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User: Minna+Kirai

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Comments · 5,376

  1. Re:Gain is nice but not the issue on Bush Backed Spying On Americans · · Score: 1

    Have you every actually been in a military unit? I have.

    Way to "refrain from personal attacks"! Hint: by declining to offer even the shadow of a substantive point, you have just conceded the argument.

  2. Re:Well, that's a big shocker. on Bush Backed Spying On Americans · · Score: 1

    If it's truly so obviously unconstitutional that any layman can glance over the Bill of Rights and find the problems

    Presuming that the Justices of the Supreme Court are uniformly inerrant and unbiased is unsupportable. For evidence to the contrary, just look at any of the many non-unanimous decisions they hand down each year. If, as you claim, the Supreme Court was guarranteed to issue a correct ruling, then how can they disagree with each other so often?

    Every major party, on the left, right, or looney, has benefitted from a blatantly unconstitutional act or ruling. From Wickard to Roe to Bono, you'll find no shortage of concise breakdowns.

  3. Re:schrodinger's Constitution? on Bush Backed Spying On Americans · · Score: 1

    Congress could not fund a project if they feel it is unconstitutional

    Demonstrably false. They've done things which are blatantly unconstitutional numerous times, banking on the hope that (a) the measure is popular enough that public pressure to overturn is minimal and (b) that the political allegiances which all justices possess (though they deny it) will be enough to dilute a principled response.

    SC can step forward at any time if it wants to see something solved post-haste

    If the SC truely had an obessive desire to see the Constitution rigorously enforced, you might have a point. But in reality, they're happy to sit back and take what comes to them.

    Notice, for example, that the SC schedule is now set by a very recent and very grateful Bush appointee. Will he be in a huge rush to enforce the 4th amendment against these illegal searches? Of course not.

  4. Re:How many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust on Bush Backed Spying On Americans · · Score: 1

    "Holocaust" means "Disaster" in Yiddish.

    And it doesn't mean anything in German or Romani-speak. That's why events relating to those other groups have other names.

    fairly flawed. In reality, the real story of the attrocities that the NSDAP committed against their own people if *far* larger and *far* worse than our history books are willing to discuss.

    Strawmanning. You have, at best, selected a small number of bad history books, and decided they represent everything.

    2) The assumption that the main and only motivation of the death camps was racial hatred. This is demonstrably false.

    More rhetorical misdirection. "Main and only" is a redundant clause, because "only" implies "main" as a subset. But removing "main" to leave it as "that the only motivation of the death camps" reveals your technique for what it is: strawmanning.

    No historical topic that's even slightly-complex truely has "only" one reason, so it proves nothing for you to point out that this one doesn't either.

    The main reason for the "Holocaust" was racial/ethnic hatred*. That is true, and you can't even begin to "demonstrate" otherwise.

    Nobody assumes that the ONLY reason was racial hatred. You're arguing against a position created from your own imagination.

    * What some people don't know is that Hitler had below-average Jew-hatred, compared to the normal citizens of his country.

  5. Re:No just galaxies... on Disabled Fans Shut Out of Galaxies · · Score: 1

    I don't think W3 requires fast reflexes, just a bit of planning and forethought; then again, I've never played it online

    The topic was SWG, an online-only game, so the offline modes of other games weren't useful comparisons.

    WC3's offline campaign (aside from the final 2 missions) is trivially easy compared to multiplayer games, which don't give you the same huge advantage in resources and powers.

    More importantly, your relaxed and thoughtful single-play style is enabled by the ability to select and control the rate of time advancement, through -, +, and even pause buttons.

    Naturally, no interactive online game can allow pausing of that nature, so of course everything's faster. A time rate which allowed you to easily follow the events of a combat would be sluggishly boring to somebody who's just trying to explore the map and dig gold.

    In Wc3 multiplayer, commanding your shooters to focus on a moving hero is only a little less difficult than scoring an FPS headshot- and it needs to be done far more frequently.

    The point still holds for the other games in the list, thought.

    The point is similarly wrong for the other games in the list. I just didn't want to make the effort to explain each one, but they are all either non-realtime-multiplayer, or not effectively playable with just a mouse.

    Games which are turn-based (or quasi-turn based, such as allowing each player N number of "timeouts" to briefly pause) do allow effective mouse-only multiplay, but those systems cannot be scaled up to a "massively multiplayer" situation, as they break down past 4 users.

  6. Re:Gender gaps elsewhere... on Gender Gap in Computer Science Growing · · Score: 1

    Are you saying that it follows that Tom Cruise has a more difficult job than some poor schlub getting shot at in Iraq?

    It does. "Difficulty" != "risk" != "importance", although those factors do inter-relate in various ways.

    But yes, to simply wait around to soak up bullets is pretty easy, although highly risky (and not at all, in the context of USA 2005, important)

  7. Re:Gender gaps elsewhere... on Gender Gap in Computer Science Growing · · Score: 1

    along with your plumber, your garbage collector is more responsible for increased life expectancy than your doctor

    Nope. The fact that you HAVE a garbage collector is important, but the skills and qualifications of that individual are not.

    Both plumbers and doctors have more difficult jobs, as measured by the percentage of the population competent to fill that role.

    If 50% of the country's garbagemen exploded tommorrow, the vacancies could be filled within a month. Medical professionals are not so easy to replace.

  8. Re:Well, that's a big shocker. on Bush Backed Spying On Americans · · Score: 1

    No this is standard practice. The president has executive authority to do things like this in a state of emergency.

    Aside from all the other ways you're wrong, there is also no state of emergency...

  9. Re:schrodinger's Constitution? on Bush Backed Spying On Americans · · Score: 1

    All law can be challanged, but someone with standing must do it.

    This isn't quantum physics. The fact that nobody has PROVEN it's unconstitutional yet doesn't mean it is constitutional. It's not enforcedly unconstitutional yet, but that's just a matter of time and paperwork. When the Supremes strike down a law, it doesn't BECOME unconstitutional at that instant. It always was, and they're just informing everybody.

    Your position implies the USSC is not only omniscient, but infintely fast as well.

    It takes the USSC a minimum of 1 year to hear any case. So do you intent to claim that the president can get away with violating any part of the Consitution, so long as he does it in periods of 11 months or less?

    That's buying into the Bushian thought pattern (as demonstrated by Rice's torture denials): (a) We don't do illegal things (b) We're doing this (c) Therefore, it must not be illegal.

  10. Re:How many Jews were murdered in the Holocaust on Bush Backed Spying On Americans · · Score: 1

    Do you know the definition of "holocaust"? Hint: it has something to do with fire.

    was subsequently imprisoned in Dachau. He was repeatedly threatened with his life, and told that if he joined the SS, that he would be let out. He was still in Dachau ten years later,

    Yeah, he was still in there- and STILL ALIVE. Whereas 99% of the Jews who came into Dachau during his time there had been burned or buried by that point.

    Persecutions such as you describe were known world-wide from 1940 onward. Everyone knew about the Nazi's political supression. The Holocaust was a separate operation, only marginally connected.

    You are simply trying to argue that people don't understand "the Holocaust" by using "the Holocaust" to refer to something other than what they're talking about. Arguments of the form "You understand $XYZ so badly, you don't even know what it's really called" never carry much weight. They just signal that the speaker has decided to make up a private language, disjoint from typical human meaning.

    After his dismissal, Himmler used the SS as his private army and negotiated his own surrender apart from the general surrender of the German military negotiated by Doenitz.

    This is another typical example of rhetorical misdirection, the "non-sequitur". You simply have to enter in some voluminous factoids, overwhelming the audience with their truthfulness, while not giving them time to ask if they're relevant in any way.

  11. Re:Palpatine loses one on Bush Backed Spying On Americans · · Score: 1

    Hardly. My concepts of ethics are based on systemics. Hence the numbers don't matter-- the system is either good or bad.

    Therefore you can only function successfully in a monochrome world were everybody is 100% good or 100% evil. A single shade of gray, and you become unable to cope rationally.

    I wonder how you bank account is doing, as someone who doesn't believe numbers matter!

  12. Re:Palpatine loses one on Bush Backed Spying On Americans · · Score: 1

    techniques were employed to destroy the Native Americans as a cohesive social unit. These incldued some forced sterilizations,

    Congratulations! You included such a blatant giveaway that your post was just confused/imaginary rantings, and still sucked many people into taking you seriously! Nice job.

  13. Re:But legislative branch was informed! RTFA! on Bush Backed Spying On Americans · · Score: 1

    Hello people... the article mentions that the CIA and the Executive branch informed the Legislative branch this was happening.

    They were informed, although on a piecemeal individual basis, not as one body. But they were forbidden to do anything about it. The administration said that the existence of their illegal wiretaps was classified, which is tantamount to threatening the Congressmen with imprisonment if they mention it to anyone.

  14. Re:But the saddest thing of all on Bush Backed Spying On Americans · · Score: 1

    So then you agree that Clinton should have been removed from office

    She wrote no such thing. "Not get away with" is very far from "remove from office"

    So then you agree that Clinton should have been removed from office for his lies under oath? It's so refreshing to hear a liberal say that!

    Any rational liberal supporting the goals of his own party would say that. If Clinton had found an excuse to retire, then Gore would've recieved the usual incumbent-bonus, and handily defeated Bush in 2000.

  15. Re:If this is lawful then we need new laws! on Bush Backed Spying On Americans · · Score: 1
    Franklin Delano Roosevelt establishes the Office of Censorship in 1941 t

    That's not as bad as Bush. When you "establish an Office", you are putting everyone on notice that those communication channels are not confidential, and removing any expectation of privacy.

    Bush wanted to have secret eavesdropping that the public would not know about, and he calls it "shameful" that the press exposed him:
    1. "It was a shameful act for someone to disclose this important program in a time of war. The fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy," - GWBush


    Furthermore, FDR was involved in a genuine WAR (as in, Congress issued a Declaration of War). The "war" Bush refers to is a rhetorical object summoned from his own fantasies. (Note: WWII was the most recent time the USA declared war)
  16. Re:Nothing new .. on Bush Backed Spying On Americans · · Score: 1

    Spying on US citizens is precisely what the NSA is prohibited from doing,

    "Monitor" is different from "spying". The single most critical job of the NSA is actually to evalutate which US citizens are trustworthy to handle classified secrets, which is under their Information Assurance duty. That involves lots of monitoring, polygraphs, etc.

  17. Re:Wow, there's a shocker. on Bush Backed Spying On Americans · · Score: 1

    (1) I don't consider just raising taxes to cover every spending spree you go on to be "financial responsibility".

    Wrong. Paying for what you spend will automatically cause the actual cost to be measured, and by next year's budget there will be a REAL pressure to slash spending. Running up the debt is just pretending that the government can eternally create money from nothing.

    Responsibility is impossible without sanity.
    High spending + high taxes and low spending+low taxes are both self-consistent plans, which are at least sane.
    High spending + low taxes is insane, and can never lead to "responsibility". (That's why The Economist endorsed the Kerry campaign: because he at least acknowledged that loans someday need to be paid off)

    Republicans regularly vote for smaller spending increases than Dems.

    Oh, you'd prefer people to steal a little from you, instead of borrow a lot and pay it all back?

    Republicans regularly vote for smaller spending increases than Dems.

    Noting that Republicans regularly win 100% of Congressional votes, whatever the Democrats are voting for is of only abstract interest.

    And I can't think of the last time a departments budget was actually cut.

    Exactly. It's never happened, even though the Republicans have had a lock on Congressional power for the past few years. Therefore, their claims to desire to cut budgets have been shown to be false, because if they really wanted it, they'd have started already.

  18. Re:Online-only games on Disabled Fans Shut Out of Galaxies · · Score: 1
    Dude--it's a monthly service. If you stop enjoying it, stop giving them money.

    The thing is, it's not really the service he wants. The item of value is a piece of software they rented out, and now have stopped renting.

    These people would be perfectly happy if the old SWG server code was released to the public (even if at a high fee, like $500) so that dedicated players could host their own game. But instead, due to various external dampers on free-market behaviors, their legitimate demand is not being met.

    That's not how capitalism is advertised to work.
    1. You've got something.
    2. You don't want it
    3. I want it enough to offer you non-zero money
    4. You sell it to me
    5. We're both happy

    In this situation, that hypothetical system has broken down.
  19. Re:No just galaxies... on Disabled Fans Shut Out of Galaxies · · Score: 1

    Now, if the game has become an first person shooter, as everyone keeps on saying, then I understand, since they require fast reactions.

    You mentioned Warcraft3 in a list earlier- have you actually played it? Do you know it puts greater demands on reaction time than Doom3?

    Warcraft cannot be played at anywhere near normal skill level with just a mouse. It's much too fast-paced.

    Nick Dupre used to be a high-level SWG player. Then, the game was replaced to require 10x the apm, and he can no longer get by in even a low-challenge situation.

  20. Re:There's a solution to this... on Disabled Fans Shut Out of Galaxies · · Score: 1

    or she'd need right mouse button bound to move forward,

    That's very clearly becoming a barely-moving target.

  21. Re:This should prove... on Bill Gates, Time Magazine "Person of the Year" · · Score: 1

    Sorry but there arent many larger buildings;

    There aren't many, but they do exist. The test-evacuation to which I referred was an Asian tower that is actually more stories than the WTC was.

    Other buildings in NYC are required to have adequate evactuation routes, to conduct occasional test drills, and to otherwise obey a municipal fire code. The NYC WTC was exempt from those safety requirements. Maybe if Guiliani had been a better mayor, he would've forced them to uphold the same safety standards as Manhattan's other skyscrapers. (But once again, I'm not really blaming him for those failures, just pointing out his missed opportunities to deserve a Time cover)

    especially when a large plane crashes halfway up the tower, blocking many floors from getting out via normal means.

    On that, you're addressing a strawman with no relation to what I wrote.

    The fire department sent in more people because they were trying to evacuate EVERYONE.

    Wrong. Read the transcripts of the official debriefing interviews, if you need evidence. The firefighters were going in because they had an intention to fight the fire, which should've been obviously impossible.

    Furthermore, the majority of the firemen in the 2nd tower were not attempting to rescue anyone, but were just standing around in the lobby waiting for equipment and instructions on exactly how to deal with the blaze. If they'd had even barely adequate radio equipment, they could've been instructed to walk outside after the first collapse, saving 100 lives.

    What you just said, belittles the sacrifices those MEN made to save lives.

    If you think the facts belittle them, then that's your opinion, not mine. The truth is that the FDNY response to the WTC towers killed more firemen than it saved civilians. Sometimes the truth hurts.

    If you were standing before me and made that statement, I'd slap you so hard,

    And I'd crack your neck with a single punch (breaking my knuckle also, as I forget to punch softer without gloves, but that's an acceptable tradeoff)

  22. Re:This should prove... on Bill Gates, Time Magazine "Person of the Year" · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Signing orders that violated the US Constitution? How's that?

    In the past two days, George W Bush has publically confessed to hundreds of counts of wiretapping.

    Wiretapping without a court order is a flagrant violation of state and federal laws. And more importantly, it violates the fourth amendment to the US Constitution, something Bush theoretically swore to uphold.

    Bush says this is acceptable, because he did it in support of the "war on terrorism". By that same reasoning, police officers can make warrantless searches during the "war on drugs". This reasoning is a justification for vigilantism: you can freely break the law if you've got a good reason, and are too strong for the police to stop you.

    Last I checked they were warranted by the Patriot Act.

    They were not, but it doesn't matter: an act of Congress does not have the authority to override the US Constitution.

  23. Re:This should prove... on Bill Gates, Time Magazine "Person of the Year" · · Score: 1

    Tell me how you evacuate twin 110 story towers in 103 minutes.

    For starters, don't send any additional people into the building. Because on Sept 11, the FDNY sent more people into the towers than they evacuated. (Plus, the stream of incoming firefighters slowed outbound evacuation, by both blocking traffic and misleading civilians in the lower floors that they had no hurry)

    Tell me how you evacuate twin 110 story towers in 103 minutes.

    Larger buildings have been evacuated in 30 minutes, as a preparedness drill.

    The WTC was the creation of the notoriously arrogant and autonomous NYC Port Authority.

    Yes, it was really outside of the mayor's responsibility, which is why I'm not blaming him.

  24. Re:Binary Packages on Gaim 2.0.0beta1 Released · · Score: 1

    Each Linux distribution has its own form of package management, thus gaim can't exactly offer ready made packages for each distribution.

    It is easy to offer a package compatibile with any normal Linux desktop.

  25. Re:This should prove... on Bill Gates, Time Magazine "Person of the Year" · · Score: 4, Informative

    Without the Gates empire and the direction for the 'computer industry' that it has pushed and promoted, regular folks could be sitting at home comfortably watching TV.

    The direction of the computer industry was chosen by the US government, when they commanded IBM to subcontract their Operating System provider to avoid anti-trust action. As it happens, Microsoft was the company which got that contract- but it could've been anyone. As long as the fundamental decision to have separate vendors for a PC's hardware and core OS had been made, Microsoft's greatest historical contribution was inevitable.

    The more ambitious among them could be on a global network of VT-100 terminals connected

    Heard of a little thing called Apple Computer, predating Bill Gates's efforts by a considerable margin?