I'm a physics/computer science research assistant on a public grant, who does sabre fencing in his spare time. They can just come study me. I've been living like they describe for the last 5 years.
Except for the "in his spare time" part, exactly as they describe:P
And as a former fencer as well, since when is a cloth lamé equivalent to bronze armor?
Also, why no showers? Didn't they have baths back then?
For many reasons I spend my own money to filter the water coming from the government with all of their "wonderful" regulations. If it was so safe why can't I put fish into it immediately after getting it from the tap?
Possibly for the same reason that you can't necessarily drink the same water straight from the lake, stream, or ocean that fish lives in.
There is no need for government regulation here - it would only benefit the existing ISPs at the expense of the consumer.
Only if we get rid of the expemtion ISPs have to license usage on their hardware. As it stands now, you have the choice of one cable ISP (maybe), several DSL providers (if you're lucky, you probably have one or zero), and one fiber provider (maybe). If we get rid of the localized monopolies, then we can possibly start to deregulate the ISPs. Until then, regulation is necessary if we want to be able to reach the internet.
Believing in aliens isn't necessarily stupid. Believing in aliens because the morning paper mentioned it on April fools day and not realizing for one second that maybe, just maybe, aliens would pick a nicer place to land than war-torn fundie Jordan, now THAT'S stupid.
Believing someone is stupid because they read on/. that someone in Jordan got fooled on April 1, and not realizing for one second that maybe Jordan doesn't generally observe April Fools the way we do? Now THAT'S stupid.
It would be reasonable to assume that Jordan doesn't have the same cultural trappings that we do. Would you, without looking it up, know when you woke up that it was the first day of Ramadan? Is it that hard to expect that this non-Western nation without a tradition of practical jokes would have people who don't wake up on April 1st with a stronger sense of skepticism than usual?
because you know, when the aliens to invade, I am sure the first priority is to set a frontpage, insert some nice ads, print it, distribute it...
At least the Orson Welles scare was over the bloody radio.
In both this instance and the War of the Worlds radio broadcast, neither was from the point of view that the aliens were in charge of the media. Both are the media 'reporting' on an ongoing alien invasion in a backwater hick town, so I'm not sure how this is relevent.
Inversely, like your example, people who would feel the weight of attrocities they commit became completely desensatized to that environment, and in the end have appalling effects. (I don't know for sure if those soldiers played video games, but I wouldn't at all be surprised).
Alternatively, couldn't game design be used to better train the pilots to act properly before they get into tense situations? For example, to learn Geneva Convention rules and internalize them, rather than depending on gut feelings of morality.
There's nothing wrong with being desensitized to death, per-se. It's important to ones psyche as a first responder, medical professional, or when your life is threatened and the only way to preserve it is to kill the other person first. It's only when one is desensitized to death and lacks a sense of right from wrong that we get atrocities.
And whenever a reporter get's too close to something embarrassing or which the military would prefer didn't end up on the news they can be quickly and easily intercepted and diverted.
Reporters are not supposed to be lapdogs reporting only what the military want them to report.
They're supposed to get pictures of things the military would prefer they didn't.
Of course, it's then a catch-22. They can only do their job effectively by blending in. But, if they blend in, they may get mistaken for enemy combatants and killed.
This teaches you to be skeptical of "truths" handed to you on a platter by the media.
Though, we're not talking about reporting on "truths" that are partisan spin. We're talking about a front page report about a disaster/national security issue. You know, the kind of thing where taking the time to investigate it on your own could be costly, and that you expect has little room for intentionally misleading reporting.
In any case, it's poor form to publish a prank story implying people were in imminent danger, especially in a country like Jordan, which according to TFA is not known for pranks. I'd be angry too, since the prank had actual consequences (loss of productivity, etc).
Actually, I believe all of this data was publicly accessable, even without an account. This is part of the updated privacy controls (which set most everything to public by default if someone never adjusted their privacy). Thus it seems a ToS would never have applied, though FB obviously wants it to.
Actually, the quote in the summary explains this exactly. If you know who your target audience is, and that they are on the PC, and your development budget is below that expectation, then it make sense. In other words, AAA PC titles will only work if they belong to a genre where nearly all of the players are exclusively PC gamers. If you want to make a AAA PC game, it better be an MMO or RTS, not a platformer or shooter. Alternatively, you'd better have a DRM that's as good as that of a console, and plan to make your money off a smaller audience.
Would it be pretty much OK as they kind of thought innocents might theoretically be a threat? Or would you want to kill people like that?
If they came clean right off the bat and said "Shit, that journalist looked like he was threatening our helicopter. We don't want that mistake to happen again, so we will make adjustments to our procedures, and the media should also be aware not to use postures that can be misinterpreted as threatening" and then followed through, then I would be alright with that. The problem is entirely that the military clammed up, and kept claiming that they were legitimate insurgents, which is clearly not the case.
I would agree that a better look would have been nice, and possibly cleared up any mistaken identifications. However, the kneeling posture around the corner absolutely looks like he was taking aim on the apache. It's terribly bad coincidence between his pose and the angle of the Apache, and unfortunately it ended in a loss of life. This was a tragic misunderstanding.
Watch it again then. And this time, turn on the sound. Or at least read the subtitles.
Let me rephrase: the malice is because he mistakenly identified them as enemy combatants who has been attacking and killing his friends and countrymen, not because he saw warm bodies and felt like shooting. The first type seems reasonably justified for a combat situation, the second would have been murder.
Yeah, a camera really looks soooo much like an RPG.
Same goes for the tank driver who overrun a body (was that person even dead?)
I agree that these are terrible mistakes, but they definitely look more like mistakes than malice. I'm not saying that the killing was a good thing, but it seemed that the incident that starts this whole thing off was a misidentification that appeared to be an enemy combatant taking aim on his position with an RPG, with the ROE taking over from there.
In other words, put me in a helicopter with the same low-resolution video feed (we are watching this video in a comfortable desk and the knowledge that it's a journo with a camera, he was not), and any of us could have made the same mistake. It's horrible that it happened, but I don't see how you can be so definite that he didn't just make an initial mistake and choose self-preservation over risking a closer look. How are you so sure he wanted to shoot this man just for the sake of squeezing off rounds at live targets?
Finally got a chance to watch. It seems to be the gunner not having sufficient resolution to determine the camera and other items were not an RPG and AK-47s is the cause, and passing the intel off as conclusive. I don't detect malice, though. Hell, I couldn't even tell that the 'AK-47s' weren't actually weapons. At the point the cameraman kneels around the corner and wields the camera, I find it difficult to fault the gunner for believing him to be taking aim.
From there on out, with the assumption there are armed insurgents, everything seems as close to the ROE as they can be reasonably expected to get in the situation. It's a terrible thing to have happen, and I hope and pray it doesn't again, but it's a case of mistaken identity not of malice.
I will reiterate, though, that my beef is still with the military for not being forthcoming about the incident. FOIA is there for a reason, it was wrong of them to cock-block it if they don't think anything wrong happened. However, I do agree that there probably wasn't a ROE violation, which just makes the cover-up more puzzling.
In light of this new information that you did not have, NOW what do you think about the use of a gunship, and the order to go ahead and fire?
Agreed, I hadn't thought that they assumed themselves to be in imminent danger (again, the previous accounts I read missed this piece of information). They erred in their identification, but had it been an RPG preparing to fire their responding attack would have been justified.
As I mentioned elsewhere, though, the real issue is the coverup, not the mistake. Why not come out and say 'that camera looked a hell of a lot like an RPG, so we fired on a threatening target'? I would have said shame on the journalist, instead.
I don't think it hurts the image of the Apache crew, just of whoever ordered them to fire. I'm willing to assume they were given faulty information of the threat on the ground. The question is who decided it was a good idea to use large caliber weaponry very near civilians?
They weren't given faulty data; they were the ones collecting the data. The Apache's gunner was the one with the first eyeballs on the crowd (consisting of around a dozen people, including two reporters).
Thanks for the clarification, I'll try to watch the video before going into particulars again. But the point remains, why not own up to the mistake? Perhaps it would reduce further incidents of TV cameras being mistaken as RPGs, and prevent the uproar over a coverup.
Why? Because then you have all these d*ckheads coming out of the woodwork that think that America can do nothing but wrong or that the American military can do nothing but wrong.
And you propose a cover-up is the best way to keep from riling them up? You must have a promising career in politics!
They are quite willing to take a few minutes of video out of context, fixate in their cushy suburban (or other) lifestyle and not consider the broader context that this video was ripped from.
So they can either make those who will always oppose the military mad by admitting fault and promising to not let it happen again, or they can cover it up and piss off them and the people who are generally supportive of our troops when it comes to light.
I fail to see how reduced transparency and oversight is a good thing in this (or any) context.
In isolation, it makes the Apache crew look pretty retarded but we also don't know what else was going on at the time or anything about this location.
I don't think it hurts the image of the Apache crew, just of whoever ordered them to fire. I'm willing to assume they were given faulty information of the threat on the ground. The question is who decided it was a good idea to use large caliber weaponry very near civilians?
But more important is why the military didn't just own up and say "we had a breakdown in communication, we're taking steps to prevent this happening again"? Not taking responsibility implies they knew they messed up, but don't want to admit it. That's much worse than just erring in the first place.
Until we develop better ways of making the journey sending meatsacks is just pretty damned wasteful and IMHO dumb....
Let the unmanned remotes and robots do the hard and dangerous stuff and keep the meatsacks on the ground working on better propulsion systems so we can actually get somewhere in our lifetimes. Sending humans into space at this point is just a monumental waste of resources ATM.
Putting humans in space now gives us the expertise for later, when we do have those improved propulsion systems. Humans are also more versitile and flexible than a special-purpose robot when mission parameters or experiments change. Not every mission needs humans, but many do.
And as for rent-an-astronaut, they will need to be trained by a private corporation (who has to build their facilities and training programs from scratch), and once we use them a few times it will end up more expensive than having NASA astronauts.
Again, these guys may well have screwed up and may well be deserving of punishment. Assuming, however, that my base assumption (that these guys aren't all evil merciless killing machines) is correct, there must be factors we don't, as civilians, understand.
Even if they did nothing wrong, the question then becomes "why cover it up in the first place?" That is far more troubling to me than the fact that the mistake happened.
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I'm a physics/computer science research assistant on a public grant, who does sabre fencing in his spare time. They can just come study me. I've been living like they describe for the last 5 years.
Except for the "in his spare time" part, exactly as they describe :P
And as a former fencer as well, since when is a cloth lamé equivalent to bronze armor?
Also, why no showers? Didn't they have baths back then?
Doesn't mean the gladiators themselves used them.
For many reasons I spend my own money to filter the water coming from the government with all of their "wonderful" regulations. If it was so safe why can't I put fish into it immediately after getting it from the tap?
Possibly for the same reason that you can't necessarily drink the same water straight from the lake, stream, or ocean that fish lives in.
Aside from the high infrastructure cost and predatory pricing from the incumbent? Sure, no reason why a new ISP couldn't succeed. /s
There is no need for government regulation here - it would only benefit the existing ISPs at the expense of the consumer.
Only if we get rid of the expemtion ISPs have to license usage on their hardware. As it stands now, you have the choice of one cable ISP (maybe), several DSL providers (if you're lucky, you probably have one or zero), and one fiber provider (maybe). If we get rid of the localized monopolies, then we can possibly start to deregulate the ISPs. Until then, regulation is necessary if we want to be able to reach the internet.
Right, the news would never look this good.
Believing in aliens isn't necessarily stupid. Believing in aliens because the morning paper mentioned it on April fools day and not realizing for one second that maybe, just maybe, aliens would pick a nicer place to land than war-torn fundie Jordan, now THAT'S stupid.
Believing someone is stupid because they read on /. that someone in Jordan got fooled on April 1, and not realizing for one second that maybe Jordan doesn't generally observe April Fools the way we do? Now THAT'S stupid.
It would be reasonable to assume that Jordan doesn't have the same cultural trappings that we do. Would you, without looking it up, know when you woke up that it was the first day of Ramadan? Is it that hard to expect that this non-Western nation without a tradition of practical jokes would have people who don't wake up on April 1st with a stronger sense of skepticism than usual?
because you know, when the aliens to invade, I am sure the first priority is to set a frontpage, insert some nice ads, print it, distribute it...
At least the Orson Welles scare was over the bloody radio.
In both this instance and the War of the Worlds radio broadcast, neither was from the point of view that the aliens were in charge of the media. Both are the media 'reporting' on an ongoing alien invasion in a backwater hick town, so I'm not sure how this is relevent.
If I'm in imminent danger, I'd hate to have to wait until the morning printing to find out about it.
I guess it's a good thing you don't live in Jordan, then.
Inversely, like your example, people who would feel the weight of attrocities they commit became completely desensatized to that environment, and in the end have appalling effects. (I don't know for sure if those soldiers played video games, but I wouldn't at all be surprised).
Alternatively, couldn't game design be used to better train the pilots to act properly before they get into tense situations? For example, to learn Geneva Convention rules and internalize them, rather than depending on gut feelings of morality.
There's nothing wrong with being desensitized to death, per-se. It's important to ones psyche as a first responder, medical professional, or when your life is threatened and the only way to preserve it is to kill the other person first. It's only when one is desensitized to death and lacks a sense of right from wrong that we get atrocities.
And whenever a reporter get's too close to something embarrassing or which the military would prefer didn't end up on the news they can be quickly and easily intercepted and diverted.
Reporters are not supposed to be lapdogs reporting only what the military want them to report. They're supposed to get pictures of things the military would prefer they didn't.
Of course, it's then a catch-22. They can only do their job effectively by blending in. But, if they blend in, they may get mistaken for enemy combatants and killed.
Obviously, Hungry Hobo would never be tricked by a story out of One Thousand and One Nights.
This teaches you to be skeptical of "truths" handed to you on a platter by the media.
Though, we're not talking about reporting on "truths" that are partisan spin. We're talking about a front page report about a disaster/national security issue. You know, the kind of thing where taking the time to investigate it on your own could be costly, and that you expect has little room for intentionally misleading reporting.
In any case, it's poor form to publish a prank story implying people were in imminent danger, especially in a country like Jordan, which according to TFA is not known for pranks. I'd be angry too, since the prank had actual consequences (loss of productivity, etc).
Actually, I believe all of this data was publicly accessable, even without an account. This is part of the updated privacy controls (which set most everything to public by default if someone never adjusted their privacy). Thus it seems a ToS would never have applied, though FB obviously wants it to.
Actually, the quote in the summary explains this exactly. If you know who your target audience is, and that they are on the PC, and your development budget is below that expectation, then it make sense. In other words, AAA PC titles will only work if they belong to a genre where nearly all of the players are exclusively PC gamers. If you want to make a AAA PC game, it better be an MMO or RTS, not a platformer or shooter. Alternatively, you'd better have a DRM that's as good as that of a console, and plan to make your money off a smaller audience.
Would it be pretty much OK as they kind of thought innocents might theoretically be a threat? Or would you want to kill people like that?
If they came clean right off the bat and said "Shit, that journalist looked like he was threatening our helicopter. We don't want that mistake to happen again, so we will make adjustments to our procedures, and the media should also be aware not to use postures that can be misinterpreted as threatening" and then followed through, then I would be alright with that. The problem is entirely that the military clammed up, and kept claiming that they were legitimate insurgents, which is clearly not the case.
I would agree that a better look would have been nice, and possibly cleared up any mistaken identifications. However, the kneeling posture around the corner absolutely looks like he was taking aim on the apache. It's terribly bad coincidence between his pose and the angle of the Apache, and unfortunately it ended in a loss of life. This was a tragic misunderstanding.
I don't detect malice, though.
Watch it again then. And this time, turn on the sound. Or at least read the subtitles.
Let me rephrase: the malice is because he mistakenly identified them as enemy combatants who has been attacking and killing his friends and countrymen, not because he saw warm bodies and felt like shooting. The first type seems reasonably justified for a combat situation, the second would have been murder.
Yeah, a camera really looks soooo much like an RPG.
Same goes for the tank driver who overrun a body (was that person even dead?)
I agree that these are terrible mistakes, but they definitely look more like mistakes than malice. I'm not saying that the killing was a good thing, but it seemed that the incident that starts this whole thing off was a misidentification that appeared to be an enemy combatant taking aim on his position with an RPG, with the ROE taking over from there.
In other words, put me in a helicopter with the same low-resolution video feed (we are watching this video in a comfortable desk and the knowledge that it's a journo with a camera, he was not), and any of us could have made the same mistake. It's horrible that it happened, but I don't see how you can be so definite that he didn't just make an initial mistake and choose self-preservation over risking a closer look. How are you so sure he wanted to shoot this man just for the sake of squeezing off rounds at live targets?
Finally got a chance to watch. It seems to be the gunner not having sufficient resolution to determine the camera and other items were not an RPG and AK-47s is the cause, and passing the intel off as conclusive. I don't detect malice, though. Hell, I couldn't even tell that the 'AK-47s' weren't actually weapons. At the point the cameraman kneels around the corner and wields the camera, I find it difficult to fault the gunner for believing him to be taking aim.
From there on out, with the assumption there are armed insurgents, everything seems as close to the ROE as they can be reasonably expected to get in the situation. It's a terrible thing to have happen, and I hope and pray it doesn't again, but it's a case of mistaken identity not of malice.
I will reiterate, though, that my beef is still with the military for not being forthcoming about the incident. FOIA is there for a reason, it was wrong of them to cock-block it if they don't think anything wrong happened. However, I do agree that there probably wasn't a ROE violation, which just makes the cover-up more puzzling.
In light of this new information that you did not have, NOW what do you think about the use of a gunship, and the order to go ahead and fire?
Agreed, I hadn't thought that they assumed themselves to be in imminent danger (again, the previous accounts I read missed this piece of information). They erred in their identification, but had it been an RPG preparing to fire their responding attack would have been justified.
As I mentioned elsewhere, though, the real issue is the coverup, not the mistake. Why not come out and say 'that camera looked a hell of a lot like an RPG, so we fired on a threatening target'? I would have said shame on the journalist, instead.
I don't think it hurts the image of the Apache crew, just of whoever ordered them to fire. I'm willing to assume they were given faulty information of the threat on the ground. The question is who decided it was a good idea to use large caliber weaponry very near civilians?
They weren't given faulty data; they were the ones collecting the data. The Apache's gunner was the one with the first eyeballs on the crowd (consisting of around a dozen people, including two reporters).
Thanks for the clarification, I'll try to watch the video before going into particulars again. But the point remains, why not own up to the mistake? Perhaps it would reduce further incidents of TV cameras being mistaken as RPGs, and prevent the uproar over a coverup.
Why? Because then you have all these d*ckheads coming out of the woodwork that think that America can do nothing but wrong or that the American military can do nothing but wrong.
And you propose a cover-up is the best way to keep from riling them up? You must have a promising career in politics!
They are quite willing to take a few minutes of video out of context, fixate in their cushy suburban (or other) lifestyle and not consider the broader context that this video was ripped from.
So they can either make those who will always oppose the military mad by admitting fault and promising to not let it happen again, or they can cover it up and piss off them and the people who are generally supportive of our troops when it comes to light.
I fail to see how reduced transparency and oversight is a good thing in this (or any) context.
We also don't have any context for this stuff.
In isolation, it makes the Apache crew look pretty retarded but we also don't know what else was going on at the time or anything about this location.
I don't think it hurts the image of the Apache crew, just of whoever ordered them to fire. I'm willing to assume they were given faulty information of the threat on the ground. The question is who decided it was a good idea to use large caliber weaponry very near civilians?
But more important is why the military didn't just own up and say "we had a breakdown in communication, we're taking steps to prevent this happening again"? Not taking responsibility implies they knew they messed up, but don't want to admit it. That's much worse than just erring in the first place.
Until we develop better ways of making the journey sending meatsacks is just pretty damned wasteful and IMHO dumb. ...
Let the unmanned remotes and robots do the hard and dangerous stuff and keep the meatsacks on the ground working on better propulsion systems so we can actually get somewhere in our lifetimes. Sending humans into space at this point is just a monumental waste of resources ATM.
Putting humans in space now gives us the expertise for later, when we do have those improved propulsion systems. Humans are also more versitile and flexible than a special-purpose robot when mission parameters or experiments change. Not every mission needs humans, but many do.
And as for rent-an-astronaut, they will need to be trained by a private corporation (who has to build their facilities and training programs from scratch), and once we use them a few times it will end up more expensive than having NASA astronauts.
Again, these guys may well have screwed up and may well be deserving of punishment. Assuming, however, that my base assumption (that these guys aren't all evil merciless killing machines) is correct, there must be factors we don't, as civilians, understand.
Even if they did nothing wrong, the question then becomes "why cover it up in the first place?" That is far more troubling to me than the fact that the mistake happened.