If you're not being coherent and act according to one standard towards similar things/situations in life - then you are not behaving morally
Sheesh - maybe so, but I'd call it "being human". I've never met a single person, ever, who always behaved 100% consistently according to a single specific well-laid-down set of moral standards. Everyone I know has 'bad days and good days', 'bad incidents and good incidents'. I've never met anyone who was completely good or completely bad, and I rather doubt that I ever will.
Our idea of whether people we know are "moral" or not usually depend on a perceived kind of average of their behaviours, and whether or not the total good outweighs the total bad by a large enough ratio.
The same applies to companies. We judge a company based on the perceived "averages" of their behaviours. No company is "morally perfect", but then we can't sit around waiting for only morally perfect companies, because we'd never find any. This is especially true as companies just consist of people. Possibly hundreds or thousands of people, all with their own motivations and goals and internal inconsistencies.
So we rather form a general overall opinion of companies, based on how much good (and bad) they do, how good their products are, etc. Thus a company we perceive as being generally a "good" company can still get away (in our minds) with doing "bad" things, provided they don't do too much of it. Likewise, we let the people in our lives get away with "bad things" sometimes, so long as it's the exception and not the norm (if you don't, and you only let 'perfect' people into your life, well, good luck finding a girlfriend/wife/boyfriend/whatever).
Microsoft's average ratio of "bad behaviours" to "good behaviours" is (IMO) tipped way too much towards "bad". But then I guess you'd only know that if you have studied the companies actions for a long time, as I have. I admit, I have not studied Apple's actions nearly as closely. Nonetheless their products are very good.
This is the usual Apple apology. Apple is the "good" company, and otherwise "bad" behavior is OK for them to pursue, since an evil company might patent it first, and we all know that Apple never does anything evil. Oh, and they're involved in open source, too, which makes them even more of a "good" company, unlike some other evil companies who aren't involved in supporting open source at all.
I'm afraid I don't see the problem in this.
Like people, companies are neither "good" nor "evil", but have bits of both. However some people have lots of good and a little evil, others have lots of evil and not so much good. Microsoft have done gazillions of "evil" things and very few good things. Apple however are mostly good. We accept companies that are mostly good, and even forgive them the occasional transgression.
Is that so hard to understand?
It's the same with people. If your girlfriend mostly pleases you, then you don't mind so much if she pisses you off once in a while - in fact you see it as normal in a relationship. But if she pisses you off very often, and is hardly ever nice, then you start to dislike her and after a while show her the door, and at this point every little annoying thing she does makes you angry, because she has no "goodwill capital" left to burn, and she doesn't deserve forgiveness because she hasn't tried to be nice.
Sorry, but I don't see the problem with that, nor with that something similar should apply to how we perceive and tolerate companies in our lives.
Every day we "lose some people" to rebels who think that it is ok to attack our soldiers.
But of COURSE it is ok for them to attack your soldiers --- you have (illegally) invaded their country and taken occupation, and they don't want you there! There is nothing difficult to understand about that: If a country like, say, China invaded the US, overthrew the government and took occupation of the mainland, I guarantee you that you'd also feel as though you had a right to defend against the illegal occupation, including by force! And I would support your right to fight the occupation too. Would China "declaring the war over" and telling you that you were "now defeated, so stop fighting" change your attitude? Of course not. How silly really to think that the Iraqis should stop fighting foreign occupation on their soil!
Having said that though (in *principle*), I am actually optimistic about the medium-term future of Iraq. I think that the resistance is a relative minority of the population, and that many members of the resistance will tend towards pragmatism after the elections when they see start to see the benefits of a new relatively democratic government, and people start focusing on the positive aspects of building a new Iraq. I think that the majority of Iraqi people really are going to ultimately see this as new hope for them to finally build a "new Iraq". I know it sounds corny, but I think it is a definite possibility. Remains to be seen if I'm right or wrong though. In the years leading up to the first democratic elections in South Africa, there was a lot of violence and quite some armed resistance, and the world thought that civil war was almost inevitable. I think a lot of it stemmed from uncertainty and fear about what the "new South Africa" would mean. After the elections, a new far more peaceful South Africa emerged, with a people that mostly have a growing positive spirit of building the country. I think that something similar may happen in Iraq. I do however think that it is critical that American troops remain in Iraq for a long time still, to maintain the peace and make sure that civil war is averted. The premise of this war apparently was never to "defeat Iraq as an enemy" but to "liberate Iraq", and as occupier and liberator, staying there a looong time and spending a lot on it is just part and parcel of the decision to go to war and overthrow Saddam - one must accept it if that is one's stated goal. You don't go in, throw out the leaders, and then pull out and say "we've liberated you, have fun and good luck". You either liberate properly, or you don't go to war at all.
The idea of "flattening the place" is incredibly, ridiculously childish. I might understand such a comment only if spoken in anger against the perpetrators of 9/11. But there has never been demonstrated any link between 9/11 and Iraq. So that amounts to "hey let's bomb some small country into oblivion because we're angry and because we can". Good luck winning any friends in the world that way. It's comments like that that help cause the rest of the world to view America as a bunch of backwards barbarians.
And why the argument against the 'cycle of violence' doesn't hold any water. If you are worried about the 'cycle of violence,' you don't fight a war in the first place.
But that is precisely the point - that the US should not have fought this war in the first place. The vast majority of people in virtually every country in the whole world realises that, and despises what the US is doing and the way they are doing it, and the cavalier, casual "oh well shit happens in a war" reaction to things like torture and killing (accidental or otherwise) of innocent civilians.
I think this entire situation would be different if it was not for Arab oil.
I think there is no doubt about that. Western wars, in fact wars in general, are almost always about access to important resources. But that is just the way it is. The US must certainly feel that it needs to ensure it has a
Well I don't think DirectX is a very good example in general, but regardless, DirectX was originally developed by a London company (Rendermorphics) and simply bought by Microsoft. They've done a lot of cleaning up and re-factoring, but actually not that much "innovation". The main "innovation" within DirectX in the last five years is almost certainly pixel and vertex shaders for 3D, and the associated complexities of built-in shader compilers in drivers.
If no major insurance cartels control the market (like RIAA), and there is competition in the market, and insurance companies are operating on high margins, then it is quite feasible that some insurance companies may lower their prices (and profit margins) in order to try to increase their market share. This can spark price wars, which leads to a lowering of profit margins in the industry down to their natural minimum (and ineffecient companies who can't compete going under).
Not everything is like the RIAA or Microsoft. Competition still works sometimes. I'm not sure if it's the rule or the exception though.
Re:Sasser exploit
on
A Worm's Worm
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Wow, a slightly pro-linux, on-topic, otherwise entirely unoffensive post gets modded "Troll"? Now I'm certain that mods are being manipulated somehow.
Ah but a few innocents here and there, who cares when it's blood-thirsty revenge, right?
Yup, indeed, those were civilian prisoners.
The worst part about that logic is that it is the stupid-ass 'cycle of violence' logic in action. They 'had blood on their hands' for killing Americans, poor poor loved ones. But wait, what were those American soldiers doing there to begin with, and hey, those American soldiers also killed many Iraqi soldiers (and civilians) whom their loved ones will never see again thanks to them. So unless you agree to hold double standards, then you also have to say it's OK for an Iraqi to think "hey, let's torture some Americans, they have blood on their hands, and it doesn't matter if some are innocent". So you say the Americans are there because of 9/11 (dubious at best since no link has ever been shown, but hey, let's pretend to go along with that). OK, but why did those guys plot 9/11 to begin with? And no the answer is not "they're just really evil guys who hate US freedoms". Anyway, apart from a childish "who started it" argument, bottom line is you get trapped in the cycle of attacks, counter-attacks, retribution, counter-retribution, counter-counter-retribution, ad infinitum. And it only goes on because people here imply that their side's latest attacks were justified as a response to the other side's latest attacks. Dumb, dumb, dumb. There are far many more Iraqi women and children whose fathers/brothers/uncles etc have been killed by US soldiers than vice versa. This is in a war which everyone widely agrees had no justification, no provocation, was not self-defence, and is definitely illegal. Sorry, but if you're going to wage an illegal war and invade another country, don't go blaming others when you lose some people.
Well, think of it as just a "large country" then. This has always basically worked when applied at the country level, a lot of different groups of people agree to organize their communities under a single rooted hierarchy for the benefit of all (safety, policing, infrastructure etc). This can work even in large countries like the USA, and historically the USA can be seen as a microcosm of the global concept, with different states agreeing to unite. So why shouldn't it work on a global scale? Especially with modern technology making the world effectively a smaller place. When you think about it, there is no need to have other countries to define as enemies. The world is just one large community of people. Communities have organized into self-governing units historically at the village level, municipal level, county level, province level, state level, country level, and so on. There is no theoretical reason why it shouldn't scale globally, and there are HUGE BENEFITS to doing so if you just think about the idea for a bit. We expend enormous amounts of resources in just figuring out how to destroy enemies as defined by lines we draw on maps. When everything becomes one big country, you're all 'on the same team', and psychologically the destructive competitive focus shifts toward a positive competitive spirit. Think it can't work? Why not? It worked in the USA. You may argue that the ideologies of the majority of all those in the different states that now make up the USA were relatively homogenous, while globally there are many different (and more conflicting) ideologies, preventing groups from agreeing. I'm not sure though that ideologies need to destroy one another, perhaps there is enough room for all. Just as in the states, people in different states still have a tendency to generally be grouped according to certain different ideologies.
When you "give up sovereignty" you perhaps do give up firstly some sense of identity felt in asserting that "I am an X" or "I am a Y", and also to a degree one loses a sense of autonomy of one's 'own community'. But the benefits almost always vastly outweigh the disadvantages, and one can look at many historical contexts to back that up.
An aspect of "sovereignty" is defining what you are by defining what you are not, which usually involves the creation of friction by defining other groups as having negative qualities. And it's damn silly.
One could view try view things the other way round too, as a thought experiment. Imagine a world that started out as being just one huge country. Then imagine the people, for whatever reasons, deciding that they should split into three greater sub-regions. And then people within each sub-region start splitting up those sub-regions, etc etc. This is not healthy or progressive.
I guess the difference comes down to the sheer size of the geographical area occupied. The area of Rome roughly corresponded to what is now Europe, which is small, and even the Mongols only controlled most of the Asian landmass. The British Empire was vastly unprecendented in size, and no other empire has come close since either. At it's peak, they apparently controlled something like 1/3 of the planet's landmass, and 1/4 of the world's population.
Just to check, are you sarcastically mocking the people who have been brainwashed by Bush propaganda, or are you one of the people who have been brainwashed by Bush propaganda? Honestly, real life isn't some cliched American TV show or movie where all the characters neatly fall into these little "good" and "evil" boxes. The real world is a lot more complex than that, and so are people. If you continue to believe that people in other countries hate the US because they "are just mean people" (oooh, invoke super-evil Darth Vader-like stereotype here), then no progress will ever, ever, ever be made towards peace. People like you just lead us further into the upwardly spiralling cycle of hatred and violence, seemingly unable to see the obvious, predictable and inevitable outcome of continually upping the ante against the potential threat of a hyper-caricatured and vilified view of 'the enemy'. Good luck with your intelligent strategy there, hope it works out for you.
I have to agree with you, the 'troll' mod was unfair, even though I don't agree with it (and he/she was responding to my post) he/she certainly wasn't trolling. I think that moderation quality on/. has gone completely down the tubes lately - anything and everything that anyone doesn't like gets a "troll" mod these days, and nobody seems to care what "troll" even means. I'm starting to wonder if there are now several groups deliberately doing bad moderation, and moderating each others posts up to maintain their karma, or something.
Well you are certainly not off-topic (in spite of what some stupid moderators think), I think your point was trying to be that people who live comfortably and have their basic needs taken care off are generally less likely to be inclined to wage war. By and large this is true, but there are exceptions. People also have basic needs which are not material, such as the feeling of having some independence and control over their own lives and communities, and the feeling that they are able to contribute to the development of their communities. Thus people like Bin Laden do not like foreign troops on their land and foreign meddling in their affairs.
Given that they've already posited that mankind's ancestors appeared about 50 million years ago, they're down to a mere 200 million years to go from single-celled to upright and walking.
Huh? Are you confused or just stupid?
And the worst part is you've been modded up as insightful. It's insane. Come on people, visit a goddamn library, or do some googling, or something! This post is total BS, and it doesn't take a genuis to confirm against actual scientific theories that this is total BS.
Could you explain exactly who is "blindly accepting" these theories? We all know they're "just theories".
BTW they found a bit more than just "sediments" and a "few holes in the ground". It does seem likely in fact that they have found a meteor impact crater, just not necessarily one that resulted in a major extinction.
Troll? Come on moderators. It's either 'funny' or 'off-topic'. Perhaps you should be forced to read a definition of the word "troll" before you're allowed to moderate.
You're not "supposed to" believe it, where did you get that idea? Clearly you have no idea how science functions, why don't you learn what science is before publicly criticizing it? It is obvious from your post that you don't even understand the basics of the scientific method, despite the fact that you think you "know a bit" about science.
If you actually read up a bit about this, the scientists here are basically saying that this MIGHT BE a possible cause of one of the great extinctions (read "more research required"). Furthermore, this is now just one new "HYPOTHESIS" against two other major "HYPOTHESES" that alread exist that proposing other "POSSIBLE" reasons for this great extinction.
Certainly nobody has asked you to "believe" any of these possible explanations, and none of the scientists involved have claimed that their hypotheses are 'the truth' either. In fact, with things like this, scientists never really decide that any one theory is "the truth" - they basically often settle on a theory that is "the most likely" - they, however, ALWAYS "leave the door open" to other possible explanations that may appear in future that are better. Always. (This is all in refreshing contrast to religions like Christianity, where you are in fact expected to 100% completely believe something regardless of whether or not there is really evidence for it.)
The slashdot blurb has also spun this thing completely wrong. So even worse, now you make decisions about scientific theories based on a slashdot blurb. Sheesh.
As a developer, I switched to wxWidgets not explicitly for the cross-platform capabilities, but because it's a much better API, and quite frankly Win32 and MFC suck so incredibly ridiculously badly that I could not face the thought of using them (and yes I have over 6 years of dev experience with them, they are bad). But now that I've switched to wxWidgets, my applications will require relatively minimal effort for me to make them run on other platforms. If I'd done them on Win32 or MFC, I would be at least a man-year away from being cross-platform. Perhaps Microsoft realises that their APIs are so bad that they're chasing some people into the hands of cross-platform competitor APIs, which is dangerous from their perspective because it means more ISVs building software that runs on other platforms. So perhaps they're hoping to start attracting more ISVs back to strictly Microsoft APIs again to prevent this.
This is non-fact-based speculation, of course, based on my own perceptions.
Slashdot Mirror
Would you base your opinion of all americans on the activities of the KKK or the NRA
Or even worse, slashdot! :/
If you're not being coherent and act according to one standard towards similar things/situations in life - then you are not behaving morally
Sheesh - maybe so, but I'd call it "being human". I've never met a single person, ever, who always behaved 100% consistently according to a single specific well-laid-down set of moral standards. Everyone I know has 'bad days and good days', 'bad incidents and good incidents'. I've never met anyone who was completely good or completely bad, and I rather doubt that I ever will.
Our idea of whether people we know are "moral" or not usually depend on a perceived kind of average of their behaviours, and whether or not the total good outweighs the total bad by a large enough ratio.
The same applies to companies. We judge a company based on the perceived "averages" of their behaviours. No company is "morally perfect", but then we can't sit around waiting for only morally perfect companies, because we'd never find any. This is especially true as companies just consist of people. Possibly hundreds or thousands of people, all with their own motivations and goals and internal inconsistencies.
So we rather form a general overall opinion of companies, based on how much good (and bad) they do, how good their products are, etc. Thus a company we perceive as being generally a "good" company can still get away (in our minds) with doing "bad" things, provided they don't do too much of it. Likewise, we let the people in our lives get away with "bad things" sometimes, so long as it's the exception and not the norm (if you don't, and you only let 'perfect' people into your life, well, good luck finding a girlfriend/wife/boyfriend/whatever).
Microsoft's average ratio of "bad behaviours" to "good behaviours" is (IMO) tipped way too much towards "bad". But then I guess you'd only know that if you have studied the companies actions for a long time, as I have. I admit, I have not studied Apple's actions nearly as closely. Nonetheless their products are very good.
This is the usual Apple apology. Apple is the "good" company, and otherwise "bad" behavior is OK for them to pursue, since an evil company might patent it first, and we all know that Apple never does anything evil. Oh, and they're involved in open source, too, which makes them even more of a "good" company, unlike some other evil companies who aren't involved in supporting open source at all.
I'm afraid I don't see the problem in this.
Like people, companies are neither "good" nor "evil", but have bits of both. However some people have lots of good and a little evil, others have lots of evil and not so much good. Microsoft have done gazillions of "evil" things and very few good things. Apple however are mostly good. We accept companies that are mostly good, and even forgive them the occasional transgression.
Is that so hard to understand?
It's the same with people. If your girlfriend mostly pleases you, then you don't mind so much if she pisses you off once in a while - in fact you see it as normal in a relationship. But if she pisses you off very often, and is hardly ever nice, then you start to dislike her and after a while show her the door, and at this point every little annoying thing she does makes you angry, because she has no "goodwill capital" left to burn, and she doesn't deserve forgiveness because she hasn't tried to be nice.
Sorry, but I don't see the problem with that, nor with that something similar should apply to how we perceive and tolerate companies in our lives.
Every day we "lose some people" to rebels who think that it is ok to attack our soldiers.
But of COURSE it is ok for them to attack your soldiers --- you have (illegally) invaded their country and taken occupation, and they don't want you there! There is nothing difficult to understand about that: If a country like, say, China invaded the US, overthrew the government and took occupation of the mainland, I guarantee you that you'd also feel as though you had a right to defend against the illegal occupation, including by force! And I would support your right to fight the occupation too. Would China "declaring the war over" and telling you that you were "now defeated, so stop fighting" change your attitude? Of course not. How silly really to think that the Iraqis should stop fighting foreign occupation on their soil!
Having said that though (in *principle*), I am actually optimistic about the medium-term future of Iraq. I think that the resistance is a relative minority of the population, and that many members of the resistance will tend towards pragmatism after the elections when they see start to see the benefits of a new relatively democratic government, and people start focusing on the positive aspects of building a new Iraq. I think that the majority of Iraqi people really are going to ultimately see this as new hope for them to finally build a "new Iraq". I know it sounds corny, but I think it is a definite possibility. Remains to be seen if I'm right or wrong though. In the years leading up to the first democratic elections in South Africa, there was a lot of violence and quite some armed resistance, and the world thought that civil war was almost inevitable. I think a lot of it stemmed from uncertainty and fear about what the "new South Africa" would mean. After the elections, a new far more peaceful South Africa emerged, with a people that mostly have a growing positive spirit of building the country. I think that something similar may happen in Iraq. I do however think that it is critical that American troops remain in Iraq for a long time still, to maintain the peace and make sure that civil war is averted. The premise of this war apparently was never to "defeat Iraq as an enemy" but to "liberate Iraq", and as occupier and liberator, staying there a looong time and spending a lot on it is just part and parcel of the decision to go to war and overthrow Saddam - one must accept it if that is one's stated goal. You don't go in, throw out the leaders, and then pull out and say "we've liberated you, have fun and good luck". You either liberate properly, or you don't go to war at all.
The idea of "flattening the place" is incredibly, ridiculously childish. I might understand such a comment only if spoken in anger against the perpetrators of 9/11. But there has never been demonstrated any link between 9/11 and Iraq. So that amounts to "hey let's bomb some small country into oblivion because we're angry and because we can". Good luck winning any friends in the world that way. It's comments like that that help cause the rest of the world to view America as a bunch of backwards barbarians.
And why the argument against the 'cycle of violence' doesn't hold any water. If you are worried about the 'cycle of violence,' you don't fight a war in the first place.
But that is precisely the point - that the US should not have fought this war in the first place. The vast majority of people in virtually every country in the whole world realises that, and despises what the US is doing and the way they are doing it, and the cavalier, casual "oh well shit happens in a war" reaction to things like torture and killing (accidental or otherwise) of innocent civilians.
I think this entire situation would be different if it was not for Arab oil.
I think there is no doubt about that. Western wars, in fact wars in general, are almost always about access to important resources. But that is just the way it is. The US must certainly feel that it needs to ensure it has a
Well I don't think DirectX is a very good example in general, but regardless, DirectX was originally developed by a London company (Rendermorphics) and simply bought by Microsoft. They've done a lot of cleaning up and re-factoring, but actually not that much "innovation". The main "innovation" within DirectX in the last five years is almost certainly pixel and vertex shaders for 3D, and the associated complexities of built-in shader compilers in drivers.
From a user perspective little have changed since Windows95
More like Macintosh '84.
Linux isn't an example either (firstly it's non-commercial, second it's a rewrite of Unix - the change is more social than technical).
Linux was also not created by an American anyway .. :)
If no major insurance cartels control the market (like RIAA), and there is competition in the market, and insurance companies are operating on high margins, then it is quite feasible that some insurance companies may lower their prices (and profit margins) in order to try to increase their market share. This can spark price wars, which leads to a lowering of profit margins in the industry down to their natural minimum (and ineffecient companies who can't compete going under).
Not everything is like the RIAA or Microsoft. Competition still works sometimes. I'm not sure if it's the rule or the exception though.
Wow, a slightly pro-linux, on-topic, otherwise entirely unoffensive post gets modded "Troll"? Now I'm certain that mods are being manipulated somehow.
Uh, yeah, right. So people hate the USA because they're "just jealous", or whatever.
Yup, fully agree, a 'rose is a rose by any other name' etc.
Like the riddle: "How many legs does a donkey have if you call it's tail a leg?" Answer: "Four. Calling the tail a leg does not make it a leg."
Also, "if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck...". If this was a "war", all that would be different was the label.
Likewise, calling POWs "enemy combatants" does not make them any less POWs.
It is a war, and it's an illegal war with no provocation and no justification.
Ah but a few innocents here and there, who cares when it's blood-thirsty revenge, right?
Yup, indeed, those were civilian prisoners.
The worst part about that logic is that it is the stupid-ass 'cycle of violence' logic in action. They 'had blood on their hands' for killing Americans, poor poor loved ones. But wait, what were those American soldiers doing there to begin with, and hey, those American soldiers also killed many Iraqi soldiers (and civilians) whom their loved ones will never see again thanks to them. So unless you agree to hold double standards, then you also have to say it's OK for an Iraqi to think "hey, let's torture some Americans, they have blood on their hands, and it doesn't matter if some are innocent". So you say the Americans are there because of 9/11 (dubious at best since no link has ever been shown, but hey, let's pretend to go along with that). OK, but why did those guys plot 9/11 to begin with? And no the answer is not "they're just really evil guys who hate US freedoms". Anyway, apart from a childish "who started it" argument, bottom line is you get trapped in the cycle of attacks, counter-attacks, retribution, counter-retribution, counter-counter-retribution, ad infinitum. And it only goes on because people here imply that their side's latest attacks were justified as a response to the other side's latest attacks. Dumb, dumb, dumb. There are far many more Iraqi women and children whose fathers/brothers/uncles etc have been killed by US soldiers than vice versa. This is in a war which everyone widely agrees had no justification, no provocation, was not self-defence, and is definitely illegal. Sorry, but if you're going to wage an illegal war and invade another country, don't go blaming others when you lose some people.
Well, think of it as just a "large country" then. This has always basically worked when applied at the country level, a lot of different groups of people agree to organize their communities under a single rooted hierarchy for the benefit of all (safety, policing, infrastructure etc). This can work even in large countries like the USA, and historically the USA can be seen as a microcosm of the global concept, with different states agreeing to unite. So why shouldn't it work on a global scale? Especially with modern technology making the world effectively a smaller place. When you think about it, there is no need to have other countries to define as enemies. The world is just one large community of people. Communities have organized into self-governing units historically at the village level, municipal level, county level, province level, state level, country level, and so on. There is no theoretical reason why it shouldn't scale globally, and there are HUGE BENEFITS to doing so if you just think about the idea for a bit. We expend enormous amounts of resources in just figuring out how to destroy enemies as defined by lines we draw on maps. When everything becomes one big country, you're all 'on the same team', and psychologically the destructive competitive focus shifts toward a positive competitive spirit. Think it can't work? Why not? It worked in the USA. You may argue that the ideologies of the majority of all those in the different states that now make up the USA were relatively homogenous, while globally there are many different (and more conflicting) ideologies, preventing groups from agreeing. I'm not sure though that ideologies need to destroy one another, perhaps there is enough room for all. Just as in the states, people in different states still have a tendency to generally be grouped according to certain different ideologies.
When you "give up sovereignty" you perhaps do give up firstly some sense of identity felt in asserting that "I am an X" or "I am a Y", and also to a degree one loses a sense of autonomy of one's 'own community'. But the benefits almost always vastly outweigh the disadvantages, and one can look at many historical contexts to back that up.
An aspect of "sovereignty" is defining what you are by defining what you are not, which usually involves the creation of friction by defining other groups as having negative qualities. And it's damn silly.
One could view try view things the other way round too, as a thought experiment. Imagine a world that started out as being just one huge country. Then imagine the people, for whatever reasons, deciding that they should split into three greater sub-regions. And then people within each sub-region start splitting up those sub-regions, etc etc. This is not healthy or progressive.
I guess the difference comes down to the sheer size of the geographical area occupied. The area of Rome roughly corresponded to what is now Europe, which is small, and even the Mongols only controlled most of the Asian landmass. The British Empire was vastly unprecendented in size, and no other empire has come close since either. At it's peak, they apparently controlled something like 1/3 of the planet's landmass, and 1/4 of the world's population.
Just to check, are you sarcastically mocking the people who have been brainwashed by Bush propaganda, or are you one of the people who have been brainwashed by Bush propaganda? Honestly, real life isn't some cliched American TV show or movie where all the characters neatly fall into these little "good" and "evil" boxes. The real world is a lot more complex than that, and so are people. If you continue to believe that people in other countries hate the US because they "are just mean people" (oooh, invoke super-evil Darth Vader-like stereotype here), then no progress will ever, ever, ever be made towards peace. People like you just lead us further into the upwardly spiralling cycle of hatred and violence, seemingly unable to see the obvious, predictable and inevitable outcome of continually upping the ante against the potential threat of a hyper-caricatured and vilified view of 'the enemy'. Good luck with your intelligent strategy there, hope it works out for you.
I have to agree with you, the 'troll' mod was unfair, even though I don't agree with it (and he/she was responding to my post) he/she certainly wasn't trolling. I think that moderation quality on /. has gone completely down the tubes lately - anything and everything that anyone doesn't like gets a "troll" mod these days, and nobody seems to care what "troll" even means. I'm starting to wonder if there are now several groups deliberately doing bad moderation, and moderating each others posts up to maintain their karma, or something.
Well you are certainly not off-topic (in spite of what some stupid moderators think), I think your point was trying to be that people who live comfortably and have their basic needs taken care off are generally less likely to be inclined to wage war. By and large this is true, but there are exceptions. People also have basic needs which are not material, such as the feeling of having some independence and control over their own lives and communities, and the feeling that they are able to contribute to the development of their communities. Thus people like Bin Laden do not like foreign troops on their land and foreign meddling in their affairs.
nearly 800 dead
I thought there were many thousands more than that dead by now. Or do only American deaths 'count' in this anyway illegal war? Surely not?
Likewise, the parent post (i.e. my own post) should be "off-topic", NOT "troll". Hope the meta-moderators get you.
Given that they've already posited that mankind's ancestors appeared about 50 million years ago, they're down to a mere 200 million years to go from single-celled to upright and walking.
Huh? Are you confused or just stupid?
And the worst part is you've been modded up as insightful. It's insane. Come on people, visit a goddamn library, or do some googling, or something! This post is total BS, and it doesn't take a genuis to confirm against actual scientific theories that this is total BS.
Could you explain exactly who is "blindly accepting" these theories? We all know they're "just theories".
BTW they found a bit more than just "sediments" and a "few holes in the ground". It does seem likely in fact that they have found a meteor impact crater, just not necessarily one that resulted in a major extinction.
Troll? Come on moderators. It's either 'funny' or 'off-topic'. Perhaps you should be forced to read a definition of the word "troll" before you're allowed to moderate.
I hope you were just joking :) Sturgeon's Law is certainly not a "law" in any scientific sense.
You're not "supposed to" believe it, where did you get that idea? Clearly you have no idea how science functions, why don't you learn what science is before publicly criticizing it? It is obvious from your post that you don't even understand the basics of the scientific method, despite the fact that you think you "know a bit" about science.
If you actually read up a bit about this, the scientists here are basically saying that this MIGHT BE a possible cause of one of the great extinctions (read "more research required"). Furthermore, this is now just one new "HYPOTHESIS" against two other major "HYPOTHESES" that alread exist that proposing other "POSSIBLE" reasons for this great extinction.
Certainly nobody has asked you to "believe" any of these possible explanations, and none of the scientists involved have claimed that their hypotheses are 'the truth' either. In fact, with things like this, scientists never really decide that any one theory is "the truth" - they basically often settle on a theory that is "the most likely" - they, however, ALWAYS "leave the door open" to other possible explanations that may appear in future that are better. Always. (This is all in refreshing contrast to religions like Christianity, where you are in fact expected to 100% completely believe something regardless of whether or not there is really evidence for it.)
The slashdot blurb has also spun this thing completely wrong. So even worse, now you make decisions about scientific theories based on a slashdot blurb. Sheesh.
Hmm .. true, good point, it's not very newsworthy when you put it that way. I thought it was quite interesting though nonetheless.
As a developer, I switched to wxWidgets not explicitly for the cross-platform capabilities, but because it's a much better API, and quite frankly Win32 and MFC suck so incredibly ridiculously badly that I could not face the thought of using them (and yes I have over 6 years of dev experience with them, they are bad). But now that I've switched to wxWidgets, my applications will require relatively minimal effort for me to make them run on other platforms. If I'd done them on Win32 or MFC, I would be at least a man-year away from being cross-platform. Perhaps Microsoft realises that their APIs are so bad that they're chasing some people into the hands of cross-platform competitor APIs, which is dangerous from their perspective because it means more ISVs building software that runs on other platforms. So perhaps they're hoping to start attracting more ISVs back to strictly Microsoft APIs again to prevent this.
This is non-fact-based speculation, of course, based on my own perceptions.