Doesn't seem to be much use arguing with you since I'm just a privileged, myopic, knee-jerk bugiouse fuck. But anyway, I'm a New York resident as well, and I gotta say there's a lot of privileged, myopic, knee-jerk bugiouse fucks around here. I just think we could be Afghanistan's salvation a lot faster and better if we didn't bomb their Red Cross centers, maybe helped clean up their minefields, whatever. As a taxpayer I think it's my right to express the opinion that my money could be used better than by funding a drawn-out nightmare of a war effort there. As a taxpayer (?) it's your right as well to express the opinion that we gotta bomb them Muslim fucks. After all, you wouldn't mind if a bigger, more wealthy country started bombing your hometown because they said there were terrorists and dictators living there. As I see it, we're out to murder us some Afghans. The fact that you don't see it just shows what a privileged, myopic, knee-jerk jingoistic fuck... wait, sorry, I didn't mean for the conversation to degenerate to this level...
The Taliban is an unrepentant power-hungry group of dictators with no desire for their country's wellbeing. They force the extremes of their religion down their citizens' throats, they support unspeakable violations of human rights particularly with respect to women, and they harbor terrorists who have no respect for innocent lives and who have caused deaths possibly numbering in the tens of thousands in recent years.
The United States government is a bunch of spin-doctors who think only about public image on the one hand and keeping their campaign funds full on the other. They take revenge for the act of a small group of extremists on the entire country of Afghanistan which already is poor as dirt and needs nothing less than additional terror and death. They excuse this by claiming to "respect" the Afghani people and by dropping negligible amounts of food to no good effect accompanied by generous media attention. The continued bombing and the withdrawal of the UN may cause millions of people to starve this winter who might otherwise have been all right.
Is that an even-handed assessment of the situation? Now, which one should I bitch about more: my own government, which I might possibly influence somehow? Or the Taliban, which seems to be mostly in hiding, and which never listened to me in the slightest?
And yes, I suppose I do have a bit of an axe to grind, with respect to people who take in propaganda such as the food airdrops without bothering to do the simple math and figure out that they will have no effect and were never intended to have any effect except to soothe the conscience of the gullible-but-somewhat-humane demographic.
What's wrong with sending an actual non-negligible amount of food? Oh yeah, it might cost the taxpayers some money. Not like a war effort does.
And obviously the Taliban is to blame for a lot of things. However, the US is to blame for driving off UN services and three (as far as I heard) accidental bombings of humanitarian-effort centers. It's not a question of the Taliban being better - obviously not. Just don't assume that we're morally pure here - after all, US citizens are actually somewhat responsible for the actions of their government. Afghani citizens have relatively little say. That's the reason that I'm "screaming" about what our government is doing wrong rather than what theirs is doing wrong: I actually feel somewhat responsible for US actions. Do you really want to say that a "productive society" has no place for people who criticize their government? How else is a democracy supposed to function?
Yes, he's SUCH a nice guy, providing 1 million (definitely less than that, too lazy to look up actual number) *meals* dropped by air onto minefields to feed the ~7 million people who will be starving all winter. That'll do em a lot of good. No, that move was one for the polls.
~7 million * ~100 days of winter = 7x10^8 >> ~1x10^6. They'll be feeding on the order of 0.1% or less of the people who need to be fed, or maybe feeding 3% of the starving people 3% of the food they need. Meanwhile, the bombing drives out UN services which might have actually done some good and destroys 2 Red Cross centers and a UN mine cleanup facility. Yes, we're doing the Afghani people a huge service by declaring war on them. This is still only considering civilian losses; probably no one will even bother to count military deaths, not that most of us Americans care.
Anyway, I suppose this is offtopic, but I hate to see people taken in by such obvious propaganda as that airdrop. I suppose it might as well have been straight pork for the number of people it's feeding.
we've gotten away from carpet-bombing, napalming, and cow-launching to a system where we specifically go after military targets -- technology has allowed us to do that.
I wasn't speaking of human rights; I was speaking of technology. If people had cared about not killing civilians back before gunpowder, they would've had a much easier time of it.
The second one didn't die yet, just FYI. and obnoxious little replies like yours make me scream. I'd be tempted to actually respond to you but I don't know what the fuck you think.
When you fly planes over a country and drop bombs from them, it's unrealistic to think that they will not kill civilians. We can pick our targets as carefully as we like, but it's inevitable to have "collateral damage" - are you really trying to deny this? Maybe "most USsians" do actually believe we're going to kill not a single Afghani civilian, but I hope they're not so deluded. We're either operating on the basis that some number of civilian deaths is acceptable, or we're complete idiots.
'this "we think" crap' -- well, I think it's probably true too fwiw, but that's just the impression I get from the evening news.
"nobody likes these fundamentalist etc etc" so you think we're doing Afghanis a favor by bombing them? get real.
and don't give me this "i know it's cool and hip" crap - I gave a fairly-well-reasoned argument and you respond by dismissing it as some knee-jerk countercultural opinion. How bout I dismiss your opinion as knee-jerk bloodthirsty nationalism, not caring to reason out the actual effects of our military actions as long as it feels like we're doing something? Don't fucking patronize me. I could see the cloud from where the towers used to be and I knew damned well that I or any of my friends could've been in there and died. It's not a question of defending ourselves - there is no defending ourselves by any amount of military mobilization in this situation. Overthrowing the Taliban and doing whatever-we-want to bin Laden won't change the fact that a terrorist can kill a few hundred whenever and a few thousand in certain situations. Pure and simple, it's a choice between Bush flexing some muscles and Bush not getting reelected.
It's interesting how most of us USsians are willing to see a few Afghan civilians (realistically, probably a few thousand) die because their government is (we think) guilty of harboring terrorists, whereas when the U.S. performs criminal acts we somehow ignore or dissociate ourselves from them. The ironic thing is that we claim to be a democracy, meaning we should actually be responsible for the actions of our government -- the Taliban, on the other hand, we condemn as a fascist fundamentalist dictatorship. Why, then, should Afghans be held responsible for their government's actions? And why don't Americans feel guilty for our bombing of the Sudan, our starving of the Iraqi people, our countless other wrongdoings? No nation is perfect - that's not the point. The point is that resigning yourself to Afghani civilian deaths while remaining outraged over US civilian deaths can only be explained by the fact that you like Americans better than Afghanis - there can be no higher moral sense to it; if anything they are less responsible for the acts of their government than we are. As for the practicalities, I can't propose a good solution - but it's hypocritical to say that if 6,000 Afghani civilians die from our bombings, we somehow retain moral superiority over those who brought down the WTC.
It seems to me the reason that dead-tree works are dependably archived is that even if one university doesn't have it, another probably does. With electronic media this could be made even more redundant if a good large group of universities made a policy of periodically mirroring the content of PubMedCentral - probably not all that expensive a thing to do.
I just tried it, for a couple minutes. It has improved - much, much faster than I remember from last time I tried it. I can't say much about stability with the amount of time I used it (I got some "unknown error" when I tried to open the mail client, but at least it didn't crash...) Problem is, I'm so damned used to Opera's gesture navigation that I couldn't switch if I wanted to. Damn them!!!
Re:What other MS-compatable alternatives are there
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· Score: 1
Opera is beautiful but it definitely still has problems with/. moderation.
In this article they're talking specifically about bids for OS-less PC's that will have a site-licensed Windows installed on them in violation of their terms (they say there are no site licenses that cover anything but existing PC's.) I don't think your average home or office Linux user will be much affected, nor will your average DIYer/pirate. Still, it's a pain that OEM's lately are so damned reluctant to sell you a computer without a Windows cd. (I've heard of people buying barebones - no harddrive - and still recieving one after having specifically asked not to...)
I find keyboard commands to be convenient when I'm on the keyboard a lot anyway, but while webbrowsing the mouse seems to be the default tool (clicking links is inconvenient with the keyboard, for me anyway.) It's nice to be able to do everything with one hand and as little motion as possible....
besides which, it doesn't crash nearly as much as Moz or IE.
in fact, I can't think of a time 5.10 has caused me a crash, but then it's only been out a week or two. I'm sure that'll change if I ever get moderator points again..... anybody care to tell me what browser actually can handle slashdot moderation without crashing?
The gestures work really well, in my experience. I was annoyed earlier cause they took the "close window" command out of their rightclick context menu -- I'm lazy enough so's I don't like moving the mouse all the way up to point at the X or all the way down to their built-in taskbar thingy to close it that way -- but now the gestures solve that problem perfectly. Drag down then right with right mouse and the window closes - it's beautiful. Drag down then up on a link and the link opens in a new window behind the current one - also beautiful. I learned the gestures that I use (not all of them, but a useful few) the first day I got the browser, I've rarely triggered them accidentally, and they save me miles of pointing.
On a side note, the browser's amazingly quick and stable nowadays compared to its competitors -- so good I may even pay for it....
Winamp's builtin AVS is slow as molasses in my experience. Go with Geiss, Gforce, acidspunk - pretty and fast. As for 50+ framerates at 800x600..... good luck. I usually run at 800x600 or lower at lowest color depth and aim for ~30fps with an athlon 850. Also, i'm pretty sure the graphics card doesn't come into it since none of those plugins use 3d. RAM is probably similarly irrelevant beyond some smallish point. (and wildtangent, for the record, sucks my nuts.)
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Doesn't seem to be much use arguing with you since I'm just a privileged, myopic, knee-jerk bugiouse fuck. But anyway, I'm a New York resident as well, and I gotta say there's a lot of privileged, myopic, knee-jerk bugiouse fucks around here. I just think we could be Afghanistan's salvation a lot faster and better if we didn't bomb their Red Cross centers, maybe helped clean up their minefields, whatever. As a taxpayer I think it's my right to express the opinion that my money could be used better than by funding a drawn-out nightmare of a war effort there. As a taxpayer (?) it's your right as well to express the opinion that we gotta bomb them Muslim fucks. After all, you wouldn't mind if a bigger, more wealthy country started bombing your hometown because they said there were terrorists and dictators living there. As I see it, we're out to murder us some Afghans. The fact that you don't see it just shows what a privileged, myopic, knee-jerk jingoistic fuck... wait, sorry, I didn't mean for the conversation to degenerate to this level...
Okay, how is this:
The Taliban is an unrepentant power-hungry group of dictators with no desire for their country's wellbeing. They force the extremes of their religion down their citizens' throats, they support unspeakable violations of human rights particularly with respect to women, and they harbor terrorists who have no respect for innocent lives and who have caused deaths possibly numbering in the tens of thousands in recent years.
The United States government is a bunch of spin-doctors who think only about public image on the one hand and keeping their campaign funds full on the other. They take revenge for the act of a small group of extremists on the entire country of Afghanistan which already is poor as dirt and needs nothing less than additional terror and death. They excuse this by claiming to "respect" the Afghani people and by dropping negligible amounts of food to no good effect accompanied by generous media attention. The continued bombing and the withdrawal of the UN may cause millions of people to starve this winter who might otherwise have been all right.
Is that an even-handed assessment of the situation? Now, which one should I bitch about more: my own government, which I might possibly influence somehow? Or the Taliban, which seems to be mostly in hiding, and which never listened to me in the slightest?
And yes, I suppose I do have a bit of an axe to grind, with respect to people who take in propaganda such as the food airdrops without bothering to do the simple math and figure out that they will have no effect and were never intended to have any effect except to soothe the conscience of the gullible-but-somewhat-humane demographic.
What's wrong with sending an actual non-negligible amount of food? Oh yeah, it might cost the taxpayers some money. Not like a war effort does.
And obviously the Taliban is to blame for a lot of things. However, the US is to blame for driving off UN services and three (as far as I heard) accidental bombings of humanitarian-effort centers. It's not a question of the Taliban being better - obviously not. Just don't assume that we're morally pure here - after all, US citizens are actually somewhat responsible for the actions of their government. Afghani citizens have relatively little say. That's the reason that I'm "screaming" about what our government is doing wrong rather than what theirs is doing wrong: I actually feel somewhat responsible for US actions. Do you really want to say that a "productive society" has no place for people who criticize their government? How else is a democracy supposed to function?
When did I assert any Taliban statistics as being better than US ones?
And who's this "they"? That's the part I'm always confused about.
Yes, he's SUCH a nice guy, providing 1 million (definitely less than that, too lazy to look up actual number) *meals* dropped by air onto minefields to feed the ~7 million people who will be starving all winter. That'll do em a lot of good. No, that move was one for the polls.
~7 million * ~100 days of winter = 7x10^8 >> ~1x10^6. They'll be feeding on the order of 0.1% or less of the people who need to be fed, or maybe feeding 3% of the starving people 3% of the food they need. Meanwhile, the bombing drives out UN services which might have actually done some good and destroys 2 Red Cross centers and a UN mine cleanup facility. Yes, we're doing the Afghani people a huge service by declaring war on them. This is still only considering civilian losses; probably no one will even bother to count military deaths, not that most of us Americans care.
Anyway, I suppose this is offtopic, but I hate to see people taken in by such obvious propaganda as that airdrop. I suppose it might as well have been straight pork for the number of people it's feeding.
This is VERY interesting. Anyone know anything more about this?
Mod it if you got em. Not that this post at +1 will help the parent at +2 a whole lot.
And we're so good at it, too.
I wasn't speaking of human rights; I was speaking of technology. If people had cared about not killing civilians back before gunpowder, they would've had a much easier time of it.
The second one didn't die yet, just FYI. and obnoxious little replies like yours make me scream. I'd be tempted to actually respond to you but I don't know what the fuck you think.
...whereas back before explosives became popular, all that hand-to-hand weaponry was soooo imprecise with its targeting mechanisms.
When you fly planes over a country and drop bombs from them, it's unrealistic to think that they will not kill civilians. We can pick our targets as carefully as we like, but it's inevitable to have "collateral damage" - are you really trying to deny this? Maybe "most USsians" do actually believe we're going to kill not a single Afghani civilian, but I hope they're not so deluded. We're either operating on the basis that some number of civilian deaths is acceptable, or we're complete idiots.
'this "we think" crap' -- well, I think it's probably true too fwiw, but that's just the impression I get from the evening news.
"nobody likes these fundamentalist etc etc" so you think we're doing Afghanis a favor by bombing them? get real.
and don't give me this "i know it's cool and hip" crap - I gave a fairly-well-reasoned argument and you respond by dismissing it as some knee-jerk countercultural opinion. How bout I dismiss your opinion as knee-jerk bloodthirsty nationalism, not caring to reason out the actual effects of our military actions as long as it feels like we're doing something? Don't fucking patronize me. I could see the cloud from where the towers used to be and I knew damned well that I or any of my friends could've been in there and died. It's not a question of defending ourselves - there is no defending ourselves by any amount of military mobilization in this situation. Overthrowing the Taliban and doing whatever-we-want to bin Laden won't change the fact that a terrorist can kill a few hundred whenever and a few thousand in certain situations. Pure and simple, it's a choice between Bush flexing some muscles and Bush not getting reelected.
It's interesting how most of us USsians are willing to see a few Afghan civilians (realistically, probably a few thousand) die because their government is (we think) guilty of harboring terrorists, whereas when the U.S. performs criminal acts we somehow ignore or dissociate ourselves from them. The ironic thing is that we claim to be a democracy, meaning we should actually be responsible for the actions of our government -- the Taliban, on the other hand, we condemn as a fascist fundamentalist dictatorship. Why, then, should Afghans be held responsible for their government's actions? And why don't Americans feel guilty for our bombing of the Sudan, our starving of the Iraqi people, our countless other wrongdoings? No nation is perfect - that's not the point. The point is that resigning yourself to Afghani civilian deaths while remaining outraged over US civilian deaths can only be explained by the fact that you like Americans better than Afghanis - there can be no higher moral sense to it; if anything they are less responsible for the acts of their government than we are. As for the practicalities, I can't propose a good solution - but it's hypocritical to say that if 6,000 Afghani civilians die from our bombings, we somehow retain moral superiority over those who brought down the WTC.
This sentence included because the filters are biting. And this one too.
It seems to me the reason that dead-tree works are dependably archived is that even if one university doesn't have it, another probably does. With electronic media this could be made even more redundant if a good large group of universities made a policy of periodically mirroring the content of PubMedCentral - probably not all that expensive a thing to do.
The way he wrote it the "globals" are static variables, so you don't have to make an instance of the class to use them. like Math.PI etc.
I just tried it, for a couple minutes. It has improved - much, much faster than I remember from last time I tried it. I can't say much about stability with the amount of time I used it (I got some "unknown error" when I tried to open the mail client, but at least it didn't crash...) Problem is, I'm so damned used to Opera's gesture navigation that I couldn't switch if I wanted to. Damn them!!!
Opera is beautiful but it definitely still has problems with /. moderation.
In this article they're talking specifically about bids for OS-less PC's that will have a site-licensed Windows installed on them in violation of their terms (they say there are no site licenses that cover anything but existing PC's.) I don't think your average home or office Linux user will be much affected, nor will your average DIYer/pirate. Still, it's a pain that OEM's lately are so damned reluctant to sell you a computer without a Windows cd. (I've heard of people buying barebones - no harddrive - and still recieving one after having specifically asked not to...)
http://www.intrepidsoftware.com/fallacy/straw.htm
n .html
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/straw-ma
http://www.google.com/search?q=straw+man+fallacy
You're assuming humans are more expensive than technology....
I find keyboard commands to be convenient when I'm on the keyboard a lot anyway, but while webbrowsing the mouse seems to be the default tool (clicking links is inconvenient with the keyboard, for me anyway.) It's nice to be able to do everything with one hand and as little motion as possible....
It was just added in version 5.10, which came out a week or two ago.
besides which, it doesn't crash nearly as much as Moz or IE.
in fact, I can't think of a time 5.10 has caused me a crash, but then it's only been out a week or two. I'm sure that'll change if I ever get moderator points again..... anybody care to tell me what browser actually can handle slashdot moderation without crashing?
The gestures work really well, in my experience. I was annoyed earlier cause they took the "close window" command out of their rightclick context menu -- I'm lazy enough so's I don't like moving the mouse all the way up to point at the X or all the way down to their built-in taskbar thingy to close it that way -- but now the gestures solve that problem perfectly. Drag down then right with right mouse and the window closes - it's beautiful. Drag down then up on a link and the link opens in a new window behind the current one - also beautiful. I learned the gestures that I use (not all of them, but a useful few) the first day I got the browser, I've rarely triggered them accidentally, and they save me miles of pointing.
On a side note, the browser's amazingly quick and stable nowadays compared to its competitors -- so good I may even pay for it....
Winamp's builtin AVS is slow as molasses in my experience. Go with Geiss, Gforce, acidspunk - pretty and fast. As for 50+ framerates at 800x600..... good luck. I usually run at 800x600 or lower at lowest color depth and aim for ~30fps with an athlon 850. Also, i'm pretty sure the graphics card doesn't come into it since none of those plugins use 3d. RAM is probably similarly irrelevant beyond some smallish point. (and wildtangent, for the record, sucks my nuts.)