However, in the military, breaching your contract can end up in confinement. Does that not seem immoral? Why does wishing to fight WITH the military mean signing your life away? Isn't it the officer's job to ensure that he can rely on his troops, and if he feels he can't - then he should send them away?
Yeah, you screw over a landlord or employer that way, you face fines. You screw over our fighting forces that way, you face jail time. Just like how the punishment for busting into a nuclear silo is more severe than the punishment for breaking into someone's home.
You don't get to be a fair-weather solider. If you sign up for the Army, you sign up to war and peace, victory and defeat. Given that we have a volunteer Army, and the punishment for desertion is confinement instead of death, we've come a long way historically. If the life isn't for you, don't do it. It's certainly not something I could do, and I have a lot of respect for the people who can do it and who do do it.
55% to 26% is a small error?
The fact that I'm only going to cut off one of your legs instead of both should not ease your dread at my producing a bonesaw[1]. I mean, flooding even 10% of a country like that is a humanitarian crisis in line with the 2004 tsunami or the Haiti Earthquake. Going from a "biblical disaster" to an "epic disaster" is a small change in terms of impact. They're both catastrophic.
[1] - For the analogy-impaired, that is in no way, shape, or form a threat.
That they caught R2K at this, and were willing to expose it
Except - they neither caught R2K nor exposed them, FiveThirtyEight.com did. Going public was an act of damage control, not and act of contrition.
If you read what either Kos or Nate Silver have said, it was independent researchers working with Kos (who gave them the needed data) who exposed it, and Kos who first published it. What 538 did a few weeks ago was rank R2K low on their pollster rankings. Combined with shoddy polling in a few straight elections, this caused Kos to sack R2K before any accusations of impropriety were made.
California law is a bit unusual in that it calls all kinds of things "theft" that have different names elsewhere. For example, if you rent a car, and don't return it, and the rental car company asks you to return it, and you keep it for another eleven days, then by California law it will be assumed that this was theft.
I'm sorry for the tangent, but what is this "usually" called? Because I'm pretty sure keeping a rental for like 2 weeks is going to get you into trouble anywhere.
Nevertheless they reported the truth and that is what Apple is punishing them for. If Gizmodo had just made up the entire story they would be at WWDC just like all the other tech rags out there.
Correct. If they had just made up the story, they would not have purchased stolen Apple property, and thus Apple probably wouldn't have made them pay for their tickets.
Common sense tells you that if journalists only publish stories that please the companies they are writing about, many important stories will remain hidden in the dark.
Most of the press outlets attending WWDC have published stories that displeased Apple in one way or another, and they still get free tickets. If there's really an important story out there, any one of those press outlets would cover it, and would come out far ahead even if Apple made them buy their own WWDC tickets.
Trying to be happy is like trying to build a machine for which the only specification is that it should run noiselessly.