"William Lowell Putnam III says his family has identified with the cause of African American rights, and thus an asteroid named after Trayvon Martin is perfectly appropriate."
So a teenager whom a jury said was shot in self-defense (or there was no convincing evidence otherwise) is perfectly appropriate? Might as well name the asteroid "Al Sharpton".
How about a black scientist, like George Washington Carver? Or Mae Jemison or Guion Bluford, since this is space and asteroids we're talking about? Maybe a Rosa or a Frederick or a W.E.B. might have done a thing or two for civil rights and African Americans?
“As I see it, the social fairness showed to Trayvon Martin was very sadly lacking.”
Oh, I don't know, dominating the cable news cycle for months on end, hundreds of thousands of people taking selfies wearing hoodies and national black leaders/celebrities calling for a Double Jeopardy trial and/or punishment for George Zimmerman seems to show some kind of social backing.
Why don't we start enshrining every person that gets shot in a bar fight next?
US Deaths caused by illicit drug overdose - ~5,000 per year WAR ON DRUGS!!!!
US Deaths caused by terrorists - 3000, twelve years ago WAR ON TERROR!!!!
US Deaths caused by hacking - 1 (and that one by "friendly fire", sorry Aaron Schwartz) WAR ON HACKING!!!!
US Deaths caused by automobile accidents - 30,000 per year umm... We'll get back to you on that.
(admittedly not a fair or entirely accurate comparison... but it does say something about America's priorities.)
Are you from the United States? If you don't think there isn't a War on Motorists out there (ostensibly for the safety of the children! but also to increase the local government revenue), you haven't been paying any attention at all.
RIPD is Bleach with a Western perspective. I dunno at the specifics, but that's exactly what the marketing made it out to be. The difference between why Bleach has hooked millions of kids and teenagers worldwide and RIPD is failing is twofold:
1) Bleach has teenagers as the main characters. The Star Trek reboot understands this. If you want to capture the core summer blockbuster audience, it helps to cater and relate to the core audience. Ryan Reynolds does not count. Jeff Bridges sure as hell doesn't count. 2) With Bleach, the cops / Soul Reapers have crazy unique powers like the X-Men. Incidentally, the X-Men movies have done well at the box office, even the crappy Last Stand. The power reveals are half the damn fun. In the trailers for RIPD, Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds get to shoot stuff with guns. Woot.
But why chase after a complicated case involving an obscure amendment when there's a simple one available? Americans generally understand that political speech is protected by the 1st amendment. Point out that monitoring makes that impossible, and you're done, in a way that's very easy to explain to people--and therefore rally support around.
Yes, but it's not entirely clear that "monitoring makes that impossible". For example, as long as the government doesn't interfere with a political rally, can you really show harm to 1st Amendment rights by the mere fact that the government databased everyone who attended? It would seem that a 4th Amendment challenge would be much more clearcut.
To further extend the analogy, I'm in favor of responsible gun control that doesn't infringe on 2nd Amendment rights - including comprehensive databases on gun ownership for criminal tracing and background checks. Unless you really believe the nutball theory that evil UN men in black will use those databases to swoop in and start confiscating guns indiscriminately then it's pretty implausible that holding gun sellers and owners accountable would violate anyone's rights.
The shots stopped the situation. If she had killed him, that would have stopped it too, but the shots stopped it dead. So why is a warning shot always a bad thing? You can scare an attacker off without killing them, often they will fear the shots are drawing police and other attention, and will flee. If it stops the situation and you have reason to use deadly force to stop the situation, then why not warn without killing?
There is only one reason recognized by the law to use deadly force: if you are in fear of immediate death or serious bodily harm to you or others. Not in the next minute. Not in the next hour. Now. In most situations, firing a warning shot means you have time to verbally warn an attacker, or otherwise try to reason with them to desist without pulling the trigger. And that is how it should be. In some states, you are allowed to brandish your weapon in "self-defense" with the express purpose of terminating an escalating confrontation, where you are not in immediate fear for your life but are being interfered with. Not sure it is universal, but I would bet it wouldn't be so. See my above post in response to someone else where NYC police shot 9 bystanders in addition to a criminal. And they weren't firing "warning shots", which intentionally are being shot somewhere else that you're not aiming at.
>You really have a criminal code where it is illegal to shoot warning shots without intended those shots to penetrate the person you are warning?
If this makes sense to you I am glad I live elsewhere.
It only makes sense to those who have very little value for human life.
It makes perfect sense to anyone who is grounded in the reality of physics. Every time you shoot a high velocity dense metal bullet, it goes somewhere. There was a recent shooting in New York City (revenge for some slight, google it) out in broad daylight. The cops who responded to the scene weren't even attempting "warning shots" and they still managed to hit multiple bystanders unintentionally, actually shooting more people than the real criminal.
Of course, if you're an anti-firearm liberal living in fantasyland, then yes... I suppose warning shots makes perfect sense, since confrontations are essentially Aaron Sorkin scripts to teach us life lessons, not unpredictable chaos.
I hope he's right about that. I suspect he may have thought that the last time.
Overthrowing dictators is always a good thing, but I consider it a tossup at best as to whether the new leadership actually wants to rule democratically. Egyptians voluntarily elected an Islamist party last time, and even if the Muslim Brotherhood is out, Islamist sentiments remain. I will hope for better, but I'll believe it when I see it.
I always want to throw up when I see sentiments like this. Egyptians ONLY voluntarily elected an Islamist party the last time because (insert crappy dichotomy) the OTHER choice was to elect a stooge of the outgoing dictatorship that they just spent blood, sweat, and tears to oust.
Go figure, Wolf #2 turns out to be just as bad as Wolf #1, and Egyptians turn out in the millions in the street again to protest Morsi. Now, that's not to say a sizeable minority of Egypt would like their freedoms to be bent over under Sharia rule, but there's also a sizeable minority in the US that would base the government on Old Testament law given the chance.
If Obama woke up tomorrow and ordered that all Tea Party members be arrested, I would expect our military to essentially remove him from office - in the immediate case by ignoring him, and in the longer case by Congress impeaching him and removing him from office - which would still require the cooperation of the military (they'd have to decide to listen to Congress and not the President.)
This is what Abraham Lincoln did and he is considered a hero.
Even heroes do really shitty things from time to time.
Did Abraham Lincoln violate the Constitution, and should he have been called to account for it?
Yes, and maybe. Sometimes the spirit of the law is fulfilled in different ways than by following the letter of the law, but in the case of Lincoln, it isn't clear that it was necessary.
Oh, and FDR, who probably saved the world from the Nazis by supplying the Soviets and Britain against popular opinion in the US (before Pearl Harbor), his government opened concentration camps for Japanese Americans. Being a hero doesn't mean everything you do is heroic.
Unless you live in Russia or Syria, it's not, and shouldn't be, your problem.
And if a large majority of Syrian citizens are against further arming Assad's regime? Whose problem does it become? If they ask or beg for the UN to impose a no-fly zone to counteract the Assad regime's airstrikes, whose problem does it become, these new(er) anti-aircraft missiles?
Just curious at how far regimes can descend, before action is taken. Is it a utilitarian argument, where the balance of lives saved must outweigh the lives lost in escalating the rebellion or outright toppling the regime? Is it an argument for means justifying the ends, that there's a tipping point where offensive military action or aid is justified (Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey already think so)? Does it change the equation if not stopping the Syrian conflict will inevitably draw Lebanon, Israel and probably Iran, Turkey and the United States into a wider and messier conflict? Would it change the equation if Assad had 10,000 artillery pieces aimed at Istanbul?
The point of all these questions is foreign policy is difficult and nuanced. No two situations are alike, and although we'd like it to play out like a domestic law enforcement problem, it never does and it necessarily can't be. Leaders and nations following simple rules to a fault, such as "Unless you live in Russia or Syria, it's not, and shouldn't be, your problem" tend to make a fucked up mess of things, either through gross inaction or not-well thought out action, like George W. Bush.
Oh, I just noticed, you are not a software-only klutz, you are actually going for a medical degree. If you think, with a premed education, that these things can be regulated, you are really a complete moron. It is scary to think that people like you actually will practice medicine.
Hey thanks, moron, for stalking me and my slashdot account information. If you didn't notice, my UID is slightly older than your ignorant ass, so you're about a decade too late with the premed cracks. And again, you're fucking retarded, because while the laws don't prevent people necessarily from making a weapon or two at home with materials and tooling that they can purchase, it does give legal pretext to 1) arrest these idiots (like you, I presume) who make these completely unjustifiable weapons without going through the due process of obtaining the proper credentials and 2) monitor the purchases of material (fertilizer, anyone?) to make these weapons and 3) prevent any scalability of businesses who peddle services in obtaining these weapons. You can't outlaw education and skills, but you can tell people, politely, to not turn their skills to violent purposes. And it shouldn't take a bomb going off to take away the said bomb in the first place...which in your fantasy world apparently everyone should be able to stockpile whatever weapons they want.
So, please, do the world a favor and blow yourself up with your favorite hobby. The gene pool thanks you in advance.
I'm not going to kill you, so you have no right to restrict my ownership of potentially dangerous objects. Trying to restrict my liberties because you presume me to be dangerous without any kind of cause is an infringement on my liberties.
Are you fucking retarded? Do you own a 20 mm minigun? How about a room full of pressure cooker improvised explosives? Maybe a fertilizer bomb? There are clearly things that do not belong in the possession of the general public (other than properly licensed and checked entities) and it doesn't need to progress to pulling or pushing the trigger before saying "oops, he shouldn't have possession of that item!".
It doesn't need to proven that Manning personally handed a copy of the release to an al Qaeda agent to make him guilty. This charge should absolutely stick. Let's say John Doe is a disgruntled Armed Forces intel agent working in Afghanistan. He's sick of his job, and takes a huge stack of classified targeting mission profiles and drone photos and scatters them in the air in Kabul's marketplace out of protest. Agents of the Taliban or al Qaeda collect the papers and peruse it. Regardless of the timeliness or utility of the info, he's (unwittingly and stupidly) gone against explicit orders and policy and aided and abetted the enemy efforts. Trying to draw a ridiculous line of causality for "proof" between release and someone getting killed is not needed at that point.
Quit idolizing Manning. Just because Manning exposed some of the seedy underpinnings of international diplomacy doesn't make him a hero. No, there were no explicit war crimes that weren't already being exposed by the MSM (Abu Ghraib being the best example). I've read through the wiki leaks releases, and there is little to nothing within them that couldn't be found in the MSM or inferred through a basic knowledge of international affairs. He's a Kevin Mitnick of this decade.
How does paying ~30,000 in federal taxes put you in the middle class? According to the calculator I found online, a married couple with no kids would have to make $168,000 a year to pay $30,000 in federal taxes. Lets assume you're single and have zero deductions...you'd still have to make $132000 a year to reach $30k in federal taxes. You sir are not middle class. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-41141728/are-you-middle-class/
$168,000 for a married couple would be lower-end upper middle class (or comfortable middle class for a higher living-cost area like a metropolis). Think about it. That's two lower-end salaries for a pair of educated professionals. You're not buying mansions at $168,000 a year; nor are you jet setting to Club Med on a whim.
Just because the current meme equates middle class with "just above drowning in debt and living paycheck to paycheck" does not make it true.
The Wealthy, the true upper class, have no need to work. Their income (for the most part) comes from interest and capital gains. They'd be using a different tax calculator anyways.
Iran should feel free to. The US economy wouldnt even blink. In fact, Iran needs the US and other advanced manufacturing economies for the high strength materials needed for its missile and nuclear material enrichment programs.
And that was for Mario, as well as my and my kids' anticipation for the next Zelda, Mario Kart, Smash Bros, Mario Party, and Metroid. We'll probably get a PS4 too, but the decision to buy a Wii U was a no-brainer. Those games are coming, and yes, they'll be worth a new console.
Which drugs are we talking about here? Some drugs, like meth, are "modern chemistry." Other drugs, like opium, alcohol, caffeine, weed, shrooms, etc, etc are as old as the hills.
For that matter, who are we to judge what form of pleasure somebody may experience or not? It also calls into question the term "addicted." What constitutes addiction, and when do we determine "addiction" is bad? SSRI-class drugs are highly addictive; I know that firsthand from quitting. They tell me sex is addictive, but I'm on slashdot so I wouldn't know lol. Cheesecake can be addictive, and so can caffeine.
Are we performing this horrific procedure on people simply because our own lives are miserable and we don't like that somebody found a way to be happy? Or is this a person who is unable to support themselves? Would this person be able to support themselves if not for whatever habit we want to correct by completely annihilating their ability to feel pleasure of any kind?
I agree with your conclusion. Creepy and dangerous.
Yes, this surgery is creepy and dangerous.
However, when you veer off into talking about addiction in general, you start conflating two very different phenomena: dependency and addiction. Dependency is the fact that if you stop using the substance in question, you will experience adverse effects. Stop drinking caffeine after you've become dependent, and you'll experience headaches. Etc. Addiction is a primary neurological disorder stemming from the way the reward/pleasure centers of the brain are wired. Addiction is not necessarily tied to a specific substance; more than likely, if an addict experiments around, there are multiple behaviors and/or substances that can fill their craving just fine.
There's a very simple litmus test that can tell you when a person needs to stop. Substance abuse is separated from mere dependency by the continued use of said substance despite clear harm or impairment from its use. A cigarette smoker that is tied to an oxygen tank because of COPD. A cocaine abuser that has cardiomyopathy and heart failure. An drinker that continues to drink despite brain damage and liver failure. These are more extreme but easy to think of cases of abuse in which they should have stopped a long time ago or gotten treatment.
Lego is not a fad. However, buying Lego sets and selling them for a profit is a fad. As an example, the 6000 parts Taj Mahal was for sale around £200 I believe and now people try to sell it for £1000. It's obviously not worth that as a toy, because you get equally challenging sets for £200 - why would you pay five times as much? The only ones paying that money are idiots who think it is an investment. And once you run out of idiots, the prices will drop.
We're running out of idiots? Surprise surprise surprise.
Well, everything, and I do mean everything, exists in a finite supply. What's more limiting than simply the number of idiots is 1) the amount of ready-to-spend cash held by idiots and 2) the attention span of idiots before they jump at the next make-money-with-no-effort scheme.
Because now we live in a totalitarian regime, where the "authorities" must be obeyed?
The authorities should be obeyed, in most general situations, unless they are asking you to do something unlawful. If you're an idiot that is refusing to leave a place of private business when the business owner's representative asks you to leave, and then calls the cops when you refuse to leave, everything else that happens after that is a simple preventable fact.
There is a way of handling the police or other law enforcement officials. Be polite. Be courteous. Follow simple directions, with the above limits. Have a plan to contact an attorney with full details, names, and badge numbers at the soonest available opportunity if the need arises.
You are not going to out-argue a police officer. You are not going to outfight a police officer. You are not going to kill more police officers than there are willing to kill you. Physical or verbal confrontations with a police officer are pointless; they will all end in the same result. The way to fight police injustices is through the courts and media, not through sparring of any kind.
Keep in mind: police officers in any individual incident, above all else, are trained to MAINTAIN CONTROL OF THE SITUATION, using any necessary means. If you're the idiot trying to take control of the situation away from the police officer (rightly or wrongly), guess who's going to end up next on the target list?
The North Korean people aren't just hungry, they are starving en-masse. And the leadership is all into putting its tiny foreign earnings into dick swinging activities like this (achieving what Russia and the US did decades ago). The DPRK really is the most criminal and totalitarian regime out there.
As 1984 and central Africa demonstrate, hunger as a tool of dissent control and food as a political weapon can be a very powerful thing. Even if North Korea was swimming in cash, I doubt its common citizens would be getting well fed any time soon.
That's a good summary. What I find really odd about Russia's position in this, and god knows how many similar events, is that they seem content to support the side obviously seen as the 'baddy' by the rest of the world; who will invariably lose. So they get some short term sales and in return are probably losing the ability to sell just about anything into Syria when the inevitable happens. As a bonus they even make themselves less popular with the West and middle eastern countries who don't support Assad.
There's nothing odd about Russia's position. Russia has always asserted its right to militarily dominate its own secessionist populations and its nearby sphere of influence. Agreeing that al-Assad shouldn't kill 40,000 of his own citizens in an attempt to restore order sets a bad precedent for Russia. It might come back to haunt them, say, the next time they decide to level Grozny block by block to bring Chechnya back in line.
I can't speak for the poster, but he said his passive aggressive co-workers use IM. He didn't actually call IM users passive aggressive. There is a distinct difference between those two statements.
The implication was/is that passive aggressive people in his/her company are more likely to use IM rather than picking up the phone. It doesn't make sense at all.
It makes perfect sense. Passive-aggressives avoid visible and outright conflict or argument. Why would they want to have a conversation that could turn negative when they could simply shoot off a text or email?
This is +4 Insightful? I could buy plenty of movies with boobs showing at the supermarket. "R" rating includes pretty much everything except prolonged full frontal nudity and/or hardcore sex. In some cases, enough people get off that here in the United States wenominate it for an Oscar.
Heck, if boobage is all you're looking for, just turn on some cable TV. Don't act like you have to travel to the naughty side of town for that.
What is the reasoning behind it being illegal to sell your non-vital organs? Is it to prevent people from being coerced into it under the guise of a legitimate transaction? Some weird pseudo prostitution thing about "selling your body"? Purely moral taboo?
Always wondered why this was the case. You'd think if this venue was opened up, there would be more organs going where they are needed without requiring the donor first have a nasty case of death.
First: kidneys are vital organs. Just because the human body has a built-in redundancy does not make it any less necessary to live. Some people, depending on their preexisting health, won't be able to tolerate the removal of a kidney either without taking a significant hit to their kidney function.
Second: opening the marketplace for donor human organs to profit motives is a bad idea all around. But, if you can solve the human conditions of corruption, avarice and socioeconomic inequality than yes, it might be workable.
By the time a workable profiteering model for selling organs is adopted, we'll be growing MHC-matched replacement organs in the lab.
I upgraded one of my desktops to Windows 8. At $40 for the download, why not?
My take: Metro is pretty much useless, but that's OK, because I spend close to 100% of my time on the Windows Desktop. The internals from a look-and-feel perspective seem to hold up well. Compared to the Windows Vista that came with that particular box, Windows 8 is more responsive and faster with the same resources... which is what you would expect with an OS upgrade. Also, reliability is pretty good. I've been running the box for close to a month now without either the system or applications freezing or crashing. Which makes it better than other Windows boxes I've used (or my current Ubuntu box).
Steam and my library of games works perfectly on Windows 8. I understand Gabe Newell doesn't like it; but his platform is working just fine.
In summary; a ho hum upgrade. Some new eye candy that my kids think are pretty, but otherwise faster and more reliable.
Slashdot Mirror
"William Lowell Putnam III says his family has identified with the cause of African American rights, and thus an asteroid named after Trayvon Martin is perfectly appropriate."
So a teenager whom a jury said was shot in self-defense (or there was no convincing evidence otherwise) is perfectly appropriate? Might as well name the asteroid "Al Sharpton".
How about a black scientist, like George Washington Carver? Or Mae Jemison or Guion Bluford, since this is space and asteroids we're talking about? Maybe a Rosa or a Frederick or a W.E.B. might have done a thing or two for civil rights and African Americans?
“As I see it, the social fairness showed to Trayvon Martin was very sadly lacking.”
Oh, I don't know, dominating the cable news cycle for months on end, hundreds of thousands of people taking selfies wearing hoodies and national black leaders/celebrities calling for a Double Jeopardy trial and/or punishment for George Zimmerman seems to show some kind of social backing.
Why don't we start enshrining every person that gets shot in a bar fight next?
US Deaths caused by illicit drug overdose - ~5,000 per year
WAR ON DRUGS!!!!
US Deaths caused by terrorists - 3000, twelve years ago
WAR ON TERROR!!!!
US Deaths caused by hacking - 1 (and that one by "friendly fire", sorry Aaron Schwartz)
WAR ON HACKING!!!!
US Deaths caused by automobile accidents - 30,000 per year
umm...
We'll get back to you on that.
(admittedly not a fair or entirely accurate comparison... but it does say something about America's priorities.)
Are you from the United States? If you don't think there isn't a War on Motorists out there (ostensibly for the safety of the children! but also to increase the local government revenue), you haven't been paying any attention at all.
RIPD is Bleach with a Western perspective. I dunno at the specifics, but that's exactly what the marketing made it out to be. The difference between why Bleach has hooked millions of kids and teenagers worldwide and RIPD is failing is twofold:
1) Bleach has teenagers as the main characters. The Star Trek reboot understands this. If you want to capture the core summer blockbuster audience, it helps to cater and relate to the core audience. Ryan Reynolds does not count. Jeff Bridges sure as hell doesn't count.
2) With Bleach, the cops / Soul Reapers have crazy unique powers like the X-Men. Incidentally, the X-Men movies have done well at the box office, even the crappy Last Stand. The power reveals are half the damn fun. In the trailers for RIPD, Jeff Bridges and Ryan Reynolds get to shoot stuff with guns. Woot.
But why chase after a complicated case involving an obscure amendment when there's a simple one available? Americans generally understand that political speech is protected by the 1st amendment. Point out that monitoring makes that impossible, and you're done, in a way that's very easy to explain to people--and therefore rally support around.
Yes, but it's not entirely clear that "monitoring makes that impossible". For example, as long as the government doesn't interfere with a political rally, can you really show harm to 1st Amendment rights by the mere fact that the government databased everyone who attended? It would seem that a 4th Amendment challenge would be much more clearcut.
To further extend the analogy, I'm in favor of responsible gun control that doesn't infringe on 2nd Amendment rights - including comprehensive databases on gun ownership for criminal tracing and background checks. Unless you really believe the nutball theory that evil UN men in black will use those databases to swoop in and start confiscating guns indiscriminately then it's pretty implausible that holding gun sellers and owners accountable would violate anyone's rights.
I am not amazed a white guy got off on a shooting charge of killing a black man. There is a long history of it, both in the US and elsewhere.
Yeah, no kidding!! Oh, wait. Zimmerman's Hispanic. Maybe you should read up on the actual facts of the case, not what NBC is trying to sell you.
The shots stopped the situation. If she had killed him, that would have stopped it too, but the shots stopped it dead. So why is a warning shot always a bad thing? You can scare an attacker off without killing them, often they will fear the shots are drawing police and other attention, and will flee. If it stops the situation and you have reason to use deadly force to stop the situation, then why not warn without killing?
There is only one reason recognized by the law to use deadly force: if you are in fear of immediate death or serious bodily harm to you or others. Not in the next minute. Not in the next hour. Now. In most situations, firing a warning shot means you have time to verbally warn an attacker, or otherwise try to reason with them to desist without pulling the trigger. And that is how it should be. In some states, you are allowed to brandish your weapon in "self-defense" with the express purpose of terminating an escalating confrontation, where you are not in immediate fear for your life but are being interfered with. Not sure it is universal, but I would bet it wouldn't be so. See my above post in response to someone else where NYC police shot 9 bystanders in addition to a criminal. And they weren't firing "warning shots", which intentionally are being shot somewhere else that you're not aiming at.
>You really have a criminal code where it is illegal to shoot warning shots without intended those shots to penetrate the person you are warning?
If this makes sense to you I am glad I live elsewhere.
It only makes sense to those who have very little value for human life.
It makes perfect sense to anyone who is grounded in the reality of physics. Every time you shoot a high velocity dense metal bullet, it goes somewhere. There was a recent shooting in New York City (revenge for some slight, google it) out in broad daylight. The cops who responded to the scene weren't even attempting "warning shots" and they still managed to hit multiple bystanders unintentionally, actually shooting more people than the real criminal.
Of course, if you're an anti-firearm liberal living in fantasyland, then yes... I suppose warning shots makes perfect sense, since confrontations are essentially Aaron Sorkin scripts to teach us life lessons, not unpredictable chaos.
I hope he's right about that. I suspect he may have thought that the last time.
Overthrowing dictators is always a good thing, but I consider it a tossup at best as to whether the new leadership actually wants to rule democratically. Egyptians voluntarily elected an Islamist party last time, and even if the Muslim Brotherhood is out, Islamist sentiments remain. I will hope for better, but I'll believe it when I see it.
I always want to throw up when I see sentiments like this. Egyptians ONLY voluntarily elected an Islamist party the last time because (insert crappy dichotomy) the OTHER choice was to elect a stooge of the outgoing dictatorship that they just spent blood, sweat, and tears to oust.
Go figure, Wolf #2 turns out to be just as bad as Wolf #1, and Egyptians turn out in the millions in the street again to protest Morsi. Now, that's not to say a sizeable minority of Egypt would like their freedoms to be bent over under Sharia rule, but there's also a sizeable minority in the US that would base the government on Old Testament law given the chance.
If Obama woke up tomorrow and ordered that all Tea Party members be arrested, I would expect our military to essentially remove him from office - in the immediate case by ignoring him, and in the longer case by Congress impeaching him and removing him from office - which would still require the cooperation of the military (they'd have to decide to listen to Congress and not the President.)
This is what Abraham Lincoln did and he is considered a hero.
Even heroes do really shitty things from time to time.
Did Abraham Lincoln violate the Constitution, and should he have been called to account for it?
Yes, and maybe. Sometimes the spirit of the law is fulfilled in different ways than by following the letter of the law, but in the case of Lincoln, it isn't clear that it was necessary.
Oh, and FDR, who probably saved the world from the Nazis by supplying the Soviets and Britain against popular opinion in the US (before Pearl Harbor), his government opened concentration camps for Japanese Americans. Being a hero doesn't mean everything you do is heroic.
Unless you live in Russia or Syria, it's not, and shouldn't be, your problem.
And if a large majority of Syrian citizens are against further arming Assad's regime? Whose problem does it become? If they ask or beg for the UN to impose a no-fly zone to counteract the Assad regime's airstrikes, whose problem does it become, these new(er) anti-aircraft missiles?
Was Rwanda and its internal affairs just a problem for Rwanda and Uganda? Was the breakup of Yugoslavia merely a problem for the Serbs, Croats and Muslims to duke it out?
Just curious at how far regimes can descend, before action is taken. Is it a utilitarian argument, where the balance of lives saved must outweigh the lives lost in escalating the rebellion or outright toppling the regime? Is it an argument for means justifying the ends, that there's a tipping point where offensive military action or aid is justified (Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey already think so)? Does it change the equation if not stopping the Syrian conflict will inevitably draw Lebanon, Israel and probably Iran, Turkey and the United States into a wider and messier conflict? Would it change the equation if Assad had 10,000 artillery pieces aimed at Istanbul?
The point of all these questions is foreign policy is difficult and nuanced. No two situations are alike, and although we'd like it to play out like a domestic law enforcement problem, it never does and it necessarily can't be. Leaders and nations following simple rules to a fault, such as "Unless you live in Russia or Syria, it's not, and shouldn't be, your problem" tend to make a fucked up mess of things, either through gross inaction or not-well thought out action, like George W. Bush.
Oh, I just noticed, you are not a software-only klutz, you are actually going for a medical degree. If you think, with a premed education, that these things can be regulated, you are really a complete moron. It is scary to think that people like you actually will practice medicine.
Hey thanks, moron, for stalking me and my slashdot account information. If you didn't notice, my UID is slightly older than your ignorant ass, so you're about a decade too late with the premed cracks. And again, you're fucking retarded, because while the laws don't prevent people necessarily from making a weapon or two at home with materials and tooling that they can purchase, it does give legal pretext to 1) arrest these idiots (like you, I presume) who make these completely unjustifiable weapons without going through the due process of obtaining the proper credentials and 2) monitor the purchases of material (fertilizer, anyone?) to make these weapons and 3) prevent any scalability of businesses who peddle services in obtaining these weapons. You can't outlaw education and skills, but you can tell people, politely, to not turn their skills to violent purposes. And it shouldn't take a bomb going off to take away the said bomb in the first place...which in your fantasy world apparently everyone should be able to stockpile whatever weapons they want.
So, please, do the world a favor and blow yourself up with your favorite hobby. The gene pool thanks you in advance.
I'm not going to kill you, so you have no right to restrict my ownership of potentially dangerous objects. Trying to restrict my liberties because you presume me to be dangerous without any kind of cause is an infringement on my liberties.
Are you fucking retarded? Do you own a 20 mm minigun? How about a room full of pressure cooker improvised explosives? Maybe a fertilizer bomb? There are clearly things that do not belong in the possession of the general public (other than properly licensed and checked entities) and it doesn't need to progress to pulling or pushing the trigger before saying "oops, he shouldn't have possession of that item!".
It doesn't need to proven that Manning personally handed a copy of the release to an al Qaeda agent to make him guilty. This charge should absolutely stick. Let's say John Doe is a disgruntled Armed Forces intel agent working in Afghanistan. He's sick of his job, and takes a huge stack of classified targeting mission profiles and drone photos and scatters them in the air in Kabul's marketplace out of protest. Agents of the Taliban or al Qaeda collect the papers and peruse it. Regardless of the timeliness or utility of the info, he's (unwittingly and stupidly) gone against explicit orders and policy and aided and abetted the enemy efforts. Trying to draw a ridiculous line of causality for "proof" between release and someone getting killed is not needed at that point.
Quit idolizing Manning. Just because Manning exposed some of the seedy underpinnings of international diplomacy doesn't make him a hero. No, there were no explicit war crimes that weren't already being exposed by the MSM (Abu Ghraib being the best example). I've read through the wiki leaks releases, and there is little to nothing within them that couldn't be found in the MSM or inferred through a basic knowledge of international affairs. He's a Kevin Mitnick of this decade.
How does paying ~30,000 in federal taxes put you in the middle class? According to the calculator I found online, a married couple with no kids would have to make $168,000 a year to pay $30,000 in federal taxes. Lets assume you're single and have zero deductions...you'd still have to make $132000 a year to reach $30k in federal taxes. You sir are not middle class. http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_162-41141728/are-you-middle-class/
$168,000 for a married couple would be lower-end upper middle class (or comfortable middle class for a higher living-cost area like a metropolis). Think about it. That's two lower-end salaries for a pair of educated professionals. You're not buying mansions at $168,000 a year; nor are you jet setting to Club Med on a whim.
Just because the current meme equates middle class with "just above drowning in debt and living paycheck to paycheck" does not make it true.
The Wealthy, the true upper class, have no need to work. Their income (for the most part) comes from interest and capital gains. They'd be using a different tax calculator anyways.
Iran should feel free to. The US economy wouldnt even blink. In fact, Iran needs the US and other advanced manufacturing economies for the high strength materials needed for its missile and nuclear material enrichment programs.
And that was for Mario, as well as my and my kids' anticipation for the next Zelda, Mario Kart, Smash Bros, Mario Party, and Metroid. We'll probably get a PS4 too, but the decision to buy a Wii U was a no-brainer. Those games are coming, and yes, they'll be worth a new console.
Which drugs are we talking about here? Some drugs, like meth, are "modern chemistry." Other drugs, like opium, alcohol, caffeine, weed, shrooms, etc, etc are as old as the hills.
For that matter, who are we to judge what form of pleasure somebody may experience or not? It also calls into question the term "addicted." What constitutes addiction, and when do we determine "addiction" is bad? SSRI-class drugs are highly addictive; I know that firsthand from quitting. They tell me sex is addictive, but I'm on slashdot so I wouldn't know lol. Cheesecake can be addictive, and so can caffeine.
Are we performing this horrific procedure on people simply because our own lives are miserable and we don't like that somebody found a way to be happy? Or is this a person who is unable to support themselves? Would this person be able to support themselves if not for whatever habit we want to correct by completely annihilating their ability to feel pleasure of any kind?
I agree with your conclusion. Creepy and dangerous.
Yes, this surgery is creepy and dangerous.
However, when you veer off into talking about addiction in general, you start conflating two very different phenomena: dependency and addiction. Dependency is the fact that if you stop using the substance in question, you will experience adverse effects. Stop drinking caffeine after you've become dependent, and you'll experience headaches. Etc. Addiction is a primary neurological disorder stemming from the way the reward/pleasure centers of the brain are wired. Addiction is not necessarily tied to a specific substance; more than likely, if an addict experiments around, there are multiple behaviors and/or substances that can fill their craving just fine.
There's a very simple litmus test that can tell you when a person needs to stop. Substance abuse is separated from mere dependency by the continued use of said substance despite clear harm or impairment from its use. A cigarette smoker that is tied to an oxygen tank because of COPD. A cocaine abuser that has cardiomyopathy and heart failure. An drinker that continues to drink despite brain damage and liver failure. These are more extreme but easy to think of cases of abuse in which they should have stopped a long time ago or gotten treatment.
Lego is not a fad. However, buying Lego sets and selling them for a profit is a fad. As an example, the 6000 parts Taj Mahal was for sale around £200 I believe and now people try to sell it for £1000. It's obviously not worth that as a toy, because you get equally challenging sets for £200 - why would you pay five times as much? The only ones paying that money are idiots who think it is an investment. And once you run out of idiots, the prices will drop.
We're running out of idiots? Surprise surprise surprise.
Well, everything, and I do mean everything, exists in a finite supply. What's more limiting than simply the number of idiots is 1) the amount of ready-to-spend cash held by idiots and 2) the attention span of idiots before they jump at the next make-money-with-no-effort scheme.
Because now we live in a totalitarian regime, where the "authorities" must be obeyed?
The authorities should be obeyed, in most general situations, unless they are asking you to do something unlawful. If you're an idiot that is refusing to leave a place of private business when the business owner's representative asks you to leave, and then calls the cops when you refuse to leave, everything else that happens after that is a simple preventable fact.
There is a way of handling the police or other law enforcement officials. Be polite. Be courteous. Follow simple directions, with the above limits. Have a plan to contact an attorney with full details, names, and badge numbers at the soonest available opportunity if the need arises.
You are not going to out-argue a police officer. You are not going to outfight a police officer. You are not going to kill more police officers than there are willing to kill you. Physical or verbal confrontations with a police officer are pointless; they will all end in the same result. The way to fight police injustices is through the courts and media, not through sparring of any kind.
Keep in mind: police officers in any individual incident, above all else, are trained to MAINTAIN CONTROL OF THE SITUATION, using any necessary means. If you're the idiot trying to take control of the situation away from the police officer (rightly or wrongly), guess who's going to end up next on the target list?
The North Korean people aren't just hungry, they are starving en-masse. And the leadership is all into putting its tiny foreign earnings into dick swinging activities like this (achieving what Russia and the US did decades ago). The DPRK really is the most criminal and totalitarian regime out there.
As 1984 and central Africa demonstrate, hunger as a tool of dissent control and food as a political weapon can be a very powerful thing. Even if North Korea was swimming in cash, I doubt its common citizens would be getting well fed any time soon.
That's a good summary. What I find really odd about Russia's position in this, and god knows how many similar events, is that they seem content to support the side obviously seen as the 'baddy' by the rest of the world; who will invariably lose. So they get some short term sales and in return are probably losing the ability to sell just about anything into Syria when the inevitable happens. As a bonus they even make themselves less popular with the West and middle eastern countries who don't support Assad.
There's nothing odd about Russia's position. Russia has always asserted its right to militarily dominate its own secessionist populations and its nearby sphere of influence. Agreeing that al-Assad shouldn't kill 40,000 of his own citizens in an attempt to restore order sets a bad precedent for Russia. It might come back to haunt them, say, the next time they decide to level Grozny block by block to bring Chechnya back in line.
I can't speak for the poster, but he said his passive aggressive co-workers use IM. He didn't actually call IM users passive aggressive. There is a distinct difference between those two statements.
The implication was/is that passive aggressive people in his/her company are more likely to use IM rather than picking up the phone. It doesn't make sense at all.
It makes perfect sense. Passive-aggressives avoid visible and outright conflict or argument. Why would they want to have a conversation that could turn negative when they could simply shoot off a text or email?
This is +4 Insightful? I could buy plenty of movies with boobs showing at the supermarket. "R" rating includes pretty much everything except prolonged full frontal nudity and/or hardcore sex. In some cases, enough people get off that here in the United States wenominate it for an Oscar.
Heck, if boobage is all you're looking for, just turn on some cable TV. Don't act like you have to travel to the naughty side of town for that.
What is the reasoning behind it being illegal to sell your non-vital organs? Is it to prevent people from being coerced into it under the guise of a legitimate transaction? Some weird pseudo prostitution thing about "selling your body"? Purely moral taboo?
Always wondered why this was the case. You'd think if this venue was opened up, there would be more organs going where they are needed without requiring the donor first have a nasty case of death.
First: kidneys are vital organs. Just because the human body has a built-in redundancy does not make it any less necessary to live. Some people, depending on their preexisting health, won't be able to tolerate the removal of a kidney either without taking a significant hit to their kidney function.
Second: opening the marketplace for donor human organs to profit motives is a bad idea all around. But, if you can solve the human conditions of corruption, avarice and socioeconomic inequality than yes, it might be workable.
By the time a workable profiteering model for selling organs is adopted, we'll be growing MHC-matched replacement organs in the lab.
I upgraded one of my desktops to Windows 8. At $40 for the download, why not?
My take: Metro is pretty much useless, but that's OK, because I spend close to 100% of my time on the Windows Desktop. The internals from a look-and-feel perspective seem to hold up well. Compared to the Windows Vista that came with that particular box, Windows 8 is more responsive and faster with the same resources... which is what you would expect with an OS upgrade. Also, reliability is pretty good. I've been running the box for close to a month now without either the system or applications freezing or crashing. Which makes it better than other Windows boxes I've used (or my current Ubuntu box).
Steam and my library of games works perfectly on Windows 8. I understand Gabe Newell doesn't like it; but his platform is working just fine.
In summary; a ho hum upgrade. Some new eye candy that my kids think are pretty, but otherwise faster and more reliable.