As apposed to today's age where people think the physical universe just created itself from thin air one day.
Last I checked (about two months ago), nobody believes that. In fact, according to current physical theories, air of neither thin nor other thickness existed at that time. But, of course, it is a lot easier to put a complex, well-researched physical theory into a barely fitting metaphor than it is to actually understand it.
You might want to grab a 3rd grade science book and learn why the physical universe could not possibly have created itself. That whole matter is never created or destroyed thing gets into the way of your "just came to be from nothing" theory of utter stupidity.
Because 3rd grade science explains the known universe, yes? Just like English 101 is more than enough to fully understand Shakespeare and French 101 is more than sufficient to grasp all the subtleties of Voltaire.
And since Jehovah Created you, you'd be a total dick to go to the Other Guy. Ingrate.
I love it when religion tries its hand at something so alien as this newfangled invention called "logic" (you know, created after the stone age, that's pretty new from a religious POV).
Now another internally consistent argument would say that since Jehovah created you including your soul, he has no use for souls, since he can apparently make them. Giving your soul to him would be like giving the shoemaker a pair of shoes for christmas.
Hell, even Buddhists and Atheists sometimes kill over questions like this,
[citation needed]
The poor judge who has to deal with this will be walking on eggshells to avoid any ruling that even mentions whether souls exist or how much they are worth.
Yes, he will. Maybe, just maybe, someone in there will realize just how crazy it is to kill each other over a word. Once you have reached that stage, welcome to Atheism, it's a few more easy steps in the same direction.:-)
The difference is that in one case, someone is making a commercial profit off your expense. A spammer is essentially someone who steals half a cent from you and everyone else, every day. Sure, it's not much, but for him it adds up. And so does it for society as a whole. The damage to each individual is small, but to us all as a group, it is huge. Easily higher than a kidnapping.
Traffic jams, OTOH, are not something that someone has intentionally create in order to make a buck.
Yes, because the inconvenience of mashing the 'delete" key a few times is exactly comparable to the inconvenience of having a family member kidnapped and held against their will.
You have heard about scaling factors sometime during your education, haven't you?
A small crime done to millions sums up. The math has been done before. The "few seconds" times the amount of spam just one of the major spammers sends out in a month comes to easily an entire human lifetime.
Spammers try to make it appear hazy, but it isn't. 99.999999% of the spam volume is not from some overly zealous marketing temp who sends the company newsletter to a few more people than he should've. Pretty much all the spam you get is from address lists. You buy one of them to send those people mail, you fucking know that you're sending unsolicited mails.
The tiny fraction of mails that fall in the "you actually did sign in and forgot" category is so negliegable, you can ignore it for the general discussion. The only point where it ever comes in is if you want to define the line at "opt-in". That would be a very simple and elegant solution to the problem: $1000 fine per mail, payable to receiver unless you can produce evidence that he signed up for it. Of course, that's been discussed before and dumped due to the problem of collecting the money.
The problem with your vigilance is that it's often objective to draw the line where spamming stops and legitimate business e-mails start.
opt-in
If you send me advertisement that I didn't ask for, you are spamming. It is that simple.
Good point. The strategy was invented by the Romans, in case you care. The Roman Empire had a kind of primary objective on any and all sieges, namely that they win. No matter how long or what ressources it takes, there was the order from Rome that they will never leave defeated.
A famous mountain fort considered itself invulnerable due to natural features - there was only one small path up to the fortress. The romans built a big camp at the foot of the mountain and started building a ramp. It took them years to build it, but they did it, and took the invulnerable fortress.
That's why one day, when the roman army had just begun besieging another city, its ambassador came for talks, and he boasted "we have food for ten years". To which the romans replied "then we will accept your surrender in the eleventh". The next day, the city surrendered.
I'm telling that story because I like it a lot, but also because it shows that insane investment can pay off in the end. Yes, the romans poured ressources into a few sieges that were far beyond what they gained. But once the word had spread, the return-on-investment came.
There are two things we have to do to get rid of spam, minus the small amount you can never get rid off.
One is to make it very hard to make a profit via spam. A few simple laws could cover that. Going through the credit card companies would probably work great. Simply allow people a chargeback for any and all products sold via spam. All you have to do is send the spam message to the credit card company and ask for it. The CC company may not charge you. They don't want to pay for the trouble themselves, either. They will charge the merchant. That would pretty much eliminate all the non-working crap that's being sold via spam.
Two is to go absolutely anal on the spammers themselves. While #1 reduces the ROI, #2 increases the risk. Once you do that, the business case for being a spammer goes away. I don't necessarily mean higher penalties, but more effort in actually bringing them to justice, in an international effort.
Might look nice in the video. In a real installation, I fear the human eyes are just too good, and will quickly tell you that while that may seem like the golden gate bridge outside, it has no depth, and thus is more likely to be a 2D image than a 3D reality.
But in retrospect, it was a clear antecedent of what Apple is doing -- much more successfully -- with the iPad.
About as much as a 13th century carriage is a "clear antecedent" to a Lamborghini. Yes, it has four wheels. One more author who either has no clue whatsoever about what the iPad actually is (note: "table computer" is not the answer) or who does, and simply wanted to drive up page views by throwing the currently hot topic "iPad" into a totally unrelated story.
No, to be a rival, you have to address the same market.
A Linux tablet PC and the iPad address completely different markets. One goes for geeky people who want a small, portable multi-touch thing that they can hack at leisure. The other for people who want a media and content consumption device that simply works and stays out of your way.
They're not the same device. The number of people who really find it hard to decide between them is tiny. Probably about 50 grandmothers who can't afford an iPad but their granddaughter wants one, so the sales person at the computer store convince them this Linux pad thingy is mostly the same, for half the price.
Really? You had to go back 9 years to find that one.
Only because it is the most famous./. has rooted for Openmoko and Android, and they are failures. There have been a dozen or so "this will kill the iPhone" stories, usually telling the lame tale of how the development model isn't open and you can't access the OS source code - and yet...
Oh yes, and I'm sure 2010 is the year where Linux is ready for the desktop.
Vista being a big fail was about the only tech story with mainstream impact that we here at/. got right, isn't it?
But the iPad clearly has significant limitations that someone else can capitalize on.
Yeah, less memory than a Nomad.
When was the last time that a/. opinion on anything counted for something? The track record of this community on what the greatest thing ever is and what will fail is not exactly stellar.
End of story, really. Everything else is whining and artificial overcomplication. When you buy an iPhone, you can be extremely well informed about what it can and can't do. In fact, that info is much easier to come by than for almost all competitors.
To start with, the rounds from the heli are over three times as large as a 7.62 round. That is a huge difference. Not everyone might be able to tell the difference, but those living in a warzone probably have seen their share of combat wounds and should know that something wasnt caused just by small arms.
Since he was still moving, it could've been a grazing shot, for example. Can you even survive a direct hit from a 30mm? Wouldn't hydrostatic shock alone kill you?
As I said: We don't know. We can speculate all we want, we're not likely to find out what the van driver really thought.
its not smart to put yourself in the shooting zone.
Sorry, but this is so much off the scale, I don't know what the fuck to say.
These people didn't put themselves in a shooting zone. The shooting zone was put up around them. They happened to live there. That is the one comment in the chatter for which I think the soldier should be severely reprimanded. "don't bring your kids to a battle".
You have two interpretations, and both aren't good for the US military in general and that chopper crew in particular.
One, all of Iraq is a shooting zone/battle. Well, yes, but why? Because you made it so. You can't blame the people living in a place for being in a battle zone when you are the ones who brought the battle to them. That's like setting fire to a house and then telling the burn victims that they were stupid being in a burning house.
Two, this particular spot at that particular time was a shooting zone/battle. Yes, it was because US soldiers opened fire first. That's even more like the burning house example. That's like blaming Kennedy for putting himself in the line-of-fire of Oswald. It's totally backwards logic.
I dont deny that mistakes were made, and I'd wager those involved still have nightmares about what they did. To crucify the soldiers and portray them as gun happy rambos is an intentional misrepresentation of what happened though.
Because, you know, they don't build Mac Pros or XServes, do they?
Apple is great a building integrated devices, and have maybe not created but built up markets where there wasn't one before. But they still do sell perfectly good computers. If you're not fanatical about home maintainance, you can include their notebooks and the iMac in there.
anyone who saw it should have known that it was made by a MUCH bigger gun
I don't know, I haven't seen the bullet wounds, and I have no idea if they teach bullet wounds in Iraqi schools. If you are a civilian, who probably doesn't even know the difference between 30mm and 7.62mm except that one sounds larger, are you sure you could, when you come about a bunch of bodies and a guy bleeding profoundly, identify the type of wound? It's easy to blame people from afar, with a birds-eye view of the situation.
Had they not been pointing something around the corner, they would have likely been left alone. Do you poke your grocery bag around corners?
In a city where someone is shot every few hours, I may look carefully around a corner before going around it, yeah. Again, we only know how it looked from the chopper. The actual story on the ground could be completely different. Or, heck, they could've all been insurgents and the two Reuters journalists were really conspiring with them. Aliens could be involved. -- look, we can make up all kinds of shit to justify or condemn the shooting, going by what we know there was at no point a weapon clearly and obviously visible. So the chopper crew went by their interpretation of the scene and that turned out to be wrong.
Once more - that happens. I don't understand the people who try to create a major scandal out of that. But I don't dig the people saying nobody made a mistake. Someone did. Innocent, unarmed civilians were killed. That's the facts. To me, the interesting discussion is questions like "could they have avoided this mistake?" and "what can be done to avoid it in the future?".
They fired on the van because it was presumed to be insurgents trying to escape with a comrade.
Presumed insurgents, potentially escaping with a severely wounded, supposed comrade. That's a lot of "maybe" and "ifs" there. Besides, a wounded enemy is more of a burden to your enemy than a dead one, so please give me one justification, military or not, to open fire.
Also, let me point out that after arriving on the scene they DID find weapons with the group, just not as many as they had expected.
As you point out, the AK47 is so common in that area of the world, that you can shoot a 70 year old grandfather in his sleep and chance are, you'll find an AK47 in his bedroom. When I was in Egypt a couple years ago on holidays, one such grandfather was cleaning his right on the street.
You're right that if someone carries a rifle in Iraq and he's not a US soldier, there's at least 95% chance that it's an AK47. My point wasn't about the model. My point was about how the communication went from "might be" to certainty without there actually being any certainty.
We dont know what was down the street, it might have been a school or playground for all we know.
Now you are creating justifications out of thin air, because nothing even remotely like this is even hinted at in the chatter. Not a thing. Zilch, nada, null, zero. From what we do know, the choppers spotted people they thought were insurgents and opened fire, and it turned out they were wrong. It's that simple, and mistakes like that are made in wars, and friendly fire is a major killer. I don't see a reason to go all alarmist on either side of the debate. Shit happens, and people get killed in war, and a lot of innocent people get killed with them. I'd much rather question the war per se than the shit that happens because shit happens in war.
But I don't dig the apologists, either. Mistakes were made, why deny it instead of learning from them?
Without the ability to verify how the vote was cast, there is little incentive to be a vote purchaser.
We're not talking about individual topics here, you mentioned the ability to give your vote entirely to someone else. Like "ah, I don't bother with all this politics, but the ACLU is usually good in their choices, I trust them, here's my vote."
For a lot of people, "I trust them" doesn't matter, they're desinterested in politics (or just poor, usually both), so "they pay me" becomes a good substitute.
Making such an offer to a significant fraction of a 300M population directly without attracting notice would be basically impossible in this day and age.
You underestimate the ability of people with deep enough pockets to commit crimes in plain view of everyone. Many of our current western democracies are run by people who again and again (and sometimes, continuously) speak out against the very constitutions they have sworn to protect. We have corporations violating labor laws with everyone knowing it - just the court cases to resolve it have been running for years. Think about SCO, we all knew they were full of shit on day one.
With so much at stake, there will be no shortage of people willing to take the risk and do it anyways. And in plain sight. Really, think SCO.
Out of curiosity, would you consider the status quo "heavily gamed?" I certainly would.
Yes, I do. The ballot lists (as a system) make it pretty much certain for certain people to be elected, no matter what. The - what's the term? - cutting of district lines that very openly happens to maximize political profit. The whole party system is flawed, unless you're a high-ranking member, in which case it's perfect.
But just because something is bad doesn't mean we should replace it with a different bad thing. That takes the focus away. We need to replace it with something better, otherwise everyone will just say "uh, it's still the transition period, things will work themselves out".
The point is that your system will work as long as NGOs act as the vote accumulators, i.e. organisations with a published agenda and the purpose to push that.
But here's a prophecy. Don't take it literally, variables (names, dates, etc.) can be exchanged at will:
2020, the new system is announced. February 2022, Coca-Cola announces that it will become a vote accumulator. If you assign your vote to Coca-Cola, you will get 20% off on all purchases of their soft drinks at McDonalds and Pizza Hut. March 2022, lawsuits against Coca-Cola commence. A temporary injunction is rejected, as the Coca-Cola lawyers were well-prepared for this event. 2023, Coca-Cola has accumulated 10% of the nations votes, largely due to rising food prices, most of the votes are from poor, uneducated people. Lawsuits are still dragging on. 2024, Fifty of the Fortune 500 companies now act as vote accumulators. They swing a combined 45% of votes and have successfully passed several amendments to the voting laws that make it more difficult to continue the numerous lawsuits to stop them. 2025, 50%+1 of the votes are now in the hands to corporate America. NGOs are crying foul. Lawsuits still going on. 2026, retroactive immunity law for vote accumulators passed, three months before the first lawsuit comes to a close end of 2026, Coca-Cola lawsuit ends, finding Coca-Cola in violation of the voting laws. Retroactive immunity law prevents any punishments. Voting laws have since been changed to allow these acts. Coca-Cola must drop half of its votes, as these were acquired illegally. Answers with a "25% off if you re-assign" marketing campaign, which is legal under the new laws.
Likely? I don't know. But not impossible. When you talk about giving away voting rights, be extra careful. The problem is that with the current system, votes have to be cast again in a couple of years. That keeps our politicians slightly in line. Any assignement proce
If you actually watch the video, its pretty hard to find a lot of fault with the heli crew.
While I don't jump on the sensationalism either, this is too far off the other end.
There was a guy apparently carrying something at his side. I've not done any slow-motion or such, just watched the video, so I figure I had the same view as the guys in the heli. I would not have said that that's a weapon. However, did you notice how the communication went? It went straight from "could be a gun" to "we have individuals with weapons" to "AK47". At that point, someone in the chain of command should've said "uh, you're looking through a shitty b/w camera and you can make out the model of the gun?" and wondered whether things on the ground really are that way. What should have happened - and didn't - was confirmation. "Are you certain they have guns?"
I didn't see anything that was even close to looking like an RPG, either. Not to mention that an RPG is an unguided weapon and pretty much sucks against moving helicopters (if they were hovering, that'd be another story).
The good Samaritan with his kids was well intentioned, but didn't think it through either. There obviously had just been an attack and with two helicopters flying around, it doesn't take much to figure that the place is still being watched. Not that he deserved to die because of it, but it was unwise to put himself and his family in that position.
Yes, that's easy to say from 20,000 miles away. In that situation, to him on the ground, things may have looked different. We'll never know. He may have thought there was a shooting, and the helicopters have secured the area. It had been a few minutes since the last shot had been fired.
And, once again, there was - to me - no reason in the video why they opened fire on the bus. Even before someone had left the car, the chatter was already "they're going to recover bodies and weapons". Then they proceeded to load the injured guy into the car, and at that point the helicopters opened fire. No weapon in sight.
Yes "don't bring your children to battle" is a nice saying. Except that this happened inside a city. You know, the place where civilians happen to live.
Now, I can understand that you'd rather stand on trial for shooting an innocent civilian than discovering too late that he's not and be killed yourself. Perfectly understandable, human, everything.
What I don't get is: a) the total lack of critical thinking. Even when everyone was dead and one wounded guy tried to crawl away, it appeared that the gunner actually wanted him to reach for a weapon so he could shoot him. Likewise, at no point did anyone in the chatter wonder whether the guys in the bus could be just civilians trying to bring someone who is seriously injured to the nearest hospital.
b) the lack of protocol and procedure in the chain of command to deal with situations like this. After years of operating in urban warfare, they should've done some homework. A lot of things you and I carry with us when we're shopping, or moving, or just bringing some stuff to a friend, can look like a weapon from far away. A lot of perfectly innocent behaviour can look not so from far away. Aparently, the official non-policy is "whatever the guys at the scene think they see, that's gotta be it".
c) why the cover-up? We all hate it when we make mistakes, but covering it up only raises the suspicion that you have something to hide.
Slashdot Mirror
As apposed to today's age where people think the physical universe just created itself from thin air one day.
Last I checked (about two months ago), nobody believes that. In fact, according to current physical theories, air of neither thin nor other thickness existed at that time. But, of course, it is a lot easier to put a complex, well-researched physical theory into a barely fitting metaphor than it is to actually understand it.
You might want to grab a 3rd grade science book and learn why the physical universe could not possibly have created itself. That whole matter is never created or destroyed thing gets into the way of your "just came to be from nothing" theory of utter stupidity.
Because 3rd grade science explains the known universe, yes? Just like English 101 is more than enough to fully understand Shakespeare and French 101 is more than sufficient to grasp all the subtleties of Voltaire.
The template reply is a lot more funny if the answers aren't checked randomly. To pick out just one:
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
So the CC company that he uses to be paid by his customers will be unable to find him?
And since Jehovah Created you, you'd be a total dick to go to the Other Guy. Ingrate.
I love it when religion tries its hand at something so alien as this newfangled invention called "logic" (you know, created after the stone age, that's pretty new from a religious POV).
Now another internally consistent argument would say that since Jehovah created you including your soul, he has no use for souls, since he can apparently make them. Giving your soul to him would be like giving the shoemaker a pair of shoes for christmas.
Debunk me. :-)
Hell, even Buddhists and Atheists sometimes kill over questions like this,
[citation needed]
The poor judge who has to deal with this will be walking on eggshells to avoid any ruling that even mentions whether souls exist or how much they are worth.
Yes, he will. Maybe, just maybe, someone in there will realize just how crazy it is to kill each other over a word. :-)
Once you have reached that stage, welcome to Atheism, it's a few more easy steps in the same direction.
Traffic is a crime :-)
The difference is that in one case, someone is making a commercial profit off your expense. A spammer is essentially someone who steals half a cent from you and everyone else, every day. Sure, it's not much, but for him it adds up. And so does it for society as a whole. The damage to each individual is small, but to us all as a group, it is huge. Easily higher than a kidnapping.
Traffic jams, OTOH, are not something that someone has intentionally create in order to make a buck.
Yes, because the inconvenience of mashing the 'delete" key a few times is exactly comparable to the inconvenience of having a family member kidnapped and held against their will.
You have heard about scaling factors sometime during your education, haven't you?
A small crime done to millions sums up. The math has been done before. The "few seconds" times the amount of spam just one of the major spammers sends out in a month comes to easily an entire human lifetime.
Spamming, on the other hand, is very hazy.
No, it is not.
Spammers try to make it appear hazy, but it isn't. 99.999999% of the spam volume is not from some overly zealous marketing temp who sends the company newsletter to a few more people than he should've. Pretty much all the spam you get is from address lists. You buy one of them to send those people mail, you fucking know that you're sending unsolicited mails.
The tiny fraction of mails that fall in the "you actually did sign in and forgot" category is so negliegable, you can ignore it for the general discussion. The only point where it ever comes in is if you want to define the line at "opt-in". That would be a very simple and elegant solution to the problem: $1000 fine per mail, payable to receiver unless you can produce evidence that he signed up for it. Of course, that's been discussed before and dumped due to the problem of collecting the money.
The problem with your vigilance is that it's often objective to draw the line where spamming stops and legitimate business e-mails start.
opt-in
If you send me advertisement that I didn't ask for, you are spamming. It is that simple.
Good point. The strategy was invented by the Romans, in case you care. The Roman Empire had a kind of primary objective on any and all sieges, namely that they win. No matter how long or what ressources it takes, there was the order from Rome that they will never leave defeated.
A famous mountain fort considered itself invulnerable due to natural features - there was only one small path up to the fortress. The romans built a big camp at the foot of the mountain and started building a ramp. It took them years to build it, but they did it, and took the invulnerable fortress.
That's why one day, when the roman army had just begun besieging another city, its ambassador came for talks, and he boasted "we have food for ten years". To which the romans replied "then we will accept your surrender in the eleventh". The next day, the city surrendered.
I'm telling that story because I like it a lot, but also because it shows that insane investment can pay off in the end. Yes, the romans poured ressources into a few sieges that were far beyond what they gained. But once the word had spread, the return-on-investment came.
There are two things we have to do to get rid of spam, minus the small amount you can never get rid off.
One is to make it very hard to make a profit via spam. A few simple laws could cover that. Going through the credit card companies would probably work great. Simply allow people a chargeback for any and all products sold via spam. All you have to do is send the spam message to the credit card company and ask for it. The CC company may not charge you. They don't want to pay for the trouble themselves, either. They will charge the merchant. That would pretty much eliminate all the non-working crap that's being sold via spam.
Two is to go absolutely anal on the spammers themselves. While #1 reduces the ROI, #2 increases the risk. Once you do that, the business case for being a spammer goes away. I don't necessarily mean higher penalties, but more effort in actually bringing them to justice, in an international effort.
Only if the court accepts that such a thing actually exists and has a value to be considered.
That's going to be one interesting court case, especially when the time for evidence comes.
Good. We're not here to amuse the remaining dumbos who have remained in the mental iron age.
Might look nice in the video. In a real installation, I fear the human eyes are just too good, and will quickly tell you that while that may seem like the golden gate bridge outside, it has no depth, and thus is more likely to be a 2D image than a 3D reality.
But in retrospect, it was a clear antecedent of what Apple is doing -- much more successfully -- with the iPad.
About as much as a 13th century carriage is a "clear antecedent" to a Lamborghini. Yes, it has four wheels. One more author who either has no clue whatsoever about what the iPad actually is (note: "table computer" is not the answer) or who does, and simply wanted to drive up page views by throwing the currently hot topic "iPad" into a totally unrelated story.
No, to be a rival, you have to address the same market.
A Linux tablet PC and the iPad address completely different markets. One goes for geeky people who want a small, portable multi-touch thing that they can hack at leisure. The other for people who want a media and content consumption device that simply works and stays out of your way.
They're not the same device. The number of people who really find it hard to decide between them is tiny. Probably about 50 grandmothers who can't afford an iPad but their granddaughter wants one, so the sales person at the computer store convince them this Linux pad thingy is mostly the same, for half the price.
you missed the obvious:
3) Google ignores them
Because what are they gonna do? Cut Google.com and YouTube on their side? Yeah, right.
Really? You had to go back 9 years to find that one.
Only because it is the most famous. /. has rooted for Openmoko and Android, and they are failures. There have been a dozen or so "this will kill the iPhone" stories, usually telling the lame tale of how the development model isn't open and you can't access the OS source code - and yet...
Oh yes, and I'm sure 2010 is the year where Linux is ready for the desktop.
Vista being a big fail was about the only tech story with mainstream impact that we here at /. got right, isn't it?
But the iPad clearly has significant limitations that someone else can capitalize on.
Yeah, less memory than a Nomad.
When was the last time that a /. opinion on anything counted for something? The track record of this community on what the greatest thing ever is and what will fail is not exactly stellar.
They can.
End of story, really. Everything else is whining and artificial overcomplication. When you buy an iPhone, you can be extremely well informed about what it can and can't do. In fact, that info is much easier to come by than for almost all competitors.
To start with, the rounds from the heli are over three times as large as a 7.62 round. That is a huge difference. Not everyone might be able to tell the difference, but those living in a warzone probably have seen their share of combat wounds and should know that something wasnt caused just by small arms.
Since he was still moving, it could've been a grazing shot, for example. Can you even survive a direct hit from a 30mm? Wouldn't hydrostatic shock alone kill you?
As I said: We don't know. We can speculate all we want, we're not likely to find out what the van driver really thought.
its not smart to put yourself in the shooting zone.
Sorry, but this is so much off the scale, I don't know what the fuck to say.
These people didn't put themselves in a shooting zone. The shooting zone was put up around them. They happened to live there. That is the one comment in the chatter for which I think the soldier should be severely reprimanded. "don't bring your kids to a battle".
You have two interpretations, and both aren't good for the US military in general and that chopper crew in particular.
One, all of Iraq is a shooting zone/battle. Well, yes, but why? Because you made it so. You can't blame the people living in a place for being in a battle zone when you are the ones who brought the battle to them. That's like setting fire to a house and then telling the burn victims that they were stupid being in a burning house.
Two, this particular spot at that particular time was a shooting zone/battle. Yes, it was because US soldiers opened fire first. That's even more like the burning house example. That's like blaming Kennedy for putting himself in the line-of-fire of Oswald. It's totally backwards logic.
I dont deny that mistakes were made, and I'd wager those involved still have nightmares about what they did. To crucify the soldiers and portray them as gun happy rambos is an intentional misrepresentation of what happened though.
Then we agree on everything but minor details :-)
Because, you know, they don't build Mac Pros or XServes, do they?
Apple is great a building integrated devices, and have maybe not created but built up markets where there wasn't one before. But they still do sell perfectly good computers. If you're not fanatical about home maintainance, you can include their notebooks and the iMac in there.
anyone who saw it should have known that it was made by a MUCH bigger gun
I don't know, I haven't seen the bullet wounds, and I have no idea if they teach bullet wounds in Iraqi schools. If you are a civilian, who probably doesn't even know the difference between 30mm and 7.62mm except that one sounds larger, are you sure you could, when you come about a bunch of bodies and a guy bleeding profoundly, identify the type of wound? It's easy to blame people from afar, with a birds-eye view of the situation.
Had they not been pointing something around the corner, they would have likely been left alone. Do you poke your grocery bag around corners?
In a city where someone is shot every few hours, I may look carefully around a corner before going around it, yeah. Again, we only know how it looked from the chopper. The actual story on the ground could be completely different. Or, heck, they could've all been insurgents and the two Reuters journalists were really conspiring with them. Aliens could be involved. -- look, we can make up all kinds of shit to justify or condemn the shooting, going by what we know there was at no point a weapon clearly and obviously visible. So the chopper crew went by their interpretation of the scene and that turned out to be wrong.
Once more - that happens. I don't understand the people who try to create a major scandal out of that. But I don't dig the people saying nobody made a mistake. Someone did. Innocent, unarmed civilians were killed. That's the facts. To me, the interesting discussion is questions like "could they have avoided this mistake?" and "what can be done to avoid it in the future?".
They fired on the van because it was presumed to be insurgents trying to escape with a comrade.
Presumed insurgents, potentially escaping with a severely wounded, supposed comrade. That's a lot of "maybe" and "ifs" there. Besides, a wounded enemy is more of a burden to your enemy than a dead one, so please give me one justification, military or not, to open fire.
Also, let me point out that after arriving on the scene they DID find weapons with the group, just not as many as they had expected.
As you point out, the AK47 is so common in that area of the world, that you can shoot a 70 year old grandfather in his sleep and chance are, you'll find an AK47 in his bedroom. When I was in Egypt a couple years ago on holidays, one such grandfather was cleaning his right on the street.
You're right that if someone carries a rifle in Iraq and he's not a US soldier, there's at least 95% chance that it's an AK47. My point wasn't about the model. My point was about how the communication went from "might be" to certainty without there actually being any certainty.
We dont know what was down the street, it might have been a school or playground for all we know.
Now you are creating justifications out of thin air, because nothing even remotely like this is even hinted at in the chatter. Not a thing. Zilch, nada, null, zero. From what we do know, the choppers spotted people they thought were insurgents and opened fire, and it turned out they were wrong. It's that simple, and mistakes like that are made in wars, and friendly fire is a major killer. I don't see a reason to go all alarmist on either side of the debate. Shit happens, and people get killed in war, and a lot of innocent people get killed with them. I'd much rather question the war per se than the shit that happens because shit happens in war.
But I don't dig the apologists, either. Mistakes were made, why deny it instead of learning from them?
Without the ability to verify how the vote was cast, there is little incentive to be a vote purchaser.
We're not talking about individual topics here, you mentioned the ability to give your vote entirely to someone else. Like "ah, I don't bother with all this politics, but the ACLU is usually good in their choices, I trust them, here's my vote."
For a lot of people, "I trust them" doesn't matter, they're desinterested in politics (or just poor, usually both), so "they pay me" becomes a good substitute.
Making such an offer to a significant fraction of a 300M population directly without attracting notice would be basically impossible in this day and age.
You underestimate the ability of people with deep enough pockets to commit crimes in plain view of everyone. Many of our current western democracies are run by people who again and again (and sometimes, continuously) speak out against the very constitutions they have sworn to protect. We have corporations violating labor laws with everyone knowing it - just the court cases to resolve it have been running for years. Think about SCO, we all knew they were full of shit on day one.
With so much at stake, there will be no shortage of people willing to take the risk and do it anyways. And in plain sight. Really, think SCO.
Out of curiosity, would you consider the status quo "heavily gamed?" I certainly would.
Yes, I do. The ballot lists (as a system) make it pretty much certain for certain people to be elected, no matter what. The - what's the term? - cutting of district lines that very openly happens to maximize political profit. The whole party system is flawed, unless you're a high-ranking member, in which case it's perfect.
But just because something is bad doesn't mean we should replace it with a different bad thing. That takes the focus away. We need to replace it with something better, otherwise everyone will just say "uh, it's still the transition period, things will work themselves out".
The point is that your system will work as long as NGOs act as the vote accumulators, i.e. organisations with a published agenda and the purpose to push that.
But here's a prophecy. Don't take it literally, variables (names, dates, etc.) can be exchanged at will:
2020, the new system is announced.
February 2022, Coca-Cola announces that it will become a vote accumulator. If you assign your vote to Coca-Cola, you will get 20% off on all purchases of their soft drinks at McDonalds and Pizza Hut.
March 2022, lawsuits against Coca-Cola commence. A temporary injunction is rejected, as the Coca-Cola lawyers were well-prepared for this event.
2023, Coca-Cola has accumulated 10% of the nations votes, largely due to rising food prices, most of the votes are from poor, uneducated people. Lawsuits are still dragging on.
2024, Fifty of the Fortune 500 companies now act as vote accumulators. They swing a combined 45% of votes and have successfully passed several amendments to the voting laws that make it more difficult to continue the numerous lawsuits to stop them.
2025, 50%+1 of the votes are now in the hands to corporate America. NGOs are crying foul. Lawsuits still going on.
2026, retroactive immunity law for vote accumulators passed, three months before the first lawsuit comes to a close
end of 2026, Coca-Cola lawsuit ends, finding Coca-Cola in violation of the voting laws. Retroactive immunity law prevents any punishments. Voting laws have since been changed to allow these acts. Coca-Cola must drop half of its votes, as these were acquired illegally. Answers with a "25% off if you re-assign" marketing campaign, which is legal under the new laws.
Likely? I don't know. But not impossible. When you talk about giving away voting rights, be extra careful. The problem is that with the current system, votes have to be cast again in a couple of years. That keeps our politicians slightly in line. Any assignement proce
If you actually watch the video, its pretty hard to find a lot of fault with the heli crew.
While I don't jump on the sensationalism either, this is too far off the other end.
There was a guy apparently carrying something at his side. I've not done any slow-motion or such, just watched the video, so I figure I had the same view as the guys in the heli. I would not have said that that's a weapon. However, did you notice how the communication went? It went straight from "could be a gun" to "we have individuals with weapons" to "AK47". At that point, someone in the chain of command should've said "uh, you're looking through a shitty b/w camera and you can make out the model of the gun?" and wondered whether things on the ground really are that way. What should have happened - and didn't - was confirmation. "Are you certain they have guns?"
I didn't see anything that was even close to looking like an RPG, either. Not to mention that an RPG is an unguided weapon and pretty much sucks against moving helicopters (if they were hovering, that'd be another story).
The good Samaritan with his kids was well intentioned, but didn't think it through either. There obviously had just been an attack and with two helicopters flying around, it doesn't take much to figure that the place is still being watched. Not that he deserved to die because of it, but it was unwise to put himself and his family in that position.
Yes, that's easy to say from 20,000 miles away. In that situation, to him on the ground, things may have looked different. We'll never know. He may have thought there was a shooting, and the helicopters have secured the area. It had been a few minutes since the last shot had been fired.
And, once again, there was - to me - no reason in the video why they opened fire on the bus. Even before someone had left the car, the chatter was already "they're going to recover bodies and weapons". Then they proceeded to load the injured guy into the car, and at that point the helicopters opened fire. No weapon in sight.
Yes "don't bring your children to battle" is a nice saying. Except that this happened inside a city. You know, the place where civilians happen to live.
Now, I can understand that you'd rather stand on trial for shooting an innocent civilian than discovering too late that he's not and be killed yourself. Perfectly understandable, human, everything.
What I don't get is:
a) the total lack of critical thinking. Even when everyone was dead and one wounded guy tried to crawl away, it appeared that the gunner actually wanted him to reach for a weapon so he could shoot him. Likewise, at no point did anyone in the chatter wonder whether the guys in the bus could be just civilians trying to bring someone who is seriously injured to the nearest hospital.
b) the lack of protocol and procedure in the chain of command to deal with situations like this. After years of operating in urban warfare, they should've done some homework. A lot of things you and I carry with us when we're shopping, or moving, or just bringing some stuff to a friend, can look like a weapon from far away. A lot of perfectly innocent behaviour can look not so from far away. Aparently, the official non-policy is "whatever the guys at the scene think they see, that's gotta be it".
c) why the cover-up? We all hate it when we make mistakes, but covering it up only raises the suspicion that you have something to hide.
There's a crucial thing there: You want to make selling a vote illegal, but assigning it not only legal, but the standard.
But you won't be able to differentiate one from the other. The system will be gamed, heavily.