"This is an internal matter, because of things happening inside Canada."
Never heard of domestic terrorism? Does the name "Timothy McVeigh" not ring a bell? If they intentionally target civillians then they're terrorists, reguardless of where they're from or what their stated goals.
"The closest analogy would be to the American Civil War if anything."
"If an economic powerhouse (heh) like the USA goes zero-emissions, it's likely the technology would be cheap enough for use in developing countries as well."
You know what would be even cheaper, though? Doing nothing and not paying anything at all, in which case you could undercut American production costs (probably even without accounting for cheaper labor).
"Any advanced race probably left their world eons ago."
Wouldn't they also probably be using point-to-point transmissions to talk to each other? Really, I'd think the only hope SETI has is if the other species is actively trying to find us or we run into a species no more and no less advanced than we are (heavily relying on broadcast EM communications).
"This article on the English version of the online newspaper Xinhuanet (...) but I've never beat anyone with a fire extinguisher because of it (not that I remember, anyway)."
What we have here is a state-run newspaper talking about kids trying to do what the state doesn't want them to do. Do you think the state will paint a rosy picture of them?
You'd have better luck getting the RIAA to admit that P2P really isn't all that bad.
"They are finally giving the people what they want."
I hope to God that isn't want they're doing. Screw the people, I'd rather have what Miyamoto wants. If I wanted what "the people" wanted I'd probably be waiting for the next Acclaim game.
"If you can't make that distinction then don't even bother talking to me."
No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.
Show me where in there it says "unless we've been invaded."
"If the US was invaded there would be no more principles left to defend."
But the principles are paramount. Without them we are nothing. And, yes, those principles are more important than both human lives and independence. All people have the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness whether or not you agree with them, and they should only forfeit those rights if they are directly involved in attacking the rights of another.
"If the US invaded I suspect people like you will act as collaborators and spy on your fellow citizens."
Please do. I would sooner die than live in what you and those like you would make of the United States.
"You may remember a phrase from our founding fathers. "Give me liberty of give me death" and "don't tread on me"."
You might also recall that one of the reasons they were saying things like that was the treatment of the American civillian population by British troops. If you want to commit exactly the same crimes, why bother even protecting the US, a country whose birth was supposedly rooted in protest of such actions? Things like:
He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and waging war against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation, and tyranny already begun with circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow-citizens, taken captive on the high seas, to bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.
And what about some other words from our "Founding Fathers?"
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishment inflicted.
"Israel doesn't deserve freedom either. They have targeted innocent civilians too, and in a more brutal manner, some would argue."
And from what I've seen many of the Israeli people are very unhappy with that situation and are working to bring these people before a court of law to stand trial for their crimes. I certainly don't see a similar effort among the Palestinians, however.
"The Irish, for example, also targeted innocent civilians. Would anyone argue that "such people (the Irish) don't deserve to be free"?"
No, but I would certainly argue that the IRA and its supporters don't deserve to walk the streets free.
"There are like 50 UN resolutions condemning"
The same UN that didn't have any problems with the Iraqi Oil for Palaces program?
"I don't know about you but if the US was invaded I'd be fighting back too. I'd even tie a bomb to my chest if I had to. Wouldn't you?"
Perhaps, but I sure as hell would not be targeting unarmed civilians. As far as I'm concerned the Palestinians lost any and all moral high ground when they started going after bus stations and Olympic athletes and the like. People like that don't deserve freedom.
"That goes up to the early part of the 20th century, and even as late as the 19-teens in some rural parts of America and Europe."
If Tombstone, Arizona could have a dentist in 1881 (population: less than my old high schol), why would it be harder to find one after another 19 years of railroad tracks and telegraph lines had been set up?
"Incidentally, why barbers? Because they had the straight-razors, of course."
Yeah, people in 1900 had to wait a long, long four years for Gilette to patent his safety razor.
And if doctors and dentists were so hard to find, why were these barbers everywhere? Shaving with a straight razor was tricky enough that you needed to rely on professionals to do it, but you could also do what many (most?) men did back then: Grow a beard.
And why were there so many bearded rural men when it was apparently so easy to find a barber?
"So I look at this debate over the efficacy of the Hafnium bomb and wonder to myself why it is that humans have this innate need to develop weapons that possess this much power."
To scare people enough to keep them from wanting to attack you. You're focusing too much on the "weapon" part of "terror weapon" and not enough on the "terror." More than a few people have worked on weapons like this with the intent of making them so frightening to everybody that nobody would want to see them actually "used."
If you want to talk Star Trek, think back about that TOS episode "A Taste of Armageddon," where an interplanetary war goes on for centuries because the two sides kept things "civilized" by relying on computer simulations to decide who was supposed to die.
Nuclear weapons have been working just as designed since the 1940's: they sit there and scare the bajeezus out of everybody.
"So were tuberculosis, tularemia, scurvy, plague, scarlet fever, pneumonia, typhus, cholera, and diphtheria."
100 years ago germ theory was more or less accepted and people knew how to avoid such diseases. Notice the way Nineteenth Century engineers drained the swamps of Panama first before building the canal.
" Today, the rate of infant mortality is about 8 per 1,000 live births. In the 1940's, just 60 years ago, it was nearly six times that."
In the 1940's there was this little event called "The Second World War." It's kind of difficult to provide proper medical suvervision to childbirth when things are blowing up around you.
"Do you know what would happen to you if you broke your arm in 1900?"
You'd have it set and wait for it to mend, same as today. Having thumbed through a copy of Gray's Anatomy (first published in 1858) would help to know what was supposed to go where, but setting something as simple as an arm (as opposed to, say, a hip) could probably be done by feel.
Not that you'd have to rely on feel. Roentgen published his work on x-rays in 1896 and their medical applications were immediately apparent. You might have ended up being heavily over-exposed to hard radiation, but you'd at least know your arm was the way it was supposed to be again.
" because you would have had far less calcium in your diet,"
That would depend on your local culture and your diet, wouldn't it?
"If you broke your arm and you were very lucky, you would merely be crippled for life."
I think you're confusing "bone fracture" with "gunshot wound."
"Your barber--unless you were one of the relatively few people who lived in or very near a big city,"
"Relatively few?" One of the things I will admit they didn't have 100 years ago were suburbs. Unless you lived out on a farm in BFE, you lived in a city, along with just about everybody else in what we now called the industrialized world. There was rampant overcrowding and slums and the like (which was why some of the diseases like "scarlet fever, pneumonia, typhus, cholera, and diphtheria" you mentioned spread so quickly back then) to the point where it was becoming a very visible social concern. There were all sorts of exposes and such written at the time about it in books and newspapers, including accompaying photographs (made with cameras).
"and the absence of anything like a cast"
"Plaster of Paris" was first developed in the Eighteenth Century and was used to protect mending fractures at least as far back as before the American Civil War (which, by the way, happened before 1900). Hell, if the Romans could figure out cement...
"Your wound would get infected. "
Joseph Lister started the ball rolling on antiseptics in the 1860's.
"and then saw through the bone."
It still sounds like you're confusing "fracture" with "gunshot wound." Did you play with your Civil War Field Surgeon Log too much as a child?
"Meanwhile, you're unable to scream because you've got a piece of rawhide stuck in your mouth, "
Chloroform was first used as an anesthetic in the 1840's, a little after nitrous oxide.
"that blood-soaked sawdust will be swept up,"
What, were people getting amputations left and right that there was that much blood on the floor? With that many grievous injuries you'd think they were all getting hit by Minie balls or something, like that certain time period from around 1860 to 1865... what was it called again?
(And this goes back to my previous allusion to the 1940's: It's kinda tough to be a good doctor when things are blowing up all around you. And even then, they were called "doctors.")
Just because there was research doesn't mean they actually did anything it. Fett could have used on of these Golfballs of Doom to kill the senator off in the first five or ten minutes of Ep. II, but no, he had to set up the Goldberg assassination plot involving poisonous worms sent by a rookie dumb enough to have the droid return home.
Better yet, they could have put these into each of the combat droids in Ep. I, along with a failsafe switch that says "If you lose contact with the mothership, detonnate." It wouldn't perhaps be as fun as my other solution ("If you lose contact, shoot anything that moves"), but it works a heck of a lot better than leaving all that expensive hardware just standing around and doing nothing.
"As soon as North Korea finishes their nuke(s), you'll see Japan go nuclear faster than you can say, "irrishaimase"."
It would be redundant. It's all but accepted that the US would use its own nukes to protect the USN's largest aircraft carrier (if for no other reason).
Both Japan and ROK seem to be more willing to accept the continued presence of US troops than to develop their own nuclear weapons, no matter how unpalletable having US soldiers around may be for them.
This is easily solved by the standard tech support answer!
fdisk format re-install (doo-dah, doo-dah)
Seriously, I don't see how this problem really affects hell desk employees since they're not allowed to support anything but the software the machine was shipped with.
Slashdot Mirror
"This is an internal matter, because of things happening inside Canada."
Never heard of domestic terrorism? Does the name "Timothy McVeigh" not ring a bell? If they intentionally target civillians then they're terrorists, reguardless of where they're from or what their stated goals.
"The closest analogy would be to the American Civil War if anything."
For the most part the rebels shot at (and getting shot at by) uniformed federal soldiers instead of, say, kidnapping and murdering members of the civillian government.
"If an economic powerhouse (heh) like the USA goes zero-emissions, it's likely the technology would be cheap enough for use in developing countries as well."
You know what would be even cheaper, though? Doing nothing and not paying anything at all, in which case you could undercut American production costs (probably even without accounting for cheaper labor).
"Any advanced race probably left their world eons ago."
Wouldn't they also probably be using point-to-point transmissions to talk to each other? Really, I'd think the only hope SETI has is if the other species is actively trying to find us or we run into a species no more and no less advanced than we are (heavily relying on broadcast EM communications).
And here I thought that the Microsoft logo was a sure sign that the software wasn't trustworthy...
"I never worry about my office building/city/town getting targeted by terrorists."
Three words: militant Quebecois separatists.
"This article on the English version of the online newspaper Xinhuanet (...) but I've never beat anyone with a fire extinguisher because of it (not that I remember, anyway)."
What we have here is a state-run newspaper talking about kids trying to do what the state doesn't want them to do. Do you think the state will paint a rosy picture of them?
You'd have better luck getting the RIAA to admit that P2P really isn't all that bad.
"They are finally giving the people what they want."
I hope to God that isn't want they're doing. Screw the people, I'd rather have what Miyamoto wants. If I wanted what "the people" wanted I'd probably be waiting for the next Acclaim game.
" Remember the cool CG Link/Gannondorf battle Nintendo showed us before Gamecube came out?"
You mean the teaser for SSB: Melee?
Just in from Netcraft: Windows is dying!
"If the US was invaded there would be no more principles left to defend."
But the principles are paramount. Without them we are nothing. And, yes, those principles are more important than both human lives and independence. All people have the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness whether or not you agree with them, and they should only forfeit those rights if they are directly involved in attacking the rights of another.
"If the US invaded I suspect people like you will act as collaborators and spy on your fellow citizens."
Please do. I would sooner die than live in what you and those like you would make of the United States.
You might also recall that one of the reasons they were saying things like that was the treatment of the American civillian population by British troops. If you want to commit exactly the same crimes, why bother even protecting the US, a country whose birth was supposedly rooted in protest of such actions? Things like:And what about some other words from our "Founding Fathers?"
"Israel doesn't deserve freedom either. They have targeted innocent civilians too, and in a more brutal manner, some would argue."
And from what I've seen many of the Israeli people are very unhappy with that situation and are working to bring these people before a court of law to stand trial for their crimes. I certainly don't see a similar effort among the Palestinians, however.
"The Irish, for example, also targeted innocent civilians. Would anyone argue that "such people (the Irish) don't deserve to be free"?"
No, but I would certainly argue that the IRA and its supporters don't deserve to walk the streets free.
"There are like 50 UN resolutions condemning"
The same UN that didn't have any problems with the Iraqi Oil for Palaces program?
If there was such a perfect reflector in the infrared range people would have started wrapping their houses in it long ago.
"The tinfoil hat just don't cut it anymore I guess. Eep. jm2c"
Yeah, because we all know how effective it was against misdirected bombs or anti-aircraft artillery shells falling back to earth.
"I don't know about you but if the US was invaded I'd be fighting back too. I'd even tie a bomb to my chest if I had to. Wouldn't you?"
Perhaps, but I sure as hell would not be targeting unarmed civilians. As far as I'm concerned the Palestinians lost any and all moral high ground when they started going after bus stations and Olympic athletes and the like. People like that don't deserve freedom.
"That goes up to the early part of the 20th century, and even as late as the 19-teens in some rural parts of America and Europe."
If Tombstone, Arizona could have a dentist in 1881 (population: less than my old high schol), why would it be harder to find one after another 19 years of railroad tracks and telegraph lines had been set up?
"Incidentally, why barbers? Because they had the straight-razors, of course."
Yeah, people in 1900 had to wait a long, long four years for Gilette to patent his safety razor.
And if doctors and dentists were so hard to find, why were these barbers everywhere? Shaving with a straight razor was tricky enough that you needed to rely on professionals to do it, but you could also do what many (most?) men did back then: Grow a beard.
And why were there so many bearded rural men when it was apparently so easy to find a barber?
"So I look at this debate over the efficacy of the Hafnium bomb and wonder to myself why it is that humans have this innate need to develop weapons that possess this much power."
To scare people enough to keep them from wanting to attack you. You're focusing too much on the "weapon" part of "terror weapon" and not enough on the "terror." More than a few people have worked on weapons like this with the intent of making them so frightening to everybody that nobody would want to see them actually "used."
If you want to talk Star Trek, think back about that TOS episode "A Taste of Armageddon," where an interplanetary war goes on for centuries because the two sides kept things "civilized" by relying on computer simulations to decide who was supposed to die.
Nuclear weapons have been working just as designed since the 1940's: they sit there and scare the bajeezus out of everybody.
"So were tuberculosis, tularemia, scurvy, plague, scarlet fever, pneumonia, typhus, cholera, and diphtheria."
100 years ago germ theory was more or less accepted and people knew how to avoid such diseases. Notice the way Nineteenth Century engineers drained the swamps of Panama first before building the canal.
" Today, the rate of infant mortality is about 8 per 1,000 live births. In the 1940's, just 60 years ago, it was nearly six times that."
In the 1940's there was this little event called "The Second World War." It's kind of difficult to provide proper medical suvervision to childbirth when things are blowing up around you.
"Do you know what would happen to you if you broke your arm in 1900?"
You'd have it set and wait for it to mend, same as today. Having thumbed through a copy of Gray's Anatomy (first published in 1858) would help to know what was supposed to go where, but setting something as simple as an arm (as opposed to, say, a hip) could probably be done by feel.
Not that you'd have to rely on feel. Roentgen published his work on x-rays in 1896 and their medical applications were immediately apparent. You might have ended up being heavily over-exposed to hard radiation, but you'd at least know your arm was the way it was supposed to be again.
" because you would have had far less calcium in your diet,"
That would depend on your local culture and your diet, wouldn't it?
"If you broke your arm and you were very lucky, you would merely be crippled for life."
I think you're confusing "bone fracture" with "gunshot wound."
"Your barber--unless you were one of the relatively few people who lived in or very near a big city,"
"Relatively few?" One of the things I will admit they didn't have 100 years ago were suburbs. Unless you lived out on a farm in BFE, you lived in a city, along with just about everybody else in what we now called the industrialized world. There was rampant overcrowding and slums and the like (which was why some of the diseases like "scarlet fever, pneumonia, typhus, cholera, and diphtheria" you mentioned spread so quickly back then) to the point where it was becoming a very visible social concern. There were all sorts of exposes and such written at the time about it in books and newspapers, including accompaying photographs (made with cameras).
"and the absence of anything like a cast"
"Plaster of Paris" was first developed in the Eighteenth Century and was used to protect mending fractures at least as far back as before the American Civil War (which, by the way, happened before 1900). Hell, if the Romans could figure out cement...
"Your wound would get infected. "
Joseph Lister started the ball rolling on antiseptics in the 1860's.
"and then saw through the bone."
It still sounds like you're confusing "fracture" with "gunshot wound." Did you play with your Civil War Field Surgeon Log too much as a child?
"Meanwhile, you're unable to scream because you've got a piece of rawhide stuck in your mouth, "
Chloroform was first used as an anesthetic in the 1840's, a little after nitrous oxide.
"that blood-soaked sawdust will be swept up,"
What, were people getting amputations left and right that there was that much blood on the floor? With that many grievous injuries you'd think they were all getting hit by Minie balls or something, like that certain time period from around 1860 to 1865... what was it called again?
(And this goes back to my previous allusion to the 1940's: It's kinda tough to be a good doctor when things are blowing up all around you. And even then, they were called "doctors.")
" ... and the damn prequels still sucked."
Just because there was research doesn't mean they actually did anything it. Fett could have used on of these Golfballs of Doom to kill the senator off in the first five or ten minutes of Ep. II, but no, he had to set up the Goldberg assassination plot involving poisonous worms sent by a rookie dumb enough to have the droid return home.
Better yet, they could have put these into each of the combat droids in Ep. I, along with a failsafe switch that says "If you lose contact with the mothership, detonnate." It wouldn't perhaps be as fun as my other solution ("If you lose contact, shoot anything that moves"), but it works a heck of a lot better than leaving all that expensive hardware just standing around and doing nothing.
"As soon as North Korea finishes their nuke(s), you'll see Japan go nuclear faster than you can say, "irrishaimase"."
It would be redundant. It's all but accepted that the US would use its own nukes to protect the USN's largest aircraft carrier (if for no other reason).
Both Japan and ROK seem to be more willing to accept the continued presence of US troops than to develop their own nuclear weapons, no matter how unpalletable having US soldiers around may be for them.
Nukes cost money, but American soldiers are free.
No one who speaks German can be an evil man!
This is easily solved by the standard tech support answer!
fdisk
format
re-install
(doo-dah, doo-dah)
Seriously, I don't see how this problem really affects hell desk employees since they're not allowed to support anything but the software the machine was shipped with.
" takes a look at the Howard County (Maryland) Public Library's"
I belive you're referring to Haard Canny.
"That's one of those home-made "rules" that really annoys me,"
Ah, but Bill gets to abuse his monopoly powers, which means he makes up the rules as he goes along.