tetron.interreality

Comment Threads

• Charlie Stross commented on Sometimes I hate being right
  Oh, it gets it right a little more often than that: for example, yesterday. (TL;DR: the first Obscene Publications Act trial in quite a long time -- the jury returned a "not guilty" verdict on all charges because the definition of "tends to corrupt and deprave the viewer has changed somewhat since the advent of the internet). And I'd like to note that the "British" legal system is actually two systems -- the English-Welsh one and the Scottish one, which again does things differently....
• Charlie Stross commented on Sometimes I hate being right
  Cullis: But I see that even in this supposed den of rationality, commenters discount and pretend data they can't explain away doesn't exist. WARNING: Please refer to the moderation policy on politeness. This is your yellow card. (If that comment had been directed at a specific individual by name, you'd be being unpublished/deleted at this point. Instead, consider this a warning.) I was under the impression that the psych stats for combat you're discussing relate to small arms, while from WW1 onwards the majority of casualties in wars between industrial powers were inflicted by crew-served weapons (where the soldiers don't...
• scentofviolets commented on Sometimes I hate being right
  IMO it's a case of the law (despite the comments near the bottom) being well written so that as the culture changes so does what's counted as obscene. I dread to think what a list from 1857 would ban and I'm pretty sure that even a list published in 1964 would be horribly out of date 48 years later. As I understand it - and I freely admit this is yet another subject where I'm not as informed as I probably should be - there's a fundamental philosophical difference between Usian law and British law. To wit, here on this...
• brucecohenpdx commented on Sometimes I hate being right
  That depends to some extent on local terrain. It was very true in Vietnam, at least in the lowlands where vegetation is dense and sight lines are a few meters in most places. Even in the mountains, which aren't very high, the trees tend to be thick. By contrast, the highlands of central Asia are pretty bare; most cover is rocks and knolls and such, which makes it harder for guerilla's to enfilade an enemy unit (not impossible, just harder, and often at greater range). In Vietnam, small VC units would often risk moving into clear areas in order to...
• brucecohenpdx commented on Sometimes I hate being right
  That sounds like a reasonable set of Rules of Engagement for counter-insurgency work. It's nice to know that the PBI has got the right end of the stick, especially with the drone attacks being a lot less controlled. I guess that's the difference between soldiers who have to deal with the consequences of their actions among the population and the spooks who are hundreds or thousands of miles away and only care about target acquisition and destruction....