So I guess the HR drpartment can come search my house at any time because the funds for the payments on it came from work.
Your house wasn't built with company funds. It was built with your own money (I presume). When the company pays you your salary, it's not their money any more. But if the HR department searched your desk, or the PC they gave you to use at work, I wouldn't have a problem with it.
And the government requires that they go to a specific place at a specific time, then requires they submit to searches of their person, effects, and designater private storage areas.
We were talking about lockers, which would be storage areas, not about body searches, which I wouldn't agree with. They are not private storage areas. They're storage areas which belong to the school. Any access at all to school lockers is a privelege extended by the school to the students to use the school's facilities to store the students possessions. If the students don't want the school to know they have something, then don't keep it in the school's lockers.
Now, as other posters have pointed out, the school is an entity funded by parents; either indirectly, way of taxes, or directly, in the form of tuition fees at a private school. It should therefore be up to the parents wether they wish to allow the school they fund to search lockers. Either way, it's not up to the students. Not unless they want to pay for their own education.
I'm all for freedom of speech, but saying the school has to allow their newspaper to say whatever it wants is just like saying people have to let spammers deliver their junkmail - freedom of speech guarantees you the right to speak, not to hijack somebody else's resources in order to propogate your speech.
Um, if the school paper is produced with school resources, and the school lockers are paid for by school funds, then the school has every right to search for them.
Freedom of speech and privacy does not mean you have to fund the people embarrassing you. If you want to write things about your school, produce your own newspaper.
As far as RFIDs go, I don't like them, but I can see them as an outgrowth of modern trends - at least in Australia. More and more responsibility is being placed on those looking after children, and less and less authority is given. A school here was successfully sued by the parents of two children who truanted, and where injured in the course of having a rock fight. At the same time, schools are prohibited from and corporal punishment, or removing children from their peers ("timeouts") in case they alienate them from their friends.
I don't know the conditions in the states, nor in Japan, but based on things going on here, all I can say is "more power to them". People who demand other people take responsibility for their own stupid actions deserve whatever they get. Grow up, take responsibility for yourself, and don't blame the school if your kid is a dick.
The origin of "its'" is probably the rule about possessives ending in "s". For example, you would write "Bess' car is red". The apostrophe is the most misused punctuation mark in the english language.
Well, let's go through a few scenarios. These are all just things I've thought up - they may or may not have occurred somewhere in reality.
1.) A country is under severe economic sanctions. Their ability to manufacture goods drops, their economy falls. Imported consumables are no longer available; the price of petroleum sky rockets. Assuming the countries maintaining the sanctions are not willing to relax them, would it be better for that country to attack, or to just sit back and die?
2.) There is a clear indication that a country is planning a pre-emptive strike against your country. For example, satelite photos showing missiles being fueled, or intercepted communications confirmed by other intelligence. Especially when dealing with things like nuclear weapons, can you afford to wait to strike second?
3.) A country is performing actions that are against established human rights. The government is condoning, or actively promoting child prostitution, organ farming, human testing of biological weapons, etc. Do you respect that nation's sovereignty to treat their populace however they like, or do you attempt to intervene?
I'm not saying Japan was in the right in WWII. I'm saying that claiming Japan was in the wrong solely because they were the aggressor is overly simplistic.
You said the Japanese attacked first, and were therefore the bad guys. You implied that this gave the US moral justification for bombing them. I'm not asking wether the bombing of Japan was sound military thinking, I'm asking wether it was sound moral thinking. If the bombing of Japan was justifiable because it was the aggressor, then the bombing of America because it is currently the aggressor is equally justified. The bombing of Japan may well have been justified - but not simply because Japan attacked first.
Considering and "doing" are very different things. Example: The US is "considering" pulling out of Afghanistan and Iraq.
But if the Japanese were "considering" surrender, would it not have been better to see where that lead before dropping nuclear weapons on two heavily populated cities? A point I made in another thread is that I don't necessarily view the bombing as wrong, but I definately think the allies did not pursue diplomatic solutions as far as they should have - they did not try to discuess any conditional surrender with Japan. They wanted unconditional surrender, and they wanted it now, and since they didn't get it, they dropped the bombs. Discussion and compromise is much better than nuclear holocaust.
Not if you own the hardware, which is what this case was about. A more apt analogy for the grandparent would be if a company sold you a box with a screw you were forbiddem tp undo. If the DMCA were against physical countermeasures rather than electronic, it would be illegal for you to unscrew your own screw. It would still be legal for you to break the box though.
They were not. An unconditional surrender was demanded. That is unfortunate. It was a mistake on America's part, one that in the original wording of the demand could have been avoided. Dean Acheson himself admited the mistake after the fact. Hindsight is always sharper. There is at least an outside chance that terms could have been come to that would have allowed such a thing, although I find it doubtful.
And that's my whole point. Nuclear weapons should, at minimum, be a weapon of last resort. In this case, the weapon was deployed before diplomatic means of ending the conflict were exhausted. I think invasion would have been premature also, but at least with an invasion, you can say "enough, withdraw". With a nuclear weapon, everything is done in one, swift movement, with no going back.
The Japanese were essentially defeated at this point in the war. They were on the back foot, and on the defensive. If there is ever a time for a serious attempt at peace, this was it. The Japanese didn't want their home invaded. If the US was at all sane, they didn't want to invade Japan - preceisely because people fight furiously when they're defending their home.
No. After the surrender. It is a tautology to say that the surrenderd have surrenderd, and that's the only sense I can make out of what you're saying here.
I'm saying there are two ways the allies could have accomplished their ends. Firstly, by using the bomb, and forcing an unconditional surrender. Secondly, by attempting to negotiate a conditional surrender. I'm saying the bomb was not necessarily necessary (man that's an awkward phrase) to accomplish Japanese surrender. You don't think they Japanese would have surrendered, and maybe they wouldn't have. But my point was that this avenue was not pursued far enough.
You said that the Japanese would not have allowed America entry into their country before the bombings. To back this up, you pointed out that America would not allow the Japanese into California.
I am saying that if Japan had conditionally surrendered to the US, as they might have done prior to the bombings, then they would have tolerated America's presence, just as they did after their unconditional surrender.
No, the Japanese would not tolerate an invasion, any more than the US would. But if the US had surrendered to Japan, then Japanese forces probably would have allowed access to America, just as after Japan surrendered, America was allowed access to Japan.
The converse situation would apply to Japan. They would not have simply allowed America to "take over" without a pitched battle, hedgerow to hedgerow.
But they did allow such a thing after the bombings. If I understand the Japanese correctly, it was because the Emporer surrendered. If the Emporer had surrendered before the bombings, would not the Japanese have tolerated an American presence?
Japanese people until the time of their surrender, which might well have taken years
They were considering a conditional surrender before the bombing, according to intercepted communications.
After the bombing, that was changed to an
unconditional surrender . . .
This is incorrect. The demand for unconditional surrender was made before the bombings
No, you missed my meaning. I meant that before the bombings, the Japanese would have considered a conditional surrender. After the bombings they surrendered unconditionally. My contention is that all the bombs did was change a "conditional" surrender to an "unconditional" surrender, and that that change did not warrant the use of nuclear weapons.
I find the idea of divorcing war and intimidation a rather peculiar one. Even chess players make good use of intimidation from time to time. Properly done winning through intimidation is almost always the most desirable end as it obviates unnecessary conflict for all parties
Not when you look at the type on intimidation used here. It wasn't merely putting strength on display so an opponent would back down. It was an unncessary, and unnecessarily potent, attack against an already-defeated foe, in order to intimidate a third party. Of course, intimidation is generally better than aggression, but when you intimidate through aggression, it loses any moral value it might have.
So far as anyone thought of it at the time it was just a bomb. A really, really big bomb, but just a bomb, not a "nuke."
Apart from the people who decided to use it, who knew full well its destructive potential (at least in the short-term) from all that testing they'd done.
Because America's military always behaves so politely, doesn't it? As all these stories of torture in Iraq demonstrate. Face it, war is barbaric. It brings out the barbarism inherent in all people, regardless of nationality.
Take one person. Drill into their head that a particular nationality is the enemy. Take them into a situation where their comrades are killed by members of this nationality. Deliver a prisoner of that nationality, especially an enemy combatant, into their hands, and see how they treat them.
To about the same extent that had the Japanese gained the ascendency in the war and invaded California America would have allowed the Japanese to occupy its lands and pay "reparations."
This is not an accurate representation. You are comparing the surrender of one nation to another with the occupation of an enemy state. The State of California could not have surrendered to Japan. If the United States of America had unconditionally surrendered to Japan, then the Americans would have paid reparation to the Japanese.
If, instead of the Japanese surrendering to America, the Americans had invaded and subdued a Japanese island, then you'd probably have a more apt comparison. In this case, the rest of Japan would move to "liberate" the occupied island, just as the US would act to "liberate" an occupied California.
America didn't have to invade Japan. They didn't need to take control of the company. They just needed them out of the war. The Japanese were considering this - a conditional surrender. After the bombing, that was changed to an unconditional surrender - which was what let the US write the Japanese constitution and impose some basic Western ideology. Wether that ideology has been good or bad for Japan is up for debate - a Japan after a conditional surrender to the US would be very different to the one now. But the war would have ended the same way. The only factor that might have changed the outcome of the war was the intimidation factor of a demonstration of nuclear might. And I don't see initimidation as a good enough reason for nuking two cities.
Remember, the Japanese attacked us. That made them the bad guys that time around. We did bad things too, but at least we weren't trying to rule the world.
Which would make the US the bad guys in the Iraq war, and thus deserving of a nuke or two in some heavily populated cities? Now there are a tonne of problems with "pre-emptive strikes" but saying "whoever attacked first is necessarily wrong" is just stupid.
Situational ethics. Fewer people died that way than if we'd used conventional weapons.
Right. Where's the proof? Many people have pointed out theat the Japanese were considering surrender before the bombings. It was the nuclear attack that made them surrender unconditionally.
And I truly doubt that the people who made the decision were thinking of the good of the many. It's not likely they were counting total lives lost - more likely they were counting American military lives lost. That's the way people tend to think in wartime - their thoughts become polarised into "us and them".
"campaign of terror"? Somebody's been listening to Mr. Bush too much. The bombing of Pearl Harbour was an act of war, not of terrorism. The relative merits of war over terrorism are up for debate, of course, but there is a clear demarkation between the two.
Please define "unclaimed". Is it only claimed if I stake out a fence and build a homestead? I don't know the specifics of native American tribes; I'm Australian. But most of the indigineous peoples that have been wiped out in various parts of the world have been nomadic, or semi-nomadic. That creates a different sense of "claimed" land, one that the British and European colonizers of the time weren't able to recognize.
I paid their royalties when I bought my DVD. Now I want to watch it. They want me to pay them for the encryption keys to something I have already bought. It would be like charging $60 for Doom 3 - and then another $60 for the decryption keys that actually let you install it.
I dunno, I found their most recent series (Well of Darkness) incredibly boring. It seemed just more of the same. I didn't like the DragonLance series as much as I could have - there were so many critical parts of the plot that were just skipped over by a 20-verse song at the start of the book. The DragonLance Chronicles was a bit better; Weiss and Hickman's characters were always very good, but I think their plotting and pacing was a bit off in their first few books. Death's Gate was good as well, but I found the ending to be a bit of a cop-out. In fact, my favorite Weiss and Hickman series are The Darksword Trilogy (the fourth book sucks) and the Rose of the Prophet Trilogy (currently OOP in Australia). Both of those are fairly original in their world-concept, have a tight plot, a few well-fleshed out characters that change and develop throughout the story, and maintain consistency between their elements.
I also found Raymond E. Feist's subsequent books to be worse than the original few, with the exception of the Mistress of the Empire series, which was done in collaboration. And Eddings' The Elder Gods was just plain bad. It was a parade of all the one-trick ponies from his previous books.
The whole sha-bang. Partly governmental things, yes, but also cultural things - television, music, food, fashion, etc. Attitudes, language, all sorts of things.
It's not always people thinking the American way is bad (although this is some of it), but also people just not wanting to turn into a pale copy of some place else. People just want to keep their uniqueness.
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So I guess the HR drpartment can come search my house at any time because the funds for the payments on it came from work.
Your house wasn't built with company funds. It was built with your own money (I presume). When the company pays you your salary, it's not their money any more. But if the HR department searched your desk, or the PC they gave you to use at work, I wouldn't have a problem with it.
And the government requires that they go to a specific place at a specific time, then requires they submit to searches of their person, effects, and designater private storage areas.
We were talking about lockers, which would be storage areas, not about body searches, which I wouldn't agree with. They are not private storage areas. They're storage areas which belong to the school. Any access at all to school lockers is a privelege extended by the school to the students to use the school's facilities to store the students possessions. If the students don't want the school to know they have something, then don't keep it in the school's lockers.
Now, as other posters have pointed out, the school is an entity funded by parents; either indirectly, way of taxes, or directly, in the form of tuition fees at a private school. It should therefore be up to the parents wether they wish to allow the school they fund to search lockers. Either way, it's not up to the students. Not unless they want to pay for their own education.
I'm all for freedom of speech, but saying the school has to allow their newspaper to say whatever it wants is just like saying people have to let spammers deliver their junkmail - freedom of speech guarantees you the right to speak, not to hijack somebody else's resources in order to propogate your speech.
Um, if the school paper is produced with school resources, and the school lockers are paid for by school funds, then the school has every right to search for them.
Freedom of speech and privacy does not mean you have to fund the people embarrassing you. If you want to write things about your school, produce your own newspaper.
As far as RFIDs go, I don't like them, but I can see them as an outgrowth of modern trends - at least in Australia. More and more responsibility is being placed on those looking after children, and less and less authority is given. A school here was successfully sued by the parents of two children who truanted, and where injured in the course of having a rock fight. At the same time, schools are prohibited from and corporal punishment, or removing children from their peers ("timeouts") in case they alienate them from their friends.
I don't know the conditions in the states, nor in Japan, but based on things going on here, all I can say is "more power to them". People who demand other people take responsibility for their own stupid actions deserve whatever they get. Grow up, take responsibility for yourself, and don't blame the school if your kid is a dick.
Right - get back to me when you finish it.
The origin of "its'" is probably the rule about possessives ending in "s". For example, you would write "Bess' car is red". The apostrophe is the most misused punctuation mark in the english language.
Why is that stupid?
Well, let's go through a few scenarios. These are all just things I've thought up - they may or may not have occurred somewhere in reality.
1.) A country is under severe economic sanctions. Their ability to manufacture goods drops, their economy falls. Imported consumables are no longer available; the price of petroleum sky rockets. Assuming the countries maintaining the sanctions are not willing to relax them, would it be better for that country to attack, or to just sit back and die?
2.) There is a clear indication that a country is planning a pre-emptive strike against your country. For example, satelite photos showing missiles being fueled, or intercepted communications confirmed by other intelligence. Especially when dealing with things like nuclear weapons, can you afford to wait to strike second?
3.) A country is performing actions that are against established human rights. The government is condoning, or actively promoting child prostitution, organ farming, human testing of biological weapons, etc. Do you respect that nation's sovereignty to treat their populace however they like, or do you attempt to intervene?
I'm not saying Japan was in the right in WWII. I'm saying that claiming Japan was in the wrong solely because they were the aggressor is overly simplistic.
You said the Japanese attacked first, and were therefore the bad guys. You implied that this gave the US moral justification for bombing them. I'm not asking wether the bombing of Japan was sound military thinking, I'm asking wether it was sound moral thinking. If the bombing of Japan was justifiable because it was the aggressor, then the bombing of America because it is currently the aggressor is equally justified. The bombing of Japan may well have been justified - but not simply because Japan attacked first.
Considering and "doing" are very different things. Example: The US is "considering" pulling out of Afghanistan and Iraq.
But if the Japanese were "considering" surrender, would it not have been better to see where that lead before dropping nuclear weapons on two heavily populated cities? A point I made in another thread is that I don't necessarily view the bombing as wrong, but I definately think the allies did not pursue diplomatic solutions as far as they should have - they did not try to discuess any conditional surrender with Japan. They wanted unconditional surrender, and they wanted it now, and since they didn't get it, they dropped the bombs. Discussion and compromise is much better than nuclear holocaust.
Not if you own the hardware, which is what this case was about. A more apt analogy for the grandparent would be if a company sold you a box with a screw you were forbiddem tp undo. If the DMCA were against physical countermeasures rather than electronic, it would be illegal for you to unscrew your own screw. It would still be legal for you to break the box though.
Only if they tried to unscrew it. They can still kick the stupid box in.
They were not. An unconditional surrender was demanded. That is unfortunate. It was a mistake on America's part, one that in the original wording of the demand could have been avoided. Dean Acheson himself admited the mistake after the fact. Hindsight is always sharper. There is at least an outside chance that terms could have been come to that would have allowed such a thing, although I find it doubtful.
And that's my whole point. Nuclear weapons should, at minimum, be a weapon of last resort. In this case, the weapon was deployed before diplomatic means of ending the conflict were exhausted. I think invasion would have been premature also, but at least with an invasion, you can say "enough, withdraw". With a nuclear weapon, everything is done in one, swift movement, with no going back.
The Japanese were essentially defeated at this point in the war. They were on the back foot, and on the defensive. If there is ever a time for a serious attempt at peace, this was it. The Japanese didn't want their home invaded. If the US was at all sane, they didn't want to invade Japan - preceisely because people fight furiously when they're defending their home.
No. After the surrender. It is a tautology to say that the surrenderd have surrenderd, and that's the only sense I can make out of what you're saying here.
I'm saying there are two ways the allies could have accomplished their ends. Firstly, by using the bomb, and forcing an unconditional surrender. Secondly, by attempting to negotiate a conditional surrender. I'm saying the bomb was not necessarily necessary (man that's an awkward phrase) to accomplish Japanese surrender. You don't think they Japanese would have surrendered, and maybe they wouldn't have. But my point was that this avenue was not pursued far enough.
You said that the Japanese would not have allowed America entry into their country before the bombings. To back this up, you pointed out that America would not allow the Japanese into California.
I am saying that if Japan had conditionally surrendered to the US, as they might have done prior to the bombings, then they would have tolerated America's presence, just as they did after their unconditional surrender.
No, the Japanese would not tolerate an invasion, any more than the US would. But if the US had surrendered to Japan, then Japanese forces probably would have allowed access to America, just as after Japan surrendered, America was allowed access to Japan.
The converse situation would apply to Japan. They would not have simply allowed America to "take over" without a pitched battle, hedgerow to hedgerow.
But they did allow such a thing after the bombings. If I understand the Japanese correctly, it was because the Emporer surrendered. If the Emporer had surrendered before the bombings, would not the Japanese have tolerated an American presence?
Japanese people until the time of their surrender, which might well have taken years
They were considering a conditional surrender before the bombing, according to intercepted communications.
After the bombing, that was changed to an unconditional surrender . . .
This is incorrect. The demand for unconditional surrender was made before the bombings
No, you missed my meaning. I meant that before the bombings, the Japanese would have considered a conditional surrender. After the bombings they surrendered unconditionally. My contention is that all the bombs did was change a "conditional" surrender to an "unconditional" surrender, and that that change did not warrant the use of nuclear weapons.
I find the idea of divorcing war and intimidation a rather peculiar one. Even chess players make good use of intimidation from time to time. Properly done winning through intimidation is almost always the most desirable end as it obviates unnecessary conflict for all parties
Not when you look at the type on intimidation used here. It wasn't merely putting strength on display so an opponent would back down. It was an unncessary, and unnecessarily potent, attack against an already-defeated foe, in order to intimidate a third party. Of course, intimidation is generally better than aggression, but when you intimidate through aggression, it loses any moral value it might have.
So far as anyone thought of it at the time it was just a bomb. A really, really big bomb, but just a bomb, not a "nuke."
Apart from the people who decided to use it, who knew full well its destructive potential (at least in the short-term) from all that testing they'd done.
Because America's military always behaves so politely, doesn't it? As all these stories of torture in Iraq demonstrate. Face it, war is barbaric. It brings out the barbarism inherent in all people, regardless of nationality.
Take one person. Drill into their head that a particular nationality is the enemy. Take them into a situation where their comrades are killed by members of this nationality. Deliver a prisoner of that nationality, especially an enemy combatant, into their hands, and see how they treat them.
To about the same extent that had the Japanese gained the ascendency in the war and invaded California America would have allowed the Japanese to occupy its lands and pay "reparations."
This is not an accurate representation. You are comparing the surrender of one nation to another with the occupation of an enemy state. The State of California could not have surrendered to Japan. If the United States of America had unconditionally surrendered to Japan, then the Americans would have paid reparation to the Japanese.
If, instead of the Japanese surrendering to America, the Americans had invaded and subdued a Japanese island, then you'd probably have a more apt comparison. In this case, the rest of Japan would move to "liberate" the occupied island, just as the US would act to "liberate" an occupied California.
America didn't have to invade Japan. They didn't need to take control of the company. They just needed them out of the war. The Japanese were considering this - a conditional surrender. After the bombing, that was changed to an unconditional surrender - which was what let the US write the Japanese constitution and impose some basic Western ideology. Wether that ideology has been good or bad for Japan is up for debate - a Japan after a conditional surrender to the US would be very different to the one now. But the war would have ended the same way. The only factor that might have changed the outcome of the war was the intimidation factor of a demonstration of nuclear might. And I don't see initimidation as a good enough reason for nuking two cities.
Remember, the Japanese attacked us. That made them the bad guys that time around. We did bad things too, but at least we weren't trying to rule the world.
Which would make the US the bad guys in the Iraq war, and thus deserving of a nuke or two in some heavily populated cities? Now there are a tonne of problems with "pre-emptive strikes" but saying "whoever attacked first is necessarily wrong" is just stupid.
Situational ethics. Fewer people died that way than if we'd used conventional weapons.
Right. Where's the proof? Many people have pointed out theat the Japanese were considering surrender before the bombings. It was the nuclear attack that made them surrender unconditionally.
And I truly doubt that the people who made the decision were thinking of the good of the many. It's not likely they were counting total lives lost - more likely they were counting American military lives lost. That's the way people tend to think in wartime - their thoughts become polarised into "us and them".
"campaign of terror"? Somebody's been listening to Mr. Bush too much. The bombing of Pearl Harbour was an act of war, not of terrorism. The relative merits of war over terrorism are up for debate, of course, but there is a clear demarkation between the two.
Please define "unclaimed". Is it only claimed if I stake out a fence and build a homestead? I don't know the specifics of native American tribes; I'm Australian. But most of the indigineous peoples that have been wiped out in various parts of the world have been nomadic, or semi-nomadic. That creates a different sense of "claimed" land, one that the British and European colonizers of the time weren't able to recognize.
How about "Y'all lil leet script kiddies"?
Insulting every person who reads your post by over-generalising is definately flamebait.
There's such a thing as stretching a metaphor, and you just took it waaaaay too far.
However, people who say "It's Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' in full effect!" do have a point ;)
No they don't. Because you can't get the neighbourhood geek to come around and fix your syphilis problem.
I paid their royalties when I bought my DVD. Now I want to watch it. They want me to pay them for the encryption keys to something I have already bought. It would be like charging $60 for Doom 3 - and then another $60 for the decryption keys that actually let you install it.
I can't afford a non ARM cell phone, you insensitive clod.
Me neither. They cost an ARM and a leg.
I dunno, I found their most recent series (Well of Darkness) incredibly boring. It seemed just more of the same. I didn't like the DragonLance series as much as I could have - there were so many critical parts of the plot that were just skipped over by a 20-verse song at the start of the book. The DragonLance Chronicles was a bit better; Weiss and Hickman's characters were always very good, but I think their plotting and pacing was a bit off in their first few books. Death's Gate was good as well, but I found the ending to be a bit of a cop-out. In fact, my favorite Weiss and Hickman series are The Darksword Trilogy (the fourth book sucks) and the Rose of the Prophet Trilogy (currently OOP in Australia). Both of those are fairly original in their world-concept, have a tight plot, a few well-fleshed out characters that change and develop throughout the story, and maintain consistency between their elements.
I also found Raymond E. Feist's subsequent books to be worse than the original few, with the exception of the Mistress of the Empire series, which was done in collaboration. And Eddings' The Elder Gods was just plain bad. It was a parade of all the one-trick ponies from his previous books.
Goering's statement also breaks down for 9/11 - we ACTUALLY WERE attacked.
Yes...but not necessarily by the people the US is now invading.
The whole sha-bang. Partly governmental things, yes, but also cultural things - television, music, food, fashion, etc. Attitudes, language, all sorts of things.
It's not always people thinking the American way is bad (although this is some of it), but also people just not wanting to turn into a pale copy of some place else. People just want to keep their uniqueness.