I'm not saying it's right, but that you're putting a highly emotive and anachronistic slant on a practice which Muhammad's contemporaries would probably never have dreamed of calling into question.
Comcast admitted to delaying P2P traffic during peak times, but denied that any file-sharing applications were being completely blocked.
Except that was actually proven, and they even admitted to, is like standing outside someone's house patched into their main phone line and then randomly hanging up on people.
Time to watch this with as many eyes as we can get. Letting Comcrap do this is kind of like putting Mohammed, Lenin, Stalin, Che Guevara, Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, and Chairman Mao in a room to write a declaration of human rights.
It does have the side effect of barring you from working with Paizo's 3.75 system
Actually, that's precisely why WotC/Hasborg did this - they had a falling out with Paizo, said "Fuck you we're pulling Dragon/Dungeon", got greedy over the idea of $14/month for people to play on their shitty as hell (I've been in beta) "insider" online playboards.
End result? D&D 4e is a pile of steaming crap that doesn't deserve to have the D&D name on it. Every gameplay change has been made not to make a better game, but to make it easier for lazy programmers to code it into the online board.
Yeah, there's a set of things in 3.5 that need fixing. There were things in 3.0 that needed fixing. 4e is the "fix" for those things like replacing a worn down Ferrari's engine with a Geo Metro 3-cylinder engine will "fix" the car.
the "Barbary Pirates" were actually privateers and muslim terrorists.
The response the US got back from the Barbary ambassador was that their taking captive sailors and forcing them to either convert or be killed was "founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Quran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman (Muslim) who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise." (quote the direct words of Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja , the Dey of Algiers to Britain).
Muslim terrorism isn't a new thing, it's been going on since Mohammed killed Safiya Bint Huyyay's entire tribe, cut her father's head off in front of her, raped her, then declared it a "marriage" the next day when his troops started grumbling that he always got the hottest chicks for his personal slaves.
Secondary thought: At some point, it is safer for society as a whole to, in fact, give up on someone.
To the rational mind, the potential of a stint in jail is a deterrent. To the irrational mind, or a mind which simply has a poor action-correlation ability, the potential of a stint in jail or other punishment is disconnected with the act. Young children, for example, tend to not understand a long-term punishment simply because their brains lack the ability to focus and think back on "what they did"; a time-out of more than 15-20 minutes to a 2-year-old, for example, is counterproductive.
If you have someone who, for whatever reason, either (a) cannot match the punishment/deterrent with a violent action or (b) continues to disregard it, or (c) has a perceptional bias which cannot comprehend it, you have a problem. Most school bullies, for example, don't see a school suspension as punishment because their grades are already in the shitter, and may actually see it as a reward if they can cause one of the good kids to face the same because they get to enjoy watching the good kid suffer. Gang criminals see the "rewards" of their illegal actions against someone else, and the idea of the cops/authorities getting them or their being punished is a long time off and out of the calculation for the most part.
If you have someone like that, the chance of fixing them versus the chance of more harm to another member of society may be too great for society to take. Are we giving up? Maybe. Is it a rational thing for society to do? YES.
Especially with *limited* goals, and the parent poster stated one that's perfectly achievable. Having a *justice system* that doesn't execute innocent people is exceptionally easy: don't have executions as part of the justice system.
Except that there are cases where the best defense for society is the excise of the individual from the ability to ever harm another person, ever again, no matter how small a chance.
Putting them in a normal prison isn't an option. We do have a responsibility to protect those who are rehabilitatable or in for more minor crimes from those who are simply irredeemable and likely to harm others. In this case, I think our prisons are woefully inadequate, and that is true the world over.
Which is more humane - marooning someone on a deserted island or somewhere else, "with no hope of escape"? Sticking them in a 4x6 cell, no sunlight, sealed door, food passed through a slot, till they die? Sticking them together with other homicidal maniacs and seeing which kills the others in how gruesome a way possible? Or recognizing that they are irredeemable, and excising them from society in the most painless manner possible?
The whole "easy" point you make isn't so easy when put in those terms. We do a damn good job, going through an incredible amount of evidentiary checks and appeals before we get to the point of carrying out a capital sentence. There's a reason that all the various innocence projects practice multiple forms of statistic misuse not the least of which is observational selection/cherry-picking: they refuse to release their full results, counting how many (still measured in single digits) people they've managed to "exonerate" while throwing out/hiding the number of people claiming innocence that their own evidentiary checking proved guilty.
To paraphrase you: "Having a *justice system* that doesn't convict innocent people is exceptionally easy: don't have a justice system". If you find everyone innocent, your "goal" of not having mistaken convictions is achieved - though I guarantee you wouldn't like the lawless results.
Funny - I hold the US has the best rights record in the world. We certainly have the best (though I'd like it to still be better) rights record on freedom of speech.
Then again, you're probably one of those people who thinks capital punishment (e.g. the death penalty) for the brutal rape and murder of children is a "violation of human rights."
Sounds about right. Looks a lot like the UN councils on "human rights" where tin-pot dictatorships, murderous scum, and totalitarian states (cuba, china, saudi arabia anyone?) sit around condemning the nations with the best human rights records in the world while hushing up their abuses.
Concrap needs to be told to cut the crap off and provide the service people are paying for.
Superconductors would help, but we(humanity) can't make ones that work at room temperature; or even close to it. We're getting closer though, and are actually using them in limited places. NYC is currently installing them in parts of the city; along with the expensive cooling system to make the wires work.
In other words, NYC is "solving" the "problem" of electricity wasted into heat (by resistance) by wasting a ton of electricity running a gigantic fucking A/C unit 24/7... which coincidentally, is just a heat pump.
Is it just me, or is this really silly to start with?
Funny, most wikipedia articles that don't turn out to themselves be plagiarized from other sources are pure crap.
And on anything that might be interesting, you can be pretty sure the article's not accurate just because it's been hit at least once by the little Judge Dredds (they call themselves "administrators") running around the place shooting first and asking questions never.
I want some real competition - in the Houston market, Comcrap came in and is the monopoly on cable modem service. A TEENSY TINY area is covered by FIOS, and 80% of the areas covered by DSL don't overlap the Comcrap areas. No, I don't consider satellite internet "competition" either, given their 3000+ ms ping times.
Prior to Comcrap, we had Roadrunner (time warner) running the service. Since Comcrap broke the agreement with TW and came in our service has gone down the crapper, we constantly have dead periods, bandwidth is cut in half, and meanwhile they run ads claiming (quite fraudulently) that they are "increasing" the number of channels for the cable subscribers.
Used to be, if we had service outage (say, someone didn't trim their tree and cable got broken) we called the local customer service, we got a tech out, it was fixed within 4 hours. Now, we call customer service and get some fucking moron in India who doesn't speak english, and it takes 2 days just to get some mexican (who also doesn't speak english) in a truck out to verify there's a problem and then say he needs to get some other mexican out to fix it.
Most users do not understand the benefits of Windows Vista...
You mean the almost-constant nag screens?
or do not see Vista as being better enough than Windows XP...
Making them smarter than the lying marketroids selling it...
to make incurring the cost and pain of migration worthwhile.
Translation: People are smarter than they think, and an OS that takes twice the hardware to be twice as slow AND even more incompatible with previous software isn't worth my money.
Of course, they still get sales - from the same idiots at my work who want to be upgraded from Office 2003 to Office 2007 because it's a bigger number, and then complain that they are confused by Office 2007 and want the tech support guys to "fix" it.
And you forget how easy that would be to fix. Format, copy in your preferred distro (Or if you prefer, load in a flavor of Windows more to your liking)... presto!
1.6 GHZ VIA processor and "crappy" (by today's standards) graphics, if even remotely able to run Vista home edition (which is likely the "Vista" referred to) is still enough to do MAME and just about any other emulation you come up with. Think about it, really.
WoW will run - admittedly in the lowest graphics mode - on a P3/Athlon 800 MHz, 512 MB RAM, and a video board with at least GeForce2-level (read: capabilities from 8 years ago) graphics ability. This laptop will do at LEAST that much - and those are specs I'd have killed for back in college running MAME.
Trust me: if there is a way, the kids WILL find it.
Optical drives have been left out to prevent kids from playing 'unauthorized games.'
Of course, being kids, they will require ~30 seconds (maybe less) to figure out a way around this. USB optical drive / keychain drive? Check. Daemon Tools and ISO image? Check. No-CD Patch of whatever game they want to run? Check. Web games, bittorrent, whatever else their little hearts might desire? Check.
I have a vision of 1,000s of kids sitting in school, on school-approved laptop, all endowed with MAME and console emulators... "and god looked down, and saw that it was good."
As opposed to the US, where every time copyrighted anything comes close to hitting public domain, Dizney sends a bunch of hookers to the congressional offices to "lobby" for an "extension."
I was kind of expecting this. There's a few core constituencies (Google apologists, Wikipedia nuts, etc) who always seem to have "attack dogs" with mod points sitting around.
Google have become far too big for their boots in recent years.
Indeed. Trying to get their crappy, browser-crashing "toolbar" included in every download (Adobe Reader, Sun Java, etc) was just the beginning.
But that was piddly, realplayer-style evil.
This? While they have a form (if you spend a ton of time hunting for them, not "readily available" as they claim) to try to remove an image, they still force you to go through a whole ton of paperwork just to assert your privacy rights. And there is no equivalent to remove your house from their satellite stuff if you so desire.
Plus, reviewing the photos makes it pretty obvious that whoever was taking the photos drove all the way up to the house.
People "love" Google for handing them free widgets - but then again, they can also be used for ridiculous false propaganda and Google's never corrected anything shown false on any of their tools, particularly when they can vilify Israel by keeping it up (see also the listing of the Temple Mount as "Palestinian", the listing of Gaza to this day as "Israeli Occupied" when it's run by Hamas terrorists after Israeli forces left years ago, and on and on).
Their "News service" is biased the same way - they'll run Hezbollah and Hamas "newspapers" but not western news organizations that catch those groups lying every day.
And then with Google owning YouTube, all of a sudden videos intended to counter Islamic Supremacist groups are being removed for "violation of terms of service", while videos of Jihadi nutcases put out by terror groups stay up for weeks on end.
Oh, and they'll put up all sorts of kitschy front page images for days in remembrance of canadian "Remembrance Day", and countless other days year-round, but they stuck the middle finger to US Veterans' Day and Memorial Day.
And of course, there was the torrent of anti-Bush ads at the same moment they rejected ads on a book which took Hillary down a peg or two.
Don't forget how in-bed they are with the Chinese "great firewall of China" in shutting down free speech over there.
I think Google long ago crossed the line. "Don't Be Evil"? They've moved past Vader all the way to Palpatine.
Why do you think people hate Vista so much? It breaks more older apps... there are still old games I love to play, that I'll dig out, but they take enough patching even to run on winxp, I don't even want to THINK about getting them to run under Vista.
There were people who were perfectly happy with a Geo Metro, but I figured a car with better gas mileage AND more power than a go-kart engine was probably the way to go.
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I'm not saying it's right, but that you're putting a highly emotive and anachronistic slant on a practice which Muhammad's contemporaries would probably never have dreamed of calling into question.
Funny how this old arab pervert's example continues quite regularly into the modern day.
Or how about this?
Or how about the fact that non-muslims still have to try to stop this in nigeria too?
Tells me a lot that the "ultimate example" of how to behave in the Muslim religion is a stinky, homicidal arab perv.
lumping Muhammad in with mass murderers and dictators
Kind of like comparing apples and apples.
Except I don't think Mao and Che ever got around to fucking a 6-year-old like Mohammed did.
Comcast admitted to delaying P2P traffic during peak times, but denied that any file-sharing applications were being completely blocked.
Except that was actually proven, and they even admitted to, is like standing outside someone's house patched into their main phone line and then randomly hanging up on people.
Time to watch this with as many eyes as we can get. Letting Comcrap do this is kind of like putting Mohammed, Lenin, Stalin, Che Guevara, Pol Pot, Adolf Hitler, and Chairman Mao in a room to write a declaration of human rights.
It does have the side effect of barring you from working with Paizo's 3.75 system
Actually, that's precisely why WotC/Hasborg did this - they had a falling out with Paizo, said "Fuck you we're pulling Dragon/Dungeon", got greedy over the idea of $14/month for people to play on their shitty as hell (I've been in beta) "insider" online playboards.
End result? D&D 4e is a pile of steaming crap that doesn't deserve to have the D&D name on it. Every gameplay change has been made not to make a better game, but to make it easier for lazy programmers to code it into the online board.
Yeah, there's a set of things in 3.5 that need fixing. There were things in 3.0 that needed fixing. 4e is the "fix" for those things like replacing a worn down Ferrari's engine with a Geo Metro 3-cylinder engine will "fix" the car.
Muslims who kidnap people and either kill them, or enslave them, unless they convert?
I'd call that terrorism. Fully Koranic-supported terrorism, btw.
the "Barbary Pirates" were actually privateers and muslim terrorists.
The response the US got back from the Barbary ambassador was that their taking captive sailors and forcing them to either convert or be killed was "founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Quran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman (Muslim) who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise." (quote the direct words of Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja , the Dey of Algiers to Britain).
Muslim terrorism isn't a new thing, it's been going on since Mohammed killed Safiya Bint Huyyay's entire tribe, cut her father's head off in front of her, raped her, then declared it a "marriage" the next day when his troops started grumbling that he always got the hottest chicks for his personal slaves.
I'm amazed nobody has asked the real question yet.
Namely: how much money did the MafiAA pay the district judge for this ruling?
Secondary thought: At some point, it is safer for society as a whole to, in fact, give up on someone.
To the rational mind, the potential of a stint in jail is a deterrent. To the irrational mind, or a mind which simply has a poor action-correlation ability, the potential of a stint in jail or other punishment is disconnected with the act. Young children, for example, tend to not understand a long-term punishment simply because their brains lack the ability to focus and think back on "what they did"; a time-out of more than 15-20 minutes to a 2-year-old, for example, is counterproductive.
If you have someone who, for whatever reason, either (a) cannot match the punishment/deterrent with a violent action or (b) continues to disregard it, or (c) has a perceptional bias which cannot comprehend it, you have a problem. Most school bullies, for example, don't see a school suspension as punishment because their grades are already in the shitter, and may actually see it as a reward if they can cause one of the good kids to face the same because they get to enjoy watching the good kid suffer. Gang criminals see the "rewards" of their illegal actions against someone else, and the idea of the cops/authorities getting them or their being punished is a long time off and out of the calculation for the most part.
If you have someone like that, the chance of fixing them versus the chance of more harm to another member of society may be too great for society to take. Are we giving up? Maybe. Is it a rational thing for society to do? YES.
Especially with *limited* goals, and the parent poster stated one that's perfectly achievable. Having a *justice system* that doesn't execute innocent people is exceptionally easy: don't have executions as part of the justice system.
Except that there are cases where the best defense for society is the excise of the individual from the ability to ever harm another person, ever again, no matter how small a chance.
Putting them in a normal prison isn't an option. We do have a responsibility to protect those who are rehabilitatable or in for more minor crimes from those who are simply irredeemable and likely to harm others. In this case, I think our prisons are woefully inadequate, and that is true the world over.
Which is more humane - marooning someone on a deserted island or somewhere else, "with no hope of escape"? Sticking them in a 4x6 cell, no sunlight, sealed door, food passed through a slot, till they die? Sticking them together with other homicidal maniacs and seeing which kills the others in how gruesome a way possible? Or recognizing that they are irredeemable, and excising them from society in the most painless manner possible?
The whole "easy" point you make isn't so easy when put in those terms. We do a damn good job, going through an incredible amount of evidentiary checks and appeals before we get to the point of carrying out a capital sentence. There's a reason that all the various innocence projects practice multiple forms of statistic misuse not the least of which is observational selection/cherry-picking: they refuse to release their full results, counting how many (still measured in single digits) people they've managed to "exonerate" while throwing out/hiding the number of people claiming innocence that their own evidentiary checking proved guilty.
To paraphrase you: "Having a *justice system* that doesn't convict innocent people is exceptionally easy: don't have a justice system". If you find everyone innocent, your "goal" of not having mistaken convictions is achieved - though I guarantee you wouldn't like the lawless results.
You forgot to include the USA in that list.
Funny - I hold the US has the best rights record in the world. We certainly have the best (though I'd like it to still be better) rights record on freedom of speech.
Then again, you're probably one of those people who thinks capital punishment (e.g. the death penalty) for the brutal rape and murder of children is a "violation of human rights."
Sounds about right. Looks a lot like the UN councils on "human rights" where tin-pot dictatorships, murderous scum, and totalitarian states (cuba, china, saudi arabia anyone?) sit around condemning the nations with the best human rights records in the world while hushing up their abuses.
Concrap needs to be told to cut the crap off and provide the service people are paying for.
Superconductors would help, but we(humanity) can't make ones that work at room temperature; or even close to it. We're getting closer though, and are actually using them in limited places. NYC is currently installing them in parts of the city; along with the expensive cooling system to make the wires work.
In other words, NYC is "solving" the "problem" of electricity wasted into heat (by resistance) by wasting a ton of electricity running a gigantic fucking A/C unit 24/7... which coincidentally, is just a heat pump.
Is it just me, or is this really silly to start with?
Funny, most wikipedia articles that don't turn out to themselves be plagiarized from other sources are pure crap.
And on anything that might be interesting, you can be pretty sure the article's not accurate just because it's been hit at least once by the little Judge Dredds (they call themselves "administrators") running around the place shooting first and asking questions never.
I want some real competition - in the Houston market, Comcrap came in and is the monopoly on cable modem service. A TEENSY TINY area is covered by FIOS, and 80% of the areas covered by DSL don't overlap the Comcrap areas. No, I don't consider satellite internet "competition" either, given their 3000+ ms ping times.
Prior to Comcrap, we had Roadrunner (time warner) running the service. Since Comcrap broke the agreement with TW and came in our service has gone down the crapper, we constantly have dead periods, bandwidth is cut in half, and meanwhile they run ads claiming (quite fraudulently) that they are "increasing" the number of channels for the cable subscribers.
Used to be, if we had service outage (say, someone didn't trim their tree and cable got broken) we called the local customer service, we got a tech out, it was fixed within 4 hours. Now, we call customer service and get some fucking moron in India who doesn't speak english, and it takes 2 days just to get some mexican (who also doesn't speak english) in a truck out to verify there's a problem and then say he needs to get some other mexican out to fix it.
Fuck Comcrap. I want them out.
Most users do not understand the benefits of Windows Vista...
You mean the almost-constant nag screens?
or do not see Vista as being better enough than Windows XP...
Making them smarter than the lying marketroids selling it...
to make incurring the cost and pain of migration worthwhile.
Translation: People are smarter than they think, and an OS that takes twice the hardware to be twice as slow AND even more incompatible with previous software isn't worth my money.
Of course, they still get sales - from the same idiots at my work who want to be upgraded from Office 2003 to Office 2007 because it's a bigger number, and then complain that they are confused by Office 2007 and want the tech support guys to "fix" it.
"Nothing's worse than a teacher with authoritah!"
And you forget how easy that would be to fix. Format, copy in your preferred distro (Or if you prefer, load in a flavor of Windows more to your liking)... presto!
1.6 GHZ VIA processor and "crappy" (by today's standards) graphics, if even remotely able to run Vista home edition (which is likely the "Vista" referred to) is still enough to do MAME and just about any other emulation you come up with. Think about it, really.
WoW will run - admittedly in the lowest graphics mode - on a P3/Athlon 800 MHz, 512 MB RAM, and a video board with at least GeForce2-level (read: capabilities from 8 years ago) graphics ability. This laptop will do at LEAST that much - and those are specs I'd have killed for back in college running MAME.
Trust me: if there is a way, the kids WILL find it.
Optical drives have been left out to prevent kids from playing 'unauthorized games.'
Of course, being kids, they will require ~30 seconds (maybe less) to figure out a way around this. USB optical drive / keychain drive? Check. Daemon Tools and ISO image? Check. No-CD Patch of whatever game they want to run? Check. Web games, bittorrent, whatever else their little hearts might desire? Check.
I have a vision of 1,000s of kids sitting in school, on school-approved laptop, all endowed with MAME and console emulators... "and god looked down, and saw that it was good."
Heh.
As opposed to the US, where every time copyrighted anything comes close to hitting public domain, Dizney sends a bunch of hookers to the congressional offices to "lobby" for an "extension."
I was kind of expecting this. There's a few core constituencies (Google apologists, Wikipedia nuts, etc) who always seem to have "attack dogs" with mod points sitting around.
Google have become far too big for their boots in recent years.
Indeed. Trying to get their crappy, browser-crashing "toolbar" included in every download (Adobe Reader, Sun Java, etc) was just the beginning.
But that was piddly, realplayer-style evil.
This? While they have a form (if you spend a ton of time hunting for them, not "readily available" as they claim) to try to remove an image, they still force you to go through a whole ton of paperwork just to assert your privacy rights. And there is no equivalent to remove your house from their satellite stuff if you so desire.
Plus, reviewing the photos makes it pretty obvious that whoever was taking the photos drove all the way up to the house.
People "love" Google for handing them free widgets - but then again, they can also be used for ridiculous false propaganda and Google's never corrected anything shown false on any of their tools, particularly when they can vilify Israel by keeping it up (see also the listing of the Temple Mount as "Palestinian", the listing of Gaza to this day as "Israeli Occupied" when it's run by Hamas terrorists after Israeli forces left years ago, and on and on).
Their "News service" is biased the same way - they'll run Hezbollah and Hamas "newspapers" but not western news organizations that catch those groups lying every day.
And then with Google owning YouTube, all of a sudden videos intended to counter Islamic Supremacist groups are being removed for "violation of terms of service", while videos of Jihadi nutcases put out by terror groups stay up for weeks on end.
Oh, and they'll put up all sorts of kitschy front page images for days in remembrance of canadian "Remembrance Day", and countless other days year-round, but they stuck the middle finger to US Veterans' Day and Memorial Day.
And of course, there was the torrent of anti-Bush ads at the same moment they rejected ads on a book which took Hillary down a peg or two.
Don't forget how in-bed they are with the Chinese "great firewall of China" in shutting down free speech over there.
I think Google long ago crossed the line. "Don't Be Evil"? They've moved past Vader all the way to Palpatine.
VMWare still fails to give the program proper access to your video board, and a lot of the things I'd like to run seek to use it...
Why do you think people hate Vista so much? It breaks more older apps... there are still old games I love to play, that I'll dig out, but they take enough patching even to run on winxp, I don't even want to THINK about getting them to run under Vista.
There were people who were perfectly happy with a Geo Metro, but I figured a car with better gas mileage AND more power than a go-kart engine was probably the way to go.
Next analogy, anyone?