Ah, I just checked, wondering what sort of 'national security' exceptions that 'transit passage' has. Here it is, folks:
Article 39: Ships and aircraft, while exercising the right of transit passage, shall: (b) refrain from any threat or use of force against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of States bordering the strait, or in any other manner in violation of the principles of international law embodied in the Charter of the United Nations;
So yeah. Iran does, indeed, have a perfectly valid reason to deny US ships passage through the strait....because we keep threatening (in violation of international law) to attack their nuclear weapons productions. (Strangely, it reads as if they can keep us out of the Oman side, also...that can't be right. I suspect that it means Oman could also keep us out, if it wanted, because we threatened Iran. Iran can't keep us out of Oman!)
There's an idiom about chickens and roosting that is apt here.
If Iran were to close the strait it would be in violation of international law.
'violation of international law' != 'act of war'.
Under the laws of the seas, yes, Iran must keep that passage open. However, failure to do so does not mean that they have declared war on anyone, and it does not give others some sort of excuse to declare war on them.
Of course, it all depends on how they're keeping it closed. Ordering ships to turn back or be shot would be an act of war. (Well, at least actually shooting at them would be.)
OTOH, simply continually moving ships around so that no one can safely pass would, while in violation of their obligation to keep the strait open, would not be an act of war. Or dragging a giant net across the ocean.
As for Oman, I thought at some point ships had to pass through Iranian waters thanks to the lay of the strait. If everyone can just detour through Oman waters, the entire game's off. Iranian ships can't put themselves in Oman waters to blockade, because Oman will just demand they leave, as they clearly not would not be following valid 'transit passage' rules. Ships have a right to pass through straits, not screw around in them. And if they don't leave, well, parking warships in other people's waters against their wishes is, in fact, an act of war.
Yes, and violating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty means they get kicked out of the treaty. All that means, as I said, is that some other countries won't sell them uranium or plutonium. That's it.
You can't invade other countries because they don't follow treaty obligations they freely signed. (Violating a peace treaty that a country was forced to sign at gunpoint usually mean the war is back on, but the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is not one of those.)
Also, 'illegal' is the wrong word. Treaty violations are not 'illegal' in any sense. It is not any sort of violation of international law(1) to develop nuclear weapons. And if it was, it would be illegal with or without a treaty. Only a few very very specific actions are illegal under international law...
...you know, actions like invading or planning or even threatening to invade other countries to alter their internal policy and behavior.
You can threaten them in the sense 'If you commit an illegal act of war against X, we will invade you.', but you can't say 'If you elect person Y, or have a research project to develop Z, we will invade you.'. You cannot threaten war against other countries about their internal actions, just about things that could be, themselves, somehow be construed as act of war. (I.e., if they regularly attempt to violate the border, you can threaten war if they do it again, even if you ignored it in the past. Or even if they violate someone else's border...it doesn't have to be an act of war against you specifically, that's the entire premise for mutual defense treaties.)
But any other threats, any threats about non-acts of war, are a 'crime against the peace', which is considered the first and most important war crime.
I hate to have to point that out, because absolutely no one appears to believe me, but it is completely and utterly true. Threatening to make non-defensive war is as illegal as actually doing so. (Because if two countries keep threatening each other, eventually you'll end up in a war that both countries can make a reasonable claim is self-defense.)
And the fact is, we constantly step over the line when dealing with various other countries, like Iran, illegally threatening them. And Iran, no matter how much the media tries to put words in their mouth, does not step over the line. (Iran has, despite what people seem to assume, never actually threatened to invade Israel.)
1) Actually, a few people have argued that nuclear weapons are inherently illegal under the laws of war, as they cannot be 'untargeted' at civilian institutions. There is no way to use a nuclear weapon without civilian casualties, and hence they are unlawful. Whether or not this argument makes sense, the US obviously cannot use it.
The Obama administration has reportedly warned Iran that closing the Straight would provoke an American response.
I love how it's only the US that can be 'provoked'.
Remember, folks, Iran's apparently nuclear weapon program, while not illegal in any sense, 'provokes' the US. Countries have a perfect right to develop nukes if they want, and cut off inspections that they are only working towards nuclear power, and all it does is get them kicked out of the nuclear weapon's treaty, which means many countries won't sell uranium to them. That's it. It doesn't give anyone the right to attack them, or be 'provoked' into a war with them.
I think people have somehow gotten confused since the Iraq war and think developing nukes are 'illegal', but Iraq signed a surrender in war saying they wouldn't develop nukes, so, if they actually had been doing so, it would be a violation of the surrender and the war would be back on. Iran is not anywhere near the same situation.
However, threatening to bomb Iran in violation of international law is illegal. I don't mean actually bombing Iran, although that's also illegal...just threatening to attack countries over internal matters is actually illegal. As is planning to do so. It's a crime against peace. Somehow, that doesn't count as 'provoking'.
But, if Iran does what is mostly within international law, closing of its own waterways to transit passage of countries threatening it, that is also 'provoking'. Countries are supposed to allow passage of ships through their waters as long as they don't stop, but they can stop that when, for example, people keep threatening to attack them. (And they can certainly keep out warships of countries that keep threatening them!)
To summarize: Iran doing things we don't like that are possibly falling short of their treaty obligations, but are not in any way 'illegal', that's 'provoking' us. The US committing the outright war crime of planning and threatening to bomb them to change their internal behavior, why, it's crazy to think Iran might not like that.
No, it's not even possible in theory and people need to stop pretending it is. The only way to know that a computer cannot be tampered with is to know every line of code and every circuit pathway It is, of course, impossible to see circuit pathways inside a processor.
So it is literally (not just practically, literally) impossible for someone to walk up to a computer and be assured that it will do what is stated to do, all the time, unless they're Dr. Manhattan or something.
Of course, the practical impossibility limit is even sooner, as they won't even let random people inspect all the code on the machine in use, or even hook the hard drive up to their own machine to verify the code.
need a procedure with votes being printed on paper to make it verifyable without having to understand the internal workings of the voting machine
Half the problem with electronic voting are utter tools who run around insisting that if we do it 'right', and by 'right' they mean 'Without counting the votes electronically', it's fine...and the fucking public hears 'electronic voting can be done right'.
STOP SAYING SHIT LIKE THAT. THAT IS NOT ELECTRONIC VOTING. ELECTRONIC VOTING IS WHEN VOTES ARE STORED AND TABULATED IN A COMPUTER.
No one has any goddamn problem with any sort of ballot-assistance, be it computers or human beings or fucking trained monkeys. But every time people group that into the same category as 'We've going to let proprietary computer system count the votes', all you've done is provided cover to those treasonous asshats who've taken the ability to verify the vote away from everyone.
Car analogy: That's like saying in a hypothetical future 'Sure, we've spent billions on self-driving cars, and they keep crashing and killing everyone, but that's because we keep building the wrong sort of self-driving cars...we need to build the kind where people operate them, and computers just provide directions and stuff.'. Hey, lunatic, those aren't self-driving cars.
CCleaner does what you're talking about, and is of course, free. (And you should have it anyway because of the actual functionality of it.)
All registry cleaners are essentially scams. Deleting paths to hundreds of files that don't exist anymore might speed up windows by 1 second during boot. None of it's worth paying any money for. Although if you have CCleaner you might was well run the registry scanner everyone once in a while, it won't hurt.
Yeah, I was baffled as to when we started solving Sudoku by 'brute force'. That would be incredibly time consuming.
And if that was how people solved Sudoku, adding a few more blank cells would not actually make them much harder. (Assuming some sort of moderately intelligent brute force that was not literally trying every possible combination...people would hopefully be smart enough to abort each attempt as soon as a conflict arose.)
It's nice to know that you cannot have a Sudoku puzzle with 16 or less clues, but it is entirely possible to have, for example, a 17 clue puzzle that is, in fact, unsolvable except via computer, or via actual brute force, is not really a plausible solution for most people.
Actually, I don't slam on the gas at stop lights either, and yet I tend to be closer to the car in front of me.
I have noticed, at stop lights, that for some reason people wait until the car in front of them moves a specific distance, and then slam down on the gas.
It works a fuckload better if you simply notice the car in front of you has started moving and immediately start moving forward behind them, slowly ramping up your speed. You should be moving exactly like they are, starting at almost exactly the same time, except you're a couple of miles an hour slower to slowly increase the gap between your cars.
In other words, instead of waiting, and flooring it, go at the same time as them, and because they are flooring it and you are not, you will get the proper gap anyway, save gas, and be the same distance away from them after a few second. (And be closer to them before that point, which means the car behind you will go sooner, reducing traffic in general.)
About half of you are going to assert that is how you drive. Here's a hint: Unless you're doing that consciously, you're not driving like that. Actually watch what happens when you drive.
My God, I forgot I was really stupid and couldn't solve that with the aforementioned 'script' that I was running rsync from to put each backup in a new directory and --link-dest= it to the last backup!
rdiff-backup is what I used to use, before I decided it was, frankly, too much work to try to get files out of. And it kept hanging and making me delete everything.
Now it's just a basic script that puts each day in a new directory, with hardlinks to unchanged files from the previous day, and something to delete old directories.
And getting files out of it is a standard cp command.
I don't really understand there would be problems with ACLs, my copy of rsync can preserve those.
As for SELinux, I don't use that, but I thought those were stored in extended attributes, and hence rsync would catch those if you told it to?
Or do you mean problems on the other end? I can see how assigning random security contexts to files might cause weird backup problems if the server you're backing up to is also running SELinux.
If everyone has health care there could be an increase in demand for health care, which would push the prices higher.
As opposed to not everyone having health care, which not reduces the demand for health care because people can't afford it, but reduces it permanently as people die.
In fact, if some of this is happening naturally, then that just means we need to have a net reduction in CO2, below past where it was 1000 years ago.
I swear, we're in a crashing car, and scientists are blaming the driver, and insisting he needs to drive better. However, some people insist a tire just blew, it has nothing or almost nothing to do with the driver at all...and thus he doesn't need to drive better and we should crash?
Uh, no.
And even if we're going to crash no matter what, and can't fix it, should we not start buckling our seatbelts and installing airbags? Perhaps climate change is unavoidable...all that means is that we should redirect energies from trying to avoid it to trying to survive it.
Which, when it comes to energy consumption, would be a lot of the same things, because climate change is going to start sucking so much added energy we really can't afford to not be energy efficient everywhere we can. We've going to have to save our energy for climate control. (And we're going to run into some serious problems with water, also. No just sea levels, usable drinking water.)
Likewise, climate change is going to make already scary political situations worse, and if the world really was going to face a disaster on that scale, it would be clever to, you know, stop relying on middle east oil. Or oil at all. The more local the energy, the less likely it is that random world-wide problems will interrupt it. (Do you know what happens if shifting weather patterns start dumping 100x the amount of water in a desert? Sounds great in theory...in practice, not so good.)
If someone was standing there arguing that the government shouldn't spend money installing solar panels, but instead should spend money trying to build flood walls around Manhattan or subside sheltered farms to avoid the random weather, okay, I could respect that. I'd disagree, but we'd both be in the same universe. It would be a legitimate disagreement....I think a problem can still be corrected in time, he thinks it's too late and we have to deal with the results.
But the people pushing 'Climate change is not cause by us' aren't actually 'People who disagree about the best next step', they're 'People who profit from the status quo and assume they'll be dead before they have to deal with it, so are literally arguing everything in order to delay any change'
No kidding. They'd functionally stop all flights, and possible cause enough of an overreaction that people who've already gone through security can't go anywhere.
And, of course, there's the other fun attack: taking out the dozen or so bridges that almost all port traffic uses. Car bombs would do it.
The only thing that hijacking airplanes let you do is blow up buildings, and, uh, there are other ways to do that that are easier.
Luckily, al Quaeda is apparently gone, otherwise, I'd fully expect this to start happening now that we've gotten out of Iraq. (Because the entire point of the attacks was to get us in wars in the Middle East, producing people who will give their lives to kill us. The amount of people who will give their lives for religious reasons is quite small. The amount of who will give their lives because a US bomb took out their family...well...)
The problem is, there's no 'mark' per se. Chambers of Commerce are not any sort of collective. They're just completely-seperate NPOs started by local business owners. In fact, nothing stops people from starting a competing one to existing CoCs. (Although they're kind of pointless if many businesses do not join.)
There are a few national networks that let CoCs stay in touch (In addition to the direct connections they usually develop to nearby ones.), and the 'US Chamber of Commerce' does indeed operate as one of those, and a lot of the local Chambers have joined it. Although a lot left after the revelation it was engaged in lobbying and taking money from China at the same time.
In fact, signing up with the US Chamber of Commerce is actually against a lot of rule of the local Chambers, and people need to point that. Most local Chambers are charitable non-profits, and hence cannot legally support candidates in election, which the USCoC does. Even if they are not 401(c)(3)s and hence could support candidates, a lot of them are explicitly supposed to be non-partisan, which the USCoC is not.
So if you are part of a business that is a member of a local CoC, and they are a member of the USCoC check their bylaws and point this out to them. And point out to other members that they are supporting a organization explicitly designed to elect Republicans. (Yes, merely being a member, for free, is 'supporting' them, as the USCoC is running around claiming your business supports them.)
There's not really anything anyone can do about the name, though. 'Chamber of Commerce' is not any sort of mark, it's a general term for 'organization of companies'.
The local Chambers also have a political agenda that isn't always perfect.
But local Chambers of Commerce don't run around bribing politicians and working together to make sure that it's perfectly acceptable to send millions of jobs overseas and that they're allowed to sell whatever shitty lead-painted stuff China produces and that no regulation of any sort should exist, ever.
Business in local Chambers of Commerce can't run around trying to set Federal or even State regulation of stuff, or screw around with any tax rates(Except sales, and they will argue against that.), so almost all the Chamber's effort gets directed at 'Bringing in more business for local businesses', which generally everyone likes. More business means more jobs and more money in the local economy.
I have no idea what the hell the point of 'color' ereaders are.
It's like we live in a world where there are two kinds of vehicles. Everyone either drives a enclosed electric golf cart, which is a good pollution-less short-range cheap vehicle, or a gas-powered car, which is more expensive but has a 300 mile range and is much faster and can carry more.
And then vendors inexplicably start selling cars as 'gas powered golf cars', in the golf cart market. They've crippled these cars so they only have a range of golf cart, although admittedly they can carry more. However, they have all the disadvantages of the cars such as requiring gas stations and polluting, and the price of the crippled cars isn't much less than the price of an actual car. (A price difference that apparently is supposed to be made in the marked up price of accessories.)
I really have to question the market here. The actual market for 'color ereaders' that I see is people who want a cheap tablet.
People who actually want an ereader, as in, a device to read a book on, seem to actually want eInk.
But instead we've decide to have a war where people uncripple their 'golf cart' cars and the manufacturer tries to stop it.
I say this, ironically, as someone who owned a Nook Simple Touch...that I've rooted. (The eInks are much easier to root, apparently. Just need an SD card.) But I didn't do it to make it a tablet, I did it to make it a better ereader.
And I doubt that you, Cessna-boy, even get CLOSE to the g-forces involved in the kind of maneuvers done by military pilots, especially those trying to pull out of a dive.
You've misread him, and given him even more credit that he deserves.
He flies in planes all the time. He's not even a fucking pilot, he's a passenger.
I'm sure sitting in a passenger airline and experiencing maybe 1.2G during takeoff is comparable to flying a fighter plane.
I sure I couldn't pull a 40 pounds with one finger away from my body, while sitting down and strapped in (Aka, pulling using just my arms), even if I wasn't in a flight suit and near blacking out. (Why the hell is someone pulling away from their body? Would installing a lever there to push add $2 to the cost or something?)
Hell, I'm not sure I could pull 40 pounds hooked to a ring, straight up, while standing. I can lift that much with two hands, sure, but using one finger? Maybe, but I wouldn't bet on it.
I once pulled up to a four-way stop at the same time as someone did to my right. Because I'm not an idiot, I knew they had the right of way, so I waited.
They turned left, cutting the corner...and stopped about a foot from my front bumper, with half their car in my lane. I mean, I'm not a stickler for 'stay in your lane' during turns, especially on backroads where the turns are rather tight, we all do that. But I think people should probably not actually ram cars sitting in the other lane.
I mean, it's not as if I'd appeared out of nowhere. We got to the stop signs at the same time!
They started at me for a second, with the phone glued to their head, almost as if they were expecting me to back up. I thought 'Fuck that, you're the idiot who can't drive and almost front-ended me while I was stopped at a stop sign', so eventually they backed up and tried their turn again. Yes, they were so close they had to back up a few feet to turn enough to go around me.
I mean, you hear about idiotic drivers on cell phones, but you always assume they simply aren't paying attention to new things, not that they are pulling up to stop signs and not noticing cars that pulled up at the same time. (Which would have probably resulted in a collision if I had had the right of way and tried to go.)
And this is really really why people can't be trusted to hold cell phones to their head while driving.
Because the rule of politeness requires you listen to people talking to you. So you cannot remove the phone from your head to grab the wheel for your turn. Unlike, for example, a burger, which you can remove from your mouth, even if you do end up with ketchup all over the steering wheel.
It's bad social evolution. The rules of speech require you to listen to people, and in turn it requires they shut the hell when you're in danger and when you're trying to do complicated thing. But evolution never realized we'd be talking to people without them seeing the situation we were in, and it certainly didn't realize that listening to them could dedicate the use of a hand.
I think, with training and education, hands-free is safe. If we as a society start saying 'It's perfectly acceptable, in fact required, that drivers who are on the phone ask the other person to stop talking in any sort of complicated situation. And they can simply stop paying attention at any time and make the other person repeat the last minute.'.
As it is now? Eh...it's not very safe. I'm not sure if banning it is the solution, because I'm not entirely sure that would even work. And it would shove this entire issue into the 'illegal' territory where no one wants to promote doing it smartly.
Instead, I think the NTSB should start a campaign about 'cell phone etiquette'. Perhaps we could, to start with, start informing the other person at the start of the conversation that we're driving and might ask them to stop talking or repeat what they said at any time. (And by simply telling them that, we'd remember it ourselves.)
There are (at least) three ways to be a bad driver.
One is simply to not look at the road. I'm all for laws that disallow operating the sort of things you have to look away from the road for. This isn't anything to do with distraction per se, this is simply 'You can only look at one thing at a time'.
So anything that requires more a quick glance should be banned. Texting, for example. (And a lot of car interface things should be rethought, also.)
The second is hand problems. I.e., holding a cell phone, holding a burger, whatever. Cell phones are actually worse than most other things because you can't 'stop'....if you're doing something that requires two hands as you try to take a bite, you can remove the burger from your mouth. But all too often, we instinctively do not want to remove the phone from our ear as we then cannot hear, and they do not know to stop talking. It's a little weird, yes, but everyone does it. We are trained to be polite, and during a cell phone conversation we will often be polite at the expense of safety. We obviously don't think of it this way...but we like to think everything we do is safe until suddenly we're in a car accident wondering what the hell just happened. Think about it in a non-car context..how often have you done weird contortions to continue a conversation instead of just saying 'Hey, I need to hold the phone away from my face for about ten second to do something, hold on?'.
So holding phones to your head should be disallowed. Hands-free only.
The last is distraction, where you start driving 'by automatic' and are not paying attention enough to react in time. The question is, how much of a danger is this, and are cell phones really such a large contributor of it that we need to ban them totally?
I don't actually think this is as much a problem as some people think. Conversations rarely take someone's attention to the point they aren't paying attention to other stuff. Well, I say that, and then I remember people not in cars indeed having cell phone conversations and not paying attention to the world around then...and OTOH, I've seen plenty of idiots not in cars not paying attention for no discernible reason at all.
I have no real answers, but I often feel as if we've lumped all these dangers together. Hands-free removes two of the three ways that cell phones can cause car accidents, and I don't know if anyone's actually tried to figure out how many people got in accidents due to the last one. (As this article points out, this crash was not actually that.)
There's basically no way in which non-medical personal can use any of those rules besides 'An inability to bear weight both immediately and in the emergency department for four steps.'.
If you cannot do that, you need an x-ray. (I am assuming by 'in the emergency department' they mean 'ten to twenty minutes later', not that there is some magical property of emergency departments.) If you can take four steps, you still might need one. So people can rule themselves into needing an x-ray, but can't possibly rule themselves out of one.
So there's really no point of them doing the test in the first place. Just go see the doctor.
Granted, we don't need actual doctors to do the test. In fact, I think an RN could legally do the test. (I think collecting symptoms to find out if a test is needed is generally within their bailiwick.)
Of course, we refuse to set up any sort of system where you might see medically knowledgeable people who aren't doctors who then tell you basically what's going on, and send you to a doctor if it appears to be an actual problem. (And we refuse to actually have enough doctors to do it how we do it now.)
Remember, the reason people have no jobs is that they are lazy. That's it.
It has nothing to do with the fact that employers aren't hiring. And the fact they aren't hiring (Pretending such a fact existed) has nothing to do with the fact corporations don't need employees because no one is buying their stuff. And the fact no one can buy anything (Again, if such a fact existed.) is utterly unrelated to the fact that the rich have made off with all the money and now banks won't loan to us.
No, it's all because people are lazy. Unlazy people can always make money. They could become prostitutes, or pan for gold, or something in the vast and numerous ways that random people wandering around with no assets can somehow 'make money'.
Oh, I know. They can live off their book sales. Surely they're all disgraced political figures who have a ready audience.
Well, teaching kids the trick how to multiple single digits by 11 is reasonable, although it's rather likely that they'll figure it out themselves. You can only add (n*10)+n so many times without realizing it is always written nn.
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Ah, I just checked, wondering what sort of 'national security' exceptions that 'transit passage' has. Here it is, folks:
Article 39: Ships and aircraft, while exercising the right of transit passage, shall: (b) refrain from any threat or use of force against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of States bordering the strait, or in any other manner in violation of the principles of international law embodied in the Charter of the United Nations;
So yeah. Iran does, indeed, have a perfectly valid reason to deny US ships passage through the strait....because we keep threatening (in violation of international law) to attack their nuclear weapons productions. (Strangely, it reads as if they can keep us out of the Oman side, also...that can't be right. I suspect that it means Oman could also keep us out, if it wanted, because we threatened Iran. Iran can't keep us out of Oman!)
There's an idiom about chickens and roosting that is apt here.
Here's the section on transit passage.
If Iran were to close the strait it would be in violation of international law.
'violation of international law' != 'act of war'.
Under the laws of the seas, yes, Iran must keep that passage open. However, failure to do so does not mean that they have declared war on anyone, and it does not give others some sort of excuse to declare war on them.
Of course, it all depends on how they're keeping it closed. Ordering ships to turn back or be shot would be an act of war. (Well, at least actually shooting at them would be.)
OTOH, simply continually moving ships around so that no one can safely pass would, while in violation of their obligation to keep the strait open, would not be an act of war. Or dragging a giant net across the ocean.
As for Oman, I thought at some point ships had to pass through Iranian waters thanks to the lay of the strait. If everyone can just detour through Oman waters, the entire game's off. Iranian ships can't put themselves in Oman waters to blockade, because Oman will just demand they leave, as they clearly not would not be following valid 'transit passage' rules. Ships have a right to pass through straits, not screw around in them. And if they don't leave, well, parking warships in other people's waters against their wishes is, in fact, an act of war.
Yes, and violating the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty means they get kicked out of the treaty. All that means, as I said, is that some other countries won't sell them uranium or plutonium. That's it.
You can't invade other countries because they don't follow treaty obligations they freely signed. (Violating a peace treaty that a country was forced to sign at gunpoint usually mean the war is back on, but the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty is not one of those.)
Also, 'illegal' is the wrong word. Treaty violations are not 'illegal' in any sense. It is not any sort of violation of international law(1) to develop nuclear weapons. And if it was, it would be illegal with or without a treaty. Only a few very very specific actions are illegal under international law...
You can threaten them in the sense 'If you commit an illegal act of war against X, we will invade you.', but you can't say 'If you elect person Y, or have a research project to develop Z, we will invade you.'. You cannot threaten war against other countries about their internal actions, just about things that could be, themselves, somehow be construed as act of war. (I.e., if they regularly attempt to violate the border, you can threaten war if they do it again, even if you ignored it in the past. Or even if they violate someone else's border...it doesn't have to be an act of war against you specifically, that's the entire premise for mutual defense treaties.)
But any other threats, any threats about non-acts of war, are a 'crime against the peace', which is considered the first and most important war crime.
I hate to have to point that out, because absolutely no one appears to believe me, but it is completely and utterly true. Threatening to make non-defensive war is as illegal as actually doing so. (Because if two countries keep threatening each other, eventually you'll end up in a war that both countries can make a reasonable claim is self-defense.)
And the fact is, we constantly step over the line when dealing with various other countries, like Iran, illegally threatening them. And Iran, no matter how much the media tries to put words in their mouth, does not step over the line. (Iran has, despite what people seem to assume, never actually threatened to invade Israel.)
1) Actually, a few people have argued that nuclear weapons are inherently illegal under the laws of war, as they cannot be 'untargeted' at civilian institutions. There is no way to use a nuclear weapon without civilian casualties, and hence they are unlawful. Whether or not this argument makes sense, the US obviously cannot use it.
The Obama administration has reportedly warned Iran that closing the Straight would provoke an American response.
I love how it's only the US that can be 'provoked'.
Remember, folks, Iran's apparently nuclear weapon program, while not illegal in any sense, 'provokes' the US. Countries have a perfect right to develop nukes if they want, and cut off inspections that they are only working towards nuclear power, and all it does is get them kicked out of the nuclear weapon's treaty, which means many countries won't sell uranium to them. That's it. It doesn't give anyone the right to attack them, or be 'provoked' into a war with them.
I think people have somehow gotten confused since the Iraq war and think developing nukes are 'illegal', but Iraq signed a surrender in war saying they wouldn't develop nukes, so, if they actually had been doing so, it would be a violation of the surrender and the war would be back on. Iran is not anywhere near the same situation.
However, threatening to bomb Iran in violation of international law is illegal. I don't mean actually bombing Iran, although that's also illegal...just threatening to attack countries over internal matters is actually illegal. As is planning to do so. It's a crime against peace. Somehow, that doesn't count as 'provoking'.
But, if Iran does what is mostly within international law, closing of its own waterways to transit passage of countries threatening it, that is also 'provoking'. Countries are supposed to allow passage of ships through their waters as long as they don't stop, but they can stop that when, for example, people keep threatening to attack them. (And they can certainly keep out warships of countries that keep threatening them!)
To summarize: Iran doing things we don't like that are possibly falling short of their treaty obligations, but are not in any way 'illegal', that's 'provoking' us. The US committing the outright war crime of planning and threatening to bomb them to change their internal behavior, why, it's crazy to think Iran might not like that.
No, it's not even possible in theory and people need to stop pretending it is. The only way to know that a computer cannot be tampered with is to know every line of code and every circuit pathway It is, of course, impossible to see circuit pathways inside a processor.
So it is literally (not just practically, literally) impossible for someone to walk up to a computer and be assured that it will do what is stated to do, all the time, unless they're Dr. Manhattan or something.
Of course, the practical impossibility limit is even sooner, as they won't even let random people inspect all the code on the machine in use, or even hook the hard drive up to their own machine to verify the code.
need a procedure with votes being printed on paper to make it verifyable without having to understand the internal workings of the voting machine
Half the problem with electronic voting are utter tools who run around insisting that if we do it 'right', and by 'right' they mean 'Without counting the votes electronically', it's fine...and the fucking public hears 'electronic voting can be done right'.
STOP SAYING SHIT LIKE THAT. THAT IS NOT ELECTRONIC VOTING. ELECTRONIC VOTING IS WHEN VOTES ARE STORED AND TABULATED IN A COMPUTER.
No one has any goddamn problem with any sort of ballot-assistance, be it computers or human beings or fucking trained monkeys. But every time people group that into the same category as 'We've going to let proprietary computer system count the votes', all you've done is provided cover to those treasonous asshats who've taken the ability to verify the vote away from everyone.
Car analogy: That's like saying in a hypothetical future 'Sure, we've spent billions on self-driving cars, and they keep crashing and killing everyone, but that's because we keep building the wrong sort of self-driving cars...we need to build the kind where people operate them, and computers just provide directions and stuff.'. Hey, lunatic, those aren't self-driving cars.
CCleaner does what you're talking about, and is of course, free. (And you should have it anyway because of the actual functionality of it.)
All registry cleaners are essentially scams. Deleting paths to hundreds of files that don't exist anymore might speed up windows by 1 second during boot. None of it's worth paying any money for. Although if you have CCleaner you might was well run the registry scanner everyone once in a while, it won't hurt.
Yeah, I was baffled as to when we started solving Sudoku by 'brute force'. That would be incredibly time consuming.
And if that was how people solved Sudoku, adding a few more blank cells would not actually make them much harder. (Assuming some sort of moderately intelligent brute force that was not literally trying every possible combination...people would hopefully be smart enough to abort each attempt as soon as a conflict arose.)
It's nice to know that you cannot have a Sudoku puzzle with 16 or less clues, but it is entirely possible to have, for example, a 17 clue puzzle that is, in fact, unsolvable except via computer, or via actual brute force, is not really a plausible solution for most people.
Actually, I don't slam on the gas at stop lights either, and yet I tend to be closer to the car in front of me.
I have noticed, at stop lights, that for some reason people wait until the car in front of them moves a specific distance, and then slam down on the gas.
It works a fuckload better if you simply notice the car in front of you has started moving and immediately start moving forward behind them, slowly ramping up your speed. You should be moving exactly like they are, starting at almost exactly the same time, except you're a couple of miles an hour slower to slowly increase the gap between your cars.
In other words, instead of waiting, and flooring it, go at the same time as them, and because they are flooring it and you are not, you will get the proper gap anyway, save gas, and be the same distance away from them after a few second. (And be closer to them before that point, which means the car behind you will go sooner, reducing traffic in general.)
About half of you are going to assert that is how you drive. Here's a hint: Unless you're doing that consciously, you're not driving like that. Actually watch what happens when you drive.
My God, I forgot I was really stupid and couldn't solve that with the aforementioned 'script' that I was running rsync from to put each backup in a new directory and --link-dest= it to the last backup!
rdiff-backup is what I used to use, before I decided it was, frankly, too much work to try to get files out of. And it kept hanging and making me delete everything.
Now it's just a basic script that puts each day in a new directory, with hardlinks to unchanged files from the previous day, and something to delete old directories.
And getting files out of it is a standard cp command.
I don't really understand there would be problems with ACLs, my copy of rsync can preserve those.
As for SELinux, I don't use that, but I thought those were stored in extended attributes, and hence rsync would catch those if you told it to?
Or do you mean problems on the other end? I can see how assigning random security contexts to files might cause weird backup problems if the server you're backing up to is also running SELinux.
The best backup solution is a damn rsync script that replicates to another server.
If everyone has health care there could be an increase in demand for health care, which would push the prices higher.
As opposed to not everyone having health care, which not reduces the demand for health care because people can't afford it, but reduces it permanently as people die.
It's win win!
In fact, if some of this is happening naturally, then that just means we need to have a net reduction in CO2, below past where it was 1000 years ago.
I swear, we're in a crashing car, and scientists are blaming the driver, and insisting he needs to drive better. However, some people insist a tire just blew, it has nothing or almost nothing to do with the driver at all...and thus he doesn't need to drive better and we should crash?
Uh, no.
And even if we're going to crash no matter what, and can't fix it, should we not start buckling our seatbelts and installing airbags? Perhaps climate change is unavoidable...all that means is that we should redirect energies from trying to avoid it to trying to survive it.
Which, when it comes to energy consumption, would be a lot of the same things, because climate change is going to start sucking so much added energy we really can't afford to not be energy efficient everywhere we can. We've going to have to save our energy for climate control. (And we're going to run into some serious problems with water, also. No just sea levels, usable drinking water.)
Likewise, climate change is going to make already scary political situations worse, and if the world really was going to face a disaster on that scale, it would be clever to, you know, stop relying on middle east oil. Or oil at all. The more local the energy, the less likely it is that random world-wide problems will interrupt it. (Do you know what happens if shifting weather patterns start dumping 100x the amount of water in a desert? Sounds great in theory...in practice, not so good.)
If someone was standing there arguing that the government shouldn't spend money installing solar panels, but instead should spend money trying to build flood walls around Manhattan or subside sheltered farms to avoid the random weather, okay, I could respect that. I'd disagree, but we'd both be in the same universe. It would be a legitimate disagreement....I think a problem can still be corrected in time, he thinks it's too late and we have to deal with the results.
But the people pushing 'Climate change is not cause by us' aren't actually 'People who disagree about the best next step', they're 'People who profit from the status quo and assume they'll be dead before they have to deal with it, so are literally arguing everything in order to delay any change'
No kidding. They'd functionally stop all flights, and possible cause enough of an overreaction that people who've already gone through security can't go anywhere.
And, of course, there's the other fun attack: taking out the dozen or so bridges that almost all port traffic uses. Car bombs would do it.
The only thing that hijacking airplanes let you do is blow up buildings, and, uh, there are other ways to do that that are easier.
Luckily, al Quaeda is apparently gone, otherwise, I'd fully expect this to start happening now that we've gotten out of Iraq. (Because the entire point of the attacks was to get us in wars in the Middle East, producing people who will give their lives to kill us. The amount of people who will give their lives for religious reasons is quite small. The amount of who will give their lives because a US bomb took out their family...well...)
The problem is, there's no 'mark' per se. Chambers of Commerce are not any sort of collective. They're just completely-seperate NPOs started by local business owners. In fact, nothing stops people from starting a competing one to existing CoCs. (Although they're kind of pointless if many businesses do not join.)
There are a few national networks that let CoCs stay in touch (In addition to the direct connections they usually develop to nearby ones.), and the 'US Chamber of Commerce' does indeed operate as one of those, and a lot of the local Chambers have joined it. Although a lot left after the revelation it was engaged in lobbying and taking money from China at the same time.
In fact, signing up with the US Chamber of Commerce is actually against a lot of rule of the local Chambers, and people need to point that. Most local Chambers are charitable non-profits, and hence cannot legally support candidates in election, which the USCoC does. Even if they are not 401(c)(3)s and hence could support candidates, a lot of them are explicitly supposed to be non-partisan, which the USCoC is not.
So if you are part of a business that is a member of a local CoC, and they are a member of the USCoC check their bylaws and point this out to them. And point out to other members that they are supporting a organization explicitly designed to elect Republicans. (Yes, merely being a member, for free, is 'supporting' them, as the USCoC is running around claiming your business supports them.)
There's not really anything anyone can do about the name, though. 'Chamber of Commerce' is not any sort of mark, it's a general term for 'organization of companies'.
The local Chambers also have a political agenda that isn't always perfect.
But local Chambers of Commerce don't run around bribing politicians and working together to make sure that it's perfectly acceptable to send millions of jobs overseas and that they're allowed to sell whatever shitty lead-painted stuff China produces and that no regulation of any sort should exist, ever.
Business in local Chambers of Commerce can't run around trying to set Federal or even State regulation of stuff, or screw around with any tax rates(Except sales, and they will argue against that.), so almost all the Chamber's effort gets directed at 'Bringing in more business for local businesses', which generally everyone likes. More business means more jobs and more money in the local economy.
I have no idea what the hell the point of 'color' ereaders are.
It's like we live in a world where there are two kinds of vehicles. Everyone either drives a enclosed electric golf cart, which is a good pollution-less short-range cheap vehicle, or a gas-powered car, which is more expensive but has a 300 mile range and is much faster and can carry more.
And then vendors inexplicably start selling cars as 'gas powered golf cars', in the golf cart market. They've crippled these cars so they only have a range of golf cart, although admittedly they can carry more. However, they have all the disadvantages of the cars such as requiring gas stations and polluting, and the price of the crippled cars isn't much less than the price of an actual car. (A price difference that apparently is supposed to be made in the marked up price of accessories.)
I really have to question the market here. The actual market for 'color ereaders' that I see is people who want a cheap tablet.
People who actually want an ereader, as in, a device to read a book on, seem to actually want eInk.
But instead we've decide to have a war where people uncripple their 'golf cart' cars and the manufacturer tries to stop it.
I say this, ironically, as someone who owned a Nook Simple Touch...that I've rooted. (The eInks are much easier to root, apparently. Just need an SD card.) But I didn't do it to make it a tablet, I did it to make it a better ereader.
And I doubt that you, Cessna-boy, even get CLOSE to the g-forces involved in the kind of maneuvers done by military pilots, especially those trying to pull out of a dive.
You've misread him, and given him even more credit that he deserves.
He flies in planes all the time. He's not even a fucking pilot, he's a passenger.
I'm sure sitting in a passenger airline and experiencing maybe 1.2G during takeoff is comparable to flying a fighter plane.
I sure I couldn't pull a 40 pounds with one finger away from my body, while sitting down and strapped in (Aka, pulling using just my arms), even if I wasn't in a flight suit and near blacking out. (Why the hell is someone pulling away from their body? Would installing a lever there to push add $2 to the cost or something?)
Hell, I'm not sure I could pull 40 pounds hooked to a ring, straight up, while standing. I can lift that much with two hands, sure, but using one finger? Maybe, but I wouldn't bet on it.
I once pulled up to a four-way stop at the same time as someone did to my right. Because I'm not an idiot, I knew they had the right of way, so I waited.
They turned left, cutting the corner...and stopped about a foot from my front bumper, with half their car in my lane. I mean, I'm not a stickler for 'stay in your lane' during turns, especially on backroads where the turns are rather tight, we all do that. But I think people should probably not actually ram cars sitting in the other lane.
I mean, it's not as if I'd appeared out of nowhere. We got to the stop signs at the same time!
They started at me for a second, with the phone glued to their head, almost as if they were expecting me to back up. I thought 'Fuck that, you're the idiot who can't drive and almost front-ended me while I was stopped at a stop sign', so eventually they backed up and tried their turn again. Yes, they were so close they had to back up a few feet to turn enough to go around me.
I mean, you hear about idiotic drivers on cell phones, but you always assume they simply aren't paying attention to new things, not that they are pulling up to stop signs and not noticing cars that pulled up at the same time. (Which would have probably resulted in a collision if I had had the right of way and tried to go.)
And this is really really why people can't be trusted to hold cell phones to their head while driving.
Because the rule of politeness requires you listen to people talking to you. So you cannot remove the phone from your head to grab the wheel for your turn. Unlike, for example, a burger, which you can remove from your mouth, even if you do end up with ketchup all over the steering wheel.
It's bad social evolution. The rules of speech require you to listen to people, and in turn it requires they shut the hell when you're in danger and when you're trying to do complicated thing. But evolution never realized we'd be talking to people without them seeing the situation we were in, and it certainly didn't realize that listening to them could dedicate the use of a hand.
I think, with training and education, hands-free is safe. If we as a society start saying 'It's perfectly acceptable, in fact required, that drivers who are on the phone ask the other person to stop talking in any sort of complicated situation. And they can simply stop paying attention at any time and make the other person repeat the last minute.'.
As it is now? Eh...it's not very safe. I'm not sure if banning it is the solution, because I'm not entirely sure that would even work. And it would shove this entire issue into the 'illegal' territory where no one wants to promote doing it smartly.
Instead, I think the NTSB should start a campaign about 'cell phone etiquette'. Perhaps we could, to start with, start informing the other person at the start of the conversation that we're driving and might ask them to stop talking or repeat what they said at any time. (And by simply telling them that, we'd remember it ourselves.)
There are (at least) three ways to be a bad driver.
One is simply to not look at the road. I'm all for laws that disallow operating the sort of things you have to look away from the road for. This isn't anything to do with distraction per se, this is simply 'You can only look at one thing at a time'.
So anything that requires more a quick glance should be banned. Texting, for example. (And a lot of car interface things should be rethought, also.)
The second is hand problems. I.e., holding a cell phone, holding a burger, whatever. Cell phones are actually worse than most other things because you can't 'stop'....if you're doing something that requires two hands as you try to take a bite, you can remove the burger from your mouth. But all too often, we instinctively do not want to remove the phone from our ear as we then cannot hear, and they do not know to stop talking. It's a little weird, yes, but everyone does it. We are trained to be polite, and during a cell phone conversation we will often be polite at the expense of safety. We obviously don't think of it this way...but we like to think everything we do is safe until suddenly we're in a car accident wondering what the hell just happened. Think about it in a non-car context..how often have you done weird contortions to continue a conversation instead of just saying 'Hey, I need to hold the phone away from my face for about ten second to do something, hold on?'.
So holding phones to your head should be disallowed. Hands-free only.
The last is distraction, where you start driving 'by automatic' and are not paying attention enough to react in time. The question is, how much of a danger is this, and are cell phones really such a large contributor of it that we need to ban them totally?
I don't actually think this is as much a problem as some people think. Conversations rarely take someone's attention to the point they aren't paying attention to other stuff. Well, I say that, and then I remember people not in cars indeed having cell phone conversations and not paying attention to the world around then...and OTOH, I've seen plenty of idiots not in cars not paying attention for no discernible reason at all.
I have no real answers, but I often feel as if we've lumped all these dangers together. Hands-free removes two of the three ways that cell phones can cause car accidents, and I don't know if anyone's actually tried to figure out how many people got in accidents due to the last one. (As this article points out, this crash was not actually that.)
There's basically no way in which non-medical personal can use any of those rules besides 'An inability to bear weight both immediately and in the emergency department for four steps.'.
If you cannot do that, you need an x-ray. (I am assuming by 'in the emergency department' they mean 'ten to twenty minutes later', not that there is some magical property of emergency departments.) If you can take four steps, you still might need one. So people can rule themselves into needing an x-ray, but can't possibly rule themselves out of one.
So there's really no point of them doing the test in the first place. Just go see the doctor.
Granted, we don't need actual doctors to do the test. In fact, I think an RN could legally do the test. (I think collecting symptoms to find out if a test is needed is generally within their bailiwick.)
Of course, we refuse to set up any sort of system where you might see medically knowledgeable people who aren't doctors who then tell you basically what's going on, and send you to a doctor if it appears to be an actual problem. (And we refuse to actually have enough doctors to do it how we do it now.)
Remember, the reason people have no jobs is that they are lazy. That's it.
It has nothing to do with the fact that employers aren't hiring. And the fact they aren't hiring (Pretending such a fact existed) has nothing to do with the fact corporations don't need employees because no one is buying their stuff. And the fact no one can buy anything (Again, if such a fact existed.) is utterly unrelated to the fact that the rich have made off with all the money and now banks won't loan to us.
No, it's all because people are lazy. Unlazy people can always make money. They could become prostitutes, or pan for gold, or something in the vast and numerous ways that random people wandering around with no assets can somehow 'make money'.
Oh, I know. They can live off their book sales. Surely they're all disgraced political figures who have a ready audience.
Well, teaching kids the trick how to multiple single digits by 11 is reasonable, although it's rather likely that they'll figure it out themselves. You can only add (n*10)+n so many times without realizing it is always written nn.
The rest of 11 and 12 is pretty useless.