First of all, you can't "own" a copy of any cinema film, not unless you happen to be a Hollywood mogul - at least, not in the sense that ownership actually allows you to do what you want with your property.
I'm not sure if you're being pedantic, or swallowing the fud about copyright being property. He never claimed that he could do those things - he clearly meant "own" in the "Own it now on DVD" sense, i.e., owning the physical item, as is the most common usage of the term. He never claimed he could own the copyright. (Indeed, he even explicitly stated "own a copy", not "own the film".)
As for hotdogs, can't you just learn to keep your cakehole shut for a couple of hours and enjoy a film?
No, but if I can't enjoy a snack or drink as I watch (except at their prices), why bother at all? That's all the more reason to enjoy it at home.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy an occasional trip to the cinema, but I think he makes some valid points.
This does seem to be true - people always seem to bring up "But it has ads" even now. It's sad though - I always remember Opera for being the only decent browser that was an alternative to Firefox (i.e., I was using it long before Firefox was even thought of). If people can accept the change that Firefox is now a valid alternative, I wonder why they can't accept the change that Opera no longer has ads.
In what sense does it feel "foreign"? I admit I can't stand the default flashy interface that they added in later versions, but it can easily be switched back to the classic interface (and really, they were only jumping on the same bandwagon that everyone else, including Microsoft, have been doing for their UIs on Windows, so it isn't really "foreign").
Why would you say "for some reason" when you admit, in the very next sentence, that you know precisely what the reason is (in regards to Opera)?
Well, what I mean is that I don't know if that necessarily is the reason, it's just one reason. And if being open source was all that mattered, as I say, people should be praising Haiku, and criticising OS X, so it doesn't seem to be the whole explanation here.
We spent the better part of a decade getting all of these various applications working on Linux, and nobody wants to go back to square 1 with a different OS.
Well you did, but not everyone wants the same thing. After all, isn't that why Linux was started in the first place, because somebody wanted something different, no matter how difficult the challenge seemed?
And your argument would apply to OS X - shouldn't Apple be working on Linux, instead of OS X, by this reasoning?
Most of the BeOS advantages are things like "uses multiple CPUs better, has a fancy database filesystem, etc..." Stuff that's nice, but not completely different from what's already available.
So what are the unique advantages of Linux or OS X? Ask this question of OS X, and all you get are either criticisms of Windows, or vague "It just works, it um does it better". No OS has unique advantages these days, and the same vague things can be said of any alternative OS.
I loved it too - out of all the various alternative PC OSs I installed over the years, BeOS was the only one that installed with ease (even coping with complete changes of hardware without batting an eyelid), and was enjoyable to use. Certainly superior to Linux at the time (which back then, you were still reliant on the command line, and Red Hat wouldn't support my graphics card in anything higher than 320x200!), but sadly killed off by MS.
I also thought it was interesting the way that the BeBoxes were multiprocessor as standard. Just think, if the platform was better supported and still around, it seems reasonable that applications would have been more likely to support multiprocessing, and be in a much better position to take advantage of multicore processors. Compared with what's happened for all other platforms - few applications bothered to support it, and now most computers run with 50% sat idle.
Myself, I don't see anything worth the effort and expense of putting together an OS X box. But I don't feel the need to post about it to every OS X article. And if I did, just see how quickly I'd be modded down.
It's Haiku, not BeOS. And I wasn't aware there was a limit to the number of operating systems allowed to exist. Is there a limit for any kind of software, or just operating systems?
You know, where Brian tries to separate the People's Front of Judea and the Campaign to Free Galilee.
Except there they had a common cause. In the market, we have this thing known as competition.
We already have several OS alternatives out there, Mac, Linux, BSD. Why throw another in the mix which will never be supported mainstream?
Well, why bother with Mac, Linux or BSD then? Surely, it would be better if everyone just used Windows, right?
For a site supposedly traditionally supportive of alternative platforms, in practice there's a surprising amount of contempt for any alternative platform that doesn't fall into the cool club of Linux and OS X. I'm not a Haiku user, but if someone is writing an open source OS, good luck to them. Or maybe we should give up, and ridicule anyone who doesn't use Windows?
(I see this with other things - e.g., Internet Explorer is bad, Firefox is good... but Opera for some reason is also bad. The usual argument of it not being open source doesn't even apply to Haiku, though. By that reasoning, we should be praising Haiku, and criticising OS X!)
Is anyone who starts an open source project flogging a "deadhorse", unless they're already mainstream? What a depressing attitude.
"Deadhorse" doesn't make sense anyway - according to Wikipedia, Haiku is a relatively new OS, only having received significant development in the last few years. Oh, it's a dead horse because it maintains some compatibility with BeOS? Big deal - by that reasoning, we should tag every OS X article "deadhorse", on the grounds that it shares its trademark name with a long dead twenty five year old OS that was never even particularly good at the time.
This is an example of why Wikipedia is fundamentally flawed
I hope you don't lecture logic - the problem here isn't specific to Wikipedia; the problem here is the media not checking facts, and not attributing their sources.
and in my job as a university lecturer, I grade essays that cite Wikipedia no higher than 2:2.
And for anyone who cites any encyclopedia, I hope.
Blah. Do you know how much CPU it took to fucking land someone on the moon? Why does it take 200 times that just to browse the web?
Because computationally, browsing the web is much harder than landing on the moon.
You're taking advantage of people's conception of "landing on the moon" as being something very hard - the fallacy here is that it's hard in other ways.
I mean, I might as well say that riding on a unicycle whilst balancing three apples on my nose is very hard - but it would clearly be ludicrous to claim there's something amazing about the fact that someone could do so without using any computer at all to do it.
Put it another way - why weren't we browsing the web in 1969? Perhaps it isn't so easy as you thought.
[Oh, and you could browse the web on a 7MHz 68000 which whilst still far more than what was used in Apollo, is still far less than today's machines - the reason you need a lot more now is computers do more than simple web pages.]
The average boot time is still ~60 seconds on the desktop.
Nothing to do with CPU time. Oh, and if we're comparing meaningless things, that's still much quicker than the time to get to the moon!
Modern software is bloat. Let's do something about that, first.
You first - let's see you write it better, if modern software is really so inefficient.
There isn't a "verifiability over truth" policy - rather, the threshold for inclusion is verifiability, not truth. You're reading it in the wrong direction: this policy doesn't mean that untrue "verifiable" things should be added. Rather, it's to stop people claiming that things should be added because they claim it's true, even though no one can verify it
Yes, it's unfortunate that sometimes seemingly "verifiable" things can turn out to be untrue. But the same situation would have occurred if the policy was "truth" - since someone would still be claiming this fact was true, based on what the media article said (or perhaps, not based on anything).
The media make a false claim without attribution or fact checking, and you're complaining about Wikipedia?
The question should be: Who takes the media seriously. They're great if you want a bit of pop culture or celebrity gossip, but geo-politics? Current events? Stop.
any student or journalist who uses it as source should be ridiculed, then shot.
The same goes for any encyclopedia, of course. But the problem isn't that they cited Wikipedia as a source (if they did, it would've been clear not to use the article in Wikipedia as a source), the problem is that the article made false claims without attribution. At that point, Wikipedia reporting that spiegel.de claimed his name was such-and-such was an entirely factual statement (since it was attributed), and the false claim lies with spiegel.de.
What about all the other times when someone makes a false claim, and it gets repeated around the media like some bad game of chinese whispers, without attribution? There, we never hear about it, or even find out it's happened in the first place. The fact that Wikipedia's edit history allows us to see it happening here is a step upwards.
I agree that there's nothing specifically wrong with Wikipedia here. The far bigger problem is the way that the media copy information from each other, and elsewhere, without checking any facts they quote. Given how, unlike Wikipedia, people are far more willing to treat the news as truth, this is very worrying.
The same circular referencing could happen between any other kind of source too - nothing special about Wikipedia.
The only difference here is that, thanks to Wikipedia's edit history, you can see the problem occurring. When it happens any other time, we don't even know it.
Der Spiegel is not a scholarly journal, either. It also cannot be taken as a primary source of information.
No, but it is a secondary source. This is a problem - what to do if secondary sources are wrong? Moving to primary sources doesn't help, as they could still be wrong. Also, not allowing secondary sources would mean that finding citations would be far harder.
I think the key point is attribution. When you see "Paris is the capital of England[ref Der Spiegel]", this is actually shorthand for "Der Spiegel states that Paris is the capital of England". Suddenly, it's clear that it's not Wikipedia that's making the false claim: the claim is clearly attributed to Der Spiegel.
And indeed, this problem occurred because Der Spiegel didn't state their references (like most media sources). Had they attributed the claim to Wikipedia, then it would be instantly clear not to use them as a source for Wikipedia. So the fault lies clearly with Der Spiegel, for making a false claim without attribution.
I'd rather the EU was spending my tax euros on something of more immediate consequence
Well, on the plus side, if we hadn't given money to CERN, we wouldn't be able to listen to you moaning about them on the web...
like a new generation of nuclear reactors, or advanced solar power plants, both of which would, I imagine, employ the kind of engineers and engineering companies working on the LHC.
People are working on those things too. This isn't some computer game where you only have limited numbers of scientists, and can make one thing go faster by instantly moving your scientists from one job to the other.
IIRC, the costs of the LHC are on the same order as the London 2012 Olympics - shall we cancel that, too? (And how many days in Iraq does it come to?) And the UK's yearly contribution is comparable to the cost of the Royal family.
No data is lost, he just has to log in again. Big deal. How is that anymore annoying than someone walking to someone else's PC and logging them out, or shutting the computer off?
And whether or not data is lost, if this sort of thing is happening if your office, I think there are worse problems. I mean, you might as well say "What if I walk down to Cubicle #3, and throw his computer out the window?" Is that a hardware flaw?
So I could get you to make you think the opposite, just by posting a stupid comment? Okay then:
These new plans are absolutely necessary, because there are terrorists lurking on every corner, and underneath people's beds! This plan will magically get rid of them forever!
Personally when I judge an issue, it's the strongest and most convincing arguments that I cornern myself with, not the weakest or most stupid ones.
Saying "The government keeps a log of when I leave the country... POLICE STATE BIG BROTHER!!!" is somewhat overstating it. I know I roll my eyes when I hear that term, because it gets thrown around so often. It immediately reduced my interest in this issue.
Note that neither the article nor the summary referred to a police state in the first place. This was only mentioned by the first post - your interest in a topic is reduced just by a random person commenting on Slashdot?
The article talks about big brother and surveillance, but that's very different to "police state", and those labels are much more appropriate to this story - Zimbabwe is irrelevant, because "big brother" or "surveillance" aren't to do with "people being murdered".
the current laws that are being abused were part of a terrorism act which is being inforced by stupid councils rather than police.
We're a council state!
But I'm not sure that's true - people arrested and held without charge for 30 days under terrorism laws is something that is decided and enforced entirely by the police.
I don't see that it demeans the phrase. If people are murdered in a "police state", I don't say "They lived in a police state" if I want to convey the gravity, I say "They were murdered".
No, I don't think that we are in a police state. But the term is not some magical phrase that is only reserved for the absolute worse case possible - that demeans the phrase. You are wrong to equate police state with "very bad things like murder" in the first place. The term is a phrase describing how things are run in a country, and not what necessarily takes place in such a country. It's also not a case that one either is or isn't - a country typically has many different systems, and it's rather simplistic to catgorise all countries as either being a police state, or not being one. You could have countries that were generally okay, but where they gave judicial powers to the police. OTOH, you could have regimes where people were murdered by the state, but which wasn't a police state at all, because it was still a democratic country with oversight by the courts.
I'm sorry if you can't see that, but if you keep watering down the word people will not realize when REAL problems occur as they'll have no way to describe them, just like the boy who cried wolf.
The only one watering down phrases is you, by mistaking a term describing how things are done in a country, with how many people are murdered in such a country. By your reasoning, a state where millions of people were imprisoned by the choice of the police wouldn't be a police state, so long as they were simply "inconvenienced" and not murdered.
I entirely agree. Saying "But but, it's not as bad as [insert some very bad country]" is not exactly a ringing endorsement!
What happened to striving towards a country that values freedom? Now instead, it's okay to strive towards countries like Zimbabwe, just so long as things don't get as bad as them? This trend in itself is worrying.
Say what you will about the United States but at least it takes more than a majority vote in the House of Representatives to start taking away our rights.
Yes, but that's a property of the US Constitution, and not the fact that you have guns.
The OP's point wasn't to say that the US was worse than the UK. The point is that everytime there's an article like this about the UK, we get the inevitable "If only you had guns". The fact that similar things happen in the US, despite your guns, suggest that the point is irrelevant.
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, you can't "own" a copy of any cinema film, not unless you happen to be a Hollywood mogul - at least, not in the sense that ownership actually allows you to do what you want with your property.
I'm not sure if you're being pedantic, or swallowing the fud about copyright being property. He never claimed that he could do those things - he clearly meant "own" in the "Own it now on DVD" sense, i.e., owning the physical item, as is the most common usage of the term. He never claimed he could own the copyright. (Indeed, he even explicitly stated "own a copy", not "own the film".)
As for hotdogs, can't you just learn to keep your cakehole shut for a couple of hours and enjoy a film?
No, but if I can't enjoy a snack or drink as I watch (except at their prices), why bother at all? That's all the more reason to enjoy it at home.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoy an occasional trip to the cinema, but I think he makes some valid points.
This does seem to be true - people always seem to bring up "But it has ads" even now. It's sad though - I always remember Opera for being the only decent browser that was an alternative to Firefox (i.e., I was using it long before Firefox was even thought of). If people can accept the change that Firefox is now a valid alternative, I wonder why they can't accept the change that Opera no longer has ads.
In what sense does it feel "foreign"? I admit I can't stand the default flashy interface that they added in later versions, but it can easily be switched back to the classic interface (and really, they were only jumping on the same bandwagon that everyone else, including Microsoft, have been doing for their UIs on Windows, so it isn't really "foreign").
Why would you say "for some reason" when you admit, in the very next sentence, that you know precisely what the reason is (in regards to Opera)?
Well, what I mean is that I don't know if that necessarily is the reason, it's just one reason. And if being open source was all that mattered, as I say, people should be praising Haiku, and criticising OS X, so it doesn't seem to be the whole explanation here.
We spent the better part of a decade getting all of these various applications working on Linux, and nobody wants to go back to square 1 with a different OS.
Well you did, but not everyone wants the same thing. After all, isn't that why Linux was started in the first place, because somebody wanted something different, no matter how difficult the challenge seemed?
And your argument would apply to OS X - shouldn't Apple be working on Linux, instead of OS X, by this reasoning?
Most of the BeOS advantages are things like "uses multiple CPUs better, has a fancy database filesystem, etc..." Stuff that's nice, but not completely different from what's already available.
So what are the unique advantages of Linux or OS X? Ask this question of OS X, and all you get are either criticisms of Windows, or vague "It just works, it um does it better". No OS has unique advantages these days, and the same vague things can be said of any alternative OS.
I loved it too - out of all the various alternative PC OSs I installed over the years, BeOS was the only one that installed with ease (even coping with complete changes of hardware without batting an eyelid), and was enjoyable to use. Certainly superior to Linux at the time (which back then, you were still reliant on the command line, and Red Hat wouldn't support my graphics card in anything higher than 320x200!), but sadly killed off by MS.
I also thought it was interesting the way that the BeBoxes were multiprocessor as standard. Just think, if the platform was better supported and still around, it seems reasonable that applications would have been more likely to support multiprocessing, and be in a much better position to take advantage of multicore processors. Compared with what's happened for all other platforms - few applications bothered to support it, and now most computers run with 50% sat idle.
Myself, I don't see anything worth the effort and expense of putting together an OS X box. But I don't feel the need to post about it to every OS X article. And if I did, just see how quickly I'd be modded down.
It's Haiku, not BeOS. And I wasn't aware there was a limit to the number of operating systems allowed to exist. Is there a limit for any kind of software, or just operating systems?
You know, where Brian tries to separate the People's Front of Judea and the Campaign to Free Galilee.
Except there they had a common cause. In the market, we have this thing known as competition.
We already have several OS alternatives out there, Mac, Linux, BSD. Why throw another in the mix which will never be supported mainstream?
Well, why bother with Mac, Linux or BSD then? Surely, it would be better if everyone just used Windows, right?
For a site supposedly traditionally supportive of alternative platforms, in practice there's a surprising amount of contempt for any alternative platform that doesn't fall into the cool club of Linux and OS X. I'm not a Haiku user, but if someone is writing an open source OS, good luck to them. Or maybe we should give up, and ridicule anyone who doesn't use Windows?
(I see this with other things - e.g., Internet Explorer is bad, Firefox is good ... but Opera for some reason is also bad. The usual argument of it not being open source doesn't even apply to Haiku, though. By that reasoning, we should be praising Haiku, and criticising OS X!)
Is anyone who starts an open source project flogging a "deadhorse", unless they're already mainstream? What a depressing attitude.
"Deadhorse" doesn't make sense anyway - according to Wikipedia, Haiku is a relatively new OS, only having received significant development in the last few years. Oh, it's a dead horse because it maintains some compatibility with BeOS? Big deal - by that reasoning, we should tag every OS X article "deadhorse", on the grounds that it shares its trademark name with a long dead twenty five year old OS that was never even particularly good at the time.
This is an example of why Wikipedia is fundamentally flawed
I hope you don't lecture logic - the problem here isn't specific to Wikipedia; the problem here is the media not checking facts, and not attributing their sources.
and in my job as a university lecturer, I grade essays that cite Wikipedia no higher than 2:2.
And for anyone who cites any encyclopedia, I hope.
(What about someone who cites spiegel.de?)
Blah. Do you know how much CPU it took to fucking land someone on the moon? Why does it take 200 times that just to browse the web?
Because computationally, browsing the web is much harder than landing on the moon.
You're taking advantage of people's conception of "landing on the moon" as being something very hard - the fallacy here is that it's hard in other ways.
I mean, I might as well say that riding on a unicycle whilst balancing three apples on my nose is very hard - but it would clearly be ludicrous to claim there's something amazing about the fact that someone could do so without using any computer at all to do it.
Put it another way - why weren't we browsing the web in 1969? Perhaps it isn't so easy as you thought.
[Oh, and you could browse the web on a 7MHz 68000 which whilst still far more than what was used in Apollo, is still far less than today's machines - the reason you need a lot more now is computers do more than simple web pages.]
The average boot time is still ~60 seconds on the desktop.
Nothing to do with CPU time. Oh, and if we're comparing meaningless things, that's still much quicker than the time to get to the moon!
Modern software is bloat. Let's do something about that, first.
You first - let's see you write it better, if modern software is really so inefficient.
There isn't a "verifiability over truth" policy - rather, the threshold for inclusion is verifiability, not truth. You're reading it in the wrong direction: this policy doesn't mean that untrue "verifiable" things should be added. Rather, it's to stop people claiming that things should be added because they claim it's true, even though no one can verify it
Yes, it's unfortunate that sometimes seemingly "verifiable" things can turn out to be untrue. But the same situation would have occurred if the policy was "truth" - since someone would still be claiming this fact was true, based on what the media article said (or perhaps, not based on anything).
"Verifiable" is meant to be a subset of "truth".
The media make a false claim without attribution or fact checking, and you're complaining about Wikipedia?
The question should be: Who takes the media seriously. They're great if you want a bit of pop culture or celebrity gossip, but geo-politics? Current events? Stop.
any student or journalist who uses it as source should be ridiculed, then shot.
The same goes for any encyclopedia, of course. But the problem isn't that they cited Wikipedia as a source (if they did, it would've been clear not to use the article in Wikipedia as a source), the problem is that the article made false claims without attribution. At that point, Wikipedia reporting that spiegel.de claimed his name was such-and-such was an entirely factual statement (since it was attributed), and the false claim lies with spiegel.de.
What about all the other times when someone makes a false claim, and it gets repeated around the media like some bad game of chinese whispers, without attribution? There, we never hear about it, or even find out it's happened in the first place. The fact that Wikipedia's edit history allows us to see it happening here is a step upwards.
I agree that there's nothing specifically wrong with Wikipedia here. The far bigger problem is the way that the media copy information from each other, and elsewhere, without checking any facts they quote. Given how, unlike Wikipedia, people are far more willing to treat the news as truth, this is very worrying.
The same circular referencing could happen between any other kind of source too - nothing special about Wikipedia.
The only difference here is that, thanks to Wikipedia's edit history, you can see the problem occurring. When it happens any other time, we don't even know it.
Der Spiegel is not a scholarly journal, either. It also cannot be taken as a primary source of information.
No, but it is a secondary source. This is a problem - what to do if secondary sources are wrong? Moving to primary sources doesn't help, as they could still be wrong. Also, not allowing secondary sources would mean that finding citations would be far harder.
I think the key point is attribution. When you see "Paris is the capital of England[ref Der Spiegel]", this is actually shorthand for "Der Spiegel states that Paris is the capital of England". Suddenly, it's clear that it's not Wikipedia that's making the false claim: the claim is clearly attributed to Der Spiegel.
And indeed, this problem occurred because Der Spiegel didn't state their references (like most media sources). Had they attributed the claim to Wikipedia, then it would be instantly clear not to use them as a source for Wikipedia. So the fault lies clearly with Der Spiegel, for making a false claim without attribution.
How come I posted this on Slashdot?
You posted this, thanks to the efforts of CERN - you now use their invention to criticise them.
Thankfully, they, and those who fund them, don't share your attitude. And that's why you can post to Slashdot.
Speciation has been observed.
But of course, you probably had in mind cats turning into dogs, or some other straw man version of evolution.
Well, yes, I do still use coal.
Allow me to rephrase his point: With an attitude like that, we'd still be communicating using hand-written letters.
I'd rather the EU was spending my tax euros on something of more immediate consequence
Well, on the plus side, if we hadn't given money to CERN, we wouldn't be able to listen to you moaning about them on the web...
like a new generation of nuclear reactors, or advanced solar power plants, both of which would, I imagine, employ the kind of engineers and engineering companies working on the LHC.
People are working on those things too. This isn't some computer game where you only have limited numbers of scientists, and can make one thing go faster by instantly moving your scientists from one job to the other.
IIRC, the costs of the LHC are on the same order as the London 2012 Olympics - shall we cancel that, too? (And how many days in Iraq does it come to?) And the UK's yearly contribution is comparable to the cost of the Royal family.
No data is lost, he just has to log in again. Big deal. How is that anymore annoying than someone walking to someone else's PC and logging them out, or shutting the computer off?
And whether or not data is lost, if this sort of thing is happening if your office, I think there are worse problems. I mean, you might as well say "What if I walk down to Cubicle #3, and throw his computer out the window?" Is that a hardware flaw?
So I could get you to make you think the opposite, just by posting a stupid comment? Okay then:
These new plans are absolutely necessary, because there are terrorists lurking on every corner, and underneath people's beds! This plan will magically get rid of them forever!
Personally when I judge an issue, it's the strongest and most convincing arguments that I cornern myself with, not the weakest or most stupid ones.
Saying "The government keeps a log of when I leave the country... POLICE STATE BIG BROTHER!!!" is somewhat overstating it. I know I roll my eyes when I hear that term, because it gets thrown around so often. It immediately reduced my interest in this issue.
Note that neither the article nor the summary referred to a police state in the first place. This was only mentioned by the first post - your interest in a topic is reduced just by a random person commenting on Slashdot?
The article talks about big brother and surveillance, but that's very different to "police state", and those labels are much more appropriate to this story - Zimbabwe is irrelevant, because "big brother" or "surveillance" aren't to do with "people being murdered".
the current laws that are being abused were part of a terrorism act which is being inforced by stupid councils rather than police.
We're a council state!
But I'm not sure that's true - people arrested and held without charge for 30 days under terrorism laws is something that is decided and enforced entirely by the police.
And anyway, by your own reasoning:
out military do not run armed check points
That's the "stupid" military, not the police.
I don't see that it demeans the phrase. If people are murdered in a "police state", I don't say "They lived in a police state" if I want to convey the gravity, I say "They were murdered".
No, I don't think that we are in a police state. But the term is not some magical phrase that is only reserved for the absolute worse case possible - that demeans the phrase. You are wrong to equate police state with "very bad things like murder" in the first place. The term is a phrase describing how things are run in a country, and not what necessarily takes place in such a country. It's also not a case that one either is or isn't - a country typically has many different systems, and it's rather simplistic to catgorise all countries as either being a police state, or not being one. You could have countries that were generally okay, but where they gave judicial powers to the police. OTOH, you could have regimes where people were murdered by the state, but which wasn't a police state at all, because it was still a democratic country with oversight by the courts.
I'm sorry if you can't see that, but if you keep watering down the word people will not realize when REAL problems occur as they'll have no way to describe them, just like the boy who cried wolf.
The only one watering down phrases is you, by mistaking a term describing how things are done in a country, with how many people are murdered in such a country. By your reasoning, a state where millions of people were imprisoned by the choice of the police wouldn't be a police state, so long as they were simply "inconvenienced" and not murdered.
I entirely agree. Saying "But but, it's not as bad as [insert some very bad country]" is not exactly a ringing endorsement!
What happened to striving towards a country that values freedom? Now instead, it's okay to strive towards countries like Zimbabwe, just so long as things don't get as bad as them? This trend in itself is worrying.
Say what you will about the United States but at least it takes more than a majority vote in the House of Representatives to start taking away our rights.
Yes, but that's a property of the US Constitution, and not the fact that you have guns.
The OP's point wasn't to say that the US was worse than the UK. The point is that everytime there's an article like this about the UK, we get the inevitable "If only you had guns". The fact that similar things happen in the US, despite your guns, suggest that the point is irrelevant.