Most people who live in San Francisco are against the war already. So the protesters come and block intersections and prevent exit off of the interchanges?? The purpose of protests should be to convert people,
So the point is then to make it onto the national news, where the case might be the opposite, and people in other cities won't care about traffic being block in someone else's.
It can't be repeated enough, but massed protests are about a visceral and immediate show of strength, and an attempt to raise concerns with audiences who will see the crowds in person or on the news. It also is empowering for people in less predominantly anti-war areas to see the huge crowds that share their opinion.
If it makes it onto world news, other countries not so friendly to the U.S. currently may see they have something in common with the regular people here, that we aren't all warmongers.
It's not, and it shouldn't be, an outright attempt to sway anybody who's already solidly on the other side of the fence.
Responding to sigs is dumb (since you can delete it out from under me), but here goes:
According to that logic, we should've just contained Hitler in 1945.
No, we should have contained him in the pre-1939 period, before he'd taken territories ceded to France after WWI and then annexed Austria and Poland after that, and growing more ambitious externally and oppressive internally with every success.
Iraq tried to took Kuwait, lost it to a broad international coalition, and was (succcessfully) contained thereafter. Not the same as Germany prior to WWII.
Ad hominem, literally meaning 'against the person', or amounting to attacking the individual making a claim as means of attacking their argument.
I said:
The irony is tired and cliched, and a contains two strawmen to boot (the purpose of the war and the purpose of the 'anti-war people'). This sort of arguement dates at least to the war against Vietnam...
I never mentioned the orginal poster, only the comments they made. If you can't attack the words they said then argument is impossible. What is the latin phrase for a argument that attempts to legitimize itself by inappropriately using latin phrases?
Care to elucidate as to what turns an old argument "tired and cliched", and how such a transformation makes it invalid? I'm seriously curious, if you're up for it.
Of course I'm up for it. If the government wanted to silence dissent on slashdot, creating tech jobs would be their main goal...
The answers to both your questions is the two strawmen I mentioned in combination the age you mentioned. If you say something enough times, it becomes cliche. 'Tired' is redundant, I admit.
Oh, and if you could delineate the two strawmen, I would appreciate that as well.
"the purpose of the war and the purpose of the 'anti-war people'" Or more accurately, the people who are perpetrating the war and the people who are against it, since strawmen are about people and not purposes.
Interestingly enough, that's no different than the protest strategy that everyone else in the world is using.
Right, and they date back to the tactics pioneered by the SLCC during the civil rights movement, which were inspired by Ghandi decades before them. They never changed the minds of the racists in the south, and they weren't trying to. But the incidents they created brought the purpose of their movement world-wide attention.
Seriously, what good does tying up traffic or puking do to get people to agree with you?
It's not about changing the minds of those already commited to the other side, it's about demonstrating seriousness of purpose, a willingness to risk arrest, ridicule, and profiling by the FBI. And it's about being in direct congregation with a lot of people who feel the same way.
As for puking, if one guy does something stupid to protest, does that illegitimize every other protestor? The movement isn't a monolithic entity that approves of every action a member does, it's diverse enough that bizarre things like vomit-protesting are bound to occur.
Creating a traffic snarl in order to protest what is perceived as a much greater injustice (if causing someone to be late even qualifies as injustice) is a minor tradeoff. People are usually justified in committing misdemeanors if they're trying to prevent a felony- the police do it all the time.
76% of Americans...
Un-cited statistic quotes should be capital offense, IMHO, or at least grounds for 'overrated' moderation. Same goes for saying "I'm right because a bunch of other people agree." It's just a pathetic argument, besides.
I love (note sarcasm) how in the very country these anti-war people seek to save, they would be killed, tortured, or raped for the very actions they do to try to save it.
Do they not see the irony?
The irony is tired and cliched, and a contains two strawmen to boot (the purpose of the war and the purpose of the 'anti-war people'). This sort of arguement dates at least to the war against Vietnam...
The fact that your country gives you a right to protest does not give it the right to invade countries that don't.
Why is it that the nightvision shots still have the same crap quality of ten years ago? Did no one think to upgrade them?
I mean, there's stuff now that'll let you see the undergarments of people in high resolution from half a mile away, but we're stuck here with blobs of light flying across a grainy sky.
Hit the 'mute' button and most of the propaganda/disinfo will be cut out, and there's still some pretty smoking wreckage, stern looking generals, and maps with helpful colored arrows to look at. I haven't figured out how to get rid of that damn scrolling text at the bottom of the screen, but duct tape could be involved in the solution.
Somebody should set up a streaming audio site with insightful/humorous replacement audio, otherwise just put on some music...
Once you violate Godwin's law, there's no turning back:
There are a scary number of parallels between Saddam Hussein of today, and Hitler of the 1930s.
There are plenty of disturbing parallels between Bush and Hitler as well. Since the U.S. has a much greater capability for destruction and oppression than Iraq, this comparisons requires more attention even if it is less apt.
The 'axis' in 'Axis of Evil' and comparing Hussein to Hitler is just a cheap ploy to try to associate this conflict with the one war universally recognized as a just cause.
You'd almost wish that Europe would have intervened with Germany earlier not because of the tens of millions of lives that would have been saved (most of them would be dead by now anyway right?), but so that we wouldn't have to deal with all these poor-analogy justifications from world leaders, pundits, and slashdot users.
Lets say you have a wife. If someone pulls a gun and aims it at her head, do you wait till he pulls the trigger until you do something? If you have the capability to stop him before he pulls the trigger, you know that you can stop him but you have to kill him. Who do you choose?
What if you were in a room with a dozen people, some which you know have guns, some which might, and others which would like to get them. One or more of them would like to shoot you. So you shoot a few which you happen to dislike just to make your odds better...
No lets make your wife be a barrel of oil, and the guy with kind eyes- he's actually the devil, and you have shot people in the head without UN sanction in the past, so what do you do when-
I for one am not optimistic about the post war rebuilding chances being anything like Japan & Germany
In addition to all your Iraq specific points, there was also a remarkable thing called the "Marshall Plan", billions of dollars in reconstructive investment, and a whole generation of visionary military men and civil servants who pulled together to make democracy and great economic growth possible in the defeated countries.
Part of the success in Japan and Germany would have been fueled by the need for strong allies against the USSR.
That's an extremely defeatist attitude.
"People always complain about human nature, but no one does anything about it."
Hopefully this doesn't cost us, and I mean all of us, as much as past conflicts.
Hope that the repercussions for the sins of the leaders are not visited upon their constituents... though it always seems to end up that way (I'm being defeatist, right).
Re:Not a troll: How many civilians died last time?
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
Most anti-war people I hear talk about all the civilian casualties resulting from this war, but I'm somehow not sure I should take their word for it. Does anyone here know the read civilian death toll from the last Iraqi war?
One thing is for sure, don't try any major U.S. owned media outlet for that kind of information, they'll just be repeating how much worse it would be without the expensive gadgetry and gloss over the real numbers.
Re:Not necessarily the war yet
on
Strike on Iraq
·
· Score: 1
It wouldn't be hard for the troops to think if you're against the war you're against them. I know it's possible to support the troops but protest the war, but it's hard to convey both at once.
I'm sure the government encourages exactly that sort of confusion. If they can turn people-vs-government into hippies-vs-soldiers the administration can avoid a lot of flack.
What would be cool is if every Editor Edition dvd came with most of the raw footage (that's what you'd need 27GB dvds for I guess) that is remotely watchable, and instead of would-be editors trying to redistribute their own editions in GB portions, they could distribute their edit decision list (EDL) and anyone else with that movie could download it and have their player put the edits together. Editing and remixing the sound the sound would require a lot of work.
Huge communities of EDL trading could spring up, where different editors would cater to any audience (only the action parts? or just the sex scenes? the Memento edit with scenes in reverse order? ever read a review where the critic criticized the overly fast 'MTV style' editing: well now he can slow it down!).
The problem is that the cost of developing all that film would be enormous (notice how missing scenes on SE dvds are sometimes in video, with the running clock at the bottom - they didn't actually process the film in the can, but just took the video from the on-board video camera they have to review shots immediately with), and special effects, CG backdrops or whatever would also be costly to duplicate for scenes that won't even be in theatres (of course, all the easier to make a Jar-Jar free movie if you have the scenes without him composited in).
I don't find most TV shows to be compelling enough that I'd want to re-edit them, but maybe it's a step in the right direction.
Maybe it's just me, but the video still looks like a soap opera or BBC production (all of which use video, to save money apparently) however many lines of resolution it has. And every single shot looks like it's either all CG or a composite with CG background- but the technology just isn't there yet: the difference between the CG lighting and the set lighting, as well as the color rendered by the computer and that captured in video are still to great to look more convincing (that the actor is really in the environment around them) than Command & Conquer or Myst video sequences.
Why does Lucas even bother with live actors at all when the results has the foreground characters looking so inconsistent with all the CG in the backgrounds? He could just scan in the bodies of all the actors and motion-capture their movements, and then render all at once with no compositing. Maybe that's what's in store for EP3...
All they have to do to make some quick money is take a lot of potentially embarassing pictures of dead civilians in Afghanistan, and then the Pentagon will buy the exclusive rights at the taxpayer's expens! (FOIA, anyone?)
Microsoft is generously preparing a 'terrorist free' version that will be ready in a few years, and all current XP users will be forced (you don't want the terrorist version floating around do you?) to buy it for the nominal price of several hundred dollars.
What I'd like to play (or code myself when I get out of college) is a fighting game that incorporates a lot of physics:
Instead of a hit just causing the victim to go into a canned fall down sequence, the force imparted by the blow would be computed and the proper response of the impacted body would result in a unique reaction for blows landed on different parts of the body with different ammounts of force.
In addition to reaction to hits, all the moves should be based on biokinematics rather than canned sequences- the fighter would not execute perfect flying whatevers every time, but some phsyics model would cause them to attempt the move and the result would vary by the conditsions it was executed under.
More physics in any kind of game makes for much more interesting and varied play, if the alternatives is just as many sequences as the designers bothered to record.
For example, many people run out to buy expensive assembler books when the best resource is available online. [ucr.edu] Or, they run out to buy expensive Linux device driver manuals when the best resource is available online. [xml.com]
The problem isn't that the free material is more obscure, it's that its not as conveniently packaged as a printed book. I can only tolerate reading short news items and a screenful or two of text on a single topic at a time or longer work if it's proportionally less detailed/more vacuous. I certainly wouldn't want to read a chapter on assembly on a computer, but I'd read the same length of material in slashdot posts...
Barring cheap and non-eyestraining portable digital book readers, I think print shops (like the kinds that print out course packets at universities) should have a convenient way to print out books that are free online in a printer friendly format at the cost of the print job (conceivably this may be more than a mass produced book but otherwise unobtainable titles would be well worth it).
I think all this criticism is silly- obviously the virus is smart enough only to infect your computer if you're a terrorist and will compromise your system _only_ to the FBI via some flawless authentication mechanism. All in under a KB, I'd guess.
Lots of people have already said as much on Slashdot before, especially the Beyond Napster story earlier this year- But to reiterate what is needed to completely subvert the model of massive risk/massive exploitation:
Micropayments Whether or not they're required to download the music in the first place or a culture of fairtunes-esque donation can be raised to a level that would reimburse costs. If a donation system revealed how much money had been given to any one group or person, people would probably cease donation to artists after some perceived level of sufficiency had been met. So if you have to live in a mansion and drive a Bentley just so you have something to make music about you'll have to rent instead of own.
Recommendation System Advertising is the big money sink, and most of it gets wasted on people who don't even care. But with a well designed a popular (and preferably free and open) system that would make suggestions with a high success rate (the music suggested is well liked by a high percentage of the people given the suggestion). It would need a diverse set of different criteria for suggestion creation- top download lists, overlapping categories of for every conceivable classification, trusted 'friends', lyrics database, Amazon style 'people who got this also got this', etc. The passive recommendation part would coexist along side user initiated searches facilities, where you could traverse say a tree that would map the decent of samples from one work to the next or have some advance 'sounds like' dsp stuff going on.
The latter one is a pretty huge project, if anything like that has already been initiated share the links.
Slashdot Mirror
Most people who live in San Francisco are against the war already. So the protesters come and block intersections and prevent exit off of the interchanges?? The purpose of protests should be to convert people,
So the point is then to make it onto the national news, where the case might be the opposite, and people in other cities won't care about traffic being block in someone else's.
It can't be repeated enough, but massed protests are about a visceral and immediate show of strength, and an attempt to raise concerns with audiences who will see the crowds in person or on the news. It also is empowering for people in less predominantly anti-war areas to see the huge crowds that share their opinion.
If it makes it onto world news, other countries not so friendly to the U.S. currently may see they have something in common with the regular people here, that we aren't all warmongers.
It's not, and it shouldn't be, an outright attempt to sway anybody who's already solidly on the other side of the fence.
Saw it right after I submitted, sorry.
Regardless, it used to sound intelligent to quote statistics in an argument, cited or not, but rampant abuse tends to make it look cheap.
Responding to sigs is dumb (since you can delete it out from under me), but here goes:
According to that logic, we should've just contained Hitler in 1945.
No, we should have contained him in the pre-1939 period, before he'd taken territories ceded to France after WWI and then annexed Austria and Poland after that, and growing more ambitious externally and oppressive internally with every success.
Iraq tried to took Kuwait, lost it to a broad international coalition, and was (succcessfully) contained thereafter. Not the same as Germany prior to WWII.
Your argument is ad hominem in the beginning,
Ad hominem, literally meaning 'against the person', or amounting to attacking the individual making a claim as means of attacking their argument.
I said:
I never mentioned the orginal poster, only the comments they made. If you can't attack the words they said then argument is impossible. What is the latin phrase for a argument that attempts to legitimize itself by inappropriately using latin phrases?
Care to elucidate as to what turns an old argument "tired and cliched", and how such a transformation makes it invalid? I'm seriously curious, if you're up for it.
Of course I'm up for it. If the government wanted to silence dissent on slashdot, creating tech jobs would be their main goal...
The answers to both your questions is the two strawmen I mentioned in combination the age you mentioned. If you say something enough times, it becomes cliche. 'Tired' is redundant, I admit.
Oh, and if you could delineate the two strawmen, I would appreciate that as well.
"the purpose of the war and the purpose of the 'anti-war people'"
Or more accurately, the people who are perpetrating the war and the people who are against it, since strawmen are about people and not purposes.
Interestingly enough, that's no different than the protest strategy that everyone else in the world is using.
Right, and they date back to the tactics pioneered by the SLCC during the civil rights movement, which were inspired by Ghandi decades before them. They never changed the minds of the racists in the south, and they weren't trying to. But the incidents they created brought the purpose of their movement world-wide attention.
Seriously, what good does tying up traffic or puking do to get people to agree with you?
It's not about changing the minds of those already commited to the other side, it's about demonstrating seriousness of purpose, a willingness to risk arrest, ridicule, and profiling by the FBI. And it's about being in direct congregation with a lot of people who feel the same way.
As for puking, if one guy does something stupid to protest, does that illegitimize every other protestor? The movement isn't a monolithic entity that approves of every action a member does, it's diverse enough that bizarre things like vomit-protesting are bound to occur.
Creating a traffic snarl in order to protest what is perceived as a much greater injustice (if causing someone to be late even qualifies as injustice) is a minor tradeoff. People are usually justified in committing misdemeanors if they're trying to prevent a felony- the police do it all the time.
76% of Americans...
Un-cited statistic quotes should be capital offense, IMHO, or at least grounds for 'overrated' moderation. Same goes for saying "I'm right because a bunch of other people agree." It's just a pathetic argument, besides.
I love (note sarcasm) how in the very country these anti-war people seek to save, they would be killed, tortured, or raped for the very actions they do to try to save it.
Do they not see the irony?
The irony is tired and cliched, and a contains two strawmen to boot (the purpose of the war and the purpose of the 'anti-war people'). This sort of arguement dates at least to the war against Vietnam...
The fact that your country gives you a right to protest does not give it the right to invade countries that don't.
Why is it that the nightvision shots still have the same crap quality of ten years ago? Did no one think to upgrade them?
I mean, there's stuff now that'll let you see the undergarments of people in high resolution from half a mile away, but we're stuck here with blobs of light flying across a grainy sky.
Hit the 'mute' button and most of the propaganda/disinfo will be cut out, and there's still some pretty smoking wreckage, stern looking generals, and maps with helpful colored arrows to look at. I haven't figured out how to get rid of that damn scrolling text at the bottom of the screen, but duct tape could be involved in the solution.
Somebody should set up a streaming audio site with insightful/humorous replacement audio, otherwise just put on some music...
Once you violate Godwin's law, there's no turning back:
There are a scary number of parallels between Saddam Hussein of today, and Hitler of the 1930s.
There are plenty of disturbing parallels between Bush and Hitler as well. Since the U.S. has a much greater capability for destruction and oppression than Iraq, this comparisons requires more attention even if it is less apt.
The 'axis' in 'Axis of Evil' and comparing Hussein to Hitler is just a cheap ploy to try to associate this conflict with the one war universally recognized as a just cause.
You'd almost wish that Europe would have intervened with Germany earlier not because of the tens of millions of lives that would have been saved (most of them would be dead by now anyway right?), but so that we wouldn't have to deal with all these poor-analogy justifications from world leaders, pundits, and slashdot users.
Lets say you have a wife. If someone pulls a gun and aims it at her head, do you wait till he pulls the trigger until you do something? If you have the capability to stop him before he pulls the trigger, you know that you can stop him but you have to kill him. Who do you choose?
What if you were in a room with a dozen people, some which you know have guns, some which might, and others which would like to get them. One or more of them would like to shoot you. So you shoot a few which you happen to dislike just to make your odds better...
No lets make your wife be a barrel of oil, and the guy with kind eyes- he's actually the devil, and you have shot people in the head without UN sanction in the past, so what do you do when-
Fuck it.
I for one am not optimistic about the post war rebuilding chances being anything like Japan & Germany
In addition to all your Iraq specific points, there was also a remarkable thing called the "Marshall Plan", billions of dollars in reconstructive investment, and a whole generation of visionary military men and civil servants who pulled together to make democracy and great economic growth possible in the defeated countries.
Part of the success in Japan and Germany would have been fueled by the need for strong allies against the USSR.
There's always going to be war.
Peace is not a natural state for human beings.
That's an extremely defeatist attitude.
"People always complain about human nature, but no one does anything about it."
Hopefully this doesn't cost us, and I mean all of us, as much as past conflicts.
Hope that the repercussions for the sins of the leaders are not visited upon their constituents... though it always seems to end up that way (I'm being defeatist, right).
Most anti-war people I hear talk about all the civilian casualties resulting from this war, but I'm somehow not sure I should take their word for it. Does anyone here know the read civilian death toll from the last Iraqi war?
One thing is for sure, don't try any major U.S. owned media outlet for that kind of information, they'll just be repeating how much worse it would be without the expensive gadgetry and gloss over the real numbers.
It wouldn't be hard for the troops to think if you're against the war you're against them. I know it's possible to support the troops but protest the war, but it's hard to convey both at once.
I'm sure the government encourages exactly that sort of confusion. If they can turn people-vs-government into hippies-vs-soldiers the administration can avoid a lot of flack.
If a reporter uses the phrase 'literally dying' to express urgency when the people are actually dying.
This is, of course, no game.
Tell that to our National Guard 'veteran' president...
What would be cool is if every Editor Edition dvd came with most of the raw footage (that's what you'd need 27GB dvds for I guess) that is remotely watchable, and instead of would-be editors trying to redistribute their own editions in GB portions, they could distribute their edit decision list (EDL) and anyone else with that movie could download it and have their player put the edits together. Editing and remixing the sound the sound would require a lot of work.
Huge communities of EDL trading could spring up, where different editors would cater to any audience (only the action parts? or just the sex scenes? the Memento edit with scenes in reverse order? ever read a review where the critic criticized the overly fast 'MTV style' editing: well now he can slow it down!).
The problem is that the cost of developing all that film would be enormous (notice how missing scenes on SE dvds are sometimes in video, with the running clock at the bottom - they didn't actually process the film in the can, but just took the video from the on-board video camera they have to review shots immediately with), and special effects, CG backdrops or whatever would also be costly to duplicate for scenes that won't even be in theatres (of course, all the easier to make a Jar-Jar free movie if you have the scenes without him composited in).
I don't find most TV shows to be compelling enough that I'd want to re-edit them, but maybe it's a step in the right direction.
Maybe it's just me, but the video still looks like a soap opera or BBC production (all of which use video, to save money apparently) however many lines of resolution it has. And every single shot looks like it's either all CG or a composite with CG background- but the technology just isn't there yet: the difference between the CG lighting and the set lighting, as well as the color rendered by the computer and that captured in video are still to great to look more convincing (that the actor is really in the environment around them) than Command & Conquer or Myst video sequences.
Why does Lucas even bother with live actors at all when the results has the foreground characters looking so inconsistent with all the CG in the backgrounds? He could just scan in the bodies of all the actors and motion-capture their movements, and then render all at once with no compositing. Maybe that's what's in store for EP3...
All they have to do to make some quick money is take a lot of potentially embarassing pictures of dead civilians in Afghanistan, and then the Pentagon will buy the exclusive rights at the taxpayer's expens! (FOIA, anyone?)
Microsoft is generously preparing a 'terrorist free' version that will be ready in a few years, and all current XP users will be forced (you don't want the terrorist version floating around do you?) to buy it for the nominal price of several hundred dollars.
What I'd like to play (or code myself when I get out of college) is a fighting game that incorporates a lot of physics:
Instead of a hit just causing the victim to go into a canned fall down sequence, the force imparted by the blow would be computed and the proper response of the impacted body would result in a unique reaction for blows landed on different parts of the body with different ammounts of force.
In addition to reaction to hits, all the moves should be based on biokinematics rather than canned sequences- the fighter would not execute perfect flying whatevers every time, but some phsyics model would cause them to attempt the move and the result would vary by the conditsions it was executed under.
More physics in any kind of game makes for much more interesting and varied play, if the alternatives is just as many sequences as the designers bothered to record.
For example, many people run out to buy expensive assembler books when the best resource is available online. [ucr.edu] Or, they run out to buy expensive Linux device driver manuals when the best resource is available online. [xml.com]
The problem isn't that the free material is more obscure, it's that its not as conveniently packaged as a printed book. I can only tolerate reading short news items and a screenful or two of text on a single topic at a time or longer work if it's proportionally less detailed/more vacuous. I certainly wouldn't want to read a chapter on assembly on a computer, but I'd read the same length of material in slashdot posts...
Barring cheap and non-eyestraining portable digital book readers, I think print shops (like the kinds that print out course packets at universities) should have a convenient way to print out books that are free online in a printer friendly format at the cost of the print job (conceivably this may be more than a mass produced book but otherwise unobtainable titles would be well worth it).
There's really no reason to get rid of any design as long as the U.S. is just bombing third-world countries.
It'll be 'no negotiations' for countries with no serious defences until some new Ho Chi Minh catches the U.S. off guard.
I think all this criticism is silly- obviously the virus is smart enough only to infect your computer if you're a terrorist and will compromise your system _only_ to the FBI via some flawless authentication mechanism. All in under a KB, I'd guess.
Lots of people have already said as much on Slashdot before, especially the Beyond Napster story earlier this year- But to reiterate what is needed to completely subvert the model of massive risk/massive exploitation:
Micropayments Whether or not they're required to download the music in the first place or a culture of fairtunes-esque donation can be raised to a level that would reimburse costs. If a donation system revealed how much money had been given to any one group or person, people would probably cease donation to artists after some perceived level of sufficiency had been met. So if you have to live in a mansion and drive a Bentley just so you have something to make music about you'll have to rent instead of own.
Recommendation System Advertising is the big money sink, and most of it gets wasted on people who don't even care. But with a well designed a popular (and preferably free and open) system that would make suggestions with a high success rate (the music suggested is well liked by a high percentage of the people given the suggestion). It would need a diverse set of different criteria for suggestion creation- top download lists, overlapping categories of for every conceivable classification, trusted 'friends', lyrics database, Amazon style 'people who got this also got this', etc. The passive recommendation part would coexist along side user initiated searches facilities, where you could traverse say a tree that would map the decent of samples from one work to the next or have some advance 'sounds like' dsp stuff going on.
The latter one is a pretty huge project, if anything like that has already been initiated share the links.