Those are two major factors I haven't seen while skimming comments.
Most of your communication is done through keeping in touch with your peers. Talk to them, understand what they're doing, etc. But also long term, document your code as you go, either with written documentation or, better, with tests. Especially, learn what they're doing right, and tell them; people need recognition from their peers.
Professionalism is pretty easy: learn how to use version control and continuous integration, e.g. Jenkins. Use CI, especially, to make sure that you fix your bugs right away. If you set it up and use it rigorously, you'll find you can put out some very high quality code, even though it will be at a slower pace than you're used to. But for large projects, fixing bugs "later" is madness.
Ha, typical leftist Slashdot mods are trying to bury me, just like on Digg.:-)
Hearst was a supporter of Adolf Hitler from 1934 until 1938
You're incredibly dishonest, let's finish that quote:
According to David Nasaw Hearst was a supporter of Adolf Hitler from 1934 until 1938: Hearst believed that Hitler was going to bring a century of peace to Europe. However, in a private interview Hearst told Hitler that in order to be a great leader, he must "stop the persecution of the German Jews." Hearst convinced himself that Hitler was going to listen to him, but his support for Hitler only changed following Kristallnacht in 1938.
So, basically, after Hitler showed his true colors, Hearst dropped his support. Many people thought that Fascism generally was a bold new invention; the German Worker's Party that the Nazi party was formed from was quite popular.
And, again: the left continued to support Stalin and Communism even after the tremendous slaughter of his regime had been exposed, and you're still apologists for it.
Diplomacy would do nothing to sway the Soviets. Why would it?
Of course not. What finally toppled the Soviets was diplomacy backed by nuclear weapons. In spite of leftist apologists for the mass murders. There's no reason to believe that the West, with proper knowledge, couldn't have influenced the Soviets to stop it.
Not long after [Bill Maher's] show was canceled.
And nothing of value was lost.
Saddam Hussein complied with every single U.S. request leading up to the war.
The Iraqis sent thousands of pages of garbage reports. They moved munitions around while inspectors were visiting.
The fact that Americans were willing to put up with blatant censorship post-9/11 (banning songs on the radio!) shows just how irrational the general populace was between September 2001 up to around 2005.
The nonstop protests that simply stopped as soon as a Democrat was in office is a fact you can't address. It was purely political theater, the irrationality was coming entirely from a deranged left that was upset that the Republicans had gone after Clinton.
Hatred is not a principle to base reasoned arguments on, and that's all you had. You're still so full of hate you believe in these bizarre conspiracies where Dick Cheney and Karl Rove have Fox News and a handful of right-wing rags orchestrate the entire rest of the media in suppressing all the brilliant peaceful alternatives we could have pursued that, obviously, the Koch brothers must have deleted from the Internet.
Joke wasn't said in an airport, these were tweets posted over a week before they travelled. No concern that every post on the internet is being cataloged and traced back to the individual ? None at all ?
I'd be more concerned if the government wasn't scanning publicly available information looking for obvious stuff like "Hi! I want to blow up America!".
Terrorists use public sites to coordinate; usually in code, but also not in code so as to recruit. I'm worried about the government snooping on my *private* affairs, not if they listen to things I post in an explicitly public forum.
Duranty was just a Soviet shill whereas Hearst paved the way for guys like Murdoch, started a war to sell newspapers, supported Hitler . . . need I go on?
Hearst supported Hitler? Quoth Wikipedia:
In 1934 after checking with Jewish leaders to make sure the visit would prove of benefit to Jews, Hearst visited Berlin to interview Adolf Hitler. Hitler asked why he was so misunderstood by the American press. "Because Americans believe in democracy," Hearst answered bluntly, "and are averse to dictatorship."
Hearst described Kristallnacht as “making the flag of National Socialism a symbol of national savagery” and advocated the creation of a "homeland for dispossessed or persecuted Jews.” When news of the Holocaust began to seep out of occupied Europe, Hearst covered it as important news, in contrast to other newspapers which downplayed the mass murders.
It's only wikipedia, but, yes, you do need to go on before I'm going to accept that the guy supported Hitler.
Even if Duranty would have reported accurately, those people still would have died.
Do you really believe that? Nothing would have happened? All the diplomacy, all the protests, they're all completely useless? Governments can just do whatever they want and there's nothing anyone can do?
Even if you're that cynical, why is it that the Soviets and Nazis, and even the Chinese today think that death camps and labor camps need to be hidden?
Also, I would argue that NewsCorp's efforts to sell the war in Iraq are far more grievous than denying a famine.
What "sold" that war was an insane tyrant who refused to let other nations be sure he didn't have nukes. The administration people pushing for an aggressive strategy in Iraq genuinely wanted to do the right thing in Iraq. What a political system needs, though, is a principled opposition to give them useful alternatives.
The anti-war movement is virutally silent now that a Democrat is in office, even though much of his foreign policy is damned near Bush's foreign policy on autopilot.
What is it that failed to sell peace? A blatantly political anti-war movement. All those idiots did was scream about how Bush was Hitler, and if there were any serious thoughts coming from the anti-war movement, they were entirely drowned out.
Murdoch is scum. The only thing he cares about is power. He is completely fine with hurting lots of people if that increases his power.
How do you feel about Walter Duranty? And his complicity in ignoring the Holodomor? Did you even know that such a person existed? What do you think of the Pulitzer prize committee that basically pretended it hadn't happened for fifty years, and quietly rescinded Duranty's pulitzer when they thought no one would notice?
Is there anything you know of NewsCorp doing that even approaches the level of denying an ethnically targeted mass famine for purely political reasons? Anything?
This man and his sprawling NewsCorp media empire have almost single-handedly ruined/corrupted objective journalism, and done so across multiple countries where NewsCorp is active.
How do you feel about Walter Duranty? And his complicity in ignoring the Holodomor? Did you even know that such a person existed? What do you think of the Pulitzer prize committee that basically pretended it hadn't happened for fifty years, and quietly rescinded Duranty's pulitzer when they thought no one would notice?
Is there anything you know of NewsCorp doing that even approaches the level of denying an ethnically targeted mass famine for purely political reasons? Anything?
Sorry to be a buzzkill, but it looks like it'll be just a movie by Terry Jones with the other Pythons being voice actors and nothing more. Heck, Terry Jones himself said that "It's not a Monty Python picture".http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-16744299 None of the other Pythons are involved in the writing process.
The interviewers had a really hard time pretending to give a fuck.
From the link:
A talking dog that will ham the shit out of every scene named Dennis will be voiced by Mrs Doubtfire actor Robin Williams.
Anyone else sick of encountering this kind of thinking?
This is insightful? Even when we have thousands of people who were driven to march in protests because they're unemployed and saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of debt?
No one is saying education is "only useful for jobs." What people are trying to get across is that how you're going to pay the bills for the next forty years needs to be a significant factor guiding your major life decisions.
More than likely though they just find other sources of copper to steal from or just steal more of it in more sophisticated operations.
You overestimate the intelligence of thieves. The word is out that cable is valuable so the average thief will carry right on stealing it.
The fact that he doesn't get paid much just means he won't take the day off to spend money. He'll be out stealing cable next day instead. Net result: even more cable being stolen than before.
People don't have to be smart to respond to price signals. There are other things to steal, thus an opportunity cost. If you dramatically decrease the value of stealing something, while the risk and effort to obtain that value remain the same, people are going to steal less of it.
In case you hadn't noticed, everything is a felony these days.
But I agree that a second conviction for theft should carry a very long sentence. Many crimes are crimes of passion, committed under circumstances that are unlikely to be repeated - and many more "crimes" are not really crimes at all - but theft has real victims and thieves have a very high recidivism rate. If there is one crime that we should punish with very long vacations from polite society, it should be theft.
To be clear, I think Silvergate's drawing attention to a real problem, which is why that title bothers me. Presuming that he's putting his best case forward, the title is complete bullshit.
Unless the "average American" (I take average to mean typical, not statistical mean) is routinely importing goods, wandering around wetlands, lying about their sick days, receiving classified data, talking to the cops, etc., it's hard to see how he or she is committing three felonies a day. You can even have a drug habit without committing a felony in many cases, and that's probably the worst area of law enforcement overreach in society today.
How can you tell a kid it is ok to kill the guy pointing a gun at you. But you need to respect the body of the guy who wanted you dead? While it is disgusting, i find the killing far more disgusting then the pissing on the body.
In order for you to be able to shoot that guy, your weapon (it's generally a ship or tank pointing a gun at you:-) has to fire.
So you have to maintain that weapon. You can thus be punished for not taking care of that weapon, even though neglecting to clean a rifle is a far lesser act than taking a human life.
That is the basis for the idea of discipline and good order: A military can't conduct its primary mission to make war if it doesn't have it. Ergo, pissing on an enemy corpse, while individually a minor act, is destructive towards that mission.
This notion is also influenced by the US military having adopted a values-based system of morality which, while fuzzy as all hell, tries to establish what a good soldier (or marine or airman or whatever) is so that others can emulate them.
Now, I'm confused about pacifism. My operative premise is that human life (at least) is intrinsically valuable. So if A attacks B, that's wrong. But why is it *worse* for B to defend against A, or for C to intervene? I would have thought that when faced with a series of bad choices, you go with the least worst.
But the big flap over urinating over the Taliban corpses is just that - a flap. I think it just reflects on the total inanity of the general media these days. You don't want to talk about big, complex issues so you make little stupid things go nuclear.
Nothing to see here, move along.
But it wasn't the media that flipped out over it, it was our incompetent Secretary of State. She was put there so that she wouldn't run against the Pres in the coming election. We have a President that puts people in cabinet positions based on little more than political calculations, and we're surprised that they act like amateurs?
Al Qaeda didn't attack us because we brought middle eastern oil. Al Qaeda didn't attack us because they hated our freedom and democracy.
They attacked us because we stationed troops in their holy land. They attacked us because we supported despotic regimes in the middle east. They attacked us because we are Israel's biggest ally.
If they were concerned about our troops stationed, they could have attacked those troops, which they had previously done when they attacked the USS Cole.
Saying they attacked us because we're Israel's ally directly contradicts your claim that they didn't act out of hate for our freedom and democracy. You've got three secular countries, Turkey, Lebanon and Israel. They see the secularism of Turkey and Lebanon as part of an infectious influence that originated in Israel; a very similar view to the one many Westerners have of Saudi-funded Wahhabi mosques.
You'll also note that in Iraq, the Islamists have worked assiduously to make sure that Sharia is the basis of the new Iraqi constitution. There are constant calls in the Muslim world to go back to Sharia to avoid what they see as the corrupting influence of the West. And, frankly, it's not just democracy and freedom that they consider corrupting, but Judaism. Our singular support of Israel is most notable in the voting record in the UN. The UN is routinely used as a platform to mount virulently anti-semitic attacks against Israel, and the US and Israel are often alone in voting against them. What's notable about those anti-semitic attacks, beyond Europe's silent accession to them, is that they are routinely voiced by the most odious dictators, people who really do hate freedom and democracy.
The rest of the Middle East is despotic regimes, so why didn't Al Qaeda attack countries all over the world, or the regimes themselves? In fact, other terrorist groups have done that, and corrupt kleptocrats are constantly looking over their shoulder. I don't think AQ are the most reasonable bunch, but they seem to be perfectly cognizant of world affairs, and the reality that there's no one else for us to deal with.
While they have various motives and grievances behind their jihad, those are naturally hard to nail down. What's straightforward are their strategic calculations. The core reason Al Qaeda attacked us was that they thought they could escalate their jihad and by attacking us, and they certainly succeeded in that initial goal. But, being a strategic calculation, they attacked because they thought they could win. Given the administration that was in office while they were planning the attacks, they thought that our response would be weak or appeasing, which would have shown the world that Allah was with them on their holy crusade. They were probably quite surprised that Bush would buck world opinion and six years of protests to hunt them down and kill them.
Publishing a comic isn't going to make people choose better passwords.
People have had well over a decade years to learn about choosing passwords but they're as ignorant as ever.
The only way forward is to take the choice out of their hands. Use the XKCD method if you want, just don't let the users do it themselves.
In many cases, you *can't* use the xkcd method because: a. the password field is too short b. the password checker rejects common words c. you can't see what you're typing when you enter the password
The problem generally isn't the users' ignorance, it's the assholes writing the password system.
The average weight of cars has been increasing because crash survival standards have been becoming stricter, and that requires that more material be used in the car to protect the passenger compartment.
Don't forget that all the children have to be strapped into dedicated child safety seats. It's a squeeze for a family of four to fit into a regular sedan, and people typically want to have friends along. So now you need an SUV. Back in the days, we all piled into the back of my Mom's station wagon. We would have gone flying around the vehicle in the case of an accident.
What's really amazing is that the author doesn't seem to have wondered *why* people suddenly wanted bigger cars. There's just this inane assumption that Americans are terrible people and wasteful and buy bigger expensive things for the hell of it.
It also would show such a shirt-wearer's disrespect for the US flag. It's offensive to the people who've given their lives so that an American can be free to be a douchebag.
I like to think I did my 6 years of service in large part so people can be idiots, douchebags, fat, lazy, crass, rude, craven or whatever they please. If you want to honor my small contribution, please drive really slowly in the fast lane, or tear ass on an elevator, or take a full cart through the express checkout, or misspell 'lose' and 'loose.'
Yeah, but can you prove that the small fraking-caused quakes didn't release stress that would have caused a much more dangerous larger magnitude quake?
This kind of nonsense is why people don't take environmentalists seriously.
It's completely impossible to prove that we're not somehow influencing larger quakes because we can't possibly get a baseline for the typical magnitude of larger quakes. And even if we could somehow get that, they vary in intensity by orders of magnitude, and the big ones are decades apart.
These types of arguments are intended to throw up one roadblock after another to extracting energy. The motivations of the originators of these arguments aren't care for the earth, but a loathing of humanity and prosperity.
How's that "secret assassination" and drone-thing working out for your "left of avowed socialist" types?
The anti-war movement is neither conservative nor liberal. The standard anti-war line is that the US does things that cause aggression, therefore if the US doesn't do things, aggression will cease. It's neither a liberal nor a conservative idea. Bill Clinton's interventionism was on liberal humanitarian lines, and Obama has been continuing policies that were influenced heavily by liberal interventionists who converted to conservatism after 9/11.
The American left was militant and jingoistic from the 1870s to 1970s, so if Obama's policies are indicative of a shift, they're just reverting to form. And certainly far leftists everywhere else, like Korea, China, Russia, hell, Venezuela, are all highly belligerent, not to mention the Soviet Union, who if there weren't machine guns to march entire companies into, they slaughtered their people during "peacetime" by the tens of millions.
But you're so brainwashed, you think gays in the military is a progressive cause - equal to abolishing slavery. Get a clue! It is never in human interest to support military membership by any one.
The only way a human being can actually read through an entire Greenwald article is to be in restraints with your eyeballs taped open, so you don't have standing to call anyone brainwashed. What's really funny is I've listened to liberals "debating" about conservatives, and they do what you just did: claim that we believe X, Y or Z and then pronounce us stupid because of it. Talk about brainwashing!
Regarding why gays in the military is not a progressive issue but is a Democratic issue: The Democrat party, to a far greater degree than the Republican party, is a composite organization. (Even the gay movement itself is an alphabet soup of sexual identities.) The binding principle of the Democratic party is identity politics which is what makes it truly left-wing. They will claim a doctrinal set of issues and even try to stick to them, but that's more a communication strategy than reflective of their core beliefs.
Really trust me on this - the label on the can bears little relation to actual contents.
Of course not, that's the whole *point* of leftism.
European conservatism is very different from American. European conservatives are direct inheritors of the old Burkean conservatism, and have far closer ties to the ideas of the old European aristocracies; for instance, the UK Tory party is the only party in the world older than the US Democratic party. But it's still conservative; that you don't understand it doesn't make it any less so.
And, yes, Euro socialism is failing, yet again. Germany, France and the UK have all made deep cuts, and they aren't doing well enough to bail out their neighbors. Some European countries like Italy and Greece are literally unable to produce enough children to maintain their populations, let alone the ever expanding welfare state. The main reason they've lasted this long is that they haven't had to spend anything on defense, but the US is broke, too, and we'll probably see NATO substantially reorganized before too long.
Slashdot Mirror
Those are two major factors I haven't seen while skimming comments.
Most of your communication is done through keeping in touch with your peers. Talk to them, understand what they're doing, etc. But also long term, document your code as you go, either with written documentation or, better, with tests. Especially, learn what they're doing right, and tell them; people need recognition from their peers.
Professionalism is pretty easy: learn how to use version control and continuous integration, e.g. Jenkins. Use CI, especially, to make sure that you fix your bugs right away. If you set it up and use it rigorously, you'll find you can put out some very high quality code, even though it will be at a slower pace than you're used to. But for large projects, fixing bugs "later" is madness.
Ha, typical leftist Slashdot mods are trying to bury me, just like on Digg. :-)
Hearst was a supporter of Adolf Hitler from 1934 until 1938
You're incredibly dishonest, let's finish that quote:
According to David Nasaw Hearst was a supporter of Adolf Hitler from 1934 until 1938: Hearst believed that Hitler was going to bring a century of peace to Europe. However, in a private interview Hearst told Hitler that in order to be a great leader, he must "stop the persecution of the German Jews." Hearst convinced himself that Hitler was going to listen to him, but his support for Hitler only changed following Kristallnacht in 1938.
So, basically, after Hitler showed his true colors, Hearst dropped his support. Many people thought that Fascism generally was a bold new invention; the German Worker's Party that the Nazi party was formed from was quite popular.
And, again: the left continued to support Stalin and Communism even after the tremendous slaughter of his regime had been exposed, and you're still apologists for it.
Diplomacy would do nothing to sway the Soviets. Why would it?
Of course not. What finally toppled the Soviets was diplomacy backed by nuclear weapons. In spite of leftist apologists for the mass murders. There's no reason to believe that the West, with proper knowledge, couldn't have influenced the Soviets to stop it.
Not long after [Bill Maher's] show was canceled.
And nothing of value was lost.
Saddam Hussein complied with every single U.S. request leading up to the war.
The Iraqis sent thousands of pages of garbage reports. They moved munitions around while inspectors were visiting.
The fact that Americans were willing to put up with blatant censorship post-9/11 (banning songs on the radio!) shows just how irrational the general populace was between September 2001 up to around 2005.
The nonstop protests that simply stopped as soon as a Democrat was in office is a fact you can't address. It was purely political theater, the irrationality was coming entirely from a deranged left that was upset that the Republicans had gone after Clinton.
Hatred is not a principle to base reasoned arguments on, and that's all you had. You're still so full of hate you believe in these bizarre conspiracies where Dick Cheney and Karl Rove have Fox News and a handful of right-wing rags orchestrate the entire rest of the media in suppressing all the brilliant peaceful alternatives we could have pursued that, obviously, the Koch brothers must have deleted from the Internet.
Joke wasn't said in an airport, these were tweets posted over a week before they travelled. No concern that every post on the internet is being cataloged and traced back to the individual ? None at all ?
I'd be more concerned if the government wasn't scanning publicly available information looking for obvious stuff like "Hi! I want to blow up America!".
Terrorists use public sites to coordinate; usually in code, but also not in code so as to recruit. I'm worried about the government snooping on my *private* affairs, not if they listen to things I post in an explicitly public forum.
Duranty was just a Soviet shill whereas Hearst paved the way for guys like Murdoch, started a war to sell newspapers, supported Hitler . . . need I go on?
Hearst supported Hitler? Quoth Wikipedia:
In 1934 after checking with Jewish leaders to make sure the visit would prove of benefit to Jews, Hearst visited Berlin to interview Adolf Hitler. Hitler asked why he was so misunderstood by the American press. "Because Americans believe in democracy," Hearst answered bluntly, "and are averse to dictatorship."
Hearst described Kristallnacht as “making the flag of National Socialism a symbol of national savagery” and advocated the creation of a "homeland for dispossessed or persecuted Jews.” When news of the Holocaust began to seep out of occupied Europe, Hearst covered it as important news, in contrast to other newspapers which downplayed the mass murders.
It's only wikipedia, but, yes, you do need to go on before I'm going to accept that the guy supported Hitler.
Even if Duranty would have reported accurately, those people still would have died.
Do you really believe that? Nothing would have happened? All the diplomacy, all the protests, they're all completely useless? Governments can just do whatever they want and there's nothing anyone can do?
Even if you're that cynical, why is it that the Soviets and Nazis, and even the Chinese today think that death camps and labor camps need to be hidden?
Also, I would argue that NewsCorp's efforts to sell the war in Iraq are far more grievous than denying a famine.
What "sold" that war was an insane tyrant who refused to let other nations be sure he didn't have nukes. The administration people pushing for an aggressive strategy in Iraq genuinely wanted to do the right thing in Iraq. What a political system needs, though, is a principled opposition to give them useful alternatives.
The anti-war movement is virutally silent now that a Democrat is in office, even though much of his foreign policy is damned near Bush's foreign policy on autopilot.
What is it that failed to sell peace? A blatantly political anti-war movement. All those idiots did was scream about how Bush was Hitler, and if there were any serious thoughts coming from the anti-war movement, they were entirely drowned out.
Murdoch is scum. The only thing he cares about is power. He is completely fine with hurting lots of people if that increases his power.
How do you feel about Walter Duranty? And his complicity in ignoring the Holodomor? Did you even know that such a person existed? What do you think of the Pulitzer prize committee that basically pretended it hadn't happened for fifty years, and quietly rescinded Duranty's pulitzer when they thought no one would notice?
Is there anything you know of NewsCorp doing that even approaches the level of denying an ethnically targeted mass famine for purely political reasons? Anything?
This man and his sprawling NewsCorp media empire have almost single-handedly ruined/corrupted objective journalism, and done so across multiple countries where NewsCorp is active.
How do you feel about Walter Duranty? And his complicity in ignoring the Holodomor? Did you even know that such a person existed? What do you think of the Pulitzer prize committee that basically pretended it hadn't happened for fifty years, and quietly rescinded Duranty's pulitzer when they thought no one would notice?
Is there anything you know of NewsCorp doing that even approaches the level of denying an ethnically targeted mass famine for purely political reasons? Anything?
Sorry to be a buzzkill, but it looks like it'll be just a movie by Terry Jones with the other Pythons being voice actors and nothing more. Heck, Terry Jones himself said that "It's not a Monty Python picture".http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-16744299 None of the other Pythons are involved in the writing process.
The interviewers had a really hard time pretending to give a fuck.
From the link:
A talking dog that will ham the shit out of every scene named Dennis will be voiced by Mrs Doubtfire actor Robin Williams.
FTFY. Will not watch.
Anyone else sick of encountering this kind of thinking?
This is insightful? Even when we have thousands of people who were driven to march in protests because they're unemployed and saddled with tens of thousands of dollars of debt?
No one is saying education is "only useful for jobs." What people are trying to get across is that how you're going to pay the bills for the next forty years needs to be a significant factor guiding your major life decisions.
Numb3rs already. Yawn.
Dear teeloo,
Many of us reside outside the US and/or have lives.
Sincerely,
The rest of /.
Uh, no, the rest of /. knows how to use a search engine.
No cash for copper. ID required and a direct deposit to a bank account.
I'm sure no criminal has ever had to deal with that.
More than likely though they just find other sources of copper to steal from or just steal more of it in more sophisticated operations.
You overestimate the intelligence of thieves. The word is out that cable is valuable so the average thief will carry right on stealing it.
The fact that he doesn't get paid much just means he won't take the day off to spend money. He'll be out stealing cable next day instead. Net result: even more cable being stolen than before.
People don't have to be smart to respond to price signals. There are other things to steal, thus an opportunity cost. If you dramatically decrease the value of stealing something, while the risk and effort to obtain that value remain the same, people are going to steal less of it.
In case you hadn't noticed, everything is a felony these days.
But I agree that a second conviction for theft should carry a very long sentence. Many crimes are crimes of passion, committed under circumstances that are unlikely to be repeated - and many more "crimes" are not really crimes at all - but theft has real victims and thieves have a very high recidivism rate. If there is one crime that we should punish with very long vacations from polite society, it should be theft.
To be clear, I think Silvergate's drawing attention to a real problem, which is why that title bothers me. Presuming that he's putting his best case forward, the title is complete bullshit.
The site promoting the book briefly explains how a person commits "three felonies a day".
Unless the "average American" (I take average to mean typical, not statistical mean) is routinely importing goods, wandering around wetlands, lying about their sick days, receiving classified data, talking to the cops, etc., it's hard to see how he or she is committing three felonies a day. You can even have a drug habit without committing a felony in many cases, and that's probably the worst area of law enforcement overreach in society today.
How can you tell a kid it is ok to kill the guy pointing a gun at you. But you need to respect the body of the guy who wanted you dead? While it is disgusting, i find the killing far more disgusting then the pissing on the body.
In order for you to be able to shoot that guy, your weapon (it's generally a ship or tank pointing a gun at you :-) has to fire.
So you have to maintain that weapon. You can thus be punished for not taking care of that weapon, even though neglecting to clean a rifle is a far lesser act than taking a human life.
That is the basis for the idea of discipline and good order: A military can't conduct its primary mission to make war if it doesn't have it. Ergo, pissing on an enemy corpse, while individually a minor act, is destructive towards that mission.
This notion is also influenced by the US military having adopted a values-based system of morality which, while fuzzy as all hell, tries to establish what a good soldier (or marine or airman or whatever) is so that others can emulate them.
Now, I'm confused about pacifism. My operative premise is that human life (at least) is intrinsically valuable. So if A attacks B, that's wrong. But why is it *worse* for B to defend against A, or for C to intervene? I would have thought that when faced with a series of bad choices, you go with the least worst.
You neglect the Japanese atrocities of the same World War II period.
Hey, what about the Italians?!?!
But the big flap over urinating over the Taliban corpses is just that - a flap. I think it just reflects on the total inanity of the general media these days. You don't want to talk about big, complex issues so you make little stupid things go nuclear.
Nothing to see here, move along.
But it wasn't the media that flipped out over it, it was our incompetent Secretary of State. She was put there so that she wouldn't run against the Pres in the coming election. We have a President that puts people in cabinet positions based on little more than political calculations, and we're surprised that they act like amateurs?
Al Qaeda didn't attack us because we brought middle eastern oil. Al Qaeda didn't attack us because they hated our freedom and democracy.
They attacked us because we stationed troops in their holy land. They attacked us because we supported despotic regimes in the middle east. They attacked us because we are Israel's biggest ally.
If they were concerned about our troops stationed, they could have attacked those troops, which they had previously done when they attacked the USS Cole.
Saying they attacked us because we're Israel's ally directly contradicts your claim that they didn't act out of hate for our freedom and democracy. You've got three secular countries, Turkey, Lebanon and Israel. They see the secularism of Turkey and Lebanon as part of an infectious influence that originated in Israel; a very similar view to the one many Westerners have of Saudi-funded Wahhabi mosques.
You'll also note that in Iraq, the Islamists have worked assiduously to make sure that Sharia is the basis of the new Iraqi constitution. There are constant calls in the Muslim world to go back to Sharia to avoid what they see as the corrupting influence of the West. And, frankly, it's not just democracy and freedom that they consider corrupting, but Judaism. Our singular support of Israel is most notable in the voting record in the UN. The UN is routinely used as a platform to mount virulently anti-semitic attacks against Israel, and the US and Israel are often alone in voting against them. What's notable about those anti-semitic attacks, beyond Europe's silent accession to them, is that they are routinely voiced by the most odious dictators, people who really do hate freedom and democracy.
The rest of the Middle East is despotic regimes, so why didn't Al Qaeda attack countries all over the world, or the regimes themselves? In fact, other terrorist groups have done that, and corrupt kleptocrats are constantly looking over their shoulder. I don't think AQ are the most reasonable bunch, but they seem to be perfectly cognizant of world affairs, and the reality that there's no one else for us to deal with.
While they have various motives and grievances behind their jihad, those are naturally hard to nail down. What's straightforward are their strategic calculations. The core reason Al Qaeda attacked us was that they thought they could escalate their jihad and by attacking us, and they certainly succeeded in that initial goal. But, being a strategic calculation, they attacked because they thought they could win. Given the administration that was in office while they were planning the attacks, they thought that our response would be weak or appeasing, which would have shown the world that Allah was with them on their holy crusade. They were probably quite surprised that Bush would buck world opinion and six years of protests to hunt them down and kill them.
Publishing a comic isn't going to make people choose better passwords.
People have had well over a decade years to learn about choosing passwords but they're as ignorant as ever.
The only way forward is to take the choice out of their hands. Use the XKCD method if you want, just don't let the users do it themselves.
In many cases, you *can't* use the xkcd method because:
a. the password field is too short
b. the password checker rejects common words
c. you can't see what you're typing when you enter the password
The problem generally isn't the users' ignorance, it's the assholes writing the password system.
Why would you want to come to this gestapo country? Stay in Europe.
Fascism is always about to descend upon the US, but somehow always lands in Europe...
I think you just won this thread.
What a load of tripe.
The average weight of cars has been increasing because crash survival standards have been becoming stricter, and that requires that more material be used in the car to protect the passenger compartment.
Don't forget that all the children have to be strapped into dedicated child safety seats. It's a squeeze for a family of four to fit into a regular sedan, and people typically want to have friends along. So now you need an SUV. Back in the days, we all piled into the back of my Mom's station wagon. We would have gone flying around the vehicle in the case of an accident.
What's really amazing is that the author doesn't seem to have wondered *why* people suddenly wanted bigger cars. There's just this inane assumption that Americans are terrible people and wasteful and buy bigger expensive things for the hell of it.
Whatever you think..taxes should not be used for behavioral manipulations.
Taxes are for funding the govt services we all need...that should be it...period.
People should be free to choose to drive and spend in the fashion they wish.
Taxes weren't passed to allow a 'chosen' few to dictate citizen behavior....
So you advocate rolling back tobacco taxes?
Should our roads and schools be funded by the working poor?
It also would show such a shirt-wearer's disrespect for the US flag. It's offensive to the people who've given their lives so that an American can be free to be a douchebag.
I like to think I did my 6 years of service in large part so people can be idiots, douchebags, fat, lazy, crass, rude, craven or whatever they please. If you want to honor my small contribution, please drive really slowly in the fast lane, or tear ass on an elevator, or take a full cart through the express checkout, or misspell 'lose' and 'loose.'
Yeah, but can you prove that the small fraking-caused quakes didn't release stress that would have caused a much more dangerous larger magnitude quake?
This kind of nonsense is why people don't take environmentalists seriously.
It's completely impossible to prove that we're not somehow influencing larger quakes because we can't possibly get a baseline for the typical magnitude of larger quakes. And even if we could somehow get that, they vary in intensity by orders of magnitude, and the big ones are decades apart.
These types of arguments are intended to throw up one roadblock after another to extracting energy. The motivations of the originators of these arguments aren't care for the earth, but a loathing of humanity and prosperity.
How's that "secret assassination" and drone-thing working out for your "left of avowed socialist" types?
The anti-war movement is neither conservative nor liberal. The standard anti-war line is that the US does things that cause aggression, therefore if the US doesn't do things, aggression will cease. It's neither a liberal nor a conservative idea. Bill Clinton's interventionism was on liberal humanitarian lines, and Obama has been continuing policies that were influenced heavily by liberal interventionists who converted to conservatism after 9/11.
The American left was militant and jingoistic from the 1870s to 1970s, so if Obama's policies are indicative of a shift, they're just reverting to form. And certainly far leftists everywhere else, like Korea, China, Russia, hell, Venezuela, are all highly belligerent, not to mention the Soviet Union, who if there weren't machine guns to march entire companies into, they slaughtered their people during "peacetime" by the tens of millions.
But you're so brainwashed, you think gays in the military is a progressive cause - equal to abolishing slavery. Get a clue! It is never in human interest to support military membership by any one.
The only way a human being can actually read through an entire Greenwald article is to be in restraints with your eyeballs taped open, so you don't have standing to call anyone brainwashed. What's really funny is I've listened to liberals "debating" about conservatives, and they do what you just did: claim that we believe X, Y or Z and then pronounce us stupid because of it. Talk about brainwashing!
Regarding why gays in the military is not a progressive issue but is a Democratic issue: The Democrat party, to a far greater degree than the Republican party, is a composite organization. (Even the gay movement itself is an alphabet soup of sexual identities.) The binding principle of the Democratic party is identity politics which is what makes it truly left-wing. They will claim a doctrinal set of issues and even try to stick to them, but that's more a communication strategy than reflective of their core beliefs.
Really trust me on this - the label on the can bears little relation to actual contents.
Of course not, that's the whole *point* of leftism.
European conservatism is very different from American. European conservatives are direct inheritors of the old Burkean conservatism, and have far closer ties to the ideas of the old European aristocracies; for instance, the UK Tory party is the only party in the world older than the US Democratic party. But it's still conservative; that you don't understand it doesn't make it any less so.
And, yes, Euro socialism is failing, yet again. Germany, France and the UK have all made deep cuts, and they aren't doing well enough to bail out their neighbors. Some European countries like Italy and Greece are literally unable to produce enough children to maintain their populations, let alone the ever expanding welfare state. The main reason they've lasted this long is that they haven't had to spend anything on defense, but the US is broke, too, and we'll probably see NATO substantially reorganized before too long.