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1) Have a look at http://law.shu.edu/publication...

Key points for me:
a) Only 5% of gitmo detainees were actually captured by the US. 86% were handed in by' bounty hunters' during a dubious bounty program that offered the public a nice way to get rich while getting rid of anyone you really didn't like :

Get wealth and power beyond your dreams....You can receive millions of
dollars helping the anti-Taliban forces catch al-Qaida and Taliban murders.
This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for
the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and
housing for all your people.

b) Fifty-five percent (55%) of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies.

2) Terror laws are being used against US citizens...on US soil.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

"Since then[9/11], the Justice Department's Inspector General found that the FBI has issued hundreds of thousands of national security letters, a majority against U.S. persons, and many without any connection to terrorism at all."
https://www.aclu.org/top-ten-a...

Americans can be accused of terrorism, with no basis, and be thrown in a hole indefinitely with no right to legal defense or trail.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So, for me...I'd rather say "Stop" to the government who I feel is out of control. You fight a war, you fight a war - you don't use it as a justification to take away constitutional protections of the citizens who put you in power.

As far as actual fear of terror...I am more afraid or (and statistically much more likely to actually die from) getting hit by a car crossing the street.

So yes, I want the government to obey the law and the constitution. I do not want the government to have more and more power over me because of media inspired fear of something that is not actually a real threat.

I don't have numbers to back it up but I suspect that I am more likely to be hurt by the government, in some way, than I am to be hurt by a terrorist.

And you do realize these folks weren't exactly picked up off the street for jaywalking, right? Most, if not all, were caught on the battlefield, and those who weren't, like Khalid Sheik Mohammad (considered the Forrest Gump of terrorism) were put there for their positions in terror groups such as al-Qaeda. For the most part, the folks in this prison don't have "sob stories".

Ahem. I'm not saying that everybody there is innocent. I will suggest that this is one of those times in our history that we're going to be embarassed about once enough years have passed. There are enough well publicised stories of the insane screw ups associated with Guantanamo that it's time to stop drinking the official Kool Aid about "Most, if not all were caught on the battlefield..." and other such nonsense.

I highly recommend this epsiode of This American Life to anybody who isn't familiar with the other side of the story.

Examples of evidence
that the Government cited as proof that the detainees were enemy combatants includes the
following:

• Associations with unnamed and unidentified individuals and/or organizations;
  
• Associations with organizations, the members of which would be allowed into the
  United States by the Department of Homeland Security;
  
• Possession of rifles;
  
• Use of a guest house;
  
• Possession of Casio watches; and
  
• Wearing of olive drab clothing.
  
  

NON BIASED Source?

How do we expect our soldiers to gather evidence for the prosecution while they're being shot at? How do you expect our soldiers to gather evidence at all when they're generally not the ones picking these people up?

Here.

Salient extract from the summary:

1. Fifty-five percent (55%) of the detainees are not determined to have committed any hostile acts against the United States or its coalition allies.

2. Only 8% of the detainees were characterized as al Qaeda fighters. Of the remaining detainees, 40% have no definitive connection with al Qaeda at all and 18% are have no definitive affiliation with either al Qaeda or the Taliban.

3. The Government has detained numerous persons based on mere affiliations with a large number of groups that in fact, are not on the Department of Homeland Security terrorist watchlist. Moreover, the nexus between such a detainee and such organizations varies considerably. Eight percent are detained because they are deemed âoefighters for;â 30% considered âoemembers of;â a large majority â" 60% -- are detained merely because they are âoeassociated withâ a group or groups the Government asserts are terrorist organizations. For 2% of the prisoners their nexus to any terrorist group is unidentified.

  4. Only 5% of the detainees were captured by United States forces. 86% of the detainees were arrested by either Pakistan or the Northern Alliance and turned over to United States custody.

Also from the report:

The United States promised (and apparently paid) large sums of money for the capture of persons identified as enemy combatants in Afghanistan and Pakistan. One representative flyer, distributed in Afghanistan, states:

Get wealth and power beyond your dreams....You can receive millions of dollars helping the anti-Taliban forces catch al-Qaida and Taliban murders. This is enough money to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life. Pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people.

Bounty hunters or reward-seekers handed people over to American or Northern Alliance soldiers in the field, often soon after disappearing; as a result, there was little opportunity on the field to verify the story of an individual who presented the detainee in response to the bounty award.


I think the report is fairly damning.

NON BIASED Source?

You are correct. We've been lied to about these guys. Mostly, they were turned in for money -- a king's ransom really if you compared the amount paid to per capita income. Seriously, if you started offering American's $150,000 to turn in terrorists, and required little evidence beyond someone's word, every neighborhood grudge would devolve into one person disappearing, and another installing a new swimming pool. We've been totally duped: Seton Hall Report.

Sadly -- the GP is part of the end of America as we know it (whether by intention, apathy or simple lack of knowledge doesn't really matter). I don't know what we will be in the future, but it won't have anything to do with freedom, justice, fairness, or equity.

...the overwhelming majority of people in Guantanamo were rounded up from the battlefield...

Pardon me. The proper study link is here.

I know this because I was a soldier myself. Regardless of what you hear in the media, the military does not like to waste resources. Wasting money is bad. It will get you in trouble. Wasting some other's soldier's time is a HUGE No-No!

Wasting someone's time who is not really military that belongs to some organization with three initials like CIA or NSA.... well, you just don't do that.

he won't bother so here's a link

http://law.shu.edu/aaafinal.pdf

then you stick them in a monkey and his testicles melt or his hair falls out

Military members are statutorily barred from suing the government for injuries arising in the line of duty. See here.

Government contractors are also immune from products liability suits, so long as the product in question was designed according to military specifications. See here.

Things the recruiter doesn't tell you... Hopefully the government tests carefully before using!

Terrorists hiding in civilian populations and as often as not attacking those same civilians deserve no protection. Catch em, give some minimal justice where needed to try to make sure the Mohammad you caught really is the same Mohammad that blew up a marketplace last week and then shoot the bastard.

Why? Our government derives it's powers FROM US. By definition we hold a claim for our government to respect (and defend) our rights. Think of government as a mutual defense pact.

I see this claimed all over the place by people who have some problem with Guantanamo, but I haven't seen where the evidence for this comes from. These people are given hearings to determine their status, and tribunals to determine their guilt or innocence, and without evidence, they are not found guilty. The charges against them are specific, and I read many of them online a while back. None of the charges read "some guy said he belonged to Al Qaeda." Yes, some were brought there without sufficient evidence... and were subsequently released. Doesn't that mean that the tribunals are working properly?

I see this claimed all over the place by people who have some problem with Guantanamo, but I haven't seen where the evidence for this comes from. These people are given hearings to determine their status, and tribunals to determine their guilt or innocence, and without evidence, they are not found guilty. The charges against them are specific, and I read many of them online a while back. None of the charges read "some guy said he belonged to Al Qaeda." Yes, some were brought there without sufficient evidence... and were subsequently released. Doesn't that mean that the tribunals are working properly?

Don't bother. GP is a brainwashed idiot.

Even the Pentagon says only about 10% will face trial because of a lack of evidence: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15361740/

And of course there's Seton Hall Law School's report: http://law.shu.edu/news/guantanamo_report_final_2_ 08_06.pdf (pdf)
Two notable factoids: only 5% were captured by US forces. Secondly, we were paying a $4285 reward per head. Pakistan delivered quite a few and with a per capita income = $720 (that's almost 6 years of pay as a reward for captured prisoners), how likely is it that there was no fraud? Can we talk negative probabilities here? Any realistic person would know there's a 100% chance innocents got nabbed for cash.

After an investigation, the Judicial Affairs office decided to take action against Miner and, in an Oct. 13 hearing, found him guilty of violating university policy prohibiting discrimination on the basis of "sexual orientation." As "punishment" - a term university officials say they don't like to use - Miner must write a 10-page essay in which he is required to research and explain the Roman Catholic church's position on gays and lesbians.

Now that's going to backfire, big-time. Because official Vatican doctrinal documents are much closer to the student's position than what Duquesne University is putting out.

The Catholic Church is having a doctrinal crackdown on this. No more "diversity". The Apostolic Visitation (what used to called the Grand Inquisition) of US seminaries by Vatican personnel is underway right now. Some faculty members have already been canned for deviations from church doctrine.

If you testify then you have to answer their questions under oath. The top question on the RIAA list would be: where you using p2p to share RIAA member owned songs? If you were sharing and deny it, that is a felony.

This differs from a criminal case, where the jury is instructed to not hold silence against the accused. Also as pointed out by others, the standard of proof is lower in a civil case. Together these points make the common criminal defense strategy of staying silent and letting your lawyer raise doubts a much less effective tactic in civil cases.

Says the courts. Congress hasn't bothered to actually codify the doctrines, but they do appear to have endorsed them in various legislation.

FYI, this isn't unusual: The fair use doctrine was created by the courts back in 1841 and wasn't codified until the 1976 Act. The first sale doctrine was created in what, 1908, and was codified in the 1909 Act the next year. The work for hire doctrine appeared in US courts in the 19th century and also wasn't codified until 1909.

Anyway, read the decision here, where the relevant bit begins "Accordingly, we next address whether Napster is secondarily liable for the direct infringement under two doctrines of copyright law: contributory copyright infringement and vicarious copyright infringement."

It seemed a bit long to quote.

Of course, you could've just googled for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement and found plenty about this.

These are rather old doctrines and AFAIK no one has really challenged the basic idea, and certainly not successfully. The only fights tend to be whether there was a necessary direct infringement (for neither contributory nor vicarious infringement can exist where there is no underlying direct infringement) and whether the requirements for these indirect forms of infringement have been met.

For example, Sony won the famous Betamax case both by arguing that there were fewer direct infringements than had been claimed, and that they didn't have the level of knowledge required by the contributory infringement doctrine. OTOH they didn't say that the very idea of contributory infringement was a lot of crap, probably because that would not be a successful argument.

Try Interactive Real Analysis

Unintentional plagiarism occurs when a student attempts to acknowledge, quote, and/or cite sources but does so inadequately or incorrectly.

See here or here.

This is extremely common in student papers. (and slashdot posts)

It seems pretty clear to me that the zeno paradox is not a paradox at all but just our inability to intuitively solve maths with infinite terms. It reminds me of those visual illusion drawings that cause our brains to make sense of things in a missleading way. Check it out.

At the same time, this does not disprove his paper since the article, is not well writen enough to be useful in determining the validity of this work.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that a mathematical physics model can accurately explain Zeno's paradox as well as a philosophical explanation can.

This is going to be a bit long, so bear with me.

First of all, as others have said here, the solution to Zeno's paradox has been discussed at length and largely agreed to be this.

The idea here is that you can have a functon that describes distance covered over some arbitrary time interval. The point is that you must be able to describe a time interval.

Our amateur physicist is claiming that in fact you can't describe an arbitrary time interval because there is no such thing-- there is only an infinite set of time and that once you pick an arbitrary interval out of that set, you're not talking about a moving object but rather an arbitrary point in space as well. That is, you can't pick out an arbitrary point or interval in time and still be talking about motion or distance outside of that interval, and, in the case of Zeno's paradox, you have to 'unfreeze' time to watch the race continue, in which case your runner is back to having to cover an infinite distance.

What I'm saying is that physics has described a mathematical, theoretical solution to the paradox. What it has not done is provide a solution which is intuitive to the spirit of the paradox.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself that the mathematical solution is a very intuitive solution-- after all, if I go to watch a race between a tortoise and Achilles, I'm sure to see Achilles leave that turtle in the dust, and now it's nice that I have a physics solution that explains what I see. You'd be correct! But here's where I make my claim, and I know it's very strange.

A sentence in the article that caught my eye the most is this one:

"There's no such thing as an instant in time or present moment in nature. It's something entirely subjective that we project onto the world around us. That is, it's the outcome of brain function and consciousness."

We're taught from all directions in Western society that math and physics and the sciences are objective, and things in the humanities are subjective. I suggest that the opposite is true, for certain technical definitions of subjective and objective.

My claim is that it is the sciences which are subjective descriptions of the world, and that subject-less, non-located descriptions are objective. Science relies on measurement and mathematics to get anywhere, but measurement and math are subject dependent. You cannot measure what you cannot experience. Yes, that includes your instruments.

In the case of this amateur phyisicst's work, he is making a claim about the world that attempts to describe things from a non-subjective perspective. His claim is essentially, I think, rather intuitive and obvious. His claim is just that it is us, as subjects, we project time intervals on a universe in which they may not really exist-- that is, time is not objectively quantifiable because objective quantification implies no people around to do the quantification, which means that there aren't any physicists to use mathematics to describe their reality.

While to most philosophers this sort of claim is routine, most physicists and mathematicians are aghast at the suggestion that their science is essentially dependent on the experience they have as subjects. I think that even though some physicists are starting to take note of this, it won't do much to hurt physics (nor should it), nor will it invalidate arguments and proofs which already deal with Zeno's paradox (nor should it). What I hope that it will do, however, is make some of the more arrogant physicists who have a large chip on their shoulder (Hi, Alan Sokal!) understand that they are not the keepers of objective world views, and that the work they do is just as subjective as any other human endeavour.

Regards,
Edward

The thing is, you might "solve" Zeno's paradox as much as you want by referring to examples, but most attempts at attacking Zeno's paradox via "logical" examples doesn't do anything to explain it, but merely points at motions and declares the matter solved.

Look at your answer again - you just restated the paradox

If you keep taking increasingly smaller steps, you will never reach your goal.

That is the core of the paradox: During the race, you will always have an infinite number of "half-distances" left.

Yet, the paradox as stated is correct in stating that to move from point A to B (provided they are not the same :), you have to cover every "half-distance" in between - an infinite number of them.

So how do you prove that covering an infinite number of half distance is possible to do in finite time?

That's where the aforementioned limits of infinite series comes in.

Today, this is pretty basic maths, but it had people stumped for a proof for more than two thousand years.

As reported before, the US Department of Defense is going to become fully IPv6 compliant by 2008 and purchasing only IPv6 compliant devices starting in October (see this press release).

Will they make full compliance by 2008? Probably not, knowing how government institutions work. However, DoD purchases a lot of computers, a lot of networked devices, etc. I remember hearing about 70% of their traffic goes accross the Internet (years ago, and they create a lot of traffic.) They have been a big influence on the 'net in the past, and I think this will be a big catalyst to IPv6 in the future.

They don't need to do so, as one can prove that Pi is irrational in advance.

On another note, P2P programs are simply another aplication of the 20-80 Rule, aka Pareto's Principle where 20% of your users account for 80% of your bandwidth.

I am sorry to downplay you but apparently you do not have a strong background in math and maybe some knowledge in algorithm theory? In short: Gödel's theorem applies to all axiomatic systems containing Peano axioms. The system that number theoreticians study contains the Peano axioms (obviously as it is a theory of numbers). Therefore the Gödel theorem applies as considering the Riemann hypothesis.

You'll find the Peano axioms here. The most important thing about the Peano axioms is that they state the existence of natural numbers {1,2,3,...} (note the axioms give out an infinite number of such objects). So no Peano axioms => no theory of numbers...

Pareto's Principle: The 80-20 Rule

"Pareto's rule states that a small number of causes is responsible for a large percentage of the effect, in a ratio of about 20:80. Expressed in a management context, 20% of a person's effort generates 80% of the person's results. The corollary to this is that 20% of one's results absorb 80% of one's resources or efforts."

Should anybody ask "How is this a bad thing?", send them to read Privacy and Power: Computer Databases and Metaphors for Information Privacy (linked to here) by Daniel Solove. I personally think it is worth reading the whole thing, but it's kinda long, so maybe this NY Times article is a better suggestion.