Of all the bits of OS X that are actually interesting and of value to users, "it's a UNIX" is a long, long, long way down the list
Depends on what you mean by "users." Web developers love it: you can be running a near-perfect approximation of your production server right on your laptop and have commercial desktop apps...
There's nothing especially unique about MacOS that lets that happen. You can say the same thing about Windows or Linux. Unless you're running MacOS on your production server (you aren't). On today's machines, you can have a miniature version of just about any configuration, I can't think of anything in that respect that MacOS can do that others can't.
It certainly depends on the web development you're doing, but my company's developers use everything from Windows to BSD to MacOS, and by far the hardest ones to support are the ones using MacOS. They have the most problems getting our tools configured properly, and I had one guy who spent an entire day trying to figure out how to get Tomcat to run. We don't use anything esoteric, straight Java, no frills. On every other system used by our teams, it's been trivial to get things to run, but every Mac user has had to jump through flaming hoops to get where those that use Windows or Linux get to in under an hour.
I think that the Web developers who use it use it because that's the system they're comfortable with, not because it offers anything that cannot be done with another system.
This whole meme about how software companies are a 'young man's' game... I just don't get it.
Maybe at your way-hip, Web 2.0, here today, gone tomorrow kind of outfit, that might be true, but perhaps that's the reason why those companies always tank.
At 36, I am the youngest member of our operations in the US. My boss and our CTO cut their teeth on punch cards. As an aside, our CTO never completed college, which leads me to my main point.
Do you want this degree because you believe you'll pick up some more marketable skills, or because you're interested in CS? If you can already write code, you won't learn any more of that getting a CS degree.
If you want to boost your paycheck, getting a BS in CS may or may not help you.
After having spent about 15 years in the software business, I can safely say that only about half of the engineers and developers I have worked with have formal education in CS. The rest have a wide variety of backgrounds. I myself have a BA in Sociology. One of our developers was a veterinarian!
I have also worked with some people with CS degrees who were shitty engineers, and difficult to work with, as well. Go get your bachelor's in CS, but do it for the learning, not because you think it will get you a higher paycheck.
Private schools are not businesses. Accredited, non-parochial private schools (at least the ones worth sending your kids to) are non-profit organizations.
Teachers are not service industry workers, either.
Indeed they did. Now, Clinton claims that they are being 'disenfranchised'...
It's silly. There are rules. If a person sends in their absentee ballot after election day, they can't complain about being disenfranchised. Same idea applies here.
If it was clear that Obama had the lead in FL and MI, I seriously doubt that Clinton would be fighting so hard for their 'rights'.
Not editorials, coverage, which involves more than simply repeating what the person behind the podium says. It means having to look around, making a phone call or two, checking the story out, see if the people behind the podium are saying things that actually reflect what's going on. Reporters used to do that. Now, they credulously repeat whatever the mouthpiece says, as if they would have no reason to lie.
Editorials are just opinion pieces, which is not the same as reporting. Reporting is supposed to aim for some kind of accurate picture of reality.
The trouble with that is that sometimes the facts run counter to what people want you to think, or the facts don't agree with what people think should be happening, and so then the reporter is accused of bias.
Am I? What do you mean? I wasn't talking about Iraq, and as far as I am concerned, we need to just leave Iraq, because it doesn't matter who the US backs or doesn't back, going there was a mistake.
War is a contest of wills. It ends when one side decides they can't win. That decision is based very much on each side's assessment of the other side's morale.
This would only be the case if, say, we were fighting the Iraqi army in Kuwait after they had invaded Kuwait, or the German army in France after they invaded France. It is decidedly not the case when fighting against an irregular guerrilla opponent that is trying to oust an occupier.
Do you really think that the insurgents would stop fighting if they saw nothing but "people breathing fire, publicly demanding that Iraq be nuked" on American TV?
Let's put it another way: If the US was occupied by a foreign power, would their TV broadcasts, however extreme and bellicose, convince you that your cause was hopeless? I doubt that, it might even reinforce your resolve. If their TV showed nothing but how unpopular their occupation was, would that convince you to keep fighting? Maybe it would, but the critical piece here is that regardless of what their TV keeps saying, you're going to fight until either you get killed or the occupation is over, and what the other side's TV news is saying is just background noise.
Bottom line is that as long as our armed forces are there, they are going to be attacked. No amount of cheerleading is going to change that.
Do you think it might have bucked up our fighting spirit, just a tad, to think that our enemy was near surrender?
Depends. How many times have we heard that the insurgency in Iraq was "in its last throes", or that we have reached a "defining moment"?
In terms of Vietnam, it may have, but it would have done nothing to change the fact that the government we were backing in Saigon was loathed by the people in the South. Nixon assured everyone that we could see the light at the end of the tunnel. No one believed him.
What lost Vietnam was not a lack of fighting spirit in our soldiers, or news coverage at home, or too much civilian control of the military, or any of those right-wing talking points about Vietnam. We lost Vietnam because we backed a thoroughly corrupt, inept and brutal regime in Saigon.
If the U.S. had spent more time trying to foster a real alternative to what Hanoi was offering instead of more of the same old corrupt rule by kleptocrats, Vietnam could have ended differently. As it was, what we wanted Vietnam to accept was the same old colonial situation, minus the foreigners.
We "lost" Vietnam because we backed the wrong people in Saigon, and no amount of fighting spirit or rah-rah news coverage at home was going to change that.
It's not so much that it's "pro-war". They just repeat the talking points without providing any background, context or countervailing facts. They become tacitly pro-war.
If you don't mind committing suicide, you can 'be' an atomic bomb. Place a piece of U-235, or Pu-239 in one hand, and a nice alpha emitter in the other. Smack 'em together. No fancy designs needed.
Oh yes, don't get me wrong, a good UI is key to any successful app, but it is possible to pay too much attention to cosmetics at the expense of underlying functions. I do people-facing apps for a living, so I pay special attention to UI elements. Truth be told, I don't think that iTunes' ui is anything special.
I never can get this quote quite right, but 'Never attribute to malice that which can be accounted for by stupidity'. These unpublished APIs were probably custom-built for Safari, and since Apple apparently has a wicked case of not-made-here, this is not a surprise. I don't use OSX, but I do use iTunes, and I can only conclude that Apple just does not have a priority placed on well-engineered apps. They look great, but on Windows especially, they are pretty pitiful. I am always amazed at how much memory iTunes takes up for itself considering what it does. If I fire up Windows Media Player, loathsome as it is, it uses up a fraction of the resources. I run a Postgresql database server on my laptopn for development, and it does not even approach the big ol' Homer Simpson ass print that iTunes does. I don't get it. Do they deploy some kind of bottom-up graphics library? A monstrous cache? What? For all the memory that sucker takes up, it sure runs ponderously slow.
Enough of that. Apple just doesn't make applications very well. They put all the resources into the UI, and skimp on the important stuff.
Yes, some kids to get snatched, raped, and murdered. But there are so few that it's impossible to protect against it since the circumstances are so statistically anomalous that they can't be predicted.
I see where you're coming from, but I have to disagree here. I would wager that in most of these cases, the child was snatched, raped, etc. by someone known to them. Looking to shield children from strangers who mean them harm is very tough to do. Recognizing warning signs exhibited by relatives, friends and neighbors and overcoming denial about it is what would actually have the chance of saving a kid.
And in case your not familiar with that, it is where a minority or a person with some protected quality is able to use that status as a bonus to their qualifications and take jobs or positions they aren't technically qualified for or the most qualified person for the job/position/whatever.
Don't patronize me. I know what a quota is, and what you describe here isn't one. You are describing a preference program of some kind. A quota says that we must have x% of one type, y% of another, and so on. Programs designed in this way are unlawful, and have been for some time.
I think you are also being disingenuous when you describe such preference programs as preferring someone who is not qualified over someone who is. The more likely reality is that the preference program takes two qualified candidates and uses such preferences to give one candidate more weight. Whether you agree with this approach or not, it doesn't matter. The 'bonus' does not apply to the qualification, it applies to the candidate. It is not a perfect system by any means.
Never attribute to malice that which can be accounted for by stupidity.
I suppose that anyone who gets passed over for a promotion feels crappy about it, and perhaps they do feel that someone else got the job, or got accepted to that degree program solely because of their gender or ethnicity. Maybe they're right. Or, and I think this is the more likely scenario, maybe they got passed over because they have a shitty attitude and a chip on their shoulder and whine about other people getting what is 'rightfully' theirs. Nothing kills a career faster than a sense of entitlement, and everyone hates a prima donna. Those people are what is usually called, in case you don't know, a pain in the ass, which is probably the real reason they didn't get promoted in the first place.
So yeah, back from veering off-topic, I thought Padilla is serving way too heavy a sentence, and considering the evidence that he is now insane because of his treatment as a guest of the state, he's serving that overly harsh sentence in the wrong place.
With respect to intelligence and sources, federal courts are well-equipped to consider evidence furnished by sources that must remain secret. There are numerous cases where sensitive national security issues are part of the case, and that evidence was admitted in ways that protected the sources. I highly doubt that they airballed Padilla et. al. to protect intelligence assets in place. So I just don't buy that argument. The guy was a small fish at best, and evidently not the brightest guy, either, and he had a tendency to shoot his mouth off, to boot. Just because you attend a training camp in the Afghan hinterland, that doesn't mean much. By all accounts, he washed out, which means he didn't make the cut.
Padilla's charges were in no way related to 9/11. Please refer to the indictment and verdict. Nothing in the complaint or indictment says anything about 9/11.
You should familiarize yourself with the case under discussion before calling someone else's post 'tripe'.
It says that Padilla participated in a conspiracy to kidnap people, and kill U.S. citizens and foreign nationals somewhere, somehow. Whether or not any of the plans could or were going to happen is what is in question. Padilla was initially trotted out as the poster boy for the Justice Department's efforts against terrorism. When it became clear that they busted some schlub who was probably not capable of holding up a 7-11, let alone plan a mass murder, they had to make something stick, lest they look ineffective.
Yes, I am familiar with criminal conspiracy, and I also know that it is used by prosecutors for a variety of reasons, some of them legit, others not so much. The threat of prosecution for conspiracy is often used to elicit testimony against the target of another investigation. Conspiracy is also used when a prosecutor can't get enough evidence to convict on a more direct charge. Sometimes this is all they have to prosecute a true criminal. It's also used as a face-saving technique by prosecutors in high-profile cases that turn out to be less than originally hyped.
I use the term 'thought crime' advisedly. Until quite recently, it was not a crime to simply *want* to commit a crime. It's not, or was not, illegal to want to rob a bank, or even plan to rob a bank, as long as you don't actually rob a bank. I'm sure that at some point in your life, you have wanted to strike another person. As long as you do not act on this, you have not committed a crime. If I get together with my buddies, and plan out a bank heist, that is not illegal or a conspiracy unless we actually do it, or get caught in the act of doing it. Padilla traveled abroad, expressed a desire to carry out some kind of attack, and may have planned something. The guy is also not very bright, and was told by a local cleric to master English before attempting to learn Arabic. If they had more concrete evidence that these guys were planning something, believe me, it would have appeared in that indictment. It does not, so I can only conclude that what's in the indictment was all they had. After 4 years in solitary confinement, that's all they got? Pretty thin.
Your example of 'hate crimes' as 'thought crimes' baffles me. Why is it inappropriate to consider the motivations of the perpetrator of a crime? You know, we have 1st and 2nd degree murder, manslaughter and other variants that consider the motivation of someone who kills another, but committing a crime motivated by bigotry is a 'thought crime'? Is that a thought crime in the same sense as the difference between murder 1 and murder 2? There is an argument to be made that some of these could be 'aggravated', hence obviating the need for hate crimes statutes, but do we not regard bigotry as an especially odious motivation for crime? Smashing a store window as an act of simple vandalism and smashing a store window and spray-painting 'Kristallnacht' on the storefront are two levels of crime, are they not?
17 years is a long time for a guy who never actually *did* anything. He talked to some people, he filled out a form. That was it. So I'd say he was far from guilty.
The main reason they declared him an enemy combatant is because they couldn't get him on anything. It used to be that in the U.S., you had to do more than want to commit a crime to get even 24 hours in jail. Now, as Padilla's case proves, we have thought crimes.
It happened to Jose Padilla, U.S. citizen. I don't think you realize what happens when the president declares you an enemy combatant in this manner. It would be illegal for the local police to investigate. It would be illegal for your family or friends to ask about what happened to you, and illegal for anyone to tell them. All your assets would be frozen, so you cannot hire a lawyer, but that doesn't matter, because it is illegal for anyone to work on your behalf. Read these things, it's all there.
All this on the President's say-so, and his say-so alone.
I was surprised at how stable it was. How quickly people forget the wailing and gnashing of teeth that occurred before SP2... I do, and Vista has been remarkably problem-free for me as well, and I am not like the upthread poster's girlfriend. I do software development (with Java) and Vista has been very good overall.
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Of all the bits of OS X that are actually interesting and of value to users, "it's a UNIX" is a long, long, long way down the list
Depends on what you mean by "users." Web developers love it: you can be running a near-perfect approximation of your production server right on your laptop and have commercial desktop apps...
There's nothing especially unique about MacOS that lets that happen. You can say the same thing about Windows or Linux. Unless you're running MacOS on your production server (you aren't). On today's machines, you can have a miniature version of just about any configuration, I can't think of anything in that respect that MacOS can do that others can't.
It certainly depends on the web development you're doing, but my company's developers use everything from Windows to BSD to MacOS, and by far the hardest ones to support are the ones using MacOS. They have the most problems getting our tools configured properly, and I had one guy who spent an entire day trying to figure out how to get Tomcat to run. We don't use anything esoteric, straight Java, no frills. On every other system used by our teams, it's been trivial to get things to run, but every Mac user has had to jump through flaming hoops to get where those that use Windows or Linux get to in under an hour.
I think that the Web developers who use it use it because that's the system they're comfortable with, not because it offers anything that cannot be done with another system.
This whole meme about how software companies are a 'young man's' game... I just don't get it.
Maybe at your way-hip, Web 2.0, here today, gone tomorrow kind of outfit, that might be true, but perhaps that's the reason why those companies always tank.
At 36, I am the youngest member of our operations in the US. My boss and our CTO cut their teeth on punch cards. As an aside, our CTO never completed college, which leads me to my main point.
Do you want this degree because you believe you'll pick up some more marketable skills, or because you're interested in CS? If you can already write code, you won't learn any more of that getting a CS degree.
If you want to boost your paycheck, getting a BS in CS may or may not help you.
After having spent about 15 years in the software business, I can safely say that only about half of the engineers and developers I have worked with have formal education in CS. The rest have a wide variety of backgrounds. I myself have a BA in Sociology. One of our developers was a veterinarian!
I have also worked with some people with CS degrees who were shitty engineers, and difficult to work with, as well.
Go get your bachelor's in CS, but do it for the learning, not because you think it will get you a higher paycheck.
Actually, if a textbook is not acceptable to either the California or Texas State curricula, it's much more costly to the publisher.
My wife was a teacher, we have a library full of 'California edition' textbooks.
Private schools are not businesses. Accredited, non-parochial private schools (at least the ones worth sending your kids to) are non-profit organizations.
Teachers are not service industry workers, either.
ne gavarite pa-Russki
Indeed they did. Now, Clinton claims that they are being 'disenfranchised'...
It's silly. There are rules. If a person sends in their absentee ballot after election day, they can't complain about being disenfranchised. Same idea applies here.
If it was clear that Obama had the lead in FL and MI, I seriously doubt that Clinton would be fighting so hard for their 'rights'.
Small schools, too.
How can you prove that an OD was not an accident vs. suicide?
Either way, I'm sure that if it involved illegal activity on behalf of the insured it changes the landscape.
Not editorials, coverage, which involves more than simply repeating what the person behind the podium says. It means having to look around, making a phone call or two, checking the story out, see if the people behind the podium are saying things that actually reflect what's going on. Reporters used to do that. Now, they credulously repeat whatever the mouthpiece says, as if they would have no reason to lie.
Editorials are just opinion pieces, which is not the same as reporting. Reporting is supposed to aim for some kind of accurate picture of reality.
The trouble with that is that sometimes the facts run counter to what people want you to think, or the facts don't agree with what people think should be happening, and so then the reporter is accused of bias.
Am I? What do you mean? I wasn't talking about Iraq, and as far as I am concerned, we need to just leave Iraq, because it doesn't matter who the US backs or doesn't back, going there was a mistake.
War is a contest of wills. It ends when one side decides they can't win. That decision is based very much on each side's assessment of the other side's morale.
This would only be the case if, say, we were fighting the Iraqi army in Kuwait after they had invaded Kuwait, or the German army in France after they invaded France. It is decidedly not the case when fighting against an irregular guerrilla opponent that is trying to oust an occupier.
Do you really think that the insurgents would stop fighting if they saw nothing but "people breathing fire, publicly demanding that Iraq be nuked" on American TV?
Let's put it another way: If the US was occupied by a foreign power, would their TV broadcasts, however extreme and bellicose, convince you that your cause was hopeless? I doubt that, it might even reinforce your resolve. If their TV showed nothing but how unpopular their occupation was, would that convince you to keep fighting? Maybe it would, but the critical piece here is that regardless of what their TV keeps saying, you're going to fight until either you get killed or the occupation is over, and what the other side's TV news is saying is just background noise.
Bottom line is that as long as our armed forces are there, they are going to be attacked. No amount of cheerleading is going to change that.
Small correction: Yoo was a lawyer at the DOJ, not Bush's counsel. That job has been occupied by winners like Alberto Gonzalez and Harriet Miers.
Do you think it might have bucked up our fighting spirit, just a tad, to think that our enemy was near surrender?
Depends. How many times have we heard that the insurgency in Iraq was "in its last throes", or that we have reached a "defining moment"?
In terms of Vietnam, it may have, but it would have done nothing to change the fact that the government we were backing in Saigon was loathed by the people in the South. Nixon assured everyone that we could see the light at the end of the tunnel. No one believed him.
What lost Vietnam was not a lack of fighting spirit in our soldiers, or news coverage at home, or too much civilian control of the military, or any of those right-wing talking points about Vietnam. We lost Vietnam because we backed a thoroughly corrupt, inept and brutal regime in Saigon.
If the U.S. had spent more time trying to foster a real alternative to what Hanoi was offering instead of more of the same old corrupt rule by kleptocrats, Vietnam could have ended differently. As it was, what we wanted Vietnam to accept was the same old colonial situation, minus the foreigners.
We "lost" Vietnam because we backed the wrong people in Saigon, and no amount of fighting spirit or rah-rah news coverage at home was going to change that.
It's not so much that it's "pro-war". They just repeat the talking points without providing any background, context or countervailing facts. They become tacitly pro-war.
How would a server know how to appropriately position an element on a page if all the processing was put back on the server?
If you don't mind committing suicide, you can 'be' an atomic bomb. Place a piece of U-235, or Pu-239 in one hand, and a nice alpha emitter in the other. Smack 'em together. No fancy designs needed.
Oh yes, don't get me wrong, a good UI is key to any successful app, but it is possible to pay too much attention to cosmetics at the expense of underlying functions. I do people-facing apps for a living, so I pay special attention to UI elements. Truth be told, I don't think that iTunes' ui is anything special.
I never can get this quote quite right, but 'Never attribute to malice that which can be accounted for by stupidity'. These unpublished APIs were probably custom-built for Safari, and since Apple apparently has a wicked case of not-made-here, this is not a surprise. I don't use OSX, but I do use iTunes, and I can only conclude that Apple just does not have a priority placed on well-engineered apps. They look great, but on Windows especially, they are pretty pitiful. I am always amazed at how much memory iTunes takes up for itself considering what it does. If I fire up Windows Media Player, loathsome as it is, it uses up a fraction of the resources. I run a Postgresql database server on my laptopn for development, and it does not even approach the big ol' Homer Simpson ass print that iTunes does. I don't get it. Do they deploy some kind of bottom-up graphics library? A monstrous cache? What? For all the memory that sucker takes up, it sure runs ponderously slow.
Enough of that. Apple just doesn't make applications very well. They put all the resources into the UI, and skimp on the important stuff.
Yes, some kids to get snatched, raped, and murdered. But there are so few that it's impossible to protect against it since the circumstances are so statistically anomalous that they can't be predicted.
I see where you're coming from, but I have to disagree here. I would wager that in most of these cases, the child was snatched, raped, etc. by someone known to them. Looking to shield children from strangers who mean them harm is very tough to do. Recognizing warning signs exhibited by relatives, friends and neighbors and overcoming denial about it is what would actually have the chance of saving a kid.
And in case your not familiar with that, it is where a minority or a person with some protected quality is able to use that status as a bonus to their qualifications and take jobs or positions they aren't technically qualified for or the most qualified person for the job/position/whatever.
Don't patronize me. I know what a quota is, and what you describe here isn't one. You are describing a preference program of some kind. A quota says that we must have x% of one type, y% of another, and so on. Programs designed in this way are unlawful, and have been for some time.
I think you are also being disingenuous when you describe such preference programs as preferring someone who is not qualified over someone who is. The more likely reality is that the preference program takes two qualified candidates and uses such preferences to give one candidate more weight. Whether you agree with this approach or not, it doesn't matter. The 'bonus' does not apply to the qualification, it applies to the candidate. It is not a perfect system by any means.
Never attribute to malice that which can be accounted for by stupidity.
I suppose that anyone who gets passed over for a promotion feels crappy about it, and perhaps they do feel that someone else got the job, or got accepted to that degree program solely because of their gender or ethnicity. Maybe they're right. Or, and I think this is the more likely scenario, maybe they got passed over because they have a shitty attitude and a chip on their shoulder and whine about other people getting what is 'rightfully' theirs. Nothing kills a career faster than a sense of entitlement, and everyone hates a prima donna. Those people are what is usually called, in case you don't know, a pain in the ass, which is probably the real reason they didn't get promoted in the first place.
So yeah, back from veering off-topic, I thought Padilla is serving way too heavy a sentence, and considering the evidence that he is now insane because of his treatment as a guest of the state, he's serving that overly harsh sentence in the wrong place.
With respect to intelligence and sources, federal courts are well-equipped to consider evidence furnished by sources that must remain secret. There are numerous cases where sensitive national security issues are part of the case, and that evidence was admitted in ways that protected the sources. I highly doubt that they airballed Padilla et. al. to protect intelligence assets in place. So I just don't buy that argument. The guy was a small fish at best, and evidently not the brightest guy, either, and he had a tendency to shoot his mouth off, to boot. Just because you attend a training camp in the Afghan hinterland, that doesn't mean much. By all accounts, he washed out, which means he didn't make the cut.
Padilla's charges were in no way related to 9/11. Please refer to the indictment and verdict. Nothing in the complaint or indictment says anything about 9/11.
You should familiarize yourself with the case under discussion before calling someone else's post 'tripe'.
It says that Padilla participated in a conspiracy to kidnap people, and kill U.S. citizens and foreign nationals somewhere, somehow. Whether or not any of the plans could or were going to happen is what is in question. Padilla was initially trotted out as the poster boy for the Justice Department's efforts against terrorism. When it became clear that they busted some schlub who was probably not capable of holding up a 7-11, let alone plan a mass murder, they had to make something stick, lest they look ineffective.
Yes, I am familiar with criminal conspiracy, and I also know that it is used by prosecutors for a variety of reasons, some of them legit, others not so much. The threat of prosecution for conspiracy is often used to elicit testimony against the target of another investigation. Conspiracy is also used when a prosecutor can't get enough evidence to convict on a more direct charge. Sometimes this is all they have to prosecute a true criminal. It's also used as a face-saving technique by prosecutors in high-profile cases that turn out to be less than originally hyped.
I use the term 'thought crime' advisedly. Until quite recently, it was not a crime to simply *want* to commit a crime. It's not, or was not, illegal to want to rob a bank, or even plan to rob a bank, as long as you don't actually rob a bank. I'm sure that at some point in your life, you have wanted to strike another person. As long as you do not act on this, you have not committed a crime. If I get together with my buddies, and plan out a bank heist, that is not illegal or a conspiracy unless we actually do it, or get caught in the act of doing it. Padilla traveled abroad, expressed a desire to carry out some kind of attack, and may have planned something. The guy is also not very bright, and was told by a local cleric to master English before attempting to learn Arabic. If they had more concrete evidence that these guys were planning something, believe me, it would have appeared in that indictment. It does not, so I can only conclude that what's in the indictment was all they had. After 4 years in solitary confinement, that's all they got? Pretty thin.
Your example of 'hate crimes' as 'thought crimes' baffles me. Why is it inappropriate to consider the motivations of the perpetrator of a crime? You know, we have 1st and 2nd degree murder, manslaughter and other variants that consider the motivation of someone who kills another, but committing a crime motivated by bigotry is a 'thought crime'? Is that a thought crime in the same sense as the difference between murder 1 and murder 2? There is an argument to be made that some of these could be 'aggravated', hence obviating the need for hate crimes statutes, but do we not regard bigotry as an especially odious motivation for crime? Smashing a store window as an act of simple vandalism and smashing a store window and spray-painting 'Kristallnacht' on the storefront are two levels of crime, are they not?
17 years is a long time for a guy who never actually *did* anything. He talked to some people, he filled out a form. That was it. So I'd say he was far from guilty.
The main reason they declared him an enemy combatant is because they couldn't get him on anything. It used to be that in the U.S., you had to do more than want to commit a crime to get even 24 hours in jail. Now, as Padilla's case proves, we have thought crimes.
Fourth Amendment. Look it up.
It happened to Jose Padilla, U.S. citizen.
I don't think you realize what happens when the president declares you an enemy combatant in this manner. It would be illegal for the local police to investigate. It would be illegal for your family or friends to ask about what happened to you, and illegal for anyone to tell them. All your assets would be frozen, so you cannot hire a lawyer, but that doesn't matter, because it is illegal for anyone to work on your behalf. Read these things, it's all there.
All this on the President's say-so, and his say-so alone.
I was surprised at how stable it was. How quickly people forget the wailing and gnashing of teeth that occurred before SP2... I do, and Vista has been remarkably problem-free for me as well, and I am not like the upthread poster's girlfriend. I do software development (with Java) and Vista has been very good overall.
Maybe we just got lucky.