My 3-year-old nephew is on the list. This has resulted in such events as him getting into a tugging match with a TSA screener over his teddy bear....
Please, please, please have some supporting proof for your claim. It is just too perfect of an example of the problems with the system. If it were documented, it would be the kind of thing that no one, not even the most deeply-dyed-in-the-wool law-and-order-over-freedom neo-con-luvin sheeple could argue as being OK.
yeah cos that's what happened in nazi germany; the soldiers all had a crisis of concience and stopped obeying hitler.
Actually you are right. That is exactly what happened in nazi germany. Just not the way you mean it.
The Nazi's made it illegal to own firearms, making it really easy to round up all the victims and lock them up afterwards. Yeah, that's right. The people doing the rounding-up where far away removed from the people doing the killing. Sure there were plenty of rumours about the death camps, but none of the people doing the rounding up were faced with the question of whether they were going to kill joe shlomo, his wife and 3 daughters right there, right now and have their blood on his hands for the rest of their lives or not.
its ok becuase "jews and communists burnt down the reichstag" / "arabs knocked down the world trade center".
Demonization is sufficient to get a lot of people to do inhumane things - abu graib is a clear example and the general use of the term "haji" is symptomatic. But unless the KKK take over the US government, we've got enough social diversity within the ranks that there will be enough people on the ground who share enough in common with persecuted us citizens that demonization isn't likely to be enough for them to shoot and kill their friends and neighboors on the spot.
By the way, this is NOT a discussion about George Bush, it is a discussion of whether gun ownership is reasonable deterrant to tyrrany in a larger discussion of whether or not "guns are bad." Bush was not even mentioned by name until you wrote it, and otherwise only mentioned indirectly as part of a silly strawman argument.
Well, if the NRA says so, then it must be true!:-) (which is ridiculous - 4.5 million is 1.5% of the entire USA population!),
Which is why I decimated their numbers.
But you make the fundamentally flawed assumption that each person who used a gun that way only did so once. If you live in a ghetto where you can't even walk home from the grocery market without worry of assault, then you may use your gun in that fashion on a weekly basis.
As for "solving that problem" - well few governments have solved the problems of ghettos yet, if I were stuck in one I would not hold my breath. The ghettos where legal ownership of firearms has been banned have usually seen increases in the violent crimes rate (c.f. Washington DC, banned guns in 1973 but as of the mid-90s had a murder rate 8x the national average - sorry I don't have numbers for mid-2000s, they weren't readily available without a deep search). You can also look at over-all violent crime rate, despite about 4.5 million new firearms purchases per year, the total violent crime rate in the USA has declined by about 60% since 1993. So, I'd say that "pumping even more firearms into the hands of ordinary people" does not hurt and probably helps.
Additionally, only 6% of all violent crimes in the USA were committed by a person with a gun. Yet, almost 4 times that amount of violent crimes involved a weapon - gun, knife, etc. So, in the USA at least, less than 1 out of 15 violent crimes are committed with a gun, while more than 1 out of 6 violent crimes involve a non-gun weapon. Sounds to me like knives and such are a bigger threat to regular people than guns.
Take a look at this - in 2003-2004, according to the chart England, where handguns had been banned for about 7 year already, had a violent crime rate of about 4% of the population. While for about the same time period, the USA had a rate of about half that. The studies are different, so the numbers aren't directly comparable, but still a 100% increase in violent crime without handguns than with handguns, even if it is only 10% that's a remarkably strong argment in favor of arming citizeens.
I am 35, and have never *ever* been even remotely in the situation to need a gun to protect myself or my property. Neither has *anybody* else that I happen to know. I live in Europe.
It's nice to be a member of the upper-middle socio-economic class, isn't it? I have had just about the exact same experience here in the USA. But, I recognize that not everyone is so privileged and try not to draw false conclusions from my anecdotal experience.
Now your example is one that occurs after you have made your Custer-like last stand.
You have misinterpreted my point. The point is that if "they" are forced to kill you if they want to take you, they guys on the ground may decide that killing you is not acceptable and refuse to follow orders.
This isn't about guys feeling bad that they have killed you. It is about real humans deciding that whatever crime against the state you have been accused of, guilty or not, it is no capital crime and they simply will not be your executioner.
Sure, some people are such automatons that they will go ahead and kill you just because they were ordered to. But if you believe, as the founding fathers did, that people have the ability of self-determination, then you will also believe that enough people are going to have moral problems with killing their friends and neighbors that most of them will refuse.
At best, the state can hope for a Wako/Koresh type result in such cases - an accident that gets the job done. But after two or three of those, the troops with moral qualms aren't even going to let it get that far.
Besides, how often did you (or some other poster from the "guns are good for protecting own life/property/whatever" club) actually shot somebody who was threatening you? I suppose, for the most people around here, the answer will be "never".
Just as the answer is "never" for most people who have used a gun to protect their life/property/whatever.
Against an armed criminal, to whom your life means *nothing at all* and who probably already has some blood on his hands, you wouldn't stand much chance if he sees you pulling your glock out of the drawer.
And how often does that really happen? According to you it must be less than 160 times per year, nationwide.
The odds are you'll actually panick and shoot that neighbours kid sneaking out of your daughters bedroom in the middle of the night instead.
So, better than 50/50 odds it is a kid and you accidentally kill him right? Well, the latest numbers (2003) from the CDC show that for the population aged 0-20, the number of accidental deaths by firearm was 157 nationwide. So, at most 156 ruthless criminals vs 157 innocent kids. And those 157 kids include plenty of cases where mistaken identity was not a factor, like self-inflicted gunshots, kids playing with guns and shooting their friends, etc.
Consider the hundreds of thousands of times per year where simply brandshing a gun was enough to ward off an attack (the NRA's number is about 4.5million times per year), it is quite reasonable to expect that more than 157 lives were saved by a gun. Even reasonable to expect that many, many more than 157 lives where saved by a gun.
in Canada where we are 100X less gun happy then in the US (I don't think I know any Canadians who own a pistol),
According to Michael Moore in Bowling for Columbine Canadians have approximately the same rate of gun ownership as Americans do. They just don't have as much media/goverment-induced irrational fear of strangers that leads them to shoot first and ask questions later.
But do you honestly think that if "they" want to come get you, that your guns are going to stop them?
No. But it does mean that you won't be taken peacefully. They may even have to kill you.
That is a check on tyrany.
As long as there are real humans doing it, they are going to have some level of emotional conflict over their actions. If things get out of hand and government forces start to routinely maim and kill their fellow citizens, especially ones that don't look the part of nefarious evil-doers like their neighbors and former classmates, most of those forces will have a crisis of conscience that will eventually cause them to stop obeying orders.
That's why so-called "non-lethal" weapons are 100x worse than any kind of heavy armament. They let the troops follow orders without having to face the question of whether or not the person they've been sent to apprehend is right and the ones giving the orders are the real bad guys.
It's been tried already. Well, sort of. There was a very obscure format of recordable dvd called "HV-DVD" which worked similarly. They came with a unique serial number on each disc that could be used as part of the decryption key. I think only one media vendor ever even announced that they were going to sell HV-DVD blanks, and I suspect they never made it to market.
In my opinion the problem with that approach is that you can use a DVD emulator. So, even though a normal recordable DVD can't record a serial number, the emulator can fake it. And in fact most of the pre-standard high-def dvds that use microsoft's WM9 (mostly a bunch of IMAX discs, although europe had some mainstream releases) can be copied and and their DRM completely circumvented with one of many such software emulators.
FWIW, with the advent of HD-DVD there are a bazillion typos that say "HV-DVD" when they meant "HD-DVD" so digging for a link to a page talking about actual HV-DVD media is like finding a needle in a haystack. I may be misremembering the name, it might have been H-DVD or HI-DVD. I am pretty sure it meant "high-video" whatever the exact acronym was.
PS, the only reason I ever heard of this format was I ran across an HV-DVD logo on a website with homebrew DVD-case covers for people burning actual HDTV transport streams to DVD. Someone had misused the logo for these covers and since it looked so professional I figured it must have come from somewhere. Back then BLU-RAY and HD-DVD were barely heard of so googling for it worked a lot better.
I'd say that it is not the abundance that is your problem, it is the price.
It is human nature to assign greater value to things that cost the acquirer more. In your case, pirated entertainment is essentially free, so you feel that it is of little worth. While paying your "hard earned money" for something gives it a boost in perceived value.
This phenomenon manifests throughout the human experience, from the mundane to the weird. For example, it has been widely reported that the people who pay full sticker price for their cars tend to be the happiest and have the least number of complaints regardless of make or model.
Another case is fraternity hazing - which on the surface makes absolutely no sense, what kind of idiot wants to be a part of a group that tortured them? Well, it works out that all the hazing is the "price of entrance" to the group and has the long-term effect of making the fraternity members assign an irrationally high value to their membership in the group.
Huh? There are only 7 articles in the US Constitution.
noone shall be arrested randomly. There doesn't have to be a central authority stopping people from arresting you, and taking responsibility when they do;
Presuming this is in the constitution somewhere (I searched on "arrest" and only found that congressmen can't be 'randomly arrested' while in session) it can only apply to government, i.e. the police. Just like freedom of speech only applies to the government, individuals are free to censor others on their own property.
LOL! I just figured it out. You were reading the JAPANESE constitution.
People arn't forced to sit through something disturbing that they don't want to see in a movie any more than in a book or a game.
It is not that they don't want the story to continue, it is that the impact of the story prevents them from doing anything beyond think about it. In order for the story to have the intended level of impact it must continue to progress without interruption.
Sure you can stop reading and put a book down right in the middle of an important passage, but if you do that instead of waiting until the end of the scene or chapter, then you will greatly reduce the effect of that scene.
Hey guys! Yeah you, the ones with mod points. Why are you modding up all these posts about being scared or "creeped out" by a video game? That's not disturbing, anymore than riding a roller-coaster is disturbing.
Storylines that pull back the fascia of society to reveal ugly truths about the nature of man are disturbing. Hotel Rwanda is disturbing. A love story like Oasis where one social outcast rapes another and yet the two are able to develop a relationship that is 100x more healthy than the "normal" society around them is disturbing (just read the comment from the woman who naively rented the movie for valentines day).
The point of the articles is that movies like those are the level of story-telling to which video games should be striving. What the article doesn't really discuss is just how to motivate someone to continue interacting with a game when the story hits them with such a huge emotional wallop. When it happens in a movie, the audience can just sit there, stunned into immobility (and often tears) and let the experience flow over them. But that's not what games are about. Perhaps it is just not possible for a game to evoke the kind of strong, personally felt, emotions that a movie or book can. Or perhaps the genius who will figure out a way just hasn't been born yet.
The information that can be obtained from the chip is encrypted
Not ALL of the information that can be obtained will be encrypted. How do you "encrypt" its presence?
and will only be readable using the public-key which is encoded in a machine readable format inside the passport
Great - so the official use will require some sort of physical scanning device to read the machine-readable format (i.e. 2-D bar-code) - thus negating any value that RFIDs might provide. While you are reading the public-key, why can't they just read another bar-code with the actual information in it too? Pork for the RFID manufacturers?
The plan in the U.S. is the to do the same thing, as well as putting a metal lining in the cover of the passport so that the RFID cannot be read when the passport is closed.
That shielding will hardly be a perfect faraday cage. Put enough EM juice in the air and you will make that little RIFD sing.
The job is to report the facts. The citizens can make up their own minds. Unfortunately the NYT tries to make it up for you.
I feel like I am posting in a loop.
The price of freedom is that people will abuse that freedom. If you aren't willing to take the bad with the good, then you don't truly believe in freedom.
That freedom has to be exercised responsibly just like any other. Most U. S. news organizations (before Vietnam) considered themselves American first. Now they have fallen into the very leftist mantra that the U. S. is the greatest evil around while ignoring N. Korea, Iran, and China all of whom make the U. S. look like Boy Scouts in all respects.
It's not the job of American news organizations to rah-rah the USA. It's not even their job to critize foreign countries. The job of the fourth estate is to watchdog their own country.
It really doesn't matter how saintly or demonic other countries are - we all know that moral relativism doesn't work. What matters is if the USA lives up to its own high standards and ideals. As watchdog, it is the fourth estate's job to keep the country at large informed of those failures of morality.
Its only when the press is expected to, and compliantly does, self-censor that they are failing in their duty to America.
The problem is when a so called news agency puts it's own opinions ahead of everything else including truth.
And that's part of the price of freedom just like Fox's easy blending of editorial and facts is also part of the price of freedom.
Freedom doesn't mean anything if you don't exercise it, the NYT, Fox and thousands of other news organizations across the spectrum are all doing just that.
The NYT could have reported the SWIFT story without revealing anything harmful, had they cared to. They knew full well nothing illegal was happening, but even for illegal intelligence operation one can still choose to report them responsibly, reporting the program without revealing sources or methods.... You can't have freedom for free. If you're not willing to fight to preserve it, at least be unwilling to hinder those who do.
You don't undestand the meaning of that phrase.
It means that the price of freedom is that sometimes bad people will use their freedom to do bad things.
It does not mean that the price of freedom is that we have to give up our freedom. That should be an obvious contradiction, but apparently a whole lot of people have bought into it - kind of along the lines of "Freedom is Slavery." Fits right in with "War is Peace" and "Ignorance is Strength."
The first link on a google search pulls up "Thwarted Terrorist Plots Since Sept. 11 Attacks" on the ABC news site (or is ABC a republican talking points shill now?)
That list is a joke, did you read it?
The first two entries are "hijack airplane and fly into buildings" plots. As if anyone would fall for that again. I'm willing to bet those "plots" were pre-911 and long abandoned by the time they were "thwarted."
The third entry - which is the only one we have any independent reporting of beyond the administration's say-so - is Jose Padilla. The joke terrorist. This guy, an american citizen, was held without charges for 3 years and days away from winning a supreme court judgement about said detention was finally charged. Except he wasn't charged with anything even related to all the allegations made about him since his arrest and confinement. The guy is an illiterate bum, who didn't even graduate from high school. The only threat he ever posed was to the reputations of all the people involved in his "capture" for wasting so many tax dollars with their incompetence.
When the top 3 "succeses" on the list of accomplishments are so laughable, and the rest are completely undocumented, is it really a surprise that anyone capable of critical thinking is snide and cynical about these sorts of claims?
Worldwide there have been more than 5312 documented deadly attacks since 9/11.
You expect us to take you seriously when you make a statement like that and then just link to the front page of site that wears its bias as a badge of honor?
If you really think a website like that is even close to an authoritative source then you might as well just save time and just post "rah, rah Bush!" and leave it at that.
Regional dialects continued to form, such as in the US, as waves of immagrants did not fully assimilate. But telecommunications, television, radio, and the vast storehouse of recorded words, voices, and movies have reversed this trend, and the languages of the world have begun normalizing.
Sounds nice, but I don't buy it.
I regularly speak to Indians in India and Filipinos in the Philippines - both countries where English is an official language (in the Philippines all college level courses are taught in English only).
Not only does each group have significantly different pronuciation and cadence, they also have a whole different vernacular from American English - lots of meanings and double-meanings to words that would never be used in the US, or in each other's countries.
Perhaps the dialects are converging, but right now they are so far apart that it doesn't sound like it.
You act is if just because something can be copied nearly effortlessly, it should be, and indeed, MUST be, for the good of all humanity.
If you buy into the argument that private ownership of the means of production aka capitalism should be, and indeed, MUST be, the best way to run an economy of rivalrous goods then it only stands to reason that an economy of non-rivalrous goods should be and indeed, must be, based on free and unimpeded sharing.
I put "stealing" in quotes in my post for a reason. Christ, the way you fuckers insist it be called "copyright infringement" or "nonauthorized duplication" stinks of PC in the vein of "undocumented migrants" and "differently abled" to high heavens.
Marxists often refer to capitalists as stealing the means of production from the people as a means to bias the listener to their argument. Would you be content to let that slide in millions of discussions in name of avoiding political correctness?
You ought to read your own links. About half the definitions that Google found for atheism are exactly that - an absence of belief.
You'd do well to read your link for agnosticism too - most of the definitions are pretty clear that agnostics believe you can't know explicitly because there is not enough empirical data.
Athiests don't care, agnostics care but can't decide.
The vast majority of the time that athiesm is defined as an active disbelief is when it is being defined by those with belief and it is usually in a political context where they are seeking to demonize the athiest because - from the believer's perspective - denying their god is tantamount to being against their god thus making athiests agents of their anti-god. In their world, there is no "don't care" - there is only "either with us or against us."
Slashdot Mirror
My 3-year-old nephew is on the list. This has resulted in such events as him getting into a tugging match with a TSA screener over his teddy bear....
Please, please, please have some supporting proof for your claim. It is just too perfect of an example of the problems with the system. If it were documented, it would be the kind of thing that no one, not even the most deeply-dyed-in-the-wool law-and-order-over-freedom neo-con-luvin sheeple could argue as being OK.
If you're going to be a misanthrope, at least do it eloquently.
And if you are going to be an antelope, do it with the style and grace of a gazelle.
yeah cos that's what happened in nazi germany; the soldiers all had a crisis of concience and stopped obeying hitler.
Actually you are right. That is exactly what happened in nazi germany. Just not the way you mean it.
The Nazi's made it illegal to own firearms, making it really easy to round up all the victims and lock them up afterwards. Yeah, that's right. The people doing the rounding-up where far away removed from the people doing the killing. Sure there were plenty of rumours about the death camps, but none of the people doing the rounding up were faced with the question of whether they were going to kill joe shlomo, his wife and 3 daughters right there, right now and have their blood on his hands for the rest of their lives or not.
its ok becuase "jews and communists burnt down the reichstag" / "arabs knocked down the world trade center".
Demonization is sufficient to get a lot of people to do inhumane things - abu graib is a clear example and the general use of the term "haji" is symptomatic. But unless the KKK take over the US government, we've got enough social diversity within the ranks that there will be enough people on the ground who share enough in common with persecuted us citizens that demonization isn't likely to be enough for them to shoot and kill their friends and neighboors on the spot.
By the way, this is NOT a discussion about George Bush, it is a discussion of whether gun ownership is reasonable deterrant to tyrrany in a larger discussion of whether or not "guns are bad." Bush was not even mentioned by name until you wrote it, and otherwise only mentioned indirectly as part of a silly strawman argument.
Well, if the NRA says so, then it must be true! :-)
(which is ridiculous - 4.5 million is 1.5% of the entire USA population!),
Which is why I decimated their numbers.
But you make the fundamentally flawed assumption that each person who used a gun that way only did so once. If you live in a ghetto where you can't even walk home from the grocery market without worry of assault, then you may use your gun in that fashion on a weekly basis.
As for "solving that problem" - well few governments have solved the problems of ghettos yet, if I were stuck in one I would not hold my breath. The ghettos where legal ownership of firearms has been banned have usually seen increases in the violent crimes rate (c.f. Washington DC, banned guns in 1973 but as of the mid-90s had a murder rate 8x the national average - sorry I don't have numbers for mid-2000s, they weren't readily available without a deep search). You can also look at over-all violent crime rate, despite about 4.5 million new firearms purchases per year, the total violent crime rate in the USA has declined by about 60% since 1993. So, I'd say that "pumping even more firearms into the hands of ordinary people" does not hurt and probably helps.
Additionally, only 6% of all violent crimes in the USA were committed by a person with a gun. Yet, almost 4 times that amount of violent crimes involved a weapon - gun, knife, etc. So, in the USA at least, less than 1 out of 15 violent crimes are committed with a gun, while more than 1 out of 6 violent crimes involve a non-gun weapon. Sounds to me like knives and such are a bigger threat to regular people than guns.
Take a look at this - in 2003-2004, according to the chart England, where handguns had been banned for about 7 year already, had a violent crime rate of about 4% of the population. While for about the same time period, the USA had a rate of about half that. The studies are different, so the numbers aren't directly comparable, but still a 100% increase in violent crime without handguns than with handguns, even if it is only 10% that's a remarkably strong argment in favor of arming citizeens.
I am 35, and have never *ever* been even remotely in the situation to need a gun to protect myself or my property. Neither has *anybody* else that I happen to know. I live in Europe.
It's nice to be a member of the upper-middle socio-economic class, isn't it? I have had just about the exact same experience here in the USA. But, I recognize that not everyone is so privileged and try not to draw false conclusions from my anecdotal experience.
Now your example is one that occurs after you have made your Custer-like last stand.
You have misinterpreted my point. The point is that if "they" are forced to kill you if they want to take you, they guys on the ground may decide that killing you is not acceptable and refuse to follow orders.
This isn't about guys feeling bad that they have killed you. It is about real humans deciding that whatever crime against the state you have been accused of, guilty or not, it is no capital crime and they simply will not be your executioner.
Sure, some people are such automatons that they will go ahead and kill you just because they were ordered to. But if you believe, as the founding fathers did, that people have the ability of self-determination, then you will also believe that enough people are going to have moral problems with killing their friends and neighbors that most of them will refuse.
At best, the state can hope for a Wako/Koresh type result in such cases - an accident that gets the job done. But after two or three of those, the troops with moral qualms aren't even going to let it get that far.
Besides, how often did you (or some other poster from the "guns are good for protecting own life/property/whatever" club) actually shot somebody who was threatening you? I suppose, for the most people around here, the answer will be "never".
h tml
Just as the answer is "never" for most people who have used a gun to protect their life/property/whatever.
Against an armed criminal, to whom your life means *nothing at all* and who probably already has some blood on his hands, you wouldn't stand much chance if he sees you pulling your glock out of the drawer.
And how often does that really happen? According to you it must be less than 160 times per year, nationwide.
The odds are you'll actually panick and shoot that neighbours kid sneaking out of your daughters bedroom in the middle of the night instead.
So, better than 50/50 odds it is a kid and you accidentally kill him right? Well, the latest numbers (2003) from the CDC show that for the population aged 0-20, the number of accidental deaths by firearm was 157 nationwide. So, at most 156 ruthless criminals vs 157 innocent kids. And those 157 kids include plenty of cases where mistaken identity was not a factor, like self-inflicted gunshots, kids playing with guns and shooting their friends, etc.
Consider the hundreds of thousands of times per year where simply brandshing a gun was enough to ward off an attack (the NRA's number is about 4.5million times per year), it is quite reasonable to expect that more than 157 lives were saved by a gun. Even reasonable to expect that many, many more than 157 lives where saved by a gun.
Source for my numbers of pediatric accidental (unintentional) firearms deaths: http://webapp.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/mortrate10_sy.
in Canada where we are 100X less gun happy then in the US (I don't think I know any Canadians who own a pistol),
According to Michael Moore in Bowling for Columbine Canadians have approximately the same rate of gun ownership as Americans do. They just don't have as much media/goverment-induced irrational fear of strangers that leads them to shoot first and ask questions later.
But do you honestly think that if "they" want to come get you, that your guns are going to stop them?
No. But it does mean that you won't be taken peacefully. They may even have to kill you.
That is a check on tyrany.
As long as there are real humans doing it, they are going to have some level of emotional conflict over their actions. If things get out of hand and government forces start to routinely maim and kill their fellow citizens, especially ones that don't look the part of nefarious evil-doers like their neighbors and former classmates, most of those forces will have a crisis of conscience that will eventually cause them to stop obeying orders.
That's why so-called "non-lethal" weapons are 100x worse than any kind of heavy armament. They let the troops follow orders without having to face the question of whether or not the person they've been sent to apprehend is right and the ones giving the orders are the real bad guys.
Great. Now how about the ban on exporting dahl?
It's been tried already. Well, sort of. There was a very obscure format of recordable dvd called "HV-DVD" which worked similarly. They came with a unique serial number on each disc that could be used as part of the decryption key. I think only one media vendor ever even announced that they were going to sell HV-DVD blanks, and I suspect they never made it to market.
In my opinion the problem with that approach is that you can use a DVD emulator. So, even though a normal recordable DVD can't record a serial number, the emulator can fake it. And in fact most of the pre-standard high-def dvds that use microsoft's WM9 (mostly a bunch of IMAX discs, although europe had some mainstream releases) can be copied and and their DRM completely circumvented with one of many such software emulators.
FWIW, with the advent of HD-DVD there are a bazillion typos that say "HV-DVD" when they meant "HD-DVD" so digging for a link to a page talking about actual HV-DVD media is like finding a needle in a haystack. I may be misremembering the name, it might have been H-DVD or HI-DVD. I am pretty sure it meant "high-video" whatever the exact acronym was.
PS, the only reason I ever heard of this format was I ran across an HV-DVD logo on a website with homebrew DVD-case covers for people burning actual HDTV transport streams to DVD. Someone had misused the logo for these covers and since it looked so professional I figured it must have come from somewhere. Back then BLU-RAY and HD-DVD were barely heard of so googling for it worked a lot better.
I'd say that it is not the abundance that is your problem, it is the price.
It is human nature to assign greater value to things that cost the acquirer more. In your case, pirated entertainment is essentially free, so you feel that it is of little worth. While paying your "hard earned money" for something gives it a boost in perceived value.
This phenomenon manifests throughout the human experience, from the mundane to the weird. For example, it has been widely reported that the people who pay full sticker price for their cars tend to be the happiest and have the least number of complaints regardless of make or model.
Another case is fraternity hazing - which on the surface makes absolutely no sense, what kind of idiot wants to be a part of a group that tortured them? Well, it works out that all the hazing is the "price of entrance" to the group and has the long-term effect of making the fraternity members assign an irrationally high value to their membership in the group.
Take a look at article 9
Huh? There are only 7 articles in the US Constitution.
noone shall be arrested randomly. There doesn't have to be a central authority stopping people from arresting you, and taking responsibility when they do;
Presuming this is in the constitution somewhere (I searched on "arrest" and only found that congressmen can't be 'randomly arrested' while in session) it can only apply to government, i.e. the police. Just like freedom of speech only applies to the government, individuals are free to censor others on their own property.
LOL! I just figured it out. You were reading the JAPANESE constitution.
People arn't forced to sit through something disturbing that they don't want to see in a movie any more than in a book or a game.
It is not that they don't want the story to continue, it is that the impact of the story prevents them from doing anything beyond think about it. In order for the story to have the intended level of impact it must continue to progress without interruption.
Sure you can stop reading and put a book down right in the middle of an important passage, but if you do that instead of waiting until the end of the scene or chapter, then you will greatly reduce the effect of that scene.
Hey guys! Yeah you, the ones with mod points. Why are you modding up all these posts about being scared or "creeped out" by a video game? That's not disturbing, anymore than riding a roller-coaster is disturbing.
Storylines that pull back the fascia of society to reveal ugly truths about the nature of man are disturbing. Hotel Rwanda is disturbing. A love story like Oasis where one social outcast rapes another and yet the two are able to develop a relationship that is 100x more healthy than the "normal" society around them is disturbing (just read the comment from the woman who naively rented the movie for valentines day).
The point of the articles is that movies like those are the level of story-telling to which video games should be striving. What the article doesn't really discuss is just how to motivate someone to continue interacting with a game when the story hits them with such a huge emotional wallop. When it happens in a movie, the audience can just sit there, stunned into immobility (and often tears) and let the experience flow over them. But that's not what games are about. Perhaps it is just not possible for a game to evoke the kind of strong, personally felt, emotions that a movie or book can. Or perhaps the genius who will figure out a way just hasn't been born yet.
The information that can be obtained from the chip is encrypted
Not ALL of the information that can be obtained will be encrypted. How do you "encrypt" its presence?
and will only be readable using the public-key which is encoded in a machine readable format inside the passport
Great - so the official use will require some sort of physical scanning device to read the machine-readable format (i.e. 2-D bar-code) - thus negating any value that RFIDs might provide. While you are reading the public-key, why can't they just read another bar-code with the actual information in it too? Pork for the RFID manufacturers?
The plan in the U.S. is the to do the same thing, as well as putting a metal lining in the cover of the passport so that the RFID cannot be read when the passport is closed.
That shielding will hardly be a perfect faraday cage. Put enough EM juice in the air and you will make that little RIFD sing.
Much, much safer would be a normal smart-card chip (like the one in your credit card) that requires physical contact to read anything.
This is america, we aren't that smart.
Seriously - Chip & PIN does not exist in any detectable quantity over here..
The job is to report the facts. The citizens can make up their own minds. Unfortunately the NYT tries to make it up for you.
I feel like I am posting in a loop.
The price of freedom is that people will abuse that freedom. If you aren't willing to take the bad with the good, then you don't truly believe in freedom.
That freedom has to be exercised responsibly just like any other. Most U. S. news organizations (before Vietnam) considered themselves American first. Now they have fallen into the very leftist mantra that the U. S. is the greatest evil around while ignoring N. Korea, Iran, and China all of whom make the U. S. look like Boy Scouts in all respects.
It's not the job of American news organizations to rah-rah the USA. It's not even their job to critize foreign countries. The job of the fourth estate is to watchdog their own country.
It really doesn't matter how saintly or demonic other countries are - we all know that moral relativism doesn't work. What matters is if the USA lives up to its own high standards and ideals. As watchdog, it is the fourth estate's job to keep the country at large informed of those failures of morality.
Its only when the press is expected to, and compliantly does, self-censor that they are failing in their duty to America.
The problem is when a so called news agency puts it's own opinions ahead of everything else including truth.
And that's part of the price of freedom just like Fox's easy blending of editorial and facts is also part of the price of freedom.
Freedom doesn't mean anything if you don't exercise it, the NYT, Fox and thousands of other news organizations across the spectrum are all doing just that.
The NYT could have reported the SWIFT story without revealing anything harmful, had they cared to. They knew full well nothing illegal was happening, but even for illegal intelligence operation one can still choose to report them responsibly, reporting the program without revealing sources or methods. ...
You can't have freedom for free. If you're not willing to fight to preserve it, at least be unwilling to hinder those who do.
You don't undestand the meaning of that phrase.
It means that the price of freedom is that sometimes bad people will use their freedom to do bad things.
It does not mean that the price of freedom is that we have to give up our freedom. That should be an obvious contradiction, but apparently a whole lot of people have bought into it - kind of along the lines of "Freedom is Slavery." Fits right in with "War is Peace" and "Ignorance is Strength."
The first link on a google search pulls up "Thwarted Terrorist Plots Since Sept. 11 Attacks" on the ABC news site (or is ABC a republican talking points shill now?)
That list is a joke, did you read it?
The first two entries are "hijack airplane and fly into buildings" plots. As if anyone would fall for that again. I'm willing to bet those "plots" were pre-911 and long abandoned by the time they were "thwarted."
The third entry - which is the only one we have any independent reporting of beyond the administration's say-so - is Jose Padilla. The joke terrorist. This guy, an american citizen, was held without charges for 3 years and days away from winning a supreme court judgement about said detention was finally charged. Except he wasn't charged with anything even related to all the allegations made about him since his arrest and confinement. The guy is an illiterate bum, who didn't even graduate from high school. The only threat he ever posed was to the reputations of all the people involved in his "capture" for wasting so many tax dollars with their incompetence.
When the top 3 "succeses" on the list of accomplishments are so laughable, and the rest are completely undocumented, is it really a surprise that anyone capable of critical thinking is snide and cynical about these sorts of claims?
Worldwide there have been more than 5312 documented deadly attacks since 9/11.
You expect us to take you seriously when you make a statement like that and then just link to the front page of site that wears its bias as a badge of honor?
If you really think a website like that is even close to an authoritative source then you might as well just save time and just post "rah, rah Bush!" and leave it at that.
Regional dialects continued to form, such as in the US, as waves of immagrants did not fully assimilate. But telecommunications, television, radio, and the vast storehouse of recorded words, voices, and movies have reversed this trend, and the languages of the world have begun normalizing.
Sounds nice, but I don't buy it.
I regularly speak to Indians in India and Filipinos in the Philippines - both countries where English is an official language (in the Philippines all college level courses are taught in English only).
Not only does each group have significantly different pronuciation and cadence, they also have a whole different vernacular from American English - lots of meanings and double-meanings to words that would never be used in the US, or in each other's countries.
Perhaps the dialects are converging, but right now they are so far apart that it doesn't sound like it.
You act is if just because something can be copied nearly effortlessly, it should be, and indeed, MUST be, for the good of all humanity.
If you buy into the argument that private ownership of the means of production aka capitalism should be, and indeed, MUST be, the best way to run an economy of rivalrous goods then it only stands to reason that an economy of non-rivalrous goods should be and indeed, must be, based on free and unimpeded sharing.
I put "stealing" in quotes in my post for a reason. Christ, the way you fuckers insist it be called "copyright infringement" or "nonauthorized duplication" stinks of PC in the vein of "undocumented migrants" and "differently abled" to high heavens.
Marxists often refer to capitalists as stealing the means of production from the people as a means to bias the listener to their argument. Would you be content to let that slide in millions of discussions in name of avoiding political correctness?
Atheism isn't the absence of belief.
You ought to read your own links. About half the definitions that Google found for atheism are exactly that - an absence of belief.
You'd do well to read your link for agnosticism too - most of the definitions are pretty clear that agnostics believe you can't know explicitly because there is not enough empirical data.
Athiests don't care, agnostics care but can't decide.
The vast majority of the time that athiesm is defined as an active disbelief is when it is being defined by those with belief and it is usually in a political context where they are seeking to demonize the athiest because - from the believer's perspective - denying their god is tantamount to being against their god thus making athiests agents of their anti-god. In their world, there is no "don't care" - there is only "either with us or against us."