How far would you go if somebody invaded your home and imposed their will on you, your family, and nation?
I'm fairly certain that it wouldn't include signing the death warrants of innocent civilians by using them as human shields.
So why do the terrorists do it? Simple: public relations. The best thing that can possibly happen to the terrorists in Iraq is for the United States to bomb a mosque or a hospital. They can't defeat us militarily, so they try to defeat us from within by weakening our resolve.
Why do you think they claimed that the terrorist camp we destroyed last week was a "wedding party?" Why, for that matter, do you think Saddam put his military intelligence headquarters in the same building as the al-Amirya air-raid shelter back in 1991?
I'm gonna nitpick you to death here. Please excuse me, and understand that my intentions are good.
I have heard illegal tactics... Not all guerilla tactics are illegal...
Please don't use the word "illegal" in this context. It propagates the myth that there is such a thing as "international law" or "laws of war." There isn't, and it's a mistake to imply that there is.
Some tactics are prohibited by certain treaties. But that's not the same thing as saying that those tactics are illegal.
I know this seems like a very small thing, but it's an important point.
I'm not sure what you're criticizing - that they had individual hairs, or that you could see them?
Have you ever heard the old joke about the bad old days of low-resolution monitors? "That icon is 32 pixels across. One, two, three..."
Look at a picture of a person. Can you count his hairs?
The problem is that the hairs on Prince Charming were animated in such a way that they looked insufficiently dense and wavy, and therefore fake. And not stylized-fake, but rather not-on-purpose, oops-we-screwed-up fake.
So why are guerilla tactics used by an opposing force often decried as unfair or underhanded?
Unfair? No, never. Ask anybody in uniform or anybody who's ever served in uniform and they'll tell you that fairness has nothing to do with it. "Overwhelming force" is the watchword.
Some tactics are immoral, though. Like surrounding your troops with civilians acting as human shields, or storing weapons in or basing operations out of hospitals or mosques. Why? Because both of those tactics put civilians in danger. If you make hospitals legitimate military targets, for example, then doctors, nurses, and patients are going to die. That's bad for everybody.
Oh, please. The lipsync was terrible, and the little Prince-Charming head-toss smacked of "Hey, we just figured out how to use particles to model hair! Look at this!" I was counting individual strands of hair, which is exactly the wrong idea.
(Okay, on preview I realize that it's not actually easy to pronounce at all unless you too an art appreciation class in college. It's "On-gur." Oh, well. It's still easier to pronounce than PostgreSQL, which despite being my favorite database I can't tell anybody about because I can't say the damn name without feeling like a moron.)
Would it kill you to see the big picture for a change?;-)
In other words, if you invent and share a way to turn water into gasoline, my using it to turn my water into gasoline doesn't affect your using it to turn your water into gasoline.
Both true and completely irrelevant for reasons I described above.
OK, fine, it's up to the collective will of the people to decide.
No-ooo... not exactly. If the people decided, collectively, that rape is okay, would that be just or moral? No, of course not. The fact that a group of people living as a society decide to deprive a whole swath of their peers of their rights is not justified by the fact that the majority voted for it.
Remember what I said above: the purpose of government is, in part, to protect our rights. And that includes protecting them from one another.
What I'm saying is, one person's use of an idea does not interfere with another's use of it, which is not true when you substitute "land" or "widget" for "idea."
That (1) untrue and (2) irrelevant. Let's say I have an idea, and I intend to profit from it. If you then copy my idea without my permission, you are interfering with my ability to profit from my invention.
But the larger point is this: so what? We're not talking about economics here. We're talking about property rights. You're saying that we should just arbitrarily revoke an entire class of property rights on the basis of economics. How does that work, exactly? What's your moral justification for that?
Whether the government grants rights or simply recognizes them, it's still up to the government to decide to what extent it should do this.
No, no, no. Government exists only as long as it enjoys the collective consent of those subject to it. To say "it's up to government to decide" is completely backward, and dare I say dangerous to boot! Because once you start thinking about "government" as this abstract thing that has some existence of its own, above and beyond merely being an object of the collective will of the people, then you've opened the door to all sorts of tyrannies.
We have our rights. They belong to us. We are endowed by our creator. (That phrase should ring a bell.) Government exists only to protect our rights and facilitate the expression and enjoyment thereof.
That decision should be the most beneficial one given the prevailing conditions, not one biased by any academic theory.
No. When we're talking about the potential for tyranny, it's principle over pragmatism every time.
IP rights, or if you prefer, governments' recognition of them, have become strong only recently
Australian aborigines recognized property rights over songs and stories fifty thousand years ago. Native Americans recognized then ten thousand years ago or more; their histories don't go back quite as far. The examples of cultural tradition of property rights over intangibles are legion. Google for your own enlightenment.
and lay off the ad hominem, while you're at it
First, grab yourself a dictionary and look up what "ad hominem" means, because you're obviously confused about it. Second, this is not a high-school forensics team. If you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.
But to answer your question simply, the tragedy of the commons is not applicable to intangible things.
Of course it is. I have an idea or a creative work: you lack it. That's scarcity. "I could have thought of that!" is trumped by the fact that you didn't.
(Might want to find another metaphor, by the way. Hardin's work in "The Tragedy of the Commons" [1968] was pretty much invalidated by Borlaug's work with dwarf wheat [1970]. Same with Ehrlich's work in '68. In other words, the assumption that scarcity is absolute is not a valid one. Not all games are zero-sum.)
Specifically, you can limit the scope, duration, and applicability to non-commercial, fair, or private use of protection of IP rights.
Yes! Yes! A thousand times yes! It's possible, and even proper under the right circumstances, for society to limit rights in order to advance a greater good.
But we must never cross the line into believing that those rights are somehow the state's to grant or revoke. We must never forget that those rights are ours, and that we voluntarily give them up for our own purposes.
Crossing the line into "this kind of property is protected by property rights; this kind is not" is a mistake, both in terms of being incorrect and in terms of being wrong.
Disney's veto of the Miramax distribution has probably made it 10x the political bombshell it would have been otherwise.
Like most events involving Michael Moore, that one didn't really happen the way he said it did.
Disney made it clear a year ago that they had no intention of distributing the film, but told Moore that he was more than welcome to keep working on it. Then, a few weeks ago, Moore issues a statement claiming that he'd been dropped suddenly and without warning and made all sorts of intimations about the Bush family and their desire to censor him.
The result? Unprecedented media coverage of Moore's movie, and a Palme d'Or.
Michael Moore is a successful filmmaker for the same reason that Bill Gates is a successful businessman. Neither one has any serious qualms about little things like ethics.
But now you're using physical analogies, which doesn't cut it.
Sure it does. See, what you need to do here is to come up with an argument for why these customs and traditions should no longer apply to all kinds of property, but rather only to some kinds.
How is that not wrong?
The greater wrong is to declare that an entire class of property rights no longer exists.
You can cry "it isn't fair!" as long and as loudly as you want. It's not relevant, and it's hardly persuasive.
You're the one advocating change, so make an argument!
Oh, I don't know why I bother. Slashdotters wouldn't know the reasoned debate of ideas if it crawled up their legs and bit them on their butts.
You mean how is it exclusively mine? Simple: I thought of it first. The one who gets there first gets to plant his flag and claim the land, so to speak.
why do you think Apple needs to charge $3500/seat for a license when no other OS company in the business gets even close to that???
Who else is selling operating systems to run on third-party hardware?
I can think of Microsoft... and that's it.
Hmmmm MS sells their os for 300, so I guess we'll multiply that by 10 and thats how much apple would charge...
Microsoft will sell ten times as many licenses, or more, than Apple. Windows isn't ten times bigger or more complex than Mac OS X. The costs have to be recovered somehow.
nice thought process...
Rather than mocking and hopping up and down on the period key (do you even know what an ellipsis is for?) why don't you either say something constructive or butt out?
The character or actions of a person do not have any bearing on the truth (or lack thereof) of the claim being made, or the quality of the argument being made.
Of course it does. Two things: first, you're not making an argument. Invited to make an argument to defend your assertions, you're choosing to avoid the question instead. Second, have you ever heard the phrase "consider the source?"
An argument stands or falls on it's own merit regardless of who makes it.
No, it does not.
And you haven't made an argument yet. All you've done is said, "Torture is not justifiable, and anybody who thinks it is is morally equivalent to a terrorist." Except you haven't made an argument to back that up. You've merely asserted it. Repeatedly.
You need to be able to construct a valid argument if you want to debate.
If by "debate" you mean sling around remarks like "Abusive ad homenim attack," then forget it. I would love to have a substantive discussion, but it's been a long time since a 2AR has been able to hold my attention.
Let's be explicit. Are you saying, for the record, that you would disagree that democracy and pluralism are inherently better than Islamic theocracy?
Evil people by and large do not consider themselves or their actions to be evil you know.
Let me repeat myself. NOT EVERYTHING IS RELATIVE. THERE REALLY ARE SUCH THINGS AS RIGHT AND WRONG. Simply saying "evil people also believe they are good" doesn't invalidate this key point. Heck, it doesn't even dispute it.
As I said before, the "effectiveness" or torture is not the impact it has on any one individual.
You are mistaken. You are speaking about a subject with which you have no personal experience.
Have you ever reached your own personal breaking point? There are certain lines of work in which people are subjected to psychological torture as part of their training. In my youth, I was put through that kind of training. For me, it was four days. Some in my "class" lasted five, some only three. For me it was four.
I know what it's like to be broken. I know, firsthand, what it's like to be literally, cognitively unable to tell a coherent lie.
You don't have firsthand knowledge, and that's fine. But you refuse to accept the limits of your own knowledge on this subject, and that's not okay. You just keep repeating, "Nuh-uh." That's crap. You're out of your depth here. Back off.
One of the greatest problems of American society is the desensitization of the general population to violence.
You think you're saying something here? You think you're being insightful? You're not saying anything at all. Your words are devoid of meaning.
If you don't consider torture to be an act (or acts, as per your example) of violence against another human being (regardless of what "greater good" is being served") than I see no further point in continuing this discussion!
There's no violence involved in psychological torture. We're talking about confinement, deprivation of sleep or respite, discomfort. These are not acts of violence.
I also understand that no decent human being would ever commit such acts of violence towards another human being.
You are mistaken. Any decent human being, when facing the threat of harm to his person, his family, his people, or his country, would do whatever is necessary, including torture and things much worse, to defend against that harm.
If you don't think so, that just illustrates that you've never actually faced that kind of threat. You've never internalized your own responsibility to your people or your country.
You are, in short, untested. There's no shame in that. In fact, it's a luxury that a lot of people have fought and died to provide to you.
If you believe otherwise, you have my sympathy and pity.
Yawn.
There are animals that exhibit signs of empathy, how regrettable that humanity chooses not to.
Empathy gets trumped by survival every time.
Enough with the abstracts: let's get concrete. You have certain knowledge that a terrorist has planted a nuclear bomb somewhere in your home town and set it to go off at a future time. Depending on the yield of the bomb, where it's placed, and when it goes off, the death toll will be anywhere between the tens and hundreds of thousands of people. You know this without a doubt. Let's say, for sake of argument, that you had situational awareness of the bomb but lost it at some point. It's out there, but you don't know where.
You have, handcuffed to a chair, a person who knows where the bomb is and how to disarm it. But he's not talking.
What would you do?
If you have the tiniest shred of either decency or intellectual honesty, do NOT dodge the question. Do NOT spin off onto a tangent about how "you can never know something like that with certainty." That's not the point. This is an example of a situation that does occur in the real world. Don't wimp out. Don't refuse to face it. Answer the question.
The single button mouse is standard, the multibutton mouse is an option.
I covered that already. This is exactly the same as the status quo, only it involves Apple spending a lot of money building a product that very few people will buy.
Having numerous hard disk and memory "options' doesn't appear to have made all Macs BTO
Apple doesn't spend any money building hard drives or DIMMs, last time I checked.
Because it is the only real gap in their product lineup.
Let's see, you advocate acts of violence against people who commit acts of violence. Both you and the terrorist would claim to be acting towards some greater good.
That's where your reasoning starts and stops? You don't bother taking a moment to contemplate whether there really is a greater good?
Not everything is relative. Sometimes there is good and evil, right and wrong. And you, despite your evident unwillingness to do so, have the power to make those judgments.
The war on terror will not be won by adopting the practices and methods of the terrorists.
Sigh. You just don't get it.
I expect that someone being tortured would insist that their grandmother was really Hitler in drag if that is what they thought the torturer wanted to hear.
It isn't so, though. If that were true, torture, whether psychological or physical, would be useless. It's not. It's a highly effective means of gathering intelligence.
Coerced confessions will not make you any safer because you have no guarantee of the veracity of the information that is extracted.
We're not talking about coercion. We're talking about shattering a human being's ability to conceal the truth. We're talking about so deeply affecting a person that they lose all volition and are literally unable to lie or to deceive.
But you need not take my word for it, check the research.
I know a thing or two about "the research," if that's what you want to call it.
By the way, there is a great deal of psychological research to back up my aphorism that is devoid of truth about the effects of violence.
We're not talking about violence. We're talking about torture.
I don't think you really understand what that means.
Imagine being stripped naked and put in a room. There are bright lights shining on you 24 hours a day. There's very loud noise. The room is either very cold or very hot. Ammonia or another foul-smelling agent is pumped in to irritate your eyes and sinuses.
Imagine being in that environment for a week.
Now imagine a month.
We're not talking about violence. We're talking about psychological torture. We're talking about the complete destruction of a person's will.
Excuse me? Where the heck do you get that? Even DV is 25 Mbps, and that's crappy quality. You'd need at least 50 Mbps to get anything worth saving, and that's still only standard definition. Figure 100 Mbps minimum for high-definition video, and even that's highly compressed.
But let's assume, just for sake of argument, that we limit it to 25 Mbps. Then it comes to a total of just under 8,000 TB.
Slashdot Mirror
Sigh.
Let's see if I can dismantle this argument in the fewest possible words.
If killing is immoral, than the prevention of killing is moral. And if the prevention of killing involves lesser killing, then... well, QED, huh?
Take a seat on the bench, "EvilBudMan." We play for keeps around here.
How far would you go if somebody invaded your home and imposed their will on you, your family, and nation?
I'm fairly certain that it wouldn't include signing the death warrants of innocent civilians by using them as human shields.
So why do the terrorists do it? Simple: public relations. The best thing that can possibly happen to the terrorists in Iraq is for the United States to bomb a mosque or a hospital. They can't defeat us militarily, so they try to defeat us from within by weakening our resolve.
Why do you think they claimed that the terrorist camp we destroyed last week was a "wedding party?" Why, for that matter, do you think Saddam put his military intelligence headquarters in the same building as the al-Amirya air-raid shelter back in 1991?
I'm gonna nitpick you to death here. Please excuse me, and understand that my intentions are good.
I have heard illegal tactics... Not all guerilla tactics are illegal...
Please don't use the word "illegal" in this context. It propagates the myth that there is such a thing as "international law" or "laws of war." There isn't, and it's a mistake to imply that there is.
Some tactics are prohibited by certain treaties. But that's not the same thing as saying that those tactics are illegal.
I know this seems like a very small thing, but it's an important point.
I'm not sure what you're criticizing - that they had individual hairs, or that you could see them?
Have you ever heard the old joke about the bad old days of low-resolution monitors? "That icon is 32 pixels across. One, two, three..."
Look at a picture of a person. Can you count his hairs?
The problem is that the hairs on Prince Charming were animated in such a way that they looked insufficiently dense and wavy, and therefore fake. And not stylized-fake, but rather not-on-purpose, oops-we-screwed-up fake.
So why are guerilla tactics used by an opposing force often decried as unfair or underhanded?
Unfair? No, never. Ask anybody in uniform or anybody who's ever served in uniform and they'll tell you that fairness has nothing to do with it. "Overwhelming force" is the watchword.
Some tactics are immoral, though. Like surrounding your troops with civilians acting as human shields, or storing weapons in or basing operations out of hospitals or mosques. Why? Because both of those tactics put civilians in danger. If you make hospitals legitimate military targets, for example, then doctors, nurses, and patients are going to die. That's bad for everybody.
Oh, please. The lipsync was terrible, and the little Prince-Charming head-toss smacked of "Hey, we just figured out how to use particles to model hair! Look at this!" I was counting individual strands of hair, which is exactly the wrong idea.
Ever considered that just having a 'gres' doesn't make it French?
Being named after an incredibly well-know French painter of the 19th century, on the other hand, does.
PostgreSQL is post-gres-que-el
Hence the part where I feel like a moron. Great database; dumb name.
Because "Ingres" is easy to pronounce?
(Okay, on preview I realize that it's not actually easy to pronounce at all unless you too an art appreciation class in college. It's "On-gur." Oh, well. It's still easier to pronounce than PostgreSQL, which despite being my favorite database I can't tell anybody about because I can't say the damn name without feeling like a moron.)
(Would it kill you to read the whole paragraph?)
;-)
Would it kill you to see the big picture for a change?
In other words, if you invent and share a way to turn water into gasoline, my using it to turn my water into gasoline doesn't affect your using it to turn your water into gasoline.
Both true and completely irrelevant for reasons I described above.
OK, fine, it's up to the collective will of the people to decide.
No-ooo... not exactly. If the people decided, collectively, that rape is okay, would that be just or moral? No, of course not. The fact that a group of people living as a society decide to deprive a whole swath of their peers of their rights is not justified by the fact that the majority voted for it.
Remember what I said above: the purpose of government is, in part, to protect our rights. And that includes protecting them from one another.
What I'm saying is, one person's use of an idea does not interfere with another's use of it, which is not true when you substitute "land" or "widget" for "idea."
That (1) untrue and (2) irrelevant. Let's say I have an idea, and I intend to profit from it. If you then copy my idea without my permission, you are interfering with my ability to profit from my invention.
But the larger point is this: so what? We're not talking about economics here. We're talking about property rights. You're saying that we should just arbitrarily revoke an entire class of property rights on the basis of economics. How does that work, exactly? What's your moral justification for that?
Whether the government grants rights or simply recognizes them, it's still up to the government to decide to what extent it should do this.
No, no, no. Government exists only as long as it enjoys the collective consent of those subject to it. To say "it's up to government to decide" is completely backward, and dare I say dangerous to boot! Because once you start thinking about "government" as this abstract thing that has some existence of its own, above and beyond merely being an object of the collective will of the people, then you've opened the door to all sorts of tyrannies.
We have our rights. They belong to us. We are endowed by our creator. (That phrase should ring a bell.) Government exists only to protect our rights and facilitate the expression and enjoyment thereof.
That decision should be the most beneficial one given the prevailing conditions, not one biased by any academic theory.
No. When we're talking about the potential for tyranny, it's principle over pragmatism every time.
Actually, it is his right.
Then why are fraud, false advertising, libel, and slander all against the law?
It's not a right, or even necessarily legal, to speak untruths for commercial gain.
IP rights, or if you prefer, governments' recognition of them, have become strong only recently
Australian aborigines recognized property rights over songs and stories fifty thousand years ago. Native Americans recognized then ten thousand years ago or more; their histories don't go back quite as far. The examples of cultural tradition of property rights over intangibles are legion. Google for your own enlightenment.
and lay off the ad hominem, while you're at it
First, grab yourself a dictionary and look up what "ad hominem" means, because you're obviously confused about it. Second, this is not a high-school forensics team. If you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen.
But to answer your question simply, the tragedy of the commons is not applicable to intangible things.
Of course it is. I have an idea or a creative work: you lack it. That's scarcity. "I could have thought of that!" is trumped by the fact that you didn't.
(Might want to find another metaphor, by the way. Hardin's work in "The Tragedy of the Commons" [1968] was pretty much invalidated by Borlaug's work with dwarf wheat [1970]. Same with Ehrlich's work in '68. In other words, the assumption that scarcity is absolute is not a valid one. Not all games are zero-sum.)
Specifically, you can limit the scope, duration, and applicability to non-commercial, fair, or private use of protection of IP rights.
Yes! Yes! A thousand times yes! It's possible, and even proper under the right circumstances, for society to limit rights in order to advance a greater good.
But we must never cross the line into believing that those rights are somehow the state's to grant or revoke. We must never forget that those rights are ours, and that we voluntarily give them up for our own purposes.
Crossing the line into "this kind of property is protected by property rights; this kind is not" is a mistake, both in terms of being incorrect and in terms of being wrong.
Disney's veto of the Miramax distribution has probably made it 10x the political bombshell it would have been otherwise.
Like most events involving Michael Moore, that one didn't really happen the way he said it did.
Disney made it clear a year ago that they had no intention of distributing the film, but told Moore that he was more than welcome to keep working on it. Then, a few weeks ago, Moore issues a statement claiming that he'd been dropped suddenly and without warning and made all sorts of intimations about the Bush family and their desire to censor him.
The result? Unprecedented media coverage of Moore's movie, and a Palme d'Or.
Michael Moore is a successful filmmaker for the same reason that Bill Gates is a successful businessman. Neither one has any serious qualms about little things like ethics.
It's his right to say what he wants... but it's not his right to lie or to distort the truth with the intention of deceiving his audience.
Which many believe is exactly what he does.
But now you're using physical analogies, which doesn't cut it.
Sure it does. See, what you need to do here is to come up with an argument for why these customs and traditions should no longer apply to all kinds of property, but rather only to some kinds.
How is that not wrong?
The greater wrong is to declare that an entire class of property rights no longer exists.
You can cry "it isn't fair!" as long and as loudly as you want. It's not relevant, and it's hardly persuasive.
You're the one advocating change, so make an argument!
Oh, I don't know why I bother. Slashdotters wouldn't know the reasoned debate of ideas if it crawled up their legs and bit them on their butts.
how is its exclusivity yours?
You mean how is it exclusively mine? Simple: I thought of it first. The one who gets there first gets to plant his flag and claim the land, so to speak.
why do you think Apple needs to charge $3500/seat for a license when no other OS company in the business gets even close to that???
Who else is selling operating systems to run on third-party hardware?
I can think of Microsoft... and that's it.
Hmmmm MS sells their os for 300, so I guess we'll multiply that by 10 and thats how much apple would charge...
Microsoft will sell ten times as many licenses, or more, than Apple. Windows isn't ten times bigger or more complex than Mac OS X. The costs have to be recovered somehow.
nice thought process...
Rather than mocking and hopping up and down on the period key (do you even know what an ellipsis is for?) why don't you either say something constructive or butt out?
Abusive ad homenim attack.
You're not in high school debate class any more.
The character or actions of a person do not have any bearing on the truth (or lack thereof) of the claim being made, or the quality of the argument being made.
Of course it does. Two things: first, you're not making an argument. Invited to make an argument to defend your assertions, you're choosing to avoid the question instead. Second, have you ever heard the phrase "consider the source?"
An argument stands or falls on it's own merit regardless of who makes it.
No, it does not.
And you haven't made an argument yet. All you've done is said, "Torture is not justifiable, and anybody who thinks it is is morally equivalent to a terrorist." Except you haven't made an argument to back that up. You've merely asserted it. Repeatedly.
You need to be able to construct a valid argument if you want to debate.
If by "debate" you mean sling around remarks like "Abusive ad homenim attack," then forget it. I would love to have a substantive discussion, but it's been a long time since a 2AR has been able to hold my attention.
You may of course draw whatever conclusion you wish.
My conclusion is that you, like all armchair intellectuals, have no idea what it's like to make real decisions about life and death.
Until you understand what you're talking about, you will therefore please stop criticizing those who make such decisions.
From my perspective, there is not
Let's be explicit. Are you saying, for the record, that you would disagree that democracy and pluralism are inherently better than Islamic theocracy?
Evil people by and large do not consider themselves or their actions to be evil you know.
Let me repeat myself. NOT EVERYTHING IS RELATIVE. THERE REALLY ARE SUCH THINGS AS RIGHT AND WRONG. Simply saying "evil people also believe they are good" doesn't invalidate this key point. Heck, it doesn't even dispute it.
As I said before, the "effectiveness" or torture is not the impact it has on any one individual.
You are mistaken. You are speaking about a subject with which you have no personal experience.
Have you ever reached your own personal breaking point? There are certain lines of work in which people are subjected to psychological torture as part of their training. In my youth, I was put through that kind of training. For me, it was four days. Some in my "class" lasted five, some only three. For me it was four.
I know what it's like to be broken. I know, firsthand, what it's like to be literally, cognitively unable to tell a coherent lie.
You don't have firsthand knowledge, and that's fine. But you refuse to accept the limits of your own knowledge on this subject, and that's not okay. You just keep repeating, "Nuh-uh." That's crap. You're out of your depth here. Back off.
One of the greatest problems of American society is the desensitization of the general population to violence.
You think you're saying something here? You think you're being insightful? You're not saying anything at all. Your words are devoid of meaning.
If you don't consider torture to be an act (or acts, as per your example) of violence against another human being (regardless of what "greater good" is being served") than I see no further point in continuing this discussion!
There's no violence involved in psychological torture. We're talking about confinement, deprivation of sleep or respite, discomfort. These are not acts of violence.
I also understand that no decent human being would ever commit such acts of violence towards another human being.
You are mistaken. Any decent human being, when facing the threat of harm to his person, his family, his people, or his country, would do whatever is necessary, including torture and things much worse, to defend against that harm.
If you don't think so, that just illustrates that you've never actually faced that kind of threat. You've never internalized your own responsibility to your people or your country.
You are, in short, untested. There's no shame in that. In fact, it's a luxury that a lot of people have fought and died to provide to you.
If you believe otherwise, you have my sympathy and pity.
Yawn.
There are animals that exhibit signs of empathy, how regrettable that humanity chooses not to.
Empathy gets trumped by survival every time.
Enough with the abstracts: let's get concrete. You have certain knowledge that a terrorist has planted a nuclear bomb somewhere in your home town and set it to go off at a future time. Depending on the yield of the bomb, where it's placed, and when it goes off, the death toll will be anywhere between the tens and hundreds of thousands of people. You know this without a doubt. Let's say, for sake of argument, that you had situational awareness of the bomb but lost it at some point. It's out there, but you don't know where.
You have, handcuffed to a chair, a person who knows where the bomb is and how to disarm it. But he's not talking.
What would you do?
If you have the tiniest shred of either decency or intellectual honesty, do NOT dodge the question. Do NOT spin off onto a tangent about how "you can never know something like that with certainty." That's not the point. This is an example of a situation that does occur in the real world. Don't wimp out. Don't refuse to face it. Answer the question.
What would you do?
The single button mouse is standard, the multibutton mouse is an option.
I covered that already. This is exactly the same as the status quo, only it involves Apple spending a lot of money building a product that very few people will buy.
Having numerous hard disk and memory "options' doesn't appear to have made all Macs BTO
Apple doesn't spend any money building hard drives or DIMMs, last time I checked.
Because it is the only real gap in their product lineup.
There's no market for it.
How about the 3 button mouse "option" *replacing* the default mouse
Then every Mac becomes a build-to-order. Manufacturing costs go up, and delivery times go up, and that doesn't address the retail angle.
Who knows, in a few years we might even see Apple selling an affordable, sans-monitor machine !
Why?
Let's see, you advocate acts of violence against people who commit acts of violence. Both you and the terrorist would claim to be acting towards some greater good.
That's where your reasoning starts and stops? You don't bother taking a moment to contemplate whether there really is a greater good?
Not everything is relative. Sometimes there is good and evil, right and wrong. And you, despite your evident unwillingness to do so, have the power to make those judgments.
The war on terror will not be won by adopting the practices and methods of the terrorists.
Sigh. You just don't get it.
I expect that someone being tortured would insist that their grandmother was really Hitler in drag if that is what they thought the torturer wanted to hear.
It isn't so, though. If that were true, torture, whether psychological or physical, would be useless. It's not. It's a highly effective means of gathering intelligence.
Coerced confessions will not make you any safer because you have no guarantee of the veracity of the information that is extracted.
We're not talking about coercion. We're talking about shattering a human being's ability to conceal the truth. We're talking about so deeply affecting a person that they lose all volition and are literally unable to lie or to deceive.
But you need not take my word for it, check the research.
I know a thing or two about "the research," if that's what you want to call it.
By the way, there is a great deal of psychological research to back up my aphorism that is devoid of truth about the effects of violence.
We're not talking about violence. We're talking about torture.
I don't think you really understand what that means.
Imagine being stripped naked and put in a room. There are bright lights shining on you 24 hours a day. There's very loud noise. The room is either very cold or very hot. Ammonia or another foul-smelling agent is pumped in to irritate your eyes and sinuses.
Imagine being in that environment for a week.
Now imagine a month.
We're not talking about violence. We're talking about psychological torture. We're talking about the complete destruction of a person's will.
I don't think you really understand that.
it seems to me that if you espouse such ideals you are no different than the villains you oppose!
Did you get your penchant for false moral equivalence from Nietzsche, too?
Use your brain. I implore you.
Information extracted via physical torture is notoriously inaccurate. People will say anything to make it stop.
That's not so. Just the opposite. As I explained elsewhere, it's basically impossible to lie once you've reached the breaking point.
As we brutalize other people, so do we brutalize ourselves.
That statement includes no content. It's just an aphorism, devoid of truth.
But, as you say, the end justifies the means and apparently we must have victory at any cost.
I don't mind when people put words in my mouth, but I'd prefer it if you could at least make them interesting words.
Assuming 733kb/s sample rate
Excuse me? Where the heck do you get that? Even DV is 25 Mbps, and that's crappy quality. You'd need at least 50 Mbps to get anything worth saving, and that's still only standard definition. Figure 100 Mbps minimum for high-definition video, and even that's highly compressed.
But let's assume, just for sake of argument, that we limit it to 25 Mbps. Then it comes to a total of just under 8,000 TB.