If it's your brat, you* should pay for its upkeep.
Really? Why?
No matter how you slice it, the current system sucks. Take the case of an unintended pregnancy. If I get a woman pregnant, and she decides to have an abortion, I don't have a say in the matter. If she decides to keep the child, I don't get a say in the matter. Whether or not I shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars depends solely on what decision she makes. How is that fair?
Alternately, consider an intentional pregnancy in a marriage, followed by a divorce. Unless the woman has become a crack-addicted alcoholic prostitute, there's zero chance I'll get sole custody. On the other hand, if she wants sole custody, all she has to do is claim I was an abusive husband and chances are she'll get it.
How is any of that fair? If I don't have a legal right to decide whether the child is born in the first place, and the legal system has the ability to take away my child on the say-so of a third party, why in the world should I feel any responsibility to pay for it? To use Slashdots favourite form of analogy, it's as if a GM rep came to me and said "You owe us $50,000 for this car we made, but you don't get to drive it".
Do you honestly see that as an equitable arrangement?
since living in gitmo isn't known for it's long survival rates
?????
I dunno what the hell you've been smoking, but living in gitmo is paradise compared to the shitholes that most of it's inmates come from. IIRC average weight gain for inmates is 15-20lbs. Not sure where these supposed short survival rates come in - are the prisoners dying from heart attacks after getting fat from eating too much cake?
So while that's true if he's under US law, don't think for even an 1/8th of a second that this would run through traditional US courts.
You're right - it'll never go through "traditional US courts" because the US has no interest in Assange. If they really wanted him out of the way, he would have choked on a peanut months ago. The guy is completely inconsequential - it's only his rabid fans that consider him important enough to go after.
As an experienced combat vet, I can assure you that the vast majority, if not all of the troops will vote for the most effective weapon/ammo that they can carry routinely.
You don't need to assure me of anything - I've been serving since the late 90's, and troops don't get to vote. Purchasing decisions are made based on all sorts of considerations, many of which the average soldier hasn't thought of or doesn't care about.
We don't care what the 'bean-counters', REMF's, 'arm chair general', etc. think
Right, and that's the problem. If it were up to the average grunt, the military would end up looking something like the Taliban - random bits of gear and clothing al thrown together and chosen by the owners preference. That model works ok for a guerrilla force; it doesn't work so well for a professional army.
A bit over the top to be on-topic, IMHO.
Your sarcasm detector must be on the fritz. I'm trained on every weapons system that our military has, plus some that your boys let us play with when we visited. I'm all for diversity in knowledge and capability; I was pointing out the silliness of his suggestion that doing many things "ok" means you won't do anything "well".
The A-10 is one of the best aircraft ever made, and it was a single-purpose fleet
The waffle iron is one of the best appliances ever made.
See how silly that sounds?
And small turboprop CAS vehicles can me used in any COIN operation
And the MRAP can't? I guess it'll spontaneously-combust if it ever crosses a border.
And about a multi-role fleet: being able to do a lot of stuff ok means you can't do anything good.
Right. Which is why a rifleman should never carry grenades. And the guy running the fry-vat should stay the fuck away from the grille.
Don't get me wrong - I like the 6.5mm cartridges (and waffle irons), I love the A-10, and I think UAV's will probably take over the CAS role in the long term. But none of the things you're listing support your basic premise. If the US were to switch from 5.56 to 6.5 tomorrow, you might be happy, but a thousand other guys just like you would be bitching that it's a huge waste of money. If a new project were to be launched to look for a dedicated CAS aircraft, a thousand guys like you would be bitching because the military already has plenty of CAS assets. And I'm not so sure that you wouldn't be with them. You can't please everyone all the time, and you can't please some people ANY time. The fact remains that the US is THE best armed force in the world. That's not going to change just because some dude on slashdot thinks he knows which type of ammunition or aircraft is "The Best".
No, you don't have to go on. You should have never started in the first place. If you think the M-4 is a problem, you don't understand infantry tactics. You suggest that a new single-role fleet should be stood up instead of using a multi-role aircraft, then bitch about a single-role vehicle being procured for a specific theater. And then you whine about a bidding-process whose major problem was that the government wasted money because they wanted to appear fair and impartial. You flail around at random making inconsistent and ignorant complaints because your initial premise is the same as your conclusion, and you care more about proving that you're right than about the truth. Of all the things you've listed, maybe one is a legitimate complaint. Congrats: out of the thousands of projects that the military has been involved with over the years, you've found one that turned out badly.
*golf clap*
But no, you're right: the best equipped military force on the face of the planet is, in fact, full of crappy equipment. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.
And yet somehow it will still get built by the same contractors the military already uses, have huge cost overruns, weigh too much, and be unable to fully fulfill the mission for which it was originally designed.
If you're talking about a White House state dinner, you're probably right. If you're talking about the military, you have no idea what you're talking about, and you clearly haven't looked at the equipment which the US military currently owns.
Yep, because you don't need to use energy to make solar cells - they just fall out of the sky. And because industrial grade smelters can run off a couple calculators daisy-chained together. And lithium is an inexhaustible resource.
Solar isn't even a solution TODAY. If you honestly think we could have transitioned to it 100 years ago, you are completely ignorant of what's involved. The only reason we can even CONSIDER it now is because of the relatively cheap energy which we've been ripping out of the ground for the last century.
Hold on there, Stalin. Why not just save us all the hassle and ship them off to the gulag? I'm sure the next batch of "supervisors" will be highly motivated to ensure that no more disasters befall the Proud Industry of the Motherland.
Yes, I know there are ways to fix each individual issue without actually restarting the system, but there are enough persistent problems that
I have the option of doing a reboot - which takes about a minute and a half - or screwing around for half an hour trying to fix each individual problem. Likewise, the other guy could probably figure out a way to make his server run more smoothly without rebooting every night, but the reboot is the easier solution.
Anyway, until I get hybernation to start working again, I don't have much motivation to look into a better solution since I end up having to restart the laptop at least once a week anyway.
Give 'em a soldering gun and some multimeters, and I think they might surprise you. Given a large enough supply of kindles, you'd be able to scavenge more than enough parts to keep a decent percentage running for a long time. For us it's cheaper to toss the broken one and buy something new; for someone in the middle of Africa, the economics involved are completely different.
The idea that you ought to just reboot to fix things comes from the Windows world.
From the rest of your comment, it seems more like an idea which comes from crappy-software world.
Starting in 2000, I had a win2k workstation running as a home server which eventually reached a 3 year uptime. Meanwhile, my current Ubuntu laptop needs to be rebooted every couple days thanks to the insane memory usage of firefox, and memory leaks caused by the graphics driver. I don't blame "linux" for my problems; it would be just as silly as blaming "windows" for your issues.
Do you really have to attack people personally in each of your responses? My valid reasoning was "idiotic". The other commenter "had something very wrong" with him/her.
I'm not attacking you or 'him/her' - I'm criticizing your positions. You may very well be an idiot - I don't know - but that doesn't concern me; I'm much more interested in the statements you made about this issue. If you expect me to self-censor to avoid hurting your feelings, you're destined for disappointment.
Also, I find it quite humorous that the comment I called "idiotic" was one where you suggested that criticism of an individualâ(TM)s free expression was verboten, and now here you are criticizing my conversational technique! Now, I donâ(TM)t have a problem with people modifying their position to incorporate new data or facts which they were unaware of - in fact, I'd like to see it happen MUCH more often - but you should at least make it clear that you've changed your mind subsequent to the last time we talked. Otherwise I might get the impression that you're just being hypocritical.
Meh. Whose pilots are we gonna capture these days? Irans airforce probably wouldn't survive takeoff, and Kim Jong Il's boys would probably defect before we had a chance to shoot at them. Unless the Taliban has bought some crop-dusters, I don't think it's much of an issue for the next couple decades.
taxes pay for police as well... i think the duty falls on them somewhat.
No, it doesn't. Look up Warren vs. District of Columbia. It deals with a case where three women were beaten, raped, and otherwise degraded for a 14 hour stretched, after not just calling the police, but calling them twice and being assured each time that officers were being dispatched. The women sued the district and lost. Here's the relevant part of the court ruling (emphasis added):
"The Court, however, does not agree that defendants owed a specific legal duty to plaintiffs with respect to the allegations made in the amended complaint for the reason that the District of Columbia appears to follow the well established rule that official police personnel and the government employing them are not generally liable to victims of criminal acts for failure to provide adequate police protection."
If, like me, you're not an American citizen, you might rightly point out that this doesn't apply to your nation. Rest assured that all nations follow a similar rule, for the simple reason that the amount of police officers required to guarantee protection of all individuals would vastly exceed all other government positions combined. Right now you probably have 1 police officer on duty for every 100+ criminals. If you can't understand why the government has no responsibility to protect you, then you don't understand the magnitude of the problem.
if a park is the shortest path between work and the train station, i reserve the right as a free fucking citizen to walk through that park, no matter what time it is. YMMV.
Carry on. Momma Nature reserves the right to present you with a Darwin Award. And I reserve the right to shake my head and/or laugh while reading your obituary.
Sure, of course there are going to be differences. Analogies are always imperfect. However, the original comment stated that the criminal should be "left alone" and the government punished for the failure. If you find that approach to be in any way reasonable, there's something very wrong with you.
(and no, I'm not suggesting that YOU do, I'm only explaining why I responded in the way I did)
Atlantic Richfield, Amoco, Exxon, and Mobil all purchased photovoltaic technologies in the late 70's and soon thereafter lobbied for the repeal of tax credits for solar power. Now why would they do that?
Because the subsidies were idiotic. Even now, after ~30 years of improvement, solar panels are a huge investment with low returns. Back then, you would have been better off just tossing the money in your fireplace.
Not to mention that the idea that oil companies - whose biggest consumers are the transportation sector and large industry - would be worried about home-photovoltaic cutting into their profits is completely absurd. Like the vast majority of conspiracy theories, yours fails even the most cursory examination.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's your brat, you* should pay for its upkeep.
Really? Why?
No matter how you slice it, the current system sucks. Take the case of an unintended pregnancy. If I get a woman pregnant, and she decides to have an abortion, I don't have a say in the matter. If she decides to keep the child, I don't get a say in the matter. Whether or not I shell out hundreds of thousands of dollars depends solely on what decision she makes. How is that fair?
Alternately, consider an intentional pregnancy in a marriage, followed by a divorce. Unless the woman has become a crack-addicted alcoholic prostitute, there's zero chance I'll get sole custody. On the other hand, if she wants sole custody, all she has to do is claim I was an abusive husband and chances are she'll get it.
How is any of that fair? If I don't have a legal right to decide whether the child is born in the first place, and the legal system has the ability to take away my child on the say-so of a third party, why in the world should I feel any responsibility to pay for it? To use Slashdots favourite form of analogy, it's as if a GM rep came to me and said "You owe us $50,000 for this car we made, but you don't get to drive it".
Do you honestly see that as an equitable arrangement?
since living in gitmo isn't known for it's long survival rates
?????
I dunno what the hell you've been smoking, but living in gitmo is paradise compared to the shitholes that most of it's inmates come from. IIRC average weight gain for inmates is 15-20lbs. Not sure where these supposed short survival rates come in - are the prisoners dying from heart attacks after getting fat from eating too much cake?
So while that's true if he's under US law, don't think for even an 1/8th of a second that this would run through traditional US courts.
You're right - it'll never go through "traditional US courts" because the US has no interest in Assange. If they really wanted him out of the way, he would have choked on a peanut months ago. The guy is completely inconsequential - it's only his rabid fans that consider him important enough to go after.
As an experienced combat vet, I can assure you that the vast majority, if not all of the troops will vote for the most effective weapon/ammo that they can carry routinely.
You don't need to assure me of anything - I've been serving since the late 90's, and troops don't get to vote. Purchasing decisions are made based on all sorts of considerations, many of which the average soldier hasn't thought of or doesn't care about.
We don't care what the 'bean-counters', REMF's, 'arm chair general', etc. think
Right, and that's the problem. If it were up to the average grunt, the military would end up looking something like the Taliban - random bits of gear and clothing al thrown together and chosen by the owners preference. That model works ok for a guerrilla force; it doesn't work so well for a professional army.
A bit over the top to be on-topic, IMHO.
Your sarcasm detector must be on the fritz. I'm trained on every weapons system that our military has, plus some that your boys let us play with when we visited. I'm all for diversity in knowledge and capability; I was pointing out the silliness of his suggestion that doing many things "ok" means you won't do anything "well".
The A-10 is one of the best aircraft ever made, and it was a single-purpose fleet
The waffle iron is one of the best appliances ever made.
See how silly that sounds?
And small turboprop CAS vehicles can me used in any COIN operation
And the MRAP can't? I guess it'll spontaneously-combust if it ever crosses a border.
And about a multi-role fleet: being able to do a lot of stuff ok means you can't do anything good.
Right. Which is why a rifleman should never carry grenades. And the guy running the fry-vat should stay the fuck away from the grille.
Don't get me wrong - I like the 6.5mm cartridges (and waffle irons), I love the A-10, and I think UAV's will probably take over the CAS role in the long term. But none of the things you're listing support your basic premise. If the US were to switch from 5.56 to 6.5 tomorrow, you might be happy, but a thousand other guys just like you would be bitching that it's a huge waste of money. If a new project were to be launched to look for a dedicated CAS aircraft, a thousand guys like you would be bitching because the military already has plenty of CAS assets. And I'm not so sure that you wouldn't be with them. You can't please everyone all the time, and you can't please some people ANY time. The fact remains that the US is THE best armed force in the world. That's not going to change just because some dude on slashdot thinks he knows which type of ammunition or aircraft is "The Best".
No, you don't have to go on. You should have never started in the first place. If you think the M-4 is a problem, you don't understand infantry tactics. You suggest that a new single-role fleet should be stood up instead of using a multi-role aircraft, then bitch about a single-role vehicle being procured for a specific theater. And then you whine about a bidding-process whose major problem was that the government wasted money because they wanted to appear fair and impartial. You flail around at random making inconsistent and ignorant complaints because your initial premise is the same as your conclusion, and you care more about proving that you're right than about the truth. Of all the things you've listed, maybe one is a legitimate complaint. Congrats: out of the thousands of projects that the military has been involved with over the years, you've found one that turned out badly.
*golf clap*
But no, you're right: the best equipped military force on the face of the planet is, in fact, full of crappy equipment. War is Peace. Freedom is Slavery. Ignorance is Strength.
What about a design in which you don't send the combatants in the field in the first place?
That would be like /. without the comments. Boring, a waste of money and space, and even more pointless than usual.
And yet somehow it will still get built by the same contractors the military already uses, have huge cost overruns, weigh too much, and be unable to fully fulfill the mission for which it was originally designed.
If you're talking about a White House state dinner, you're probably right. If you're talking about the military, you have no idea what you're talking about, and you clearly haven't looked at the equipment which the US military currently owns.
It's true. I walked into a bank wearing a balaclava, and those damn Nazi rent-a-cops threatened to shoot me. The profiling never stops ...
I'm fine with wikileaks alternatives and don't particularly care about Assange, but I want raw data, and lots of it.
/dev/random
enjoy.
However I suspect for you it would 'Rock out with your pawn out!' Poor AC.
Yeah. Always gets the check, never gets to mate.
Deepak Chopra strikes again.
*facepalm*
Hey, look, there goes jesus on a triceratops!
Yep, because you don't need to use energy to make solar cells - they just fall out of the sky. And because industrial grade smelters can run off a couple calculators daisy-chained together. And lithium is an inexhaustible resource.
Solar isn't even a solution TODAY. If you honestly think we could have transitioned to it 100 years ago, you are completely ignorant of what's involved. The only reason we can even CONSIDER it now is because of the relatively cheap energy which we've been ripping out of the ground for the last century.
Hold on there, Stalin. Why not just save us all the hassle and ship them off to the gulag? I'm sure the next batch of "supervisors" will be highly motivated to ensure that no more disasters befall the Proud Industry of the Motherland.
It's ok. Anyone who quotes 1984 in serious conversation clearly isn't firing on all cylinders, anyway.
I fixed my Sansa e200 using a soldering gun. Last I checked, they didn't make those in 1965, but I could be wrong.
Yes, I know there are ways to fix each individual issue without actually restarting the system, but there are enough persistent problems that
I have the option of doing a reboot - which takes about a minute and a half - or screwing around for half an hour trying to fix each individual problem. Likewise, the other guy could probably figure out a way to make his server run more smoothly without rebooting every night, but the reboot is the easier solution.
Anyway, until I get hybernation to start working again, I don't have much motivation to look into a better solution since I end up having to restart the laptop at least once a week anyway.
Give 'em a soldering gun and some multimeters, and I think they might surprise you. Given a large enough supply of kindles, you'd be able to scavenge more than enough parts to keep a decent percentage running for a long time. For us it's cheaper to toss the broken one and buy something new; for someone in the middle of Africa, the economics involved are completely different.
The idea that you ought to just reboot to fix things comes from the Windows world.
From the rest of your comment, it seems more like an idea which comes from crappy-software world.
Starting in 2000, I had a win2k workstation running as a home server which eventually reached a 3 year uptime. Meanwhile, my current Ubuntu laptop needs to be rebooted every couple days thanks to the insane memory usage of firefox, and memory leaks caused by the graphics driver. I don't blame "linux" for my problems; it would be just as silly as blaming "windows" for your issues.
Do you really have to attack people personally in each of your responses? My valid reasoning was "idiotic". The other commenter "had something very wrong" with him/her.
I'm not attacking you or 'him/her' - I'm criticizing your positions. You may very well be an idiot - I don't know - but that doesn't concern me; I'm much more interested in the statements you made about this issue. If you expect me to self-censor to avoid hurting your feelings, you're destined for disappointment.
Also, I find it quite humorous that the comment I called "idiotic" was one where you suggested that criticism of an individualâ(TM)s free expression was verboten, and now here you are criticizing my conversational technique! Now, I donâ(TM)t have a problem with people modifying their position to incorporate new data or facts which they were unaware of - in fact, I'd like to see it happen MUCH more often - but you should at least make it clear that you've changed your mind subsequent to the last time we talked. Otherwise I might get the impression that you're just being hypocritical.
Meh. Whose pilots are we gonna capture these days? Irans airforce probably wouldn't survive takeoff, and Kim Jong Il's boys would probably defect before we had a chance to shoot at them. Unless the Taliban has bought some crop-dusters, I don't think it's much of an issue for the next couple decades.
taxes pay for police as well... i think the duty falls on them somewhat.
No, it doesn't. Look up Warren vs. District of Columbia. It deals with a case where three women were beaten, raped, and otherwise degraded for a 14 hour stretched, after not just calling the police, but calling them twice and being assured each time that officers were being dispatched. The women sued the district and lost. Here's the relevant part of the court ruling (emphasis added):
"The Court, however, does not agree that defendants owed a specific legal duty to plaintiffs with respect to the allegations made in the amended complaint for the reason that the District of Columbia appears to follow the well established rule that official police personnel and the government employing them are not generally liable to victims of criminal acts for failure to provide adequate police protection."
If, like me, you're not an American citizen, you might rightly point out that this doesn't apply to your nation. Rest assured that all nations follow a similar rule, for the simple reason that the amount of police officers required to guarantee protection of all individuals would vastly exceed all other government positions combined. Right now you probably have 1 police officer on duty for every 100+ criminals. If you can't understand why the government has no responsibility to protect you, then you don't understand the magnitude of the problem.
if a park is the shortest path between work and the train station, i reserve the right as a free fucking citizen to walk through that park, no matter what time it is. YMMV.
Carry on. Momma Nature reserves the right to present you with a Darwin Award. And I reserve the right to shake my head and/or laugh while reading your obituary.
Sure, of course there are going to be differences. Analogies are always imperfect. However, the original comment stated that the criminal should be "left alone" and the government punished for the failure. If you find that approach to be in any way reasonable, there's something very wrong with you.
(and no, I'm not suggesting that YOU do, I'm only explaining why I responded in the way I did)
Atlantic Richfield, Amoco, Exxon, and Mobil all purchased photovoltaic technologies in the late 70's and soon thereafter lobbied for the repeal of tax credits for solar power. Now why would they do that?
Because the subsidies were idiotic. Even now, after ~30 years of improvement, solar panels are a huge investment with low returns. Back then, you would have been better off just tossing the money in your fireplace.
Not to mention that the idea that oil companies - whose biggest consumers are the transportation sector and large industry - would be worried about home-photovoltaic cutting into their profits is completely absurd. Like the vast majority of conspiracy theories, yours fails even the most cursory examination.
Blaming a woman for the way she dresses in a rape trial would be attacking her freedom of expression.
No, it would be blaming the victim.
The former is not okay. The latter is responsible and should be expected.
Nonsense. You're effectively saying that it's not ok to criticize people - it's only ok to criticize the government. That's idiotic.