yet tool around/. today and you'll also find hundreds of posters advocating stealing from their employers
If you could connect the two opinions as originating from the same person, that would be one thing, but still not a valid criticism. Attacking someone's opinion of their own freedom because they advocate a morally shaky interpretation of who owns what when their company folds and leaves them jobless, still doesn't invalidate their views on personal liberty. Do your homework and come up with a logical invalidation of one or the other opinion. Crossing them against each other and claiming that they're "inconsistent" is sloppy and only serves to show that you haven't got much substance to your own argument.
I have learned to detest the clueless who come into this forum and shout "Slashdot is inconsistent in their opinion!" as if there is such a thing as we slashdotters, all carbon copies of one another . . .
Such a system would have to be programmable, and therefore re-programmable. And no pilot in his right mind would take the controls of a vehicle that did not have manual override.
So let's figure out where to start. Anonymous "Coward?" Of course. Using this awful occasion to make such a grotesque batch of ill-willed and incredibily uninformed statements would probably get you severely injured if not outright killed, if you grew the cojones to stand up in public and actually speak these words to any group of people. You know that.
Yet even in this warm little electronic cave where you need not let anyone know your true name, you cannot suffer the thought that your fictive identity might be associated with this incredibly infantile little treatise of yours, lest someone link you to it at an inconvenient time. For example, in some other thread it might damage your credibility. But if this is typical of the tenor of your thoughts, I seriously doubt there's much to damage in the first place.
In closing, I don't think anyone needs to bother to refute or even challenge one of the categorical propositions you've chosen to grace us with here. I can hardly find any group of individual statements that qualify as a "premise" here, and even when they do they are so ridiculous that I don't need to do much to reveal their fumbling, stumbling ineptitude. They (and you) manage to hang themselves of their own dead weight. Cheers.
would it be silly to blame the airlines and airports that set the security policies that allowed people to slip onto planes with apparently innocuous items turned into deadly weapons ?
Unlike innocuous items such as razor blades, which have other purposes, or encryption, which is perfectly valid for business transactions and privacy, airline security measures have only one purpose: to prevent things like this from happening. It's perfectly valid to point out their flaws. Assigning blame is something people are liking to do much these days.
Is it silly to question the engineering designs that allow a plane to be crashed into a building ?
In this case, there are only two options. Don't build buildings, or don't build airplanes. So yes, it's very silly.
Let's require all terrorist organizations to register with the US government, and submit to having an electronic tracking device strapped to each member's leg. We will know terrorists are in violation of the law (and therefore up to something devious) when we see them moving around without their tracking devices, and we can accept that as a violation of the law and take them into custody before they blow something up.
I have to say, honestly, "What good is free speech if you're DEAD?"
Let's put it this way: What will you life have been worth if you spent it on your knees in servitude?
You're pandering to an emotional over-reaction. Yes this is horrible. But don't parade the horribleness of it in front of us and tell us we're somehow responsible for it and all future acts of its kind by our refusal to give up our freedoms.
That's more than a tad insulting, and guaranteed to get you a rhetorical slap in the face. It's a lot like the statements of this guy in that it lashes out randomly at someone who is flat-out not responsible for this act, but who is a lot nearer and less dangerous than the ones who are.
Demographic analysis of where this attack came from would seem to indicate that the entire premise that restricting freedom leads to more safety is in error. The Taliban is arguably the most oppresive government which has ever existed (at least it is the most oppresive one I have ever seen described). It slaughters people in public for the minutest infractions of its laws. It bans virtually every convenience and means of expression in order to keep its citizens pure. As a byproduct it can successfully suppress any and all critizism of its actions by those who suffer under its rule. As a further byproduct, it can comfortably host a maniac like bin Laden without comment from its own people. I've seen some people compare this to our harboring of Henry Kissinger or any other Vietnam-era "war criminal." But we're free to criticize our government for that, without fear of being jailed.
I would submit that by giving up your liberty you gain only the illusion of safety. In the short term we might see a more well-behaved public. In the long term we would suffer from extended abuses of power.
That's the "apostraphytic slippery slope" where, if you get an apostraphe out of place, it's not long before you're using "alot" as a single word, and pretty soon you descend into brainless monosyllabic 133ts93ak and no one can speak except on a third-grade level. It's a common fear in these modern times.
Slashdot Mirror
If you could connect the two opinions as originating from the same person, that would be one thing, but still not a valid criticism. Attacking someone's opinion of their own freedom because they advocate a morally shaky interpretation of who owns what when their company folds and leaves them jobless, still doesn't invalidate their views on personal liberty. Do your homework and come up with a logical invalidation of one or the other opinion. Crossing them against each other and claiming that they're "inconsistent" is sloppy and only serves to show that you haven't got much substance to your own argument.
I have learned to detest the clueless who come into this forum and shout "Slashdot is inconsistent in their opinion!" as if there is such a thing as we slashdotters, all carbon copies of one another . . .
Every once in awhile, I think farting is funny, too. But not at a funeral.
Such a system would have to be programmable, and therefore re-programmable. And no pilot in his right mind would take the controls of a vehicle that did not have manual override.
Yet even in this warm little electronic cave where you need not let anyone know your true name, you cannot suffer the thought that your fictive identity might be associated with this incredibly infantile little treatise of yours, lest someone link you to it at an inconvenient time. For example, in some other thread it might damage your credibility. But if this is typical of the tenor of your thoughts, I seriously doubt there's much to damage in the first place.
In closing, I don't think anyone needs to bother to refute or even challenge one of the categorical propositions you've chosen to grace us with here. I can hardly find any group of individual statements that qualify as a "premise" here, and even when they do they are so ridiculous that I don't need to do much to reveal their fumbling, stumbling ineptitude. They (and you) manage to hang themselves of their own dead weight. Cheers.
Unlike innocuous items such as razor blades, which have other purposes, or encryption, which is perfectly valid for business transactions and privacy, airline security measures have only one purpose: to prevent things like this from happening. It's perfectly valid to point out their flaws. Assigning blame is something people are liking to do much these days.
Is it silly to question the engineering designs that allow a plane to be crashed into a building ?
In this case, there are only two options. Don't build buildings, or don't build airplanes. So yes, it's very silly.
Let's require all terrorist organizations to register with the US government, and submit to having an electronic tracking device strapped to each member's leg. We will know terrorists are in violation of the law (and therefore up to something devious) when we see them moving around without their tracking devices, and we can accept that as a violation of the law and take them into custody before they blow something up.
Let's put it this way: What will you life have been worth if you spent it on your knees in servitude?
You're pandering to an emotional over-reaction. Yes this is horrible. But don't parade the horribleness of it in front of us and tell us we're somehow responsible for it and all future acts of its kind by our refusal to give up our freedoms.
That's more than a tad insulting, and guaranteed to get you a rhetorical slap in the face. It's a lot like the statements of this guy in that it lashes out randomly at someone who is flat-out not responsible for this act, but who is a lot nearer and less dangerous than the ones who are.
Demographic analysis of where this attack came from would seem to indicate that the entire premise that restricting freedom leads to more safety is in error. The Taliban is arguably the most oppresive government which has ever existed (at least it is the most oppresive one I have ever seen described). It slaughters people in public for the minutest infractions of its laws. It bans virtually every convenience and means of expression in order to keep its citizens pure. As a byproduct it can successfully suppress any and all critizism of its actions by those who suffer under its rule. As a further byproduct, it can comfortably host a maniac like bin Laden without comment from its own people. I've seen some people compare this to our harboring of Henry Kissinger or any other Vietnam-era "war criminal." But we're free to criticize our government for that, without fear of being jailed.
I would submit that by giving up your liberty you gain only the illusion of safety. In the short term we might see a more well-behaved public. In the long term we would suffer from extended abuses of power.
And in other news, researchers are horrified to discover that a full 50% of Americans are of below average intelligence!
You even got it wrong. It's not the backdoor. It's the crypto itself. Oh dear. Our children may have secrets from us. How troublesome that could be.
That's the "apostraphytic slippery slope" where, if you get an apostraphe out of place, it's not long before you're using "alot" as a single word, and pretty soon you descend into brainless monosyllabic 133ts93ak and no one can speak except on a third-grade level. It's a common fear in these modern times.