A large part of the difference is the maturity of the field. People have been building houses for a LONG time. The processes of collaboration are firmly in place. Just as importantly, the expectations one unit will have of another unit are well established, and accepted by both sides of the equation (i.e., your painters know that they are expected to put up more than a layer of primer, you know they know this expectation, and so on). This is not necessarily true in a coding environment. Coding practices are still very ambiguous, on an industry scale.
Another factor is the relative ease of migrating contract coding work. Like you say, in construction, you quickly learn who in town is and is not worth hiring. And you don't do a whole lot of hiring people 5 towns over. Not so with coding. When I can hire contractors from India as feasibly as I can hire local talent, it becomes much harder to rely on reputation to separate the wheat from the chaff.
How would you feel if you were expected to provide services in conflict with your beliefs? E.G. expected to convert customers to some cult, or write articles you disagreed strongly with
Well, it depends. If MY boss asked me to convert customers to some cult, I would refuse, AND be upset if she tried to fire me, b/c it is a completely unreasonable thing to ask of a database administrator. I could not reasonably have been expected to know that this might be a job duty when I took the job.
However, if I took a job writing company press releases, and was asked to write something with which I strongly disagreed, I would either make a moral compromise, or quit. I knew when I took the job that it entailed writing what my boss told me to. So, yes, I DO expect people to either do the job they agreed to do, or quit if they find that it conflicts with their beliefs. If that means they have to choose a different field of work, well, people have been suffering for their beliefs for a long time. I find that an admirable trait. Expecting OTHERS to suffer for YOUR beliefs, which they don't share, I find... not so admirable.
Yeah, that touches on one of my pet peeves. As a self-identified Christian, it really irks me that these fundamentalist assholes are out there killing, hating, and judging other people in the name of MY savior.
Of course, to be fair, it would probably irk them to know that I drink, smoke pot occasionally, don't care if homosexuals marry each other, and identify myself as Christian.
many of whom believe Christians are a persecuted minority in America.
Well, it all depends on your definition of persecuted, doesn't it (except for the minority claim, that is pretty cut-and-dried)? For instance, some Christians think that freedom of religion means they have the *right* to force their religious beliefs on others. Any attempt to prevent them from doing so is persecution. For instance, a pharmacist that refuses to fill a prescription for the morning after pill. Refusing to provide a legal service (that happens to be your job) to someone else because you disagree with their moral (but legal) choices, well, that is just good Christianity, certainly not any sort of religious/moral discrimination. However, firing someone for not doing their job is "religious persecution". Its all in the spin.
and it might well prove to provide nothing more than an expensive and false sense of security.
Which is the only kind our leaders seem to be interested in providing. I flew to Europe October, 2001, out of Raleigh/Durham INTL. There were MPs with M16s scattered all around the airport. Because, you know, having armed guards in the terminal is really useful and all...but hey, it sure does make people feel better! Who cares that you can smuggle just about anything you want into the baggage compartments of airplanes?
Yeah, I actually managed to parse what you were trying to say; I just found it too funny to avoid commenting on it.
BTW, your English is VERY good (much better than my <INSET ANY OTHER LANGUAGE>, but you might want to make sure you have a firm grasp of the word "kinky" before using it. Its just one of those words that is too easy to say something embarassing with...
In my opinion, free speech is _exactly_ escaping any consequences of your speech
Then there is no such thing as free speech, anywhere. There is nowhere on Earth that I can be free of the social consequences of telling you that your wife is a fat nasty two dollar whore that hands out gonorrhea like lollipops. At the very least, I will suffer from a reputation as an asshole. Socially. Legally, which is the important one when determining one's "Freedom of Speech", there are not any consequences.
The office building I work in is located in one of those "We have everything in the world right here" communities: it has a church, a bank, a grocery store, a movie theater, several resteraunts and pubs, etc. One of my coworkers lives in this community, literally one block from the office. She drives to work EVERY DAY! She also drives home for lunch, then back to work, EVERY DAY! She lives two blocks from the gym; yep, she drives to the gym to work out three times/week.
Not terribly surprising, she is also the most useless sack of crap we have in our department: comes in at 9:30 - 10:00, takes a two hour lunch, goes home at 3:30-4:00. And constantly bitches about how swamped she is, while farming as much of her work out as possible. Too bad our department head is too soft to actually fire anyone...
</rant>
. If you want some right that isn't spelled out in the constitution, pass an amendment
But thats not the way it is supposed to work. We, the people, are supposed to have any and all rights that are not explicitly granted to the federal government, or denied us by (constitutionally sound) laws. So, for instance, I don't have the right to print money; that is reserved for the federal government. Nor do I have the right to drive as fast as I want on the highway; laws have been passed restricting this right, and these laws have been found to be constitutionally sound (well, I honestly don't know that anyone has ever challenged speed limits, but you get the point). I DO have the right to brew beer in my own home, NOT b/c the constitution GIVES me that right, but b/c it no longer DENIES me that right. The 21st ammendment doesn't grant me the right to brew my own beer, it negates the 18th ammendment that denied me that right. Prior to the 18th ammendment, the constitution didn't say anything about alcohol at all, so Americans, by default, had the right to brew, since it wasn't denied them.
Their job is to filter things thru the exact wording and original intent of the law.
Don't have some panty waste judge decide that if the founders had realized that some folks wanted to be able to do, whatever, they'd have included it in the bill of rights, so it must be OK.
Uhm, deciding that if the founders had realized $X (or $X had even existed 250 years ago), then they would have done $Y, so we should do $Y, isn't that "filter[ing] things thru the exact wording and original intent of the law[/constitution]"? Besides, the Bill of Rights is not, and was not meant to be, an exclusive list of the rights we get. It was merely put in to emphasize the ones that the founders felt were absolutely the most important. Check out the 9th ammendment, sometime.
But you really can't expect your average slashdotter to get out of their chairs and actually go down to the passport office to do this? They'd much rather sit on their butts and whine.
You're right, it is much easier to sit and whine than do something about it (I personally have a very nice ass-groove in my favorite sitting chair). In this case, however, I think postponing the problem for a decade is less desirable than fixing the problem now. And don't even try to tell me that posting a comment on Slashdot isn't the first step in fixing the problem. ANY PROBLEM!
Original statement:Free speech should be exactly what the Constitution says it is, and that we need additional regulations to protect it means that the Consitution is being shit on, and that makes me sad.
Edited statement: Free speech should be [blah] we need additional regulations
And Jesus spoke, saying "All of my teachings can be summed up in this one thing: Love [blah] thyself." See, kids, editing can be FUN.
And if the company does the testing without your knowledge?
If a company can collect a urine or blood sample from you without your knowledge, maybe you need to lay off the drugs for a while, anyway.
Re:"Essentially" the same data?
on
OpenOffice Bloated?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
If using a prefetch causes my documents to load faster, then that would seem to me to be good design.
I think you misunderstand the OP (although, its possible I do). My take on his comment is that whichever application you use most commonly is going to be improved thru pre-caching and binding. So, if the testers use Excel often, their Excel load time is going to be faster than my load time if I never use Excel, even on otherwise identical machines. His point, I believe, is that if the testers did not account for this, then the Operating System's behavior of pre-caching and binding could play a significant enough factor in the load speeds to completely overshadow any differences in the Applications' respective abilities.
You'd probably save money by just doing it in-house, or at least find a better company to contract with.
We can't really afford to do it in-house. We have tried to shop around for a better hosting company, but these guys aren't too bad, and don't cost too much, so we haven't found anyone better per dollar, yet.
So then why are we paying taxes and giving politicians generous salaries if they aren't doing their job properly, and we have to expend extra money and effort to oversee them?
I agree, but what are the alternatives? Stop spending time and money overseeing them? Put someone else in charge, and spend time and money overseeing them? Do away with government altogether? I personally don't think that any of these are viable, attractive solutions, but maybe you do (or have another alternative I didn't think of).
Second, if power (the "right" to initiate force) is guaranteed to be abused (which history has proven many times over), then logically, the only way to prevent the abuse is to eliminate the power.
The problem with that is that eliminating the "power" (which is the "right" to use force) is not going to prevent those with the ability and the will from exercising force to gain their objectives; it will only remove the legitimacy that society currently gives to government. The whole point behind legitimizing government (and only gov't) to use force is that there WILL BE assholes that use force to gain their objectives. The only real choice is whether we want to be told what to do by whomever has the will and ability to amass the most force, or whether we collectively grant that force to actors that we choose. Look at the Shogun era of Japan for a good example of the "might makes right" form of rule.
What does "community" have to do with government run public schools?
I don't know exactly how you are defining "community" and "government", but most systems have a locally elected school board that makes most of the day-to-day decisions regarding running the system (actually, most systems delegate these responsibilities to a superintendent that is appointed by the elected school board, but the authority lies with the elected board). Of course, there are state and federal level regulations and officials, but as we are seeing with No Child Left Behind, state officials are challenging ( the authority of federal regulations. So, right now, it looks promising for the state level authorities that are asserting final say in how their system are run.
Why should we pay taxes to the government to run the public school system AND have to "actually work to improve" them?
Because, ideally, WE are the government? It is our duty and privilege to oversee what our appointed officials are doing, and if we think they aren't doing it right, work to change that. Yes, this is a pain; it requires time, effort, and money, but so does everything else. At work, we pay an off-site company to store our data, run backups, and manage our database servers. And yet, often enough, I actually have to spend time and effort working with this company to figure out what the problem is, when there are problems. And managing a multi-sourced data warehouse is fairly simple compared to running an effective educational system.
And yeah, this kind of intellectual gaming being passed off as critical thinking skills does tend to offend those with actual logical thinking skills. Like all of us here on/., eh?
Naturally:D
In fact, it seems reasonable to suspect that the people making this claim have invented a newly-refined definition of "racism" specifically to support their argument--a bit circular, but worse, unnecessary and distracting.
I agree, anytime an argument breaks down into a disagreement over the definition of your terms, the argument has strayed far from the realm of being a productive exchange of ideas. And generally, the one who has to stretch the common usage of a word the farthest is the one I find myself disagreeing with. Sorry, grammar pedants, I know I should say "...the one with whom I find myself disagreeing.", I just think it makes me sound like a schmuck.
I've actually had convervastions with [black & white] people that claimed it wasn't not possible for a black person to be racist, because a) they did not have any socio-economic power, so could not suppress others AND b) black persons' (in America) dislike/hate/whatever of white people was justified by their historical enslavement, and therefore was not racism.
The truly frightening part is that these people had all learned this particular view in class, from a professor, at a prestigious college. Ignoring the condescension (no black person has socio-economic power?) and (in my mind) extreme moral/philisophic/political view (whatever I do to you is justified, b/c your ancestor did something bad to mine), the thinking skills that are obviously being taught (or not taught) in this class make me cringe. It's almost enough to make me sympathize with the people who sneer at "liberal educations" (but not quite).
And I always thought Courtney Love was a brain-dead, no talent media whore. I was wrong about brain-dead, maybe I should download some of her music and give it a listen...
Thanks for the link, a really good read.
...then it's an oppressive government bitching about us forcing our ethics on them by restrcting the software we sell them.
While I don't doubt that these countries present it exactly as you say, I disagree with the implication inherent in such a position that me failing to help you* act in ways I find unethical is the equivalent of forcing my ethics on you. Refusing to involve myself in acts that I find unethical, by refusing to help enable others to perform them, is not the same as preventing others from engaging in these acts. If I (well, the US; noone cares what I say in these matters) said that these other countries were not allowed to develop and implement their own censorship software, that would be forcing western ethics on them.
* I don't really mean YOU, Iriel; more the general sense of "all of you that are not me". Unless, of course, you are actually John Smith of 742 Evergreen Terrace. If so, I want my baseball bat back, and you better have cleaned the blood off, this time!
People of conscience wouldn't support American companies building torture devices or weapons for oppressive regimes, but we'll turn a blind eye to the censorship of their people? Why is that?
So as to avoid a flamewar, I'll forbear mentioning my ideas as to the why, but I would like to point out that a not insignificant number of Americans not only turn a blind eye, but actively support the censorship of their own people; why should we expect them to be more charitable towards others?
From WikiPedia:
It's interesting to note that whilst the original version of Venom had a personal vendetta on Spider-Man, he just knew he was Peter Parker, this version had a vendetta against Peter and the Spider-Man identity meant nothing to him."
Not true. The original version of Venom's vendetta was against Peter Parker as well. Eddie Brock hated Parker b/c he blamed him for the fact that Brock was fired from the Daily Bugle. I'm not sure about the symbiote; it hated Peter Parker/Spiderman for rejecting it, I don't know that there was ever anything to suggest it distinguished between them.
The issue is displaying the dead bodies of soldiers (in caskets, but how does that matter?). The rest is partisan crap.
To me, the partisan crap is the issue. If I felt that the Administration was truly concerned (as you seem to be) about the appropriateness of the images, I would be less concerned that they are wielding political power to keep them out of the media. However, due to their past willingness to display equally distastefull images in the pursuit of their own agenda, I find it much more likely that they are supressing these images out of a desire to further their own political agenda. Censorship decisions based on moral grounds I merely find suspect; censorship decisions based on political expediency I find quite frightening.
Slashdot Mirror
A large part of the difference is the maturity of the field. People have been building houses for a LONG time. The processes of collaboration are firmly in place. Just as importantly, the expectations one unit will have of another unit are well established, and accepted by both sides of the equation (i.e., your painters know that they are expected to put up more than a layer of primer, you know they know this expectation, and so on). This is not necessarily true in a coding environment. Coding practices are still very ambiguous, on an industry scale.
Another factor is the relative ease of migrating contract coding work. Like you say, in construction, you quickly learn who in town is and is not worth hiring. And you don't do a whole lot of hiring people 5 towns over. Not so with coding. When I can hire contractors from India as feasibly as I can hire local talent, it becomes much harder to rely on reputation to separate the wheat from the chaff.
How would you feel if you were expected to provide services in conflict with your beliefs? E.G. expected to convert customers to some cult, or write articles you disagreed strongly with
Well, it depends. If MY boss asked me to convert customers to some cult, I would refuse, AND be upset if she tried to fire me, b/c it is a completely unreasonable thing to ask of a database administrator. I could not reasonably have been expected to know that this might be a job duty when I took the job.
However, if I took a job writing company press releases, and was asked to write something with which I strongly disagreed, I would either make a moral compromise, or quit. I knew when I took the job that it entailed writing what my boss told me to. So, yes, I DO expect people to either do the job they agreed to do, or quit if they find that it conflicts with their beliefs. If that means they have to choose a different field of work, well, people have been suffering for their beliefs for a long time. I find that an admirable trait. Expecting OTHERS to suffer for YOUR beliefs, which they don't share, I find... not so admirable.
Yeah, that touches on one of my pet peeves. As a self-identified Christian, it really irks me that these fundamentalist assholes are out there killing, hating, and judging other people in the name of MY savior.
Of course, to be fair, it would probably irk them to know that I drink, smoke pot occasionally, don't care if homosexuals marry each other, and identify myself as Christian.
many of whom believe Christians are a persecuted minority in America.
Well, it all depends on your definition of persecuted, doesn't it (except for the minority claim, that is pretty cut-and-dried)? For instance, some Christians think that freedom of religion means they have the *right* to force their religious beliefs on others. Any attempt to prevent them from doing so is persecution. For instance, a pharmacist that refuses to fill a prescription for the morning after pill. Refusing to provide a legal service (that happens to be your job) to someone else because you disagree with their moral (but legal) choices, well, that is just good Christianity, certainly not any sort of religious/moral discrimination. However, firing someone for not doing their job is "religious persecution". Its all in the spin.
and it might well prove to provide nothing more than an expensive and false sense of security.
Which is the only kind our leaders seem to be interested in providing. I flew to Europe October, 2001, out of Raleigh/Durham INTL. There were MPs with M16s scattered all around the airport. Because, you know, having armed guards in the terminal is really useful and all...but hey, it sure does make people feel better! Who cares that you can smuggle just about anything you want into the baggage compartments of airplanes?
Yeah, I actually managed to parse what you were trying to say; I just found it too funny to avoid commenting on it.
BTW, your English is VERY good (much better than my <INSET ANY OTHER LANGUAGE>, but you might want to make sure you have a firm grasp of the word "kinky" before using it. Its just one of those words that is too easy to say something embarassing with...
or subtle dirty joke?
Naturally criminals aren't kinky: thay take what the opportunity will give.
"Dude, that chick is so kinky. She took everything I had the opportunity to give!"
In my opinion, free speech is _exactly_ escaping any consequences of your speech
Then there is no such thing as free speech, anywhere. There is nowhere on Earth that I can be free of the social consequences of telling you that your wife is a fat nasty two dollar whore that hands out gonorrhea like lollipops. At the very least, I will suffer from a reputation as an asshole. Socially. Legally, which is the important one when determining one's "Freedom of Speech", there are not any consequences.
The office building I work in is located in one of those "We have everything in the world right here" communities: it has a church, a bank, a grocery store, a movie theater, several resteraunts and pubs, etc. One of my coworkers lives in this community, literally one block from the office. She drives to work EVERY DAY! She also drives home for lunch, then back to work, EVERY DAY! She lives two blocks from the gym; yep, she drives to the gym to work out three times/week.
Not terribly surprising, she is also the most useless sack of crap we have in our department: comes in at 9:30 - 10:00, takes a two hour lunch, goes home at 3:30-4:00. And constantly bitches about how swamped she is, while farming as much of her work out as possible. Too bad our department head is too soft to actually fire anyone... </rant>
. If you want some right that isn't spelled out in the constitution, pass an amendment
But thats not the way it is supposed to work. We, the people, are supposed to have any and all rights that are not explicitly granted to the federal government, or denied us by (constitutionally sound) laws. So, for instance, I don't have the right to print money; that is reserved for the federal government. Nor do I have the right to drive as fast as I want on the highway; laws have been passed restricting this right, and these laws have been found to be constitutionally sound (well, I honestly don't know that anyone has ever challenged speed limits, but you get the point). I DO have the right to brew beer in my own home, NOT b/c the constitution GIVES me that right, but b/c it no longer DENIES me that right. The 21st ammendment doesn't grant me the right to brew my own beer, it negates the 18th ammendment that denied me that right. Prior to the 18th ammendment, the constitution didn't say anything about alcohol at all, so Americans, by default, had the right to brew, since it wasn't denied them.
Their job is to filter things thru the exact wording and original intent of the law.
Don't have some panty waste judge decide that if the founders had realized that some folks wanted to be able to do, whatever, they'd have included it in the bill of rights, so it must be OK.
Uhm, deciding that if the founders had realized $X (or $X had even existed 250 years ago), then they would have done $Y, so we should do $Y, isn't that "filter[ing] things thru the exact wording and original intent of the law[/constitution]"? Besides, the Bill of Rights is not, and was not meant to be, an exclusive list of the rights we get. It was merely put in to emphasize the ones that the founders felt were absolutely the most important. Check out the 9th ammendment, sometime.
and having been a college sophmore once
:-)
Ha! I was a college sophomore twice. Well, twice as long as most, anyway
But you really can't expect your average slashdotter to get out of their chairs and actually go down to the passport office to do this? They'd much rather sit on their butts and whine.
You're right, it is much easier to sit and whine than do something about it (I personally have a very nice ass-groove in my favorite sitting chair). In this case, however, I think postponing the problem for a decade is less desirable than fixing the problem now. And don't even try to tell me that posting a comment on Slashdot isn't the first step in fixing the problem. ANY PROBLEM!
Original statement: Free speech should be exactly what the Constitution says it is, and that we need additional regulations to protect it means that the Consitution is being shit on, and that makes me sad.
Edited statement: Free speech should be [blah] we need additional regulations
And Jesus spoke, saying "All of my teachings can be summed up in this one thing: Love [blah] thyself." See, kids, editing can be FUN.
And if the company does the testing without your knowledge?
If a company can collect a urine or blood sample from you without your knowledge, maybe you need to lay off the drugs for a while, anyway.
If using a prefetch causes my documents to load faster, then that would seem to me to be good design.
I think you misunderstand the OP (although, its possible I do). My take on his comment is that whichever application you use most commonly is going to be improved thru pre-caching and binding. So, if the testers use Excel often, their Excel load time is going to be faster than my load time if I never use Excel, even on otherwise identical machines. His point, I believe, is that if the testers did not account for this, then the Operating System's behavior of pre-caching and binding could play a significant enough factor in the load speeds to completely overshadow any differences in the Applications' respective abilities.
You'd probably save money by just doing it in-house, or at least find a better company to contract with.
We can't really afford to do it in-house. We have tried to shop around for a better hosting company, but these guys aren't too bad, and don't cost too much, so we haven't found anyone better per dollar, yet.
So then why are we paying taxes and giving politicians generous salaries if they aren't doing their job properly, and we have to expend extra money and effort to oversee them?
I agree, but what are the alternatives? Stop spending time and money overseeing them? Put someone else in charge, and spend time and money overseeing them? Do away with government altogether? I personally don't think that any of these are viable, attractive solutions, but maybe you do (or have another alternative I didn't think of).
Second, if power (the "right" to initiate force) is guaranteed to be abused (which history has proven many times over), then logically, the only way to prevent the abuse is to eliminate the power.
The problem with that is that eliminating the "power" (which is the "right" to use force) is not going to prevent those with the ability and the will from exercising force to gain their objectives; it will only remove the legitimacy that society currently gives to government. The whole point behind legitimizing government (and only gov't) to use force is that there WILL BE assholes that use force to gain their objectives. The only real choice is whether we want to be told what to do by whomever has the will and ability to amass the most force, or whether we collectively grant that force to actors that we choose. Look at the Shogun era of Japan for a good example of the "might makes right" form of rule.
What does "community" have to do with government run public schools?
I don't know exactly how you are defining "community" and "government", but most systems have a locally elected school board that makes most of the day-to-day decisions regarding running the system (actually, most systems delegate these responsibilities to a superintendent that is appointed by the elected school board, but the authority lies with the elected board). Of course, there are state and federal level regulations and officials, but as we are seeing with No Child Left Behind, state officials are challenging ( the authority of federal regulations. So, right now, it looks promising for the state level authorities that are asserting final say in how their system are run.
Why should we pay taxes to the government to run the public school system AND have to "actually work to improve" them?
Because, ideally, WE are the government? It is our duty and privilege to oversee what our appointed officials are doing, and if we think they aren't doing it right, work to change that. Yes, this is a pain; it requires time, effort, and money, but so does everything else. At work, we pay an off-site company to store our data, run backups, and manage our database servers. And yet, often enough, I actually have to spend time and effort working with this company to figure out what the problem is, when there are problems. And managing a multi-sourced data warehouse is fairly simple compared to running an effective educational system.
And yeah, this kind of intellectual gaming being passed off as critical thinking skills does tend to offend those with actual logical thinking skills. Like all of us here on /., eh?
:D
Naturally
In fact, it seems reasonable to suspect that the people making this claim have invented a newly-refined definition of "racism" specifically to support their argument--a bit circular, but worse, unnecessary and distracting.
I agree, anytime an argument breaks down into a disagreement over the definition of your terms, the argument has strayed far from the realm of being a productive exchange of ideas. And generally, the one who has to stretch the common usage of a word the farthest is the one I find myself disagreeing with.
Sorry, grammar pedants, I know I should say "...the one with whom I find myself disagreeing.", I just think it makes me sound like a schmuck.
I've actually had convervastions with [black & white] people that claimed it wasn't not possible for a black person to be racist, because a) they did not have any socio-economic power, so could not suppress others AND b) black persons' (in America) dislike/hate/whatever of white people was justified by their historical enslavement, and therefore was not racism.
The truly frightening part is that these people had all learned this particular view in class, from a professor, at a prestigious college. Ignoring the condescension (no black person has socio-economic power?) and (in my mind) extreme moral/philisophic/political view (whatever I do to you is justified, b/c your ancestor did something bad to mine), the thinking skills that are obviously being taught (or not taught) in this class make me cringe. It's almost enough to make me sympathize with the people who sneer at "liberal educations" (but not quite).
And I always thought Courtney Love was a brain-dead, no talent media whore. I was wrong about brain-dead, maybe I should download some of her music and give it a listen...
Thanks for the link, a really good read.
...then it's an oppressive government bitching about us forcing our ethics on them by restrcting the software we sell them.
While I don't doubt that these countries present it exactly as you say, I disagree with the implication inherent in such a position that me failing to help you* act in ways I find unethical is the equivalent of forcing my ethics on you. Refusing to involve myself in acts that I find unethical, by refusing to help enable others to perform them, is not the same as preventing others from engaging in these acts. If I (well, the US; noone cares what I say in these matters) said that these other countries were not allowed to develop and implement their own censorship software, that would be forcing western ethics on them.
* I don't really mean YOU, Iriel; more the general sense of "all of you that are not me". Unless, of course, you are actually John Smith of 742 Evergreen Terrace. If so, I want my baseball bat back, and you better have cleaned the blood off, this time!
People of conscience wouldn't support American companies building torture devices or weapons for oppressive regimes, but we'll turn a blind eye to the censorship of their people? Why is that?
So as to avoid a flamewar, I'll forbear mentioning my ideas as to the why, but I would like to point out that a not insignificant number of Americans not only turn a blind eye, but actively support the censorship of their own people; why should we expect them to be more charitable towards others?
From WikiPedia:
It's interesting to note that whilst the original version of Venom had a personal vendetta on Spider-Man, he just knew he was Peter Parker, this version had a vendetta against Peter and the Spider-Man identity meant nothing to him."
Not true. The original version of Venom's vendetta was against Peter Parker as well. Eddie Brock hated Parker b/c he blamed him for the fact that Brock was fired from the Daily Bugle. I'm not sure about the symbiote; it hated Peter Parker/Spiderman for rejecting it, I don't know that there was ever anything to suggest it distinguished between them.
The issue is displaying the dead bodies of soldiers (in caskets, but how does that matter?). The rest is partisan crap.
To me, the partisan crap is the issue. If I felt that the Administration was truly concerned (as you seem to be) about the appropriateness of the images, I would be less concerned that they are wielding political power to keep them out of the media. However, due to their past willingness to display equally distastefull images in the pursuit of their own agenda, I find it much more likely that they are supressing these images out of a desire to further their own political agenda. Censorship decisions based on moral grounds I merely find suspect; censorship decisions based on political expediency I find quite frightening.