I disagree with you therefore I must be a troll. Don't back up your argument with facts, don't try to argue about provable things, just call your opponent a troll and move on. Yep, typical/. reasoning. Immature, unthoughtful, shallow, but very typical. Bravo! You should be proud of yourself!
because it completely fails to take into account that all this is very new and you can't just pull something finished out of your ass and declare it working.
The original design lifetime of the shuttle had it being retired before 2010. It is now 2005, meaning we have at most five years to completely pull off an entirely new launch system. The shuttle has been known to have major design flaws and limitations since 1986, yet NASA has killed every idea designed to replace it.
Further, the shuttle has failed to achieve every single design advantage goal proposed by the original design. It is not cheaper to operate. It does not get into space any more regularly than a traditional booster (far less, AAMOF). It is not safer than what came before. It cannot haul more cargo than what came before. The very concept of saving money and time by going with a reusable spacecraft is flawed, and nothing makes that more obvious than the fact that all the talk about replacing the shuttle is arrayed around non-reusable capsules.
There was funding for this in the next budget bill, if I remember right.
There is funding for studies about getting back to the moon and Mars. There is no funding for a shuttle replacement because there is no shuttle replacement. You can't fund a thin-air idea, you have to fund a design. NASA has no design, and it doesn't have one because it's been stubbornly refusing to even entertain the concept of shutting down the shuttle for almost two decades.
If nothing comes of it but more talk and debate and no studies are done and no early work gets done within a couple years to make it look like something is being done with that money, THEN you can bitch.
I can (and will) bitch because the actions you speak of should have already been in progress years ago! Does GM wait until they are ready to shut down a car production line before they start even thinking about making a new car? Absolutely not. A new car design is started the day the prior design goes into production. That way, if design & testing takes five years, you can pump out a new model every five years. If NASA takes a decade or more to design a shuttle replacement, they should've been designing and testing something back in 2000. It is now 2005 and there isn't a single piece of hardware on any NASA drawing board anywhere aimed at replacing the shuttle.
Until then, sit down, take a stress pill, and think things over.
Until then, sit down, put your head in the sand, and think happy joy-joy thoughts, because that's apparently where you are comfortable.
HOWEVER , I do not believe that such matters of faith should be taught in schools. I know that my faith is inherently unprovable...that's pretty much the definition of 'faith'. Matters of unproven, unprovable faith belong in your chosen place of worship. Matters of proven, or at least provable fact belong in the secular classroom.
Your argument here is thoughtful and introspective, which is why I'm shocked beyond belief you got modded +5 Insightful instead of modded down like most of the truly insightful commentary around here. But I digress.
I agree that matters of faith are best practiced at home, at church, or at some other personal location. I'm kind of an oddball Christian in that respect. I don't go around proselytizing everyone in sight. I figure if you want to know more about Christianity and whether it's the right thing for you, you can get off your own lazy butt and go figure it out without me haranguing you. If you're too lazy to do that, I don't want you in the afterlife with me, that's for sure.;-)
But, despite my above argument, there is one point we keep dodging here about teaching Creationism, and I believe it's the real reason the hardcore Christian Conservatives are so adamant about getting this taught in schools. Today, if you don't mention Creationism (or I.D., or whatever you want to call it) in the schools, then your teacher is more or less going to say "we evolved from lower life forms, and that's a fact that is unarguable, and nothing else is possible." They are not just omitting Creationism, they are actively teaching it is not possible. This is where I have a big beef with the educational system, because it shouldn't be teaching kids to be close-minded about any subject. Evolution is a theory. It has mountains of evidence to support it, but it remains a theory. Until someone perfects a time-traveling device, it will stay a theory. Teaching kids that evolution is the One And Only Way We Got Here is just as narrow-minded as those Christians seeking to have the exact same concept forced on kids.
Here's my idea of the ideal way to do this: the teachers should teach evolution as a very likely theory on how we got here, but also that there are competing theories from both other scientists and theologians. Round up the discussion with an emphasis on making up your own mind about what you believe. There! Simple, objective dispersion of knowledge without a bias as to what kind of conclusion you should draw.
To quote Albert Einstein, "science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
You waste all this space saying "we should do this" and "we should do that" without realizing that... we are doing it!
Oh really? Where are the plans? Where are the prototypes? Where are the engineering teams testing out launch and recovery scenarios? Where is the budget? Where are the simulators? Where? Where?
They don't exist! NASA has nothing on hand to replace the shuttle right now. It doesn't even have anything firm on the drawing board to replace the shuttle! If NASA had to ground the shuttle permanently (which it may very well do after this flight), the U.S. would be out of the manned spaceflight business until a replacement were designed, prototyped, tested, built, tested again, flown experimentally, and then flown operationally. That process can take a decade, perhaps more. And NASA hasn't even officially started looking for a successor to the shuttle! There's no money budgeted for a specific design. Hell, there isn't even an agreed upon design direction! How in the hell can you possibly say "we are doing it!" when there is absolutely positively no "action" going on in that direction?
Sure, there's a lot of talk, but talk is cheap. When NASA has blueprints being sent to fabricators, then you can say "we are doing it!" Until then, NASA is just doing more of what it's been doing for the last 34 years: blowing lots of hot air and going fast in circles.
At this rate, the last man to stand on the face of the moon will be dead of old age before the next man follows in his footsteps. Forty years ago we were preparing to land a man on the moon, and today the best we can do is low Earth orbit with a vehicle that cost ten times as much to operate and has killed 14 astronauts due to the most pedestrian failures (O-rings and foam)! How the mighty have fallen! NASA should be ashamed, and we are not worthy of those who came before us if this is the best we can do.
Touche. However, if you know anything about rocket engines, you know the weight of the engine is just about inconsequential when compared to the overall weight of the vehicle and (above all) fuel.
According to wikipedia, the Saturn V launch vehicle weighed approximately 6.3 million pounds. Of that, each first-stage F-1 engine weighed 18,500 pounds. This means all five F-1 engines comprised only 1.5% of the total vehicle mass. Admittedly I've left out the ancillary things associated with extra engines (mounting struts, extra plumbing, extra turbopumps, etc.) but the point should be clear: adding engines doesn't hideously impact the cost of the system unless you have to haul the whole damn thing to orbit. Expendable stages really are still the best answer to getting into space cheaply, quickly, and reliably.
So? The SR-71 needs similar refitting and costs many, many times more to produce and service.
It also did much, much, much more than the MiG-25, so the comparison here is an unfair one. The SR-71 could cruise for hours at Mach 3+, the MiG-25 could ony do it for minutes at a time. Further, the speed record set by the MiG-25 was acheived at the cost of ruining the engines of the fighter for that one sprint.
The MiG-25 was indeed a great Russian acheivement, but to say it's in the same class as the SR-71 is somewhat of a gross distortion. And the SR-71 didn't cost that much to run compared to other surveillance platforms of the day -- namely satellites!
Even the smallest stray piece of material can cause disruption upon re-entry.
The utter fragility of such a system is proof enough the design is tragically flawed. If a billion dollar vehicle can be taken out by such a simple failure, something is wrong. Would you accept such SPoF's (Single Points of Failure) in any I.T. system you're responsible for designing or maintaining? I mean, it's not like we can't make something better than the current tile-and-felt the shuttle uses. Apollo-era capsules had monolithic, non-reusable ablative heatshields that were far less fragile, and the capsule design was elegant enough to protect the heatshield with other portions of the spacecraft until it was actually time for re-entry.
The shuttle was, is, and remains, a boondoggle. It was not a step forward from Apollo, it was a leap backwards.
The Russians have the much cheaper and safer soyuz, not because they are especially smarter, but because they just cannot afford to run their shuttle.
The Russians understand something that NASA does not, namely that their technology is limited and thus must be overengineered for saftey. Everything about the former Soviet space program was overdesigned for a reason, just like our Saturn V was: to give good safety margins without going gonzo with costs. If you've got four engines making enough thrust to get you into orbit, you add a fifth for safety and then run all your engines at 80% rated thrust for even more safety. Is it efficient? No, but it's safer.
Now, I'm not about to argue that space exploration is, or ever should be, perfectly safe. That is obviously absurd. However, the more of a design margin you have, the less meticulous you have to be when preparing to launch the vehicle. Almost all the cost overruns in the shuttle program are due to the incredible number of inspections and maintenance needed to turn a shuttle around. With a throwaway booster, you don't have any of that. Sure, you're junking valuable hardware every time you launch with a throwaway booster, but it actually costs less to do it that way. Why do you think commercial satellites are launched on Delta rockets instead of the shuttle?
Take a modern top-fuel dragster as an example. It is designed to do one thing: go as fast as you can in one quarter of a mile. Everything inside the engine is designed to last roughly just that distance, and it is torn down and rebuilt pretty much completely between every run. It is, in essence, a throwaway booster. Dragster teams do it this way because it is impractical to build an engine that can survive multiple runs and be competitive. Sure, it's expensive. But losing the race is even more expensive.
NASA needs to get away from giving us a Ferrari of a shuttle, with all its myriad valves, camshafts, and amazingly expensive maintenance, and instead give us a slightly-updated version of the 60's-era Chevy Big Block. Sure, a Ferrari can get 400hp out of a 2.5-liter engine, but it must use exotic techniques to do so. A big block V8 can make 400hp all day long without working hard, and it costs pretty much an order of magnitude less to construct and maintain. We need the Chevy, not the Ferrari, if we're going to get back into space on a large scale.
Sure. Do you happen to have a formula for some spray-on stuff that will withstand the 3000F re-entry temperatures? Oh, and it has to be very light, at least as light as the current "gap filler," because if it's too heavy at all it will drastically hurt the shuttle's load-carrying capability (there are a lot of gaps to fill for the tens of thousands of tiles on the shuttle, of course). And it has to be cheap so it doesn't increase launch costs. And it has to be easy to apply so it doesn't increase turnaround times and costs. And it has to interact well with the existing tiles so it doesn't damage them or degrade their capability. And it has to be aerodynamically sound so nothing interrupts the smooth airflow under the belly.
Yeah, it's so simple, I just can't imagine why NASA hasn't come up with something like this.
I'm just finishing reading "Comm Check," a book on the Columbia accident by Michael Cabbage and William Harwood. I've read a lot about the shuttle ever since its first flight 24 years ago, and if there's one thing that's abundantly clear, it is this: the shuttle is a lemon.
What's so tragically funny here is that, in the book, a NASA rep is quoted as saying "the shuttle isn't a lemon" right after the CAIB report pretty much said NASA was flying a platform that was not only unreasonable unsafe, but also one having such serious design flaws as to be much less safe than necessary. Spaceflight may never be as safe as an airplane ride, but the level of risk associated with the shuttle is just much more than it could've been with a better design.
Disocover magazine had a lengthy article about twenty years ago on how the shuttle was developed, and it was an amazing insight into how so many compromises can add up to a vehicle that is not only hugely different than what was originally invented, but also one that just doesn't do anything really well. The cargo capacity was too small. It can't achieve high orbits. It lands as an unpowered glider with a glide ratio of a brick wall. It has solid boosters that can't be throttled, trimmed, or turned off. There is no practical escape or abort manuver during the most dangerous parts of the flight (launch & re-entry). Worst of all, it's designed in such a fashion that there are an amazing number of "criticality-1" items. If a crit-1 item fails, it will result in "loss of mission, crew, and vehicle." The shuttle system has several thousand crit-1 items. To the average I.T. geek, that's like running a few thousand servers, each holding billions of dollars worth of data, and not having any redundant hard drives, power supplies, or UPS's. In other words, madness.
There isn't a single solitary thing the shuttle does better than the Apollo-era capsules it was supposed to replace. Launch costs for the shuttle were supposed to be 1/10th those of the throwaway boosters, but instead they are more than ten times what the Saturn V cost in adjusted dollars.
So, to sum it up, the shuttle is more expensive, less reliable, less capable, and more dangerous than its predecessor. Yeah, gimme more of that.
The ISS is also a boondoggle for many of the same reasons. Why do we have a shuttle fleet? To build the space station, of course! Why are we building a space station? To give the shuttles somewhere to go, of course! It's a circular argument. No shuttle equals no station, and no station equals no shuttle. No wonder NASA has its head so far up its exhaust nozzles it can't see the shuttle is an amazing failure. To admit failure would be to kill off the two biggest projects the organization has.
As has been said elsewhere here, our technology is just not yet at the point where something like the shuttle is practical. We just don't have the propulsion and materials to do it just yet. What we should be doing instead is using the best practical technologies out there, namely BDB's (Big Dumb Boosters). The aren't sexy, but they work, and they can haul a cubic buttload of cargo into orbit -- or beyond.
Unfortunately, I have the sinking feeling NASA is going to have to kill another seven astronauts before they finally, regrettably put the shuttle to bed. It was a good try, but you have to be able to admit when you are wrong. Build us a modern version of the Saturn V. With modern materials and modern computers, it could be made more cheaply and even more reliable than before, probably with more lift capacity as well. Make it so it does one thing very well. We don't need a Swiss Army knife of a shuttle to get into space, not when you've got much better proven technologies that are already available. NASA can get this right. The big question is, will they?
Less broken face = more compliant with the standards. Period.
While I'm not going to disagree that some compliance is better than no compliance, your own puritanical quest for standards compliance apparently only extends to Microsoft products. Firefox has been in development how long? Years. And it can't pass the Acid2 test. Where are the endless posts moaning and whining about how long its taking Mozilla to fix this issue? Where is the condemnation? Where is the hue and cry about how awful it is to see Mozilla flouting the supreme will of the W3C?
Methinks I doth smell a double standard here.
And there are browsers that pass the test. Safari's new version supposedly passes (Tiger version, I suppose - I don't have it at hand, so I can't say).
Hmmm, so Safari -- a web browser only available on an architecture that has less than 3% of the corporate computing market and 5% overall -- might pass this test. And not everyone running Mac OS X is even running Safari. It would seem your own answer has revealed a startling truth: nobody gives a damn about W3C compliance! Actually, it shouldn't be all that startling because I stated it in my earlier post. No crystal ball required, I just happen to observe reality more often than the average/.'er.
The only major vendor that doesn't even try is Microsoft, who says that CSS2 is "fundamentally flawed"
And their opinion is wrong...why? Microsoft is entitled to their opinion. Just because the W3C comes out with a standard doesn't mean everyone is supposed to love it. If MS thinks it can do something bigger or better than CSS2, it is most welcome to try. If it succeeds, the W3C will be forced to review their own ideas. If it fails, Microsoft will be forced to adopt CSS2, or whatever else "wins." There is no law saying the W3C has the first, last, and every word on web "standards." A standard is more than what the W3C says it is. If everyone decides to use MS-CSSv3.1 (or whatever MS might call something) instead of W3C-CSSv9.0, Microsoft's standard is the de facto standard. Any other conclusion is merely whining.
So what you're saying is that since FF butchers the test and IE7 butchers the test, FF is really better anyway. Yeah, that's objectivity for you.
The test is not graded on a curve, it's pass/fail. FF fails. IE7 fails. IE6 fails. I don't run Mozilla so I can't speak for it, but I'm willing to bet it fails, too. Is there any browser out there at all that can pass this test? And if not, doesn't that pretty much prove that nobody really gives a damn about W3C standards?
Re:Something borrowed, nothing new
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IE7 Bugs and Reviews
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What kind of fucking idiot are you that you can't grasp that I wasn't adding up all desktop OS's, I was adding up only Windows desktops. While my first post didn't make this clear, the followups did. So, please explain to my why you're too fucking stupid to read.
AMD chips are like a big ole Mack truck. they suck up a lot of juice, but they can hold their own hauling a big load.
It would seem you're operating with outdated information. For the record, current maximum current draw for all Opteron, Athlon64, and Athlon64 X2 chips is 95W. Note that that is the maximum for all chips at all speeds, current and planned, for the Socket 939/940 designs. Independent testing has shown that even the top-end dual-core Opterons consume roughly 89W.
Contrast this to Intel's flagship Pentium 4 EE or the fastest Prescott-based Pentium 4. Independent testing shows a power consumption of at least 119W, in some cases as much as 130W under maximum load. AnandTech and Tom's Hardware have confirmed this.
So, to revise your erroneous statements, AMD chips are like a turbocharged Acura NSX, zippy and frugal with the "gas," but as affordable and reliable as your average Honda. Intel chips are like fuel-guzzling V8's but without the horsepower and torque you'd expect from such gluttony behavior. And they cost more. That's why the P4 has been, for all intents and purposes, completely killed off in favor of Pentium-M derivations, all of which are essentially based on the old Pentium Pro design from the early 90's.
nor should any developer forget that around ten percent of Joe Users are using firefox.
Most ever web software development company I've consulted for in the last four years develops their software and tests it on the following platforms: IE5, IE6, and Mozilla. Most of them are now integrating FF into their QA process, so FF users are not being forgotten. But the vast majority of the coding and testing is aimed at IE compatiblity. Despite what/.'ers might want, the reality of the world is that IE *owns* the browser market. FF might be changing that, but it'll be years before Microsoft is displaced, if ever.
Re:Something borrowed, nothing new
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IE7 Bugs and Reviews
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· Score: -1, Flamebait
Maybe you should think about what comes out of your fucking trap before you commit it to paper. Then you'll look like less of an ass.
Re:Something borrowed, nothing new
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IE7 Bugs and Reviews
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· Score: -1, Flamebait
Source please.
Don't be a fucking tard. Go Google on your own damned time and quit acting like a smug know-it-all. As a share of all Windows operating systems, XP has more than 50%. Google Zeitgeist reported 62.8% of reported OS types were WinXP.
Hmmm, so there are more than 100% of the desktops out there? Oh, I get it. -10% of the desktops have *nix, bringing the total back down to 100%.
Again, you think you're being cute and funny but you're really being a snobbish ass. I was referring to XP's share as a portion of overall Windows OS's, not the total OS market included OS X, *nix, and everything else. But, as is usual with OS zealots, you decided to take the most ridiculous interpretation you could as a way of asserting just how big your OS penis is. What a loser.
I hear this every time someone mentions web standards. The fact is that "Joe User" is not as stupid as we imagine, he just has other things on his plate, but he still wants all his web apps to work.
And no web software developer in the world is going to make a mass-market solution that breaks in the most prolific browser in the world. You may think that some anti-establishment web developer somewhere will make his or her application work only for the W3C standards and to hell with testing on actual browsers, but that developer is on a fast track to bankruptcy if they try.
The point is this: it doesn't really matter what standards Microsoft does or does not adhere to. With it owning the vast majority of the market (and the *overwhelming* majority of the corporate market), every web software company in the world is going to test and qualify their app to work with IE7. Microsoft *is* a de facto standard by virtue of its ubiquity.
When you consider that pretty much any new machine sold in the last three years has had WinXP on it, the XP-only stigma might not be as bad as you think. Sure, grandma might have an eight-year-old PC, but most people don't, and most people get a new OS when they get a new PC.
My point is this: XP is on more than 50% of the desktops out there. The remaining 50% consists of a melange of 2K, NT, ME, and the 9x series of 16-bit/32-bit junk. With the dropping of support for 2K (and the already-sunset support for everything 9x and ME), XP adoption in Windows circles is accelerating rapidly.
I just tried Firefox 1.06 on The Second Acid Test and it looks like it fails as well. I guess that now means Firefox is just as half-baked as IE7 if you go with the standard ranking system on Slashdot. Not that anyone will actually acknowledge that, of course.
Bzzzt. Sorry, but just because you put it on paper and sign it doesn't make the contract valid. There's MANY examples of things that aren't enforceable under contract law. I believe a California judge struck down a 2 year non-compete clause an employee had with his/her employer because it didn't let the employee earn a living.
Bzzzt. Sorry! Microsoft is headquartered in Redmond, Washington, not California, thus California contract law does not apply. It matters where you sign the contract, not where you go afterwards.
Further, you're using the letter of the law to violate the spirit of the law. If the employee didn't wish to be restricted by a no-compete clause, he could've asked that it be removed. If Microsoft refused to do so, he could've refused to work for Microsoft and gone elsewhere. It's not like someone put a gun to his head and forced him to sign the contract; he did it on his own free will. He later decided his signed word of honor was inconvenient and thus decided to break it.
Either way, you're missing the whole point here. The way to fight no-compete clauses is to refuse to sign on them. If everyone decided they wouldn't sign any such thing, companies would be forced to remove them or risk being unable to recruit top talent. This is the same argument I use against those who think pirating MP3's is a way to defeat the RIAA. Neither case works because your opponent uses your violation of the law as a rationale for more vigorous enforcement of the very law you despise. The proper way to get things done is within the law.
If you don't like things like this, get the laws changed, don't just decide "I'm going to break the law (in this case, contract law) today because I don't like it." You're just helping your enemies by doing so.
Look, I despise non-compete clauses just as much as the next geek, but a contract is a contract is a contract. If you sign your name to a contract stating you won't do something, you shouldn't do it. If you don't intend to follow the letter and spirit of the contract, you shouldn't sign it. What is difficult to understand about this concept?
This isn't a Big Business Versus The Little Guy argument, it's a He Violated A Signed Contract argument. I'm assuming, of course, that the no-compete language is clearly spelled out here, and if I know MS, I'm sure it's tight as a drum legally. There aren't too many legal teams better paid and better staffed than those at MS.
Forget morality for a moment. Who cares whether no-compete is "right" or "wrong." The issue here is a contract. If we all get so worked up in a lather when the GPL is violated, we should be no less lathered up when an employee of Microsoft violates his or her contract to work for a competitor. Unless, of course,/. has a double standard when it comes to Microsoft. Nah, that couldn't be it, could it?
They were found guilty of this in court? No they weren't - it is you who is delusional. The point is, we don't know whether they are terrorists, otherwise bad people, or not.
Please point out to me exactly where it is required that these individuals must be found guilty in court before they can be incarcerated. If you can't do that, you've lost this argument already.
Even if we say that neither the US protections, nor (that's "nor", not "therefore") the Geneva Convention apply, this doesn't mean that it's okay. You might be able to say that it's not illegal, if there aren't any international agreements against it, but I don't think legality really applies well in this case - that certainly doesn't mean it's morally okay.
Thank you for projecting your morals on the entire rest of the world. And here it was I thought all you liberals were supposed to be so accepting and tolerant of everyone else's view of morality! What, did you miss a Liberal Socialists Club meeting or something? Didn't you get the memo?
Also, you have to accept that it's just as "legal" whenever US citizens are captured and taken hostage by other countries or organisations. Oddly, people never seem to argue this...
You're again falling into the whole "moral relativst" perspective that anyone detaining anyone is equivalent to anyone else detaining anyone else. Your naivete in this respect is stunning. Do you have to practice at it or does it just come naturally?
To re-acquaint you with the real world, when a professional, recognize military force takes a prisoner, he or she is not a "hostage," they are prisoners and subject to nothing more than whatever Geneve accords apply. If none apply, the only restraint imposed on the military is what is deemed morally acceptable by the chain of command. On the other hand, when a group of self-proclaimed radicals kidnaps an innocent civilian and saws his head off with a knife on live TV, that is not the same thing. It's not even close, just in case your sense of "morality" can't tell the difference.
Based upon your assessment, I would be led to believe that you equate a bank robber killing a cop and police officer killing a bank robber to be morally equivalent. Such relativism is as disgusting as it is misguided.
kay, so if members of the US Military were taken hostage from their homes in the US, that would be okay?
Only in your bizarre reality where those who commit crimes and those who capture those who commit crimes are morally equal.
Also, you've contradicted yourself - first you say that the Geneva Convention doesn't apply because they aren't part of a military, but now you say that they aren't civilians, because they defended their homes.
"defended their homes"? What kind of apologist tripe is this? You would elevate terrorist scum of the earth to the same level as a professional solder. I was wrong. You're not naive, you're just plain stupid.
Oh, and I didn't contradict myself, you're just too dense to understand it. For foreign nationals captured while attacking U.S. property or forces, if they're not part of a recognized army, neither U.S. law nor the Geneva accords apply. No contradiction required...unless of course you count the logical one inside your head.
This is what is commonly referred to as an ad hominem argument.
No, it's not an argument, it's an insult. I'm sorry you're too ignorant to figure that out. My argument is the part of this conversation you've been unable to either grasp or refute.
the question is, would it be legal according to the law of the country you'd been abducted to?
First off, "abduction" is what happens when terrorist kidnap a defenseless civilian and execute him. That's not what's going on here and you damn well know it. They are prisoners, not "hostages" or "abductees," and the distinction is importan
I find it worrying that people think by default it is acceptable to imprison people, just because there isn't anything saying you can't.
If we were just picking up people at random for no reason at all I might -- might -- agree with you. However, we are not. If you're one of the naive souls who thinks those insurgents in Guantanamo are just clean-living, innocent, totally-not-at-fault humans who just happend to fall under the heel of the evil, despotic, brutal, imperialistic U.S. forces, you're beyond reasoning with. You're also delusional, but that's beside the point.
If you say that the Geneva Convention doesn't apply, nor do any protections for US Citizens apply, you can't then say that therefore it's okay.
This statement is what's commonly referred to as a non sequitur, meaning it's something that doesn't logically follow what was said before. You claim that since the Geneva Convention doesn't apply that somehow the U.S. Constitution doesn't apply? That's so absurd I'm not sure how to even reply to it.
As a U.S. citizen I am given the due protections and guaranteed my rights as stated in the Constitution. The Constitution applies only to citizens, just in case you were ignorant of that concept. A foreigner caught attacking U.S. forces on foreign soil can be picked up, detained, questioned...pretty much anything you want short of what is outlined in the Geneva Conventions and that's all perfectly legal both locally and internationally. Don't want to get picked up and detained? Then don't do anything that would require it. Rather simple, don't you think? Oh, I forget, you're not thinking, you're just reacting according to dogma.
When other US citizens are captured abroad, people don't say "Oh, well he wasn't wearing a uniform, nor does he have any legal protections over there, so I guess that's okay then" do they? No, we refer to them having been taken hostage.
You seem to misunderstand the difference between taking a civilian like Daniel Pearl hostage (you know, the journalist who had his living head hacked off his body as a tribute to Allah by those wonderful peaceful Muslims you're so eager to defend) and a recognized member of the U.S. military. I've got news for you: the laws of war do not allow for the indiscriminate targeting of civilians for the purpose of terror (i.e. the London tube bombings, 9/11, etc.) You have fallen into the liberal mindset of moral equivalence. You think that when Al-Queada detonates a carbomb killing 80 Iraqi civilians, it's no different than when a U.S. military jet drops a bomb and blows away 80 Al-Queada terrorists. Again, if this is your deranged mindset, you're beyond reasoning with. Logic is not in you.
So, if someone comes over to your house, breaks in, then you resist - but you're not wearing a uniform, and you don't have your own national flag! - then they capture and throw you in a prison camp in some other country, you'll have no problems with that, morally or legally?
This is what is commonly referred to as a strawman, namely taking your opponent's argument, twisting it, refuting it, and then using that rebuttal to buttress your argument. It is a weak tactic because it's founding on falsehood to begin with. If this is the best you can do, you're just really worth arguing with, but I'll try to insinuate some small seed of sense into that impermeable cranium of yours.
First, if someone breaks into my home, that person is immediately a criminal. According to U.S. law, I can resist them, perhaps even kill them, and not be charged with anything at all. You see, you've neglected the whole "he started it" concept. If I instigate a crime, I am the criminal. If someone resists me, that person is the victim and is morally justified in taking actions against me. That's what you do to criminals: you resist them, capture them, punish them, and if appropriate, you kill them. The Geneva Conventions do not trump local law in
Either you have to charge them or you have to let them go. This crap isn't even legal under the geneva convention, not that this administration seems to give a damn.
Thank you for quoting the laws applying to citizens of the United States of America. Now, please identify for me by name each and every United States Citizen that is being held down in Guantanamo. You will not be able to, because none of them are U.S. citizens.
In fact, only one U.S. citizen has been arrested and detained without trial for any length of time, and that is Jose Padilla. He, however, is not in Guantanamo, he is in South Carolina.
The rest of the rabble being held in Guantanamo are not covered by the U.S. Constitution and thus are not given the rights and protections of the laws of this land. In this case, international law prevails, although exactly which international law is up for debate.
If those being held in Guantanamo have conspired to fight against U.S. forces or attack U.S. property domestically or abroad, they can be rightfully considered to be "enemy combatants" and thus subject to the Geneva conventions. However, none of these combatants are operating under a national flag and none are in uniform, which exempts them from "prisoner of war" status. In truth, the Geneva conventions were not designed to address the current situation where multinationals are committing acts of terrorism via loosely-affiliated groups operating through porous national borders.
So, to rebuke your initial assertions:
- "Either you have to charge them or you have to let them go." No, you don't, unless they are U.S. citizens. Jose Padilla is the only one that falls into anything remoted resembling a grey area. I agree that he should be charged or released immediately and disagree with the current admininstration's attempts to hold him without trial. The rest of those in Guantanamo cells can stay there indefinitely quite legally, and neither I nor the U.S. Constitution has any problems with that, morally or legally.
- "This crap isn't even legal under the geneva convention, not that this administration seems to give a damn." Actually, it's quite legal, as demonstrated above. If you care to disagree, please feel free to cite the paragraph and subsection of the Geneva Convention that you feel is being violated. I am certain you've read it and analyzed it thoroughly since you are claiming it's been violated. Only a fool would do otherwise.
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This must be a troll
/. reasoning. Immature, unthoughtful, shallow, but very typical. Bravo! You should be proud of yourself!
I disagree with you therefore I must be a troll. Don't back up your argument with facts, don't try to argue about provable things, just call your opponent a troll and move on. Yep, typical
because it completely fails to take into account that all this is very new and you can't just pull something finished out of your ass and declare it working.
The original design lifetime of the shuttle had it being retired before 2010. It is now 2005, meaning we have at most five years to completely pull off an entirely new launch system. The shuttle has been known to have major design flaws and limitations since 1986, yet NASA has killed every idea designed to replace it.
Further, the shuttle has failed to achieve every single design advantage goal proposed by the original design. It is not cheaper to operate. It does not get into space any more regularly than a traditional booster (far less, AAMOF). It is not safer than what came before. It cannot haul more cargo than what came before. The very concept of saving money and time by going with a reusable spacecraft is flawed, and nothing makes that more obvious than the fact that all the talk about replacing the shuttle is arrayed around non-reusable capsules.
There was funding for this in the next budget bill, if I remember right.
There is funding for studies about getting back to the moon and Mars. There is no funding for a shuttle replacement because there is no shuttle replacement. You can't fund a thin-air idea, you have to fund a design. NASA has no design, and it doesn't have one because it's been stubbornly refusing to even entertain the concept of shutting down the shuttle for almost two decades.
If nothing comes of it but more talk and debate and no studies are done and no early work gets done within a couple years to make it look like something is being done with that money, THEN you can bitch.
I can (and will) bitch because the actions you speak of should have already been in progress years ago! Does GM wait until they are ready to shut down a car production line before they start even thinking about making a new car? Absolutely not. A new car design is started the day the prior design goes into production. That way, if design & testing takes five years, you can pump out a new model every five years. If NASA takes a decade or more to design a shuttle replacement, they should've been designing and testing something back in 2000. It is now 2005 and there isn't a single piece of hardware on any NASA drawing board anywhere aimed at replacing the shuttle.
Until then, sit down, take a stress pill, and think things over.
Until then, sit down, put your head in the sand, and think happy joy-joy thoughts, because that's apparently where you are comfortable.
HOWEVER , I do not believe that such matters of faith should be taught in schools. I know that my faith is inherently unprovable...that's pretty much the definition of 'faith'. Matters of unproven, unprovable faith belong in your chosen place of worship. Matters of proven, or at least provable fact belong in the secular classroom.
;-)
Your argument here is thoughtful and introspective, which is why I'm shocked beyond belief you got modded +5 Insightful instead of modded down like most of the truly insightful commentary around here. But I digress.
I agree that matters of faith are best practiced at home, at church, or at some other personal location. I'm kind of an oddball Christian in that respect. I don't go around proselytizing everyone in sight. I figure if you want to know more about Christianity and whether it's the right thing for you, you can get off your own lazy butt and go figure it out without me haranguing you. If you're too lazy to do that, I don't want you in the afterlife with me, that's for sure.
But, despite my above argument, there is one point we keep dodging here about teaching Creationism, and I believe it's the real reason the hardcore Christian Conservatives are so adamant about getting this taught in schools. Today, if you don't mention Creationism (or I.D., or whatever you want to call it) in the schools, then your teacher is more or less going to say "we evolved from lower life forms, and that's a fact that is unarguable, and nothing else is possible." They are not just omitting Creationism, they are actively teaching it is not possible. This is where I have a big beef with the educational system, because it shouldn't be teaching kids to be close-minded about any subject. Evolution is a theory. It has mountains of evidence to support it, but it remains a theory. Until someone perfects a time-traveling device, it will stay a theory. Teaching kids that evolution is the One And Only Way We Got Here is just as narrow-minded as those Christians seeking to have the exact same concept forced on kids.
Here's my idea of the ideal way to do this: the teachers should teach evolution as a very likely theory on how we got here, but also that there are competing theories from both other scientists and theologians. Round up the discussion with an emphasis on making up your own mind about what you believe. There! Simple, objective dispersion of knowledge without a bias as to what kind of conclusion you should draw.
To quote Albert Einstein, "science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind."
You waste all this space saying "we should do this" and "we should do that" without realizing that ... we are doing it!
Oh really? Where are the plans? Where are the prototypes? Where are the engineering teams testing out launch and recovery scenarios? Where is the budget? Where are the simulators? Where? Where?
They don't exist! NASA has nothing on hand to replace the shuttle right now. It doesn't even have anything firm on the drawing board to replace the shuttle! If NASA had to ground the shuttle permanently (which it may very well do after this flight), the U.S. would be out of the manned spaceflight business until a replacement were designed, prototyped, tested, built, tested again, flown experimentally, and then flown operationally. That process can take a decade, perhaps more. And NASA hasn't even officially started looking for a successor to the shuttle! There's no money budgeted for a specific design. Hell, there isn't even an agreed upon design direction! How in the hell can you possibly say "we are doing it!" when there is absolutely positively no "action" going on in that direction?
Sure, there's a lot of talk, but talk is cheap. When NASA has blueprints being sent to fabricators, then you can say "we are doing it!" Until then, NASA is just doing more of what it's been doing for the last 34 years: blowing lots of hot air and going fast in circles.
At this rate, the last man to stand on the face of the moon will be dead of old age before the next man follows in his footsteps. Forty years ago we were preparing to land a man on the moon, and today the best we can do is low Earth orbit with a vehicle that cost ten times as much to operate and has killed 14 astronauts due to the most pedestrian failures (O-rings and foam)! How the mighty have fallen! NASA should be ashamed, and we are not worthy of those who came before us if this is the best we can do.
That should read "adding engines doesn't hideous impact the weight of the system," not cost. That's what I get for not proofreading it.
Touche. However, if you know anything about rocket engines, you know the weight of the engine is just about inconsequential when compared to the overall weight of the vehicle and (above all) fuel.
According to wikipedia, the Saturn V launch vehicle weighed approximately 6.3 million pounds. Of that, each first-stage F-1 engine weighed 18,500 pounds. This means all five F-1 engines comprised only 1.5% of the total vehicle mass. Admittedly I've left out the ancillary things associated with extra engines (mounting struts, extra plumbing, extra turbopumps, etc.) but the point should be clear: adding engines doesn't hideously impact the cost of the system unless you have to haul the whole damn thing to orbit. Expendable stages really are still the best answer to getting into space cheaply, quickly, and reliably.
So? The SR-71 needs similar refitting and costs many, many times more to produce and service.
It also did much, much, much more than the MiG-25, so the comparison here is an unfair one. The SR-71 could cruise for hours at Mach 3+, the MiG-25 could ony do it for minutes at a time. Further, the speed record set by the MiG-25 was acheived at the cost of ruining the engines of the fighter for that one sprint.
The MiG-25 was indeed a great Russian acheivement, but to say it's in the same class as the SR-71 is somewhat of a gross distortion. And the SR-71 didn't cost that much to run compared to other surveillance platforms of the day -- namely satellites!
Even the smallest stray piece of material can cause disruption upon re-entry.
The utter fragility of such a system is proof enough the design is tragically flawed. If a billion dollar vehicle can be taken out by such a simple failure, something is wrong. Would you accept such SPoF's (Single Points of Failure) in any I.T. system you're responsible for designing or maintaining? I mean, it's not like we can't make something better than the current tile-and-felt the shuttle uses. Apollo-era capsules had monolithic, non-reusable ablative heatshields that were far less fragile, and the capsule design was elegant enough to protect the heatshield with other portions of the spacecraft until it was actually time for re-entry.
The shuttle was, is, and remains, a boondoggle. It was not a step forward from Apollo, it was a leap backwards.
The Russians have the much cheaper and safer soyuz, not because they are especially smarter, but because they just cannot afford to run their shuttle.
The Russians understand something that NASA does not, namely that their technology is limited and thus must be overengineered for saftey. Everything about the former Soviet space program was overdesigned for a reason, just like our Saturn V was: to give good safety margins without going gonzo with costs. If you've got four engines making enough thrust to get you into orbit, you add a fifth for safety and then run all your engines at 80% rated thrust for even more safety. Is it efficient? No, but it's safer.
Now, I'm not about to argue that space exploration is, or ever should be, perfectly safe. That is obviously absurd. However, the more of a design margin you have, the less meticulous you have to be when preparing to launch the vehicle. Almost all the cost overruns in the shuttle program are due to the incredible number of inspections and maintenance needed to turn a shuttle around. With a throwaway booster, you don't have any of that. Sure, you're junking valuable hardware every time you launch with a throwaway booster, but it actually costs less to do it that way. Why do you think commercial satellites are launched on Delta rockets instead of the shuttle?
Take a modern top-fuel dragster as an example. It is designed to do one thing: go as fast as you can in one quarter of a mile. Everything inside the engine is designed to last roughly just that distance, and it is torn down and rebuilt pretty much completely between every run. It is, in essence, a throwaway booster. Dragster teams do it this way because it is impractical to build an engine that can survive multiple runs and be competitive. Sure, it's expensive. But losing the race is even more expensive.
NASA needs to get away from giving us a Ferrari of a shuttle, with all its myriad valves, camshafts, and amazingly expensive maintenance, and instead give us a slightly-updated version of the 60's-era Chevy Big Block. Sure, a Ferrari can get 400hp out of a 2.5-liter engine, but it must use exotic techniques to do so. A big block V8 can make 400hp all day long without working hard, and it costs pretty much an order of magnitude less to construct and maintain. We need the Chevy, not the Ferrari, if we're going to get back into space on a large scale.
Sure. Do you happen to have a formula for some spray-on stuff that will withstand the 3000F re-entry temperatures? Oh, and it has to be very light, at least as light as the current "gap filler," because if it's too heavy at all it will drastically hurt the shuttle's load-carrying capability (there are a lot of gaps to fill for the tens of thousands of tiles on the shuttle, of course). And it has to be cheap so it doesn't increase launch costs. And it has to be easy to apply so it doesn't increase turnaround times and costs. And it has to interact well with the existing tiles so it doesn't damage them or degrade their capability. And it has to be aerodynamically sound so nothing interrupts the smooth airflow under the belly.
Yeah, it's so simple, I just can't imagine why NASA hasn't come up with something like this.
I'm just finishing reading "Comm Check," a book on the Columbia accident by Michael Cabbage and William Harwood. I've read a lot about the shuttle ever since its first flight 24 years ago, and if there's one thing that's abundantly clear, it is this: the shuttle is a lemon.
What's so tragically funny here is that, in the book, a NASA rep is quoted as saying "the shuttle isn't a lemon" right after the CAIB report pretty much said NASA was flying a platform that was not only unreasonable unsafe, but also one having such serious design flaws as to be much less safe than necessary. Spaceflight may never be as safe as an airplane ride, but the level of risk associated with the shuttle is just much more than it could've been with a better design.
Disocover magazine had a lengthy article about twenty years ago on how the shuttle was developed, and it was an amazing insight into how so many compromises can add up to a vehicle that is not only hugely different than what was originally invented, but also one that just doesn't do anything really well. The cargo capacity was too small. It can't achieve high orbits. It lands as an unpowered glider with a glide ratio of a brick wall. It has solid boosters that can't be throttled, trimmed, or turned off. There is no practical escape or abort manuver during the most dangerous parts of the flight (launch & re-entry). Worst of all, it's designed in such a fashion that there are an amazing number of "criticality-1" items. If a crit-1 item fails, it will result in "loss of mission, crew, and vehicle." The shuttle system has several thousand crit-1 items. To the average I.T. geek, that's like running a few thousand servers, each holding billions of dollars worth of data, and not having any redundant hard drives, power supplies, or UPS's. In other words, madness.
There isn't a single solitary thing the shuttle does better than the Apollo-era capsules it was supposed to replace. Launch costs for the shuttle were supposed to be 1/10th those of the throwaway boosters, but instead they are more than ten times what the Saturn V cost in adjusted dollars.
So, to sum it up, the shuttle is more expensive, less reliable, less capable, and more dangerous than its predecessor. Yeah, gimme more of that.
The ISS is also a boondoggle for many of the same reasons. Why do we have a shuttle fleet? To build the space station, of course! Why are we building a space station? To give the shuttles somewhere to go, of course! It's a circular argument. No shuttle equals no station, and no station equals no shuttle. No wonder NASA has its head so far up its exhaust nozzles it can't see the shuttle is an amazing failure. To admit failure would be to kill off the two biggest projects the organization has.
As has been said elsewhere here, our technology is just not yet at the point where something like the shuttle is practical. We just don't have the propulsion and materials to do it just yet. What we should be doing instead is using the best practical technologies out there, namely BDB's (Big Dumb Boosters). The aren't sexy, but they work, and they can haul a cubic buttload of cargo into orbit -- or beyond.
Unfortunately, I have the sinking feeling NASA is going to have to kill another seven astronauts before they finally, regrettably put the shuttle to bed. It was a good try, but you have to be able to admit when you are wrong. Build us a modern version of the Saturn V. With modern materials and modern computers, it could be made more cheaply and even more reliable than before, probably with more lift capacity as well. Make it so it does one thing very well. We don't need a Swiss Army knife of a shuttle to get into space, not when you've got much better proven technologies that are already available. NASA can get this right. The big question is, will they?
Less broken face = more compliant with the standards. Period.
/.'er.
While I'm not going to disagree that some compliance is better than no compliance, your own puritanical quest for standards compliance apparently only extends to Microsoft products. Firefox has been in development how long? Years. And it can't pass the Acid2 test. Where are the endless posts moaning and whining about how long its taking Mozilla to fix this issue? Where is the condemnation? Where is the hue and cry about how awful it is to see Mozilla flouting the supreme will of the W3C?
Methinks I doth smell a double standard here.
And there are browsers that pass the test. Safari's new version supposedly passes (Tiger version, I suppose - I don't have it at hand, so I can't say).
Hmmm, so Safari -- a web browser only available on an architecture that has less than 3% of the corporate computing market and 5% overall -- might pass this test. And not everyone running Mac OS X is even running Safari. It would seem your own answer has revealed a startling truth: nobody gives a damn about W3C compliance! Actually, it shouldn't be all that startling because I stated it in my earlier post. No crystal ball required, I just happen to observe reality more often than the average
The only major vendor that doesn't even try is Microsoft, who says that CSS2 is "fundamentally flawed"
And their opinion is wrong...why? Microsoft is entitled to their opinion. Just because the W3C comes out with a standard doesn't mean everyone is supposed to love it. If MS thinks it can do something bigger or better than CSS2, it is most welcome to try. If it succeeds, the W3C will be forced to review their own ideas. If it fails, Microsoft will be forced to adopt CSS2, or whatever else "wins." There is no law saying the W3C has the first, last, and every word on web "standards." A standard is more than what the W3C says it is. If everyone decides to use MS-CSSv3.1 (or whatever MS might call something) instead of W3C-CSSv9.0, Microsoft's standard is the de facto standard. Any other conclusion is merely whining.
So what you're saying is that since FF butchers the test and IE7 butchers the test, FF is really better anyway. Yeah, that's objectivity for you.
The test is not graded on a curve, it's pass/fail. FF fails. IE7 fails. IE6 fails. I don't run Mozilla so I can't speak for it, but I'm willing to bet it fails, too. Is there any browser out there at all that can pass this test? And if not, doesn't that pretty much prove that nobody really gives a damn about W3C standards?
What kind of fucking idiot are you that you can't grasp that I wasn't adding up all desktop OS's, I was adding up only Windows desktops. While my first post didn't make this clear, the followups did. So, please explain to my why you're too fucking stupid to read.
AMD chips are like a big ole Mack truck. they suck up a lot of juice, but they can hold their own hauling a big load.
It would seem you're operating with outdated information. For the record, current maximum current draw for all Opteron, Athlon64, and Athlon64 X2 chips is 95W. Note that that is the maximum for all chips at all speeds, current and planned, for the Socket 939/940 designs. Independent testing has shown that even the top-end dual-core Opterons consume roughly 89W.
Contrast this to Intel's flagship Pentium 4 EE or the fastest Prescott-based Pentium 4. Independent testing shows a power consumption of at least 119W, in some cases as much as 130W under maximum load. AnandTech and Tom's Hardware have confirmed this.
So, to revise your erroneous statements, AMD chips are like a turbocharged Acura NSX, zippy and frugal with the "gas," but as affordable and reliable as your average Honda. Intel chips are like fuel-guzzling V8's but without the horsepower and torque you'd expect from such gluttony behavior. And they cost more. That's why the P4 has been, for all intents and purposes, completely killed off in favor of Pentium-M derivations, all of which are essentially based on the old Pentium Pro design from the early 90's.
nor should any developer forget that around ten percent of Joe Users are using firefox.
/.'ers might want, the reality of the world is that IE *owns* the browser market. FF might be changing that, but it'll be years before Microsoft is displaced, if ever.
Most ever web software development company I've consulted for in the last four years develops their software and tests it on the following platforms: IE5, IE6, and Mozilla. Most of them are now integrating FF into their QA process, so FF users are not being forgotten. But the vast majority of the coding and testing is aimed at IE compatiblity. Despite what
Maybe you should think about what comes out of your fucking trap before you commit it to paper. Then you'll look like less of an ass.
Source please.
Don't be a fucking tard. Go Google on your own damned time and quit acting like a smug know-it-all. As a share of all Windows operating systems, XP has more than 50%. Google Zeitgeist reported 62.8% of reported OS types were WinXP.
Hmmm, so there are more than 100% of the desktops out there? Oh, I get it. -10% of the desktops have *nix, bringing the total back down to 100%.
Again, you think you're being cute and funny but you're really being a snobbish ass. I was referring to XP's share as a portion of overall Windows OS's, not the total OS market included OS X, *nix, and everything else. But, as is usual with OS zealots, you decided to take the most ridiculous interpretation you could as a way of asserting just how big your OS penis is. What a loser.
I hear this every time someone mentions web standards. The fact is that "Joe User" is not as stupid as we imagine, he just has other things on his plate, but he still wants all his web apps to work.
And no web software developer in the world is going to make a mass-market solution that breaks in the most prolific browser in the world. You may think that some anti-establishment web developer somewhere will make his or her application work only for the W3C standards and to hell with testing on actual browsers, but that developer is on a fast track to bankruptcy if they try.
The point is this: it doesn't really matter what standards Microsoft does or does not adhere to. With it owning the vast majority of the market (and the *overwhelming* majority of the corporate market), every web software company in the world is going to test and qualify their app to work with IE7. Microsoft *is* a de facto standard by virtue of its ubiquity.
When you consider that pretty much any new machine sold in the last three years has had WinXP on it, the XP-only stigma might not be as bad as you think. Sure, grandma might have an eight-year-old PC, but most people don't, and most people get a new OS when they get a new PC.
My point is this: XP is on more than 50% of the desktops out there. The remaining 50% consists of a melange of 2K, NT, ME, and the 9x series of 16-bit/32-bit junk. With the dropping of support for 2K (and the already-sunset support for everything 9x and ME), XP adoption in Windows circles is accelerating rapidly.
I just tried Firefox 1.06 on The Second Acid Test and it looks like it fails as well. I guess that now means Firefox is just as half-baked as IE7 if you go with the standard ranking system on Slashdot. Not that anyone will actually acknowledge that, of course.
Bzzzt. Sorry, but just because you put it on paper and sign it doesn't make the contract valid. There's MANY examples of things that aren't enforceable under contract law. I believe a California judge struck down a 2 year non-compete clause an employee had with his/her employer because it didn't let the employee earn a living.
Bzzzt. Sorry! Microsoft is headquartered in Redmond, Washington, not California, thus California contract law does not apply. It matters where you sign the contract, not where you go afterwards.
Further, you're using the letter of the law to violate the spirit of the law. If the employee didn't wish to be restricted by a no-compete clause, he could've asked that it be removed. If Microsoft refused to do so, he could've refused to work for Microsoft and gone elsewhere. It's not like someone put a gun to his head and forced him to sign the contract; he did it on his own free will. He later decided his signed word of honor was inconvenient and thus decided to break it.
Either way, you're missing the whole point here. The way to fight no-compete clauses is to refuse to sign on them. If everyone decided they wouldn't sign any such thing, companies would be forced to remove them or risk being unable to recruit top talent. This is the same argument I use against those who think pirating MP3's is a way to defeat the RIAA. Neither case works because your opponent uses your violation of the law as a rationale for more vigorous enforcement of the very law you despise. The proper way to get things done is within the law.
If you don't like things like this, get the laws changed, don't just decide "I'm going to break the law (in this case, contract law) today because I don't like it." You're just helping your enemies by doing so.
Look, I despise non-compete clauses just as much as the next geek, but a contract is a contract is a contract. If you sign your name to a contract stating you won't do something, you shouldn't do it. If you don't intend to follow the letter and spirit of the contract, you shouldn't sign it. What is difficult to understand about this concept?
/. has a double standard when it comes to Microsoft. Nah, that couldn't be it, could it?
This isn't a Big Business Versus The Little Guy argument, it's a He Violated A Signed Contract argument. I'm assuming, of course, that the no-compete language is clearly spelled out here, and if I know MS, I'm sure it's tight as a drum legally. There aren't too many legal teams better paid and better staffed than those at MS.
Forget morality for a moment. Who cares whether no-compete is "right" or "wrong." The issue here is a contract. If we all get so worked up in a lather when the GPL is violated, we should be no less lathered up when an employee of Microsoft violates his or her contract to work for a competitor. Unless, of course,
They were found guilty of this in court? No they weren't - it is you who is delusional. The point is, we don't know whether they are terrorists, otherwise bad people, or not.
Please point out to me exactly where it is required that these individuals must be found guilty in court before they can be incarcerated. If you can't do that, you've lost this argument already.
Even if we say that neither the US protections, nor (that's "nor", not "therefore") the Geneva Convention apply, this doesn't mean that it's okay. You might be able to say that it's not illegal, if there aren't any international agreements against it, but I don't think legality really applies well in this case - that certainly doesn't mean it's morally okay.
Thank you for projecting your morals on the entire rest of the world. And here it was I thought all you liberals were supposed to be so accepting and tolerant of everyone else's view of morality! What, did you miss a Liberal Socialists Club meeting or something? Didn't you get the memo?
Also, you have to accept that it's just as "legal" whenever US citizens are captured and taken hostage by other countries or organisations. Oddly, people never seem to argue this...
You're again falling into the whole "moral relativst" perspective that anyone detaining anyone is equivalent to anyone else detaining anyone else. Your naivete in this respect is stunning. Do you have to practice at it or does it just come naturally?
To re-acquaint you with the real world, when a professional, recognize military force takes a prisoner, he or she is not a "hostage," they are prisoners and subject to nothing more than whatever Geneve accords apply. If none apply, the only restraint imposed on the military is what is deemed morally acceptable by the chain of command. On the other hand, when a group of self-proclaimed radicals kidnaps an innocent civilian and saws his head off with a knife on live TV, that is not the same thing. It's not even close, just in case your sense of "morality" can't tell the difference.
Based upon your assessment, I would be led to believe that you equate a bank robber killing a cop and police officer killing a bank robber to be morally equivalent. Such relativism is as disgusting as it is misguided.
kay, so if members of the US Military were taken hostage from their homes in the US, that would be okay?
Only in your bizarre reality where those who commit crimes and those who capture those who commit crimes are morally equal.
Also, you've contradicted yourself - first you say that the Geneva Convention doesn't apply because they aren't part of a military, but now you say that they aren't civilians, because they defended their homes.
"defended their homes"? What kind of apologist tripe is this? You would elevate terrorist scum of the earth to the same level as a professional solder. I was wrong. You're not naive, you're just plain stupid.
Oh, and I didn't contradict myself, you're just too dense to understand it. For foreign nationals captured while attacking U.S. property or forces, if they're not part of a recognized army, neither U.S. law nor the Geneva accords apply. No contradiction required...unless of course you count the logical one inside your head.
This is what is commonly referred to as an ad hominem argument.
No, it's not an argument, it's an insult. I'm sorry you're too ignorant to figure that out. My argument is the part of this conversation you've been unable to either grasp or refute.
the question is, would it be legal according to the law of the country you'd been abducted to?
First off, "abduction" is what happens when terrorist kidnap a defenseless civilian and execute him. That's not what's going on here and you damn well know it. They are prisoners, not "hostages" or "abductees," and the distinction is importan
I find it worrying that people think by default it is acceptable to imprison people, just because there isn't anything saying you can't.
If we were just picking up people at random for no reason at all I might -- might -- agree with you. However, we are not. If you're one of the naive souls who thinks those insurgents in Guantanamo are just clean-living, innocent, totally-not-at-fault humans who just happend to fall under the heel of the evil, despotic, brutal, imperialistic U.S. forces, you're beyond reasoning with. You're also delusional, but that's beside the point.
If you say that the Geneva Convention doesn't apply, nor do any protections for US Citizens apply, you can't then say that therefore it's okay.
This statement is what's commonly referred to as a non sequitur, meaning it's something that doesn't logically follow what was said before. You claim that since the Geneva Convention doesn't apply that somehow the U.S. Constitution doesn't apply? That's so absurd I'm not sure how to even reply to it.
As a U.S. citizen I am given the due protections and guaranteed my rights as stated in the Constitution. The Constitution applies only to citizens, just in case you were ignorant of that concept. A foreigner caught attacking U.S. forces on foreign soil can be picked up, detained, questioned...pretty much anything you want short of what is outlined in the Geneva Conventions and that's all perfectly legal both locally and internationally. Don't want to get picked up and detained? Then don't do anything that would require it. Rather simple, don't you think? Oh, I forget, you're not thinking, you're just reacting according to dogma.
When other US citizens are captured abroad, people don't say "Oh, well he wasn't wearing a uniform, nor does he have any legal protections over there, so I guess that's okay then" do they? No, we refer to them having been taken hostage.
You seem to misunderstand the difference between taking a civilian like Daniel Pearl hostage (you know, the journalist who had his living head hacked off his body as a tribute to Allah by those wonderful peaceful Muslims you're so eager to defend) and a recognized member of the U.S. military. I've got news for you: the laws of war do not allow for the indiscriminate targeting of civilians for the purpose of terror (i.e. the London tube bombings, 9/11, etc.) You have fallen into the liberal mindset of moral equivalence. You think that when Al-Queada detonates a carbomb killing 80 Iraqi civilians, it's no different than when a U.S. military jet drops a bomb and blows away 80 Al-Queada terrorists. Again, if this is your deranged mindset, you're beyond reasoning with. Logic is not in you.
So, if someone comes over to your house, breaks in, then you resist - but you're not wearing a uniform, and you don't have your own national flag! - then they capture and throw you in a prison camp in some other country, you'll have no problems with that, morally or legally?
This is what is commonly referred to as a strawman, namely taking your opponent's argument, twisting it, refuting it, and then using that rebuttal to buttress your argument. It is a weak tactic because it's founding on falsehood to begin with. If this is the best you can do, you're just really worth arguing with, but I'll try to insinuate some small seed of sense into that impermeable cranium of yours.
First, if someone breaks into my home, that person is immediately a criminal. According to U.S. law, I can resist them, perhaps even kill them, and not be charged with anything at all. You see, you've neglected the whole "he started it" concept. If I instigate a crime, I am the criminal. If someone resists me, that person is the victim and is morally justified in taking actions against me. That's what you do to criminals: you resist them, capture them, punish them, and if appropriate, you kill them. The Geneva Conventions do not trump local law in
Either you have to charge them or you have to let them go. This crap isn't even legal under the geneva convention, not that this administration seems to give a damn.
Thank you for quoting the laws applying to citizens of the United States of America. Now, please identify for me by name each and every United States Citizen that is being held down in Guantanamo. You will not be able to, because none of them are U.S. citizens.
In fact, only one U.S. citizen has been arrested and detained without trial for any length of time, and that is Jose Padilla. He, however, is not in Guantanamo, he is in South Carolina.
The rest of the rabble being held in Guantanamo are not covered by the U.S. Constitution and thus are not given the rights and protections of the laws of this land. In this case, international law prevails, although exactly which international law is up for debate.
If those being held in Guantanamo have conspired to fight against U.S. forces or attack U.S. property domestically or abroad, they can be rightfully considered to be "enemy combatants" and thus subject to the Geneva conventions. However, none of these combatants are operating under a national flag and none are in uniform, which exempts them from "prisoner of war" status. In truth, the Geneva conventions were not designed to address the current situation where multinationals are committing acts of terrorism via loosely-affiliated groups operating through porous national borders.
So, to rebuke your initial assertions:
- "Either you have to charge them or you have to let them go." No, you don't, unless they are U.S. citizens. Jose Padilla is the only one that falls into anything remoted resembling a grey area. I agree that he should be charged or released immediately and disagree with the current admininstration's attempts to hold him without trial. The rest of those in Guantanamo cells can stay there indefinitely quite legally, and neither I nor the U.S. Constitution has any problems with that, morally or legally.
- "This crap isn't even legal under the geneva convention, not that this administration seems to give a damn." Actually, it's quite legal, as demonstrated above. If you care to disagree, please feel free to cite the paragraph and subsection of the Geneva Convention that you feel is being violated. I am certain you've read it and analyzed it thoroughly since you are claiming it's been violated. Only a fool would do otherwise.