Except they did work, and worked better, in the last version. The kernel maintainers swapped out the working version for a flakey version, and now have made enough changes that the working version won't work even if you compile it in manually.
Did it occur to you to actually read the post you were replying to? This was in all there, not behind a link or anything.
Maybe a stupid question, but why does rumble support for N64 pads have anything that goes in the kernel? Doesn't Linux have any kind of abstraction layer for game controllers?
Re:50 years, and still no portable death ray.
on
The Laser Turns 50
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· Score: 1
It would be quite a challenge to make a laser-based death ray that performs as well as our current chemical-based death-dealing devices-- if you could make a battery to effectively supply a laser pistol, and weighs as much or less as the equivalent cordite, I sure as hell want one of those in my cellphone.
It's good to know that, while so many hundreds of thing in Slashdot don't even fucking work, or work the exact same way they did in 1997 (when it's, lemme check my calendar, oh yeah, 2010) that they've wasted so much time making those stupid headers.
Although I have to admit it's slightly clever as far as easter eggs go. I'd never have thought to look at the headers for the page itself in a million years.
I do a lot of job interviews. I see approximately zero correlation between possessing a degree and being "intelligent" (defined as: suited for the job.) There are a hell of a lot of people with CS degrees who can't write a line of code. There's also a good amount of "some college" or high school grads who can program up a storm. (They are harder to find, I think because they don't jump jobs as much because they're afraid of their lack of degree. That's my hunch.)
Your first recommendation assumes its the responsibility of the editor to be an expert in every article. It's not. The contributors are responsible for doing the research,
Two points: 1) There's no concept of ownership on Wikipedia, so the "editor" (as you call them) owns the article as much as anybody. 2) In theory, everything posted to Wikipedia is look-up-able, so the "editor" is just as capable of looking up the factoid as anybody else
The reason editors shit [citation needed] tags all over is because they're lazy. It's a good way to appear to be fixing articles without actually doing any actual work... after all, looking up citations might involve getting their fat ass off the office chair and going to a library! Gasp!
the editors are merely there to make sure the final article is of good quality.
And adding [citation needed] tags increases the quality... how?
Oh right, it doesn't. It actually hugely decreases the quality substantially. All the possible crap is still in the article, but now it's hard-to-read as well. WHAT AN IMPROVEMENT!
On the other hand, if you just up and delete, that must mean that you know it's wrong.
No, what I'm saying is that a real "editor" (instead of someone who's just pretending to edit) would try to look up the factoid, and delete it if they can't find a reference-- without ever adding a [citation needed] tag.
If they come to the article, and they're too lazy to look up the factoid so they shit tags all over, they're not contributing to the project. It's just adding noise.
I think the biggest problem with wikipedia are the people deleting shit. If it's vandalism, delete it. If you know for sure that something is wrong, and can post the factual information with citations, then delete it.
I actually agree with you.
But since the Wikipedia elite have already decided to be deletionists, they might as well do it properly and consistently.
The website you and I want doesn't exist, and never will at the "wikipedia.org" domain. After all, if Wales added pop culture articles that people want to read, how would he get money from Wikia.com? He might have to get a job!
I'm not sure why the tags would bother anyone, even if they are up there for six years.
Real encyclopedias, which is the example Wikipedia is trying to follow, don't have little annoying tags after every fucking sentence.
Well, hopefully, you'd have "polish" in the "things you rub on shoes" folder and "Polish" in the "nationalities" folder. Unless you have the most disorganized filesystem on the planet, I can't conceive of a way that those two files would be in the same folder.
Look, I do support. I work with end-users. It's already confusing enough that they can have a text document named "Polish" and an image named "Polish" in the same folder. They can't handle anything more confusing than that, even if there is some extremely rare edge-case that Linux geeks might benefit from.
The message there is basically, "I think whoever wrote this is wrong, but I'm too fucking lazy to look it up my damn self. Therefore, I'll shit this tag on it so one of my slaves can look it up later." Except there aren't any slaves, so the damned [citation needed] stays up for 6 years.
Look, if the factoid sounds like bullshit, you have two options: 1) Look it up your damned self and add a citation 2) Delete it
Don't shit tags all over the place. That's not fixing the problem, that's just adding to it.
Case-insensitive filesystems already preserve whatever case you originally named the file as (on Macs: back to the original HFS in 1984.) This is already a completely solved problem.
It's also an indication that the code is shit, and written by Windows morons who don't give a shit about a clean mac port.
I don't think that follows; by that logic, since Windows already uses the case-insensitive NTFS, it should be broken on Windows as well, right?
I'd wager the bug is in a third-party library they're using. If they know about the issue enough to write a knowledge base article, it's harder than trivial to fix and might be in someone else's code.
Apple's HFS has always been case insensitive, back to 1984. This is only an issue because, since OS X is based on Unix, a certain (tiny) subset of people want to use it "the Unix way". Real Mac users (meaning: have been using a Mac longer than 5 years) wouldn't, in a million years, go out of their way to format a drive as case sensitive.
Whats hard? No one would ever notice really, with a GUI the issue is moot unless you care about it.
Or until they hit "sort by name".
You really have to be a douche bag to make an app that cant' deal with case sensitive file systems. It takes effort or absolutely unacceptable programming practices to accomplish what they've done.
Then don't use it, and relax a bit. It's not like you're out anything: you didn't have access to Steam yesterday, and you don't today.
OS X (which is a certified Unix, for whatever that matters) creates case-insensitive filesystems by default. You have to go out of your way to make a case-sensitive one.
This is because Apple, like all right-thinking people, realizes how stupid and hard-to-use a case-sensitive filesystem is. (Debate below.:)
I think what they're trying to communicate is: "We've had to delay this, since the comments are so positive we don't believe we're getting an accurate cross-section of opinion."
Which I guess I see as valid, if this legislation wasn't already overdue by at least 10 years.
Goddamned, I fucked up the tags, and Slashdot sucks shit. That last paragraph should read:
However I've never seen anyone give a convincing argument why hate speech should be allowed
Because there's no universal agreement on what "hate speech" is?
Hell, look at Canada: Mark Steyn can be prosecuted by a special government commission for simply quoting somebody else in his book! In Canada, quoting a radial Imam is equivalent to holding the same opinion yourself. This is where "hate speech" laws lead you!
You don't need to rely on a theoretical "slippery slope," you can watch it happen in real-time.
That's a point we differ on. I agree with the German government (and many other governments) that yes, it should be. Speech is NOT harmless. It can influence people (again, look at advertising), and therefore large amounts of hate speech can cause serious problems.
If and When it is used to talk somebody into committing a crime, then a crime has been committed. Until an actual crime occurs, it's equivalent to 1984's "thoughtcrime".
If I do an action that hurts you, than I'm at fault and I could be prosecuted for it. If I say a word that hurts you, that's *your* fault... if you haven't learned by adulthood that "sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never harm me", that's not my problem. If you haven't internalized your sense of self-worth, well, I'm sorry, it's going to be a long, hard life for you-- but it's not my fucking fault.
I think people just prefer to err on the side of caution since it doesn't hurt. While I COULD make a game with characters wearing Nazi uniforms and plaster the walls of the game with Swastikas, and then have a VALID argument in court that it's okay because I'm showing the historical fact and not espousing the ideology associated with it, why would I WANT to go through all that hassle when it's easier not to? I think the only people that really WANT to plaster Nazi symbols everywhere are neo-Nazis, and that's exactly what these laws exist to stop.
Ok:
1) The government has already successfully regulated your actions by making you too terrified to exercise your rights.
2) How are you seriously suggesting that putting historically accurate costumes in a video game is equivalent to "plastering Nazi symbols everywhere." That argument is so specious I can't even believe you typed it.
Look, the US uses Nazi symbols in movies and video games... and somehow we have fewer neo-Nazis than you do, so I'm thinking the symbols are utterly unrelated to the problem.
Outlaw the ability to tell the children to hate black people, and racism will die (not immediately of course, there's still all of the societal problems to fix that were caused by it to begin with, such as higher crime rates in ghettos and so on, but it'd be a HUGE first step)
No, it won't. Make the law completely color-blind, like everything else, and racism will eventually go away. Every time you call out somebody based on skin color, *whether positive or negative*, you're encouraging racism.
BTW, how the holy hell are you saying all this and claiming to be a Libertarian? Do you even know what "Libertarian" means? This conversation is like, "yah I'm a vegetarian, but I think everybody should eat rare steaks twice a day." It's crazy.
However I've never seen anyone give a convincing argument why hate speech should be allowedquoting somebody else in his book! In Canada, quoting a radial Imam is equivalent to holding the same opinion yourself. This is where "hate speech" laws lead you!
You don't need to rely on a theoretical "slippery slope," you can watch it happen in real-time.
Yes, this IS restricting the choice of the boss, but I don't feel a society can function well and take care of all its members when such a situation is possible.
So you're telling me that my society (in Washington State) isn't functioning well right now?
Moreover, it's functioning worse than (for example) California's?
The homeless people on the streets of NYC for example tend to be in pretty bad situations with no obvious way out for them. They can go stay in shelters where crime and violence are worse than their own "communities" on the streets, but despite there being programmes there that are intended to help them, the success rate is extremely low.
First of all, I'm going to sound like a jerk, but I really don't care about New York whatsoever. As far as I'm concerned, that's a completely different country from me-- I'm thousands of miles away and in a vastly, vastly different culture.
Secondly, homeless people are generally mentally-ill. That doesn't excuse the fact that they're homeless, but it does mean that the current programs to assist them (shelters) are only addressing a small portion of the actual problem.
Well, like I said I'm not German, I just live here... but I don't think anyone really "worships" a royal family anywhere these days. There are quite a few Monarchies here in Europe and in almost all cases, they're pretty much just figureheads.
The British do.
Freedom of speech here is guaranteed by the constitution, as is the freedom of the press (a related and equally important topic)... The reason it's commonly perceived as though freedom of speech is limited here is that it's not the "highest" right that is given.
Yah; it's guaranteed by the Chinese constitution also. (Seriously, look it up.) That doesn't mean you got it.
Putting a SS logo on the shoulder of a CGI soldier in a video game about WWII isn't "hate speech" by any reasonable definition of the term.
Even if it was, so what? Hate speech shouldn't be a crime by itself.
It can be argued that "human dignity" is a pretty broad thing and therefore this interpretation is open to abuse, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree with you, but in practice it seems to be working pretty well right now, and the Germans have learned from their past to be wary of governments that try to impose extreme views...
That's great. China seems to be doing ok, too. But that doesn't mean you have freedom of speech.
It still at least leaves room for the "there is no way in hell this could ever be the right thing to do, so I won't do it" feeling that I believe is REQUIRED for a soldier to have in some circumstances.
We might have to just agree to disagree, but I believe every American soldier does exactly that.
but I was referring more to the "lower" jobs... someone working at McDonalds is never going to have that kind of power over their boss - their job just doesn't justify it. Their bosses can and DO treat them pretty poorly in places with "at will" employment.
So then they need to make themselves more valuable. The Government is not your nanny. You have to run your own life.
While I think "slave" might be going a bit far, it's pretty close when all other avenues are worse than the bad situation you're in.
I don't believe there is a single American who has no avenues to improve himself and his life.
I certainly don't disagree with you here. I don't live in the UK or the US and I find this attitude disgusting. Personal responsibility is something that I rank very highly and the kinds of people that ask the government to regulate things that they should be able to self-regulate do bother me a lot.
Unless you work at McDonalds, in which case you're all "OH GOVERNMENT, SAVE ME FROM THIS LOW-PAYING JOB!!!" You're really coming across as a hypocrite, here.
I am however more "libertarian" in my views regarding freedom of choice. I should be allowed to do whatever the hell I want as long as it doesn't directly negatively affect others.
Then you should love "at will" employment states, where the worker and boss both have the *choice* to work with each other.
You can't love "choice" then also love "job protectionism" in the same breath. What kind of "choice" is it to tell a boss he can't fire somebody?
believe that the government has no right to tell me the gender or even number of people I can marry (I only want to marry one woman, but should I CHOOSE to marry 3 women and 2 men and everyone in the marriage agrees, that's none of the government's business);
I agree with you, the government should have no hand in marriage at all.
Here in Germany it's definitely a completely foreign concept (these days) as the very first article of the constitution here (or equivalent of consitution) relates to the inviolability of human dignity. Seeing it on TV, whether in the UK, Germany or US however shouldn't be such a foreign idea - we (should) all understand that there are people that act that way, do those things, and even accept it as normal.
Ugh, Germans. On the one hand, you don't worship a royal family, so that's good. On the other, you have zero freedom of speech, which is worse. You're also the reason the baddies in Wolfenstein don't wear actual SS logos on their uniforms.
I hope you weren't referring to me as a "US-hater".
No, sorry. You seem pretty rational. This site is full of US-haters, though.
And yet it's Americans that complain that British/European waiters are rude (they're paid fairly, so they're not begging for tips),
Huh? What does this have to do with anything?
think it's weird that everyone queues with each other (fairest way),
I don't know what "queues with each other" means, but if you mean "lines up single-file" then we do that in my part of the US. We also say "good morning" and "thank you" to the driver when we board and leave.
Hey, maybe you shouldn't fucking stereotype a HUGE country based on a few douchebags in New Jersey, huh? (Or more likely, based on what you see on TV... which is douchebags in LA, primarily.)
avoid public transport (it's not only for "poor people"),
Again, this doesn't exist in my State. Generally, people avoid public transportation because the system is too small and neighborhoods too spread-out to make it effective. (To take a commuter train into work, I have to drive about 8 miles to a neighboring city, for example. If I took the bus in from my city, I'd still have to drive about 4 miles to a park-and-ride, and I'd be screwed if I worked late since it only runs twice in the evenings.)
I've never heard anybody say that public transit is for poor people. Of course, I don't live in a douchebag state that you see on TV.
There is a class system in Britain, but it's nothing to do with master/servant stuff. You can be "upper class" but still quite poor, or "lower class" and rich, and either way you don't do what someone else says, or tell others.
Ok, but how about you guys work to make it not exist at all?
Slashdot Mirror
Is this a new "Humorless Monday" holiday I haven't yet heard about? Or do kernel people really take themselves this seriously?
Christ. You're like the fifth reply who didn't get that the parent was an EXTREMELY OBVIOUS JOKE. Laugh, stupid.
Except they did work, and worked better, in the last version. The kernel maintainers swapped out the working version for a flakey version, and now have made enough changes that the working version won't work even if you compile it in manually.
Did it occur to you to actually read the post you were replying to? This was in all there, not behind a link or anything.
Maybe a stupid question, but why does rumble support for N64 pads have anything that goes in the kernel? Doesn't Linux have any kind of abstraction layer for game controllers?
It would be quite a challenge to make a laser-based death ray that performs as well as our current chemical-based death-dealing devices-- if you could make a battery to effectively supply a laser pistol, and weighs as much or less as the equivalent cordite, I sure as hell want one of those in my cellphone.
It's good to know that, while so many hundreds of thing in Slashdot don't even fucking work, or work the exact same way they did in 1997 (when it's, lemme check my calendar, oh yeah, 2010) that they've wasted so much time making those stupid headers.
Although I have to admit it's slightly clever as far as easter eggs go. I'd never have thought to look at the headers for the page itself in a million years.
I do a lot of job interviews. I see approximately zero correlation between possessing a degree and being "intelligent" (defined as: suited for the job.) There are a hell of a lot of people with CS degrees who can't write a line of code. There's also a good amount of "some college" or high school grads who can program up a storm. (They are harder to find, I think because they don't jump jobs as much because they're afraid of their lack of degree. That's my hunch.)
Your first recommendation assumes its the responsibility of the editor to be an expert in every article. It's not. The contributors are responsible for doing the research,
Two points:
1) There's no concept of ownership on Wikipedia, so the "editor" (as you call them) owns the article as much as anybody.
2) In theory, everything posted to Wikipedia is look-up-able, so the "editor" is just as capable of looking up the factoid as anybody else
The reason editors shit [citation needed] tags all over is because they're lazy. It's a good way to appear to be fixing articles without actually doing any actual work... after all, looking up citations might involve getting their fat ass off the office chair and going to a library! Gasp!
the editors are merely there to make sure the final article is of good quality.
And adding [citation needed] tags increases the quality... how?
Oh right, it doesn't. It actually hugely decreases the quality substantially. All the possible crap is still in the article, but now it's hard-to-read as well. WHAT AN IMPROVEMENT!
On the other hand, if you just up and delete, that must mean that you know it's wrong.
No, what I'm saying is that a real "editor" (instead of someone who's just pretending to edit) would try to look up the factoid, and delete it if they can't find a reference-- without ever adding a [citation needed] tag.
If they come to the article, and they're too lazy to look up the factoid so they shit tags all over, they're not contributing to the project. It's just adding noise.
I think the biggest problem with wikipedia are the people deleting shit. If it's vandalism, delete it. If you know for sure that something is wrong, and can post the factual information with citations, then delete it.
I actually agree with you.
But since the Wikipedia elite have already decided to be deletionists, they might as well do it properly and consistently.
The website you and I want doesn't exist, and never will at the "wikipedia.org" domain. After all, if Wales added pop culture articles that people want to read, how would he get money from Wikia.com? He might have to get a job!
I'm not sure why the tags would bother anyone, even if they are up there for six years.
Real encyclopedias, which is the example Wikipedia is trying to follow, don't have little annoying tags after every fucking sentence.
Well, hopefully, you'd have "polish" in the "things you rub on shoes" folder and "Polish" in the "nationalities" folder. Unless you have the most disorganized filesystem on the planet, I can't conceive of a way that those two files would be in the same folder.
Look, I do support. I work with end-users. It's already confusing enough that they can have a text document named "Polish" and an image named "Polish" in the same folder. They can't handle anything more confusing than that, even if there is some extremely rare edge-case that Linux geeks might benefit from.
Computers are for *human beings*.
I hate [citation needed].
The message there is basically, "I think whoever wrote this is wrong, but I'm too fucking lazy to look it up my damn self. Therefore, I'll shit this tag on it so one of my slaves can look it up later." Except there aren't any slaves, so the damned [citation needed] stays up for 6 years.
Look, if the factoid sounds like bullshit, you have two options:
1) Look it up your damned self and add a citation
2) Delete it
Don't shit tags all over the place. That's not fixing the problem, that's just adding to it.
So, how come Laissez-Faire, don't-tell-corporations-how-to-run-themselves, deregulation didn't stop this from happening?
You mean Slashdot posting this scare-mongoring, Bible-quoting, idiotic article?
I'm with you, buddy, but I don't think the government is going to start regulating Slashdot editors...
Case-insensitive filesystems already preserve whatever case you originally named the file as (on Macs: back to the original HFS in 1984.) This is already a completely solved problem.
Nice try, though.
It's also an indication that the code is shit, and written by Windows morons who don't give a shit about a clean mac port.
I don't think that follows; by that logic, since Windows already uses the case-insensitive NTFS, it should be broken on Windows as well, right?
I'd wager the bug is in a third-party library they're using. If they know about the issue enough to write a knowledge base article, it's harder than trivial to fix and might be in someone else's code.
Apple's HFS has always been case insensitive, back to 1984. This is only an issue because, since OS X is based on Unix, a certain (tiny) subset of people want to use it "the Unix way". Real Mac users (meaning: have been using a Mac longer than 5 years) wouldn't, in a million years, go out of their way to format a drive as case sensitive.
Whats hard? No one would ever notice really, with a GUI the issue is moot unless you care about it.
Or until they hit "sort by name".
You really have to be a douche bag to make an app that cant' deal with case sensitive file systems. It takes effort or absolutely unacceptable programming practices to accomplish what they've done.
Then don't use it, and relax a bit. It's not like you're out anything: you didn't have access to Steam yesterday, and you don't today.
Fixed now.
OS X (which is a certified Unix, for whatever that matters) creates case-insensitive filesystems by default. You have to go out of your way to make a case-sensitive one.
This is because Apple, like all right-thinking people, realizes how stupid and hard-to-use a case-sensitive filesystem is. (Debate below. :)
I think what they're trying to communicate is: "We've had to delay this, since the comments are so positive we don't believe we're getting an accurate cross-section of opinion."
Which I guess I see as valid, if this legislation wasn't already overdue by at least 10 years.
In other news, power in Pyongyang will only be available from 5:00 - 7:00 PM this week in celebration of the achievement.
Goddamned, I fucked up the tags, and Slashdot sucks shit. That last paragraph should read:
However I've never seen anyone give a convincing argument why hate speech should be allowed
Because there's no universal agreement on what "hate speech" is?
Hell, look at Canada: Mark Steyn can be prosecuted by a special government commission for simply quoting somebody else in his book! In Canada, quoting a radial Imam is equivalent to holding the same opinion yourself. This is where "hate speech" laws lead you!
You don't need to rely on a theoretical "slippery slope," you can watch it happen in real-time.
That's a point we differ on. I agree with the German government (and many other governments) that yes, it should be. Speech is NOT harmless. It can influence people (again, look at advertising), and therefore large amounts of hate speech can cause serious problems.
If and When it is used to talk somebody into committing a crime, then a crime has been committed. Until an actual crime occurs, it's equivalent to 1984's "thoughtcrime".
If I do an action that hurts you, than I'm at fault and I could be prosecuted for it. If I say a word that hurts you, that's *your* fault... if you haven't learned by adulthood that "sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never harm me", that's not my problem. If you haven't internalized your sense of self-worth, well, I'm sorry, it's going to be a long, hard life for you-- but it's not my fucking fault.
I think people just prefer to err on the side of caution since it doesn't hurt. While I COULD make a game with characters wearing Nazi uniforms and plaster the walls of the game with Swastikas, and then have a VALID argument in court that it's okay because I'm showing the historical fact and not espousing the ideology associated with it, why would I WANT to go through all that hassle when it's easier not to? I think the only people that really WANT to plaster Nazi symbols everywhere are neo-Nazis, and that's exactly what these laws exist to stop.
Ok:
1) The government has already successfully regulated your actions by making you too terrified to exercise your rights.
2) How are you seriously suggesting that putting historically accurate costumes in a video game is equivalent to "plastering Nazi symbols everywhere." That argument is so specious I can't even believe you typed it.
Look, the US uses Nazi symbols in movies and video games... and somehow we have fewer neo-Nazis than you do, so I'm thinking the symbols are utterly unrelated to the problem.
Outlaw the ability to tell the children to hate black people, and racism will die (not immediately of course, there's still all of the societal problems to fix that were caused by it to begin with, such as higher crime rates in ghettos and so on, but it'd be a HUGE first step)
No, it won't. Make the law completely color-blind, like everything else, and racism will eventually go away. Every time you call out somebody based on skin color, *whether positive or negative*, you're encouraging racism.
BTW, how the holy hell are you saying all this and claiming to be a Libertarian? Do you even know what "Libertarian" means? This conversation is like, "yah I'm a vegetarian, but I think everybody should eat rare steaks twice a day." It's crazy.
However I've never seen anyone give a convincing argument why hate speech should be allowedquoting somebody else in his book! In Canada, quoting a radial Imam is equivalent to holding the same opinion yourself. This is where "hate speech" laws lead you!
You don't need to rely on a theoretical "slippery slope," you can watch it happen in real-time.
When Bill Gates gives you 300,000 dollars, I'll consider your idea less stupid than the spraying boats. Deal?
Yes, this IS restricting the choice of the boss, but I don't feel a society can function well and take care of all its members when such a situation is possible.
So you're telling me that my society (in Washington State) isn't functioning well right now?
Moreover, it's functioning worse than (for example) California's?
The homeless people on the streets of NYC for example tend to be in pretty bad situations with no obvious way out for them. They can go stay in shelters where crime and violence are worse than their own "communities" on the streets, but despite there being programmes there that are intended to help them, the success rate is extremely low.
First of all, I'm going to sound like a jerk, but I really don't care about New York whatsoever. As far as I'm concerned, that's a completely different country from me-- I'm thousands of miles away and in a vastly, vastly different culture.
Secondly, homeless people are generally mentally-ill. That doesn't excuse the fact that they're homeless, but it does mean that the current programs to assist them (shelters) are only addressing a small portion of the actual problem.
Well, like I said I'm not German, I just live here... but I don't think anyone really "worships" a royal family anywhere these days. There are quite a few Monarchies here in Europe and in almost all cases, they're pretty much just figureheads.
The British do.
Freedom of speech here is guaranteed by the constitution, as is the freedom of the press (a related and equally important topic)... The reason it's commonly perceived as though freedom of speech is limited here is that it's not the "highest" right that is given.
Yah; it's guaranteed by the Chinese constitution also. (Seriously, look it up.) That doesn't mean you got it.
Putting a SS logo on the shoulder of a CGI soldier in a video game about WWII isn't "hate speech" by any reasonable definition of the term.
Even if it was, so what? Hate speech shouldn't be a crime by itself.
It can be argued that "human dignity" is a pretty broad thing and therefore this interpretation is open to abuse, and I wouldn't necessarily disagree with you, but in practice it seems to be working pretty well right now, and the Germans have learned from their past to be wary of governments that try to impose extreme views...
That's great. China seems to be doing ok, too. But that doesn't mean you have freedom of speech.
It still at least leaves room for the "there is no way in hell this could ever be the right thing to do, so I won't do it" feeling that I believe is REQUIRED for a soldier to have in some circumstances.
We might have to just agree to disagree, but I believe every American soldier does exactly that.
but I was referring more to the "lower" jobs... someone working at McDonalds is never going to have that kind of power over their boss - their job just doesn't justify it. Their bosses can and DO treat them pretty poorly in places with "at will" employment.
So then they need to make themselves more valuable. The Government is not your nanny. You have to run your own life.
While I think "slave" might be going a bit far, it's pretty close when all other avenues are worse than the bad situation you're in.
I don't believe there is a single American who has no avenues to improve himself and his life.
I certainly don't disagree with you here. I don't live in the UK or the US and I find this attitude disgusting. Personal responsibility is something that I rank very highly and the kinds of people that ask the government to regulate things that they should be able to self-regulate do bother me a lot.
Unless you work at McDonalds, in which case you're all "OH GOVERNMENT, SAVE ME FROM THIS LOW-PAYING JOB!!!" You're really coming across as a hypocrite, here.
I am however more "libertarian" in my views regarding freedom of choice. I should be allowed to do whatever the hell I want as long as it doesn't directly negatively affect others.
Then you should love "at will" employment states, where the worker and boss both have the *choice* to work with each other.
You can't love "choice" then also love "job protectionism" in the same breath. What kind of "choice" is it to tell a boss he can't fire somebody?
believe that the government has no right to tell me the gender or even number of people I can marry (I only want to marry one woman, but should I CHOOSE to marry 3 women and 2 men and everyone in the marriage agrees, that's none of the government's business);
I agree with you, the government should have no hand in marriage at all.
Here in Germany it's definitely a completely foreign concept (these days) as the very first article of the constitution here (or equivalent of consitution) relates to the inviolability of human dignity. Seeing it on TV, whether in the UK, Germany or US however shouldn't be such a foreign idea - we (should) all understand that there are people that act that way, do those things, and even accept it as normal.
Ugh, Germans. On the one hand, you don't worship a royal family, so that's good. On the other, you have zero freedom of speech, which is worse. You're also the reason the baddies in Wolfenstein don't wear actual SS logos on their uniforms.
I hope you weren't referring to me as a "US-hater".
No, sorry. You seem pretty rational. This site is full of US-haters, though.
And yet it's Americans that complain that British/European waiters are rude (they're paid fairly, so they're not begging for tips),
Huh? What does this have to do with anything?
think it's weird that everyone queues with each other (fairest way),
I don't know what "queues with each other" means, but if you mean "lines up single-file" then we do that in my part of the US. We also say "good morning" and "thank you" to the driver when we board and leave.
Hey, maybe you shouldn't fucking stereotype a HUGE country based on a few douchebags in New Jersey, huh? (Or more likely, based on what you see on TV... which is douchebags in LA, primarily.)
avoid public transport (it's not only for "poor people"),
Again, this doesn't exist in my State. Generally, people avoid public transportation because the system is too small and neighborhoods too spread-out to make it effective. (To take a commuter train into work, I have to drive about 8 miles to a neighboring city, for example. If I took the bus in from my city, I'd still have to drive about 4 miles to a park-and-ride, and I'd be screwed if I worked late since it only runs twice in the evenings.)
I've never heard anybody say that public transit is for poor people. Of course, I don't live in a douchebag state that you see on TV.
There is a class system in Britain, but it's nothing to do with master/servant stuff. You can be "upper class" but still quite poor, or "lower class" and rich, and either way you don't do what someone else says, or tell others.
Ok, but how about you guys work to make it not exist at all?
What do the contents of our media say about our ability for independent thinking? Or lack of master/servant relationships?
In fact, what he hell are you even talking about? Is this a conspiracy theory? Is your tinfoil hat a little too tight this morning?