So next time you have a house party with 6 friends you would like to have 24 cops show up at your door then taze you for playing your music too loud?
No, ONE cop can show up and ASK you to turn it down. Just like this idiot was ASKED to participate in the event like everyone else, and ASKED to behave in a reasonable manner so that the people holding the event could make it about what the event was supposed to be about, and not about this jerk getting raising his street cred with the hot activist chicks on campus. It's when the people having the loud party refuse to acknowledge that they're being a nuisance, and continue to be a problem, that you have to escalate the response. Just like this kid, who was asked multiple times to give it a rest and allow someone else to speak, who refused to simply walk away after blathering for so long, who refused to be LED, peacefully away (hell, he could have kept shouting, if he wanted, as he walked away, but he wouldn't do that, either), and who when reached for to be led away started flailing at the police, and who continued to fight even after multiple warnings that they'd use other means to settle him down to the point where he could be peacefully handled. Do you really think that's the same as being "tazed for playing music too loud?" Obviously you haven't actually watched any coverage of this fool's behavior, or you'd realize that no one just walked up and tazed him.
Are you telling me 4 cops couldn't restrain and remove 1 unarmed student without needing to electrocute him?
Leaving aside for the moment the fact that you obviously don't know what the word "electrocute" actually means, it's apparent you've never tried to subdue and move someone who is trying to fight you off. People get hurt. This moron could just as easily have wrenched his arm out of joint, and then blamed the cops for THAT. Instead (as you would see if you actually watched the video), the less traumatic, and more civil behavior he SHOULD have been exhibiting when he was politely asked to wrap up his tantrum was much more quickly acheived - despite HIS violent behavior - and no risk of further injuries.
when someone grabs you unexpectedly your first natural reaction is to lay down and give up
Well, see, now you're just BSing and you know it. This wasn't unexpected. He deliberately set out to cause a confrontation. No one touched him until well after he'd been warned that they would. No one had to get more physical with him until HE started flailing. Again, you either haven't watched it, or you're trolling. Trolling, I'd say.
Maybe he should have been removed but this is still excessive force.
Ah! So, if he refused to be removed, what then? You have to subdue him enough to actually carry him out, right? Kicking and screaming? Fine. Have you ever actually tried to handle even one fourth of a person who is seriously trying to prevent you from doing so, and them carry them through a crowd of OTHER people? Well? Getting him to finally chill out so he could be safely moved WAS using less force.
Wrong. You can have your OWN event, exactly like the one that was being disrupted, ANY time you want to go to exactly the same trouble and expense as those that organized THAT one. You aren't off in some corner, you're in exactly the same place, with ALL of the same rights as anyone else. "The government" isn't "bending" ANYTHING when they offer equal protection for anyone that holds an event. You're confused. You think that your right to shut down someone else's event is your freedom to assemble. You've got it exactly backwards. You don't have the right to stop them from assembling and speaking, and when it's your turn (if you choose to take one) to set up an event of the same sort, in the same place, with the same facility/safety/access considerations that anyone running such an event has to consider, you will ALSO have the police there to make sure that some else doesn't get to shut YOU down.
You're looking for the right to interfere with someone else's freedom of assembly, without consequence, even as you complain about having freedom of assembly impacted. Which is it? Do you want free speech, or do you want SOME people's free speech to be shouted down when it suits you? You want freedom of assembly, but you also want the ability to deny someone else that freedom by being able to have their event cancelled when you use a few people with chains or other devices to block or road and make the event too unsafe to continue? You want to protect freedom of assembly, and you want to USE it in order to block or prevent people you don't like from assembling? Do you even LISTEN to yourself? You can't have it both ways. Let people have their events, and you get to have YOURS - with all of the same protections and safety considerations. If you want to hold an event where the framework specifically calls for people in giant puppet masks to stand there screaming at each other, and you specifically are cool with no one who is organizing the event being able to actually run the program or allow the speakers they've invited to actually be heard, great! HAVE such an event - because you CAN, and that's freedom of assembly. But when you pretend to support that freedom, and use that facade to cover a coordinated effort to deprive someone you don't like from exercising it themselves... well, that little bit of hypocrisy speaks for itself.
we're becoming a police state, and this is one of so many contributing factors.
I'm not really clear, here, on how you arrive at that conclusion. The whole point is that we have the freedom to assemble. You know, the freedom to hold an event where people get to do things like take turns talking, if that's the sort of event you want to hold. And someone else decides that your freedom of speech and assembly isn't important, and that he can shout you down and take over the event for his own aggrandizement and 15 minutes of annoying notoriety. It's a "police state" action when law enforcement officers actually act to enforce the laws that are written to prevent people from interfering with your events and rights? If there were no statutes covering things like disturbing the peace, then the officers wouldn't have had the grounds to ask the guy to leave, or to arrest him when he decided to ignore their obligation to uphold those statutes. But there ARE such laws, and this twit clearly knew that he went in there to provoke exactly such a reaction, and he clearly considered the rights of the people gathered there to be secondary to his own need for political theater.
History is full of loudmouths, drunks, disturbed people of all sorts. That's why disturbing the peace is a notion we all understand. But the law works FOR this clown, too. This guy can have his OWN assembly where he DOES get to talk non-stop the whole time if he wants, and if someone decides to stand there trying to shout him down, then HE gets the benefit of the police working for HIM, if that becomes necessary. If he wants to run an event where non-stop interruptions by everyone there is the actual framework of the event, then someone being a blathering jerk, in that context, wouldn't BE disturbing the peace, and there's no need for the officers to act. Save the "police state" hyperbole for when it matters, because trotting it out when someone like this deliberately seeks this sort of action and attention completely cheapens the meaning of that phrase.
An officer saying "you were distribing the peace" doesn't cut it; this is supposed to be a free society, were we CANNOT be arrested at whim.
So, if I stand outside your bedroom window all night beating trashcan lids together, you should have no recourse? Or, if you hold a seminar, and I decide to disrupt it continually, you should have no recourse? If an officer DOES find that you're disturbing the peace, should it be up to YOU to determine whether that's true or not? If so, do only I get to determine if I'm disturbing YOUR peace? Should I be able to enter a venue where your candidate is talking, and just stand there all day shouting him down? Let's just stipulate for a moment that you might consider "disturbing the peace" to be an actual public nuisance, and that perhaps a law enforcement officer in charge of enforcing the law that your elected officials specifically wrote to deal with that are actually called upon to enforce it. And the person who is beating trashcan lids together so that no one can hear your candidate speak simply decides that that community's law doesn't apply to them. What then? The cops have to give up and walk away, and allow the disruption to continue? No? Then what? Maybe they have to resort to actually physically moving the person away from the scene because they're too much of an asshat to show the decency to knock it off.
And if they start fighting with the officers trying to move them? Then what? The officers should decide that, well, if someone's willing to physically fight in order to maintain their ability to bash trash can lids together to prevent political speech, then, well, gosh, they should probably be left to it? Or, should the officers actually uphold the law, and stop the person from disturbing the peace? You can't have it both ways. You say you have a "problem with that." What is it you have a problem with, exactly? The right to assemble and have a civil conversation without someone taking over your event for themselves? You say you want a free society. So, I'm not free to hold an event where people get to take turns talking? You don't want freedom for everyone, just the freedom to pick and choose which other people YOU get to shout down.
Give me a fucking break! How did they manage police work before they had tasers?
With someone who physically fights them, they physically restrain or subdue them. Absent things like tasers, that comes down to much less politically correct methods sometimes. And that results in everything from bruises to dislocated shoulders, and worse. And then people complain about THAT. What you're really asking is whether or not police should ever be able or be obligided to physically control someone's actions or presence. If the answer to that is yes, then we're just splitting hairs over the method... unless, of course, you're a cop, and perhaps you don't actually WANT to have to have a wrestling match with someone who might have an unsheathed knife in their pocket, or who might have open wounds, or who might be shockingly strong, etc.
The draconian DRM debacle that is called Vista is sounding more and more like the who's-to-blame catch-22 we've all experienced in the past: Your high definition video won't play in HD mode. Microsoft-it's the hardware's fault, PC maker-it's the content provider's fault, Content Provider-it's Vista's fault. Anyone else want to dance?
Except, as has been pointed out, Vista isn't actually CAUSING the restriction on some playback, they're only supporting it if the content provider that invests the money in producing the content in the first place WANTS to use it. You're looking for ways to imply that MS has a hand in deciding if/when a given producer elects to enable a specific feature. They don't. That's up to the artists and the people they hire to distribute their work for them. If they don't enable that feature in their content, then it simply doesn't matter downstream, and that's Bott's point.
The condemnation of Tehran is part of a larger concerted effort to selectively show the worst side of the Iranian government and citizenry
Sorry, I don't buy it. The theocratic medievalists that are running that country are doing a FINE job of ridiculing themselves and making us all feel sorry for the poor shmucks who are being raised there right now amidst a mysoginistic culture and a frail, failing economy. Even what many here would consider to be a highly biased new source (say, Fox) don't have to work very hard to report on stories that the Tehran government itself uses press releases to announce. Banning certain hair styles. Forbidding the use of the word "pizza," for being to western, etc. That's not a reflection of the people of Iran, it's a reflection of the backwards theocracy that has those people by the short hairs.
It's isn't demonizing some young Iranian to point out that his religious leaders and the army under control of those religious leaders are nuts. It isn't demonizing a young Iranian woman to point out that the authorities running her country seem really obsessed with what she wears. And it isn't just the US pointing out that those same damaged people are busy trying to build nukes, and have press conferences every week announcing the imminent demise of other countries. To say nothing of seeking out buddy-buddy relations with neo-Stalinists-in-training like Hugo Chavez, and pumping cash, weapons, and terrorist-soldiers into a civil conflict that they're invested in sustaining and inflaming next door in Iraq, all the more so as it is tamped down in places where they've tried the hardest to spark it up.
Actually, no. But then, you probably can't imagine that someone might actually respond to another post's comment by mentioning actual information that's relevent to the conversation, right? Or is someone less of a 'fag' if they cite the Coast Guard, instead? Which branch of the military does one get to mention that makes them less homosexual, from your perspective, exactly?
paint a bulls-eye on your forehead fag
And I don't have to guess. You're making it obvious that you're a sexually insecure 12 year old that just got home from school this afternoon (after obviously having some sort of lapse in the locker room after gym class), and you've got your entire world view shaped for you by hanging out with worldly 13 year olds that you think are cool, what with being allowed to stay up past 9:00PM and all.
The world could do with less of you.
Yes, yes. The world would be so much better off with more... what? Militant members of the Taliban, who shoot women in the street for teaching their daughters to read? Or members of China's PLA? You know, the ones that reinforce a government that would consider the cowardly anonymous post you just made to be a crime? I really hope that this is the year you actually take a history class. It's already too late for any sort of a course that will help you with critical thinking, alas.
Can someone please figure out a way to weaponize a cure for cancer?
You mean kind of like how there are now lots more skilled laser eye surgeons in the private sector competing to give you better prices for your business because once the military decided to back providing that service to its pilots, there was a giant leap in people being trained to do the work during their rotations?
As far as cancer: the military provides all kinds of basic medical research from which we all benefit. You'll see considerable military spending in epidemialogical studies, trauma treatment, etc. To the extent that, say, The Marine Corp is a weapon, the huge studies that can be conducted on the systematically collected health stats, DNA, etc., on a huge number of generally healthy people over several generations IS a part of all sorts of cancer (and other) studies.
I used to live in between 3 government facilities in CA. I new that my sprint communications was secretly monitored. So many times it was either jammed, disrupted, or I got the impression someone was listening from the weird sounds it would make in the background on a call(weird coded signals or strange rythym pulses).
I could not have written a satirical take on paranoid delusions combined with make-believe ignorance of the technology involved any better if I tried to. You're a freakin' GENIUS, man.
And a government that intends to relegate the vast majority of the population to the status of "labor pool" has an interest in what *everybody* has to say about it.
Well, yes, I suppose that at the rate you must be using tinfoil, we WILL need a larger labor pool to meet demand.
Well, "rounding down" is more like it. Are you deliberately ignoring the months and years that preceded the events that drove their surrender?
I still cannot bear the thought of nuclear bombs being dropped on innocent civilians.
But... you're OK with the Japanese army sitting in various ports, factory towns, and other facilities and cities throughout Japan, and being "conventionally" bombed into oblivion, along with the civilians they're standing next to? How about the factories and shipping facilities (such as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki), staffed and supported by civilians, but with their output entirely directed to supporting the fight-til-the-end Japanese military? What technology, available in the 1940's, are you proposing we should have used in order to get Japan to surrender? The only other one available had ALREADY BEEN TRIED: to wit, massive conventional bombing, in advance of an on-the-ground invasion. Were you paying ANY attention to what happened on the countless Pacific Islands that had to be handled that way? The Japanese mainland would have been unbelievably worse, because a devoted Emprorer-obeying population would have largely done the same things that Japanese soldiers did in Okinawa or elsewhere: fight to the death.
You're confusing the fact that, owing to their surrender, far fewer Japanese soldiers and civilians died than would have in a bloody block-by-block invasion of the mainland with anyone feeling generous about that. That fewer of them died is just frosting on the cake. The CAKE was the end of the war, without having to send half a million US solidiers and marines into horrific urban struggle that would have made the insurgency in Iraq look like a football game in terms of collateral damage to non-combatants. This was 60 years ago! The conventional conquering of that ground would have been far, far worse for everyone involved. But the motivation for getting them to surrender was to save OUR people from having to do it in a vastly bloodier, more costly way. It's just luck for the average Japanese citizen that they didn't have to have every village burned down, every town square riddled with machine gun fire, and vastly more people caught up in horror that - because of a limited but violent solution in Hiroshima, and because the Japanese military thought maybe it was some sort of one-time stunt, Nagasaki - didn't have to happen.
And we keep talking about ALL THE JAPANESE lives we saved.
Actually, "we" are simply OBSERVING that fact. You're the one that's obsessed with preferring a conventional invasion of the mainland, and somehow preferring "standard" deaths of far more people. Which is pretty perverse, really, when you think about it. But you're not really thinking about it, obviously.
We shot to kill, not to make them surrender.
False dichotomy. We shot to kill because no other action, as had been amply demonstrated by the Japanese military over and over again, would cause them to surrender.
We wanted revenge for Pearl Harbor.
Gross simplification. We wanted to shut down the entire campaign that Japan had put into motion, of which things like Pearl Harbor, or the brutal rape of Nanking, were merely episodes. The military regime that authored those events and which was torching so much of the Pacific rim, needed to be stopped. And there was no fiercely effective UN (hah!) to somehow make them do so through angry letters and corrupt sanctions. Every minute that the Japanese continued with that campaign, untold thousands of people died. You clearly think it's rude to stop them using violence, but you are spectacularly silent on just what method you think would have actually worked more quickly, and with fewer deaths.
We wanted mass carnage and devastation.
Has your shrink ever talked to you about "projection?" Regardless, we DID want devastation, in the two limited places where we deployed
Perhaps dropping the first nuke can be justified by arguing along those lines. But dropping the second nuke was simply murder.
Why? The horrific firebombing of Tokyo wasn't enough to get Japan to surrender. And the first a-bomb on Hiroshima wasn't, either. Japan didn't actually surrender until after Nagasaki. How many more lives would you have been comfortable seeing lost on both sides if we'd dropped only the bomb on Hiroshima, and then gone on and on with more equally/more horrible meat-grinding/roasting conventional warfare afterwards? Several hundred thousand? Because that's what the second bomb prevented.
Electric Universe! Come on, man, just think about it. It takes time to develope these things. Before we had the fancy, new Electric Universe, we had the Water-Powered Universe.
Stealing/theft is depriving someone else of goods/services
How would you characterize someone who sneaks in through a concert hall kitchen window to avoid paying for a ticket to see a show by their all-time favorite performer? The artist isn't going to notice one more person standing in the crowd of otherwise paying customers, right? How about two of them? How about 999 out of a 1000 of them? Careful!
Alas, you're wasting your breath/keystrokes. It seems that a lot of people who want artists to entertain them for free would rather have a venomous, pedantic pissing contest over linguistics and semantics than actually address the underlying topic: they want some hairsplitting legal cover so that they can rip off the works by the very artists that they pretend to respect. And, since they're busy cultivating a culture of entitlement because there are technical ways to lay hands on the artist's work without it feeling quite like lifting a CD from a store shelf, they have lots of fellow parasites that are trying to somehow turn ripping off entertainment into a virtue - like some sort of noble gesture against The Man. "Dude! It's just like V for Vendetta, only instead of, like blowing stuff up, I'm, like, getting that new Fergie CD for free. OMG, that'll teach her to... um... want to sell her recordings... uh... anyway, I also ripped a better copy of V for Vendetta - you want to come over and watch it on my new $3000 television? I got a case of St. Pauli Girl - it was only $18.99! Oh, and on your way over, pick up one of those $20 pizzas you always pick up - those are great. You really gotta respect anyone who can make a pizza that good."
This is more like all the grocery stores in a town deciding one day that too many people are stealing milk.
Actually, this is more like all of the musicians in a town - who all book the same venue to do performances - getting tired of selling 100 tickets to their show, but seeing 1000 people in the venue they rented out to host the performance. And then following up when it becomes clear that people are putting information up on a public network that explains how to get into the show through the building's unlocked back door.
a fictional association to protect themselves
Do you really think that trade associations are fictional? Why do you think that?
I don't think we'd have to work too hard to find lawsuits (especially class actions, obviously) that inlude two or more nominal competitors sharing resources when facing a common opponent in civil court, or when serially dealing with similar issues on an ongoing basis. Most industries have trade associations that exist precisely to allow members (who frequently compete with each other) to lower their collective overhead on commonly needed marketing, representation, lobbying, etc. One might even say that labor unions (and the meta-unions) - which represent intra-competing parties - are a similar beast. If there was a solid reason to argue that being a member of a trade association somehow torpedoes your copyrights, trademarks, or any other IP turf, that would already have been rabidly pursued.
Based on that website, I don't really see why the term "begging the question" is used to describe that particular logical fallacy
That's because you're not getting the historical context of the term "begging" and how it got put to use in this phrase. Regardless...
It seems much more appropriate to the common vernacular
Sort of like the popular vernacular that says "I could care less," when what the person actually means is that they "couldn't care less?" People say four words that mean the opposite of they're saying, and they're not being ironic. They're just being lazy, and uttering some syllables similar to what they've heard other people say under the same circumstances, and they're not actually thinking about what they're saying. It's not like it's some new vocabulary word without any prior meaning to the speakiner. "I" and "could"/"not" and "care" and "less" are all pretty specific and easily understood. And yet, the popular vernacular gets it embarassingly wrong most of the time. And that betray's the fact that the speaker isn't one of those people that actually has a clear concept in their head when they open their mouth.
Or, sort of like the phrase "carrot and stick," which people now completely confuse with its origins and meaning? They now use it wrongly - at the most simple, logical, practical level - and while you (in particular) would seem to be prepared to write it off because it's "just what people say, these days," the problem is that by using the phrase incorrectly, it removes meaning from uttering the phrase. It would be like saying, "I talked to my boss about a raise, but he's thinking like a tub of water that green clever foobar pineapples!" It doesn't mean anything. It would be one thing if the words "carrot" and "stick" had themselves changed their popular associations with... carrots and sticks... but they haven't. And yet people use the phrase with utterly the wrong picture in their head, and one which is driven by a complete lack of critical thinking on the subject. The "begging the question" issue is exactly the same. People mean to say "raises the question," and aren't actually thinking about what they're saying.
You don't see the same constant consistent warnings about Hurricane Preparedness
Oh please. Among other things, my firm consults on disaster recovery. Many of our (east coast, in particular) customers work with us specifically with weather-related disruptions in mind (hurricanes, blizzards, etc). Off site backups, telecommuting through portals hosted at data centers, etc. They are only just now beginning to ask themselves how they'd function if a large percentage of their employees were either sick or worried about becoming sick... no matter where the IT end of things lives. And since this DOES happen, and there's so far nothing at all available to stop such a strain from creating a huge mess... it's not the consultants pushing this stuff, it's the end users ASKING for consulting on it.
Fear mongering and talking about the destruction caused by the Spanish lady without framing it in these terms does everyone a disservice.
Compared to, say, describing simulations that test a financial institution's ability to function with a partially absent workforce as some sort of conspiracy to distract the masses from politics? Come, now.
As for people being "weakened by war" in 1918... well, sure - that took a toll. But the deaths from that strain were mostly found in people with very HEALTHY immune systems. TOO healthy, as it turns out. The mechanism of death with an immune system response so robust that it, itself, actually killed the victims. As for your take on the numbers: let's say that "only" 5 million deaths out of a 100-million death pandemic were to occur in US cities. That's out of, of course, MANY more millions that would be sick and not die, or absent from work for fear of becoming sick. It's not fear-mongering to confront that scenario and think through how to deal with it, or at least mitigate it.
As for your use of the term "useful", I think that you need to reevaluate the impact of 128kbps available over 910 square miles. Being able to open up a notebook in the middle of the park and prove that a tomato is a fruit by botanical definition and a vegetable by US import definition is useful to me.
Don't get me wrong! I can and do get a LOT of work done over that much bandwidth (you can certainly run a perfectly good terminal server session that way). I just want to be clear that such a service (at the subsidized bandwidth) wouldn't really cut it for a lot of people. Certainly not for the entertainment + business type use that's becoming so common. Half a dozen people streaming video next to you could pretty well kill it. I think it's just important to set expectations about the overall utility of that sort of bandwidth, and even more important to keep in mind that someone's ALWAYS footing the bill (and might choose to STOP doing so).
I, by the way, also resolve numerous socially weighty arguments by Googling in the wild. Usually on my phone. But I do get your point!
Slashdot Mirror
So next time you have a house party with 6 friends you would like to have 24 cops show up at your door then taze you for playing your music too loud?
No, ONE cop can show up and ASK you to turn it down. Just like this idiot was ASKED to participate in the event like everyone else, and ASKED to behave in a reasonable manner so that the people holding the event could make it about what the event was supposed to be about, and not about this jerk getting raising his street cred with the hot activist chicks on campus. It's when the people having the loud party refuse to acknowledge that they're being a nuisance, and continue to be a problem, that you have to escalate the response. Just like this kid, who was asked multiple times to give it a rest and allow someone else to speak, who refused to simply walk away after blathering for so long, who refused to be LED, peacefully away (hell, he could have kept shouting, if he wanted, as he walked away, but he wouldn't do that, either), and who when reached for to be led away started flailing at the police, and who continued to fight even after multiple warnings that they'd use other means to settle him down to the point where he could be peacefully handled. Do you really think that's the same as being "tazed for playing music too loud?" Obviously you haven't actually watched any coverage of this fool's behavior, or you'd realize that no one just walked up and tazed him.
Are you telling me 4 cops couldn't restrain and remove 1 unarmed student without needing to electrocute him?
Leaving aside for the moment the fact that you obviously don't know what the word "electrocute" actually means, it's apparent you've never tried to subdue and move someone who is trying to fight you off. People get hurt. This moron could just as easily have wrenched his arm out of joint, and then blamed the cops for THAT. Instead (as you would see if you actually watched the video), the less traumatic, and more civil behavior he SHOULD have been exhibiting when he was politely asked to wrap up his tantrum was much more quickly acheived - despite HIS violent behavior - and no risk of further injuries.
when someone grabs you unexpectedly your first natural reaction is to lay down and give up
Well, see, now you're just BSing and you know it. This wasn't unexpected. He deliberately set out to cause a confrontation. No one touched him until well after he'd been warned that they would. No one had to get more physical with him until HE started flailing. Again, you either haven't watched it, or you're trolling. Trolling, I'd say.
Maybe he should have been removed but this is still excessive force.
Ah! So, if he refused to be removed, what then? You have to subdue him enough to actually carry him out, right? Kicking and screaming? Fine. Have you ever actually tried to handle even one fourth of a person who is seriously trying to prevent you from doing so, and them carry them through a crowd of OTHER people? Well? Getting him to finally chill out so he could be safely moved WAS using less force.
Yeah, in a 'Free Speech Zone'.
Wrong. You can have your OWN event, exactly like the one that was being disrupted, ANY time you want to go to exactly the same trouble and expense as those that organized THAT one. You aren't off in some corner, you're in exactly the same place, with ALL of the same rights as anyone else. "The government" isn't "bending" ANYTHING when they offer equal protection for anyone that holds an event. You're confused. You think that your right to shut down someone else's event is your freedom to assemble. You've got it exactly backwards. You don't have the right to stop them from assembling and speaking, and when it's your turn (if you choose to take one) to set up an event of the same sort, in the same place, with the same facility/safety/access considerations that anyone running such an event has to consider, you will ALSO have the police there to make sure that some else doesn't get to shut YOU down.
You're looking for the right to interfere with someone else's freedom of assembly, without consequence, even as you complain about having freedom of assembly impacted. Which is it? Do you want free speech, or do you want SOME people's free speech to be shouted down when it suits you? You want freedom of assembly, but you also want the ability to deny someone else that freedom by being able to have their event cancelled when you use a few people with chains or other devices to block or road and make the event too unsafe to continue? You want to protect freedom of assembly, and you want to USE it in order to block or prevent people you don't like from assembling? Do you even LISTEN to yourself? You can't have it both ways. Let people have their events, and you get to have YOURS - with all of the same protections and safety considerations. If you want to hold an event where the framework specifically calls for people in giant puppet masks to stand there screaming at each other, and you specifically are cool with no one who is organizing the event being able to actually run the program or allow the speakers they've invited to actually be heard, great! HAVE such an event - because you CAN, and that's freedom of assembly. But when you pretend to support that freedom, and use that facade to cover a coordinated effort to deprive someone you don't like from exercising it themselves... well, that little bit of hypocrisy speaks for itself.
we're becoming a police state, and this is one of so many contributing factors.
I'm not really clear, here, on how you arrive at that conclusion. The whole point is that we have the freedom to assemble. You know, the freedom to hold an event where people get to do things like take turns talking, if that's the sort of event you want to hold. And someone else decides that your freedom of speech and assembly isn't important, and that he can shout you down and take over the event for his own aggrandizement and 15 minutes of annoying notoriety. It's a "police state" action when law enforcement officers actually act to enforce the laws that are written to prevent people from interfering with your events and rights? If there were no statutes covering things like disturbing the peace, then the officers wouldn't have had the grounds to ask the guy to leave, or to arrest him when he decided to ignore their obligation to uphold those statutes. But there ARE such laws, and this twit clearly knew that he went in there to provoke exactly such a reaction, and he clearly considered the rights of the people gathered there to be secondary to his own need for political theater.
History is full of loudmouths, drunks, disturbed people of all sorts. That's why disturbing the peace is a notion we all understand. But the law works FOR this clown, too. This guy can have his OWN assembly where he DOES get to talk non-stop the whole time if he wants, and if someone decides to stand there trying to shout him down, then HE gets the benefit of the police working for HIM, if that becomes necessary. If he wants to run an event where non-stop interruptions by everyone there is the actual framework of the event, then someone being a blathering jerk, in that context, wouldn't BE disturbing the peace, and there's no need for the officers to act. Save the "police state" hyperbole for when it matters, because trotting it out when someone like this deliberately seeks this sort of action and attention completely cheapens the meaning of that phrase.
An officer saying "you were distribing the peace" doesn't cut it; this is supposed to be a free society, were we CANNOT be arrested at whim.
So, if I stand outside your bedroom window all night beating trashcan lids together, you should have no recourse? Or, if you hold a seminar, and I decide to disrupt it continually, you should have no recourse? If an officer DOES find that you're disturbing the peace, should it be up to YOU to determine whether that's true or not? If so, do only I get to determine if I'm disturbing YOUR peace? Should I be able to enter a venue where your candidate is talking, and just stand there all day shouting him down? Let's just stipulate for a moment that you might consider "disturbing the peace" to be an actual public nuisance, and that perhaps a law enforcement officer in charge of enforcing the law that your elected officials specifically wrote to deal with that are actually called upon to enforce it. And the person who is beating trashcan lids together so that no one can hear your candidate speak simply decides that that community's law doesn't apply to them. What then? The cops have to give up and walk away, and allow the disruption to continue? No? Then what? Maybe they have to resort to actually physically moving the person away from the scene because they're too much of an asshat to show the decency to knock it off.
And if they start fighting with the officers trying to move them? Then what? The officers should decide that, well, if someone's willing to physically fight in order to maintain their ability to bash trash can lids together to prevent political speech, then, well, gosh, they should probably be left to it? Or, should the officers actually uphold the law, and stop the person from disturbing the peace? You can't have it both ways. You say you have a "problem with that." What is it you have a problem with, exactly? The right to assemble and have a civil conversation without someone taking over your event for themselves? You say you want a free society. So, I'm not free to hold an event where people get to take turns talking? You don't want freedom for everyone, just the freedom to pick and choose which other people YOU get to shout down.
Give me a fucking break! How did they manage police work before they had tasers?
With someone who physically fights them, they physically restrain or subdue them. Absent things like tasers, that comes down to much less politically correct methods sometimes. And that results in everything from bruises to dislocated shoulders, and worse. And then people complain about THAT. What you're really asking is whether or not police should ever be able or be obligided to physically control someone's actions or presence. If the answer to that is yes, then we're just splitting hairs over the method... unless, of course, you're a cop, and perhaps you don't actually WANT to have to have a wrestling match with someone who might have an unsheathed knife in their pocket, or who might have open wounds, or who might be shockingly strong, etc.
The draconian DRM debacle that is called Vista is sounding more and more like the who's-to-blame catch-22 we've all experienced in the past: Your high definition video won't play in HD mode. Microsoft-it's the hardware's fault, PC maker-it's the content provider's fault, Content Provider-it's Vista's fault. Anyone else want to dance?
Except, as has been pointed out, Vista isn't actually CAUSING the restriction on some playback, they're only supporting it if the content provider that invests the money in producing the content in the first place WANTS to use it. You're looking for ways to imply that MS has a hand in deciding if/when a given producer elects to enable a specific feature. They don't. That's up to the artists and the people they hire to distribute their work for them. If they don't enable that feature in their content, then it simply doesn't matter downstream, and that's Bott's point.
The condemnation of Tehran is part of a larger concerted effort to selectively show the worst side of the Iranian government and citizenry
Sorry, I don't buy it. The theocratic medievalists that are running that country are doing a FINE job of ridiculing themselves and making us all feel sorry for the poor shmucks who are being raised there right now amidst a mysoginistic culture and a frail, failing economy. Even what many here would consider to be a highly biased new source (say, Fox) don't have to work very hard to report on stories that the Tehran government itself uses press releases to announce. Banning certain hair styles. Forbidding the use of the word "pizza," for being to western, etc. That's not a reflection of the people of Iran, it's a reflection of the backwards theocracy that has those people by the short hairs.
It's isn't demonizing some young Iranian to point out that his religious leaders and the army under control of those religious leaders are nuts. It isn't demonizing a young Iranian woman to point out that the authorities running her country seem really obsessed with what she wears. And it isn't just the US pointing out that those same damaged people are busy trying to build nukes, and have press conferences every week announcing the imminent demise of other countries. To say nothing of seeking out buddy-buddy relations with neo-Stalinists-in-training like Hugo Chavez, and pumping cash, weapons, and terrorist-soldiers into a civil conflict that they're invested in sustaining and inflaming next door in Iraq, all the more so as it is tamped down in places where they've tried the hardest to spark it up.
Libraries of Congress
No, no. It's Libraries of Congress per fortnight.
you could find someone that still believes in geo-centrism as well
Next you're going to tell me that the anti-arthritis knee-joint magnets I'm using aren't actually powered by the Electric Universe.
I'm guessing you're a fucking jarhead.
Actually, no. But then, you probably can't imagine that someone might actually respond to another post's comment by mentioning actual information that's relevent to the conversation, right? Or is someone less of a 'fag' if they cite the Coast Guard, instead? Which branch of the military does one get to mention that makes them less homosexual, from your perspective, exactly?
paint a bulls-eye on your forehead fag
And I don't have to guess. You're making it obvious that you're a sexually insecure 12 year old that just got home from school this afternoon (after obviously having some sort of lapse in the locker room after gym class), and you've got your entire world view shaped for you by hanging out with worldly 13 year olds that you think are cool, what with being allowed to stay up past 9:00PM and all.
The world could do with less of you.
Yes, yes. The world would be so much better off with more... what? Militant members of the Taliban, who shoot women in the street for teaching their daughters to read? Or members of China's PLA? You know, the ones that reinforce a government that would consider the cowardly anonymous post you just made to be a crime? I really hope that this is the year you actually take a history class. It's already too late for any sort of a course that will help you with critical thinking, alas.
Can someone please figure out a way to weaponize a cure for cancer?
You mean kind of like how there are now lots more skilled laser eye surgeons in the private sector competing to give you better prices for your business because once the military decided to back providing that service to its pilots, there was a giant leap in people being trained to do the work during their rotations?
As far as cancer: the military provides all kinds of basic medical research from which we all benefit. You'll see considerable military spending in epidemialogical studies, trauma treatment, etc. To the extent that, say, The Marine Corp is a weapon, the huge studies that can be conducted on the systematically collected health stats, DNA, etc., on a huge number of generally healthy people over several generations IS a part of all sorts of cancer (and other) studies.
I used to live in between 3 government facilities in CA. I new that my sprint communications was secretly monitored. So many times it was either jammed, disrupted, or I got the impression someone was listening from the weird sounds it would make in the background on a call(weird coded signals or strange rythym pulses).
I could not have written a satirical take on paranoid delusions combined with make-believe ignorance of the technology involved any better if I tried to. You're a freakin' GENIUS, man.
And a government that intends to relegate the vast majority of the population to the status of "labor pool" has an interest in what *everybody* has to say about it.
Well, yes, I suppose that at the rate you must be using tinfoil, we WILL need a larger labor pool to meet demand.
Keep in mind, you are speculating.
Well, "rounding down" is more like it. Are you deliberately ignoring the months and years that preceded the events that drove their surrender?
I still cannot bear the thought of nuclear bombs being dropped on innocent civilians.
But... you're OK with the Japanese army sitting in various ports, factory towns, and other facilities and cities throughout Japan, and being "conventionally" bombed into oblivion, along with the civilians they're standing next to? How about the factories and shipping facilities (such as in Hiroshima and Nagasaki), staffed and supported by civilians, but with their output entirely directed to supporting the fight-til-the-end Japanese military? What technology, available in the 1940's, are you proposing we should have used in order to get Japan to surrender? The only other one available had ALREADY BEEN TRIED: to wit, massive conventional bombing, in advance of an on-the-ground invasion. Were you paying ANY attention to what happened on the countless Pacific Islands that had to be handled that way? The Japanese mainland would have been unbelievably worse, because a devoted Emprorer-obeying population would have largely done the same things that Japanese soldiers did in Okinawa or elsewhere: fight to the death.
You're confusing the fact that, owing to their surrender, far fewer Japanese soldiers and civilians died than would have in a bloody block-by-block invasion of the mainland with anyone feeling generous about that. That fewer of them died is just frosting on the cake. The CAKE was the end of the war, without having to send half a million US solidiers and marines into horrific urban struggle that would have made the insurgency in Iraq look like a football game in terms of collateral damage to non-combatants. This was 60 years ago! The conventional conquering of that ground would have been far, far worse for everyone involved. But the motivation for getting them to surrender was to save OUR people from having to do it in a vastly bloodier, more costly way. It's just luck for the average Japanese citizen that they didn't have to have every village burned down, every town square riddled with machine gun fire, and vastly more people caught up in horror that - because of a limited but violent solution in Hiroshima, and because the Japanese military thought maybe it was some sort of one-time stunt, Nagasaki - didn't have to happen.
And we keep talking about ALL THE JAPANESE lives we saved.
Actually, "we" are simply OBSERVING that fact. You're the one that's obsessed with preferring a conventional invasion of the mainland, and somehow preferring "standard" deaths of far more people. Which is pretty perverse, really, when you think about it. But you're not really thinking about it, obviously.
We shot to kill, not to make them surrender.
False dichotomy. We shot to kill because no other action, as had been amply demonstrated by the Japanese military over and over again, would cause them to surrender.
We wanted revenge for Pearl Harbor.
Gross simplification. We wanted to shut down the entire campaign that Japan had put into motion, of which things like Pearl Harbor, or the brutal rape of Nanking, were merely episodes. The military regime that authored those events and which was torching so much of the Pacific rim, needed to be stopped. And there was no fiercely effective UN (hah!) to somehow make them do so through angry letters and corrupt sanctions. Every minute that the Japanese continued with that campaign, untold thousands of people died. You clearly think it's rude to stop them using violence, but you are spectacularly silent on just what method you think would have actually worked more quickly, and with fewer deaths.
We wanted mass carnage and devastation.
Has your shrink ever talked to you about "projection?" Regardless, we DID want devastation, in the two limited places where we deployed
Perhaps dropping the first nuke can be justified by arguing along those lines. But dropping the second nuke was simply murder.
Why? The horrific firebombing of Tokyo wasn't enough to get Japan to surrender. And the first a-bomb on Hiroshima wasn't, either. Japan didn't actually surrender until after Nagasaki. How many more lives would you have been comfortable seeing lost on both sides if we'd dropped only the bomb on Hiroshima, and then gone on and on with more equally/more horrible meat-grinding/roasting conventional warfare afterwards? Several hundred thousand? Because that's what the second bomb prevented.
*clears throat, goes for slightly maniacal tone*
Electric Universe! Come on, man, just think about it. It takes time to develope these things. Before we had the fancy, new Electric Universe, we had the Water-Powered Universe.
Whereas, duplicating a CD deprives no-one of anything.
Other than depriving the artist of her copyrights, you mean.
Stealing/theft is depriving someone else of goods/services
How would you characterize someone who sneaks in through a concert hall kitchen window to avoid paying for a ticket to see a show by their all-time favorite performer? The artist isn't going to notice one more person standing in the crowd of otherwise paying customers, right? How about two of them? How about 999 out of a 1000 of them? Careful!
It's stealing.
Alas, you're wasting your breath/keystrokes. It seems that a lot of people who want artists to entertain them for free would rather have a venomous, pedantic pissing contest over linguistics and semantics than actually address the underlying topic: they want some hairsplitting legal cover so that they can rip off the works by the very artists that they pretend to respect. And, since they're busy cultivating a culture of entitlement because there are technical ways to lay hands on the artist's work without it feeling quite like lifting a CD from a store shelf, they have lots of fellow parasites that are trying to somehow turn ripping off entertainment into a virtue - like some sort of noble gesture against The Man. "Dude! It's just like V for Vendetta, only instead of, like blowing stuff up, I'm, like, getting that new Fergie CD for free. OMG, that'll teach her to... um... want to sell her recordings... uh... anyway, I also ripped a better copy of V for Vendetta - you want to come over and watch it on my new $3000 television? I got a case of St. Pauli Girl - it was only $18.99! Oh, and on your way over, pick up one of those $20 pizzas you always pick up - those are great. You really gotta respect anyone who can make a pizza that good."
This is more like all the grocery stores in a town deciding one day that too many people are stealing milk.
Actually, this is more like all of the musicians in a town - who all book the same venue to do performances - getting tired of selling 100 tickets to their show, but seeing 1000 people in the venue they rented out to host the performance. And then following up when it becomes clear that people are putting information up on a public network that explains how to get into the show through the building's unlocked back door.
a fictional association to protect themselves
Do you really think that trade associations are fictional? Why do you think that?
I don't think we'd have to work too hard to find lawsuits (especially class actions, obviously) that inlude two or more nominal competitors sharing resources when facing a common opponent in civil court, or when serially dealing with similar issues on an ongoing basis. Most industries have trade associations that exist precisely to allow members (who frequently compete with each other) to lower their collective overhead on commonly needed marketing, representation, lobbying, etc. One might even say that labor unions (and the meta-unions) - which represent intra-competing parties - are a similar beast. If there was a solid reason to argue that being a member of a trade association somehow torpedoes your copyrights, trademarks, or any other IP turf, that would already have been rabidly pursued.
Based on that website, I don't really see why the term "begging the question" is used to describe that particular logical fallacy
That's because you're not getting the historical context of the term "begging" and how it got put to use in this phrase. Regardless...
It seems much more appropriate to the common vernacular
Sort of like the popular vernacular that says "I could care less," when what the person actually means is that they "couldn't care less?" People say four words that mean the opposite of they're saying, and they're not being ironic. They're just being lazy, and uttering some syllables similar to what they've heard other people say under the same circumstances, and they're not actually thinking about what they're saying. It's not like it's some new vocabulary word without any prior meaning to the speakiner. "I" and "could"/"not" and "care" and "less" are all pretty specific and easily understood. And yet, the popular vernacular gets it embarassingly wrong most of the time. And that betray's the fact that the speaker isn't one of those people that actually has a clear concept in their head when they open their mouth.
Or, sort of like the phrase "carrot and stick," which people now completely confuse with its origins and meaning? They now use it wrongly - at the most simple, logical, practical level - and while you (in particular) would seem to be prepared to write it off because it's "just what people say, these days," the problem is that by using the phrase incorrectly, it removes meaning from uttering the phrase. It would be like saying, "I talked to my boss about a raise, but he's thinking like a tub of water that green clever foobar pineapples!" It doesn't mean anything. It would be one thing if the words "carrot" and "stick" had themselves changed their popular associations with... carrots and sticks... but they haven't. And yet people use the phrase with utterly the wrong picture in their head, and one which is driven by a complete lack of critical thinking on the subject. The "begging the question" issue is exactly the same. People mean to say "raises the question," and aren't actually thinking about what they're saying.
You don't see the same constant consistent warnings about Hurricane Preparedness
Oh please. Among other things, my firm consults on disaster recovery. Many of our (east coast, in particular) customers work with us specifically with weather-related disruptions in mind (hurricanes, blizzards, etc). Off site backups, telecommuting through portals hosted at data centers, etc. They are only just now beginning to ask themselves how they'd function if a large percentage of their employees were either sick or worried about becoming sick... no matter where the IT end of things lives. And since this DOES happen, and there's so far nothing at all available to stop such a strain from creating a huge mess... it's not the consultants pushing this stuff, it's the end users ASKING for consulting on it.
Fear mongering and talking about the destruction caused by the Spanish lady without framing it in these terms does everyone a disservice.
Compared to, say, describing simulations that test a financial institution's ability to function with a partially absent workforce as some sort of conspiracy to distract the masses from politics? Come, now.
As for people being "weakened by war" in 1918... well, sure - that took a toll. But the deaths from that strain were mostly found in people with very HEALTHY immune systems. TOO healthy, as it turns out. The mechanism of death with an immune system response so robust that it, itself, actually killed the victims. As for your take on the numbers: let's say that "only" 5 million deaths out of a 100-million death pandemic were to occur in US cities. That's out of, of course, MANY more millions that would be sick and not die, or absent from work for fear of becoming sick. It's not fear-mongering to confront that scenario and think through how to deal with it, or at least mitigate it.
As for your use of the term "useful", I think that you need to reevaluate the impact of 128kbps available over 910 square miles. Being able to open up a notebook in the middle of the park and prove that a tomato is a fruit by botanical definition and a vegetable by US import definition is useful to me.
Don't get me wrong! I can and do get a LOT of work done over that much bandwidth (you can certainly run a perfectly good terminal server session that way). I just want to be clear that such a service (at the subsidized bandwidth) wouldn't really cut it for a lot of people. Certainly not for the entertainment + business type use that's becoming so common. Half a dozen people streaming video next to you could pretty well kill it. I think it's just important to set expectations about the overall utility of that sort of bandwidth, and even more important to keep in mind that someone's ALWAYS footing the bill (and might choose to STOP doing so).
I, by the way, also resolve numerous socially weighty arguments by Googling in the wild. Usually on my phone. But I do get your point!