Open mocking and ridicule is not. I am protesting the latter, not the former.
I know that, and I knew that before when I made my statement the first time. Your claim "We're not arguing what you think we're arguing" is false. I know exactly what you're arguing, and it's still utter bullshit to be making the claim that the Canadian's motivation for it is an inferiority complex.
What you have done is set up a situation where the only two possibilities are: 1 - A person's ridicule is valid, or 2 - it is caused by an inferiority complex. The notion that someone could be making an invalid argument, but still not be doing it out of a motivation of inferiority, would not be possible if your attitude was true.
What you have is "If I don't agree that your criticism is valid, then it must be the case that you have an inferiority complex." That attitude is unacceptable, and just as bad as what the Candian to which you are replying did.
I often miss "humor" when it's not actually humorous. (The show was trying to be funny for its content and it succeeded at that, but you're now trying to claim it was also trying to funny for it's use of "American" in the title - I don't believe it.)
And the only way to do that is to show a publicly dissemated version of your design (can't prove the age of something you never showed anyone before today), which you're not going to have most of the time.
Due to the great lakes, Michigan's borders with Canada are easily defendable pinch-points. The ones who've really got to worry are out west. That's a really long straight land border - plenty of places for dirty Canuks to sneak across in the great plains, sending a patrol of mounties or commandoes in hockey armor to cause trouble.
That might have more to do with the size of the airport than where it's located. They prefer to do customs at whichever end is less swamped, to help balance the workload and decrease the wait.
Technically, as far as the laws are concerned, the declaration of independance is meaningless. It was a justification for the rebellion, NOT a description of what the laws of the land would end up being twelve years later when the constitution was ready. (Here's one very vital difference: The Declaration says rights come from the Creator. That idea was dropped in the Constitution and it makes no such religious claim and in fact says a few things quite the opposite.)
Now, granted the Constitution ALSO has some things to say that make it quite clear that Guantanamo Bay is against the spirit of the law, if not the letter of the law. (They get around the letter of the law by having the compund on a military base not on US soil.)
Are you sure that's the reason for your different type of license? That seems like a stretch. One reason could be that the normal kind of license is meant to last longer and you have something more temporary. One reason could be to signify that your license doesn't operate under the same laws because it is not a real US driver's license - maybe it is just a placeholder "link" in the computer that if they looked it up would end up pointing them to your license from your home country. You are assuming the motivation is what you say it is when there are many possible explanations.
The Patriot Act was in response to a direct attack on the US by non-state sponsored terrorism,
Yeah, because terrorism has everything to do with students going to college having a harder time getting visas, and researchers on cryptography flying planes into buildings.
You don't know that. Firstly, a signifigant percentage didn't vote. Secondly, a lot of them didn't vote because they weren't eligible (below 18 years old) as opposed to because of apathy. Thirdly, and most importantly, the big alternative was Kerry, who was also an evil, greedy person lacking morals. People may have been picking the lesser of two evils (which does NOT mean approval), and a lot who would normally be okay with "anybody but bush" would have gone third-party becuase the particular "anybody" the Democrats put forward this time was a real nobdy. Out of all the people they could have picked, Kerry was the worst choice.
I agree 100% with your assesment of GW Bush's motivations. And that's why, despite being generally in favor of us being in Afghanistan and Iraq, I could not in good conscience vote for Bush. For me, the fact that his motivations are rooted in #1 make him an unacceptable candidate. According to people like him and his dad, belief in god is necessary in order to be a good person, and a good citizen. As an atheist, it would be dangerous for me to vote for such a person who might start whittling away at my rights. If I did it, I'd be doing it under the hope that congress would be a buffer that stops laws based on this part of his belief from getting through, and that he therefore wouldn't attempt them.
(I do have disagreements over Iraq, but they are based on the fact that Bush doesn't seem to understand that occupying a country takes a gigantic number of people equipped with a small amount of firepower each (i.e footsoldiers), as opposed to a small number of people equipped with a huge amount of firepower each (tanks and planes). He's going about it all wrong. Merely defeating a country on the battlefield is the easy part. After that, soldiers become like the police, and the job of the police is very different than the job of a soldier. If they continue to treat the situation like soldiers on a battlefield, they will piss off more and more of the people they are policing, and never be able to stop the violence. My complaint over Iraq is based on this particular strategic mistake, NOT on the idea that we shouldn't be there. There are very good reasons to be doing what we are doing. It's just that they aren't the reasons Bush tried using to sell the idea to the American people and the rest of the world - those reasons were lies.)
No, you make fun of us as a means to feel better about yourselves. It's a classic inferiority complex, and very transparent.
I don't like the attitude expressed by some Canadians toward us either, but that's no justification for using this unfair, totally bullshit line of "reasoning". The notion that "if you ridicule, it's because you have an inferority complex" should just fucking die already. It's unfair because it puts people in a situation where they cannot justly point out when someone is doing something wrong. It's just like that stupid notion that "if you deny it veheminenlty, then it must be true." Sheer, utterly lying bullshit.
I (an American) learned to program first as a kid using the Simon's Basic cartridge for the C-64. The cartridge was from a British company. Therefore I got used to spelling "colour" with the 'u', because the cartridge said it was a syntax error to leave it out. In fact, I never even realized other people around be spelled it without the 'u' until much later. I just assumed every time I saw "color" that the person had made a minor spelling error, and I didn't bother mentioning it because it wasn't important. Thusly my misconception lasted a very long time.
Now, that link illustrates something that bothers me a lot. Notice how it's called "Talking to Americans", not "Talking to USA people" or "Talking to United States citizens" or anything like that. It says "Americans". And it was a show made for Canadian TV, by Canadians, for Canadians. In other words, you people north of the border call us "Americans" too, so stop getting pissed off about how it's the name for the whole continent when we do it. Your own people in your own country use the exact same word the exact same way.
At least the US had a civil war and solved their indifferences many years ago.
There is still a lot of leftover animosity about it. The way the war is covered in history classes in the north is very different from how it is covered in history classes in the south. Most of the facts are the same, but the slant on who's fault it was (i.e. which action was the first one that was "wrong") is the opposite.
And the whole local vs federal issue is still a thorny thing that keeps coming up. (And the two major parties have had total flip-flops on this issue through their histories.)
In the recent election, there was serious concern on the part of the Democrats that Kerry would be disliked in the south simply for being too much of a northerner.
That war did not completely solve these differences.
The Arctic ocean around the north pole is international "waters", okay granted it's FROZEN waters, but it's still officially not owned by any country. (This also means that Canada does not actually border Russia.)
Yeah, but (1) Alaska is remote, and completely disconnected from the rest of the US, and (2) The other side of the straight, in the USSR, is even MORE remote and hard to get to from the main population of Russia than Alaska is from the main population of the US. So it's not like those "near" borders ever meant anything useful or signifigant.
Your characterization applies to the writers but not the ratifiers of the PATRIOT ACT. I don't think paranoia was the motivation of the people in the executive branch who wrote the PATRIOT ACT, but I think it was the motivation of the people who passed it in the legislative branch.
There's this code I've heard of that represents letters as numbers. I think a capitol "A" is 65, a capitol "B" is 66, a capitol "C" is 67, and so on. Granted, it's not a very good code for encryption or security through obscurity, but since the DMCA NEVER ONCE DEFINED a careful limitation to what it means by encryption, anyone who uses it, or a device designed to decode it, who has ever done so with any material that is copyrighted in any way (even if properly purchased) is violating the DMCA.
I sure hope that particular code isn't used very much. I wouldn't want to think our government would pass a law that would turn everyone into a criminal and then just enforce it selectively. That might not be so good.
My first computer game was on a VAX when I was 6 or so years old. My dad worked at a place that let you check out a tty (and roll of paper) for the night and take it home. My first experience with a computer was watching my dad stuff a telehpone headset into the rubber cups of the modem, and the family sitting around the kitchen table playing adventure. I can even remember the moment we figured out that when it asks if you want to kill the dragon with your bare hands, you just say "yes".
Somewhere, in the basement of my parent's house, there's a plain unmarked cardboard box with a pile of yellowed, crumbling paper. On it is the text scroll from the day they actually played adventure all the way through to the end while us kids watched on. (Yeah, I was hooked on programming from that moment.)
I'm semi-seriously considering what it would take to get that thing restored. I'd love to scan it and put the images up for a nostalgia site, but (A) It's a LOT to scan, and would take a painfully long time. and (B) To do it justice, with the faded look to the paper and everything, would require a high-res scan that would just take too much space.
But I just keep thinking about how darn COOL that would be.
with patents no one is allowed to invent things unless they're the first one.
Even that's not true. Nobody is allowed to invent things unless they're the first one TO PATENT what they invented. If you invented first, but didn't have the idea patented, you still lose rights to use it when someone else patents it later.
Of course, this ends up meaning that a big corporation with plenty of time and money to waste submitting patent proposals for every silly little thing they do (even things that are already common knowlege) ends up winning lawsuits over the little guy who can only submit patents for things that he really does believe are brand new ideas. This was NOT the intent of the patent system, but it's the reality of how it works today. Frivoilously patent everything you do without checking to see if it is prior art or not, because the patent office will probably grant it to you if THEY haven't seen it before - even if it's a classic textbook example of how to do things, that everyone in the field knows. The people in the patent office are not aware of what is already known in the field, so they'll give you your patent anyway.
A Patent office that was doing its job correctly would never have given Amazon.com the one-click shopping patent.
It's a common tactic of belittlement of your opponents - assume they are all one amorphous blob with a single hive mind, and then you can find them committing alleged hypocracy everywhere when they behave like what they really are - a bunch of individuals that only agree on a few things here and there.
Slashdot Mirror
Open mocking and ridicule is not. I am protesting the latter, not the former.
I know that, and I knew that before when I made my statement the first time. Your claim "We're not arguing what you think we're arguing" is false. I know exactly what you're arguing, and it's still utter bullshit to be making the claim that the Canadian's motivation for it is an inferiority complex.
What you have done is set up a situation where the only two possibilities are: 1 - A person's ridicule is valid, or 2 - it is caused by an inferiority complex. The notion that someone could be making an invalid argument, but still not be doing it out of a motivation of inferiority, would not be possible if your attitude was true.
What you have is "If I don't agree that your criticism is valid, then it must be the case that you have an inferiority complex." That attitude is unacceptable, and just as bad as what the Candian to which you are replying did.
I often miss "humor" when it's not actually humorous. (The show was trying to be funny for its content and it succeeded at that, but you're now trying to claim it was also trying to funny for it's use of "American" in the title - I don't believe it.)
they put words in other peoples mouths.
Since the record of what you said earlier already proves me right, I'll just let the record stand for itself and leave it at that.
And the only way to do that is to show a publicly dissemated version of your design (can't prove the age of something you never showed anyone before today), which you're not going to have most of the time.
Due to the great lakes, Michigan's borders with Canada are easily defendable pinch-points. The ones who've really got to worry are out west. That's a really long straight land border - plenty of places for dirty Canuks to sneak across in the great plains, sending a patrol of mounties or commandoes in hockey armor to cause trouble.
That might have more to do with the size of the airport than where it's located. They prefer to do customs at whichever end is less swamped, to help balance the workload and decrease the wait.
Technically, as far as the laws are concerned, the declaration of independance is meaningless. It was a justification for the rebellion, NOT a description of what the laws of the land would end up being twelve years later when the constitution was ready. (Here's one very vital difference: The Declaration says rights come from the Creator. That idea was dropped in the Constitution and it makes no such religious claim and in fact says a few things quite the opposite.)
Now, granted the Constitution ALSO has some things to say that make it quite clear that Guantanamo Bay is against the spirit of the law, if not the letter of the law. (They get around the letter of the law by having the compund on a military base not on US soil.)
Are you sure that's the reason for your different type of license? That seems like a stretch. One reason could be that the normal kind of license is meant to last longer and you have something more temporary. One reason could be to signify that your license doesn't operate under the same laws because it is not a real US driver's license - maybe it is just a placeholder "link" in the computer that if they looked it up would end up pointing them to your license from your home country. You are assuming the motivation is what you say it is when there are many possible explanations.
The Patriot Act was in response to a direct attack on the US by non-state sponsored terrorism,
Yeah, because terrorism has everything to do with students going to college having a harder time getting visas, and researchers on cryptography flying planes into buildings.
Over 50% of you approve of Bush.
You don't know that. Firstly, a signifigant percentage didn't vote. Secondly, a lot of them didn't vote because they weren't eligible (below 18 years old) as opposed to because of apathy. Thirdly, and most importantly, the big alternative was Kerry, who was also an evil, greedy person lacking morals. People may have been picking the lesser of two evils (which does NOT mean approval), and a lot who would normally be okay with "anybody but bush" would have gone third-party becuase the particular "anybody" the Democrats put forward this time was a real nobdy. Out of all the people they could have picked, Kerry was the worst choice.
I agree 100% with your assesment of GW Bush's motivations. And that's why, despite being generally in favor of us being in Afghanistan and Iraq, I could not in good conscience vote for Bush. For me, the fact that his motivations are rooted in #1 make him an unacceptable candidate. According to people like him and his dad, belief in god is necessary in order to be a good person, and a good citizen. As an atheist, it would be dangerous for me to vote for such a person who might start whittling away at my rights. If I did it, I'd be doing it under the hope that congress would be a buffer that stops laws based on this part of his belief from getting through, and that he therefore wouldn't attempt them.
(I do have disagreements over Iraq, but they are based on the fact that Bush doesn't seem to understand that occupying a country takes a gigantic number of people equipped with a small amount of firepower each (i.e footsoldiers), as opposed to a small number of people equipped with a huge amount of firepower each (tanks and planes). He's going about it all wrong. Merely defeating a country on the battlefield is the easy part. After that, soldiers become like the police, and the job of the police is very different than the job of a soldier. If they continue to treat the situation like soldiers on a battlefield, they will piss off more and more of the people they are policing, and never be able to stop the violence. My complaint over Iraq is based on this particular strategic mistake, NOT on the idea that we shouldn't be there. There are very good reasons to be doing what we are doing. It's just that they aren't the reasons Bush tried using to sell the idea to the American people and the rest of the world - those reasons were lies.)
No, you make fun of us as a means to feel better about yourselves. It's a classic inferiority complex, and very transparent.
I don't like the attitude expressed by some Canadians toward us either, but that's no justification for using this unfair, totally bullshit line of "reasoning". The notion that "if you ridicule, it's because you have an inferority complex" should just fucking die already. It's unfair because it puts people in a situation where they cannot justly point out when someone is doing something wrong. It's just like that stupid notion that "if you deny it veheminenlty, then it must be true." Sheer, utterly lying bullshit.
I (an American) learned to program first as a kid using the Simon's Basic cartridge for the C-64. The cartridge was from a British company. Therefore I got used to spelling "colour" with the 'u', because the cartridge said it was a syntax error to leave it out. In fact, I never even realized other people around be spelled it without the 'u' until much later. I just assumed every time I saw "color" that the person had made a minor spelling error, and I didn't bother mentioning it because it wasn't important. Thusly my misconception lasted a very long time.
Now, that link illustrates something that bothers me a lot. Notice how it's called "Talking to Americans", not "Talking to USA people" or "Talking to United States citizens" or anything like that. It says "Americans". And it was a show made for Canadian TV, by Canadians, for Canadians. In other words, you people north of the border call us "Americans" too, so stop getting pissed off about how it's the name for the whole continent when we do it. Your own people in your own country use the exact same word the exact same way.
At least the US had a civil war and solved their indifferences many years ago.
There is still a lot of leftover animosity about it. The way the war is covered in history classes in the north is very different from how it is covered in history classes in the south. Most of the facts are the same, but the slant on who's fault it was (i.e. which action was the first one that was "wrong") is the opposite.
And the whole local vs federal issue is still a thorny thing that keeps coming up. (And the two major parties have had total flip-flops on this issue through their histories.)
In the recent election, there was serious concern on the part of the Democrats that Kerry would be disliked in the south simply for being too much of a northerner.
That war did not completely solve these differences.
Ganga (okay, so maybe that's not really English)
There is a buffer of "international waters" at the north pole.
The Arctic ocean around the north pole is international "waters", okay granted it's FROZEN waters, but it's still officially not owned by any country. (This also means that Canada does not actually border Russia.)
Yeah, but
(1) Alaska is remote, and completely disconnected from the rest of the US, and
(2) The other side of the straight, in the USSR, is even MORE remote and hard to get to from the main population of Russia than Alaska is from the main population of the US.
So it's not like those "near" borders ever meant anything useful or signifigant.
Your characterization applies to the writers but not the ratifiers of the PATRIOT ACT. I don't think paranoia was the motivation of the people in the executive branch who wrote the PATRIOT ACT, but I think it was the motivation of the people who passed it in the legislative branch.
There's this code I've heard of that represents letters as numbers. I think a capitol "A" is 65, a capitol "B" is 66, a capitol "C" is 67, and so on. Granted, it's not a very good code for encryption or security through obscurity, but since the DMCA NEVER ONCE DEFINED a careful limitation to what it means by encryption, anyone who uses it, or a device designed to decode it, who has ever done so with any material that is copyrighted in any way (even if properly purchased) is violating the DMCA.
I sure hope that particular code isn't used very much. I wouldn't want to think our government would pass a law that would turn everyone into a criminal and then just enforce it selectively. That might not be so good.
My first computer game was on a VAX when I was 6 or so years old. My dad worked at a place that let you check out a tty (and roll of paper) for the night and take it home. My first experience with a computer was watching my dad stuff a telehpone headset into the rubber cups of the modem, and the family sitting around the kitchen table playing adventure. I can even remember the moment we figured out that when it asks if you want to kill the dragon with your bare hands, you just say "yes".
Somewhere, in the basement of my parent's house, there's a plain unmarked cardboard box with a pile of yellowed, crumbling paper. On it is the text scroll from the day they actually played adventure all the way through to the end while us kids watched on. (Yeah, I was hooked on programming from that moment.)
I'm semi-seriously considering what it would take to get that thing restored. I'd love to scan it and put the images up for a nostalgia site, but
(A) It's a LOT to scan, and would take a painfully long time.
and
(B) To do it justice, with the faded look to the paper and everything, would require a high-res scan that would just take too much space.
But I just keep thinking about how darn COOL that would be.
with patents no one is allowed to invent things unless they're the first one.
Even that's not true. Nobody is allowed to invent things unless they're the first one TO PATENT what they invented. If you invented first, but didn't have the idea patented, you still lose rights to use it when someone else patents it later.
Of course, this ends up meaning that a big corporation with plenty of time and money to waste submitting patent proposals for every silly little thing they do (even things that are already common knowlege) ends up winning lawsuits over the little guy who can only submit patents for things that he really does believe are brand new ideas. This was NOT the intent of the patent system, but it's the reality of how it works today. Frivoilously patent everything you do without checking to see if it is prior art or not, because the patent office will probably grant it to you if THEY haven't seen it before - even if it's a classic textbook example of how to do things, that everyone in the field knows. The people in the patent office are not aware of what is already known in the field, so they'll give you your patent anyway.
A Patent office that was doing its job correctly would never have given Amazon.com the one-click shopping patent.
And if you're about to post a snide rebuttal, then YOU are one of those fanboys.
I have no respect whatsoever for people who resort to the "if you deny it then it must be true" line of bullshit. This is precisely what you did.
It's a common tactic of belittlement of your opponents - assume they are all one amorphous blob with a single hive mind, and then you can find them committing alleged hypocracy everywhere when they behave like what they really are - a bunch of individuals that only agree on a few things here and there.