Ok, heading for ruin. I hope I'm wrong, but there's a book that was required reading in an undergraduate sociology class I had to take in the late '70s; it's Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen; the link it to the full text of the book (I have it in paperback, it's still on my bookshelf). The similarities to the Bush administration and the Coolige administrations are almost as scary as the similarities between the stock market and housing markets then and now.
Wait, your pegging this report on the current administration?
No, I'm pegging the use of it to the current administration. I've seen no evidence of anyone being held indefinitly without trial or tortured or any of the other horrible things this administration has done, by previous administrations. If it comes to light that people were tortured with Clinton's complicity then yes, I would demand that he, too be held accountable.
But I've never even seen that suggested, let alone proven.
Writing "torture is ok" in a field manual isn't illegal until the torture actually happens. It happened under Bush's watch, not Clinton's.
BTW, amended in 2004. That was the year Bush was REelected.
As to Clinton, I'd like to see him and Janet Reno on trial for Waco and Ruby Ridge.
I can still fill my car up with gas without showing the attendant a permission slip from the government.
You obviously weren't old enough to drive in 1979, when you were only allowed to buy gas every other day and had a limit on how much you could buy.
I believe there were more US citizens of Japanese descent held in internment camps than there are US citizens in Gitmo.
Hirohito didn't cause that any more than Bin Laden caused Gitmo. That's on Truman's head.
I suggest that perhaps folks might want to stop voting Democrat and Republican.
I'd LOVE to see term limits established so we can end the perpetual re-election campaigning
So would I! I'd also like to see it illegal to "contribute" to more than one candidate in any given race, and illegal to contribute to anyone you're not eligible to vote for. Actually I'd like to see an end to campaign contributions altogether and have elections 100% publically funded.
I'd like to see term limits on laws, too. Ten years and a law must be relegislated or it's off the books; and I'd like to see a yearly referendum where no bill enacted becomes law until it's voted on by the citizens.
If enough people demanded these things we'd get them.
There's a "plain text option; your comment would be far more readable if you used paragraphs. But I'll try to wade through it.
Somehow I think you are lying. The first time in 56 years over some criminals stashed away in cuba this make you ashamed?
They're not criminals; not until they have been tried in a court of law and convicted. Never before in my lifetime were people imprisoned by my government without council, without habeus corpus, without trial.
Never before (that I am aware of) has my government sanctioned torture.
If you are an American you are part of the government you are just as much to blame as any functionary.
If I had voted for Bush, or not voted at all, then I would have culpability. But I voted against him, and did so twice. How am I to blame? What would you have me do, take up arms?
Does the government do what you want it to do?
No, it doesn't. It does what Sony and Shell and BP tell it to do.
If it doesn't does that make you blameless?
Yes, it does make me blameless.
is it bush's fault that sirhan killed kennedy because he was pro israel?
Dude, you just keep getting less and less coherent with each sentence. Bush was in the Texas National Guard when Kennedy was shot; he was only 22 years old!
"we" want to blame "them" and then exonerate ourselves so we can feel good about ourselves
If I do something wrong it's on my head. If you do something wrong it's not.
Liberals seem to be especially good at blaming everyone but themselves for the mess we are in.
I've voted for as many Republicans as I have Democrats. So what does "liberal" and "conservative" have to do with it?
I think that most people do the try to do the right thing no matter what their politics, religion, ethnicity, or any other category you want to name
Normal people do, but Bush isn't "normal people". As another commentor said, he's a psychopath, or at best a sociopath.
You are guilty of pressuring the government, corporations, and yes probably even your own family into doing things so that you can continue to live the way that you want to.
You've never met me, yet you think you know all about me. I'll bet you can't even tell me my last name, despite the fact that I've posted it here at slashdot.
So lets all find a straw man to blame friggin everything on and dream up all kinds of rationalizations as to why they and those around them are evil.
You seem to not know what a "straw man" is. Have a look at the wikipedia entry. Know what a term is before you use it.
You sir are a hypocrite unless you are living in a field growing your own food and of coarse [sic] not eating any meat
You also don't seem to know the deficintion of Hypocrite. I never spoke against agriculture or carnivorousness.
Your spare time should be spent volunteering for the poor
You have no idea how much I do for he poor. The possessions of five homeless people are stored in my basement for them as I write this. What have YOU done for the poor?
I have nothing but contempt for your ilk's spoiled whiny self righteousness.
And I have nothing but pity for you and your apparent medical condition. I urge you to get professional help.
You can't just "realize" something like that. The government-run schools have the responsibility to teach our youth, and the corporate media (corporations run the government) have the responsibility to inform adults.
Americans simply don't know any better. Someone did a poll in Californis about various rights enumerated in our Constitution's first ten amendmants, and an overwhelming majority thought that they were an extremely bad idea.
So, a dictator guilty of crimes against humanity on a regular basis, who funded terrorists groups, and was so absolutely devoid any sense of human dignity wasn't a good reason?
No, it wasn't. Otherwise we should invade Syria, China, North Korea, Burma, Pakistan, and a shitload of other countries, many in out own hemisphere.
Oh, and just because we haven't found the WMDs doesn't mean they didn't have them.
Just because nobody found any bodies buried in your backyard doesn't mean you never murdered anyone, either. That's the same piss-poor logic you're using here. Hussein himself (after his capture, and BTW where's Bin Laden? Shouldn't we be invading Pakistan?) said the rumors of WMDs were a ploy to keep Iran from invading.
We are still finding caches of weapons and other dangerous things not known before.
That's becauise they weren't there before. The terrorists (who were NOT in Iraq before the invasion) are importing them from Syria and other such benevolent democracies.
I wish you had not posted anonymously, because your post shows all the hallmarks of shillage. You SAY you prefer Linux; you call it Wondows "Windoze", you know the names of two Linux distros.
Then you slobber all over Microsoft's OS. Sorry, but there's no way in hell I'm going to believe you're not part of Microsoft's marketing department. If you had not posted anonymously I could look at your comment history.
If I metamod your comment, the mods who marked it "insightful" probably won't get any more mod points. I see no insight; I see a Microsoft shill.
It is also different and often it seems like it is different not to be better but to just be different.
This is my number one complaint about every piece of Microsoft software, both apps and OSes. They can't leave well enough alone. They seem to have never heard the phrase "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
Take IE, for exampple. IIRC its different versions have had "options" under file, edit. view, tools, and even help in its various incarnations. Microsoft is like a woman - always moving your stuff so you can't find it.
Some time back in the nineties, my employer's IT department decided they'd switch from the Word Perfect suite to Office. I'd learned Quattro, but decided that if they were switching to Excel I'd better learn Excel, since after they switched to MS I needed to learn how to use a spreadsheet again. So they sent me to an Excel class, then three weeks later upgraded to a newer version of Excel.
The new version of Excel was more like Quattro than it was like the old version of Excel, down to the placement of the menu subitems! If I hadn't known how to use Quattro I'd have had to take another class. Wasting your customers' money without getting any of it yourself is pretty damned foolish if you ask me.
Look folks, the reason for the extra $50 is simple. You get both a rabid dog, AND dogshit.
I know it's a lot more fun to make fun of the summary, than to commit Microsoft executives to an insane asylum. But if you actually use Windows, it's not so pathetic.
There seems to be a correlation, but which is cause and which is effect? I think rather than SUVs turning people into asshole, selfish people who don't care about anyone else on the road are more likely to buy SUVs.
I'm going to have to RTFA! I keep wondering why my old Quake site the Springfield Fragfest (abandoned years ago) is in the Wayback Machine, while "Kneel" Harriot's Yello There has seemingly disappeared from the entire internet.
The only page from Yello There I can find is one that was linked from my site (the aformentioned Quake site). That particular page was wonderfully recursive because of Yello's frame.
Yes, there are polite bicyclists and asshole motorcyclists; there are always exceptions.
I'd modify your theory slightly: a drivers politeness is directly proportional to how fscked up they percieve they will get in an accident.
SUVs are inherently dangerous, yet their drivers perceive them as being safe. SUV drivers disproportionally die on the roadways, probably partly because they perceive themselves to be invulnerable.
Someone posted a link here last week to a fascinating article about SUVs and their perceived safety vs their actual lack of same. I wish I'd have kept the link.
Calling him "son" is a derogatory ad-hominem attack
Being called "son" is a friendly reminder that you are speaking to your elder. I'm a geezer; damned near everyone here is young enough to be my offspring. If there's anything derogatory about it I never knew it all those years my elders called me "son".
I argue about freedom of the press all the time, regardless of whether or not those seeking to limit publication are "provoking" me.
That's a good thing. But in a forum like this, offtopic comments that would provoke an emotional response are called "trolls". That's almost word for word from the wilipedia article about internet trolls.
Are you suggesting that I need to be attacked before I have the right to criticize?
That depends on the venue. I'd say anything is fair game in your journal, which I see you don't use. In a topic about road rage a discussion of Rumsfeld or Muhammed is offtopic and inflammatory - in short, a troll.
Hundreds of thousands of images on Flickr are being used to teach a program to determine the geographic location of an image, simply by looking at it.
teach Audio Help/tit/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[teech] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation verb, taught, teaching, noun -verb (used with object) 1. to impart knowledge of or skill in; give instruction in: She teaches mathematics. 2. to impart knowledge or skill to; give instruction to: He teaches a large class. -verb (used without object) 3. to impart knowledge or skill; give instruction. -noun 4. Informal. teacher.
look Audio Help (lk) Pronunciation Key v. looked, looking, looks v. intr. To employ one's sight, especially in a given direction or on a given object: looking out the window; looked at the floor. To search: We looked all afternoon but could not find it. To turn one's glance or gaze: looked to the right. To turn one's attention; attend: looked to his neglected guitar during vacation; looked at the evidence. To turn one's expectations: looked to us for a solution.
To turn one's glance or gaze: looked to the right. To turn one's attention; attend: looked to his neglected guitar during vacation; looked at the evidence. To turn one's expectations: looked to us for a solution. To seem or appear to be: look morose. See Synonyms at seem. To face in a specified direction: The cottage looks on the river.
Anthropomorphism is the attribution of uniquely human characteristics to non-human creatures and beings, natural and supernatural phenomena, material states and objects or abstract concepts. Subjects for anthropomorphism commonly include animals depicted as creatures with human motivation able to reason and converse, forces of nature such as winds or the sun, components in games, unseen or unknown sources of chance, etc. Almost anything can be subject to anthropomorphism. The term derives from a combination of Greek (anthrpos), human and (morph), shape or form.
Humans seem to have an innate capacity to project human characteristics in this way. Evidence from art and artefacts suggests it is a long-held propensity that can be dated back to earliest times. It is strongly associated with the art of storytelling where it also appears to have ancient roots. Most cultures possess a long-standing fable tradition with anthropomorphised animals as characters that can stand as commonly recognised types of human behaviour. The use of such literature to draw moral conclusions can be highly complex.[1]
Within these terms, humans have more recently been identified as having an equivalent opposite propensity to deny common traits with other species - most particularly apes - as part of a feeling that humans are unique and "special." This tendency has been referred to as Anthropodenial by primatologist Frans de Waal.
No, it was a big black Chevy Suburban, the kind the DEA and the FBI jumped out of last summer when they tried to bust me and two friends for drugs we didn't have because we were wearing the wrong color skin (white) in the wrong neighborhood. Journaled last January.
The fact that it was the same make and model that the US Gestapo (Secret Police) use made it worse.
Why do people mod up posts like this calling people assholes and the like?
The post I was responding to said "whenever I see the Jesus fish on the back of a car, I do want to run it off the road on general principle."
Anyone who would tell you that he wants to run someone off the road for his beliefs IS an asshole. If you're going to post flamebait you should expect to get flamed. You might want to look "internet troll" up in wikipedia.
A single person's experience contrary to the norm is not a valid statistical sample.
Nobody said it was. Not every experience has to be statistically signifigant. In fact, I'm usually at the head or tail of every bell curve there is; very little of my life's exeperiences have been in any way normal.
What do you suggest? Asking the insurgents nicely to go home?
They are home. We invaded their country, not the other way around. WE are the vilianous aggressors in Iraq, not the Iraqis.
I never thought I'd see a worse President than Carter, but Bush has managed to prove me wrong. I never thought I'd see a more useless, more destructive to America war than Vietnam, but again Bush managed to accomplish that as well.
How can he sleep with all thouse deaths on his head?
Slashdot Mirror
ignorance of the law, confusion regarding the GPL
Are you really trying to tell us that a company that size has no lawyers?
Ok, heading for ruin. I hope I'm wrong, but there's a book that was required reading in an undergraduate sociology class I had to take in the late '70s; it's Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen; the link it to the full text of the book (I have it in paperback, it's still on my bookshelf). The similarities to the Bush administration and the Coolige administrations are almost as scary as the similarities between the stock market and housing markets then and now.
I sincerely hope I'm wrong.
Do you believe everything you read in the newspaper?
I believe very little of what I read in the newspaper.
Wait, your pegging this report on the current administration?
No, I'm pegging the use of it to the current administration. I've seen no evidence of anyone being held indefinitly without trial or tortured or any of the other horrible things this administration has done, by previous administrations. If it comes to light that people were tortured with Clinton's complicity then yes, I would demand that he, too be held accountable.
But I've never even seen that suggested, let alone proven.
Writing "torture is ok" in a field manual isn't illegal until the torture actually happens. It happened under Bush's watch, not Clinton's.
BTW, amended in 2004. That was the year Bush was REelected.
As to Clinton, I'd like to see him and Janet Reno on trial for Waco and Ruby Ridge.
I can still fill my car up with gas without showing the attendant a permission slip from the government.
You obviously weren't old enough to drive in 1979, when you were only allowed to buy gas every other day and had a limit on how much you could buy.
I believe there were more US citizens of Japanese descent held in internment camps than there are US citizens in Gitmo.
Hirohito didn't cause that any more than Bin Laden caused Gitmo. That's on Truman's head.
What do you suggest? Armed insurrection?
I suggest that perhaps folks might want to stop voting Democrat and Republican.
I'd LOVE to see term limits established so we can end the perpetual re-election campaigning
So would I! I'd also like to see it illegal to "contribute" to more than one candidate in any given race, and illegal to contribute to anyone you're not eligible to vote for. Actually I'd like to see an end to campaign contributions altogether and have elections 100% publically funded.
I'd like to see term limits on laws, too. Ten years and a law must be relegislated or it's off the books; and I'd like to see a yearly referendum where no bill enacted becomes law until it's voted on by the citizens.
If enough people demanded these things we'd get them.
There's a "plain text option; your comment would be far more readable if you used paragraphs. But I'll try to wade through it.
Somehow I think you are lying. The first time in 56 years over some criminals stashed away in cuba this make you ashamed?
They're not criminals; not until they have been tried in a court of law and convicted. Never before in my lifetime were people imprisoned by my government without council, without habeus corpus, without trial.
Never before (that I am aware of) has my government sanctioned torture.
If you are an American you are part of the government you are just as much to blame as any functionary.
If I had voted for Bush, or not voted at all, then I would have culpability. But I voted against him, and did so twice. How am I to blame? What would you have me do, take up arms?
Does the government do what you want it to do?
No, it doesn't. It does what Sony and Shell and BP tell it to do.
If it doesn't does that make you blameless?
Yes, it does make me blameless.
is it bush's fault that sirhan killed kennedy because he was pro israel?
Dude, you just keep getting less and less coherent with each sentence. Bush was in the Texas National Guard when Kennedy was shot; he was only 22 years old!
"we" want to blame "them" and then exonerate ourselves so we can feel good about ourselves
If I do something wrong it's on my head. If you do something wrong it's not.
Liberals seem to be especially good at blaming everyone but themselves for the mess we are in.
I've voted for as many Republicans as I have Democrats. So what does "liberal" and "conservative" have to do with it?
I think that most people do the try to do the right thing no matter what their politics, religion, ethnicity, or any other category you want to name
Normal people do, but Bush isn't "normal people". As another commentor said, he's a psychopath, or at best a sociopath.
You are guilty of pressuring the government, corporations, and yes probably even your own family into doing things so that you can continue to live the way that you want to.
You've never met me, yet you think you know all about me. I'll bet you can't even tell me my last name, despite the fact that I've posted it here at slashdot.
So lets all find a straw man to blame friggin everything on and dream up all kinds of rationalizations as to why they and those around them are evil.
You seem to not know what a "straw man" is. Have a look at the wikipedia entry. Know what a term is before you use it.
You sir are a hypocrite unless you are living in a field growing your own food and of coarse [sic] not eating any meat
You also don't seem to know the deficintion of Hypocrite. I never spoke against agriculture or carnivorousness.
Your spare time should be spent volunteering for the poor
You have no idea how much I do for he poor. The possessions of five homeless people are stored in my basement for them as I write this. What have YOU done for the poor?
I have nothing but contempt for your ilk's spoiled whiny self righteousness.
And I have nothing but pity for you and your apparent medical condition. I urge you to get professional help.
You can't just "realize" something like that. The government-run schools have the responsibility to teach our youth, and the corporate media (corporations run the government) have the responsibility to inform adults.
Americans simply don't know any better. Someone did a poll in Californis about various rights enumerated in our Constitution's first ten amendmants, and an overwhelming majority thought that they were an extremely bad idea.
So, a dictator guilty of crimes against humanity on a regular basis, who funded terrorists groups, and was so absolutely devoid any sense of human dignity wasn't a good reason?
No, it wasn't. Otherwise we should invade Syria, China, North Korea, Burma, Pakistan, and a shitload of other countries, many in out own hemisphere.
Oh, and just because we haven't found the WMDs doesn't mean they didn't have them.
Just because nobody found any bodies buried in your backyard doesn't mean you never murdered anyone, either. That's the same piss-poor logic you're using here. Hussein himself (after his capture, and BTW where's Bin Laden? Shouldn't we be invading Pakistan?) said the rumors of WMDs were a ploy to keep Iran from invading.
We are still finding caches of weapons and other dangerous things not known before.
That's becauise they weren't there before. The terrorists (who were NOT in Iraq before the invasion) are importing them from Syria and other such benevolent democracies.
Is FOX the only channel on your TV?
I wish you had not posted anonymously, because your post shows all the hallmarks of shillage. You SAY you prefer Linux; you call it Wondows "Windoze", you know the names of two Linux distros.
Then you slobber all over Microsoft's OS. Sorry, but there's no way in hell I'm going to believe you're not part of Microsoft's marketing department. If you had not posted anonymously I could look at your comment history.
If I metamod your comment, the mods who marked it "insightful" probably won't get any more mod points. I see no insight; I see a Microsoft shill.
It is also different and often it seems like it is different not to be better but to just be different.
This is my number one complaint about every piece of Microsoft software, both apps and OSes. They can't leave well enough alone. They seem to have never heard the phrase "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
Take IE, for exampple. IIRC its different versions have had "options" under file, edit. view, tools, and even help in its various incarnations. Microsoft is like a woman - always moving your stuff so you can't find it.
Some time back in the nineties, my employer's IT department decided they'd switch from the Word Perfect suite to Office. I'd learned Quattro, but decided that if they were switching to Excel I'd better learn Excel, since after they switched to MS I needed to learn how to use a spreadsheet again. So they sent me to an Excel class, then three weeks later upgraded to a newer version of Excel.
The new version of Excel was more like Quattro than it was like the old version of Excel, down to the placement of the menu subitems! If I hadn't known how to use Quattro I'd have had to take another class. Wasting your customers' money without getting any of it yourself is pretty damned foolish if you ask me.
have been making a list of irritations that are novel to Vista.
Please post it in your as-yet nonexistant slashdot journal!
Look folks, the reason for the extra $50 is simple. You get both a rabid dog, AND dogshit.
I know it's a lot more fun to make fun of the summary, than to commit Microsoft executives to an insane asylum. But if you actually use Windows, it's not so pathetic.
There seems to be a correlation, but which is cause and which is effect? I think rather than SUVs turning people into asshole, selfish people who don't care about anyone else on the road are more likely to buy SUVs.
I'm going to have to RTFA! I keep wondering why my old Quake site the Springfield Fragfest (abandoned years ago) is in the Wayback Machine, while "Kneel" Harriot's Yello There has seemingly disappeared from the entire internet.
The only page from Yello There I can find is one that was linked from my site (the aformentioned Quake site). That particular page was wonderfully recursive because of Yello's frame.
Nirvana, In Bloom:
Yes, there are polite bicyclists and asshole motorcyclists; there are always exceptions.
I'd modify your theory slightly: a drivers politeness is directly proportional to how fscked up they percieve they will get in an accident.
SUVs are inherently dangerous, yet their drivers perceive them as being safe. SUV drivers disproportionally die on the roadways, probably partly because they perceive themselves to be invulnerable.
Someone posted a link here last week to a fascinating article about SUVs and their perceived safety vs their actual lack of same. I wish I'd have kept the link.
Calling him "son" is a derogatory ad-hominem attack
Being called "son" is a friendly reminder that you are speaking to your elder. I'm a geezer; damned near everyone here is young enough to be my offspring. If there's anything derogatory about it I never knew it all those years my elders called me "son".
I argue about freedom of the press all the time, regardless of whether or not those seeking to limit publication are "provoking" me.
That's a good thing. But in a forum like this, offtopic comments that would provoke an emotional response are called "trolls". That's almost word for word from the wilipedia article about internet trolls.
Are you suggesting that I need to be attacked before I have the right to criticize?
That depends on the venue. I'd say anything is fair game in your journal, which I see you don't use. In a topic about road rage a discussion of Rumsfeld or Muhammed is offtopic and inflammatory - in short, a troll.
I don't suffer trolls gladly.
No, it was a big black Chevy Suburban, the kind the DEA and the FBI jumped out of last summer when they tried to bust me and two friends for drugs we didn't have because we were wearing the wrong color skin (white) in the wrong neighborhood. Journaled last January.
The fact that it was the same make and model that the US Gestapo (Secret Police) use made it worse.
Why do people mod up posts like this calling people assholes and the like?
The post I was responding to said "whenever I see the Jesus fish on the back of a car, I do want to run it off the road on general principle."
Anyone who would tell you that he wants to run someone off the road for his beliefs IS an asshole. If you're going to post flamebait you should expect to get flamed. You might want to look "internet troll" up in wikipedia.
A single person's experience contrary to the norm is not a valid statistical sample.
Nobody said it was. Not every experience has to be statistically signifigant. In fact, I'm usually at the head or tail of every bell curve there is; very little of my life's exeperiences have been in any way normal.
I should buy lottery tickets.
and I thought the only security hole in coffee was drugging it.
Damn it, someone replaced my cocaine with morph...zzzZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ
What do you suggest? Asking the insurgents nicely to go home?
They are home. We invaded their country, not the other way around. WE are the vilianous aggressors in Iraq, not the Iraqis.
I never thought I'd see a worse President than Carter, but Bush has managed to prove me wrong. I never thought I'd see a more useless, more destructive to America war than Vietnam, but again Bush managed to accomplish that as well.
How can he sleep with all thouse deaths on his head?
All these are valid tactics for civil war.
Our civil war was over well over a hundred years ago. WTF are we doing starting a civil war in Iraq? There was absolutely no justification.
What's the difference between sex and coffee?
Hackers can get coffee.
Should I assume that the coffeepot that can be cracked by an outside attacker was manufactured by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation?
If Iraq had attacked us I would agree with you. But they didn't - we are the agressors. We are to Iraq what Japan was to us in WWII.