You may have the same concern about a suspected murderer, but that is not an excuse to violate that person's rights and rewrite the nation's laws just to get a conviction.
I am not talking about letting them go. I am talking about going through the proper channels to get the desired convictions, without stepping on the prisoners' rights and without giving the world community more of an excuse to accuse us of cavalierly disregarding international standards and the will and opinion of the int'l community.
Also, when you say, "counter to the goal," remember that the goal of keeping them in Cuba in the first place is so that they do not need to be granted the rights of prisoners on US soil. That is sneaky. They might as well circumvent the need to treat the prisoners humanely by keeping them in a country which didn't sign the convention and has no human rights protection. Then we can simply torture and execute them legally.
When a prison is set up on foreign soil for the sole purpose of circumventing US law, that is sneaky.
So you must watch the movie before posting?
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I would not be compelled to present my views about my disagreement with the article if the article had not been printed.
If someone posts an innapropriate article containing empty pro-war rhetoric, then I feel entitled to respond with my views about that rhetoric.
BTW, there is nothing "anti-war" in my posts whatsoever. I simply do not start with the assumption that my gov't is correct and infallable. That does not make me anti-war, just a little bit vigilant.
Sorry, got my info wrong, but the forthcoming surrender was already known about, and even had it not been, a non-murderous demonstration of the bomb would have been much more ethical. There is no good reason that those people were murdered in the US terror attack (by the US's definition)
Re:Let's see some shred of evidence
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Adhere to the Geneva convention.
Release the names of the prisoners to the world.
Stop acting like they are pulling some sneaky, illegal stunt if they aren't.
Sorry, but claiming that civilians' support of the war effort makes them somehow not civilians anymore is BS.
How many American families saved up their peach pits for the USO so the military could make cyanide from them? Were those peach pit savers somehow waiving their status as civilians?
Also, condoning such mass murder under any circumstance, especially when a simple demonstration of the bomb would have sufficed, seems pretty low.
The bomb was dropped on Hiroshima after the Japanese had already surrendered, so the BS about saving lives through this despicable act does not fly with the thinking man.
No, it's more than that. The problem is not that the US got bad intelligence and used it innocently. The problem is that they relied on that bad intelligence to carry out assasinations. Even if the information was correct, the policy of assasinating people based on hearsay with no evidence and no legal process is unethical.
First of all, neither you or I have seen any of this evidence, so you can't assume it actually exists.
You say, there is evidence that "these guys are who the US thinks they are," but that is the whole point. The US does not even think that they know who these guys are. There is no such evidence.
The US absolutely has not established the identity of many of the prisoners and does not know which group, if any, they belong to; therefore, the insinuation that I should trust them to already have made such identification is totally illogical. That is like saying, "Person A has no idea what they are talking about. Why don't you trust person A to know what they are talking about."
In no way will I put blind faith in the motives of the US gov't. I'm sorry, but history will show that they are simply not trustworthy enough to take their actions and words at face value.
Assuming that the gov't must have some good reason for its most questionable actions is not the way to maintain constant vigilance.
Well, the US failed to minimize the killing of civilians.
In fact, one of the reasons that the US has lost so much int'l support is that so many civilians have been killed in these operations.
Also, since many of the targeted assasinations (remember when it was uncool for Israel? now it's OK for everybody) are based solely on the word of a warring faction which claims, "these people (our enemies) are Taleban - kill them for us."
The US is not establishing the guilt of those it targets for assasination before assasinating them. Why not capture them if you don't really know if they are guilty of anything? Better than blowing up a convoy of innocent tribal elders based on the word of their detractors.
How would you like to be assasinated on the basis that one of your enemies said something untrue about you? Wouldn't you rather have the chance to establish your innocence before being wiped out?
No, it's true. Something on the order of 4000 Afghani civilians have been killed since the US's "anti-terrorist" actions have begun. About 3000 US civilians were killed on 9/11.
And, interestingly enough, NONE OF THE HIJACKERS WERE AFGHANI! So, we wiped out 4000 innocents whose only crime was that they were born in the wrong country in order to prove the point that we will not tolerate the killing of innocent civilians!
They can't even identify these "CRIMINALS"
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If the guys in Camp X-Ray are truly the "worst of the worst," then how come the US can't even figure out who they are, or which group (if any) they belong to? (BBC article.
It sure sounds like the US is making blanket declarations of guilt without first establishing the truth.
Also, the US simply does not have the authority to classify these people as non-POW's. That can only be done by a competent international tribunal (I am surprised one has not been set up in disregard of the US's wishes).
No, the Somali opinion was negative
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I read a BBC article which described two thing in particular:
One was that the Somali's thought that the movie was total BS and glorified acts which were, at the very least, unheroic, and at most, constituted a massacre.
The other was the reaction of the Somali's to the action in the movie. Every time a US soldier was killed, or US equipment blown up, the audience cheered wildly. Why would they do that if they agreed with the classification of these soldiers as heroes?
Black Hawk Down was fiction
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I can't really speak from my own opinion, since I have not seen the movie and am not up on the actual historical event, but from what I gather, the consensus among historians is that Black Hawk Down takes a great deal of liberties with the truth.
The heroism you mention portrayed in the movie was apparently totally fabricated.
Also, your pseudo-patriotic military bias does not belong here. Comments like:
"These same soldiers are now crawling around the hills of Afghanistan, their cause clear and powerful,"
are off topic, and do not belong in a review of a dumb Arnie movie.
Warmongering should not be confused with patriotism. The real patriots are those who are questioning the actions of our gov't and the likes of Ashcroft, etc., in order to keep our country free of the constant threat of facism from within. The soldiers in Afghanistan have been duped into participating in a sham which at this point has killed more civilians than were killed in the US on 9/11. (Also, notice the lack of mention of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden when people talk about their outrage at the concept of the killing of civillians - a total of 140,000 unarmed, innocent civilians were wiped out in order to influence the gov'ts of Japan and Germany through the terror of their citizens).
I guess I really wonder what this review is doing here on slashdot at all.
Bush has used the Sept. 11 attacks to transfer the wealth of our country directly into the pockets of his cronies.
Now he wants to give those same friends a huge tax cut with the idea that the will all run out and build factories to employ us all. Hah!
During the whole anthrax episode, five people died, and an additional ten got sick and recovered. Ten people got sick at a post office when a ream of copier paper was irradiated to kill anthrax.
Now Bush wants to spend an additional $11bn on anthrax.
How much do you suppose is in his budget for AIDS research (or cancer, or the slew of other diseases which kill many more people than anthrax has)? Certainly no $11bn.
Why can't these politicians ever have cronies in worthwhile industries? Because worthwhile industries don't have the money to bribe the politicians blue. Why not? Because worthwhile industries don't get kickbacks and deals from the gov't. Why don't they? Because they don't have buddies in the gov't. Lather, rinse, repeat...
Ultimately, there is no incentive for the companies that actually get funded to do anything except whore for more funding and pretend to spend what they already got while pocketing it.
He can pretty much do what he wants right now, since Congress is swept up in the "rally behind Bush no matter what maniacal things he says and does" craze.
Scene selection is easy to acomplish on digital tapes. In fact, they could have done it on analog tape basically the same way. They just throw a little bit more info on the control track for indexing.
I'm not defending the decision, but it occurred to me that with a linear format, they won't be able to force you to watch some ad or preview every time you insert the tape or try to access a different scene... Maybe.
The company used to be owned by Harman Int'l and was part of their broadcast group. They made equipment for radio and TV stations. They did not try to sell into the pro audio market, nor the consumer audio market. Harman has plenty of other companies which specialize in these other (and very different) fields, and they didn't want Orban products competing with Lexicon products competing with Harman/Kardon products.
Orban has since been sold. It is still primarily in the broadcast audio field, so its focus is still on the radio and TV markets, but it no longer has this specific incentive not to compete in other fields.
Here's what I think happenned: Soundtainer is really nothing more than a really snazzy device for recording voice only in the field in two situations 1) recording voice with the intention of transcribing what is said to text, and 2) recording voice with the intention of broadcasting to a medium (AM/FM) which is already so compressed that the low quality makes very little difference. Orban decided, "hey, as long as we are selling this MP3 recorder to the broadcast market, let's try to sell it to musicians and consumers." This is not something that would have happenned in the old days under Harman, when Orban had a strict market identity and a parent company to enforce it.
In my opinion, Orban is probably going after markets which it should stay out of, but it is doing it with the idea that it is a freebie, since they have this device to market to whomever they please. But marketing to musicians and consumers is a totally different beast than marketing to a corporate community (the broadcast industry), and I think they may find that it is more than they can deal with.
So, having sort of justified the existence of this thing, I will also say that, since one of its primary uses would be for transcription, they should have built in a crappy mic. The built in mic would also make it more palatable to consumers who just want to record their children's first words, etc.; however, this was originally designed as a broadcast oriented device, and most reporters would prefer to use a lapel mic over a built in anyway (or a hand-held for interviews).
It would be really neat if it were a device suitable for use by professional musicians, but it appears that it really was not designed for that purpose, it is just being marketed that way to make an extra buck (which will probably be immediately lost due to the costs of setting up consumer support - keep in mind, Orban is used to selling their equipment to companies, not people).
They really are not specifically claiming perpetual motion.
What if the device burns air? That would seem to satisfy the term self-sustaining with an energy surplus.
Also, when getting all high and mighty about the second law of thermodynamics, keep in mind that all assumptions are false, including this one.
At one time, Newton's model of gravity was The Truth (TM), and you were a fanatic to beleive otherwise.
And there's the ubiquitous cold fusion reference, wrong as usual. Cold fusion was not a scam that some people tried to pull off. Cold fusion was achieved and reproduced; however, it was never reliably reproduced. Some labs could reproduce it and others couldn't.
The final conclusion by those involved was that they had done it, but they did not have the complete recipe; the experiments were being affected by some variable, and they did not know what it was.
I recall a BC++ licence (sometime after 3.1) which only provided for distribution of a limited number of copies of software compiled by "the product" without paying royalties to B'land. So if you wanted to whip off 20 or 30 copies of the exe you were fine, but if you wanted to sell s'ware to the masses, you would have to make arrangements with B'land to pay them $.0X per copy.
Clearly Microsoft Bob for Windows is a violation of good ole' Bob's trademark that he's had since '57.
Seriously, though, how many companies have trademarks with the word 'windows' in them which have been around much longer than MS?
Perhaps a bunch of them should get together and sue (or at least request a list of every mailing address and email address that MS has ever obtained in the course of their business).
Are you supposed to file a new copy with the government every time you make a significant change? With a lot of software, that's several times a day. And I don't want to have to turn MY code over to the government.
It also defies the concept of natural copyright. I don't have to do anything to 'get' my copyright, I own it naturally. It is only if I want to register that copyright with the government that I have to actually do anything. Registering helps establish your claim of a copyright, but it is not what makes a copyright valid or invalid.
Once upon a time, we all complained about how the CD standard was too low quality, and we were going to be stuck with it for a long time.
Variable bandwidth was supposed to give us a way of choosing a reasonable quality level. Instead, it only allows us to fit way more over-compressed, shitty sounding mp3's onto a disc. I'm sure the musicians love that (the ones that care about how their music sounds).
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I am not talking about letting them go. I am talking about going through the proper channels to get the desired convictions, without stepping on the prisoners' rights and without giving the world community more of an excuse to accuse us of cavalierly disregarding international standards and the will and opinion of the int'l community.
Also, when you say, "counter to the goal," remember that the goal of keeping them in Cuba in the first place is so that they do not need to be granted the rights of prisoners on US soil. That is sneaky. They might as well circumvent the need to treat the prisoners humanely by keeping them in a country which didn't sign the convention and has no human rights protection. Then we can simply torture and execute them legally.
When a prison is set up on foreign soil for the sole purpose of circumventing US law, that is sneaky.
If someone posts an innapropriate article containing empty pro-war rhetoric, then I feel entitled to respond with my views about that rhetoric.
BTW, there is nothing "anti-war" in my posts whatsoever. I simply do not start with the assumption that my gov't is correct and infallable. That does not make me anti-war, just a little bit vigilant.
Sorry, got my info wrong, but the forthcoming surrender was already known about, and even had it not been, a non-murderous demonstration of the bomb would have been much more ethical. There is no good reason that those people were murdered in the US terror attack (by the US's definition)
Release the names of the prisoners to the world.
Stop acting like they are pulling some sneaky, illegal stunt if they aren't.
How many American families saved up their peach pits for the USO so the military could make cyanide from them? Were those peach pit savers somehow waiving their status as civilians?
Also, condoning such mass murder under any circumstance, especially when a simple demonstration of the bomb would have sufficed, seems pretty low.
The bomb was dropped on Hiroshima after the Japanese had already surrendered, so the BS about saving lives through this despicable act does not fly with the thinking man.
No, it's more than that. The problem is not that the US got bad intelligence and used it innocently. The problem is that they relied on that bad intelligence to carry out assasinations. Even if the information was correct, the policy of assasinating people based on hearsay with no evidence and no legal process is unethical.
You say, there is evidence that "these guys are who the US thinks they are," but that is the whole point. The US does not even think that they know who these guys are. There is no such evidence.
The US absolutely has not established the identity of many of the prisoners and does not know which group, if any, they belong to; therefore, the insinuation that I should trust them to already have made such identification is totally illogical. That is like saying, "Person A has no idea what they are talking about. Why don't you trust person A to know what they are talking about."
In no way will I put blind faith in the motives of the US gov't. I'm sorry, but history will show that they are simply not trustworthy enough to take their actions and words at face value.
Assuming that the gov't must have some good reason for its most questionable actions is not the way to maintain constant vigilance.
In fact, one of the reasons that the US has lost so much int'l support is that so many civilians have been killed in these operations.
Also, since many of the targeted assasinations (remember when it was uncool for Israel? now it's OK for everybody) are based solely on the word of a warring faction which claims, "these people (our enemies) are Taleban - kill them for us."
The US is not establishing the guilt of those it targets for assasination before assasinating them. Why not capture them if you don't really know if they are guilty of anything? Better than blowing up a convoy of innocent tribal elders based on the word of their detractors.
How would you like to be assasinated on the basis that one of your enemies said something untrue about you? Wouldn't you rather have the chance to establish your innocence before being wiped out?
Establishing someone's guilt usually involves collecting evidence, etc..
This seems more like:
US: "You guilty?"
Prisoner: "No."
US: "How are we ever going to establish your guilt if you keep lying like this?"
And, interestingly enough, NONE OF THE HIJACKERS WERE AFGHANI! So, we wiped out 4000 innocents whose only crime was that they were born in the wrong country in order to prove the point that we will not tolerate the killing of innocent civilians!
It sure sounds like the US is making blanket declarations of guilt without first establishing the truth.
Also, the US simply does not have the authority to classify these people as non-POW's. That can only be done by a competent international tribunal (I am surprised one has not been set up in disregard of the US's wishes).
One was that the Somali's thought that the movie was total BS and glorified acts which were, at the very least, unheroic, and at most, constituted a massacre.
The other was the reaction of the Somali's to the action in the movie. Every time a US soldier was killed, or US equipment blown up, the audience cheered wildly. Why would they do that if they agreed with the classification of these soldiers as heroes?
The heroism you mention portrayed in the movie was apparently totally fabricated.
Also, your pseudo-patriotic military bias does not belong here. Comments like: "These same soldiers are now crawling around the hills of Afghanistan, their cause clear and powerful," are off topic, and do not belong in a review of a dumb Arnie movie.
Warmongering should not be confused with patriotism. The real patriots are those who are questioning the actions of our gov't and the likes of Ashcroft, etc., in order to keep our country free of the constant threat of facism from within. The soldiers in Afghanistan have been duped into participating in a sham which at this point has killed more civilians than were killed in the US on 9/11. (Also, notice the lack of mention of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Dresden when people talk about their outrage at the concept of the killing of civillians - a total of 140,000 unarmed, innocent civilians were wiped out in order to influence the gov'ts of Japan and Germany through the terror of their citizens).
I guess I really wonder what this review is doing here on slashdot at all.
Now he wants to give those same friends a huge tax cut with the idea that the will all run out and build factories to employ us all. Hah!
During the whole anthrax episode, five people died, and an additional ten got sick and recovered. Ten people got sick at a post office when a ream of copier paper was irradiated to kill anthrax.
Now Bush wants to spend an additional $11bn on anthrax.
How much do you suppose is in his budget for AIDS research (or cancer, or the slew of other diseases which kill many more people than anthrax has)? Certainly no $11bn.
Why can't these politicians ever have cronies in worthwhile industries? Because worthwhile industries don't have the money to bribe the politicians blue. Why not? Because worthwhile industries don't get kickbacks and deals from the gov't. Why don't they? Because they don't have buddies in the gov't. Lather, rinse, repeat...
Ultimately, there is no incentive for the companies that actually get funded to do anything except whore for more funding and pretend to spend what they already got while pocketing it.
Sigh!
He can pretty much do what he wants right now, since Congress is swept up in the "rally behind Bush no matter what maniacal things he says and does" craze.
Scene selection is easy to acomplish on digital tapes. In fact, they could have done it on analog tape basically the same way. They just throw a little bit more info on the control track for indexing.
I'm not defending the decision, but it occurred to me that with a linear format, they won't be able to force you to watch some ad or preview every time you insert the tape or try to access a different scene... Maybe.
The company used to be owned by Harman Int'l and was part of their broadcast group. They made equipment for radio and TV stations. They did not try to sell into the pro audio market, nor the consumer audio market. Harman has plenty of other companies which specialize in these other (and very different) fields, and they didn't want Orban products competing with Lexicon products competing with Harman/Kardon products.
Orban has since been sold. It is still primarily in the broadcast audio field, so its focus is still on the radio and TV markets, but it no longer has this specific incentive not to compete in other fields.
Here's what I think happenned: Soundtainer is really nothing more than a really snazzy device for recording voice only in the field in two situations 1) recording voice with the intention of transcribing what is said to text, and 2) recording voice with the intention of broadcasting to a medium (AM/FM) which is already so compressed that the low quality makes very little difference. Orban decided, "hey, as long as we are selling this MP3 recorder to the broadcast market, let's try to sell it to musicians and consumers." This is not something that would have happenned in the old days under Harman, when Orban had a strict market identity and a parent company to enforce it.
In my opinion, Orban is probably going after markets which it should stay out of, but it is doing it with the idea that it is a freebie, since they have this device to market to whomever they please. But marketing to musicians and consumers is a totally different beast than marketing to a corporate community (the broadcast industry), and I think they may find that it is more than they can deal with.
So, having sort of justified the existence of this thing, I will also say that, since one of its primary uses would be for transcription, they should have built in a crappy mic. The built in mic would also make it more palatable to consumers who just want to record their children's first words, etc.; however, this was originally designed as a broadcast oriented device, and most reporters would prefer to use a lapel mic over a built in anyway (or a hand-held for interviews).
It would be really neat if it were a device suitable for use by professional musicians, but it appears that it really was not designed for that purpose, it is just being marketed that way to make an extra buck (which will probably be immediately lost due to the costs of setting up consumer support - keep in mind, Orban is used to selling their equipment to companies, not people).
What if the device burns air? That would seem to satisfy the term self-sustaining with an energy surplus.
Also, when getting all high and mighty about the second law of thermodynamics, keep in mind that all assumptions are false, including this one.
At one time, Newton's model of gravity was The Truth (TM), and you were a fanatic to beleive otherwise.
And there's the ubiquitous cold fusion reference, wrong as usual. Cold fusion was not a scam that some people tried to pull off. Cold fusion was achieved and reproduced; however, it was never reliably reproduced. Some labs could reproduce it and others couldn't.
The final conclusion by those involved was that they had done it, but they did not have the complete recipe; the experiments were being affected by some variable, and they did not know what it was.
This could get rather costly for them.
They yanked that pretty quickly, as I recall.
The link may not provide the actual rule he refers to (it's = it is vs. its = owned by it), but it is a real rule of the English language.
Seriously, though, how many companies have trademarks with the word 'windows' in them which have been around much longer than MS?
Perhaps a bunch of them should get together and sue (or at least request a list of every mailing address and email address that MS has ever obtained in the course of their business).
It also defies the concept of natural copyright. I don't have to do anything to 'get' my copyright, I own it naturally. It is only if I want to register that copyright with the government that I have to actually do anything. Registering helps establish your claim of a copyright, but it is not what makes a copyright valid or invalid.
Variable bandwidth was supposed to give us a way of choosing a reasonable quality level. Instead, it only allows us to fit way more over-compressed, shitty sounding mp3's onto a disc. I'm sure the musicians love that (the ones that care about how their music sounds).