Justice is malleable and based totally on the circumstances. Trying to adhere to an idealized universal definition of justice will never leave everyone satisifed.
No, but it will create less of a mess than replacing justice with vengeance.
This is the 3rd time this week I have seen someone state that basic civil rights have been suspended. Can you give me an example of this terrible situation?
Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay. People can be imprisoned for a long time without a formal charge, let alone a fair trial. The principle that people are presumed innocent unless proven guilty in a court of law is the very basis of the modern rule of law.
(The word I'm really looking for here is an English translation of the Dutch word "Rechtsstaat". Imagine my surprise that it has an English Wikipedia entry, but it also seems to be a mostly continental European concept. Maybe that explains why the US takes this a lot less seriously, but on the other hand, many European countries have also been undermining some very basic principles of justice of the past decade. Mind you, I think that the fact that we are undermining our own justice, our own nations, is the real victory of Al Qaeda.)
So we should just ignore people who commit random murder in job lots because it might advertise their existence and help recruiting? Sort of just close your eyes and hope it all just goes away?
Of course not. Arrest them and try them in court. Don't murder them right back. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
A Nations actions are initiated by it's leaders.
Like Tunesia, Egypt and Libya?
The real palestinian leaders, the ones holed up in their villas in Syria and Lebanon know that if they cross a line Israel would have no problem eliminating them. Their only defense is propaganda and sadly people are falling for it instead of doing independent research themselves and really looking at the facts. You might still feel the same way after but you may not either. Besides the palestinian leaders make a ton of money running waepons and black market goods that they high jack from International donor shipments into the "occupied territories".
I'm not sure who exactly you mean by "the real palestinian leaders". There are a lot of different factions among Palestinians, some of which try to direct the anger and unrest about Israelian atrocities into action against Israel, others are striving for peace against all odds, and certainly some of them are merely trying to enrich themselves. Fatah (the official leadership on the West Bank) is well known for its corruption, for example. Hamas, funded mostly by Saudis, has actually built a lot of schools and hospitals. It's no surprise they are popular, even among people who don't agree with their extremist goals.
Israel is in the spot they are in because they didn't roll over and die when 5 Arab armies evacuated the "palestinian" territory and then attacked the Jews in 1948. The Arabs lost. The Arabs re-armed and gave it another shot in 1967 and not only got beat but lost territory to the defending army. Next time you look at a map check out the size of Israel. Any competent military commander would want to enlarge the area between itself and it's enemies and that is what Israel did.
But that's the real problem. Israel has never even tried to make friends with its neighbours. I'm not in any way condoning what the Arab nations did, but their last attack was nearly 40 years ago. Israel has been at peace with the leaders of its neighbours for over 30 years, but has done nothing to establish friendly relationships with the neighbouring peoples. And as you've seen in Egypt, those leaders, undemocratic though they may be, don't last forever. In the mean time, rather than working on a peaceful solution, Israel has increased
Hunting down and killing people like him is a demonstration of intent, capability, and dedication.
But not one of justice. And to people who care about justice, that's a problem.
The whole point of the US response post 9/11 has been to generate a level of fear and uncertainty in those who encourage or participate in actions against the US. Ditto for Guatanemo.
But the effect has been the creation of fear and uncertainty in everybody, not just those who participate in actions against the US. Basic civil rights have been suspended for everybody. You can be punished for mere suspicion, nothing has to be proven anymore. And many innocents have been punished.
You can't stop all terrorist attacks no matter how many security precautions you put in place. Eventually someone will succeed. But you can make a lasting impression on those thinking about participating in a terrorist attack.
And you know what impression you're making? That you're evil. That you don't care about justice. Much of the US response post 9/11 has just created more enemies. Leave the horrors of 9/11 stand on its own, and everybody will be disgusted with Al Qaeda. But if you show them that Al Qaeda might be fighting a worthy cause, many more will flock to that cause.
The good thing about the past few years is that Al Qaeda had been practically forgotten. Nobody cared about them anymore. But now they're back in the news, everybody's talking about possible retribution from them, and they have a martyr for their cause. They're back on top, and the only thing they had to do was get assassinated.
You know why the Arabs make only half assed attacks against Israel? It's not because they can't get the necessary weapons it's because they are scared shitless of Israel's army and intelligence agencies.
That's nations. People don't work like that. Look at the continuing rebellion that Israel is sowing in their occupied territories. It's as if Israel likes to have enemies.
Israel doesn't need to get anyones "permission" to take out their enemies.
But the end result is that Israel has become a rogue nation. They've alienated their allies, and made enemies of their neighbours. They're in a tough spot, and they did it all themselves. Yes, they are feared, but they are not loved. Not by anyone.
For fuck sake, Hilary said this operation was planned with the intention of killing bin laden. Has anyone considered that we just intentionally executed a man without trial? The most likely reason being that there wasn't any real evidence against bin laden in the first place (unless you want to count the fake video where some guy who wasn't bin laden claimed credit for 9/11).
That's exactly why I think the US killed him. Getting him convicted could turn out to be too hard and take too much time. A quick victory works much better in the media.
Interestingly, a Dutch poll showed that quite a number of Dutch people would have preferred him on trial, but it's mostly people to tend to vote for the left-libertarian parties. The more conservative, the less they care about justice, apparently.
Also, my newspaper had an article explaining why Bin Laden is more valuable to Al Qaeda dead than alive. He's a martyr now, whereas over the past years, he accomplished nothing other than cost money to keep him safe and hidden. The world had practically forgotten about him, but now he's news again, and so is Al Qaeda.
It puts more load on their network if you use up your five gigabytes of monthly data with your laptop instead of your cell phone, unless you pay extra for it.
The load on their network is the same whether you use those 5 gigabytes with a laptop or a cellphone.
Hitler was not really that bad, provided you have anti-semitic beliefs (which seems to be a really no-no these days, what could be the source of this stigma ? I mean, it seems to be ok to hate other people of arabic (jews are arabs with different religion) descent, and they are just trying to get by, not accruing unwarranted wealth and manipulating the masses).
By that reasoning, nobody is ever evil because there's always some nutcase who thinks he's okay.
By the way, Jews aren't Arabs. They're both Semites, however.
Also, look up social mobility statistics. The USA really doesn't have it. It's feudalism all over again, except the serfs have access to much more entertainment now.
You'd think most people would be aware of this by now. The simple fact that some important families have a big hand in US government, having provided senators, governors and presidents for several generations, should be a rather big sign that the US effectively an aristocracy.
Not that getting into politics is easier for a nobody in other western countries; it really helps to have the right connections, and family plays a big role there. But in the US it's still somewhat more obvious than elsewhere.
Given that you've got what you've got from your genes, I, as a parent, am going to mostly praise my child for trying hard and "working smart" rather than just BEING smart.
I agree wholeheartedly. I've always been terribly lazy, relying on my intelligence to get me through. Worked well enough for me, but who knows what I could have accomplished if I'd actually learn some discipline and persistence? Those are the values I'm trying to instill in my son: keep trying and don't give up.
Tribalism is the most common cause of mass murder. Religions and various -isms are merely excuses. What matters is that there's something that makes them different, and we hate that, there he must die. It can be politics, religion, culture, skin colour, nationality, favourite football team, or anything else that makes us perceive them as belonging to a different tribe.
The problem with Crysis is that it's old by the time my hardware can handle it. It's rather interesting to see a company invest to make itself irrelevant.
Because they have a good understanding of the scientific method (one of the only disciplines that actually spells it out to their majors...a psych major could give a better definition of science than most "hard science" majors who still think it is just about math and test tubes), statistics, and human behavior.
Actually, in my (and many others') experience, they reason they spell it out is that they need to spell it out. Many psychology students (and researchers!) don't seem to have a lot of affinity for the scientific method or statistics, whereas many science students kinda pick it up along the way. The good psychology students and researchers have a better understanding of statistics and the scientific method than most science students, but the bad ones still really suck at it, despite having it spelled out for them. And that hurts psychology, because it's a field that really needs a thorough understanding of statistics and the scientific method, while it attracts a lot of people who just like to write intuitive crap like Freud did.
You do realize that graduates are the supply, not the demand?
Only when education is free and prospective employers pay the bills. As long as students pay for their education, it's students who are the demand, and education that's the supply.
A system where employers pay the bills sounds interesting, but having them buy graduates from a university sounds a bit too much like indentured servitude.
One of the problems I've come across repeatedly is that, when I present my first rough drafts of something on the Web, the clients rarely have any material criticisms. Their criticisms are mostly on the order of "That border is slightly too wide/narrow; can you make it a bit narrower/wider?" or "Can you make that red border not quite so bright?" With most "sophisticated" Web development packages, whatever they're called, the answer is usually "No; the package you wanted me to use doesn't seem to have any (documentsed) way to control such fine details." With an actual programming language, I can say "That's easy; it'll just take a bit of testing to see how to persuade all the common browsers to show it the way you want."
Are you saying that stuff like Drupal won't even let you use your own CSS? That's pretty awful. What you're saying has nothing whatsoever to do with the server-side programming language, it's about CSS. It's like using a system that won't let you change your own html. It's fun for amateurs without technical knowledge or strict requirements, but useless for a professional site.
Drupal has many more modules than rails or django, making it the most like to find an almost out of the box solution that is quick to get working.
More than rails? I'm not sure how many "gems" there are for rails, but it's a lot. Enough to occasionally make it hard to find the one you need. Same thing with Grails (which I have somewhat more experience with). There are tons of plugins that are very easy to use. And when you can't find a suitable plugin, you can just drop a Java lib into your project and use that.
I totally agree. I tend to call computer RPGs "CRPGs" to distungish them from real RPGs, but the name still contains the word "roleplaying", which rarely plays much of a role in those games.
There are exceptions, mind you. In Planescape: Torment, the entire story revolves around you, who you are, who you were, and what you're going to do about it. Great roleplaying potential (pointless though it seems to roleplay alone with a computer). The Witcher featured lots of hard choices that define where you stand in the world. KotOR 2 has a very interesting approach with questions about the past, including stuff you did in the past (not part of the game), where the game doesn't really care what you answer, but you as a player do. For a long time I was convinced that there's simply no such thing as "computer roleplaying", but now I'm not so sure anymore.
There are others that at least scratch the surface of what roleplaying should be about. And in fact, some of these games go a lot deeper into who your character is and what his motivations are than most of my "real" pen&paper roleplaying sessions (which aren't quite as satisfying as I wish they are, and I'm sure they could be).
Slashdot Mirror
Depending on who exactly you refer to by "hippies", there could be a reasonable number of hippies involved in successful professional agriculture.
Of course not everybody actually knows what they're talking about, but that's not strictly limited to hippies.
Sony's description of Anonymous is funny. Pointing out that they mean it and it should raise flags, is insightful.
And if you can use a purely a-neutronic fusion reaction, you might not have any radioactivity at all.
I'm not so sure. I think those hippies are likely to vote against standard farm practices (which are pretty destructive, at least where I live).
"Moonwalking senator wants to mine the moon". Only problem is that I'm now picturing someone doing Michael Jackson moves.
Justice is malleable and based totally on the circumstances. Trying to adhere to an idealized universal definition of justice will never leave everyone satisifed.
No, but it will create less of a mess than replacing justice with vengeance.
This is the 3rd time this week I have seen someone state that basic civil rights have been suspended. Can you give me an example of this terrible situation?
Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay. People can be imprisoned for a long time without a formal charge, let alone a fair trial. The principle that people are presumed innocent unless proven guilty in a court of law is the very basis of the modern rule of law.
(The word I'm really looking for here is an English translation of the Dutch word "Rechtsstaat". Imagine my surprise that it has an English Wikipedia entry, but it also seems to be a mostly continental European concept. Maybe that explains why the US takes this a lot less seriously, but on the other hand, many European countries have also been undermining some very basic principles of justice of the past decade. Mind you, I think that the fact that we are undermining our own justice, our own nations, is the real victory of Al Qaeda.)
So we should just ignore people who commit random murder in job lots because it might advertise their existence and help recruiting? Sort of just close your eyes and hope it all just goes away?
Of course not. Arrest them and try them in court. Don't murder them right back. An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
A Nations actions are initiated by it's leaders.
Like Tunesia, Egypt and Libya?
The real palestinian leaders, the ones holed up in their villas in Syria and Lebanon know that if they cross a line Israel would have no problem eliminating them. Their only defense is propaganda and sadly people are falling for it instead of doing independent research themselves and really looking at the facts. You might still feel the same way after but you may not either. Besides the palestinian leaders make a ton of money running waepons and black market goods that they high jack from International donor shipments into the "occupied territories".
I'm not sure who exactly you mean by "the real palestinian leaders". There are a lot of different factions among Palestinians, some of which try to direct the anger and unrest about Israelian atrocities into action against Israel, others are striving for peace against all odds, and certainly some of them are merely trying to enrich themselves. Fatah (the official leadership on the West Bank) is well known for its corruption, for example. Hamas, funded mostly by Saudis, has actually built a lot of schools and hospitals. It's no surprise they are popular, even among people who don't agree with their extremist goals.
Israel is in the spot they are in because they didn't roll over and die when 5 Arab armies evacuated the "palestinian" territory and then attacked the Jews in 1948. The Arabs lost. The Arabs re-armed and gave it another shot in 1967 and not only got beat but lost territory to the defending army. Next time you look at a map check out the size of Israel. Any competent military commander would want to enlarge the area between itself and it's enemies and that is what Israel did.
But that's the real problem. Israel has never even tried to make friends with its neighbours. I'm not in any way condoning what the Arab nations did, but their last attack was nearly 40 years ago. Israel has been at peace with the leaders of its neighbours for over 30 years, but has done nothing to establish friendly relationships with the neighbouring peoples. And as you've seen in Egypt, those leaders, undemocratic though they may be, don't last forever. In the mean time, rather than working on a peaceful solution, Israel has increased
Hunting down and killing people like him is a demonstration of intent, capability, and dedication.
But not one of justice. And to people who care about justice, that's a problem.
The whole point of the US response post 9/11 has been to generate a level of fear and uncertainty in those who encourage or participate in actions against the US. Ditto for Guatanemo.
But the effect has been the creation of fear and uncertainty in everybody, not just those who participate in actions against the US. Basic civil rights have been suspended for everybody. You can be punished for mere suspicion, nothing has to be proven anymore. And many innocents have been punished.
You can't stop all terrorist attacks no matter how many security precautions you put in place. Eventually someone will succeed. But you can make a lasting impression on those thinking about participating in a terrorist attack.
And you know what impression you're making? That you're evil. That you don't care about justice. Much of the US response post 9/11 has just created more enemies. Leave the horrors of 9/11 stand on its own, and everybody will be disgusted with Al Qaeda. But if you show them that Al Qaeda might be fighting a worthy cause, many more will flock to that cause.
The good thing about the past few years is that Al Qaeda had been practically forgotten. Nobody cared about them anymore. But now they're back in the news, everybody's talking about possible retribution from them, and they have a martyr for their cause. They're back on top, and the only thing they had to do was get assassinated.
You know why the Arabs make only half assed attacks against Israel? It's not because they can't get the necessary weapons it's because they are scared shitless of Israel's army and intelligence agencies.
That's nations. People don't work like that. Look at the continuing rebellion that Israel is sowing in their occupied territories. It's as if Israel likes to have enemies.
Israel doesn't need to get anyones "permission" to take out their enemies.
But the end result is that Israel has become a rogue nation. They've alienated their allies, and made enemies of their neighbours. They're in a tough spot, and they did it all themselves. Yes, they are feared, but they are not loved. Not by anyone.
No, Android is a marvelous wide open platform that allows the networks to do and install whatever they want. This is kinda where it went wrong.
For fuck sake, Hilary said this operation was planned with the intention of killing bin laden. Has anyone considered that we just intentionally executed a man without trial? The most likely reason being that there wasn't any real evidence against bin laden in the first place (unless you want to count the fake video where some guy who wasn't bin laden claimed credit for 9/11).
That's exactly why I think the US killed him. Getting him convicted could turn out to be too hard and take too much time. A quick victory works much better in the media.
Interestingly, a Dutch poll showed that quite a number of Dutch people would have preferred him on trial, but it's mostly people to tend to vote for the left-libertarian parties. The more conservative, the less they care about justice, apparently.
Also, my newspaper had an article explaining why Bin Laden is more valuable to Al Qaeda dead than alive. He's a martyr now, whereas over the past years, he accomplished nothing other than cost money to keep him safe and hidden. The world had practically forgotten about him, but now he's news again, and so is Al Qaeda.
It puts more load on their network if you use up your five gigabytes of monthly data with your laptop instead of your cell phone, unless you pay extra for it.
The load on their network is the same whether you use those 5 gigabytes with a laptop or a cellphone.
I suggest we quantify evil through the number of successful vendor lock-ins and patent litigations.
Hitler was not really that bad, provided you have anti-semitic beliefs (which seems to be a really no-no these days, what could be the source of this stigma ? I mean, it seems to be ok to hate other people of arabic (jews are arabs with different religion) descent, and they are just trying to get by, not accruing unwarranted wealth and manipulating the masses).
By that reasoning, nobody is ever evil because there's always some nutcase who thinks he's okay.
By the way, Jews aren't Arabs. They're both Semites, however.
Also, look up social mobility statistics. The USA really doesn't have it. It's feudalism all over again, except the serfs have access to much more entertainment now.
You'd think most people would be aware of this by now. The simple fact that some important families have a big hand in US government, having provided senators, governors and presidents for several generations, should be a rather big sign that the US effectively an aristocracy.
Not that getting into politics is easier for a nobody in other western countries; it really helps to have the right connections, and family plays a big role there. But in the US it's still somewhat more obvious than elsewhere.
Given that you've got what you've got from your genes, I, as a parent, am going to mostly praise my child for trying hard and "working smart" rather than just BEING smart.
I agree wholeheartedly. I've always been terribly lazy, relying on my intelligence to get me through. Worked well enough for me, but who knows what I could have accomplished if I'd actually learn some discipline and persistence? Those are the values I'm trying to instill in my son: keep trying and don't give up.
Tribalism is the most common cause of mass murder. Religions and various -isms are merely excuses. What matters is that there's something that makes them different, and we hate that, there he must die. It can be politics, religion, culture, skin colour, nationality, favourite football team, or anything else that makes us perceive them as belonging to a different tribe.
I know this and I choose to do this. The difference here is that I hit the accept button.
That's nice, but even if you don't choose to do that and hit that accept button, your friends can still share quite a lot of information about you.
I came here to point out the same thing. If Facebook is so evil, why does Wikileaks have a facebook presence?
Politically, our biggest problem is that we have a two-party system, where both parties are totally evil and corrupt.
FTFY.
I thought one party was totally evil and corrupt, and the other was totally incompetent and corrupt.
The problem with Crysis is that it's old by the time my hardware can handle it. It's rather interesting to see a company invest to make itself irrelevant.
The tuition is based on credit hours. So if you took an engineering class you would pay the engineering class rates.
Does that mean you only pay once you get the credit? Could you learn as much as you like for free as long as you don't do exams?
Because they have a good understanding of the scientific method (one of the only disciplines that actually spells it out to their majors...a psych major could give a better definition of science than most "hard science" majors who still think it is just about math and test tubes), statistics, and human behavior.
Actually, in my (and many others') experience, they reason they spell it out is that they need to spell it out. Many psychology students (and researchers!) don't seem to have a lot of affinity for the scientific method or statistics, whereas many science students kinda pick it up along the way. The good psychology students and researchers have a better understanding of statistics and the scientific method than most science students, but the bad ones still really suck at it, despite having it spelled out for them. And that hurts psychology, because it's a field that really needs a thorough understanding of statistics and the scientific method, while it attracts a lot of people who just like to write intuitive crap like Freud did.
You do realize that graduates are the supply, not the demand?
Only when education is free and prospective employers pay the bills. As long as students pay for their education, it's students who are the demand, and education that's the supply.
A system where employers pay the bills sounds interesting, but having them buy graduates from a university sounds a bit too much like indentured servitude.
One of the problems I've come across repeatedly is that, when I present my first rough drafts of something on the Web, the clients rarely have any material criticisms. Their criticisms are mostly on the order of "That border is slightly too wide/narrow; can you make it a bit narrower/wider?" or "Can you make that red border not quite so bright?" With most "sophisticated" Web development packages, whatever they're called, the answer is usually "No; the package you wanted me to use doesn't seem to have any (documentsed) way to control such fine details." With an actual programming language, I can say "That's easy; it'll just take a bit of testing to see how to persuade all the common browsers to show it the way you want."
Are you saying that stuff like Drupal won't even let you use your own CSS? That's pretty awful. What you're saying has nothing whatsoever to do with the server-side programming language, it's about CSS. It's like using a system that won't let you change your own html. It's fun for amateurs without technical knowledge or strict requirements, but useless for a professional site.
Drupal has many more modules than rails or django, making it the most like to find an almost out of the box solution that is quick to get working.
More than rails? I'm not sure how many "gems" there are for rails, but it's a lot. Enough to occasionally make it hard to find the one you need. Same thing with Grails (which I have somewhat more experience with). There are tons of plugins that are very easy to use. And when you can't find a suitable plugin, you can just drop a Java lib into your project and use that.
I totally agree. I tend to call computer RPGs "CRPGs" to distungish them from real RPGs, but the name still contains the word "roleplaying", which rarely plays much of a role in those games.
There are exceptions, mind you. In Planescape: Torment, the entire story revolves around you, who you are, who you were, and what you're going to do about it. Great roleplaying potential (pointless though it seems to roleplay alone with a computer). The Witcher featured lots of hard choices that define where you stand in the world. KotOR 2 has a very interesting approach with questions about the past, including stuff you did in the past (not part of the game), where the game doesn't really care what you answer, but you as a player do. For a long time I was convinced that there's simply no such thing as "computer roleplaying", but now I'm not so sure anymore.
There are others that at least scratch the surface of what roleplaying should be about. And in fact, some of these games go a lot deeper into who your character is and what his motivations are than most of my "real" pen&paper roleplaying sessions (which aren't quite as satisfying as I wish they are, and I'm sure they could be).