The problem is when you get pseudo-programmers writing code which uses 'magic_quotes_gpc' as a safety net among other things, and come PHP 6 the 'shit will hit the fan' when everybody realises that with this automatic escaping functionality isn't there any more and their web applications are open for the world to abuse.
I don't know PHP. Could you explain what 'magic_quotes_gpc' is, why people use it as a safety net, and why on Earth the language designers would take it away if it provides some security?
Advertising isn't there to help you get what you want. It's there to make you want what you don't have. Keep that in mind. It's not about helping you; it's about helping companies. If it was about helping you, it would be passive and designed to make you think instead of pushed in your face and designed to make you react.
So, why put up with being manipulated, much less be more readily accepting of ads targetting specifically to push your buttons?
I don't want advertisers knowing me. Social networking, Bayesian analysis, and other data mining techniques for sifting through large amounts of seemingly unrelated data can turn up interesting and often deceptive correlations. What buying habits and behavioral do you have that are shared with criminals, with people having marriage troubles, or with people that have embarrassing diseases? Do any of your habits suggest a political affiliation that the government in power may disagree with? Do you think that there are never false positives or mistakes? Do you really want other people who have profit as their only connection to you to know and sell information about your life to other interested parties?
(Aren't the credit reporting agencies bad enough?)
The toxicity studies were done on animals. You're right that human studies haven't been conclusive. It was in fact banned because of its effects on animals, particularly eggshells. I don't know why I trimmed that part when hastily rearranging the post as I was writing it, and it does come off as saying something false. My bad.
Michael Crichton once again shows how focusing on local differences and exceptions and extrapolating them as a trend is an intellectual folly. If you want to seriously argue that the EPA budget-cutting, pro-mercury in the air, pro-arsenic in the water, pro-relaxation of pesticide rules Republicans that adamantly refuse to entertain the idea of ratifying Kyoto treaty are no different from the Democrats, then you're deliberately cherry-picking your facts to bolster your dellusional worldview -- you know, like Michael Crichton does.
Nixon was moderate to liberal on a number of domestic issues from wage controls to gun control to affirmative action to establishing the EPA, OSHA, and NOAA. He supported a lot of market regulation in a time period that pundits were saying that conservatism was dead. He was very different from many conservatives today, and many of his policies were great successes that were overshadowed by his personal corruption.
As for Johnson, he did open up a pristine area to drilling. However, he also said the following when signing the Clean Water Act:
"No one has the right to use America's rivers and
America's Waterways, that belong to all the people
as a sewer. The banks of a river may belong to one
man or one industry or one State, but the waters
which flow between the banks should belong to all
the people."
Johnson's record on the environment was overall quite good. His wife Lady Bird Johnson was a tireless environmental advocate. It was Johnson's administration that first started looking into the environment as a matter of air and water pollution instead of just protected land conservation. Nixon just kept the ball rolling that Johnson kicked off. From the Wikipedia, here is a list of environmental regulations kicked off in the Johnson era:
Clear Air, Water Quality and Clean Water Restoration Acts and Amendments
Wilderness Act of 1964
Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966
National Trail System Act of 1968
Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968
Land and Water Conservation [Fund] Act of 1965
Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965
Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act of 1965
Aircraft Noise Abatement Act of 1968
To suggest that Johnson (and thus Democrats) are and were not environmentalists based on one single action against shows Crichton's lack of intellectual integrity.
Heck, if we're talking abuse of science, I can't think of any better subject to discuss than the author of Andromeda Strain, Prey, and State of Fear. The man's been mangling science for years and then making his books look better by tossing a gratuitous biblography of all the papers he supposedly read to justify his plots. (Alien crystal viruses, grey goo, and local cooling disproving global warming, oh my!)
Michael Crichton doesn't know what he's talking about. State of Fear is filled with junk science. Read a more thorough debunking here.
The essay you link is nothing but an attack on the argument by attacking the source of the argument as being from zealots. He accuses the environmental movement of being responsible for massive deaths, and claims that they're distorting facts without backing any of it up with "facts" of his own -- except for "facts" like the harmlessness of second-hand smoke. Crichton's a loon and an asshole for making that last argument in particular, but the bulk of the essay argument is that environmentalists are wrong in their assertions (without any justification of why) and thus religious nuts for asserting something that his holiness Crichton declares to be wrong. (Oh, he could cite mainstream articles, but you wouldn't believe him anyway, so why back up his bald-faced lies?)
He attacks environmentalists as being the same as people who romanticize primativism, use errors on predictions of a socially affected phenomena like population growth show that scientists who care about the environment can't be trusted. He claims that DDT is harmless because it's not a carcinogenic (when it's the liver, immune, and nervous toxicity that actually caused it to be banned). He states that we can't totally roll back carbon emissions without fusion technology, so it's a waste of time to bother reducing them in the meantime. He falls back on the old saw of the environment being a complex system that's hard to understand as justification for not erring on the side of safety.
His speech is nothing but a litany of half-truths, distortions, unbacked assertions, and ad hominem attacks. So, yes, let's start our discussion of abuse of science with a discussion of Crichton. It's only appropriate.
While there are now excellent vegan alternatives for most everything, milk, ice cream, hot dogs, etc., cheese is really tough to get right.
I'll grant you ice cream. That's pretty good. I'll even grant you the milk substitutes as they can be good drinks in their own right (even if they taste nothing like milk), but I have never had a vegan hot dog that I could swallow the second bite of. Smart Dogs, Quorn Dogs, etc. are all just utterly horrible tasting.
*sigh* I long for a vegetarian substitute for bacon too so that I can have my favorite food without all the saturated fat. Cheese, however, there's never going to be a substitute for the real thing. Never. Anyone who enjoys cheeses and who seeks out cheeses that you don't find in the normal dairy section like Dubliner, Double Glouchester, Asagio Fresco (oh man), good Gouda, etc. knows that making a substitute for Kraft slices isn't the same as making a substitute for real cheese.
I'm a cheese connoisseur, so I don't have very high hopes for vegan cheese especially after the track record with vegans loving the so-called meat substitutes. If your standards are that low for making substitutes for things you hate, you aren't going to please the people who actually like those products. Just my two cents.
It's quite useful to those of us who have learned to type numbers well enough on the main keyboard that we don't need the separate numeric keypad.
I'll bet $20 that I (thanks to an old support job) or a few of my friends who are accountants can 10-key numbers on that little keypad far, far faster than you can reaching two rows up from the home row.
And it makes room on my keyboard drawer for the mouse; I can't stand having to move my right hand from the keyboard drawer to the desk surface to use the mouse, and keeping my hand that high using the mouse for an extended time causes me pain.
You'll spend $260 on a keyboard, and you won't splurge for a desk with a wider keyboard drawer? That's messed up; I'm just saying.
Also, it's a terrible design in many other ways. What it does to function keys is horrible. Try hitting Alt-F4 without cramping your hands into an odd position. I'm not sure how you're supposed to get to PgUp, Home, etc., but if it's by hitting the "Fn" key, then it's a mighty retarded design decision to put the "Fn" key on the same side of the keyboard as those keys and thus prevent balanced use of the hands. Also, the reordering of symbol keys and the delete key would mess me up for weeks. Taking all of this and then hiding it by eliminating the legends on the keys is just masochistic. Plus, it's uses "electric capacitance" keys, which are simply inferior to mechanical swtich keys in my opinion.
Not only is it pseudo-science garbage, but it's a pseudo-science garbage double-dupe (or pseudo-science "tripe," for short). After the homeopathy / carpet fuzz / schizophrenia article, I've just about lost all repsect for him. Could someone please take away his rights to post articles in the Science section?
I think it's time to have F5 Industries figure out exactly how many bats, of what type, struck by a meteor of what size and velocity, are needed to create a fine red mist across a chunk of land that size.
Huh? I.. I don't know that. AAAAAaaaahh!!! [thrown off bridge]
Yeah, if Texans cared that much about being spied on, do you think they'd still be one of the states most favorable to Bush still? As long as all the surveillance is done under the name of keeping illegal immigrants and terrorists (i.e. evil foreigners) out of the country, the Texans would compete to see who could be first to be barcoded (as long as you put is somewhere other than the hand or head).
That kind of stuff is only available in the basements of otaku-catering stores. I was not pleasantly suprised to find out that was what was in the basement of most anime / game stores in Akihabara when I visited there. Despite what you may have heard, porn gamers are not commonly available in Japan. You have to go looking for them.
The shops that are likely to not want Z rated titles are big name electronics stores like Yamada Denki, an equivalent of Best Buy which wouldn't have carried porn anyway.
Do creatures that live in no-light situations evolve to be colourless as colour is not useful without light? Does this show that other creatures in light-available areas develop pigments etc to serve a function based on their environment?
Yes, and yes. Pigmentation in water crustaceans is often a matter of camoflage. Producing these pigments has a metabolic cost as does producing eyes. When they are no longer needed for survival, the very slight pressure to conserve energy overwhelms the now missing pressure to disguise oneself to avoid getting eaten.
This is why nearly all species isolated from light for many, many generations end up blind and colorless. What little color they do have is from the materials they are made from instead of from added pigmentation.
By not referencing the fact that he copied and pasted the text, he plagiarised. End of story.
He REFERENCED the fact that he copied the story by posting the link back to it. That is what a reference is! End of story.
You're flat out wrong if you're claiming that he didn't reference the original. If you want to claim that he didn't do so properly, then fine -- that's a matter of opinion. But for purposes of what is essentially a blog entry, it's good enough in mine, and the accusation of plagarism is a bit strident and exaggerated.
Where is he claiming that he wrote it? Slashdot puts "[Submitter] writes [Blurb]" in its standard form. There's no option for "[Submitter] quotes [3rd party]: [Blurb]." It's just put in the submitter, put in the story, and pick a section. Seriously. Try it out sometime. You don't have to actually click submit.
If he was actually stealing credit for the story, then why did he put a link right back to where he got it from? The intent was obviously to show the original story. I mean it's not like real thieves act like the Riddler and deliberately plant blatant clues to their crimes in real life.
Okay, now turn that argument into a defense of the government being allowed to punish employees for their speech. Be sure to consider the 14th Amendment in any such argument for your speech being allowed to have penalties. Also, be sure to defend the public interest in keeping whisteblowers from exposing government corruption / ineptitude.
Serbia, Iraq, Syria, and Aghanistan. You can look it up.
You mean the NATO bombing campaign in Serbia? That was an allied act. The others, eh, not so much. They were however limited strikes and not an all out war and cannot be compared to what went on in Iraq and against so much world sentitment. Some of us do believe in military policing action but not in all out invasion, especially as poorly planned out as this one was.
I'm just playing devil's advocate. Clinton intentionally turned his back on China's human rights violations, which include ACTUAL torture and transmigration (killing off the male population, colonizing and breeding a people out of existence).
I'm really unhappy with Clinton putting globalization and business interests over human rights too, but are you suggesting that what went on in Abu Ghraib wasn't "ACTUAL" torture?
Devil's Advocate, huh? Okay, well I might could swallow that position if your argument didn't rest on what went on in Abu Ghraib not being torture.
I mean, okay, maybe in your sick mind being stripped naked, forced to simulate sex acts with other men, and being leashed and collared like a dog isn't all that torturous, but a lot more went on there. Some of the sexual degradation included being forced to masturbate while on video tape, being forced to stand naked and hooded on boxes for days, and an reported case of a female prisoner being raped. The degradation and humiliation is stomach churning. There's an image out there of a man being forced to walk a straight line by a female officer while naked, covered in feces, and with bound ankles.
In additions there were repeated beatings and attacks with fist and blunt objects. One of the described attacks was a sergeant punching a man so hard in the chest that he almost went into cardiac arrest. People were threatened with dogs and there was at least one report of a detanee actually being attacked and severely wounded by a dog.
There were prisoners who died in the "care" of the guards responsible for the torture. The most famous is Manadel al-Jamadi whose ice-packed corpse was made famous thanks to an image of Specialist Charles Graner posing and giving a thumbs-up over it. He died after a half-hour interrogation that involved suspending him by his wrists from a barred window while his wrist were bound behind his back. What killed him was a blood clot from the vicious beating he took during his interrogation.
Are the "soldiers" involved doing hard time for murder? Of course not, they've been handed a slap on the wrist related to what a civillian would've gotten for that kind of crime. Heck, drug smokers and shoplifters sometimes get harsher sentences than these sociopathic animals got. While Chinese excesses are really bad, don't think that we've been angels. You cannot excuse our behavior by saying that the Chinese are worse. That's like saying that Saddam's an okay guy because he didn't kill as many of his own people as Pol Pot did.
The fact that we have apologists for Abu Ghraib and that they're not uncommon shows that we are in one of the darkest periods of American history. What killed your sense of outrage?
I can hardly consider Bush's flippant treatment of executions and his signing of that horrible "futility of care" law while governor of Texas that allow hospitals to decide to terminate a patient when care gets too expensive to be pro-life. Incidentally, that law would've given control over Terri Schaivo's life to her husband had she been in a Texas hospital.
My bigger concern however is about putting the 2nd Amendment above all other Amendments. Isn't it a bit self-defeating to stand behind the law meant to give the people the right to defend themselves against tyranny while at the same time voting in favor of the party that is fastest speeding us towards fascism?
I hope you're happy to be prepared for your showdown when it comes. Just think, it won't be anything like Waco or Ruby Ridge if they come for you because you've got guns, right, and to hell with all the others they come for first, right?
Personally, if we're going to go by a Constitutional checklist, I'd put Bush's trashing of the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th Amendments above Kerry's potential trashing of the 2nd. I think your priorities are out of whack just by Bill of Rights scorecard alone.
Then again, I do applaud your bravery for posting your voting record in a public forum that is hostile to it and for being willing to defend your beliefs.
I don't know; is there some sort of law that they could be charged under (and be innocent of)? In that case, as long as there's a criminal investigation, most countries allow the police to seize a group's property for evidence gathering. Depending on the country, they might not even have to bring it back for years.
I, of course, can only speak of the US as in the case of Steve Jackson Games vs. Secret Service where a game company's computers were raided for connections to a hacker ring due to their research for their cyberpunk game. It took them years to get their stuff back and to get awarded damages.
He linked the original article as you pointed out. What more do you want, a full bibliography at the end of the article? This is Slashdot, not a thesis paper. Using a link as citation is good enough.
In the book it's a little more gruesome. Earlier in the book, he'd developed a hole in his cheek from fighting that never healed. At one point after he's realized that he's mad, he tries to stop Tyler Durden by getting in a fight with everyone at a fight club. This results in his face getting torn from the hole to his lips on that side.
Not much later, he tries to shoot himself to put an end to the whole mess. The bullet wound there slips and rips open the other half of his face leaving him with a permanent, jagged smile. In the movie, all that happens is that the bullet comes out of his cheek near the jawbone, with only a little hole left that he is covering at the end.
I guess they couldn't figure out a good special effect to have Edward Norton's face torn in half for a good part of the movie.
(**** Now for the book spoilers. I highly recommend the book. If you are affected by spoilers, stop reading now and go get the book. ****)
His "suicide" is an attempt to kill Tyler and not himself as he explains to Marla and all the support group people that she calls to his aid. The building doesn't explode because Tyler (possibly deliberately) did not mix the explosives properly. He ends up in an insane asylum, delluded into thinking that it's Heaven, where he gets letters from Marla and where the bruised orderlies tell him that they miss him, that everything's going according to plan, and that they look forward to getting him back once they've broken up civilization. In the end, after his metaphorical death he still can't escape the monster he's created which is now far, far bigger than him.
And no, the Pixies do not sing a happy song as civilization ends at the end.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is when you get pseudo-programmers writing code which uses 'magic_quotes_gpc' as a safety net among other things, and come PHP 6 the 'shit will hit the fan' when everybody realises that with this automatic escaping functionality isn't there any more and their web applications are open for the world to abuse.
I don't know PHP. Could you explain what 'magic_quotes_gpc' is, why people use it as a safety net, and why on Earth the language designers would take it away if it provides some security?
Aren't radio transmitters/receivers legally required to not be able to access certain bands without proper licenses?
Advertising isn't there to help you get what you want. It's there to make you want what you don't have. Keep that in mind. It's not about helping you; it's about helping companies. If it was about helping you, it would be passive and designed to make you think instead of pushed in your face and designed to make you react.
So, why put up with being manipulated, much less be more readily accepting of ads targetting specifically to push your buttons?
I don't want advertisers knowing me. Social networking, Bayesian analysis, and other data mining techniques for sifting through large amounts of seemingly unrelated data can turn up interesting and often deceptive correlations. What buying habits and behavioral do you have that are shared with criminals, with people having marriage troubles, or with people that have embarrassing diseases? Do any of your habits suggest a political affiliation that the government in power may disagree with? Do you think that there are never false positives or mistakes? Do you really want other people who have profit as their only connection to you to know and sell information about your life to other interested parties?
(Aren't the credit reporting agencies bad enough?)
The toxicity studies were done on animals. You're right that human studies haven't been conclusive. It was in fact banned because of its effects on animals, particularly eggshells. I don't know why I trimmed that part when hastily rearranging the post as I was writing it, and it does come off as saying something false. My bad.
Michael Crichton once again shows how focusing on local differences and exceptions and extrapolating them as a trend is an intellectual folly. If you want to seriously argue that the EPA budget-cutting, pro-mercury in the air, pro-arsenic in the water, pro-relaxation of pesticide rules Republicans that adamantly refuse to entertain the idea of ratifying Kyoto treaty are no different from the Democrats, then you're deliberately cherry-picking your facts to bolster your dellusional worldview -- you know, like Michael Crichton does.
Nixon was moderate to liberal on a number of domestic issues from wage controls to gun control to affirmative action to establishing the EPA, OSHA, and NOAA. He supported a lot of market regulation in a time period that pundits were saying that conservatism was dead. He was very different from many conservatives today, and many of his policies were great successes that were overshadowed by his personal corruption.
As for Johnson, he did open up a pristine area to drilling. However, he also said the following when signing the Clean Water Act:
Johnson's record on the environment was overall quite good. His wife Lady Bird Johnson was a tireless environmental advocate. It was Johnson's administration that first started looking into the environment as a matter of air and water pollution instead of just protected land conservation. Nixon just kept the ball rolling that Johnson kicked off. From the Wikipedia, here is a list of environmental regulations kicked off in the Johnson era:
To suggest that Johnson (and thus Democrats) are and were not environmentalists based on one single action against shows Crichton's lack of intellectual integrity.
Heck, if we're talking abuse of science, I can't think of any better subject to discuss than the author of Andromeda Strain, Prey, and State of Fear. The man's been mangling science for years and then making his books look better by tossing a gratuitous biblography of all the papers he supposedly read to justify his plots. (Alien crystal viruses, grey goo, and local cooling disproving global warming, oh my!)
Michael Crichton doesn't know what he's talking about. State of Fear is filled with junk science. Read a more thorough debunking here.
The essay you link is nothing but an attack on the argument by attacking the source of the argument as being from zealots. He accuses the environmental movement of being responsible for massive deaths, and claims that they're distorting facts without backing any of it up with "facts" of his own -- except for "facts" like the harmlessness of second-hand smoke. Crichton's a loon and an asshole for making that last argument in particular, but the bulk of the essay argument is that environmentalists are wrong in their assertions (without any justification of why) and thus religious nuts for asserting something that his holiness Crichton declares to be wrong. (Oh, he could cite mainstream articles, but you wouldn't believe him anyway, so why back up his bald-faced lies?)
He attacks environmentalists as being the same as people who romanticize primativism, use errors on predictions of a socially affected phenomena like population growth show that scientists who care about the environment can't be trusted. He claims that DDT is harmless because it's not a carcinogenic (when it's the liver, immune, and nervous toxicity that actually caused it to be banned). He states that we can't totally roll back carbon emissions without fusion technology, so it's a waste of time to bother reducing them in the meantime. He falls back on the old saw of the environment being a complex system that's hard to understand as justification for not erring on the side of safety.
His speech is nothing but a litany of half-truths, distortions, unbacked assertions, and ad hominem attacks. So, yes, let's start our discussion of abuse of science with a discussion of Crichton. It's only appropriate.
While there are now excellent vegan alternatives for most everything, milk, ice cream, hot dogs, etc., cheese is really tough to get right.
I'll grant you ice cream. That's pretty good. I'll even grant you the milk substitutes as they can be good drinks in their own right (even if they taste nothing like milk), but I have never had a vegan hot dog that I could swallow the second bite of. Smart Dogs, Quorn Dogs, etc. are all just utterly horrible tasting.
*sigh* I long for a vegetarian substitute for bacon too so that I can have my favorite food without all the saturated fat. Cheese, however, there's never going to be a substitute for the real thing. Never. Anyone who enjoys cheeses and who seeks out cheeses that you don't find in the normal dairy section like Dubliner, Double Glouchester, Asagio Fresco (oh man), good Gouda, etc. knows that making a substitute for Kraft slices isn't the same as making a substitute for real cheese.
I'm a cheese connoisseur, so I don't have very high hopes for vegan cheese especially after the track record with vegans loving the so-called meat substitutes. If your standards are that low for making substitutes for things you hate, you aren't going to please the people who actually like those products. Just my two cents.
It's quite useful to those of us who have learned to type numbers well enough on the main keyboard that we don't need the separate numeric keypad.
I'll bet $20 that I (thanks to an old support job) or a few of my friends who are accountants can 10-key numbers on that little keypad far, far faster than you can reaching two rows up from the home row.
And it makes room on my keyboard drawer for the mouse; I can't stand having to move my right hand from the keyboard drawer to the desk surface to use the mouse, and keeping my hand that high using the mouse for an extended time causes me pain.
You'll spend $260 on a keyboard, and you won't splurge for a desk with a wider keyboard drawer?
That's messed up; I'm just saying.
Also, it's a terrible design in many other ways. What it does to function keys is horrible. Try hitting Alt-F4 without cramping your hands into an odd position. I'm not sure how you're supposed to get to PgUp, Home, etc., but if it's by hitting the "Fn" key, then it's a mighty retarded design decision to put the "Fn" key on the same side of the keyboard as those keys and thus prevent balanced use of the hands. Also, the reordering of symbol keys and the delete key would mess me up for weeks. Taking all of this and then hiding it by eliminating the legends on the keys is just masochistic. Plus, it's uses "electric capacitance" keys, which are simply inferior to mechanical swtich keys in my opinion.
Not only is it pseudo-science garbage, but it's a pseudo-science garbage double-dupe (or pseudo-science "tripe," for short). After the homeopathy / carpet fuzz / schizophrenia article, I've just about lost all repsect for him. Could someone please take away his rights to post articles in the Science section?
I think it's time to have F5 Industries figure out exactly how many bats, of what type, struck by a meteor of what size and velocity, are needed to create a fine red mist across a chunk of land that size.
Huh? I.. I don't know that. AAAAAaaaahh!!! [thrown off bridge]
Yeah, if Texans cared that much about being spied on, do you think they'd still be one of the states most favorable to Bush still? As long as all the surveillance is done under the name of keeping illegal immigrants and terrorists (i.e. evil foreigners) out of the country, the Texans would compete to see who could be first to be barcoded (as long as you put is somewhere other than the hand or head).
Only if you do it at the Watergate Hotel while playing poker or blackjack.
In fact, forget about the bills and blackjack.
espite what you may have heard, porn gamers are not commonly available in Japan. You have to go looking for them.
I meant porn games are not commonly available. You don't want to go looking for porn gamers. *shudder*
That kind of stuff is only available in the basements of otaku-catering stores. I was not pleasantly suprised to find out that was what was in the basement of most anime / game stores in Akihabara when I visited there. Despite what you may have heard, porn gamers are not commonly available in Japan. You have to go looking for them.
The shops that are likely to not want Z rated titles are big name electronics stores like Yamada Denki, an equivalent of Best Buy which wouldn't have carried porn anyway.
Do creatures that live in no-light situations evolve to be colourless as colour is not useful without light? Does this show that other creatures in light-available areas develop pigments etc to serve a function based on their environment?
Yes, and yes. Pigmentation in water crustaceans is often a matter of camoflage. Producing these pigments has a metabolic cost as does producing eyes. When they are no longer needed for survival, the very slight pressure to conserve energy overwhelms the now missing pressure to disguise oneself to avoid getting eaten.
This is why nearly all species isolated from light for many, many generations end up blind and colorless. What little color they do have is from the materials they are made from instead of from added pigmentation.
Is that in addition to the other one in the Atlanta Airport mentioned in the article?
Just poking fun at you.
By not referencing the fact that he copied and pasted the text, he plagiarised. End of story.
He REFERENCED the fact that he copied the story by posting the link back to it. That is what a reference is! End of story.
You're flat out wrong if you're claiming that he didn't reference the original. If you want to claim that he didn't do so properly, then fine -- that's a matter of opinion. But for purposes of what is essentially a blog entry, it's good enough in mine, and the accusation of plagarism is a bit strident and exaggerated.
Where is he claiming that he wrote it? Slashdot puts "[Submitter] writes [Blurb]" in its standard form. There's no option for "[Submitter] quotes [3rd party]: [Blurb]." It's just put in the submitter, put in the story, and pick a section. Seriously. Try it out sometime. You don't have to actually click submit.
If he was actually stealing credit for the story, then why did he put a link right back to where he got it from? The intent was obviously to show the original story. I mean it's not like real thieves act like the Riddler and deliberately plant blatant clues to their crimes in real life.
Thank you for perfectly demonstrating the useless of predictions based on a single point of data. You can go now.
Okay, now turn that argument into a defense of the government being allowed to punish employees for their speech. Be sure to consider the 14th Amendment in any such argument for your speech being allowed to have penalties. Also, be sure to defend the public interest in keeping whisteblowers from exposing government corruption / ineptitude.
Serbia, Iraq, Syria, and Aghanistan. You can look it up.
You mean the NATO bombing campaign in Serbia? That was an allied act. The others, eh, not so much. They were however limited strikes and not an all out war and cannot be compared to what went on in Iraq and against so much world sentitment. Some of us do believe in military policing action but not in all out invasion, especially as poorly planned out as this one was.
I'm just playing devil's advocate. Clinton intentionally turned his back on China's human rights violations, which include ACTUAL torture and transmigration (killing off the male population, colonizing and breeding a people out of existence).
I'm really unhappy with Clinton putting globalization and business interests over human rights too, but are you suggesting that what went on in Abu Ghraib wasn't "ACTUAL" torture?
Devil's Advocate, huh? Okay, well I might could swallow that position if your argument didn't rest on what went on in Abu Ghraib not being torture.
I mean, okay, maybe in your sick mind being stripped naked, forced to simulate sex acts with other men, and being leashed and collared like a dog isn't all that torturous, but a lot more went on there. Some of the sexual degradation included being forced to masturbate while on video tape, being forced to stand naked and hooded on boxes for days, and an reported case of a female prisoner being raped. The degradation and humiliation is stomach churning. There's an image out there of a man being forced to walk a straight line by a female officer while naked, covered in feces, and with bound ankles.
In additions there were repeated beatings and attacks with fist and blunt objects. One of the described attacks was a sergeant punching a man so hard in the chest that he almost went into cardiac arrest. People were threatened with dogs and there was at least one report of a detanee actually being attacked and severely wounded by a dog.
There were prisoners who died in the "care" of the guards responsible for the torture. The most famous is Manadel al-Jamadi whose ice-packed corpse was made famous thanks to an image of Specialist Charles Graner posing and giving a thumbs-up over it. He died after a half-hour interrogation that involved suspending him by his wrists from a barred window while his wrist were bound behind his back. What killed him was a blood clot from the vicious beating he took during his interrogation.
Are the "soldiers" involved doing hard time for murder? Of course not, they've been handed a slap on the wrist related to what a civillian would've gotten for that kind of crime. Heck, drug smokers and shoplifters sometimes get harsher sentences than these sociopathic animals got. While Chinese excesses are really bad, don't think that we've been angels. You cannot excuse our behavior by saying that the Chinese are worse. That's like saying that Saddam's an okay guy because he didn't kill as many of his own people as Pol Pot did.
The fact that we have apologists for Abu Ghraib and that they're not uncommon shows that we are in one of the darkest periods of American history. What killed your sense of outrage?
I can hardly consider Bush's flippant treatment of executions and his signing of that horrible "futility of care" law while governor of Texas that allow hospitals to decide to terminate a patient when care gets too expensive to be pro-life. Incidentally, that law would've given control over Terri Schaivo's life to her husband had she been in a Texas hospital.
My bigger concern however is about putting the 2nd Amendment above all other Amendments. Isn't it a bit self-defeating to stand behind the law meant to give the people the right to defend themselves against tyranny while at the same time voting in favor of the party that is fastest speeding us towards fascism?
I hope you're happy to be prepared for your showdown when it comes. Just think, it won't be anything like Waco or Ruby Ridge if they come for you because you've got guns, right, and to hell with all the others they come for first, right?
Personally, if we're going to go by a Constitutional checklist, I'd put Bush's trashing of the 1st, 4th, 5th, 6th, and 8th Amendments above Kerry's potential trashing of the 2nd. I think your priorities are out of whack just by Bill of Rights scorecard alone.
Then again, I do applaud your bravery for posting your voting record in a public forum that is hostile to it and for being willing to defend your beliefs.
I don't know; is there some sort of law that they could be charged under (and be innocent of)? In that case, as long as there's a criminal investigation, most countries allow the police to seize a group's property for evidence gathering. Depending on the country, they might not even have to bring it back for years.
I, of course, can only speak of the US as in the case of Steve Jackson Games vs. Secret Service where a game company's computers were raided for connections to a hacker ring due to their research for their cyberpunk game. It took them years to get their stuff back and to get awarded damages.
He linked the original article as you pointed out. What more do you want, a full bibliography at the end of the article? This is Slashdot, not a thesis paper. Using a link as citation is good enough.
In the book it's a little more gruesome. Earlier in the book, he'd developed a hole in his cheek from fighting that never healed. At one point after he's realized that he's mad, he tries to stop Tyler Durden by getting in a fight with everyone at a fight club. This results in his face getting torn from the hole to his lips on that side.
Not much later, he tries to shoot himself to put an end to the whole mess. The bullet wound there slips and rips open the other half of his face leaving him with a permanent, jagged smile. In the movie, all that happens is that the bullet comes out of his cheek near the jawbone, with only a little hole left that he is covering at the end.
I guess they couldn't figure out a good special effect to have Edward Norton's face torn in half for a good part of the movie.
(**** Now for the book spoilers. I highly recommend the book. If you are affected by spoilers, stop reading now and go get the book. ****)
His "suicide" is an attempt to kill Tyler and not himself as he explains to Marla and all the support group people that she calls to his aid. The building doesn't explode because Tyler (possibly deliberately) did not mix the explosives properly. He ends up in an insane asylum, delluded into thinking that it's Heaven, where he gets letters from Marla and where the bruised orderlies tell him that they miss him, that everything's going according to plan, and that they look forward to getting him back once they've broken up civilization. In the end, after his metaphorical death he still can't escape the monster he's created which is now far, far bigger than him.
And no, the Pixies do not sing a happy song as civilization ends at the end.