Besides, a more efficient killing machine is the last thing you want in an insurgency like Iraq.
'Scuse me? If you've got insurgents setting up an ambush, blasting the frak out of them sounds like a good solution to me.
I think the GP was referring to the problem of having "efficient killing machines" when you are having difficulty telling the enemy apart from the people you are supposed to be protecting. There are good historically-demonstrated reasons why using soldiers as law-enforcement agents tends to alienate the general population, even with the best of intentions.
If the insurgents would wait we'd already be out of Iraq and they could be dealing with the local, underpowered government.
You are implying that the U.S. intends to leave Iraq once "peace" has been established. Based on both public statements and actions by quite a few government representatives, I think you are incorrect in this assumption.
The people who started this war intend for the U.S. to maintain a strong, permanent military presence in the Middle East.
The engineer in me asks: why not 0.01E-24 or 10E-27?
It's customary to use the # of digits before the "e" as an easy way to indicate the precision of the value. Engineering notation isn't a canonical-enough form to do that consistently.
The rest of your response confused me too much to come up with a coherent comment.
_None_ of the First World nations have used genocide as an "official" foreign policy tactic. The only people who have blatantly used genocide to achieve political goals were Third World countries that had little or no influence on overall world stability.
You are completely wrong about how the other First World countries would react if a country like the U.S. committed a blatant act of genocide, especially if the public of that country seemed to be supporting it. A united country willing to perpetrate an atrocity like that would be a direct threat to the existence of every other country in the world. For the simple reason of survival, the rest of the world would unite to crush that threat no matter what the cost.
No, at least for those countries that have signed the Berne Convention, anything "original" you write has automatic copyrighted status granted. It might be easier to enforce that copyright in the courts, however, if you register your work with the Copyright Office.
History is irrelevant in the stated situation, since there has not been the possibility until now that at least some of the opposing countries have the weapons necessary to vaporize each other.
If a single First World country (i.e., a country powerful enough to affect all the countries in the world), with the consent of its public, uses genocide to "solve" the sort of situation we are facing in Iraq, then every other country in the world will have to decide whether they are willing to risk living in the same world as such a country.
I find it highly unlikely that ALL of the other First World countries would be willing to take the risk of allowing such an morally-uninhibited country to run free, and it certainly wouldn't take much of a propaganda stretch to demonize such a country.
Kill all who? The rest of the world? Do you seriously think the rest of the world would stand by and let a nation who considered genocide a valid form of foreign policy to exist?
On the other we have a bunch of folk who want to have everything for free and construct elaborate explanations as to how this is great for the artists.
There are also a number of people who believe that artists should be paid like any other craftsperson: when they perform the service.
There aren't too many cabinetmakers who expect to get paid _every time_ one of their cabinets trades hands or gets copied. They understand that if they want to keep getting paid, then they've got to keep on making cabinets.
There is no valid free-market rationale that says artists should be compensated any differently.
Copyright is a legislative issue.
From a higher perspective, copyright is a SOCIAL issue. There are several aspects:
1. Do creators need to be subsidized or otherwise protected to encourage behavior which will provide a net benefit to society?
2. If so, what mechanism will provide the greatest benefit to society (the availability of creative works) with the least damage (the violation of personal private property rights), and
3. If you are using legal enforcement methods of "intellectual property" protection (such as copyright/patents exclusivity), what threshhold of protection do you set where the protection of the creator is causing more harm to society than it provides good?
I can wipe a marker across a scantron bubble as fast as I can push a button.
Any procedure relying on manual marking is going to be problematic - you'll get people putting little dots that don't register, big Xs that cross multiple dots, crossing out choices they didn't mean to make & filling in new ones, doodling around the select dots, etc.
A printing machine can create a nice clean user & machine-readable ballot which contains ONLY the choices that the user wanted to make, with no chance of mistaking those choices for anything else. Printing machines can provide a fair amount of benefit.
The same can't be said for the counting machines, however.
Heh - if there's anything will freak the fundies out more than a bunch of gays, it will be a bunch of genetically-modified furry gays (or even hermaphrodites if you want to go way over the top).
How does a barcode give any more anonymity over the simple act of NOT putting the voter's id on the ballot? If anything, a barcode can give less of an appearane of anonymity since the voter can't be sure that their ID wasn't put into the barcode.
nd you can do that with electronic voting much more easily than you can do it with paper ballots.
I was agreeing with you right up to here. I absolutely disagree with this statement; is MUCH, MUCH easier to hide shenanigans using electronic voting than with paper voting, and it is MUCH, MUCH harder to figure out if somebody has hacked your system than with paper voting.
Given the complexity of even simple computer systems (especially ones based on commodity parts), even with all the openness in the world there is no way you can be confident that your electronic system is secure. Why risk it when there are quite a few time-tested & quite practical methodologies for counting votes in a corruption-resistance manner?
The voting machine can print out a nice clean ballot, using an easily readable & OCReable font, and presenting ONLY those choices that the voter made.
You can also provide specialized voting machines that provide support for the disabled, but which still generate the nice clean ballot that can be counted with all of the other ballots generated by non-disabled folks.
Using a machine to print the ballots can provide some decent benefits. It's when you use machines to do the counting which cause the main breakdown in a trustworthy voting scheme.
Why introduce that possibility that the barcode might be different than what the user verified? All counting should be done by using the same symbols that the voter used to verify their own vote. There are a number of computer-printable fonts that are highly human readable, but are still very easy for an OCR process to process accurately.
A lot of people aren't voting for Ron Paul because they believe the same things he does. They're voting for him because he represents the only politician who they believe means it when he says he's going to completely upset the status quo.
If he were elected, I'm not sure how much of his own agenda he'd be able to accomplish since he can only propose new legislation & veto things he disagrees with, but he could make it VERY difficult for Congress to pass things that there wasn't unanimous agreement about, and he wouldn't be giving the protection of the President's Office to those agents of the executive branch who are blatantly violating the Constitution.
Since the parent was referring to the concept that OTHER countries don't want THEIR traffic monitored by the U.S., your response indicates that you must be an idiot.
If you severely limit government power, then you don't need as much oversight, since the government has proportionally less power to cause harm.
The one thing you DON'T want to do is give the government unlimited power without any oversight at all. If there are time-tested recipes for disaster, that's one of them.
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I think the GP was referring to the problem of having "efficient killing machines" when you are having difficulty telling the enemy apart from the people you are supposed to be protecting. There are good historically-demonstrated reasons why using soldiers as law-enforcement agents tends to alienate the general population, even with the best of intentions.
You are implying that the U.S. intends to leave Iraq once "peace" has been established. Based on both public statements and actions by quite a few government representatives, I think you are incorrect in this assumption.
The people who started this war intend for the U.S. to maintain a strong, permanent military presence in the Middle East.
It's customary to use the # of digits before the "e" as an easy way to indicate the precision of the value. Engineering notation isn't a canonical-enough form to do that consistently.
The rest of your response confused me too much to come up with a coherent comment.
_None_ of the First World nations have used genocide as an "official" foreign policy tactic. The only people who have blatantly used genocide to achieve political goals were Third World countries that had little or no influence on overall world stability.
You are completely wrong about how the other First World countries would react if a country like the U.S. committed a blatant act of genocide, especially if the public of that country seemed to be supporting it. A united country willing to perpetrate an atrocity like that would be a direct threat to the existence of every other country in the world. For the simple reason of survival, the rest of the world would unite to crush that threat no matter what the cost.
No, at least for those countries that have signed the Berne Convention, anything "original" you write has automatic copyrighted status granted. It might be easier to enforce that copyright in the courts, however, if you register your work with the Copyright Office.
Was there a court decision which has verified this?
History is irrelevant in the stated situation, since there has not been the possibility until now that at least some of the opposing countries have the weapons necessary to vaporize each other.
If a single First World country (i.e., a country powerful enough to affect all the countries in the world), with the consent of its public, uses genocide to "solve" the sort of situation we are facing in Iraq, then every other country in the world will have to decide whether they are willing to risk living in the same world as such a country.
I find it highly unlikely that ALL of the other First World countries would be willing to take the risk of allowing such an morally-uninhibited country to run free, and it certainly wouldn't take much of a propaganda stretch to demonize such a country.
Kill all who? The rest of the world? Do you seriously think the rest of the world would stand by and let a nation who considered genocide a valid form of foreign policy to exist?
There are also a number of people who believe that artists should be paid like any other craftsperson: when they perform the service.
There aren't too many cabinetmakers who expect to get paid _every time_ one of their cabinets trades hands or gets copied. They understand that if they want to keep getting paid, then they've got to keep on making cabinets.
There is no valid free-market rationale that says artists should be compensated any differently.
From a higher perspective, copyright is a SOCIAL issue. There are several aspects:
1. Do creators need to be subsidized or otherwise protected to encourage behavior which will provide a net benefit to society?
2. If so, what mechanism will provide the greatest benefit to society (the availability of creative works) with the least damage (the violation of personal private property rights), and
3. If you are using legal enforcement methods of "intellectual property" protection (such as copyright/patents exclusivity), what threshhold of protection do you set where the protection of the creator is causing more harm to society than it provides good?
Any procedure relying on manual marking is going to be problematic - you'll get people putting little dots that don't register, big Xs that cross multiple dots, crossing out choices they didn't mean to make & filling in new ones, doodling around the select dots, etc.
A printing machine can create a nice clean user & machine-readable ballot which contains ONLY the choices that the user wanted to make, with no chance of mistaking those choices for anything else. Printing machines can provide a fair amount of benefit.
The same can't be said for the counting machines, however.
Religion is about a relationship with God in the same way that little kids have "relationships" with invisible friends.
Heh - if there's anything will freak the fundies out more than a bunch of gays, it will be a bunch of genetically-modified furry gays (or even hermaphrodites if you want to go way over the top).
How does a barcode give any more anonymity over the simple act of NOT putting the voter's id on the ballot? If anything, a barcode can give less of an appearane of anonymity since the voter can't be sure that their ID wasn't put into the barcode.
The body provides a support infrastructure for the brain that we don't really know how to reproduce via robotics.
I was agreeing with you right up to here. I absolutely disagree with this statement; is MUCH, MUCH easier to hide shenanigans using electronic voting than with paper voting, and it is MUCH, MUCH harder to figure out if somebody has hacked your system than with paper voting.
Given the complexity of even simple computer systems (especially ones based on commodity parts), even with all the openness in the world there is no way you can be confident that your electronic system is secure. Why risk it when there are quite a few time-tested & quite practical methodologies for counting votes in a corruption-resistance manner?
The voting machine can print out a nice clean ballot, using an easily readable & OCReable font, and presenting ONLY those choices that the voter made.
You can also provide specialized voting machines that provide support for the disabled, but which still generate the nice clean ballot that can be counted with all of the other ballots generated by non-disabled folks.
Using a machine to print the ballots can provide some decent benefits. It's when you use machines to do the counting which cause the main breakdown in a trustworthy voting scheme.
Why introduce that possibility that the barcode might be different than what the user
verified? All counting should be done by using the same symbols that the voter used
to verify their own vote. There are a number of computer-printable fonts that are
highly human readable, but are still very easy for an OCR process to process accurately.
I wouldn't do it no matter how much they paid me. Too easy to get lost in there.
Oh look, a "but...but...but...Clinton!"
I haven't seen one of those in a while - how cute!
Let's see, it's been how many years since Clinton?
And most of those years with a cooperative Congress?
It's called voting strategically. A lot of people understand the concept, even if you don't.
By the way, your comparison of Ron Paul to Dahmer is over the line. It reveals more about your character than Ron Paul's.
A lot of people aren't voting for Ron Paul because they believe the same things he does. They're voting for him because he represents the only politician who they believe means it when he says he's going to completely upset the status quo.
If he were elected, I'm not sure how much of his own agenda he'd be able to accomplish since he can only propose new legislation & veto things he disagrees with, but he could make it VERY difficult for Congress to pass things that there wasn't unanimous agreement about, and he wouldn't be giving the protection of the President's Office to those agents of the executive branch who are blatantly violating the Constitution.
Since the parent was referring to the concept that OTHER countries don't want THEIR traffic monitored by the U.S., your response indicates that you must be an idiot.
No, bribes is the right word.
If you severely limit government power, then you don't need as much oversight, since the government has proportionally less power to cause harm.
The one thing you DON'T want to do is give the government unlimited power without any oversight at all. If there are time-tested recipes for disaster, that's one of them.
Zombies? You nuke them from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
And how would you rate the current ability of anyone to oversee the executive branch at this point in time?