You could as accurately say there is no place for "intelligent discussion" on the germ theory, the heliocentric solar system, atomic theory, plate tectonics, or any number of mainstream scientific theories. There is mainstream science that, for better for worse, has come to a consensus because the data and their models match up better than anything else. Then there are the dissenters, everyone from cold-fusion advocates to fixedearth.com to ansersingenesis, who pick away at mainstream science from a variety of angles.
The only viewpoints that I actually see treated with scorn/hostility are those that are brought up time and time and time again, despite being answered already ad nauseum, like saying "no, it's the sun, dummy!" or "evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics!" When I see a claim from skeptics about global warming, I look for a response from mainstream science, and I've never come up wanting.
All the global warming skeptics have to do is do better science, or find models that better fit the facts. Lobbing in objections, while ignoring the responses, and lobbing in the same questions again and crying "bias! dogma!" when people ignore you, isn't really much of a contribution.
Unfortunately our measuring stick for "smart" has come to be "can work and play well with others in a productive business environment." If someone's a brilliant programmer, then that has value, even if they wouldn't be a good member of a team, don't use proper programming techniques, and so on.
I'm a a literature geek, and I liken this to grammar rules. A passage by Gibbon or Proust would be marked to hell by an English teacher because they wrote half-page long sentences with nested subordinate clauses and overly convoluted structure, but dammit their stuff is good. Their prose wouldn't make you a good grade, but it's written on a far higher level than the vast majority of people can write.
I understand the value of conventionally good programming technique (or good technique in any field) but I reserve a special sort of respect for the lone hacker in any field who just does interesting things that a formal team probably couldn't come up with.
I've been waiting for another biped to acknowledge that the command line is sometimes easier than the gui methods. Just this morning I was digging around in menus (at work) and wishing to myself that there was a text config file I could search and edit. I'm not a "power user" but text files, and by extension command lines, are easier than looking for the elusive menu/selection/tab/checkbox combo needed to reach your objective.
With Linux I can google for a problem and copy/paste the solution into a terminal. It's much more tedious trying to duplicate someone's sequence of menu selections. Sometimes I think there's a program running in the background that randomly shuffles the menu options.
I'm always intrigued by the "Linux is more secure only because no one is attacking it" argument. If I install Windows XP or 2000 (haven't fiddled with Vista yet) I have to install the service packs, Zonealarm, antivirus, and spybot right away. I have to install Zonealarm before I even plug my computer into the internet. I've read of Windows computers being infected in something like 17 seconds after the network cable being plugged in.
Is there any comparable danger for Linux/BSD/OS X systems? I've always read that the permissions model and all that stuff made Unix-like OSs inherently more secure. Not unbreachable, mind you, but more secure. I'm sure that if all the hordes of virus and trojan writers targeted Linux they'd do some damage, but is Linux as susceptible, as weak security-wise, as Windows? I'm not an expert, but from the reading I've done, I doubt that Windows and Linux (or BSD|OS X) are equivalently insecure, and Windows just suffers from a larger pool of malevolent hackers.
Yes, I'm an American, but I haven't lived in the USA for about 8 yrs. I know that pre-paid is (and has been) available, but I didn't know it was the standard. Everyone I know with a cellphone stateside is charged when they receive calls, and they have a monthly payment plan.
Great personality, by the way. I prefer sarcasm and innuendo, but just being a rude jerk is always another option. You can tell someone something they don't know without insulting them.
I just got to Italy, and it's much simpler. Everything is pre-paid. Buy the phone, buy minutes, and you pay only for the calls you make. I hate that in the USA you get charged for calls someone makes to you. Docomo in Japan also charges only for calls you make. Now if only my town had broadband available. I've had broadband for 7 years and I'm having withdrawals. How is bittorrent surviving without me?
Yes, many Americans consider McCarthy to be a historical joke and cultural embarassment, but a large conservative minority consider him a slandered American hero. Ann Coulter and others have been rehabilitating his image for a while now. Strange but true.
its even more infuriating that the media and the populace insist that we are all murdering torturers because of the few idiot assholes when the vast majority aren't.
Well, I've seen this happen approximately zero times. But then again, I don't watch TV. TV news is well known for dredging the very bottom of the lowest common denominator. All the same, I'd like to seen an actual example of anyone in "the media" saying that we are "all murdering torturers". What I do see is claims that the media is slandering the entire military, when in fact the media is just talking about the torture, waterboarding, secret prisons, covered-up deaths, and lies that have gone on for the past few years, and that a large number of military personnel have been involved with.
Picture those same couple hundred thousand, building schools, fixing power plants, guarding neighborhoods, and then ONE shoots your wife
But I'm not just talking about one murderer. A lot of people are shot at checkpoints, or on the streets, or in raids, or in battles. The convicted murderers do not represent the only noncombatant deaths caused by our military, not by a long shot. And you know as well as I do that if we had hundreds of thousands of foreign military, with complete immunity from our laws, who barely get a reprimand unless there is videotaped evidence of cold-blooded murder, we'd hate them. A few posts ago I linked to a story about an ethics story saying that 10% of our troops have admitted to abusing noncombatants. That's a bit beyond a few bad apples, and it very well would explain why so many hate us.
My point is not that "the American GI is a bad person" but that if you put people in this situation the occupiers will abuse the locals and come to hate them, and the occupied will distrust and hate the occupiers. Orwell wrote about it, and others have as well. We're not historically unique, and there is no reason at all to think that we are immune from the normal, routine, expected problems of occupation that plagued all the other military occupations in history. Yes, Americans think that their ostensibly noble and pure motives should make everyone love them as much as they love themselves, but obviously it isn't that simple.
Do you believe Iraq is a safe place, and the media is just making it look dangerous? Our military members would tend to disagree with you. How many military members and assets did McCain take to guard him on his stroll through the market? I'm not sure what you want the media to report. I think it'd look stupid to say "allegations have surfaced of torture at 5 US-run prison facilities, and the Corps of Engineers painted a school today!" If the local cops tortured your child to get information about a crime and then painted the local school on the weekend, you might not consider the painting of the school to be news.
Well, of course it would be by US companies, because that's who makes and sells things. The US government doesn't make bombs, planes, warships, or even paperclips. It's well known that we (as in the USA, through US companies, with the approval of the US government) sold arms, and gave money to, Saddam in the 80s. There is a well-known video clip of Rumsfeld shaking hands with the man, as the US govt was reopening diplomatic relations with our new friend. The USS Vincennes shot down an Iranian airliner (not knowing it was an airliner, of course--don't accuse me of that allegation) when we were helping Saddam wage war against Iran. Come on, man--this is not some obscure secret from a dim, murky past.
Our support of Saddam is very well known. We were so upset that he gassed the Kurds that we increased the financial aid to his country. We supported him until he invaded Kuwait. Here is another page with more detail about our diplomatic relations with Saddam. This isn't exactly a smoking gun--everyone knows about this history, and has since well before we deposed Saddam and occupied Iraq.
My point here is not "Aha! The USA is eeeeevil!" My point was only one of perspective. He was a murderous tyrant before, during, and after our alliance with him. I would have liked to see a more thorough discussion (i.e. any discussion) about why we supported such a murderous dictator for such a long time. But that would have put Rumsfeld and Cheney on the hotseat, and that wouldn't have served the current political objectives very well.
Saddam had Soviet, Chinese, French, British, and yes, American weapons--a good, though short, article is here. The soviets were not his only supplier. And I think the Iraqi insurgency is a bit more complex than your "WRONG" conveys. I appreciate concision, but not at the price of oversimplification.
I've read articles in Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The Economist, and so on, and the issue is complex as hell. There is a very real Sunni insurgency, and also Al Queda, and a wide hodgepodge of people who are attacking the Iraqi government, Shiites, the USA, or whoever. Whether they are trying to unseat what they see as a repressive Shiite government, or want an Islamicist government, or want to mire the USA in an endless war, or just like chaos, is anyone's guess. I'd guess it's a mixture, and not all killers have the exact same motive.
Well, I don't see how Microsoft has to "lose". They aren't going to go away, they aren't going to die, and they aren't going to have to face a world with 90% Linux desktop use. They will be above 80% of desktop use for decades upon decades. True, they can't beat Linux, but they really don't have to. With Sharepoint, Outlook, and all the behind-the-scenes business stuff, they own the corporate world. They own the corporate mentality, which is more important to market share than the technical abilities of any OSS offering. All they have to do is not suck horribly. They currently aren't doing too well at this, but they can improve. I liked Win2K, hated XP, and won't even bother pirating Vista. If they just improved 2K, like Apple continues to improve OS X, they'd keep loyal customers. People don't necessarily want a new look/feel every few years.
Just improve security, get rid of the bit-rot syndrome so people don't have to reinstall every 6 months, and add features rather than eye candy. They got into trouble not for adding features (like the critics of the critics say) but because they tried to kill the competition by precluding the use of everything else. MS could remake itself by embracing open standards and concentrating on quality over vendor lock-in, like IBM apparently has, and they'd be back. But even if they continue to suck, they'll never go away, because the corporate world isn't going to use Debian or some hippie OS. The business world has imbibed too much of the kool-aid and made too many (now bad) decisions that have locked them into the MS path, for good or ill.
Well, making up a number and then never providing hard data worked well for Joseph McCarthy. Maybe they can get Ann Coulter on board in an ad campaign or something. But repeating an unfounded, unverified claim again and again and again works quite well. The point is not to create certainty, but uncertainty.
We're still not sure if there was an attack in the Gulf of Tonkin, are we? Did Saddam support Al Queida? We don't have specific answers, but we sure have a lot of engineered uncertainty that allows people to believe what is convenient for them to believe.
I'm not trying to draw politics into this (appearances notwithstanding), but muddying the waters while never providing hard data not only works, but it works well and often. It won't stop techie users or Google from using F/OSS, but it'll slow down business adoption and keep MS stock afloat a while longer.
A person is responsible for their actions even if they are just there to earn a living, just following orders, don't really believe in what they're doing, or secretly think that the Decider is a moron. If they torture someone, they're a despicable person, even if it's okayed or ignored through the chain of command, and even if they get away with it. Our troops are human beings doing a job for pay, and shouldn't be viewed as sainted martyrs incapable for shouldering responsibility for their actions. They chose to take the money, chose their actions, and are no less culpable for their actions than the CIA or State Dept civilians. That they didn't make the policy doesn't exempt them for moral responsibility for implementing the policy.
Pablo Escobar built soccer stadiums, schools, and invested millions in charitable projects around Colombia. Why does the media, and our very own government, focus just on the fact that he was a cocaine dealer and may have killed some people? Where is the perspective there?
Look, are you really missing something so obvious? Picture a couple of hundred thousand foreign military and civilians occupying your country, with complete immunity from the laws of your country. They paint some schools, hand out some candy, and then shoot your wife at a checkpoint. Which of their actions do you really consider relevant to evaluating the impact of their presence in your country? How much "balance" would you have?
We are killing a lot of noncombatants over there and then saying "well, sorry about that" and actually thinking that people should just judge us by the nice things we do. Sorry dude, the bad things carry a lot more weight than the nice PR handing-out-candy things. The problem is that you want credit for your virtues but not commensurate blame for the ill effects of your actions. While I consider that desire normal, I don't consider it realistic or moral.
Most are good people, but the definition of what makes a "good person" is taking a beating lately. 40% support torture, and 10% admit to personally abusing civilians. Civilians, not caught-in-the-act bomb-making maniacs.
The problem I see is that we consider "being a good person" to be an innate, defined trait, not an character assessment made on your actions. If someone supports torture, I don't consider them a good person, even if they give candy to kids and scratch puppies behind the ears. Most of us have the assessment backwards, thinking that someone couldn't have done what they clearly did so we can continue to think what we already thought of them. Consequently, reports of widespread torture, abuse, beatings, unecessary killings, etc are discounted so we can continue to think rosy thoughts.
It isn't that Americans are bad or that soldiers/seamen/marines/airmen are bad, but that people all have the capacity for evil, and the situation our government has put them in makes it surface and blossom. And is it still their fault? You're damned right it is.
If you support torture, much less engage in it, you are a bad person. I don't care if someone is wringing their hands and saying "but you have to understand what they've been through!" We don't ask what the suicide bombers or death squad members have "been through," and I don't care what a torturer has been through, even if we share nationalities. Americans don't get a free pass on morality.
We "liberated" them from Saddam, who we had previously financed and armed. We did this by killing a lot of Iraqis. We now support a government that employs death squads, prison without trial, and torture. We also support other governments in the region which use torture, prison without trial, and other repressive measures. Dozens to hundreds of Iraqis a day are dying, some by Sunni bombs, some by Shiite death squads who operate with government complicity. Is the death rate, the safety of the "man in the street", the accessibility of medicine and clean water, the safety of the schools, and so on better or worse than when Saddam was in power?
What is your good news? The mainstream media is reporting that people are dying. From what I understand, people are dying. Also, their country is being looted, a couple of hundred thousand Americans, both military and civilian, are roaming Iraq with complete immunity from Iraqi law. The security contractors are, from what I can tell, immune from any law. Iraqis can be jailed just for criticizing the USA. Iraqis can be tortured to death for being Sunni, or blown up for being Shiite. What the hell would you like the media to report? "A flower bloomed today?" "A dog had puppies, and they were cute?"
Since the media sucks so much, please link to this good news we're missing.
I remember those ages. I guess I just didn't consider watching them, making sure they didn't hurt themselves, to be that big of an imposition. Maybe it was because I felt innately responsible for them (funny, that) as opposed to an actual for-pay job, which I only do because someone pays me. I was lucky with the "why" issue because my kids, even then, were understanding, and as long as I made a concerted effort to answer as many questions as I could in good faith, if I said "Daddy is getting a bit cranky, so could you go play for a little while? We'll talk about your question later" they actually understood. Even the diapers issue didn't bother me, other than the stinky factor.
I wouldn't say that I'd be happy staying home and being a full-time dad. Saying it's "not difficult" isn't the same thing as it being desirable.
A weird side note is that when my wife got back from out of town, she was a little disappointed that I wasn't a frazzled mess. I didn't get it, and still don't. They required care and feeding, and I had to clean the house, check the mail, and so on, but I still did a lot of reading, played a lot of chess with the neighbor, and so on. No, I wouldn't want to do it for 18 years straight, or with five kids, but the experience I had wasn't all that difficult.
But I think the difference is that I feel an innate responsibiity towards my kids, and don't begrudge taking care of them, whereas my job requires constant mental attention to staying "in-character" because I really, honestly don't care about it beyond the money it brings in. I'm not saying that other parents begrudge their kids, but many do seem to keep a mental tally of all the stuff they do and expect a cookie or something. I'm especially amused when people complain that kids aren't grateful. I certainly wasn't grateful as a kid, and I don't expect my kids to be grateful to me for feeding and sheltering them.
Maybe something other than the bottom line is perpetuating the on-site job culture. I think a lot of people want to get out of the house, away from the spouse and kids, etc. Office politics, despicable as they are, fulfill emotional needs for conflict, schmoozing, alliance-building, backbiting, and so on. A work environment where people were judged solely on the quality of their work would be a lot less invigorating to many people.
Plus, many managers like in-person management because they like being in charge and telling people what to do. Not all of them are fascist jerks, but giving orders in "the voice" and having underlings scurry to comply is a heady feeling, and telecommuting undermines the opportunities for that. My point is that resistance to telecommuting isn't always about the bottom line. People like me, who view a job as a paycheck, have trouble understanding it, but a lot of people are very happy with the face-to-face job culture and all the politics and intrigue it makes possible, not to mention the friendships and other relationships they find there. But I still agree that we should push for more telecommuting.
I was only a full-time parent for a month or so, when I was on vacation and my then-wife (now ex) was out of town. I had two, aged 2 and 3. It was incredibly boring because I couldn't go do anything, but I didn't find it hard. They need to eat, be clean, be watched so they don't hurt themselves, you play with them occasionally, and so on, but it wasn't nearly as full-time as my actual job. Many days I sat outside and played chess with a neighbor all day while her kids and my kids played together in the yard. When someone got hurt/hungry/dirty/tired, we intervened, but otherwise we were just there.
I could never have done that in my actual job. The life was limiting in that I couldn't exactly take the kids to a bookstore or library, but it wasn't hard, and certainly didn't require the sustained attention and effort that an actual job entails.
Additionally, I've always wondered, if being a parent is a full-time job, who made Oprah so rich? I mean, someone was watching her shows all those years, and someone watches enough daytime TV to make it a profitable advertising medium. To me, being a full-time parent would be hard mainly because it's boring and limiting, not because it's actually full-time. It doesn't require the sustained attention and activity of a job, but you can't go out and do things as if you had nothing to do. My then-wife's biggest problem was that she didn't get to talk to grown-ups all day, unless you count the other housewives, who were also going crazy from the same problem.
That being said, both of my kids were (and still are, strangely) well-behaved, healthy, and relatively low-maintenance. Talk to them, listen to them, feed/clothe them, and they're fine. I've known parents whose kids had health problems that made their care actually a full-time job, and I don't presume to ever say anything about their situation, because I respect what they have to do. But I've always felt that this whole "parenting is a full-time job", much less the famous "the hardest job in the world" is a bit overblown.
I have no sense of direction. At all. I bought a GPS and it does work well, though not perfectly. But I've had that "turn left on unpaved road" direction before, and ignored it. I just keep driving until I'm somewhere that the GPS knows more about. The only time I really got worried is when I heard a "enter roundabout" instruction, where there was no roundabout anywhere near.
But even if I ignore the GPS altogether and just drive around, having it is a stress-releiver because I know it can get me home. Maybe not by the simplest or shortest route, but better than I could do without it.
Controversial issues in the US often take on an absolutist, black-vs-white character. One side characterizes the other as practically Evil with an capital E. My capital punishment example was only an example pulled off the top of my head, but the political environment has gotten ugly in the last few decades (not that I can attest to what it was like before then). Many people in my country think that if you don't agree with them on a broad array of issues, then you "hate America," "want the terrorists to win," "want to coddle criminals," etc.
I never said I slacked off. And the overtime issue was from a previous employer, during a time when I was an hourly employee. I could have reported them, in which case I would have no doubt been fired for some (I'm sure) completely unrelated reason.
It's interesting that you impugn my character so readily, knowing so little about my work habits. I am regularly commended for the hard work I do. The difference here is that you evaluate me on what I have written, whereas my employer evaluates me on my actions. They don't care what I think as long as I produce, which I do. My loyalties lie where they do because I view my job as a fee-for-service arrangement, and since I like my paycheck, I give good value for money. But my job is a paycheck, not my life. It's a way to buy toys, pay the rent, and so on, and little more. Similarly, my employers don't lie awake at night worrying about my self-actualization or spiritual fulfillment--they view our relationship just as commercially and pragmatically as I do.
I'm sure judging people by words and not actions ingratiates you with the kissasses. Yeah, I know, I know, you don't tolerate kissasses, which would no doubt come as a surprize to the kissasses you've worked with. If you pay more attention to what people say about their beliefs and motivations than you do to their actions, then you are susceptible to kissasses. Don't be annoyed--most people are suckers for that. But keep thinking you can assess my actions by my loyalties. I guess the fact that I was pointing out that I was mirroring my loyalties on my employers' just sort of escaped you, since you didn't impugn their characters.
I've been on the receiving end of that before, and I still don't feel all that bad for them. I worked with a guy who was always late, very lazy, and largely useless, and I did work harder to make up for him, but it was my choice every step of the way. I'm not actually lazy, and my work gets done, and I'm commended by my bosses for what I do--it doesn't follow from what I said about my loyalties that I'm a bad worker. A company's loyalties are to its shareholders, but that doesn't necessarily mean that they're horrible to work for, or screw their customers, only that, if forced to make a choice, they choose loyalty to the shareholders. Many companies realize that treating employees well is good for the bottom line, and along those lines I realize that being seen as a good worker is good for my bottom line.
I'm not surprized by your assumption, because we routinely attribute a bad character to someone who is loyal to themselves, while we routinely admire someone who is loyal to the company. We've been conditioned that way, but I'm pretty sick of it so I'll be about as loyal to my employer as we see employers being loyal to their workers. Meaning: just as far as is advantageous to me.
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The only viewpoints that I actually see treated with scorn/hostility are those that are brought up time and time and time again, despite being answered already ad nauseum, like saying "no, it's the sun, dummy!" or "evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics!" When I see a claim from skeptics about global warming, I look for a response from mainstream science, and I've never come up wanting.
All the global warming skeptics have to do is do better science, or find models that better fit the facts. Lobbing in objections, while ignoring the responses, and lobbing in the same questions again and crying "bias! dogma!" when people ignore you, isn't really much of a contribution.
From what I read, when Gibson wrote Neuromancer, he had never even owned a computer.
I'm a a literature geek, and I liken this to grammar rules. A passage by Gibbon or Proust would be marked to hell by an English teacher because they wrote half-page long sentences with nested subordinate clauses and overly convoluted structure, but dammit their stuff is good. Their prose wouldn't make you a good grade, but it's written on a far higher level than the vast majority of people can write.
I understand the value of conventionally good programming technique (or good technique in any field) but I reserve a special sort of respect for the lone hacker in any field who just does interesting things that a formal team probably couldn't come up with.
With Linux I can google for a problem and copy/paste the solution into a terminal. It's much more tedious trying to duplicate someone's sequence of menu selections. Sometimes I think there's a program running in the background that randomly shuffles the menu options.
Is there any comparable danger for Linux/BSD/OS X systems? I've always read that the permissions model and all that stuff made Unix-like OSs inherently more secure. Not unbreachable, mind you, but more secure. I'm sure that if all the hordes of virus and trojan writers targeted Linux they'd do some damage, but is Linux as susceptible, as weak security-wise, as Windows? I'm not an expert, but from the reading I've done, I doubt that Windows and Linux (or BSD|OS X) are equivalently insecure, and Windows just suffers from a larger pool of malevolent hackers.
Great personality, by the way. I prefer sarcasm and innuendo, but just being a rude jerk is always another option. You can tell someone something they don't know without insulting them.
I just got to Italy, and it's much simpler. Everything is pre-paid. Buy the phone, buy minutes, and you pay only for the calls you make. I hate that in the USA you get charged for calls someone makes to you. Docomo in Japan also charges only for calls you make. Now if only my town had broadband available. I've had broadband for 7 years and I'm having withdrawals. How is bittorrent surviving without me?
Yes, many Americans consider McCarthy to be a historical joke and cultural embarassment, but a large conservative minority consider him a slandered American hero. Ann Coulter and others have been rehabilitating his image for a while now. Strange but true.
But I'm not just talking about one murderer. A lot of people are shot at checkpoints, or on the streets, or in raids, or in battles. The convicted murderers do not represent the only noncombatant deaths caused by our military, not by a long shot. And you know as well as I do that if we had hundreds of thousands of foreign military, with complete immunity from our laws, who barely get a reprimand unless there is videotaped evidence of cold-blooded murder, we'd hate them. A few posts ago I linked to a story about an ethics story saying that 10% of our troops have admitted to abusing noncombatants. That's a bit beyond a few bad apples, and it very well would explain why so many hate us.
My point is not that "the American GI is a bad person" but that if you put people in this situation the occupiers will abuse the locals and come to hate them, and the occupied will distrust and hate the occupiers. Orwell wrote about it, and others have as well. We're not historically unique, and there is no reason at all to think that we are immune from the normal, routine, expected problems of occupation that plagued all the other military occupations in history. Yes, Americans think that their ostensibly noble and pure motives should make everyone love them as much as they love themselves, but obviously it isn't that simple.
Do you believe Iraq is a safe place, and the media is just making it look dangerous? Our military members would tend to disagree with you. How many military members and assets did McCain take to guard him on his stroll through the market? I'm not sure what you want the media to report. I think it'd look stupid to say "allegations have surfaced of torture at 5 US-run prison facilities, and the Corps of Engineers painted a school today!" If the local cops tortured your child to get information about a crime and then painted the local school on the weekend, you might not consider the painting of the school to be news.
Our support of Saddam is very well known. We were so upset that he gassed the Kurds that we increased the financial aid to his country. We supported him until he invaded Kuwait. Here is another page with more detail about our diplomatic relations with Saddam. This isn't exactly a smoking gun--everyone knows about this history, and has since well before we deposed Saddam and occupied Iraq.
My point here is not "Aha! The USA is eeeeevil!" My point was only one of perspective. He was a murderous tyrant before, during, and after our alliance with him. I would have liked to see a more thorough discussion (i.e. any discussion) about why we supported such a murderous dictator for such a long time. But that would have put Rumsfeld and Cheney on the hotseat, and that wouldn't have served the current political objectives very well.
I've read articles in Foreign Affairs, The Atlantic, The Economist, and so on, and the issue is complex as hell. There is a very real Sunni insurgency, and also Al Queda, and a wide hodgepodge of people who are attacking the Iraqi government, Shiites, the USA, or whoever. Whether they are trying to unseat what they see as a repressive Shiite government, or want an Islamicist government, or want to mire the USA in an endless war, or just like chaos, is anyone's guess. I'd guess it's a mixture, and not all killers have the exact same motive.
Just improve security, get rid of the bit-rot syndrome so people don't have to reinstall every 6 months, and add features rather than eye candy. They got into trouble not for adding features (like the critics of the critics say) but because they tried to kill the competition by precluding the use of everything else. MS could remake itself by embracing open standards and concentrating on quality over vendor lock-in, like IBM apparently has, and they'd be back. But even if they continue to suck, they'll never go away, because the corporate world isn't going to use Debian or some hippie OS. The business world has imbibed too much of the kool-aid and made too many (now bad) decisions that have locked them into the MS path, for good or ill.
We're still not sure if there was an attack in the Gulf of Tonkin, are we? Did Saddam support Al Queida? We don't have specific answers, but we sure have a lot of engineered uncertainty that allows people to believe what is convenient for them to believe.
I'm not trying to draw politics into this (appearances notwithstanding), but muddying the waters while never providing hard data not only works, but it works well and often. It won't stop techie users or Google from using F/OSS, but it'll slow down business adoption and keep MS stock afloat a while longer.
A person is responsible for their actions even if they are just there to earn a living, just following orders, don't really believe in what they're doing, or secretly think that the Decider is a moron. If they torture someone, they're a despicable person, even if it's okayed or ignored through the chain of command, and even if they get away with it. Our troops are human beings doing a job for pay, and shouldn't be viewed as sainted martyrs incapable for shouldering responsibility for their actions. They chose to take the money, chose their actions, and are no less culpable for their actions than the CIA or State Dept civilians. That they didn't make the policy doesn't exempt them for moral responsibility for implementing the policy.
Look, are you really missing something so obvious? Picture a couple of hundred thousand foreign military and civilians occupying your country, with complete immunity from the laws of your country. They paint some schools, hand out some candy, and then shoot your wife at a checkpoint. Which of their actions do you really consider relevant to evaluating the impact of their presence in your country? How much "balance" would you have?
We are killing a lot of noncombatants over there and then saying "well, sorry about that" and actually thinking that people should just judge us by the nice things we do. Sorry dude, the bad things carry a lot more weight than the nice PR handing-out-candy things. The problem is that you want credit for your virtues but not commensurate blame for the ill effects of your actions. While I consider that desire normal, I don't consider it realistic or moral.
The problem I see is that we consider "being a good person" to be an innate, defined trait, not an character assessment made on your actions. If someone supports torture, I don't consider them a good person, even if they give candy to kids and scratch puppies behind the ears. Most of us have the assessment backwards, thinking that someone couldn't have done what they clearly did so we can continue to think what we already thought of them. Consequently, reports of widespread torture, abuse, beatings, unecessary killings, etc are discounted so we can continue to think rosy thoughts.
It isn't that Americans are bad or that soldiers/seamen/marines/airmen are bad, but that people all have the capacity for evil, and the situation our government has put them in makes it surface and blossom. And is it still their fault? You're damned right it is.
If you support torture, much less engage in it, you are a bad person. I don't care if someone is wringing their hands and saying "but you have to understand what they've been through!" We don't ask what the suicide bombers or death squad members have "been through," and I don't care what a torturer has been through, even if we share nationalities. Americans don't get a free pass on morality.
What is your good news? The mainstream media is reporting that people are dying. From what I understand, people are dying. Also, their country is being looted, a couple of hundred thousand Americans, both military and civilian, are roaming Iraq with complete immunity from Iraqi law. The security contractors are, from what I can tell, immune from any law. Iraqis can be jailed just for criticizing the USA. Iraqis can be tortured to death for being Sunni, or blown up for being Shiite. What the hell would you like the media to report? "A flower bloomed today?" "A dog had puppies, and they were cute?"
Since the media sucks so much, please link to this good news we're missing.
I wouldn't say that I'd be happy staying home and being a full-time dad. Saying it's "not difficult" isn't the same thing as it being desirable.
A weird side note is that when my wife got back from out of town, she was a little disappointed that I wasn't a frazzled mess. I didn't get it, and still don't. They required care and feeding, and I had to clean the house, check the mail, and so on, but I still did a lot of reading, played a lot of chess with the neighbor, and so on. No, I wouldn't want to do it for 18 years straight, or with five kids, but the experience I had wasn't all that difficult.
But I think the difference is that I feel an innate responsibiity towards my kids, and don't begrudge taking care of them, whereas my job requires constant mental attention to staying "in-character" because I really, honestly don't care about it beyond the money it brings in. I'm not saying that other parents begrudge their kids, but many do seem to keep a mental tally of all the stuff they do and expect a cookie or something. I'm especially amused when people complain that kids aren't grateful. I certainly wasn't grateful as a kid, and I don't expect my kids to be grateful to me for feeding and sheltering them.
Plus, many managers like in-person management because they like being in charge and telling people what to do. Not all of them are fascist jerks, but giving orders in "the voice" and having underlings scurry to comply is a heady feeling, and telecommuting undermines the opportunities for that. My point is that resistance to telecommuting isn't always about the bottom line. People like me, who view a job as a paycheck, have trouble understanding it, but a lot of people are very happy with the face-to-face job culture and all the politics and intrigue it makes possible, not to mention the friendships and other relationships they find there. But I still agree that we should push for more telecommuting.
I could never have done that in my actual job. The life was limiting in that I couldn't exactly take the kids to a bookstore or library, but it wasn't hard, and certainly didn't require the sustained attention and effort that an actual job entails.
Additionally, I've always wondered, if being a parent is a full-time job, who made Oprah so rich? I mean, someone was watching her shows all those years, and someone watches enough daytime TV to make it a profitable advertising medium. To me, being a full-time parent would be hard mainly because it's boring and limiting, not because it's actually full-time. It doesn't require the sustained attention and activity of a job, but you can't go out and do things as if you had nothing to do. My then-wife's biggest problem was that she didn't get to talk to grown-ups all day, unless you count the other housewives, who were also going crazy from the same problem.
That being said, both of my kids were (and still are, strangely) well-behaved, healthy, and relatively low-maintenance. Talk to them, listen to them, feed/clothe them, and they're fine. I've known parents whose kids had health problems that made their care actually a full-time job, and I don't presume to ever say anything about their situation, because I respect what they have to do. But I've always felt that this whole "parenting is a full-time job", much less the famous "the hardest job in the world" is a bit overblown.
Well, Joan Rivers is slightly older, but the "how" involves a lot of math and I can't really explain it here.
But even if I ignore the GPS altogether and just drive around, having it is a stress-releiver because I know it can get me home. Maybe not by the simplest or shortest route, but better than I could do without it.
Controversial issues in the US often take on an absolutist, black-vs-white character. One side characterizes the other as practically Evil with an capital E. My capital punishment example was only an example pulled off the top of my head, but the political environment has gotten ugly in the last few decades (not that I can attest to what it was like before then). Many people in my country think that if you don't agree with them on a broad array of issues, then you "hate America," "want the terrorists to win," "want to coddle criminals," etc.
It's interesting that you impugn my character so readily, knowing so little about my work habits. I am regularly commended for the hard work I do. The difference here is that you evaluate me on what I have written, whereas my employer evaluates me on my actions. They don't care what I think as long as I produce, which I do. My loyalties lie where they do because I view my job as a fee-for-service arrangement, and since I like my paycheck, I give good value for money. But my job is a paycheck, not my life. It's a way to buy toys, pay the rent, and so on, and little more. Similarly, my employers don't lie awake at night worrying about my self-actualization or spiritual fulfillment--they view our relationship just as commercially and pragmatically as I do.
I'm sure judging people by words and not actions ingratiates you with the kissasses. Yeah, I know, I know, you don't tolerate kissasses, which would no doubt come as a surprize to the kissasses you've worked with. If you pay more attention to what people say about their beliefs and motivations than you do to their actions, then you are susceptible to kissasses. Don't be annoyed--most people are suckers for that. But keep thinking you can assess my actions by my loyalties. I guess the fact that I was pointing out that I was mirroring my loyalties on my employers' just sort of escaped you, since you didn't impugn their characters.
I'm not surprized by your assumption, because we routinely attribute a bad character to someone who is loyal to themselves, while we routinely admire someone who is loyal to the company. We've been conditioned that way, but I'm pretty sick of it so I'll be about as loyal to my employer as we see employers being loyal to their workers. Meaning: just as far as is advantageous to me.