Actually, the social shunning/shaming of those who advocate positions that are detrimental to society does serve a useful and positive function. Consider the way most people would respond to someone who openly advocates racism, for example. The response such a person receives would not be a pleasant one and really would discourage them. This is a good thing and it's a service to everyone else.

The only difference between racist views and pro-authoritarian views is the method by which they damage society for everyone else. Honestly the idea that your safety is in terrible danger from terrorism, and that giving up freedom and privacy is an acceptable solution, is a form of cowardice. It enables tyranny and those who advocate it are enablers. It's also inconsistent with reality: you're more likely to be injured by lightning than by terrorists, and you're very much more likely to be harmed by police or other members of your own government than any terrorist. If you were truly interested in your safety you would religiously monitor weather reports and you would advocate that the federal government be reduced in size and power.

Meanwhile, it's a fact of life that not all opinions are equally valid. Some, like yours, are rooted in ignorance and cowardice and have proven extremely dangerous each time they are put into practice, as an honest reading of history would reveal to you. Yes, the USA is not the first nation to use the idea of a foreign threat as an excuse to curtail civil liberties. The delusional among us seem to believe that it does happen to be the very first nation that will do this without causing a complete disaster (which has always taken the form of a totalitarian government under which human life is without value). Neither an understanding of history nor of human nature could possibly support this delusion.

I'd like to leave you with two quotations that this conversation reminds me of. You see, we (collectively) keep rehashing these same old debates not realizing that great effort has already been poured into thinking about what are not new issues. The first is from C. S. Lewis:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

The other is a dialog between Hermann Goring, a leading member of the Nazi Party, and a man named Gilbert, during an interview conduced in Goering's prison cell during the Nuremburg trials, on April 18, 1946:

-----

Goring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.

Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.

Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

----

Something I hope you will consider.

I thought the point of the charge was to make the "wooly" side-fibers of the strands wrap around the prey's limbs and/or the microscopic irregularities in the exoskeleton, tangling to it. "Tying" the fibers to the prey would have a similar binding effect to gluing them to it, without the need for glue, and lots of little fibers could make a very strong attachment.

(Stretching fibers made of long chains makes them stronger by aligning the chains along the direction of the stretch.)

How do you know we're not decedents of exiles on a prison planet already?

Youtube just switched to HTML5 video by default, so perhaps we can uninstall Flash for good now!

But can it play "Badger Badger Badger"?

Why are they still using C to deal with network protocol? Is the performance so critical that it's worth all the troubles?

Also, because there's a lot of C code that has been in heavy use, and tested for correctness, for decades, suitable for reuse with substantial confidence that it's correct (though you check it anyhow...).

Let's see you find code like THAT for a language that hasn't been AROUND for decades. B-)

The new ones were only good for throwing at thos damn kids walking on their lawn.

The old ones were much better, and it still worked afterward.

Why are they still using C to deal with network protocol?

For starters, because it's transparent. The "K&R compliant assembly laguage", as one of my former colleagues once characterized it, translates to object in a clearly understandable way (especially if you turn optimization down or off). Though it gives you more opportunities to create bugs, it makes it hard for the bugs to hide from inspection.

The "higher-level" the language, the more it takes over and inserts its own stuff between you and the metal, and the more opportunity for that to inject an invisible vulnerability - which you might have trouble removing even if you DO discover it.

Meanwhile, many of the things "higher-level" languages protect you from can also be detected and flagged by both modern C compilers and code examination tools - starting with the venerable "lint".

Good call

That's why I never vote for 'one or the other' party. People who do that are wasting their votes, no worse, they are selling their votes to the highest bidder with the flashiest suit, and who can move the most pork their way. We are bumping up against the limits of majority rule. We shouldn't allow the 99% who vote for 'one or the other' party screw over the 1% that knows better.

Run? You're funny. I won't even run to the donut shop. In fact I never make it to the donut shop, because half way there is a bakery with fresh cupcakes, with nice thick frosting. Mmm, so good (look closely, and tell me what you don't see)

:-) Wow... I am amazed... The elite, eh? Yeah, I suppose the people who know better than to pimp for democrats and republicans are kind of an 'elite', considering their statistically insignificant numbers. We do only comprise a little over one percent of the people who vote. YAY! I'm a one percenter! Can't think of anything better.

Geeze, you throw a rope to a guy and he cusses you out for it. Yep, I'm definitely keeping people down. You too, seem to have this little problem of exactly reversing everything I said. This is why I believe your belief systems are highly skewed, and apparently extremely powerful, fully confirming the science of crowd psychology.

They actually DID disband the army. The GP's post included two negatives that cancelled.

By disbanding the Iraqi Army they not only got rid of personnel that could have been used in the projects to rebuild the country, but they released tens of thousands of armed men with at least nominal training in the use of common weapons in the region. With no way to make a living or to feed their families, they resorted to either criminal enterprise, banding into factions with others based on religious lines for support, or to insurgency in order to fight against the occupying force.

If they'd kept them intact taken over control of them and continued to pay them, my guess is that a lot of these problems wouldn't have manifested so strongly. If the goal was to try to transition to a stable country under other leadership anyway.

Heh. If it's effective in a clusterfuck of copy/paste, then it should be really effective when the bulk of the code is original...

Sounds like the solution is to use an entirely different language than the bulk of one's work is in, if one wants to anonymously write malicious or otherwise legally complicated code.

...based on the quality of that code...

"Linux" is already something of a 'cute' name, a man named Linus applied his name to his reimplemented UNIX-type kernel...