While I'm of the opinion that the US was more than justified in using the atomic bomb on Japan (twice, even), I want to play devil's advocate.
"I'm sorry, there is nothing innocent about supporting a regime..."
Who voted for Hideki Tojo?
"The true innocent victims were the American sailors who were bombed in Pearl Harbor by the same people we were discussing peace treaties with."
1.) From the Japanese POV, Pearl Harbor was a cold war gone hot. US trade embargos (especially on oil) were strangling the Japanese war effort (whether the Japanese war effort was moral is a completely different story), not to mention indirect and direct assistance the US was providing Chiang Kai-Shek's government. What do you think the Japanese diplomats were discussing with the US in Washington, tea parties?
2.) A war declaration was supposed to be delivered just before the Pearl Harbor attacks.
" this doesn't discount environmentalists trusting the scientific method for observation."
Huh?
Dr Brown said: "The conclusion that 20th century warming is not unusual relies on the assertion that the Medieval Warm Period was a global phenomenon. This is not the conclusion of IPCC."
He added that there were also doubts about the reliability of temperature proxies such as tree rings: "They are not able to capture the recent warming of the last 50 years," he said.
He doesn't want to trust modern tree ring measurements, but it's OK to trust human temperature measurements nearly a millenium before the development of the mercury thermometer? It seems Dr. Brown's International Panel on Climate Change at the UN is being awfully choosy on what data they want to use, in a way that borders on "unscientific."
"Besides, science and technology cannot be relied upon to build a safe atomic power plant (Chernobyl, Three Mile Island are fine counterexamples)."
First off, it seems the pro-global warming crowd are relying on technology themselves: medieval technology. They're relying on the ability of medieval people to accurately measure then-present temperature over the ability of modern people to measure temperature 1000 years ago.
Secondly, the problematic reactor at Three Mile Island shut down exactly like it was supposed to. And it still supplies electricity, practically within sight of Pennsylvania's state house. If anything, it's the "exception" that prooves the rule. And while they seem to have trouble building shipboard reactors, the French and Belgians seem to be doing just fine with their heavy reliance on nuclear reactors for civillian power generation.
"IMO, the Slashdot editors are just lazy/insufficiently staffed. (For the record, most major news sites will inform you when they're about to link to you.)"
Yeah, we all complain about so-called "link nazis," jumping up and down about seemingly superfluous complaints about "deep linking," but we hop to the other side of the fence when Slashdot is involved.
Sure, it's technically possible to mirror a site easily enough, but your post doesn't even touch upon three other issues:
Legal. As we've seen over and over again, mirroring a site qualifies as republishing that site, which is generally considered a violation of copyright law. Just ask the Scientologists what they think about that. Hell, they put legal pressure on Slashdot just for hosting an AC post.
Sure, the author may say "yes," but he may also change his mind to "no" five minutes after you publish the mirror. And Slashdot would then be legally obligated to take down the mirror as of five minutes ago. If that's nto a bureaucratic clusterfuck in the making I don't know what is.
Philosophical. I'm sorry, but if you don't want anybody to see your website, what the heck are you doing publishing a website to begin with? People publish on the world wide web with both the knowledge that anybody could see your page at any time and the intent to take advantage of that. If you want to limit the people seeing your site, put a password on it. Or put a EULA on it. Better yet, put it on a VPN subnet. Hell, maybe you shouldn't be using HTTP to begin with.
The world wide web is a pull media, meaning that the users decide what they want to see, when, and how much. If you want to have some sort of control over the user's experience that extends beyond your own servers, you're foolishly using the wrong media and in my opinion deserve what ever you get. I fail to see why Slashdot should be held responsible for the domain admin's foolish choices.
Economic. Guess what: Hosting a website costs money. I'm sure the admins at asciipr0n are well aware of that. Mirroring a page also costs money. Why should Slashdot (apparently barely able to keep their heads above water to begin with) take on the financial onus of re-publishing your material when you already implicitly agreed to handle that yourself when you published to begin with?
You want to publish freely on multiple servers without having to worry about administrative overhead? Post on a newsgroup. Want to control who has access to what files? Use FTP. Want to have a say in the order that pages on your site are viewed? Use gopher. If you decide to use the world wide web, you and only you are responsible for what happens because of it, no matter how much you whine.
(Oh, wait, I just linked to their site without their permission! Should I have set up a mirror before I composed this post?)
"But the reality of the situation is that a soldier does what he is told,"
In Iraq and China and other militaries where people are promoted by loyalty instead of skill, yes. But that is far from true in Western militaries, especially the United States. Western military power is what it is today because the lower ranks are both allowed and expected to think for themselves. Instead of the micromanaged clusterfuck we see "defending" Iraq, the higher-ups in Western militaries give broad and generalized goals for the military to meet, and the lower ranks are given a great deal of leeway to meet those goals.
Remember how the press was remarking on the first few days of the war how it seemed President Bush seemed totally uninvolved in the war? That's because he fulfilled his role as commander in chief by issuing his marching orders. The details are left to people below him in the rank structure. The only reason he seems "more involved" now is because he's going through the motions to appease the uneducated public, the one that doesn't realize how much Lyndon Johnson screwed up.
"Yet they still need to be put forward an hour in spring and moved back again in the autumn without damaging their fragile mechanisms, some of which are 250 years old. "
Cheaper/easier solution: Put a big honking neon sign below the clock that says "[name of time zone here] Standard Time." Require other people to remember to add an hour for "summer"/"daylight" time when appropriate.
"Actually, he's the head of the executive branch of the government."
Which is what "head of government" means. The US president is also "chief of state" (ie. chief diplomat), the US being one of the countries that combines the two in one office (in name as well as in fact). The British (Canada, Australia, etc.) technically split those two between prime minister and monarch, and the French split it between prime minister and president.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled debate.
"Is there some important angle that Peter can bring to the movie the third time around that the first two missed?"
Yes, they can follow the life of mass transit authority employee Gunther Toody. After his harrowing experience aboard the elevated train that Kong attacked (where he was one of the few survivors), Gunther was scarred for life, unable to stop making monkey noises ("Ooh! Ooh!") every few minutes. He left the MTA and went on to join the NYPD where he considered it safer, on which he stayed until he retired. He was so traumatized by the experience that he never realized his partner in car 54 was a Munster.
"That will make for a more interesting picture, and allow the characters to display more wide eyed amazement than modern characters could."
It would also prevent him from climbing a building with a roof flat and wide enough to keep him from falling off, and there wouldn't be a need for idiot helicopter pilots flying too close to him when they can just hover out of arm's reach. It would also fix problems like trying to explain how uncharted islands happen in the 21st century.
"and without them getting landed with massive liabilities."
Their strategy for this involves their legal department repeating the phrase "We're not a bank! Really!" over and over again.
"I suspect that people that have had bad PayPal experiences might simply have become victims of the fact that Paypal has to be extremely aggressive about fraud just to survive."
No, they're extremely aggressive about hiding fraud. If you have a problem (such as being defrauded by a seller), PayPal will tell you "not our problem, deal with the seller," conveniently neglecting to tell you about the "dreaded C-word" (chargeback).
PayPal doesn't want anybody to know about fraud because they don't want anybody to know about credit card fraud policies. When the buyer issues a chargeback, PayPal loses money, and it's more cost-effective for them to hide and/or sidestep fraud than to combat it.
Do you think the root cause of all this trouble is with the DMCA in particular, or is the Act just a symptom of the problems with existing federal copyright laws in general?
"I notice you failed to address any of the conflict of interest issues."
The conflict of issues mentioned were not against Florida law. And if they were against Florida law, it would be out of the US Supreme's Court jurisdiction to decide the matter (especially while deciding on a different case altogether). They could only get involved after she went through the entire Florida appeals process, and even then all they could say is whether or not she got a fair trial, etc.
"Not to mention failing to provide anything other than smoke re the ballot issues."
As I said before, the Florida Legislature in Tallahassee can appoint its members of the Electoral College however it damned well pleases. If they want to hold a popular election with some screwy laws, that's their problem. Other than ensuring Florida's election laws doesn't violate personal rights guaranteed by certain federal constitutional amendments (can't be turned away because of race, sex, poll-tax status, or under the age of 18), there is absolutely nothing any part of the federal government can do without running head first into Article II.
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors(.)
Now, if you'd like to debate the cause of "democracy" vs. "federal separation of powers," be my guest. But as things stand now, the federal government cannot get involved in matters such as "Should the Florida Secretary of State sign off on this?" or "Should vote X be counted and not vote Y (barring the exceptions I listed above)?" without some serious violations of the US Constitution as it stands now. The entire Florida election for presidential electors to begin with happened solely at Tallahassee's discretion.
The really nasty part is that people are sacrificing the liberties of other people for their own security. I'm reminded of the protesters for the past year and a half who have been saying "Overthrowing (despotic government X) will only provoke more attacks!"
Federal judges can be impeached much the same way as the president. It requires a lot of people in both chambers of Congress to agree on the matter, but they can be removed from office for anything Congress as a whole generally doesn't agree with.
I say programmers aren't engineers because they don't need to know a non-negligible amount of real-world physics to do their job. A programmer is as much an engineer as a race car driver: They both can do amazing things with their respective machines, but they certainly aren't able to design them.
"a person appointed to his job by a court of people appointed to their jobs"
Um... which court was that? The US Supreme Court, as always, chose between "you go fix it" and "not our problem" (which is what they've always done since 1789 or so). The people they told to "fix it" were the democratically elected members of the Florida Supreme Court, interpreting Florida laws written and ratified by democratically elected state legislators and signed into law by a democratically elected governor. The issue in question were the election results that a democratically elected secretary of state signed off on.
And even then there was very little the US Supreme Court could have done. All they could do is say whether or not what the State of Florida was doing violated parts of the Fourteenth Amendment or not. Otherwise, the US Constitution clearly spells out that the Florida Legislature can pick its memebers of the Electoral College however it damned well pleases.
And don't forget that appointments to all federal courts have to be cleared by a democratically elected Congress, which also has the power to remove them from their bench.
Slashdot Mirror
While I'm of the opinion that the US was more than justified in using the atomic bomb on Japan (twice, even), I want to play devil's advocate.
"I'm sorry, there is nothing innocent about supporting a regime..."
Who voted for Hideki Tojo?
"The true innocent victims were the American sailors who were bombed in Pearl Harbor by the same people we were discussing peace treaties with."
1.) From the Japanese POV, Pearl Harbor was a cold war gone hot. US trade embargos (especially on oil) were strangling the Japanese war effort (whether the Japanese war effort was moral is a completely different story), not to mention indirect and direct assistance the US was providing Chiang Kai-Shek's government. What do you think the Japanese diplomats were discussing with the US in Washington, tea parties?
2.) A war declaration was supposed to be delivered just before the Pearl Harbor attacks.
Huh?He doesn't want to trust modern tree ring measurements, but it's OK to trust human temperature measurements nearly a millenium before the development of the mercury thermometer? It seems Dr. Brown's International Panel on Climate Change at the UN is being awfully choosy on what data they want to use, in a way that borders on "unscientific."
"Besides, science and technology cannot be relied upon to build a safe atomic power plant (Chernobyl, Three Mile Island are fine counterexamples)."
First off, it seems the pro-global warming crowd are relying on technology themselves: medieval technology. They're relying on the ability of medieval people to accurately measure then-present temperature over the ability of modern people to measure temperature 1000 years ago.
Secondly, the problematic reactor at Three Mile Island shut down exactly like it was supposed to. And it still supplies electricity, practically within sight of Pennsylvania's state house. If anything, it's the "exception" that prooves the rule. And while they seem to have trouble building shipboard reactors, the French and Belgians seem to be doing just fine with their heavy reliance on nuclear reactors for civillian power generation.
"Except for the waste of ink..."
Solution: Thermal toilet paper.
Yeah, we all complain about so-called "link nazis," jumping up and down about seemingly superfluous complaints about "deep linking," but we hop to the other side of the fence when Slashdot is involved.
Sure, it's technically possible to mirror a site easily enough, but your post doesn't even touch upon three other issues:
- Legal. As we've seen over and over again, mirroring a site qualifies as republishing that site, which is generally considered a violation of copyright law. Just ask the Scientologists what they think about that. Hell, they put legal pressure on Slashdot just for hosting an AC post.
- Philosophical. I'm sorry, but if you don't want anybody to see your website, what the heck are you doing publishing a website to begin with? People publish on the world wide web with both the knowledge that anybody could see your page at any time and the intent to take advantage of that. If you want to limit the people seeing your site, put a password on it. Or put a EULA on it. Better yet, put it on a VPN subnet. Hell, maybe you shouldn't be using HTTP to begin with.
- Economic. Guess what: Hosting a website costs money. I'm sure the admins at asciipr0n are well aware of that. Mirroring a page also costs money. Why should Slashdot (apparently barely able to keep their heads above water to begin with) take on the financial onus of re-publishing your material when you already implicitly agreed to handle that yourself when you published to begin with?
You want to publish freely on multiple servers without having to worry about administrative overhead? Post on a newsgroup. Want to control who has access to what files? Use FTP. Want to have a say in the order that pages on your site are viewed? Use gopher. If you decide to use the world wide web, you and only you are responsible for what happens because of it, no matter how much you whine.Sure, the author may say "yes," but he may also change his mind to "no" five minutes after you publish the mirror. And Slashdot would then be legally obligated to take down the mirror as of five minutes ago. If that's nto a bureaucratic clusterfuck in the making I don't know what is.
The world wide web is a pull media, meaning that the users decide what they want to see, when, and how much. If you want to have some sort of control over the user's experience that extends beyond your own servers, you're foolishly using the wrong media and in my opinion deserve what ever you get. I fail to see why Slashdot should be held responsible for the domain admin's foolish choices.
(Oh, wait, I just linked to their site without their permission! Should I have set up a mirror before I composed this post?)
"DRM in the GBA games will surely be here soon to force only a real GBA handheld can play the games."
You do realize we're talking about a media that doesn't even have region encoding and hasn't for over a decade, right?
Those lawsuits against gun manufacturers were about accidental deaths, not murders.
"Good to see the Democrats sticking up for the small guy."
Democrats like Fritz Hollings?
"But the reality of the situation is that a soldier does what he is told,"
In Iraq and China and other militaries where people are promoted by loyalty instead of skill, yes. But that is far from true in Western militaries, especially the United States. Western military power is what it is today because the lower ranks are both allowed and expected to think for themselves. Instead of the micromanaged clusterfuck we see "defending" Iraq, the higher-ups in Western militaries give broad and generalized goals for the military to meet, and the lower ranks are given a great deal of leeway to meet those goals.
Remember how the press was remarking on the first few days of the war how it seemed President Bush seemed totally uninvolved in the war? That's because he fulfilled his role as commander in chief by issuing his marching orders. The details are left to people below him in the rank structure. The only reason he seems "more involved" now is because he's going through the motions to appease the uneducated public, the one that doesn't realize how much Lyndon Johnson screwed up.
Just like "Rowdy" Roddy Piper in "They Live?"
All of Duke Nukem's lines were cool long before there was a Duke Nukem.
"Yet they still need to be put forward an hour in spring and moved back again in the autumn without damaging their fragile mechanisms, some of which are 250 years old. "
Cheaper/easier solution: Put a big honking neon sign below the clock that says "[name of time zone here] Standard Time." Require other people to remember to add an hour for "summer"/"daylight" time when appropriate.
"Actually, he's the head of the executive branch of the government."
Which is what "head of government" means. The US president is also "chief of state" (ie. chief diplomat), the US being one of the countries that combines the two in one office (in name as well as in fact). The British (Canada, Australia, etc.) technically split those two between prime minister and monarch, and the French split it between prime minister and president.
We now return you to your regularly scheduled debate.
"Is there some important angle that Peter can bring to the movie the third time around that the first two missed?"
Yes, they can follow the life of mass transit authority employee Gunther Toody. After his harrowing experience aboard the elevated train that Kong attacked (where he was one of the few survivors), Gunther was scarred for life, unable to stop making monkey noises ("Ooh! Ooh!") every few minutes. He left the MTA and went on to join the NYPD where he considered it safer, on which he stayed until he retired. He was so traumatized by the experience that he never realized his partner in car 54 was a Munster.
I read that and can't help but think of Universal executives' eyes turning into dollar signs with accompanying "cha-CHING" sound effects.
"That will make for a more interesting picture, and allow the characters to display more wide eyed amazement than modern characters could."
It would also prevent him from climbing a building with a roof flat and wide enough to keep him from falling off, and there wouldn't be a need for idiot helicopter pilots flying too close to him when they can just hover out of arm's reach. It would also fix problems like trying to explain how uncharted islands happen in the 21st century.
In the original, we have a claymation crew blazing new territory with work that convinced a number of people in the audience that King Kong was real.
In the 70's version, we have a guy in a monkey suit, and a number of "sequels" made with the "Godzilla vs." philosophy.
At any rate, I think I hope he still sets the movie in the 1930's.
All we need now is for King Kong to fall into the public domain some time this century...
The easiest way to get them is to go into any bank with $20 and ask for a roll of them. Same deal with half-dollars and $2 bills.
"and without them getting landed with massive liabilities."
Their strategy for this involves their legal department repeating the phrase "We're not a bank! Really!" over and over again.
"I suspect that people that have had bad PayPal experiences might simply have become victims of the fact that Paypal has to be extremely aggressive about fraud just to survive."
No, they're extremely aggressive about hiding fraud. If you have a problem (such as being defrauded by a seller), PayPal will tell you "not our problem, deal with the seller," conveniently neglecting to tell you about the "dreaded C-word" (chargeback).
PayPal doesn't want anybody to know about fraud because they don't want anybody to know about credit card fraud policies. When the buyer issues a chargeback, PayPal loses money, and it's more cost-effective for them to hide and/or sidestep fraud than to combat it.
I think you mean the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Nobody uses Sacagawea dollars, not even terrorists.
Do you think the root cause of all this trouble is with the DMCA in particular, or is the Act just a symptom of the problems with existing federal copyright laws in general?
The conflict of issues mentioned were not against Florida law. And if they were against Florida law, it would be out of the US Supreme's Court jurisdiction to decide the matter (especially while deciding on a different case altogether). They could only get involved after she went through the entire Florida appeals process, and even then all they could say is whether or not she got a fair trial, etc.
"Not to mention failing to provide anything other than smoke re the ballot issues."
As I said before, the Florida Legislature in Tallahassee can appoint its members of the Electoral College however it damned well pleases. If they want to hold a popular election with some screwy laws, that's their problem. Other than ensuring Florida's election laws doesn't violate personal rights guaranteed by certain federal constitutional amendments (can't be turned away because of race, sex, poll-tax status, or under the age of 18), there is absolutely nothing any part of the federal government can do without running head first into Article II.Now, if you'd like to debate the cause of "democracy" vs. "federal separation of powers," be my guest. But as things stand now, the federal government cannot get involved in matters such as "Should the Florida Secretary of State sign off on this?" or "Should vote X be counted and not vote Y (barring the exceptions I listed above)?" without some serious violations of the US Constitution as it stands now. The entire Florida election for presidential electors to begin with happened solely at Tallahassee's discretion.
The really nasty part is that people are sacrificing the liberties of other people for their own security. I'm reminded of the protesters for the past year and a half who have been saying "Overthrowing (despotic government X) will only provoke more attacks!"
Federal judges can be impeached much the same way as the president. It requires a lot of people in both chambers of Congress to agree on the matter, but they can be removed from office for anything Congress as a whole generally doesn't agree with.
"If garabage collecters"
Somebody needs an English engineer.
I say programmers aren't engineers because they don't need to know a non-negligible amount of real-world physics to do their job. A programmer is as much an engineer as a race car driver: They both can do amazing things with their respective machines, but they certainly aren't able to design them.
Troll.
"a person appointed to his job
by a court of people appointed to their
jobs"
Um... which court was that? The US Supreme Court, as always, chose between "you go fix it" and "not our problem" (which is what they've always done since 1789 or so). The people they told to "fix it" were the democratically elected members of the Florida Supreme Court, interpreting Florida laws written and ratified by democratically elected state legislators and signed into law by a democratically elected governor. The issue in question were the election results that a democratically elected secretary of state signed off on.
And even then there was very little the US Supreme Court could have done. All they could do is say whether or not what the State of Florida was doing violated parts of the Fourteenth Amendment or not. Otherwise, the US Constitution clearly spells out that the Florida Legislature can pick its memebers of the Electoral College however it damned well pleases.
And don't forget that appointments to all federal courts have to be cleared by a democratically elected Congress, which also has the power to remove them from their bench.