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Can Open Source Give Comfort To the Enemy?
zlite writes "We make open source Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (drones), mostly for geomapping and other amateur uses. One of our problems is that most people think of UAVs as Scary Things, and despite our efforts to prove otherwise there's always the risk of regulatory crackdowns. We have amateur UAV participants from around the world, but now they've been joined by an Iranian in Tehran, who has made a UAV in the colors of the Iranian flag. My instinct is that we should welcome everyone, everywhere, but I'm sure some in Washington worry that this looks like helping an 'Axis of Evil' country make advanced weapons. They could shut us down with the stroke of a pen. My question: is there ever a case for letting national security issues dictate the limits of an open source project?"
OH GOD THE IRANIAN FLAG!
As if Americans don't festoon their flag everywere.
Patiotic? "Nationalistic"? God.
If you want to do the government's work for them, sure.
If you are shutting down a project based solely on the fear that your government may shut you down in the future (and not for a valid reason), you are only saving them the trouble, and making it that much worse for the next controversial open-source project that comes along.
Just like scientific advancements and knowledge in general are available to anyone, anywhere, so should be open source software. It's a principles thing.
In any case, something tells me no open source UAV software will ever be capable of running a weapons platform without significant contributions. If a country can build a UAV capable of military grade recon or even able to field weapons, they won't have any problem writing the software.
Enemy of whom? Iran has not been in a war of aggression against any nation, since the 19th century.
Don't bite the propaganda of AIPAC or Dick Cheney! Israel is the nuclear armed agressor in the Middle East.
Persian culture, by way of contrast, produced the world's first assertion and declaration of Human Rights, and is responsible for the foundation of modern mathematics.
You want ethical and humane living? Read the Avesta of Zoroaster. Unlike the rabid Old Testament, it pleads that humanity have good thought, good speech and good deeds, not casting it's neighbors as "abominations" and wishing them plagues.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
One would think someone infiltrating a group to aid a hostile government would be able to cover their tracks a little better. Maybe use a cutout in Germany, South America or Canada. It would be pretty foolish for the Iranian Air Force to use an IP that traces back to Tehran. Just because they talk with an accent doesn't mean they think with one.
Besides, if the Iranians want advanced UAV's, the Russians will sell them whatever is in their inventory. The Chinese, who probably make a lot of the circuit boards and sub systems for our military, would happily sell them their 100% original design...that just happens to look amazingly like ours. Heeeey.
If they struck out there then they're down to the French, Taiwanese, North Koreans and a half-dozen other countries happy to sell them weapons systems under the table.
Of course, this is the Bush administration we're talking about here. Logic and common sense hold no sway in American government and people get appointed to high office because they're skilled fund raisers. So, yeah, I could see them shaking down you guys just because it makes them feel like they're doing something and they can understand you when you talk...if you limit yourself to simple words. Plus you're convenient driving distance from their offices.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
It seems to me that the Iranians have this type of basic technology - keep in mind, keeping something in the air is no big challenge, nor is waypoint navigation. Also - picking up any field robotics journal will have papers on this sort of autonomous stuff - should be ban those too?
I hate to complicate matters, but...I'm not sure it's so cut-and-dried. The Nazi example above may seem a little silly to some, but it's not totally off-the-wall. It seems to me that the question that needs to be asked is "Who says it's a national security issue?" If it seems like a knee-jerk "He's a Muslim!"-type thing, then we're not really talking national security. But if we're dealing with someone who has a reasonable likelihood of wanting to harm the U.S., and the project itself actually lends itself to that, then...yeah, I suppose you'd need to seriously consider not allowing the guy to participate.
In other words: believe it or not, there are somethings that are more important than "freedom"...as far as SOFTWARE goes. =P
Yes, making a UAV is not trivial, but neither is it incredibly difficult. There are plenty of cheap parts out there that, with a little programming, could tie together a small GPS module and aircraft control servos. It wouldn't be too terribly difficult for any country to make a UAV; I would say with a parts budget of $1K US, I could probably get a simple one (that could fly to a given waypoint) working within a few weeks/months. With $10K, you could make a very capable one -- probably with a range of several hundred km -- which could carry a small payload (a few grams of radioactives go a long way, ya know.)
Bottom line -- trying to restrict such technology is laughable these days. Microchip literally gives away microcontrollers capable of handling a small aircraft, given the right software and interface electronics. These "evil terr-a-rists" will always be able to get their hands on technology. What we need is to find a way to make it politically difficult for them to continue as terrorists. (I.E. find a diplomatic solution.)
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Then you will laugh when the next Ice Age comes.
And cry when the next asteroid hits...
The only "hope", if there is a point, is to get geographically diversified. And by geographically, I mean light-years.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
``My instinct is that we should welcome everyone, everywhere, but I'm sure some in Washington worry that this looks like helping an 'Axis of Evil' country make advanced weapons.''
Is anyone still taking these guys seriously? I mean, the "Axis of Evil" was coined at the time when the whole cast was performing a play where they convinced the USAmerican public that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction and posed a great threat to the USA. Now that has been exposed for the load of bollocks many of us already saw it for at the time. The whole "Axis of Evil" concept was invented to scare the American public into thinking there was a conspiracy against them, but, in all the time since then, none of the countries on this supposed axis have actually attacked the USA. The only aggressor in this whole stage play has been the USA itself, with the demagogues leading the violence somehow escaping scrutiny. Sure, Iraqis are killing US soldiers _now_, but, well, can you blame them, after said soldiers plunged their country into an anarchy where it's news if there is a day _without_ bombings? And the same guys who came up with the "Axis of Evil" told you that the US soldiers would be received as heroes and bring peace and stability to Iraq.
And now you are saying that X is a good idea, but we'd better not do it because the "Axis of Evil" guys may not like it? I'm not saying the idea is good and you should do it, but _not_ doing it because of those demagogues seems about as bad an idea as they get. They've done enough damage already!
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Imagine if someone decided to design an open source cruise missile.
The U.S.A. already leaned on the New Zealand gov't to shut down a guy making a (non-open source) DIY cruise missile just to prove that he could do it. The NZ version of the IRS hound him into bankruptcy.
Not to mention that his gov't even said it'd be perfectly fine if he sold the technology to Iran. BTW - He didn't.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
TROLL ALERT
It is unbelievable propaganda to equate Iran to Nazi Germany. Israeli disinfo and psyops (MEMRI) deliberately mis-translate stories, and the lapdog media in the US and UK eat it up.
Here is the country, and the people, that you smear as "enemy".
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
...made a UAV in the colors of the Iranian flag
If you are going to fly it in the US, just paint it sideways. The worst problem you'll then encounter is border patrol thinking its those illegal Mexican immigrants crossing by air.
Technology is not inherently wrong/evil/whatever. Technology is just technology. And if an Iranian kid finds some peaceful apps for technology, good for him, hope he inspires the hell out of his friends to do the same.
Let's face it, you can use a baseball bat to play baseball. Or, you can use it to beat somebody to a pulp. Going to make baseball illegal cause somebody might pick up a bat and hit somebody? Same principle.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
Might be a bit offtopic but Wait a minute... there is no war going on between USA and Iran, Since when did Iran become your enemy? Just because your president sais something stupid you see a whole country as "your" enemy?
Call me crazy, but that is just wrong.
I'm from Iran myself and I know that most people in Iran do not see USA as the "enemy" at all. People should not judge a country by the small minority which rules it.
I might be a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.
My question: is there ever a case for letting national security issues dictate the limits of an open source project?"
Crypto was kept out of the Linux kernel for a long time, since the US had regulation on exporting crypto systems. These were mostly lifted under Clinton, though there's still a list of countries that it's illegal to export to (Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria, according to: http://www.epic.org/crypto/export_controls/regs_1_ 00.html).
RMS has stated that if copyright laws in the vein of the DMCA continue to be passed, Free Software development could no longer take place in US borders.
Germany was recently hit with a law that outlawed "hacking software", apparently including nmap or packet sniffers.
It's nice to say that you want to do things for the good of humanity, but beaurocrats have other ideas.
Not a typewriter
The Iranian Government currently has the technology to produce:
And you think that stopping a not for profit, model aircraft UAV building group is going to limit their ability to produce a military UAV.
So how many other open source projects may have secret Iranian participants, shall we shut them all down.
How about shutting down Linux because it can be used by the Iranians to build super computers like they do in the west to test bomb designs.?
Lets ban all knowledge because the terrorists may get at it.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
I'm not sure what those pictures are supposed to prove--Nazi Germany had cars and trees and apartment buildings and highways too. It is not quite accurate to compare the two, however. Iran is more like pre-Reformation Europe--a civilization whose people are growing more advanced, leading to tensions with a medieval theocratic regime.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
While I do personally agree with your sentiments, that is not really the question being asked. The question being asked is "Is it legal?".
That question is more complex. I am working on a rocket - similar issue arise. ITAR is the governing regulation, and the state department decides what ITAR means. And they are not logical about it.
I want to develop human rocket transports - but anything that goes into space is automatically a weapon, according to the state department. That means that if I talk to a non-US citizen about my improvements to rockets, I go to jail - let alone hiring or working with a non-US citizen.
UAVs seem very likely to fall under ITAR, because the state department will almost certainly say so. Ignorance of the law does not free you from the consequences of it, so I would tread carefully. One of the biggest problems with ITAR is that it is difficult to know exactly what it makes illegal - and so you end up having to consult lawyers every time you want to do anything involving foriengers. Very annoying, and very expensive! But it does lock in big profits for government contractors, of course... (You did know that they get reimbursed for all legal expenses, right?)
My dream is that knowing this will so enrage the Slashdot community that everyone will call their senator and tell them to force the state department to make the ITAR list less inclusive, and only include things that have weaponry as a primary purpose - and get congress to force state to change.
I'd also like a pony...
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What, do you think people in the middle east are somehow stupid or not educated and incapable of
creating a UAV without assistance? Having spent a fair amount of time in the middle east I can tell you that their population in many cases has better access to technology than we do here in the states.
I think if they have the smarts and capability to build a reactor that a UAV would not be real difficult for them.
Got Code?
Don't bite the propaganda of AIPAC or Dick Cheney! Israel is the nuclear armed agressor in the Middle East.
Huh? Aggressor? Last I checked, it wasn't Israel who was swearing to wipe out other countries, nor do they send suicide bombers to blow up buses of children. Israel is certainly not squeaky clean, but having enemies around you screaming for your destruction tends to make a country trigger happy. The ledger of atrocities is about 10 (if not 100) to 1 in favor of Israel.
Persian culture, by way of contrast, produced the world's first assertion and declaration of Human Rights, and is responsible for the foundation of modern mathematics.
Those civilizations are long dead -- unfortunately for the people of the middle east.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
My question: is there ever a case for letting national security issues dictate the limits of an open source project?
National security issues can put the kibosh on nearly anything. Just ask the amateur rocketry hobbyists about the hoops they have to jump through due to the PATRIOT Act. In a few more years you'll probably be lucky to be able to find chemistry sets with experiments more interesting than mixing vinegar and baking soda.
Persian culture, by way of contrast, produced the world's first assertion and declaration of Human Rights, and is responsible for the foundation of modern mathematics.
While I somewhat agree with that sentiment, we need to recognize that Iran isn't exactly the same Persia that we know and love. A lot has changed over the years. Persia finally succumbed to Islam; around 90% of Iranians follow the various Islamic faiths, and there are very few Zoroastrians hanging around. Sure, ethnically, the people are mostly the same as they were during the Empire years, but to say that culture is still pervasive? I don't know about that. Also, you can't berate people who follow the other Abrahamic religions, and then praise a modern country filled with people who also follow an (in my eye) equally stupid, but somewhat different Abrahamic religion. What sense does that make?
I've no doubt that the Iranian people are generally, and individually, great people; still, they're under the influence of assholes. It's no different than the US. Their government lies, our government lies, their leader has a screw loose, our leader has to have a screw loose-and unfortunately he has control over the bombs. Israel is the same way. It would be nice, however, if Ahmadinejad didn't periodically call for the elimination of Israel. Instead of defusing the situation, all they do is throw another stick of dynamite on the pile, and it doesn't further their cause in the international arena.
Constitutional rights may be respected, repealed, or modified; but they must never be ignored.
That has to have been the most non-troll way of putting that.
Sorry that your facts are unpopular here...
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I could care less about baseball. Doesn't bother me in the least if they wanna do 'better ballplay through chemistry'.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
You ever read failed states or hegemony or survival by noam chomsky?
Not to get into a debate on Chomsky, but he suffers from two major logic flaws: Proof by selective evidence, and he presupposes his conclusions (e.g., Given problem A, the conclusion will be that the U.S. holds the vast majority of blame).
No doubt he's a bright guy, but he has some huge blinders when it comes to politics. Unfortunately, his anger overwhelms his rationality.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Imagine if someone decided to design an open source cruise missile. ... DIY cruise missile
That guy was developing something that some strategic intel people have been expecting for years - a simple V1-like UAV, but with modern guidance.
The V1 of WWII was a very simple device, built cheaply out of sheet metal with a crude engine. Range of several hundred miles. Moderately reliable airframe. But the guidance systems of that era had trouble finding London, and hitting a specific military target was hopeless. The same airframe with modern guidance could hit specific buildings. It could become the Third World's answer to US bombing strikes - the AK-47 of air warfare. So far, no one has bothered.
Believe it or not, there was a time in American history when lots of people carried guns. Used them to catch dinner, too. Shooting a person was considered bad form.
You're confused. Israel has never fought an aggressive war.
Right - like the war in 1948 where Arabs were massacred or ethnic-cleansed out of their villages... that wasn't aggressive. And nor was the unilateral "preemptive" strike on the Iraqi nuclear facility. Oh, and lets not forget the unprovoked attack on the USS Liberty (how many Americans were killed in the "accidental" attack that lasted several hours?). Oh, and the invasions into Lebanon... how many times now? Nope, no aggression there.
On a hot, tiring day of Jihad, some holy RPG-wielding Islamic terrorist might pick up a tasty Coca-Cola product and indulge in good old-fashioned American refreshment!
So does that mean that Coca-Cola Co. is lending aid and comfort to the enemy??
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I'm fairly sure it still is considered bad form ;)
Normal people worry me!
A smarter device isn't that hard to create today - a GPS, gyro and a small one-chip computer will make things easy. Failure rate may be higher than for the military spec UAV:s but what's missing in precision can be made up by larger numbers.
So all R/C equipment around may also be a security risk.
I'm sure that this is causing dandruff for some security people. Just accept that the worms are out of the can.
And anyway - there are better ways to streak terror in people than with UAV:s. - They are too visible, rather slow and can be spotted before they are about to cause any big trouble.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
You can name just as many atrocities that Muslim Arabs have committed against Israel. Over the years the suicide bombings, the kidnappings, and the rockets add up, you know. This debate is tired and it doesn't go anywhere. Both sides are convinced they are waging a defensive war, and anything can be justified if one thinks one is defending oneself.
You never hear anyone who speaks loudly condemn both sides for their ethical failures over the years. Why does everyone have to declare one side or the other innocent of all crimes?
Why don't we just look at the facts: Israel exists in a sea of Arab countries, some of whom consistently announce their intention to wipe them from the face of the Earth. This tense climate has made both sides afraid, and people who are afraid make bad decisions. Because of these bad decisions, the Muslims in Palestine have become more marginalized and more radicalized. The Israelis have become more aggressive.
This does not exempt either side from culpability, and it also does not make either side the clear moral victor.
The only way peace will be accomplished in the Middle East is if both sides learn to move past their grievances and realize that the past has no rational relationship to how they should proceed in the future. The past is all sunken cost. Both sides need to say to themselves: How do we prevent further death?
If you take a russian rocket engine into the US, it then becomes illegal to send it back to Russia or to tell anything technical about it to Russians. The only exception is anything "published", which you can quote (but not embellish - even saying "this looks good" could be construed as an ITAR violation).
I've heard that the best way around it is to patent it. A Patent counts as publishing it, which means that you can then talk about it. If you had published it yourself, they would consider that an ITAR violation - but if the PTO publishes it, you are off the hook.
The most annoying and inane rules anywhere. Seriously, call your senator!
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Well, the Soviets tried that several decades ago, and, well... Yeah.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
Come on! This is the same State Department and ITAR that banned exportation of strong encryption as being "dangerous to National Security". As a result, the US could not compete in the international marketing of effective encryption, while everybody else could.
They really thought that "security through obscurity" was a viable option.
What a crock.
Eventually they were FORCED to see the light... but the problem is, everybody else saw the light right away... not after many years of argument and litigation.
Rather than getting rid of UAVs, we should lobby to get rid of ITAR. Just about everybody would be happier as a result.
>Both sides are convinced they are waging a defensive war, and anything can be justified if one thinks one is defending oneself.
But only one side is carrying on a 40 year illegal occupation.
>This does not exempt either side from culpability, and it also does not make either side the clear moral victor.
Moral victors are those trying to gain their independence from an occupying force.
>How do we prevent further death?
Start by ending the occupation. Pull back to the 64 borders, build a wall around yourself, let the UN patrol the other side of the war. Never ever deal with any muslim country again.
evil is as evil does
You don't see Native Americans strapping explosives to their chests and screaming that, in the name of their god, they shall take back their homeland from the filthy paleskins that conquered them, do you? Israel was created generations ago, after World War II came to a close - It seems as though a fair amount of time has passed since then, over half a century. Have the Arab people (or at least their leaders) of those lands surrounding Israel been breeding nothing but unbridled hatred and fury over the past nearly sixty years? Do survivors of World War II teach hatred and distrust of Germans and Japanese, and vice versa? Why must the fighting continue as it is? Why is Israel's mere existence considered such a stain on the face of the Middle East?
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
False comparison. The Native Americans suffered the worst of their indignities centuries ago. Palestinians who are in their 70's and 80's still have their house keys from their homes that they were forcibly removed from.
The Native Americans are allowed to become full American citizens. Palestinians are denied citizenship by Israel. Native Americans are offered economic autonomy, ie casinos and tax-free shopping, while Palestinians are suffering while Israel closes the borders and blocks commerce and electricity.
Oh noez!! I haz a pair of ducks![*]
The only thing that's relevant to any discussion of any contemporary political regime is how they act today and the recent past. Pining over long dead civilizations and trying to impart a few choice characteristics some idealized version of them on to their contemporary decendents while ignoring all intervening history is extremely sophmoric.
----
[*] Thank you. Thank you. I'll be here all week. Two shows on Friday and Saturday: 7 and 10. No kids at the 10. It gets a little blue.
Their Marx worship was just as much a religion as christianity, islam, mormonism, hinduism, etc. are. If it quacks like a duck and all that. Of course their propaganda denied that, but that was just their way of saying that there is only One True religion.
Your argument does nothing to disprove the original premise.
You never hear anyone who speaks loudly condemn both sides for their ethical failures over the years.
Wrong. Lots of people do. But those who do are despised by BOTH the sides (instead of just one of the sides) so they get much less media coverage. SO it ends up that anybody that talks against Israel's landgrabbing is labelled antisemitic (which is ridiculous if not else because the Palestinians are as much semitic as the Israeli, and actually often more semitic because most of Israeli are Jew but with lots of caucasic blood in their veins, so even from a purely racist point of view the label doesn't even make sense), and anybody that talks against the Palestinians terrorism acts is labeled as 'sold-out to the Israelf-US capitalistic landgrabbing agenda' or whatever.
Also, the main problem is that people keep talking about culpability instead of thinkin in terms of find a solution. This is exactly the same reason why most vendettas go on for centuries. (Plus, if we have to talk about culpability in the Palestine case I would go for the UN, which almost literely threw the Jew colonists to the lions, by supporting the creation of the State of Israel despite the clear and loud voices against it from the neighbouring nations. And please nobody mention the Belford declaration, that was before WWII and the promise to wipe Israel out of the face of Earth if it got founded was declared right after WWII, and before the foundation of the State. As for the right of a nation to have a State, that goes for lots of persecuted nations around the world, but nobody gives a shit about them so that's quite obviously not enough of a reason.)
So the solution has to rely on a current analysis of the situation, and the current analysis is that Israel is still landgrabbing, using the settlers (or squatters, depending on the point of view) outside of its borders as an excuse to extend its control over Palestine. Until they dismantle those settlements (that serve no purpose but landgrabbing) and fully retreat within the UN-declared borders they simply have no right to complain about the Palestinian terrorism. Likewise, Palestine should officially and once for all acknolwedge the State of Israel (within the UN-declared borders) and cease all hostile activity against Israel.
Of course, it's not something that I foresee happening anytime soon.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
"ITAR is the governing regulation, and the state department decides what ITAR means. And they are not logical about it."
I think you misunderstand the problem. In the US we have multiple branches of government. The laws are written by one branch, and enforced by another. Of course, every person in the government has their own political agenda. This means that when an agency is looking at enforcing a law, they don't ask "what did the writers of this law intend" instead they ask "how can this law be used to further my agenda". I am not being cynical, I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with things working this way. Indeed, if enforcement agencies always set about enforcing the spirit of the law, it would give legislators far too much power.
I think you'll find that regulatory agencies' interpretation of the law makes a lot more sense when you consider the agencies' basic goals.
Instead of asking a bunch of Slashdotters what they think the government might say, why not ask the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency themselves. ICE and the Department of State have joint jurisdiction over ITAR. I've never been able to figure out who handles what, but I'd recommend starting with ICE. You can call them at 1-866-DHS-2-ICE. (Yes, this may be the first time in Slashdot history that someone has recommended calling DHS not as a joke.)
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ICE has a program called Project Shield America that is designed for exactly this type of thing. Their goal is to try to educate industry about what can and can't be exported.
http://www.ice.gov/pi/news/factsheets/shield07120
Lastly, IANAIA (I am not an ICE agent) but I suspect their answer is probably going to be that exporting UAV technology to Iran is a no-no. I'm sure it depends on exactly what you are doing, but from a quick googling, it looks like a lot of UAV related technology is restricted.
Why is it that I feel like I'm about to get modded back into the Stone Age?
So what if they are?
It's only baseball, and if the players want to take those personal risks..let them-it's their health/career.
You should stick to bad car analogies until it's time to get rid of your training wheels, kiddo.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
A little of topic but I think you misunderstood what he was trying to say. We don't all speak the same 'language' but all languages use similar constructs which are pre-wired into the human brain allowing us to acquire language (something that only humans can do). The theory is not unnecessary - it is vital to understanding the development of language, and it is demonstratively true. He is very well respected within linguistics - but his writings on politics are rather one sided.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
The ledger of atrocities is about 10 (if not 100) to 1 in favor of Israel.
It's this type of thinking that truly galls me (as well as helps what's going on in the Middle East to continue). There's no "scorecard" to look at, and there's no such thing as, well, these atrocities are not as bad as those ones, therefore we should side with these guys. In case you haven't noticed, both sides are equally guilty of atrocities; both are just as bad as the other based on the measurement that they are atrocities. For every atrocity someone picks out about one side, there's certainly something equal to find from the other.
So, let's look at your claim: "10 (if not 100) to 1 in favor of Israel". Let's assume, like you do, that there is some sort of scorecard you can use to support this. How do you measure this?
Number of civilians killed? Israel has certainly killed more.
Number of times innocent civilians are targeted intentionally? Israeli Chief of Staff Mordechai Gur admitted in 1978 that Israel intentionally targeted civilian populations. Israeli military analyst Deev Schiff remarked on the comments at the time saying: "In South Lebanon we struck the civilian population consciously, because they deserved it ... [T]he importance of Gur's remarks is the admission that the Israeli army has always struck civilian populations, purposely and consciously ... the army, he said, has never distinguished civilian [from military] targets...[but] purposely attacked civilian targets even when Israeli settlements had not been struck." The same pattern was again repeated in the most recent Lebanon invasion, echoing the comments of Abba Eban's "rational prospect ... that afflicted populations would exert pressure for the cessation of hostilities", terrorism in ever sense of the word.
Number of civilian targets and infrastructure destroyed? Just counting the recent war with Lebanon would put Israel in a clear lead.
What about terrorism, or genocide, or ethnic cleansing, or other human rights measurements such as torture etc.? Is that a measure of how bad an atrocity is? Do some reading about what Israel actually did to the civilian population during the first Lebanon war. For example, most men between 16 and 60 in Southern Lebanon were rounded up and imprisoned without any reason. Countless numbers were tortured, beaten, starved, and killed, quite intentionally, with the laughter and racist insults of their captors ringing in their ears. Or perhaps go further back and look at what Ilan Pappe (Israeli historian) calls "The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine", detailing quite accurately how the plan to forcibly transfer the Arab population from their land "was a clear-cut case of an ethnic cleansing operation, regarded under international law today as a crime against humanity."
And what about being an aggressor? You imply they've always been on the defence, which is untrue. The 1956 Israeli-French-British attack on Egypt was not defensive. The 1978 invasion of Lebanon was not defensive. The 1973 Arab attack was an Israeli defensive war in that they were defending territory that they occupied. Even the 1967 war is not conclusively one of Israeli defence: Menachem Begin remarked that "In June 1967, we again had a choice. The Egyptian Army concentrations in the Sinai approaches do not prove that Nasser was really about to attack us. We must be honest with ourselves. We decided to attack him."
The point I'm trying to make here is that blame is not a zero sum game. Until there is some sort of even handedness against both parties - in other words, until there is an embargo against Israel on a par with what has been put in place against the Palestinians - there is simply not going to be peace in that region until one side is exterminated, and at the moment that is likely to be the Palestinians.
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
>Let's correct it, carrying occupation only because of hostility of territories around it.
That's the lousiest excuse I have ever heard for apartheid.
>blowing up civilians in big numbers doesn't count as fight for something right in my book
Sounds to me like you are perfectly fine with it when israel does it.
>Don't want to sound like troll, flamer or something,
And yet you sound exactly like a troll and a flamer.
>And that worries me most. It is clear that they don't know what are good for them. They simply refuse to live in this life without conflict and seeks very antagonistic attitude.
This sentence applies to the israeli side more then it applies to the palestenian side.
But I know what you will never admit that. You have already made an excuse for 40 years of brutal occupation of 3.5 million people.
evil is as evil does
against the government; all patent applications are screened to see if there is a national secutrity interest involoved. If the gov. decides there is, there is no application published, and the idea/device becomes property of the governent for as long as they deem appropriate.
They seem to have all the bases covered.
Palestinians are denied citizenship by Israel.
Whoa there!
Is the West Bank and Gaza occupied territory or is it a part of Israel?
If the Palestinians become Israeli citizens you have to make the assumption that they are a part of Israel which is completely wrong.
I'm all for Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the West bank and letting the Palestinians have their own state and be rightful citizens of their own nations.
But if you are to confer them Israeli citizenship you no longer admit them to have their own free country and that those occupied territories are just an extension of Israel proper (which most Palestinians would say they are not). It would be like telling the Bosnians that there are going to get full citizen rights as Serbians.
So lets talk about given the Palestinians sovereignty rather than a foreign country's citizenship shall we? I'm sure they feel the same way.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jonathan_stee
Sounds like regime change to me. Sounds like Bush in fact.
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http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/jonathan_stee
Of course it's handy to paint the guy as more insane than he really is. It makes invasion much more supportable.
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Ask your lawyer what the minimum you have to do in order to keep yourself, your project, and contributors out of trouble.
Then follow his advice.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Depends on who is getting shot. :(
You are where you are at the time you are there.
That is a load of bullshit. I'm not a Muslim (well technically I am, but only by the definition used in the Quran, not by the definition used in this conversation), but I have read the Quran and the quotes you provide are taken woefully out of context. The Quran is a philosophical and enlightening book and if you pay careful attention to the context, not violent either.
The fanatical lunatics who terrorise civilians and who drag the Prophet's Name, Peace be upon Him (although he probably ends up rolling in his grave every time they defile His name with their acts), through mud at every chance they get are no more faithful Muslims than the Spanish Inquisition were loving Christians.
Feel free not to take my word for it, but rather than visiting some anti-<insert religion here> site, go to the source and read their holy scriptures with an open mind. Also do not forget to bear in mind the time and place they were revealed, that help explain some of the more interesting laws.
As far as translations of the Quran go, I've been given to understand that George Sale's translation is very good.
But can you say that the US (or any other country for that matter) mass media does not wear the same blinders of a different sort? His view are no more or less distorted than that of the average popular opinion piece.
Everyone has their own blinders. But it's a question of degree. His views ARE far, far, FAR more distorted than the average opinion piece. Just because everyone has bias doesn't mean everyone's opinions are equivalently valid.
And secondly, he doesn't argue from honesty. I don't know if it's deliberate, but he's infamous for quoting out of context and oversimplifying to the point of absurdity. I tend to think that he's not dishonest, but he does have some psychological problems.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Anybody who 'excels' at any sport is by definition a genetic abberation. The people who are 'best' at all the Olympic events start out as being physically ideal in some way and then train further in the given activity. So since they're already genetic freaks, what's the difference if they're chemically augmented genetic freaks?
Big brutish football players, and freakish tall basketball players would deserve our sympathy if there wasn't an entertainment industry eager to draw our attention to them (and to the advertising played in parallel with their performances)
There. The nerd interpretation of sports.
Microsoft says legacy (serial/parallel) ports are bad. They don't obfuscate the hardware enough.
OK, so they're not all literally Big-Haired, from Mississippi, or Women; but that archetype typifies the kind of person who ends up implementing security policy in the DoD. They're minimally educated low to mid level administrators. They're hard working, but solidly average intelligence folks. Watch a little prime time TV and imagine the sort of person who enjoys it. It's people like that that are actually turning the crank that makes the bureaucracy machine go. When you hear about the government moving to classify a bunch of formerly unclassified information, the temptation is to think that the decision to do so originated from Cheney or Scooter...err..Bush, but the reality is that the notion that it ought to be done at all originated from below, from the BHWfM, and the "terrorists are everywhere" paranoids just signed off on it. Even outside those single wholesale orders to classify info, the BHWfM are responsible for a continuous and irrational "classification creep" that you don't even see unless you work in the system. It works like this: XYZ Corp designs a rocket (call it the X-123) for the DoD. The X-123 rocket design is reviewed by the DoD project managers, who tell their BHWfM to stamp it "top secret". A couple years pass, and XYZ Corp submits some design modifications to the LOX pump of the X-123. It's a bog-standard pump design, straight out of an engineering 101 textbook, but it's part of the top secret X-123 rocket, it too is stamped top secret by the BHWfM. A year later, XYZ Corp designs an improved life support module for the ISS and they re-use the same pump. Whoops! DoD says no go, because it uses a top secret LOX pump design! Since once something is classified it's nearly impossible to get it declassified, they have to create a new pump design.
Now imagine that happening every day, and not just with big, tangible things like LOX pumps, but with mundane crap like a table of performance characteristics of mild steel that was included in some report. It's totally asinine, but apparently unstoppable.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
Palestinians are also denied citizenship by all Arab states, due to an Arab League decision of NOT allowing Palestinians to be absorbed by any Arab country (thus keeping the pressure against Israel).
Catalin Braescu
Ofaly.com
Also some were just terrified of what the Israeli military might do and fled. However, when it looked safe to go back to their homes, they discovered that they were not allowed to return. Israel has always had a problem which is that it wants to be both a Jewish state, but also a democracy. The only way you can really do that is by ensuring that the majority of people in that state are Jewish. This is why the Palestinians were not allowed to return. It also explains why so many of the Holocaust Jews ended up in Israel. Many of them didn't want to go an live in some Middle Eastern desert. They were Europeans and would much have preferred to go to the US, Canada or perhaps some other European country. They were being deliberately channelled into Palestine to build up the numbers.
Here's the thing: if you're a pilot, UAVs are scary things.
We're already trained to look for birds, which are bad enough bad at least have the courtesy to move in a way that attracts the eye naturally. But UAVs are very hard to see and do not talk on the radio to let other aircraft know where they are ("I see you about 2 miles off my wing"). They can't even look around to see what other VFR aircraft (who are not required to carry anything more complex than eyeballs to avoid collisions) they might be nearing and steer clear.
Outside of controlled airspaces, these things are deathtraps waiting to happen unless very clear rules govern their deployment, just as there are rules for other moving hazards like sykdivers ("sykdivers in the air from x-thousand feet in the area imediately south of mumblefrotz airfield, traffic steer clear"). Too many, and they're be the only things in the sky. Too few, and there won't be enough general awareness of their use in VFR airspaces.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Normally I wouldn't want to feed a troll, but you have replied with the exact same answer I would expect from the Pentagon. Part of standard terrorism tactics is turning everyday things like airplanes or remote control cars or little old ladies, into weapons. The denial of technologies to the whole culture will only fuel terrorist sympathies. What needs to be confronted is the source of the tension, fanaticism combined with polygamy. Large portions of your terrorist producing cultures are young men that have no hope of ever having a wife because they are not rich/powerful/status enough, and so cannot negotiate with the bride's parents. Combine this with religious leaders who promise an afterlife with a whole harem if you manage to martyr yourself and you get people who will do any and everything to achieve the task assigned to you by the fanatical religious leader.
Technology isn't going to change the problem, culture is. If through international projects/interaction/communication we can take the edge off a culture with some dangerous imbalances then we are helping to solve the problem.
We are all just people.
I helped provide security at the Atlanta Olympics at the Boxing venue, I saw the boxers behind the scenes practicing for their upcoming events and for many of them I was truly frighted at the thought of them competing; what you see on TV isn't representative of the vast majority of the contestants, but the result of the TV pool cherry picking the best matches for ratings.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
I'm not sure I would place too much stock in Wiki articles. For all you know, they are slanted and authored by a tenured professor living in moms basement in kentucky who does such a good job that no one at his university has ever heard of him including human resources who issues the pay checks. The link you mention about Ahmed Yassin says he was born in the Palestine territory Not Israel. Of course in the creation of Israel, everyone was welcome to come. Read about the Balfour proclamation and the British mandate of Palestine. And read about it from some independed sources then wikki.
But anyways, history shows us that the Palestinians were the first aggressors. And this aggression dates back before the 1300's. The ottoman empire sold the jews the land around Israel, there have been squawks between them for ages. After WW1 this flared up again and now Israel is an independent state and Palestine is still a territory making bad decisions. Israel was originally intended to be open to all without regard to their religion. Under the Balfour proclamation, this was supposed to be the way. With Israel getting attack and successfully defending herself, that is gone.
Palestine started a war they couldn't win and they lost land in the process. Every time Israel intends to give the land back, and they have made more then enough concessions, the Palestinians attacked Israel again. They make it clear they only want th land to launch ranged attacks at innocent civilians. I don't see why that is acceptable to some. But if Israel really had issues fermenting from religion, they could easily just wipe all the palastine people out and be done with it.
While I am sure you are correct in most cases, some athletes are just ordinary people who acquired extraordinary skills through hard work since elementary school age. Those are the most unhappy about a competitor getting the same muscles in a few months by taking hormones.
Fine. Just don't go pulling out your gun first if someone tries to rob your house. If you threaten their life, surely they can be justified in protecting themselves and killing you with their own firearm. They should still be charged with robbery, but not murder since, like everyone else, they were just carrying a gun for self-protection and not planning to even threaten you with it.
Breaking in, a robber has already declared they are a danger. "Oh wait please Mr robber while I call the police." Gang you're dead. Growing up my best friend's dad had a sign in the front window beside the door with a smoking gun, the caption read "Anyone found here at night will be found here in the morning." And he meant it. Like my dad he served in the US Air Force, though he was discharged when he suffered an injury causing a disability whereas my father retired from the Air Force. He was an expert shot too, he'd take the two of us out in the middle of nowhere for target practice, and he'd have one of us toss something small up then he'd shoot it drawing from the hip. Before I was a teenager my dad gave me a .22 long rifle and I'd use it for practice myself. I believe it's important for a person to grow up being able to handle firearms and being taught to respect them.
I believe that's a root problem with firearms in the US today, too many people are afraid of firearms so when they have children they don't teacher them to respect firearms. Then like when a young adult reaches legal age to drink they go off on a drinking bing. They never learned to respect alcohol, or firearms. It used to be that parents in the US were able to give their teens a drink and not get in trouble, my parents did as well as most other parents I knew growing up. They just made sure the child only had a little bit to drink and not a lot. A sip or two to start with, then a little more. By the tyme I was 18 I'd open a longneck bottle of beer and nurse it throughout the evening. When I was stationed in Germany, I enlisted in the US Army, I saw how casually German parents would order a glass of wine for their child to drink while eating out. Try that now in the US and that parent will have their child taken away, have a good chance of being criminally prosecuted, and be labeled a child abuser.
FalconShould there be a Law?