By anyone who isn't such a petty asshole that they can't accept American English as being a valid version of the language.
If you're in Australia, spell Australian and drive on the left. If you're in America drive on the right and spell American.
Which matters where spelling on the internet is concerned HOW? As in, it doesn't fucking matter in the slightest, because Australia doesn't get a vote on how a poster gets to spell 'color'?
...saying that the government should *force* people to switch to metric? What kind of fucking dictatorships do you all live in, where your version of Big Brother gets to say what you can and cannot use for measurements?
This just proves that unlike the rest of the world we can use whatever system we choose for the task at hand without becoming hopelessly confused. Unless we work at NASA.
Global in the sense that both spellings are accurate and accepted, except by a few uptight assholes who use it as an excuse to piss all over Americans.
Max
Re:Tolerance? Why should anybody be tolerant?
on
Our Friend, The Meter
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
The absolute monstrosity that is the "system" of measures in the US and other few countries is something an elightened society should have ditched decades ago.
You'd think that being from one of those 'enlightened' socialist shit-holes in Europe, you'd be 'enlightened' enough to know how to spell 'enlightened'.
(1) The ship was successfully launched (2) The ship achieved it's goal (3) Both ship and pilot returned safely to the ground
I would call this a success, wouldn't you?
I'd also point out that the pilot - who, I'd wager, has more experience testing experimental craft than all of Slashdot put together - was so concerned over the irregularities of the flight that he...played with M&M's while weightless.
Yep, ol' Mike was riddled with doubt and fear over the safety of his ship, he was.
Hand-wringers, space never was, and never will be, for you.
...this is. Rather than solve the problem by repealing the laws that cause the problem in the first place, we pass *more* laws which simply muddy the issue so badly that only the lawyers can figure out what the fuck is going on.
This doesn't solve anything, it only makes the whole situation worse. With the DMCA at least I *knew* I was guilty of copyright infringement when I did thing X; after this act I won't have a goddamn clue. That can only be a good thing for the RIAA/MPAA, who'll then be free to persecute Americans who couldn't figure out the fucking bill and committed a series of crimes when they thought they were in the clear.
If I were you, I'd wonder if this boy isn't getting funding from some bar association.
And since the average voter is so easy to bamboozle, or simply doesn't give a shit, what exactly does this say about our experiment in representative government? Perhaps it's time for a change? Perhaps voting shouldn't be a right, but a privilege earned?
My guess is that you're too fucking stupid to properly comprehend the world 'all'. But you're right about one thing: the police aren't any more likely to be law-abiding than any other citizen. This I learned from personal experience, working with the police.
Contrary to what a certain select subset of morons seem to think, wearing a badge does not grant one superior character.
Um, yes they did. The police were called out on a report of a domestic disturbance between Hiibel and his daughter. Hiibel and his daughter were fighting -his daughter admits it when they start to question her- so I would say that the police did have reasonable suspicion to question him.
Reasonably suspicion of what? That they were arguing? Since when did having an argument with your kids become a fucking crime?
I guess people are expected to be mugged while the perp runs and never gets caught.
I worked with law enforcement for a number of years. The overwhelming sentiment with that particular force is that citizens had absolutely no right to protect themselves in any way, shape or form. Any citizen who dared to go armed was just as bad, or worse even, than a criminal.
Most cops would rather see a woman raped and strangled with her own pantyhose than pull a gun from her purse and blow her attacker away. They seem to take it as a personal affront that a citizen would have the gall to actually protect themselves, rather than do the decent thing and become a victim...so the police could 'do their jobs' and clean up after.
My experience with the police (and their complete lack of respect for the people they supposedly served) left me with the conviction that the only person interested in actually protecting me - was me. Which is why I go armed.
I am an advocate for being able to walk in a mall knowing that know one around me has a bomb.
You will never have that particular security. You can have the illusion of it, if you like, but that sort of security will always elude you. No law, no government agency, no 'war on terror' will ever give you the sort of security that you desire.
While I can agree that you want/need to have some relative anonymity in life in general (from a stalker, from an employer), I'm not sure why it's specifically required for a democracy.
Because it's been an established belief that in order to have absolutely free reign to criticize the government one must have at least the option of remaining anonymous in doing so, in order to avoid the possible retribution (however remote the chance) of said government. Or even the fear of retribution, justified or not.
Without the protection of anonymity, a certain percentage of the population will refuse to speak against the government because of that fear. A certain larger segment of the population will temper their words for the same reason. The lack of anonymity stifles free speech and dilutes the freedoms enshrined by the First Amendment.
But this has little to do with democracy. We aren't a democracy and never have been - and thank the gods for that. If the majority actually ruled according to whatever assinine whim seized them, this country would've been turned into a hell a long, long time ago.
The primary need for anonymity has to do with protecting free speech, and free speech is seen as vital to any *representative* government. Once free speech is stifled, the rest of the Bill of Rights might as well be used as toilet paper.
I don't see any valid reason you would have to refuse to tell somebody (law enforcement or not) what your name is.
And I don't see any valid reason for the police demanding my name unless they have probable cause, which isn't a requirement of the ruling. All they need is 'suspicion', and this suspicion is entirely defined by the police officer in question.
Which means that a cop can stop and question me, at any time, on a whim, claiming 'suspicion' to justify his actions later. And there's no way I can prove otherwise, since it's just my word against his.
Actually, I take that back. He *was* on a government shit-list: the racial profiling shit list. If you think that doesn't exist, just ask any black or hispanic who lives in a predominantly white area of any major city.
It's exactly what I claimed. Someone said that shit like this doesn't happen in the USA. I proved that he was wrong.
You also present no evidence that the victim in this case was previously on the "shit list" of some unnamed government agency
I never said he was. The guy in the particular example I quoted happened to be on the shit list of a couple of white bigots who had the gall to call themselves cops.
Only now the cops have yet another tool to harass you with. Hell, all they have to do is *claim* that you wouldn't tell them your name, whether or not you did. How are you going to prove otherwise? And who is the jury going to believe?
Your original comment included the highly bigoted and prejudicial phrase "in the South"
That's because the example I remembered best happened in Georgia, where a black motorist had his car completely stripped. You can google that incident as well, if you want. I didn't know about the Maryland incident until I decided to try to find a link to the Georgia one. I thought the Maryland incident a better example because it proved that it can happen anywhere, not just the South.
implying that it never happens in the enlightened area where you happen to live, but only in those barbarian areas you despise in such a wonderfully stereotypical fashion.
I don't despise the South; just the screwed-up, half-wit, clan-loving, bible-thumping, sister-fucking morons who live there. Aside from these scum-sucking rejects of the human race, the rest of the people who make their home there seem to be pretty much like folks anywhere else in the U.S.
(1) It is the whole story. He happened to be black, and a couple of cops wanted to fuck with him. Like I said, there are other incidents of the same thing happening in several southern states, and you can find them yourself, if you bother.
(2) Anecdotal evidence proves my point. Sometimes, elements of the government fuck with you just because they can. Why make it easier for them to do so?
"Nelson Walker, a young Liberian man attending college in North Carolina, was driving along I-95 in Maryland when he was pulled over by state police who said he wasn't wearing a seatbelt. The officers detained him and his two passengers for two hours as they searched for illegal drugs, weapons, or other contraband. Finding nothing in the car, they proceeded to dismantle the car and removed part of a door panel, a seat panel and part of the sunroof. The officers found nothing and in the end handed Walker a screwdriver and said, "You're going to need this" as they left the scene. "
This is just one of a half-dozen incidents I located in about five minutes of searching online. This was in Maryland; the others were in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.
This ruling doesn't change the fact that police just can't ask to for your name for no reason at all.
That doesn't change the fact that the officer in question is the sole person responsible for deciding whether or not you're "under suspicion" for some crime...a crime which may be invented after the fact.
Unless you've snorted enough crack to think that all police officers are nice, law-abiding citizens. In which case let's pause while I laugh my ass off.
But saying your name alone doesn't seem incriminating.
Unless, of course, you're on the shit list of some local government agency, for speaking out against said government agency. And then you might suddenly find yourself with a busted tail light, a flat tire, or even 'suspicion of transporting drugs' which, in the South at least, can get your car completely dismantled.
But that doesn't happen in the good ol' U.S. of A., right?
And then we have the social anomaly with the Third Reich.
Which apparently wasn't much of an anomaly, *since just about every technical breakthrough known to man has been produced by a dictatorship until the late 1700's*. In fact, one could rightly claim, given the whole of human history, that the anomaly is in *free* societies producing technical innovation.
Either way, though, it's bogus. *Societies* produce technical innovations; whether they're free or not is largely irrelevant, unless you're dishing out propaganda to the masses.
So that leads to much speculation for a writer with imagination, with or without a tin foil hat.
No, you definitely need a tinfoil hat for that one. Or be a writer for the X-Files. If that isn't redundant.
Ah, yes, great example of doublespeak. You beat me to it. Of course giving up rights *promotes* freedom and liberty! Only a traitor would claim otherwise! Are YOU a traitor?
I think DS9 was great..for the first three seasons. After that it went decidedly downhill. First there was the crew 'makeovers' (Kira goes from former terrorist/freedom-fighter to bridge officer bombshell), then the fucking inane plotlines, then the 'let's toss the first three seasons and go a completely different direction' writing (e.g., Dukat goes from a nearly-understandable bad guy to a two-dimensional Black Hat), followed by 'let's model the Federation after the United States, corruption and all', etc.
It didn't end. One bad mistake after another. I stopped watching regularly after season 4, and only subjected myself to the occasional painful episode thereafter to see if anyone had fired fuckwit Berman's ass somewhere along the way.
What the Trek franchise needs, more than anything else, is to get rid of Berman. He turns everything to shit.
Slashdot Mirror
Until Joe Sixpack figures out that money isn't magically falling out of the sky
I don't think it's Joe Sixpack that's the problem. Rather, Boomers Bill and Ted who're running the country into the ground.
Max
Valid for an American
Which means just as valid as any other version of English, anywhere, anywhen.
Max
Accepted by who?
By anyone who isn't such a petty asshole that they can't accept American English as being a valid version of the language.
If you're in Australia, spell Australian and drive on the left. If you're in America drive on the right and spell American.
Which matters where spelling on the internet is concerned HOW? As in, it doesn't fucking matter in the slightest, because Australia doesn't get a vote on how a poster gets to spell 'color'?
Max
...saying that the government should *force* people to switch to metric? What kind of fucking dictatorships do you all live in, where your version of Big Brother gets to say what you can and cannot use for measurements?
Yet another reason to thank god I'm not European!
Max
This just proves that unlike the rest of the world we can use whatever system we choose for the task at hand without becoming hopelessly confused. Unless we work at NASA.
Max
Global in the sense that both spellings are accurate and accepted, except by a few uptight assholes who use it as an excuse to piss all over Americans.
Max
The absolute monstrosity that is the "system" of measures in the US and other few countries is something an elightened society should have ditched decades ago.
You'd think that being from one of those 'enlightened' socialist shit-holes in Europe, you'd be 'enlightened' enough to know how to spell 'enlightened'.
Do you need me to 'enlighten' you?
Max
Let' recap, shall we?
(1) The ship was successfully launched
(2) The ship achieved it's goal
(3) Both ship and pilot returned safely to the ground
I would call this a success, wouldn't you?
I'd also point out that the pilot - who, I'd wager, has more experience testing experimental craft than all of Slashdot put together - was so concerned over the irregularities of the flight that he...played with M&M's while weightless.
Yep, ol' Mike was riddled with doubt and fear over the safety of his ship, he was.
Hand-wringers, space never was, and never will be, for you.
Max
...this is. Rather than solve the problem by repealing the laws that cause the problem in the first place, we pass *more* laws which simply muddy the issue so badly that only the lawyers can figure out what the fuck is going on.
This doesn't solve anything, it only makes the whole situation worse. With the DMCA at least I *knew* I was guilty of copyright infringement when I did thing X; after this act I won't have a goddamn clue. That can only be a good thing for the RIAA/MPAA, who'll then be free to persecute Americans who couldn't figure out the fucking bill and committed a series of crimes when they thought they were in the clear.
If I were you, I'd wonder if this boy isn't getting funding from some bar association.
Max
but its votes that actually put them in office.
And since the average voter is so easy to bamboozle, or simply doesn't give a shit, what exactly does this say about our experiment in representative government? Perhaps it's time for a change? Perhaps voting shouldn't be a right, but a privilege earned?
Max
My guess is that you're too fucking stupid to properly comprehend the world 'all'. But you're right about one thing: the police aren't any more likely to be law-abiding than any other citizen. This I learned from personal experience, working with the police.
Contrary to what a certain select subset of morons seem to think, wearing a badge does not grant one superior character.
Max
Um, yes they did. The police were called out on a report of a domestic disturbance between Hiibel and his daughter. Hiibel and his daughter were fighting -his daughter admits it when they start to question her- so I would say that the police did have reasonable suspicion to question him.
Reasonably suspicion of what? That they were arguing? Since when did having an argument with your kids become a fucking crime?
Max
I guess people are expected to be mugged while the perp runs and never gets caught.
I worked with law enforcement for a number of years. The overwhelming sentiment with that particular force is that citizens had absolutely no right to protect themselves in any way, shape or form. Any citizen who dared to go armed was just as bad, or worse even, than a criminal.
Most cops would rather see a woman raped and strangled with her own pantyhose than pull a gun from her purse and blow her attacker away. They seem to take it as a personal affront that a citizen would have the gall to actually protect themselves, rather than do the decent thing and become a victim...so the police could 'do their jobs' and clean up after.
My experience with the police (and their complete lack of respect for the people they supposedly served) left me with the conviction that the only person interested in actually protecting me - was me. Which is why I go armed.
Max
I am an advocate for being able to walk in a mall knowing that know one around me has a bomb.
You will never have that particular security. You can have the illusion of it, if you like, but that sort of security will always elude you. No law, no government agency, no 'war on terror' will ever give you the sort of security that you desire.
Max
While I can agree that you want/need to have some relative anonymity in life in general (from a stalker, from an employer), I'm not sure why it's specifically required for a democracy.
Because it's been an established belief that in order to have absolutely free reign to criticize the government one must have at least the option of remaining anonymous in doing so, in order to avoid the possible retribution (however remote the chance) of said government. Or even the fear of retribution, justified or not.
Without the protection of anonymity, a certain percentage of the population will refuse to speak against the government because of that fear. A certain larger segment of the population will temper their words for the same reason. The lack of anonymity stifles free speech and dilutes the freedoms enshrined by the First Amendment.
But this has little to do with democracy. We aren't a democracy and never have been - and thank the gods for that. If the majority actually ruled according to whatever assinine whim seized them, this country would've been turned into a hell a long, long time ago.
The primary need for anonymity has to do with protecting free speech, and free speech is seen as vital to any *representative* government. Once free speech is stifled, the rest of the Bill of Rights might as well be used as toilet paper.
Max
I don't see any valid reason you would have to refuse to tell somebody (law enforcement or not) what your name is.
And I don't see any valid reason for the police demanding my name unless they have probable cause, which isn't a requirement of the ruling. All they need is 'suspicion', and this suspicion is entirely defined by the police officer in question.
Which means that a cop can stop and question me, at any time, on a whim, claiming 'suspicion' to justify his actions later. And there's no way I can prove otherwise, since it's just my word against his.
Max
Actually, I take that back. He *was* on a government shit-list: the racial profiling shit list. If you think that doesn't exist, just ask any black or hispanic who lives in a predominantly white area of any major city.
Max
Not quite what you claimed, now is it?
It's exactly what I claimed. Someone said that shit like this doesn't happen in the USA. I proved that he was wrong.
You also present no evidence that the victim in this case was previously on the "shit list" of some unnamed government agency
I never said he was. The guy in the particular example I quoted happened to be on the shit list of a couple of white bigots who had the gall to call themselves cops.
Only now the cops have yet another tool to harass you with. Hell, all they have to do is *claim* that you wouldn't tell them your name, whether or not you did. How are you going to prove otherwise? And who is the jury going to believe?
Your original comment included the highly bigoted and prejudicial phrase "in the South"
That's because the example I remembered best happened in Georgia, where a black motorist had his car completely stripped. You can google that incident as well, if you want. I didn't know about the Maryland incident until I decided to try to find a link to the Georgia one. I thought the Maryland incident a better example because it proved that it can happen anywhere, not just the South.
implying that it never happens in the enlightened area where you happen to live, but only in those barbarian areas you despise in such a wonderfully stereotypical fashion.
I don't despise the South; just the screwed-up, half-wit, clan-loving, bible-thumping, sister-fucking morons who live there. Aside from these scum-sucking rejects of the human race, the rest of the people who make their home there seem to be pretty much like folks anywhere else in the U.S.
Max
(1) It is the whole story. He happened to be black, and a couple of cops wanted to fuck with him. Like I said, there are other incidents of the same thing happening in several southern states, and you can find them yourself, if you bother.
(2) Anecdotal evidence proves my point. Sometimes, elements of the government fuck with you just because they can. Why make it easier for them to do so?
Max
"Nelson Walker, a young Liberian man attending college in North Carolina, was driving along I-95 in Maryland when he was pulled over by state police who said he wasn't wearing a seatbelt. The officers detained him and his two passengers for two hours as they searched for illegal drugs, weapons, or other contraband. Finding nothing in the car, they proceeded to dismantle the car and removed part of a door panel, a seat panel and part of the sunroof. The officers found nothing and in the end handed Walker a screwdriver and said, "You're going to need this" as they left the scene. "
This is just one of a half-dozen incidents I located in about five minutes of searching online. This was in Maryland; the others were in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.
Sure, it doesn't happen in America. Uh-huh.
Max
This ruling doesn't change the fact that police just can't ask to for your name for no reason at all.
That doesn't change the fact that the officer in question is the sole person responsible for deciding whether or not you're "under suspicion" for some crime...a crime which may be invented after the fact.
Unless you've snorted enough crack to think that all police officers are nice, law-abiding citizens. In which case let's pause while I laugh my ass off.
Max
But saying your name alone doesn't seem incriminating.
Unless, of course, you're on the shit list of some local government agency, for speaking out against said government agency. And then you might suddenly find yourself with a busted tail light, a flat tire, or even 'suspicion of transporting drugs' which, in the South at least, can get your car completely dismantled.
But that doesn't happen in the good ol' U.S. of A., right?
Max
And then we have the social anomaly with the Third Reich.
Which apparently wasn't much of an anomaly, *since just about every technical breakthrough known to man has been produced by a dictatorship until the late 1700's*. In fact, one could rightly claim, given the whole of human history, that the anomaly is in *free* societies producing technical innovation.
Either way, though, it's bogus. *Societies* produce technical innovations; whether they're free or not is largely irrelevant, unless you're dishing out propaganda to the masses.
So that leads to much speculation for a writer with imagination, with or without a tin foil hat.
No, you definitely need a tinfoil hat for that one. Or be a writer for the X-Files. If that isn't redundant.
Max
Ah, yes, great example of doublespeak. You beat me to it. Of course giving up rights *promotes* freedom and liberty! Only a traitor would claim otherwise! Are YOU a traitor?
Max
I think DS9 was great..for the first three seasons. After that it went decidedly downhill. First there was the crew 'makeovers' (Kira goes from former terrorist/freedom-fighter to bridge officer bombshell), then the fucking inane plotlines, then the 'let's toss the first three seasons and go a completely different direction' writing (e.g., Dukat goes from a nearly-understandable bad guy to a two-dimensional Black Hat), followed by 'let's model the Federation after the United States, corruption and all', etc.
It didn't end. One bad mistake after another. I stopped watching regularly after season 4, and only subjected myself to the occasional painful episode thereafter to see if anyone had fired fuckwit Berman's ass somewhere along the way.
What the Trek franchise needs, more than anything else, is to get rid of Berman. He turns everything to shit.
Max