claim that the insurgency side is "evil" because they set off bombs knowing they will kill civilians, even if they do so against military targets (convoys, bases, etc).
But that's complete bullshit. Many of their attacks are not against military targets. Many of them are just in the middle of a market place. Many of them are against targets like schools. Many of them are against political targets who they see as betraying their own country. What's your response to all that, just to ignore it and focus on the minority of attacks that are successfully carried out against military targets? You are completely ignoring the degrees on both side.
How do you get no conflict at all while still retaining your independence? What do you do in the face of people willing to die for their cause making demands that you don't want to give in to?
Compulsory national service, at least in the history of the United States, leads to poor services and terrible morale.
We might be doing it wrong. Switzerland and Israel don't seem to have poor services and terrible morale. Personally I think it sounds like a good idea, but we have to change our implementation. First of all, you can't have compulsory service ONLY in times of war. That's basically admitting that you just need fuel for the meat grinder. The point of compulsory service is to be trained in advance and ready to go.
Second of all, we need to make being in the army more respectable in society. I'm not sure how to accomplish that. Maybe it's just a matter of propaganda and pushing a view that being successful in the military, or on the battlefield, is pretty damn cool. It would also involve seriously curtailing all the crap we have about rules of engagement and prosecuting soldiers for accidents and the like.
You base your vote on what you know. If the media isn't giving you good information, you vote poorly.
So year after year people get fooled by the media and politicians and vote poorly. To me, at some point it's fair to expect people to know they're being duped and change.
And even if you spend vast amounts of time researching for real facts, and become very well informed on every issue, your choice of candidates is usually between "corporate owned slightly liberal politician A" and "corporate owned slightly conservative politician B".
Personally I like the political stability in the US. I find the chaotic systems prevalent in Europe and third world democracies totally crazy. But maybe you're focusing on the "corporate" part and not the "slightly" part... I disagree that corporations have undue influence.
That won't ever change unless we have meaningful campaign finance reform and serious regulation on political ads, plus a revamp of news agencies.
It makes no sense to me to depend on the government to reform the government. First of all it's way too easy for the government to twist that type of reform into something that sounds good but really benefits them to the detriment of true democracy. And second of all how are these great politicians going to be elected if you are presupposing that the system is broken and nobody can learn enough to vote for the "right" politicians? And if somehow they can in this particular instance, they surely can in others as well so why is there any reform necessary?
There are a lot of things wrong with our political system right now, but it isn't the people.
The people vote for the president, governors, mayors, senators, congressmen, state legislators... everything wrong with the system. How is it not the people's fault?
The news is failing us.
The people also give the news media their popularity and make them profitable.
Out of curiosity, do you see "noose incidents", cross burnings, and so on as a form of hate speech or something else? I see how you could see them as having nothing to do with speech but there's an argument that they are speech too, but they are nonetheless illegal.
But that was also a result of the company's own policies, e.g. only having one person with access to the network and having no clear policy for transferring network ownership. That's completely their own fault.
Let's look at something similar but with programming. Say I write really bad code that nobody can understand. No, actually, say whenever I write code I run it through an obfuscator. I do this for a few years, and everybody's perfectly okay with it. Then I say, hey guys, it was nice knowing you, but I got a job offer and I'm taking it. Then suddenly they're like "oh noes we can't read your code, you have to stay and translate it or at least explain it to us."
Am I obligated to stay, even for a day? Am I criminally liable if they have to spend $200k hiring a few people to figure out what I did and rewrite it?
This isn't an exact analogy of the Terry Childs case, but is similar in that: 1. Both companies have physical access to the product but can't use it meaningfully without a lot of additional work and cost 2. Both companies never foresaw any type of problem arising from their policies or lack thereof 3. Both companies had no explicit agreements in place with the employee, but at the last minute make some request that would help themselves but not the employee
Maybe the boss had authority to grant access to a person who had the authorization to be granted access. I.e. the people the boss has the authority to grant access to may be preselected or restricted in some way by another person or group. Does the boss have the authority to grant access to his cousin who doesn't work for the company? Probably not. So the question becomes does the boss have the authority to grant access to himself?
The answer could be no, because maybe the policy was set by the boss's boss, as in "We don't need every middle manager to have root access to every system just because they are 'higher up' than the DBAs and sysadmins on the payscale. You can direct a current sysadmin to grant access to any other person we've hired and vetted as a sysadmin. But you don't need to do it yourself."
The answer could be yes, but I have my doubts since obviously the boss didn't have his own privileged account before this incident either. Was this really the first time that an employee had been transferred or fired? When Terry Childs was hired, did the boss personally give him the username/password of the previous sysadmin to log in with for the first time?
The forklift is a physical object. The network is a physical object. The keys grant physical access to the forklift. What grants physical access to the network? The keys to the building and various closets and so on.
Passwords are more like a way of encoding authorization or moral permission. The analogy for the forklift would maybe a licensing authority or insurer. Say you had a token that indicated you were authorized to drive the forklift, and anything the forklift did while under the power of your token credential was your liability. Then your boss says "Hey, I need to drive the forklift. Give me your token." What do you do?
How does not defining it help the defense more than defining it in a way that vindicates the defense?
If Terry Childs really thought the only person authorized to receive the information was the mayor, and his boss had no argument against that since nowhere in their reams of paperwork was "authorized" clearly defined, that seems like a point in the defense's favor.
On the other hand, leaving it undefined means most people are going to substitute their own "reasonable" definition, which would probably consider many people (the police and the manager for instance) to be authorized.
I remembered reading a few years ago about splitting water just using heat rather than electricity. Doing a quick search, it looks like the research has changed direction a bit and is focused on liberating magnesium from seawater, with hydrogen being a useful byproduct when the magnesium reacts with water later.
My point is that access to cheap energy can help remove one of the barriers to electric cars, which would reduce dependence on oil.
How is the cost of electricity a barrier? Current prices are already far cheaper than gas on a cost per mile basis.
As an example, from the Tesla Roadster faq page, it costs about $5 to fill up the car, which gets you about 244 miles of real world driving.
If electricity comes down enough in price, perhaps a commercial building heated in the winter by kerosene could be heated electrically.
There's a much better argument here. All the new houses being built around where I live come with natural gas for air and water heating and often cooking. I doubt that wind power is so much cheaper than coal and nuclear that the situation will change. But anyway, we get our natural gas domestically and from Canada, so that doesn't count as much as foreign dependence.
I recall reading that the NIF is the first stage of a prototype for an actual method of producing steady thermal power from fusion, i.e. a viable electricity source. After proving that the ignition occurs, the next steps are to find a way to mass produce the little fuel pellets, and then to find a way to be able to load and position the pellets fast enough and accurately enough to provide a sustained heat source (since each one lasts about a nanosecond).
That law says you can't incite violence, so neither Ann nor these guys are allowed to say "someone should go and kill that person" like they do, pretending they didn't mean to actually say what they actually said.
I'm not Canadian but doing a little research shows the law is a lot worse than you think. It's not about directly calling for violence against an individual as you seem to think (and which of course is a pretty acceptable limit).
The funny thing about Canada's hate speech law is they make an exemption if "the person expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text".
So basically I'm allowed to say "In the Bible, homosexuals are stoned, so we should stone all homosexuals." But I'm not allowed to say, "I think we should stone all homosexuals."
Or for a real example from Canada:
In December 2008, the Commission refused to look at the case of Imam Abou Hammad Sulaiman al-Hayiti. Al-Hayiti is a Montreal Salafist Muslim who was accused of inciting hatred against homosexuals, Western women and Jews in a book he published on the Internet. Al-Hayiti has written that Allah has taught that "If the Jews, Christians, and [Zoroastrians] refuse to answer the call of Islam, and will not pay the jizyah [tax], then it is obligatory for Muslims to fight them if they are able."
My examples were things that have gone on for a long time and still go on today. Yours are much shorter in duration and don't carry on at all today, except for the priest example.
My point isn't to get into a pissing match enumerating atrocities over the past 2000 years. It's more about what's going on today, what can be seen as fairly isolated versus ingrained in the culture, and so on.
Not to downplay the harm that Christianity causes.... but for every one of your dozen Christian terrorist attacks, I can point to a hundred that were conducted by Muslims.
The sad thing to me is not many people know about those attacks only because they didn't happen here and our media doesn't shove them in our faces 24/7.
As a result people don't understand the enormity of Islamic extremism. They can peacefully think of it as a fringe activity or "tiny minority" that lives in remote caves or something.
It would have been great to see more coverage of Taliban activity in Pakistan over the last few years. A lot of people don't understand or don't see the point in "helping" the Afghans, probably because they don't know that e.g. when the Taliban took over the Swat Valley in Pakistan they bombed or burned down over 100 girls schools. They hung signs in the market places saying "No women allowed". It's a very large, widespread, in your face phenomenon, not a few guys with long beards making videos and holding occasional marches.
For Muslims degrading Mohammad is more akin to desecrating a grave or religious building.
Even Muslims see the difference between physical destruction which someone has to go clean up and a TV show that goes on the air then goes off the air. Your argument is completely invalid.
What is true is that Muslims get *as upset* when someone insults Mohammed as others would do if you desecrated a grave or religious building. That is the problem, not something to learn a lesson from or try to respect!
You're right of course, but we don't have/share their perspective. We base morality on what we see happen to others in addition to what happens to ourselves, otherwise there would be no moral stance at all on murder since nobody who was murdered could contribute.
Do you have any idea how many muslims there are in the world, vs. how many have committed terrible acts in the name of their religion?
Depends what you mean by terrible acts, though. Obviously the percentage of suicide bombers and hijackers is small. Now if you're talking about less terrible (but still pretty terrible) thing like acid attacks on women, riots against religious minorities, punishing religious minorities with blasphemy laws, not providing education to daughters just because they are female, forcing daughters into arranged marriages with pretty bad guys, etc, then the number is going to climb significantly. That stuff is going to be approaching 0% with Christians (though not 0, there are Christian sects like fundamentalist Mormons who do polygamy and forced marriages).
Part of the problem with the Western understanding and handling of Islam is that Islam is inherently political as well as religious. Like the Old Testament, Islam dictates many of the laws that a society is supposed to have in order to please Allah. Christians get around that by saying the Old Testament was for another time, but many Muslim-majority societies do not. Even Muslim communities within non-Muslim host societies want to have Islamic "law" to the extent possible, such as in England by taking advantage of contract law and arbitration and using Islamic law as a basis for contracts in civil issues like marriage, inheritance, etc.
People like you try to say the same thing about Christianity. The IRA are Christian terrorists because they are terrorists who are Christian and want to kick out rulers of another sect of Christianity. Okay, that's true, but are they kicking out those rulers so that they can set up a certain Christian *society* as well? Are they going to not allow freedom of religion? Have special rules and laws for people of other religions?
I don't think the IRA ever claimed to want any of those things, but that's exactly what Muslim groups like the Taliban and Al Qaeda want. That's why people like me don't understand or agree with those kinds of comparisons. Sure there are groups-that-are-composed-of-Christians who do bad things, but there are very few organized Christian groups that are pushing for actual Christian rule.
Murder has a scale of morality. On one end you have self defense, which is almost universally accepted as okay. Murdering over a speech issue where there is no possibility of physical harm is way on the other end -- almost universally (in the West) not condoned. Murdering on the behalf of someone else's self defense is somewhere in the middle.
I'd say the two situations are not as equivalent as you claim because the actions are indeed on a different part of the spectrum (in Western culture).
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claim that the insurgency side is "evil" because they set off bombs knowing they will kill civilians, even if they do so against military targets (convoys, bases, etc).
But that's complete bullshit. Many of their attacks are not against military targets. Many of them are just in the middle of a market place. Many of them are against targets like schools. Many of them are against political targets who they see as betraying their own country. What's your response to all that, just to ignore it and focus on the minority of attacks that are successfully carried out against military targets? You are completely ignoring the degrees on both side.
How do you get no conflict at all while still retaining your independence? What do you do in the face of people willing to die for their cause making demands that you don't want to give in to?
Compulsory national service, at least in the history of the United States, leads to poor services and terrible morale.
We might be doing it wrong. Switzerland and Israel don't seem to have poor services and terrible morale. Personally I think it sounds like a good idea, but we have to change our implementation. First of all, you can't have compulsory service ONLY in times of war. That's basically admitting that you just need fuel for the meat grinder. The point of compulsory service is to be trained in advance and ready to go.
Second of all, we need to make being in the army more respectable in society. I'm not sure how to accomplish that. Maybe it's just a matter of propaganda and pushing a view that being successful in the military, or on the battlefield, is pretty damn cool. It would also involve seriously curtailing all the crap we have about rules of engagement and prosecuting soldiers for accidents and the like.
So because one group of people are killing Iraqi^WAfghanistani civilians, then that makes it OK for another group, e.g. the US military, to do so?
It makes it okay to fight the other group. It makes it okay to kill civilians while fighting that group.
Even better, if one group kills civilians then that makes it OK for the US military to kill more of them in order to protect and bring peace to them?
There's no alternative. What are you going to do when someone makes a demand and says they will kill civilians if you don't comply?
You base your vote on what you know. If the media isn't giving you good information, you vote poorly.
So year after year people get fooled by the media and politicians and vote poorly. To me, at some point it's fair to expect people to know they're being duped and change.
And even if you spend vast amounts of time researching for real facts, and become very well informed on every issue, your choice of candidates is usually between "corporate owned slightly liberal politician A" and "corporate owned slightly conservative politician B".
Personally I like the political stability in the US. I find the chaotic systems prevalent in Europe and third world democracies totally crazy. But maybe you're focusing on the "corporate" part and not the "slightly" part... I disagree that corporations have undue influence.
That won't ever change unless we have meaningful campaign finance reform and serious regulation on political ads, plus a revamp of news agencies.
It makes no sense to me to depend on the government to reform the government. First of all it's way too easy for the government to twist that type of reform into something that sounds good but really benefits them to the detriment of true democracy. And second of all how are these great politicians going to be elected if you are presupposing that the system is broken and nobody can learn enough to vote for the "right" politicians? And if somehow they can in this particular instance, they surely can in others as well so why is there any reform necessary?
There are a lot of things wrong with our political system right now, but it isn't the people.
The people vote for the president, governors, mayors, senators, congressmen, state legislators... everything wrong with the system. How is it not the people's fault?
The news is failing us.
The people also give the news media their popularity and make them profitable.
Out of curiosity, do you see "noose incidents", cross burnings, and so on as a form of hate speech or something else? I see how you could see them as having nothing to do with speech but there's an argument that they are speech too, but they are nonetheless illegal.
eg. http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,301046,00.html
But that was also a result of the company's own policies, e.g. only having one person with access to the network and having no clear policy for transferring network ownership. That's completely their own fault.
Let's look at something similar but with programming. Say I write really bad code that nobody can understand. No, actually, say whenever I write code I run it through an obfuscator. I do this for a few years, and everybody's perfectly okay with it. Then I say, hey guys, it was nice knowing you, but I got a job offer and I'm taking it. Then suddenly they're like "oh noes we can't read your code, you have to stay and translate it or at least explain it to us."
Am I obligated to stay, even for a day? Am I criminally liable if they have to spend $200k hiring a few people to figure out what I did and rewrite it?
This isn't an exact analogy of the Terry Childs case, but is similar in that:
1. Both companies have physical access to the product but can't use it meaningfully without a lot of additional work and cost
2. Both companies never foresaw any type of problem arising from their policies or lack thereof
3. Both companies had no explicit agreements in place with the employee, but at the last minute make some request that would help themselves but not the employee
Maybe the boss had authority to grant access to a person who had the authorization to be granted access. I.e. the people the boss has the authority to grant access to may be preselected or restricted in some way by another person or group. Does the boss have the authority to grant access to his cousin who doesn't work for the company? Probably not. So the question becomes does the boss have the authority to grant access to himself?
The answer could be no, because maybe the policy was set by the boss's boss, as in "We don't need every middle manager to have root access to every system just because they are 'higher up' than the DBAs and sysadmins on the payscale. You can direct a current sysadmin to grant access to any other person we've hired and vetted as a sysadmin. But you don't need to do it yourself."
The answer could be yes, but I have my doubts since obviously the boss didn't have his own privileged account before this incident either. Was this really the first time that an employee had been transferred or fired? When Terry Childs was hired, did the boss personally give him the username/password of the previous sysadmin to log in with for the first time?
The forklift is a physical object.
The network is a physical object.
The keys grant physical access to the forklift.
What grants physical access to the network? The keys to the building and various closets and so on.
Passwords are more like a way of encoding authorization or moral permission. The analogy for the forklift would maybe a licensing authority or insurer. Say you had a token that indicated you were authorized to drive the forklift, and anything the forklift did while under the power of your token credential was your liability. Then your boss says "Hey, I need to drive the forklift. Give me your token." What do you do?
How does not defining it help the defense more than defining it in a way that vindicates the defense?
If Terry Childs really thought the only person authorized to receive the information was the mayor, and his boss had no argument against that since nowhere in their reams of paperwork was "authorized" clearly defined, that seems like a point in the defense's favor.
On the other hand, leaving it undefined means most people are going to substitute their own "reasonable" definition, which would probably consider many people (the police and the manager for instance) to be authorized.
I remembered reading a few years ago about splitting water just using heat rather than electricity. Doing a quick search, it looks like the research has changed direction a bit and is focused on liberating magnesium from seawater, with hydrogen being a useful byproduct when the magnesium reacts with water later.
http://www.economist.com/science-technology/technology-monitor/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15939644
My point is that access to cheap energy can help remove one of the barriers to electric cars, which would reduce dependence on oil.
How is the cost of electricity a barrier? Current prices are already far cheaper than gas on a cost per mile basis.
As an example, from the Tesla Roadster faq page, it costs about $5 to fill up the car, which gets you about 244 miles of real world driving.
If electricity comes down enough in price, perhaps a commercial building heated in the winter by kerosene could be heated electrically.
There's a much better argument here. All the new houses being built around where I live come with natural gas for air and water heating and often cooking. I doubt that wind power is so much cheaper than coal and nuclear that the situation will change. But anyway, we get our natural gas domestically and from Canada, so that doesn't count as much as foreign dependence.
If we are at a tipping point where any day now the sea may rise 200 feet
Let me stop you right there..
I recall reading that the NIF is the first stage of a prototype for an actual method of producing steady thermal power from fusion, i.e. a viable electricity source. After proving that the ignition occurs, the next steps are to find a way to mass produce the little fuel pellets, and then to find a way to be able to load and position the pellets fast enough and accurately enough to provide a sustained heat source (since each one lasts about a nanosecond).
Hmm, maybe you replied to the wrong post, but I don't see GP (or anyone) claiming that the law is to punish parents.
That law says you can't incite violence, so neither Ann nor these guys are allowed to say "someone should go and kill that person" like they do, pretending they didn't mean to actually say what they actually said.
I'm not Canadian but doing a little research shows the law is a lot worse than you think. It's not about directly calling for violence against an individual as you seem to think (and which of course is a pretty acceptable limit).
Check out this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Human_Rights_Commission_free_speech_controversies
and this page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hate_speech_laws_in_Canada
The funny thing about Canada's hate speech law is they make an exemption if "the person expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion on a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text".
So basically I'm allowed to say "In the Bible, homosexuals are stoned, so we should stone all homosexuals." But I'm not allowed to say, "I think we should stone all homosexuals."
Or for a real example from Canada:
In December 2008, the Commission refused to look at the case of Imam Abou Hammad Sulaiman al-Hayiti. Al-Hayiti is a Montreal Salafist Muslim who was accused of inciting hatred against homosexuals, Western women and Jews in a book he published on the Internet. Al-Hayiti has written that Allah has taught that "If the Jews, Christians, and [Zoroastrians] refuse to answer the call of Islam, and will not pay the jizyah [tax], then it is obligatory for Muslims to fight them if they are able."
Sorry, you're right, though he was using actual laws of Canada to make the threat, not university policy.
My examples were things that have gone on for a long time and still go on today. Yours are much shorter in duration and don't carry on at all today, except for the priest example.
My point isn't to get into a pissing match enumerating atrocities over the past 2000 years. It's more about what's going on today, what can be seen as fairly isolated versus ingrained in the culture, and so on.
Not to downplay the harm that Christianity causes .... but for every one of your dozen Christian terrorist attacks, I can point to a hundred that were conducted by Muslims.
The sad thing to me is not many people know about those attacks only because they didn't happen here and our media doesn't shove them in our faces 24/7.
As a result people don't understand the enormity of Islamic extremism. They can peacefully think of it as a fringe activity or "tiny minority" that lives in remote caves or something.
It would have been great to see more coverage of Taliban activity in Pakistan over the last few years. A lot of people don't understand or don't see the point in "helping" the Afghans, probably because they don't know that e.g. when the Taliban took over the Swat Valley in Pakistan they bombed or burned down over 100 girls schools. They hung signs in the market places saying "No women allowed". It's a very large, widespread, in your face phenomenon, not a few guys with long beards making videos and holding occasional marches.
For Muslims degrading Mohammad is more akin to desecrating a grave or religious building.
Even Muslims see the difference between physical destruction which someone has to go clean up and a TV show that goes on the air then goes off the air. Your argument is completely invalid.
What is true is that Muslims get *as upset* when someone insults Mohammed as others would do if you desecrated a grave or religious building. That is the problem, not something to learn a lesson from or try to respect!
You're right of course, but we don't have/share their perspective. We base morality on what we see happen to others in addition to what happens to ourselves, otherwise there would be no moral stance at all on murder since nobody who was murdered could contribute.
Do you have any idea how many muslims there are in the world, vs. how many have committed terrible acts in the name of their religion?
Depends what you mean by terrible acts, though. Obviously the percentage of suicide bombers and hijackers is small. Now if you're talking about less terrible (but still pretty terrible) thing like acid attacks on women, riots against religious minorities, punishing religious minorities with blasphemy laws, not providing education to daughters just because they are female, forcing daughters into arranged marriages with pretty bad guys, etc, then the number is going to climb significantly. That stuff is going to be approaching 0% with Christians (though not 0, there are Christian sects like fundamentalist Mormons who do polygamy and forced marriages).
Part of the problem with the Western understanding and handling of Islam is that Islam is inherently political as well as religious. Like the Old Testament, Islam dictates many of the laws that a society is supposed to have in order to please Allah. Christians get around that by saying the Old Testament was for another time, but many Muslim-majority societies do not. Even Muslim communities within non-Muslim host societies want to have Islamic "law" to the extent possible, such as in England by taking advantage of contract law and arbitration and using Islamic law as a basis for contracts in civil issues like marriage, inheritance, etc.
People like you try to say the same thing about Christianity. The IRA are Christian terrorists because they are terrorists who are Christian and want to kick out rulers of another sect of Christianity. Okay, that's true, but are they kicking out those rulers so that they can set up a certain Christian *society* as well? Are they going to not allow freedom of religion? Have special rules and laws for people of other religions?
I don't think the IRA ever claimed to want any of those things, but that's exactly what Muslim groups like the Taliban and Al Qaeda want. That's why people like me don't understand or agree with those kinds of comparisons. Sure there are groups-that-are-composed-of-Christians who do bad things, but there are very few organized Christian groups that are pushing for actual Christian rule.
Murder has a scale of morality. On one end you have self defense, which is almost universally accepted as okay. Murdering over a speech issue where there is no possibility of physical harm is way on the other end -- almost universally (in the West) not condoned. Murdering on the behalf of someone else's self defense is somewhere in the middle.
I'd say the two situations are not as equivalent as you claim because the actions are indeed on a different part of the spectrum (in Western culture).