I don't see this flying well with consumers at all. Because it may come with the appropriate monitor for that manufacturer, it's the CONTENT people that get to decide what is an appropriate monitor. "Oh, we have a partnership with Sony and you have an NEC monitor...sorry, downsampling for you!"
huh? that's not at all what is going to happen. this will be a simple technology. it will be some format that they advertise as being secure. sony and NEC will both make monitors that support that format.
it's going to be a standard like any other standard -- like CSS -- the DVDs all use it.
That is indeed a problem. I think that the insitance can happen within a person's circle of relations. You don't have to go down the street telling everyone how they should act (except for the things people all agree on.)
The trouble with that, at least in the states, is that everyone is so into the "i'm-my-own-master, don't-tell-me-what-to-do" mentality. so i do think that this has to be premised on a greater degree of respect (not just acceptance) for others.
it's tricky. thanks for the feedback. please follow up if you have any other ideas of how this might be possible.
the problem, of course, is that the people who are reprehensible are usually in circles that think that's okay... (most people who only care about money, for instance, came from families who emphasized it tremendously.)
so what are you suggesting? People working at google should quit their jobs and walk out? What's the name of the little world you live in? We have laws because we cannot trust people to make up their own moral code.
We can not trust people to make up their own moral code, maybe. But we can expect them do.
I think that's one of the major problems. With comments like "they're a company, don't expect them to care about anything except profit" we demonstrate how we have stopped expecting people to act ethically. If we did, we'd have considerably more ethical people. And if we specifically said that those ethics applied to what you did at work, and what you contributed to, then I think we'd have more ethical companies and offices.
But we don't. We have been taught to think that whatever the market does it right. Or, if it's not right, that it's inevitable.
But people are made by their environment as much as they make it. It is a two way street. If we would start expecting people to have some humanity, they will start to. It might be disheartening because you feel like you're the one moral person who is getting beat up by the people who don't. (If you do, feel better knowing there are others out there who still feel that there is such thing as right and wrong and that trying to live ethically makes life fuller.)
But the alternative is no better -- we will continue to have to do more and more reprehensible things just to get by. Our kids have to take ritalin to compete in school now. To make it up the corperate ladder you have to stab people in the back. These kinds of awful realities are only going to increase unless we fight against it and insist that our business, cultural, and political leaders have some decency.
Laws aren't the basis of morality in the society, they're (hopefully) the product. But once we deffer too much to law and too little to our own ability to konw what is right and wrong, the more we have to depend on those laws just to maintain our society.
A cultural insistance on personal morality and responsibility would provide us a means to resisting the world we're heading towards (and are already wading in.)
This isn't some kind of "we need religion in our government" dogmatic position. We need a balance. But just withdrawing and saying, "to each his own" leaves us with a soceity that only hasn't collapsed because we have a reasonably well rooted judicial system.
Just read on news.google.com about this 19 year-old, Emerson, who started mugglenet.com -- a source of all things harry potter. J.K. found out about it and invited the kid to come meet her. Turns out J.K. wants to use the site to do cross references so the Harry Potter world is more coherent.
Read the Wall of Shame. The kid has a funny sense of humor. And the article says he hopes to be the world's greatest philanthropist, his fortune presumably made while he's at Norte Damn discovering alternative fuels. So he's a good kid, too. And home schooled.
"Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security"--Benjamin Franklin
I am in Israel right now. I admire how they generally live normal lives without stressing about being blown up, but i don't like how no one cares if the massod listens in on them, or if they have to be medal-detected every time they enter a mall. (not to mention that the stress of attacks, IMHO, makes them live more me-first and in-the-moment... but i've only been here 6 weeks so i'm still doing my psychological analysis. and there are defintely some people who don't deal with it well. go to news.google.com and search for "lynch" "palestinian" "gaza.")
so i feel like i can still be agreeing with ben if i approve a security policy that requires its documents be released, in full, in some number of years. no more of the classifying everything crap. i don't trust anyone to deal with my privacy that doesn't have transparency and oversight, and surely not the government.
There are already services that provide broadband speeds for 80 dollars/month on a pcmcia card. Couldn't the city have a contract with a company that provides this? Then they could workout whatever details they want (i.e. have a subsidized rate.)
Or you could have a private company put in the infrastructure and get a monopoly for X number of years with the city paying a subsidized rate until X years is over when the city takes over.
well -- there are things more important than dead ppl right now.
that's one of our major problems. we obsess over the right-now. (wrt iraq) we need to stop worrying about how many soldiers are killed (and retaliating) and focus on development. THAT should affect politics. things that will matter in 30 years, not things that matter right now.
as for london -- it's a tragedy. but they have to keep focusing on international development. it will take many years of loss, just as gandhi's or mandela's struggle took many years of loss, but it will end in a lasting peace that trying to kill all the bad guys won't provide.
He had a reason, but it's irrational and insane. He's religious fundamentalist, and the motivations of such people are incomprehensible to reasonable, logical thinkers. He thinks Christians and Jews are abominations and must be exterminated. He hates the West, all of it, regardless of whether or not a given subsection of it is involved in Iraq or not. America is the "Big Satan" and Israel is the "Little Satan" and anybody who isn't actively trying to destroy both nations is the enemy of Islam.
I wouldn't say it was irrational. You just drew the steps in which he reasoned it (thugh I don't know him personally so I don't know if those are actually the steps he used). You might think the the premise is unreasonable, but that's a relative term. We think that polygamists are wacko. Many of us think that homosexuals are f'd up. Many of us think that any government that is not democratic is bad. What gives us this authority? It certainly isn't devine.
We base our logic on one premise, he bases his on another premise. I don't happen to agree with his -- but I don't think it is insane or irrational. You can't plan 9/11 or any of the other successes he's had if you're irrational.
Just like I don't think Bush is irrational or stupid. He might be working on a totally different premise from me, but he is working on that premise pretty rationally.
You people amaze me. You are able to throw your hands up in the air at the oddball decisions of President Bush, and say, "Well, he's a religious weirdo, who knows what those people think," but you're attempting to explain the actions of terrorists through logic. "We deserve it," for some reason. "We caused this. This is our fault, if we hadn't (done whatever), then they wouldn't have done this."
And you ppl amaze me. They aren't right to throw up their hands and say they can't understand why Bush does what he does. I disagree with a good portion of the Bush agenda, but I can understand clearly why he does it. The same way I know why Hal Turner thinks what he thinks or Rush Limbaugh.
As for deserving it -- I don't think deserve is a good word. We could have predicted it. If you're a black man in Howard Beach, Queens, and you feel the white racists creeping in on you, regardless of what the surrounding peoples' intention are, it is reasonable to expect that some percentage of such black men will lash out. Why? Because there have been high-profile racist attacks in Howard Beach that have made ppl paranoid.
To extrapolate -- the British are blamed for a lot of the problems in the M. East because they are seen as having supported illigitimate governments. The U.S. and British invasion strikes many as the same thing -- just as we'd lash out of the japanese attacked us, even if they were "saving" us from an an awful leader.
No. Bullshit. They tried to knock over the World Trade Center in 1993 when Bill Clinton was president. Why? They bombed the USS Cole during Clinton's term. Why? They slaughtered hundreds at our embassies in Africa. Why? President Clinton mostly ignored them, why did they still want to get us? All because of Gulf 1? If there's no connection between al Qaeda and Iraq, why in the world would these terrorists be so upset about Iraq?
I think I made that clear enough above. They hate us like we hated soviet advances into our allies' land. Same reason we overthrew many communist governments (even popular ones.)
And, I ask you, why has there not been a single American civilian death on our own soil since 9/11? How hard would it be for just ONE al Qaeda sympathizer or sleeper cell operative to build a bomb and blow up the food court at a shopping ball? Or a zoo? An amusement park? A sporting event? A crowded bus? Why? NOT ONE. Not one in 4 years. There's almost 300,000,000 people in our borders, and NOT ONE OF THEM has done this. Why?
I actually don't know the answer, but I have a few ideas. (1) They're busy dying in Iraq (2) Our new security policies after 9/11 have
Good point. I just wish people wouldn't think that their country's past was sqeaky-clean.
Also, at some point the civilians hold some responsibility. White civilians in the south that supported the racist government, for instance, in the U.S.
but, again, i don't support civilian death regardless of your reasons. i do support public and governmental pressure to force our governments act justly, however, regardless of the political cost. (and that, of course, means that i support awareness programs that make the public understand the political games and also understand things from a less myopic perspective.)
I'm not agreeing with the GP, but there are plenty of times when the government is in part responsible.
If you have a repressive government, then you have to expect retaliation. If you attack an ally, then you have to expect retaliation.
Or, on a more domestic level, if you attack one guy, you can expect his brother to fight back.
Of course you can argue that one side acted more legitimately. Or that one event was in retaliation. But there things get fuzzy.
The Kurds were repressed legally under Saddam. Blacks were repressed leagally in the States for a long time. Japanese were repressed leagally during WWII. I would have stated any retalliation against the government or it's supporters (read: voters) would have been understandable, if not legit.
I don't know anything about the group that did this. But plenty of moderate Muslims have taken a fundamentalist turn because they felt that their brother is being repressed. Orginally the hate was vented towards the Saudi monarchy, which is seen as corrupt and unholy in a holy land. The British are seen in an unfavorable light because they gave away the palestinians land to the zionists. America is hated for similar reasons (supporting governments that are or have been considered illegitimate by the residents.)
Libertarians would disagree, though. There is only a crime committed when the trigger is pulled (not when you choose not to hire someone due to race/sexual preference/etc.)
I'm not taking sides. Just throwing out another perspective.
i meant that when a FOSS OS finally does what the's saying (does everything his system does and more) and that OS starts becoming a standard desktop, then that's where innovation will be because there will be real competition instead of trying-to-make-something-that-works.
Once a FOSS operating system reaching the same usability level of the proprietary OSs then the OS marketplace will really change.
Why? Because once a FOSS OS takes off then there will be little or no compatibilty (read: migration) issues. People won't have to spend years trying to get to the same level of hardware support, etc. When this happens then the competition begins because people will actually have a CHOICE about what OS they use, because the foundation of the OS will be the same. Different OSs (basically distros) will be trying to develop innovative features to get more users. And, since they will be able to all base their OSs on a solid foundation that allows for compatibility, people will be much more easily sold. And the easier it is to switch, the more people have to compete.
Same logic goes for the cell phone companies with transferable phone numbers -- now they have to compete because they can't lock you in. (Though they try with the free phones that require 2-year agreements...)
Skype seems to be the only product making cross-platform solutions.
as for video -- it doesn't seem like ANYONE is looking for cross-platform compatibility. iChat doesn't work with netmeeting or gnomemeeting (and the tiny AIM video screen sucks). video4skype only works in windows (though it is great in windows.)
i use linux, but i have recently had to reinstall (dual-boot) windows so I can use AIM's video chat with my girlfriend (who uses iChat.) It's the only solution that easily works through odd connections (firewalls,etc.) And, unfortunately, xmeeting just doesn't work that easily for the non tech savvy (like her.)
why hasn't there been movement to make cross-platform video solutions?
i've asked around -- including an X.org developer. unless i stated my question incorrectly, it isn't possible. i don't know what quake does: maybe it is possible to go from larger to smaller. or maybe it's a different kind of resolution change. or maybe it starts a special X -- i don't know. but switching from my laptop's LCD to my external LCD doesn't work -- and i've been using linux exclusively since 1997 and consider myself very familiar with X and any other configuration.
but if you know how to do it -- i'll HAPPILLY admit defeat.
to all the people who say it's easy enough -- no, it isn't.
for instance, there is no way to reconfigure X's resolution live (so if i plug in my external monitor into my laptop i can get it to display on my external monitor - -but only at the same resolution. but my external monitor is 1280x1024, my monitor (ibm x40) is 1024x768.)
and it isn't easy to switch between clone, side by side (different side-by-side configs), and one or the other. it's a limit of x.org -- not just distros.
obviously more growing up occurs in college -- though i fear too much. not because growing up is bad, but because it indicates very little of it happened in high school.
i was dealt with a lot of reality in high school and before and benefited from it. i'm not saying force them to work all their freetime away -- but get them out of the circle of high school cliques and give them some freedom so they can start making responsible decisions and dealing with the consuqences so they aren't totally unprepared for the frat party drunkenness or seniors using every trick they know to get in their pants.
Wow. You're right. I was going to buy this. But I'm not going to buy a collection that doesn't have One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovish -- because if it doesn't have that in a collection of 1000, then it doesn't have other's I'd want.
This is probably nostalgia speaking, but I miss games like menzoberanzan -- it had more of a complete story than most of these FPS games have now adays.
I'll admit, though, that the HLs have had good stories. And the new FFs probably have good stories, though the last one I've played is FFIII on SNES.
i guess the same has happened in most industries though -- the need to keep up with technology/compete has reduced the depth and quality of the stories.
and to make this social -- the same has happened in our society. we feel our priority is to be able to compete, so our schools have responded by becoming increasingly vocational.
it's sad though when survival requires you live a shallower life. it's really making me question whether or not humanity's really progressing...
The pre-colonial despots weren't necessarily more enlightened than the post-colonial despots. In some cases they were -- and in many cases the colonists put particularly corrupt governments in place.
But regardless, for most countries that were colonized, the period in which they were colonized was a period of stagnant intellectual development. India is of of a few exceptions.
So for those decades/hundreds of years the colony's peoples weren't able to go through the phase we had to go through to reach our current state of government (i.e. the enlightenment, etc.)
Would they have done it on their own? Probably not. But we could have been helping them then (and now) instead of trying to have easy-to-work-with governments (then) or top-down reform (now.)
And Osama and the other hijackers certainly weren't motivated by poverty. But what do you think allowed thier followers to be so succeptible to their influence?
But the focus on poverty shouldn't be absolute. There are lots of factors. But none of them are "the arab people are just wacko or lead by bad leaders that we can take out." we're influenced by our environments tremendously -- poverty, our culture's philosophy, etc.
but would the left complain about any bush action in sudan, i don't know. but i complain about clinton's inaction in rwanda. and i would rather have had him go in strongly than have him do nothing.
so would i approve of an overthrow of the sudanese government? no. but i would support a U.N. force (even just an american force wearing blue caps) going in and peace keeping for 10 years while international trade in increased in sudan and educational opportunities are presented. would the U.N. agree to such an action? i don't know. the U.N., which I happen to support, is still a bureaucracy. so then i'd probably support action. and i suspect it'd be easier to find support (if we hadn't gone into iraq and burned bridges) in darfur than we had in iraq.
but that isn't how peacebuilding should be. we should be helping countries before they collapse into sudan-esqe situations. educational opportunities, ground-up economic development (i.e. micro-financing), etc. allowing a self-determined movement into the modern arena.
i probably wouldn't want china sending a unilateral force anywhere. their army isn't well trained in fighting, let alone peace keeping. but i suspect they'd do just fine in a coalition with international oversight.
criticism is necessary for development. it's like physics -- something will stay in motion until a force is applied on it. so i support criticism of both parties. what i don't support is criticism of the other party/platform without accepting criticism of your own.
on that note i'll make a closing statement -- i'm a unique guy. i am american, but haven't spent a lot of time in america. i'm liberal, but since i spend most of my time abroad i can't know what liberalism looks like on the ground in the states.
from what i've seen, far left-or-righters look pretty pathetically myopic.
Would they have The problem was, they were not able to go through the same process that the west was able to go through -- the enlightenment period, etc. Would they have done it themselves? Probably not. The countries of the world are not so similar that they all go through the same intellectual revolutions at the same time. But th
You say in your sig that leftists have "aligned themselves." This quote of yours makes a similar statement at the end.
Observing causality, i.e. between colonial governments and following government structures that are either weak and collapse or are strong and prehistoric, is a totally different thing.
And since the west was the largest colonial source, and manipulated a good portion of the world to their benefit, and activly supported puppet governments, some liberals tend to like to say, "see? that's what you get."
that isn't saying, "i agree with the killing." it's saying, "we believe in social sciences and can see how these things developed. if you want to change anything you're going to have to go to the root of the cause." As the pastor Jim Wallis says, "you have to drain the swamp of poverty and desperation in which the misquitoes breed." Anyways, something like that.
So you can try to simplify it yourself if you want. Blame it on religious extremism -- but ask yourself, what conditions allowed that extremism to develop? Democratic revolutions have failed to take root -- why?
And you can say that it is because of people of influence abusing the population; maybe so. But you have to develop the democratic norms before you can have democracy, for instance. And you can't get rid of all influencial people and hope to have anything other than chaos.
So I'm pretty left, and I don't agree with very much of what the theocracies are doing. But I don't think that we, as the west, have made the necessary amends in the countries we manipulated.
I'm sorry if this isn't terribly well written. I was going to leave my response for tomorrow, but I figured I'd forget about it and leave you hanging. It is 11pm here and i've had a long day. Good night.
And it's the left that protests inaction in the Sudan, btw.
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I don't see this flying well with consumers at all. Because it may come with the appropriate monitor for that manufacturer, it's the CONTENT people that get to decide what is an appropriate monitor. "Oh, we have a partnership with Sony and you have an NEC monitor...sorry, downsampling for you!"
huh? that's not at all what is going to happen. this will be a simple technology. it will be some format that they advertise as being secure. sony and NEC will both make monitors that support that format.
it's going to be a standard like any other standard -- like CSS -- the DVDs all use it.
though i'd want to know how much that magnetic field above my lap was f'ing with my balls. I don't want mutant kids.
That is indeed a problem. I think that the insitance can happen within a person's circle of relations. You don't have to go down the street telling everyone how they should act (except for the things people all agree on.)
The trouble with that, at least in the states, is that everyone is so into the "i'm-my-own-master, don't-tell-me-what-to-do" mentality. so i do think that this has to be premised on a greater degree of respect (not just acceptance) for others.
it's tricky. thanks for the feedback. please follow up if you have any other ideas of how this might be possible.
the problem, of course, is that the people who are reprehensible are usually in circles that think that's okay... (most people who only care about money, for instance, came from families who emphasized it tremendously.)
so what are you suggesting? People working at google should quit their jobs and walk out? What's the name of the little world you live in?
We have laws because we cannot trust people to make up their own moral code.
We can not trust people to make up their own moral code, maybe. But we can expect them do.
I think that's one of the major problems. With comments like "they're a company, don't expect them to care about anything except profit" we demonstrate how we have stopped expecting people to act ethically. If we did, we'd have considerably more ethical people. And if we specifically said that those ethics applied to what you did at work, and what you contributed to, then I think we'd have more ethical companies and offices.
But we don't. We have been taught to think that whatever the market does it right. Or, if it's not right, that it's inevitable.
But people are made by their environment as much as they make it. It is a two way street. If we would start expecting people to have some humanity, they will start to. It might be disheartening because you feel like you're the one moral person who is getting beat up by the people who don't. (If you do, feel better knowing there are others out there who still feel that there is such thing as right and wrong and that trying to live ethically makes life fuller.)
But the alternative is no better -- we will continue to have to do more and more reprehensible things just to get by. Our kids have to take ritalin to compete in school now. To make it up the corperate ladder you have to stab people in the back. These kinds of awful realities are only going to increase unless we fight against it and insist that our business, cultural, and political leaders have some decency.
Laws aren't the basis of morality in the society, they're (hopefully) the product. But once we deffer too much to law and too little to our own ability to konw what is right and wrong, the more we have to depend on those laws just to maintain our society.
A cultural insistance on personal morality and responsibility would provide us a means to resisting the world we're heading towards (and are already wading in.)
This isn't some kind of "we need religion in our government" dogmatic position. We need a balance. But just withdrawing and saying, "to each his own" leaves us with a soceity that only hasn't collapsed because we have a reasonably well rooted judicial system.
Just read on news.google.com about this 19 year-old, Emerson, who started mugglenet.com -- a source of all things harry potter. J.K. found out about it and invited the kid to come meet her. Turns out J.K. wants to use the site to do cross references so the Harry Potter world is more coherent.
i -0507110173jul11,1,6770856.column?coll=chi-newsnat ionworld-hed
Read the Wall of Shame. The kid has a funny sense of humor. And the article says he hopes to be the world's greatest philanthropist, his fortune presumably made while he's at Norte Damn discovering alternative fuels. So he's a good kid, too. And home schooled.
I was impressed.
Here's the article.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ch
the ever-quoted line by ben franklin:
"Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security"--Benjamin Franklin
I am in Israel right now. I admire how they generally live normal lives without stressing about being blown up, but i don't like how no one cares if the massod listens in on them, or if they have to be medal-detected every time they enter a mall. (not to mention that the stress of attacks, IMHO, makes them live more me-first and in-the-moment... but i've only been here 6 weeks so i'm still doing my psychological analysis. and there are defintely some people who don't deal with it well. go to news.google.com and search for "lynch" "palestinian" "gaza.")
so i feel like i can still be agreeing with ben if i approve a security policy that requires its documents be released, in full, in some number of years. no more of the classifying everything crap. i don't trust anyone to deal with my privacy that doesn't have transparency and oversight, and surely not the government.
There are already services that provide broadband speeds for 80 dollars/month on a pcmcia card. Couldn't the city have a contract with a company that provides this? Then they could workout whatever details they want (i.e. have a subsidized rate.)
Or you could have a private company put in the infrastructure and get a monopoly for X number of years with the city paying a subsidized rate until X years is over when the city takes over.
seems like there are lots of options...
thank you for that post.
well -- there are things more important than dead ppl right now.
that's one of our major problems. we obsess over the right-now. (wrt iraq) we need to stop worrying about how many soldiers are killed (and retaliating) and focus on development. THAT should affect politics. things that will matter in 30 years, not things that matter right now.
as for london -- it's a tragedy. but they have to keep focusing on international development. it will take many years of loss, just as gandhi's or mandela's struggle took many years of loss, but it will end in a lasting peace that trying to kill all the bad guys won't provide.
He had a reason, but it's irrational and insane. He's religious fundamentalist, and the motivations of such people are incomprehensible to reasonable, logical thinkers. He thinks Christians and Jews are abominations and must be exterminated. He hates the West, all of it, regardless of whether or not a given subsection of it is involved in Iraq or not. America is the "Big Satan" and Israel is the "Little Satan" and anybody who isn't actively trying to destroy both nations is the enemy of Islam.
I wouldn't say it was irrational. You just drew the steps in which he reasoned it (thugh I don't know him personally so I don't know if those are actually the steps he used). You might think the the premise is unreasonable, but that's a relative term. We think that polygamists are wacko. Many of us think that homosexuals are f'd up. Many of us think that any government that is not democratic is bad. What gives us this authority? It certainly isn't devine.
We base our logic on one premise, he bases his on another premise. I don't happen to agree with his -- but I don't think it is insane or irrational. You can't plan 9/11 or any of the other successes he's had if you're irrational.
Just like I don't think Bush is irrational or stupid. He might be working on a totally different premise from me, but he is working on that premise pretty rationally.
You people amaze me. You are able to throw your hands up in the air at the oddball decisions of President Bush, and say, "Well, he's a religious weirdo, who knows what those people think," but you're attempting to explain the actions of terrorists through logic. "We deserve it," for some reason. "We caused this. This is our fault, if we hadn't (done whatever), then they wouldn't have done this."
And you ppl amaze me. They aren't right to throw up their hands and say they can't understand why Bush does what he does. I disagree with a good portion of the Bush agenda, but I can understand clearly why he does it. The same way I know why Hal Turner thinks what he thinks or Rush Limbaugh.
As for deserving it -- I don't think deserve is a good word. We could have predicted it. If you're a black man in Howard Beach, Queens, and you feel the white racists creeping in on you, regardless of what the surrounding peoples' intention are, it is reasonable to expect that some percentage of such black men will lash out. Why? Because there have been high-profile racist attacks in Howard Beach that have made ppl paranoid.
To extrapolate -- the British are blamed for a lot of the problems in the M. East because they are seen as having supported illigitimate governments. The U.S. and British invasion strikes many as the same thing -- just as we'd lash out of the japanese attacked us, even if they were "saving" us from an an awful leader.
No. Bullshit. They tried to knock over the World Trade Center in 1993 when Bill Clinton was president. Why? They bombed the USS Cole during Clinton's term. Why? They slaughtered hundreds at our embassies in Africa. Why? President Clinton mostly ignored them, why did they still want to get us? All because of Gulf 1? If there's no connection between al Qaeda and Iraq, why in the world would these terrorists be so upset about Iraq?
I think I made that clear enough above. They hate us like we hated soviet advances into our allies' land. Same reason we overthrew many communist governments (even popular ones.)
And, I ask you, why has there not been a single American civilian death on our own soil since 9/11? How hard would it be for just ONE al Qaeda sympathizer or sleeper cell operative to build a bomb and blow up the food court at a shopping ball? Or a zoo? An amusement park? A sporting event? A crowded bus? Why? NOT ONE. Not one in 4 years. There's almost 300,000,000 people in our borders, and NOT ONE OF THEM has done this. Why?
I actually don't know the answer, but I have a few ideas. (1) They're busy dying in Iraq (2) Our new security policies after 9/11 have
Good point. I just wish people wouldn't think that their country's past was sqeaky-clean.
Also, at some point the civilians hold some responsibility. White civilians in the south that supported the racist government, for instance, in the U.S.
but, again, i don't support civilian death regardless of your reasons. i do support public and governmental pressure to force our governments act justly, however, regardless of the political cost. (and that, of course, means that i support awareness programs that make the public understand the political games and also understand things from a less myopic perspective.)
You mean like samuel adams when he tarred and feathered the british loyalists (civilians) and paraded them around in public?
or the insurgents (foreign-funded by the french) that fought against the legitimate british rulers?
or the guerrilla attacks that were considered "barbaric" but used because they were the only means the american rebellion had of beating the british?
i'm not trying to say our "founding fathers" were terrorists -- i'm just saying that these concepts are relative.
I'm not agreeing with the GP, but there are plenty of times when the government is in part responsible.
If you have a repressive government, then you have to expect retaliation. If you attack an ally, then you have to expect retaliation.
Or, on a more domestic level, if you attack one guy, you can expect his brother to fight back.
Of course you can argue that one side acted more legitimately. Or that one event was in retaliation. But there things get fuzzy.
The Kurds were repressed legally under Saddam. Blacks were repressed leagally in the States for a long time. Japanese were repressed leagally during WWII. I would have stated any retalliation against the government or it's supporters (read: voters) would have been understandable, if not legit.
I don't know anything about the group that did this. But plenty of moderate Muslims have taken a fundamentalist turn because they felt that their brother is being repressed. Orginally the hate was vented towards the Saudi monarchy, which is seen as corrupt and unholy in a holy land. The British are seen in an unfavorable light because they gave away the palestinians land to the zionists. America is hated for similar reasons (supporting governments that are or have been considered illegitimate by the residents.)
Libertarians would disagree, though. There is only a crime committed when the trigger is pulled (not when you choose not to hire someone due to race/sexual preference/etc.)
I'm not taking sides. Just throwing out another perspective.
i meant that when a FOSS OS finally does what the's saying (does everything his system does and more) and that OS starts becoming a standard desktop, then that's where innovation will be because there will be real competition instead of trying-to-make-something-that-works.
but you're right -- MS will fight tooth and nail.
You are almost right on the money.
Once a FOSS operating system reaching the same usability level of the proprietary OSs then the OS marketplace will really change.
Why? Because once a FOSS OS takes off then there will be little or no compatibilty (read: migration) issues. People won't have to spend years trying to get to the same level of hardware support, etc. When this happens then the competition begins because people will actually have a CHOICE about what OS they use, because the foundation of the OS will be the same. Different OSs (basically distros) will be trying to develop innovative features to get more users. And, since they will be able to all base their OSs on a solid foundation that allows for compatibility, people will be much more easily sold. And the easier it is to switch, the more people have to compete.
Same logic goes for the cell phone companies with transferable phone numbers -- now they have to compete because they can't lock you in. (Though they try with the free phones that require 2-year agreements...)
Skype seems to be the only product making cross-platform solutions.
as for video -- it doesn't seem like ANYONE is looking for cross-platform compatibility. iChat doesn't work with netmeeting or gnomemeeting (and the tiny AIM video screen sucks). video4skype only works in windows (though it is great in windows.)
i use linux, but i have recently had to reinstall (dual-boot) windows so I can use AIM's video chat with my girlfriend (who uses iChat.) It's the only solution that easily works through odd connections (firewalls,etc.) And, unfortunately, xmeeting just doesn't work that easily for the non tech savvy (like her.)
why hasn't there been movement to make cross-platform video solutions?
i've asked around -- including an X.org developer. unless i stated my question incorrectly, it isn't possible. i don't know what quake does: maybe it is possible to go from larger to smaller. or maybe it's a different kind of resolution change. or maybe it starts a special X -- i don't know. but switching from my laptop's LCD to my external LCD doesn't work -- and i've been using linux exclusively since 1997 and consider myself very familiar with X and any other configuration.
but if you know how to do it -- i'll HAPPILLY admit defeat.
to all the people who say it's easy enough -- no, it isn't.
for instance, there is no way to reconfigure X's resolution live (so if i plug in my external monitor into my laptop i can get it to display on my external monitor - -but only at the same resolution. but my external monitor is 1280x1024, my monitor (ibm x40) is 1024x768.)
and it isn't easy to switch between clone, side by side (different side-by-side configs), and one or the other. it's a limit of x.org -- not just distros.
obviously more growing up occurs in college -- though i fear too much. not because growing up is bad, but because it indicates very little of it happened in high school.
i was dealt with a lot of reality in high school and before and benefited from it. i'm not saying force them to work all their freetime away -- but get them out of the circle of high school cliques and give them some freedom so they can start making responsible decisions and dealing with the consuqences so they aren't totally unprepared for the frat party drunkenness or seniors using every trick they know to get in their pants.
Wow. You're right. I was going to buy this. But I'm not going to buy a collection that doesn't have One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovish -- because if it doesn't have that in a collection of 1000, then it doesn't have other's I'd want.
How easy is it to use skype (esp. behind NAT)?
thanks.
This is probably nostalgia speaking, but I miss games like menzoberanzan -- it had more of a complete story than most of these FPS games have now adays.
I'll admit, though, that the HLs have had good stories. And the new FFs probably have good stories, though the last one I've played is FFIII on SNES.
i guess the same has happened in most industries though -- the need to keep up with technology/compete has reduced the depth and quality of the stories.
and to make this social -- the same has happened in our society. we feel our priority is to be able to compete, so our schools have responded by becoming increasingly vocational.
it's sad though when survival requires you live a shallower life. it's really making me question whether or not humanity's really progressing...
The pre-colonial despots weren't necessarily more enlightened than the post-colonial despots. In some cases they were -- and in many cases the colonists put particularly corrupt governments in place.
But regardless, for most countries that were colonized, the period in which they were colonized was a period of stagnant intellectual development. India is of of a few exceptions.
So for those decades/hundreds of years the colony's peoples weren't able to go through the phase we had to go through to reach our current state of government (i.e. the enlightenment, etc.)
Would they have done it on their own? Probably not. But we could have been helping them then (and now) instead of trying to have easy-to-work-with governments (then) or top-down reform (now.)
And Osama and the other hijackers certainly weren't motivated by poverty. But what do you think allowed thier followers to be so succeptible to their influence?
But the focus on poverty shouldn't be absolute. There are lots of factors. But none of them are "the arab people are just wacko or lead by bad leaders that we can take out." we're influenced by our environments tremendously -- poverty, our culture's philosophy, etc.
but would the left complain about any bush action in sudan, i don't know. but i complain about clinton's inaction in rwanda. and i would rather have had him go in strongly than have him do nothing.
so would i approve of an overthrow of the sudanese government? no. but i would support a U.N. force (even just an american force wearing blue caps) going in and peace keeping for 10 years while international trade in increased in sudan and educational opportunities are presented. would the U.N. agree to such an action? i don't know. the U.N., which I happen to support, is still a bureaucracy. so then i'd probably support action. and i suspect it'd be easier to find support (if we hadn't gone into iraq and burned bridges) in darfur than we had in iraq.
but that isn't how peacebuilding should be. we should be helping countries before they collapse into sudan-esqe situations. educational opportunities, ground-up economic development (i.e. micro-financing), etc. allowing a self-determined movement into the modern arena.
i probably wouldn't want china sending a unilateral force anywhere. their army isn't well trained in fighting, let alone peace keeping. but i suspect they'd do just fine in a coalition with international oversight.
criticism is necessary for development. it's like physics -- something will stay in motion until a force is applied on it. so i support criticism of both parties. what i don't support is criticism of the other party/platform without accepting criticism of your own.
on that note i'll make a closing statement -- i'm a unique guy. i am american, but haven't spent a lot of time in america. i'm liberal, but since i spend most of my time abroad i can't know what liberalism looks like on the ground in the states.
from what i've seen, far left-or-righters look pretty pathetically myopic.
Would they have
The problem was, they were not able to go through the same process that the west was able to go through -- the enlightenment period, etc. Would they have done it themselves? Probably not. The countries of the world are not so similar that they all go through the same intellectual revolutions at the same time. But th
You have a low /. ID, so I know you've been around a long time. Do you never think it is appropriate to reply to sigs? Especially outlandish sigs?
You say in your sig that leftists have "aligned themselves." This quote of yours makes a similar statement at the end.
Observing causality, i.e. between colonial governments and following government structures that are either weak and collapse or are strong and prehistoric, is a totally different thing.
And since the west was the largest colonial source, and manipulated a good portion of the world to their benefit, and activly supported puppet governments, some liberals tend to like to say, "see? that's what you get."
that isn't saying, "i agree with the killing." it's saying, "we believe in social sciences and can see how these things developed. if you want to change anything you're going to have to go to the root of the cause." As the pastor Jim Wallis says, "you have to drain the swamp of poverty and desperation in which the misquitoes breed." Anyways, something like that.
So you can try to simplify it yourself if you want. Blame it on religious extremism -- but ask yourself, what conditions allowed that extremism to develop? Democratic revolutions have failed to take root -- why?
And you can say that it is because of people of influence abusing the population; maybe so. But you have to develop the democratic norms before you can have democracy, for instance. And you can't get rid of all influencial people and hope to have anything other than chaos.
So I'm pretty left, and I don't agree with very much of what the theocracies are doing. But I don't think that we, as the west, have made the necessary amends in the countries we manipulated.
I'm sorry if this isn't terribly well written. I was going to leave my response for tomorrow, but I figured I'd forget about it and leave you hanging. It is 11pm here and i've had a long day. Good night.
And it's the left that protests inaction in the Sudan, btw.