Why are we opposed to these ones? Why is the Senator (and the entire State of Georgia) being called names?
Kids (depending on age) can not drive, buy tobacco and alcohol, open bank accounts, stay out late, or marry without legal guardians' consent. Heck — a few months before birth they can even be killed by their mothers (with doctors assistance).
So, what's the fuss about restricting their on-line socializing? It is not like their real-life socializing is not already restricted (and always has been)...
The current nuclear powers should disarm and the united nations should resolve that the mere development, construction or preperation to construct or develop nuclear weapons is itself a crime against humanity. Nuclear weapons should be utterly understood by all concerned to be off the table.
Why? They have their uses and are not that inhumane — supposedly, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings have taken less lives, than the weeks of conventional bombings before them (something like 150K lives per night is allegedly attributable to the latter).
And they ended the war, possibly several months earlier...
Today, for another example, using "tactical" nukes to bust Iran's nuclear-research bunkers would, likely, be quite efficient and kill fewer people than any alternative... It would, of course, be a political barrel of worms with anti-Americans world wide screaming their heads off (I wish they did!), but in cold blooded objectivity, it would be rather beneficial for all concerned, including Iranians (tough love and all).
It should be patently obvious to virtually anyone that a nuclear arms race is utterly immoral.
Arms race is just a part of the general race (technological, cultural, scientific). There is nothing particularly immoral about it. Killing people sucks (and is often immoral), but it sucks even more to be killed — or seeing someone dear being killed...
How about the mission defined in the Authorization for Use of Military Force in Iraq, defend the security interests of the US from the threat in Iraq?
That's done too. Iraqi Army, which used to threaten our aircraft patrolling North (Kurds) and South (Shia) of the country, is disbanded. The threat to our allies in the region (Kuwait, Israel, Saudi Arabia) is gone too, thank you very much...
... hottest threat center in the world, probably part of Greater Iran.
Iran now has 100+K American troops next to it, which is good if we want to contain it. USSR (so contained earlier) is gone — America's decades-long presence in Western Europe accomplished its purpose. Now it is Middle East's turn...
We have the most effective military in the world, pointed at our own head.
Only if "your head" is somewhere in Najaf's orchards plotting to kill prominent Iraqis or US soldiers...
Not needed under capitalism- it's far easier just to let them become homeless and die of exposure the next winter
You are changing the subject. From whether USA's regime is genocidal to whether USA's regime is brutal to certain economic class. I'll take it as a sign of your surrendering the former. I shall not debate the latter for it would allow you to get away with subject-changing, and use this opportunity to request, once again, that you kindly bugger off — you made enough Marxist proclamations already.
We're supporting a Shi'a government in Iraq- and that support is going directly to the extermination of the Sunni
Typical Red lies, distortions, and manipulations...
You seem to be saying that because it's very easy to make a flawed comparison with fascist states of the past, that we shouldn't talk about whether the US is now or is becoming a fascist state.
You could be arguing that the actual comparisons made on this thread are faulty and attempting to paint the US as a genocidal state, but I haven't seen that.
I argue, that associating a target of the name-calling with the gross misdeeds of Fascists is the only reason to bring up such comparisons — they have no other purpose. From Tim Skirvin's excellent write-up on Godwin's Law:
In case your head has been buried in the sand for the last sixty
years or so, the Nazis were a German political party led by Adolf Hitler
that slaughtered upwards of ten million people that didn't meet their
standards of "ethnic purity" and set off to conquer Europe and the world
in World War II. They are generally considered the most evil group of
people to live in modern times, and to compare something or someone to
them is usually considered the gravest insult imaginable.
As a Usenet discussion gets longer it tends to get more heated; as
more heat enters the discussion, tensions get higher and people start to
insult each other over anything they can think of. Godwin's Law merely
notes that, eventually, those tensions eventually cause someone to find
the worst insults that come to mind - which will almost always include a
Nazi comparison.
So which is it? Does fascism include the genocide, or not?
By definition it does not. By common understanding — it does. An academic-sounding argument can be made on how a politician (or any public figure, mind you) has a Fascist trait of some kind (anyone appealing to finding strength in unity, for example), and that immediately makes that politician (and his Party/movement/etc.) appear genocidal to everyone else. A very old (negative) PR-trick.
During the 19th century, the bundle of rods, in Latin called fasces and in Italian fascio, came to symbolize strength through unity, the point being that whilst each independent rod was fragile, as a bundle they were strong [emphasis mine -mi]. [...] were scattered over Italy, and it was to one of these spontaneously created groups, devoid of party affiliations, that Benito Mussolini belonged.
Ergo, Pink Floyd advocated Fascism... Ha-ha... Much closer parallel, BTW, than anything Gonzales has said...
All of this "Fascism"-branding is pure garbage. The term is used as a dirty word for one reason only — to associate the object of the name-calling with the horrors of Nazi Germany. But Fascism itself was not the horrific part of that state. The targeted and cold-blooded extermination of millions of civilians (Jews and Gypsies) was. (Indeed, Mussolini's Italy was a rather benign regime for the times, despite being Fascist — they coined the very word from the ancient Roman word Fasci.)
Until you can name a racial, national, or religious minority that is being systematically exterminated (in cold blood, preferably) by "BushCo" — or any hints of same — kindly cease from dragging up "American decline into Fascism" all the time. (This request also applies to your fan(s) among moderators.)
Unless, you guys mean to call Bush "Mussolini", that is — but that does not strike the nerve nearly as hard as "Bushitler", does it?
Oran's Dictionary of the Law (1983) defines treason as: "...[a]...citizen's actions to help a foreign government overthrow, make war against, or seriously injure the [parent nation]."
I can think of fewer things more injurious to the United States than the Fascist dribble coming out of the mouth of our nation's attorney General.
It is injurious, but as long as it is not done to help a foreign government, it is not treason. That's the point. Oh, and you dearly need to educate yourself on the perils of mentioning Fascism in a debate... You could've said "Communism", you know...
You might not, but I'd imagine several editors would.
You are changing the topic. No human (and no bot for that matter) has ever suggested, my links are inappropriate. That would've been a different argument... They are appropriate, but are now "thrown away" together with the spammy ones.
You released the images under the GFDL when you uploaded them to Wikipedia. That means they can effectively do whatever they want with them, including removing the advertisement in the caption.
You are misinterpreting GFDL, but that's irrelevant, because that is not the license I used... I don't put advertisements in the captions either — only on the image's own page.
Not to be blunt, but if you don't like it, don't upload the images.
Instead of walking away, as you propose, I'm trying to change the bits and pieces which I dislike...
And BTW, thanks for commenting on the main part of my post — one about removing nofollow after a URL survives certain number of subsequent edits by other people...
For example, auto-add the "nofollow" only to the links added in recent edits (for some definition of recent). Once a particular link was part of the page long enough (and survived other people's edits), it can be followed by the search engines...
I, for one, contributed a number of wild-life pictures to Wikipedia, but am also selling them in my own shop. I don't think, it is unfair for me to expect links to my shop from the contributed images to be followed...
It would be nice if that were true, but given the secrecy and lack of information about exactly what the NSA did we have no idea how "helped" any of us are.
Given the fact, that nobody is pushing NSA to say anything on the subject, it is unlikely, that they are lying. The kind of "help" you suspect NSA of providing needs no press-releases...
In any event, if the government wanted to help "the users" it would make it very clear as to what security criteria [...]
That's very strict requirements you are placing there, actually. Making anything "very clear", coming up with reliable estimates of saving/loss from using a particular product, making recommendations — hairy stuff, which NSA is rightly stearing clear from...
[...] helping hand to a private monopoly, because the roll out of their latest software abortion is looking like a flop.
And why does NSA help BSD and Linux? Sorry, your conspiracy theory is less convincing, than NSA's stated reasoning — 90% of personal computers run Windows, thus we all benefit from the OS being more secure. Microsoft is, of course, going to milk this for all they can, but it is no less plausible an explanation because of that...
I certainly understand and share the frustration of tax-dollars helping a healthy and profitable corporation, but another way to look at this is NSA is helping the users. The proper long-term solution would, probably, be to make software vendors liable for flaws in their products — as is the case with most other industries. Short-term, however, National Security Agency making personal computers harder to hijack does, indeed, contribute to, uhmm, national security...
Microsoft is not the only entity to benefit either, BTW. For example, FreeBSD cvs-commit messages have plenty of acknowledgments of government's help (fgrep for TrustedBSD). The NSA-fundedSELinux is another example...
NSA is, supposedly, full of very smart, technically adept people, who, no doubt, strongly prefer Unix-like OSes (on average) to Microsoft's offerings. However, with Microsoft's market-dominance, it gives a lot more bang for the NSA's buck to help them, rather than the OSS projects...
Granted, there is a danger of this solution perpetuating the problem, but that's a distant and lesser danger, than the present and grave one of millions of zombies arraigned into bot-nets and immediately usable (and up for hire) against businesses and government institutions alike.
I'm not some random person, I'm a citizen of an allied nation.
Sadly, we had terrorist acts against us committed by citizens of allied nations. Heck — even by our own citizens... And the allied nations — Germany, Spain, Britain — have suffered similarly, from either their own citizens, or trusted visitors.
[...] can only be described as a neo-fascist [...]
Like the guy in this thread who replied that someone's fingerprints at a location where a crime occurred are a pretty good indication that they were involved.
That's me, I think. Is it not a good indication, however? The defense lawyer will have to do his job... What would he say?
The court may still require more evidence, but they may not either... so there's nothing physical forcing you to have more than fingerprint evidence anymore.
Assuming court's complacency, you don't need fingerprints to begin with:-)
As long as it applies to everyone, there really shouldn't be an indignity from this
Similarly, I would not object to having to take my belt and shoes off, if the TSA officers were standing their beltless and barefeet themselves. But they don't. And when I asked for paper towels to "slide" on my bare feet through the scanner without touching the dirty floor, they said I can't and forced me to walk barefeet through the machine...
Interestingly, when I was going through the same procedure before the Kyiv-JFK flight (from Ukraine), I was given single-use "slippers" to cover my socks while shoe-less... Perhaps, being barefeet in front of a government officer is only undignifying for an Eastern European?
However, we've raised two generations of SHEEP who submit to whatever the government says without question, and who do not know what freedom is.
Travelers had to give their names to the inn-keepers for as long as inns existed, pretty much. Certainly for longer than "two generations"... Local baron, sheriff, or whatever other authority, could always inquire, who you are...
Having just gone through TSA's routine mistreatment, I certainly dislike the government's practices. But there is nothing recent about them...
And your opinion is based on any factual data at all or just plain prejudice?
It is based on the simple statistics of the average and median incomes per head in both countries. Criminals (of the kind, fingerprinting is likely to catch anyway) are poor. Very few poor Americans go to Brazil to find work. Plenty of Brazilians travel to US for that purpose (God bless their enterprise). For whatever reasons, some of them (may He devastate their families) commit crimes — leaving fingerprints...
If Brazil were doing the fingerprinting for the purposes of the genuine crime-fighting, they would not single Americans out. If they do — and the original poster in this thread stated so — they do it for the emotional reasons (like pride, et al.)
Using your line of thinking, I'd say that when mostly of you go to another country you don't go as tourists, you go as invading force. So I think it makes pretty much sense to have you all identified.
This was not "my line of thinking", but our invading forces wear uniform and are thus very easy to identify already. Also, they don't invade without numerous prior warnings — a country would have plenty of time to change their border-crossing procedures...
You are still welcome to try to force them to submit to fingerprinting, though. Go ahead, make my day...
This means that US
citizens have a gratuitious extra 100 EUR (UK: 155) processing fee slapped
onto their visa handling fee.
True. Don't know about European or UK consulates' fees, but in the US, they charge Americans $100 for visas. Or did in August 2006...
There was no (overt) photographing nor fingerprinting of Americans, however. Thus the message, I was responding to, was likely incorrect — unless the policy was introduced since August...
After all, everyone who has ever been in a building or location that is later identified as a "safe house" or "training camp" by the utterly infalible authorities is obviously a terrorist, so what possible objection could there be?
Wha-wha-wait... Where is that "utterly infalible authorities" coming from?.. A tad off-topic, aren't we?..
Finger-print match from a crime-scene is always strong evidence of the person having something to do with the crime — its been like this for years. Unless you are against using them at all, you should not be against using them at the border — not for this reasons, anyway...
And yes, it is the hated "authorities", however fallible, that decide, what is a "crime scene"...
Brazil has strong protections regarding extradition.
Those "strong protections" don't single Americans out. Thus targeting only Americans for fingerprinting can not be justified by your argument... Reciprocity/pride is what it is — if true to begin with. Once again, this last August, when I visited Brazil, I was neither photographed nor were my fingerprints taken (not overtly anyway)...
Slashdot Mirror
Why are we opposed to these ones? Why is the Senator (and the entire State of Georgia) being called names?
Kids (depending on age) can not drive, buy tobacco and alcohol, open bank accounts, stay out late, or marry without legal guardians' consent. Heck — a few months before birth they can even be killed by their mothers (with doctors assistance).
So, what's the fuss about restricting their on-line socializing? It is not like their real-life socializing is not already restricted (and always has been)...
Why? They have their uses and are not that inhumane — supposedly, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings have taken less lives, than the weeks of conventional bombings before them (something like 150K lives per night is allegedly attributable to the latter).
And they ended the war, possibly several months earlier...
Today, for another example, using "tactical" nukes to bust Iran's nuclear-research bunkers would, likely, be quite efficient and kill fewer people than any alternative... It would, of course, be a political barrel of worms with anti-Americans world wide screaming their heads off (I wish they did!), but in cold blooded objectivity, it would be rather beneficial for all concerned, including Iranians (tough love and all).
Arms race is just a part of the general race (technological, cultural, scientific). There is nothing particularly immoral about it. Killing people sucks (and is often immoral), but it sucks even more to be killed — or seeing someone dear being killed...
That's done too. Iraqi Army, which used to threaten our aircraft patrolling North (Kurds) and South (Shia) of the country, is disbanded. The threat to our allies in the region (Kuwait, Israel, Saudi Arabia) is gone too, thank you very much...
Iran now has 100+K American troops next to it, which is good if we want to contain it. USSR (so contained earlier) is gone — America's decades-long presence in Western Europe accomplished its purpose. Now it is Middle East's turn...
Only if "your head" is somewhere in Najaf's orchards plotting to kill prominent Iraqis or US soldiers...
You are changing the subject. From whether USA's regime is genocidal to whether USA's regime is brutal to certain economic class. I'll take it as a sign of your surrendering the former. I shall not debate the latter for it would allow you to get away with subject-changing, and use this opportunity to request, once again, that you kindly bugger off — you made enough Marxist proclamations already.
Typical Red lies, distortions, and manipulations...
Nope, would not count. But do get back to me, when you hear rumors of plans to burn all representatives of an economic class in gas-chambers.
US is not targeting neither Sunnis nor Shia for systematic extermination.
In other words — bugger off, Commie.
Cool! When can the new technology allow us to walk through the security with dignity again?
I'm just refreshing/expanding the arguments behind Godwin's Law for the uninitiated (Since September never ended)...
I argue, that associating a target of the name-calling with the gross misdeeds of Fascists is the only reason to bring up such comparisons — they have no other purpose. From Tim Skirvin's excellent write-up on Godwin's Law:
By definition it does not. By common understanding — it does. An academic-sounding argument can be made on how a politician (or any public figure, mind you) has a Fascist trait of some kind (anyone appealing to finding strength in unity, for example), and that immediately makes that politician (and his Party/movement/etc.) appear genocidal to everyone else. A very old (negative) PR-trick.
Remember this one?
Here is from WP's write-up on Fascio:
Ergo, Pink Floyd advocated Fascism... Ha-ha... Much closer parallel, BTW, than anything Gonzales has said...
All of this "Fascism"-branding is pure garbage. The term is used as a dirty word for one reason only — to associate the object of the name-calling with the horrors of Nazi Germany. But Fascism itself was not the horrific part of that state. The targeted and cold-blooded extermination of millions of civilians (Jews and Gypsies) was. (Indeed, Mussolini's Italy was a rather benign regime for the times, despite being Fascist — they coined the very word from the ancient Roman word Fasci.)
Until you can name a racial, national, or religious minority that is being systematically exterminated (in cold blood, preferably) by "BushCo" — or any hints of same — kindly cease from dragging up "American decline into Fascism" all the time. (This request also applies to your fan(s) among moderators.)
Unless, you guys mean to call Bush "Mussolini", that is — but that does not strike the nerve nearly as hard as "Bushitler", does it?
It is injurious, but as long as it is not done to help a foreign government, it is not treason. That's the point. Oh, and you dearly need to educate yourself on the perils of mentioning Fascism in a debate... You could've said "Communism", you know...
You are changing the topic. No human (and no bot for that matter) has ever suggested, my links are inappropriate. That would've been a different argument... They are appropriate, but are now "thrown away" together with the spammy ones.
You are misinterpreting GFDL, but that's irrelevant, because that is not the license I used... I don't put advertisements in the captions either — only on the image's own page.
Instead of walking away, as you propose, I'm trying to change the bits and pieces which I dislike...
And BTW, thanks for commenting on the main part of my post — one about removing nofollow after a URL survives certain number of subsequent edits by other people...
For example, auto-add the "nofollow" only to the links added in recent edits (for some definition of recent). Once a particular link was part of the page long enough (and survived other people's edits), it can be followed by the search engines...
I, for one, contributed a number of wild-life pictures to Wikipedia, but am also selling them in my own shop. I don't think, it is unfair for me to expect links to my shop from the contributed images to be followed...
Is not anyone at least a little bit concerned about MIT offering that power out to everyone — including our enemies?
I'm not at all sure, they will be so overwhelmed with this generosity that they'll stop wanting to hurt us...
If you ever played "Civilization", the practical value of scientific advances should be immediately obvious. Real life examples abound too...
Can this thing assemble (a copy of) itself?
Also, back to the programming-languages famous problem — can it output its own design document(s) in some format?
Given the fact, that nobody is pushing NSA to say anything on the subject, it is unlikely, that they are lying. The kind of "help" you suspect NSA of providing needs no press-releases...
That's very strict requirements you are placing there, actually. Making anything "very clear", coming up with reliable estimates of saving/loss from using a particular product, making recommendations — hairy stuff, which NSA is rightly stearing clear from...
And why does NSA help BSD and Linux? Sorry, your conspiracy theory is less convincing, than NSA's stated reasoning — 90% of personal computers run Windows, thus we all benefit from the OS being more secure. Microsoft is, of course, going to milk this for all they can, but it is no less plausible an explanation because of that...
I certainly understand and share the frustration of tax-dollars helping a healthy and profitable corporation, but another way to look at this is NSA is helping the users. The proper long-term solution would, probably, be to make software vendors liable for flaws in their products — as is the case with most other industries. Short-term, however, National Security Agency making personal computers harder to hijack does, indeed, contribute to, uhmm, national security...
Microsoft is not the only entity to benefit either, BTW. For example, FreeBSD cvs-commit messages have plenty of acknowledgments of government's help (fgrep for TrustedBSD). The NSA-funded SELinux is another example...
NSA is, supposedly, full of very smart, technically adept people, who, no doubt, strongly prefer Unix-like OSes (on average) to Microsoft's offerings. However, with Microsoft's market-dominance, it gives a lot more bang for the NSA's buck to help them, rather than the OSS projects...
Granted, there is a danger of this solution perpetuating the problem, but that's a distant and lesser danger, than the present and grave one of millions of zombies arraigned into bot-nets and immediately usable (and up for hire) against businesses and government institutions alike.
Sadly, we had terrorist acts against us committed by citizens of allied nations. Heck — even by our own citizens... And the allied nations — Germany, Spain, Britain — have suffered similarly, from either their own citizens, or trusted visitors.
Bzzz.... You lose. Remember to logout...
That's me, I think. Is it not a good indication, however? The defense lawyer will have to do his job... What would he say?
Assuming court's complacency, you don't need fingerprints to begin with :-)
Similarly, I would not object to having to take my belt and shoes off, if the TSA officers were standing their beltless and barefeet themselves. But they don't. And when I asked for paper towels to "slide" on my bare feet through the scanner without touching the dirty floor, they said I can't and forced me to walk barefeet through the machine...
Interestingly, when I was going through the same procedure before the Kyiv-JFK flight (from Ukraine), I was given single-use "slippers" to cover my socks while shoe-less... Perhaps, being barefeet in front of a government officer is only undignifying for an Eastern European?
Travelers had to give their names to the inn-keepers for as long as inns existed, pretty much. Certainly for longer than "two generations"... Local baron, sheriff, or whatever other authority, could always inquire, who you are...
Having just gone through TSA's routine mistreatment, I certainly dislike the government's practices. But there is nothing recent about them...
It is based on the simple statistics of the average and median incomes per head in both countries. Criminals (of the kind, fingerprinting is likely to catch anyway) are poor. Very few poor Americans go to Brazil to find work. Plenty of Brazilians travel to US for that purpose (God bless their enterprise). For whatever reasons, some of them (may He devastate their families) commit crimes — leaving fingerprints...
If Brazil were doing the fingerprinting for the purposes of the genuine crime-fighting, they would not single Americans out. If they do — and the original poster in this thread stated so — they do it for the emotional reasons (like pride, et al.)
This was not "my line of thinking", but our invading forces wear uniform and are thus very easy to identify already. Also, they don't invade without numerous prior warnings — a country would have plenty of time to change their border-crossing procedures...
You are still welcome to try to force them to submit to fingerprinting, though. Go ahead, make my day...
True. Don't know about European or UK consulates' fees, but in the US, they charge Americans $100 for visas. Or did in August 2006...
There was no (overt) photographing nor fingerprinting of Americans, however. Thus the message, I was responding to, was likely incorrect — unless the policy was introduced since August...
Wha-wha-wait... Where is that "utterly infalible authorities" coming from?.. A tad off-topic, aren't we?..
Finger-print match from a crime-scene is always strong evidence of the person having something to do with the crime — its been like this for years. Unless you are against using them at all, you should not be against using them at the border — not for this reasons, anyway...
And yes, it is the hated "authorities", however fallible, that decide, what is a "crime scene"...
Those "strong protections" don't single Americans out. Thus targeting only Americans for fingerprinting can not be justified by your argument... Reciprocity/pride is what it is — if true to begin with. Once again, this last August, when I visited Brazil, I was neither photographed nor were my fingerprints taken (not overtly anyway)...