So they civilians are just to blame themselves by getting killed by the US army?
No. But people in a combat zone where armed insurgents are in an active series of all-day firefights, and who just watched an overhead helicopter shoot up a bunch of armed militants don't get any sympathy for aiding the insurgents while the gunship is still right there looking for more insurgents. Of course you know this, and you're just pretending you don't understand. Which also explains this nonsense:
The problem is first of all that the USA invaded Iraq on false pretenses
So, you think the US just made up the part where Saddam invaded Kuwait? You're one of the denier-types who think the mass casualties from poison gas attacks were all staged? You think that the Iraqi SCUDs were what... secret CIA launches from inside Iraq? And you're probably going to also say that the massive stockpiles of VX gas weapons observed and reported by the UN inspectors were all imaginary, and that when Saddam refused to honor his commitment to show where he sent them, that was really the US making him say that, right? And his non-stop targeting of allied aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones set up to stop his slaughter of Iraqis outside his tribe? All imaginary, right? Skimming UN oil for food money to starve his people while building more palaces and smuggling in more of the weapons he agreed to stop importing? All imaginary, obviously.
He never met a single requirement (to which he agreed) when he was pushed back out of his murderous invasion of a neighboring country. He continued to obstruct inspections, attack people, smuggle in weapons, target patrolling aircraft, attempt political killings, build long range weapons, hide his WMDs, and fund outside terror groups. You have a really twisted notion of who was the aggressor when he rolled his tanks across his border to annex another country. Actually you don't. You're just trolling.
Animals might be more aggressive, but they sure as fuck aren't as evil as humans...
You're confusing motives with capabilities. Chimps, baboons, etc., are practically psychotic compared to us. If the few of them that are "nice" could build prisons to keep the really dangerous, murderous ones from bothering them and killing their offspring, I expect they certainly would.
Which is a city, the kind of city where people live in.
Right! Which is exactly why the insurgent group in question had been starting firefights in the city all day. So that they can hide behind civilians, and when possible, make sure that civilians are killed in the fights they start. People who rush in to help them, in a day-long firefight, are understandably seen as: people helping armed insurgents who have been shooting up downtown Baghdad all day.
Your nonchalant attitude about murdering innocent people is disturbing to say the least
You've got it backwards. It's your nonchalant attitude about armed insurgents running and gunning their way through a civilian population in a big city that is truly strange. Them, and people who help them, are the problem.
erhaps you should think real hard about what you are saying especially if the roles where reversed and this happened in your homeland and this was your family.
I haven't the slightest concern that I or anyone I know or am related to would take guns and money from terror sponsoring states and organizations, and seek to prevent the establishment and rule-of-law conduct of a constitutional republic by shooting up police stations, attacking peacekeepers, and planting IEDs in public streets. I'm likewise not the least bit worried that anyone I care about would watch a group of guys armed with automatic weapons and RPGs wandering through my neighborhood after a day of shooting at innocents, and then - as they are hunted down by an aircrew - run over to help them in any way . They're cold blooded murderers looking to prevent the viability of Iraqi civil society. They lost a firefight they started. Helping them to try to escape the consequences of their actions while the fight they started is still under way is support for their actions. Your nonchalant, if more removed, support for them is strange indeed. You seem interested in Baghdad being a safe city where people can live. Strange that you are annoyed by attempts to get rid of the people who the ones acting to make it a dangerous place.
Ah, another person who thinks that only rich people care about the reality of what it takes to increase prosperity. What kind of person hopes that a hard working person loses their way of making a living for saying out loud that it's actually making a living that brings prosperity, and not unsustainable deficit spending.
Right! But the people hanging out with guys who've shooting up the town all day, or who pull up on the scene to help out the armed guys - those aren't the people who are trying to avoid the insurgents or work against them. When you've been hunting them all day (and being shot at by them), and a truck pulls up to help them out, combat zone issues absolutely apply.
Ancient Mars decided to go down the Austerity path, and thus life never progressed and never got out of the dinosaur age.
Or, perhaps Mars decided it could borrow its way to prosperity and penalize its most successful life forms for being successful, and the desolate wasteland you now see is exactly what one might expect from that understanding of where prosperity comes from.
Yeah, two can play stupid insert-politics-into-everything games. But you shot first, Greedo.
You might argue about the first strike, but the second strike was obviously targeted at the relief efforts, that is collateral murder.
No, it's the continued use of force against people who are assisting militant insurgents who has been using automatic weapons and RPGs in attacks throughout the day. The insurgents were doing their level best to kill people, and the appearance of people on the ground to support and help them meant... they were simply more of the same. Of course, you know all of this, but you're more interested in scoring political points and being an Assange groupie than you are in the truth about combat zones and what happens when armed insurgents deliberately launch attacks in the middle of civilian populations.
Or, you don't know all of that. Which makes you an uninformed person who should read more before spouting off.
the several Iranians I have met and worked with. They (also women!) typically are well schooled, well opiniated, and very different from the neighbours you mention.
Then why haven't those several people used their articulate, educated, smart-people powers of persuasion to help drag their beloved country back from the depths of medieval Islamist theocratic thuggery? Because not enough Iranians want that. Obviously it doesn't help when activists who are actively seeking and working towards a more forward-looking, democratic Iran are put in jeopardy by having their names and families identified by idiots like Bradley Manning. Yay, noble leaker of hundreds of thousands of documents he couldn't be bothered to read! Yay!
Which, as a man of world, you must know is the source of iocane powder. And because iocane comes from Australia, and Australia is entirely peopled with criminals, and criminals would try to fool wandering Vikings into thinking they could navigate with an iolite stone, we know we cannot trust this story they've put in front of us.
Because most of what they have to read when they're figuring out what's up with someone that fits into what they're researching is as poorly written as that summary/post. That's some fine editing, there.
Speaking of which... we're another household that completely ignores the things except as a source of material to light the charcoal chimney starter we occasionally use, or for zombie apocalypse toilet paper.
But a few months back, we walked outside and found a newly delivered YP book half out of its plastic bag in front of our house. It was in the gutter, and water was running into it, making something that's almost 100% useless under normal circumstances completely useless. So I looked on the back of the thing, and there was a web site mentioned, encouraging feedback about the book and their service. Great! I wrote a short missive about the wastefulness of the books in general, and about how especially wasteful it was to have their delivery morons turn their barely-seen advertising into paper mache trash because they couldn't be bothered to keep the books out of running water while "delivering" them.
The next day, every house on our street had yet another YP book thrown into their front yards. It was so awful we laughed. And, of course, nobody ever looked at them because it was also recycle pickup day, and every bin on the block had a brand new YP book featured as the last item in. What a waste, times two.
why does he/she go on a tangent and link everything under the sun to his/her theory?
You're referring, of course, to the way in which this article links human/dog co-evolution to metallurgy, super-string theory, quantum mechanics, political science, game theory, economics, thermodynamics, and the debate over whether or not the Lego Harry Potter kits are really an authentic way to enjoy the books?
Or do you mean that someone looking into how two social mammals co-evolve might have a lot to do with a whole lot of cultural and physiological things we see in present day humans and dogs? "Everything under the sun," in your case, means... things having to do with pack behavior and thus having to do with much larger issues like civilization in general (a superset of pack activity)? Not sure what you're actually complaining about.
Yes, it is. It's so they can see that it doesn't actually result in harm, that it's not actual going to kill them, scar them, or anything like that. Military people are trained to tolerate annoying, stressful treatment so they understand what it's all about and how to cope with it. The same process - combined with lots of other techniques - can wear down someone who's not trained, and who would really rather that it all just stopped. And when they realize that they're never going to get out of custody, that their militant jihaddist days of blowing up vegetable markets full of women are permanently over, the idea is to give them something to look forward to... like having a more pleasant time of it once they answer questions about their murderous buddies.
That only works if everybody agrees. Ask people living in Mali if they think that their agreeing not to be violent towards militant Islamists is going to stop militant Islamists from killing those who oppose their attempt to take over that country. The peaceful people can agree they don't want a fight, but if the people who invade neighboring countries think that concept is hilarious simply ignore your "agreement," then what? Do the people willing to use force simply get to always have their way, because the people who don't want a fight are going to be perpetually agreeing that they don't want to fight... and thus always ending up living at the point of a sword? That's what the people with the swords want, of course.
Wanna know who's a helluva lot more brave than any army grunt? Julian Assange. He's taking on the world.
Oh, please. He's an insufferable misogynistic attention whore who cherry-picks his outrage to raise cash from people who think he's cool. His capricious, intermittent ethics and generally jerky personal behavior alienate his fanboys and fangirls once they get to actually know him, and his transparently political shenanigans aren't "taking on the world," unless you mean "looking for lots of international press" so that he can find a way to go back to living comfortably on other people's misconceptions of his wonderfulness. "Brave?" Brave would be going to Sweden to explain away his asshattery with the two women he pissed off. Nobody, including him, thinks he's going to be magically taken away by angry governments if he returns there. He knows it, you know it, and everybody else knows it. He just doesn't want time spent explaining his offensive behavior to distract from the martyr theater production he's been busy running. Save your hero worship for someone who doesn't publish information exposing the family names of Iranian democracy activists/organizers.
There was absolutely no good reason to invade Iraq
So, you were cool with Saddam's invasion of Kuwait? And you were cool with his slaughter of people using WMDs? And cool with his continued import and manufacture of long range weapons, and his continued shooting at allied aircraft protecting the no-fly zones? How were you with the cash he was paying (on TV!) to the families of suicide bombers? Comfortable with his skimming UN cash for more palaces and re-arming his Republican Guard, while he deliberately withheld that support from his own citizens? Happy, were you, with his regime's deliberate lies and obfuscation about the disposition of tons of VX gas previously observed by UN inspectors? Liked his ongoing SCUD projects, did you?
Because, in a civilized world, there's no need for secrets
Tell that to the family of people who work undercover against organized crime. I suppose you'd like a web site somewhere that lists the activities of federal agents right up to the minute they go in to bust a kiddie porn ring, or seize a load of heroin, or stop a container of counterfeit currency from being delivered. Right? Right! There should be no covert activities, ever! Because it's definitely better if North Korea knows who in their country is looking out for the interests of neighboring countries. And it's definitely important that Somali pirates are kept up to date on exactly what is being shipped where, on what schedule, and which freighters are ideal targets for theft and hostage harvesting. It would help, I'm sure, if they had a web site where they could go to help plan attacks without having to worry about anyone in government keeping them unaware of what they want to know.
Manning tried to expose the activities our military engages in for what they are -- high tech barbarism.
No, Manning is spinning it that way, now, so that apologists like you have something to cling to. What h
Civilized human beings do not torture their enemies, ever.
What a relief, then, that the same waterboarding that thousands of US troops voluntarily go through so they see that it's not torture wasn't actually torture when it was used to help a handful of guys focus their minds on what they were a part of.
Really? He built an entire infrastructure and reward system built around wooing people who uploaded ripped off materials in order to attract a leech ecosystem. He deliberately created an environment and an ethos built around ripping off material people would otherwise have to pay for. Saying he's not responsible for his system being used in exactly the way he encouraged it to be used is completely disingenuous. He's lying. We all know the deal.
performed their legal duty to maximize shareholder value
I'm getting tired of people translating this meme into reasons why a sales rep performed jackassery like the sale in question. Yes, the company owes its shareholders a true and ongoing effort to make their shares valuable. Part of that effort includes making the company valuable by maintaining its market-worthiness through the stewardship of its reputation with its customers. When a sales rep oversells like this, and it comes out in the press, it erodes the value of the company, and is counter to the make-shareholders-happy mandate.
The "corporate America is inherently bad because publicly traded companies must do wrong-headed things because they're required to" attack on businesses is just wrong. Thousands of businesses, every day, increase their near and long term value by being valuable to their customers. Nobody likes to talk about that in ranty internet forums because it takes all the fun out of shouting about The Man etc.
What Cisco did in this case was demonstrably not in the shareholders' interests.
I hate corporate America as much as the next guy
What you hate are the people and incidents that make you hate those people and incidents. In the meantime, millions of people at work in thousands of companies do sensible things every day, and have loyal customers as a result. But that never makes the news because it doesn't provide something to bitch about, and where would Slashdot be without that?
He seemed to spell most everything else correctly.
No. He also used an apostrophe incorrectly, which demonstrates that everything else he says is based on incoherence and random mental noise. The correlation is unmistakable. In a response he will say that he "could care less" about punctuation, further demonstrating my point.
I don't really know anything about (semi-)professional photography, but I always assumed objectives from different manufacturers were compatible. Can't you use your old glass with the new, different camera?
Only in some circumstances. Most systems have different physical mounts, are built to sit at different distances from the sensor/film, have different electrical contacts for aperture control solenoids and auto-focus motor power/control. Etc.
Good lenses can usually be sold without much loss. But when you have a full collection built around a given system, it makes more sense to stick with that system, body-wise. It might mean being a little less pious about open source software... but then, the people swearing they're not going to use Canon products are 1) Lying anyway (they probably also said they'd leave the country if Bush got re-elected), 2) Pretending they don't know that Canon as a business has thousands and thousands of employees and no doubt many thousands of devices and servers running the MS stack. If they jump ship over this story, it's for completely absurd, situational-outrage, non-reasons.
So why is this guy fussing about Nikon's software licensing arrangements when vastly larger swaths of the economy are hip deep involved with the company he so hates? He's going to have to stop buying vegetables from thousands of farmers, fuel from thousands of gas stations, anti-biotics from pretty much everybody who makes them... in fact there are millions of people in this country he has to stop interacting with, now. How exhausting.
Nikon doesn't have to play this game. But then, they do want to interact with billions of people around the world who choose to use MS-based products. They could decide that it's not important to them to work with this one software publisher. But they'd be idiots.
which makes them quite clumsy, makeshift tools for anything else
I use my guns for protection (yes, it came up once, dramatically - no shots fired, situation diffused), for dinner (mmm, tasty pheasant and venison!), for dealing with injured or dangerous animals, for challenging sports of several flavors (breaking clay pigeons with shotguns, ringing steel targets with old-school cowboy guns, or my favorite: completely disabling old hard disk drives... from 200 yards away). I have LAN testing equipment and garden implements that don't do nearly as many things as that. Especially the protection part.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is first of all that the USA invaded Iraq on false pretenses
So, you think the US just made up the part where Saddam invaded Kuwait? You're one of the denier-types who think the mass casualties from poison gas attacks were all staged? You think that the Iraqi SCUDs were what ... secret CIA launches from inside Iraq? And you're probably going to also say that the massive stockpiles of VX gas weapons observed and reported by the UN inspectors were all imaginary, and that when Saddam refused to honor his commitment to show where he sent them, that was really the US making him say that, right? And his non-stop targeting of allied aircraft patrolling the no-fly zones set up to stop his slaughter of Iraqis outside his tribe? All imaginary, right? Skimming UN oil for food money to starve his people while building more palaces and smuggling in more of the weapons he agreed to stop importing? All imaginary, obviously.
He never met a single requirement (to which he agreed) when he was pushed back out of his murderous invasion of a neighboring country. He continued to obstruct inspections, attack people, smuggle in weapons, target patrolling aircraft, attempt political killings, build long range weapons, hide his WMDs, and fund outside terror groups. You have a really twisted notion of who was the aggressor when he rolled his tanks across his border to annex another country. Actually you don't. You're just trolling.
Animals might be more aggressive, but they sure as fuck aren't as evil as humans...
You're confusing motives with capabilities. Chimps, baboons, etc., are practically psychotic compared to us. If the few of them that are "nice" could build prisons to keep the really dangerous, murderous ones from bothering them and killing their offspring, I expect they certainly would.
Which is a city, the kind of city where people live in.
Right! Which is exactly why the insurgent group in question had been starting firefights in the city all day. So that they can hide behind civilians, and when possible, make sure that civilians are killed in the fights they start. People who rush in to help them, in a day-long firefight, are understandably seen as: people helping armed insurgents who have been shooting up downtown Baghdad all day.
Your nonchalant attitude about murdering innocent people is disturbing to say the least
You've got it backwards. It's your nonchalant attitude about armed insurgents running and gunning their way through a civilian population in a big city that is truly strange. Them, and people who help them, are the problem.
erhaps you should think real hard about what you are saying especially if the roles where reversed and this happened in your homeland and this was your family.
I haven't the slightest concern that I or anyone I know or am related to would take guns and money from terror sponsoring states and organizations, and seek to prevent the establishment and rule-of-law conduct of a constitutional republic by shooting up police stations, attacking peacekeepers, and planting IEDs in public streets. I'm likewise not the least bit worried that anyone I care about would watch a group of guys armed with automatic weapons and RPGs wandering through my neighborhood after a day of shooting at innocents, and then - as they are hunted down by an aircrew - run over to help them in any way . They're cold blooded murderers looking to prevent the viability of Iraqi civil society. They lost a firefight they started. Helping them to try to escape the consequences of their actions while the fight they started is still under way is support for their actions. Your nonchalant, if more removed, support for them is strange indeed. You seem interested in Baghdad being a safe city where people can live. Strange that you are annoyed by attempts to get rid of the people who the ones acting to make it a dangerous place.
Ah, another person who thinks that only rich people care about the reality of what it takes to increase prosperity. What kind of person hopes that a hard working person loses their way of making a living for saying out loud that it's actually making a living that brings prosperity, and not unsustainable deficit spending.
not everyone in Iraq is part of the insurgents
Right! But the people hanging out with guys who've shooting up the town all day, or who pull up on the scene to help out the armed guys - those aren't the people who are trying to avoid the insurgents or work against them. When you've been hunting them all day (and being shot at by them), and a truck pulls up to help them out, combat zone issues absolutely apply.
Ancient Mars decided to go down the Austerity path, and thus life never progressed and never got out of the dinosaur age.
Or, perhaps Mars decided it could borrow its way to prosperity and penalize its most successful life forms for being successful, and the desolate wasteland you now see is exactly what one might expect from that understanding of where prosperity comes from.
Yeah, two can play stupid insert-politics-into-everything games. But you shot first, Greedo.
You might argue about the first strike, but the second strike was obviously targeted at the relief efforts, that is collateral murder.
No, it's the continued use of force against people who are assisting militant insurgents who has been using automatic weapons and RPGs in attacks throughout the day. The insurgents were doing their level best to kill people, and the appearance of people on the ground to support and help them meant ... they were simply more of the same. Of course, you know all of this, but you're more interested in scoring political points and being an Assange groupie than you are in the truth about combat zones and what happens when armed insurgents deliberately launch attacks in the middle of civilian populations.
Or, you don't know all of that. Which makes you an uninformed person who should read more before spouting off.
the several Iranians I have met and worked with. They (also women!) typically are well schooled, well opiniated, and very different from the neighbours you mention.
Then why haven't those several people used their articulate, educated, smart-people powers of persuasion to help drag their beloved country back from the depths of medieval Islamist theocratic thuggery? Because not enough Iranians want that. Obviously it doesn't help when activists who are actively seeking and working towards a more forward-looking, democratic Iran are put in jeopardy by having their names and families identified by idiots like Bradley Manning. Yay, noble leaker of hundreds of thousands of documents he couldn't be bothered to read! Yay!
also known as iolite
Which, as a man of world, you must know is the source of iocane powder. And because iocane comes from Australia, and Australia is entirely peopled with criminals, and criminals would try to fool wandering Vikings into thinking they could navigate with an iolite stone, we know we cannot trust this story they've put in front of us.
Because most of what they have to read when they're figuring out what's up with someone that fits into what they're researching is as poorly written as that summary/post. That's some fine editing, there.
Make giant paper mache/spit wads
Speaking of which ... we're another household that completely ignores the things except as a source of material to light the charcoal chimney starter we occasionally use, or for zombie apocalypse toilet paper.
But a few months back, we walked outside and found a newly delivered YP book half out of its plastic bag in front of our house. It was in the gutter, and water was running into it, making something that's almost 100% useless under normal circumstances completely useless. So I looked on the back of the thing, and there was a web site mentioned, encouraging feedback about the book and their service. Great! I wrote a short missive about the wastefulness of the books in general, and about how especially wasteful it was to have their delivery morons turn their barely-seen advertising into paper mache trash because they couldn't be bothered to keep the books out of running water while "delivering" them.
The next day, every house on our street had yet another YP book thrown into their front yards. It was so awful we laughed. And, of course, nobody ever looked at them because it was also recycle pickup day, and every bin on the block had a brand new YP book featured as the last item in. What a waste, times two.
why does he/she go on a tangent and link everything under the sun to his/her theory?
You're referring, of course, to the way in which this article links human/dog co-evolution to metallurgy, super-string theory, quantum mechanics, political science, game theory, economics, thermodynamics, and the debate over whether or not the Lego Harry Potter kits are really an authentic way to enjoy the books?
... things having to do with pack behavior and thus having to do with much larger issues like civilization in general (a superset of pack activity)? Not sure what you're actually complaining about.
Or do you mean that someone looking into how two social mammals co-evolve might have a lot to do with a whole lot of cultural and physiological things we see in present day humans and dogs? "Everything under the sun," in your case, means
Those cheap IR/daytime trail cameras have a million uses. Very handy.
So, it isn't torture for any definition of torture that only includes permanent physical damage. Got it.
Or, being forced to be interrogated by a woman who refuses to cover her head is torture, right?
That's totally why they do it.
Yes, it is. It's so they can see that it doesn't actually result in harm, that it's not actual going to kill them, scar them, or anything like that. Military people are trained to tolerate annoying, stressful treatment so they understand what it's all about and how to cope with it. The same process - combined with lots of other techniques - can wear down someone who's not trained, and who would really rather that it all just stopped. And when they realize that they're never going to get out of custody, that their militant jihaddist days of blowing up vegetable markets full of women are permanently over, the idea is to give them something to look forward to ... like having a more pleasant time of it once they answer questions about their murderous buddies.
Thousands of people voluntarily jump off perfectly good airplanes all the time, does that make it okay to to force a handful to jump off at gunpoint?
I think the better question is: should it be legal to torture your readers with nonsensical analogies?
but we cannot agree to simply not wage war?
That only works if everybody agrees. Ask people living in Mali if they think that their agreeing not to be violent towards militant Islamists is going to stop militant Islamists from killing those who oppose their attempt to take over that country. The peaceful people can agree they don't want a fight, but if the people who invade neighboring countries think that concept is hilarious simply ignore your "agreement," then what? Do the people willing to use force simply get to always have their way, because the people who don't want a fight are going to be perpetually agreeing that they don't want to fight ... and thus always ending up living at the point of a sword? That's what the people with the swords want, of course.
Wanna know who's a helluva lot more brave than any army grunt? Julian Assange. He's taking on the world.
Oh, please. He's an insufferable misogynistic attention whore who cherry-picks his outrage to raise cash from people who think he's cool. His capricious, intermittent ethics and generally jerky personal behavior alienate his fanboys and fangirls once they get to actually know him, and his transparently political shenanigans aren't "taking on the world," unless you mean "looking for lots of international press" so that he can find a way to go back to living comfortably on other people's misconceptions of his wonderfulness. "Brave?" Brave would be going to Sweden to explain away his asshattery with the two women he pissed off. Nobody, including him, thinks he's going to be magically taken away by angry governments if he returns there. He knows it, you know it, and everybody else knows it. He just doesn't want time spent explaining his offensive behavior to distract from the martyr theater production he's been busy running. Save your hero worship for someone who doesn't publish information exposing the family names of Iranian democracy activists/organizers.
There was absolutely no good reason to invade Iraq
So, you were cool with Saddam's invasion of Kuwait? And you were cool with his slaughter of people using WMDs? And cool with his continued import and manufacture of long range weapons, and his continued shooting at allied aircraft protecting the no-fly zones? How were you with the cash he was paying (on TV!) to the families of suicide bombers? Comfortable with his skimming UN cash for more palaces and re-arming his Republican Guard, while he deliberately withheld that support from his own citizens? Happy, were you, with his regime's deliberate lies and obfuscation about the disposition of tons of VX gas previously observed by UN inspectors? Liked his ongoing SCUD projects, did you?
Because, in a civilized world, there's no need for secrets
Tell that to the family of people who work undercover against organized crime. I suppose you'd like a web site somewhere that lists the activities of federal agents right up to the minute they go in to bust a kiddie porn ring, or seize a load of heroin, or stop a container of counterfeit currency from being delivered. Right? Right! There should be no covert activities, ever! Because it's definitely better if North Korea knows who in their country is looking out for the interests of neighboring countries. And it's definitely important that Somali pirates are kept up to date on exactly what is being shipped where, on what schedule, and which freighters are ideal targets for theft and hostage harvesting. It would help, I'm sure, if they had a web site where they could go to help plan attacks without having to worry about anyone in government keeping them unaware of what they want to know.
Manning tried to expose the activities our military engages in for what they are -- high tech barbarism.
No, Manning is spinning it that way, now, so that apologists like you have something to cling to. What h
Civilized human beings do not torture their enemies, ever.
What a relief, then, that the same waterboarding that thousands of US troops voluntarily go through so they see that it's not torture wasn't actually torture when it was used to help a handful of guys focus their minds on what they were a part of.
Really? He built an entire infrastructure and reward system built around wooing people who uploaded ripped off materials in order to attract a leech ecosystem. He deliberately created an environment and an ethos built around ripping off material people would otherwise have to pay for. Saying he's not responsible for his system being used in exactly the way he encouraged it to be used is completely disingenuous. He's lying. We all know the deal.
performed their legal duty to maximize shareholder value
I'm getting tired of people translating this meme into reasons why a sales rep performed jackassery like the sale in question. Yes, the company owes its shareholders a true and ongoing effort to make their shares valuable. Part of that effort includes making the company valuable by maintaining its market-worthiness through the stewardship of its reputation with its customers. When a sales rep oversells like this, and it comes out in the press, it erodes the value of the company, and is counter to the make-shareholders-happy mandate.
The "corporate America is inherently bad because publicly traded companies must do wrong-headed things because they're required to" attack on businesses is just wrong. Thousands of businesses, every day, increase their near and long term value by being valuable to their customers. Nobody likes to talk about that in ranty internet forums because it takes all the fun out of shouting about The Man etc.
What Cisco did in this case was demonstrably not in the shareholders' interests.
I hate corporate America as much as the next guy
What you hate are the people and incidents that make you hate those people and incidents. In the meantime, millions of people at work in thousands of companies do sensible things every day, and have loyal customers as a result. But that never makes the news because it doesn't provide something to bitch about, and where would Slashdot be without that?
He seemed to spell most everything else correctly.
No. He also used an apostrophe incorrectly, which demonstrates that everything else he says is based on incoherence and random mental noise. The correlation is unmistakable. In a response he will say that he "could care less" about punctuation, further demonstrating my point.
I don't really know anything about (semi-)professional photography, but I always assumed objectives from different manufacturers were compatible. Can't you use your old glass with the new, different camera?
Only in some circumstances. Most systems have different physical mounts, are built to sit at different distances from the sensor/film, have different electrical contacts for aperture control solenoids and auto-focus motor power/control. Etc.
... but then, the people swearing they're not going to use Canon products are 1) Lying anyway (they probably also said they'd leave the country if Bush got re-elected), 2) Pretending they don't know that Canon as a business has thousands and thousands of employees and no doubt many thousands of devices and servers running the MS stack. If they jump ship over this story, it's for completely absurd, situational-outrage, non-reasons.
Good lenses can usually be sold without much loss. But when you have a full collection built around a given system, it makes more sense to stick with that system, body-wise. It might mean being a little less pious about open source software
So why is this guy fussing about Nikon's software licensing arrangements when vastly larger swaths of the economy are hip deep involved with the company he so hates? He's going to have to stop buying vegetables from thousands of farmers, fuel from thousands of gas stations, anti-biotics from pretty much everybody who makes them ... in fact there are millions of people in this country he has to stop interacting with, now. How exhausting.
Nikon doesn't have to play this game. But then, they do want to interact with billions of people around the world who choose to use MS-based products. They could decide that it's not important to them to work with this one software publisher. But they'd be idiots.
Except for hipsters. They likely already stole his turntable and cassette deck!
To say nothing of his entire suite of Lomography equipment. He's going to be banned from the local coffee shop.
which makes them quite clumsy, makeshift tools for anything else
I use my guns for protection (yes, it came up once, dramatically - no shots fired, situation diffused), for dinner (mmm, tasty pheasant and venison!), for dealing with injured or dangerous animals, for challenging sports of several flavors (breaking clay pigeons with shotguns, ringing steel targets with old-school cowboy guns, or my favorite: completely disabling old hard disk drives ... from 200 yards away). I have LAN testing equipment and garden implements that don't do nearly as many things as that. Especially the protection part.