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Taliban Demands Downtime on Afghanistan Cellphone Networks
faster_manic writes "The Taliban has demanded that cellphone network providers in Afghanistan cease service between the hours of 5pm and 7am each night of the week, as they believe American troops are able to track down Taliban members using their cellphones."
Turning the cell phone off? Maybe Airplane mode?
afraid of being tracked? don't carry your cellphone.
it's much easier to make a personal change than to have a whole infrastructure shut down.
"they believe American troops are able to track down Taliban members using their cellphones."
I'm sure those companies who have physical, and known locations will get on that ASAP.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
It occurs to me that in a country like Afghanistan, which like most developing countries these days has better cell infrastructure than landline infrastructure, cellphones may be the _only_ way of calling the local police to say the Taliban are attacking you.
(currently testing something about signatures here)
You have got to be kidding. Did they just now figure this out? Or did a member of the press feel the need to point this out, just like when someone printed the article that the US was eavesdropping on OBL on his unencrypted satellite phone?
This news story essentially amounts to the Taliban crying "C'mon guys! Play fair!"
Don't get me wrong, the news story is quite legit, it just sounds like the kids playing cowboys and indians in the playground.
Wow these guys are stupid. Just turn off the damn phone. Oh yeah it requires stupidity to be a religious extremist.
Next, they'll get the phone companies to give them the phone records of all Afghani citizens who may be saying mean things about the Taliban. That's when we'll know the Taliban are on their way to becoming a full-fledged modern democracy like us.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Seriously, does Taliban expect a business to bend over and get ass-f*cked by them, knowing that if they came in power they will cease to be in business anyway? At least there are "business activities", even by Taliban, at this moment of time.
Cell phone companies don't pay any heed to anyone. I suspect this ridiculous plea will get the same attention as someone wanting a fairer contract.
The cell network is one of the more low-tech surveillance methods available to the US military/CIA...knock y'self out - the demand is perhaps more to inhibit local/individual freedoms/communications and insure continued fear-based controls more than it is a 'militia' concern.
...thinks these leaders are total dumbasses for not telling their members to shut off their own phones during 5pm and 7am? Oh wait, and they are using *cellphones?* For their operations? And shutting them off is going to help them...how?
Okay, I MUST be missing something. They want cell phone providers to cease service between 7pm and 5am because the Americans can track them when they are using their cell phones? WTF? If they can do it between those hours, don't you FREAKING THINK THEY CAN OUTSIDE THOSE HOURS? Idiots. Well that just proves right there those dillholes don't know shit about technology. There's nothing better than a group who wants to keep their people in the Dark Ages.
Oh, hello, Congress. I didn't see you standing there. I was talking about the Taliban, not you. You guys are doing one hell of a bang up job in DC. Honest.
Pax Vobiscum
Come on feds, spend the extra little bit of money and track these guys using something other than your unlimited "Nights and Weekends."
to say "Nuts to that".
Possibly, "fuck that noise".
You mad
Since the invasion, residents of Afghanistan have been recieving an increasingly alarming amount of American telemarketing calls.
... I mean people living in the United States. I still occasionally suffer from the conceit that everyone who reads the same web site I do is obviously from the same country.
Eviscerati.Org: All Hail the Eviscerati
Their goal is obviously to disrupt communications, not to avoid being tracked. If they knew we were using their phones to track them, they could use that as an advantage to setup traps and make us confident of their whereabouts. They could always just remove the batteries or stuff the phone in a lead box or whatever. If you can't call for help it makes the decision to resist or just do whatever these psychopaths want a much simpler one.
I keep forgetting my place. Jesus is for losers. Why do I still play to the crowd?
3rd cave on the eastern side,
Mountain that looks like a sitting goat,
Kandahar, Afghanistan
...that theres been a towlie-ban [wikipedia.org]?
"Give someone a program, frustrate them for a day... Teach someone to program, frustrate them for a lifetime."
If you're still more paranoid, you can wrap tinfoil around your cell phone and head. If you need instructions as to how that should be done, this forum is an excellent place to find individuals with enormous experience.
they believe American troops are able to track down Taliban members using their cellphones.
Too bad it'll make all their cell phones transmit MORE, looking for said shut down towers- when a cell can't reach a tower, not only does it try to reconnect more often, but it also bumps up the transmit power.
That makes the cell phone a whole lot easier to find...and kills everyone's batteries...
Please help metamoderate.
I suggest reading this site. Not all Muslims are radical crazies, but it's also not true that the religion has nothing to do with making certain elements radical crazies. Islam needs to learn tolerance, not the other way around.
Next thing you know the Taliban will demand immunity from lawsuits arising from damage or injuries caused by the cell service being shut down.
"We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers." Carl Sagan
Overkill response: we're worried about being tracked so we should shut down the whole network every night.
Intelligent response: we're worried about being tracked so we should turn off the phone.
Cell phone tracking tracks the current position of a cell phone. To locate the phone, it must be turned on but does not require an active call. GSM localisation is then done by triangulation based on the signal strength to nearby signal masts.[1] In order to route calls to your phone the cell towers listen for a signal sent from the phone and negotiate which tower is best able to communicate with the phone. As the phone changes location, the towers monitor the signal and the phone is switched to a different tower as appropriate. By comparing the relative signal strength from multiple towers a general location of a phone can be determined. A phone's location can be uploaded to a common web site where your "friends and family" can view your last reported position. Newer phones may or may not have built-in GPS receivers which could be used in a similar fashion, but with much higher accuracy. Some newer phones and technology may also allow the tracking of the phone even when turned off or, at least, have the microphone activated.[2] Also, phones can have secondary batteries installed to allow tracking even if the battery is removed. ------ So, even if you turn your cell phone is off or remove batteries they (or you) can still be tracked.
If this demand is successful, the next thing they will want is to turn the clock back a thousand years! Oh, wait...
Better yet, don't identify yourself as being a Muslim who is against these 'radicals' and instead pan everyone else for stating what is obvious to them, islam is not a 'religion of peace'.
MABASPLOOM!
As other posters stated, mobile phones are the sole communication tool there.. and Taliban are among the users. They must have a military reason to try to enforce this demand.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=465572&cid=22544926
And it's not insightful now.
I couldn't care less about your opinions on Islam, stop spamming the fucking board, douche.
Thanks.
The Taliban say: "Help us to hide so we may launch sneak attacks on you. If you don't do this, we will launch sneak attacks on you."
Nice demand geniuses. I can think of no better use for the phrase "How about 'no' you crazy bastards?"
PS:
:)
(picture of the Prophet Mohammed)
Equine Mammals Are Considerably Smaller
Nah, they're in collusion with the cell phone providers to take away free ANYTIME minutes overnight and blame the US government. If it works there, look for this to come here under the guise of protection from warrantless cellphone-tapping.
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
The whole, "US may be tracking us," is just a MacGuffin. The reality is their teen's texting charges are flat out killing them. Why do you think they only want the phones on during school hours? Coincedence? Ha! I think not.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
Just slap one of these http://www.gethandyswitch.com/ to each tower's fence, and let them knock themselves out.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I was sure I saw a very similar compliant yesterday, and I was right.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=465572&cid=22544926
See you tomorrow I guess...
Islam in and of itself is not evil, I have a copy of the Quaran sitting right here on my desk. But like most any religon, yes it does indeed lead to so called 'evil' behavior. Them damn 'people of the book' need to be set the fuck straight and all.
I'm sick of following my dreams. I'm just going to ask where they're goin' and hook up with 'em later.
Its the cell phone companies, they don't want people to have free nights
This demand is about proving the Taliban is still relevant to the population of Afghanistan and capable of influencing their lives. They've lost pretty much all of their control over the population's behavior and they need to prove to themselves that they still matter.
It look like I'm going to have to update my favorite 5.
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
Reading TFA (what there is of it) suggests another interpretation: that the coalition forces are using mobile phones when they attack, mostly at night. That is, it isn't the Taliban use of phones which is the issue, it's the occupation forces'. Not saying it makes much more sense...
the terrorists win!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
/oblig
Islam is evil. The more you know!
(sorry. I had to do it. Please forgive me.)
needs to control their radicals. of course the majority of muslims are moderate. but if their radicals are allowed free reign, the muslim world invites deserved criticism
the usa gets plenty of criticism for its actions in the world. much of it deserved. do you think the usa deserves no criticism? of course you don't
so, in the spirit of an open mind, you accept that the muslim world deserves criticism as well
there are some xenophobic bigots who are doing the criticism of the muslim world, yes. there are also some mindless bigots criticizing the usa
the point is, the existence of these bigots does not mean that all criticism of the muslim world, or criticism of the usa, is simple bigotry or without merit
so if you dismiss all criticism of the muslim world out of hand, simply because you think it is all bigotry, it is you, as well as the bigots, with a closed, simple partisan kneejerk mind
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If we don't comply they'll attack us again!
Don't forget Pakistan. We have to shut off cell phone service there too. After all, most of the Taliban is with our "friends" in Pakistan.
</sarcasm>
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
anything that is landline based is usually blown to smithereens in the prolonged effort to keep the people of afghanistan in the middle ages, where the ideology of the taliban actually works
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
How dare you call us Slashbigots!
For this outrage, we will turn off your cellphone and cut off your head!
Admiral Ackbar!
Wow, i had no idea that terrorists and religious fundamentalists also worked normal business hours.....
"Tomorrow at 8:00pm, you will drive an explosives laden truck into the American barracks."
"Hold on, Muhammed. My position as a level 1 suicide bomber clearly states that this is a non-exempt position, and my scheduled hours are from 8:00am to 5:00pm complete with two fifteen minute breaks and a 30 minute lunch. I can't be forced to work any overtime. Look, we can take this all the way to Vicki in HR, but I'd really rather not.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Goo::BOOM::
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Seriously, i don't think they are as smart as you presume. They use the cell phones in combat to communicate. I'm afraid they want the networks shut down so they can call each other without being tracked. They're muslim terrorists you know, the type of guys who tried to sink a navy vessel but failed because they overloaded their boat.
Trust me, I work for the government.
What the Taliban wants rates below what I think of whatever Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh want, but add in my total disdain and desire to see every member of the Taliban drink a warm coca-cola full of ground glass.
False Flag Propaganda.
Q. What is Calvin's monster snowman called? A. The Torment Of Existence Weighed Against The Horror of Non Being
War has certainly changed, back in the day soldiers didn't have the convenience of hiding by the enemies mailbox and blowing them up when they came out to get their phone bill.
I have nothing compelling to say
"All cars with OnStar can be monitored the same way. Welcome to 1984."
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. --Benjamin Franklin
I love Ben's wisdom, but this quote is being so overused and so often poorly used that it is being diminished. Please note the word "essential", Ben put that word in there for a reason. His words were carefully crafted and extraneous words were not left in. In short, non-essential liberties are excluded by the quote and anonymity while driving is a non-essential liberty, actually a non-existent liberty. We have no right to drive on public roads, it is a privilege. We knowingly enter into a contract in order to exercise that privilege. Our cars must be registered and display a unique identifier, the license plate. We are required to be licensed and must present that license upon request. Furthermore, OnStar is voluntary and has positive benefits, any good contract should, such as notifying rescue personnel of an accident's location. Ben's quote is quite inappropriate here.
Oh, the irony of it all.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If the Afghanistan goverment follows through with the request then it will prove that the Afghanistan goverment is supporting the taliban.
But really, do they really expect the goverment to basicaly turn off a standard and important utility in their country? Why not turn off electricity so they can't see the lights on in taliban members houses?
TruePunk | Games
They seem to have a history of preferring others to change rather than change themselves.
;-)
That is perfectly "rational" behavior when you are acting precisely as God has "commanded".
If you were a taliban fighter and you were upset because you couldn't detonate any of your suicide bombers via a cell phone because the coverage in your country was so horrendous, how would you get the cell infrastructure upgraded? 1) Call government and cell providers and ask them to spend more money on said infrastructure so your fighters could operate more effectively? 2) Issue crazy sounding demand that cell towers are evil and must not be built (or operated at night)? I think #2 would probably pay off in spades. Once they hear that the taliban wants less cell phone coverage, the coalition forces are going to be throwing up towers everywhere. The best part of the plan, is that issuing a crazy threat like this won't necessarily tip off your enemies because they are used to demands like this from you. A third possibility is that the taliban didn't really issue the threat themselves. Instead it was issued by a few (OK, the only) tech support workers in Kabul who are sick and tired of being paged late at night.
Missing something, that is. The problem, as someone pointed out above, is more likely that informants are phoning the Americans to tell them where the Taliban are, which information might be followed up with a Predator overflight and a missile up the ass.
The US military obviously doesn't need commercial cell-phones to communicate amongst themselves, and, while it's certainly possible in principle to find someone using a cell phone, it's a fair amount of work and he's got to be a pretty high-value target, as well as dumb enough to stick around in the same cell after calling. It's much cheaper and easier to pay off some mistreated or misunderstood underling -- there's always one -- to betray his masters by phoning in their whereabouts when they're up to something he knows the Americans would find interesting.
Never underestimate the cost-benefit ratio of "humint" versus "elint."
...their own temporary, and mobile, cellphone mini towers programmed to spoof the Afghan towers that are powered down, and then be able to simply and rapidly p0wn the cellphones that were left powered up, and triangulate their positions within seconds, and also perhaps even give them dialtone and the ability to make and receive calls on a totally 100% monitored and recorded man-in-the-middle intercept.
Isn't it as easy as turning the cell phone off? Maybe Airplane mode?
No, it is not that easy, they have a "legitimate" complaint from their perspective. The "problem" is *not* their people and their cell phones. The "problem" is that ordinary citizen are reporting suspicious nighttime activities. Their are essentially trying to turn off the tips hotline.
Mod me down, but I'm always surprised by the amount of hate US has against the talibans.
Taliban are a bunch of Pakistani trained people that took over Afghanistan after the Russian withdrawal and turned it into a medieval butcher shop. they publicly gunned down people, censored everything, harassed and abused women, destroyed priceless cultural landmarks, drove their people in backwards illiterate oppression, but other than that, I guess they were ok.
We should have nuked Afghanistan.
This is my sig.
"religionofpeace, thatsnotfair, lol, justturnitoff"
/. editors, some are assigned by users (mostly idiots who do not understand a concept of tag).
/. is becoming more and more like digg.
Some tags are assign by
Is there a way to see only editor-assigned tags?
Also, if I pick !stupidtag, I would like not to see "stupidtag" in my view as well.
"lol" as a tag? Give me a break...
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
This may backfire on them. If they are anything like US cell phones,when they do not receive a signal from a tower, they kick into a higher power transmit mode in search of any tower. If anything, this would make them even more detectable. Also, what would prevent the 'opposition' from setting up other better-protected/secured towers, which they would then connect to?
V for Vendetta: People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.
Unless your phone gets pwned or otherwise modified, every phone I've encountered shuts down the radio circuit when powered down to conserve battery life. If this weren't the case, your phone wouldn't have to a take a short moment to search for service when first powered up. I don't know of any phones that will "wake themselves up" on a regular basis once powered down, either.
Your phone can be tracked when it is on and you're not using it, since it communicates (transmits/receives) with the network on a regular basis when not in use. The eavesdropping without some software modification is rather questionable as well.
I think someone's been watching too many movies or episodes of 24.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dzhokhar_Dudayev#Assassination
Wouldnt it just be easier to ask the Americans to stop bombing them? Then they could still call their girlfriends after the days usual activities... oh wait, about the girlfriends...
Is there any proof to back-up this claim? Obviously, in order to be tracked your phone has to give off a cell phone signal. If it's true that your phone does this even when it's "off", it should be pretty easy to tell. I haven't found any legitimate sources to either prove or disprove your claim.
If cell phones weren't important to them, they would discard them and find other means to communicate. So we can safely assume they depend on them.
They are threatening to blow up towers if their demands aren't met, which would eliminate the cell service they depend upon.
Clearly, they will either be cutting of their own noses to spite their faces, or the threat is without substance.
Wagers anyone?
As long as the phones are on, they're going to try to link up to a tower, which causes a definite
beacon-like behavior that can be tracked with a portable cell site or the modern signal warfare hardware
the US military already has.
Heh... Shows you how clueless they are. The US military has gear that can track cell conversations
and their general location of origin, along with pretty much any RF comm gear you can imagine, in a
theater of operations.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
It's been mentioned earlier, but this tracking and espionage has to do with the local populace being able to report Taliban activity, not US (and other joint) forces tracking their current location. Because there is no landline infrastructure, they can prevent the people of Afghanistan from being able to communicate with the outside world by simply turning off the cell towers.
But if that is true, then Coalition forces would not have to wade through a bunch of cell phone chatter to see who's talking to who (via radios and other stuff). Only the bad guys will be talking at night...
Surely this is simply a misunderstanding on the part of users who do not wish to use mobile phones at night themselves who think that it is necessary to shut down the towers and take away everyone's service. Ideally, the Afgani telcos will understand who the noctually-sensitive customers are and simply shut off service to THOSE handsets at night. In any case, Any user that are discourtious enough to wish ALL users to be off the air at night won't be able to tell the difference between their phone being unable to connect and the entire tower being shutdown.
Seriously, the Talaban are caught in a contradiction here. Either they need the towers operational for their own purposes during the day (in which case, blowing up the towers is counter productive) or they don't need them, in which case why ask the telcos to do the nightly shutdown and simply blow them up anyway. I suspect the answer is that destroying the towers would be incredibly unpopular and there's a internal struggle going on between the luddite faction in the Taliban that wants to blow them anyway and the more rational faction that realizes this will be a huge PR mistake.
Does the Taliban really think there is something special about the cell phone towers? Sure, shut them down at night. Then fly an AWACS over suspected Taliban areas with its own "cell tower" of hardware and software. Hell, I bet you could package it into a Predator if you felt like it. Taliban operates under the mistaken impression that their communications are safe.
-
And taking away their cell phones might just do that. Maybe can can force people to wear beards and veils. But some things go too far.
Quick, label everyone a bigot who points out that despite being labeled a religion of peace, nearly all terrorists around the world are Islamic, and at least one side of almost every conflict being fought on our planet is Muslim. Of course, those are just simple facts, so saying them makes me a bigot too, doesn't it?
There are indeed peace loving Muslims out there, who support liberty, human rights, and all that jazz. However, while Muslims will take to the streets in riots when some Danes draw cartoons of Mohammed, the streets remain empty and few, if any Muslims rise to denounce the honor killings, female circumcision, targeting of civilian (Heck, even civilian non-Jewish) populations by Al Qaeda/Hamas/Hezbollah/Fatah, executions for being raped without four male witnesses around to vouch for the woman, executions for converting to a different religion...etc. And all of these activities are committed by people claiming to do so in the name of Islam.
If Muslims are truly opposed to these activities, why aren't they protesting day after day, saying, "Not in our name!"?
...didn't we topple the taliban? take them out of power? I mean c'mon - the current administration wouldn't LIE to us... would they? :P
"Can you hear me now?"
This is my opinion. To make sure you don't steal it, it's covered by the DMCA.
Wait. Six years later, the Taliban is in a position to make demands?
Yeah forget about shiny new wtubes, in Taliban territory the internet comes to you in a muddy ditch.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
1. Confiscate all firearms with all people/groups not in agreement with you.
2. Confiscate or disable all cell phones with those people/groups not in agreement with you.
3. When no one complies with demands 1 and 2, throw a tantrum while hiding in a hole in the ground and shitting next to your bedroll.
"We should have nuked Afghanistan"??
This is one of those super rare, once in a lifetime occassions where Slashdot gets the headline wrong. I know, I know, difficult to believe but true nonetheless.
A lot of the comments suggest that the taliban is afraid of the cellphones they use being tracked by the US. This does not seem to be the case.
Rather the taliban objects to the fact that the cellphone network is being used as a communication network for the US to gather intelligence on the taliban. Simply put, people call on their cellphone to tell about the taliban.
In effect this would be like a gang of criminals demanding that 911 be taken down because people keep calling it to report on them.
About half the comments already get this right, they seem to want to take out a communication network that allows people to inform the western forces about their activity at night.
What is amusing about this is that obviously the Taliban with all their anti-western rethoric still needs this very western tech to be operational part of the time for some reason, else they would just demand the towers be torn down and launch attacks against the towers themselves makingthe network go dark 24/7.
For some reason I don't think they "allow" the network to beactive during daylight is out of concern for the common public, obviously they need it for their own purposes.
Neither do they strictly want it to go down to stop US forces or orgnanised "spies". Either would just use other means of communication. No, they want the general public to be incapable of making a call at night, when the taliban is most active.
This is in a way hopefull news, it suggests rather strongly to me that the general public is a bit to fond in taliban eyes of calling the supposedly hated occupier whenever they show up.
After all if the taliban was popular among the common public then this cellphone spy network would work both ways, why is the taliban prepared to give up the chance for any freedom loving afghani to call the taliban and inform on the invader? Don't they want to get a call telling them a convoy is on the move?
This is a bit of a subtle conclusion on my part, but on the whole you don't destroy a bit of infra-structure when you still need it. You don't blow up the bridge your forces still need and you do NOT disrupt a communication service unless you have no need for it. I think the Taliban uses the phone network therefor occasionally to communicate but does no longer have the support that would allow it to use the phone network to receive intelligence of its own during the night.
It will be intresting to see what happens next. Is the taliban really willing to disrupt communications for the common public (the occupying forces don't need it) AND themselves to avoid their activities being reported by the common public? If the towers remain up and are not assaulted I think that proves just how feeble the taliban has become, radio's ain't that expensive to buy, why is the taliban so depended on the cellphone network to wish it to remain active during the day?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
The Taliban may be concerned that US forces are using the cell towers as a passive rader system to track their movements, as described here: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_42/b3854113.htm
Afgan cellular companies have three choices: 1) keep the towers running 24 hours a day, 2) give into the Taliban, or 3) say they're not going to comply but then contract AT&T, Verizon, or Sprint to manage their systems, which in terms of service pretty would much achieve the same result as option 2.
TLR
A man no more knows his destiny than a tea leaf knows the history of the East India Company
So what happens to my "Unlimited-Nights" ..... you insensitive clods.
cheers, http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks
I don't get these guys. They're paying for the Predator plan with free nights and weekends. They might as well use the service!
So, you live in an area most of whose people have decided that beer shouldn't be sold before noon on Sunday. But that doesn't suit you. You'd prefer it to be changed -- you want the world around you adjusted to fit your way of thinking. Tough luck.
Those laws *do* serve the community. Whether they make sense I don't know, but the community opted for them. Whether the community are happier this way or not, whether they know what they're doing or not I don't know, but they picked what to do, and if that doesn't suit you that doesn't mean everyone *else* has to change and do it *your* way. Maybe you don't share their religious views. Maybe you don't spend your Sunday the same way as them. That doesn't mean they have to do things differently for your benefit.
It's ironic that you can use this as an example of *other people's* self-interestedness and closed-mindedness. You're right, those things aren't the exclusive territory of muslim extremists; suburbanites can be pretty darn focused on themselves too. Of course, not many devout Muslims would talk about unbelievers with quite the same lofty scorn that you use in your second-to-last paragraph, there.
The rest of the world really *isn't* asking you to compensate for their stupidity. But you seem to ask a heck of a lot from the rest of the world. Not everyone is the same as you and not everyone -- not the Taliban, not regular people who happen to have a religion, not your local town council -- has to be like you. They can write laws that they think protect their children if they darn well want to.
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
It would be soooo funny if this was a media applied American move to find the Taliban...
BUSH: So you are saying let's tell them to all turn off their phone as not to be able
to track their movement? How does that work?
CHANEY: Well this is why I am vice president and you are only the president.
By telling them to do this as if I was their leader sending the message,
we will know who all the Taliban are by seeing who turns of their phones between this time.
BUSH: Thank god you are on our side dick!
Nice to know the Taliban has regained enough power in Afghanistan where they can make such demands. We've half-assed Afghanistan, we've half-assed Iraq, and we are going to lose both. I don't know if history will ever figure out how such a simpleton ended up doing two terms in office.
-R
The mobile tower probably is and HAS been a squadron of Predator (or unnamed, undisclosed, covered/black-ops) drones.
Looks to me like the Taliban will pull an Iraq and set up a mesh radar to find these drones. They might even use one-time microwave jammers to fry the sky-bugs...
Or, they can just send the DIA/CIA on wild goose chases. Put the suspected phones in vehicles that make regular and irregular but fixed runs. Deliver critical messages the old fashion way: Carrier Pigeon. That bird will be more able to evade the predator, since unless the Predator has a super synthetic aperture radar, the pigeon's natural features as natural predator evasion coloring/maneuverability might help it. Question is: how to train the pigeon in SERE: Survival, Escape, Resistance & Evasion, AKA, "lose the tail".
Might make movie of the week...
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I think a wise mode of action should be to agree with them and turn off the cell towers. Thus the taliban would be lulled into some false sense of security. Then use mobile truck mounted antenna to triangulate and locate their handsets and bomb them to their 72 waiting virgins in heaven.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Roads have existed long before cars and used by horse, carriage, and other methods of transportation for millenia. Yet, only recently have we tried this mantra of "it's not a right, it's a privilege".
Go further back than all that: it used to be that roads were built by individual rulers or individual societies, and there were LOTS of toll roads - the tolls did things like finance the soldiers who would protect them. The word you're looking for is path not road.
In the USA, roads are built by the state or private individuals, and the state or private individuals are allowed to place conditions on the public use of those roads. Typical conditions would be "use a liscenced vehicle" or "pay a toll." If one is unwilling to comply with those conditions, and attempt to use the road anyway, then one can be hauled off to jail. Sounds like it's not quite as inalienable right as you implied...
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
No. What I did was call people who are willing to hold up such an article as being emblematic of the whole of Islam (by tagging it "religionofpeace") bigots.
My point was that tagging the article in that way is a condemnation of Islam, in its entirety, with no nuance. Tagging the article with the sarcastic "religionofpeace" moniker is not a way of criticizing the Islamic world's attitudes towards its radicals - it's an outright condemnation of the entire religion based on a small, radical subgroup.
No, I didn't, but BFD. My failure to explicitly condemn them, however, in no way constitutes approval. I don't really think that a group as crazy and evil as the Taliban needs condemnation every time it's mentioned. My post was targeted specifically at the way discussions of anything involving Islam or Arabs happens on Slashdot.
Ahh, the unbridled wit of an AC. It really does warm the heart.
Go soak your head in your cave, troll.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
You might want to do a little reading about the current state of things. Saw an excellent interview with Sarah Chayes on PBS over the weekend. I can't remember what show it was on. She is an American that lives in Afghanistan now, her story is pretty cool http://chayes.blogs.nytimes.com/
The best quote from her was along the lines of 'They have paved the roads in Kanahar, which is great, but if you drive on them you'll be shaken down by the government in the day and the taliban at night.' She said that before the taliban fell that she could drive into Kandahar (when the roads were dirt), but wouldn't dream of doing it now (she was making a point, not saying that they should come back).
She is on the ground there living as a citizen and doesn't think that the taliban is going anywhere anytime soon. Her opinion of the government is that we have replaced the taliban with criminals.
The US supports the requests of the Taliban; apparently turning cell towers off has the opposite effect, phones seeking signal will broadcast at full strength while searching, the 5 fold increase in signal strength should allow new cellphone guided missiles to zero in with previously unrecorded accuracy.
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
you're the first person who has me marked as a foe on slashdot that i have marked as a friend on slashdot
you have written my own thoughts better than i could ever write them
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The Real Reason the Taliban want to ban cell phones at night is that they keep forgetting to put theirs on vibrate. Here they are sneaking up on the running dog Crusader American sentry when their brother terrorist gets notice that the latest OBL tirade just got posted to the web. He calls his brother to tell him the joyous (Allah be Praised!) news, the phone goes off, and another terrorist bites the dust. After six years of this happening, some bright Taliban commander finally figured this out and set about solving it in the usual 7th century medieval manner used by those folks. Noisy Twinkie wrappings will certainly be banned from sale as an Insult to Islam next.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
you are also responsible for the taliban. so is everyone else. what kind of insanity is this? it's the notion that you are responsible for the world you live in. the more people think like that, the better the world is
you, all of us, have to actively fight the scourge of religious fundamentalism in the world. passive acceptance of religious fundamentalism is not a morally or intellectually defensible position. religious fundamentalism is a weed. it must be actively hunted down and destroyed for being the evil it is, or it will spread in our neglect, and strangle us all: bring civilization and progress in decline, and fill the world with ignorance
religious fundamentalism does not disappear on its own. it actively breeds and spreads its hateful ideology. therefore, you must forever more eradicate it. its a simple maintenance function of human civilization, a taking out of the mental trash. if you don't take out the trash, your house begins to stink and becomes unliveable. if religious fundamentalists are not opposed, civilization stagnates and becomes backwards and oppressive and cruel
this is actually a big hurdle for many people. they enjoy the fruits of enlightened society and tolerant ideology, but they are hesitant to defend tolerance, or even admit that it is threatened. they see in the effort to defend enlightenment a seed of the very avarice that must be fought in order to preserve enlightment. and they react to that seed instead of the slobbering monster hellbent on destroying the tolerance they hold so dear
tolerance of intolerance is intolerance by extension. intolerance of intolerance is tolerance by extension
people need to learn this. you must defend civilization form religious fundamentalism. because religious fundamentalism is most certainly hard at work destroying all of the enlightened thought you hold so dear
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Once they read about it on slashdot, they'll figure it out.
The reason I point these out is that your argument can be applied to any religion, anywhere, anytime. Any educated person knows the difference between a Muslim and a terrorist. The same for Christians for that matter. Catholic Priest doesn't necessarily mean child molester.
The above comment seems to be more intent on blaming the religion, not the skewed, perverted interpretation that the extremists follow. If Muslims are truly opposed to these activities, why aren't they protesting day after day, saying, "Not in our name!"? They do. The reason you don't see it over there is because the minute this happens, they're executed. You're more apt to bring change if you're not dead.
In an effort to conform with internet communication standards, please note that the above comment is 100% biased opinion
"Turn off your cell phone towers so we can't be bombed back into the last century." Right- that should happen....
you are responsible for the taliban
no really, you are
and so is everyone else
the more people who think like this, the better the world is
the more people divest themselves of their simple human responsibility to take care of the world, the worse the world is
it really is as simple as that
and sometimes i wonder if some (i said SOME not ALL) criticism of the usa is really just anger at the usa doing a job no one else wants to do. a job that if everyone just ignores does not go away on its own. just because the job is ugly, not because the job is wrong. kind of like how many people are always cricisizing the police. even though they enjoy the stablity in society that police provide, and if there were no police, the same people that have nothing but words of criticism for the police would be begging for police
people are very shortsighted. and the whine and complain. even when they are totally wrong
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
that"
actually, the top post in this thread was attacking people for exactly saying that (saying that the whole of Islam and the Muslim world may be fairly judged as being indistinguishable from the Taliban)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm not a member of the TIA (Taliban Intelligence Agency) so I may just be missing something obvious here, but couldn't any taliban who didn't want to be tracked turn off their phone? And what is it about the hours between 7am and 5pm that Taliban celphone usage is untrackable? The only way that makes sense is to imagine that only Taliban make phone cals between 5pm and 7am. Which is so far out there that it makes me laugh out loud. Ha. Ha.
Completely off-topic, but I just had a conversation with a moron recently where I tried to use that example. For some reason, I was trying to explain to her that cold is not an actual "thing", it is the absence of heat, heat being the "thing". I tried to explain it to her as being similar to the way dark is really just the absence of light. I made some comment about you can shine light on something, but you can't shine dark on it, merely block the light. This baffled her, which fact baffled me, so I conceded the bet and bought her a beer.
There are certain special brands of stupid you just can't argue with.
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
Let us get back to the Democrat Global-Warming Fear-Mongering ...
Kind of sad, isn't it, that the United States Military Forces have to depend on Afghani cell phone service for tactical communications.
Or is that just what the Taliban thinks?
You mean they didn't know till now? Why hasn't that war been won yet?
Can't we just round up all of the selfish groups of people that demand the world revolve around them, stick them on an island somewhere, and watch them all kill each other off? Yano, kinda like 'Battle Royal', but with fucked up adults instead of high-schoolers.
Really WHY are they using cellphones?
Shouldn't they be like... amish? They are ultra religious...
The Taliban must not read Slashdot, because I have been reliably informed by Slashdotters--who are, of course, the smartest and most reasonable and independent-thinking people in the world (and they'll confirm that if you don't believe me)--that the only reason that the US is interested in that sort of data managed and maintained by telecom companies is to spy on John and Jane Doe as they are making arrangements for picking up their kids at soccer practice. I have been assured that all of the government's very limited human resources is already allocated to "spying on Americans", so they surely aren't busy actually hunting down terrorists.
They should just relax.
Perhaps I'm the one who's got it backwards, but I'm pretty sure what the article is saying is not that the Allied forces are tracking down the Taliban's cell signals, but that the Allied forces are using cell phones for their own communications, either between units or to get in touch with informants, spies, etc. It makes sense. Suppose Hashim down at the local market knows that Yousaf, who owns the fertilizer store, is a Taliban supplier. If you want Hashim to tell you whenever Yousaf makes a big sale of ammonium nitrate, you can either give him a $6,500 SINCGARS tactical radio that he'll need a couple hours training to use and if the wrong people knows he has they'll kill him for working with the invaders...or you can just get his phone number.
Besides, it doesn't make sense for the Taliban to need the towers turned off. If they were looking to prevent anyone from tracking them (assuming we know which phones to track in the first place), all they have to do is turn their phones off as you said, or switch to airline mode, or if you want to be really certain, remove the battery. That way you don't piss off the service providers, you don't piss off the other Afghani's whom you're supposedly trying to "free," you don't expose yourself to risk by contacting the service providers who are supposedly in league with the infidels anyways, and you don't have to waste explosives blowing up more people.
But it's still kind of funny to hear the Taliban whining about cellphones. Just wait until they find out you can download Jessica Simpson music videos on VCast.
people with a different opinion than yours are also the same people that are wrong ;-)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It is already a movie, it happened in WW2. BBC article about the medals. The Aussies have given medals to pigeons too.
Not a sentence!
First, the fact that you parse this to mean what you like doesn't make that THE meaning, and more importantly, when you say "you are grossly misapplying the words to twist it into a justification for exactly the opposite of what he said" I have to ask, how could you possibly know that? I see nothing that supports a reading one way or the other, and it would seem including the qualifier "Essential" was done to differentiate between types of liberties. I cannot believe the quote is meant to portray all liberty as essential, and reading it that way doesn't make any sense.
Regardless, in either case, we can agree that traveling would probably be "essential". But your reading is no more authoritative than anyone's, and seems to be wrong.
Also, Ben Franklin didn't say it, and in fact, denied having anything to do with the quote apart from reprinting it.
One last thing
"In fact, my right is to travel how and where I want"
No, actually, it isn't. You can't, for instance, drive your car across my lawn with impunity because of my rights as a property owner. This is just one example demonstrating that you are incorrect on this point.
You are acting as though convenience has anything to do with rights. You can always walk, thereby preserving your RIGHT to travel, and essentially ends your argument.
They could go back to using Pigeon express, where notes are 10 words long and take 3 days to deliver.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
We already have the problem of deliberate misinformation that you talk about - it exists all over the place in anonymous tips where someone will call an Army hotline and say "I've seen a weapons cache behind so and so building downtown" and when troops show up, there is an IED or an ambush. As a new vector for similar misinformation, cellphones aren't really a game changer, and the military is already aware that information they get leading to militant hideouts and so on can be "spurious" at best. So the problem you highlight gets handled like we handle anonymous tips, and troops go in with the foreknowledge that they may be heading towards a trap. I know you're probably not intending to paint the military as a house of fools, but they _can_ imagine that locational information from an insurgent phone leads them to something other than an unprepared insurgent.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
The issue is not some super high-tech gadgets. It is basic intelligence. It is the informants! The informants in the Afghan population are reporting Taliban movements to their local police or military units. That's it. When you turn off the cell towers, then Taliban can move much more freely as no one will be reporting them.
;).
Taliban is not supported by majority, or even a sizable minority in Afghanistan. People are tired of war. Hell, 25+ years of it in one way or another.
Furthermore, do you think the women like Taliban? Even if only 1 in 100 women is brave enough to report Taliban movements, that's 1 in 200 people. And I would guess that most med do not want their women bound to their houses either (hey, men don't like the extra work
Kabul is now thriving compared to when Taliban were in power. Kandahar is even much better off now. People see the change. There are more informants every day. And cellphones are what is enabling them to provide the military/police with intelligence they would never be able to gather alone.
So sorry. I think the 'mrican soldier's ability to mostly differentiate between the bad guys and the rest of the population has about two hundred years of ethical tradition behind it, so I'll go with letting the cell phone networks stay on.
Any Talibani warriors who disagree are welcome to call into their respective cell phone provider networks and complain.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
NT
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
Does the article have ANYTHING to say about the phone companies giving in to these demands?
I DEMAND YOU GO AND KILL YOURSELVE!
Take that world, obviously I rule you since I can demand you kill yourselve.
Oh, you are not going to give into my demands, well that ain't nice.
Oh and if the taliban is winning, why are they then so worried about the phone network? I think it is a sign of them loosing.
But you don't want to hear logic, you just want to slam the war, go right ahead but do realize you sound like a bit of a twit when you link making demands (which so far have not even been replied to one way or the other) shows who is control. People in control don't make demands, they dictate.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Hereafter on each Organization Day of the 11th Signal Company, the name "John Silver" will be added to the roll-call. When his name is called, the senior non-commisioned officer present wil lrespond, "Died of wounds received in battle in the service of his country."
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMSI-catcher for how they work. ;-)
I think switching off the regular towers would make an IMSI-catcher even more efficient at locating the talibans' phones...
C - the footgun of programming languages
but we're talking about the people who take what you say and go "therefore, there shall be no criticism of the muslim world"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Instead of telling Taliban members not to use their cell phones they try to shut down the towers so using them is impossible. Instead of telling men not to molest women they force the women into burqas to shut down any desire the men might have. To me God or Allah would be more impressed by someone who avoids sin in Vegas (hard, temptation everywhere) than one who avoids sin in Salt Lake City (easy, no temptation to be found). The Taliban knows they will fail the self control test so they remove the options that tempt them. They are losers.
A Communication disruption can mean only one thing...inv--oh wait.
What? Do they not like free nights and weekends or something? They really are barbarians!
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Also, you understand that the "Northern Alliance" is not really any better when it comes to gunning down people and abusing women, except that they do it more often for the sake of fun and profit, while Taliban usually did so for religious reasons?
One guy, an Afghani refuge living in NZ, told me once: "The Taliban were loonies, but at least they had law, cruel as it was, and they made it known, and you knew that you'd normally be okay as long as you stick to it. You could live your lives. But now, the country is run by bandits, and there's no law at all - you'd get robbed, tortured, or killed (and women, raped) just because you might have money or something valuable, because you look wrong (i.e. Pashtuni), because they've had a bad day, or because they were bored and wanted to have some fun."
I'm not saying the West shouldn't get involved and try to fix this mess. I'm rather glad we did, originally. But the wrong way to do that was to pick one side from several and help them - because there weren't any "good guys" on either side. Now, it was an easy choice to make, since that meant that NATO didn't have to put troops on the ground when it was really hot - the Afghanis themselves did the dirty job, and took the toll. But easy choices are often wrong. And handing sovereignity over to that mob, now what a joke! And with predictable outcome, too, now that Shari'a courts are doing well again, this time on a fully consitutional basis:
- Chapter I, Article 3: "In Afghanistan, no law can be contrary to the beliefs and provisions of the sacred religion of Islam.";
- Chapter II, Article 54: "The state adopts necessary measures to ensure physical and psychological well being of family, especially of child and mother, upbringing of children and the elimination of traditions contrary to the principles of sacred religion of Islam."
- Chapter VII, Article 130: "When there is no provision in the Constitution or other laws regarding ruling on an issue, the courts' decisions shall be within the limits of this Constitution in accord with the Hanafi jurisprudence and in a way to serve justice in the best possible manner."
- Chapter X, Article 1: "The provisions of adherence to the fundamentals of the sacred religion of Islam and the regime of the Islamic Republic cannot be amended."
And there aren't just words on the paper, either: they have already been applied in practice to pronounce death sentences under Shari'a. There are a few high-profile we know about and intervene, but how many we don't (and which are most likely fulfilled).Mount a frikin laser on the shar... err, I mean cell tower.
Gee I'll leave the cell sites up in Afghanistan and listen into any large congregation cell phones that are of any real terrorist that really plotting something bad and then send in a HARM to finish the job.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/agm-88.htm
They can't turn off their Iphones. Damn you steve jobs, WHY?!?!??
Oh Crap, I'm an optimist.....
So in other words, please turn off cell network (except when we're using it to activate bombs).
I can explanate how to administrate your network. You must configurate and segmentate it, so it can computate.
What about dragging the war on until the US gets beaten, like in Vietnam? I would suppose that is their goal, and they are winning at that: attacks in the north are increasing, my country has soldiers in Herat and only in recent months they have started to come under fire.
Aside from the fact that you are suggesting practices typical of the SS divisions (I don't care about Goodwin: they were the last ones in the West to do anything like that, it's the only example available), the Geneva conventions is only about war prisoners, and makes no mention of civilians only because of that. That a US commander would walk out freely I have no doubt, they are pretty much untouchable no matter what crimes they may commit; what is sure is that, no matter what, any attack directed against civilians is a war crime . Surely, Nazi officers who practiced retaliation on civilians were jailed for decades when they could be tried in the countries where they committed their atrocities.
Such utter disrespect of the life of a person who is not a threat is really appalling. Of course, other than being brainwashed by war-time propaganda, you are also wrong: the Geneva convention, article four, states very clearly:
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
about the palestine argument: it is the chicken and egg-problem and you're not giving the complete context (and I'll refrain from that too).
nosig today
It makes my unlimited nights and weekends plan kind of worthless.
I toggled a toggle and buttoned a button, but when I got done, I was done doin' nothin'.
Max Hastings, the military historian, has written in his remarkably fair and balanced book Armageddon about the British policy of carpet bombing civilians, and how it probably lengthened the war (because it diverted resources from protecting shipping in the Atlantic, and because strategic attacks on oil plants could have caused the German army to come to a stop much sooner. He describes revenge attacks by many Allied groups. Apart from Bomber Harris, the Allied commanders were in general much more careful than the Russians, and this reduced casualties in the West. In the east, knowing what the Russians would do, the Germans fought with more desperation.
Hastings points out, very fairly, that Japan suffered far less than Germany because the result of the A-bomb attacks was surrender without invasion. Therefore, paradoxically, the A-Bomb may well have reduced the death rate in the Far East very considerably.
This shows how ethically difficult the whole thing is in the context of all out war.
It is also very difficult nowadays to define who is a civilian. Is a worker in an oil production plant a civilian when a tanker driver is a soldier? They are part of the supply chain, and the oil plant could well be a legitimate military target. In a country where the majority of men carry guns, how do you tell a civilian from a soldier?
I am not in favor of indiscriminate war, believe me. Thanks to my father and my uncle and their friends, my only experience of the military has been as an R&D engineer. But I do think we often expect the military to solve ethical problems that philosophers give up on, and that when it comes to people who want to run a country so they can torture and abuse women versus people who, basically, don't, I think we need to be very careful before sounding off.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The problem with your assertions here about what "Ben" (and I presume you mean Franklin) meant is that this isn't a quote from "Ben" at all, so your argument is totally fabricated.
"Ben" reprinted it, but openly "denied writing any part of it".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Those_who_would_give_up_Essential_Liberty
It's hard to give much consideration to your opinion when you obviously accept and repeat things you hear without checking them for accuracy.
I remember a while back there was a story that the Taliban thought US Army personal had air conditioned underwear and their nightvision technology let them look through women's clothes so I would say it is very possible they think the towers track the cell phones even when they are powered down.
Simple Facts. Look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Current_wars for a list of current conflicts. Kashmir, Chechnya, Sudan, Kenya, The Phillipines, Thailand, and most of the other current African conflicts also involve Muslims, in addition to the various middle eastern conflicts. Recent conflicts that are considered resolved and so aren't on the list also include Kosovo. Admittedly, there's a couple conflicts I didn't know about, so I'll retract my statement of almost every conflict and change it to the majority of conflicts. As for nearly all terrorists around the world being Islamic, lets look at the numbers there: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_designated_terrorist_organizations Notice that the Islamic and West Bank/Gaza organizations outnumber the non-Islamic organizations 40 to 26 - and that several of the non-Islamic organizations have disbanded, or disarmed (like the Northern Ireland organizations. Of course, number of organizations is different from number of members. So lets go by the number of attacks. Here's the past couple years, and I'll let you count: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents%2C_2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents%2C_2007 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents%2C_2006 Keep in mind that all of the terrorist incidents in Kashmir, Pakistan, The Phillipines, Algiers, and Europe (and many in Kosovo too) are all of Muslim origin. It is in fact quite a search not to find terrorist attacks not by Islamists. Yes, Christians have behaved badly throughout history, as have Muslims. The difference is that Christianity stopped being a religion that resolves its differences by killing hundreds of years ago. Islam still orders hits taken on people who write books that criticize it. "Holy Blood, Holy Grail" compares to the Danish cartoon riots? Please. "Holy Blood, Holy Grail", the piss christ, the elephant dung madonna - Christianity takes such violations daily, and they speak out about it, sure, but they don't riot in the streets and issue death warrants for those who created the violations. My arguments can be applied to any religion, anywhere, anytime? Yeah, sure. Its funny, cause I can't think of the last time Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, or Jews have attacked others in the name of religion, or at least wearing their religion on their sleeves and not been loudly denounced by the rest of their religion for their violence. Only the Muslims have this problem. Large portions of their religion are stuck in a completely medieval mindset, and the others rarely protest about it. And I'm not talking about the Muslims who live in the middle east or Africa protesting "not in our name". Why will Muslims in Europe, England, and America take to the streets to protest Danes drawing cartoons, but not the daily, despicable acts performed in the name of their religion, the daily violations of woman's rights, human rights, and fundamental liberties?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://web.archive.org/web/20021130135854/http://politicalhumor.com/HumorPics/NoTalibanAnsMach.mp3
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Don't give them hell, give them TEL$TRA!!!!!
Taliban is like any other totalitarian group where you must view their propaganda only which their form of YouTube.
Also want these cell phones off so the members don't take part any "special" activities after hours.
So they're in for life then.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Remember that it was the US that gave the mujahadeen the weapons and money to fight the Soviets and the CIA never did check on who got those weapons so long as they were pointing them at the soviets, as a consequence the religious maniacs got all the weapons and still had them when the Soviets left. Indirectly the US put the Taliban into power and I find it ironic that US forces were occasionally shot at with 1970's and 1980's vintage equipment.
Nuclear strikes are never an option. The amount of weapons required would have caused enough fallout would have killed everyone from Burma to Israel, but that OK because they're only Jews, Muslims, Hindu's and Buddhists right (hint: I'm being sarcastic)?
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
You have to meet certain conditions to get any benefit from the Geneva convention. The Taliban does not. The VC did sometimes. (Remember the black pajamas? Those were uniforms. Ho was smarter then Mulla Omar is.)
Anybody not in uniform fighting in a war can be summarily executed legally.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Re-read you own post. Particularly points 2.1 thru 2.4. Point 6 does not apply at all.
Captured Taliban are not legally 'Prisoners of war'. By your own citation of the Geneva convention.
Finally. Abortion is a civil right? You are nuts.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
You are only embarrassing yourself. Complaining about your 'joke' not being modded funny makes you look like an unfunny whiny bitch.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Name one?
I hear that interpretation on occasion from a 'fundy scholar'. (He graduated the sixth grade!)
Never from anywhere else.
BTW grape juice that isn't boiled and kept sterile will invariably turn to wine or vinegar.
The bible warns against excess in all things earthly. Not all will go astray by wine or strong drink, the wise will know their own personal history.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Who is approving these 'religionofpeace' tags? They're not relevant to a lot of the stories, and I don't see a tag mocking christianity...
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
REMOVING THE FUCKING BATTERY so no matter what you do, the damned cell phone doesn't send out a fucking signal. It's that damned simple unless some screwed up cell phone company went Apple and hardwired the battery.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Take the battery out, and the phone becomes a brick -- not trackable at all. Put the battery back in a make a call. Take the battery back out and breathe easy . . . This will also render the "roaming bug" *feature* of a cell phone useless as well.
Because ordinary citizens can't use land lines if their cell was down?
Land lines, in Afghanistan? Perhaps you missed it, but the developing world decided to skip plain old telephones and go straight to cellular. The cost and disruption of laying new phone lines made the plain old telephone system a bad idea.
If you lived through it, you must have done so with a blindfold.
The Tet offensive was a decisive strategic victory for Vietnam: US troops had to be recalled from the countryside to fight back in the cities. The fact that the offensive was tactically repulsed in the cities is of little significance, because the countryside fell to the Viet Cong, and the US would never reattain the same level of control of the territory they had before Tet.
Hey, you don't need to read von Clausewitz to know that an action that demoralises the enemy counts as a victory too.
Except, duh, being an unpopular war leading nowhere, discrediting the US administration and generating more support for enemies of the US?
Obligatory Monty Python quote: "We didn't lose Vietnam! It was a tie!"
Victims of 9/11: <3000. Traffic in the US: >30,000/y
They could easily have used the situation to their advantage, by having their phones used to give false information on where they are, strap it to a dog, leave it on a bus, whatever. They could easily have drawn their hunters out with a collection of phones in a booby-trapped area & ambushed them. Maybe they are dumb & lucky so far...
May I make the observation that 'disregard for due process' should be the epitaph for the present Bush administration? I'm not a US citizen and want to make it known that putting American lives before human rights is arrogant, outrageous and dangerous. Either everyone has inherent rights (not just US citizens), or noone has inherent rights (even US citizens). Finally, I believe that the 'they want to kill us, so we'll kill them first' attitude will only bring about more blood shed.
Thank you for listening to my words.
How the hell did the draft even get approved for a war where losing would not be a major threat to the US? Drafting for WW2 made sense since not intervening in the European Theatre of War would most likely lead to the winner mounting an invasion of the US but Vietnam?
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
"it's clear facts don't bother you a bit. "
Well, it's funny you say the when the FACT is, you said something that was FACTUALLY incorrect, then based your reasoning on your incorrect FACT.
The FACT is, the only reason I replied to you was to correct your erroneous assumption of FACT. In fact, I am the only one of us who has actually presented ANY correct facts.
It seems your statement applies far more to you and your factually incorrect post, and your insistence that you being wrong doesn't matter, than it does to me.
And that's twice now that you've behaved like a child instead of thanking me for educating you. Are this much of an asshole to everyone who corrects you when you're obviously wrong, or are you just embarrassed by your failure and lashing out?
Thank you. The only two explanations I can think of for that modding are that one of slshdot's religious fanatics (athieism, the athiests here are the most fanatical of all) got his panties in a bunch because I dared quote the dreaded book, or it's one of my freaks.
/. that said "[some asshat] has made you his foe." I looked at the guy's user page, and he had no comments, no journals, no fans, no freaks, the only indication he had ever been at slashdot at all was his "foes" list, with only one name - mine. Prabably had something to do with my Whore Journals.
I got one of those "reletionship change" messages from
The metamods will take care of the idiot who modded that as flamebait. Meanwhile another slashdotter's sig comes to mind: "Karma excellent. Try again, modboy!"
Again, thanks for the support.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
You mean, being nuked is better than being gunned down
You make an argument that says, at first, the Taliban are religious, and the other guys are not, but then you go and essentially the entire country is filled with religious fruitcakes, otherwise, they wouldn't have the Constitution that they have.
So really, what it boils down to, is that, yeah, the entire population is in fact the problem. So therefor, even if a morally wrong choice, wouldn't nuclear weapons be an option? If Shariah law is evil, but everyone wants it, then, doesn't that make everyone over there evil?
Honestly, the USA should have just nuked Kandahar, and not invaded either country. It satisfies domestic lust for revenge against arabs post 9/11, and keeps the USA from being entangled into two wars of liberation for a people that want to enslave.
This is my sig.
Nuking the lot of them would be a lot cheaper in the long run.
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
Got a reference for the Tet victory? Everything that I've read indicated that it was only a PR victory for the Viet Cong and a loss for them by most military standards. The US & its allies never really controlled the countryside in a traditional sense before or after Tet because it would take more manpower than was politically acceptable.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
In the West we use other methods to obscure News, uncomfortable truths and other opinions. I call it the noise to signal ratio.
BRITNEY SPEARS.
PARIS HILTON
etc
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
That's all the reason they need to continue hating us.
In the end we're not going to force anybody to convert to 'westernism'. They're children will choose to convert because 'westernism' is more fun. Their society will break because it cannot bend.
BTW Sun Tzu never said anything of the sort. He didn't address the political underpinnings of war at all. Make stuff up elsewhere.
Your whole approach has earned an 'Epic Fail' every time it's been tried. Its not useful to be more 'civilized' then you enemy when your enemy is now in charge. Tell it to Nevil Chamberlin (better yet tell it to the Vechi French). You can only afford to be so civilized. That is largely a function of the level of civilization of your enemies.
The 'fanatic stupid' already believe AIDs is a CIA plot. What do we have to lose by making sure the Ben Ladin family gets its share? (Yes I'm talking about rich Saudi's)
AIDS is already running rampent in the Arab world (Arafat died of AIDS). They are just in denial, claiming no homosexuality or AIDS in Iran for instance.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Point 1. Taliban is a militia part of a regular army. Failed.
Point 3. Part of a regular army. Point does not apply. Regular army has a definition and requires uniforms at least.
Point 6. Haven't had time to organize? Might have applied once for a brief time. Not any more.
The only point they could fit is 2. If they adopted uniforms and carried arms openly. That might not work out so well for them however.
That's why you fail reading comprehension. You see those words you cite? They mean things.
And failing the test for 'Prisoner of war' does not make you a simple criminal. It makes you an unlawful combatant. BTW in WWII nobody was convicted of any crime against non-uniformed partisans (French or otherwise). That's because the Germans/Japanese/Americans/Russians were within their legal rights just shooting them. Nuermburg was about war crimes. Shooting spies or other non-uniformed combatants is not a war crime. Never has been, hopefully it never will be.
Your society has chosen to define the start of life as birth. Other societies are more culturally advanced (Most of Europe bans third trimester abortions with very narrow exceptions). Abortion is not a human right, life is.
It is all about when you define the start of life. (I'd use the start of electrical activity in the fetal brain, more or less the same as the modern definition of death.)
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'