Bak

darkhosis: what difference in policy is there between hillary and barrak that upsets you? (or is it a character trait?)

Two point on this: First, if guns are banned it also makes it more difficult for the criminals to get them. Are you better off if both you and the criminal have a gun, or neither of you do? Secondly, there's other reasons a society may want to ban guns such as suicide prevention and all that jazz. Certainly you can debate these two points, but why shouldn't a society be allowed to outlaw guns? Even if there was a mountain of evidence that a handgun in the home meant 90% chance of death from it, we still couldn't outlaw them. The Cons!@#$%^&*ution is supposed to protect the minority from the majority, but I think we need an update. It makes sense in the 1700's to allow personal gun possession, as if there's a crime you couldn't do anything about it. There's no phones, so you have to walk to the sherrif's office and tell him in person, which isn't workable. Now days, we can make instant phone calls and police cars can travel mph so the need is much less (although for home invasions, it might still make sense). I guess the point is, I'm willing to let your society do what I think is stupid (murder as a punishment for neighborhood burglary), if you let mine do what you think is stupid (ban handguns).

How is it a question of rationality? They've agreed as a society on the laws they want to follow and they're following those laws. What you meant to say is that in a society that considers this murder, he would have been convicted of murder, which is obviously true but irrelevant. There is no absolute scale you can point to and say, "aha, this is the proper punishment for neighborhood burglary." The best we can do is the laws we've enacted through democracy. It would be much worse if we forced your opinion on the majority of Texans. Similarly, it's terrible that we can't democratically outlaw handguns in OUR society because of the values of people who live somewhere else. Seriously cons!@#$%^&*ution wtf? Life, Liberty, Pursuit of Happiness, and Personal Possession of Handguns.

it's not going to go the way of television and radio because it's a different medium altogether. If they decided to take away something from the internet someone would find a way to make money by offering what they took away. The only thing a non-neutral net would do is be able to differentiate quality of service between different programs and different customers. If you're lagging in subspace now you can't do anything about it. Potentially with a non-neutral net you could pay $1 on your ISPs website (or call them up), and they'd give you lower packetloss and better pings for a few hours. Right now if they did this they would be breaking the law. Profit motive only makes things better. You CAN watch public broadcasting on TV without commercials but guess what, it sucks.

firefox has a built-in spell checker for forms (does the red underline thing and everything); maybe it's time to switch

We need to make a topic on net neutrality, cause it's really holding the internet back imo.

i care a lot about the personally identifying information, and hopefully google is allowed to anonymize the data before giving it away.

if the law said for you to jump off a bridge would you do it? if a grand jury said the person who killed your entire family was free to go, would it make it right? We never were talking about what the law says or whether this guy was convicted or not. The discussion is about SHOULD he have been convicted, and SHOULD the laws let you shoot someone robbing your neighbor's house. I was never trying to convince you that this man is now in jail for his crimes, or the law says what he did was murder. Pointing out what the law says isn't proof that the action is acceptable (even if the law's democratically enacted by a majority!). Likewise, pointing out that a jury didn't convict him doesn't prove that he shouldn't have been convicted. This is the meat of the discussion. You feel burglary is punishable by death. That is your personal belief. A crazy man might have a personal belief that speeding or, with your example, littering, is punishable by death. Clearly we can't allow people to act on their personal beliefs alone or people may end up getting killed for things such as speeding or littering. Hmm, after thinking a little more your side seems to make sense. We clearly can't use a personal standard for these sorts of things, so the only standard we have is what society agrees upon. If Texans agree this action is allowed then it should be allowed. However, if he were to come to my state and do this he would go to jail as it is against my society's standard. He seemed to even know about the property law while talking to the operator. I suppose the reason why this seems so wrong to me is that the law in Texas goes against my personal standard. However, if I applied that standard to other people, it would be no different than the gun-toting litter-hater shooting people dead for littering because that's HIS personal standard.

This discussion isn't about self-defense. The guys were unarmed and were not even going into this guys house (you mentioned they started moved on to his stuff, but the article didn't?). In either case, pointing a gun and having them run away scared prevents loss of property and protects your family There is nothing you could steal from me that would ruin my life. Sure I might be extremely inconvenienced for a few months, but I would eventually recover. When you shoot someone dead they can never recover from that. Hence, the punishment does not fit the crime. Think about it this way, you were speeding and some nut saw you endangering the lives of everyone on the road by driving at speeds faster than what the road engineers recommend. His children walk on that street; you might have hit one of them. Why are you allowed to abuse his right to walk on the street safely? If you're willing to do that to him he has no concern for your life, since you obviously have no concern for his. Should he now be allowed to shoot you dead? This is the same line of reasoning you applied to the burglary case, almost verbatim. I'm sure I could dig up a news story where some otherwise sane driver was speeding and hit and killed a child. Sure these stories do well at emotional appeals, but if you are looking for proof that cooperation with criminals is more dangerous than confrontation, you're going to want to use (fair and independently collected) statistics.

Because the law is the problem here. People's lives are worth more than property. And he didn't shoot two illegal immigrants, one of which was deported 15 years ago for drugs; he shot two people he knew nothing about other than that they were non-violent criminals. Also, it's not like the only response is going outside and shooting them in the back. He could go outside and yell at them and they'll leave, or point a gun and wait until they run away (and not shoot them the back when they're doing it), or fire a warning shot. At some point, NBVegita, you've broken a law in your life. Thank God some self-reliant conservative didn't pull out his shotgun and shoot you for it.

haha... I think given a bad enough candidate we could convince ail to vote democrat, although it would take some arm twisting

additionally, what would happen if everyone acted like this? He shoots some criminals because he believes he's morally justified in doing so, and the the civil rights activists shoot him because they think he's a murderer. This guy's basically acting as judge, jury, and executioner.

I'd say being in the military is a special qualification even if you're not the general leading the armies. Just willing to risk your life for the country's interests says a lot about loyalty and patriotism.

your stuff is worth more than two non-violent criminal's lives? Wow your values suck. Then again, it's hard to say what really happened. If they actually did confront him (what kind of idiot confronts a guy with a shotgun?), then he definitely has the right to defend himself, however I find it more likely he just shot them in the back like the article says, especially since he told the 911 operator he was going to kill them.

No! I'm just saying that a war hero is not the "only needed qualification." Wes Clark was most likely asked how can he support Obama when McCain was in the military, to which he replied that being the military is not a sufficient condition for being president, which is perfectly reasonable. He didn't say it was meaningless or irrelevant, he just said it wasn't sufficient, i.e. there are other qualifications needed. lol, yeah maybe if you showed their entire "earlier years" side by side you would be right, but if you don't think people can pick and choose which photos to show with an agenda in mind you've clearly never seen the tabloids.

mccain looks like a pimp in that photo haha if only being a war hero was a sufficient condition for being president (if it was, every war hero that ran would be president because that's what sufficient means; why people get so upset)

I like it

I'm working on it ok... there's lots of stuff i needed to adjust to get discretion modules working on ASSS server... most notably I'm working on getting server-side weapons in so players can actually get hit (also no cheating!). Anyways the big problem is discretion modules are made to be for one arena, whereas a server must handle multiple arenas. I have just about every module done... still gotta fix one or two and we should have a online playable version out with server-side weapons.

Your chair also rotates; do you spend all day rotating? No! It's a waste of energy. Anyways it's clear they're trying to steal our wind and monopolize that after the oil runs out.

what a jerk

he's 471/1024th arabic

perhaps then we should be required to prove they are, in fact, enemies?

McCain is definitely a war hero, no one can deny that. Patriotism is a double edged sword though. On one sense we need someone who loves America and is looking out for our best interests. On the other hand, we don't want someone so patriotic they think everyone else is crap and we're the best at everything and there's nothing to learn from the policies of others. For example, a blindly patriotic president may think we have the best military on earth and there's no way any force could wage a serious war for more than a few months, whereas a more levelheaded person would realize that short of committing atrocities against innocents, we can't dominate in a guerrilla war. This translates to other policies. A blindly patriotic leader would say we have the best education/healthcare/tax system and that would be the end of it whereas an objective leader would realize that many European schools are doing better than ours, and move to adopt their policies which have been produced results. An objective leader would see that Candians live longer than Americans, and try to figure out why and do what they have done to get those results. As for pride, something extraordinary is required to be proud of your country (not saying this isn't the case). Sure it's great that we have freedom of speech, career, thoughts, but these are our "inalienable rights". Hurray the government hasn't robbed us of what it has no right to take away! Would you be proud of a child because he didn't beat up his little brother, or steal from his mother's purse? Maybe...

These girls obviously wanted to stay in touch after high school in figured if their kids were all the same age they'd remain friends forever because their kids would play with one another. If only someone would have shown them facebook!