*sigh*

Too late.

I wanna play!

I wish I had such gullible congressmen and congresswomen. Tell them you can find the terrorist but only once they provide you with the funds for your terrorist detector. Then just sort of attach them randomly at airports, pat-down / grope anyone that walks through them for a while and say you didn't find any terrorists. (Implying that it's keeping the terrorists away.) It's a win-win situation.

Well, I wouldn't call it stupid, but just that it is presented as a false dichotomy. The only options that you're giving us in this scenario is either keeping them in expensive farms or slaughtering them. I'm sure that some can be released into the wild, just not all at once.

I personally eat meat, as I feel that it's part of nature. If a hungry animal out in the wild saw me, it may try to eat me without giving it a second thought. I appreciate the food that I eat, and am thankful for it and try not to waste it. I do try to imagine what it must be like though, I mean, what would happen if there were a new species in the food chain that was above us, and they decided to keep us in farms for the sole purpose of butchering us and selling our meat. That won't happen in my lifetime, but it's why I appreciate my food rather than take it for granted.

Anti-terrorism bag checks, coming to a metro near you!.

I'm not sure if you're able to view the article, but the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority is going to bring random bag checks to the Washington D.C. metro / subway system. The problem, as I see it, is that not only is this ridiculousness not stopping at airports, but the authorities who are in charge are now going to bring it to us locally.

If you don't live in the DC Metro area, driving from Northern Virginia into DC in the morning is pretty much out of the question if you want to get into work at a reasonable time without having to leave your house at 5 AM. Taking the metro still takes over an hour going from the orange line into DC, but at least you're not sitting in bumper to bumper traffic.

Sticking random bag checks will just create a bottleneck, as there will be tens of thousands of people rushing to work, ALL with bags.

At this rate, these "anti-terrorism" checks will just be brought home to us if we decide to avoid flying. There's already discussion about having some of these scanners at passenger train stations as well. 9/11 helped usher in a new bureaucracy that has employed almost 60,000+ employees. It's also helped give lobbyists and insiders lucrative contracts. So, what I am beginning to fear is that the amount of money to be made on employing such unnecessary and time consuming protocols will win out over the amount of money that airlines will stand to lose if we decide to use a different system.

Especially if that said-system is no different than the ones that we're supposed to boycott.

It makes much more sense when read in this context.

Once you get such a filtering infrastructure in place by invoking the universal "think-of-the-children" excuse, then using said-system to filter out copyrighted material becomes a breeze. And if anyone complains, kindly remind them that complaining will only make them suspected pedophiles.

O_o

You're doing it wrong.

See what happens when you don't plan your robotics lab out properly? They riot and start posting on /.

And yet one of them worked for an anti-Communist group funded by the CIA.

(Assuming that you're an American since you don't mention where you come from)

Top Ten Countries where US gets its oil:

Yeah, Muslim Canada sure has us by our balls.

wikiwikileaks.

It's wikileaks all the way down!

And this emotional outburst is why we can never have rational discussion about world politics. Anyone who disagrees with your position is automatically cast aside as an anti-Semite.

Because I do agree with you that those statistics that the parent presented are heavily biased, and that there are a lot of Israeli civilians who have been killed and this fact should be acknowledged. A simple Google search would bring up bus and night club bombings that clearly shows that civilians on the Israeli side have been killed.

But way to put the brakes on any future discourse.

I have mixed feelings about this.

I honestly believe that a safeguard against preemptive aggression is a fundamental right that every sovereign nation should have. It's why any country has a standing military. The fact that Iran should even feel threatened by the US justifies this safeguard, not the other way around. Just like how America did not need permission to arm themselves with nuclear weapons, and actually used a couple when it felt necessary to win WWII, proves this. Do you honestly believe that any amount of UN treaties or protocols would actually prevent the United States from ever using a nuclear weapon if it ever felt the need to in the future? U.N. treaties certainly did not stop France from allegedly helping Israel develop their nuclear program.

America's invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan was a giant kick in Iran's butt. With US troops operating within two bordering countries, Iran felt it was necessary to hasten their nuclear ambitions. Why did the U.S. invade two nations that had virtually no real military, but continues to avoid North Korea, who even shelled South Korea? The biggest response that could be mustered by South Korea and the US were war games? Seriously? That's precisely why Iran feels the need to develop their nuclear program. Also, the fact that Iranian scientists are getting assassinated (a very disgusting, cowardly move) shows that this safeguard is necessary. I consider assassinating scientists and civilians as terrorism. I would be equally appalled if contractors for Northrop Grumman or Lockheed Martin were to be killed using that same logic.

I do agree with you though that Iran is not a democracy. Every election that they've had has been a sham. The last leader that they democratically elected was over 50 years ago, and he was overthrown and replaced with a dictator. Their government kills and maims more of their own citizens in political prisons than you could ever imagine. While I wholeheartedly agree that the world would be a better place if the current Iranian government was not in power, I do not agree with assassinating scientists, especially since many of them have no choice but to either work on government-sponsored projects or to try to defect, but risk getting their families that they leave behind killed if they manage to escape. Some of the scientists actually support opposition movements, and are stuck in a really bad situation.

I hope that you can understand my position. I dislike the government of Iran since it's my relatives over there that are always at risk of getting killed if they speak out, but am also disgusted by US aggression and double-standards, which I also see as a threat to my relatives over there. It was bad enough wondering if each missile lobbed by Iraq in the 1980s would actually hit one of my relatives' residence. Now I have to worry the same about an Israeli strike or a U.S. invasion.

You can download almost all of Oracle's software right from their website for personal or educational use. You are expected to have a license though if you use it to conduct any business transactions. I believe that they also have a 'lite' edition of their database in case you wanted to also try that out. From their website:

Geez when did the parent say that we should all go to China? Isn't the whole point of a democracy that we can point out these problems and try to fix them so that we can avoid becoming like a country that has less freedoms?

As citizens, you get the government that you tolerate. If we become complacent simply because we're better than country X, then slowly over time, we'll become country X.

and

How is he telling the truth when the poster has to create completely bullshit scenarios to prop up his argument? Unless he actually knows of a little Roshanjam, who is the 9th son of Shaniqua who has 8 other half-brothers and no daddy for any of them? Heck, the entire post was made up of hypothetical examples. Why not use a real life example, there are plenty out there.

It's trolling when he has to pull completely hypothetical situations out of his ass to prop up an argument, which shows that he's more interested in getting a rise out of people than he is interested in making a point. It almost sounds like he's advocating personal responsibility, but yet he makes a sweeping racial generalization. I agree with personal and parental responsibility and not creating a nanny state, but even I can see that making a legitimate point was not the poster's primary intention.