That plan was evil, and should never have even been drafted, let alone approved by the military and brought to the Secretary of Defense. The people who proposed it should have been brought up on treason charges.
The New York Times references are several years old. The Wikipedia article you mention says the controversy has died down and the system has brought the intended benefits.
I wish they would just use an automated system in all the parks instead of relying on the umps. I also wish they would use a standard strike zone, instead of one that changes based on the batter. It'll never happen, though.
Sure, I can't prove that I'm not trolling, but it speaks rather poorly of you that you just assume someone is trolling because you don't like their opinion.
I agree with you. It has become extremely fashionable on the Net to call anybody that has a disagreeable opinion a troll. Whoever went through this thread and modded all your posts Troll shouldn't have moderator privileges.
By the way, I absolutely love Adblock and NoScript.
Web 2.0 is a rather new idea. No, it was just a new name to popularize existing ideas.
Before everything was basically content handed to you by a content creator now in days users make the content. Before there was Second Life, there was MOO, circa 1990. Wikis were also created in the 90s.
So much socio-religious engineering has taken place in those people's life (the Quran) that their present attitude is *mostly* driven by irrational, i.e purely emotional reasons. The religion is just a common ideology that binds the group together. Their stance is pretty mundane, rational, and old as society itself: Drive out foreigners and protect the ideology that holds the group together.
Finding any kind of intellectual common ground with them just wonâ(TM)t work, because it is our very existence as a culture and as a people that drives them to mass murder. And how is it different than how the United States fought communism? How we condemn cultures that don't share our ideals? But a lot of that is just bullshit cover while looking out for our strategic interests.
Just listen to Bush's speeches in the run up to the Iraq war, as he tried to portray us as liberators. We certainly didn't care about Saddam as a dictator when he was our ally against Iran.
And we certainly didn't care about Islamic ideology when we used it to thwart the Russians in Afghanistan (and neither did Osama care about our religious freedoms when we were helping them out).
9/11 wasn't about them hating our culture, so much as it was about our foreign policy with regards to Israel and troops in their "holy land". Using religion as the rallying point and calling us infidels is just a way to motivate the group, the same way we sent our troops over to Iraq to "protect our freedoms". It's just monkey tribes fighting it out on a grand scale. Nothing new here.
The handsets don't require a huge investment. They're cheap pieces of plastic. Can I see your business plan then with an estimated cost? Also, who do you have in mind who is going to fund this? Why would people buy it without the network in place to make it useful, when there is already a functional, extensive network in place?
Unlike music, generally there's a pretty small market for the stars of porn to get out and perform live and make money via that alternative revenue stream Porn stars are a big draw at strip clubs. They can also prostitute themselves legally in certain locales. Not that I agree that either music or porn should be illegally infringed.
Whether he believes the states should be involved in marriage or not, he still believes the states should have the power to do so. Read those first two sentences again: "I'd let California do what they want. And I didn't vote for the Constitutional Amendment to ban gay marriage, but the states can do it." [emphasis mine]
Also another quote, from his speech against amending the constitution, but for the Defense of Marriage Act and the Marriage Protection Act:
"I am unwilling either to cede to federal courts the authority to redefine marriage, or to deny a state's ability to preserve the traditional definition of marriage."
A little perspective helps. He says he's in the line of work of "digital video production". Who's going to buy some random hard drive from eBay and try to recover it after it has been wiped? And what will it gain them?
I think the real issue here is that you simply don't believe that the states can be trusted to protect your rights. I'd encourage you to apply that same healthy skepticism to the federal government as well. I'd rather have that power devolved to the various states where it is closer to the people being governed than concentrated in the hands of the rather distant federal government that wasn't even intended to have that kind of power in the first place. I think these rights are too important to be left to ad hoc protection -- they should be pledged to be upheld by the states for the same reason the feds pledged to uphold them. I don't see where else to put a central clearing house of common rights for citizens of the United States, except under the Constitution and ultimately overseen by the federal government.
You haven't offered a concrete alternative, except to say let the states do as they please, without any checks, balances, or commitments. That same answer wasn't good enough for the feds, and the Bill of Rights was created.
I understand your concerns, and surely there are problems, but ultimately I prefer federal protection of fundamental rights.
I believe basic freedoms are worth protecting at the federal level, even if that means some states are annoyed. "move out of the state" clearly wasn't a trivial option for blacks who had basic liberties suppressed before the Civil Rights movement.
Yes, they were listed originally as limitations of federal power. I think these same limits would be good for all levels of government, for exactly the same reason that they are good for the federal government.
I don't believe that my rights are limited to what is spelled out in the bill of rights I don't either, and I don't think that requiring the states to respect the same fundamental rights that the feds must respect limits your rights to the Bill of Rights. That's why I say it's a straw man. You are attacking an argument I am not proposing.
He's saying that the state governments should protect those rights at the state level. Then there's nothing wrong explicitly stating that the Bill of Rights must be respected by the states -- are they fundamental rights worth protecting or not? The states already yield to laws where the federal laws have priority. I think it makes sense that there's some basic rights that all citizens should have protected from all levels of government.
Entrusting the states to respect these rights on their own is not as good as explicitly stating they must. I don't want my basic freedoms to be denied just because I cross state lines.
What you're looking for is a courtroom with a judge and a jury. That's not going to happen. Slashdot is as good a place as any to hold this debate, as this is where it currently resides. This open discussion has already yielded plenty of quality comments, and everybody is free to form their own opinion. Sure there's some cruft too, but that's the nature of open discussion.
The bill of rights was never intended to be a complete or comprehensive list of our rights. I agree, and I'm not arguing that they are. I'm arguing that they are fundamental rights that were deemed so important that they were explicitly listed.
Proponents of limited government aren't opposed to the contents of the bill of rights. We are opposed to the idea that the federal government should be able to claim that it has the authority to limit our rights to those spelled out in some short list, as well as the belief that the federal government has the authority to enforce those claims on the states. That's a straw man. The question is NOT whether federal government should have expanded rights beyond what is listed in the Constitution. The question is: Are these fundamental rights, so important that they were enshrined into the Constitution, worth protecting at all levels of government?
Ron Paul says no, and he seems motivated by lettings states impose Christian fundamentals on it's citizens. Personally, I like having freedom of speech and the other rights granted in the Bill of Rights no matter what state I happen to live in.
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That plan was evil, and should never have even been drafted, let alone approved by the military and brought to the Secretary of Defense. The people who proposed it should have been brought up on treason charges.
The New York Times references are several years old. The Wikipedia article you mention says the controversy has died down and the system has brought the intended benefits.
I wish they would just use an automated system in all the parks instead of relying on the umps. I also wish they would use a standard strike zone, instead of one that changes based on the batter. It'll never happen, though.
Sure, I can't prove that I'm not trolling, but it speaks rather poorly of you that you just assume someone is trolling because you don't like their opinion.
I agree with you. It has become extremely fashionable on the Net to call anybody that has a disagreeable opinion a troll. Whoever went through this thread and modded all your posts Troll shouldn't have moderator privileges.
By the way, I absolutely love Adblock and NoScript.
I have lost sympathy for motorcyclists. Too many assholes making a ton of noise with illegal after market tailpipes.
Umm, no. This is morning show news, targeted at housewives.
You're probably mixing up Fox with Fox News. They're different channels.
Nice link, thanks.
Just listen to Bush's speeches in the run up to the Iraq war, as he tried to portray us as liberators. We certainly didn't care about Saddam as a dictator when he was our ally against Iran.
And we certainly didn't care about Islamic ideology when we used it to thwart the Russians in Afghanistan (and neither did Osama care about our religious freedoms when we were helping them out).
9/11 wasn't about them hating our culture, so much as it was about our foreign policy with regards to Israel and troops in their "holy land". Using religion as the rallying point and calling us infidels is just a way to motivate the group, the same way we sent our troops over to Iraq to "protect our freedoms". It's just monkey tribes fighting it out on a grand scale. Nothing new here.
I understand your position, even if I don't agree with it.
How do you feel about abortions in cases of rape?
Whether he believes the states should be involved in marriage or not, he still believes the states should have the power to do so. Read those first two sentences again: "I'd let California do what they want. And I didn't vote for the Constitutional Amendment to ban gay marriage, but the states can do it." [emphasis mine]
Also another quote, from his speech against amending the constitution, but for the Defense of Marriage Act and the Marriage Protection Act:
"I am unwilling either to cede to federal courts the authority to redefine marriage, or to deny a state's ability to preserve the traditional definition of marriage."
A little perspective helps. He says he's in the line of work of "digital video production". Who's going to buy some random hard drive from eBay and try to recover it after it has been wiped? And what will it gain them?
You haven't offered a concrete alternative, except to say let the states do as they please, without any checks, balances, or commitments. That same answer wasn't good enough for the feds, and the Bill of Rights was created.
I understand your concerns, and surely there are problems, but ultimately I prefer federal protection of fundamental rights.
I believe basic freedoms are worth protecting at the federal level, even if that means some states are annoyed. "move out of the state" clearly wasn't a trivial option for blacks who had basic liberties suppressed before the Civil Rights movement.
Entrusting the states to respect these rights on their own is not as good as explicitly stating they must. I don't want my basic freedoms to be denied just because I cross state lines.
What you're looking for is a courtroom with a judge and a jury. That's not going to happen. Slashdot is as good a place as any to hold this debate, as this is where it currently resides. This open discussion has already yielded plenty of quality comments, and everybody is free to form their own opinion. Sure there's some cruft too, but that's the nature of open discussion.
I can easily point to the computer. But this "god-like intelligence", I don't see any evidence of it. Could you describe what evidence you see for it?
Ron Paul says no, and he seems motivated by lettings states impose Christian fundamentals on it's citizens. Personally, I like having freedom of speech and the other rights granted in the Bill of Rights no matter what state I happen to live in.
So they got paid off on a bogus patent, and you think this will discourage others in the future from suing?
Where's the god-like intelligence?