Militant Islam, it only stems from American interventionism in Arab countries and its blatant support of Israel
Wow, so the Beslan school massacre was because of American support for Israel?
The Bangalore bombings too?
How about the Bali massacre?
Or what about the Sudan?
What about all the Thais getting their heads chopped off?
Thats an awful lot to lay down at the feet of the US. Occams razor suggests the other, more obvious reason alluded to by the Pope is probably the correct one rather than your fanciful "it's the US's fault" version.
I've been to towns in Cambodia where close to half of the inhabitants were missing limbs from old landmines. I'm given to understand that similar conditions exist in parts of Africa.
True, in some parts of Africa, half of the inhabitants are missing limbs, but they aren't typically from landmines. Charles Taylor and his henchmen running lose in Liberia and Sierra Leone removed limbs the old fashioned way, they hacked them off.
Unfortunately, landmines have a valuable place in warfare. The things that landmines do cannot be done effectively in "other ways".
A felon should not have their voting rights removed, even in prison.
So says you. A felon in prison is, by definition, limited in rights. Those rights are being limited, hopefully, through the due process of law.
Once a felon is released, however, they should have their full rights restored (including 2nd Ammendment rights). If they are too dangerous to be trusted with the rights a normal citizen is allowed, then they shouldn't be released.
LE: If you don't care about the propogation of your DNA or that of your species, you are an unfit genetic abnormality. Darwin will see to it that you vanish.
Idiot gronofer: Yes, I know. It doesn't bother me.
And strangely enough, I doubt it bothers anyone else. Looks like you're a evolutionary dead end. Just don't expect much success in many other people subscribing to your genoicidal suicide pact.
(FWIW: The CIA World Factbook gives "United States", not "America", as the short form of "United States of America". But that's the thing about colloquialisms...they're not "official", just widespread and commonly understood.)
You are correct, but I'd add that it also gives "United States of America" as the long name and it lists "American", "American(s) as the nationality.
Um, the official name of Mexico is "The United States of Mexico". Hence, they are called "Mexicans".
The official name of the United States is "The United States of America". Hence, we are called "Americans".
Canada is just Canada, hence "Canadian".
So, your theory, while logically compact, is wrong. People from the US are properly called "Americans", while people who aren't from the US, are not properly called Americans, even if they hail from North or South America.
A fair point. Partisan politics is the death of civil discourse in this country. Talking heads and propaganda mills fan the flames, divide the people, and keep them bickering amongst themselves while the scum in charge get away with their crimes. Too many people treat politics like their favorite football team, my guys, win or lose, to root for, rather than vote on the issues.
I agree that partisan politics is the death of civil discourse, and both sides are guilty of that. It's brother, an unwillingness to compromise, is going to be the death of representative government. Democrats are unwilling to compromise on pretty much anything...and why should they, when the Republican "compromise", as in the current Senate immigration bill, is total capitulation?
Talking heads and propoganda mills, however, do serve a purpose, and that's to get information out. And on some things that they rile people up about, people should get upset. Case in point, American citizens are being sold down the river with the US Senate's "Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill" to the point where immigrants will have more rights than an American worker with things such as guaranteed median pay and 2 out of 5 years tax debt forgiven and an EITC rebate credit for the 5 or more years they were here illegally. I'm more than tempted to sign up for "amnesty" just so I can partake in the looting of the American treasury, since our own "leaders" don't seem to care (Republican or Democrat).
*Israel's policy of separation closely resembles pre 1994 South Africa and also resembles pre world war II Germany, (first) making second class citizens out of jews.
Israel's policy of separation closely resembles pre-1994 South Africa and pre-World War II Germany only because you're an idiot with a befuddled mind.
Israel is pursuing the policy because the Palestinians overwhelmingly (>70% in most polls) support attacks on Israeli civilians, including school children. Israel is pursuing a policy of separation because most Israelis have come to the very obvious conclusion that Israeli society and Palestinian society can't be compatible when the majority of Palestinians want the Israelis dead. There's no hidden ambiguity behind the words "from the (Jordan) river to the sea". Palestinians aren't fighting because they are second class non-citizens of Israel. They don't want to be citizens of Israel. They want Israel wiped off the map and the Jews driven out (and most want the Christians driven out too).
Sad fact is that too many of those people wouldn't object to it as long as it was their favored political party asking to put in the cameras.
The ironic thing is most people invoking this claim or similar claims are partisan Democrats. Not that I'm saying you are, mind you, but in my experience the partisan Republican is a reaction to extreme partisanism on the side of the left. When every Republican except for John McCain gets grossly slandered as a "right-wing extremist who will turn back the clock" on minority rights, gay rights, education, slavery, the environment, etc, etc, don't be surprised when those people being slandered harden their views to the opposition in response.
If that were the case, you'd think we'd be doing something about legal immigration too since Mexicans are the single largest national component of legal immigrants in addition to being the overwhelming source of the majority of illegal immigrants.
Why stop with punching them in the face? Why not exterminate them, and their children to keep them from further harming the planet by breathing the air that everyone else needs? All hail mrchaotica, who will decide what is, and is not allowed. All othes bow before him.
First we hear the science supporting global warming is being suppressed, now we hear that science opposing global warming is being suppressed. The only clear conclusion is to get politics out of science, but I don't think anyone's ever succeeded at that in its entire history.
The easiest way to do that is to take the politics out of the funding of science. And the easiest way to do that is to take the government out of the funding of science. By having the government involved in funding, it de facto becomes political. Of course, for lots of research (like high energy physics), this really isn't practical, since governments are the only ones with big enough purse strings to pursue certain types of research.
Exactly what we have seen in the car industry too. The best (and definitely) most succesful cars in the world are designed and built in the US by US companies. Oh, wait... they're not, which means other (individual) countries can (and will if needed) out-design and outproduce the US.
You are absolutely correct that the US does not have a monopoly on great engineering, nor are they the best at everything or even most things. Militarily speaking, however, the US does have technical supremacy in more than a few areas. Aerospace and naval technology being predominate (and nuclear also). In theory, other countries could build super carriers and F-22 or JSF equivilent aircraft. In practice, no one else has done so successfully. Whether that is because of lack of skill, lack of will, or lack of funding is largely irrelevant.
Educated people usually delay having children in favor of their careers and have fewer children overall than uneducated people. So natural selection favors the uneducated.
Likely a temporary anomaly. Right now if an uneducated person wants to have 10 children, the state (and by extension, those educated people) will take care of them. In effect, the "smart", educated people are being cuckolded into feeding, raising, and sustaining the offspring of competitors.
It is a bad thing. We've lost the filter aspect of evolution. Sure, the genes are changing, but it's no longer survival of the fittest. Say 100 years ago disease X killed all carriers of the defective gene before they could breed.
According to the Red Queen Hypothesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_queen), evolution within population groups is all about parasites anyway. You cannot get away from survival of the fittest (fitness = ability to procreate viable offspring), but the characteristics which determine fitness can change over time and generations due to the environment.
When the styrofoam eating bacteria get out of hand, we'll just release some bioengineered bacteria eating eukaryotic flagellates to eat the bacteria. You know, like on the Simpsons.
That being said, you can not keep a technology secret forever. Eventually, any government that wants nuclear weapons, will get nuclear weapons. The question we have to ask, is why countries like Sweden, or Canada, or Japan, despite having all the technology they need to build nuclear weapons, currently do not have nuclear weapons? And why do countries like Iran, or North Korea, etc., so desperatly want to get nuclear weapons, even at a high cost and risk?
Nuclear weapons accord a nation "great power" status. Iran views itself as the natural hegemon in Southwest Asia and nuclear arms as their right. The mullahs in Iran are rather unpopular, but the idea that Iran should have nukes is not unpopular among Iranians. Unless all this sabre rattling isn't just for show, and I'm inclined to believe that it is, Iran will get nukes sooner or later. The best that we can hope for is that it won't be the Mullah's holding the button.
Some folks don't have the option, unfortunately. For example, 2.0 has much better X.509 support than 1.1 where it's functionally crippled. But guess which one I have to use?
I work for a Forture 200 company. We're actually using 3 different offshore vendors. Wipro is one of them. We have a large onshore staff of H1B workers in addition to the offshore resources (we are in year 2 of implementing an offshoring strategy).
My intent is not to bash Indians or offshore workers. Prior to us pursuing offshoring, easily half of the people placed as full time hires were Indian anyway, and their status varied from native US citizens, naturalized US citizens, green card holders, and H1B visa holders. With my last team, I was the only white guy in otherwise all Indian team. We used to joke and say I was the affirmative action guy.
That being said, with the offshore guys, I've seen a dropoff in quality with respect to English skills compared to the onshore guys. The onshore guys (and girls), for the most part, have decent English skills (there are exceptions, of course). From a technical skill perspective, the onshore guys are equivilent to the distribution we get if we were placing the candidates ourselves. Some are good, most are in the middle, and some are bad. The Wipro guys do have the advantage of having a large knowledge network they can call up for solutions to things they can't figure out themselves.
The big problem with outsourcing is, at least in my company, it's being presented as a silver bullet to cure all of the IT cost problems. It isn't. It's costing us more, especially when you factor in time to market impacts to NPV. This isn't the fault of the outsource providers (for the most part, Unisucks is a different story), but the fault of our business customers who aren't really a good fit for an outsourcing model, and unless they change the way they deliver requirements, never will be.
India is a great place for development,as they have very skilled programmers for cheap wages and "tech speak" has less problems with the language barriers than customer service.
You have a couple of flawed premises here.
One: "tech speak" has more problems with language barriers, not less, because we techies are usually trying to solve complex technical problems where accurate communication is essential. If you or I have to repeat what we say several times to communicate the point, or understand the point, it's a problem. And this is a problem I've experienced firsthand. I work in a shop where we have a majority of "onshored" Indians in development, and a lot of our development offshored to India as well, so I have to interact with people that are "fresh off the boat", Indians that have been here 6 years and speak English as well as I do, Indians that have been here 8 years and speak English worse than some of the FOB's, and offshore people who speak 2 or 3 words of English and about 15 words of Hindi per sentence. And in the latter case, "tech speak" isn't enough to bridge the gap.
The second flawed premise is that the very skilled programmers in India are working for cheap wages. I've met quite a few very smart Indians. They've all been very aware of their market value and had a savvy business sense. Most of the offshore guys I've interacted with aren't that great, and are probably just collecting skills for their resume for when their H1B comes in or they win a green card lottery. They have the Internet in India too, and they know getting paid $8/hr (which is how much Wippro pays their guys in India while charging $25/hr for them) while their counterparts in the US are getting paid $40/hr is a raw deal. That's why turnover is high, and the guys you work with this project probably isn't going to be the same group you work with next project.
Put it this way. If it's less brutal than what we submit our own pilots to at SERE school to, it ain't torture.
And I guarantee listening to people whine about our government abusing its power is not nearly as bad as being waterboarded.
Yeah it is, because waterboarding lasts a few minutes. You guys never stop.
You don't find anything wrong with all this Gitmo biz? - no oversight, proven torture, and no repercussions?
The biggest problem with Gitmo are idiots like you that don't understand that there is plenty of oversight. Red Cross visits, Congressional delegations being among them. "Proven" torture at Gitmo? You mean allegations of torture by people who've been released from Gitmo. And I like how torture has been watered down to being anything that might discomfort anyone at any point in time, compared to say, the torture that Americans at Hanoi Hilton received. No repercussiosn? Listen to bedwetters like you whine incessantly is torture in and of itself.
Never thought I was on the 'radar'; people like you should be.
Interesting. So, it's not that you object to people being on the radar or disappearing into the night, they just need to fit the "right" profile. Got it now. You're not a liberal, you're a Stalinist. Good, now you can FOAD.
Slashdot Mirror
Militant Islam, it only stems from American interventionism in Arab countries and its blatant support of Israel
Wow, so the Beslan school massacre was because of American support for Israel?
The Bangalore bombings too?
How about the Bali massacre?
Or what about the Sudan?
What about all the Thais getting their heads chopped off?
Thats an awful lot to lay down at the feet of the US. Occams razor suggests the other, more obvious reason alluded to by the Pope is probably the correct one rather than your fanciful "it's the US's fault" version.
Yeah, the Republicans are all to blame. The Democrats have never stooped to polarizing politics http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,388 903,00.html/.
I've been to towns in Cambodia where close to half of the inhabitants were missing limbs from old landmines. I'm given to understand that similar conditions exist in parts of Africa.
True, in some parts of Africa, half of the inhabitants are missing limbs, but they aren't typically from landmines. Charles Taylor and his henchmen running lose in Liberia and Sierra Leone removed limbs the old fashioned way, they hacked them off. Unfortunately, landmines have a valuable place in warfare. The things that landmines do cannot be done effectively in "other ways".
A felon should not have their voting rights removed, even in prison.
So says you. A felon in prison is, by definition, limited in rights. Those rights are being limited, hopefully, through the due process of law.
Once a felon is released, however, they should have their full rights restored (including 2nd Ammendment rights). If they are too dangerous to be trusted with the rights a normal citizen is allowed, then they shouldn't be released.
LE: If you don't care about the propogation of your DNA or that of your species, you are an unfit genetic abnormality. Darwin will see to it that you vanish.
Idiot gronofer: Yes, I know. It doesn't bother me.
And strangely enough, I doubt it bothers anyone else. Looks like you're a evolutionary dead end. Just don't expect much success in many other people subscribing to your genoicidal suicide pact.
(FWIW: The CIA World Factbook gives "United States", not "America", as the short form of "United States of America". But that's the thing about colloquialisms...they're not "official", just widespread and commonly understood.)
You are correct, but I'd add that it also gives "United States of America" as the long name and it lists "American", "American(s) as the nationality.
Um, the official name of Mexico is "The United States of Mexico". Hence, they are called "Mexicans".
The official name of the United States is "The United States of America". Hence, we are called "Americans".
Canada is just Canada, hence "Canadian".
So, your theory, while logically compact, is wrong. People from the US are properly called "Americans", while people who aren't from the US, are not properly called Americans, even if they hail from North or South America.
A fair point. Partisan politics is the death of civil discourse in this country. Talking heads and propaganda mills fan the flames, divide the people, and keep them bickering amongst themselves while the scum in charge get away with their crimes. Too many people treat politics like their favorite football team, my guys, win or lose, to root for, rather than vote on the issues.
I agree that partisan politics is the death of civil discourse, and both sides are guilty of that. It's brother, an unwillingness to compromise, is going to be the death of representative government. Democrats are unwilling to compromise on pretty much anything...and why should they, when the Republican "compromise", as in the current Senate immigration bill, is total capitulation?
Talking heads and propoganda mills, however, do serve a purpose, and that's to get information out. And on some things that they rile people up about, people should get upset. Case in point, American citizens are being sold down the river with the US Senate's "Comprehensive Immigration Reform Bill" to the point where immigrants will have more rights than an American worker with things such as guaranteed median pay and 2 out of 5 years tax debt forgiven and an EITC rebate credit for the 5 or more years they were here illegally. I'm more than tempted to sign up for "amnesty" just so I can partake in the looting of the American treasury, since our own "leaders" don't seem to care (Republican or Democrat).
*Israel's policy of separation closely resembles pre 1994 South Africa and also resembles pre world war II Germany, (first) making second class citizens out of jews.
Israel's policy of separation closely resembles pre-1994 South Africa and pre-World War II Germany only because you're an idiot with a befuddled mind.
Israel is pursuing the policy because the Palestinians overwhelmingly (>70% in most polls) support attacks on Israeli civilians, including school children. Israel is pursuing a policy of separation because most Israelis have come to the very obvious conclusion that Israeli society and Palestinian society can't be compatible when the majority of Palestinians want the Israelis dead. There's no hidden ambiguity behind the words "from the (Jordan) river to the sea". Palestinians aren't fighting because they are second class non-citizens of Israel. They don't want to be citizens of Israel. They want Israel wiped off the map and the Jews driven out (and most want the Christians driven out too).
Sad fact is that too many of those people wouldn't object to it as long as it was their favored political party asking to put in the cameras.
The ironic thing is most people invoking this claim or similar claims are partisan Democrats. Not that I'm saying you are, mind you, but in my experience the partisan Republican is a reaction to extreme partisanism on the side of the left. When every Republican except for John McCain gets grossly slandered as a "right-wing extremist who will turn back the clock" on minority rights, gay rights, education, slavery, the environment, etc, etc, don't be surprised when those people being slandered harden their views to the opposition in response.
If that were the case, you'd think we'd be doing something about legal immigration too since Mexicans are the single largest national component of legal immigrants in addition to being the overwhelming source of the majority of illegal immigrants.
I think you mean that they wrap their thumb with their other fingrs...your thumb is actually supposed to be under your fingers positionally.
Make a fist Says a karate fist, but that's the same fist you use in boxing as well.
Why stop with punching them in the face? Why not exterminate them, and their children to keep them from further harming the planet by breathing the air that everyone else needs? All hail mrchaotica, who will decide what is, and is not allowed. All othes bow before him.
Hmmm, so not only are you telling people what they can and can't buy, you are also telling them how many kids they can have also. Awesome.
First we hear the science supporting global warming is being suppressed, now we hear that science opposing global warming is being suppressed. The only clear conclusion is to get politics out of science, but I don't think anyone's ever succeeded at that in its entire history.
The easiest way to do that is to take the politics out of the funding of science. And the easiest way to do that is to take the government out of the funding of science. By having the government involved in funding, it de facto becomes political. Of course, for lots of research (like high energy physics), this really isn't practical, since governments are the only ones with big enough purse strings to pursue certain types of research.
Exactly what we have seen in the car industry too. The best (and definitely) most succesful cars in the world are designed and built in the US by US companies. Oh, wait... they're not, which means other (individual) countries can (and will if needed) out-design and outproduce the US.
You are absolutely correct that the US does not have a monopoly on great engineering, nor are they the best at everything or even most things. Militarily speaking, however, the US does have technical supremacy in more than a few areas. Aerospace and naval technology being predominate (and nuclear also). In theory, other countries could build super carriers and F-22 or JSF equivilent aircraft. In practice, no one else has done so successfully. Whether that is because of lack of skill, lack of will, or lack of funding is largely irrelevant.
Educated people usually delay having children in favor of their careers and have fewer children overall than uneducated people. So natural selection favors the uneducated.
Likely a temporary anomaly. Right now if an uneducated person wants to have 10 children, the state (and by extension, those educated people) will take care of them. In effect, the "smart", educated people are being cuckolded into feeding, raising, and sustaining the offspring of competitors.
It is a bad thing. We've lost the filter aspect of evolution. Sure, the genes are changing, but it's no longer survival of the fittest. Say 100 years ago disease X killed all carriers of the defective gene before they could breed.
According to the Red Queen Hypothesis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_queen), evolution within population groups is all about parasites anyway. You cannot get away from survival of the fittest (fitness = ability to procreate viable offspring), but the characteristics which determine fitness can change over time and generations due to the environment.
When the styrofoam eating bacteria get out of hand, we'll just release some bioengineered bacteria eating eukaryotic flagellates to eat the bacteria. You know, like on the Simpsons.
That being said, you can not keep a technology secret forever. Eventually, any government that wants nuclear weapons, will get nuclear weapons. The question we have to ask, is why countries like Sweden, or Canada, or Japan, despite having all the technology they need to build nuclear weapons, currently do not have nuclear weapons? And why do countries like Iran, or North Korea, etc., so desperatly want to get nuclear weapons, even at a high cost and risk?
Nuclear weapons accord a nation "great power" status. Iran views itself as the natural hegemon in Southwest Asia and nuclear arms as their right. The mullahs in Iran are rather unpopular, but the idea that Iran should have nukes is not unpopular among Iranians. Unless all this sabre rattling isn't just for show, and I'm inclined to believe that it is, Iran will get nukes sooner or later. The best that we can hope for is that it won't be the Mullah's holding the button.
Some folks don't have the option, unfortunately. For example, 2.0 has much better X.509 support than 1.1 where it's functionally crippled. But guess which one I have to use?
I work for a Forture 200 company. We're actually using 3 different offshore vendors. Wipro is one of them. We have a large onshore staff of H1B workers in addition to the offshore resources (we are in year 2 of implementing an offshoring strategy).
My intent is not to bash Indians or offshore workers. Prior to us pursuing offshoring, easily half of the people placed as full time hires were Indian anyway, and their status varied from native US citizens, naturalized US citizens, green card holders, and H1B visa holders. With my last team, I was the only white guy in otherwise all Indian team. We used to joke and say I was the affirmative action guy.
That being said, with the offshore guys, I've seen a dropoff in quality with respect to English skills compared to the onshore guys. The onshore guys (and girls), for the most part, have decent English skills (there are exceptions, of course). From a technical skill perspective, the onshore guys are equivilent to the distribution we get if we were placing the candidates ourselves. Some are good, most are in the middle, and some are bad. The Wipro guys do have the advantage of having a large knowledge network they can call up for solutions to things they can't figure out themselves.
The big problem with outsourcing is, at least in my company, it's being presented as a silver bullet to cure all of the IT cost problems. It isn't. It's costing us more, especially when you factor in time to market impacts to NPV. This isn't the fault of the outsource providers (for the most part, Unisucks is a different story), but the fault of our business customers who aren't really a good fit for an outsourcing model, and unless they change the way they deliver requirements, never will be.
India is a great place for development,as they have very skilled programmers for cheap wages and "tech speak" has less problems with the language barriers than customer service.
You have a couple of flawed premises here.
One: "tech speak" has more problems with language barriers, not less, because we techies are usually trying to solve complex technical problems where accurate communication is essential. If you or I have to repeat what we say several times to communicate the point, or understand the point, it's a problem. And this is a problem I've experienced firsthand. I work in a shop where we have a majority of "onshored" Indians in development, and a lot of our development offshored to India as well, so I have to interact with people that are "fresh off the boat", Indians that have been here 6 years and speak English as well as I do, Indians that have been here 8 years and speak English worse than some of the FOB's, and offshore people who speak 2 or 3 words of English and about 15 words of Hindi per sentence. And in the latter case, "tech speak" isn't enough to bridge the gap.
The second flawed premise is that the very skilled programmers in India are working for cheap wages. I've met quite a few very smart Indians. They've all been very aware of their market value and had a savvy business sense. Most of the offshore guys I've interacted with aren't that great, and are probably just collecting skills for their resume for when their H1B comes in or they win a green card lottery. They have the Internet in India too, and they know getting paid $8/hr (which is how much Wippro pays their guys in India while charging $25/hr for them) while their counterparts in the US are getting paid $40/hr is a raw deal. That's why turnover is high, and the guys you work with this project probably isn't going to be the same group you work with next project.
Put it this way. If it's less brutal than what we submit our own pilots to at SERE school to, it ain't torture. And I guarantee listening to people whine about our government abusing its power is not nearly as bad as being waterboarded.
Yeah it is, because waterboarding lasts a few minutes. You guys never stop.
You don't find anything wrong with all this Gitmo biz? - no oversight, proven torture, and no repercussions?
The biggest problem with Gitmo are idiots like you that don't understand that there is plenty of oversight. Red Cross visits, Congressional delegations being among them. "Proven" torture at Gitmo? You mean allegations of torture by people who've been released from Gitmo. And I like how torture has been watered down to being anything that might discomfort anyone at any point in time, compared to say, the torture that Americans at Hanoi Hilton received. No repercussiosn? Listen to bedwetters like you whine incessantly is torture in and of itself.
Never thought I was on the 'radar'; people like you should be.
Interesting. So, it's not that you object to people being on the radar or disappearing into the night, they just need to fit the "right" profile. Got it now. You're not a liberal, you're a Stalinist. Good, now you can FOAD.