I have to disagree. Alignment is a mattter of philosophy. Maybe it's just that I'm an optimist, but I'd have to say the majority of humanity is of the "Good" alignment in that they generally hold helping others to be at least equal to if not slightly above personal gain. I'd also argue that they by and large have Lawful tendencies, as otherwise organized society would not work. No, there are very few paragons of these alignments, but to claim *most* people don't favor Good over Evil or Law over Chaos is just silly. Whether or not you devote your life to fighting evil isnt' a matter of alignment, it's a matter of where you get your hit dice...
Note I say this as someone who is most decidedly NOT Lawful Good...
Politicians being covered under the Hatch Act would mean they couldn't be politicians... As the things it prevents you from doing are the exact things an elected official is supposed to be doing, and that's kind of the point. From my time as a local and state employee I'm pretty familiar with this kind of regulation. The idea is *supposed* to be that since you're a civil servant, an elected official can't come along and axe your job because you didn't support him/her/it or their favorite pet project, etc. But as a consequence of this "protection" you're not supposed to engage in political activity in public and thereby take advantage of your privileged position.
Honestly those sort of regulations are what I hated most about being a civil servant. It's not that I disagreed with them, just that I hated having to watch what I said/did in public.
On top of that, if he's abusing government resources to post political speech he's doubly deserving of a good beating...
Your ignorance is astounding. That alone is not entirely surprising or disheartening, but what really has me depressed is the fact that I know there's probably hundreds of thousands of people out there who think just like you and will happily destroy useful research and progress for the sake of "helping humanity".
Let me be a geek and dissect you piece by piece for a bit...
This is not flamebait, this is simple logic.
Emphasis mine. One of those words describes your "argument" rather well. It also describes you rather succinctly. The other word has little to do with you or the diarrhea of the mouth/keyboard you seem to be suffering from. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which.
Studying blackholes takes away billions that could be used on finding new eco-friendly energy sources.
Interesting. "Studying black holes" in particular generally does not take "billions", at least not on a yearly basis. That's done mostly with computer simulation and radio telescopes, the cost of which is spread out nicely over their long life spans. And funnily enough, theoretical physics research of that sort leads nicely into exotic "clean" power production research. Granted that's a tree that probably won't bear fruit in yours or my lifetime, but when/if it does it will as big of a chance to the human race as tool use was for our ancestors, perhaps even more. The fact that you'd even compare those two things makes me wonder if I'm just falling for a really clever troll...
The billions wasted on finding water on Mars could be spent on purifying water in Africa.
You realize these costs are not mutually exclusive, don't you? You realize that understanding how the climate of Mars has changed helps us better understand how our own climate may behave in the future and better deal with problems like desertification? You realize that two the Mars rovers didn't cost $1billion combined? And have probably provided us more knowledge on Mars' climate history than the sum total of all missions before them? Meanwhile we send billions in aid to Africa every year and (at least the way the news paints it) it only gets worse there every day...
Calling this flamebait is simply a copout not being able to argue the counter position logically.
It's hard to counter an illogical person who's argument is driven by emotion with logic, as said person generally does not bother to recognize the logic they are being presented with.
Space exploration is a waste of real resources that are needed here.
Can you point to what resources are being wasted on space exploration and are therefore not available to humanitarian efforts? And don't say money--we spend more money on humanitarian aid EVERY YEAR than we did the previous year, and see less for it. Meanwhile the trend for the past three decades has been to spend less on space every year, and yet our rate of return just keeps going up...
What does having a better understanding of the universe get us, nothing.
This. Right here. This almost leaves me speechless. That you could actually believe that a greater understanding of how the Universe works is not in itself beneficial is mind boggling. It's infuriating. It makes me wonder if I'm just being trolled really hard, except I know that there are others out there like you. How can you be so blind?
Even ignoring for a moment why knowing how the FABRIC OF THE UNIVERSE is put together is beneficial, you certainly can't be ignorant of all the advances in the sciences that have come from the space program that daily improve people's lives? What we've gained in material sciences alone is incredible. The medical field has benefited enormously, as well. You want to purify water in Africa? Where do you think the cutting edge research is being done in water purification and recycl
Well I can't beat the LEOs, but if you disqualify them for using emulation I may have a winner.
I recently started working at the William J. Hughes Technical Center in Atlantic City, which is an FAA Research and Development campus. I work in the Target Generation Facility, where we simulate air traffic control scenarios to test new approaches, recreate problems with existing systems, or try out new software/hardware for air traffic control centers. Not too long after I started, a coworker took me on a quick tour of the labs and showed me "something amazing".
What he showed me were a row of about a dozen UNIVAC machines in the back of one of the lab areas. What's even more amazing was that they're still plugging away. After doing some research, turns out they're running one of the old versions of ARTS (Automated Radar Tracking System) so that we can simulate older ATCs. Depending on which version, that means the code is from anywhere between the late 60s and around '74 (which is when, I believe, ARTS III was rolled out).
Seeing a visual representation of the register values on a machine (and having them change slow enough that you can actually get some idea of the values) really makes you appreciate how far we've come. Coworker and I laughed that the Razr I was taking a picture of them with probably had 10000X the processing power as those boxes... And it's a piece of crap...:P
The additional features are that you can have the card render to a buffer (GPU-accelerated rendering)
Now I may be totally off base on this, but I'm pretty sure when I do render-to-texture type operations on a GeForce card they're hardware accelerated, and that is VERY useful for gaming (it's the most common way to implement "bloom" for instance). Most cards offer >10-bit color depth now, as well, which is useful for HDR type effects. Of course most monitors are still clamped to 8-bit, but that's besides the point...:)
And yet, as 2short pointed out, modifying and compiling public domain source code creates a proprietary work BASED on said public domain source code. The original program, as originally claimed, remains public domain. So yes, the FSF "simplification" does border on falsehood.
I happen to have been one of those "employees", until just recently, and I was involved in a minor scandal regarding republishing of lecture notes. I was a Research Assistant involved in helping teach a Senior/Graduate level computer graphics course. As part of the course, we provided PDFs of the lecture notes and slides on the University's Moodle site for students to use as study aids. Two of the students decided they were going to get rich, started a commercial, advertisement supported website to host lecture notes, and took the PDFs from the Moodle site for our class and put them on there.
There's three obvious problems with this:
1) The files are marked "not for distribution outside of class" 2) The files are available freely to anyone actually enrolled in the class, making a mirror pointless (especially one which makes the mirrorer money...) 3) The slides, in addition to having copyrighted works of the professor and RAs teaching the class, include excerpts from textbooks and supplementary materials from the publishers, reproduction of which is legal in limited (ie: academic) circumstances by a Professor but expressly forbidden for commercial use. The distribution of them on the Moodle site was done only for the benefit of the students, but if the publisher were to find these materials being distributed from a commercial site and track their origin back to us, we could be held liable.
In the case of us (the faculty) being held liable, we'd have no choice but to just NOT distribute any of these materials, which just screws over the students in the end (I'd like to see them pass the exam without them!). In the end, the two students involved were pointed to the notices on Moodle (and the syllabus) not to distribute the slides/notes and given a choice whether to remove the files from their site or receive an F... Thankfully they chose to remove the files.
So you want to sell your lecture notes? Fine, but make sure they're YOU'RE lecture notes, not just a copy of what the Professor's provided... A better option would be to use something like Moodle inside your University to share notes between fellow classmates... If your University doesn't have something like Moodle/Blackboard available for students, get on their case.
And since I was talking about a Cell processor in a hypothetical MacBook and NOT the one in the PS3, your little diatribe seems a bit redundant, doesn't it?
1) To call this a "supercomputer on a chip" shows a person to either have a complete lack of understanding as to what is meant by the word "supercomputer" or a degree in Marketing and/or Business. I'm hoping in your case it's the former, not the latter. 2) A MacBook powered by a Cell would be significantly less useful to the average consumer than the current crop of dual-core machines. Primarily because desktop applications just aren't that parallelizable. Not to mention the eight Cell cores are individually rather weak. Would you rather pull your cart with 100 Chihuahuas or 2 Clydesdales? 3) On top of there being no way for desktop software to take advantage of 8 cores, there's no software written for the Cell architecture in the first place. Except, as you said, Linux, which is great but uninteresting to 99% of the laptop buying populace.
Sorry dude, but there's nothing wrong with the law differentiating between me lighting a bag of dogshit on your doorstep and me lighting a burning cross on your lawn.
And I never said otherwise. You're comparing apples and oranges. But why should the law differentiate between burning a cross on a black family's lawn and burning a cross on an asian family's lawn?
In the absence of 'hate crime' laws, planting a burning cross on a black family's lawn is little more than mischief. That's probably not appropriate.
No, I'd say it's arson and trespassing at the least, with whatever laws cover "threats" in your local jurisdiction as well.
And there's nothing wrong with the law differentiating between you picking a fight in a bar with a guy because he hit on your girlfriend versus picking a fight with a guy because you don't like [fill-in-the-blank-minority group].
Yes, there is, if they are both spur of the moment, non-planned crimes. If I kill the guy who hit on my girlfriend or I kill the latino guy because I'm in a black gang and we want them out of our neighborhood, they're both equally dead. Neither one deserves less justice than the other.
Calling this 'thought crime' is not really fair, as all we're talking about is the degree and type of criminal intent. Like how the big difference between first and second degree murder is premeditation. Does that make the distinction of first-degree murder 'thought crime' too?
No, and everyone who keeps trying to claim that is either being purposely ignorant or just has a complete lack of understanding of the difference between "manslaughter" and "murder in the first degree". The difference is INTENT. Did you intend to kill the person? If yes, did you do this on the spur of the moment or did you take time and plan this out and commit the act in "cold blood"? At no point in deciding where in that spectrum your crime falls does the motivation for the act play a part.
So in your mind, juries should never take into account a defendant's state of mind? That would wipe out many of the distinctions commonly made today between first and second degree murder and manslaughter, as well as consideration of mitigating and aggravating circumstances in violent crimes in general.
To quote myself:
No, the difference there is not motivation but intent. Did you intend to kill the person? If you did intend to do so, did you do it on the spur of the moment or was it done in a planned out, cold-blooded fashion?
The defendant in such crimes is always on trial for his actions, not his thoughts.
No, if he were just on trial for his actions then it would be a normal assault/robbery/arson/murder trial, not a hate crime trial.
What about murder and manslaughter? Are you against the distinction?
No, the difference there is not motivation but intent. Did you intend to kill the person? If you did intend to do so, did you do it on the spur of the moment or was it done in a planned out, cold-blooded fashion?
Why not punish them that extra bit more?
Why punish someone who isn't a racist less? Does a victim deserve less justice because they were killed by a member of their race?
We have had motivation as an essential factor in a crime for as long as law exists. It is called mens rea. If you run someone over because it's dark and you didn't see them, your punishment will not be the same as it would be if you run them over because you wanted to kill them.
That's not a matter of motivation, that's a matter of intent. Did you intend to kill the person? If you did intend to kill them, did you do it on the spur of the moment or did you spend a significant amount of time planning the act, wherein a reasonable individual would have calmed down and thought better of it? That's the spectrum from involuntary manslaughter to murder one. Your reason for killing the person in no way plays a part in how severe the crime is.
Mens rea is a "guilty mind". Yes, this means every crime committed consists both of a thought crime and a criminal act. The concept of thought crime in this context makes very good sense. The context in which it is not tolerable is when thought crime is punishable on its own, without a criminal act.
No, it is completely intolerable that a victim should receive LESS justice because the person who harmed them is the same race/nationality/sexual orientation as them. Likewise, it is completely insane to start basing punishment on such nebulous things as racism/sexism/etc. You have no way of knowing whether a crime was truly motivated by some -ism or by any of the other mundane motivations for crime. Does every black gang vs. latino gang crime automatically become a hate crime? When two drunk guys get in a fight, and it turns out one was bisexual, does the straight guy get charged with a hate crime? How do you know what was motivating them at that point in time? You can't know, you can only make wild guesses.
You know, you might want to read what he said. He was comparing burning a cross on a black family's lawn to burning garbage on anybody's lawn.
And I rejected his comparison and pointed out that the correct comparison is burning a cross on a black family's lawn and burning a cross on a non-black family's lawn.
In general, we treat acts of intimidation and threats of violence as beyond the pale and in most jurisdictions we punish people for them.
Exactly. Laws against threats already exist.
You appear to be saying that acts of intimidation and threats of violence are ok and should be ignored as long as they're combined with - that is, a part of - some other punishable violent act.
I never said any such thing. Threats are wrong. Arson is wrong. Trespassing is wrong. Several crimes are committed in the act of burning a cross on someone else's property. They should be punished accordingly. What I was pointing out is that if it's wrong on a black family's lawn, someone burning a cross on an asian family's lawn or a white family's lawn should not be punished any less.
No, it's not. It's the recognition that the harm caused by burning a cross on a black family's lawn (for instance) is a whole lot more harmful to the victims than, say, burning some garbage out back behind your neighbor's house.
I'm sorry, but in what way is it "a whole lot more harmful"? It's wrong and despicable, but I don't see how it's obviously "a whole lot more harmful". Is it more harmful to burn a cross on a black family's lawn than an asian family's lawn or a white family's lawn? The only way to claim it is somehow more harmful is by trying to get into the motivation of the act, ie: what the person who is doing it is thinking.
Criminals should be punished commensurate with the severity of the harm they've caused their victims. Clearly that's an indisputable goal of the justice system.
Except you're arguing that someone who kills someone they love should be punished less than if they killed someone they despised. Both victims are equally dead, the difference is the motivation you attach to the killer's actions.
Things that fall under the level of "hate crime" represent acts that harm their victims far, far more than the basic act (just burning something on somebody else's property) might suggest.
I'm sorry, but if you're dead you're dead. Regardless of why someone killed you. The fact that they killed you because you're gay/black/martian doesn't make you any more dead than the guy who was killed over $0.30.
Also, things that fall under the the banner of "hate crime" are whatever the news media and/or an over-zealous prosecutor decides is such. And the way they decide such things is by claiming the accused was motivated by hate. Again, I ask, why should a person who killed someone on a whim be punished less than someone who killed because of someone's religious beliefs.
Hate crime legislation doesn't have anything to do with thought.
It has everything to do with thought. You're wanting to punish people differently based on the reasoning behind the crime, not the crime itself.
It's the actions that are being punished commensurate with the harm they caused.
Harm caused has no relation to why it was caused. If your home is firebombed, if you're beaten/stabbed/murdered, if your daughter is raped, WHY these acts were committed against you does not vary the amount of harm.
Completely consistent with the aims of the justice system.
The aims of the justice system is equal justice, which is not consistent with legislation that treats different groups unequally. A black man beaten by another black man does not deserve less justice than a black man beaten by a white man.
Of course, even with the FCC around this doesn't always work, especially if you are a small, public university station and there's a huge religious broadcaster who is willing to bend the rules
That's a bit dishonest, they're both University stations funnily enough.
One rather wonders what would have happened if in 2003 we hadn't sent an Army but just airdropped a few million pacifists into Iraq to sing songs and cuddle with everybody.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to disagree. Alignment is a mattter of philosophy. Maybe it's just that I'm an optimist, but I'd have to say the majority of humanity is of the "Good" alignment in that they generally hold helping others to be at least equal to if not slightly above personal gain. I'd also argue that they by and large have Lawful tendencies, as otherwise organized society would not work. No, there are very few paragons of these alignments, but to claim *most* people don't favor Good over Evil or Law over Chaos is just silly. Whether or not you devote your life to fighting evil isnt' a matter of alignment, it's a matter of where you get your hit dice...
Note I say this as someone who is most decidedly NOT Lawful Good...
Politicians being covered under the Hatch Act would mean they couldn't be politicians... As the things it prevents you from doing are the exact things an elected official is supposed to be doing, and that's kind of the point. From my time as a local and state employee I'm pretty familiar with this kind of regulation. The idea is *supposed* to be that since you're a civil servant, an elected official can't come along and axe your job because you didn't support him/her/it or their favorite pet project, etc. But as a consequence of this "protection" you're not supposed to engage in political activity in public and thereby take advantage of your privileged position.
Honestly those sort of regulations are what I hated most about being a civil servant. It's not that I disagreed with them, just that I hated having to watch what I said/did in public.
On top of that, if he's abusing government resources to post political speech he's doubly deserving of a good beating...
Let me be a geek and dissect you piece by piece for a bit...
Emphasis mine. One of those words describes your "argument" rather well. It also describes you rather succinctly. The other word has little to do with you or the diarrhea of the mouth/keyboard you seem to be suffering from. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which.
Interesting. "Studying black holes" in particular generally does not take "billions", at least not on a yearly basis. That's done mostly with computer simulation and radio telescopes, the cost of which is spread out nicely over their long life spans. And funnily enough, theoretical physics research of that sort leads nicely into exotic "clean" power production research. Granted that's a tree that probably won't bear fruit in yours or my lifetime, but when/if it does it will as big of a chance to the human race as tool use was for our ancestors, perhaps even more. The fact that you'd even compare those two things makes me wonder if I'm just falling for a really clever troll...
You realize these costs are not mutually exclusive, don't you? You realize that understanding how the climate of Mars has changed helps us better understand how our own climate may behave in the future and better deal with problems like desertification? You realize that two the Mars rovers didn't cost $1billion combined? And have probably provided us more knowledge on Mars' climate history than the sum total of all missions before them? Meanwhile we send billions in aid to Africa every year and (at least the way the news paints it) it only gets worse there every day...
It's hard to counter an illogical person who's argument is driven by emotion with logic, as said person generally does not bother to recognize the logic they are being presented with.
Can you point to what resources are being wasted on space exploration and are therefore not available to humanitarian efforts? And don't say money--we spend more money on humanitarian aid EVERY YEAR than we did the previous year, and see less for it. Meanwhile the trend for the past three decades has been to spend less on space every year, and yet our rate of return just keeps going up...
This. Right here. This almost leaves me speechless. That you could actually believe that a greater understanding of how the Universe works is not in itself beneficial is mind boggling. It's infuriating. It makes me wonder if I'm just being trolled really hard, except I know that there are others out there like you. How can you be so blind?
Even ignoring for a moment why knowing how the FABRIC OF THE UNIVERSE is put together is beneficial, you certainly can't be ignorant of all the advances in the sciences that have come from the space program that daily improve people's lives? What we've gained in material sciences alone is incredible. The medical field has benefited enormously, as well. You want to purify water in Africa? Where do you think the cutting edge research is being done in water purification and recycl
Well I can't beat the LEOs, but if you disqualify them for using emulation I may have a winner.
:P
I recently started working at the William J. Hughes Technical Center in Atlantic City, which is an FAA Research and Development campus. I work in the Target Generation Facility, where we simulate air traffic control scenarios to test new approaches, recreate problems with existing systems, or try out new software/hardware for air traffic control centers. Not too long after I started, a coworker took me on a quick tour of the labs and showed me "something amazing".
What he showed me were a row of about a dozen UNIVAC machines in the back of one of the lab areas. What's even more amazing was that they're still plugging away. After doing some research, turns out they're running one of the old versions of ARTS (Automated Radar Tracking System) so that we can simulate older ATCs. Depending on which version, that means the code is from anywhere between the late 60s and around '74 (which is when, I believe, ARTS III was rolled out).
Seeing a visual representation of the register values on a machine (and having them change slow enough that you can actually get some idea of the values) really makes you appreciate how far we've come. Coworker and I laughed that the Razr I was taking a picture of them with probably had 10000X the processing power as those boxes... And it's a piece of crap...
Now I may be totally off base on this, but I'm pretty sure when I do render-to-texture type operations on a GeForce card they're hardware accelerated, and that is VERY useful for gaming (it's the most common way to implement "bloom" for instance). Most cards offer >10-bit color depth now, as well, which is useful for HDR type effects. Of course most monitors are still clamped to 8-bit, but that's besides the point...
Actually it may be because some GNU policies don't meet the Debian version of "Free", like their documentation licenses.
And yet, as 2short pointed out, modifying and compiling public domain source code creates a proprietary work BASED on said public domain source code. The original program, as originally claimed, remains public domain. So yes, the FSF "simplification" does border on falsehood.
Then I guess I should be thankful I have the freedom to run software that meets my needs.
I happen to have been one of those "employees", until just recently, and I was involved in a minor scandal regarding republishing of lecture notes. I was a Research Assistant involved in helping teach a Senior/Graduate level computer graphics course. As part of the course, we provided PDFs of the lecture notes and slides on the University's Moodle site for students to use as study aids. Two of the students decided they were going to get rich, started a commercial, advertisement supported website to host lecture notes, and took the PDFs from the Moodle site for our class and put them on there.
There's three obvious problems with this:
1) The files are marked "not for distribution outside of class"
2) The files are available freely to anyone actually enrolled in the class, making a mirror pointless (especially one which makes the mirrorer money...)
3) The slides, in addition to having copyrighted works of the professor and RAs teaching the class, include excerpts from textbooks and supplementary materials from the publishers, reproduction of which is legal in limited (ie: academic) circumstances by a Professor but expressly forbidden for commercial use. The distribution of them on the Moodle site was done only for the benefit of the students, but if the publisher were to find these materials being distributed from a commercial site and track their origin back to us, we could be held liable.
In the case of us (the faculty) being held liable, we'd have no choice but to just NOT distribute any of these materials, which just screws over the students in the end (I'd like to see them pass the exam without them!). In the end, the two students involved were pointed to the notices on Moodle (and the syllabus) not to distribute the slides/notes and given a choice whether to remove the files from their site or receive an F... Thankfully they chose to remove the files.
So you want to sell your lecture notes? Fine, but make sure they're YOU'RE lecture notes, not just a copy of what the Professor's provided... A better option would be to use something like Moodle inside your University to share notes between fellow classmates... If your University doesn't have something like Moodle/Blackboard available for students, get on their case.
And since I was talking about a Cell processor in a hypothetical MacBook and NOT the one in the PS3, your little diatribe seems a bit redundant, doesn't it?
OW MY BRAIN
1) To call this a "supercomputer on a chip" shows a person to either have a complete lack of understanding as to what is meant by the word "supercomputer" or a degree in Marketing and/or Business. I'm hoping in your case it's the former, not the latter.
2) A MacBook powered by a Cell would be significantly less useful to the average consumer than the current crop of dual-core machines. Primarily because desktop applications just aren't that parallelizable. Not to mention the eight Cell cores are individually rather weak. Would you rather pull your cart with 100 Chihuahuas or 2 Clydesdales?
3) On top of there being no way for desktop software to take advantage of 8 cores, there's no software written for the Cell architecture in the first place. Except, as you said, Linux, which is great but uninteresting to 99% of the laptop buying populace.
I marked you as a friend from reading earlier posts before reading this one.
After reading this one I wish there was a way I could mark you as a friend a second time.
Bravo.
A corporation is incapable of censorship. Censorship is the realm of governments alone.
Words have meaning. This was definitely a case of complete asshattery by a business, but it was not censorship.
Unfortunately there isn't an "I Love You" moderation.
Thou art God, and all that...
And I never said otherwise. You're comparing apples and oranges. But why should the law differentiate between burning a cross on a black family's lawn and burning a cross on an asian family's lawn?
No, I'd say it's arson and trespassing at the least, with whatever laws cover "threats" in your local jurisdiction as well.
Yes, there is, if they are both spur of the moment, non-planned crimes. If I kill the guy who hit on my girlfriend or I kill the latino guy because I'm in a black gang and we want them out of our neighborhood, they're both equally dead. Neither one deserves less justice than the other.
No, and everyone who keeps trying to claim that is either being purposely ignorant or just has a complete lack of understanding of the difference between "manslaughter" and "murder in the first degree". The difference is INTENT. Did you intend to kill the person? If yes, did you do this on the spur of the moment or did you take time and plan this out and commit the act in "cold blood"? At no point in deciding where in that spectrum your crime falls does the motivation for the act play a part.
To quote myself:
No, the difference there is not motivation but intent. Did you intend to kill the person? If you did intend to do so, did you do it on the spur of the moment or was it done in a planned out, cold-blooded fashion?
No, if he were just on trial for his actions then it would be a normal assault/robbery/arson/murder trial, not a hate crime trial.
No, the difference there is not motivation but intent. Did you intend to kill the person? If you did intend to do so, did you do it on the spur of the moment or was it done in a planned out, cold-blooded fashion?
Why punish someone who isn't a racist less? Does a victim deserve less justice because they were killed by a member of their race?
That's not a matter of motivation, that's a matter of intent. Did you intend to kill the person? If you did intend to kill them, did you do it on the spur of the moment or did you spend a significant amount of time planning the act, wherein a reasonable individual would have calmed down and thought better of it? That's the spectrum from involuntary manslaughter to murder one. Your reason for killing the person in no way plays a part in how severe the crime is.
No, it is completely intolerable that a victim should receive LESS justice because the person who harmed them is the same race/nationality/sexual orientation as them. Likewise, it is completely insane to start basing punishment on such nebulous things as racism/sexism/etc. You have no way of knowing whether a crime was truly motivated by some -ism or by any of the other mundane motivations for crime. Does every black gang vs. latino gang crime automatically become a hate crime? When two drunk guys get in a fight, and it turns out one was bisexual, does the straight guy get charged with a hate crime? How do you know what was motivating them at that point in time? You can't know, you can only make wild guesses.
And I rejected his comparison and pointed out that the correct comparison is burning a cross on a black family's lawn and burning a cross on a non-black family's lawn.
Exactly. Laws against threats already exist.
I never said any such thing. Threats are wrong. Arson is wrong. Trespassing is wrong. Several crimes are committed in the act of burning a cross on someone else's property. They should be punished accordingly. What I was pointing out is that if it's wrong on a black family's lawn, someone burning a cross on an asian family's lawn or a white family's lawn should not be punished any less.
Why should someone be punished any less for killing someone they love rather than someone they hate?
Hate crime legislation is thought crime legislation. What matters is you denying someone their rights, not your reasoning for doing it.
That's a bit dishonest, they're both University stations funnily enough.
I fully support this idea.
Wait, what do you mean parachutes? Nevermind...