You state that as if it were factual truth that the role of the state is to avoid contact, &c. While it is clear from examples that misguided intervention will mess things up (although the word misguided does not really apply to most cases once you look at them in detail), examples also show that state intervention has been at the very base of essentially every economic success in the history of mankind. In some of the most visible cases, the intervention of the state in economic matters has occurred outside the official jurisdiction of the state intervening, but this is by no means the rule, and by no means makes the intervention less of an intervention.
The kind of statement you make is usually accompanied, in the most illustarted cases, by quotes from Smith and Mills and what not. But actually reading those authors will very fast provide the certitude that they'd be kicking the ass of the people using their names to justify such statements.
I don't mind if they're breaking in to ISPs around the world but I would rather they showed some restraint back in the UK.
This line makes me wish you are trolling.
The weltanschauung you evince corresponds to a completely different historical context, in which imperial/colonial power could choose the geographical location of conflict, and, of course, sistematically chose it away from the metropole. The very fact that that context is no more was what made the WTC attack so perturbing.
And, independently from that, the ``what's-good-for-us-is-too-good-for-them'' attitude explicit in your sentence is precisely one of the reasons why imperial/colonial power is not exactly liked in colonies. A reasonable reason.
If your family was taken out by these guys, I think you'd have a different opinion.
That this may pass as an argument is sad. Not only it is fallacious and disregards any minimally sensible standard for the setting up of rules and procedures, but it is in fact a generalization unwarranted by experience: not everybody subjected to such tragedies thinks differently. Of course, their not thinking differently makes them very much less interesting material for prime-time news, and this kind of `argument' is usually propounded around that time.
How do you know that <random-web-site> (e.g. a web page dedicated ot the memory of someone's dead puppy) is not used for that? If you are trying to hide such a message it'd make two or three more cubic light years of sense to hide it as a change on such a site than on one ranking first on a Google search for 'jihad'...
You are assigning blame. I, on the other hand, am more interested in cities not being bombed. Or children not being molested. Or wives not being beaten.
I very deeply believe that the understanding of the objective conditions which underlie the rising of violent behaviour is basic to any serious attempt at trying to deal with violent behaviour. I also deeply believe in individual responsability, and these two beliefs are in no way contradictory.
That there are objective conditions that need to be understood can easily be verified by comparing the number of Swedish suicide bombers in the last century with the number of palestinian or pakistani (for example) suicide bombers. There is a disparity. This disparity is not random, as the facts are absolutely not consistent with randomness: suicide bombers are not uniformly distributed neither in space nor in time. When then one sets out to try to prevent cities like London from being bombed (not when is prosecuting an individual for having bombed London, which is a wholly different undertaking) one utmostly needs to understand what causes this disparity.
Now, among these objective conditions are the feelings of people. It may even sound funny, but it is nonetheless so.
At most, being free to use torture as a means of getting information would stop attacks planned or being planned from actually being carried out. It clearly cannot stop attacks from being attempted, or the urge to attempt them on the part of those that attempt them. That is, it might be able to help mitigate the effects, but it is plainly absolutely ineffective in dealing with the cause (and its actual utility in getting real information is rather dubious, as it is quite well-known and understandable that people will confess of anything under torture) And, from all evidence, the cause is such that attempts of attacks will not diminuish in number but increase, and the increase can quite imaginably exceed the response capacity available to such attacks, and even the capacity of extracting usable information form torture.
You think these radical Islams care about our feelings?
Do you care about theirs? Did you care about their feelings before they became radicalized? Can you not imagine that, under the same circumstances you might have gone through the same path as them? Can you not imagine that, being you one of them, you would probably not care for your feelings? Unimaginable amounts of imagination are needed to put oneself in the place of a suicide bomber in that last moment when everything has already being played out, but it is much less strenuous, and requires only some information, to mentally take the place of someone whose circumstances are such that his becoming a suicide bomber is among the possible roads in life. There are lots of people in precisely those circumstances right now. Do you care for their feelings?
The Wikipedia entry is a good start, to be followed by some of the links provided there, and a very mild amount of googling around. Most notably, there is the UN Convention Against Torture which provides a more legalesian definition in its article 1---of course, the US never ratified that convention and it may very well be, judging from history, that they have changed their mind since they signed, and, in any case, they do not seem to act in a way that shows they attach any value to the conventions they do ratify apart from PR.
Independently of that, I sincerely and humbly fail to imagine how anyone can consider `making someone feel like they are being burned alive' not a form of torture when it is used as a deterrent (and, frankly, when it is used for any other use whatsoever). Note that the absence of permament damage is absolutely irrelevant to the qualification of anything as torture, according to most authorities. Finally, the fact that people do things frequently does not make those things not torture; it is certainly arguable that tear-gassing crowds as a form of control is not a form of torture, but the (remarkably increasing) frequency with with this happens is definitely not an argument for this.
Hmm. Your definition of 'everyone' seems to be rather restricted! Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population
and any sensible estimate of the number of people connected to the net.
I guess that depends on the apps you use. I cannot think of an app I have installed and use that has not set itself up properly, and certainly none of the apps I work on as developer fails to set itself up. I have also explained to a non-negligeable number of people how to set up an app so that it does set itself up correctly when installed, so I have had the opportunity to appreciate that doing so is essentially trivial and, in fact, in the large majority of cases, just a matter of cutting and pasting 3 lines from a configure.ac file from an existing app, copying its.desktop file and merely editing the appropriate fields (of course, after finding an appropriately licenced app to copy from!).
So what you are saying here is basically that there are developers out there who will not follow essentially trivial steps to ensure their apps follow standard (albeit relatively recently standarized) interfaces. Well. It is hard to disagree with that. The readiness of the Linux Desktop cannot be made dependent on them, I think, though.
Try using Win32 in a locale different from English, and check how many of those shareware apps that do know how to set up a start menu folder know to put themselves in the localized versions of "My Programs", "My Pictures" or "My Whatever"---that is, how many of those apps use the correct interface to get to those directories. The fact that most of them do not can grow into a rather serious annoyance. Claiming thereupon that Windows is not ready for the desktop is... well... incorrect.
There is a direct way to add stuff to GNOME panels, as long as the apps you are trying to add comunicate with their environment in rather well-defined ways (specified the standards you refer to): you right click on a panel and select the "Add to Panel" item in the context menu. By design, the panel expects applications to present a precisely defined interface, the.desktop file, which should be set up by the application itself. If Deer Park does not conform with the interface, and you feel it should, you should file a bug against it.
This expectation on behalf of the panel is not very different from the expectation the window manager has about apps adhering to the ICCCM, or apps assuming the cos function they get when they dynamically link to libc will compute the cosine of the argument passed to it when called. And, I think, it is as reasonable.
You can expect a response along the lines of "well, this is an alpha release, so you should really tell your mom to use our released versions, or, even better, the packages set up by her distro". This response should be met with understanding on your part, but, determined, you should insist (politely and with a constructive undertone) remarking that if Deer Park installed a.desktop file properly it might get more testers.
(If you want to create a launcher on a panel, you can also simply drag an item from the Applications menu to it---this has been possible since the beginning of time, IIRC. Of course, this also depends on your having a menu item to begin with, and this in turn depends on the.desktop file being there.)
Re: the indirection you notice. That indirection is a good thing, actually. The fact that you stumbled upon this problem is completely separate from it; your problem is due to the app not presented the interface it should. Also, fd.o does not hide the information in its specs; at least, not more so than the W3C hides the information on HTML in its spec. The intended audience for those specs is formed by developers, and though they may be terse and sometimes even slightly obtuse, the community which develops them is notably helpful in clearifying them.
Re: nothing happens when you create the.desktop file: The panel uses fam/gamin to monitor the directory in which you created the.desktop file, and when things are working it gets notified of the file-cretaing event, and updates its menus and what not. If this did not happen, then this is a problem, maybe a bug (but it does work correctly for most people). It is an orthogonal issue, though. Unless you've done tweaking affecting this, this is the kind of thing that you probably should report to your distro.
In my very humble opinion, if the problem you can think to exemplify the non-readiness of the Linux Desktop (tm) is that an alpha release, intended only for developers, of Firefox is not behaving as a end-user-targetted released version of Firefox, well, I have to admit that I for one do not worry much.
And 'boxen' and 'VAXen' are not the plural forms of 'box' and 'VAX'. And so on.
Using those variants does not make anyone look less intelligent. I am not saying that they are not less intelligent, but it is not the spelling of this or that plural that allows you to tell an idiot from a non-idiot.
On the other hand, the ability to recognize usage patterns for words, of variations in forms, of overgeneralization of `rules' of the language, of changes in the role words play (from verbs to nouns, from nouns to adjectives, and so on), of `incorrect' uses of derivation rules for words, of appropriation of jargon from other groups for various purposes, and other thousand ways a speaker of a language can mess around with his/her language, and the ability of recognizing the intent and meaning of such messing around *does* give very good hints as to the intelligence of a person.
The phrase "justice system" is a misnomer. The justice system is not supposed to impart justice, but the law. The real justice system should be the legislative power, which should produce laws that are just; judges and the legal system should then apply these just laws.
You should always be in fear of incriminating yourself, if you are a criminal. If not, you have nothing to fear.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that even if the end result will be that you will be unhurt, you might have to go through quite an ordeal, and that your life can very well be ended for all practical purposes---financially, emotionally, socially---while you calmly await for the final acquittal.
Leaving out the practicalities when stating things that end in "you have nothing to fear" is hardly reassuring.
Our dear Mr. Torrent has knowingly been operating in a gray area. So, common sense would say, perhaps he should watch his mouth.
He was never in a gray area. It is at most uncharted.
There are lots of movies satisfying those requirements. There are also books and music satisfying them. They are harder to come by because of the peculiar psychology of distribution companies (and editorials and music labels): anything original is a risk, and those entities avoid risk at the risk of becoming providers of inanities. As these risk avoiding entities essentially control what is available (you can, if you look hard enough, find other content, of course; but you even need to know that there is other content available, and that is not common knowledge!), they make other kind of content invisible. It is very much there, though.
As with anything worth while, both accessing it and partaking of the goodness in it, requires an effort on your part.
Using the presence of civilization as a criterion for inclusion might end up being problematic, don't you think? It could even lead to the removal of large portions of quite densely populated areas which are already mapped...
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe -not- having Google Maps at all would be worse?
Ah! The joys of NP!
The difference between those flavors is not (only) in the looks but in behaviour.
You seem not to have been exposed to anything newer in cryptography since the Gold Bug...
You state that as if it were factual truth that the role of the state is to avoid contact, &c. While it is clear from examples that misguided intervention will mess things up (although the word misguided does not really apply to most cases once you look at them in detail), examples also show that state intervention has been at the very base of essentially every economic success in the history of mankind. In some of the most visible cases, the intervention of the state in economic matters has occurred outside the official jurisdiction of the state intervening, but this is by no means the rule, and by no means makes the intervention less of an intervention.
The kind of statement you make is usually accompanied, in the most illustarted cases, by quotes from Smith and Mills and what not. But actually reading those authors will very fast provide the certitude that they'd be kicking the ass of the people using their names to justify such statements.
The front line in Iraq has very little to do with freedom, or at least, has as much to do with it as with WMD.
I cannot but wonder what people need to finally see this: a handwritten explanation by Cheney himself?
This line makes me wish you are trolling.
The weltanschauung you evince corresponds to a completely different historical context, in which imperial/colonial power could choose the geographical location of conflict, and, of course, sistematically chose it away from the metropole. The very fact that that context is no more was what made the WTC attack so perturbing.
And, independently from that, the ``what's-good-for-us-is-too-good-for-them'' attitude explicit in your sentence is precisely one of the reasons why imperial/colonial power is not exactly liked in colonies. A reasonable reason.
That this may pass as an argument is sad. Not only it is fallacious and disregards any minimally sensible standard for the setting up of rules and procedures, but it is in fact a generalization unwarranted by experience: not everybody subjected to such tragedies thinks differently. Of course, their not thinking differently makes them very much less interesting material for prime-time news, and this kind of `argument' is usually propounded around that time.
That'd be most extraordinary
How do you know that <random-web-site> (e.g. a web page dedicated ot the memory of someone's dead puppy) is not used for that? If you are trying to hide such a message it'd make two or three more cubic light years of sense to hide it as a change on such a site than on one ranking first on a Google search for 'jihad'...
Is defragging *still* necessary?!
Indeed, lack of imagination is one of the most common ways in which people get screwed.
In the same line, how is it that people end up with spyware installed in their computers?
You are assigning blame. I, on the other hand, am more interested in cities not being bombed. Or children not being molested. Or wives not being beaten.
I very deeply believe that the understanding of the objective conditions which underlie the rising of violent behaviour is basic to any serious attempt at trying to deal with violent behaviour. I also deeply believe in individual responsability, and these two beliefs are in no way contradictory.
That there are objective conditions that need to be understood can easily be verified by comparing the number of Swedish suicide bombers in the last century with the number of palestinian or pakistani (for example) suicide bombers. There is a disparity. This disparity is not random, as the facts are absolutely not consistent with randomness: suicide bombers are not uniformly distributed neither in space nor in time. When then one sets out to try to prevent cities like London from being bombed (not when is prosecuting an individual for having bombed London, which is a wholly different undertaking) one utmostly needs to understand what causes this disparity.
Now, among these objective conditions are the feelings of people. It may even sound funny, but it is nonetheless so.
At most, being free to use torture as a means of getting information would stop attacks planned or being planned from actually being carried out. It clearly cannot stop attacks from being attempted, or the urge to attempt them on the part of those that attempt them. That is, it might be able to help mitigate the effects, but it is plainly absolutely ineffective in dealing with the cause (and its actual utility in getting real information is rather dubious, as it is quite well-known and understandable that people will confess of anything under torture) And, from all evidence, the cause is such that attempts of attacks will not diminuish in number but increase, and the increase can quite imaginably exceed the response capacity available to such attacks, and even the capacity of extracting usable information form torture.
Do you care about theirs? Did you care about their feelings before they became radicalized? Can you not imagine that, under the same circumstances you might have gone through the same path as them? Can you not imagine that, being you one of them, you would probably not care for your feelings? Unimaginable amounts of imagination are needed to put oneself in the place of a suicide bomber in that last moment when everything has already being played out, but it is much less strenuous, and requires only some information, to mentally take the place of someone whose circumstances are such that his becoming a suicide bomber is among the possible roads in life. There are lots of people in precisely those circumstances right now. Do you care for their feelings?
Hmm. You should look up what torture is...
The Wikipedia entry is a good start, to be followed by some of the links provided there, and a very mild amount of googling around. Most notably, there is the UN Convention Against Torture which provides a more legalesian definition in its article 1---of course, the US never ratified that convention and it may very well be, judging from history, that they have changed their mind since they signed, and, in any case, they do not seem to act in a way that shows they attach any value to the conventions they do ratify apart from PR.
Independently of that, I sincerely and humbly fail to imagine how anyone can consider `making someone feel like they are being burned alive' not a form of torture when it is used as a deterrent (and, frankly, when it is used for any other use whatsoever). Note that the absence of permament damage is absolutely irrelevant to the qualification of anything as torture, according to most authorities. Finally, the fact that people do things frequently does not make those things not torture; it is certainly arguable that tear-gassing crowds as a form of control is not a form of torture, but the (remarkably increasing) frequency with with this happens is definitely not an argument for this.
Hmm. Your definition of 'everyone' seems to be rather restricted! Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population and any sensible estimate of the number of people connected to the net.
'god' - 'God'
Maybe his god's ego does not require capitalization...
I guess that depends on the apps you use. I cannot think of an app I have installed and use that has not set itself up properly, and certainly none of the apps I work on as developer fails to set itself up. I have also explained to a non-negligeable number of people how to set up an app so that it does set itself up correctly when installed, so I have had the opportunity to appreciate that doing so is essentially trivial and, in fact, in the large majority of cases, just a matter of cutting and pasting 3 lines from a configure.ac file from an existing app, copying its .desktop file and merely editing the appropriate fields (of course, after finding an appropriately licenced app to copy from!).
So what you are saying here is basically that there are developers out there who will not follow essentially trivial steps to ensure their apps follow standard (albeit relatively recently standarized) interfaces. Well. It is hard to disagree with that. The readiness of the Linux Desktop cannot be made dependent on them, I think, though.
Try using Win32 in a locale different from English, and check how many of those shareware apps that do know how to set up a start menu folder know to put themselves in the localized versions of "My Programs", "My Pictures" or "My Whatever"---that is, how many of those apps use the correct interface to get to those directories. The fact that most of them do not can grow into a rather serious annoyance. Claiming thereupon that Windows is not ready for the desktop is... well... incorrect.
There is a direct way to add stuff to GNOME panels, as long as the apps you are trying to add comunicate with their environment in rather well-defined ways (specified the standards you refer to): you right click on a panel and select the "Add to Panel" item in the context menu. By design, the panel expects applications to present a precisely defined interface, the .desktop file, which should be set up by the application itself. If Deer Park does not conform with the interface, and you feel it should, you should file a bug against it.
This expectation on behalf of the panel is not very different from the expectation the window manager has about apps adhering to the ICCCM, or apps assuming the cos function they get when they dynamically link to libc will compute the cosine of the argument passed to it when called. And, I think, it is as reasonable.
You can expect a response along the lines of "well, this is an alpha release, so you should really tell your mom to use our released versions, or, even better, the packages set up by her distro". This response should be met with understanding on your part, but, determined, you should insist (politely and with a constructive undertone) remarking that if Deer Park installed a .desktop file properly it might get more testers.
(If you want to create a launcher on a panel, you can also simply drag an item from the Applications menu to it---this has been possible since the beginning of time, IIRC. Of course, this also depends on your having a menu item to begin with, and this in turn depends on the .desktop file being there.)
Re: the indirection you notice. That indirection is a good thing, actually. The fact that you stumbled upon this problem is completely separate from it; your problem is due to the app not presented the interface it should. Also, fd.o does not hide the information in its specs; at least, not more so than the W3C hides the information on HTML in its spec. The intended audience for those specs is formed by developers, and though they may be terse and sometimes even slightly obtuse, the community which develops them is notably helpful in clearifying them.
Re: nothing happens when you create the .desktop file: The panel uses fam/gamin to monitor the directory in which you created the .desktop file, and when things are working it gets notified of the file-cretaing event, and updates its menus and what not. If this did not happen, then this is a problem, maybe a bug (but it does work correctly for most people). It is an orthogonal issue, though. Unless you've done tweaking affecting this, this is the kind of thing that you probably should report to your distro.
In my very humble opinion, if the problem you can think to exemplify the non-readiness of the Linux Desktop (tm) is that an alpha release, intended only for developers, of Firefox is not behaving as a end-user-targetted released version of Firefox, well, I have to admit that I for one do not worry much.
And 'boxen' and 'VAXen' are not the plural forms of 'box' and 'VAX'. And so on.
Using those variants does not make anyone look less intelligent. I am not saying that they are not less intelligent, but it is not the spelling of this or that plural that allows you to tell an idiot from a non-idiot.
On the other hand, the ability to recognize usage patterns for words, of variations in forms, of overgeneralization of `rules' of the language, of changes in the role words play (from verbs to nouns, from nouns to adjectives, and so on), of `incorrect' uses of derivation rules for words, of appropriation of jargon from other groups for various purposes, and other thousand ways a speaker of a language can mess around with his/her language, and the ability of recognizing the intent and meaning of such messing around *does* give very good hints as to the intelligence of a person.
The phrase "justice system" is a misnomer. The justice system is not supposed to impart justice, but the law. The real justice system should be the legislative power, which should produce laws that are just; judges and the legal system should then apply these just laws.
You seem to be ignoring the fact that even if the end result will be that you will be unhurt, you might have to go through quite an ordeal, and that your life can very well be ended for all practical purposes---financially, emotionally, socially---while you calmly await for the final acquittal.
Leaving out the practicalities when stating things that end in "you have nothing to fear" is hardly reassuring.
He was never in a gray area. It is at most uncharted.
There are lots of movies satisfying those requirements. There are also books and music satisfying them. They are harder to come by because of the peculiar psychology of distribution companies (and editorials and music labels): anything original is a risk, and those entities avoid risk at the risk of becoming providers of inanities. As these risk avoiding entities essentially control what is available (you can, if you look hard enough, find other content, of course; but you even need to know that there is other content available, and that is not common knowledge!), they make other kind of content invisible. It is very much there, though.
As with anything worth while, both accessing it and partaking of the goodness in it, requires an effort on your part.
Using the presence of civilization as a criterion for inclusion might end up being problematic, don't you think? It could even lead to the removal of large portions of quite densely populated areas which are already mapped...