> Rioters are not protected by the Geneva Convention,
Correct. Which makes both the Geneva Conventions and DOD's Operations Manuals utterly irrelevant. Triply so, since 2) Cotton was not in command of any troops and 3) the alleged violation of the laws of war never actually occurred.
From the latter:
> In assessing whether de facto hostilities exist for the purpose of applying jus in bello restrictions, situations of internal disturbances and tensions, such as riots, isolated and sporadic acts of violence, and other acts of a similar nature do not amount to armed conflict.7
You really should familiarize yourself with the material before citing it.
This. Was. Not. A. War.
I'm not sure how to make it any more clear than that.
> You're essentially calling this person a liar for sharing an anecdote.
Nonsense. If I share something I read in the newspaper, and you find out that it's not true, that doesn't make me a "liar". Gullible, perhaps, but not a liar.
The objective is to make you obey. That's it. That's the whole reason.
The folderol about "neuro-divergent people" is just a thin gloss of claimed virtue intended to disguise the actual goal.
Do they have any actual evidence that "neuro-divergent people" suffer a greater degree of trauma from clapping than finger-snapping? No, they don't. Sure, there might be a "neuro-divergent" person, or even more than one, who finds clapping disturbing, but that says nothing at all about the general case.
> if anyone doesn’t comply, that’s a great indicator that they oppose all of the above and are therefore fascists to be smoked out.
Or witches, perhaps. The terminology changes over the years, but the tactics remain the same. The people who get out the torches and pitchforks because someone clapped his hands are exactly the same type of people who used to lynch blacks, burn harmless old ladies as witches, and throw Jews down wells. Exactly.
They do it because they enjoy hurting people, and have found a cover story that allows them to do it under an illusion of virtue. You complain because we burned Mrs. Johnson? Well, then you must be pro-Satan!
> Tom Cotton is a former military officer and attorney, he knew exactly what “no quarter” means, it is explicitly called out as a war crime in the Geneva Conventions.
Rioters and looters have nothing to do with the Geneva Conventions. For one, that is not even a bona fide combat situation. For another, they don't meet the definition of "lawful combatants" because they don't typically wear "uniforms or other insignia recognizable at a distance". No uniform = no POW rights under the Geneva Conventions. Unlawful combatants can be executed on the spot with no trial or any other formalities.
Now, one could make a decent argument that the so-called "Black Bloc" groups qualify, because they do wear outfits that might be characterized as uniforms if you squint at them hard enough. They should at least get the benefit of the doubt, IMO.
But random rioters and looters? It is utterly disingenuous to suggest that the Geneva Conventions even apply in that situation. Swiping iPads and Air Jordans are not the actions of lawful combatants. In fact, looting itself is explicitly called out as a war crime under the Fourth Geneva Convention.
Someone here isn't familiar with the Geneva Conventions, but it's not Cotton.
K&R (yes, it's outdated now, but it is still a fine model for how to write a clear and concise textbook).
SICP.
Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice by Foley and van Dam (plus a bunch more authors now).
I'd be happy even if they just didn't hijack Command/Ctrl-F. You can't even search for text on the screen you're viewing without being dumped into their shitful pseudosearch.
This is interesting, given that Activision itself was founded by disgruntled Atari developers who'd walked out...whereupon the then-CEO of Atari, a former textile company executive who'd referred to the developers as "towel designers", discovered that he couldn't just call up a temp agency and have them send over a bunch of people who could cram a fun, playable game into 4K of memory.
"The right-wing science-fiction writers Jerry Pournelle (an admirer of the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini) and Larry Niven pursued a similar argument in their CoDominium novels, a long-running series of novels that started in 1973 and imagines a world where the U.S. and the Soviet Union work together to govern an unruly planet."
1) Niven didn't co-write any of the CoDominium novels, as far as I know. Mote had some historical references to it, but it was set hundreds of years after the CoDominium had collapsed.
2) The CoDominium weren't the "good guys" in those books.
"the so-called "Star Wars" program under Reagan to which I'm referring was considered by many to be wasteful spending."
And was considered by others to be the final straw that broke the Soviet Union and put an end to a 70 year Cold War and eliminated one of the most evil empires in the history of the human race.
"I don't think there is much in the constitution mandating space lasers."
Article I, Section 8. Unless you're one of those people who attempt to argue that armies and navies are limited to 18th century technology.
I'm already regretting getting into an argument with a zealot, but to be blunt: you are simply incorrect.
People (especially the kind of people who installed alternative operating systems) could, and did, assemble their own machines without paying any "Windows tax". At all.
Yes, some manufacturers cut a bulk deal to bundle Windows with complete systems.
No, that didn't make it impossible (or even particularly difficult) to avoid the so-called "Windows tax".
BeOS didn't even run on Intel hardware at first, btw.
When I used BeOS (and I have used it, hands-on... have you?) it only ran on PPC machines. The port to Intel happened after the Return of Jobs and the decision to use NeXTSTEP (which became OS X) for new Macs. That's what killed BeOS, not the "Windows tax". The port to Intel was a late desperation move.
I'm tagging out now. I have better things to do than rehash a war that was over 25 years ago.
I remember that era well. There were always plenty of machines available that didn't pay the so-called "Windows tax". I know. I bought (and installed Linux on) many of them.
You know what? The number of people (again, including me) who didn't want Windows? That was a rounding error, dude.
And yet Walmart is still much larger than Amazon. In 2015, Walmart had sales of about $508 billion, while Amazon only had $83 billion. AMZ barely cracked the top ten:
The difference, of course, is that Bezos controls a much larger portion of AMZ than the Waltons control of WMT.
None of them are anywhere near John D. Rockefeller, who had an inflation-adjusted net worth of $392 billion, equivalent to 1.5-2% of the entire U.S. economy at the time.
Correct. Which makes both the Geneva Conventions and DOD's Operations Manuals utterly irrelevant. Triply so, since 2) Cotton was not in command of any troops and 3) the alleged violation of the laws of war never actually occurred.
From the latter:
> In assessing whether de facto hostilities exist for the purpose of applying jus in bello restrictions, situations of internal disturbances and tensions, such as riots, isolated and sporadic acts of violence, and other acts of a similar nature do not amount to armed conflict.7
You really should familiarize yourself with the material before citing it.
This. Was. Not. A. War.
I'm not sure how to make it any more clear than that.