Wtf? "They shouldn't do it because they might piss off the president." ??? What kind of reasoning is that? The president's ethical whims do not automatically become law.
That's some seriously funny shit right there, and anyone who reads it literally should be strapped down and forcefed The Daily Show and The Colbert Report until they develop a sense of humor.
Bzzzzt, wrong. Communism does not mandate a dictatorship or oligarchy. It is perfectly possible to have a democratic socialist state--see Sweden, for example (yes I know they're somewhat captialistic, but not *that* much more than the former USSR was.)
These kinds of informational needs aren't going to magically disappear.
Oh heavens, I've forgotten that law enforcement has been COMPLETELY INCAPABLE of stopping crime until now, until this spiffy new tech was invented.
The only way law enforcement alone will ever stomp out all crime is if we turn into a police state so controlling that it would've given Orwell nightmares (in 1984, 90% of the population--the proles--were actually relatively free to do as they please, provided they didn't challenge The Party.) Law enforcement is a band-aid, a safety net, it's "the best we've got" until we've managed to eliminate the majority of crime socially (yes, it is possible. Take a look at some figures, and you'll notice that crime rates do not correlate very well at all with stricter law enforcement. Crime does not primarily stem from a lack of law enforcement power.) They don't need to use every goddamn tool at their disposal in the name of efficiency.
I wish your argument was valid, but once they have the data they have all the trump cards. Doesn't matter what they promise to do or not do with the data NOW... fifty years from now it'll be a different story. When Social Security Numbers were introduced, they were extremely controversial and congress only agreed to it with a strict understanding that it was to be used for Social Security purposes only--it was NOT to be a citizen or tax ID number. Yeah, they kept that promise real good now didn't they? Point isn't whether you agree or disagree that a citizen ID number was a good idea; the point is that given an arbitrary length of time the slippery slope is nigh infinite. Better to stop them NOW, stop them from ever getting their hands on our DNA (without a warrant) than to beg and plead in the future--"Oh please oh please oh please don't abuse the information you already possess."
but can't leave behind the mixture of oils on the fingers that get picked up as fingerprints.
You're assuming this "mixture of oils" can't be duplicated. Pretty big assumption, IMO. Even if it turns out to be too difficult to chemically duplicate, if you had reasonably oily skin you could probably just rub the fake finger on your forehead for a bit, then use an air-duster to blow off any skin or follicle cells that may have transfered. If you were super-paranoid about leaving behind any of your own DNA, you could still leave behind visible prints e.g. in your victim's blood.
Noble sentiment, but ultimately futile. You can't keep track of all your loose hair follicles and skin cells (often found in saliva--think empty soda can.)
Not that I disagree with the general sentiment of your post, but fingerprints are not difficult at all to fake. Can't seem to find a link offhand, but some guy figured out how to make a fake finger using a lifted fingerprint and some gelatin that can fool scanners something like 75% of the time. That's with around $50 in supplies and no extensive training--I'm sure it's possible to push that number to 100% given a little more money and practice.
There's a Firefox extension called CustomizeGoogle which offers (among many other handy features) the ability to filter Google's text ads. I don't use it (Google's ads don't really bother me), but it's worth mentioning as an easy alternative to Greasemonkey.
Do you care to proffer any evidence to substantiate your claim that Jewish culture is money-obsessed? Any texts you'd like to quote?
Not really, just personal experience. The Jews I've met tend to be a little too rich and stingy for my tastes. It's a completely nonscientific (and very possibly erroneous) observation, but that's kinda the point. I shouldn't be threatened with jail time for espousing an opinion, no matter how ill-conceived it may be.
I'm not a huge fan of the fact that laws may allow the government to act against you if you say those things in some countries, but given that continental Europe saw the systematic attempt to wipe out its Jewish population, along with other minorities, two generations ago, government are a bit more cautious than the US in regard to free speech.
If enough people were willing to support Hitler 2.0, it would happen regardless whether or not it was illegal to speak of. Outlawing speech only strengthens their cause. They should not be able to (quite rightly) complain about persecution--they should be attacked (scientifically and socially) and mocked and belittled in every way possible until their ideologies are driven virtually extinct. Outlawing ideology, no matter how fucked up that ideology is, will always be counterproductive. I've been to Germany and I've seen quite a few swastikas spraypainted on walls...
In a word, yes. You just need to replace "ClosedBSD" with "OS X."
Fortunately, Apple was kind enough to open source Darwin, but it didn't need to, and it choose not to open source the Aqua UI and the Finder shell. I could be mistaken, but I don't think they would have been able to do this had Darwin been based on GPL'ed software.
A better example of the GPL's strength would be the Linksys WRT54G router. I've got one myself and it does all kinds of awesome things it wasn't able to do out of the box (hell, you can even run an OpenVPN server on it), all because Linksys was forced to release their source code under the GPL.
That said, the BSDs are great projects (as are public domain projects like SQLite) and I wouldn't want to see them disappear. I believe that the core focus of the OSS community should be on GPL'ed software (because "embrace and extend" does in fact happen), but there's definitely an argument and a place for BSD-style licenses.
The way I look at it is, if you have to legislate the truth then you're already fucked. By all means, let people sue each other in cases of blatant lies and deceit, but prison is going way too far. If the truth must be legally enforced, then either humanity is fucked up beyond all hope or the truth being legislated is one too shakey to be blindly trusted.
Anyway, I'm not sure your example holds water. From what I've heard, most Japanese people are in no big hurry to return to their hyper-militaristic roots, and there are plenty of neo-Nazi's left in Germany. Instead of being openly laughed at, they're merely oppressed and driven underground. By banning the swastika they've given it unimaginable strength--the power of taboo. On top of this, they've criminalized many eastern religions which for thousands of years used the swastika as a symbol of life.
Meanwhile, fundementalist Christian groups (Europe has their share, though I'm sure they're not powerful as they are in America) get a free pass to preach their hatred of anyone who dares to love in ways they don't approve. You see, in my eyes fundementalist Christanity's war on love is much more obscene and offensive and hateful than mere racism. But that's the problem--obscenity is in the eye of the beholder, even hate can be in the eye of the beholder, and that's why speech (and other forms of expression) should never ever ever ever be punishable by prison time. Civil penalties are reasonable in certain cases, but silence doled out by men with guns who throw you in a little locked room for a few years is never, ever called for.
As the other guy said, it depends where you live. Denying the holocaust can land you a jail sentence in many western European countries, and the European Court of Human Rights has upheld such convictions despite the free speech provisions found in Article 10. This issue goes far beyond violent neo-Nazis. Certain historical theories, however stupid or silly they may be, are illegal to speak of. With discussion of certain events essentially banned, who knows whether any legitimate theories are being suppressed? It can also be quite dangerous to criticize Jewish religion or Jewish culture. Don't get me wrong, I think Jews catch way too much flak when compared to Christians, but that doesn't mean that there aren't perfectly valid reasons to attack their beliefs and their customs--e.g., I think that circumcision performed on any child not old enough to decide for himself is barbaric (other than for medical reasons. Long-term medical reasons such as very slightly lower STD transmission and penile cancer rates are not not valid because by the time he's old enough to worry about such things, he's old enough to make the decision himself.), the foundation of Israel was one of the all-time stupidest fucking ideas ever conceived and western nations should not support their holy war (even if they weren't the ones who started it), their dietary restrictions are dumb, their culture is too male-centric, power-centric and money-centric, and (like most other Abrahamic religions) observant Jews tend to be arrogant, ignorant, deluded, and bigoted.
I can say all of that without thinking twice because the one freedom America hasn't completely sold out is the freedom to criticize or insult whomever you wish. If I were in France (or Germany or Switzerland or Poland or Belgium or Austria), I would think very long and hard before I said anything like that in public. If it was a very public statement, such as a speech or academic paper, likely I'd have to consult a lawyer first and he'd probably tell me to tone down my language.
Simply put, that's fucked up... and it's doubly fucked up for an allegedly free western democratic nation. The USA certainly has its share of freedom-stomping, un-democratic laws on the books, but I certainly do hope Amnesty International doesn't neglect to go after oppressive and unproductive "hate crime" laws in western Europe.
Why don't you get back to me again in a few decades when everyone uses high resolution video conferencing and downloads high definition TV shows and movies on demand (free, pirated, pay-per-play, and/or DRM'ed with built-in commercials... one way or another, it'll happen.) With 4+ people in a household sharing a connection, a 25-megabit pipe would bottleneck pretty damn quick, and that's without giving any consideration at all to future yet-to-be-invented high bandwidth applications. Just because YOU can't see any use for extremely fat pipes doesn't mean that such uses do not exist; and those people who intend to fully utilize their ungodly connections of the future will feel the pinch if ISPs decide to start selling their bandwidth twice.
I've recently seen at least two posts that were so mind-blowingly awesome that it seemed like a crime to group them together with ok-but-nothin'-too-special +5 posts. An exponential moderation system would be great--2 points to go to from +5 to +6, 3 to go from +6 to +7, etc. Modding down will work as usual, so there really wouldn't be much room for abuse.
Extrapolating from the statistic I posted before, heart disease kills an average of 1,900+ Americans per day. What if every night the 6 o'clock news read off a list of the 'victims' of heart disease? What if they bombarded us with pictures of their grieving families?
I do get what you're saying; I do agree that it's the sensationalism of the attack that makes people want to sacrifice obscene amounts of money and freedom in order to do so. People like the idea of fighting evil a lot more than they like the idea of promoting good. *But*, I don't accept that this is the way it has to be--I don't accept that the majority is always right. There's no reason why we couldn't treat heart disease or car accidents or diabetes like we do terrorism. I might not be a pacifist like Ghandi, but I do believe that the key to solving the world's problems is to put doing good higher on the list of priorities than fighting evil. As it stands, we spend many, many orders of magnitude more money on trying fight other human beings than we do on simply making our lives safer, longer, and better.
I think it's our support of Israel that ticks off the rest of the middle east so much, true? I just don't think that our usage of oil imports drives anyone else to want to attack us.
Why did you say, then, that withdrawing our support for Israel would only make the situation even more insane? Well yeah, it might precipitate a war between Middle East Muslims and Jews, but to be extremely blunt and callous about it... that really wouldn't be our problem. I'm not saying we should do this, but it would certainly eliminate most of the anti-American rhetoric.
Oil is not directly responsible for terrorism, this is true... however, without oil, we would not have bothered to prevent Iraq from invading Kuwait in the early 90s. Meddling in muslim vs. muslim wars is another major complaint of al-Qaeda and other extremist groups. Like it or not, we meddle largely because we're protecting our main petrolium source. Yes, instead of giving up oil we could pledge not to meddle and withdraw our standing forces from countries like Saudi Arabia (another major complaint from Osama and friends), but then we would likely be strongarmed and manipulated by OPEC much more severely.
The point is, without oil and Israel we couldn't really fucking care less what the Middle East does. We would have no interest in interfering in their affairs financially or militarily, and in return they would have no interest in flying airliners into our monuments.
Oh my fucking god. Our ideology? You actually literally believe that they bomb us because they "hate our freedom"? Lay off the crackpipe. No one flies fucking airplanes into buildings because they "hate freedom."
Yes, I seem to remember getting a mail from the government telling me I need to get RIFD in my arm next time I renew my license.
If you were paying any attention at all, you'd realize I was making a point using a hypothetical scneario. Point is, we *can* gain increases in security if we sacrifice every last one of our freedoms (and yes, I do include the FREEDOM to associate people e.g. by calling them without being ruthlessly tracked), but that doesn't mean we should. The loss of 2,500 lives mandates at best a very small loss of freedom.
Abandon Israel? You are definitely off your rocker now. They're the only thing keeping the Middle East from going completely insane.
Oh yes, I forgot Israel has such a wonderful STABILIZING influence! I think you've got some rat poison in that crack of yours.
Once Iran gets nukes, you can forget safety, regardless of whether or not we're driving cars on foreign or domestic oil-products.
Iran getting nukes is indeed scary. Too bad we don't have enough resources to spare to take them on while simultaneously keeping Iraq from plunging into civil war. Maybe we should of thought of that before, you know, we declared war on a country that did not attack us (9/11 hijackers were mostly Saudi), does not openly support al-Qaeda, and had no WMDs (don't fucking tell me "everyone thought/knew Iraq had them!" because that's bullshit. The only "evidence" we had was classified, and then turned out to be blatantly false) Iran has a *huge* standing army...
'm pretty sure everyone in America agreed that something should be done
Yup, and something WAS done. Flight 93, despite having already given control of the plane to the terrorists, forced them to abort their mission. Any future hijackers will not even get this far (even disregarding the increased security)--they might stab a flight attendant or two before everyone on the plane kicks their fucking asses. On top of this, we made some much-needed changes in the intelligence community (improving inter-agency communication.) That's it; that's all that's needed. If you really want to end terrorism, you must take drastic action like banning all aliens and immigrants from Middle or taking away the things that connect us to them (oil and Israel.) What the hell is this phone monitoring going to do? It's going to show Arabs phoning other Arabs. Likely, every single muslim in this country is only 3-6 'steps' away from al-Qaeda, just like the Kevin Bacon game. If you want to deport all the foriegn muslims then just freaking DO it; don't pretend that monitoring the calling habits of the rest of us is going to make a damn bit of difference.
Furthermore, just about all what you mention there are ISOLATED incidents. You don't have 2500 people dying of cancer in the same building at the same time.
Yes, because 2,500 people dying at once is so much worse than millions dying over the course of one year! Really, your logic is so rational it's almost breathtaking.
Not a member of the debate team, are you?
At least I can say I'm not a member of the sensationalist spin machine.
Most of what you mention is not nearly as preventable. Cancer studies have been going on for years and years and years, same with a lot of the other diseases you mention. We haven't made a lot of progress in a lot of those, just measures to prolong life a bit.
That's just plain ignorant. We've made HUGE strides against many types of cancer, and we've got a slew of new heart disease medicines as well. And I'll wager we haven't spent well over one trillion dollars on research, either (including Afghanistan and Iraq, this figure is acturate.) Who knows what kind of d
At least 63% of Americans believe that Al Qaeda is in fact a threat to America, meaning your fringe kook appeasement views are in the minority, just as you were in the minority on November 2nd, 2004.
Yupm he's a kook alright. There certainly isn't *anything* better we could be spending over a trillion dollars on...
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that our "war on terrorism" has costed us more than we spend on all of these other problems combined... maybe even by an order of magnitude. There's a difference between "We were attacked! Let's do nothing." and "We were attacked! Let's get our intelligence agencies to talk to start talking to each other and let's increase airline security." And there's a huge difference between the latter and "We were attacked! Let's spend close to a trillion dollars on wars and homeland security and allow the government to do unlimited search and seizures without warrants, force protesters into Free Speech Zones because they're (supposedly) a security risk, allow indefinite imprisonment without trial, allow the government to strip anyone of their USA citizenship without trial, and allow the NSA to monitor every single USA citizen when none of the terrorists on 9/11 were actually USA citizens.
You want a definitive change that will make America safer vs. terrorists? Here ya go, this is the only one that will work: switch to biodiesel/ethenol/hydrogen (with a trillion dollars of spending, we COULD make this happen) and tell Israel they're on their own (sucks to be them, but I would have no sympathy for someone who founded a nation in the Antartic and complained when their toes started falling off... similarly, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the all-too-predictable holy war Israel has been drawn into.)
Or, you and the rest of America can grow some fucking balls and realize that freedom isn't free. The price we pay isn't measured in dollars or even in the lives of our soldiers--it's measured by the lives of you, me, and every other civilian. Every day we put our lives on the line, even though our risk vs. terrorism and murder could be lessened if the government took draconian measures such as tagging us, putting cameras in our houses, and monitoring every single call we make. But that's not a fair tradeoff, not when murder and terrorism represent such a tiny tiny percent of our country's problem. We should not be monitored in any way without a warrant, and you're a damn fool for not seeing how this could be abused.
The government can be toppled with rifles. You cannot fight a ground war with nukes and smart bombs, and the government will never nuke or bomb its own people (for then who would they have to rule over?)
So when are you going to topple the government?
Sometimes it's the thought that counts. Likely those in power will not do anything so incredibly evil as to provoke an armed revolution until the vast majority of the people are unarmed.
Tell that to Switzerland, where most households are required by law to have and maintain assault rifles. They've got a much lower crime rate than the USA or UK, too.
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Wtf? "They shouldn't do it because they might piss off the president." ??? What kind of reasoning is that? The president's ethical whims do not automatically become law.
What the hell is wrong with you people! Is this the first time you've ever read irony or satire?
That's some seriously funny shit right there, and anyone who reads it literally should be strapped down and forcefed The Daily Show and The Colbert Report until they develop a sense of humor.
Bzzzzt, wrong. Communism does not mandate a dictatorship or oligarchy. It is perfectly possible to have a democratic socialist state--see Sweden, for example (yes I know they're somewhat captialistic, but not *that* much more than the former USSR was.)
These kinds of informational needs aren't going to magically disappear.
Oh heavens, I've forgotten that law enforcement has been COMPLETELY INCAPABLE of stopping crime until now, until this spiffy new tech was invented.
The only way law enforcement alone will ever stomp out all crime is if we turn into a police state so controlling that it would've given Orwell nightmares (in 1984, 90% of the population--the proles--were actually relatively free to do as they please, provided they didn't challenge The Party.) Law enforcement is a band-aid, a safety net, it's "the best we've got" until we've managed to eliminate the majority of crime socially (yes, it is possible. Take a look at some figures, and you'll notice that crime rates do not correlate very well at all with stricter law enforcement. Crime does not primarily stem from a lack of law enforcement power.) They don't need to use every goddamn tool at their disposal in the name of efficiency.
I wish your argument was valid, but once they have the data they have all the trump cards. Doesn't matter what they promise to do or not do with the data NOW... fifty years from now it'll be a different story. When Social Security Numbers were introduced, they were extremely controversial and congress only agreed to it with a strict understanding that it was to be used for Social Security purposes only--it was NOT to be a citizen or tax ID number. Yeah, they kept that promise real good now didn't they? Point isn't whether you agree or disagree that a citizen ID number was a good idea; the point is that given an arbitrary length of time the slippery slope is nigh infinite. Better to stop them NOW, stop them from ever getting their hands on our DNA (without a warrant) than to beg and plead in the future--"Oh please oh please oh please don't abuse the information you already possess."
but can't leave behind the mixture of oils on the fingers that get picked up as fingerprints.
You're assuming this "mixture of oils" can't be duplicated. Pretty big assumption, IMO. Even if it turns out to be too difficult to chemically duplicate, if you had reasonably oily skin you could probably just rub the fake finger on your forehead for a bit, then use an air-duster to blow off any skin or follicle cells that may have transfered. If you were super-paranoid about leaving behind any of your own DNA, you could still leave behind visible prints e.g. in your victim's blood.
Noble sentiment, but ultimately futile. You can't keep track of all your loose hair follicles and skin cells (often found in saliva--think empty soda can.)
Not that I disagree with the general sentiment of your post, but fingerprints are not difficult at all to fake. Can't seem to find a link offhand, but some guy figured out how to make a fake finger using a lifted fingerprint and some gelatin that can fool scanners something like 75% of the time. That's with around $50 in supplies and no extensive training--I'm sure it's possible to push that number to 100% given a little more money and practice.
Although come to think of it, CustomizeGoogle is likely based on Greasemonkey. Oh well, still a good extension worthy of mentioning.
There's a Firefox extension called CustomizeGoogle which offers (among many other handy features) the ability to filter Google's text ads. I don't use it (Google's ads don't really bother me), but it's worth mentioning as an easy alternative to Greasemonkey.
Great. Now I've got this going through my head:
"RIAA!"
"MPAA!"
"Fear!"
"Uncertainty!"
"Doubt!"
"GO COPYRIGHT!"
"By your powers combined, I AM CAPTAIN COPYRIGHT!"
Do you care to proffer any evidence to substantiate your claim that Jewish culture is money-obsessed? Any texts you'd like to quote?
Not really, just personal experience. The Jews I've met tend to be a little too rich and stingy for my tastes. It's a completely nonscientific (and very possibly erroneous) observation, but that's kinda the point. I shouldn't be threatened with jail time for espousing an opinion, no matter how ill-conceived it may be.
I'm not a huge fan of the fact that laws may allow the government to act against you if you say those things in some countries, but given that continental Europe saw the systematic attempt to wipe out its Jewish population, along with other minorities, two generations ago, government are a bit more cautious than the US in regard to free speech.
If enough people were willing to support Hitler 2.0, it would happen regardless whether or not it was illegal to speak of. Outlawing speech only strengthens their cause. They should not be able to (quite rightly) complain about persecution--they should be attacked (scientifically and socially) and mocked and belittled in every way possible until their ideologies are driven virtually extinct. Outlawing ideology, no matter how fucked up that ideology is, will always be counterproductive. I've been to Germany and I've seen quite a few swastikas spraypainted on walls...
In a word, yes. You just need to replace "ClosedBSD" with "OS X."
Fortunately, Apple was kind enough to open source Darwin, but it didn't need to, and it choose not to open source the Aqua UI and the Finder shell. I could be mistaken, but I don't think they would have been able to do this had Darwin been based on GPL'ed software.
A better example of the GPL's strength would be the Linksys WRT54G router. I've got one myself and it does all kinds of awesome things it wasn't able to do out of the box (hell, you can even run an OpenVPN server on it), all because Linksys was forced to release their source code under the GPL.
That said, the BSDs are great projects (as are public domain projects like SQLite) and I wouldn't want to see them disappear. I believe that the core focus of the OSS community should be on GPL'ed software (because "embrace and extend" does in fact happen), but there's definitely an argument and a place for BSD-style licenses.
The way I look at it is, if you have to legislate the truth then you're already fucked. By all means, let people sue each other in cases of blatant lies and deceit, but prison is going way too far. If the truth must be legally enforced, then either humanity is fucked up beyond all hope or the truth being legislated is one too shakey to be blindly trusted.
Anyway, I'm not sure your example holds water. From what I've heard, most Japanese people are in no big hurry to return to their hyper-militaristic roots, and there are plenty of neo-Nazi's left in Germany. Instead of being openly laughed at, they're merely oppressed and driven underground. By banning the swastika they've given it unimaginable strength--the power of taboo. On top of this, they've criminalized many eastern religions which for thousands of years used the swastika as a symbol of life.
Meanwhile, fundementalist Christian groups (Europe has their share, though I'm sure they're not powerful as they are in America) get a free pass to preach their hatred of anyone who dares to love in ways they don't approve. You see, in my eyes fundementalist Christanity's war on love is much more obscene and offensive and hateful than mere racism. But that's the problem--obscenity is in the eye of the beholder, even hate can be in the eye of the beholder, and that's why speech (and other forms of expression) should never ever ever ever be punishable by prison time. Civil penalties are reasonable in certain cases, but silence doled out by men with guns who throw you in a little locked room for a few years is never, ever called for.
As the other guy said, it depends where you live. Denying the holocaust can land you a jail sentence in many western European countries, and the European Court of Human Rights has upheld such convictions despite the free speech provisions found in Article 10. This issue goes far beyond violent neo-Nazis. Certain historical theories, however stupid or silly they may be, are illegal to speak of. With discussion of certain events essentially banned, who knows whether any legitimate theories are being suppressed? It can also be quite dangerous to criticize Jewish religion or Jewish culture. Don't get me wrong, I think Jews catch way too much flak when compared to Christians, but that doesn't mean that there aren't perfectly valid reasons to attack their beliefs and their customs--e.g., I think that circumcision performed on any child not old enough to decide for himself is barbaric (other than for medical reasons. Long-term medical reasons such as very slightly lower STD transmission and penile cancer rates are not not valid because by the time he's old enough to worry about such things, he's old enough to make the decision himself.), the foundation of Israel was one of the all-time stupidest fucking ideas ever conceived and western nations should not support their holy war (even if they weren't the ones who started it), their dietary restrictions are dumb, their culture is too male-centric, power-centric and money-centric, and (like most other Abrahamic religions) observant Jews tend to be arrogant, ignorant, deluded, and bigoted.
I can say all of that without thinking twice because the one freedom America hasn't completely sold out is the freedom to criticize or insult whomever you wish. If I were in France (or Germany or Switzerland or Poland or Belgium or Austria), I would think very long and hard before I said anything like that in public. If it was a very public statement, such as a speech or academic paper, likely I'd have to consult a lawyer first and he'd probably tell me to tone down my language.
Simply put, that's fucked up... and it's doubly fucked up for an allegedly free western democratic nation. The USA certainly has its share of freedom-stomping, un-democratic laws on the books, but I certainly do hope Amnesty International doesn't neglect to go after oppressive and unproductive "hate crime" laws in western Europe.
"Hate speech" and "Neo-Nazi crap" is not the same thing as "death threats". It is perfectly possible to be a non-violent bigot.
Why don't you get back to me again in a few decades when everyone uses high resolution video conferencing and downloads high definition TV shows and movies on demand (free, pirated, pay-per-play, and/or DRM'ed with built-in commercials... one way or another, it'll happen.) With 4+ people in a household sharing a connection, a 25-megabit pipe would bottleneck pretty damn quick, and that's without giving any consideration at all to future yet-to-be-invented high bandwidth applications. Just because YOU can't see any use for extremely fat pipes doesn't mean that such uses do not exist; and those people who intend to fully utilize their ungodly connections of the future will feel the pinch if ISPs decide to start selling their bandwidth twice.
I've recently seen at least two posts that were so mind-blowingly awesome that it seemed like a crime to group them together with ok-but-nothin'-too-special +5 posts. An exponential moderation system would be great--2 points to go to from +5 to +6, 3 to go from +6 to +7, etc. Modding down will work as usual, so there really wouldn't be much room for abuse.
But 2500 in one morning?
Extrapolating from the statistic I posted before, heart disease kills an average of 1,900+ Americans per day. What if every night the 6 o'clock news read off a list of the 'victims' of heart disease? What if they bombarded us with pictures of their grieving families?
I do get what you're saying; I do agree that it's the sensationalism of the attack that makes people want to sacrifice obscene amounts of money and freedom in order to do so. People like the idea of fighting evil a lot more than they like the idea of promoting good. *But*, I don't accept that this is the way it has to be--I don't accept that the majority is always right. There's no reason why we couldn't treat heart disease or car accidents or diabetes like we do terrorism. I might not be a pacifist like Ghandi, but I do believe that the key to solving the world's problems is to put doing good higher on the list of priorities than fighting evil. As it stands, we spend many, many orders of magnitude more money on trying fight other human beings than we do on simply making our lives safer, longer, and better.
I think it's our support of Israel that ticks off the rest of the middle east so much, true? I just don't think that our usage of oil imports drives anyone else to want to attack us.
Why did you say, then, that withdrawing our support for Israel would only make the situation even more insane? Well yeah, it might precipitate a war between Middle East Muslims and Jews, but to be extremely blunt and callous about it... that really wouldn't be our problem. I'm not saying we should do this, but it would certainly eliminate most of the anti-American rhetoric.
Oil is not directly responsible for terrorism, this is true... however, without oil, we would not have bothered to prevent Iraq from invading Kuwait in the early 90s. Meddling in muslim vs. muslim wars is another major complaint of al-Qaeda and other extremist groups. Like it or not, we meddle largely because we're protecting our main petrolium source. Yes, instead of giving up oil we could pledge not to meddle and withdraw our standing forces from countries like Saudi Arabia (another major complaint from Osama and friends), but then we would likely be strongarmed and manipulated by OPEC much more severely.
The point is, without oil and Israel we couldn't really fucking care less what the Middle East does. We would have no interest in interfering in their affairs financially or militarily, and in return they would have no interest in flying airliners into our monuments.
Credit where credit is due. I just made a couple of small embellishments.
Oh my fucking god. Our ideology? You actually literally believe that they bomb us because they "hate our freedom"? Lay off the crackpipe. No one flies fucking airplanes into buildings because they "hate freedom."
Yes, I seem to remember getting a mail from the government telling me I need to get RIFD in my arm next time I renew my license.
If you were paying any attention at all, you'd realize I was making a point using a hypothetical scneario. Point is, we *can* gain increases in security if we sacrifice every last one of our freedoms (and yes, I do include the FREEDOM to associate people e.g. by calling them without being ruthlessly tracked), but that doesn't mean we should. The loss of 2,500 lives mandates at best a very small loss of freedom.
Abandon Israel? You are definitely off your rocker now. They're the only thing keeping the Middle East from going completely insane.
Oh yes, I forgot Israel has such a wonderful STABILIZING influence! I think you've got some rat poison in that crack of yours.
Once Iran gets nukes, you can forget safety, regardless of whether or not we're driving cars on foreign or domestic oil-products.
Iran getting nukes is indeed scary. Too bad we don't have enough resources to spare to take them on while simultaneously keeping Iraq from plunging into civil war. Maybe we should of thought of that before, you know, we declared war on a country that did not attack us (9/11 hijackers were mostly Saudi), does not openly support al-Qaeda, and had no WMDs (don't fucking tell me "everyone thought/knew Iraq had them!" because that's bullshit. The only "evidence" we had was classified, and then turned out to be blatantly false) Iran has a *huge* standing army...
'm pretty sure everyone in America agreed that something should be done
Yup, and something WAS done. Flight 93, despite having already given control of the plane to the terrorists, forced them to abort their mission. Any future hijackers will not even get this far (even disregarding the increased security)--they might stab a flight attendant or two before everyone on the plane kicks their fucking asses. On top of this, we made some much-needed changes in the intelligence community (improving inter-agency communication.) That's it; that's all that's needed. If you really want to end terrorism, you must take drastic action like banning all aliens and immigrants from Middle or taking away the things that connect us to them (oil and Israel.) What the hell is this phone monitoring going to do? It's going to show Arabs phoning other Arabs. Likely, every single muslim in this country is only 3-6 'steps' away from al-Qaeda, just like the Kevin Bacon game. If you want to deport all the foriegn muslims then just freaking DO it; don't pretend that monitoring the calling habits of the rest of us is going to make a damn bit of difference.
Furthermore, just about all what you mention there are ISOLATED incidents. You don't have 2500 people dying of cancer in the same building at the same time.
Yes, because 2,500 people dying at once is so much worse than millions dying over the course of one year! Really, your logic is so rational it's almost breathtaking.
Not a member of the debate team, are you?
At least I can say I'm not a member of the sensationalist spin machine.
Most of what you mention is not nearly as preventable. Cancer studies have been going on for years and years and years, same with a lot of the other diseases you mention. We haven't made a lot of progress in a lot of those, just measures to prolong life a bit.
That's just plain ignorant. We've made HUGE strides against many types of cancer, and we've got a slew of new heart disease medicines as well. And I'll wager we haven't spent well over one trillion dollars on research, either (including Afghanistan and Iraq, this figure is acturate.) Who knows what kind of d
At least 63% of Americans believe that Al Qaeda is in fact a threat to America, meaning your fringe kook appeasement views are in the minority, just as you were in the minority on November 2nd, 2004.
Yupm he's a kook alright. There certainly isn't *anything* better we could be spending over a trillion dollars on...
(2002 alone)
* Heart Disease: 696,947
* Cancer: 557,271
* Stroke: 162,672
* Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 124,816
* Accidents (unintentional injuries): 106,742
* Diabetes: 73,249
* Influenza/pneumonia: 65,681
* Alzheimer's disease: 58,866
* Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 40,974
* Septicemia: 33,865
* Suicide: 30,622
* Murder: 16,110
Statistics from 2002: * Heart Disease: 696,947
* Cancer: 557,271
* Stroke: 162,672
* Chronic lower respiratory diseases: 124,816
* Accidents (unintentional injuries): 106,742
* Diabetes: 73,249
* Influenza/pneumonia: 65,681
* Alzheimer's disease: 58,866
* Nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, and nephrosis: 40,974
* Septicemia: 33,865
* Suicide: 30,622
* Murder: 16,110
I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that our "war on terrorism" has costed us more than we spend on all of these other problems combined... maybe even by an order of magnitude. There's a difference between "We were attacked! Let's do nothing." and "We were attacked! Let's get our intelligence agencies to talk to start talking to each other and let's increase airline security." And there's a huge difference between the latter and "We were attacked! Let's spend close to a trillion dollars on wars and homeland security and allow the government to do unlimited search and seizures without warrants, force protesters into Free Speech Zones because they're (supposedly) a security risk, allow indefinite imprisonment without trial, allow the government to strip anyone of their USA citizenship without trial, and allow the NSA to monitor every single USA citizen when none of the terrorists on 9/11 were actually USA citizens.
You want a definitive change that will make America safer vs. terrorists? Here ya go, this is the only one that will work: switch to biodiesel/ethenol/hydrogen (with a trillion dollars of spending, we COULD make this happen) and tell Israel they're on their own (sucks to be them, but I would have no sympathy for someone who founded a nation in the Antartic and complained when their toes started falling off... similarly, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the all-too-predictable holy war Israel has been drawn into.)
Or, you and the rest of America can grow some fucking balls and realize that freedom isn't free. The price we pay isn't measured in dollars or even in the lives of our soldiers--it's measured by the lives of you, me, and every other civilian. Every day we put our lives on the line, even though our risk vs. terrorism and murder could be lessened if the government took draconian measures such as tagging us, putting cameras in our houses, and monitoring every single call we make. But that's not a fair tradeoff, not when murder and terrorism represent such a tiny tiny percent of our country's problem. We should not be monitored in any way without a warrant, and you're a damn fool for not seeing how this could be abused.
The government can be toppled with rifles. You cannot fight a ground war with nukes and smart bombs, and the government will never nuke or bomb its own people (for then who would they have to rule over?)
So when are you going to topple the government?
Sometimes it's the thought that counts. Likely those in power will not do anything so incredibly evil as to provoke an armed revolution until the vast majority of the people are unarmed.
Tell that to Switzerland, where most households are required by law to have and maintain assault rifles. They've got a much lower crime rate than the USA or UK, too.