The problem is that he didn't realize the guy was crazy until the news media told him so.
Seriously, now -- even Huckabee has gone on record saying that (1) preachers often say things at the height of a sermon that can be taken out of context, and (2) that Obama shouldn't be judged be Wright. Huckabee.
As for me, I grew up attending a non-denominational church which had, among its board of elders, a hellfire-and-brimstone Southern Baptist who, when it was his turn to give the sermon, would occasionally wander far wide of the love-thy-neighbor New Testament interpretation. We (read: the younger and more modern folks) generally ignored him when he did this, because the rest of the time he was kind to everyone, and was instrumental in organizing the church to do good in our community. (We built -- meaning the congregation, with our own hands -- a battered women's shelter, fed the poor, and otherwise were a group of people much more involved than just coming and sitting somewhere on Sunday and tithing our money).
Looking at Obama's church in that context (and reading Dreams From my Father when he's talking about some of the other black churches in Chicago), his decision seems a lot more reasonable to me. I can't fault him for it.
Large cuts will severely cripple an already under-funded space program, and it's such a small percentage of the federal budget that it wouldn't make a real difference anyway.
The goal is to funnel that money into education -- remember that one of Obama's huge criticisms about No Child Left Behind was that it came as an unfunded mandate. Education is a pretty small percentage of the federal budget too, so the money might actually make a difference there -- and NASA doesn't have much of a long-term future if science education continues to flounder.
The specific cuts are intended to delay programs, rather than cancel them outright, so the big risk is that there'll be a brain drain in the interim. It's a real problem, but so is the state of the public education system.
I actually hope Obama wins so when he signs some new **AA sponsored bill I'll get to read all the heartbroken comments.
I don't expect that Obama will only do things I like -- but I also wouldn't exactly be shocked if one of his tech and intellectual property advisors ends up being Larry Lessig; the two go a long way back, and Lessig has given Obama a quite a bit of support (admittedly, among a demographic which Obama pretty much owned already). If that happens, signing some *AA-sponsored bill is... not exceptionally likely.
Do our enemies need such an invitation? Last time I checked Arab countries had a history of torturing captured enemies, one that predates the first Gulf war.
It's one thing to have an enemy that takes some immoral action. It's another thing for every enemy to have a moral justification which they can offer in public to support that action.
When he's not Bush Light, McCain understands this.
The Obama team just wants Hillary to go away, but when she has the support of half the party, how can she just give up and disappear? That would be irresponsible to her supporters.
Nobody wants Hillary to disappear -- particularly Obama. For all of the bad blood, the Clintons are a Name; they can bring back memories of the 90s and bring in the fundraising and political clout for the Democratic party in the general election.
That said -- failing gracefully is a virtue. This fight in the primary has given McCain quite a lot of ammo to use, and use it he will.
Another argument that the Obama team has been making for the past few months is that Clinton is ruining Obama's chances in the general election by keeping the election going, and that she's been mean to him with her campaign. The sad thing is that what Hillary has thrown at Obama is nothing compared to what the Republicans will throw at him starting now.
Maybe. It's a shame that Huckabee didn't win the Republican nomination; I detest the man's positions, but he understood playing fair -- while McCain is clearly no stranger to hardball politics, whatever show he may put on. However, there's something else to be considered here: Look at how Houndini died; A punch one could easily take when ready for it can be fatal when unprepared. Presumed democratic voters are more likely to listen to criticism of a candidate when it comes from someone senior within the Democratic party. It's not necessarily just the attacks themselves but their source which may have been crippling.
[...]it won't happen if Obama just runs fully with it, leaving HIllary in the dust. Or, as you put it, to "make this woman go away".
Clearly not going to happen. It's been made very clear that even should she not be offered the vice-presidential spot, Clinton will be offered a key role in the Obama administration in healthcare or education. Should she reject such a role, it would be to the party's detriment.
universal (socialized) healthcare is a terrible idea.
Oh, c'mon now; have you actually looked at Obama's proposal? It's not making us into the UK, and it's not nationalizing health organizations; it doesn't even force people to opt in. What it does is establish a group policy which anyone can join, heavily subsidized for those who couldn't otherwise afford it. There's no nationalization of providers, and individuals and employers are free to stick to their current plans (or not elect coverage at all) should they choose to do so.
There's a huge benefit here: Having people covered means they're more likely to get preventative care, which means they won't need to clog up the emergency rooms and specialists as often.
The reason universal healthcare works is because people are most likely going to die before they get treated.
Bullshit. It's not completely unheard of for people to die on waiting lists in Canada, but it certainly isn't a common enough event to be "the reason universal healthcare works", and it's far less people than die in the US because they don't get care when they need it. (My wife would have died of appendicitis if my employer hadn't just started offering health insurance -- we couldn't afford it otherwise, and her first instinct was to wait at home and hope things got better). Anyhow, this isn't even a valid talking point applied to Obama's plan. Healthcare providers still operate as they do today, so supply will grow to meet demand via the regular free-market apparatus.
Not one of these candidates has proposed cutting the budget to fund new initiatives.
Off the top of my head, I know that Obama has large cuts planned for the space program; wants to enforce pay-as-you-go budgeting rules, and wants to make it harder for pork to get pushed through via beefing up government transparency (publishing data on money spent, who supported it and lots of other details on the 'net in formats easy to parse and analyze). He has, in the past, pushed legislation to limit no-bid contracts and voted against an effort to raise the federal debt limit.
Let's be fair, now -- McCain only thinks torture is OK when he's parroting Bush; when he's thinking on his own, he takes the position that using torture is an invitation to enemies to torture our own troops, and opposes it on those grounds.
I'm going to turn into a grammar nazi for a moment.
"Your" average machine, "your" helicopter. You wouldn't say "you are helicopter just got shot down", right?
Okay, done. Sorry 'bout that.
Getting more to the topic... you're right ("you are right" -- the apostrophe makes sense there) that CoD4 doesn't necessarily need a lot of story, but I'm not sure that that makes it a "story-entwined game". Some games just don't need backstory -- chess is a perfect example. Would you call chess a "story-entwined game" because it has just the right amount of backstory? I think that'd be silly -- it has no story, it needs no story, but just because it has exactly the amount of story it needs isn't to say that it's story-entwined.
Of course, it's really in line with the article's point that technology makes it possible to make the story so implicit that it's accepted as part of the scenery; CoD can be argued to have plenty of story implicit in the art and media bundled into the game itself, and I'm fine with that. Even so, I don't think that puts it up there with Half Life 2 and its ilk (which have carefully and deliberately written story as a centerpiece of their existence, exposed without taking control away from the player or otherwise compromising the interactivity or believability of the experience)
In all those series, the only down fall was that the story line was linear, once you past a specific point, you couldn't go back, so if you missed a key component in the game, then you might have to go back to a save point and look for the missing item
FYI, modern interactive fiction largely doesn't have this problem unless they're actually trying to be unforgiving; Varicella is an example of the unforgiving sort among modern IF, but it's excusable there because the game is meant to be replayed from the beginning until one can puzzle out how to get it right; in a great many other cases, however, being able to get stuck in an unwinnable state is considered a bug, and generally doesn't happen.
But when I think Okami, I think art. I don't think story-entwined gameplay... remember the opening sequence? The opening sequence in which you had to passively wait and press a button every so often for a half hour before anything interactive happens? If not that, how about the minigames and the collection goals? How do those advance the story?
No; when it comes to story-entwined gameplay, I think Half-Life 2.
Faxs come with a telephone number of the sender as well. and often the personal cover letter. To forge a fax that is perpetually unquestionable you have to forge the phone number, signature, and stationary.
All of which you can do trivially if you have a single example of a similar fax from the same sender. A black-and-white low-resolution image of an office's stationary is trivial to forge; the tagline sent by the fax machine is all software-controlled (and though Caller ID can be a bit of a complication for those recipients who store it, that can be spoofed as well).
Fax machines also transmit model information and such as part of the protocol -- but if it's a high-dollar scam (and one of the very few cases where anyone is actually going to be doing that level of inspection), I'll gladly buy a fax machine of the same model as the sender I wish to impersonate... or just tweak iaxmodem to impersonate it.
If a human thinks that forging stationary in a faxed document is anywhere close to the difficult of forging an office's stationary on physical paper (where it's generally a very-high-quality document, possibly color, possibly watermarked, ideally with a unique index and a signature for that index stenographically applied if you're particularly paranoid and spendy), that human is not in fact capable of evaluating the risk factors effectively.
What you're doing is ad latinum - the fallacy of throwing out a fancy latin term and thinking that it refutes a point.
Using appropriate terms to discuss forms of logical argument and the fallacies which are used in place of them is useful in discussion of whether an argument is valid, just as a discussion on software development would be hampered if people couldn't use acronyms. Whether it's latin or not is moot; the point is that the parent is using a method of argument which is recognized as wrong: Fault on the part of an individual making an argument does not make their argument any less valid.
If you've found fault with arguments made by an individual or organization in the past, that may legitimately make you less likely to want to spend your time listening to and considering their current argument -- but an argument you're choosing not to listen to is not necessarily bogus, it's merely something you choose not to consider; that distinction is important. Assuming that everyone you don't like is wrong (or that every position espoused by an individual with whom you strongly disagree on some things is wrong) is the kind of mistake that gets wars started; people generally hold positions that make some kind of sense, once you understand their assumptions and perspectives.
What the GP is doing is no different from watching a few episodes of Mythbusters, noting its decided lack of a love story (well, other than a love for blowing things up), and deciding not to watch the rest of the series.
But the GP didn't just decide not to watch; rather, the GP publicly attacked a specific segment which other folks (by submitting the article to/. and voting it up to the front page) recommended as having merit, without viewing it himself. If you trust the wisdom of crowds, that may be a good enough reason to RTFA and give this article individual consideration. If you don't, what are you doing here?
If a colleague continually spouted conspiracy theories to your face, you'd be much less likely to listen to him on another conspiracy-sounding thoery that may actually raise legitimate issues.
The GP isn't just refusing to listen to the article, but actively criticizing it in public, and encouraging others to avoid giving it their consideration. Without considering the article's merits (or even reviewing its content), taking this kind of public position is irresponsible.
Yes, but what you're doing to the article here is called ad hominem, and it's a fallacy. If you want to ignore it on account of the publisher, feel free to do so -- but if you're going to speak regarding the article's merits, it behooves you to read it first.
It's a heckuvalot more informative than your post, and raises legitimate issues (ie. mechanisms in use to circumvent laws specifically forbidding export of law enforcement equipment to China) even should you choose to ignore the editorializing.
First, we have zero evidence that god exists, never mind that god commands anything whatsoever, but that's an entirely different kettle of loaves and fishes.
...and one on which I don't take any public stance.
Even if we allow for that, "just following orders" is not an excuse.
I never said it was.
So, is the executioner in these cases guilty of murder?
You're pulling corner cases out for a general-case statement. I never meant to speak to every case of state-sanctioned killing, and for someone reading without a bone to pick, I think your interpretation (that I believe that all individuals carrying out all state-sanctioned killings are justified in their actions) is ridiculous.
Finally -- let me point out that your stated precedent ("If murder is defined as the killing of someone other than as an act of self-defense or defending someone else") is pretty far from what's generally accepted within my community, in which the death penalty is accepted as a reasonable consequence of certain particularly repugnant actions. Of course, there's an argument to be made that those community standards are incorrect -- but that's a discussion I have no interest in being a part of at this time.
I was saying that in the context of interpreting a religious text, enacting a punishment commanded by that text clearly is not intended to fall within that text's definition of murder. I said nothing at all about modern-day morals... except in the case of the electric-chair comparison, which was meant to emphasize my point.
In that case, I wholeheartedly stand by my comment, except in a case where it is clear and obvious to the executioner that due process was not followed. If an individual is found guilty and sentenced to murder by a jury of their peers, and there is no overriding reason to believe that particular instance to constitute an unjust killing, so be it. However, it's completely tangential to the point I was making.
Re your other examples, enacting a punishment which God commands clearly is not murder, any more than the person throwing the switch on the electric chair should themselves be in it.
(Not "my" religion any longer... but if you're going to make an argument against it, make it a good one, no?)
The copyright holder of a work can make an exception for Havok; it doesn't restrict them, but rather third parties (from creating a combined work under a license which restricts the user more tightly than the GPL itself).
Yes, though, the GPL is restrictive. I think people understand that (and the purpose of those restrictions) when they decide to use it.
Just so. It's almost a shame opportunistic IPsec came out years too early for most folks to see the need; I imagine it'd get much more attention if it were something big, new and shiny today.
It is not for those who pull themselves outside or goto the gym and get physical already.
Do you own one, or are you speculating?
As a Wii Fit owner who pulls himself outside on a moderately regular basis and spends an hour at the gym every morning, I think you're simply wrong. The Fit provides a different kind of exercise than the gym does (largely focused on control and balance -- but also acts as a guide for more conventional exercises like crunches, pushups and the like), and it graphs my progress over time -- which is useful no matter where the exercise is coming from.
None of that, and I imagine other examples are available, sound like he wants to "let local governments enact".
See The Audacity Of Hope for the local-government-empowerment argument; it's also something he's gone into on occasion when speaking on the topic to hostile audiences. Certainly, he supports federal gun laws as well (albeit not as strong as those he would like to see cities like Chicago able to implement) -- but his big, long-term goal is to let large cities opt to pass stronger gun laws than could ever be pushed through at a federal level (and which wouldn't make sense at a federal level -- I have friends out in the country who legitimately need weaponry for self defense against area wildlife, even disregarding sport shooting and home defense) within their borders.
You may not agree with him on this point -- I'm not sure I do either -- but it doesn't matter particularly much this cycle; he's got much bigger fish to fry as President, and pushing something as controversial as gun control legislation just isn't going to fly if he's going to be focusing on healthcare, education and foreign policy.
Slashdot Mirror
As for me, I grew up attending a non-denominational church which had, among its board of elders, a hellfire-and-brimstone Southern Baptist who, when it was his turn to give the sermon, would occasionally wander far wide of the love-thy-neighbor New Testament interpretation. We (read: the younger and more modern folks) generally ignored him when he did this, because the rest of the time he was kind to everyone, and was instrumental in organizing the church to do good in our community. (We built -- meaning the congregation, with our own hands -- a battered women's shelter, fed the poor, and otherwise were a group of people much more involved than just coming and sitting somewhere on Sunday and tithing our money).
Looking at Obama's church in that context (and reading Dreams From my Father when he's talking about some of the other black churches in Chicago), his decision seems a lot more reasonable to me. I can't fault him for it.
The specific cuts are intended to delay programs, rather than cancel them outright, so the big risk is that there'll be a brain drain in the interim. It's a real problem, but so is the state of the public education system.
We'll see, of course.
When he's not Bush Light, McCain understands this.
That said -- failing gracefully is a virtue. This fight in the primary has given McCain quite a lot of ammo to use, and use it he will.Maybe. It's a shame that Huckabee didn't win the Republican nomination; I detest the man's positions, but he understood playing fair -- while McCain is clearly no stranger to hardball politics, whatever show he may put on. However, there's something else to be considered here: Look at how Houndini died; A punch one could easily take when ready for it can be fatal when unprepared. Presumed democratic voters are more likely to listen to criticism of a candidate when it comes from someone senior within the Democratic party. It's not necessarily just the attacks themselves but their source which may have been crippling.Clearly not going to happen. It's been made very clear that even should she not be offered the vice-presidential spot, Clinton will be offered a key role in the Obama administration in healthcare or education. Should she reject such a role, it would be to the party's detriment.
There's a huge benefit here: Having people covered means they're more likely to get preventative care, which means they won't need to clog up the emergency rooms and specialists as often.Bullshit. It's not completely unheard of for people to die on waiting lists in Canada, but it certainly isn't a common enough event to be "the reason universal healthcare works", and it's far less people than die in the US because they don't get care when they need it. (My wife would have died of appendicitis if my employer hadn't just started offering health insurance -- we couldn't afford it otherwise, and her first instinct was to wait at home and hope things got better). Anyhow, this isn't even a valid talking point applied to Obama's plan. Healthcare providers still operate as they do today, so supply will grow to meet demand via the regular free-market apparatus.
Let's be fair, now -- McCain only thinks torture is OK when he's parroting Bush; when he's thinking on his own, he takes the position that using torture is an invitation to enemies to torture our own troops, and opposes it on those grounds.
I'm going to turn into a grammar nazi for a moment.
"Your" average machine, "your" helicopter. You wouldn't say "you are helicopter just got shot down", right?
Okay, done. Sorry 'bout that.
Getting more to the topic... you're right ("you are right" -- the apostrophe makes sense there) that CoD4 doesn't necessarily need a lot of story, but I'm not sure that that makes it a "story-entwined game". Some games just don't need backstory -- chess is a perfect example. Would you call chess a "story-entwined game" because it has just the right amount of backstory? I think that'd be silly -- it has no story, it needs no story, but just because it has exactly the amount of story it needs isn't to say that it's story-entwined.
Of course, it's really in line with the article's point that technology makes it possible to make the story so implicit that it's accepted as part of the scenery; CoD can be argued to have plenty of story implicit in the art and media bundled into the game itself, and I'm fine with that. Even so, I don't think that puts it up there with Half Life 2 and its ilk (which have carefully and deliberately written story as a centerpiece of their existence, exposed without taking control away from the player or otherwise compromising the interactivity or believability of the experience)
I love Okami. I really, really love Okami.
But when I think Okami, I think art. I don't think story-entwined gameplay... remember the opening sequence? The opening sequence in which you had to passively wait and press a button every so often for a half hour before anything interactive happens? If not that, how about the minigames and the collection goals? How do those advance the story?
No; when it comes to story-entwined gameplay, I think Half-Life 2.
Fax machines also transmit model information and such as part of the protocol -- but if it's a high-dollar scam (and one of the very few cases where anyone is actually going to be doing that level of inspection), I'll gladly buy a fax machine of the same model as the sender I wish to impersonate... or just tweak iaxmodem to impersonate it.
If a human thinks that forging stationary in a faxed document is anywhere close to the difficult of forging an office's stationary on physical paper (where it's generally a very-high-quality document, possibly color, possibly watermarked, ideally with a unique index and a signature for that index stenographically applied if you're particularly paranoid and spendy), that human is not in fact capable of evaluating the risk factors effectively.
Pah -- the built-in keybindings are for sissies. All hail Vimperator!
If you've found fault with arguments made by an individual or organization in the past, that may legitimately make you less likely to want to spend your time listening to and considering their current argument -- but an argument you're choosing not to listen to is not necessarily bogus, it's merely something you choose not to consider; that distinction is important. Assuming that everyone you don't like is wrong (or that every position espoused by an individual with whom you strongly disagree on some things is wrong) is the kind of mistake that gets wars started; people generally hold positions that make some kind of sense, once you understand their assumptions and perspectives.But the GP didn't just decide not to watch; rather, the GP publicly attacked a specific segment which other folks (by submitting the article to
Yes, but what you're doing to the article here is called ad hominem, and it's a fallacy. If you want to ignore it on account of the publisher, feel free to do so -- but if you're going to speak regarding the article's merits, it behooves you to read it first.
It's a heckuvalot more informative than your post, and raises legitimate issues (ie. mechanisms in use to circumvent laws specifically forbidding export of law enforcement equipment to China) even should you choose to ignore the editorializing.
Finally -- let me point out that your stated precedent ("If murder is defined as the killing of someone other than as an act of self-defense or defending someone else") is pretty far from what's generally accepted within my community, in which the death penalty is accepted as a reasonable consequence of certain particularly repugnant actions. Of course, there's an argument to be made that those community standards are incorrect -- but that's a discussion I have no interest in being a part of at this time.
WTF?
I was saying that in the context of interpreting a religious text, enacting a punishment commanded by that text clearly is not intended to fall within that text's definition of murder. I said nothing at all about modern-day morals... except in the case of the electric-chair comparison, which was meant to emphasize my point.
In that case, I wholeheartedly stand by my comment, except in a case where it is clear and obvious to the executioner that due process was not followed. If an individual is found guilty and sentenced to murder by a jury of their peers, and there is no overriding reason to believe that particular instance to constitute an unjust killing, so be it. However, it's completely tangential to the point I was making.
Re your other examples, enacting a punishment which God commands clearly is not murder, any more than the person throwing the switch on the electric chair should themselves be in it.
(Not "my" religion any longer... but if you're going to make an argument against it, make it a good one, no?)
The copyright holder of a work can make an exception for Havok; it doesn't restrict them, but rather third parties (from creating a combined work under a license which restricts the user more tightly than the GPL itself).
Yes, though, the GPL is restrictive. I think people understand that (and the purpose of those restrictions) when they decide to use it.
How is this "astroturfing"? Not giving an identity is entirely different from pretending to be John Q. Public.
Just so. It's almost a shame opportunistic IPsec came out years too early for most folks to see the need; I imagine it'd get much more attention if it were something big, new and shiny today.
Without RST packets, how are you supposed to know if the remote host is legitimately closing the connection?
As a Wii Fit owner who pulls himself outside on a moderately regular basis and spends an hour at the gym every morning, I think you're simply wrong. The Fit provides a different kind of exercise than the gym does (largely focused on control and balance -- but also acts as a guide for more conventional exercises like crunches, pushups and the like), and it graphs my progress over time -- which is useful no matter where the exercise is coming from.
You may not agree with him on this point -- I'm not sure I do either -- but it doesn't matter particularly much this cycle; he's got much bigger fish to fry as President, and pushing something as controversial as gun control legislation just isn't going to fly if he's going to be focusing on healthcare, education and foreign policy.