We have them already. Take a look at the newest Dell machines. They don't have a fan on the heatsink (which is necessarily small and fast, and thus noisy). Instead, they have a very large, slow fan near a gian heatsink. The whole setup is *really* quiet.
Um, the DMCA is a far cry from China. I can sit here and make all the cracks I want about Mr. Bush. I couldn't do that in China. World of difference my friend.
outside of his job description, he was quite an intellectual. Can you imagine an intellectual as president today? Not just a Bush joke, either. A wave of anti-intellectualism has overtaken this country. It's really sad...
I think its more subtle than just "asians are not creative." This is a government project run (like all government projects) on a tight budget. The goal of the project was to get a new CPU out the door as fast as possible. Its more the parameters of the project rather than any inherent lack of creativity on the part of the engineers.
This is a bit of an exaggeration combined with an oversimplification. >>>>>>>> Isn't that the hallmark of internet journalism? Seriously, though, I love how that sounds. Just rolls around your tongue. Nice work!
Well, my previous company was NorthPoint, which was SDSL, so it was 416K both ways. Second, I've got pretty standard Mindspring service, and its cap is at 384K, and I'm not paying any extra. There are a bunch of other ISPs around here that can offer the same service. I have to admit, though, broadband choices where I live are rather plentiful, so the situation elsewhere might be different.
You're DS sucks, man. My Mindspring connection holds 80 K/sec almost all the time. Even my old 412K service would deliver 40-50K per second constantly. 16 K/sec is about 160 kbps, just barely faster than ISDN. What ISP do you use, so we can all avoid it?
You can use lasers to lower temperatures, but that's by using the energy of the laser to cancel out the vibrations of the atoms, not by putting energy into the laser beam.
Sorry, Ext3 kicks ass. JFS and XFS are promising, but what I've seen of XFS has been very unstable. Reiserfs is buggy too. In any case, all I mentioned was ext3, and it does kick ass. >>>>>>>>>>. What have you seen of XFS? I've used it on several different Linux distros, and on everything from a 486/33 to a P4/2000. Never had a single crash, file corrupt, or whatnot. And the XFS file tools are indispensible. And from the posts on the internet, most people find XFS as rock solid as I do.
"I don't believe they removed all the BSD code" is a far leap from "most of the internals are based on BSD." And Solaris is Solaris, not BSD or SVR4. Most of the critical subsystems in Solaris have been rewritten to support the massively threaded architecture. And given the amount of original designs that came out of Solaris, and how much those designs have influenced other UNIXs, I'd give Solaris a place along SVR4 and BSD (in some sense, anyway) as major branches of UNIX.
Re:G4 800 faster than Athlon 2Ghz?!
on
RC5-64 Success
·
· Score: 2
The altivec unit in the G4 has a vector permute unit that's really useful for RC5, less useful for other things.
I have a question. Do your curtains match your sheets? Do your pants match your shirt? Asthetics is important to a majority of the world's population. Consistancy is an important part of asthetics.
Cross-platform similarity is only useful for a very limited range of applications. For the most part, its just annoying to users who want all their apps to look the same.
I generally agree with this. Even back in the Riva 128 days, NVIDIA was a whole lot friendlier than any other chip company. Though, I really have to credit 3DFx. They are the only tech company on the planet whose manual writers actually have skills. Do yourself a favor and read the Voodoo3 spec. Its written like an actual document meant for people to read. Its got introductions that lay out the high-level scope of the section, supporting paragraphs that give details, examples for complication concepts, diagrams that are well referenced in the text, and concluding paragraphs that summerize the section. Absolutely wonderful! Compare this to an Intel doc, which consists of lists of registers and their semantics.
To add on to this. NVIDIA's cards are really strange. According to some documentation at RivaTV (on sourceforge) the hardware has this object-oriented programming interface. Most other cards are much simpler, allowing you to set the properties of triangles in certain registers, with the card drawing the triangle when you've hit the last register.
The problem is that this isn't your 3Com driver. An OpenGL driver has an incredible amount of high level code in it. In fact, from the moment you call a user-level API function, like glBegin() or glVertex() you're in NVIDIA's code. It's NVIDIA's libGL, NVIDIA's GLX module, and NVIDIA's kernel-driver. As a result, a lot of the optimizations that the drivers do could very easily be applicable to any OpenGL hardware. ATI could easily take NVIDIA's driver, and just replace the low-level code, while gaining the optimizations and OpenGL-completeness of the higher-level code.
Because A) There is licensed stuff in the GL implementation that they can't release. B) ATI's major weak point is drivers. Since OpenGL drivers implement the *entire* OpenGL API, rather than just bang hardware like other drivers, opening the code would hand over a *lot* of optimizations to ATI. Helping your competitor out with their one weak aspect is asking a bit too much of a company.
And NVIDIA's drivers a rock-solid for me an many others. I've used them on a Riva TNT1, GeForce2 MX, and GeForce 4 Go 440. They've worked *perfectly* on every single one. I haven't ever had an X crash. Now, if you're having problems, that's just your setup.
LSB isn't a screwy kludge. Lots of other people did it as well. Its not exactly as if one is right and the other is wrong. Besides, PPC can be programmed into either big or little endian mode. Its Apple's fault for not being industry standard. See the Endian FAQ
I agree with the entire first sentence. It's the second sentence that's getting to me. It seems to imply that they'll bring financial records and whatnot into it, which is a bit too personal for my taste. As for rooted in the community, that's not right. Yes, a person new to a community does elicit less trust, but should they? And undoubtedly, foreigners are far less "rooted in the community" than others, and will get disproprotionalty targeted.
Probably, no one will ever see this, but you said to enlighten you, so here it goes: >>>>>>>>> Actually, thanks. A little knowledge never hurts. Though, I don't really think these differences are significant enough if you look at the meaning of Christianity and Islam in a modern context, and its relevence to real people. I was trying to point out that the two religions are not as different as everyone seems to think (because people don't have enough experience it).
The Mohammedians started this is 800 when they invaded the Christian west. Christianity almost didn't make it. They came through Turkey and up the Iberian penn. and made it to Tours (in France) before they drive out began (wanna know about that battle in France, think "Braveheart" and the mooning scene). >>>>>>>>> Yes, there was the Islamic empire, which did capture large areas of Christian lands. I'm not going to argue that, save to say that Christians have done their fair share of conquering.
The Crusades were a direct result of this invasion. >>>>>> Now you can't say this and reveal the entire truth of the situation. Yes, this was a major factor, but social and political factors rule people's lives (especially the lives of rulers), and the Crusades were as much political as religious.
Allah is NOT the "same god" as Christianity, at least not originally. Why are there little moon's on the top of Mosques? Good question. It is because at one time Allah was a moon god. There is much debate about this because modern Islamic believing scholars are having a hard time dealing with the evidence. >>>>>>> Makes sense, since Islam originated from a tribal culture. That said, the Judeochristian God almost certainly originated from (or was heavily influenced by) an older tribal diety as well. Either way, the point remains that it is generally accepted today that the Gods of both religions refer to the same God, which is what is important in the context of comparing the two religions in modern times.
In Mohammedianism, you make it to Paradise by your good works. In Christianity, you make it to Paradise by the faith in the person who was the Son of God (Yes, even in Catholicism, despite which you might have learned in catcheism class -- read Augustine and Aquinas). >>>>>>>> I'll defer to your experience on this until I have a chance to read Augustine (Aquinas came much later and doesn't seem to be as relavent to a discussion of the origins of the religions?) Though, I'd argue that in modern times, there is a strong element of salvation by good works in both religions, even in most Protestant ones. Not in the direct teachings, perhaps, but among the believers.
In Mohammedianism, you have a clear mandate in the later Sirah's to convert people by the sword. There is no coverting people by the sword in the Holy Scriptures of Christianity. >>>>> This is debatable. The Quran is rather conflicted on this issue. The fact remains that in both religions, conversion by the sword was commonplace.
In Mohammedianism, you must become Islamic when you convert and so must your culture. In Christianity's Scriptures, the message is to adapt yourself to your culture, yet remain above it.
A Mohammedian should not live under a non-Mohammedian ruler according to Mohammedian scriptures. Christianity's Scriptures say you must respect the authorities becaue they are appointed by God.
Just a few differences, and there are more, brought to you by a guy who's job it is to teach comparative religion
(I can't think of anything more hypocritical and ridiculous than a "Black Muslim", for example - considering the Muslims history of enslaving people.) >>>>>>>> History goes back a lot farther than you are taking into account. Blacks were only enslaved for a few hundred years. People in the Middle East have been enslaving each other for thousands. Muslims, Jews, and Christians alike. The Romans enslaved people. The Chinese enslaved people. Africans enslaved people. A Black Muslim is no more hypocritical than a Black Christian.
The bottom line is, I don't really care what a group claims their religious beliefs are. I care much more about the actions they take (or don't take) against others. >>>>>>>>> Keep this point in mind, I'll get to it in a second...
In the U.S., people are singled out for closer inspection by police simply based on their age, or whether or not they've got long, scraggly hair. It's well-known that blacks are pulled over much more often than whites by the police. >>>>> And the fact that blacks are pulled over more often is disgusting. Statistically, blacks commit more crimes yes. But there is nothing about being black that causes people to commit more crimes. The real reason is that statistically blacks tend to be poorer, and poor people statistically commit more crimes. There is something about being poor that could lead to criminal behavior, so if anything, the police should be pulling over people in beat-up Honda Civics. But at that point, you've got a moral issue. Yes, pulling over poor people might get you more criminals, but is it right? Well get to that in a second as well...
Try wearing a long trenchcoat and walking around stores in shopping centers. Will security staff keep their eyes and cameras focused on you more than the other customers? >>>>>>> You have to seperate profiling based on race/ethnicity from profiling based on behavior. A black or brown person cannot help being black or brown. He cannot do anything to keep from being profiled if racial profiling is in use. A person wearing a trenchcoat (or with the long-scraggly hair above) makes a concious decision to draw attention to himself. If he doesn't want to get profiled, all he has to do is change clothes and get a haircut. Beyond that, you have to look at corralation. There is little statistical evidence that Muslims are more likely to be terrorists than other groups. Americans might think so, but that's because Muslim terrorists are the only ones in their experience. I'm willing to bet a fair amount of money that the majority of the people on the British/Irish border believe that most terrorists are Irish. You have to ask yourself, why is the person behaving the way he is. Why is he wearing a trenchcoat and going around eyeing things? If the answer to that question includes a signficant possibility that he's up to no good, then by all means watch him carefully. By the same token, you can ask why someone is going around being Muslim. If the answer to that question includes a significant possibility that he's up to no good, then by all means watch him carefully. But in that case, haven't you blown all semblence of good police work out of the water?
Now, to return to the two points I held of on earlier. You cannot try to summerize the overall viewpoint of a group by the actions of a few people. If I looked at just Falwell, I'd surmise that all Christians hated women. If I looked at just some hardcore European groups, I'd surmise that all Europeans hated America. Not only is it morally wrong, but its dangerous. The key in any fight is to keep an eye on your enemy. If you take the weak-minded person's way out and use simple logic (rather than *correct* logic) to pin down you're enemy, we're screwed. I was just thinking of a very real example of this. Why is a young Muslim man any more dangerous than an old women from Nebraska? After all that talk of the Nigerian scam, I got to thinking. Wouldn't it be insanely easy of terrorists to take advantage of some person's stupidity and greed and trick them into carrying a weapon into a plane or subway? If some fly-by-night con-men can trick a women into stealing millions of dollars, its almost assured that a giant terrorist organization could do it. At that point, doesn't concentrating on young Muslim men just make you blind to your real enemy?
Are any of these things really "fair" or "just"? In a perfect world, no... But it's also flying in the face of reason to claim that they have no merit. Again, the numbers don't lie. The fact is, there *are* statistically more blacks in prisons than whites, here in the U.S. They commit a larger percentage of the crimes, so police are going to scrutinize them more closely. It's a simple matter of trying to do one's job more efficiently. >>>>>> First of all, I'd like to think there is more to being human than being efficient. If there isn't maybe I'm an anachronism from a bygone era. That said, blacks do commit more crimes, yes. But that's just a perfect example of weak-minded people using comfortable stereotypes to get around doing real work. Being black doesn't make you a criminal, being a criminal makes you a criminal. Growing up in bad neighborhoods with careless parents makes you a criminal. That's what police should be looking for. Besides, racial profiling is a sutble issue as far as law-enforcement is concerned. Its a 1% thing. Almost all criminals emit far stronger signals (a fact, btw, which is recognized by police departments). If the police were 100% effective in flagging these far more important signals, then maybe we could debate about what kind of increased efficiency racial profiling would bring. As it stands, the minor increase in efficiency is far outweighed by potential increases in other areas.
It's also statistical fact that people over a certain age (around age 40? I don't have exact figures in front of me.) are much less likely to commit violent crimes or thefts. Knowing this, as a security guard or police officer, you're going to pay more attention to the younger people - when trying to stop crimes. >>>>>>>> Again, it goes back to the 1% issue. You might be 1% more efficient if you look at age. But if you're not fully analyzing all the bigger signals of criminal behavior, that 1% doesn't mean much. And yes, police departments agree with me on this. That's why they're phasing out racial profiling (because in todays environment, they certainly could get away with it). It just diverts attention from areas of observation that have far larger potential gains.
The U.S. claims simply to be "at war with terrorism". IMHO, this means we probably should be declaring war on Israel, Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and a number of other countries that generate tyrany. Who knows where it will stop, really? Hell, China is as deserving as anyone else - but we'll, of course, leave them untouched because they're not easy to beat. >>>>>>> Oh god. One terrorist attack and we go flying of the deep end. Clue: The real world is not so simple. International politics is something that only the knowledgable should even pretend to understand. Do you even understand the potential ramifications of what you're suggesting? Do you realize that in almost all of these situations, its not a nice black/white case where the US is right and everyone else is wrong. We've got as much blame in this as most anybody else. I certainly can't analyze an international situation as complex as you describe. Unless you've got some special qualifications I should know about, then I doubt you can either. Its exactly this kind of "armchair diplomacy" that makes US foreign policy suck as much as it does.
The rest of your post isn't worth responding to. Go read a book. In fact, read several. Spend a summer studying this, because its damn important. Until then, don't give me any of this bullshit.
Err, let me clarify my point somewhat. It was a long post, written late at night, so I feel I'm entitled to a little revision:) I didn't mean that we should profile white men because they commit more crimes. I meant that, numerically, white men commit more crimes because, numerically, there are more white men. If the number of crimes commited by both groups is similar (taking into account differences in economic situations, which have a far bigger impact on criminal behavior than anything else) in percentage terms, then it doesn't make sense to profile any particular group. I hope I understood your comment correctly. If I didn't, please clarify.
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We have them already. Take a look at the newest Dell machines. They don't have a fan on the heatsink (which is necessarily small and fast, and thus noisy). Instead, they have a very large, slow fan near a gian heatsink. The whole setup is *really* quiet.
Um, the DMCA is a far cry from China. I can sit here and make all the cracks I want about Mr. Bush. I couldn't do that in China. World of difference my friend.
outside of his job description, he was quite an intellectual. Can you imagine an intellectual as president today? Not just a Bush joke, either. A wave of anti-intellectualism has overtaken this country. It's really sad...
I think its more subtle than just "asians are not creative." This is a government project run (like all government projects) on a tight budget. The goal of the project was to get a new CPU out the door as fast as possible. Its more the parameters of the project rather than any inherent lack of creativity on the part of the engineers.
I think he was exaggerating. God god.
This is a bit of an exaggeration combined with an oversimplification.
>>>>>>>>
Isn't that the hallmark of internet journalism?
Seriously, though, I love how that sounds. Just rolls around your tongue. Nice work!
Well, my previous company was NorthPoint, which was SDSL, so it was 416K both ways. Second, I've got pretty standard Mindspring service, and its cap is at 384K, and I'm not paying any extra. There are a bunch of other ISPs around here that can offer the same service. I have to admit, though, broadband choices where I live are rather plentiful, so the situation elsewhere might be different.
You're DS sucks, man. My Mindspring connection holds 80 K/sec almost all the time. Even my old 412K service would deliver 40-50K per second constantly. 16 K/sec is about 160 kbps, just barely faster than ISDN. What ISP do you use, so we can all avoid it?
You can use lasers to lower temperatures, but that's by using the energy of the laser to cancel out the vibrations of the atoms, not by putting energy into the laser beam.
Sorry, Ext3 kicks ass. JFS and XFS are promising, but what I've seen of XFS has been very unstable. Reiserfs is buggy too. In any case, all I mentioned was ext3, and it does kick ass.
>>>>>>>>>>.
What have you seen of XFS? I've used it on several different Linux distros, and on everything from a 486/33 to a P4/2000. Never had a single crash, file corrupt, or whatnot. And the XFS file tools are indispensible. And from the posts on the internet, most people find XFS as rock solid as I do.
"I don't believe they removed all the BSD code" is a far leap from "most of the internals are based on BSD." And Solaris is Solaris, not BSD or SVR4. Most of the critical subsystems in Solaris have been rewritten to support the massively threaded architecture. And given the amount of original designs that came out of Solaris, and how much those designs have influenced other UNIXs, I'd give Solaris a place along SVR4 and BSD (in some sense, anyway) as major branches of UNIX.
The altivec unit in the G4 has a vector permute unit that's really useful for RC5, less useful for other things.
I have a question. Do your curtains match your sheets? Do your pants match your shirt? Asthetics is important to a majority of the world's population. Consistancy is an important part of asthetics.
Because consistancy is important in asthetics. I'd really hate to see what you're house looks like...
Oh, mister fancy-smancy visual man. Just cuz its visual doesn't make it easier.
Cross-platform similarity is only useful for a very limited range of applications. For the most part, its just annoying to users who want all their apps to look the same.
I generally agree with this. Even back in the Riva 128 days, NVIDIA was a whole lot friendlier than any other chip company. Though, I really have to credit 3DFx. They are the only tech company on the planet whose manual writers actually have skills. Do yourself a favor and read the Voodoo3 spec. Its written like an actual document meant for people to read. Its got introductions that lay out the high-level scope of the section, supporting paragraphs that give details, examples for complication concepts, diagrams that are well referenced in the text, and concluding paragraphs that summerize the section. Absolutely wonderful! Compare this to an Intel doc, which consists of lists of registers and their semantics.
To add on to this. NVIDIA's cards are really strange. According to some documentation at RivaTV (on sourceforge) the hardware has this object-oriented programming interface. Most other cards are much simpler, allowing you to set the properties of triangles in certain registers, with the card drawing the triangle when you've hit the last register.
The problem is that this isn't your 3Com driver. An OpenGL driver has an incredible amount of high level code in it. In fact, from the moment you call a user-level API function, like glBegin() or glVertex() you're in NVIDIA's code. It's NVIDIA's libGL, NVIDIA's GLX module, and NVIDIA's kernel-driver. As a result, a lot of the optimizations that the drivers do could very easily be applicable to any OpenGL hardware. ATI could easily take NVIDIA's driver, and just replace the low-level code, while gaining the optimizations and OpenGL-completeness of the higher-level code.
Because
A) There is licensed stuff in the GL implementation that they can't release.
B) ATI's major weak point is drivers. Since OpenGL drivers implement the *entire* OpenGL API, rather than just bang hardware like other drivers, opening the code would hand over a *lot* of optimizations to ATI. Helping your competitor out with their one weak aspect is asking a bit too much of a company.
And NVIDIA's drivers a rock-solid for me an many others. I've used them on a Riva TNT1, GeForce2 MX, and GeForce 4 Go 440. They've worked *perfectly* on every single one. I haven't ever had an X crash. Now, if you're having problems, that's just your setup.
LSB isn't a screwy kludge. Lots of other people did it as well. Its not exactly as if one is right and the other is wrong. Besides, PPC can be programmed into either big or little endian mode. Its Apple's fault for not being industry standard.
See the Endian FAQ
I agree with the entire first sentence. It's the second sentence that's getting to me. It seems to imply that they'll bring financial records and whatnot into it, which is a bit too personal for my taste. As for rooted in the community, that's not right. Yes, a person new to a community does elicit less trust, but should they? And undoubtedly, foreigners are far less "rooted in the community" than others, and will get disproprotionalty targeted.
Probably, no one will ever see this, but you said to enlighten you, so here it goes:
>>>>>>>>>
Actually, thanks. A little knowledge never hurts. Though, I don't really think these differences are significant enough if you look at the meaning of Christianity and Islam in a modern context, and its relevence to real people. I was trying to point out that the two religions are not as different as everyone seems to think (because people don't have enough experience it).
The Mohammedians started this is 800 when they invaded the Christian west. Christianity almost didn't make it. They came through Turkey and up the Iberian penn. and made it to Tours (in France) before they drive out began (wanna know about that battle in France, think "Braveheart" and the mooning scene).
>>>>>>>>>
Yes, there was the Islamic empire, which did capture large areas of Christian lands. I'm not going to argue that, save to say that Christians have done their fair share of conquering.
The Crusades were a direct result of this invasion.
>>>>>>
Now you can't say this and reveal the entire truth of the situation. Yes, this was a major factor, but social and political factors rule people's lives (especially the lives of rulers), and the Crusades were as much political as religious.
Allah is NOT the "same god" as Christianity, at least not originally. Why are there little moon's on the top of Mosques? Good question. It is because at one time Allah was a moon god. There is much debate about this because modern Islamic believing scholars are having a hard time dealing with the evidence.
>>>>>>>
Makes sense, since Islam originated from a tribal culture. That said, the Judeochristian God almost certainly originated from (or was heavily influenced by) an older tribal diety as well. Either way, the point remains that it is generally accepted today that the Gods of both religions refer to the same God, which is what is important in the context of comparing the two religions in modern times.
In Mohammedianism, you make it to Paradise by your good works. In Christianity, you make it to Paradise by the faith in the person who was the Son of God (Yes, even in Catholicism, despite which you might have learned in catcheism class -- read Augustine and Aquinas).
>>>>>>>>
I'll defer to your experience on this until I have a chance to read Augustine (Aquinas came much later and doesn't seem to be as relavent to a discussion of the origins of the religions?) Though, I'd argue that in modern times, there is a strong element of salvation by good works in both religions, even in most Protestant ones. Not in the direct teachings, perhaps, but among the believers.
In Mohammedianism, you have a clear mandate in the later Sirah's to convert people by the sword. There is no coverting people by the sword in the Holy Scriptures of Christianity.
>>>>>
This is debatable. The Quran is rather conflicted on this issue. The fact remains that in both religions, conversion by the sword was commonplace.
In Mohammedianism, you must become Islamic when you convert and so must your culture. In Christianity's Scriptures, the message is to adapt yourself to your culture, yet remain above it.
A Mohammedian should not live under a non-Mohammedian ruler according to Mohammedian scriptures. Christianity's Scriptures say you must respect the authorities becaue they are appointed by God.
Just a few differences, and there are more, brought to you by a guy who's job it is to teach comparative religion
(I can't think of anything more hypocritical and ridiculous than a "Black Muslim", for example - considering the Muslims history of enslaving people.)
>>>>>>>>
History goes back a lot farther than you are taking into account. Blacks were only enslaved for a few hundred years. People in the Middle East have been enslaving each other for thousands. Muslims, Jews, and Christians alike. The Romans enslaved people. The Chinese enslaved people. Africans enslaved people. A Black Muslim is no more hypocritical than a Black Christian.
The bottom line is, I don't really care what a group claims their religious beliefs are. I care much more about the actions they take (or don't take) against others.
>>>>>>>>>
Keep this point in mind, I'll get to it in a second...
In the U.S., people are singled out for closer inspection by police simply based on their age, or whether or not they've got long, scraggly hair. It's well-known that blacks are pulled over much more often than whites by the police.
>>>>>
And the fact that blacks are pulled over more often is disgusting. Statistically, blacks commit more crimes yes. But there is nothing about being black that causes people to commit more crimes. The real reason is that statistically blacks tend to be poorer, and poor people statistically commit more crimes. There is something about being poor that could lead to criminal behavior, so if anything, the police should be pulling over people in beat-up Honda Civics. But at that point, you've got a moral issue. Yes, pulling over poor people might get you more criminals, but is it right? Well get to that in a second as well...
Try wearing a long trenchcoat and walking around stores in shopping centers. Will security staff keep their eyes and cameras focused on you more than the other customers?
>>>>>>>
You have to seperate profiling based on race/ethnicity from profiling based on behavior. A black or brown person cannot help being black or brown. He cannot do anything to keep from being profiled if racial profiling is in use. A person wearing a trenchcoat (or with the long-scraggly hair above) makes a concious decision to draw attention to himself. If he doesn't want to get profiled, all he has to do is change clothes and get a haircut. Beyond that, you have to look at corralation. There is little statistical evidence that Muslims are more likely to be terrorists than other groups. Americans might think so, but that's because Muslim terrorists are the only ones in their experience. I'm willing to bet a fair amount of money that the majority of the people on the British/Irish border believe that most terrorists are Irish. You have to ask yourself, why is the person behaving the way he is. Why is he wearing a trenchcoat and going around eyeing things? If the answer to that question includes a signficant possibility that he's up to no good, then by all means watch him carefully. By the same token, you can ask why someone is going around being Muslim. If the answer to that question includes a significant possibility that he's up to no good, then by all means watch him carefully. But in that case, haven't you blown all semblence of good police work out of the water?
Now, to return to the two points I held of on earlier. You cannot try to summerize the overall viewpoint of a group by the actions of a few people. If I looked at just Falwell, I'd surmise that all Christians hated women. If I looked at just some hardcore European groups, I'd surmise that all Europeans hated America. Not only is it morally wrong, but its dangerous. The key in any fight is to keep an eye on your enemy. If you take the weak-minded person's way out and use simple logic (rather than *correct* logic) to pin down you're enemy, we're screwed. I was just thinking of a very real example of this. Why is a young Muslim man any more dangerous than an old women from Nebraska? After all that talk of the Nigerian scam, I got to thinking. Wouldn't it be insanely easy of terrorists to take advantage of some person's stupidity and greed and trick them into carrying a weapon into a plane or subway? If some fly-by-night con-men can trick a women into stealing millions of dollars, its almost assured that a giant terrorist organization could do it. At that point, doesn't concentrating on young Muslim men just make you blind to your real enemy?
Are any of these things really "fair" or "just"? In a perfect world, no... But it's also flying in the face of reason to claim that they have no merit. Again, the numbers don't lie. The fact is, there *are* statistically more blacks in prisons than whites, here in the U.S. They commit a larger percentage of the crimes, so police are going to scrutinize them more closely. It's a simple matter of trying to do one's job more efficiently.
>>>>>>
First of all, I'd like to think there is more to being human than being efficient. If there isn't maybe I'm an anachronism from a bygone era. That said, blacks do commit more crimes, yes. But that's just a perfect example of weak-minded people using comfortable stereotypes to get around doing real work. Being black doesn't make you a criminal, being a criminal makes you a criminal. Growing up in bad neighborhoods with careless parents makes you a criminal. That's what police should be looking for. Besides, racial profiling is a sutble issue as far as law-enforcement is concerned. Its a 1% thing. Almost all criminals emit far stronger signals (a fact, btw, which is recognized by police departments). If the police were 100% effective in flagging these far more important signals, then maybe we could debate about what kind of increased efficiency racial profiling would bring. As it stands, the minor increase in efficiency is far outweighed by potential increases in other areas.
It's also statistical fact that people over a certain age (around age 40? I don't have exact figures in front of me.) are much less likely to commit violent crimes or thefts. Knowing this, as a security guard or police officer, you're going to pay more attention to the younger people - when trying to stop crimes.
>>>>>>>>
Again, it goes back to the 1% issue. You might be 1% more efficient if you look at age. But if you're not fully analyzing all the bigger signals of criminal behavior, that 1% doesn't mean much. And yes, police departments agree with me on this. That's why they're phasing out racial profiling (because in todays environment, they certainly could get away with it). It just diverts attention from areas of observation that have far larger potential gains.
The U.S. claims simply to be "at war with terrorism". IMHO, this means we probably should be declaring war on Israel, Iraq, Iran, Cuba, Saudi Arabia, and a number of other countries that generate tyrany. Who knows where it will stop, really? Hell, China is as deserving as anyone else - but we'll, of course, leave them untouched because they're not easy to beat.
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Oh god. One terrorist attack and we go flying of the deep end. Clue: The real world is not so simple. International politics is something that only the knowledgable should even pretend to understand. Do you even understand the potential ramifications of what you're suggesting? Do you realize that in almost all of these situations, its not a nice black/white case where the US is right and everyone else is wrong. We've got as much blame in this as most anybody else. I certainly can't analyze an international situation as complex as you describe. Unless you've got some special qualifications I should know about, then I doubt you can either. Its exactly this kind of "armchair diplomacy" that makes US foreign policy suck as much as it does.
The rest of your post isn't worth responding to. Go read a book. In fact, read several. Spend a summer studying this, because its damn important. Until then, don't give me any of this bullshit.
Err, let me clarify my point somewhat. It was a long post, written late at night, so I feel I'm entitled to a little revision :) I didn't mean that we should profile white men because they commit more crimes. I meant that, numerically, white men commit more crimes because, numerically, there are more white men. If the number of crimes commited by both groups is similar (taking into account differences in economic situations, which have a far bigger impact on criminal behavior than anything else) in percentage terms, then it doesn't make sense to profile any particular group. I hope I understood your comment correctly. If I didn't, please clarify.