Yes, really. Most leftist organizations and peace [sic] groups outside Israel are pretty much uniformly against Israel.
There's a difference between saying, for instance, that the Gaza settlements are illegal/unjustified and saying that therefore every Palestinian action is a justified response. In other words, there's a difference between being against the policies (official or otherwise) of the Israeli government (and thereby sympathizing with the people who are wronged by those policies) and being PRO-Palestinian reactions to those policies. The earlier comment had said that "leftists" take "the Palestinian side," which is massively oversimplified and sloppy at best. The GratefulNet has a point in that, at least, "leftists" are often smeared as being antisemitic simply for disagreeing with some Israeli politics, when in fact those very same "leftists" are the first to praise Israel for, e.g., its gay and gender equality -- where in many ways, btw, it's ahead of the US, let alone other Middle Eastern countries.
And self-styled anarchists like the bozos behind AdBusters are very anti-Israel.
Anarchists are right-wing, not left-wing.
I wish that were the case, but many leftist groups rally in support of Hamas and even Hezbollah, despite the enormous cognitive dissonance that should cause. I'd post links, but all you need to do is a Google search or searches on the sites I mentioned above.
Saying that "many leftist groups" support Hamas is a bit like saying that "many right-wing groups" supporting murdering doctors who provide reproductive services. It's true for some values of "many," but it's not a remotely helpful comment to make.
"bad words" aren't bad. It's the people who believe that "bad words" exist who are bad people.
That's a bit extreme, don't you think? That someone disagrees with you doesn't qualify that person as a "bad person." I happen to share your point of view that delicate sensibilities are usually too easy an excuse for silencing otherwise valuable content (or even valueless content whose existence hides a slippery slope), but someone who disagrees isn't magically Hitler for disagreeing. Not to mention, there's certainly a fair argument to be made that the manner of expression **can** be relevant, particularly when we're talking about making value determinations. It's one thing to say offensive speech should never be censored under any circumstances (I think I agree, although I tend to shy away from absolutes as a general rule); it's quite another to suggest, implicitly, that offensive speech and equivalent speech expressed differently have equal *value*. This can matter when we're talking not about whether to censor, but whether to promote/favor, which is a pretty important question with First Amendment implications in and of itself (but it gets a lot less airtime than "censorship," which is as easy an abstract cause to rally against as Naziism).
I'm thinking genuine original creative ideas vs. an algorithm that just combines words according to preset rules. I don't think we're quite there yet.
What's the difference between that and poetry that adheres to existing rules? Is a high school student's perfectly-metered, rhymed poem any less deserving of First Amendment protection than a seasoned poet's taking of creative license, just because the merit of the high school student's poem was purely technical? In fact, language itself is just a set of rules. Creative expression occurs within those rules -- sometimes the creativity comes in breaking them, yes (although even then, you can only break so many before your expression totally loses coherence and, with it, artistic value -- even rebellious art exists in reaction to, and therefore in a sense in conformance with, rules), but more often it comes in using them in a way that is deemed by some collective subset of people to be sufficiently unique as to be "creative" or "high art" or whatever. But it's still just people following the rules in different ways. We only think computers are different because we don't view what computers do as "thought," because we created them and therefore they are "artificial" (although can you tell me why it is that any computer language even WORKS in the first place?) -- but, of course, even the most decorated and accomplished neurophysicist in the world couldn't tell you with absolute certainty what "thought" even **IS**.
But someone a large enough organization (or someone with enough money; remember, the Supreme Court says that money is speech) can force you to listen to them, by drowning out all the other voices.
My TV and radio both have an "off" knob. Who can force me not to use it?
By that reasoning, noise ordinances are inherently suspect under the First Amendment, because you could easily stick your fingers in your ears or use earplugs. If analysis of the efficacy of our laws boils down to nothing more than spouting hypothetical solutions that sidestep the realities of everyday life, then we've failed to meaningfully engage the question. Anyone who thinks "the law," and that includes the First Amendment, is simplistic enough that we can apply it like we would a mathematical formula, doesn't deserve to have his or her opinion taken seriously. The First Amendment is and ought to be more thoughtfully complex than you're giving it credit for.
Thus, under your interpretation, organizations (and the rich) have the right to have their voices heard, to the exclusion of others.
That's your interpretation of something I didn't say.
The other commenter's point was that it's a reasonably foreseeable consequence of your argument. You don't have to literally say words for their intended or necessary meaning to nonetheless be clear.
This idea will spread if corporations can profit it from it. Expect to see "proprietary" metering coming to electricity, gas, water, fuel and anything else that can be metered.
This is already how credit scores are calculated. Even though you can take actions that can be reasonably expected to have a positive impact to some degree on your credit report, there's no way whatsoever for the average consumer to calculate "if I do X, my credit score will improve by Y." This number is allowed to affect everything from our ability to get a loan to our ability to get JOBS, yet the formulae used to calculate the number are protected from scrutiny under corporation-friendly "trade secret" laws.
I am no laywer and I am assuming the cap is part of your contract with them, I cannot see how they can keep their definition of bandwidth usage a secret.
They are now basically claiming that you are restricted in your usage upto the cap but they refuse to tell you what the cap actually *means*. Without clear understanding of how usage is measured, the number of the cap is meaningless.
I am a lawyer, and this is the first thing that occurred to me. Basic contract law is that you've only agreed to terms that are set forth in the contract (which may be written or oral). The notion, employed not just by AT&T but also by the entire health insurance industry, BTW, that you as a paying, contracting customer could actually literally be paying for a good or service whose specifications you have no right to see is little more than a transparent attempt at an end-run around the legal notion of unilateral mistake of fact, which is black-letter grounds for rescission. That's the generous read. The less generous read is that it's intentional misrepresentation, i.e., fraud.
Unfortunately, as I've never repped a plaintiff's class on this issue, the only occasions I've had to research it have been on my own personal time, and haven't turned up much. I'm not aware of any court cases that have looked into whether or not this is legal, but I can tell you that it is rampant. I'd love to see someone challenge it in court (or, better yet, pay ME to challenge it;-))
If you can't see that the current elite is screwing up big time,
Not sure what in my comment remotely indicated that I think the "elites" are getting everything right. In fact, I'm pretty sure I explicitly noted my agreement with several points the author raised.
if you can't see how the financial "elite" screws up your country,
Didn't realize I'd wandered into a political discussion here, but simmer down, little fella. Don't worry, I'm a liberal too. Really, I'd have thought the whole "don't hate on women and gays" thing would've given me away here. But just to be clear, yeah, I'm definitely on the same wavelength: the aristocracy are robbing us blind, and with our blessing. It's fucking disgusting.
if you can't see that the Jews want America to make war for them, then you are a retard.
Woah Nellie.
I can't tell if this is a very subtly clever post where you're trying to make my point for me, or if you're so horrifically tone-deaf that you don't see that you've actually just made my point for me. Anyway, just in case you don't get it, Israel =/= "Jews," and believe it or not, you can disagree with America's massive amounts of foreign aid to Israel without needing to be anti-Semitic. I'm married to a Jew and have a brother-in-law who lives in Tel Aviv, and I don't like how much we pander to Israel. Guess what? You can make a political point every bit as effectively without conflating (1) all Israelis with the Israeli government or (2) Israeli hawks with "Jews" generally. As to "retard," it's unfortunate that this kind of immature derisive insult is so common it's NOT the type of thing to put off polite company.
Oh, but clearly, if you go around spouting anti-Semitic nonsense and find yourself out of work one of these days, well that must be just a great big Jewish conspiracy, yeah? Again, thanks for illustrating my point so very clearly.
Real security guys see through the bullshit and they will be labelled all of that by the Sheeple. Those who believed all the WMD lies and those who believe "Iran is evil". I will be happy when they blow up jews, because they steal land and kill the landowners just because they can. Now call me a Nazi, ass-kisser.
What you just wrote here makes so little sense that I'm actually worried for your mental health. Seriously, dude, go take a walk in the sun and talk to an actual human being, face-to-face. Just try to remember not to brandish a knife while doing it. Pro tip, that kind of thing tends to freak people the fuck out.
The author mentions things like one-time/minor drug use offenses and an unwillingness to kiss ass (btw, the latter isn't something HR can really screen for, and there are plenty of other talented professionals in other sectors who've been unfairly burned for this -- it isn't unique to "geek culture"), but falters when it comes to discussing just what he means by "personality." If what he's speaking to is more tolerance for people who see the world in a different way, he's absolutely got a point, and it's one that applies to far more industries than just security. Lots of good, smart folks suffer career setbacks for *actual* outside-the-box thinking (which needs to be distinguished from in-the-rarely-explored-corner-of-the-box thinking, which is what most employers actually want when they ask for people to think "outside the box"). Lots of industries and jobs require a four-year degree when the value of such a degree is attenuated, at best. Lots of people in all kinds of fields get overlooked just because they don't have that magical four-year degree even when their real-world experience and ability and willingness to learn more than make up for it. IMNSHO, that's a loss to society no matter which sector it affects.
But I worry that his mention of "lawyers" may be code for things like anti-harassment workplace rules. I can get behind saying we should tolerate oddness and even occasional brusqueness in service of higher-quality job performance. But I worry, based on the word choice employed, that it's being implicitly suggested that entire swaths of the population are worth counting out for a marginal increase in security. "Geek culture" broadly has been criticized, and in my view often rightly so, for an apparent tendency towards unpalatable points of view vis-a-vis the GLBTQ community, women, racial minorities, religious minorities, etc. In my experience, this is less a case of anonymity revealing what we don't want to see (that explains trolling and maybe a little bit more, but not everything) and more a case of arrested adolescence. As someone who was a bit of an ostracized nerd as a kid, I sincerely do empathize with the tendency to want to crawl into a hole and say "fuck you, world" as a response to unkindness. But there comes a time when no amount of talent makes up for a willful refusal to function in a diverse society. It's one thing to ask coworkers to shrug their shoulders that some of the security guys don't do small talk; it's entirely another to ask them to look the other way when their company's security system is run by a literal neo-Nazi.
It may very well be that the author didn't mean that all boundaries should be done away with. But the article is far from clear on that point.
>Are you referring to the "law-abiding manner" in which our business and financial communities have behaved?
You mean the law-abiding manner in which they use and abuse your government to pass regulations that support their monopolies (or near monopolies)? Or the law-abiding manner in which they lobby for subsidies using your tax dollars?
Both things which libertarianism abolishes, but current government supports in spades.
Right, but there are more possible solutions to "current government has become corrupted" than "get rid of most of the government and replace it with nothing." Jefferson apparently thought that the entire operation of government should be re-evaluated every generation or so. He was probably off in terms of timing (that's far too much frequent change), but a quick look at history makes you think he may have had a point. America had just under 100 years before its first major civil unrest, and then just about another 100 years before the second. Maybe the solution is to completely shake out and redo government every 100 years. Maybe we decide to have a constitutional convention every 100 years or something. But simply getting rid of *government* doesn't fix the problem.
>Libertarians seem to believe that without heavy regulation that free market fairy dust is going to make all the bankers be honest
No, that has nothing to do with the free market. Is has to do with the idea that if the government is not permitted to pass regulatory law, then the banks can't buy themselves portions of the government because if they do, the law is struck down swiftly.
You are confusing two important things:
Libertarians believe the free market greases the wheels of ingenuity and capitalism. Libertarians believe the government greases the wheels of modern day corporatism, socialism, and cronyism. You're getting stuck on that last one. What we don't have today is real capitalism. We have cronyism--a state where laws are bought and sold to support the highest bidder.
Agreed, but, again, getting rid of government won't stop things like cronyism or corporatism (it will stop corporate socialism, I suppose, but only technically, in the same sense that banning nail-biting would create more criminals). These problems will arise through market mechanisms instead of government mechanisms. And, no, the free market won't stop it, because history shows us that equal bargaining power is a myth (free market solutions rely on relative parity of bargaining power, which includes everything from more or less equitable resources/opportunities to availability of information). Traditionally, the way that you try to "up" the bargaining power of the "little guy" is through government regulation. Of course, the problem is when that regulation becomes co-opted into the service of those with higher bargaining power, which is the current problem we have, as you note. But recognizing that the solution to a problem has become corrupted doesn't mean we substitute for a corrupted solution, no solution at all. You won't be able to point to any societies where a totally free market has been able to solve the problem of unequal bargaining power, because no totally free market societies (other than pre-historic ones) have ever existed. Someone else noted that libertarians generally believe in some basic set of laws -- as well they should, because a lawless economy is no real economy at all. But the problem is that even basic laws can become corrupted. Currency manipulators, cartels, natural monopolies -- all these things can and do happen in the absence of government regulation. So your choice is government regulation (which MAY become corrupted if not carefully monitored) or some version of might-makes-right-plus-basic-torts-and-enforceable-contracts.
I'm with you that the modern corporatocracy has been enabled through regulatory capture. But I fail to see how the necessary conclusion from that is "therefore destroy re
Serious question: what is it that you think you buy when you buy a music CD?
Most people, I think, would agree that you haven't bought the entire copyright in the music: you don't have the right to turn around and market and sell a million copies of the CD as though you were the artist (if you did, music would rarely be made, and high-quality audio recordings would likely be non-existent, as the artist would have to recoup all costs and expected profits from a single sale). So what have you bought? You've bought a physical object, sure, but the physical object itself isn't WHY you paid the 15 bucks, or whatever music CDs sell for (who buys CDs anymore). You paid 15 bucks because you wanted to be able to listen to the music. The value you sought was the right to experience, on a repeated basis at your convenience, listening to the music. The traditional legal view is that, once you've decided you no longer want this experience, you can recoup some of your costs by selling the CD second-hand to someone else. But, enter the internet age and suddenly there's a new wrinkle: NOW you have the technological capability to continue to benefit from the repeated experience of listening to the music whenever you want, AND to sell and/or give that experience to multiple other people without inhibiting your ability to enjoy it concurrently. Well, now you're recouping your costs without giving something up, and another person has gotten the full value of the item without having to pay full value. Under the old system, buying used meant buying slightly inferior, which was why you got a discounted price and provided you with a legitimate choice: buy the full quality product from the original seller, or buy a slightly lower quality product secondhand. Because you were selling a different good, you were not usurping the seller's exclusive right to sell something she owned. With modern technology making it trivially easy to duplicate products at the same level of quality as the original, you're now competing directly with the seller by selling the exact same product (one that you never invested the resources to create) instead of offering a substitute with an attendant cost to yourself. So, essentially, you've unilaterally lowered the selling price of the CD without the seller's agreement. You've altered the market for the seller and enriched yourself at her expense. The seller didn't agree to sell you a CD for five cents (your effective cost after you've resold digital copies to multiple people). The seller agreed to sell you a CD for 15 bucks.
Yes, I know, the seller still got 15 bucks, you can't prove any of those people would have bought it from the seller so no "provable" lost profits (btw, this is exactly why the copyright act has its horrific statutory damages clause -- they've already answered this argument before you've made it and, yup, it's an ugly, bullshit answer), it doesn't "cost" anything to make extra copies and therefore no one is "hurt." You can take this view, but it's extremely short-sighted and, frankly, entitled (yeah, I said it). Yes, these are old rules based on old tech and they need to change and accommodate the new world and new tech, and the rights owners are being draconian jerks about it and the law is broken. All of these things are true. But how does any one of them mean that therefore we throw our hands up and say "IP is ridiculous"? I certainly don't want to live in a world where there are even larger hurdles and costs and disincentives for talented but cash-poor artists to seek to hone their craft and produce amazing music and writings and movies and games and artwork. Sure, there will always be SOME art, just like there was moonshine during prohibition, but moonshine is a poor substitute for a quality bourbon or a nicely-aged wine. And yes, I'm aware that we're not talking about making art illegal; we're just talking about making it impossible for artists to expect any kind of realistically orderly and enforceable system of rights that would help them, you know, EAT so
You're confused, and your apparent resentment of women's constitutional right to bodily integrity does not vouch for your rationality, but here goes anyway:
The state law did not take precedence over the Fifth Amendment. The state law, instead, allowed for the delegation of the state's eminent domain power to a corporation, and there was no constitutional provision that made such delegation invalid. Part of the analysis was whether or not the Fifth Amendment's public use requirement could be read more broadly as a public purpose. The Court held that it could, the state law in question was constitutional, and the taking was for a valid public purpose/public use. The fact that a state law influenced the Court's reasoning does not mean the state law preempted the US Constitution. There are no state laws that preempt the US Constitution. None. At most, there are state laws that do not VIOLATE the Constitution, and/or are simply outside of the scope of the Constitution, which means that those laws are, wait for it, CONSTITUTIONAL. Get it? The Court held that the state law in question was constitutional, which means that the Constitution was what took precedence.
Next time you're looking for a good rage outlet for your uterus envy, it would behoove you to actually have a clue what you're talking about first.
You're attempting to pre-quantify all possible scenarios. That works in computers... well, not really; a lot of input validation is "X Y ad Z are valid; all else is strange and scary." The world isn't so black and white.
I'm an attorney. My job frequently involves trying to figure out what the hell the law is when legislators don't do their damn job of making it clear. It's not about whether or where trying to imagine every permutation "works"; it's about asking questions to determine if the law is sufficiently clear or not, and trying to find clarifying case law when the statute and legislative history aren't clear. As you say, the world is not black and white, which is why it's very important that the law do as much as it can to warn people about what will or won't be considered legal *in advance* of their deciding to do it. Regardless, this entire tangent is a complete departure from the broader point I was making.
The real question is: what better way do you propose? The police can't escort every single citizen around everywhere to make sure they play nice. People need to defend themselves. I can kill a man with a drinking straw or a pencil, though I'm much more effective with my bare hands or a knife. That's not really great when a firearm is involved at range; in closed quarters, I'll take my bare hands against a guy with a gun. At range? Arms are too short to box with God.
Again, actually, no, that's not the real question. My point was that you were confusing legality with ethicality, and you're doing it again right here. I'm not arguing with you about what the law ought to be; I'm pointing out to you that what the law IS and what it OUGHT to be are not always the same thing, and therefore if you're going to use language referring to legality, your analysis needs to adhere consistently to that decision. When you go off the rails, as you do here, into questions of justification, you're getting into policy arguments. Even if some jurisdictions make distinctions more or less along the lines you do (I've no doubt some do), that doesn't change the fact that using the word "criminals" in reference to gun owners is not particularly useful when you haven't defined what you mean by "criminals." Some people are only "criminals" in some jurisdictions where they wouldn't be in others. Do you understand the distinction I'm making here? Your self-defending gun owner is, in some jurisdictions, every bit as much of a "criminal" as a home invader. That's why it's not useful to rely on "crime" statistics when making arguments about the efficacy of gun laws, given that some gun laws technically create more criminals. The better question is whether gun laws increase or reduce VIOLENCE, whether or not that violence has legal sanction.
What's with this "apologist" thing lately? It's like people wanted to find a word that says, "Well, this stuff is wrong and evil and bad, and you're saying sorry for it being wrong and evil and bad and for people doing it." Loaded wording.
Just because you dislike or don't understand something doesn't render it "loaded." I'm tempted to give you a lmgtfy link but I'll play it classier here.
They did this to Kevin Mitnick. He was initially forbidden to use any communications technology other than a landline telephone.
The difference is that the order there at least bore some relation to the crime he was charged with. I didn't see anything in the article suggesting that the woman was charged with having used Facebook to commit a crime. A tort, perhaps -- but then it's up to the teens/parents to sue her for emotional distress and seek an order in civil court enjoining her from using facebook. Even if the judge was merely trying to keep her from harassing the victims and their families, there's a much narrower way to do that, for instance, by ordering her not to contact them, or not to post anything that could be seen by them or someone they know. Ordering her to DELETE her facebook account, on the other hand, seems sweepingly overbroad and totally disconnected from the DUI she was charged with.
I have never seen a good study of the actual proved innocent after death penalty administered, but I imagine the numbers will be very low.
Other commenter already said that. The important point, which you seem to have missed, is that "low" isn't zero. That means that, in a country with the death penalty, a non-zero number of people is being MURDERED by the state. You're either okay with that or you aren't. It's not a question of deterrents or sliding scales or whatever -- those are pragmatic questions that you get to AFTER you answer the critical question: are you okay with the state being in the business of murdering innocent people? Is there any situation, I don't care what, in which you are morally and ethically comfortable with your country institutionally, intentionally, legally MURDERING INNOCENT HUMAN BEINGS? This is a yes or no question. After you answer it, then we can talk about all the reasons you think it's justified, or what you think (based on, presumably, actual evidence you can provide?) the likelihood is of it happening.
However, I have no problem with an error rate of one in ten thousand death penalty convictions being wrong.
I'm guessing you've never talked to a person on death row, or someone being tried for a crime whose punishment might include the death penalty. Have you ever had a conversation with a young person facing his or her own mortality? Have you ever spoken with a terminally ill person who's afraid of death? What if you personally had to execute the person in question? What if you found out the next day that you had murdered an innocent person? Have you actually really sat down and thought about this?
Perhaps you have. Perhaps I'm giving you too much credit here. I have difficulty imagining how a decent human being with an ounce of empathy could seriously take such a dim and dismissive view of other people's lives, and so I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here and hoping/assuming you think this just because you haven't really invested the emotional energy to fully comprehend the horror of what you just said.
but we should have faith that the innocent people will be weeded out eventually.
The same kind of faith we should have that the government won't violate our other rights?
When you approve of abortion, you cut the logical feet out from under the disapproval of any other murder. In point of fact, regardless of what a currently-insane society says, murder is evil, and should not be committed, no matter what the flavor.
Do please let us know when you start collecting signatures for a law requiring biological parents to donate nonessential matching organs where their children will die without an organ transplant.
I don't think a country can call itself civilized when it decides that the best way to reduce violent crime is to walk softly and carry a big stick. Why not look at eliminating the root causes of the crime, rather than enabling civilians to shoot criminals?
Because that costs money we're using to build corporate-sponsored gated communities to protect the important people from the lower-class peons. Why solve the problem when it's so much easier to just insulate yourself from it through invisible upward wealth transfers?
You have a lot of references in your comment to what the data purportedly show (or don't), and no links to any examples of such data. Care to provide them? Personally, I think it's only responsible to back up your opinions with facts when you accuse countries with stricter gun control of being "uncivilized" for it.
Shooting a motherfucker that's in your house coming at you and your kids with a samurai sword is not a crime.
What if it's just someone in your house running at you but you're not sure if he has a samurai sword? What if he's not really running at you, but just walking faster than you're comfortable with? What if he's not really walking toward you, but he's in your house and you don't know why and now you're feeling twitchy? What if he's not in your house, but he's on your property walking toward your house and you get a bad feeling about him? What if he's just hanging out in your yard, not threatening you, but you tell him to leave and he doesn't? Where's the line between when shooting him is criminal and when it isn't?
The answer, of course, is that it depends on the jurisdiction you live in. Because when you use a term like "criminal," you're not talking about whether something is right or wrong, you're talking about whether it's legal or illegal. In other words, what might strike most decent human beings as unacceptable, uncivilized, and completely wrong could nonetheless be perfectly legal; by the same token, something laudable and decent and good could be technically illegal. Talking about guns as a matter of *criminal* conduct is not terribly useful, particularly given that, often, simply owning a gun in and of itself may be a criminal act, depending on the jurisdiction and the specifics of the ownership in question. That's the point you seem to have missed. To YOU it may be obvious what we should regard as "lawful" use of a gun, but you're using the wrong word to communicate the underlying principle you're trying to convince people of -- just like the NRA does, as the other commenter pointed out.
It's all well and good for you to be a gun apologist, but don't be intellectually dishonest in the process.
I'm less familiar with the last three than with the first, so I'll focus on that one: why is the multiverse "desperate hand-waving"? It seems to me that it's a theoretical possibility that may become testable if we ever achieve the ability to travel (or communicate) at speeds exceeding the speed of light. Of course it's subject to misinterpretation and over-dramatization -- but that's true of anything sufficiently new, shiny, and/or untested. The problem as I take it isn't that faster-than-light travel has been proven to be *actually* impossible; it's that it is *theoretically* impossible because our current understanding of reality tells us that (1) causality is essential to existence and (2) FTL travel will weaken or destroy causality.
Why is it more scientific to presume that FTL, something that does not yet exist, will necessarily act in a particular way, thereby rendering it impossible (isn't this its own kind of intellectual paradox? Something that doesn't exist can't exist because if it existed it would destroy everything including itself? Seems circular, at least, if not paradoxical), than is it to hypothesize that, *IF* FTL travel were possible, that possibility could be explained by something that, *under current conditions*, is for now unfalsifiable? Doesn't that basically amount to arguing that it's more scientific to presume we'll never be able to test something we think is theoretically impossible than it is to discuss hypothetical models that neither contradict current scientific theories nor foreclose the eventual possibility of testing? Why isn't it equally unscientific to roll your eyes at the theory out-of-hand when, technically, it's as good a possibility as any? It may not be *practical* (yet), but it strikes me as unreasonably dismissive to write it off as "desperate."
Oh my god. If I have to read one more BS Apple story like this on the internet, I'm going to go nuts.
Apple lovers must be stopped. They're driving ad revenue and hits to all these *retarded* articles. They keep writing them because people keep clicking on them. STOP IT people!
Maybe I should just follow "if u can't beat em, join em." I should just post "Using an iPhone gives you crabs" or "iPhone as valuable as cream of wheat" and watch the money roll in.
I just laugh. Remember that new screw hoax? They said "they just make it too easy."
This might be intentional on your part, but you ought to know that you're coming across like an unpopular high school student with a bad case of sour grapes. You want to hate Apple (and every other smartphone company) for labor practices or something, totally, have at it. That's a legitimate reason to criticize a company. Another legitimate reason to criticize would be if they made products designed/likely to break within a couple years so you'd have to buy a new one every so often (given that my old iPhone 3G has held up better than any phone I've ever had, I don't think this is a criticism you could level at Apple). Maybe you take issue with their taking advantage of overseas tax shelters to avoid paying their fair share of corporate taxes (like every big company does). Or let's say they donated huge sums of corporate money to some horrific political movement, like the Klan or something. Those are all reasonable bases on which to criticize a large business.
NOT a reasonable basis: "I don't like that other people like them so much." You're not complaining that there's some other, worthier product that's being overlooked. You're not complaining that your company is forcing everyone to use iPhones. You're not complaining that oversaturated iPhone coverage is harming you in some way. You're just complaining that it's popular.... Sorry, but you're just being a whiner. Put on your big girl pants and get over it.
And I'm sure that the clips they selected for air were totally representative of the reactions they got from most people.
The fact that some subset of people on the street is uninformed and unobservant is hardly good evidence that the Apple-fans subset of people can be fairly classified as similarly uninformed and unobservant. It's one thing to roll your eyes at the silly ceremony and media circus that accompany Apple releases. It's totally another to use your irritation with the attention Apple gets as a reason to snark on total strangers who happen to like Apple products.
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Yes, really. Most leftist organizations and peace [sic] groups outside Israel are pretty much uniformly against Israel.
There's a difference between saying, for instance, that the Gaza settlements are illegal/unjustified and saying that therefore every Palestinian action is a justified response. In other words, there's a difference between being against the policies (official or otherwise) of the Israeli government (and thereby sympathizing with the people who are wronged by those policies) and being PRO-Palestinian reactions to those policies. The earlier comment had said that "leftists" take "the Palestinian side," which is massively oversimplified and sloppy at best. The GratefulNet has a point in that, at least, "leftists" are often smeared as being antisemitic simply for disagreeing with some Israeli politics, when in fact those very same "leftists" are the first to praise Israel for, e.g., its gay and gender equality -- where in many ways, btw, it's ahead of the US, let alone other Middle Eastern countries.
And self-styled anarchists like the bozos behind AdBusters are very anti-Israel.
Anarchists are right-wing, not left-wing.
I wish that were the case, but many leftist groups rally in support of Hamas and even Hezbollah, despite the enormous cognitive dissonance that should cause. I'd post links, but all you need to do is a Google search or searches on the sites I mentioned above.
Saying that "many leftist groups" support Hamas is a bit like saying that "many right-wing groups" supporting murdering doctors who provide reproductive services. It's true for some values of "many," but it's not a remotely helpful comment to make.
"bad words" aren't bad. It's the people who believe that "bad words" exist who are bad people.
That's a bit extreme, don't you think? That someone disagrees with you doesn't qualify that person as a "bad person." I happen to share your point of view that delicate sensibilities are usually too easy an excuse for silencing otherwise valuable content (or even valueless content whose existence hides a slippery slope), but someone who disagrees isn't magically Hitler for disagreeing. Not to mention, there's certainly a fair argument to be made that the manner of expression **can** be relevant, particularly when we're talking about making value determinations. It's one thing to say offensive speech should never be censored under any circumstances (I think I agree, although I tend to shy away from absolutes as a general rule); it's quite another to suggest, implicitly, that offensive speech and equivalent speech expressed differently have equal *value*. This can matter when we're talking not about whether to censor, but whether to promote/favor, which is a pretty important question with First Amendment implications in and of itself (but it gets a lot less airtime than "censorship," which is as easy an abstract cause to rally against as Naziism).
I'm thinking genuine original creative ideas vs. an algorithm that just combines words according to preset rules. I don't think we're quite there yet.
What's the difference between that and poetry that adheres to existing rules? Is a high school student's perfectly-metered, rhymed poem any less deserving of First Amendment protection than a seasoned poet's taking of creative license, just because the merit of the high school student's poem was purely technical? In fact, language itself is just a set of rules. Creative expression occurs within those rules -- sometimes the creativity comes in breaking them, yes (although even then, you can only break so many before your expression totally loses coherence and, with it, artistic value -- even rebellious art exists in reaction to, and therefore in a sense in conformance with, rules), but more often it comes in using them in a way that is deemed by some collective subset of people to be sufficiently unique as to be "creative" or "high art" or whatever. But it's still just people following the rules in different ways. We only think computers are different because we don't view what computers do as "thought," because we created them and therefore they are "artificial" (although can you tell me why it is that any computer language even WORKS in the first place?) -- but, of course, even the most decorated and accomplished neurophysicist in the world couldn't tell you with absolute certainty what "thought" even **IS**.
But someone a large enough organization (or someone with enough money; remember, the Supreme Court says that money is speech) can force you to listen to them, by drowning out all the other voices.
My TV and radio both have an "off" knob. Who can force me not to use it?
By that reasoning, noise ordinances are inherently suspect under the First Amendment, because you could easily stick your fingers in your ears or use earplugs. If analysis of the efficacy of our laws boils down to nothing more than spouting hypothetical solutions that sidestep the realities of everyday life, then we've failed to meaningfully engage the question. Anyone who thinks "the law," and that includes the First Amendment, is simplistic enough that we can apply it like we would a mathematical formula, doesn't deserve to have his or her opinion taken seriously. The First Amendment is and ought to be more thoughtfully complex than you're giving it credit for.
Thus, under your interpretation, organizations (and the rich) have the right to have their voices heard, to the exclusion of others.
That's your interpretation of something I didn't say.
The other commenter's point was that it's a reasonably foreseeable consequence of your argument. You don't have to literally say words for their intended or necessary meaning to nonetheless be clear.
This idea will spread if corporations can profit it from it. Expect to see "proprietary" metering coming to electricity, gas, water, fuel and anything else that can be metered.
This is already how credit scores are calculated. Even though you can take actions that can be reasonably expected to have a positive impact to some degree on your credit report, there's no way whatsoever for the average consumer to calculate "if I do X, my credit score will improve by Y." This number is allowed to affect everything from our ability to get a loan to our ability to get JOBS, yet the formulae used to calculate the number are protected from scrutiny under corporation-friendly "trade secret" laws.
I am no laywer and I am assuming the cap is part of your contract with them, I cannot see how they can keep their definition of bandwidth usage a secret. They are now basically claiming that you are restricted in your usage upto the cap but they refuse to tell you what the cap actually *means*. Without clear understanding of how usage is measured, the number of the cap is meaningless.
I am a lawyer, and this is the first thing that occurred to me. Basic contract law is that you've only agreed to terms that are set forth in the contract (which may be written or oral). The notion, employed not just by AT&T but also by the entire health insurance industry, BTW, that you as a paying, contracting customer could actually literally be paying for a good or service whose specifications you have no right to see is little more than a transparent attempt at an end-run around the legal notion of unilateral mistake of fact, which is black-letter grounds for rescission. That's the generous read. The less generous read is that it's intentional misrepresentation, i.e., fraud.
Unfortunately, as I've never repped a plaintiff's class on this issue, the only occasions I've had to research it have been on my own personal time, and haven't turned up much. I'm not aware of any court cases that have looked into whether or not this is legal, but I can tell you that it is rampant. I'd love to see someone challenge it in court (or, better yet, pay ME to challenge it ;-))
Is it really any better to vote for the 'lesser evil' (someone who you disagree with)?
Well, yes. That's what that word "lesser" means. Getting five bucks when you'd prefer 100 is still better than zero dollars.
If you can't see that the current elite is screwing up big time,
Not sure what in my comment remotely indicated that I think the "elites" are getting everything right. In fact, I'm pretty sure I explicitly noted my agreement with several points the author raised.
if you can't see how the financial "elite" screws up your country,
Didn't realize I'd wandered into a political discussion here, but simmer down, little fella. Don't worry, I'm a liberal too. Really, I'd have thought the whole "don't hate on women and gays" thing would've given me away here. But just to be clear, yeah, I'm definitely on the same wavelength: the aristocracy are robbing us blind, and with our blessing. It's fucking disgusting.
if you can't see that the Jews want America to make war for them, then you are a retard.
Woah Nellie.
I can't tell if this is a very subtly clever post where you're trying to make my point for me, or if you're so horrifically tone-deaf that you don't see that you've actually just made my point for me. Anyway, just in case you don't get it, Israel =/= "Jews," and believe it or not, you can disagree with America's massive amounts of foreign aid to Israel without needing to be anti-Semitic. I'm married to a Jew and have a brother-in-law who lives in Tel Aviv, and I don't like how much we pander to Israel. Guess what? You can make a political point every bit as effectively without conflating (1) all Israelis with the Israeli government or (2) Israeli hawks with "Jews" generally. As to "retard," it's unfortunate that this kind of immature derisive insult is so common it's NOT the type of thing to put off polite company.
Oh, but clearly, if you go around spouting anti-Semitic nonsense and find yourself out of work one of these days, well that must be just a great big Jewish conspiracy, yeah? Again, thanks for illustrating my point so very clearly.
Real security guys see through the bullshit and they will be labelled all of that by the Sheeple. Those who believed all the WMD lies and those who believe "Iran is evil". I will be happy when they blow up jews, because they steal land and kill the landowners just because they can. Now call me a Nazi, ass-kisser.
What you just wrote here makes so little sense that I'm actually worried for your mental health. Seriously, dude, go take a walk in the sun and talk to an actual human being, face-to-face. Just try to remember not to brandish a knife while doing it. Pro tip, that kind of thing tends to freak people the fuck out.
The author mentions things like one-time/minor drug use offenses and an unwillingness to kiss ass (btw, the latter isn't something HR can really screen for, and there are plenty of other talented professionals in other sectors who've been unfairly burned for this -- it isn't unique to "geek culture"), but falters when it comes to discussing just what he means by "personality." If what he's speaking to is more tolerance for people who see the world in a different way, he's absolutely got a point, and it's one that applies to far more industries than just security. Lots of good, smart folks suffer career setbacks for *actual* outside-the-box thinking (which needs to be distinguished from in-the-rarely-explored-corner-of-the-box thinking, which is what most employers actually want when they ask for people to think "outside the box"). Lots of industries and jobs require a four-year degree when the value of such a degree is attenuated, at best. Lots of people in all kinds of fields get overlooked just because they don't have that magical four-year degree even when their real-world experience and ability and willingness to learn more than make up for it. IMNSHO, that's a loss to society no matter which sector it affects.
But I worry that his mention of "lawyers" may be code for things like anti-harassment workplace rules. I can get behind saying we should tolerate oddness and even occasional brusqueness in service of higher-quality job performance. But I worry, based on the word choice employed, that it's being implicitly suggested that entire swaths of the population are worth counting out for a marginal increase in security. "Geek culture" broadly has been criticized, and in my view often rightly so, for an apparent tendency towards unpalatable points of view vis-a-vis the GLBTQ community, women, racial minorities, religious minorities, etc. In my experience, this is less a case of anonymity revealing what we don't want to see (that explains trolling and maybe a little bit more, but not everything) and more a case of arrested adolescence. As someone who was a bit of an ostracized nerd as a kid, I sincerely do empathize with the tendency to want to crawl into a hole and say "fuck you, world" as a response to unkindness. But there comes a time when no amount of talent makes up for a willful refusal to function in a diverse society. It's one thing to ask coworkers to shrug their shoulders that some of the security guys don't do small talk; it's entirely another to ask them to look the other way when their company's security system is run by a literal neo-Nazi.
It may very well be that the author didn't mean that all boundaries should be done away with. But the article is far from clear on that point.
>Are you referring to the "law-abiding manner" in which our business and financial communities have behaved?
You mean the law-abiding manner in which they use and abuse your government to pass regulations that support their monopolies (or near monopolies)? Or the law-abiding manner in which they lobby for subsidies using your tax dollars?
Both things which libertarianism abolishes, but current government supports in spades.
Right, but there are more possible solutions to "current government has become corrupted" than "get rid of most of the government and replace it with nothing." Jefferson apparently thought that the entire operation of government should be re-evaluated every generation or so. He was probably off in terms of timing (that's far too much frequent change), but a quick look at history makes you think he may have had a point. America had just under 100 years before its first major civil unrest, and then just about another 100 years before the second. Maybe the solution is to completely shake out and redo government every 100 years. Maybe we decide to have a constitutional convention every 100 years or something. But simply getting rid of *government* doesn't fix the problem.
>Libertarians seem to believe that without heavy regulation that free market fairy dust is going to make all the bankers be honest
No, that has nothing to do with the free market. Is has to do with the idea that if the government is not permitted to pass regulatory law, then the banks can't buy themselves portions of the government because if they do, the law is struck down swiftly.
You are confusing two important things:
Libertarians believe the free market greases the wheels of ingenuity and capitalism. Libertarians believe the government greases the wheels of modern day corporatism, socialism, and cronyism. You're getting stuck on that last one. What we don't have today is real capitalism. We have cronyism--a state where laws are bought and sold to support the highest bidder.
Agreed, but, again, getting rid of government won't stop things like cronyism or corporatism (it will stop corporate socialism, I suppose, but only technically, in the same sense that banning nail-biting would create more criminals). These problems will arise through market mechanisms instead of government mechanisms. And, no, the free market won't stop it, because history shows us that equal bargaining power is a myth (free market solutions rely on relative parity of bargaining power, which includes everything from more or less equitable resources/opportunities to availability of information). Traditionally, the way that you try to "up" the bargaining power of the "little guy" is through government regulation. Of course, the problem is when that regulation becomes co-opted into the service of those with higher bargaining power, which is the current problem we have, as you note. But recognizing that the solution to a problem has become corrupted doesn't mean we substitute for a corrupted solution, no solution at all. You won't be able to point to any societies where a totally free market has been able to solve the problem of unequal bargaining power, because no totally free market societies (other than pre-historic ones) have ever existed. Someone else noted that libertarians generally believe in some basic set of laws -- as well they should, because a lawless economy is no real economy at all. But the problem is that even basic laws can become corrupted. Currency manipulators, cartels, natural monopolies -- all these things can and do happen in the absence of government regulation. So your choice is government regulation (which MAY become corrupted if not carefully monitored) or some version of might-makes-right-plus-basic-torts-and-enforceable-contracts.
I'm with you that the modern corporatocracy has been enabled through regulatory capture. But I fail to see how the necessary conclusion from that is "therefore destroy re
Just like people are leaving Manhattan in droves because of the high cost of living and aforementioned gridlock.
Serious question: what is it that you think you buy when you buy a music CD?
Most people, I think, would agree that you haven't bought the entire copyright in the music: you don't have the right to turn around and market and sell a million copies of the CD as though you were the artist (if you did, music would rarely be made, and high-quality audio recordings would likely be non-existent, as the artist would have to recoup all costs and expected profits from a single sale). So what have you bought? You've bought a physical object, sure, but the physical object itself isn't WHY you paid the 15 bucks, or whatever music CDs sell for (who buys CDs anymore). You paid 15 bucks because you wanted to be able to listen to the music. The value you sought was the right to experience, on a repeated basis at your convenience, listening to the music. The traditional legal view is that, once you've decided you no longer want this experience, you can recoup some of your costs by selling the CD second-hand to someone else. But, enter the internet age and suddenly there's a new wrinkle: NOW you have the technological capability to continue to benefit from the repeated experience of listening to the music whenever you want, AND to sell and/or give that experience to multiple other people without inhibiting your ability to enjoy it concurrently. Well, now you're recouping your costs without giving something up, and another person has gotten the full value of the item without having to pay full value. Under the old system, buying used meant buying slightly inferior, which was why you got a discounted price and provided you with a legitimate choice: buy the full quality product from the original seller, or buy a slightly lower quality product secondhand. Because you were selling a different good, you were not usurping the seller's exclusive right to sell something she owned. With modern technology making it trivially easy to duplicate products at the same level of quality as the original, you're now competing directly with the seller by selling the exact same product (one that you never invested the resources to create) instead of offering a substitute with an attendant cost to yourself. So, essentially, you've unilaterally lowered the selling price of the CD without the seller's agreement. You've altered the market for the seller and enriched yourself at her expense. The seller didn't agree to sell you a CD for five cents (your effective cost after you've resold digital copies to multiple people). The seller agreed to sell you a CD for 15 bucks.
Yes, I know, the seller still got 15 bucks, you can't prove any of those people would have bought it from the seller so no "provable" lost profits (btw, this is exactly why the copyright act has its horrific statutory damages clause -- they've already answered this argument before you've made it and, yup, it's an ugly, bullshit answer), it doesn't "cost" anything to make extra copies and therefore no one is "hurt." You can take this view, but it's extremely short-sighted and, frankly, entitled (yeah, I said it). Yes, these are old rules based on old tech and they need to change and accommodate the new world and new tech, and the rights owners are being draconian jerks about it and the law is broken. All of these things are true. But how does any one of them mean that therefore we throw our hands up and say "IP is ridiculous"? I certainly don't want to live in a world where there are even larger hurdles and costs and disincentives for talented but cash-poor artists to seek to hone their craft and produce amazing music and writings and movies and games and artwork. Sure, there will always be SOME art, just like there was moonshine during prohibition, but moonshine is a poor substitute for a quality bourbon or a nicely-aged wine. And yes, I'm aware that we're not talking about making art illegal; we're just talking about making it impossible for artists to expect any kind of realistically orderly and enforceable system of rights that would help them, you know, EAT so
You're confused, and your apparent resentment of women's constitutional right to bodily integrity does not vouch for your rationality, but here goes anyway: The state law did not take precedence over the Fifth Amendment. The state law, instead, allowed for the delegation of the state's eminent domain power to a corporation, and there was no constitutional provision that made such delegation invalid. Part of the analysis was whether or not the Fifth Amendment's public use requirement could be read more broadly as a public purpose. The Court held that it could, the state law in question was constitutional, and the taking was for a valid public purpose/public use. The fact that a state law influenced the Court's reasoning does not mean the state law preempted the US Constitution. There are no state laws that preempt the US Constitution. None. At most, there are state laws that do not VIOLATE the Constitution, and/or are simply outside of the scope of the Constitution, which means that those laws are, wait for it, CONSTITUTIONAL. Get it? The Court held that the state law in question was constitutional, which means that the Constitution was what took precedence.
Next time you're looking for a good rage outlet for your uterus envy, it would behoove you to actually have a clue what you're talking about first.
You're attempting to pre-quantify all possible scenarios. That works in computers... well, not really; a lot of input validation is "X Y ad Z are valid; all else is strange and scary." The world isn't so black and white.
I'm an attorney. My job frequently involves trying to figure out what the hell the law is when legislators don't do their damn job of making it clear. It's not about whether or where trying to imagine every permutation "works"; it's about asking questions to determine if the law is sufficiently clear or not, and trying to find clarifying case law when the statute and legislative history aren't clear. As you say, the world is not black and white, which is why it's very important that the law do as much as it can to warn people about what will or won't be considered legal *in advance* of their deciding to do it. Regardless, this entire tangent is a complete departure from the broader point I was making.
The real question is: what better way do you propose? The police can't escort every single citizen around everywhere to make sure they play nice. People need to defend themselves. I can kill a man with a drinking straw or a pencil, though I'm much more effective with my bare hands or a knife. That's not really great when a firearm is involved at range; in closed quarters, I'll take my bare hands against a guy with a gun. At range? Arms are too short to box with God.
Again, actually, no, that's not the real question. My point was that you were confusing legality with ethicality, and you're doing it again right here. I'm not arguing with you about what the law ought to be; I'm pointing out to you that what the law IS and what it OUGHT to be are not always the same thing, and therefore if you're going to use language referring to legality, your analysis needs to adhere consistently to that decision. When you go off the rails, as you do here, into questions of justification, you're getting into policy arguments. Even if some jurisdictions make distinctions more or less along the lines you do (I've no doubt some do), that doesn't change the fact that using the word "criminals" in reference to gun owners is not particularly useful when you haven't defined what you mean by "criminals." Some people are only "criminals" in some jurisdictions where they wouldn't be in others. Do you understand the distinction I'm making here? Your self-defending gun owner is, in some jurisdictions, every bit as much of a "criminal" as a home invader. That's why it's not useful to rely on "crime" statistics when making arguments about the efficacy of gun laws, given that some gun laws technically create more criminals. The better question is whether gun laws increase or reduce VIOLENCE, whether or not that violence has legal sanction.
What's with this "apologist" thing lately? It's like people wanted to find a word that says, "Well, this stuff is wrong and evil and bad, and you're saying sorry for it being wrong and evil and bad and for people doing it." Loaded wording.
Just because you dislike or don't understand something doesn't render it "loaded." I'm tempted to give you a lmgtfy link but I'll play it classier here.
It is evidence. Evidence and proof aren't the same thing, and not all evidence is of equally-probative value.
They did this to Kevin Mitnick. He was initially forbidden to use any communications technology other than a landline telephone.
The difference is that the order there at least bore some relation to the crime he was charged with. I didn't see anything in the article suggesting that the woman was charged with having used Facebook to commit a crime. A tort, perhaps -- but then it's up to the teens/parents to sue her for emotional distress and seek an order in civil court enjoining her from using facebook. Even if the judge was merely trying to keep her from harassing the victims and their families, there's a much narrower way to do that, for instance, by ordering her not to contact them, or not to post anything that could be seen by them or someone they know. Ordering her to DELETE her facebook account, on the other hand, seems sweepingly overbroad and totally disconnected from the DUI she was charged with.
I have never seen a good study of the actual proved innocent after death penalty administered, but I imagine the numbers will be very low.
Other commenter already said that. The important point, which you seem to have missed, is that "low" isn't zero. That means that, in a country with the death penalty, a non-zero number of people is being MURDERED by the state. You're either okay with that or you aren't. It's not a question of deterrents or sliding scales or whatever -- those are pragmatic questions that you get to AFTER you answer the critical question: are you okay with the state being in the business of murdering innocent people? Is there any situation, I don't care what, in which you are morally and ethically comfortable with your country institutionally, intentionally, legally MURDERING INNOCENT HUMAN BEINGS? This is a yes or no question. After you answer it, then we can talk about all the reasons you think it's justified, or what you think (based on, presumably, actual evidence you can provide?) the likelihood is of it happening.
However, I have no problem with an error rate of one in ten thousand death penalty convictions being wrong.
I'm guessing you've never talked to a person on death row, or someone being tried for a crime whose punishment might include the death penalty. Have you ever had a conversation with a young person facing his or her own mortality? Have you ever spoken with a terminally ill person who's afraid of death? What if you personally had to execute the person in question? What if you found out the next day that you had murdered an innocent person? Have you actually really sat down and thought about this?
Perhaps you have. Perhaps I'm giving you too much credit here. I have difficulty imagining how a decent human being with an ounce of empathy could seriously take such a dim and dismissive view of other people's lives, and so I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here and hoping/assuming you think this just because you haven't really invested the emotional energy to fully comprehend the horror of what you just said.
but we should have faith that the innocent people will be weeded out eventually.
The same kind of faith we should have that the government won't violate our other rights?
When you approve of abortion, you cut the logical feet out from under the disapproval of any other murder. In point of fact, regardless of what a currently-insane society says, murder is evil, and should not be committed, no matter what the flavor.
Do please let us know when you start collecting signatures for a law requiring biological parents to donate nonessential matching organs where their children will die without an organ transplant.
I don't think a country can call itself civilized when it decides that the best way to reduce violent crime is to walk softly and carry a big stick. Why not look at eliminating the root causes of the crime, rather than enabling civilians to shoot criminals?
Because that costs money we're using to build corporate-sponsored gated communities to protect the important people from the lower-class peons. Why solve the problem when it's so much easier to just insulate yourself from it through invisible upward wealth transfers?
You have a lot of references in your comment to what the data purportedly show (or don't), and no links to any examples of such data. Care to provide them? Personally, I think it's only responsible to back up your opinions with facts when you accuse countries with stricter gun control of being "uncivilized" for it.
Shooting a motherfucker that's in your house coming at you and your kids with a samurai sword is not a crime.
What if it's just someone in your house running at you but you're not sure if he has a samurai sword? What if he's not really running at you, but just walking faster than you're comfortable with? What if he's not really walking toward you, but he's in your house and you don't know why and now you're feeling twitchy? What if he's not in your house, but he's on your property walking toward your house and you get a bad feeling about him? What if he's just hanging out in your yard, not threatening you, but you tell him to leave and he doesn't? Where's the line between when shooting him is criminal and when it isn't?
The answer, of course, is that it depends on the jurisdiction you live in. Because when you use a term like "criminal," you're not talking about whether something is right or wrong, you're talking about whether it's legal or illegal. In other words, what might strike most decent human beings as unacceptable, uncivilized, and completely wrong could nonetheless be perfectly legal; by the same token, something laudable and decent and good could be technically illegal. Talking about guns as a matter of *criminal* conduct is not terribly useful, particularly given that, often, simply owning a gun in and of itself may be a criminal act, depending on the jurisdiction and the specifics of the ownership in question. That's the point you seem to have missed. To YOU it may be obvious what we should regard as "lawful" use of a gun, but you're using the wrong word to communicate the underlying principle you're trying to convince people of -- just like the NRA does, as the other commenter pointed out.
It's all well and good for you to be a gun apologist, but don't be intellectually dishonest in the process.
Sure, just jump into a black hole and you're good to go. Goodbye, known universe!
I'm less familiar with the last three than with the first, so I'll focus on that one: why is the multiverse "desperate hand-waving"? It seems to me that it's a theoretical possibility that may become testable if we ever achieve the ability to travel (or communicate) at speeds exceeding the speed of light. Of course it's subject to misinterpretation and over-dramatization -- but that's true of anything sufficiently new, shiny, and/or untested. The problem as I take it isn't that faster-than-light travel has been proven to be *actually* impossible; it's that it is *theoretically* impossible because our current understanding of reality tells us that (1) causality is essential to existence and (2) FTL travel will weaken or destroy causality.
Why is it more scientific to presume that FTL, something that does not yet exist, will necessarily act in a particular way, thereby rendering it impossible (isn't this its own kind of intellectual paradox? Something that doesn't exist can't exist because if it existed it would destroy everything including itself? Seems circular, at least, if not paradoxical), than is it to hypothesize that, *IF* FTL travel were possible, that possibility could be explained by something that, *under current conditions*, is for now unfalsifiable? Doesn't that basically amount to arguing that it's more scientific to presume we'll never be able to test something we think is theoretically impossible than it is to discuss hypothetical models that neither contradict current scientific theories nor foreclose the eventual possibility of testing? Why isn't it equally unscientific to roll your eyes at the theory out-of-hand when, technically, it's as good a possibility as any? It may not be *practical* (yet), but it strikes me as unreasonably dismissive to write it off as "desperate."
Oh my god. If I have to read one more BS Apple story like this on the internet, I'm going to go nuts.
Apple lovers must be stopped. They're driving ad revenue and hits to all these *retarded* articles. They keep writing them because people keep clicking on them. STOP IT people!
Maybe I should just follow "if u can't beat em, join em." I should just post "Using an iPhone gives you crabs" or "iPhone as valuable as cream of wheat" and watch the money roll in.
I just laugh. Remember that new screw hoax? They said "they just make it too easy."
This might be intentional on your part, but you ought to know that you're coming across like an unpopular high school student with a bad case of sour grapes. You want to hate Apple (and every other smartphone company) for labor practices or something, totally, have at it. That's a legitimate reason to criticize a company. Another legitimate reason to criticize would be if they made products designed/likely to break within a couple years so you'd have to buy a new one every so often (given that my old iPhone 3G has held up better than any phone I've ever had, I don't think this is a criticism you could level at Apple). Maybe you take issue with their taking advantage of overseas tax shelters to avoid paying their fair share of corporate taxes (like every big company does). Or let's say they donated huge sums of corporate money to some horrific political movement, like the Klan or something. Those are all reasonable bases on which to criticize a large business.
NOT a reasonable basis: "I don't like that other people like them so much." You're not complaining that there's some other, worthier product that's being overlooked. You're not complaining that your company is forcing everyone to use iPhones. You're not complaining that oversaturated iPhone coverage is harming you in some way. You're just complaining that it's popular.... Sorry, but you're just being a whiner. Put on your big girl pants and get over it.
And I'm sure that the clips they selected for air were totally representative of the reactions they got from most people. The fact that some subset of people on the street is uninformed and unobservant is hardly good evidence that the Apple-fans subset of people can be fairly classified as similarly uninformed and unobservant. It's one thing to roll your eyes at the silly ceremony and media circus that accompany Apple releases. It's totally another to use your irritation with the attention Apple gets as a reason to snark on total strangers who happen to like Apple products.