Also known as surrender? Yeah I suppose that works. I'll get in my time machine and tell that to Churchill -- it would have been the most effective way to end the Battle of Britain after all.
No. It's known as "knowing thy enemy."
The best way to end any war is to convince your enemy not to fight it. If you can do so by taking actions that do not compromise your position, you should do so.
Since the terrorist's main real claim is our abhorrent treatment of other nations, the best way to stop the terrorists is to stop mistreating the various nations they come from.
As for the other significant causes of terrorism--How about we just leave Israel alone for a few years, and let that problem sort itself out?
Hell I'm in my senior year of a CS BS course of study, and there are students in my classes who couldn't use a terminal to save their lives or work remotely without a GUI. They just don't understand the system commands. Sad
Actually, no. That's not sad--that's progress.
What would be sad is, if hired to work on a job that required use of a terminal and non-GUI remote access, these same CS majors couldn't adapt.
Why is the person outside of your country - probably also the head of a household - less deserving than the person in your country?
Because the person in your country is (1) paying taxes that ultimately benefit you as a company and (2) your current employee.
The "moral" thing is, to, before firing your current employee, offer to pay them less. If the employee is willing to take a cut to equal to salary + added overhead of an outsourced equivalent, then keep the current employee.
then you shouldn't have spent four paragraphs responding to me.
"Base" quality is quality without moral judgement. If Microsoft Office 2003 were suddenly released under the GPL, would OpenOffice still be the better choice? If Longhorn were to be released as Free Software, why would anyone still use Linux?
There is nothing self-conflicting about the Open Source movement, or its principles. Sometimes, the closed, proprietary product is simply better--and (pay attention now, this is the important part) any energy spent on convincing people to use the inferior "open" or "free" product is wasted effort.
Or, to be even harsher: if you attempt to alter the values of a person so that they use poorly designed, ineffecient software soley because of its moral weight, you have created an ecology that cannot stand and you have doomed your follower to economic failure--which is exactly the fate that a wholly proprietary system would eventually doom him to.
Something similar can be said for purchasing athletic shoes
Yes, let us shift the discussion from software to another industry--the principles of the discussion shall be much better illustrated by analogy.
As you correctly stated, no one would dismiss a tyrannical manufacturer's product on moral grounds if they did not have the information about the manufacturer's amoral behavior.
However, you make the incorrect assumption that any other manufactuer's shoe would be both equitable in quality and preferrable in moral weight. Such is not necessarily the case.
Assume, for the sake of analogy, that all shoe manufacturers, save for Grand National Union Shoes, or GNUS, are strongly religious organizations that only employ those who convert to their religion. GNUS, of course, employes people of any religion, because they believe in Religious Freedom. Unfortunately, GNUS shoes are somewhat lacking in shoe design; while functional, they are neither as ascetically pleasing nor simple to use as their competition's.
Now, of course, GNUS sells its lower-quality shoes at a much lower margin, as GNUS is fortuitous enough to be a not-for-profit corporation with executives so dedicated to religious freedom that they are willing to work for less. There are even economists and political scientists who laud GNUS as a superior company, are willing to support GNUS through patronage and donations, and will trot out argument after argument that GNUS shoes, being just as good and cheaper and morally better, should be the dominant shoe.
But, due to the lower base quality of the shoe, GNUS shoes are a fraction of the market--though popular in comparatively niche markets, such as military refugee shoes and ancient times reinactments.
Of course, GNUS shoes can exist as a small fraction of the market. Or, they can hardness and dedicate their energy not in making their shoes look better, but in making their shoes actually as good as or better than their more expensive competition.
So, to clearly state my point:
We have to teach people to think about human rights when they shop. We have to teach people that they can't divorce their purchasing power from politics
No, we don't. There is a measurable value that people place on morality--there always has been, and there always will be. How else do you think that the religious American South perpetuated slavery for so long, or that the current international drug trade has continued for so long?
The single thing that must be done to increase usage of Free Software is best thought of in abstract capitalist terms. We must cause the value of Software Freedom to exceed the cost of using software that is objectively inferior. History is shown that only a great minority are willing to sacrafice their quality of life for a non-mortal (i.e., not life-threatening) Freedom in others. Because of this, the best place for any adherent of Free Software to direct his
I hope that Blizzard doesn't try to "balance" the game....
The situation you described isn't unbalanced. It's just "time-balanced."
"Game Balance" means "all of the players have roughly equal ammounts of fun." Usually, this translates to "all player choices mean roughly the same ammount of total 'power.'"
Leaving MMORPGs and CRPGs aside, and getting back to pen & paper, imagine the game that doens't care about balance--five friends pick fighters, rogues, or wizards, which are all moderately balanced with each other, and then friend number six picks "uber cleric of d00m!", which lets him outclass everyone else.
The game is unbalnaced, not because the cleric can do a lot or has the most power, but because it lets the player with the "uber cleric of d00m" do everything--and that means that he often will, meaning that he'll do more than anyone else--and he'll probably have more fun than anyone else.
With time and effort, free software becomes better on a technical scale. So the challenge is to teach people to value software freedom.
No. The challenge is to narrow the gap between the base quality (i.e., "excluding value judgements") of Free Software and the base quality of non-Free Software.
Anything else is Orwellian and self-defeating. Those who value software Freedoms will value Free Software, and those that come to value software Freedoms will also value Free Software--but the bulk of the effort in making all software Free must be making the BEST software be software that is Free, especially when Freedom is ignored.
Everything you do with technology including the computer you're using now is supported completely by theories.
No. Everything I'm doing now is supported completely by the sort of things that theories are made about. The theories are just our best guesses as to why these things work.
Creationists, and other non-mainstream avenues of thought, often bring up the "only a theory" argument not because they think it improperly weakens the weight of a theory, but because they want to debunk theories being treated as Gospel truth.
We probably evolved from an apelike ancestor through natural selection. The universe looks like it arose from a Big Bang fourteen billion years ago.
Science is not religion, and it doesn't give definite answers--because every claim it makes is eternally subject to review and refutation, and many of the theories that contradict someone's religious beliefs are untestable.
No OS has ever been installed on a wider variety of hardware than Unix (in all its flavors).
And failing to properly use this advantage is Unix's greatest failing.
If i cannot take my application from one computer to another computer without recompiling or installing a different version, then the two computers are "different" in the only way that really matters.
However, current evidence indicates that, instead of slowing down as predicted by "Big Crunch" models, the expansion of the universe is speeding up. So no end of time after all.
No Big Crunch != No End of Time.
If the universe started, it started with infinite mass-energy and infinitesimal space--or two other similar opposites.
The time since then is a succession of reactions wherein mass-energy distributes itself throughout "space." Enthropy is the universe's energy being spent. (Law of Conservation of Energy only works if you count the mass/energy reduced to a state that cannot perform work as "energy.")
So, the end of time will occur when all of mass-energy is reduced to a state where it can no longer perform work; this may be a reformation of the original singularity, or it may be a state of desolate infininity.
-or-
something outside of our fourteen-billion light-year observational window and horribly inadequate perception of said window could counteract enthropy on a very high scale, like gravity tearing down wallpaper.
How can something with the same kernel, and the same ancestry go the other way: Mozilla actually improves as it evolves.
Mozilla is a descendant, of sorts, of the Netscape 4 browser. OTOH, it doesn't have any real inherited code--and Netscape 6 and 7 were just repackaged Mozilla that did, AFAIK, get smaller and faster with each iternation, just like Moz did.
Oh, I know. We're on the friggin' security council?
I think you mean the Security Council. And, where would that have gotten them, another flagrant disregard of international law from the U.S.? What would publicizing another violation from us get them? They certainly weren't going to attack us militarily on it like we were about to attack Iraq.
*sigh*
Look, since you've obviously got a hell of a lot of energy, why don't you find a legitimate legal authority that actually considers the recent invasion of Iraq as a contravention of international law?
The US has gone to war without the UN's approval before. The mere lack of UN approval does not make a war a violation of the UN charter.
A proposed UN Security Council resolution to hold off US hostilites, even if vetoed, would have shifted the legal, ethical, and political weight. But no one put such a resolution forth, not simply because Shrub would ignore it, but because the US did have plenty of legitimate reasons to invade Iraq.
. Not that I don't think that you believe the points you made were the reasons for our invasion. But, the Shrub administration and Faux News channel used these arguments to sway public opinion while all the time knowing these were not the real reasons.
*sigh* (again)
No. Bush's press harped on the one nuclear reason, which really was the only one that could have carried the war by itself if it had been true. I didn't learn of a single other reason from the war from watching the Fox news channel, and I was only reminded of a few by the President's staff's PR.
But that doesn't matter here, because you're not engaging in a reasonable discussion. You're resorting to childish name-calling and what is really unsupportable allegations of criminal malice on the part of the President.
If you really want Bush gone, doing an impersonation of a Kennedy-assassination nut won't help it happen. Just as there were legitimate reasons for war, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to elect someone other than Bush.
Al-Qaeda + Saddam was the terrorism that Shrub was telling everybody.
Got a quote? I mean, honestly, this is on the level of "Al Gore invented the internet" for misquoting an executive officeholder.
Saddam DID support terrorists. So he was at least tangental to the War on Terrorism. And more to the point, he's a malicious, vile tyrant who didn't even feed his own people.
Screw morality, screw oil, and screw religion--a world leader being so bad to their own people should be an act of war against the international community in today's world, and worthy of a military response. It @#$ing was good enough to hang Nazis and go to war in Yugoslavia, so it was good enough for Saddam--and, if anyone forgets it, it should be good enough for tyrants in any other nation.
Other than the war-mongering of frustrated American masculinity, what did we have?
Moral outrage, indisputable evil, and the willingness to step on toes and offend people to eliminate a bad man.
Bush is a Christian. Not just any Christian, but a "born again" christian. When he saw Saddam Hussein, he didn't see an Arab, or a political opponent, or even the guy who tried to kill his father. He saw an Evil Man who should be stopped--and, as a Good Christian, Bush was of the opinion even before he was elected that he would stop Saddam if he got a chance.
THIS is the great, mysterious reason that you're alluding to. And Bush was right, even if only this one time.
From your argument, two wrongs make a right. History tells us that's a good recipe for a blood fued.
Or progress. Find a time of peace, and I'll point you to the time of war that made it happen. Historically, people do NOT simply become peaceful--they live in peace once those who cannot live in peace are violently excised.
Now, all that said: Bush did what he wanted to do, and he created a hell of a lot of problems along with it. If we can find someone who won't make things worse, we should replace Bush as President--and we won't do it by juvenile name-calling.
It was also with us. And the UN didn't even try a "no, don't bomb Iraq US" vote.
As for the rest of your critizisms: just because you don't agree with a reason doesn't make it dishonest. It might make it "wrong", but hardly not "honest."
No. Simple failure of Shrub Administration/U.N. diplomacy. His daddy was better at it, but this numbskull couldn't control his trigger finger. His only half-way feasable argument (even Powell had to excise some of the outright lies from the deceptive rhetoric he was forced to spew to the U.N.'s collective face) of Weapons of Mass Destruction have vanished into thin air, leaving a unpleasant odor that the rest of the world blames us for.
*sigh*
Rank-and-file Iraqi troops were convinced that, while their unit didn't have WMD, some more-secret unit of the Iraqi army did. According to some reports, Saddam himself thought that he had WMD before the war. And regardless of what he knew, the former Butcher of Baghdad certainly didn't act like a man with nothing to hide.
Again, why not invade Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea, or Pakistan?
Because all of those nations are engaging in active and productive diplomacy with us. War is the breakdown of diplomacy, not a hammer for every problem.
They've been attempting to get nuclear long before Iraq, and have actual terrorist ties.
What part of paying pensions to the familiy of suicide bombers and having an "Army of Israel" founded to make terrorist strikes against Israel isn't "actual terrorist ties?" (You know, the army that the US is actually fighting in Iraq?)
You're right in that Shrub didn't attack Iraq simply for Weapons of Mass Destruction. That's just what he used to sell it.
And I'm pissed at him because of that, because he had enough to go to war without nukes.
The rest of the planet can distinguish between a "global war against terrorism", and personal vendettas/business goals.
No, they just think they can. Sure, they can spot a Republican mixing priorities, but they just miss the point on a whole host of other bits that don't have anything to do with America.
It was probably pretty interesting decades ago but I'd like to think that our species is getting a bit wiser.
I don't know why.
We were reflecting on the grayness of warfare millenia ago; the Cold War and the Nuerenberg trials, with their rather drastic black & white (er, Red & Green) morality were more of a temporary backslide than an indication of any genetic inability to appreciate complexity.
Rarely is war a clear-cut matter of good vs. evil.
Actually, most of the time it is. The difference is that the good/evil difference is not always split along national lines.
* Violation of 1991 cease fire * Attempt to assassinate Bush Sr. * Giving aid and comfort to terrorists * Refusing to cooperate with the UN. * Being a rat-bastard tyrant * Simple failture of Washington/Baghdad diplomacy
(Oh, and I noticed a typo. It should have been "We didn't invade Iraq just because of that." 'they're trying to get nukes' is certainly on the list of "also-reasons". My apologies.)
What are the moral implications of a Nation that invades another because they suspect there are weapons of mass destruction, and they have such a stash in their own garage?
We didn't just invade Iraq because of that. (Look--we didn't invade Pakistan or India, nor have we invaded North Korea, or the UK, or France.)
Of course you could. There were third party supplements back in the seventies for DnD that weren't licensed. You'd have to ensure you didn't infringe on their copyrights at all, but you could do it.
"don't infringe on their copyrights" can mean a heck of a lot more than "don't copy their text word-for-word." A few good cases can be made that an RPG is a "character" and thus deserving of copyright protection as-it-is.
At the very least, Steve Jackson could take me to court--and no distributor in the industry would sell me if they really wanted to say "no."
And don't fall into the trap of "the Jewish people" because "the Jewish people" encompass more people than those who conspired against Jesus.
Sorry. I have tried to be careful to avoid that grammatical collusion--the people who call themselves jews today have about as much blame for the Crucifixtion as I have for the Holocaust. (Hence the wording of my question.)
You might as well say "one historical document" period --
The Gospels, Epistles, and the multitude of books of the Old Testament are historical documents. Biased documents that reflect belief more than fact, but historical documents nonetheless.
Well, the Romans crucified lots of people -- beyond the fact that it was a cruel act in general -- they have no reason to share your spiritual indignation. The Holocaust was quite different.
Comments like that make me slide a bit more to the "Oh, get over it" side. There's nothing spiritual about my question--it's about as secular a question as I can ask about Christ's life.
The Jewish populace in the Gospels were somewhere between conspirational and complacant in Christ's crucifixtion. Regardless of how close the actual historical jewish populace were to their portrayal in the Gospels, the reaction of people when presented with a claim that the Jews were even partially responsible for the Cruicifixtion of Christ is, in a word, "enlightening."
That's right -- it's the worldwide intellectual sociologist conspiracy
Heh. Conspiracy? Hardly. It's simple politeness. Don't critize a world culture for something that culture doesn't aknowledge itself as having.
And it wouldn't suprirse me if such artices were written, and simply (mostly) ignored. People are drive to be polite to those within their social circle, and one of the consequenes of modern life is that we're all in each other's social circle. (Which is, by and large, a Good Thing.)
If I wanted to write a GURPS supplement, it wouldn't go anywhere if Steve Jackson Games didn't feel it was worth publishing themselves. No licensing, no Open Gaming--no nothing.
You CAN do that with D&D. Go to http://www.theFGA.com/ or http://www.opengamingfoundation.org/ or even http://www.wizards.com/d20/ to learn how.
Judging by some of your appalling and embarrasing opinions...
There is, last time I checked, one historical document outside of the Gospels--and it either does not contradict or supports the Gospel's account of the Jewish people's involvement. (And it was written by a non-Christian jew.)
Which is beside the fact; I have yet to meet a jew that will admit to "if it did happen, it was a bad thing and I'd be pissed." It's a sort of social mind-block that a few sociological research papers could be written on. (OTOH, they wouldn't go anywhere, because even suggesting that there's anything wrong with any culture en masse that isn't a puny fourth-world tribe is taboo.)
to GURPS, where things are a little more grounded in fact, when possible.
There are historical-based d20 supplements. They don't fly well, because most RPG gamers don't really want to get anal-retentive with history--and those who do play GURPS.;)
GURPS combat rounds are one second each as opposed to D&D's minute rounds and vaguely defined "segments"(*) (are those even in third edition?).
Wrong.
d20/third edition (and 2nd edition's "Combat and Tacitcs" has 6-second rounds and no segments. Everyone is assumed to be doing six seconds of activity each round, and initiative is just used to determine who gets "done" first.
AND d20's a hell of a lot more "Universal" than GURPS. With a little bit of looking, you can find every RPG setting as a d20 version--and if you can't find it, you can make your own thanks to the Open Gaming License.
GURPS, despite is so-called "universality", is about as far from OSS as gaming gets. It's an odd inversion in RPGdom, wherein the 800lbs industry gorilla (Wizards of the Coast, a division of Hasbro) is the most "open source" of the RPG system-makers.
(Of course, the "third party" companies like Mongoose or Sword Sorcery Studios are even more "Open Source", but they write games, not systems for games.)
Slashdot Mirror
My computer, my data, my choice--
Stop.
You have a choice. You can not buy from Apple, and look for someone to sell you one without DRM.
The future won't tolerate the crap these copywrite perverters are trying to enforce, may as well wake up now before it's too late.
It's copyRIGHT, jackass. As in, rights to the work. As in, the right to do what you want with what you create.
Oh, and I just remembered a differnet way to avoid DRM. Partake of and promote public-domain music.
Also known as surrender? Yeah I suppose that works. I'll get in my time machine and tell that to Churchill -- it would have been the most effective way to end the Battle of Britain after all.
No. It's known as "knowing thy enemy."
The best way to end any war is to convince your enemy not to fight it. If you can do so by taking actions that do not compromise your position, you should do so.
Since the terrorist's main real claim is our abhorrent treatment of other nations, the best way to stop the terrorists is to stop mistreating the various nations they come from.
As for the other significant causes of terrorism--How about we just leave Israel alone for a few years, and let that problem sort itself out?
Hell I'm in my senior year of a CS BS course of study, and there are students in my classes who couldn't use a terminal to save their lives or work remotely without a GUI. They just don't understand the system commands.
Sad
Actually, no. That's not sad--that's progress.
What would be sad is, if hired to work on a job that required use of a terminal and non-GUI remote access, these same CS majors couldn't adapt.
Why is the person outside of your country - probably also the head of a household - less deserving than the person in your country?
Because the person in your country is (1) paying taxes that ultimately benefit you as a company and (2) your current employee.
The "moral" thing is, to, before firing your current employee, offer to pay them less. If the employee is willing to take a cut to equal to salary + added overhead of an outsourced equivalent, then keep the current employee.
And a quick survey of the accidents my geek friends have caused against the accidents my non-geek friends have caused would say the opposite.
And what, pray tell, makes you think that the geeks are smarter than the non-geeks?
They're geekier, not smarter.
I don't know what "base" quality means,
then you shouldn't have spent four paragraphs responding to me.
"Base" quality is quality without moral judgement. If Microsoft Office 2003 were suddenly released under the GPL, would OpenOffice still be the better choice? If Longhorn were to be released as Free Software, why would anyone still use Linux?
There is nothing self-conflicting about the Open Source movement, or its principles. Sometimes, the closed, proprietary product is simply better--and (pay attention now, this is the important part) any energy spent on convincing people to use the inferior "open" or "free" product is wasted effort.
Or, to be even harsher: if you attempt to alter the values of a person so that they use poorly designed, ineffecient software soley because of its moral weight, you have created an ecology that cannot stand and you have doomed your follower to economic failure--which is exactly the fate that a wholly proprietary system would eventually doom him to.
Something similar can be said for purchasing athletic shoes
Yes, let us shift the discussion from software to another industry--the principles of the discussion shall be much better illustrated by analogy.
As you correctly stated, no one would dismiss a tyrannical manufacturer's product on moral grounds if they did not have the information about the manufacturer's amoral behavior.
However, you make the incorrect assumption that any other manufactuer's shoe would be both equitable in quality and preferrable in moral weight. Such is not necessarily the case.
Assume, for the sake of analogy, that all shoe manufacturers, save for Grand National Union Shoes, or GNUS, are strongly religious organizations that only employ those who convert to their religion. GNUS, of course, employes people of any religion, because they believe in Religious Freedom. Unfortunately, GNUS shoes are somewhat lacking in shoe design; while functional, they are neither as ascetically pleasing nor simple to use as their competition's.
Now, of course, GNUS sells its lower-quality shoes at a much lower margin, as GNUS is fortuitous enough to be a not-for-profit corporation with executives so dedicated to religious freedom that they are willing to work for less. There are even economists and political scientists who laud GNUS as a superior company, are willing to support GNUS through patronage and donations, and will trot out argument after argument that GNUS shoes, being just as good and cheaper and morally better, should be the dominant shoe.
But, due to the lower base quality of the shoe, GNUS shoes are a fraction of the market--though popular in comparatively niche markets, such as military refugee shoes and ancient times reinactments.
Of course, GNUS shoes can exist as a small fraction of the market. Or, they can hardness and dedicate their energy not in making their shoes look better, but in making their shoes actually as good as or better than their more expensive competition.
So, to clearly state my point:
We have to teach people to think about human rights when they shop. We have to teach people that they can't divorce their purchasing power from politics
No, we don't. There is a measurable value that people place on morality--there always has been, and there always will be. How else do you think that the religious American South perpetuated slavery for so long, or that the current international drug trade has continued for so long?
The single thing that must be done to increase usage of Free Software is best thought of in abstract capitalist terms. We must cause the value of Software Freedom to exceed the cost of using software that is objectively inferior. History is shown that only a great minority are willing to sacrafice their quality of life for a non-mortal (i.e., not life-threatening) Freedom in others. Because of this, the best place for any adherent of Free Software to direct his
I hope that Blizzard doesn't try to "balance" the game. ...
The situation you described isn't unbalanced. It's just "time-balanced."
"Game Balance" means "all of the players have roughly equal ammounts of fun." Usually, this translates to "all player choices mean roughly the same ammount of total 'power.'"
Leaving MMORPGs and CRPGs aside, and getting back to pen & paper, imagine the game that doens't care about balance--five friends pick fighters, rogues, or wizards, which are all moderately balanced with each other, and then friend number six picks "uber cleric of d00m!", which lets him outclass everyone else.
The game is unbalnaced, not because the cleric can do a lot or has the most power, but because it lets the player with the "uber cleric of d00m" do everything--and that means that he often will, meaning that he'll do more than anyone else--and he'll probably have more fun than anyone else.
With time and effort, free software becomes better on a technical scale. So the challenge is to teach people to value software freedom.
No. The challenge is to narrow the gap between the base quality (i.e., "excluding value judgements") of Free Software and the base quality of non-Free Software.
Anything else is Orwellian and self-defeating. Those who value software Freedoms will value Free Software, and those that come to value software Freedoms will also value Free Software--but the bulk of the effort in making all software Free must be making the BEST software be software that is Free, especially when Freedom is ignored.
Everything you do with technology including the computer you're using now is supported completely by theories.
No. Everything I'm doing now is supported completely by the sort of things that theories are made about. The theories are just our best guesses as to why these things work.
Creationists, and other non-mainstream avenues of thought, often bring up the "only a theory" argument not because they think it improperly weakens the weight of a theory, but because they want to debunk theories being treated as Gospel truth.
We probably evolved from an apelike ancestor through natural selection. The universe looks like it arose from a Big Bang fourteen billion years ago.
Science is not religion, and it doesn't give definite answers--because every claim it makes is eternally subject to review and refutation, and many of the theories that contradict someone's religious beliefs are untestable.
No OS has ever been installed on a wider variety of hardware than Unix (in all its flavors).
And failing to properly use this advantage is Unix's greatest failing.
If i cannot take my application from one computer to another computer without recompiling or installing a different version, then the two computers are "different" in the only way that really matters.
Hmm...
Nintendo could jump right to NES 5 if they wanted to.
However, current evidence indicates that, instead of slowing down as predicted by "Big Crunch" models, the expansion of the universe is speeding up. So no end of time after all.
No Big Crunch != No End of Time.
If the universe started, it started with infinite mass-energy and infinitesimal space--or two other similar opposites.
The time since then is a succession of reactions wherein mass-energy distributes itself throughout "space." Enthropy is the universe's energy being spent. (Law of Conservation of Energy only works if you count the mass/energy reduced to a state that cannot perform work as "energy.")
So, the end of time will occur when all of mass-energy is reduced to a state where it can no longer perform work; this may be a reformation of the original singularity, or it may be a state of desolate infininity.
-or-
something outside of our fourteen-billion light-year observational window and horribly inadequate perception of said window could counteract enthropy on a very high scale, like gravity tearing down wallpaper.
How can something with the same kernel, and the same ancestry go the other way: Mozilla actually improves as it evolves.
Mozilla is a descendant, of sorts, of the Netscape 4 browser. OTOH, it doesn't have any real inherited code--and Netscape 6 and 7 were just repackaged Mozilla that did, AFAIK, get smaller and faster with each iternation, just like Moz did.
And, where did you get that?
Let me think for a minute--
Oh, I know. We're on the friggin' security council?
I think you mean the Security Council. And, where would that have gotten them, another flagrant disregard of international law from the U.S.? What would publicizing another violation from us get them? They certainly weren't going to attack us militarily on it like we were about to attack Iraq.
*sigh*
Look, since you've obviously got a hell of a lot of energy, why don't you find a legitimate legal authority that actually considers the recent invasion of Iraq as a contravention of international law?
The US has gone to war without the UN's approval before. The mere lack of UN approval does not make a war a violation of the UN charter.
A proposed UN Security Council resolution to hold off US hostilites, even if vetoed, would have shifted the legal, ethical, and political weight. But no one put such a resolution forth, not simply because Shrub would ignore it, but because the US did have plenty of legitimate reasons to invade Iraq.
. Not that I don't think that you believe the points you made were the reasons for our invasion. But, the Shrub administration and Faux News channel used these arguments to sway public opinion while all the time knowing these were not the real reasons.
*sigh* (again)
No. Bush's press harped on the one nuclear reason, which really was the only one that could have carried the war by itself if it had been true. I didn't learn of a single other reason from the war from watching the Fox news channel, and I was only reminded of a few by the President's staff's PR.
But that doesn't matter here, because you're not engaging in a reasonable discussion. You're resorting to childish name-calling and what is really unsupportable allegations of criminal malice on the part of the President.
If you really want Bush gone, doing an impersonation of a Kennedy-assassination nut won't help it happen. Just as there were legitimate reasons for war, there are plenty of legitimate reasons to elect someone other than Bush.
Al-Qaeda + Saddam was the terrorism that Shrub was telling everybody.
Got a quote? I mean, honestly, this is on the level of "Al Gore invented the internet" for misquoting an executive officeholder.
Saddam DID support terrorists. So he was at least tangental to the War on Terrorism. And more to the point, he's a malicious, vile tyrant who didn't even feed his own people.
Screw morality, screw oil, and screw religion--a world leader being so bad to their own people should be an act of war against the international community in today's world, and worthy of a military response. It @#$ing was good enough to hang Nazis and go to war in Yugoslavia, so it was good enough for Saddam--and, if anyone forgets it, it should be good enough for tyrants in any other nation.
Other than the war-mongering of frustrated American masculinity, what did we have?
Moral outrage, indisputable evil, and the willingness to step on toes and offend people to eliminate a bad man.
Bush is a Christian. Not just any Christian, but a "born again" christian. When he saw Saddam Hussein, he didn't see an Arab, or a political opponent, or even the guy who tried to kill his father. He saw an Evil Man who should be stopped--and, as a Good Christian, Bush was of the opinion even before he was elected that he would stop Saddam if he got a chance.
THIS is the great, mysterious reason that you're alluding to. And Bush was right, even if only this one time.
From your argument, two wrongs make a right. History tells us that's a good recipe for a blood fued.
Or progress. Find a time of peace, and I'll point you to the time of war that made it happen. Historically, people do NOT simply become peaceful--they live in peace once those who cannot live in peace are violently excised.
Now, all that said: Bush did what he wanted to do, and he created a hell of a lot of problems along with it. If we can find someone who won't make things worse, we should replace Bush as President--and we won't do it by juvenile name-calling.
Correct me if I am wrong, but Windows probably has never used the middle mouse button for anything.
You're wrong, but not by much. Windows has a use for middle button mice--'autoscroll', or any other "click the mouse wheel" function.
You're either (1) conditioned to using a toughter wheel or (2) a victim of a crappy hardware run.
I personally use Logitech (and so I'm probably #1)--but MS's whole hardware division belies a claim that "they can't make anything good."
There's a reason why the only real players in hardware anymore are Logitech and Microsoft.
er, "PERIPHERAL" hardware. (E!#$@$%%....)
Not to mention I have yet to see microsoft come out with anything that is elegant and easy to use.
Check out MS's hardware department sometime, specifically their mice.
There's a reason why the only real players in hardware anymore are Logitech and Microsoft.
That agreement was with the U.N. Are we the U.N.?
It was also with us. And the UN didn't even try a "no, don't bomb Iraq US" vote.
As for the rest of your critizisms: just because you don't agree with a reason doesn't make it dishonest. It might make it "wrong", but hardly not "honest."
No. Simple failure of Shrub Administration/U.N. diplomacy. His daddy was better at it, but this numbskull couldn't control his trigger finger. His only half-way feasable argument (even Powell had to excise some of the outright lies from the deceptive rhetoric he was forced to spew to the U.N.'s collective face) of Weapons of Mass Destruction have vanished into thin air, leaving a unpleasant odor that the rest of the world blames us for.
*sigh*
Rank-and-file Iraqi troops were convinced that, while their unit didn't have WMD, some more-secret unit of the Iraqi army did. According to some reports, Saddam himself thought that he had WMD before the war. And regardless of what he knew, the former Butcher of Baghdad certainly didn't act like a man with nothing to hide.
Again, why not invade Saudi Arabia, Iran, North Korea, or Pakistan?
Because all of those nations are engaging in active and productive diplomacy with us. War is the breakdown of diplomacy, not a hammer for every problem.
They've been attempting to get nuclear long before Iraq, and have actual terrorist ties.
What part of paying pensions to the familiy of suicide bombers and having an "Army of Israel" founded to make terrorist strikes against Israel isn't "actual terrorist ties?" (You know, the army that the US is actually fighting in Iraq?)
You're right in that Shrub didn't attack Iraq simply for Weapons of Mass Destruction. That's just what he used to sell it.
And I'm pissed at him because of that, because he had enough to go to war without nukes.
The rest of the planet can distinguish between a "global war against terrorism", and personal vendettas/business goals.
No, they just think they can. Sure, they can spot a Republican mixing priorities, but they just miss the point on a whole host of other bits that don't have anything to do with America.
It was probably pretty interesting decades ago but I'd like to think that our species is getting a bit wiser.
I don't know why.
We were reflecting on the grayness of warfare millenia ago; the Cold War and the Nuerenberg trials, with their rather drastic black & white (er, Red & Green) morality were more of a temporary backslide than an indication of any genetic inability to appreciate complexity.
Rarely is war a clear-cut matter of good vs. evil.
Actually, most of the time it is. The difference is that the good/evil difference is not always split along national lines.
Oh. Then why did we?
Whole buncha reasons.
* Violation of 1991 cease fire
* Attempt to assassinate Bush Sr.
* Giving aid and comfort to terrorists
* Refusing to cooperate with the UN.
* Being a rat-bastard tyrant
* Simple failture of Washington/Baghdad diplomacy
(Oh, and I noticed a typo. It should have been "We didn't invade Iraq just because of that." 'they're trying to get nukes' is certainly on the list of "also-reasons". My apologies.)
What are the moral implications of a Nation that invades another because they suspect there are weapons of mass destruction, and they have such a stash in their own garage?
We didn't just invade Iraq because of that. (Look--we didn't invade Pakistan or India, nor have we invaded North Korea, or the UK, or France.)
Of course you could. There were third party supplements back in the seventies for DnD that weren't licensed. You'd have to ensure you didn't infringe on their copyrights at all, but you could do it.
"don't infringe on their copyrights" can mean a heck of a lot more than "don't copy their text word-for-word." A few good cases can be made that an RPG is a "character" and thus deserving of copyright protection as-it-is.
At the very least, Steve Jackson could take me to court--and no distributor in the industry would sell me if they really wanted to say "no."
And don't fall into the trap of "the Jewish people" because "the Jewish people" encompass more people than those who conspired against Jesus.
Sorry. I have tried to be careful to avoid that grammatical collusion--the people who call themselves jews today have about as much blame for the Crucifixtion as I have for the Holocaust. (Hence the wording of my question.)
You might as well say "one historical document" period --
The Gospels, Epistles, and the multitude of books of the Old Testament are historical documents. Biased documents that reflect belief more than fact, but historical documents nonetheless.
Well, the Romans crucified lots of people -- beyond the fact that it was a cruel act in general -- they have no reason to share your spiritual indignation. The Holocaust was quite different.
Comments like that make me slide a bit more to the "Oh, get over it" side. There's nothing spiritual about my question--it's about as secular a question as I can ask about Christ's life.
The Jewish populace in the Gospels were somewhere between conspirational and complacant in Christ's crucifixtion. Regardless of how close the actual historical jewish populace were to their portrayal in the Gospels, the reaction of people when presented with a claim that the Jews were even partially responsible for the Cruicifixtion of Christ is, in a word, "enlightening."
That's right -- it's the worldwide intellectual sociologist conspiracy
Heh. Conspiracy? Hardly. It's simple politeness. Don't critize a world culture for something that culture doesn't aknowledge itself as having.
And it wouldn't suprirse me if such artices were written, and simply (mostly) ignored. People are drive to be polite to those within their social circle, and one of the consequenes of modern life is that we're all in each other's social circle. (Which is, by and large, a Good Thing.)
You can do that with gurps, too.
;)
No, you can't. Read the entire sentance.
If I wanted to write a GURPS supplement, it wouldn't go anywhere if Steve Jackson Games didn't feel it was worth publishing themselves. No licensing, no Open Gaming--no nothing.
You CAN do that with D&D. Go to http://www.theFGA.com/ or http://www.opengamingfoundation.org/ or even http://www.wizards.com/d20/ to learn how.
Judging by some of your appalling and embarrasing opinions...
There is, last time I checked, one historical document outside of the Gospels--and it either does not contradict or supports the Gospel's account of the Jewish people's involvement. (And it was written by a non-Christian jew.)
Which is beside the fact; I have yet to meet a jew that will admit to "if it did happen, it was a bad thing and I'd be pissed." It's a sort of social mind-block that a few sociological research papers could be written on. (OTOH, they wouldn't go anywhere, because even suggesting that there's anything wrong with any culture en masse that isn't a puny fourth-world tribe is taboo.)
to GURPS, where things are a little more grounded in fact, when possible.
There are historical-based d20 supplements. They don't fly well, because most RPG gamers don't really want to get anal-retentive with history--and those who do play GURPS.
(THERE WILL NEVER BE FLYING CARS. PEOPLE ARE TOO STUPID TO BE TRUSTED WITH THEM.)
you're thinking "personal airplanes." And they're there, they just aren't efficient/reliable enough to work.
A "flying car" would be a buyoant-in-air, hard-shelled vehicle which can land in a parking space and manuver as well as a car on the streets.
GURPS combat rounds are one second each as opposed to D&D's minute rounds and vaguely defined "segments"(*) (are those even in third edition?).
Wrong.
d20/third edition (and 2nd edition's "Combat and Tacitcs" has 6-second rounds and no segments. Everyone is assumed to be doing six seconds of activity each round, and initiative is just used to determine who gets "done" first.
AND d20's a hell of a lot more "Universal" than GURPS. With a little bit of looking, you can find every RPG setting as a d20 version--and if you can't find it, you can make your own thanks to the Open Gaming License.
GURPS, despite is so-called "universality", is about as far from OSS as gaming gets. It's an odd inversion in RPGdom, wherein the 800lbs industry gorilla (Wizards of the Coast, a division of Hasbro) is the most "open source" of the RPG system-makers.
(Of course, the "third party" companies like Mongoose or Sword Sorcery Studios are even more "Open Source", but they write games, not systems for games.)