Luckily they have no regard for their own lives, as TFA clearly shows they're willing to use suicidal tactics to get us to shut down our alternative energy sources that will halt their advance. If they did care more, they might be pissed off that we're eating them.
Increasing water temperatures do correlate with increased jellyfish populations, and they do better in depleted oxygen waters, which pollution causes. More fossil fuels do result in increased jellyfish numbers, it's been shown in a number of scientific studies.
They ARE xenoforming our planet, and we have limited time to stop them before they begin constructing saltwater-filled vehicles to roam the lands and take over.
Except we're clearly from this planet. If you wanted to argue the jellyfish are trying to stop us from spreading to other planets, you may be right. Their efforts thus far to change our environment to suit their own purposes have been quite effective, and may end up destroying us.
We better start fighting back now. Countries such as Germany are already under the influence of jellyfish. We should look for distinctive jellyfish sting marks on the necks of their lawmakers who voted for the nuclear power ban.
I have a theory that jellyfish are alien invaders, here to xenoform our planet. They love basically everything we do to the planet, from pollution to overfishing to global warming. This is just further evidence, but by shutting down nuclear reactors, the only current viable alternative to fossil fuel power plants, they ensure we use more coal and oil power plants, contributing to the environmental change they love.
The Ars review in particular, though, made it clear that it failed to live up to the standard of its predecessor, acknowledging that DN3D's juvenile humor was at least funny and added to a game that was actually fun. DNF, it seems, at least according to Ars, is simply unfunny toilet humor with crappy gameplay tacked on. Basically, they got it backwards, and did a poor job with both.
I haven't played DNF, but it sounds like a fair criticism, if you're going to criticize a game from a raunchy franchise. It's one if Duke's being Duke in a game that's fun, but that doesn't seem to have happened here.
It's more accurate to call it a newer incarnation of BBEdit Lite, but I'll gladly second TextWrangler as a recommendation. I used to use BBEdit Lite way back in the day, and I've used TextWrangler ever since it came out. It's got a lot of advanced features, but mainly it gets out of your way and lets you do your thing until you need them.
BBEdit is still around too, if you want to pay for TextWrangler's "older brother".
From the information given in the question, it sounds to me that TextWrangler would be the better choice of the two, but check out the feature comparison. Well, TextWrangler is free, so you can always try that out for a while first anyway.
Neither program is a WYSIWYG but stuff like HTML and CSS aren't that hard to learn, and you may find it beneficial in the long run to learn how to do things by hand. Both tools will give you all the handy syntax coloring and search tools you could ever need, and they are really great web IDEs.
Exactly, different market segments. A business that's making money from two different things, one more than the other, doesn't drop the other unless it's cannibalizing sales from the first. You don't kill off any profitable part of a business unless there is actual opportunity cost. In this case, there isn't. They're smart to keep both iOS and OS X devices around, because it's diversification. Even Steve wouldn't be able to convince his board and shareholders they should just throw away Mac money, especially as it is growing and growing all the time.
Exactly. Is it a dick move by the Palestinians? Absolutely. But it really is their right, after all, they are paying for his trip and they can put whatever conditions on it they'd like.
Now, whether or not he should have, at that point, decided not to go at all, because he's being used as a political pawn, I suppose we can argue about that. But at the end of the day, he agreed to the trip as the Palestinians wanted, then decided he'd also do some other things on their dime, they said no way, so he decided to stick to the original agreement. I can't really fault him for that.
If Israeli universities want to pay for him to come in a week later, then they are free to do that.
I found the video to be fairly tedious and the music annoying. If you want to see the entire night sky in much better quality and without any telescopes cluttering it up, check out the skysurvey project. You'll have to provide your own soundtrack.
They're not that irrational. They want to kill H.264 because they're not in the patent pool for it. Flash helps them do that, even if it is the nuclear option.
Here's how I define irrationality: Taking a belief (Obama isn't an American) based on no evidence whatsoever, and in fact contrary to the facts that his opponents never brought a lawsuit to strip his name from any ballots (something they'd certainly do if he wasn't an American, after all, it would guarantee a win if you run virtually unopposed), and he was inaugurated successfully (thus met the legal requirements to be President). Furthermore, the fact that his mother was a natural born citizen, thus any children she had were legally American citizens. Furthermore, the fact he was born in Hawaii, a territory of the United States, thus he was a natural born citizen. As I recall, he also had proper documentation of his birth, which he produced quite readily, very early. This evidence was of course, ignored by the birthers.
Believing something that is contrary to all evidence is against logic, is irrational.
Why is it extraordinary? Because no other presidential candidate has ever been asked to produce such evidence. People are either American citizens or not, and it's pretty easy to tell the difference. This is not a case of ambiguity, or missing evidence. The evidence has been there all along, it's 100% in favor of the fact that Obama is an American citizen, and continuing to insist otherwise so many years later is simply irrational. Okay, so he released further proof, after all these years. And you know what, irrational people are still spinning their wild conspiracy theories about it, like about how it took too long. Obama can't win with these people, they are simply incapable of rational thought about him, but luckily he doesn't have to.
Frankly, you do sound like one of them. For somebody talking about being grounded in facts and empirical evidence, you apparently ignored all the prior facts and empirical evidence for the last five years yourself if you think the latest bit of evidence proves something new. Respected journalists and news networks showed off all the legal documents and evidence required back when he was running. That's how rational people came to understand he's an American citizen for all these years. No faith required.
I'd try explaining to you that the United States has never invaded Saudi Arabia, and Osama bin Laden's worldview is totally screwed up, but you don't really care about that.
I'd try explaining to you once again how this wasn't done in cold blood, it was done on a battlefield in a mutually declared war, but you don't really care about that.
I'd try explaining the fallacy that people don't want to die, since suicide bombers do it all the time, but you don't really care about that.
At last we have the truth from you. You're a simple anti-American troll, who believes the Americans are the terrorists, not al Qaeda. Now that you've made yourself clear, I don't see much point in debating with you. You're absolutely certain of your point of view, and nothing will change that. Kind of like al Qaeda's jihad, but you don't really care about that.
As I said, he made statements that he would never be taken alive prior to this.
As I've also said, on a battlefield in a war, you don't get to pause time and decide whether or not you want to surrender, and everyone else has to sit around waiting for you to decide. If you're at war, you can be killed at any time by the opposing force. War isn't fair, but it is what Osama bin Laden cheerfully signed up for. Nobody should feel sorry for him, and nobody should be arguing that we shouldn't have killed him in this war.
If you want to leave the war, you get proactive. Cover yourself in white flags, get rid of all your weapons, and find the nearest enemy to surrender to. If you want to keep fighting, you take the chance that you won't have time to surrender when the enemy comes. Osama bin Laden kept fighting, and we was killed. Simple as that. Was he actively fighting in the second or two before he was shot? Doesn't matter, because he wasn't actively surrendering.
I don't know what crazy media you're listening to, but what I've been hearing has been pretty consistent, from the start, and even as new details emerge. There was the ability in place to extract him alive if he surrendered. He didn't, and was killed. Nobody was shedding any tears about that, but hey, nobody really expected him to surrender anyway. Do you really think they planned a mission this dangerous and complex without accounting for every possible outcome?
Something like this, we may never really know. I will always err on the side of the soldier's judgement in that situation, having to make that split second decision. I'm not going to second-guess the honor of one of our soldiers when I have no reason to do so. These soldiers have a duty to their mission, the solider next to them, and to themselves. If there's any doubt in that split second that he might cause harm to any of those things, it's better to pull the trigger, is it not? Regardless, Osama bin Laden was an enemy on the field of battle, and you kill the enemy on a field of battle. That's war-fighting 101, and it's what Osama bin Laden signed up for when he declared war on America.
The important thing is, every one of those SEALs got to go home safe to their families. I'm not going to question any decision that led to that outcome. Perhaps some of those decisions were irrelevant to that outcome, and everything would have worked out okay anyway, but I wasn't there and I can't know. I'll err on the side of that soldier's judgement who pulled the trigger. The rest of the Monday morning quarterbacking and political nonsense, I don't think it's necessary.
If North Korea wants to come and get me, I'll fight them tooth and nail and go down fighting. Hopefully the US government does something to stop them too.
I said that Osama bin Laden chose not to turn himself in, simply because other people are saying it's somehow not fair we didn't give him a chance to surrender. I say this because he did have a chance to surrender. He had many chances for years now, and he repeatedly chose not to. Why people expect he would have surrendered now, and then we somehow ignored that and summarily executed him, I can't imagine.
This was a bad man, who was unwilling to surrender, and was killed on a battlefield in a war. It's as simple as that, not controversial, and people essentially saying we should have let him try to kill some more of us first are the ones making stupid arguments.
Pakistan has proven themselves to be an unreliable ally. Considering Osama bin Laden's location when we finally got him, either Pakistan was outright helping him, or incredibly incompetent. Working with them on such a high profile target would have been a brilliant way of losing him yet again.
Accepting that he was out of reach for now is... unacceptable. We may have violated Pakistan's airspace and sovereignty, but the ends justify the means, particularly since Pakistan is so unreliable. We eliminated a strong and charismatic proponent of jihad, and gathered information about active plots. Overall, this will save lives, and not just American lives either. It'll save Pakistani lives too, since Al Qaeda loves blowing up other muslims who aren't as orthodox as they are. Pakistan will make a fuss over this, and more than a few in their government who already hated us and were working with Al Qaeda will keep doing so, but so be it. When your allies are working against you, why should we treat them any better than enemies?
Before somebody twists my words, I'm not saying we should invade Pakistan or anything of the sort. We do need them for what they can do for us, and they need us too. It's a strange relationship, and one worth keeping relatively stable, but when we have actionable intelligence and can't trust Pakistan with it, we need to go it alone. As this operation proved, it can be well worthwhile.
Actually, this is how the world works, with nations looking out for their own best interests. Being friendly and politically correct with everyone is not how the world works, and I'm glad nobody so deluded is in charge of the US government.
Moral high ground? I think you ask just about any guy on the street, and he'll tell you we did the right thing. Okay, but if I concede going to trial is the moral high ground after all, who benefits from that? The terrorists don't recognize our courts, find our entire way of life to be an abomination. We're not going to show them anything by putting their leader on trial. Our allies probably don't care either way. I mean really. So we're left with basically making us feel good about our justice system, while at the same time dragging things out for his victims who want closure, giving him an opportunity to spout his hatred and anti-western propaganda, generally making a muck of things politically for everybody. Any self esteem we might have gotten from showcasing our trial system is probably not as strong as killing him is anyway, so it's basically all negatives.
Now look, I like the idea of putting him on trial, locking him up, and all that jazz, but ultimately I trust our soldiers who were there to do what was necessary to protect themselves and the mission. It's easy looking back, with all the information we have about the compound, who was there, and so on, to come up with a better plan. You have to remember though, they weren't even sure Osama bin Laden was there. They had no idea what room he'd be in when they found him, they had no idea if he'd be armed, if he'd be wearing a bomb, if he had other surprises in store, or who else might be in the room with him. There were so many unknowns, and so many things that could have gone wrong. At the end of the day, you have to let the soldiers on the ground make tactical decisions to protect themselves and their mission. If there was even the slightest chance one of them could have been hurt, or the mission could have been compromised in some way, it was better to just shoot Osama bin Laden if he wasn't immediately and totally surrendering the instant they came in.
Osama bin Laden was a bad guy. He was resisting capture, in some small way if not in some big way. He was on the run for years saying we'd never take him alive, and threatening all kinds of harm to those who tried. The situation was dangerous, and the soldiers sent to get him were pressed for time and taking tremendous personal risks just being there. He was an enemy combatant on the field of battle. They neutralized threats to themselves and to their country, and made off with valuable intelligence materials. The outcome of the operation should be in no way controversial.
By choosing to go to war, you're opting in to get killed violently. Osama bin Laden chose to go to war with the United States, and sure enough, he was killed violently.
There's no rule that says everybody in war is given a minute or two to think about whether or not they want to surrender when the opposing side comes along. No, if you want to surrender, you be proactive and turn yourself in, or you take your chances.
I miss the glory days too. I remember the original UT had some really really creative and fun maps made by players, stuff that no professional level designer at Epic would have even thought of doing.
I like to play games, certainly, but more than that, I like to make games. Some of my favorite games of all time have allowed me to tell my own stories, or create my own content, and many of them I still go back to time and time again, where games without such mod communities get covered in dust after a few months.
The fact that there wasn't much heat doesn't mean that there couldn't have been a lot of heat, had they hesitated at any point in the operation. I trust that they did what they had to do to get home safe, and complete their objectives. At the end of the day, that's the important part.
Armed, unarmed, it doesn't matter. They were enemies in war, in a dangerous place with a great many unknowns. If the enemy doesn't immediately surrender when you show up, the enemy is fair game. That's the rules of war and the only thing that makes sense on the battlefield. These terrorists became terrorists to kill or be killed. They had weapons nearby if not in hand, and for all these SEALs knew, there were bombs everywhere. There is absolutely no question that they were hostile enemy combatants. It may make some people more comfortable with the outcome had Osama bin Laden gotten some shots off, but for the operation to be as big a success as it was, it's probably good he never had the chance to do our soldiers harm. He certainly would not have hesitated, let there be no mistake about it.
There may be some celebrating, but I think mainly what you see is catharsis. Generally what people are celebrating, where they are celebrating, is not the death of a human being, but the major blow this is to a dangerous terrorist organization, the feeling of pride in actually doing something right as a nation in the wake of economic problems and long painful wars, and of course, relief and a sense of closure after a very long time of worry. It took nearly 10 years, but we got justice for what was done to us on 9/11. We're not incompetent, and wounded, we're accomplishing things and starting to heal.
The map itself isn't an Osama's death simulator, it's a simulation of a compound where Osama happened to have died. People are naturally curious about the place, and want to see it for themselves in some form. They're not reenacting anything because Counterstrike doesn't have an Osama character.
Osama bin Laden is already a martyr to his followers, and everybody already knew who he was. Media attention is going to have absolutely no effect on how the terrorists feel about this, it will only serve to educate an understandably curious public about the event.
Likewise, terrorists were still going to keep trying to kill us had Osama bin Laden not been killed, or if he was captured. The only difference his death makes, as far as terrorism as a whole is concerned, is there is now one less vocal proponent of jihad out there. Yes, it will stir everybody up a bit, and they may dedicate attacks to his name now, but they'd still have done attacks one way or another. Terrorists try to kill people, that's simply what they do. That's kind of why we didn't like the guy so much.
It makes a difference, because birthers are by definition irrational people, and irrational people aren't the most reliable sources of information. If somebody refuses to accept reasonable information provided to them time and time again, why should anybody trust them on any other matter?
It did indeed serve Obama's purposes to not go to extraordinary lengths to prove something every rational person already knew, because it highlights their irrationality. It makes them look stupid. Releasing it now serves his purposes because it makes birthers look really stupid at a time when some birthers are trying to run for president against him.
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Luckily they have no regard for their own lives, as TFA clearly shows they're willing to use suicidal tactics to get us to shut down our alternative energy sources that will halt their advance. If they did care more, they might be pissed off that we're eating them.
Increasing water temperatures do correlate with increased jellyfish populations, and they do better in depleted oxygen waters, which pollution causes. More fossil fuels do result in increased jellyfish numbers, it's been shown in a number of scientific studies.
They ARE xenoforming our planet, and we have limited time to stop them before they begin constructing saltwater-filled vehicles to roam the lands and take over.
Except we're clearly from this planet. If you wanted to argue the jellyfish are trying to stop us from spreading to other planets, you may be right. Their efforts thus far to change our environment to suit their own purposes have been quite effective, and may end up destroying us.
We better start fighting back now. Countries such as Germany are already under the influence of jellyfish. We should look for distinctive jellyfish sting marks on the necks of their lawmakers who voted for the nuclear power ban.
I have a theory that jellyfish are alien invaders, here to xenoform our planet. They love basically everything we do to the planet, from pollution to overfishing to global warming. This is just further evidence, but by shutting down nuclear reactors, the only current viable alternative to fossil fuel power plants, they ensure we use more coal and oil power plants, contributing to the environmental change they love.
Wow. What time capsule did you just step out of?
The Ars review in particular, though, made it clear that it failed to live up to the standard of its predecessor, acknowledging that DN3D's juvenile humor was at least funny and added to a game that was actually fun. DNF, it seems, at least according to Ars, is simply unfunny toilet humor with crappy gameplay tacked on. Basically, they got it backwards, and did a poor job with both.
I haven't played DNF, but it sounds like a fair criticism, if you're going to criticize a game from a raunchy franchise. It's one if Duke's being Duke in a game that's fun, but that doesn't seem to have happened here.
You misunderstood me.
I read this one this morning, but there are a lot of equally bad reviews out there, and a pitiful few mediocre ones.
It's more accurate to call it a newer incarnation of BBEdit Lite, but I'll gladly second TextWrangler as a recommendation. I used to use BBEdit Lite way back in the day, and I've used TextWrangler ever since it came out. It's got a lot of advanced features, but mainly it gets out of your way and lets you do your thing until you need them.
BBEdit is still around too, if you want to pay for TextWrangler's "older brother".
From the information given in the question, it sounds to me that TextWrangler would be the better choice of the two, but check out the feature comparison. Well, TextWrangler is free, so you can always try that out for a while first anyway.
Neither program is a WYSIWYG but stuff like HTML and CSS aren't that hard to learn, and you may find it beneficial in the long run to learn how to do things by hand. Both tools will give you all the handy syntax coloring and search tools you could ever need, and they are really great web IDEs.
Exactly, different market segments. A business that's making money from two different things, one more than the other, doesn't drop the other unless it's cannibalizing sales from the first. You don't kill off any profitable part of a business unless there is actual opportunity cost. In this case, there isn't. They're smart to keep both iOS and OS X devices around, because it's diversification. Even Steve wouldn't be able to convince his board and shareholders they should just throw away Mac money, especially as it is growing and growing all the time.
Exactly. Is it a dick move by the Palestinians? Absolutely. But it really is their right, after all, they are paying for his trip and they can put whatever conditions on it they'd like.
Now, whether or not he should have, at that point, decided not to go at all, because he's being used as a political pawn, I suppose we can argue about that. But at the end of the day, he agreed to the trip as the Palestinians wanted, then decided he'd also do some other things on their dime, they said no way, so he decided to stick to the original agreement. I can't really fault him for that.
If Israeli universities want to pay for him to come in a week later, then they are free to do that.
I found the video to be fairly tedious and the music annoying. If you want to see the entire night sky in much better quality and without any telescopes cluttering it up, check out the skysurvey project. You'll have to provide your own soundtrack.
http://media.skysurvey.org/interactive360/index.html
They're not that irrational. They want to kill H.264 because they're not in the patent pool for it. Flash helps them do that, even if it is the nuclear option.
Here's how I define irrationality:
Taking a belief (Obama isn't an American) based on no evidence whatsoever, and in fact contrary to the facts that his opponents never brought a lawsuit to strip his name from any ballots (something they'd certainly do if he wasn't an American, after all, it would guarantee a win if you run virtually unopposed), and he was inaugurated successfully (thus met the legal requirements to be President). Furthermore, the fact that his mother was a natural born citizen, thus any children she had were legally American citizens. Furthermore, the fact he was born in Hawaii, a territory of the United States, thus he was a natural born citizen. As I recall, he also had proper documentation of his birth, which he produced quite readily, very early. This evidence was of course, ignored by the birthers.
Believing something that is contrary to all evidence is against logic, is irrational.
Why is it extraordinary? Because no other presidential candidate has ever been asked to produce such evidence. People are either American citizens or not, and it's pretty easy to tell the difference. This is not a case of ambiguity, or missing evidence. The evidence has been there all along, it's 100% in favor of the fact that Obama is an American citizen, and continuing to insist otherwise so many years later is simply irrational. Okay, so he released further proof, after all these years. And you know what, irrational people are still spinning their wild conspiracy theories about it, like about how it took too long. Obama can't win with these people, they are simply incapable of rational thought about him, but luckily he doesn't have to.
Frankly, you do sound like one of them. For somebody talking about being grounded in facts and empirical evidence, you apparently ignored all the prior facts and empirical evidence for the last five years yourself if you think the latest bit of evidence proves something new. Respected journalists and news networks showed off all the legal documents and evidence required back when he was running. That's how rational people came to understand he's an American citizen for all these years. No faith required.
I'd try explaining to you that the United States has never invaded Saudi Arabia, and Osama bin Laden's worldview is totally screwed up, but you don't really care about that.
I'd try explaining to you once again how this wasn't done in cold blood, it was done on a battlefield in a mutually declared war, but you don't really care about that.
I'd try explaining the fallacy that people don't want to die, since suicide bombers do it all the time, but you don't really care about that.
At last we have the truth from you. You're a simple anti-American troll, who believes the Americans are the terrorists, not al Qaeda. Now that you've made yourself clear, I don't see much point in debating with you. You're absolutely certain of your point of view, and nothing will change that. Kind of like al Qaeda's jihad, but you don't really care about that.
As I said, he made statements that he would never be taken alive prior to this.
As I've also said, on a battlefield in a war, you don't get to pause time and decide whether or not you want to surrender, and everyone else has to sit around waiting for you to decide. If you're at war, you can be killed at any time by the opposing force. War isn't fair, but it is what Osama bin Laden cheerfully signed up for. Nobody should feel sorry for him, and nobody should be arguing that we shouldn't have killed him in this war.
If you want to leave the war, you get proactive. Cover yourself in white flags, get rid of all your weapons, and find the nearest enemy to surrender to. If you want to keep fighting, you take the chance that you won't have time to surrender when the enemy comes. Osama bin Laden kept fighting, and we was killed. Simple as that. Was he actively fighting in the second or two before he was shot? Doesn't matter, because he wasn't actively surrendering.
I don't know what crazy media you're listening to, but what I've been hearing has been pretty consistent, from the start, and even as new details emerge. There was the ability in place to extract him alive if he surrendered. He didn't, and was killed. Nobody was shedding any tears about that, but hey, nobody really expected him to surrender anyway. Do you really think they planned a mission this dangerous and complex without accounting for every possible outcome?
Something like this, we may never really know. I will always err on the side of the soldier's judgement in that situation, having to make that split second decision. I'm not going to second-guess the honor of one of our soldiers when I have no reason to do so. These soldiers have a duty to their mission, the solider next to them, and to themselves. If there's any doubt in that split second that he might cause harm to any of those things, it's better to pull the trigger, is it not? Regardless, Osama bin Laden was an enemy on the field of battle, and you kill the enemy on a field of battle. That's war-fighting 101, and it's what Osama bin Laden signed up for when he declared war on America.
The important thing is, every one of those SEALs got to go home safe to their families. I'm not going to question any decision that led to that outcome. Perhaps some of those decisions were irrelevant to that outcome, and everything would have worked out okay anyway, but I wasn't there and I can't know. I'll err on the side of that soldier's judgement who pulled the trigger. The rest of the Monday morning quarterbacking and political nonsense, I don't think it's necessary.
If North Korea wants to come and get me, I'll fight them tooth and nail and go down fighting. Hopefully the US government does something to stop them too.
I said that Osama bin Laden chose not to turn himself in, simply because other people are saying it's somehow not fair we didn't give him a chance to surrender. I say this because he did have a chance to surrender. He had many chances for years now, and he repeatedly chose not to. Why people expect he would have surrendered now, and then we somehow ignored that and summarily executed him, I can't imagine.
This was a bad man, who was unwilling to surrender, and was killed on a battlefield in a war. It's as simple as that, not controversial, and people essentially saying we should have let him try to kill some more of us first are the ones making stupid arguments.
Pakistan has proven themselves to be an unreliable ally. Considering Osama bin Laden's location when we finally got him, either Pakistan was outright helping him, or incredibly incompetent. Working with them on such a high profile target would have been a brilliant way of losing him yet again.
Accepting that he was out of reach for now is... unacceptable. We may have violated Pakistan's airspace and sovereignty, but the ends justify the means, particularly since Pakistan is so unreliable. We eliminated a strong and charismatic proponent of jihad, and gathered information about active plots. Overall, this will save lives, and not just American lives either. It'll save Pakistani lives too, since Al Qaeda loves blowing up other muslims who aren't as orthodox as they are. Pakistan will make a fuss over this, and more than a few in their government who already hated us and were working with Al Qaeda will keep doing so, but so be it. When your allies are working against you, why should we treat them any better than enemies?
Before somebody twists my words, I'm not saying we should invade Pakistan or anything of the sort. We do need them for what they can do for us, and they need us too. It's a strange relationship, and one worth keeping relatively stable, but when we have actionable intelligence and can't trust Pakistan with it, we need to go it alone. As this operation proved, it can be well worthwhile.
Actually, this is how the world works, with nations looking out for their own best interests. Being friendly and politically correct with everyone is not how the world works, and I'm glad nobody so deluded is in charge of the US government.
Moral high ground? I think you ask just about any guy on the street, and he'll tell you we did the right thing. Okay, but if I concede going to trial is the moral high ground after all, who benefits from that? The terrorists don't recognize our courts, find our entire way of life to be an abomination. We're not going to show them anything by putting their leader on trial. Our allies probably don't care either way. I mean really. So we're left with basically making us feel good about our justice system, while at the same time dragging things out for his victims who want closure, giving him an opportunity to spout his hatred and anti-western propaganda, generally making a muck of things politically for everybody. Any self esteem we might have gotten from showcasing our trial system is probably not as strong as killing him is anyway, so it's basically all negatives.
Now look, I like the idea of putting him on trial, locking him up, and all that jazz, but ultimately I trust our soldiers who were there to do what was necessary to protect themselves and the mission. It's easy looking back, with all the information we have about the compound, who was there, and so on, to come up with a better plan. You have to remember though, they weren't even sure Osama bin Laden was there. They had no idea what room he'd be in when they found him, they had no idea if he'd be armed, if he'd be wearing a bomb, if he had other surprises in store, or who else might be in the room with him. There were so many unknowns, and so many things that could have gone wrong. At the end of the day, you have to let the soldiers on the ground make tactical decisions to protect themselves and their mission. If there was even the slightest chance one of them could have been hurt, or the mission could have been compromised in some way, it was better to just shoot Osama bin Laden if he wasn't immediately and totally surrendering the instant they came in.
Osama bin Laden was a bad guy. He was resisting capture, in some small way if not in some big way. He was on the run for years saying we'd never take him alive, and threatening all kinds of harm to those who tried. The situation was dangerous, and the soldiers sent to get him were pressed for time and taking tremendous personal risks just being there. He was an enemy combatant on the field of battle. They neutralized threats to themselves and to their country, and made off with valuable intelligence materials. The outcome of the operation should be in no way controversial.
By choosing to go to war, you're opting in to get killed violently. Osama bin Laden chose to go to war with the United States, and sure enough, he was killed violently.
There's no rule that says everybody in war is given a minute or two to think about whether or not they want to surrender when the opposing side comes along. No, if you want to surrender, you be proactive and turn yourself in, or you take your chances.
I miss the glory days too. I remember the original UT had some really really creative and fun maps made by players, stuff that no professional level designer at Epic would have even thought of doing.
I like to play games, certainly, but more than that, I like to make games. Some of my favorite games of all time have allowed me to tell my own stories, or create my own content, and many of them I still go back to time and time again, where games without such mod communities get covered in dust after a few months.
The fact that there wasn't much heat doesn't mean that there couldn't have been a lot of heat, had they hesitated at any point in the operation. I trust that they did what they had to do to get home safe, and complete their objectives. At the end of the day, that's the important part.
Armed, unarmed, it doesn't matter. They were enemies in war, in a dangerous place with a great many unknowns. If the enemy doesn't immediately surrender when you show up, the enemy is fair game. That's the rules of war and the only thing that makes sense on the battlefield. These terrorists became terrorists to kill or be killed. They had weapons nearby if not in hand, and for all these SEALs knew, there were bombs everywhere. There is absolutely no question that they were hostile enemy combatants. It may make some people more comfortable with the outcome had Osama bin Laden gotten some shots off, but for the operation to be as big a success as it was, it's probably good he never had the chance to do our soldiers harm. He certainly would not have hesitated, let there be no mistake about it.
There may be some celebrating, but I think mainly what you see is catharsis. Generally what people are celebrating, where they are celebrating, is not the death of a human being, but the major blow this is to a dangerous terrorist organization, the feeling of pride in actually doing something right as a nation in the wake of economic problems and long painful wars, and of course, relief and a sense of closure after a very long time of worry. It took nearly 10 years, but we got justice for what was done to us on 9/11. We're not incompetent, and wounded, we're accomplishing things and starting to heal.
The map itself isn't an Osama's death simulator, it's a simulation of a compound where Osama happened to have died. People are naturally curious about the place, and want to see it for themselves in some form. They're not reenacting anything because Counterstrike doesn't have an Osama character.
Osama bin Laden is already a martyr to his followers, and everybody already knew who he was. Media attention is going to have absolutely no effect on how the terrorists feel about this, it will only serve to educate an understandably curious public about the event.
Likewise, terrorists were still going to keep trying to kill us had Osama bin Laden not been killed, or if he was captured. The only difference his death makes, as far as terrorism as a whole is concerned, is there is now one less vocal proponent of jihad out there. Yes, it will stir everybody up a bit, and they may dedicate attacks to his name now, but they'd still have done attacks one way or another. Terrorists try to kill people, that's simply what they do. That's kind of why we didn't like the guy so much.
It makes a difference, because birthers are by definition irrational people, and irrational people aren't the most reliable sources of information. If somebody refuses to accept reasonable information provided to them time and time again, why should anybody trust them on any other matter?
It did indeed serve Obama's purposes to not go to extraordinary lengths to prove something every rational person already knew, because it highlights their irrationality. It makes them look stupid. Releasing it now serves his purposes because it makes birthers look really stupid at a time when some birthers are trying to run for president against him.