So if I'm oppressed by a non-governmental group, I'm not really oppressed? The report is about the press, not the governments. Much of the (often self-policed) censorship that occurs in the USA is as the result of pressure from corporations and interest groups, not the government. That doesn't mean the press are free.
I hereby nominate this to be the most insightful of all the 1075 posts in that discussion. You haven't understood the ipod in a techno-marketing sense unless you realize why the ipod was different from other mp3 players then. That was it.
The post said that the iPod had a RAM buffer that it used to allow the hard drive to spin down - save battery etc..
Were there any hard drive players that didn't have that? Certainly the PJB-100, from late 1999, 2 years before the iPod, did.
The Daily Show's viewers retain so much more information because it is entertaining
So true... I try to watch the PBS News Hour (why does it need someone's name attached to it?), but they so successfully suck the life out of almost every story, with 15 minutes of pompous, dry, discussion from talking heads on each story, I usually skip most of it. But then I come from the UK where the BBC news is the middle-brow option (and in turn it's head-and-shoulders above what they do on BBC World). Channel 4 news at least used to be much more serious, while also being interesting. The News Hour seems to take the view that serious is by necessity boring and conservative (small c).
PBS News Hour make an attempt to be fair, though they present a very much an establishment view, but they suffer from the usual US media view that if you present a Republican view and a Democrat view, the truth must be in-between, and you've been fair and covered the story completely.
I was a one-time (pre-vim) vi power user, and switched to emacs for serious editing. The most important thing that emacs is good at, that vi(m) is kind of ok at, and everything on Windows is useless at, is ease of basic text editing. If you want to move the cursor around on Windows you have to take your hands off the home keys and use the arrows. Those who are used to Windows, or can't touch-type, will think this is unimportant. Others know better. Once you're comfortable in either emacs or vi, moving text around becomes second nature, and you don't have to engage the brain at all, even to coordinate locating the arrow keys, or worse, the mouse.
Everything in emacs has a long learning curve - learning the keys, learning how to find out about the keys..., but it is mostly effort that you can transfer outside of emacs. I thought perhaps I was swimming against the tide with emacs, having been forced onto Windows for my desktop for some time, but then I discoverd XKeymacs - now I can use the emacs keys in almost any windows app, so I can edit in Outlook, Word etc., as if it's emacs. I only need to know one interface, and it's the most efficient one I've found. Almost all applications now appear to have "emacs lite" embedded in their edit areas.
Ironically, I installed Ubuntu, and found that most apps there used the windows keys (I know this must be an editable setting, but I haven't looked yet). So, as a hardcore Emacs user I'm actually much more comfortable on Windows than Ubuntu!
Re:One..
on
Ubuntu Hacks
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Actually, it's completely appropriate. It seems you, like the British aristocracy, don't understand how to use it. They say "one" when they mean a specific person, usually themselves, too, or at least they used to. In your post, "Such as one did", is nonsense.
It's sad that such useful usage has become passe, usually inappropriately replaced with 'you'. The aforementioned royalty and their hangers-on probably had a lot to do with its fall from grace.
Think about it - to express, for instance, that people should generally be polite, people now usually say "you should be polite", which strictly speaking arrogantly excludes the speaker. Much better to say "one should be polite"...it's more polite;).
But then, sadly, ignorant people think you are affected.
I don't think you understand how GPS works. Simplifying- a GPS receiver looks at when signals with the same timestamp arrive, and deduces how far it is from each satellite from that.
I don't think you understand how a GPS receiver works. It doesn't work out how long the signal took to arrive from a satellite, it works out the difference in the time it took to come from one satellite, from the time it took to come from another. Very different things. You don't need 3 satellites, you need 4, because you are working out your 3D position, plus time.
Read lenhap's earlier response. He knows what he's talking about.
Your points 1 & 2 are just made-up. Accurate time is one of the unknowns that is solved by the calculation, but is not used to make the calculation. Otherwise they'd need atomic clocks in GPS receivers.
Wow, you get your cellphone for free!? That's amazing.
Most of the rest of us have to pay a high monthly fee, or alternatively, do what I do - use prepaid, so I pay $100 a year for my cellphone (still a lot more than free, but it's the best I can get), which gives me over 1000 minutes. 100 minutes a month is more than I need, because I use Skype for my longer "chat" calls to people in the US and abroad.
So, for those of us who can't get free cellphones, Skype already helped make telephony very cheap, and has now made it even cheaper.
On the downside, I use T-Mobile for my prepaid, because it's one of the better prepaid deals, but while its coverage is great where I spend 99% of my time, I usually lose it when I go on a trip. On the upside, when I go to the rest of the world, I just plug in a GSM SIM card and have a local cellphone for very little money.
Excellent info - thanks. I'll look forward to getting that going. MAME would be nice, but most of all I want to be able to play UK TV downloaded from uknova...
... and KnoppMyth is the way to go for low effort MythTv.
The downside is that KnoppMyth is designed to have exclusive use of the whole machine (though it is Debian based so you can add whatever extras you like), but the upside is it just works with simple installation for most people, most of the time. I tried to add MythTv to my SuSE server box 18 months ago, and was losing the will to live. Dug out another machine, installed KnoppMyth, and literally had it working within an hour.
The Hauppauge PVR-350 card allows MythTv to run on a very slow machine, like a PII (taking the decoding effort away from the CPU), and gives good quality output, but from personal experience I wouldn't recommend it. You're restricted to mpeg2 so disk usage is high and downloaded videos have to be transcoded to play, you can't play games or have pretty music visualizations, and sound is a minor configuration headaches. Worst, the drivers are the flakeyest bit of my setup (video lock-ups about once a month) and it's relatively expensive. Better to just buy a cheapo encoder card known to work with MythTv, and use TV-out from a normal video card.
It's a very different proposition in the UK. In both places HDTV is expensive with limited material, but before committing to that, you have a choice of quite good (Analogue PAL) and really quite good widescreen (Freeview - DVB digital OTA) - both equally cheap. The typical US choice is awful and fairly cheap (analogue NTSC cable), fairly awful and expensive (digital NTSC cable).
If HDTV is 10/10, I think the UK has about 6/10 already available from DVB, whereas the US has about 3/10.
Personally, I'm still too cheap for HDTV, so I'll switch in a few years.
Sorry if I misled, I tried to make it clear that I wasn't disagreeing with anything you said. I was heading off on a bit of a tangent about HFCS, which other people have condemned to me over other sugar products.
Go to wiki or other reliable resource and look this stuff up
Yeah, the Wikipedia and some web searches is all I've done. I was counting that as being fairly uninformed;-).
Above all - don't drink the shit that has 'corn syrup' or 'high fruchtose corn syrup' or whatever 'syrup' in it. It'll just get you diabetes faster. This includes most sweet drinks not diet. Like Starbucks Frappacinos at the next 7-eleven.
I agree with all you say - but I'm interested in this high fructose corn syrup stuff. I've been told it's evil and will kill us all, but a little research told me that all they do is use enzymes to break (invert) the sucrose into fructose and glucose (I could be a bit off on the details here). It's the same process by which bees turn nectar into honey. It makes it taste sweeter.
So, I'm not yet convinced that high fructose corn syrup is much more evil than, say honey? (which, as you observe, is not that good - excess leads to diabetes etc.)
One page I found warning us of the danger of HFCS going on about the "chemicals" used in manufacture. These "chemicals" were the enzymes that bees use.
I'm not informed enough to know for sure, but I'm sceptical of the claims that HFCS is poison.
It would make no difference at all. If we schedule a meeting at 84:25 global time, then it would be a case of "no, we can't make that, that's before we get to work" or "that's our lunchtime".
Rather than having to remember one simple calc about their timezone, you'd have to remember what offset their working day was from yours, and try to work out whether 82:45 was in the middle of their lunch. Much harder. When travelling you'd have to learn what the typical local rising and meal times were. Typical Americans can't even deal with the concept of a currency exchange rate, so they're not going to manage that.
Once you're used to working across timezones, you start to remember to state the timezone you're talking about up front. It's not so hard, and certainly easier than any of these radical alternatives.
Ironic that the parent has been modded flamebait - erm, what the OP posted is clearly in line with marxism - taking a privately controlled resource into common ownership.
I'm not saying anything about the rights and wrongs, just that "good job comrade" was quite apt.
If you separate politics to fiscal and social realms, there's reason to see the BNP as left-wing fiscally, but highly and offensively authoritarian-right socially.
See http://www.politicalcompass.org/ UK Election 2005 link on the left.
Though it sounds to me that it's not the fiscal policies that appeal to you.
Freedom of speech needs to be protected by oversight. Oversight comes in many forms. Rules, regulations etc. are just as capable of protecting freedom as well as restricting it (not saying which is the case here...).
In the US it could be argued that speech via the media is freely available to the highest bidder. It's a common mantra that removing regulation == "Freedom". It's rarely that simple.
If the ISP were lazy and used the current IPs rather than obtain them from logs, then anyone who, for instance, changed the MAC of their router, would obtain a new IP and escape the MPAA's clutches... Unlikely though, I'm sure they'll use logs.
However, I seem to have misjudged your level of interest, and I fully understand if you want to give up.
You're absolutely right, my level of interest in discussing anything with you is drained. You extrapolate strawman positions from everything I say and then deconstruct them, at tedious length with questionable logic. You accuse me of mindlessly refusing to accept your points, while doing exactly that to me. Yes, what you have written is very long and I haven't been bothered to address it properly. I have a job, a personal life, and everything I say will obviously lead to an explosion of largely irrelevant points from you. Perhaps you'd do well in politics.
I've tried to be somewhat conciliatory, which you have chosen to see as a sign of weakness. I've tried to be polite, and you've responded with insults. I should have known better than to tease any aspect of America, which will always flush out humorless bullys who'll react with self-righteous indignation as if challenged to a fight.
This discussion is utterly futile. Feel free to consider everything you have said extraordinarily astute, a refutation of everything I've said, and you have "won". I know you will. Tell you what, why don't I call you a Nazi. That has the benefit of having some validity (your blind self-righteous nationalism), plus by Godwin's law traditions you've won and the discussion is over! Whoo Hoo!
You're quite right that I made unfocussed points very much tangential to the original issues, but hey, we're both at it! The whole rest of the pledge, and its meaning, are tangential to my original, trivial, point.
My "citizen of the world" wording wasn't, perhaps, the best way to express what I was talking about. I was advocating a rejection of nationalism altogether, rather than replacement of US nationalism with some more inclusive equivalent. The rampant nationalism in the USA is frankly scaring much of the world.
Anyway, we will have to just disagree about whether it's reasonable for a pledge to be loosely interpreted in a figurative manner. So yes, I am refusing to accept that your interpretation of the pledge is absolute, obvious, or definitive, just as you are refusing to accept my position that the meaning of a pledge should be literal. It doesn't go much deeper than that.
I don't know where to go with some of the other things you talked about. You do realise I wasn't suggesting that flags should not exist, for instance, or that they serve no useful purpose? But hey, tangents are shooting out everywhere in this sub-thread. I'll give up now.
I didn't pick up on this. I might not have been so polite in my response if I had:
the greatest nation on the face of the earth, in the entire history of the earth, probably forevermore
Have you ever travelled abroad? And I mean longer than to just complain they don't speak English and you can't get a good burger? Long enough to spend time with some locals and get some understanding for the country?
It's small minded, ignorant thinking like this that enables the state of denial about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and other disgusting, oppressive and criminal abuses of US power. And no, most of those in both prisons are not "Terrorists Who Hate Freedom"(tm), the majority (the vast majority in AG according to the red cross), are completely innocent. Or at least they were before they went in - in their shoes many would be tempted to kill a few soldiers had I been tortured and buggered by their compatriots. All of which are a complete repudiation of everything the US flag is supposed to stand for and in direct violation of the US Constitution. (Hint: inalienable rights are not held by US citizens alone).
Disclaimer required for the hard of thinking: The fact that I abhor some of the behaviour of US governments does not mean I hate American people, hate the country, reject or lack respect for its founding documents, etc. etc.. It is possible to like and respect a country and to criticise it. Indeed, as some of your founding fathers pointed out, it's a duty.
Ok, first a disclaimer, I said I was "half joking". It was meant to be a good natured teasing. Turns out it read as a troll to some. I am sorry for that.
Anyway, a person would have to be spectacularly stupid not to work out that a flag is a symbol for a group and its ideals. But that is also my point. It is clear that in spite of protests to my post, the flag is venerated in and of itself in the USA. The national anthem is about it! And yes, I am aware that the national anthem has more and deeper meanings than "look at the pretty flag", but it does spend a lot of time venerating it.
If the pledge is supposed to mean what some say it means, then it really needs to be reworded, because its words are quite unambiguous and they involve loyalty to cloth among other things. If anything should be clear and unambiguous, it should be a solemn pledge.
Venerating the flag, and the country over others, are both considered virtues by many of the USA. Not all US truths are held to be self evident by the remainder of humanity. Decades into the space age, isn't it time that people saw themselves as citizens of the world and loyal to their ideals first, with loyalty to country further down the list? Many Americans seem to think they have given the idea and practice of liberty to the world and that the USA alone represents it. They are ignoramuses.
I'm sorry I don't have time for a full response to your post and the others in a similar vein. Most seem to be along the lines of "it may say flag, but it doesn't really mean it, it means what it represents, and anyway, we pledge alegiance to other things too". I was already aware of this. It's still ludicrous and I reject the notion that flag waving is laudable.
One day, your country will begin to understand these ideals, perhaps to the point that you will adopt them into your government.
One day, perhaps you'll travel a bit, and realise your country isn't unique, and many other people are at least as free as you, and they typically don't shout about it nearly as much. You also may come to recognise that the recently added "under God" is a minor repudiation of freedom in itself.
For the record, I am a great admirer of most of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, indeed all the things America is supposed to stand for.
you probably have better things to do than worry about than a piece of cloth
But you've pledged allegiance to it! You must protect it.
I'm only half joking. As a non-US citizen in the USA, I have a real problem with the idea of citizenship requiring me to make a solemn pledge of allegiance to a piece of cloth. I couldn't take any pledge of allegiance lightly, and yet this one is absurd. I would consider pledging allegiance to the country (though not its government), but I'd rather not pledge allegiance to any grouping of humanity over the remainder, especially on the dubious basis of geography. I suspect I'll never take citizenship.
I have never made such a pledge, and AFAIK, the citizens of most other countries do not generally do so, in schools or anywhere else.
Just write on the side:
If you blow one of these up, we'll make bombers out of the others.
Yeah, but as with all the US and Israeli responses to terrorism, will we actually be able to work out who to blow up, or will we just blast the population who happens to be where we think the terrorists might have been at some stage.
Slashdot Mirror
So if I'm oppressed by a non-governmental group, I'm not really oppressed? The report is about the press, not the governments. Much of the (often self-policed) censorship that occurs in the USA is as the result of pressure from corporations and interest groups, not the government. That doesn't mean the press are free.
The post said that the iPod had a RAM buffer that it used to allow the hard drive to spin down - save battery etc..
Were there any hard drive players that didn't have that? Certainly the PJB-100, from late 1999, 2 years before the iPod, did.
So true... I try to watch the PBS News Hour (why does it need someone's name attached to it?), but they so successfully suck the life out of almost every story, with 15 minutes of pompous, dry, discussion from talking heads on each story, I usually skip most of it. But then I come from the UK where the BBC news is the middle-brow option (and in turn it's head-and-shoulders above what they do on BBC World). Channel 4 news at least used to be much more serious, while also being interesting. The News Hour seems to take the view that serious is by necessity boring and conservative (small c).
PBS News Hour make an attempt to be fair, though they present a very much an establishment view, but they suffer from the usual US media view that if you present a Republican view and a Democrat view, the truth must be in-between, and you've been fair and covered the story completely.
Everything in emacs has a long learning curve - learning the keys, learning how to find out about the keys..., but it is mostly effort that you can transfer outside of emacs. I thought perhaps I was swimming against the tide with emacs, having been forced onto Windows for my desktop for some time, but then I discoverd XKeymacs - now I can use the emacs keys in almost any windows app, so I can edit in Outlook, Word etc., as if it's emacs. I only need to know one interface, and it's the most efficient one I've found. Almost all applications now appear to have "emacs lite" embedded in their edit areas.
Ironically, I installed Ubuntu, and found that most apps there used the windows keys (I know this must be an editable setting, but I haven't looked yet). So, as a hardcore Emacs user I'm actually much more comfortable on Windows than Ubuntu!
It's sad that such useful usage has become passe, usually inappropriately replaced with 'you'. The aforementioned royalty and their hangers-on probably had a lot to do with its fall from grace.
Think about it - to express, for instance, that people should generally be polite, people now usually say "you should be polite", which strictly speaking arrogantly excludes the speaker. Much better to say "one should be polite" ...it's more polite ;).
But then, sadly, ignorant people think you are affected.
I don't think you understand how a GPS receiver works. It doesn't work out how long the signal took to arrive from a satellite, it works out the difference in the time it took to come from one satellite, from the time it took to come from another. Very different things. You don't need 3 satellites, you need 4, because you are working out your 3D position, plus time.
Read lenhap's earlier response. He knows what he's talking about.
Your points 1 & 2 are just made-up. Accurate time is one of the unknowns that is solved by the calculation, but is not used to make the calculation. Otherwise they'd need atomic clocks in GPS receivers.
Most of the rest of us have to pay a high monthly fee, or alternatively, do what I do - use prepaid, so I pay $100 a year for my cellphone (still a lot more than free, but it's the best I can get), which gives me over 1000 minutes. 100 minutes a month is more than I need, because I use Skype for my longer "chat" calls to people in the US and abroad.
So, for those of us who can't get free cellphones, Skype already helped make telephony very cheap, and has now made it even cheaper.
On the downside, I use T-Mobile for my prepaid, because it's one of the better prepaid deals, but while its coverage is great where I spend 99% of my time, I usually lose it when I go on a trip. On the upside, when I go to the rest of the world, I just plug in a GSM SIM card and have a local cellphone for very little money.
And corrected over/underscan would be superb!
The downside is that KnoppMyth is designed to have exclusive use of the whole machine (though it is Debian based so you can add whatever extras you like), but the upside is it just works with simple installation for most people, most of the time. I tried to add MythTv to my SuSE server box 18 months ago, and was losing the will to live. Dug out another machine, installed KnoppMyth, and literally had it working within an hour.
The Hauppauge PVR-350 card allows MythTv to run on a very slow machine, like a PII (taking the decoding effort away from the CPU), and gives good quality output, but from personal experience I wouldn't recommend it. You're restricted to mpeg2 so disk usage is high and downloaded videos have to be transcoded to play, you can't play games or have pretty music visualizations, and sound is a minor configuration headaches. Worst, the drivers are the flakeyest bit of my setup (video lock-ups about once a month) and it's relatively expensive. Better to just buy a cheapo encoder card known to work with MythTv, and use TV-out from a normal video card.
If HDTV is 10/10, I think the UK has about 6/10 already available from DVB, whereas the US has about 3/10.
Personally, I'm still too cheap for HDTV, so I'll switch in a few years.
Yeah, the Wikipedia and some web searches is all I've done. I was counting that as being fairly uninformed ;-).
I agree with all you say - but I'm interested in this high fructose corn syrup stuff. I've been told it's evil and will kill us all, but a little research told me that all they do is use enzymes to break (invert) the sucrose into fructose and glucose (I could be a bit off on the details here). It's the same process by which bees turn nectar into honey. It makes it taste sweeter.
So, I'm not yet convinced that high fructose corn syrup is much more evil than, say honey? (which, as you observe, is not that good - excess leads to diabetes etc.)
One page I found warning us of the danger of HFCS going on about the "chemicals" used in manufacture. These "chemicals" were the enzymes that bees use.
I'm not informed enough to know for sure, but I'm sceptical of the claims that HFCS is poison.
Rather than having to remember one simple calc about their timezone, you'd have to remember what offset their working day was from yours, and try to work out whether 82:45 was in the middle of their lunch. Much harder. When travelling you'd have to learn what the typical local rising and meal times were. Typical Americans can't even deal with the concept of a currency exchange rate, so they're not going to manage that.
Once you're used to working across timezones, you start to remember to state the timezone you're talking about up front. It's not so hard, and certainly easier than any of these radical alternatives.
I'm not saying anything about the rights and wrongs, just that "good job comrade" was quite apt.
If you separate politics to fiscal and social realms, there's reason to see the BNP as left-wing fiscally, but highly and offensively authoritarian-right socially. See http://www.politicalcompass.org/ UK Election 2005 link on the left. Though it sounds to me that it's not the fiscal policies that appeal to you.
In the US it could be argued that speech via the media is freely available to the highest bidder. It's a common mantra that removing regulation == "Freedom". It's rarely that simple.
If the ISP were lazy and used the current IPs rather than obtain them from logs, then anyone who, for instance, changed the MAC of their router, would obtain a new IP and escape the MPAA's clutches... Unlikely though, I'm sure they'll use logs.
I've tried to be somewhat conciliatory, which you have chosen to see as a sign of weakness. I've tried to be polite, and you've responded with insults. I should have known better than to tease any aspect of America, which will always flush out humorless bullys who'll react with self-righteous indignation as if challenged to a fight.
This discussion is utterly futile. Feel free to consider everything you have said extraordinarily astute, a refutation of everything I've said, and you have "won". I know you will. Tell you what, why don't I call you a Nazi. That has the benefit of having some validity (your blind self-righteous nationalism), plus by Godwin's law traditions you've won and the discussion is over! Whoo Hoo!
My "citizen of the world" wording wasn't, perhaps, the best way to express what I was talking about. I was advocating a rejection of nationalism altogether, rather than replacement of US nationalism with some more inclusive equivalent. The rampant nationalism in the USA is frankly scaring much of the world.
Anyway, we will have to just disagree about whether it's reasonable for a pledge to be loosely interpreted in a figurative manner. So yes, I am refusing to accept that your interpretation of the pledge is absolute, obvious, or definitive, just as you are refusing to accept my position that the meaning of a pledge should be literal. It doesn't go much deeper than that.
I don't know where to go with some of the other things you talked about. You do realise I wasn't suggesting that flags should not exist, for instance, or that they serve no useful purpose? But hey, tangents are shooting out everywhere in this sub-thread. I'll give up now.
the greatest nation on the face of the earth, in the entire history of the earth, probably forevermore
Have you ever travelled abroad? And I mean longer than to just complain they don't speak English and you can't get a good burger? Long enough to spend time with some locals and get some understanding for the country?
It's small minded, ignorant thinking like this that enables the state of denial about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and other disgusting, oppressive and criminal abuses of US power. And no, most of those in both prisons are not "Terrorists Who Hate Freedom"(tm), the majority (the vast majority in AG according to the red cross), are completely innocent. Or at least they were before they went in - in their shoes many would be tempted to kill a few soldiers had I been tortured and buggered by their compatriots. All of which are a complete repudiation of everything the US flag is supposed to stand for and in direct violation of the US Constitution. (Hint: inalienable rights are not held by US citizens alone).
Disclaimer required for the hard of thinking: The fact that I abhor some of the behaviour of US governments does not mean I hate American people, hate the country, reject or lack respect for its founding documents, etc. etc.. It is possible to like and respect a country and to criticise it. Indeed, as some of your founding fathers pointed out, it's a duty.
Anyway, a person would have to be spectacularly stupid not to work out that a flag is a symbol for a group and its ideals. But that is also my point. It is clear that in spite of protests to my post, the flag is venerated in and of itself in the USA. The national anthem is about it! And yes, I am aware that the national anthem has more and deeper meanings than "look at the pretty flag", but it does spend a lot of time venerating it.
If the pledge is supposed to mean what some say it means, then it really needs to be reworded, because its words are quite unambiguous and they involve loyalty to cloth among other things. If anything should be clear and unambiguous, it should be a solemn pledge.
Venerating the flag, and the country over others, are both considered virtues by many of the USA. Not all US truths are held to be self evident by the remainder of humanity. Decades into the space age, isn't it time that people saw themselves as citizens of the world and loyal to their ideals first, with loyalty to country further down the list? Many Americans seem to think they have given the idea and practice of liberty to the world and that the USA alone represents it. They are ignoramuses.
One day, your country will begin to understand these ideals, perhaps to the point that you will adopt them into your government.
One day, perhaps you'll travel a bit, and realise your country isn't unique, and many other people are at least as free as you, and they typically don't shout about it nearly as much. You also may come to recognise that the recently added "under God" is a minor repudiation of freedom in itself.
For the record, I am a great admirer of most of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, indeed all the things America is supposed to stand for.
But you've pledged allegiance to it! You must protect it.
I'm only half joking. As a non-US citizen in the USA, I have a real problem with the idea of citizenship requiring me to make a solemn pledge of allegiance to a piece of cloth. I couldn't take any pledge of allegiance lightly, and yet this one is absurd. I would consider pledging allegiance to the country (though not its government), but I'd rather not pledge allegiance to any grouping of humanity over the remainder, especially on the dubious basis of geography. I suspect I'll never take citizenship.
I have never made such a pledge, and AFAIK, the citizens of most other countries do not generally do so, in schools or anywhere else.
Yeah, but as with all the US and Israeli responses to terrorism, will we actually be able to work out who to blow up, or will we just blast the population who happens to be where we think the terrorists might have been at some stage.
... except then I do a web search and find more reference to numbers like 20%...