Gee, didn't take long for this to come out. Do you really see the removal of a girl's clitoris and possibly labia as being analogous to removing the foreskin? I was circumcised, and I can assure you I enjoy sex just fine. Is it possible that it would be even better had I not been circumcised? Maybe, but I have a hard time envisioning how it could be, cause it's pretty frackin' great as-is. I doubt a woman who's had her clitoris removed would have a similar attitude towards sex.
Please don't trivialize the kind of suffering that those girls are put through. If you find a culture where it's common to remove most of the penis, you may be on to something, but foreskin vs. clitoris and labia seems like no contest.
Further, I've never heard any "scientific data" supporting female "circumcision", but there is scientific data supporting it for males.
To my surprise, one of the most important functions I wanted in a book reader was not there -- I could not import my own documents. So it's still useful, but it's not exactly what I want.
Take a look over at eReader or fictionwise.com. You can create your own docs for the eReader software, and import them through eReader itself, either through one of those site's content servers, or your own webserver. It's not the smoothest system on Earth, but it's not particularly difficult to set up. If you're talking about books, it should work pretty well....
Instead of filing a patent by just appending "on the internet" to every idea anyone's ever had, now they'll be adding "in space". I can see it now: "Business process patent describing the sales of books to previously known customers -- on the internet -- in space". There you go Amazon, this one's for you.....
Your example isn't the same a being put on medication, but a psychologist and speech therapy? I think you provide anecdotal support for the post you are trying to refute.
He's refuting the claim that children who don't start speaking when expected to get put on "powerful Autism medication". Unless you'd like to claim that speech therapy is a powerful medication, I'd say he's perfectly on target.
Really, is the kid deaf? No. Is the kid brain damaged? No. Anything you do after that makes me think "parents are ignorant and don't know how to raise their kids."
So doing anything to help a child "catch up" to where they normally would be expected to be is "ignorant"? Wow.
That "standard protocol" is insane. When a child hasn't started speaking at an appropriate time? WTF does that mean? There is no appropriate time to start speaking. OK, maybe if your child doesn't talk by high school, there might be an issue. Or maybe she/he just doesn't have anything to say.
Children start with their first words around 5 or 6 months, give or take a little. 20 months without any speech is clearly behind the developmental norm. Why do you think it's important that a child like this not be given any alternative means to communicate with others?
But to have a 20-month old in therapy? Your example doesn't involve medication (yet, I'm sure) but is a data point to support the parent post. Over-diagnosis, over-medication, anything that isn't exactly what we expect is a syndrome.
SPEECH therapy. They're not lying the kid on a couch and asking her about her phobias, they're teaching her sign language so she can communicate with others until, hopefully, she can communicate verbally. That hardly seems sinister or crazy.
Because we wouldn't want people to be different. Should we feed lead paint chips to the smart kids to bring them down to average? That way they are given the chance to learn the same as those who do not have the ability.
So you're against teaching a child how to communicate why? I don't see what teaching this kid sign language has to do with "dumbing down" the smart kids. Do you want to return to the halcyon days where Hellen Keller was treated like an animal because she was unable to speak like everyone else around her?
What about those weak, scrawny kids? They should get steroids and HGH! Can't leave things like hormones to chance. We might end up with different kids with different levels of ability that way.
Yeah, I've got news for you, if a kid is so weak that he's considered developmentally challenged, he *will* get medical treatment, possibly HGH, or a wheelchair, or crutches, or whatever is appropriate to help him live a normal life. Would you be more comfortable if they were told "too bad, stay in bed and watch life through a window"?
I was a late-bloomer physically, intellectually, and socially. But I did bloom eventually. I'm not perfect, but I do like the person I am. It scares me to think about what sort of lab experiment I would have turned in to if my parents had been like your daughter's best friend's.
First of all, you'd need to define "late bloomer" for it to make any impact on this conversation. Do you mean to say you never uttered a single word until you were older than two years old? Were you unable to walk on your own before you were five? What exactly is it in your past that makes you think your personal experience is in any way applicable to the story of the girl getting speech therapy? Secondly, I think it's a debatable point that you've bloomed either socially or intellectually, because your post is complete and total trash. Staggeringly ignorant at best, and mean-spirited at worst.
Shipped to you directly from the factory, in far-away, exotic China! Act now, and get a free gift of children's jewelry, made from pure, precious cadmium!
In many places, there is no exemption for breaking the road rules, but the authorities are legally not allowed to prosecute.
Without saying where, it's awfully difficult to comment. My comment is probably true for the vast majority of the United States, I have no idea where these "many places" are you're referring to.....
So let's see, proper noun, noun, noun, noun, preposition, noun. Where's the verb?
That's where you're going wrong. It's proper noun, noun, verb, noun, noun, preposition, noun. "Gates" is being used as a verb, which may be a little weird sounding to a non native English speaker, but, there it is. Think of "gates" in this sentence as meaning something like "to route" and "to provide a portal" at the same time (I'm not sure that's a great explanation, but it's the best I've got off the top of my head).
Would it really be that awful to say "MagicJack femtocell gating cell traffic to voip"?
Not really, but it wouldn't be much different at all. Either would probably do the job.
As for the rest of your comment, the only way anyone would really analyze this sentence the way you did is if they intended for it to be read by non-native English speakers, which Slashdot really doesn't do. The primary audience is Americans, although it's pretty well established that everyone else is welcome here as well.
I remember that one, thank god that's a serious edge case. I think technically the cop was right, in that police cars are higher up on the food-chain of who gets the right of way, but really, you'd have to be a serious dick to stop an ambulance with a heart patient inside instead of just (at most) calling the ambulance company later and hashing things out with a supervisor or having another unit meet them at the hospital to ticket the driver after they've arrived.....IIRC, it was a private ambulance, and they don't always have the best relationships with other emergency services, compared to either municipal/volunteer or hospital-run ambulance corps, so that may not have helped.
Everyone seems to immediately focus in on the fact that these things show naked images of people and completely ignore the fact that these images are taken by low energy x-rays that bounce off after traveling a few millimeters into the skin.
They're probably ignoring that because it isn't true. These machines a millimeter-wave scanners. From Wikipedia: Extremely high frequency is the highest radio frequency band. EHF runs the range of frequencies from 30 to 300 gigahertz, above which electromagnetic radiation is considered to be low (or far) infrared light, also referred to as terahertz radiation.
Absolutely, but the point I was making is that they're not "breaking the law". They're bound by different rules than you, in a non-emergency vehicle are, and are following the rules that apply to them accordingly. In your example, the driver of the Emergency vehicle is possibly at fault (depends on how you mean "charging in"), but if you go through a green light, when an emergency vehicle was coming through lights and sirens on, and you're aware of it's presence, refuse to yield/ignore them, and get into an accident, you've failed to yield to an emergency vehicle and you're at fault.
but they have the ability to use their judgement and training if they choose to break those traffic laws [....] going through red traffic lights with sirens on, breaking the speed limit
Minor nitpick, but they're not breaking traffic laws when they do this. There are exceptions in the law that allow for it, and other drivers are required to yield to emergency vehicles, even if they'd normally have the right-of-way. This is a good example though, in that, nobody is above the law. If the exemptions for emergency vehicles wasn't in place, then emergency vehicles could be ticketed for violating the rules.
...thinks "troll" mods are for posts they disagree with. If someone can clearly explain to me how I was trolling Wonko, I'll happily apologize, but I don't see a single thing in that post that's anything other than an opposing viewpoint to what he said.
And yet copies of "Romeo and Juliet" in paperback for around $8 or $9 are hardly rare. Yes, there are discounters selling it for less, but they're using cheaper paper-stock, covers and artwork, so you can't really compare them to the $8 or $9 copies of "Androids".
If I take your physical property for my own use then you are deprived of it.
If you take my novel without paying for it, you're depriving me, or if I so desire, my family from the income generated by that work.
If I become aware of your idea and I use the same idea for myself then you still have your idea.
If you copy my work and claim credit for it, you are a parasite. You've done nothing to create the afore-mentioned novel, and yet you still have a feeling of entitlement to my work.
A patent allows me to build a widget, sell that widget and use the force of law to prevent anyone else from building the same widget.
Irrelevant. We're talking about copyright, not patents.
It's not a natural right like owning something physical- it is a monolopy privilege granted for a specific purpose and a limited time.
What "natural right" would that be? Seems to me if we were strictly sticking to "natural rights" I'd be able to walk into your store, kill you with my bare hands, and take what I want because I'm bigger and meaner than you are. Physical property rights are just as much a social construct as intellectual property rights. They exist because we agree they exist.
So lets assume that his works are in the public domain, what do you suppose really changes? This lawsuit is silly, granted, but as far as the books themselves go, currently a copy of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" goes for about $8 or $9 for a paperback. Lets say $1.50 of that goes to his estate. If it were to become public domain tomorrow, the price will still be about $8 or $9, but the publisher then gets to keep the extra $1.50, completely cutting out anyone who actually has any connection whatsoever to Philip K. Dick. Is it really so important around here that the author's family get nothing from these sales, and that the publishers get even more than they already do? Why?
By continuing to operate the family is still providing new services
Do they? They didn't create the hotels, or the company that operates the hotels, and Conrad died. Why not have the entire thing "revert to the public domain" when he died? Make it a non-profit corporation, after all, his family is literally engaging in "rent seeking behavior", sitting on the company that Conrad Hilton created and collecting rent from the people who stay there. Let Paris start her own hotel-chain and build it up from the ground, instead of this parasitic behaviour of living off the work of her family.
Of course, all of this is absurd, I side with the creator of a given work. If and when you create something of value, you're free to give it to the public if you want, but the idea that nobody else can decide that for themselves arrogant.
In the case of art and literature, why do we have to separate physical and intellectual property? I'd argue that the intellectual property is far more personal, and far more "wholly owned" by a creator of a given work than a building that was built by someone whose chief contribution to the project was money. The fact that the creator of this work chooses to share it with the public for a price doesn't change the fact that it's his work, and if he wishes to leave a legacy for his family after he's gone, who are we, as a society, to tell him he can't, and that once he's gone everything he's done has to be given away for free? If we don't want to pay the price to read those works, then we can simply not read them.
payscales for software developers in Silicon Valley continue to well outpace inflation. Where are you working where business do not pay more?
Isn't that a little like saying that while living in Beverly Hills you haven't seen evidence of this "homelessness" thing that people talk about? Silicon Valley may not be representative of the U.S. tech-job market in general.
That's right. Why don't you watch rape, torture and (real) murder scenes everyday for a year and then let me know if it did not permanently affect (scar) you in any way. Well, sex scars children similarly.
Really? And your proof of this is exactly what? Why is it that sex scars children this way, as opposed to football or wrestling, violent aggressive activities that they not only are generally allowed to watch, but are often encouraged to participate in?
I wouldn't advocate giving adult materials to young kids, but I really can't see this as being anywhere near as damaging to them as you seem to think it would be.
Sorry, but this discussion makes no real sense until the moment that you, or someone from your family starts doubting the good guys/bad guys model.
I'd say you're handicapped in the discussion because you don't understand, or are incapable of comprehending the concept of having principles.
One day you might have to chose sides and to ask yourself whether you are willing to pay the price or not. maybe you could justify to yourself risking your family and children for your believes, but in my eyes that would make you just as big a monster as any nazi fanatic out there.
So, there's no right side in any conflict, and the only correct position is to abstain completely? Refusing to take a stand doesn't make you more moral than the others, it's called cowardice.
And don't forget that the truth, usually gets known only after the war - a fact that had many Germans ashamed - and mostly at the victors hand.
Don't kid yourself. Even if they didn't know about the death chambers themselves, the ghettos, the camps, the eastbound trains, Kristallnacht, these things were not kept secret from the population at large. They knew what was happening, and they should feel shame for what happened. If they didn't, they'd be completely inhuman.
Again, I might ask you whether you really can justify going to war (or enlisting in an army) solely on the belief that you are doing the right thing?
Yes, you most certainly can, and if you're enlisting, you should. Once again, you show a lack of understanding of the concept of having principles.
P.S. I am not german; my 2 grandfathers fought on different sides during WW2 and the grandfather who was drafted to the wehrmacht later joined the yugoslav partisans
See, there's an example of having principles. He saw that the wehrmacht was the wrong side, and he, at great risk to himself, went to the other side.
backed by the americans and brits, also committed atrocities towards civilians.
Which would be wrong. I have never claimed that any side of any conflict is pure and free from any wrongdoing ever. The original comment was "One lie, persistent on all battlefields in the history of humanity is: We're the good guys!". This is simply not true in every single case. Being the "good guys" doesn't mean you hand out flowers and kiss your enemy. Some damned distasteful things get done, even by the "good-guys". It's up to humanity to decide whether those things justified the end result. In World War 2, the common consensus is that the Nazis were the "bad guys".
So, the ones who freed your relatives from the nazis were, in the eyes of some of my relatives, just as monstrous as the nazis themselves.
So because some of them, at times, weren't perfectly good, they're as bad overall as the Nazis? Okay, tell me what actually should have happened then. Should Hitler's war machine have been allowed to roll unimpeded through Europe? Should the camps have been allowed to operate until there were no more victims left to incenerate? Or, do you just accept a world of monsters, where every side is evil, and you keep the moral high ground by sitting back, doing nothing, and criticizing everyone else.
My whole point is that there are no good or bad guys in war!
Yes, I got that, that's why I'm disagreeing.
Usually, a soldier does not choose the side he has to fight for.
Irrelevant. You always have a choice, although the consequences may be more than you're willing to pay. Nazis were not good guys.
It could have easily happened that someone from your family got drafted into the german army
I doubt it, since one of the Nazis stated goals was to liquidate them, not hire them as soldiers. There were, however, jews who did work for the Nazis, collaborators who "policed" the ghettos. You know what? They were not "good guys" either.
(My grandfather got drafted and he was neither german nor in germany at that time!).
And yet, he fought for the Germans. He could have risked everything, joined a resistance group, or even just deserted and run, again, at great peril. Being the "good guy" isn't necessarily easy, and it isn't without risk or cost, sometimes peril of death, but they were options.
I saw the wars in Croatia and Bosnia firsthand and I can tell you that there were no "bad guys" on the battlefield. Only miserable people, and some disturbed ones who were proud of what they did.
I can't say, since I don't know enough about it. My example is WW2, that's the only one I'm open to discussing at the moment.
Declaring someone to be a bad guy just because he had no choice is not acceptable to me!
Well j35ter, I'll tell ya, my family was pretty fucking happy to see the Americans show up. Oddly, they didn't enjoy being guests of the Nazis, who, incidentally, were not invited guests to their country. They most certainly did see the Americans as the "good guys".
Imagine the nazis winning the war
That doesn't take much effort on my part. I wouldn't exist.
As for the allies being the "good guys", there were many atrocities committed by the americans (in italy) and the british (middle east) and others.
The post I replied to specifically stated "battlefield". World War 2 was made up of an awful lot of battlefields. If you want to make the case that the Italians were the good guys, go for it, maybe you'll find examples of battlefields where that's true.
Just the fact that your country goes to war to "defend freedom" does not justify your willingness to take other peoples lives!
Really? Well sport, if it's their life or mine, I vote that they die instead, thanks very much. Should you find yourself in the position where you can choose to kill the other guy, or let him kill you, feel free to die.
And exactly who says that the good guys are always perfect? I certainly never did. In this case it seems pretty clear cut though, and I'm comfortable in saying that the Allies were the good-guys, and the Nazis were the bad guys. You're welcome to defend the position that everyone was a bad-guy if you'd like, but I tend to think liberating the prisoners of concentration camps is kind of a "good-guy" thing to do. I'd like to hear how you believe otherwise.
That could be, but without a citation, you might as well say that Predator drones are being phased out in favour of flying monkeys. Now, I didn't find any reference to this 20 year old pilot in the article you linked to, but I did find references to this story which indicate it's mentioned in the book that this excerpt comes from. Now, P.W. Singer (the author) is awfully light on details about this kid, but he gives us one clue: he's Army, not Air Force. I'm thinking that the drone he's flying is actually a Raven, which, from what I can tell, is about as complicated to fly as the RC planes I see people messing with at a local park. It's about 3 feet long, weighs less than 5 lbs, and isn't armed, it carries a camera. You launch it by literally picking it up and throwing it, and it only requires a single operator, compared to the crews required for the bigger drones. The qualifications to operate one of these is an awful lot lower than for a Predator or Reaper.
Anyway, calling this guy "the top drone pilot" is a little off the mark. He might be the best with the Raven, but the guys operating Predators and Reapers are in a totally different class that this kid will probably never make it to. It's like saying I'm an expert marksman because I can always bullseye a beer can at 50 feet with a.22. It's not bad shooting, but it's nothing compared to a Marine sniper.
I realize you prefaced your comment with "although it's not a jet", but that's a massive understatement. The guy driving a HMMWV is actually driving a much more expensive piece of equipment, and it's probably at least as difficult to do well, but nobody holds them up as paragons of expertise either.
Slashdot Mirror
Gee, didn't take long for this to come out. Do you really see the removal of a girl's clitoris and possibly labia as being analogous to removing the foreskin? I was circumcised, and I can assure you I enjoy sex just fine. Is it possible that it would be even better had I not been circumcised? Maybe, but I have a hard time envisioning how it could be, cause it's pretty frackin' great as-is. I doubt a woman who's had her clitoris removed would have a similar attitude towards sex.
Please don't trivialize the kind of suffering that those girls are put through. If you find a culture where it's common to remove most of the penis, you may be on to something, but foreskin vs. clitoris and labia seems like no contest.
Further, I've never heard any "scientific data" supporting female "circumcision", but there is scientific data supporting it for males.
Take a look over at eReader or fictionwise.com. You can create your own docs for the eReader software, and import them through eReader itself, either through one of those site's content servers, or your own webserver. It's not the smoothest system on Earth, but it's not particularly difficult to set up. If you're talking about books, it should work pretty well....
Instead of filing a patent by just appending "on the internet" to every idea anyone's ever had, now they'll be adding "in space". I can see it now: "Business process patent describing the sales of books to previously known customers -- on the internet -- in space". There you go Amazon, this one's for you.....
He's refuting the claim that children who don't start speaking when expected to get put on "powerful Autism medication". Unless you'd like to claim that speech therapy is a powerful medication, I'd say he's perfectly on target.
So doing anything to help a child "catch up" to where they normally would be expected to be is "ignorant"? Wow.
Children start with their first words around 5 or 6 months, give or take a little. 20 months without any speech is clearly behind the developmental norm. Why do you think it's important that a child like this not be given any alternative means to communicate with others?
SPEECH therapy. They're not lying the kid on a couch and asking her about her phobias, they're teaching her sign language so she can communicate with others until, hopefully, she can communicate verbally. That hardly seems sinister or crazy.
So you're against teaching a child how to communicate why? I don't see what teaching this kid sign language has to do with "dumbing down" the smart kids. Do you want to return to the halcyon days where Hellen Keller was treated like an animal because she was unable to speak like everyone else around her?
Yeah, I've got news for you, if a kid is so weak that he's considered developmentally challenged, he *will* get medical treatment, possibly HGH, or a wheelchair, or crutches, or whatever is appropriate to help him live a normal life. Would you be more comfortable if they were told "too bad, stay in bed and watch life through a window"?
First of all, you'd need to define "late bloomer" for it to make any impact on this conversation. Do you mean to say you never uttered a single word until you were older than two years old? Were you unable to walk on your own before you were five? What exactly is it in your past that makes you think your personal experience is in any way applicable to the story of the girl getting speech therapy?
Secondly, I think it's a debatable point that you've bloomed either socially or intellectually, because your post is complete and total trash. Staggeringly ignorant at best, and mean-spirited at worst.
Shipped to you directly from the factory, in far-away, exotic China! Act now, and get a free gift of children's jewelry, made from pure, precious cadmium!
Without saying where, it's awfully difficult to comment. My comment is probably true for the vast majority of the United States, I have no idea where these "many places" are you're referring to.....
That's where you're going wrong. It's proper noun, noun, verb, noun, noun, preposition, noun. "Gates" is being used as a verb, which may be a little weird sounding to a non native English speaker, but, there it is. Think of "gates" in this sentence as meaning something like "to route" and "to provide a portal" at the same time (I'm not sure that's a great explanation, but it's the best I've got off the top of my head).
Not really, but it wouldn't be much different at all. Either would probably do the job.
As for the rest of your comment, the only way anyone would really analyze this sentence the way you did is if they intended for it to be read by non-native English speakers, which Slashdot really doesn't do. The primary audience is Americans, although it's pretty well established that everyone else is welcome here as well.
I remember that one, thank god that's a serious edge case. I think technically the cop was right, in that police cars are higher up on the food-chain of who gets the right of way, but really, you'd have to be a serious dick to stop an ambulance with a heart patient inside instead of just (at most) calling the ambulance company later and hashing things out with a supervisor or having another unit meet them at the hospital to ticket the driver after they've arrived.....IIRC, it was a private ambulance, and they don't always have the best relationships with other emergency services, compared to either municipal/volunteer or hospital-run ambulance corps, so that may not have helped.
They're probably ignoring that because it isn't true. These machines a millimeter-wave scanners. From Wikipedia:
Extremely high frequency is the highest radio frequency band. EHF runs the range of frequencies from 30 to 300 gigahertz, above which electromagnetic radiation is considered to be low (or far) infrared light, also referred to as terahertz radiation.
Absolutely, but the point I was making is that they're not "breaking the law". They're bound by different rules than you, in a non-emergency vehicle are, and are following the rules that apply to them accordingly. In your example, the driver of the Emergency vehicle is possibly at fault (depends on how you mean "charging in"), but if you go through a green light, when an emergency vehicle was coming through lights and sirens on, and you're aware of it's presence, refuse to yield/ignore them, and get into an accident, you've failed to yield to an emergency vehicle and you're at fault.
Minor nitpick, but they're not breaking traffic laws when they do this. There are exceptions in the law that allow for it, and other drivers are required to yield to emergency vehicles, even if they'd normally have the right-of-way. This is a good example though, in that, nobody is above the law. If the exemptions for emergency vehicles wasn't in place, then emergency vehicles could be ticketed for violating the rules.
...thinks "troll" mods are for posts they disagree with. If someone can clearly explain to me how I was trolling Wonko, I'll happily apologize, but I don't see a single thing in that post that's anything other than an opposing viewpoint to what he said.
And yet copies of "Romeo and Juliet" in paperback for around $8 or $9 are hardly rare. Yes, there are discounters selling it for less, but they're using cheaper paper-stock, covers and artwork, so you can't really compare them to the $8 or $9 copies of "Androids".
If you take my novel without paying for it, you're depriving me, or if I so desire, my family from the income generated by that work.
If you copy my work and claim credit for it, you are a parasite. You've done nothing to create the afore-mentioned novel, and yet you still have a feeling of entitlement to my work.
Irrelevant. We're talking about copyright, not patents.
What "natural right" would that be? Seems to me if we were strictly sticking to "natural rights" I'd be able to walk into your store, kill you with my bare hands, and take what I want because I'm bigger and meaner than you are. Physical property rights are just as much a social construct as intellectual property rights. They exist because we agree they exist.
So lets assume that his works are in the public domain, what do you suppose really changes? This lawsuit is silly, granted, but as far as the books themselves go, currently a copy of "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep" goes for about $8 or $9 for a paperback. Lets say $1.50 of that goes to his estate. If it were to become public domain tomorrow, the price will still be about $8 or $9, but the publisher then gets to keep the extra $1.50, completely cutting out anyone who actually has any connection whatsoever to Philip K. Dick. Is it really so important around here that the author's family get nothing from these sales, and that the publishers get even more than they already do? Why?
Do they? They didn't create the hotels, or the company that operates the hotels, and Conrad died. Why not have the entire thing "revert to the public domain" when he died? Make it a non-profit corporation, after all, his family is literally engaging in "rent seeking behavior", sitting on the company that Conrad Hilton created and collecting rent from the people who stay there. Let Paris start her own hotel-chain and build it up from the ground, instead of this parasitic behaviour of living off the work of her family.
Of course, all of this is absurd, I side with the creator of a given work. If and when you create something of value, you're free to give it to the public if you want, but the idea that nobody else can decide that for themselves arrogant.
In the case of art and literature, why do we have to separate physical and intellectual property? I'd argue that the intellectual property is far more personal, and far more "wholly owned" by a creator of a given work than a building that was built by someone whose chief contribution to the project was money. The fact that the creator of this work chooses to share it with the public for a price doesn't change the fact that it's his work, and if he wishes to leave a legacy for his family after he's gone, who are we, as a society, to tell him he can't, and that once he's gone everything he's done has to be given away for free? If we don't want to pay the price to read those works, then we can simply not read them.
Isn't that a little like saying that while living in Beverly Hills you haven't seen evidence of this "homelessness" thing that people talk about? Silicon Valley may not be representative of the U.S. tech-job market in general.
That's the problem with any "definition of porn", it's like obscenity, "I know it when I see it". One person's art is another's porn.
Really? And your proof of this is exactly what? Why is it that sex scars children this way, as opposed to football or wrestling, violent aggressive activities that they not only are generally allowed to watch, but are often encouraged to participate in?
I wouldn't advocate giving adult materials to young kids, but I really can't see this as being anywhere near as damaging to them as you seem to think it would be.
You can sue for anything. Winning the suit is something else entirely.
I'd say you're handicapped in the discussion because you don't understand, or are incapable of comprehending the concept of having principles.
So, there's no right side in any conflict, and the only correct position is to abstain completely? Refusing to take a stand doesn't make you more moral than the others, it's called cowardice.
Don't kid yourself. Even if they didn't know about the death chambers themselves, the ghettos, the camps, the eastbound trains, Kristallnacht, these things were not kept secret from the population at large. They knew what was happening, and they should feel shame for what happened. If they didn't, they'd be completely inhuman.
Yes, you most certainly can, and if you're enlisting, you should. Once again, you show a lack of understanding of the concept of having principles.
See, there's an example of having principles. He saw that the wehrmacht was the wrong side, and he, at great risk to himself, went to the other side.
Which would be wrong. I have never claimed that any side of any conflict is pure and free from any wrongdoing ever. The original comment was "One lie, persistent on all battlefields in the history of humanity is: We're the good guys!". This is simply not true in every single case. Being the "good guys" doesn't mean you hand out flowers and kiss your enemy. Some damned distasteful things get done, even by the "good-guys". It's up to humanity to decide whether those things justified the end result. In World War 2, the common consensus is that the Nazis were the "bad guys".
So because some of them, at times, weren't perfectly good, they're as bad overall as the Nazis? Okay, tell me what actually should have happened then. Should Hitler's war machine have been allowed to roll unimpeded through Europe? Should the camps have been allowed to operate until there were no more victims left to incenerate? Or, do you just accept a world of monsters, where every side is evil, and you keep the moral high ground by sitting back, doing nothing, and criticizing everyone else.
Yes, I got that, that's why I'm disagreeing.
Irrelevant. You always have a choice, although the consequences may be more than you're willing to pay. Nazis were not good guys.
I doubt it, since one of the Nazis stated goals was to liquidate them, not hire them as soldiers. There were, however, jews who did work for the Nazis, collaborators who "policed" the ghettos. You know what? They were not "good guys" either.
And yet, he fought for the Germans. He could have risked everything, joined a resistance group, or even just deserted and run, again, at great peril. Being the "good guy" isn't necessarily easy, and it isn't without risk or cost, sometimes peril of death, but they were options.
I can't say, since I don't know enough about it. My example is WW2, that's the only one I'm open to discussing at the moment.
My standards are higher than yours.
Well j35ter, I'll tell ya, my family was pretty fucking happy to see the Americans show up. Oddly, they didn't enjoy being guests of the Nazis, who, incidentally, were not invited guests to their country. They most certainly did see the Americans as the "good guys".
That doesn't take much effort on my part. I wouldn't exist.
The post I replied to specifically stated "battlefield". World War 2 was made up of an awful lot of battlefields. If you want to make the case that the Italians were the good guys, go for it, maybe you'll find examples of battlefields where that's true.
Really? Well sport, if it's their life or mine, I vote that they die instead, thanks very much. Should you find yourself in the position where you can choose to kill the other guy, or let him kill you, feel free to die.
And exactly who says that the good guys are always perfect? I certainly never did. In this case it seems pretty clear cut though, and I'm comfortable in saying that the Allies were the good-guys, and the Nazis were the bad guys.
You're welcome to defend the position that everyone was a bad-guy if you'd like, but I tend to think liberating the prisoners of concentration camps is kind of a "good-guy" thing to do. I'd like to hear how you believe otherwise.
That could be, but without a citation, you might as well say that Predator drones are being phased out in favour of flying monkeys.
Now, I didn't find any reference to this 20 year old pilot in the article you linked to, but I did find references to this story which indicate it's mentioned in the book that this excerpt comes from.
Now, P.W. Singer (the author) is awfully light on details about this kid, but he gives us one clue: he's Army, not Air Force. I'm thinking that the drone he's flying is actually a Raven, which, from what I can tell, is about as complicated to fly as the RC planes I see people messing with at a local park. It's about 3 feet long, weighs less than 5 lbs, and isn't armed, it carries a camera. You launch it by literally picking it up and throwing it, and it only requires a single operator, compared to the crews required for the bigger drones. The qualifications to operate one of these is an awful lot lower than for a Predator or Reaper.
Anyway, calling this guy "the top drone pilot" is a little off the mark. He might be the best with the Raven, but the guys operating Predators and Reapers are in a totally different class that this kid will probably never make it to. .22. It's not bad shooting, but it's nothing compared to a Marine sniper.
It's like saying I'm an expert marksman because I can always bullseye a beer can at 50 feet with a
I realize you prefaced your comment with "although it's not a jet", but that's a massive understatement. The guy driving a HMMWV is actually driving a much more expensive piece of equipment, and it's probably at least as difficult to do well, but nobody holds them up as paragons of expertise either.