Doom 3 is not any kind of Quake. Doom 3 is not any kind of Half-Life. Doom 3 is certainly not any kind of Tom Clancy game.
Doom 3 is the state of the art in interactive terror. If you want a simple FPS, don't buy it. If you want a shoot-through RPG, don't buy it. If you want something that accurately represents military weaponry, don't buy it.
If you like having to sleep with the light on after a gaming binge, by all means, buy Doom 3!
Actually, since the system uses capacitive coupling, you'd have a much bigger problem with the ionized particles released by the vacuum cleaner. The $200 cabinet should keep your system running quite happily.
Elections here are typically run mostly by large groups of volunteers, with some oversight by local government. Bringing in state election commission officials is rare, and usually only done in the event of a recount.
The FCC has the power to regulate devices which receive such signals. The TiVo does this. If you separated the receiver and the more interesting parts of the TiVo into separate black boxes, you probably wouldn't get anywhere, since they'd functionally be part of the same device.
Re:CafePress print-on-demand && legal ques
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We the Media
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It strikes me that they don't want people making a profit from selling the book. If you priced it at $15.97 + S&H, the CafePress rate for a 299 page book in the "perfect bound" format (which is the one you'd want to use) then you'd be fine. CafePress would be making a profit, just as your ISP makes a profit for your download server, the CD pressing company makes a profit for the distro CDs you press, etc. Now, if CafePress decided to sell them on their own behalf, they'd probably have to offer them at a lower rate.
The really distracting thing about NWN is that some parts of it were incredibly realistic, and then some parts were Quake 1 era quality. If the whole thing was Quake 1 era quality, it wouldn't have been such a big deal, but when you walk through a field of grass that's waving in the wind, and approach a guy whose head is obviously made of less than 20 triangles, it's a bit distracting.
Not all copyright infringement is criminal. In fact, most isn't. Hollywood is working very hard to change this, but hasn't completely succeeded yet. As of right now, breaking the copy protection (if any) for your own fair use is far worse in the eyes of the law than proceeding to use that copy for commercial gain.
Joe's crime is, in addition to murder, an implicit threat to entire populations. This clearly falls under things that Congress has a compelling interest to discourage.
Mike's crime is just sick and disgusting, but that's already something that judges and juries take into account in sentencing. There doesn't need to be a special law for it.
Bill's crime, assuming that the fact-finder (judge or jury) determines that what happened is consistent with what you describe, is not a hate crime. The fact that he's written racist literature speaks to his danger to society, and thus he may get more time for both murders because of it.
A hate crime is not more severe because of your own thoughts (though the fact that you're a sick bastard may weigh on the sentencing authority's mind) but because it is a crime against people beyond the immediate victim. It's actually a rather simple and elegant legal theory, though perceptions of what constitutes intimidation vary greatly by perspective, making the details a lot more problematic.
Hate crime laws have mostly survived constitutional challenges. Most successful challenges to hate crime prosecution have been challenges to the applicability of the law to a particular case, rather than the law itself. There's a very sound reason for this.
If I have a problem with somebody who happens to be black, and I shoot him instead of walking away or mumbling under my breath or putting photochops of him in gay porn on the internet, like I'd do to anyone else, that's not by itself a hate crime, no matter how many witnesses the prosecution can parade in to tell about how racist I am. Sometimes this does happen, and the sentence often gets overturned on appeal, like it should.
A hate crime is when I do something that is calculated to intimidate people beyond the immediate victim of a crime. If I see an interracial couple together and I kill them to "make an example out of them" to intimidate others who might be inclined to do this otherwise perfectly legal and even laudable thing, that's a hate crime. It's an obvious threat of violence to entire populations of society. The first amendment allows us to say and express an awful lot of things, but "I'm going to kill you." is not one of them.
In practice, the degree to which race is a factor in a crime is not binary, and a decision is made, on a case-by-case basis, about the degree and severity of the racial influence, and sentence is adjusted accordingly. You may not like it, but it's quite remarkably fair compared to plenty of other goings-on in our legal sysem.
Actually, the energy released by exothermic chemical reactions can be measured as a change in mass, albeit a truly miniscule one compared to nuclear reactions. Of course, chemical and biological weapons are not by themselves inherently exothermic. The only exothermic reactions are the ones that happen as the corpses decay.
The mindbogglingly complex explicit resource management in real-time rendering changes quite dramatically when you add multiple resources. On systems with high-end graphics cards, where main memory bandwidth is more of a bottleneck than CPU cycles, adding another processor isn't really going to do much. About the only good it's really going to do is let one processor handle the OS and other background operations while you're gaming on the other one, in which case you might as well use a barebones Win98SE system.
The spikes you see on that framerate graph have to do with scene complexity. When a half dozen monsters of different kinds are in your face shooting stuff at you, there's a hell of a lot more to render. It doesn't matter what resources you have, they're going to be strained more by that. About the only thing that's going to smooth it out is staying above the 60 FPS max.
Humans can distinguish framerate improvements up to 72 FPS, but 60 is is a more widely supported VSYNC rate (especially on LCDs), not to mention a lower one, and they seem to have been designing the game to be close enough to perfect that you won't really notice the difference in the heat of combat, which saves a lot of resources over actually perfect, and allows a lot more eye candy on older hardware.
I've always been careful about ESD, but one time I was upgrading a machine in a carpeted office, and I was handed a RAM stick, and foolishly grabbed it rather than first grabbing the hand that offered it.
*click*
The RAM seems to be working fine. The motherboards in that office are another matter entirely. The motherboards there have disturbingly short life-spans of around a year. Of course, the only ones that have problems are the ones that were actually serviced in the office, on that carpet. That RAM stick just got one ESD shock. Those motherboards have gotten a whole bunch, and ESD can be cumulative.
When there's ESD damage involving RAM, the damage is more likely to be to the motherboard than to the RAM. In the story you describe, it's quite likely that no current was actually passing through silicon, but just over the surface of the stick. On the other hand, if you let a 1 inch spark fly from a RAM stick to a motherboard, that motherboard is gone.
My brother knocked a just-opened 12 ounce can of ginger ale into an open, running minitower. It hit the CD drive and drained down from there. The drive itself was well shielded, and shadowed the hard drive. The motherboard itself was out of the path of at least most of it, but the sound card and modem both got quite drenched. Curiously, the internet connection did not drop, nor did the mp3s quit playing. We stared at this in disbelief for about a minute, as IMs continued to come in, proving the internet connection was still up. Finally we turned it off and wiped it up.
Years later, the machine was still working as our house router, until I got sick of panicked phone calls from the family whenever our DSL connection would get fouled up. Fixing the problem required resetting the DSL modem, then restarting the PPPoE session on the router. I had it set up so that all they had to do was hit the reset button and everything would be perfectly happy, but it looked like a computer (headless though it was) so they were afraid to do this, despite my assurances that they really couldn't do any damage. I finally bought a black box router for them. Since it didn't look like a computer, they were perfectly happy turning it off and turning it back on again, without disrupting my busy napping schedule. I didn't dare tell them that it was running basically the same software inside.
Generally speaking, if there's not an overt threat of violence or massive infrastructure damage, and no money is stolen, you just can't get anyone in law enforcement to listen. This is why I don't have a huge problem with SYN flooding someone who's mailbombing your server until the mailbombing stops. That's just self-defense. If you keep SYN flooding after the mailbombing stops, then you're just attacking an arbitrary IP address that could now belong to someone else, or could have belonged to a (now fixed) zombie, or whatever else. That's reckless.
Law enforcement is trying to get a better handle on internet fraud, but there's so much of it going on and they have so few resources to attack it that vigilante efforts to stop or mitigate the attacks are about our only options in many cases.
If I shoot a gun at a guy who's robbing a bank at gunpoint, I'm probably okay with the law. If I pull out my gun, close my eyes, wave it around, and pull the trigger several times at random, I'm not okay with the law.
If I get a guy in a headlock to break up a fight, I'm probably okay with the law. If he walks away from the fight and I put him in a headlock then, I'm not okay with the law.
You're generally allowed to do things to people you wouldn't otherwise be allowed to do if they weren't committing a crime, but you have to be certain that you're not doing these things to innocent people as well. The internet makes that quite difficult at times. You also have to restrain your response to be proportional to what you're trying to prevent. "Imperfect self-defense" can often get murder reduced to manslaughter, but you still do time for it.
Dr. Hawking has solved a rather famous problem in astrophysics. That he lost a bet in the process is hardly a slight. As far as I can tell he is quite a gentleman, but even a complete egomaniac would make an announcement like this, since it's much more of a victory than a defeat.
Typically in lawsuits like this, if the act was a willful violation of contract terms and/or copyright, they can get rather substantial penalties beyond actual damages. If Google can show that this programmer introduced this code in spite of their efforts to prevent such things, rather than as a result of encouragement to get it out the door, they may be off the hook for these extra damages (punitive and statutory) though I don't think the programmer has much of a chance at that. Of course, establishing the value of actual damages in a case like this is always difficult as well. Hopefully they'll be able to settle with a licensing agreement that makes everybody mostly happy. Google probably has the resources to rewrite everything, but at this point that's probably not practical.
I hope this doesn't put too much of a damper on the 20% projects at Google. They keep turning out a lot of really cool stuff because of those, and it would be really unfortunate if liability forced them to micromanage their research.
I'm getting bored of this, so I'm going to respond to your arguments in summary:
You agree with bad people on a few things, therefore I won't listen to you. Since everyone else should think the way I do, everyone else either doesn't listen to you or is broken and doesn't count.
I vote. So do most of the people at those rallies. We also laugh and yell at stupid people who are using our cause for their own agenda, but we mostly spend our energy on what we came there to do, which has nothing to do with them.
Everyone who is shooting at us is a terrorist. Therefore, nobody shooting at us has any rights whatsoever.
While this is false, assuming for the moment that it's true, if you deny them all rights, how do you know? You may be willing to lock them all up and throw away the key, but without giving our captives rights, the world cannot know if they are truly guilty of anything. It makes us look like complete hypocrites when we talk about defending freedom and democracy. Even if we can legally do these things (debatable) that doesn't mean it's good policy that will reduce threats to our country.
You used a word or phrase in a way that has multiple meanings, and even though it is completely clear based on context what you meant, I'm going to try to make you look stupid instead of actually responding to the criticism.
You smell funny.
You personally do not know what needs to be done to solve our problems, therefore you shouldn't question other people who are doing other things that haven't solved our problems.
You don't know either. Neither do most of the people in the Bush administration. There is a wealth of expert knowledge that is being ignored or overridden at every step of the way.
We should not be nice to people who might get mad at us and start shooting at us if we're not nice to them.
Under that plan, we make friends only with people who throw themselves at our feet. Granted, some will do that, but we can do a lot better.
The situation has been getting better lately, so we should be happy.
I and a lot of people are quite angry because we believe that we'd be much better off if we'd been listened to by our own government a while ago. It's a perfectly good reason to be unhappy with people who refuse to admit mistakes.
Our leaders made good decisions that we should be proud of.
I disagree, but at least when you're arguing like this you're dignified. Keep trying this last tactic. It's much more likely than any of the others to convince people who don't already agree with you. That's the challenge of politics. It's really easy to convince the people who agree with you. The people who don't agree with you take some work, and doing everything you're legally allowed to do against them isn't always the best course of action.
If your college has its head screwed on straight, they've probably got a career office. This is the place to go, even it's been the place you were looking for the past six months. If they want your donations as an alum (they do) they'll still help you even though you're now graduated. College career offices are where companies go when they want to hire graduates with no industry experience that they can mold into their own ideal employees before they get someone else's bad habits. If you're not going through a campus recruiter, you're just a guy with no experience to them.
Failing that, do tech work for charities while working some lesser tech job that keeps you in touch with what's going on, even if you're not playing much with the latest toys. Lots of charities need programmers, and lack the money to pay them. They get their app written, you get experience and a great reference, and most employers like seeing volunteer work. It makes them think you give a crap about something, which is a big concern when hiring 20-somethings of the Office Space generation.
If you're marching alongside somebody carrying a "Support Armed Resistance" sign and you're not carrying a "No Armed Resistance" sign, then you might as well be carrying a "Support Armed Resistance" sign yourself.
So, if I show up at one of your demonstrations with Nazi banners, you're obligated to have brought a banner in response to that? What if I bring some guys in KKK garb as well? The best cure for bad speech is more speech, as the Supreme Court has been known to opine. The people with those banners piss me off quite a lot, but when I protest, it's against those I believe represent the greatest threat to our country. I think those kooks are completely ineffectual whiners and worry more about the people in power. An awful lot of other people do too. If it'll make you happy, I'll point and laugh more obviously next time. I don't really feel like starting a fight at a peace rally.
My argument about having more troops (supported both by military and intelligence experts) is that if we'd had more troops at the beginning, we could have rounded up the insurgent forces before they got organized, back when they were being clumsy and largely ineffective. At this point it's probably too late, though it would sure be nice to give a break to the guys whose tours of duty are now being extended indefinitely.
It's not a question of law. It's a question of jurisdiction. Generally, you can't capture somebody in a foreign country and charge them under US law. If they were in obvious conspiracy to commit an act of war against the US, then yes, but if they were just living at an al-Qaida training camp, then no. The US has no jurisdiction there.
They could be planning to knock over a 7-11 in the U.S. (we wouldn't even have to know which one) and we'd have jurisdiction. You're right that we'd have no jurisdiction if someone was simply living there. Do you indict the mob boss's housekeeper for conspiracy in a RICO case? No, you don't. Fortunately, al-Qaeda kept very careful records about who was getting what training. From those records it should be fairly clear who was preparing to attack America. Everyone else there is merely guilty of being mean and nasty towards us, which is not in itself a crime under any law.
Before you can be brought before a military court, you have to be a member of a military force. These prisoners are not. They aren't eligible for military trial.
Now tribunals, yes. Which is exactly what they're getting.
I said "military court", not "court martial", so all your hair-splitting is in vain. Anyway, when are they getting these tribunals? It's been almost 3 years now, and they haven't even been charged. It's possible that the legal black hole theory is consistent with the letter of the law, but it's making even our closest allies very unhappy with us. Just because we can do it (and I don't think we have that authority either) doesn't mean we should.
We use mild, non-injurious violence and the infliction of stress to convince people to give us information.
This is beyond you. You don't get it. But that doesn't mean that it's not necessary.
And how many people will die because the Arab world is furious at us at all levels? How many lives would we save if we had the active cooperation, rather than the grudging non-interference, of Arab intelligence and law enforcement? Diplomacy saves lives. Sure, we could have attacked Cuba when the Soviets put missiles there, but we didn't. Destroying those missiles was "neccesary to protect American lives" but we chose another route that involved less violence, and ended up better off for it. What I don't get is not the use of violence, but the blind indifference to international opinion. Just because we shouldn't be slaves to international opinion doesn't mean it's not worth our while to try to make the right people happy.
Now, explain this to me: you think the SecDef should have "let the generals run their own damn war," and yet at
That's not really cool, man. If you aren't happy with an outrageous accusation, either refute it or do something to fix it.
I don't have figures on how many hundreds of thousands of people had signs saying things like "Mainstream White Guys For Peace" and "How did our oil get under their sand?" and how many dozens had signs saying signs advocating the destruction of the western world, and neither do you. If we're going to work with anecdotes, start with me. I am living proof that there exist people who oppose terrorism and oppose the Bush administration's foreign policy. Therefore, your sweeping generalizations are not universally true. The issue isn't binary. There are more than two sides to it. If you don't believe me, take as an example the Afghan tribal militias that turned on each other after taking down the Taliban. I went to a peace rally with a small crowd that included a full-time union organizer, and even he was laughing at the communists.
Your point about Rumsfeld's duties is valid, but it was his idea to go in with a small force over the objection of the generals, which made it difficult to establish security in the earliest days of occupation. It made a very bad first impression and exposed our troops to attacks at a time when we needed a commanding presence. The Secretary of Defense usually negotiates with the generals, rather than handing down orders. That's basically what Rumsfeld did, and he screwed up.
Your criticisms about the enemy combatants hold less water. We actually *do* have laws that we could charge many of them under. There's a critical difference between someone planning to launch attacks on our soil, and someone training to repel invaders. If we're the invaders and acting in defense of our country, it's perfectly reasonable to kill them on the battlefield, but once they surrender, they're nothing more than prisoners of war, the sort we turn loose at the end of hostilities, just like we did at the end of every other war in history.
I'm not advocating turning loose the al-Qaeda suspects, I'm advocating trying them for conspiracy to commit (insert crime here, probably murder). We've got quite a lot of evidence against a great many of them. Because of the circumstances under which we've been interrogating them, we probably can't use many of it in a civilian court, but even a hearing in a military court, with a lawyer, would be a step up. We've been holding people who were doing nothing more than escorting their families through a war zone who were committing no crime under any law by carrying an AK-47 to do it. We've let a few of those go, but without any sort of legal hearings whatsoever, we have no idea how many innocent men are rotting in cages at Guantanamo Bay.
As for the PATRIOT Act, it doesn't really give law enforcement much more than it already had. It just removes judicial oversight. Judicial oversight is one of those nice formalities that keeps everyone honest. I'd love to see it sunset, but many of the provisions are permanent.
I'm sure you can interpret the definition of torture to make most of the officially approved interrogation techniques not be torture, but it's a moot point. If you kept people awake, threatened them with dogs, made them stand up and carry cinder blocks all day and such in an American jail, you'd be sued (successfully) for millions of dollars, and probably tried in criminal court for institutional assault or something similar. These things are illegal in the U.S., so why they should be legal in a US-run prison against people who in some cases are prisoners of war who are accused of no crimes is completely beyond me. I'm not a lawyer, so I couldn't tell you what law it violates, but it falls clearly into the category of things that piss off otherwise neutral arabs and probably aren't worth the benefit. There are still plenty of sneaky cop tricks available that don't piss off the people we really need to be our friends.
I'm not surprised that you're disgusted by the money sugg
I'm going to ignore your accusations that the majority of the protestors hate American troops, because it's not getting us anywhere. You've had your view shaped by hundreds of left-wing lunatics, and I've had mine shaped by hundreds of thousands of concerned liberals and moderates.
Anyway, I don't support terrorism. I think it's abhorrent. I also think that the current administration has done an astonishingly poor job of combatting it. At the beginning of the Vietnam War, Ho Chi Minh said "You can kill five of my men for everyone one of yours that I kill, and even at those odds, you will lose and I will win." The ratio was actually closer to 10 to 1, and we lost and he won. We have the best military in the world, but if they're operating without the support of careful and well-reasoned leadership, they can only have a local impact, which is not good enough to combat the global problem that terrorism has become.
At the beginning of the Afghanistan operations, a general (I forget which one) said "We will not win this war with one bullet, but we could lose it with one bullet." The military knows full well that it needs to win the hearts and minds of the people, and is doing its best to do it in spite of everything the civilian administration is doing to screw it up.
So, here's what I'd do:
First, I'd let the generals run their own damn war. They know how to do it better than Rumsfeld.
Second, none of this "enemy combatant" bullshit. Our closest allies are rather pissed off that we're hold their citizens without access to attorneys in a legal black hole, without even accusing them of a crime.
Third, repeal the PATRIOT act. We already had all the data we needed to prevent the September 11 attacks, and just couldn't process at all. Adding on an extra bale of hay isn't going to make it easier to find the needle. Because of the PATRIOT act, many businesses are destroying records they previously would have kept and turned over under subpoena. Some localities are actually refusing to cooperate with Federal agents spying on their citizens under its terms, and the trend is growing. Cooperation is good.
Fourth, ban torture. Personally, I think the arab world would be less pissed off at us if we'd just beaten up the Abu Ghraib prisoners. That we're just trying to mess with people's heads instead of threaten to mutilate our bodies may make us feel better than Saddam Hussein, but it's losing us a lot of friends in a region of the world where we cannot afford to lose friends.
Fifth, money up front. We're now spending billions fighting former Iraqi soldiers that we could have satisfied by spending millions to give them a couple months' pay. It's always cheaper to feed people than to fight them. If we piss them off enough (like in Vietnam) we lose that option. It's already happening.
Sixth, multilateralism. The U.N. doesn't just authorize war, sometimes it even goes to war itself. Of course Europe is reluctant to go to war. They've seen war, up close and personal, hundreds of times over the past few millenia, and they want to be really sure before they go in. Our justification for going in, the weapons of mass destruction, didn't pan out, and they're justifiably VERY angry at us. If Saddam Hussein had continued to keep the inspectors out, they all would have gotten pissed off, the French would have bombed Baghdad themselves, and nobody would have cared that nothing turned up. Everyone was skeptical of us in the first place because the war talk came from out of the blue, and everyone knew that GWB was hell-bent on conquering Iraq regardless of their lack of involvement in the September 11 attacks, which we now know is true. Now our international credibility has been flushed down the toilet. I guess I don't know how I'd salvage that at this point, since a lot of the damage has already been done. At this point, I suspect that regime change may be the only way to satisfy the international community.
The court in this case was upholding a state law, not a fundamental power of law enforcement. If your state has no such law, this doesn't apply to you.
The Supreme Court is basically running an experiment on this issue. They're allowing a law to remain on the books for the moment with the promise of revisiting it if cases arise when it is clearly harmful. They're willing to risk some chilling effects in the mean time, in deference to the judgement and political authority of the legislature, which they're not really supposed to replace.
Also note that the vote was 5-4.
Another way to look at it is that they basically punted the issue until a couple years later when the "war on terrorism" hype dies down. The court quite deliberately operates on the cusp of social upheaval, and doesn't like to force it before there are people ready to undertake it politically. If they're going to make strong affirmations of civil liberties in areas that don't have so much case law history (like most of the PATRIOT ACT issues) they'd rather do it when people have been thinking about it more.
If you want to see this issue resolved, raise a big stink about it. Call your representatives. Conflicts between state and federal laws, for example, always get the court's attention, though there may not be a good way for congress to intervene here. Not that they'd likely get anything passed in the current environment, but even making the front page of the paper is a good start. Whine about it to your friends who don't read slashdot. You'd be surprised how many people truly care about their civil liberties, but rarely act on the topic because they have other things higher on life's priority list. We've got an army of civil libertarians on Slashdot, some of whom actually have friends who don't read Slashdot, and we really do have the power to sway public opinion and get this into public dialog.
If we can get the law into public dialog, there's a pretty good chance we'll get a test case. The court always struggles finding good test cases, because bad cases make bad law, but a sense of social urgency can sway them on exactly what issues of a case are important for consideration, and thus how suitable a case is to test the law.
No, I accuse a bunch of people who advocate violence against American troops of supporting violence. I accuse a bunch of people who support the violent overthrow of the American government and the capitalist system of supporting violence.
People who don't support those things who throw their lots in with ANSWER and the IAC just need to be more careful about who they align themselves with, that's all.
Yes, there are anarchists and communists at those rallies. We generally laugh at them. They've been going to rallies for decades. These rallies have been small and barely worth mentioning in the press. Suddenly the rallies are approaching a million people. That's not because we suddenly have a several order of magnitude increase in the numbers of left-wing lunatics. It's because an awful lot of mainstream liberal, moderate, and even conservative citizens are furious about where some extremely conservative leaders are taking our country and the entire world. I'd like you to back up your claim that they advocate violence against our troops, because I've been there, and I've never seen or heard it.
As for your talk about supporting the troops, you're making it a binary issue. It's *not* a binary issue. Most of America supported going to war with Iraq, and most of America is disappointed with how the war was implemented. Most Americans believe that it was done too quickly, without seeking enough international support, and without giving diplomacy enough opportunity. You can disagree with them, but it's not a fundamentally irrational opinion.
You fucking idiot. How exactly do you hope to get "less dying, not more?" By sitting down and letting the people who are dedicated to the utter destruction of the United States and our way of life carry out their terrorist campaign unopposed? By stopping all of our economic, diplomatic, and military pressure and letting Islamism burn like a firestorm through the third world? By letting the conflict seethe until it erupts into outright global war, this generation or the next?
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. We have to deal with suicide bombers because of economic and political conditions that we helped create that causes them to believe their life is worth so little. Al-Qaeda started out of anger about the alliance between the U.S. and the corrupt Saudi government. A few lunatics can start a terrorist group, but it takes legions of disaffected, disenfranchised, unemployed laborers and farmers to create an army. We've killed over 20,000 civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. How many angry brothers is that? How many fewer would there be if we'd been more careful, more diplomatic, and more internationally cooperative? The majority of Americans now believes that the war in Iraq was not worth the cost. Are you saying that they're all completely irrational, or are you just calling the people who had the premonition to say this beforehand are completely irrational?
These are not binary issues. You seem to have taken a big swig of Bush's Kool-Aid when he said "If you're not with us, you're against us." Negotiation and dissent are the foundations of democracy, and there are a lot of people who disagree with each other, but less than they disagree with the president. That's why they're protesting side by side.
Censorship is, by definition, the making of laws abridging the freedom of speech.
I actually took the liberty of finding out the definition of censorship. Dictionary.com refers "censorship" to "censoring". Here's what I get when I check the definition of "censoring":
censorPronunciation Key(snsr) n. A person authorized to examine books, films, or other material and to remove or suppress what is considered morally, politically, or otherwise objectionable.
An official, as in the armed forces, who examines personal mail and official dispatches to remove information considered secret or a risk to security.
Slashdot Mirror
Doom 3 is not any kind of Quake.
Doom 3 is not any kind of Half-Life.
Doom 3 is certainly not any kind of Tom Clancy game.
Doom 3 is the state of the art in interactive terror. If you want a simple FPS, don't buy it. If you want a shoot-through RPG, don't buy it. If you want something that accurately represents military weaponry, don't buy it.
If you like having to sleep with the light on after a gaming binge, by all means, buy Doom 3!
Actually, since the system uses capacitive coupling, you'd have a much bigger problem with the ionized particles released by the vacuum cleaner. The $200 cabinet should keep your system running quite happily.
I was actually able to determine that the popularity of Evanescence is an indirect result of the French Revolution. Make of that what you will.
Elections here are typically run mostly by large groups of volunteers, with some oversight by local government. Bringing in state election commission officials is rare, and usually only done in the event of a recount.
The FCC has the power to regulate devices which receive such signals. The TiVo does this. If you separated the receiver and the more interesting parts of the TiVo into separate black boxes, you probably wouldn't get anywhere, since they'd functionally be part of the same device.
It strikes me that they don't want people making a profit from selling the book. If you priced it at $15.97 + S&H, the CafePress rate for a 299 page book in the "perfect bound" format (which is the one you'd want to use) then you'd be fine. CafePress would be making a profit, just as your ISP makes a profit for your download server, the CD pressing company makes a profit for the distro CDs you press, etc. Now, if CafePress decided to sell them on their own behalf, they'd probably have to offer them at a lower rate.
The really distracting thing about NWN is that some parts of it were incredibly realistic, and then some parts were Quake 1 era quality. If the whole thing was Quake 1 era quality, it wouldn't have been such a big deal, but when you walk through a field of grass that's waving in the wind, and approach a guy whose head is obviously made of less than 20 triangles, it's a bit distracting.
Not all copyright infringement is criminal. In fact, most isn't. Hollywood is working very hard to change this, but hasn't completely succeeded yet. As of right now, breaking the copy protection (if any) for your own fair use is far worse in the eyes of the law than proceeding to use that copy for commercial gain.
http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/506.html
Joe's crime is, in addition to murder, an implicit threat to entire populations. This clearly falls under things that Congress has a compelling interest to discourage.
Mike's crime is just sick and disgusting, but that's already something that judges and juries take into account in sentencing. There doesn't need to be a special law for it.
Bill's crime, assuming that the fact-finder (judge or jury) determines that what happened is consistent with what you describe, is not a hate crime. The fact that he's written racist literature speaks to his danger to society, and thus he may get more time for both murders because of it.
A hate crime is not more severe because of your own thoughts (though the fact that you're a sick bastard may weigh on the sentencing authority's mind) but because it is a crime against people beyond the immediate victim. It's actually a rather simple and elegant legal theory, though perceptions of what constitutes intimidation vary greatly by perspective, making the details a lot more problematic.
Hate crime laws have mostly survived constitutional challenges. Most successful challenges to hate crime prosecution have been challenges to the applicability of the law to a particular case, rather than the law itself. There's a very sound reason for this.
If I have a problem with somebody who happens to be black, and I shoot him instead of walking away or mumbling under my breath or putting photochops of him in gay porn on the internet, like I'd do to anyone else, that's not by itself a hate crime, no matter how many witnesses the prosecution can parade in to tell about how racist I am. Sometimes this does happen, and the sentence often gets overturned on appeal, like it should.
A hate crime is when I do something that is calculated to intimidate people beyond the immediate victim of a crime. If I see an interracial couple together and I kill them to "make an example out of them" to intimidate others who might be inclined to do this otherwise perfectly legal and even laudable thing, that's a hate crime. It's an obvious threat of violence to entire populations of society. The first amendment allows us to say and express an awful lot of things, but "I'm going to kill you." is not one of them.
In practice, the degree to which race is a factor in a crime is not binary, and a decision is made, on a case-by-case basis, about the degree and severity of the racial influence, and sentence is adjusted accordingly. You may not like it, but it's quite remarkably fair compared to plenty of other goings-on in our legal sysem.
Actually, the energy released by exothermic chemical reactions can be measured as a change in mass, albeit a truly miniscule one compared to nuclear reactions. Of course, chemical and biological weapons are not by themselves inherently exothermic. The only exothermic reactions are the ones that happen as the corpses decay.
The mindbogglingly complex explicit resource management in real-time rendering changes quite dramatically when you add multiple resources. On systems with high-end graphics cards, where main memory bandwidth is more of a bottleneck than CPU cycles, adding another processor isn't really going to do much. About the only good it's really going to do is let one processor handle the OS and other background operations while you're gaming on the other one, in which case you might as well use a barebones Win98SE system.
The spikes you see on that framerate graph have to do with scene complexity. When a half dozen monsters of different kinds are in your face shooting stuff at you, there's a hell of a lot more to render. It doesn't matter what resources you have, they're going to be strained more by that. About the only thing that's going to smooth it out is staying above the 60 FPS max.
Humans can distinguish framerate improvements up to 72 FPS, but 60 is is a more widely supported VSYNC rate (especially on LCDs), not to mention a lower one, and they seem to have been designing the game to be close enough to perfect that you won't really notice the difference in the heat of combat, which saves a lot of resources over actually perfect, and allows a lot more eye candy on older hardware.
I've always been careful about ESD, but one time I was upgrading a machine in a carpeted office, and I was handed a RAM stick, and foolishly grabbed it rather than first grabbing the hand that offered it.
*click*
The RAM seems to be working fine. The motherboards in that office are another matter entirely. The motherboards there have disturbingly short life-spans of around a year. Of course, the only ones that have problems are the ones that were actually serviced in the office, on that carpet. That RAM stick just got one ESD shock. Those motherboards have gotten a whole bunch, and ESD can be cumulative.
When there's ESD damage involving RAM, the damage is more likely to be to the motherboard than to the RAM. In the story you describe, it's quite likely that no current was actually passing through silicon, but just over the surface of the stick. On the other hand, if you let a 1 inch spark fly from a RAM stick to a motherboard, that motherboard is gone.
My brother knocked a just-opened 12 ounce can of ginger ale into an open, running minitower. It hit the CD drive and drained down from there. The drive itself was well shielded, and shadowed the hard drive. The motherboard itself was out of the path of at least most of it, but the sound card and modem both got quite drenched. Curiously, the internet connection did not drop, nor did the mp3s quit playing. We stared at this in disbelief for about a minute, as IMs continued to come in, proving the internet connection was still up. Finally we turned it off and wiped it up.
Years later, the machine was still working as our house router, until I got sick of panicked phone calls from the family whenever our DSL connection would get fouled up. Fixing the problem required resetting the DSL modem, then restarting the PPPoE session on the router. I had it set up so that all they had to do was hit the reset button and everything would be perfectly happy, but it looked like a computer (headless though it was) so they were afraid to do this, despite my assurances that they really couldn't do any damage. I finally bought a black box router for them. Since it didn't look like a computer, they were perfectly happy turning it off and turning it back on again, without disrupting my busy napping schedule. I didn't dare tell them that it was running basically the same software inside.
Generally speaking, if there's not an overt threat of violence or massive infrastructure damage, and no money is stolen, you just can't get anyone in law enforcement to listen. This is why I don't have a huge problem with SYN flooding someone who's mailbombing your server until the mailbombing stops. That's just self-defense. If you keep SYN flooding after the mailbombing stops, then you're just attacking an arbitrary IP address that could now belong to someone else, or could have belonged to a (now fixed) zombie, or whatever else. That's reckless.
Law enforcement is trying to get a better handle on internet fraud, but there's so much of it going on and they have so few resources to attack it that vigilante efforts to stop or mitigate the attacks are about our only options in many cases.
If I shoot a gun at a guy who's robbing a bank at gunpoint, I'm probably okay with the law. If I pull out my gun, close my eyes, wave it around, and pull the trigger several times at random, I'm not okay with the law.
If I get a guy in a headlock to break up a fight, I'm probably okay with the law. If he walks away from the fight and I put him in a headlock then, I'm not okay with the law.
You're generally allowed to do things to people you wouldn't otherwise be allowed to do if they weren't committing a crime, but you have to be certain that you're not doing these things to innocent people as well. The internet makes that quite difficult at times. You also have to restrain your response to be proportional to what you're trying to prevent. "Imperfect self-defense" can often get murder reduced to manslaughter, but you still do time for it.
Dr. Hawking has solved a rather famous problem in astrophysics. That he lost a bet in the process is hardly a slight. As far as I can tell he is quite a gentleman, but even a complete egomaniac would make an announcement like this, since it's much more of a victory than a defeat.
Clearly you need to use cfengine to change this default on all your servers.
Typically in lawsuits like this, if the act was a willful violation of contract terms and/or copyright, they can get rather substantial penalties beyond actual damages. If Google can show that this programmer introduced this code in spite of their efforts to prevent such things, rather than as a result of encouragement to get it out the door, they may be off the hook for these extra damages (punitive and statutory) though I don't think the programmer has much of a chance at that. Of course, establishing the value of actual damages in a case like this is always difficult as well. Hopefully they'll be able to settle with a licensing agreement that makes everybody mostly happy. Google probably has the resources to rewrite everything, but at this point that's probably not practical.
I hope this doesn't put too much of a damper on the 20% projects at Google. They keep turning out a lot of really cool stuff because of those, and it would be really unfortunate if liability forced them to micromanage their research.
I'm getting bored of this, so I'm going to respond to your arguments in summary:
You agree with bad people on a few things, therefore I won't listen to you. Since everyone else should think the way I do, everyone else either doesn't listen to you or is broken and doesn't count.
I vote. So do most of the people at those rallies. We also laugh and yell at stupid people who are using our cause for their own agenda, but we mostly spend our energy on what we came there to do, which has nothing to do with them.
Everyone who is shooting at us is a terrorist. Therefore, nobody shooting at us has any rights whatsoever.
While this is false, assuming for the moment that it's true, if you deny them all rights, how do you know? You may be willing to lock them all up and throw away the key, but without giving our captives rights, the world cannot know if they are truly guilty of anything. It makes us look like complete hypocrites when we talk about defending freedom and democracy. Even if we can legally do these things (debatable) that doesn't mean it's good policy that will reduce threats to our country.
You used a word or phrase in a way that has multiple meanings, and even though it is completely clear based on context what you meant, I'm going to try to make you look stupid instead of actually responding to the criticism.
You smell funny.
You personally do not know what needs to be done to solve our problems, therefore you shouldn't question other people who are doing other things that haven't solved our problems.
You don't know either. Neither do most of the people in the Bush administration. There is a wealth of expert knowledge that is being ignored or overridden at every step of the way.
We should not be nice to people who might get mad at us and start shooting at us if we're not nice to them.
Under that plan, we make friends only with people who throw themselves at our feet. Granted, some will do that, but we can do a lot better.
The situation has been getting better lately, so we should be happy.
I and a lot of people are quite angry because we believe that we'd be much better off if we'd been listened to by our own government a while ago. It's a perfectly good reason to be unhappy with people who refuse to admit mistakes.
Our leaders made good decisions that we should be proud of.
I disagree, but at least when you're arguing like this you're dignified. Keep trying this last tactic. It's much more likely than any of the others to convince people who don't already agree with you. That's the challenge of politics. It's really easy to convince the people who agree with you. The people who don't agree with you take some work, and doing everything you're legally allowed to do against them isn't always the best course of action.
If your college has its head screwed on straight, they've probably got a career office. This is the place to go, even it's been the place you were looking for the past six months. If they want your donations as an alum (they do) they'll still help you even though you're now graduated. College career offices are where companies go when they want to hire graduates with no industry experience that they can mold into their own ideal employees before they get someone else's bad habits. If you're not going through a campus recruiter, you're just a guy with no experience to them.
Failing that, do tech work for charities while working some lesser tech job that keeps you in touch with what's going on, even if you're not playing much with the latest toys. Lots of charities need programmers, and lack the money to pay them. They get their app written, you get experience and a great reference, and most employers like seeing volunteer work. It makes them think you give a crap about something, which is a big concern when hiring 20-somethings of the Office Space generation.
If you're marching alongside somebody carrying a "Support Armed Resistance" sign and you're not carrying a "No Armed Resistance" sign, then you might as well be carrying a "Support Armed Resistance" sign yourself.
So, if I show up at one of your demonstrations with Nazi banners, you're obligated to have brought a banner in response to that? What if I bring some guys in KKK garb as well? The best cure for bad speech is more speech, as the Supreme Court has been known to opine. The people with those banners piss me off quite a lot, but when I protest, it's against those I believe represent the greatest threat to our country. I think those kooks are completely ineffectual whiners and worry more about the people in power. An awful lot of other people do too. If it'll make you happy, I'll point and laugh more obviously next time. I don't really feel like starting a fight at a peace rally.
My argument about having more troops (supported both by military and intelligence experts) is that if we'd had more troops at the beginning, we could have rounded up the insurgent forces before they got organized, back when they were being clumsy and largely ineffective. At this point it's probably too late, though it would sure be nice to give a break to the guys whose tours of duty are now being extended indefinitely.
It's not a question of law. It's a question of jurisdiction. Generally, you can't capture somebody in a foreign country and charge them under US law. If they were in obvious conspiracy to commit an act of war against the US, then yes, but if they were just living at an al-Qaida training camp, then no. The US has no jurisdiction there.
They could be planning to knock over a 7-11 in the U.S. (we wouldn't even have to know which one) and we'd have jurisdiction. You're right that we'd have no jurisdiction if someone was simply living there. Do you indict the mob boss's housekeeper for conspiracy in a RICO case? No, you don't. Fortunately, al-Qaeda kept very careful records about who was getting what training. From those records it should be fairly clear who was preparing to attack America. Everyone else there is merely guilty of being mean and nasty towards us, which is not in itself a crime under any law.
Before you can be brought before a military court, you have to be a member of a military force. These prisoners are not. They aren't eligible for military trial.
Now tribunals, yes. Which is exactly what they're getting.
I said "military court", not "court martial", so all your hair-splitting is in vain. Anyway, when are they getting these tribunals? It's been almost 3 years now, and they haven't even been charged. It's possible that the legal black hole theory is consistent with the letter of the law, but it's making even our closest allies very unhappy with us. Just because we can do it (and I don't think we have that authority either) doesn't mean we should.
We use mild, non-injurious violence and the infliction of stress to convince people to give us information.
This is beyond you. You don't get it. But that doesn't mean that it's not necessary.
And how many people will die because the Arab world is furious at us at all levels? How many lives would we save if we had the active cooperation, rather than the grudging non-interference, of Arab intelligence and law enforcement? Diplomacy saves lives. Sure, we could have attacked Cuba when the Soviets put missiles there, but we didn't. Destroying those missiles was "neccesary to protect American lives" but we chose another route that involved less violence, and ended up better off for it. What I don't get is not the use of violence, but the blind indifference to international opinion. Just because we shouldn't be slaves to international opinion doesn't mean it's not worth our while to try to make the right people happy.
Now, explain this to me: you think the SecDef should have "let the generals run their own damn war," and yet at
That's not really cool, man. If you aren't happy with an outrageous accusation, either refute it or do something to fix it.
I don't have figures on how many hundreds of thousands of people had signs saying things like "Mainstream White Guys For Peace" and "How did our oil get under their sand?" and how many dozens had signs saying signs advocating the destruction of the western world, and neither do you. If we're going to work with anecdotes, start with me. I am living proof that there exist people who oppose terrorism and oppose the Bush administration's foreign policy. Therefore, your sweeping generalizations are not universally true. The issue isn't binary. There are more than two sides to it. If you don't believe me, take as an example the Afghan tribal militias that turned on each other after taking down the Taliban. I went to a peace rally with a small crowd that included a full-time union organizer, and even he was laughing at the communists.
Your point about Rumsfeld's duties is valid, but it was his idea to go in with a small force over the objection of the generals, which made it difficult to establish security in the earliest days of occupation. It made a very bad first impression and exposed our troops to attacks at a time when we needed a commanding presence. The Secretary of Defense usually negotiates with the generals, rather than handing down orders. That's basically what Rumsfeld did, and he screwed up.
Your criticisms about the enemy combatants hold less water. We actually *do* have laws that we could charge many of them under. There's a critical difference between someone planning to launch attacks on our soil, and someone training to repel invaders. If we're the invaders and acting in defense of our country, it's perfectly reasonable to kill them on the battlefield, but once they surrender, they're nothing more than prisoners of war, the sort we turn loose at the end of hostilities, just like we did at the end of every other war in history.
I'm not advocating turning loose the al-Qaeda suspects, I'm advocating trying them for conspiracy to commit (insert crime here, probably murder). We've got quite a lot of evidence against a great many of them. Because of the circumstances under which we've been interrogating them, we probably can't use many of it in a civilian court, but even a hearing in a military court, with a lawyer, would be a step up. We've been holding people who were doing nothing more than escorting their families through a war zone who were committing no crime under any law by carrying an AK-47 to do it. We've let a few of those go, but without any sort of legal hearings whatsoever, we have no idea how many innocent men are rotting in cages at Guantanamo Bay.
As for the PATRIOT Act, it doesn't really give law enforcement much more than it already had. It just removes judicial oversight. Judicial oversight is one of those nice formalities that keeps everyone honest. I'd love to see it sunset, but many of the provisions are permanent.
I'm sure you can interpret the definition of torture to make most of the officially approved interrogation techniques not be torture, but it's a moot point. If you kept people awake, threatened them with dogs, made them stand up and carry cinder blocks all day and such in an American jail, you'd be sued (successfully) for millions of dollars, and probably tried in criminal court for institutional assault or something similar. These things are illegal in the U.S., so why they should be legal in a US-run prison against people who in some cases are prisoners of war who are accused of no crimes is completely beyond me. I'm not a lawyer, so I couldn't tell you what law it violates, but it falls clearly into the category of things that piss off otherwise neutral arabs and probably aren't worth the benefit. There are still plenty of sneaky cop tricks available that don't piss off the people we really need to be our friends.
I'm not surprised that you're disgusted by the money sugg
I'm going to ignore your accusations that the majority of the protestors hate American troops, because it's not getting us anywhere. You've had your view shaped by hundreds of left-wing lunatics, and I've had mine shaped by hundreds of thousands of concerned liberals and moderates.
Anyway, I don't support terrorism. I think it's abhorrent. I also think that the current administration has done an astonishingly poor job of combatting it. At the beginning of the Vietnam War, Ho Chi Minh said "You can kill five of my men for everyone one of yours that I kill, and even at those odds, you will lose and I will win." The ratio was actually closer to 10 to 1, and we lost and he won. We have the best military in the world, but if they're operating without the support of careful and well-reasoned leadership, they can only have a local impact, which is not good enough to combat the global problem that terrorism has become.
At the beginning of the Afghanistan operations, a general (I forget which one) said "We will not win this war with one bullet, but we could lose it with one bullet." The military knows full well that it needs to win the hearts and minds of the people, and is doing its best to do it in spite of everything the civilian administration is doing to screw it up.
So, here's what I'd do:
First, I'd let the generals run their own damn war. They know how to do it better than Rumsfeld.
Second, none of this "enemy combatant" bullshit. Our closest allies are rather pissed off that we're hold their citizens without access to attorneys in a legal black hole, without even accusing them of a crime.
Third, repeal the PATRIOT act. We already had all the data we needed to prevent the September 11 attacks, and just couldn't process at all. Adding on an extra bale of hay isn't going to make it easier to find the needle. Because of the PATRIOT act, many businesses are destroying records they previously would have kept and turned over under subpoena. Some localities are actually refusing to cooperate with Federal agents spying on their citizens under its terms, and the trend is growing. Cooperation is good.
Fourth, ban torture. Personally, I think the arab world would be less pissed off at us if we'd just beaten up the Abu Ghraib prisoners. That we're just trying to mess with people's heads instead of threaten to mutilate our bodies may make us feel better than Saddam Hussein, but it's losing us a lot of friends in a region of the world where we cannot afford to lose friends.
Fifth, money up front. We're now spending billions fighting former Iraqi soldiers that we could have satisfied by spending millions to give them a couple months' pay. It's always cheaper to feed people than to fight them. If we piss them off enough (like in Vietnam) we lose that option. It's already happening.
Sixth, multilateralism. The U.N. doesn't just authorize war, sometimes it even goes to war itself. Of course Europe is reluctant to go to war. They've seen war, up close and personal, hundreds of times over the past few millenia, and they want to be really sure before they go in. Our justification for going in, the weapons of mass destruction, didn't pan out, and they're justifiably VERY angry at us. If Saddam Hussein had continued to keep the inspectors out, they all would have gotten pissed off, the French would have bombed Baghdad themselves, and nobody would have cared that nothing turned up. Everyone was skeptical of us in the first place because the war talk came from out of the blue, and everyone knew that GWB was hell-bent on conquering Iraq regardless of their lack of involvement in the September 11 attacks, which we now know is true. Now our international credibility has been flushed down the toilet. I guess I don't know how I'd salvage that at this point, since a lot of the damage has already been done. At this point, I suspect that regime change may be the only way to satisfy the international community.
There. That's how I'd start. Bear i
The court in this case was upholding a state law, not a fundamental power of law enforcement. If your state has no such law, this doesn't apply to you.
The Supreme Court is basically running an experiment on this issue. They're allowing a law to remain on the books for the moment with the promise of revisiting it if cases arise when it is clearly harmful. They're willing to risk some chilling effects in the mean time, in deference to the judgement and political authority of the legislature, which they're not really supposed to replace.
Also note that the vote was 5-4.
Another way to look at it is that they basically punted the issue until a couple years later when the "war on terrorism" hype dies down. The court quite deliberately operates on the cusp of social upheaval, and doesn't like to force it before there are people ready to undertake it politically. If they're going to make strong affirmations of civil liberties in areas that don't have so much case law history (like most of the PATRIOT ACT issues) they'd rather do it when people have been thinking about it more.
If you want to see this issue resolved, raise a big stink about it. Call your representatives. Conflicts between state and federal laws, for example, always get the court's attention, though there may not be a good way for congress to intervene here. Not that they'd likely get anything passed in the current environment, but even making the front page of the paper is a good start. Whine about it to your friends who don't read slashdot. You'd be surprised how many people truly care about their civil liberties, but rarely act on the topic because they have other things higher on life's priority list. We've got an army of civil libertarians on Slashdot, some of whom actually have friends who don't read Slashdot, and we really do have the power to sway public opinion and get this into public dialog.
If we can get the law into public dialog, there's a pretty good chance we'll get a test case. The court always struggles finding good test cases, because bad cases make bad law, but a sense of social urgency can sway them on exactly what issues of a case are important for consideration, and thus how suitable a case is to test the law.
People who don't support those things who throw their lots in with ANSWER and the IAC just need to be more careful about who they align themselves with, that's all.
Yes, there are anarchists and communists at those rallies. We generally laugh at them. They've been going to rallies for decades. These rallies have been small and barely worth mentioning in the press. Suddenly the rallies are approaching a million people. That's not because we suddenly have a several order of magnitude increase in the numbers of left-wing lunatics. It's because an awful lot of mainstream liberal, moderate, and even conservative citizens are furious about where some extremely conservative leaders are taking our country and the entire world. I'd like you to back up your claim that they advocate violence against our troops, because I've been there, and I've never seen or heard it.
As for your talk about supporting the troops, you're making it a binary issue. It's *not* a binary issue. Most of America supported going to war with Iraq, and most of America is disappointed with how the war was implemented. Most Americans believe that it was done too quickly, without seeking enough international support, and without giving diplomacy enough opportunity. You can disagree with them, but it's not a fundamentally irrational opinion.
You fucking idiot. How exactly do you hope to get "less dying, not more?" By sitting down and letting the people who are dedicated to the utter destruction of the United States and our way of life carry out their terrorist campaign unopposed? By stopping all of our economic, diplomatic, and military pressure and letting Islamism burn like a firestorm through the third world? By letting the conflict seethe until it erupts into outright global war, this generation or the next?
When the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. We have to deal with suicide bombers because of economic and political conditions that we helped create that causes them to believe their life is worth so little. Al-Qaeda started out of anger about the alliance between the U.S. and the corrupt Saudi government. A few lunatics can start a terrorist group, but it takes legions of disaffected, disenfranchised, unemployed laborers and farmers to create an army. We've killed over 20,000 civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. How many angry brothers is that? How many fewer would there be if we'd been more careful, more diplomatic, and more internationally cooperative? The majority of Americans now believes that the war in Iraq was not worth the cost. Are you saying that they're all completely irrational, or are you just calling the people who had the premonition to say this beforehand are completely irrational?
These are not binary issues. You seem to have taken a big swig of Bush's Kool-Aid when he said "If you're not with us, you're against us." Negotiation and dissent are the foundations of democracy, and there are a lot of people who disagree with each other, but less than they disagree with the president. That's why they're protesting side by side.
Censorship is, by definition, the making of laws abridging the freedom of speech.
I actually took the liberty of finding out the definition of censorship. Dictionary.com refers "censorship" to "censoring". Here's what I get when I check the definition of "censoring":