(shrug) I don't believe that making someone carry a card is going to alter their behavior at all. I suspect that guards in Abu Ghraib would have done what they did regardless of a little card in their pocket.
10 - that IS a more significant difference, and I'm more troubled by your first comparison and the suggestion that it's becoming a perma-camp than anything.
Policy will now be reviewed every 30 days instead of 120 days.
New rules: 1. Comply with all rules and regulations. You are subject to disciplinary action if you disobey any rule or commit any act, disorder, or neglect that is prejudicial to good order and discipline. 2. You must immediately obey all orders of U.S. personnel. Deliberate disobedience, resistance, or conduct of a mutinous or riotous nature will be dealt with by force. Be respectful of others. Derogatory comments toward camp personnel will not be tolerated. 3. You may not have any articles that can be used as a weapon in your possession at any time. If a weapon is found in your possession, you will be severely punished. Gambling is strictly forbidden. 4. Being truthful and compliance will be rewarded. Failure to comply will result in loss of privileges. 5. All trash will be returned immediately to U.S. personnel when you are finished eating. All eating utensils must be returned after meals. 6. No detainee may conduct or participate in any form of military drill, organized physical fitness, hand-to-hand combat, or martial arts style training. 7. The camp commander will ensure adequate protection for all personnel. Any detainee who mistreats another detainee will be punished. Any detainee that fears his life is in danger, or fears physical injury at the hands of another person can report this to U.S. personnel at any time. 8. Medical emergencies should be brought to the guards' attention immediately. Your decision whether or not to be truthful and comply will directly affect your quality of life while in this camp.
(nothing in there seems particularly onerous. Aside from #2, it wouldn't make a bad set of rules for any school in the US.)
(stopped reading because I have better things to do) I'd rate this -1, Overrated. It's a bunch of clarifications, seems to me as much for the detainees' benefit as anyone.
""The credibility of the United States is at stake here, because NASA made a commitment to bring Columbus and AMS to the space station," said Samuel C.C. Ting, a Nobel laureate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who conceived the project in 1994 and drew in collaborators from 60 institutes in 16 nations to build and fund it. "After all this work, it would be a terrible blow if the instrument cannot be used.""
Precisely the sort of narrow minded, exclusionist, inflammatory, idiotic, (and, not least, entirely self-interested) comment that would serve as a useful reminder that Nobel Laureates are not the fonts of Socratic wisdom some purport them to be.
The credibility of the US is at stake here? Some needs to write Mr. Ting a memo, reminding him that since that commitment is made, not one but TWO shuttles have been blown to flinders along with their brave crews.
This is tantamount to you promising to take your neighbor to work, since he doesn't have a car. Overnight both your cars BLOW UP. The next morning, as you're staring at the wreckage of your garage and both vehicles, holding the bicycle you're going to have to ride to work for the foreseeable future. If your neighbor shows up, insisting on a ride on your handlebars since you "committed" to taking him to work, well, I'd frankly hope you'd punch him.
Ironically, if you tried to enforce moral consequences like this in real life, for real-life, proven atrocities (say, having 'child molester' tattoo'd on the forehead of someone convicted of child rape) the ALCU would sue you senseless.
Why should our virtual lives have consequences, when we don't have them in the real world?
Hairshirt-wearing, veggie-sprout-yogurt-eating, deeply earnest, obsessively-focused, humorless young leftists might be considered to simply be anti-fun?
-1, Unsurprising.
Hell, from having Best Buy deliver a giant resource-consuming TV in a giant gas-wasting truck only to come pick it up again 3 days later, to eating the delicious flesh of a number of animals no doubt injected with hormones and raised in horrible, inhumane conditions, to the dumpster afterwards filled with enough wasted food to feed the entire (remaining) population of Darfur for weeks, I'm going to pretty much guess everything about my entertainment plans for Superbowl weekend would get the big "thumbs down" from that bunch of whingers...to say NOTHING of my collection of game consoles.
In those famous words coined so brilliantly in 2005 (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article515384.ece) : "Sod off, Swampy."
Actually, I was being sarcastic. In 1913, everyone was convinced that every subsequent war was going to be a guerilla/insurgent war, due to their recent experience. There is some justification that this 'certainty' that a general European war couldn't happen (haven't had one since 1815!) might have contributed to an underestimation of the danger leading to WWI.
I just find it ironic and sad that in 2007 we have people seriously claiming "all of our future wars will be insurgencies" when people were saying precisely the same thing 100 years ago, only to have a century filled with the most lethal, widespread, and deadly extended general war in human history (WWI+II).
You're right - it's a deliberately specious point.
However, I've had many a conversation with people who are convinced that global warming is happening exclusively BECAUSE of humans.
This would actually *only* prove that it's certainly possible to have global warming without people, not that our global warming is or isn't caused by humans.
Of course, you mean this as an amusing and ironic comment on the fact that a case of abundantly-obvious global warming would be denied by a fictionalized idiot president, of course drawing a parallel to our own president.
I'd instead say it's more useful to point to the ACTUAL lack of any humans, SUVs, or even Republicans on Venus... nevertheless *somehow* the planet's climate was overwhelmed by global warming.
Hm, that might almost lead one to think humans have nothing to do with the process at all.
Dateline 1913: "How many millions have been spent on these fancy "aeroplanes" that could've gone to the people of the US?
As I see it, any enemy we'd have to use this against would have armies of hundreds of thousands like back in the Civil War - these planes are too feeble and trivial to have any impact on a conflict between nations. Besides, look at the Philippines, the Spanish-American War, and the Boer War - why the fuck are we building bigger and better and more expensive bombs when all of our operations are counter-insurgency ops? War between mighty industrialized nations is impossible these days!"
I'm sure Kellogg & Briand would have agreed with you.
Armies kill things. Technology has made our military, man for man, the most effective and efficient killing machine anywhere. The invasion of Iraq and the annihilation of its military took 3 weeks and a handful of casualties, hardly more than we'd have had in almost any live-fire exercise on the same scale.
After that, however, and despite the fact that the military is a conveniently well-organized and broadly capable group of trained men and women that can be ordered to do just about anything, we didn't need a massively efficient and effective killing machine. We haven't for years now. IF we insist on the paradigm that it is our responsibility to rebuild any country we knock over, we NEEDED a wise, foresightful, thoughtful, and empathetic administrative POST-confilct authority. We didn't have it. What we got - charitably speaking - was a collection of hastily thrown-together policies based on really nothing but optimism, a lack of any strategic direction cognizant of the political, religious, and tribal realities, as well as ex-pat Iraqi opportunists who saw their chance to nab some power and wealth.
Think of the Army as a supremely well-balanced and perfectly crafted chainsaw - perfect for treecutting. Once you've cut down the forest, and want to try to build a city, is it any wonder if the chainsaw - no matter how wonderful - turns out to be nearly useless for digging wells, building homes, paving streets?
What they have accomplished is more a testament to the versatility, dedication, and skill of the individuals in our armed services who are willing to try to accomplish whatever they are ordered to do.
Surveys suggest that people who use IM's have the endless amounts of spare time required to fill out the ceaseless surveys asking if email is dead yet.
"History has... tended to show ancient people as stupid compared to us, especially the ancient non-European people (here in the US at least...). Yet again we're shown that ancient people had a grasp of the world that is surprisingly advanced, and that non-European cultures were just as advanced even if they didn't use gunpowder or some of the other things the Europeans had."
I understand that this is the canon view, but seriously: where were you educated? I'm 40 so my main primary education was in the 70s in 100% public schools and frankly there was never any TRACE of a suggestion that early or indigenous people were "stupid". In fact, I'd say that the 70s were more about the 'noble savage' nonsense which in reality is just as paternalistic and just as racist & unrealistic as the stereotypes you're talking about.
I daresay that my perception is that, due to the rigors of their environment, there was a higher Darwinistic pressure on humans in primitive circumstances, so that intelligence was more clearly 'selected for' than in our society where the stupid seem to breed freely and frequently, with government subsidies to make it even more encouraged.
From TFA: ""They broke my wardrobe, short cutted my electricity, pulled out my speakers, phone and other cables having nothing to do with this and been touching my bookkeeping, which they have no right to do," he said."
Oh, they have no RIGHT to do it? As opposed to hacking email accounts, which you DID have a right to do? What if they just said that they were 'hacking' your physical life, would that make it ok?
"While questioning Egerstad at the station, the police "played every trick in the book, good cop, bad cop and crazy mysterious guy in the corner not wanting to tell his name and just staring at me". "Well, if they want to try to manipulate, I can play that game too. [I] gave every known body signal there is telling of lies... covered my mouth, scratched my elbow, looked away and so on.""
Personally, Egerstad sounds like the kind of a sanctimonious dick that SHOULD get the beatdown. They should give him "every known signal" that the police don't like it when when someone is lying to them...tasers, nightstick, whatever.
"Egerstad said the police also accused him of theft because he had eight PlayStation 2 consoles in his apartment. He said he owns a company that "handles consoles"."
Um, yeah, his company 'handles' them. What, like, you polish them or something? SMBS...perhaps you should check your own windows before you start casting stones, Mr. Egerstad.
I think even the optimism regarding our ability to grow 'brainless' clones is troubling.
A body is the sum of its processes - a number of which are autonomically controlled by, you guessed it, the brain. So, for example I think (IANA-brain scientist) to have a functioning body we would have to have the cerebellum, the temporal lobe, and probably the occipital lobe. I'm not sure about the parietal lobe or the frontal lobe. Where do "we" exist in there, and if the frontal lobe is genetically engineered out of development, are we creating what we ironically hope is a soulless automaton? Can one be a person without the physical chunks of brain matter where higher reasoning takes place?
I'd expect that somewhere in the world there is at least one person who was born who is, by this measure, apparently a soulless automaton since birth. I would have significant ethical and moral reservations about concluding that is not a person and thus acceptable for 'harvesting'. Would it be significantly different if the body was conceived/grown in a test tube? Could we be certain that there isn't a "person" lurking in there? Could we ever be sure enough?
Ethically troubling country - both for the actuality and the ramifications - indeed.
Unfortunately, technology to grow the clones seems to be progressing much faster than your other 'miracle' techs: body freezing, or (most obviously) growing them without a brain (not possible, IMO).
So the ethical question will remain: if we are CAPABLE of doing something, that doesn't mean that DOING it is ethical. Self-evident? Sure it is, but we stupid hairless apes can't even agree on the morality of convenience-killing our not-quite-born young, do you think we're ready to resolve the question about whether we 'should' be growing what will for all intents be PEOPLE for their spare-part value?
Hell, there are credible reports that the most populous country on the planet is selling the organs of prisoners on the black market, how big a step is this from that?
Sadly, the technology isn't going to wait for us to resolve the ethical dilemma. People with enough cash will be able to find medical technologists who are either morally blind or willing to be so "in the pursuit of science" to do their bidding.
It's the same problem with ANY 'leak' - the source and its motivation must be considered, and if unknown, then that inherently devalues the information. It's a tactic that both Lee Atwater and Karl Rove perfected to an art form - the leak which counterintuitively debases the opponent's position, generally because they are incautious about how they use the information. The intellectual equivalent of a 'screen pass' in football, where the quarterback uses the overaggressiveness of a defensive line against them.
Granted, as you perceptively point out, that doesn't stop rabid fanbois of EITHER faction from waving it around slobbering that they finally have THE PROOF (which somehow always manages to justify their original preconceptions).
The first I'd heard about this type of thing was that Walt Disney reputedly had something similar on the pavement of the (private) airfield at Disney World....playing "It's a small world after all" of course.
I'm still not sure I believe it. I can see on a public road, where the speed would be predictable and ostensibly fixed. But an airstrip where the planes are logically accelerating/decelerating at wildly different rates? Seems nearly impossible to me.
It's not that they didn't celebrate Veteran's Day. It's that:
"... Google had no problem honoring the war dead of other countries, creating a special logo with poppies for Remembrance Day in Australia, Canada, Ireland and the United Kingdom."
And they refuse to note Memorial Day, either.
A lot of people are saying "pish-posh" comments, and as a Libertarian I would say "It's their business, they can do what they like."
On the other hand, I'm also free to say that I think it stinks (and invites tinfoil hattery from the Right) that they will recognize and salute the war dead of OTHER countries, but apparently refuses to do so for their own country's soldiers.
OK, hypothesize: in any match you are playing against another person, let the referee arbitrarily re-set your score to zero.
Why should you be upset? You're playing the game for FUN, right? And you can continue to play; in fact, depending on the game, if you were winning, your 'gameplay' experience has just been enhanced since you'll probably get to play longer.
People play games and get entertainment about a lot of facets of games; to believe the 'fun' exists solely in the experience is naive at best.
Slashdot Mirror
Wait, she's a Comparative Literature professor?
(shrug) I don't believe that making someone carry a card is going to alter their behavior at all. I suspect that guards in Abu Ghraib would have done what they did regardless of a little card in their pocket.
10 - that IS a more significant difference, and I'm more troubled by your first comparison and the suggestion that it's becoming a perma-camp than anything.
..the "damning" changes.
Policy will now be reviewed every 30 days instead of 120 days.
New rules:
1. Comply with all rules and regulations. You are subject to disciplinary action if you disobey any rule or commit any act, disorder, or neglect that is prejudicial to good order and discipline.
2. You must immediately obey all orders of U.S. personnel. Deliberate disobedience, resistance, or conduct of a mutinous or riotous nature will be dealt with by force. Be respectful of others. Derogatory comments toward camp personnel will not be tolerated.
3. You may not have any articles that can be used as a weapon in your possession at any time. If a weapon is found in your possession, you will be severely punished. Gambling is strictly forbidden.
4. Being truthful and compliance will be rewarded. Failure to comply will result in loss of privileges.
5. All trash will be returned immediately to U.S. personnel when you are finished eating. All eating utensils must be returned after meals.
6. No detainee may conduct or participate in any form of military drill, organized physical fitness, hand-to-hand combat, or martial arts style training.
7. The camp commander will ensure adequate protection for all personnel. Any detainee who mistreats another detainee will be punished. Any detainee that fears his life is in danger, or fears physical injury at the hands of another person can report this to U.S. personnel at any time.
8. Medical emergencies should be brought to the guards' attention immediately. Your decision whether or not to be truthful and comply will directly affect your quality of life while in this camp.
(nothing in there seems particularly onerous. Aside from #2, it wouldn't make a bad set of rules for any school in the US.)
(stopped reading because I have better things to do)
I'd rate this -1, Overrated. It's a bunch of clarifications, seems to me as much for the detainees' benefit as anyone.
All I see here is a bunch of you hairless wonders making excuses.
Yo bitch, I've got your cerebellum right here.
we pwn j00!
-The Chimps
Your tone of 'insulted moral outrage' on behalf of pedophiles proves my point precisely. Thanks ever so much.
""The credibility of the United States is at stake here, because NASA made a commitment to bring Columbus and AMS to the space station," said Samuel C.C. Ting, a Nobel laureate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who conceived the project in 1994 and drew in collaborators from 60 institutes in 16 nations to build and fund it. "After all this work, it would be a terrible blow if the instrument cannot be used.""
Precisely the sort of narrow minded, exclusionist, inflammatory, idiotic, (and, not least, entirely self-interested) comment that would serve as a useful reminder that Nobel Laureates are not the fonts of Socratic wisdom some purport them to be.
The credibility of the US is at stake here? Some needs to write Mr. Ting a memo, reminding him that since that commitment is made, not one but TWO shuttles have been blown to flinders along with their brave crews.
This is tantamount to you promising to take your neighbor to work, since he doesn't have a car. Overnight both your cars BLOW UP. The next morning, as you're staring at the wreckage of your garage and both vehicles, holding the bicycle you're going to have to ride to work for the foreseeable future. If your neighbor shows up, insisting on a ride on your handlebars since you "committed" to taking him to work, well, I'd frankly hope you'd punch him.
Ironically, if you tried to enforce moral consequences like this in real life, for real-life, proven atrocities (say, having 'child molester' tattoo'd on the forehead of someone convicted of child rape) the ALCU would sue you senseless.
Why should our virtual lives have consequences, when we don't have them in the real world?
Hairshirt-wearing, veggie-sprout-yogurt-eating, deeply earnest, obsessively-focused, humorless young leftists might be considered to simply be anti-fun?
-1, Unsurprising.
Hell, from having Best Buy deliver a giant resource-consuming TV in a giant gas-wasting truck only to come pick it up again 3 days later, to eating the delicious flesh of a number of animals no doubt injected with hormones and raised in horrible, inhumane conditions, to the dumpster afterwards filled with enough wasted food to feed the entire (remaining) population of Darfur for weeks, I'm going to pretty much guess everything about my entertainment plans for Superbowl weekend would get the big "thumbs down" from that bunch of whingers...to say NOTHING of my collection of game consoles.
In those famous words coined so brilliantly in 2005 (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article515384.ece) : "Sod off, Swampy."
Actually, I was being sarcastic. In 1913, everyone was convinced that every subsequent war was going to be a guerilla/insurgent war, due to their recent experience. There is some justification that this 'certainty' that a general European war couldn't happen (haven't had one since 1815!) might have contributed to an underestimation of the danger leading to WWI.
I just find it ironic and sad that in 2007 we have people seriously claiming "all of our future wars will be insurgencies" when people were saying precisely the same thing 100 years ago, only to have a century filled with the most lethal, widespread, and deadly extended general war in human history (WWI+II).
You're right - it's a deliberately specious point.
However, I've had many a conversation with people who are convinced that global warming is happening exclusively BECAUSE of humans.
This would actually *only* prove that it's certainly possible to have global warming without people, not that our global warming is or isn't caused by humans.
Of course, you mean this as an amusing and ironic comment on the fact that a case of abundantly-obvious global warming would be denied by a fictionalized idiot president, of course drawing a parallel to our own president.
I'd instead say it's more useful to point to the ACTUAL lack of any humans, SUVs, or even Republicans on Venus... nevertheless *somehow* the planet's climate was overwhelmed by global warming.
Hm, that might almost lead one to think humans have nothing to do with the process at all.
Dateline 1913: "How many millions have been spent on these fancy "aeroplanes" that could've gone to the people of the US?
As I see it, any enemy we'd have to use this against would have armies of hundreds of thousands like back in the Civil War - these planes are too feeble and trivial to have any impact on a conflict between nations. Besides, look at the Philippines, the Spanish-American War, and the Boer War - why the fuck are we building bigger and better and more expensive bombs when all of our operations are counter-insurgency ops? War between mighty industrialized nations is impossible these days!"
I'm sure Kellogg & Briand would have agreed with you.
Armies kill things. Technology has made our military, man for man, the most effective and efficient killing machine anywhere. The invasion of Iraq and the annihilation of its military took 3 weeks and a handful of casualties, hardly more than we'd have had in almost any live-fire exercise on the same scale.
After that, however, and despite the fact that the military is a conveniently well-organized and broadly capable group of trained men and women that can be ordered to do just about anything, we didn't need a massively efficient and effective killing machine. We haven't for years now. IF we insist on the paradigm that it is our responsibility to rebuild any country we knock over, we NEEDED a wise, foresightful, thoughtful, and empathetic administrative POST-confilct authority. We didn't have it. What we got - charitably speaking - was a collection of hastily thrown-together policies based on really nothing but optimism, a lack of any strategic direction cognizant of the political, religious, and tribal realities, as well as ex-pat Iraqi opportunists who saw their chance to nab some power and wealth.
Think of the Army as a supremely well-balanced and perfectly crafted chainsaw - perfect for treecutting. Once you've cut down the forest, and want to try to build a city, is it any wonder if the chainsaw - no matter how wonderful - turns out to be nearly useless for digging wells, building homes, paving streets?
What they have accomplished is more a testament to the versatility, dedication, and skill of the individuals in our armed services who are willing to try to accomplish whatever they are ordered to do.
+1 Informative.
I *always* wondered WTF sheep were thinking all damn day.
Why don't governments ever store this shit next to the tax records?
They NEVER seem to lose track of the fact that they get a godawful chunk of my money. They never even forget PART of that.
Surveys suggest that people who use IM's have the endless amounts of spare time required to fill out the ceaseless surveys asking if email is dead yet.
"History has ... tended to show ancient people as stupid compared to us, especially the ancient non-European people (here in the US at least...). Yet again we're shown that ancient people had a grasp of the world that is surprisingly advanced, and that non-European cultures were just as advanced even if they didn't use gunpowder or some of the other things the Europeans had."
I understand that this is the canon view, but seriously: where were you educated?
I'm 40 so my main primary education was in the 70s in 100% public schools and frankly there was never any TRACE of a suggestion that early or indigenous people were "stupid". In fact, I'd say that the 70s were more about the 'noble savage' nonsense which in reality is just as paternalistic and just as racist & unrealistic as the stereotypes you're talking about.
I daresay that my perception is that, due to the rigors of their environment, there was a higher Darwinistic pressure on humans in primitive circumstances, so that intelligence was more clearly 'selected for' than in our society where the stupid seem to breed freely and frequently, with government subsidies to make it even more encouraged.
From TFA:
... covered my mouth, scratched my elbow, looked away and so on.""
""They broke my wardrobe, short cutted my electricity, pulled out my speakers, phone and other cables having nothing to do with this and been touching my bookkeeping, which they have no right to do," he said."
Oh, they have no RIGHT to do it? As opposed to hacking email accounts, which you DID have a right to do? What if they just said that they were 'hacking' your physical life, would that make it ok?
"While questioning Egerstad at the station, the police "played every trick in the book, good cop, bad cop and crazy mysterious guy in the corner not wanting to tell his name and just staring at me". "Well, if they want to try to manipulate, I can play that game too. [I] gave every known body signal there is telling of lies
Personally, Egerstad sounds like the kind of a sanctimonious dick that SHOULD get the beatdown. They should give him "every known signal" that the police don't like it when when someone is lying to them...tasers, nightstick, whatever.
"Egerstad said the police also accused him of theft because he had eight PlayStation 2 consoles in his apartment. He said he owns a company that "handles consoles"."
Um, yeah, his company 'handles' them. What, like, you polish them or something? SMBS...perhaps you should check your own windows before you start casting stones, Mr. Egerstad.
I think even the optimism regarding our ability to grow 'brainless' clones is troubling.
A body is the sum of its processes - a number of which are autonomically controlled by, you guessed it, the brain. So, for example I think (IANA-brain scientist) to have a functioning body we would have to have the cerebellum, the temporal lobe, and probably the occipital lobe. I'm not sure about the parietal lobe or the frontal lobe. Where do "we" exist in there, and if the frontal lobe is genetically engineered out of development, are we creating what we ironically hope is a soulless automaton? Can one be a person without the physical chunks of brain matter where higher reasoning takes place?
I'd expect that somewhere in the world there is at least one person who was born who is, by this measure, apparently a soulless automaton since birth. I would have significant ethical and moral reservations about concluding that is not a person and thus acceptable for 'harvesting'. Would it be significantly different if the body was conceived/grown in a test tube? Could we be certain that there isn't a "person" lurking in there? Could we ever be sure enough?
Ethically troubling country - both for the actuality and the ramifications - indeed.
Unfortunately, technology to grow the clones seems to be progressing much faster than your other 'miracle' techs: body freezing, or (most obviously) growing them without a brain (not possible, IMO).
So the ethical question will remain: if we are CAPABLE of doing something, that doesn't mean that DOING it is ethical. Self-evident? Sure it is, but we stupid hairless apes can't even agree on the morality of convenience-killing our not-quite-born young, do you think we're ready to resolve the question about whether we 'should' be growing what will for all intents be PEOPLE for their spare-part value?
Hell, there are credible reports that the most populous country on the planet is selling the organs of prisoners on the black market, how big a step is this from that?
Sadly, the technology isn't going to wait for us to resolve the ethical dilemma. People with enough cash will be able to find medical technologists who are either morally blind or willing to be so "in the pursuit of science" to do their bidding.
It's the same problem with ANY 'leak' - the source and its motivation must be considered, and if unknown, then that inherently devalues the information. It's a tactic that both Lee Atwater and Karl Rove perfected to an art form - the leak which counterintuitively debases the opponent's position, generally because they are incautious about how they use the information. The intellectual equivalent of a 'screen pass' in football, where the quarterback uses the overaggressiveness of a defensive line against them.
Granted, as you perceptively point out, that doesn't stop rabid fanbois of EITHER faction from waving it around slobbering that they finally have THE PROOF (which somehow always manages to justify their original preconceptions).
The first I'd heard about this type of thing was that Walt Disney reputedly had something similar on the pavement of the (private) airfield at Disney World....playing "It's a small world after all" of course.
I'm still not sure I believe it. I can see on a public road, where the speed would be predictable and ostensibly fixed. But an airstrip where the planes are logically accelerating/decelerating at wildly different rates? Seems nearly impossible to me.
Crap, now Google's going to have to redesign their Veteran's day logo ALREADY?
It's not that they didn't celebrate Veteran's Day. It's that:
"... Google had no problem honoring the war dead of other countries, creating a special logo with poppies for Remembrance Day in Australia, Canada, Ireland and the United Kingdom."
And they refuse to note Memorial Day, either.
A lot of people are saying "pish-posh" comments, and as a Libertarian I would say "It's their business, they can do what they like."
On the other hand, I'm also free to say that I think it stinks (and invites tinfoil hattery from the Right) that they will recognize and salute the war dead of OTHER countries, but apparently refuses to do so for their own country's soldiers.
OK, hypothesize: in any match you are playing against another person, let the referee arbitrarily re-set your score to zero.
Why should you be upset? You're playing the game for FUN, right? And you can continue to play; in fact, depending on the game, if you were winning, your 'gameplay' experience has just been enhanced since you'll probably get to play longer.
People play games and get entertainment about a lot of facets of games; to believe the 'fun' exists solely in the experience is naive at best.