp the scientific ideals of rejecting authority-knowledge and always questioning. If you want to point fingers - don't blame a wonderfully done thought-experiment that is perfectly in line with the scientific tradition (question even our most base assumptions) - blame the enormous amount of publications/broadcasts telling you that scientist Dr. Foo Bar is trying to prove his theory of Baz. If the good Doctor Bar is any kind of decent scientist - he has come up with theory Baz and is now trying very hard to DISPROVE it - before his peers do.
So I got ranty ? This is/. it's what it is FOR isn't it ?
My biggest active FOSS project has gone through two forks in it's lifetime. This was not because of me, but because of problems when the companies I worked for tried to appropriate my (after hours) hobby work.
The final fork happened when I started my own company.
Ohloh has it listed., as well as the second of the two prior forks (both have since died as the companies couldn't maintain them without me). The newer project is however a niche-market project. It allows me to earn a living but it's hardly the kind of app that your typical computer user will ever want - it's there to do a specific job for a specific market section. It is very successful in that section however, and also fathered a number of large 'custom-version' projects which are my livelihood.
Ohloh however only counts the roughly 8 months since it was forked - not the history of nearly 7 years prior to that.
A while ago, due to having a low comment-to-code ratio, I went out of my way to add more comments to the code- most of it was completely unneeded - my code made sense to me and others - but it was giving a false, bad reflection on me as a programmer.
Now where it stands, it has a fairly good rating and value on there - but if you consider the true history it's 'value' should be much higher. And since my program is so niche-market, I don't get much kudos from it, after all there are very few other FOSS people who know anything about the field.
This is a complex and powerful application with many levels to it, but it is targeted at a small userbase and consequently has a small contributing developer base, only one person other than me has commit access - I commit other patches myself, how else would I manage it in my spare time ? I feel ohloh greatly underestimates the worth of the project and it's developers simply because it has no way of distinguishing projects everybody needs a variation off and those that are for niche-uses.
Either way, not so much a complaint (my customers recognize the worth with or without ohloh) as an attempt at constructive criticism. On the upside, it has had 33 downloads from their sites and us small projects need all the free publicity we can get (it's a small percentage of the total downloads, but every user counts).
"90% of the time, that's true all the time." Congratulations, you won the/. biggest non-sequitor of 2008 award with an honorable mention for managing it in a discussion on filesharing, it takes some doing to be less logical than the entire discussion when that topic comes up !
Slashdot Mirror
I'll go even further.
I want to ask a question of all actually.
If a scientist does an experiment and the result doesn't correlate with the predictions his preferred theory made... we expect him to revise the theory. Such a revision may vary in scope - sometimes it is merely a restriction on which cases this theory is applicable to, sometimes it's a major rewrite of what was previously believed to be a fundamental principle of how the universe worked. Einstein ended up rewriting most of Newton because and thermodynamics ended up being largely restricted to gasses and liquids because solids (at least on observable timelines) just do not work like that - my shoes are not busy rearranging themselves to be more chaotically spread about the room...
Now when a politician sees that an experiment isn't working - and changes his sociopolitical theory to adjust for this new evidence - you call him a flipflopper. Why is it that we slashdotters, all of whom have at least basic science training/interest when it comes to politics are blind to the single biggest flaw in the world's political systems - that we crucify any politician who doesn't 'stick to his guns'.
It is one thing if a politician promises to do X, and then does Y - you had that with Bush. But if a politician says 'it looks like the answer to this problem is X', then TRIES X, and comes back and says 'X isn't working, let's try Y before X makes any MORE of you suffer' - he SHOULD get a bloody medal for BRAVERY - instead of being instantly assured of losing the next election !
If anything economic and socio-political strategy is a much more complex thing than chemistry or physics. There are no universal laws for human behavior, even in groups. You have to try and draw conclusions from averages that are massively smeared out, and try and act in the best interest of the highest number of people without actually being able to conclusively predict the results of your actions.
Now, lets use a real example to clarify. So lets say a politician was asked in January how he felt about Iraq. Senator Foo is opposed to the war, always has been - he believes it to be an expensive (in money and lives) and also highly ineffective way to achieve the goal it's meant to achieve. So when asked in January he states that he would support the immediate removal of troops - all of them on a plane or a boat TOMORROW.
In February he reads a study of military withdrawal tactics citing solid historical facts that a withdrawal plan should be more spaced out, and coincide with a series of diplomatic steps to help Iraq ensure the stability of it's new government post-withdrawal. He realises that this paper raises solid points. In March he is asked about his policy toward Iraq. He states that he would like to see the immediate enactment of a phased withdrawal plan - and why he now believes this to be better.
This is NOT a case of flipflopping, this is a solid case of the exact same openmindedness we REQUIRE from scientists ! It should be lauded, not critisized !
On the other hand - if he promises to start a phased withdrawal, and then post-election refuses to do so without VERY solid evidence that ending the war would have disastrous consequences he could not have foreseen earlier - then he should be instantly barred from office for betraying his duty as a servant of the public.
>I'm sorry but it's simply unbelievable that you wouldn't lose anything. And you think cultures don't lose bits and piece anyway ? Cultures grow and evolve with every generation. Those that do not, die out anyway - so if cultures will grow, mix and evolve naturally - why can it not be love that drives this rather than money (which currently is the norm). Coca-cola billboards do more to destroy small cultures than intermarriage does anyway. My kids will have strong influences on their culture from Japan, from Brazil, From Protestant Germanics and from African cultures (that representing the 4 cultures mixed into their parents). Of course they will not be EVERYTHING that is Japanese, but *I* am not everything that is Afrikaner, nobody is. We each choose to conform to some parts of our cultures, to embrace somethings that aren't our culture and some things from other cultures. Growing up in a multicultural home is likely to make my children much more accepting of OTHER cultures than children who did not, being multilingual is likely to improve their education and job opportunities immensely. Knowing how to do a Brazilian OR an African BBQ and ALSO knowing how to make sushi will make them people with greatly opened minds and horizons. I cannot see how knowing how to make sushi will prevent them knowing how to make an Afrikaners style braai. Sorry, I just cannot see how they will have LOST anything. Indeed, culturally they will be richer than either of US can ever imagine ! >A mere opinion or argument cannot be racist; it's only were I to act on it that this would be so. What ? Are you nuts ? I know people who think the following "Black people are lazy" - are you telling me that, that is NOT a racist opinion ? A character generalization on people, based purely on race - is not racist because it's just an argument or opinion ? Sorry, that IS a racist sentiment. It isn't racist treatment of a person - but it is certainly racism, and it is simply impossible to hold an opinion like that and still treat black people as equals - so not only is the opinion itself racist, it is guaranteed to lead to behavior which is just as racist. >And while you may have a right to hold a discriminatory opinion, neither you nor any government do or should have any right to enforce such an opinion. >Well, I disagree on that. If a certain behaviour is definitely strongly harmful to society then it is the government's right and indeed duty to outlaw it. (Of course this is nowhere near being the case > for mixed-race marriage; there is no evidence I know of that the disadvantages outweigh the benefits. But in principle, I don't think a right to have sex with who you like is more important than the >overwhelming good of society). Sorry - how is this possible ? How can who anybody has sex with have ANY influence on society WHATSOEVER ? The concept of a free society is simple: anything that does not infringe on the rights of others, is by definition legal. Whether it is morally acceptable by many people, whether it is popular or common, whether it is considered obscene or beautiful - NONE of these things actually MATTER. To let them influence the decision is to NOT be a free society - now no society fully lives up to the ideal of being free, it is after all an ideal - which humans aren't. But we SHOULD try to get ever closer to it, freedom loving people should oppose all attempts to make any law that does not meet this definition. If you are not infringing on the rights of others, whatever you are doing should simply be legal - without exception. And no, nobody has the right to NOT be offended.
I can do math you know - I said myself that right now, it is almost certainly still true. Three major air crashes is probably about a thousand deaths. The number of major aircrashes per year is on the increase. The number of FATAL auto crashes is on the DECREASE as newer cars are ever LESS likely to have accidents with FATALITIES.
Sooner or later, that means cars will become SAFER than planes, because plane deaths are becoming MORE common, car deaths are DECREASING. Even though ACCIDENTS are getting MORE common, number of people INSIDE CARS who die are getting LESS every year. If we can cure the pedestrian-death problem - cars would be close to equaling planes right now.
Anyway, I wasn't really comparing cars to planes, merely pointing out that even THAT statistic is changing. My point was that dirigibles done right would be far safer than EITHER - near zero risk in fact. True it would be slower, but then again it's also much CHEAPER. You aren't wasting ANY energy to get lift, the atmosphere is giving you lift for FREE - helium at ground level has enormous potential energy which you don't need ANY difficulty to tap into. Almost all your energy expense is purely for going forward, you ONLY use a bit of energy to counteract the helium in order to land again. Your craft can survive almost any crash with nothing more than a light bounce happening. It's like a giant airbag ! The worst thing turbulence can do is shake your about a bit, maybe make you late - it cannot smash you out of the sky.
It's just a pity that one (fairly minor) tragedy seems to have permanently made people afraid of lighter-than-air travel.
A much more logical prediction of the future (prior to the Hindenburg) would have been that most passenger trips over medium-distances was handled by dirigibles which would be more comfortable, cheaper and safer. Airplanes would be used where speed was crucial. You probably wouldn't have a passenger dirigible over the atlantic as the time and associated costs (like food) wouldn't be worth it - so Jumbos would do that, but it doesn't make ANY sense to fly a jet from L.A. to New York - THAT trip would be much more sensibly done in a dirigible, even if it did take a few hours longer.
Strangely, the titanic didn't end the luxury cruise business and no aircraft crash has yet ended the passenger-flight industry. The only real difference is that the Hindenburg happened at a critical time in history, right when dirigibles and airplanes were both entering the mass-transit-market - the dirigibles had a major and much publicized accident which the airlines cashed in on. The dirigibles as a technology never really recovered from that blow at that critical time.
Bringing us back to my original point - the fact that we, right now have ONLY planes to choose for medium-distance airtravel has nothing to do with logic - it's a pure matter of emotion combined with established-market position (much the same reason some would say why Linux doesn't rule the desktop yet perhaps ?).
I would actually like to see this change. Dirigibles are safer, cleaner and cheaper. Whether it WILL or CAN change I can't speak about. I just think that it's illogical it ever ended up the way things ARE. Oh, and it's interesting that the medium distance planes have by FAR the worst track record for safety - exactly the market sphere where dirigibles would have been at their best.
Well you corrected me on the cause, fair enough - I was quoting the book though and I hadn't exactly made a study. I agree though that dirigibles would have been MUCH safer as a mass-transit technology than airplanes are. We are always told how statistically airplanes are the safest form of travel, since accidents are so rare. I am pretty sure this is not true anymore though. 20-30 years ago, the survival rate of any severe car accident was extremely low, 10% maybe. So it was probably true because there are a LOT more car accidents than plane crashes. But the average survival rate of a plane-crash is ZERO - and the amount of people inside are in the hundreds. There were 3 major air crashes last year ! By contrast, modern cars have a very HIGH survival rate in bad accidents, airbags, crumplezones etc. had a huge impact.. Most people these days walk away from a car crash. Deaths are mostly caused when one of the cars is very old, or one of the parties is a pedestrian (of course in countries where there are lots of old cars - the death-tolls are much higher). Air-crash survival figures haven't gone down though. I don't think it's happened yet - but if the trend persists (and everything suggests it must) then we will SOON reach a point where that statistic will be outright wrong- I think it's been a bit deceiving for a long time anyway. Dirigibles with Helium inside and a few other benefits of modern design would be a lot slower but I'm willing to bet that the risk of accident will be lower, and the deathtoll IN an accident could be greatly reduced as well. Oh well, we're logical - sadly, not many other people are.
In which the boys investigates a series of murders at a new startup launching Lighter-than-air travel from New York. The company in that line however was seriously trying to recreate the commercial travel market that was destroyed by the Zeppelin disaster (unfairly I may add, if the Zeppelin had been running on Helium like it should have it would almost certainly have survived - greed is a terrible thing - quoth the book). :p
Anyway, I can't remember the specific title, but it was one of the better Hardy Boys books if I recall - man this takes me back many years. I remember the CEO of the startup in the booking quoting that lighter-than-air is safer, more comfortable and cheaper than airplanes could ever be - and were it not for the Zeppelin crash would almost certainly have ruled the market because even though it's slower, every working stiff could afford a ticket.
Far be it from me to question Franklin W. Dixon's research
>After all, won't someone think of the children? They could be scarred for life. :-)
You're right... especially when they work out the high likelyhood they were conceived in the back of a car with Rick Astley playing !
I was raised in a time when my marriage would have been illegal in my country. That did change in the early 90's but sorry - I've SEEN with my own eyes what your kind of thinking does.
There wasn't a single example anywhere of any effect it had that wasn't bad.
Cultural heritage is nice (and I repeat - go see Brazilians they didn't lose one IOTA of ANYBODY's herritages in the process). When interracial couples marry, we generally respect each others born cultures, and expand our own with elements of one another's that we like (I speak from personal experience here). It is by itself a typical example of the fear behind racism to imagine that you cannot become more than the culture you were born into, without losing that culture.
As for your final line. Racism's exact definition must depend on what you are talking about, in some contexts it is judging a person by colour. When it comes to mixing of races the answer is simple. Anybody, who in the slightest way thinks he has any right to even FORM an opinion about who somebody else chooses to have sex with is by definition prejudicial. If that prejudice is based on race - then it is racism. If it's based on sexual orientation then it's homophobia. But no matter what it is based on - it is wrong.
Who somebody else chooses to have sex with, get married to, have babies with or any related matter has absolutely nothing to do with anybody except the consenting adults doing it. You could claim that celibacy might harm the population's growth - but it doesn't give you the right to judge or attempt to stop devout catholics from becoming nuns and priests. So I see no reason why they should have the right to judge or attempt to stop gay people from choosing their sex and love lives.
In short, I flat out disagree. You have the right to an opinion. Even a right to an opinion about who I am allowed to fuck - but you have to accept that any such opinion MUST by ipso facto BE a prejudicial one. Either you support the right of any consenting adults to do whatever they want to whomever they want, or you are discriminating against somebody - so even your apparently well thought out arguments remain racist - they discriminate based on race. And while you may have a right to hold a discriminatory opinion, neither you nor any government do or should have any right to enforce such an opinion.
>There is no "nuance" here. "Public" and "private" are opposites. You can't twist one around to include the other.
Right, actually the other arguer was right - it's not that simple. Public may be an opposite of private, but public as in 'public location' opposes private as in 'private location'(no pun intended), it does not oppose private as in private INFORMATION. That would be opposed by.... you guessed it.... public information.
If you testify in an open court, generally the content of your testimony is public information. Due to the nature of justice and the rights of the accused, you have no right to anonymity there, and your testimony is private - you cannot (at least, except for very special circumstances) demand the court not let anybody else know what you testified.
Now the information about where I choose to go, when I choose to go there etc. these are all examples of PRIVATE information. The fact that I have to move across a public LOCATION (the street) in order to
go to a place, does NOT remove the fact that my having gone there is private. If somebody sees me, fair enough - but a recording JUST IN CASE I COMMIT A CRIME !?!!?
Sorry. That is an outrageous abuse of the citizenry, tantamount to a presumption of guilt, a flagrant invasion of personal privacy and anonymity and against all the fundamental concepts of a free society.
Do you really want to tell us that you cannot figure out the difference between a public space and public information ? Sure, some information is private, and you have no right to know it unless I choose to share it. Some are public and I cannot keep it secret even if I want to. That is an opposite. Some places are public and you cannot stop anybody from going there, some places are private and you cannot go there without the permission of the owners.
The 'public' of a 'public place' has absolutely nothing to do with the 'private' of 'private information'.
Frankly, there is very little private information that cannot be learned by filming people as they traverse public spaces - so yes you do have the right to privacy in public places - or you don't have it at all.
It's interesting how attitudes differ. People (including in the UK) seem to think the CCTV there is a terrible violation of privacy and the justifications for it, even if true, would be weak. In South Africa, CCTV is profligating faster than that and our tech is actually MORE advanced now. Here, it has gotten nothing but praise. People just don't care about privacy. There is a twofold reason for that I think. The first is that just a generation ago we were living under what was little less than a military dictatorship. A dictatorship that had propaganda SO effective that some people to this day yearn for their rule ! What's worse, people here seem to chaos and order as a black/white thing. Either everybody does what they are told all the time, nothing more, nothing less- or you have complete chaos. The idea of a free society in between those extremes, where the individual's rights matter is basically non-existent. Throw in a massive crime wave, and putting up CCTV will get you hailed as heroes, with nobody wondering if it may be abused. It is scary to see the same thing happening in the UK though - because it removes from the rest of us yet another example of liberty being respected - if the UK with their relatively small crime problems lose it... how will we with a crime wave possibly convince people that the little extra security you may or may not get out of CCTV may not be worth the incredible price we are paying ? We already live in a country where it is now a crime for teenagers under the age of 16 to HUG OR KISS. How long before we have teenagers arrested for making out - and CCTV used to find them/as evidence ? It's no less of a minor crime than dogpoop (of course, the kissing should never have been a crime at all but at least it's classified as minor). The biggest irony of all is, even in South Africa the camera's have not actually had a real positive effect, the criminals simply moved to other neighbourhoods. So the cycle ends up with every street everywhere being under surveillance in the end. 1984 Was not so far fetched.
So if the pilot takes his girlfriend up in this thing... is that a babyboom ?
You oughta see Brazil sometime. I've been there a few times. In Brazil - same-race couples are the EXCEPTION, mixed-race are the rule. My wife is also not the same race as me, she is Japanese-Brazilian, I'm African-Caucausian. Brazil's next generation is going to be pretty far along to having no racial identity at all (since practically nobody in the whole country is bothering to marry somebody who is the same race) - keep it up for four or five generations and race completely stops existing - you end up with a mixture of all races - which I think would be chaotically impossible for us now to predict what they will look like. :)
:)
Now I know a lot of people may wonder if this is a good thing - that is what I call racism.
I love the concept - I really hope Brazil is just ahead of the curve here and the rest of the world will be there within 50 years or so. It would suck if Brazil is the only place this happens - because it will be the best thing that could happen to the human race.
And as a bonus, we get to eradicate racial differences with sex
Not to mention that a human nation made up of a roughly even mixture of all races will be essentially superhuman (I use the super- prefix in it's proper mathematical meaning, not it's comic book meaning). We're talking about combining the greatest genetic strengths of every race and combining them into one race. A race that, like black people, don't get skin cancer easily. Is immune to every disease that ANY race is currently immune to...
And that is just the pure scientific genetic benefits - now try to imagine the socio-economic benefits of a world where everybody looks the same- and nobody had to get slaughtered to make it happen ?
PS. Since my children will be mixed-race, I am obviously a bit biased in favor of racial mixing. Then again, I think only a racist could possibly even WANT to argue against it so being biassed would mean I'm a good person - I don't have any plans to change that
Shees, this could get long. Biggest project I ever did was openlab but that's dead now, these days my most important project would be OutKafe. The other few hundred were all small things that came and went.
There is about a thousand reasons. Thin-clients depend on it for one. Sometimes I create a sepperate instance of my desktop running a seperate environment, sometimes as the same user, sometimes as another one. My wife often accesses some features from my machine by ssh-ing into it while I'm logged in (creating another login session) then running an app (using X-forwarding) for a few things I don't want running on her machine.
Oh - my wife is trained as a diplomat, she is about as tech-savvy as your grandmother - and she adores her linux desktop (pclinuxOS).
Not to mention that hundreds of server apps user dedicated users to run under, very limited users that can't even GET a desktop, if you run just a few server features (like a printer-queue) these things make your whole system MUCH more secure than under windows - and couldn't work if you didn't have many users logged in all at once.
Not all users are human you know.
This means that if there IS an exploit in cups - the exploit can't root my machine - it can only become the cupsd user - who owns... oh right NO FILES WHATSOEVER.
Just because you don't understand it - doesn't mean that it doesn't make sense - all it means is you don't understand it (and you should seek the blame in your own mental capacity).
You do know that large share-purchases pushes the value of the shares up right ? The moment anybody tries your plan - lots of people will want to have a ride-along and they will buy more - and the price will skyrocket (for a while anyway).
The current execs will sell just before/as it peaks and cash in nicely while leaving us with a worthless company.
Yep, sounds like a great business plan to me. How about when we're done, we use the company's remaining cash and "invest" it in high-stakes roulette ?
I seriously doubt this one.
There was case here in South Africa a while back. A film crew was shooting a commercial on top of a building when they heard a scream from the street below. The ran to the edge of the building and filmed a crime in progress (a woman being killed with a screwdriver) while many people just walked past and did nothing to help.
The police were able to identify a lot of the people filmed (by adding other substantiating evidence of their whereabouts at the time - you can't get 100% face recognition in a top-down film after-all) - and everyone they found was charged and convicted as accomplices to the murder - serving as much time as the murderer (life sentences all around). Did a lot to get this country a little less complacent about crime.
Your friend saw a crime in progress (violent assault) - attempting to stop it is citizens arrest (a citizen when witnessing a crime immediately gains all the rights of a peace officer in South Africa, I assume in the US as well, but at the very least they DO have the right to perform a citizens arrest), if they didn't immediately stop and came with him quietly - that is resisting arrest, no less of a crime than if he was a cop - and he had every right to use (minimum required) force to subdue them.
If indeed he got the punishment you claim - you are leaving something out. Probably he didn't shout out any warning before he attacked them (cops have to shout "Stop" before they are allowed to shoot and there is no reason a civilian shouldn't be subject to the same law) ?
I don't dispute that the judge said what you quoted (it's hard to believe but I have no evidence to the contrary and judges are only human after all) - but I seriously dispute that your could have been guilty of any crime unless you are leaving something out. Quite the contrary, failing to protect the boy would have been a crime - he would be an accomplice to the crime he refused to try and stop.
Sidenote: I have 3 lawyers in my family but I am not a lawyer myself. Also my country uses the Dutch-roman legal system, not the Anglo-Saxon legal system America uses which does have several important differences.
>Misc.: If a man is trying to kill you, don't you have a right to kill him first? Freedom and government corruption? Aren't they mutually exclusive? Yes, and if a country is trying to kill your people, you have a right to defend them... but then... why has EVERY war America has had for over a century been fought on foreign soil ? If DEFENSE was the purpose, you wouldn't have fired a shot until the enemy was approaching YOUR shores. The last war where you behaved in something approaching a moral fashion was World War 2 - where you were fighting somebody who invaded you FIRST. > Freedom and government corruption? Aren't they mutually exclusive? No. The fact that the odd minister takes a bribe (and goes to jail for it... mostly) does not change the fact that our laws are more liberal than yours, and that I have more personal freedoms in many ways than you (less in a few others). The fact is that the highest power in our land is NOT the government, it's the constitutional court which can and has forced the government to not only change laws but actually enact altered policies. That is why in our country one court-case was all it took to make same-sex marriage legal - the government may or may not have liked it, but their opinions simply didn't matter. Somebody went to the constitutional court, proved that preventing it is discriminatory - and called on the constitutional protection against discrimination by the government - and the court decided they were right. Gave the government one year to legislate and enact a law that would be equal to the law for different-sex couples. This law, known as the 'civil union' law, was enacted last year. Oh and constitutional court judges are voted for by the judiciary, not elected by the same president they are supposed to be watchdogs over. >The Iraq war started because the U.S. government said that Iraq posed a threat. Enough people still believe that there is a reason for us to be there. If there wasn't, we'd be in an impeachment process, have massive protests in the streets >of major cities, and a completely new Congress. We don't have any of those things. That is what is wrong with America today. You can't make WAR on somebody just because they look like a 'threat'. The fact is, Bush's approval ratings are SO low, that frankly he should be impeached already - but there IS a movement to do so (for this and several other crimes, including falsifying of evidence) sadly, people are scared to impeach their president in the middle of a war -and your media doesn't really report this much. You probably don't know that Bush's famous Africa visits (you probably saw the sound-bites promising aid) was in fact welcomed by exactly the kind of protests you describe. The fact that Americans are too lazy to care about innocent people being killed (even when a large number of them are your sons and brothers) does not mean that there isn't anything to care about ! Now for the point you keep ignoring. I can live with 'follow orders because of the need to', but when a boss in a company expects me to do something I find m morally reprehensible - I can quit, walk out and never come back. Of course I have to deal with the consequences of those actions (I now need a new job to live, and I probably don't have a reference) - but he cannot force me to keep working when I no longer agree with him (I did exactly this a year ago). In the military though, if I join up because I agree with the way it is run in one time (as a DEFENSE force), and later a war is declared I do NOT agree with - I can't quit. I cannot refuse to fight an unjust war. I cannot quit,. I cannot walk out. More-over, if I sign a contract joining up for 2 years - your government claims the right to call you back over and over as many times as they WANT. If you breach the contract, it's jailtime, when they breach it, nobody can do anything. This is morally justifiable to you ? I could live with a system of voluntary military membership - PROVIDED that all the soldiers have the right, before every battle to decide "Do I still ag
Well I wasn't specifically reffering to the US military when I made those statements. I made it clear that I was describing my experience based on the Military of South Africa in the 1980s (when joining up was NOT optional. You either went to war or to jail - once there, if you threatened suicide, you went to jail - the only way out was the few people brave enough to actually shoot themselves in the leg). Training here was one whole year, before deployment for another year (at least again). Finally, am I really the only person who thinks the purpose of the (ANY) military should be to PREVENT wars, not MAKE them ? If that is your fundamental approach then it changes the way you work. I state that the US military being so continously prepared to attack sovereign foreign nations without provocation (which is why your military has bases in places like Ireland is it not ?), complete lack of respect for human rights (how can you claim to believe in human rights when you take a job that requires waiving your own and then forcefully removing the most important human right (at the very least) from other people ? A soldier who claims to believe in human rights is as much contradiction in terms as an atheist who claims to be prophet of $DEITY.) and your continued clinging to that patriotism (which Oscar Wilde correctly labeled 'the virtue of the vicious') for a nation that has betrayed the very ideas it was built on at least a hundred years ago (which is not to say that other nations are perfect, my own is much free-er than yours - sadly it is also corrupt and badly managed) and has become the single worst aggressor in the world over the past 50 years... well maybe THAT is why you are constantly at war now... because you forgot how NOT to be.
If somebody says to me "Go kill that guy over there" and I can't reply "Fuck you" - I have already lost the right to think for myself, about perhaps the single most important reason we need freedom of thought in the first place !
I know a LOT of ex soldiers from the bush war... not ONE of them is NOT fucked in the head now... it's very easy to pull a trigger when you are 18 and have been getting 'whipped into shape' by propagandising drill seargeants for a few months until they convince you that having no personality is 'duty' and thinking for yourself is 'treachorous dissent' - and that the 'enemy' is some faceless monster and not really a person at all.
Let's face it - military discipline is DESIGNED to destroy individual thought (you don't need THAT for studying physics you know - only to ADVANCE it).
So yeah, they do lose freedom of thought, just like ours did. And most of them, will one day sit and look at you over their whiskey (usually about 5 after they really should have stopped) and say: "To this day I keep the macho face about it, because that is what they drilled us to do... but every night I see the faces I put bullets into..."
There is no such thing as a good reason to join the military. At least in America you have the choice NOT to. I boggles the mind that any country without a conscription law actually HAS any military AT ALL. Are people really that fucking STUPID.
PS. Sorry, I usually don't swear so much in posts - but I have seen this too much... I get very angry at the people who still pretend soldiers are heroes. I think the people who refuse to join up are the real heroes. Human life is worth more than having your college tuition paid off.
I own a copy of the DVD release of that show. I found it immensely cool. Now I never expected it to be true- it said right on the cover that it was a fictional idea. What it IS is a very well done thought-experiment (you do know what those are right ?) which takes an unreal situation and explores what would be needed for it to have been real. There are about a thousand such things out there everyday. Science of the discworld is only a small step away - and that was a hit with /.'ers.
/. it's what it is FOR isn't it ?
Now if some people are too dumb to realize that this thought-experiment is not meant to be deemed as a factual account then those people probably just lack the basic skills needed to understand what science even is. I have to agree with a previous poster - a philosophy course should be mandatory to all degrees, one arts or language course made mandatory could only be a bonus as well.
I did my degree in English Literature with Philosophy and Computer Science as co-majors.
Thing is, I use what I learned in philosophy class far more often (a few thousand times a day) than anything I learned in the largely java oriented comp-sci course - and I own a software company ! Knowing the actual rules of logic means you can actually construct logical arguments - and for that matter logical algorithms.
Most people sadly cannot tell the difference between 'common-sense' and logic, let alone grasp the scientific ideals of rejecting authority-knowledge and always questioning.
If you want to point fingers - don't blame a wonderfully done thought-experiment that is perfectly in line with the scientific tradition (question even our most base assumptions) - blame the enormous amount of publications/broadcasts telling you that scientist Dr. Foo Bar is trying to prove his theory of Baz. If the good Doctor Bar is any kind of decent scientist - he has come up with theory Baz and is now trying very hard to DISPROVE it - before his peers do.
So I got ranty ? This is
My biggest active FOSS project has gone through two forks in it's lifetime. This was not because of me, but because of problems when the companies I worked for tried to appropriate my (after hours) hobby work. The final fork happened when I started my own company.
Ohloh has it listed., as well as the second of the two prior forks (both have since died as the companies couldn't maintain them without me). The newer project is however a niche-market project. It allows me to earn a living but it's hardly the kind of app that your typical computer user will ever want - it's there to do a specific job for a specific market section. It is very successful in that section however, and also fathered a number of large 'custom-version' projects which are my livelihood. Ohloh however only counts the roughly 8 months since it was forked - not the history of nearly 7 years prior to that.
A while ago, due to having a low comment-to-code ratio, I went out of my way to add more comments to the code- most of it was completely unneeded - my code made sense to me and others - but it was giving a false, bad reflection on me as a programmer.
Now where it stands, it has a fairly good rating and value on there - but if you consider the true history it's 'value' should be much higher. And since my program is so niche-market, I don't get much kudos from it, after all there are very few other FOSS people who know anything about the field.
This is a complex and powerful application with many levels to it, but it is targeted at a small userbase and consequently has a small contributing developer base, only one person other than me has commit access - I commit other patches myself, how else would I manage it in my spare time ? I feel ohloh greatly underestimates the worth of the project and it's developers simply because it has no way of distinguishing projects everybody needs a variation off and those that are for niche-uses.
Either way, not so much a complaint (my customers recognize the worth with or without ohloh) as an attempt at constructive criticism. On the upside, it has had 33 downloads from their sites and us small projects need all the free publicity we can get (it's a small percentage of the total downloads, but every user counts).
"90% of the time, that's true all the time." /. biggest non-sequitor of 2008 award with an honorable mention for managing it in a discussion on filesharing, it takes some doing to be less logical than the entire discussion when that topic comes up !
Congratulations, you won the