Do you still leave torture off the table? Not saying it would work in this case, actually fairly crappy odds. Which is intentional to make the moral choice even more murky.
Are you prepared to face the consequences? If I told you, that even if you succeeded in saving everyone you would have to spend the rest of your life in jail; would you be so quick to begin?
Your example is extreme, but my example of the consequences you should face is not. If the threat is only vague, if the person is not even likely to know anything, or even if there is no clear reason for it at all. If when you torured anyone, for any reason, you had to spend life in jail; would you be so quick to accept Guantanamo?
Put one of those monsters in the Scales of Justice and ask yourself; would it be OK to torture UBL's PGP keyring password from him and thereby round up most of Al Qaeda? I say yes. Personally I'd agnostic, but if I knew for a fact torturing Bin Laden's keyring from him would damn me to Hell this libertarian would still do it, reckoning it a fair trade; one life for many.
The end justifies the means? A shakey argument if every there was one. Is it worth burning the very foundation of your society just to go after Al Qaeda? Is the organisation really that much of a threat? Which is the bigger threat to your country. The terrorists, or th emethods you advocate to stop them.
By torturing, you have become evil. You've resorted to the tactics of every other opressive regime out there, and
Anyone with half a brain can see, looking back through history of the past few decades, that once women declared that they intended to enter the workforce en masse, the economy "responded." Overall, average wages dropped. Living expenses increased. Overnight, the economy went from one where one member of the family typically brought in the bacon, to one where dual incomes became absolutely necessary.
Yet the post war economy has consistently been the most productive, most affluent and has the highest consistent growth rate than any other period before. Not only that, but all modern economists regard increasing the amount women in the workforce as an essential factor for growth. Discuss.
If lab rats with this gene escaped, they could go native. Rats live just about anywhere humans can. Pigs on the other hand, not so much. Taiwan seems like a warm enough place for it, but I don't think they have enough wild pigs to breed with for that to be a problem.
Who said anything about wild pigs. All it takes is one broken fence and a short lived piggy elopement, one sale to an overseas distributor and "bang"! Glow in the dark pork chops in apple sause.
You are now, as the phrase goes, morally bankrupt.
I don't think you have a real understanding of what torture actually is. We're not talking about fraternity prank style harassment here. Torture is something fundamentally much much deeper than that. For any Government to engage in it corrodes the very foundations of its mandate to govern. Guantanamo is much more serious an incident than you seem to think.
This isn't intended for "the farm", nor for the butcher or human consumption. You must have missed these paragraphs:
True, but I'm afraid you've also missed this one:
The researchers say they hope the new, green pigs will mate with ordinary female pigs to create a new generation - much greater numbers of transgenic pigs for use in research.
Once they begin to breed the pigs, it will be all but impossible to stop the spread of the genes. I fully expect to see some jellyfish genes in animals mean for consmption with fifteen to twenty years.
And that list of "wars" was priceless. I haven't laughed at such an overt display of embellishment and distortion in a long time.
I can't remember who said the following "We[US]'ve been in every war hot and cold for the last 50 years", but it is true. It's not a distortion.
You might find this list of wars laughable for some reason, but they were no joking matter to the great many people who died in them. Of course, not very many of the dead were US soldiers or citizens.
Some of these wars were in some way justifiable. First Iraq war, Kosovo. But some would be farcical if people wern't getting killed. Bay of Pigs, Cambodia, Nicaragua and obviously the second Iraq war.
My wife is not working and WILL NOT work even though she is more educated than me. We made that conscious decision because we realized a child's life is more important than buying that Lexus RX330.
Bear in mind that a second job is not always a choice of luxury. Maybe people simply cannot afford not to work. This has been the case for most of history as well.
Often, the second job is not so much a question of want, as it is one of need.
1. Don't have kids until you can support them yourself (including paying for school, food, clothing and shelter).
The average cost of raising a child is $250,000.
2. Join a church or community group focused on family. Help your neighbors with kids and they'll help you.
The church essentially does what you advocate against the government doing. namely, raising peoples children for them.
3. Understand that raising a child means having one parent at home. If you have a child, stop spending money on toys and vacations and new cars and new clothes. Focus your money on your child's present and future.
Raising children has always entailed both parents working. The single working parent was a concept largely confined to 1950's america. Across the globe and throughout time, both parents have usually needed to work to support a family.
4. Understand that raising a child means constant care. Don't let your child go anywhere without knowing where and with whom. If one parent is home, this is much easier.
See previous point. Also along these lines, in the past, children often worked from quite a young age, usually alongside their parents. The modern school system is in essence an alternative to this, enabling parents to work, without simultaniously supervising their children.
What is really pissing you off is that the original poster is having fun with something you disapprove of.
That's the sound of the entire point of the grandparent post flying right over your head. The whole post was a refutation of the greatgrandparent's idea that people who cannot control vehicles without the aid of modern safety systems are bad drivers. They are not.
A good driver is both able to control the vehicle and obey the rules of the road. One can still be a good driver and rely on modern systems as good driving involves lots and lots of abilities unrelated to car control. Furthermore, modern systems aid a good drivers far more than they impede them, as they enable the driver to concentrate more on "driving" rather than moving the car.
Sorry if you've taken exception to my argument that the ability to control a muscle car has little to do with being a good driver. I stand by it. Muscle cars are not designed for modern commuting, and indeed, their size, weight and power and lack of modern features do much to promote bad driving.
Driving is not supposed to be fun. If you want to have fun while driving, please do it somewhere far away from public roads. Driving is a serious business. People having fun on the roads is definitly not funny.
There was one thing that Outlook 2003 got right and that was the tiling of the folder, inbox and message panes vertically. Has this got it? Or does this need an extension?
I would agree. We are talking about someone who got fired, and THEN decided to "whistle blow" If he reported this first and THEN got fired, then I would be more inclined to believe him. But the fact that he was fired first and afterward decided that he "needed" to report this to a newspaper (as opposed to filing a wrongful dismissal dispute via the legal system) does not speak well to his motives
Tice had been making noises before he got fired. He was one of those pushing for greater congressional protection for whistleblowers. Hint, hint.
Shortly thereafter, his bosses had him pulled in for a medical exam, where despite having no symptoms, the MO labeled him as suffering from paranoia. This is standard practice in such circles to ensure compliance, and to provide ammo for any subsequent smear campaigns.
It's like this. Anyone who believes that the NSA was not spying on their own country, is the real mentally unstable individual.
Nothing about this is illegal until the information passed into it is acquired illegally.
What counts as "legal"?
We live in a world where Gitmo is not only tolerated, but even approved by huges numbers of people in government, academia and in the public at large. Wiretap someones phone illegally, and if the president gave you say so, I doubt many judges would throw it out at this point. Get information by half drowing someone or photographing their anus and not only will judges not object, they'll pass judgement based on it!
I am 17 (and I wish morons would not judge by age) and I have not a licence, but I can drive a 1969 GTO without any of this modern bullshit implemented and perfectly(even a 1994 Chevy Beretta)
The Pontiac GTO was an automobile built by Pontiac from 1964 to 1974. It is often considered the first true muscle car.
Oh dear. the article goes on to mention that the 1969 model had a 400 cubic inch engine, which is about 6.4 litres, a size usually reserved for cargo trucks and airplanes. Someone has seen it fit to place such an engine into a two seater vehicle weighing less than one ton.
You can apparently drive this vehicle. However, I would go so far as to say that the ability to drive such a hotrod in no way prepares anyone for driving modern 1.1 litre hatchback runabouts, equipped with ABS, safely through town.
If people cannot drive without traction control or ABS (minimally) then they should not be able to drive at all. Driving a motor vehicle is not difficult.
And if people cannot drive with such systems, as was a frequent occurance when such systems were first introduced?
Getting a vehicle in motion is not a difficult process. Driving on the other hand is a very, very difficult skill which a great many people simply never achieve. Driving includes both the ability to move the vehicle and obey the rules of the road. It's the second part that most people have trouble with, not the first.
Any ass can get a 7 litre hotrod up to 200kph. But it would take a demi-god to use the beast on work, school and grocery runs for 10 years, in heavy traffic, with no incidents.
Some that I know still can't drive at all even with safety features and such... it is truly sad
Some people that I know have fifty times more time behind the wheel than I do and still cannot drive. They can get the car in motion in a paticular direction, but they speed, don't signal, brake lights, cut across lanes and generally put their lives more at risk than I ever will, despite the fact that my driving time is measured in hours and theirs in weeks.
My key point here is that people often mistake the ability to "move" a car for the ability to "drive" a car. They are very different things. Someone can still be a reasonably good "driver" without having fully mastered the ability to get the car in motion.
It is pretty easy to make sure drivers have the right skills... Make the qualification for a driver's license tougher not easier. If there are skills that are critical to driving safely, they should be on the test.
Government's will never do this, for the simple reason that having more people on the roads helps stimulate the economy. A few hundred thousand road accidents per annum is a small price to pay for higher GDP growth.
So preacheth the church of the new global capitalism. Hail Satan!
So a bunch of completely average drivers were taken around a test track at high speed and spun out. Why does this not surprise me?
Note that they spun out in "classic" cars. My expierience of "classic" cars, i.e. "older" cars, is that they are heavier, less responsive, sluggish and of course, lack any modern safety features. In other words they are fundamentally harder to drive. It's got nothign to do with the driver.
I would wager that if you ran this test with these "classic" cars 20 years ago, under the same conditions, the drivers would have spun out, despite their expierience with the less advanced technology.
Re:i'm beggining to really hate this program
on
iTunes is Malware?
·
· Score: 1
i can't friggen turn it on!! i reinstalled it, updated it rebooted it won't turn on! i checked my firewall, that an't it. i checked processes and it says it is on. grrr
This is incredulous!! The ergonomically designed iTunes interface hides nothing from the user and shows any and all pertinent information at the briefest glance. The stylishly engineered music system and efficient online purchasing system offers only the highest level of quality entertainment with none of the underhanded skullduggery that lesser companies wallow in.
Apple soars above such outrages!! You will feel His Jobnesses' Wrath!!
"If you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will be returned to our universe, but in a mangled form, which contains information about what you were like but in an unrecognizable state." These ideas are profound and will have a lasting effect on our scientific theories as well as life as we know it.
In the months since the last ruling, MS obviously got to someone (can you say bribes?)
Well, they have spent considerable sums of money "lobbying" members of the US congress, and probably other parliments as well.
But I take it you meant that actual brown paper bags full of cash were paid to certain persons of influence within the USPTO. Quite frankly, I think that not only is this a possibility, it is also a very likely one.
The USPTO is a corrupt organisation. Incompetance is the worst form of corruption, and they are certainly guilty of that. But I think even the most conservative of oberservers would have to admit that there is simply too many suspect happenings within the office to attribute soley to bereaucratic bumbling.
You'd be seriously surprised. I think you guys are underestimating the number of quality submissions we get. We might get 50 submissions to a breaking news piece, but something even SLIGHTLY more obscure may arrive only once.
You've got a problem.
As an editor you fundamentally require material to edit. You're not getting it. You need to find out the reasons for this.
In the past, did you recieve a higher quota of unique submission. Has the overall quality of submissions declined? If so, you need to find out. Any enterprise that sits around while its foundations begin to crumble is going to do just that.
Personally, I feel the reason your submissions are of such low quality is that so many good submissions have been rejected. I have no evidence for this, other than personal and anecdotal. It is quite true that many people have taken the time to write a high quality submission, only to have it rejected within ten minutes, and a story of lesser interest and quality posted shortly afterwards.
After several bouts of this, people just give up. I know I did. When I had taken the considerable time to write on what I felt were interesting stories, they were not what the Slashdot editors wanted, so after a while I just stopped trying. Meanwhile, dupes are fairly commonplace, the games section is riddled with stories no one is reading, and of course this Beatles-Beatles thing has gotten so much out of hand it's made the front page. To be frank **BB was the last straw. I totally lost faith in the editors. I would wager I'm not alone.
The way I look at it, you need to take a long hard look at your submissions system. the whole thing, from conception of story, to posting on frontpage. Email your best "reporters" find out what they're doing right. Analyse the whole thing. What's right with it, what's wrong with it. If something is broken; Fix it.
You could do worse than browsing the Slashdot journals for rejected submissions.
What are people supposed to do if they cannot free themselves from a suppressive government? It's not worth violence to be able to read wikipedia but it's clear that non-violent protests in the past did very little.
That's very debateable. All revolutions have involved a degree of violence. Even the Indian Revolution was not without violence, despite Ghandi's best efforts.
The quintessential revolution is the French Revolution. And I think any revolution in China is more likely to take this form than any other. Tight government control of the media and the sheer scale of the country would suggest that only "big" news will travel fast enough to stir people up, i.e. armed revolt. Peaceful protest simply will not get enough press coverage in so vast a territory. Nor will civil disobeidience.
The biggest tradgedy is that a revolution in China is not even guaranteed to bring in democracy. No revolution really is. Violent revolution even less so. A lot of people could end up suffering and dying for nothing but a military putsch.
The other option is that the reformers in the chinese communist party win out over the autocrats. But as the tension grows higher and the stakes become greater, this may become less, and not more likely.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you still leave torture off the table? Not saying it would work in this case, actually fairly crappy odds. Which is intentional to make the moral choice even more murky.
Are you prepared to face the consequences? If I told you, that even if you succeeded in saving everyone you would have to spend the rest of your life in jail; would you be so quick to begin?
Your example is extreme, but my example of the consequences you should face is not. If the threat is only vague, if the person is not even likely to know anything, or even if there is no clear reason for it at all. If when you torured anyone, for any reason, you had to spend life in jail; would you be so quick to accept Guantanamo?
Put one of those monsters in the Scales of Justice and ask yourself; would it be OK to torture UBL's PGP keyring password from him and thereby round up most of Al Qaeda? I say yes. Personally I'd agnostic, but if I knew for a fact torturing Bin Laden's keyring from him would damn me to Hell this libertarian would still do it, reckoning it a fair trade; one life for many.
The end justifies the means? A shakey argument if every there was one. Is it worth burning the very foundation of your society just to go after Al Qaeda? Is the organisation really that much of a threat? Which is the bigger threat to your country. The terrorists, or th emethods you advocate to stop them.
By torturing, you have become evil. You've resorted to the tactics of every other opressive regime out there, and
Anyone with half a brain can see, looking back through history of the past few decades, that once women declared that they intended to enter the workforce en masse, the economy "responded." Overall, average wages dropped. Living expenses increased. Overnight, the economy went from one where one member of the family typically brought in the bacon, to one where dual incomes became absolutely necessary.
Yet the post war economy has consistently been the most productive, most affluent and has the highest consistent growth rate than any other period before. Not only that, but all modern economists regard increasing the amount women in the workforce as an essential factor for growth. Discuss.
If lab rats with this gene escaped, they could go native. Rats live just about anywhere humans can. Pigs on the other hand, not so much. Taiwan seems like a warm enough place for it, but I don't think they have enough wild pigs to breed with for that to be a problem.
Who said anything about wild pigs. All it takes is one broken fence and a short lived piggy elopement, one sale to an overseas distributor and "bang"! Glow in the dark pork chops in apple sause.
Answer: Sometimes.
You are now, as the phrase goes, morally bankrupt.
I don't think you have a real understanding of what torture actually is. We're not talking about fraternity prank style harassment here. Torture is something fundamentally much much deeper than that. For any Government to engage in it corrodes the very foundations of its mandate to govern. Guantanamo is much more serious an incident than you seem to think.
True, but I'm afraid you've also missed this one:
Once they begin to breed the pigs, it will be all but impossible to stop the spread of the genes. I fully expect to see some jellyfish genes in animals mean for consmption with fifteen to twenty years.
And that list of "wars" was priceless. I haven't laughed at such an overt display of embellishment and distortion in a long time.
I can't remember who said the following "We[US]'ve been in every war hot and cold for the last 50 years", but it is true. It's not a distortion.
You might find this list of wars laughable for some reason, but they were no joking matter to the great many people who died in them. Of course, not very many of the dead were US soldiers or citizens.
Some of these wars were in some way justifiable. First Iraq war, Kosovo. But some would be farcical if people wern't getting killed. Bay of Pigs, Cambodia, Nicaragua and obviously the second Iraq war.
My wife is not working and WILL NOT work even though she is more educated than me. We made that conscious decision because we realized a child's life is more important than buying that Lexus RX330.
Bear in mind that a second job is not always a choice of luxury. Maybe people simply cannot afford not to work. This has been the case for most of history as well.
Often, the second job is not so much a question of want, as it is one of need.
Just some short points:
1. Don't have kids until you can support them yourself (including paying for school, food, clothing and shelter).
The average cost of raising a child is $250,000.
2. Join a church or community group focused on family. Help your neighbors with kids and they'll help you.
The church essentially does what you advocate against the government doing. namely, raising peoples children for them.
3. Understand that raising a child means having one parent at home. If you have a child, stop spending money on toys and vacations and new cars and new clothes. Focus your money on your child's present and future.
Raising children has always entailed both parents working. The single working parent was a concept largely confined to 1950's america. Across the globe and throughout time, both parents have usually needed to work to support a family.
4. Understand that raising a child means constant care. Don't let your child go anywhere without knowing where and with whom. If one parent is home, this is much easier.
See previous point. Also along these lines, in the past, children often worked from quite a young age, usually alongside their parents. The modern school system is in essence an alternative to this, enabling parents to work, without simultaniously supervising their children.
What is really pissing you off is that the original poster is having fun with something you disapprove of.
That's the sound of the entire point of the grandparent post flying right over your head. The whole post was a refutation of the greatgrandparent's idea that people who cannot control vehicles without the aid of modern safety systems are bad drivers. They are not.
A good driver is both able to control the vehicle and obey the rules of the road. One can still be a good driver and rely on modern systems as good driving involves lots and lots of abilities unrelated to car control. Furthermore, modern systems aid a good drivers far more than they impede them, as they enable the driver to concentrate more on "driving" rather than moving the car.
Sorry if you've taken exception to my argument that the ability to control a muscle car has little to do with being a good driver. I stand by it. Muscle cars are not designed for modern commuting, and indeed, their size, weight and power and lack of modern features do much to promote bad driving.
Driving is not supposed to be fun. If you want to have fun while driving, please do it somewhere far away from public roads. Driving is a serious business. People having fun on the roads is definitly not funny.
Har Har- Its funny to hear a lame pussy call it Gitmo, trying to call it what non-pussies in the military call it...
I thought the offical military slang term for the facility was "Camp Deliverance"?
There was one thing that Outlook 2003 got right and that was the tiling of the folder, inbox and message panes vertically. Has this got it? Or does this need an extension?
I would agree. We are talking about someone who got fired, and THEN decided to "whistle blow" If he reported this first and THEN got fired, then I would be more inclined to believe him. But the fact that he was fired first and afterward decided that he "needed" to report this to a newspaper (as opposed to filing a wrongful dismissal dispute via the legal system) does not speak well to his motives
Tice had been making noises before he got fired. He was one of those pushing for greater congressional protection for whistleblowers. Hint, hint.
Shortly thereafter, his bosses had him pulled in for a medical exam, where despite having no symptoms, the MO labeled him as suffering from paranoia. This is standard practice in such circles to ensure compliance, and to provide ammo for any subsequent smear campaigns.
It's like this. Anyone who believes that the NSA was not spying on their own country, is the real mentally unstable individual.
Nothing about this is illegal until the information passed into it is acquired illegally.
What counts as "legal"?
We live in a world where Gitmo is not only tolerated, but even approved by huges numbers of people in government, academia and in the public at large. Wiretap someones phone illegally, and if the president gave you say so, I doubt many judges would throw it out at this point. Get information by half drowing someone or photographing their anus and not only will judges not object, they'll pass judgement based on it!
This is probably the number one commandment of the SIGINT Ten Commandments as a SIGINT officer. You will not spy on Americans.
Intelligence agencies instilling moral values in their agents. What will they think of next?
Nobody is exempt from the laws of physics. Even the morons in California, driving their BMW's, are subject to Newton's laws of inertia.
Pppffft! Everybody knows a crack team of lawyers can get you off the hook of any law!
From Wikipedia:
Oh dear. the article goes on to mention that the 1969 model had a 400 cubic inch engine, which is about 6.4 litres, a size usually reserved for cargo trucks and airplanes. Someone has seen it fit to place such an engine into a two seater vehicle weighing less than one ton.
You can apparently drive this vehicle. However, I would go so far as to say that the ability to drive such a hotrod in no way prepares anyone for driving modern 1.1 litre hatchback runabouts, equipped with ABS, safely through town.
If people cannot drive without traction control or ABS (minimally) then they should not be able to drive at all. Driving a motor vehicle is not difficult.
And if people cannot drive with such systems, as was a frequent occurance when such systems were first introduced?
Getting a vehicle in motion is not a difficult process. Driving on the other hand is a very, very difficult skill which a great many people simply never achieve. Driving includes both the ability to move the vehicle and obey the rules of the road. It's the second part that most people have trouble with, not the first.
Any ass can get a 7 litre hotrod up to 200kph. But it would take a demi-god to use the beast on work, school and grocery runs for 10 years, in heavy traffic, with no incidents.
Some that I know still can't drive at all even with safety features and such... it is truly sad
Some people that I know have fifty times more time behind the wheel than I do and still cannot drive. They can get the car in motion in a paticular direction, but they speed, don't signal, brake lights, cut across lanes and generally put their lives more at risk than I ever will, despite the fact that my driving time is measured in hours and theirs in weeks.
My key point here is that people often mistake the ability to "move" a car for the ability to "drive" a car. They are very different things. Someone can still be a reasonably good "driver" without having fully mastered the ability to get the car in motion.
Has the great and prestidgeous institute known as the Mercedes Marketing department come to stoop so low as this?
To post a viral ad as an A/C... on Slashdot.
Truely, these are dark times.
It is pretty easy to make sure drivers have the right skills... Make the qualification for a driver's license tougher not easier. If there are skills that are critical to driving safely, they should be on the test.
Government's will never do this, for the simple reason that having more people on the roads helps stimulate the economy. A few hundred thousand road accidents per annum is a small price to pay for higher GDP growth.
So preacheth the church of the new global capitalism. Hail Satan!
It's easy!
So a bunch of completely average drivers were taken around a test track at high speed and spun out. Why does this not surprise me?
Note that they spun out in "classic" cars. My expierience of "classic" cars, i.e. "older" cars, is that they are heavier, less responsive, sluggish and of course, lack any modern safety features. In other words they are fundamentally harder to drive. It's got nothign to do with the driver.
I would wager that if you ran this test with these "classic" cars 20 years ago, under the same conditions, the drivers would have spun out, despite their expierience with the less advanced technology.
i can't friggen turn it on!! i reinstalled it, updated it rebooted it won't turn on! i checked my firewall, that an't it. i checked processes and it says it is on. grrr
It doesn't run on Linux.
This is incredulous!! The ergonomically designed iTunes interface hides nothing from the user and shows any and all pertinent information at the briefest glance. The stylishly engineered music system and efficient online purchasing system offers only the highest level of quality entertainment with none of the underhanded skullduggery that lesser companies wallow in.
Apple soars above such outrages!! You will feel His Jobnesses' Wrath!!
"If you jump into a black hole, your mass energy will be returned to our universe, but in a mangled form, which contains information about what you were like but in an unrecognizable state." These ideas are profound and will have a lasting effect on our scientific theories as well as life as we know it.
It all sounds a bit string-theory-ish to me.
In the months since the last ruling, MS obviously got to someone (can you say bribes?)
Well, they have spent considerable sums of money "lobbying" members of the US congress, and probably other parliments as well.
But I take it you meant that actual brown paper bags full of cash were paid to certain persons of influence within the USPTO. Quite frankly, I think that not only is this a possibility, it is also a very likely one.
The USPTO is a corrupt organisation. Incompetance is the worst form of corruption, and they are certainly guilty of that. But I think even the most conservative of oberservers would have to admit that there is simply too many suspect happenings within the office to attribute soley to bereaucratic bumbling.
You'd be seriously surprised. I think you guys are underestimating the number of quality submissions we get. We might get 50 submissions to a breaking news piece, but something even SLIGHTLY more obscure may arrive only once.
You've got a problem.
As an editor you fundamentally require material to edit. You're not getting it. You need to find out the reasons for this.
In the past, did you recieve a higher quota of unique submission. Has the overall quality of submissions declined? If so, you need to find out. Any enterprise that sits around while its foundations begin to crumble is going to do just that.
Personally, I feel the reason your submissions are of such low quality is that so many good submissions have been rejected. I have no evidence for this, other than personal and anecdotal. It is quite true that many people have taken the time to write a high quality submission, only to have it rejected within ten minutes, and a story of lesser interest and quality posted shortly afterwards.
After several bouts of this, people just give up. I know I did. When I had taken the considerable time to write on what I felt were interesting stories, they were not what the Slashdot editors wanted, so after a while I just stopped trying. Meanwhile, dupes are fairly commonplace, the games section is riddled with stories no one is reading, and of course this Beatles-Beatles thing has gotten so much out of hand it's made the front page. To be frank **BB was the last straw. I totally lost faith in the editors. I would wager I'm not alone.
The way I look at it, you need to take a long hard look at your submissions system. the whole thing, from conception of story, to posting on frontpage. Email your best "reporters" find out what they're doing right. Analyse the whole thing. What's right with it, what's wrong with it. If something is broken; Fix it.
You could do worse than browsing the Slashdot journals for rejected submissions.
What are people supposed to do if they cannot free themselves from a suppressive government? It's not worth violence to be able to read wikipedia but it's clear that non-violent protests in the past did very little.
That's very debateable. All revolutions have involved a degree of violence. Even the Indian Revolution was not without violence, despite Ghandi's best efforts.
The quintessential revolution is the French Revolution. And I think any revolution in China is more likely to take this form than any other. Tight government control of the media and the sheer scale of the country would suggest that only "big" news will travel fast enough to stir people up, i.e. armed revolt. Peaceful protest simply will not get enough press coverage in so vast a territory. Nor will civil disobeidience.
The biggest tradgedy is that a revolution in China is not even guaranteed to bring in democracy. No revolution really is. Violent revolution even less so. A lot of people could end up suffering and dying for nothing but a military putsch.
The other option is that the reformers in the chinese communist party win out over the autocrats. But as the tension grows higher and the stakes become greater, this may become less, and not more likely.