"I personally had a simplistic zero-sum view of the distinctions between socialism and capitalism, and I have since discovered that the reality - exemplified by online behavior - is more subtle than my cartoonish worldview."
... call them "races"? The beagle race, the greyhound race, etc.
It's what we do for humans, considering different looks/colors/sizes can ALSO interbreed, and we apparently think those differences are worth distinguishing (sometimes ridiculously so).
It might wake people up to the absurdity that is the concept of race, perhaps.
So, if a hammer is used to build a cross that the KKK burn on someone's front yard, the hammer is "enabling" racist pigs? I guess white sheets and fire enable racism too?
Please.
Google Maps is a map. If some racist/classist/hidebound Japanese use it for perpetuating reactionary stupid stereotypes, how is Google at fault?
Personally, I don't even think that they should use the "noindex" tag, either.
Perhaps at some point, someone will get it through their thick skulls that choices often have consequences, and these consequences can come back to bite you in the ass years, even decades later.
Every generation has its wild years, but I believe it really became institutionalized with the Baby Boomers, who ran rampant through the 60's and (largely) would like the rest of us to forget that ever happened. From the relatively trivial use of minor drugs, to trying to murder police officers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Soliah) - one cannot escape the consequences of their decisions.
It seems that today our entire culture wants the government system to warp into a giant "fix my situation" agency, meant to redress the grievances of individuals' pasts - even if self-inflicted. Like to have multiple piercings, tattoos, and wear purple hair? Don't be shocked if the investment bank that had the awesome paying job that you were perfectly qualified for decides to balk once they meet you. If you live below sea level in some crappy tenement, perhaps you should pay EXTRA attention to hurricane warnings looming over your city? If you decide to party your high school years away, and pop out babies while you're a teen - surprise! Odds are that the REST OF YOUR LIFE WILL SUCK (and odds are good that your babies' lives will suck TOO - congratulations, you've managed to ruin more lives than just your own!). Are you poor? Odds are likely that you dropped out of school, are a drug/substance abuser, or made some other shitty life choice that you're paying for now.
I know it's very passe and old fashioned to suggest anything but the modern vogue of heedless narcissism, but there's a REASON our formerly-successful culture praised hard work, self-restraint, delayed gratification, and self-reliance: because these qualities, instilled early, are key indicators toward a LIFETIME of moderate comfort and security. No, that might not mean that you get to have all the fun you want, fucking/smoking/partying your way through your teens and twenties. But if you don't want to spend the NEXT 40 years of your life digging ditches, cleaning drains, or working the fry baskets at McDonald's, you *might* just want to take the long view, champ.
If I understand your first point, the superficial one is "if your action demonstratably saves more lives than it cost, is it really wrong?" As far as the Iraq war, you seem so certain. I'd ask: in what scope? According to varied estimates, there are something like 500,000-1 million Iraqis that probably would have wished Saddam was ousted earlier. This grossly overshadows the (high) estimate of 100,000 Iraqi civilians slain as a result of the current war plus the (trivial, in a military sense) number military deaths. Of course, the point you're making is about the Rosenbergs. How did them selling secrets to the Soviets "save lives"? One could argue that having the bomb, and feeling secure against any serious military opposition allowed Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders to embark on their later actions without fear. One could thus logically lay ALL the deaths of the Cold War - all the internal Soviet purges (no real American analogue there, for you moral relativists, sorry) and all the brushfire proxy wars - at the feet of the Rosenbergs. So how many lives did their actions "save" again?
Your second is stated more clearly: "Is it really an offense worthy of death to act according to your own morality?" I'm staggered by the naivete and simplistic egoism that would fuel this question. More accurately, one might ask what sort of a society one would create if everyone (not just you, remember) were allowed to act according to their own morality? Remember, not everyone has your set of life rules: there's the Austrian guy who imprisoned his own daughter for what, 30 years? meanwhile impregnating her several times. Can he act according to HIS morality? Is that fine? What about the fellow who feels its perfectly justifiable to take the goods of others, because he NEEDS them more to support a really strong drug addiction? There are LOTS of moral compasses out there, and despite how simple it might look to some, it doesn't take a lot of life experience to see that they don't all point toward the same "north". To suggest that people should just be able to follow their own morality is tantamount to a Hobbesian state of nature "red in tooth and claw" where the strongest get to do what they want simply because they are the strongest or most brutal.
To explain it simply, a society is a collective of people who generally agree on a set of behavioral norms. If you violate those norms, you're subject to the punishment of the society as a whole. American society - a vocal minority aside - has settled on the idea that the worst offenders shall be killed. Like it or not. Fortunately, in modern western culture, one of the norms is that you can say "I don't agree with this set of values" and LEAVE, seeking something better.
The irony (in my view) is that most of the people in the US who complain about how they don't like this or that, tend not to understand that comparatively, they're going to have a hard time finding another society that has the combination of physical conveniences, economic opportunities, and political freedoms, so they end up just staying here and filling the internet with pointless whinging.
Any Bill of Rights is impossible today, because I believe it is fundamentally impossible to find a large enough group people to matter that are: - basically of normal or higher intelligence - qualified to discuss such topics - connected enough to matter - capable of actual altruism
1775 was an exceptional year for humanity, sadly not to be repeated.
If your team is at a secure facility, I presume the fact that the team is there is the secret? (And not that the building itself is somehow invisible...)
Unless you order your food by identifying yourselves "Hi, this is Joey from the Bravo squad of the 1st Forecon, er, DRP of the MARSOC, and we're down as 123 Elm Street and need the usual, please" I doubt that ordering pizza is somehow blowing operational security.
How would anyone know that they're delivering pizza to your unit, and not just to the janitor(s)?
(Terrorist leader watches Dominoes.com website carefully: "AHA! We've found the dirty American imperialist commandoes! Nobody in this city orders cinnamon twists AND cheesy bread! It *must* be the Americans! Muhahahah!")
...from someone who's been married 20 years, would be that love != lust.
Really, a rather sensationalistic experiment which misses the point.
Am I "happier" about my wife, or Angelina Jolie? Well, unless that morning she's done one of the multitude of things that a life partner of 20+ years can do to ruin one's whole day (and that one needs to simply accept and move on from), no doubt it's my wife.:)
On the other hand, if I found Angelina Jolie "sexy", my lust reaction for her might be somewhat more prominent than that for my wife of such a long span. The difference, which I'm sure would matter to my wife (interpreting it from a woman's context), means nothing about my LOVE of my wife.
In fact, I'd assert that one of the general characteristics that distinguishes the male from the female of the human species (*very* broadly generalizing - I know) is that the male can cheerfully lust for someone that utterly repels him in every OTHER way.
In fact, mightn't it be precisely this differential between the genders (that women connect love and lust somewhat more closely than men) explain much about the different gender-views of pornography?
...this just shows that they don't know what (some) people use tabs for.
Personally, when I tend to browse forums or a website, etc, I use tabs like footnotes.
1) Efficiency: I continue reading the current thread or page, and 'open new tab' on any interesting link. This allows THAT page to load in the background while I continue to read uninterrupted. So while I have "broadband" some pages STILL take a not-irrelevant time to load.
2) Organization: tabs allow me to reduce clutter and keep things organized. Right now, for instance, I have outlook, 2 emails I should be working on instead of reading/posting to/., 4 different excel worksheets (work), outlook reminders, adobe (work) and firefox. At least with the tabs all residing within firefox I can keep neatly separated between what I'm doing and what I SHOULD be doing....
3) resources: ok, this was a far bigger issue with previous hardware and OS's, but it's still my preference not to run/exit/run/exit multiple iterations of any program. To open a new browser for a page I might spend 30 seconds reading seems a waste (and is quite a bit slower than ctrl+t) - on a day of heavy web-browsing, I might open 100+ pages. Perhaps I'm just ignorant and the memory load/memory leakage of multiple tabs is essentially the same for tabs as for multiple iterations, but that's my 'sense' of it - tabs seem less likely to run me out of resources.
And no, having a host of "context" tabs that I could open doesn't sound terribly useful - if I open my "slashdot" tab, I'm after the individual stories, which the browser can't possibly predict which are worth downloading. On the other side of the coin, how could the browser anticipate/understand that (forum post)(4chan)(algore.com)(goatsce.cx) are all contextually tied (but only for as long as I need to make that forum post and insert the image - and then never, ever again).
For my style of tab-heavy browsing, I wouldn't mind perhaps the tabs running down the side of the page. That seems more logically useful given the lateral nature of text, and easier to pack 20-30 tabs on a page. However, then it becomes a WASTE of space for people who only open a small number of tabs. With tabs on top, you're losing only the thickness of a text line in screen real estate; with tabs to the side, you lose the WIDTH of a text line - substantially more - even if you only have two tabs open. For that matter, I'd simply be happy with the ability to increase the height of the CURRENT tabline, like you can with the Windows bar in XP, so with 20-30 tabs, I can read more of their (currently-abbreviated) headers, at a small cost in screen area.
In short, I love tabs and use them intensively. Don't see much of a need to change them.
"It may not be possible to make a realistic war game that is fun -- war is not fun" OK, now that someone's made that obligatory statement for the politically correct crowd.
Now, back to reality. Sometimes war IS fun - when it's a GAME. BECAUSE it's a game, you can try to build it to leave in the good parts (the excitement, the cameraderie, the explosions, the mano-a-mano competition) and leave out the horrible bits (the pain, death, fear, misery).
As Robert E Lee once pointed out "It is well that war is so terrible -- lest we should grow too fond of it" - and here's a man who saw very closely one the most gruesome conflicts of the modern era, while AT the battle of Fredricksburg. Homer said "Men grow tired of sleep, love, singing and dancing sooner than war. "
And before anyone starts expressing vague politically-correct qualms about the morality of divorcing violence from its effects, I'd point out that MUCH if not all of our "entertainment" is about celebrating the good parts of things while conveniently filtering out the bad. Any drama (book or movie) at the very least compresses time and space, leaving us with the (entertaining) core story, and leaving out the distractions, the plodding dull bits, and the irrelevancies that would ACTUALLY exist in real life. Hell, porn is about celebrating the exciting bits of a sexual relationship without the consequences emotional or physical.
So if we're going to discuss when and how a wargame can be fun, first we must honestly dispense with the PC baloney about (simulated) war not being fun.
"I've yet to see any game that can put nearly 2000 players on a battlefield and still function."
Then you have to look for games designed from the GROUND up to support such play. Typical 'sword and sorcery MMOs' that are built for perhaps up to a 'raid' of 50 players are simply not going to scale (without ridiculous hardware requirements) to 1000 players impact-free.
OTOH - there ARE games that were built to simulate the actions of hundreds of players in a single area, so scaling to thousands is logically a lower burden. www.battlegroundeurope.com (formerly ww2online.com) catches a lot of crap for a graphics standard that doesn't approach the bells & whistles you see on today's (shoebox-arena) shooter, but I've played in many battles that (in a multi-square km area) with at least a thousand players including multi-crewed vehicles, hundreds of infantry, and a swirling aircraft battle overhead fighting for hours for a strongly-defended city. It doesn't happen often (playerbase is now only about 12k) but I just use it as an example of a system that WAS designed to handle such a load.
I'm sure everyoone's delighted to hear how much more intelligent you are than everyone else! Congratulations, I'm sure your mom is proud.
"EU is busy putting its own superior system in place" Really? How many satellites (of 30) have they lofted again?
It looks more to me like the EU is pissing and moaning and backstabbing each other to leave Galileo a boondoggle that will only allegedly fly by 2013. One might argue that the US system, being actually operational, is far more likely to be upgraded on-time than the Galileo system which is still mostly EU promises and vaporware.
And as far as "superior" (in case you mean it technically, and not just morally), I'll remind you that some of the US GPS satellites have been in space nearly TWENTY years. One might logically presume that a system two decades newer might have some newer better features, but I'd also guess that the GPS block 3(?) upgrade will be fairly comprehensive (and if you think SA is really disabled, I have some swampland in Florida I can sell you).
I'd say however, that we'd be nevertheless delighted if you took all these good reasons to move to Europe as an invitation. Please don't let the door hit your ass on the way out. K'thx.
You are absolutely, totally 100% right. The US Constitution doesn't grant us rights, it really only circumscribes the power of the government vis a vis the people. Whether a Right is listed in the Bill of Rights is only really a commentary by the framers on the Rights that they thought were most likely to be curtailed by governments, and thus worthy of explicit listing. It is NOT an exclusive listing of rights, in any way.
My point, however, was that simply asserting a right exists doesn't ipso facto make it so.
The so-called "right to privacy" which is so familiarly bandied about as a fact (particularly on/.) is merely a hypothesis, no more intrinsically valid than me asserting I have a "right" to a job, a "right" to a living place, or even more absurd (and I heard this the other day) as an American citizen a "right" to own a piece of land simply because I was born here.
"1) Folks get together and say, hey, let's build a new, man-made attraction out of entirely different materials. To replace the old one. Which no longer exists. Because, even though we know it won't be the same, the state really could use the tourist revenue."
Valid point, assuming resources are infinite.
One could restate it as "Yes, the natural remarkable attraction is gone. So we're going to build something with taxpayer funds that we're going to simply assert that it is somehow interesting, and assume that tourists will find it equally so (insert smoke and mirrors here), in hopes of luring their tourist dollars." No?
I'm not sure a contrived "point of interest" is necessarily anything special, nor that it will somehow automagically attract all the people (or even a fraction thereof) that would have bothered to come see the original attraction?
If you're going to sink million$ of taxpayer funds, it would be your DUTY to cost-benefit this VERSUS OTHER USES FOR THOSE FUNDS, including comparing to the utility of leaving them in the taxpayers pocket. I simply don't think that "inventing" a tourist attraction - particularly with the stated goal of mimicking a natural attraction yet without the benefit of actually BEING natural - makes any sense from a pragmatic standpoint.
While Ms Dixon states it almost as a pre-established fact, I'm not sure one can assert "It only takes one country to express a dissenting opinion".
North Korea, China, Iran...there are a quick handful of countries who would quite clearly 'dissent', yet I don't see case law being formulated to accommodate their views.
The whole "right" to privacy is a vague and questionable concept anyway. Clearly it doesn't apply where lawbreaking is concerned (not many people are murdered in public; ergo someone's privacy must be violated to apprehend the murderer).
So what is the much-bandied "right to privacy"? It was really a concept INVENTED in the late 19th century by Judge Brandeis, before he was a USSC judge. As far as I can tell (and Wiki seems to back me up on this), there are 4 basic precepts:
1. the protection of one's identity as unique
2. protection from defamation
3. protection of one's private facts
4. protecting someone's ability to be left alone NONE of these are articulated in the US Constitution, and in fact #4 may be directly contrary to some basic concepts of modern civilization - for example the idea that the law is pervasive and applies to everyone, it doesn't stop at your threshold.
So where does this come from? IMO it's a natural reaction to the increasing pervasiveness of state power, and not unjustified. But let's be clear: the assertion that it's a "right" is not established in law or custom.
"...losing the mountain man was akin to filling in the Grand Canyon with a backhoe..."
Um no, you have your metaphor reversed. Losing the mountain man would be as if the Grand Canyon somehow naturally filled in, and you DUG IT OUT with a backhoe. Would that be impressive at all? I think not.
I'm not sure if it comes from our increasingly transitory society and general rootlessness, but there seems to be this juvenile preoccupation with KEEPING THINGS THE SAME.
Look, the 'balancing rock' tips over, the 'old man of the mountain' sloughs off, the Appalachians wear away. It used to be that people were so busy staying alive and fending off sabretooths that they didn't care about this stuff, it just happened. Now, when we have a basically safe society people want it and the world around it to ossify and STOP changing - witness the efforts to 'fix' various languages the way they are today, or even this obsession with global climate change. Hell, one could even point to the Baby Boomers who keep pillaging our childhoods for movie fodder, desperate to recapture 'then' and bring it to now.
People: there is no conceivable future that doesn't include change. This pervasive change starts at the personal and extends to the climatological and geological. At some point you have to grow up and accept that it happens, adapt, and move on.
"The whole "illegal enemy combatant" thing is immoral regardless of whether the "attacks" are physical attacks or just attempts made to disrupt digital communications.
No, it's very much moral and necessity. The application of it by the previous administration, however, is outright criminal."
Huh? I agree with you that the concept of a classification of certain types of violent actors as "illegal" and "legal" enemy combatant is necessary. I'm not sure how you go from that to the application by the previous administration being outright criminal?
The United Nations War Crimes commission states clearly that, certain acts committed by civilians in militarily occupied territory are liable to be treated as war crimes, for which the customary punishment has been execution, for example "Illegitimate hostilities in arms committed by individuals who are not members of the armed forces." and "...a civilian who aids, abets, or participates in the fighting is liable to punishment as a war criminal..."
War crimes executions must only be enacted if there is a reasonably fair trial beforehand; however this trial can be summary according to field expediency.
Therefore, for the fellows who were captured in the process of acting as ununiformed combatants (ie, most of them) could have been briefly tried and probably executed. This whole folderol about the legality of military tribunals is farcical - they are EXPLICITLY allowed in the Hague Conventions, and the ones that Bush implemented were a damn sight more laborious and cautious than they really needed to be.
Kind of like the War Department that morphed into the Defense Department when there wasn't a war anymore. But look how much we've benefited from a pervasive and powerful military industrial complex!
At least the military threat to our country was OCCASIONALLY not contrived...
"You mean like the time when they kicked North Korea's ass out of South Korea? Yeah that was an UN action (Resolution 84)." That's that war that's STILL GOING ON, right....50 years later? The one where total US forces were about 480,000, and the total of all the "allied forces of the mighty UN in action" equaled about 135,000? The one where the ONLY reason that "NK's ass was kicked" was the landing by MacArthur (American general) at Inchon with American forces? And perhaps we should be candid: it was the only significant action of the UN *only* because the Soviet Security Council Ambassador had left the council in a fit of pique?
"Or how it served as a forum for the US and USSR to work out the Cuban Missile Crisis instead of fighting it out?" Load of crap; the resolution to the CMC was the result of classic direct diplomacy. What did the UN have to do with ANYTHING aside from a forum for (non-constructive, and in fact inflammatory) public posturing?
"How about the first Persian Gulf war, the one that's approved by the UN and not based on bullshit? Don't we wish we listened to the UN instead of Bush and Fox News the second time around?" Not going there because I'm pretty certain that no matter what I say it's not changing your mind anyway, so why bother?
"The UN is huge and has many organs. Most of them are successful enough that you never hear about them and the work that they do. Of course there are failures but a world without the UN would be a far worse place." The list of crises where the UN failed to do anything constructive? Probably a list too big for the whole of the internets to handle. How about last week where UN "peacekeepers" let Palestinians launch rockets from adjacent positions, and then complained angrily about Israeli return fire? Or the UN-soldier juvenile prostitute rings in West Africa? Or the stunning and decisive UN response to Darfur...the Balkans....Rwanda....? You're right that SOME of the bureaucracies of the UN are effective and useful. The general council? Pretty much a whinging forum for countries that aren't worth listening to.
"Stop sucking on Fox News' teats" You need help, with this weird Freudian idee fixe about Fox News and breasts. It *could* be that someone merely disagrees with you, or in your worldview does that make them automatically an idiot?
"When performance starts to matter, and my profiling tool indicates that the sorting algorithm is to blame, then I'll consider using an alternate algorithm. But even then, there's a fair chance I'll leave it alone and buy more hardware..."
Now we understand why Vista can make a machine that runs at 3 GIGAHertz and has 4 processor cores is now slower than my original PC AT.
I wonder if one of these bloggers (and their apparently-infinite spare time) could add up ALL the various possible dangers, and the odds of it happening in a given year...odds of getting hit by lighting, 1:22 million. Odds of being in a car accident 1:50,000, etc, etc...I suspect that once you compiled a comprehensive list, you'd end up being nearly certain you'll die in the next year.
Slashdot Mirror
"I personally had a simplistic zero-sum view of the distinctions between socialism and capitalism, and I have since discovered that the reality - exemplified by online behavior - is more subtle than my cartoonish worldview."
News at 11?
... call them "races"? The beagle race, the greyhound race, etc.
It's what we do for humans, considering different looks/colors/sizes can ALSO interbreed, and we apparently think those differences are worth distinguishing (sometimes ridiculously so).
It might wake people up to the absurdity that is the concept of race, perhaps.
So, if a hammer is used to build a cross that the KKK burn on someone's front yard, the hammer is "enabling" racist pigs? I guess white sheets and fire enable racism too?
Please.
Google Maps is a map. If some racist/classist/hidebound Japanese use it for perpetuating reactionary stupid stereotypes, how is Google at fault?
SLOW NEWS DAY, +1
Personally, I don't even think that they should use the "noindex" tag, either.
Perhaps at some point, someone will get it through their thick skulls that choices often have consequences, and these consequences can come back to bite you in the ass years, even decades later.
Every generation has its wild years, but I believe it really became institutionalized with the Baby Boomers, who ran rampant through the 60's and (largely) would like the rest of us to forget that ever happened. From the relatively trivial use of minor drugs, to trying to murder police officers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathleen_Soliah) - one cannot escape the consequences of their decisions.
It seems that today our entire culture wants the government system to warp into a giant "fix my situation" agency, meant to redress the grievances of individuals' pasts - even if self-inflicted. Like to have multiple piercings, tattoos, and wear purple hair? Don't be shocked if the investment bank that had the awesome paying job that you were perfectly qualified for decides to balk once they meet you. If you live below sea level in some crappy tenement, perhaps you should pay EXTRA attention to hurricane warnings looming over your city? If you decide to party your high school years away, and pop out babies while you're a teen - surprise! Odds are that the REST OF YOUR LIFE WILL SUCK (and odds are good that your babies' lives will suck TOO - congratulations, you've managed to ruin more lives than just your own!). Are you poor? Odds are likely that you dropped out of school, are a drug/substance abuser, or made some other shitty life choice that you're paying for now.
I know it's very passe and old fashioned to suggest anything but the modern vogue of heedless narcissism, but there's a REASON our formerly-successful culture praised hard work, self-restraint, delayed gratification, and self-reliance: because these qualities, instilled early, are key indicators toward a LIFETIME of moderate comfort and security. No, that might not mean that you get to have all the fun you want, fucking/smoking/partying your way through your teens and twenties. But if you don't want to spend the NEXT 40 years of your life digging ditches, cleaning drains, or working the fry baskets at McDonald's, you *might* just want to take the long view, champ.
Your question is absurd.
If I understand your first point, the superficial one is "if your action demonstratably saves more lives than it cost, is it really wrong?"
As far as the Iraq war, you seem so certain. I'd ask: in what scope? According to varied estimates, there are something like 500,000-1 million Iraqis that probably would have wished Saddam was ousted earlier. This grossly overshadows the (high) estimate of 100,000 Iraqi civilians slain as a result of the current war plus the (trivial, in a military sense) number military deaths.
Of course, the point you're making is about the Rosenbergs. How did them selling secrets to the Soviets "save lives"? One could argue that having the bomb, and feeling secure against any serious military opposition allowed Stalin and subsequent Soviet leaders to embark on their later actions without fear. One could thus logically lay ALL the deaths of the Cold War - all the internal Soviet purges (no real American analogue there, for you moral relativists, sorry) and all the brushfire proxy wars - at the feet of the Rosenbergs. So how many lives did their actions "save" again?
Your second is stated more clearly: "Is it really an offense worthy of death to act according to your own morality?"
I'm staggered by the naivete and simplistic egoism that would fuel this question. More accurately, one might ask what sort of a society one would create if everyone (not just you, remember) were allowed to act according to their own morality? Remember, not everyone has your set of life rules: there's the Austrian guy who imprisoned his own daughter for what, 30 years? meanwhile impregnating her several times. Can he act according to HIS morality? Is that fine? What about the fellow who feels its perfectly justifiable to take the goods of others, because he NEEDS them more to support a really strong drug addiction?
There are LOTS of moral compasses out there, and despite how simple it might look to some, it doesn't take a lot of life experience to see that they don't all point toward the same "north". To suggest that people should just be able to follow their own morality is tantamount to a Hobbesian state of nature "red in tooth and claw" where the strongest get to do what they want simply because they are the strongest or most brutal.
To explain it simply, a society is a collective of people who generally agree on a set of behavioral norms. If you violate those norms, you're subject to the punishment of the society as a whole. American society - a vocal minority aside - has settled on the idea that the worst offenders shall be killed. Like it or not. Fortunately, in modern western culture, one of the norms is that you can say "I don't agree with this set of values" and LEAVE, seeking something better.
The irony (in my view) is that most of the people in the US who complain about how they don't like this or that, tend not to understand that comparatively, they're going to have a hard time finding another society that has the combination of physical conveniences, economic opportunities, and political freedoms, so they end up just staying here and filling the internet with pointless whinging.
That would be 'analogue' not 'analog'.
Editing, +1
Any Bill of Rights is impossible today, because I believe it is fundamentally impossible to find a large enough group people to matter that are:
- basically of normal or higher intelligence
- qualified to discuss such topics
- connected enough to matter
- capable of actual altruism
1775 was an exceptional year for humanity, sadly not to be repeated.
Well hold on.
If your team is at a secure facility, I presume the fact that the team is there is the secret? (And not that the building itself is somehow invisible...)
Unless you order your food by identifying yourselves "Hi, this is Joey from the Bravo squad of the 1st Forecon, er, DRP of the MARSOC, and we're down as 123 Elm Street and need the usual, please" I doubt that ordering pizza is somehow blowing operational security.
How would anyone know that they're delivering pizza to your unit, and not just to the janitor(s)?
(Terrorist leader watches Dominoes.com website carefully: "AHA! We've found the dirty American imperialist commandoes! Nobody in this city orders cinnamon twists AND cheesy bread! It *must* be the Americans! Muhahahah!")
...from someone who's been married 20 years, would be that love != lust.
Really, a rather sensationalistic experiment which misses the point.
Am I "happier" about my wife, or Angelina Jolie? Well, unless that morning she's done one of the multitude of things that a life partner of 20+ years can do to ruin one's whole day (and that one needs to simply accept and move on from), no doubt it's my wife. :)
On the other hand, if I found Angelina Jolie "sexy", my lust reaction for her might be somewhat more prominent than that for my wife of such a long span. The difference, which I'm sure would matter to my wife (interpreting it from a woman's context), means nothing about my LOVE of my wife.
In fact, I'd assert that one of the general characteristics that distinguishes the male from the female of the human species (*very* broadly generalizing - I know) is that the male can cheerfully lust for someone that utterly repels him in every OTHER way.
In fact, mightn't it be precisely this differential between the genders (that women connect love and lust somewhat more closely than men) explain much about the different gender-views of pornography?
...this just shows that they don't know what (some) people use tabs for.
Personally, when I tend to browse forums or a website, etc, I use tabs like footnotes.
1) Efficiency: I continue reading the current thread or page, and 'open new tab' on any interesting link. This allows THAT page to load in the background while I continue to read uninterrupted. So while I have "broadband" some pages STILL take a not-irrelevant time to load.
2) Organization: tabs allow me to reduce clutter and keep things organized. Right now, for instance, I have outlook, 2 emails I should be working on instead of reading/posting to /., 4 different excel worksheets (work), outlook reminders, adobe (work) and firefox. At least with the tabs all residing within firefox I can keep neatly separated between what I'm doing and what I SHOULD be doing....
3) resources: ok, this was a far bigger issue with previous hardware and OS's, but it's still my preference not to run/exit/run/exit multiple iterations of any program. To open a new browser for a page I might spend 30 seconds reading seems a waste (and is quite a bit slower than ctrl+t) - on a day of heavy web-browsing, I might open 100+ pages. Perhaps I'm just ignorant and the memory load/memory leakage of multiple tabs is essentially the same for tabs as for multiple iterations, but that's my 'sense' of it - tabs seem less likely to run me out of resources.
And no, having a host of "context" tabs that I could open doesn't sound terribly useful - if I open my "slashdot" tab, I'm after the individual stories, which the browser can't possibly predict which are worth downloading. On the other side of the coin, how could the browser anticipate/understand that (forum post)(4chan)(algore.com)(goatsce.cx) are all contextually tied (but only for as long as I need to make that forum post and insert the image - and then never, ever again).
For my style of tab-heavy browsing, I wouldn't mind perhaps the tabs running down the side of the page. That seems more logically useful given the lateral nature of text, and easier to pack 20-30 tabs on a page. However, then it becomes a WASTE of space for people who only open a small number of tabs. With tabs on top, you're losing only the thickness of a text line in screen real estate; with tabs to the side, you lose the WIDTH of a text line - substantially more - even if you only have two tabs open. For that matter, I'd simply be happy with the ability to increase the height of the CURRENT tabline, like you can with the Windows bar in XP, so with 20-30 tabs, I can read more of their (currently-abbreviated) headers, at a small cost in screen area.
In short, I love tabs and use them intensively. Don't see much of a need to change them.
"It may not be possible to make a realistic war game that is fun -- war is not fun"
OK, now that someone's made that obligatory statement for the politically correct crowd.
Now, back to reality. Sometimes war IS fun - when it's a GAME. BECAUSE it's a game, you can try to build it to leave in the good parts (the excitement, the cameraderie, the explosions, the mano-a-mano competition) and leave out the horrible bits (the pain, death, fear, misery).
As Robert E Lee once pointed out "It is well that war is so terrible -- lest we should grow too fond of it" - and here's a man who saw very closely one the most gruesome conflicts of the modern era, while AT the battle of Fredricksburg. Homer said "Men grow tired of sleep, love, singing and dancing sooner than war. "
And before anyone starts expressing vague politically-correct qualms about the morality of divorcing violence from its effects, I'd point out that MUCH if not all of our "entertainment" is about celebrating the good parts of things while conveniently filtering out the bad. Any drama (book or movie) at the very least compresses time and space, leaving us with the (entertaining) core story, and leaving out the distractions, the plodding dull bits, and the irrelevancies that would ACTUALLY exist in real life. Hell, porn is about celebrating the exciting bits of a sexual relationship without the consequences emotional or physical.
So if we're going to discuss when and how a wargame can be fun, first we must honestly dispense with the PC baloney about (simulated) war not being fun.
"I've yet to see any game that can put nearly 2000 players on a battlefield and still function."
Then you have to look for games designed from the GROUND up to support such play. Typical 'sword and sorcery MMOs' that are built for perhaps up to a 'raid' of 50 players are simply not going to scale (without ridiculous hardware requirements) to 1000 players impact-free.
OTOH - there ARE games that were built to simulate the actions of hundreds of players in a single area, so scaling to thousands is logically a lower burden. www.battlegroundeurope.com (formerly ww2online.com) catches a lot of crap for a graphics standard that doesn't approach the bells & whistles you see on today's (shoebox-arena) shooter, but I've played in many battles that (in a multi-square km area) with at least a thousand players including multi-crewed vehicles, hundreds of infantry, and a swirling aircraft battle overhead fighting for hours for a strongly-defended city. It doesn't happen often (playerbase is now only about 12k) but I just use it as an example of a system that WAS designed to handle such a load.
I'm sure everyoone's delighted to hear how much more intelligent you are than everyone else! Congratulations, I'm sure your mom is proud.
"EU is busy putting its own superior system in place"
Really? How many satellites (of 30) have they lofted again?
It looks more to me like the EU is pissing and moaning and backstabbing each other to leave Galileo a boondoggle that will only allegedly fly by 2013. One might argue that the US system, being actually operational, is far more likely to be upgraded on-time than the Galileo system which is still mostly EU promises and vaporware.
And as far as "superior" (in case you mean it technically, and not just morally), I'll remind you that some of the US GPS satellites have been in space nearly TWENTY years. One might logically presume that a system two decades newer might have some newer better features, but I'd also guess that the GPS block 3(?) upgrade will be fairly comprehensive (and if you think SA is really disabled, I have some swampland in Florida I can sell you).
I'd say however, that we'd be nevertheless delighted if you took all these good reasons to move to Europe as an invitation. Please don't let the door hit your ass on the way out. K'thx.
You are absolutely, totally 100% right. The US Constitution doesn't grant us rights, it really only circumscribes the power of the government vis a vis the people. Whether a Right is listed in the Bill of Rights is only really a commentary by the framers on the Rights that they thought were most likely to be curtailed by governments, and thus worthy of explicit listing. It is NOT an exclusive listing of rights, in any way.
My point, however, was that simply asserting a right exists doesn't ipso facto make it so.
The so-called "right to privacy" which is so familiarly bandied about as a fact (particularly on /.) is merely a hypothesis, no more intrinsically valid than me asserting I have a "right" to a job, a "right" to a living place, or even more absurd (and I heard this the other day) as an American citizen a "right" to own a piece of land simply because I was born here.
"1) Folks get together and say, hey, let's build a new, man-made attraction out of entirely different materials. To replace the old one. Which no longer exists. Because, even though we know it won't be the same, the state really could use the tourist revenue."
Valid point, assuming resources are infinite.
One could restate it as "Yes, the natural remarkable attraction is gone. So we're going to build something with taxpayer funds that we're going to simply assert that it is somehow interesting, and assume that tourists will find it equally so (insert smoke and mirrors here), in hopes of luring their tourist dollars." No?
I'm not sure a contrived "point of interest" is necessarily anything special, nor that it will somehow automagically attract all the people (or even a fraction thereof) that would have bothered to come see the original attraction?
If you're going to sink million$ of taxpayer funds, it would be your DUTY to cost-benefit this VERSUS OTHER USES FOR THOSE FUNDS, including comparing to the utility of leaving them in the taxpayers pocket. I simply don't think that "inventing" a tourist attraction - particularly with the stated goal of mimicking a natural attraction yet without the benefit of actually BEING natural - makes any sense from a pragmatic standpoint.
While Ms Dixon states it almost as a pre-established fact, I'm not sure one can assert "It only takes one country to express a dissenting opinion".
North Korea, China, Iran...there are a quick handful of countries who would quite clearly 'dissent', yet I don't see case law being formulated to accommodate their views.
The whole "right" to privacy is a vague and questionable concept anyway. Clearly it doesn't apply where lawbreaking is concerned (not many people are murdered in public; ergo someone's privacy must be violated to apprehend the murderer).
So what is the much-bandied "right to privacy"? It was really a concept INVENTED in the late 19th century by Judge Brandeis, before he was a USSC judge. As far as I can tell (and Wiki seems to back me up on this), there are 4 basic precepts:
1. the protection of one's identity as unique
2. protection from defamation
3. protection of one's private facts
4. protecting someone's ability to be left alone
NONE of these are articulated in the US Constitution, and in fact #4 may be directly contrary to some basic concepts of modern civilization - for example the idea that the law is pervasive and applies to everyone, it doesn't stop at your threshold.
So where does this come from? IMO it's a natural reaction to the increasing pervasiveness of state power, and not unjustified. But let's be clear: the assertion that it's a "right" is not established in law or custom.
"...losing the mountain man was akin to filling in the Grand Canyon with a backhoe..."
Um no, you have your metaphor reversed.
Losing the mountain man would be as if the Grand Canyon somehow naturally filled in, and you DUG IT OUT with a backhoe. Would that be impressive at all? I think not.
I'm not sure if it comes from our increasingly transitory society and general rootlessness, but there seems to be this juvenile preoccupation with KEEPING THINGS THE SAME.
Look, the 'balancing rock' tips over, the 'old man of the mountain' sloughs off, the Appalachians wear away. It used to be that people were so busy staying alive and fending off sabretooths that they didn't care about this stuff, it just happened. Now, when we have a basically safe society people want it and the world around it to ossify and STOP changing - witness the efforts to 'fix' various languages the way they are today, or even this obsession with global climate change. Hell, one could even point to the Baby Boomers who keep pillaging our childhoods for movie fodder, desperate to recapture 'then' and bring it to now.
People: there is no conceivable future that doesn't include change. This pervasive change starts at the personal and extends to the climatological and geological. At some point you have to grow up and accept that it happens, adapt, and move on.
"The whole "illegal enemy combatant" thing is immoral regardless of whether the "attacks" are physical attacks or just attempts made to disrupt digital communications.
No, it's very much moral and necessity. The application of it by the previous administration, however, is outright criminal."
Huh? I agree with you that the concept of a classification of certain types of violent actors as "illegal" and "legal" enemy combatant is necessary. I'm not sure how you go from that to the application by the previous administration being outright criminal?
The United Nations War Crimes commission states clearly that, certain acts committed by civilians in militarily occupied territory are liable to be treated as war crimes, for which the customary punishment has been execution, for example "Illegitimate hostilities in arms committed by individuals who are not members of the armed forces." and "...a civilian who aids, abets, or participates in the fighting is liable to punishment as a war criminal..."
War crimes executions must only be enacted if there is a reasonably fair trial beforehand; however this trial can be summary according to field expediency.
Therefore, for the fellows who were captured in the process of acting as ununiformed combatants (ie, most of them) could have been briefly tried and probably executed. This whole folderol about the legality of military tribunals is farcical - they are EXPLICITLY allowed in the Hague Conventions, and the ones that Bush implemented were a damn sight more laborious and cautious than they really needed to be.
(http://books.google.com/books?id=IyWOF_lzPlYC&pg=RA4-PA108&lpg=RA4-PA108&dq=military+law+and+shooting+of+spies&source=bl&ots=O33sj47Ic_&sig=_Ywd3Vz2cRe-33qU47nNDlX7EFE&hl=en&ei=NxYFSt6MH5eyMavt7aID&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#PRA4-PA111,M1)
Kind of like the War Department that morphed into the Defense Department when there wasn't a war anymore. But look how much we've benefited from a pervasive and powerful military industrial complex!
At least the military threat to our country was OCCASIONALLY not contrived...
"You mean like the time when they kicked North Korea's ass out of South Korea? Yeah that was an UN action (Resolution 84)."
That's that war that's STILL GOING ON, right....50 years later?
The one where total US forces were about 480,000, and the total of all the "allied forces of the mighty UN in action" equaled about 135,000?
The one where the ONLY reason that "NK's ass was kicked" was the landing by MacArthur (American general) at Inchon with American forces?
And perhaps we should be candid: it was the only significant action of the UN *only* because the Soviet Security Council Ambassador had left the council in a fit of pique?
"Or how it served as a forum for the US and USSR to work out the Cuban Missile Crisis instead of fighting it out?"
Load of crap; the resolution to the CMC was the result of classic direct diplomacy. What did the UN have to do with ANYTHING aside from a forum for (non-constructive, and in fact inflammatory) public posturing?
"How about the first Persian Gulf war, the one that's approved by the UN and not based on bullshit? Don't we wish we listened to the UN instead of Bush and Fox News the second time around?"
Not going there because I'm pretty certain that no matter what I say it's not changing your mind anyway, so why bother?
"The UN is huge and has many organs. Most of them are successful enough that you never hear about them and the work that they do. Of course there are failures but a world without the UN would be a far worse place."
The list of crises where the UN failed to do anything constructive? Probably a list too big for the whole of the internets to handle. How about last week where UN "peacekeepers" let Palestinians launch rockets from adjacent positions, and then complained angrily about Israeli return fire? Or the UN-soldier juvenile prostitute rings in West Africa? Or the stunning and decisive UN response to Darfur...the Balkans....Rwanda....?
You're right that SOME of the bureaucracies of the UN are effective and useful. The general council? Pretty much a whinging forum for countries that aren't worth listening to.
"Stop sucking on Fox News' teats"
You need help, with this weird Freudian idee fixe about Fox News and breasts. It *could* be that someone merely disagrees with you, or in your worldview does that make them automatically an idiot?
It's called "turning off your cellphone" and "being glad you used a fake name".
...if I was a photographer in a war zone, I think the LAST thing I'd like is something that makes it look like my camera is a gun?
Wow. Worst. Invention. Ever.
"When performance starts to matter, and my profiling tool indicates that the sorting algorithm is to blame, then I'll consider using an alternate algorithm. But even then, there's a fair chance I'll leave it alone and buy more hardware..."
Now we understand why Vista can make a machine that runs at 3 GIGAHertz and has 4 processor cores is now slower than my original PC AT.
THANKS!
I wonder if one of these bloggers (and their apparently-infinite spare time) could add up ALL the various possible dangers, and the odds of it happening in a given year...odds of getting hit by lighting, 1:22 million. Odds of being in a car accident 1:50,000, etc, etc...I suspect that once you compiled a comprehensive list, you'd end up being nearly certain you'll die in the next year.
First the bible, now The Land Before Time!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0095489/