Or did they report there was a "civil war" in Iraq? One of those is factually true, the other is not.
What do you mean? Someone gets to officialy declare "a civil war"? Or is it based on the amount of armed militias, sectarian gangs, and random thugs blowing things up and killing people by the hundreds? In the first case, no civil war was ever fought, ever as there are no valid, legitimate "sides" to "officialy" declare it, before it starts. If it is the other, a "civil war" is simmering in Iraq.
Which of them makes one "better" informed? I guess it's a matter of opinion.
Not emphasising one, versus the other (which is your whole beef here) does impact the listener's information. However it pales in comparison with simple partisan hackery which places like FOX and much of the corporate media represent. The point is that none of the so called "news" organizations should engage in either. No careful selection of news items to fit an agenda, but far more importantly a severe separation of "news" from "opinion". There are many privileges granted to newsmen in exchange for their supposed allegiance to truth, not to the bottom line. If they are unable to fulfill their part of the bargrain, all their privileges should be revoked and the so-called "news" channels severely penalized by FCC via revoking their licenses and granting the bandwith to real news organizations.
The OP's comment was along the lines of "MS money going to a good cause? Gates must be spinning in his grave!". My reply was to point out that actually, Gates has already given a lot of money to good causes.
All of which being of course horribly wrong as both Gates Senior and Junior are alive and kicking.
You do realise that the Gates Foundation has given grants worth $10.2 billion since its inception, right?
And so did Rockefeller and Carnegie. Both evil bastards responsible for killing and enslaving a whole lot of people and all sorts of unspeakable misery for others. I hear Al Capone was big on charity too. Hitler made trains run on time, or so I am told. And so on. No, whatever Gates does now is far too late to clear his name. In other words, giving away a portion of your ill gotten loot to try to buy respectability is never going to work except with naive fools who fall for such transparent schemes.
What counts is how you got the money. If it were not for Gates, that money would be already invested in a lot of other places, much of it in various good causes. May I remind you that nearly all charities and research institutions paid piles of money to Gates to begin with?
This is not a 'free market'; it is exactly the opposite. It is a market corrupted by an unsupervised government agency that is granting undeserved monopolies.
Untrue. "Free market" on its own is just one of many possible economic scenarios with a limited applicability domain and with great many flaws, which -- if not addressed by external controls -- devolve to feudal scenarios. The process just happens in a different way then the current "creeping corporatism" method of bringing about feudalism does. Monopolies and abuse of thereof are just as possible in an unrestricted "free market" as they are via government meddling. That is because contrary to what free market religion converts would like everyone to believe, a great number of real-life (as opposed to pipe-dream theoretical) conditions exist allowing for devastating monopolies to form, based on geograpghic, political, technological and other means of creating the so-called "barrier to entry" for competitors. The governmental assistance is just one method of many.
but your post seems to imply that the very concept of 'free markets' is a sham, which I don't agree with.
"Free market" is just a particular economic scheme which has a rather restricted applicability domain and a great number of flaws, many of which, if not addressed by external controls, would lead to rapid devolution of any "pure" free-market scenario into some form of feudalism. In that the parent poster is quite right. That is independent from the fact that the current creeping corporatism is approaching fedualism on its own in a different way.
I dunno about that, to me "zero copy" was always associated with not copying, essentially unchanged all the way, data buffers between various layers of the system, i.e userspace -> libs -> kernel -> ip filters -> drivers -> network hardware, rather then general-purpose memory.
There's some interesting content there, but mostly it's not news, it's a journal. It gives a limited perspective, just like every other source. I suspect you value it because it reinforces your opinion (which is understandable)
I value it because it offers unique perspective. One of course has to take it with other factors in mind: Riverbend is Suni and likely from a family which was moderately well-off under Saddam, which colours her perspective by this association with a particular ethnic/social group. But such a caution has to be excercised with every news source.
It seems that you are looking to cast a wide net and eliminate what you find valueless. Panning for gold, perhaps? I pick a few high-profile sources that are in opposition, and read between the lines as much as possible. I think in the end we probably tend to settle near the same space.
But what makes these sources "high profile"? I would posit that it is their corporate backing and financial resources, frequently not associated with the "journalism". Washington Times for example is essentially a front to the Sun Myung Moon's religious cult and loses vast sums of money every year, yet is able to maintain "high profile" due to essentially limitless supply of cash from that organisation. GE, Viviendi own NBC, Viacom owns CBS, Disney owns ABC, Newscorp owns FOX, etc and so on. All of the "high profile" media are essentially fronts for some multi-national mega-corporations 99% of whose business consists of something other then "journalism". And the criteria for being an employee of these organisations is similarly suspect.
So while using blogs for news may seem as low-yeld activity, as the signal-to-noise ratio is low, relying on the so called "mainstream media" strikes me as exceedingly dangerous. One does not need to look much further then the "Rah! Rah!" media coverage in the run up of the Iraq war, where any dissenting voices were essentially muzzled as "unpatriotic" and many "high profile" media were downright complicit in manufacturing "rationale" for the war, complete with fake "news" stories being fed to them by White House operatives and various other con-artists like Ahmed Chelabi. All of this followed by being cheerfully and uncritically "embedded" with the military to deliver sanitized, Hollywood-approved version of the "war", while studiously ignoring the reports of all the freelance, independent journalists on the ground. And may I point out that during all that time it was the blogs who were painting a picture of the affairs much closer to reality, as it is now patently obvious, eventually forcing the much belated, navel-gazing, dismissive and defiant "mea culpas" from places like The New York Times.
To me a journalist is not someone annointed by a multi-billion corporation, but someone who is able to publish original, thought provoking stories and whose search is not for the corporate dollar but for verifiable truth. And I would suggest that odds of finding such a person on his/her passion-driven blog are much higher then in a corproate news-room where any such frevor will, by the very mechanics of such a place, be severely constrained and manipulated by conflicting loyalties and financial concerns.
But the information bloggers dig up tends to come from traditional journalists.
I am not sure if that is so, as far as I can tell no verifiable data exists to back that assertion up. On the other hand, great many possibilities of worthwile journalistic activity exist on small time, one-issue blogs run simply by people with personal, first hand knowledge of the events and a grasp of English language. For example, take a look at this blog.
In light of this, you would have to come up with some stronger argument which would show a strong corelation between traditional media credentials and the originality of information. May I remind you that to be a "journalist" only two things are required: an original, relevant story and some means of publishing it. With the advent of the Internet, it is understandable why the "traditional" media journalists feel so threatened and why they desperately attempt to paint themselves as the sources of all journalism, in spite obvious evidence to the contrary.
but in the end the consistently low quality of anything but the most professional blogs eliminates them as a source of news for me.
Then you are looking at this in a wrong way, there are many functions many of the blogs perform out there. Some are mostly irellevant junk most of the time, interspersed with a rare gem of originality. Some are boring but by the confluence of events in the real world can become highly relevant. But some are aggregators of data from such rarely visited blogs and their role is similar to that of the "traditional" media: to bring various pieces of data into one spot, subsequently "refining" the overall quality of the contents, so that busy people do not have to dregde through the irellevant. Some are more successful at this then others. But the crucial distinction between blogosphere and the traditional media is that blogosphere requires the reader to search and think, while the traditional media purports to have done it all for you already.
Absolutely! That is why Slashdot, and just about any other forum in existence, reserves the "-1 Troll" as a badge of honour for the geniuses such as you. You are simply not fully recognised for your achievements yet, seeing as you are still posting with a default score of above 0 here. Perheaps you should remind people of your Troll aspirations more frequently, so that the full rewards for your wisdom can be afforded to you!
Linux fags make people puke.
Indubitably! That is also why most users of popular fora have shunned the "Linx Faggots" (who are apparently identified by a self-appointed committe of the Troll Community, a committe to which everyone refers for general advice on all things wise and complicated) and have mercilessly exterminated their posts by using their moderation powers to rate them out of sight, or even outright banned the accounts of the offenders, right?
Keep clowning on, the red nose and oversized shoes suit you so well.
Many are merely people with vested interest in the matter, focusing on one single issue, some are people with journalistic aspirations, or who could be considered as the so-called "freelance" journalists. Again, it is the quality of one's work which makes one a "journalist", not some ritualistic annointment by the media corporations.
Bloggers are the journalism equivalent of the "free market". I.e. a horde of independent, individually motivated (for whatever reason) people who are indpendently from each other digging for information. Vast majority of it turns out to be junk (sort of like plastic Chinese crap at Wal-Mart) but some manage to produce items of genuine quality. The strength is in the chaotic, but all-encompassing, method of search, very much the same strength which "free market" has in its respective area. But also having similar downisdes, chaos and great inefficiencies being some of them.
And before any free-market religion convert jumps on this with "but free markets are most efficient thing ever!" meme, lets not kid ourselves, they are efficient only from the perspective of their search function and suffer a host of horrible inefficiencies elsewhere, very much as any other method of allocation of limited resources does, each being more efficient at some of its aspects when compared to others.
regardless of having trolled in the past timecop is a pretty smart f*ck
GNAA trolling makes him an anti-social idiot, which disqualifies him from expressing any opinion on social interactions with the so called "Linux community". Next.
just because his side hobby is trolling doesn't mean he doesn't have hardcore madsk1llz too.
See above. His "madskillz" are irrellevant when it comes to interactions with live people, interactions which he already demonstrated being incapable of in any civilized sense, as he is an anti-social moron. Therefore his opinions on "snobs" will be discarded out of hand, as he is far worse himself. Such is a price of being a socipathic troglodyte.
and since i've idled with timecop for the biggest part of a decade I know damn well he knows the difference between a decent doc and not.
Hanging around with, and being sympathetic to the likes of GNAA trolls makes you one. Goodbye.
You forgot to convert to American political units.
It is exceedingly difficult to do so as the "left-right" method of description of political affiliations is crude in the extreme. Some of the policies of the Conservatives are positively neo-con, while some others are left of the Democrats. I personally think we need to come up with some other, more precise but yet concise method of describing these things.
She was a Member of Parliment (think: Congresswoman) for the Liberal Party of Canada (slightly to the right of center party -- although they tend to wobble to the right and left spectacularly all the time), who decided to get in bed with multi-national media companies, got a $250 per plate fund-raiser organised by them for herself, and promised in a speach in that fund-raiser to crusade on behalf of these multi-nationals, calling all those who oppose them "consumer rights zealots" and the like.
The electorate disagreed and she has lost the elections in a horrible way (the fact that the Liberal party was in trouble already didn't help her either).
She is a Canadian Liberal (the Liberal Party) Member of Parliment (MP) who had CRIA and other big multi-nationals organize her a $250 a plate fund-raiser, at which she gave speaches accusing any pro-consumer stance in the copyright disputes as "laughable pro-consumer zealotry" and where she promised to push through the Parliment a set of bills which reflect the interests of the multi-nationals exlusively.
The incident was publicised and added to an already severe baggage the Liberals were dragging and resulted in her loss in the elections.
Congratulations Slashdotters, you just have been successfully trolled on a grand scale!
timecop is a (founding one, if I am not mistaken) member of GNAA, the most obnoxious association of imbecillic, drooling morons the Internet had a misfortune ever to witness. Do you really plan on taking this jackass seriously?
In other words, your assumption that ANY CIVILIAN ANYWHERE has the same basic rights as the citizens of your country is sadly mistaken. Even when your Army is present somewhere, this does not grant the rights of a civilian of your nation to the locals, though your own Army/government may choose to do so if it wishes.
Lets not beat around the bush then and simply call these people what they would be, should those wishing so desperately to create such classes of "uncovered" by any law peoples want: Slaves or "Walking, Talking Pieces of Meat". From now on, anytime a discussion of "unlawful combatants" and other euhpemisms for Slaves or "Walking Pieces of Meat" starts, I will simply correct these terms, so that everyone can plainly understand what these evil, vicious, double-dealing, double-talking, conniving proponents of such "interpretations" of laws really want. Fair enough?
This incoherent, self-contradictory, spiteful and frankly, idiotic, rant does not even deserve a reply. The gist of it seems to be "I am calling myself an 'anti-idiotarian' (whatever that means) and therefroe no one can call me an idiot! Aha! Got you there!". Followed by wild claims of incompetence and ignorance on the part of just about everyone, except, of course, the ranting and raving 'anti-idiotarian', who for all intents and purposes, exhibits all the traits of, you guessed it, an idiot.
Walks like a duck, talks like a duck..
Oh and let us not forget the plentiful, arrogant, smug, sanctimonious, full of contempt name calling, labeled, self-approvingly, "honesty".
As I said earlier, replying to ACs is a waste of bits on Slashdot.
Well, if not unlawful combatants, the closest fitting description for terrorist found in war zones would be spies. And the convention allows for summary execution of spies caught in battle, so I would take Guantanamo if I were them.
Err, what? How would you know a "spy"? "Hey! That there man, he is a spy! I say so! I saw him spy! I swear!" followed by summary execution. Right? If you are going that route, might as well forget about that whole Justice System thing and start shooting people you don't like.
By the way, any "shortcuts" such as killing saboteurs on the battlefield have to do with battlefield conditions and cease to exist as soon as one is no longer in the heat of the battle, where there is no possiblity of trials and courts. Then a normal process must take over.
Note that "people not wearing uniforms/identifying markings but carrying guns" aren't protected as either soldiers or civilians under the original Geneva Conventions. That's covered by one of the Protocols.
Regardless of which the point is that under no circumstances it is possible to become a "non-person" with no rights whatsoever. If you believe otherwise, please start using the proper technical terminology for this: a slave or "walking piece of meat".
It is also not true if your opponent is not a signatory of the Geneva Convention - you have no Geneva Convention obligations to non-signatories, though it is usually easier to treat everyone the same (Geneva Convention) than to have to sort them out into "protected" and "not protected".
Again, this has only to do with additional protections, above and beyond mere civilian status, which is the default.
Note that the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan that ratified the Conventions were overthrown decades ago, and so those countries may no longer be bound by the Geneva Conventions (which would free other countries to not treat them as protected by the Conventions). Get a lawyer who's really up on International Law to sort that one out, I won't even try.
Again, such hair splitting is only relevant to someone who wishes to create the above-mentioned "walking piece of meat" class. As signatories, unless specifically withdrawn or shown to engage in actions contrary to the conventions, the countries are bound by default, regardless of government change. Otherwise no treaty would last past one president in the USA. But even if not following the Geneva Conventions, one still gets back to the starting point: a plain civilian, who has some basic rights.
Germans had to stalk American shipping, they weren't tipped off at the start because there was little opporuntiy for spies.
You must be kidding. There was no need for spies, at least at the start if WWII, where U-boats had a field day, sinking astronomical tonnage right at the shores of the USA. Coastal shipping didn't even turn off its navigation lights for Pete's sake until like 1943.
All I can show is that Brazil kept them free, and their shipping suffered inordinantly.
US shipping suffered orders of magnitude more tonnage lost to U-boats then Brazil, by any measure. Only after the convoy tactics were adopted and a huge number of ASDIC and radar equipped ships and planes were deployed, combined with the breaking of the Enigma code the tides have turned against the U-boats.
To say that he did is just completely wrong. The concept of an unlawful combatant (or more correctly, an enemy combatant) has been around for a long time.
"Enemy" and "unlawful" are worlds apart. An enemy combatant is covered by the Thrid Geneva Convention and entitled to a POW status. Also the fact that the US Supreme Court rules itself above any international agreements and laws is not exactly working in US' favour here. The US governments have commited a great number of violations of such laws over the years, and this is precisely one of the reasons why no one takes their "commitment" to law outside of its borders seriously. And even inside, as the internment of the Japanese Americans during WWII clearly indicates. Simply put, the USs attitude towards the Geneva Conventions, Nuclear Nonpoliferation and other treaties is that these laws apply to everyone else but not to the USA, who is entitled to do whatever it pleases and call it "legal".
For what its worth, every person who is brought to gitmo has an opportunity to challenge the factual basis for their labeling as an enemy combatant before a tribunal.
No they don't, the process appears to be arbitrary, probably due to the fact that next to no evidence exists against most of those captured, other then hearsay or unreliable accusations obtained via bribery and the like.
Then who is judging Saddam currently? Either there is a stable/legitimate/internationally recognized civilian court system in Iraq, or there isn't. So you are saying Saddam is right?
NO, YOU ARE WRONG. It was created by FDR to get around the law and get rid of alleged German spies during WWII.
Err... what was created?! What are you on about?
Just because you don't like Bush doesn't mean he made up everything you disagree with.
Who is talking about "everything"? Specifically, the Bush Administration's "interpretation" of Geneva Conventions is widely derided all over the planet. And rightfully so.
But FDR started this shit.
I am not sure what you are referring to? The Japanese internment camps? FDR admitted it was wrong to do and apologised later.
Slashdot Mirror
Following which it immediatelty jumped up in April.
Or did they report there was a "civil war" in Iraq? One of those is factually true, the other is not.
What do you mean? Someone gets to officialy declare "a civil war"? Or is it based on the amount of armed militias, sectarian gangs, and random thugs blowing things up and killing people by the hundreds? In the first case, no civil war was ever fought, ever as there are no valid, legitimate "sides" to "officialy" declare it, before it starts. If it is the other, a "civil war" is simmering in Iraq.
Which of them makes one "better" informed? I guess it's a matter of opinion.
Not emphasising one, versus the other (which is your whole beef here) does impact the listener's information. However it pales in comparison with simple partisan hackery which places like FOX and much of the corporate media represent. The point is that none of the so called "news" organizations should engage in either. No careful selection of news items to fit an agenda, but far more importantly a severe separation of "news" from "opinion". There are many privileges granted to newsmen in exchange for their supposed allegiance to truth, not to the bottom line. If they are unable to fulfill their part of the bargrain, all their privileges should be revoked and the so-called "news" channels severely penalized by FCC via revoking their licenses and granting the bandwith to real news organizations.
So much for highly ambiguous jokes. Perhaps it should have mentioned something about him only sleeping in it during the day.
All of which being of course horribly wrong as both Gates Senior and Junior are alive and kicking.
And so did Rockefeller and Carnegie. Both evil bastards responsible for killing and enslaving a whole lot of people and all sorts of unspeakable misery for others. I hear Al Capone was big on charity too. Hitler made trains run on time, or so I am told. And so on. No, whatever Gates does now is far too late to clear his name. In other words, giving away a portion of your ill gotten loot to try to buy respectability is never going to work except with naive fools who fall for such transparent schemes.
What counts is how you got the money. If it were not for Gates, that money would be already invested in a lot of other places, much of it in various good causes. May I remind you that nearly all charities and research institutions paid piles of money to Gates to begin with?
Untrue. "Free market" on its own is just one of many possible economic scenarios with a limited applicability domain and with great many flaws, which -- if not addressed by external controls -- devolve to feudal scenarios. The process just happens in a different way then the current "creeping corporatism" method of bringing about feudalism does. Monopolies and abuse of thereof are just as possible in an unrestricted "free market" as they are via government meddling. That is because contrary to what free market religion converts would like everyone to believe, a great number of real-life (as opposed to pipe-dream theoretical) conditions exist allowing for devastating monopolies to form, based on geograpghic, political, technological and other means of creating the so-called "barrier to entry" for competitors. The governmental assistance is just one method of many.
"Free market" is just a particular economic scheme which has a rather restricted applicability domain and a great number of flaws, many of which, if not addressed by external controls, would lead to rapid devolution of any "pure" free-market scenario into some form of feudalism. In that the parent poster is quite right. That is independent from the fact that the current creeping corporatism is approaching fedualism on its own in a different way.
I dunno about that, to me "zero copy" was always associated with not copying, essentially unchanged all the way, data buffers between various layers of the system, i.e userspace -> libs -> kernel -> ip filters -> drivers -> network hardware, rather then general-purpose memory.
I value it because it offers unique perspective. One of course has to take it with other factors in mind: Riverbend is Suni and likely from a family which was moderately well-off under Saddam, which colours her perspective by this association with a particular ethnic/social group. But such a caution has to be excercised with every news source.
It seems that you are looking to cast a wide net and eliminate what you find valueless. Panning for gold, perhaps? I pick a few high-profile sources that are in opposition, and read between the lines as much as possible. I think in the end we probably tend to settle near the same space.But what makes these sources "high profile"? I would posit that it is their corporate backing and financial resources, frequently not associated with the "journalism". Washington Times for example is essentially a front to the Sun Myung Moon's religious cult and loses vast sums of money every year, yet is able to maintain "high profile" due to essentially limitless supply of cash from that organisation. GE, Viviendi own NBC, Viacom owns CBS, Disney owns ABC, Newscorp owns FOX, etc and so on. All of the "high profile" media are essentially fronts for some multi-national mega-corporations 99% of whose business consists of something other then "journalism". And the criteria for being an employee of these organisations is similarly suspect.
So while using blogs for news may seem as low-yeld activity, as the signal-to-noise ratio is low, relying on the so called "mainstream media" strikes me as exceedingly dangerous. One does not need to look much further then the "Rah! Rah!" media coverage in the run up of the Iraq war, where any dissenting voices were essentially muzzled as "unpatriotic" and many "high profile" media were downright complicit in manufacturing "rationale" for the war, complete with fake "news" stories being fed to them by White House operatives and various other con-artists like Ahmed Chelabi. All of this followed by being cheerfully and uncritically "embedded" with the military to deliver sanitized, Hollywood-approved version of the "war", while studiously ignoring the reports of all the freelance, independent journalists on the ground. And may I point out that during all that time it was the blogs who were painting a picture of the affairs much closer to reality, as it is now patently obvious, eventually forcing the much belated, navel-gazing, dismissive and defiant "mea culpas" from places like The New York Times.
To me a journalist is not someone annointed by a multi-billion corporation, but someone who is able to publish original, thought provoking stories and whose search is not for the corporate dollar but for verifiable truth. And I would suggest that odds of finding such a person on his/her passion-driven blog are much higher then in a corproate news-room where any such frevor will, by the very mechanics of such a place, be severely constrained and manipulated by conflicting loyalties and financial concerns.
I am not sure if that is so, as far as I can tell no verifiable data exists to back that assertion up. On the other hand, great many possibilities of worthwile journalistic activity exist on small time, one-issue blogs run simply by people with personal, first hand knowledge of the events and a grasp of English language. For example, take a look at this blog.
In light of this, you would have to come up with some stronger argument which would show a strong corelation between traditional media credentials and the originality of information. May I remind you that to be a "journalist" only two things are required: an original, relevant story and some means of publishing it. With the advent of the Internet, it is understandable why the "traditional" media journalists feel so threatened and why they desperately attempt to paint themselves as the sources of all journalism, in spite obvious evidence to the contrary.
but in the end the consistently low quality of anything but the most professional blogs eliminates them as a source of news for me.
Then you are looking at this in a wrong way, there are many functions many of the blogs perform out there. Some are mostly irellevant junk most of the time, interspersed with a rare gem of originality. Some are boring but by the confluence of events in the real world can become highly relevant. But some are aggregators of data from such rarely visited blogs and their role is similar to that of the "traditional" media: to bring various pieces of data into one spot, subsequently "refining" the overall quality of the contents, so that busy people do not have to dregde through the irellevant. Some are more successful at this then others. But the crucial distinction between blogosphere and the traditional media is that blogosphere requires the reader to search and think, while the traditional media purports to have done it all for you already.
Absolutely! That is why Slashdot, and just about any other forum in existence, reserves the "-1 Troll" as a badge of honour for the geniuses such as you. You are simply not fully recognised for your achievements yet, seeing as you are still posting with a default score of above 0 here. Perheaps you should remind people of your Troll aspirations more frequently, so that the full rewards for your wisdom can be afforded to you!
Linux fags make people puke.
Indubitably! That is also why most users of popular fora have shunned the "Linx Faggots" (who are apparently identified by a self-appointed committe of the Troll Community, a committe to which everyone refers for general advice on all things wise and complicated) and have mercilessly exterminated their posts by using their moderation powers to rate them out of sight, or even outright banned the accounts of the offenders, right?
Keep clowning on, the red nose and oversized shoes suit you so well.
Many are merely people with vested interest in the matter, focusing on one single issue, some are people with journalistic aspirations, or who could be considered as the so-called "freelance" journalists. Again, it is the quality of one's work which makes one a "journalist", not some ritualistic annointment by the media corporations.
And before any free-market religion convert jumps on this with "but free markets are most efficient thing ever!" meme, lets not kid ourselves, they are efficient only from the perspective of their search function and suffer a host of horrible inefficiencies elsewhere, very much as any other method of allocation of limited resources does, each being more efficient at some of its aspects when compared to others.
GNAA trolling makes him an anti-social idiot, which disqualifies him from expressing any opinion on social interactions with the so called "Linux community". Next.
just because his side hobby is trolling doesn't mean he doesn't have hardcore madsk1llz too.
See above. His "madskillz" are irrellevant when it comes to interactions with live people, interactions which he already demonstrated being incapable of in any civilized sense, as he is an anti-social moron. Therefore his opinions on "snobs" will be discarded out of hand, as he is far worse himself. Such is a price of being a socipathic troglodyte.
and since i've idled with timecop for the biggest part of a decade I know damn well he knows the difference between a decent doc and not.
Hanging around with, and being sympathetic to the likes of GNAA trolls makes you one. Goodbye.
It is exceedingly difficult to do so as the "left-right" method of description of political affiliations is crude in the extreme. Some of the policies of the Conservatives are positively neo-con, while some others are left of the Democrats. I personally think we need to come up with some other, more precise but yet concise method of describing these things.
The electorate disagreed and she has lost the elections in a horrible way (the fact that the Liberal party was in trouble already didn't help her either).
The incident was publicised and added to an already severe baggage the Liberals were dragging and resulted in her loss in the elections.
timecop is a (founding one, if I am not mistaken) member of GNAA, the most obnoxious association of imbecillic, drooling morons the Internet had a misfortune ever to witness. Do you really plan on taking this jackass seriously?
Wake up, dammit!
Lets not beat around the bush then and simply call these people what they would be, should those wishing so desperately to create such classes of "uncovered" by any law peoples want: Slaves or "Walking, Talking Pieces of Meat". From now on, anytime a discussion of "unlawful combatants" and other euhpemisms for Slaves or "Walking Pieces of Meat" starts, I will simply correct these terms, so that everyone can plainly understand what these evil, vicious, double-dealing, double-talking, conniving proponents of such "interpretations" of laws really want. Fair enough?
Walks like a duck, talks like a duck..
Oh and let us not forget the plentiful, arrogant, smug, sanctimonious, full of contempt name calling, labeled, self-approvingly, "honesty".
As I said earlier, replying to ACs is a waste of bits on Slashdot.
Err, what? How would you know a "spy"? "Hey! That there man, he is a spy! I say so! I saw him spy! I swear!" followed by summary execution. Right? If you are going that route, might as well forget about that whole Justice System thing and start shooting people you don't like.
By the way, any "shortcuts" such as killing saboteurs on the battlefield have to do with battlefield conditions and cease to exist as soon as one is no longer in the heat of the battle, where there is no possiblity of trials and courts. Then a normal process must take over.
Regardless of which the point is that under no circumstances it is possible to become a "non-person" with no rights whatsoever. If you believe otherwise, please start using the proper technical terminology for this: a slave or "walking piece of meat".
It is also not true if your opponent is not a signatory of the Geneva Convention - you have no Geneva Convention obligations to non-signatories, though it is usually easier to treat everyone the same (Geneva Convention) than to have to sort them out into "protected" and "not protected".
Again, this has only to do with additional protections, above and beyond mere civilian status, which is the default.
Note that the governments of Iraq and Afghanistan that ratified the Conventions were overthrown decades ago, and so those countries may no longer be bound by the Geneva Conventions (which would free other countries to not treat them as protected by the Conventions). Get a lawyer who's really up on International Law to sort that one out, I won't even try.
Again, such hair splitting is only relevant to someone who wishes to create the above-mentioned "walking piece of meat" class. As signatories, unless specifically withdrawn or shown to engage in actions contrary to the conventions, the countries are bound by default, regardless of government change. Otherwise no treaty would last past one president in the USA. But even if not following the Geneva Conventions, one still gets back to the starting point: a plain civilian, who has some basic rights.
You must be kidding. There was no need for spies, at least at the start if WWII, where U-boats had a field day, sinking astronomical tonnage right at the shores of the USA. Coastal shipping didn't even turn off its navigation lights for Pete's sake until like 1943.
All I can show is that Brazil kept them free, and their shipping suffered inordinantly.
US shipping suffered orders of magnitude more tonnage lost to U-boats then Brazil, by any measure. Only after the convoy tactics were adopted and a huge number of ASDIC and radar equipped ships and planes were deployed, combined with the breaking of the Enigma code the tides have turned against the U-boats.
"Enemy" and "unlawful" are worlds apart. An enemy combatant is covered by the Thrid Geneva Convention and entitled to a POW status. Also the fact that the US Supreme Court rules itself above any international agreements and laws is not exactly working in US' favour here. The US governments have commited a great number of violations of such laws over the years, and this is precisely one of the reasons why no one takes their "commitment" to law outside of its borders seriously. And even inside, as the internment of the Japanese Americans during WWII clearly indicates. Simply put, the USs attitude towards the Geneva Conventions, Nuclear Nonpoliferation and other treaties is that these laws apply to everyone else but not to the USA, who is entitled to do whatever it pleases and call it "legal".
For what its worth, every person who is brought to gitmo has an opportunity to challenge the factual basis for their labeling as an enemy combatant before a tribunal.
No they don't, the process appears to be arbitrary, probably due to the fact that next to no evidence exists against most of those captured, other then hearsay or unreliable accusations obtained via bribery and the like.
Good point.
Err... what was created?! What are you on about?
Just because you don't like Bush doesn't mean he made up everything you disagree with.
Who is talking about "everything"? Specifically, the Bush Administration's "interpretation" of Geneva Conventions is widely derided all over the planet. And rightfully so.
But FDR started this shit.
I am not sure what you are referring to? The Japanese internment camps? FDR admitted it was wrong to do and apologised later.