All in all, I agree with filtering in this case. This is the state, and we are browsing on your dollar.
No, you're not. You're paying for internet access on our dollar. Presumably, you have a good reason for that (Internet access is basically needed for anyone to function) and presumably you're paying a flat rate, so how much internet usage there is is completely irrelevant.
However, you're also paying for filtering on our dollar. I'd like an explanation of how blocking access to certain sites helps 'develop children, youth and families', and how paying money to make purchased services less useful is a good use of taxpayer money.
And I'd also like to know when the fact you're investigating 'several abuse cases per week' with only 2500 employees will clue you in the fact you're really wasting taxpayer money.
What's really absurd is that Israel had already agreed to release those specific prisoners, yet had then not actually done so. Hezbollah was pretty much out of diplomatic options to get them back.
Holy crap, Hezbollah has time machines now! They're bombing things before they even existed!
And I believe you've mistaken 'attacked' for 'fought'. I didn't say Iran had never 'fought' the US. Just a few weeks ago, the US captured Iranian diplomats in Iraq and they fought back, IIRC. I said Iran hadn't attacked the US, or anyone in fact.
Even if you can attribute that bombing to the group that eventually formed into Hezbollah, and even if that group was being funded and directed by Iran at that time, neither of which is certain, the US was helping Israel occupy Lebanon at that time. (Hence the, you know, US military barracks in Lebanon.) Israel and Palestine started that war, which they decided to hold in Lebanon for some reason. (Lebanon was already holding their own war, so perhaps 'The more the merrier' was the thinking.)
We, and a lot of the international community, stupidly decided to join on the side of Israel, and Iran joined on the side of Lebanon. (Not Palestine. Palestine=Sunni, Hezbollah=Shi'ite. Very recently, Hamas and Hezbollah have made some peace, but not back then.) Lebanon, being quite rightly pissed about other people holding a war inside of them, especially as they were trying to hold their own civil war, was fighting everyone. Interpeting Iran supporting a group in a civil war as 'attacking' the US is somewhat stretching things. Hezbollah, or, at least, a group that might have eventually turned into Hezbollah, had a hell of a lot more right to be there than the US.
I blame Hezbolla for the Israeli civilian deaths since they INTENTIONALLY TARGETED CIVILIANS, which is something Israel never did.
Hehehe. You bring up, at least indirectly, the 1981 invasion of Lebanon by Israel, and then you have the gall to claim that Israel doesn't deliberately target civilians. Oh, man, you should do stand up. Two words: Sabra and Shatila.
Were those soldiers ever released? It's funny how Israel will decide that the cost in civilian casualties and world-wide condemnation had grown too much to continue the attacks. Hesbolla still has not released those soldiers to the best of my knowledge, which tells me that the costs to their own civilians is minuscule to the benefit of holding those soldiers.
Hezbollah was expecting the same thing to happen that had happened every other time it had kidnapped Israeli soldiers. Namely, that Israel would sputter and yell and then, quietly, negotiate a prisoner exchange for the Hezbollah soldiers it had kidnapped. (Which it had already agreed to return, but was not actually doing.) I quote the leader of Hezbollah's apology to Lebanon: "Had we known that the kidnapping of the soldiers would have led to this, we would definitely not have done it."
Israel, however, had been working on an invasion plan of Lebanon for a few years, thanks in parts of our government thinking of it as a sort of trial run for the invasion of Iran. So Israel was actually just waiting for an excuse.
But, hey, we're not talking about Hezbollah, we're talking about Iran. You really don't want to drag puppet states into this discussion, because our puppet state actually attacked Iran in full force for 8 damn years, with direct military support from the US.
And I like how you just dropped all the other stuff I brought up. To repeat:
Iran is not killing US soldiers in Iraq. Iran is diplomatically 'meddling' in Iraq with the full knowledge and consent of the Iraqi government. If Iran is supplying weapons to Iraq, it is supplying them to 'our guys'. (Yes, we call them 'Iraqi troops', but their night job is the militia. It's often exactly the same people!) We may not like this, but tough shit, we are not in charge of the Iraqi government or who they choose to let influence them. Iran is a regional superpower and they can cuddle
Uh, let's see. Embassies are considered sovereign territory, right? In the 1970's, didn't Iran capture and hold Americans from our embassy over there? I think that pretty much proves that YES, IRAN HAS ATTACKED US AND YES, THEY HAVE ATTACKED SOMEONE. Granted, it was a long time ago, but it does invalidate your point. I assume you had forgotten about it or never knew that it happened, otherwise, you are fucking liar.
*sigh*
You don't know anything about the hostage crisis, do you? Because you apparently unaware the Iran government didn't do it. A bunch of college students did, without permission or even advanced knowledge by the government. (And before you come up with some conspiracy theories, pretty much everyone accepts this as true.)
Iran was really pissed at the US at that time for quite logical reasons, like, uh, the US had recently overthrow Iran's government, which Iran had just over-thrown back, and the US-installed puppet had fled to the US, for, as the US had claimed, health reasons, which the Iranians didn't really buy, considering they wanted to put him on trial. (Hence the crisis getting to the point of being resolvable when said puppet died, although Reagan managed to delay that until he got into office.)
So Iran was not incredibly helpful in resolving the issue, barring the US from sending in their military, and was probably laughing the entire time, at how a bunch of college students had managed to take over an embassy. But they didn't do it. Legally, their police were required to provide external security for the embassy, which they failed to do, but there's no indication they deliberately failed in that duty.
Of course there are all the Iranian made weapons we are finding all over Iraq. But I'm sure you think those were planted by the NSA, CIA, FBI or Bush himself. Maybe that's what Rice was doing while she was visiting Iraq recently
You delusional freak. Iran is on the side of our allies. They are Shi'ite. They are not the insurgents setting roadside bombs, who are Sunni. If Iran is arming anyone, they're arming the militias fighting the insurgents, which operate with quasi-Iraqi-government approval, and don't shoot at us unless we shoot at them.
And, no, the CIA isn't planting anything. If they were planted, the Administration could show them to us, which it has not, you know, actually done. In fact, it's presented absolutely no evidence of that except one morter. Considering both Iran and Iraq, you know, speak the same language, and it's not English, and they both date from something Mohammed did, which makes it the year 14xx not 2007, excuse me if I'm not quite buying a morter labeled in English with the year 200x printed on it as an Iranian-supplied weapon, nor do I think anonymous military officials showing pictures of it is 'proof' of anything except that the Administration knows how dodgy that evidence is.
There may, indeed, be Iranian weapons in Iraq, although I doubt any deliberate intent on the part of Iran, and I would wager on guns, and some might even be used against us. Once weapons get somewhere, they tend not to just vanish. Every army in the world takes weapons off the bodies of enemies, and non-well-funded ones use those weapons themselves. But I'll wager there are a good deal more American and Russian weapons floating around. (Hilariously, Iran could probably supply some American weapons to Iraq.)
And finally, let us not forget Iran supplying Hesbolla with thousands of missiles, missiles that are made with ball bearings all along the casing so when they hit, they will shred anyone near by. Of course, these missiles were both designed for and targeted at civilians, with the intention of causing as much terror on the civilian population as possible and to kill or injure as many men, women and children as possible.
Ah, yes. Who can forget the vicious Hezbollah attack on Fort Sumte
I'd be much more convinced by your argument if Iranian's president came out and said "It's okay for Israel, the nation, to exist, just get rid of those pesky Zionists"
That's what the ACTUAL leader of Iran, the 'Supreme Leader', an Ayatollah named Khamenei, has indicated quite a few times.
Just because someone's title is translated as 'president' doesn't mean they run the country. The president of Iran has no authority if the Supreme Leader doesn't give it to him.
Well, the USA wants military bases in Iraq and Iran wants a (Palestinian) ethnic homeland in Israel.
Nah, not so much. The actual leader of Iran spewing much less rhetoric than the 'President' of Iran is. He doesn't really seem to care that much about Israel and Palestine, and favors the Arab League's suggestions, which is basically 'Both of you, stop acting like idiots and agree on the very tiny sticking points of the plan you've already agreed to implement. If you can't, find someone to figure them out for you.'.
The President of Iran has no authority over foreign relations or war at all, and the only reason anyone is listening to him is because the US government is trying to justify the war they haven't managed to provoke yet.
I feel exactly the same say, except about England. They could do exactly the same thing, and are a good deal more likely to.
Iran, after all, not only hasn't ever attacked us, it hasn't attacked anyone for as long as the US has existed, nor have they ever threatened us. (Perhaps you have confused us with Israel?)
England, on the other hand, has repeatedly attacked us, in at least two wars, and has more technology than Iran. They threatened us with war as recent as 1861.
And while Iran has meddled in countries around Israel (Which, I again remind people, is not the US.), England has close ties to Canada, which shares a many thousand-mile long border with us.
And, even more relevant, England already has a nuclear program. They've already admitted to nuclear power, and have had it so long they could have trivially developed nuclear weapons. They have more than enough territory to hide their development in.
So I'm with you on the whole Iran thing, I just think we need to take care of England first.
Ahmadinejad doesn't run Iran, you lunatic. The Ayatollah Ali Khamenei(1) runs Iran, and he's repeatedly said relations with Israel should be normalized and has supported the Arab League's quite sane position on Israel and Palestine. He's also said that any use of nuclear weapons is inconsistent with Islam.
But keep drinking the Kool-Aide, buddy.
1) It's not damn rocket science, his title is 'Supreme Leader'.
That said, as far as I understand Iran is within its rights to develop nuclear power options for civilian use.
Iran, unlike Iraq, is not the loser in any recent war and has no requirement not to develop whatever the hell nuclear weapons it wants.;)
Yes, it's signed the non-proliferation treaty, under which it's limited to civilian uses, but it can exit that at any time with a three month window, and it's not in violation until it actually start building nukes. Here, I'll quote 'Each non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to receive the transfer from any transferor whatsoever of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or of control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly; not to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices; and not to seek or receive any assistance in the manufacture of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.'
And even then there's no actual penalty for breaking the treaty except that you get kicked out. Which means...well, the only advantage of being in the club is that nuclear powers are legally required to sell you cheap nuclear devices for no-weapon use, such as blasting mountains and stuff.
Anyway, Iran's not like Iraq, which had signed a surrender agreement that included not building WMDs. Even if Iran came flat out and said 'We're making nuclear weapons, bitch, what are you going to do about it?', it's not actually engaged in any illegal behavior.
That's probably what's going to actually happen. Technological advances in video, editing, computer generator, etc, have made movies cheaper and cheaper to produce. Within 10 years, the entire process probably will cost less, tech-wise, than a current well-constructed stage set, with computers that draw in walls and outdoor scenes and fix amateur camera work and lighting and whatnot.
At some point around there, the whole process is going to 'crash', when people start putting out a season of a 'good enough' TV shows for $100,000, and distribute it online with commercials. (The unions will scream and moan, but won't get anywhere because they have nothing to threaten with. They will be able to block successful shows from 'graduating' to TV unless they unionize, but until them, they're pretty powerless.)
In fact, to some extent, this has already happened. Isn't there a Star Trek show thingy going on right now?
But I suspect the real 'first' shows will be sitcoms, filmed in people's houses, starring local comedians and actors. Extremely cheap to make and easy enough to write a dozen episodes or so. It might take a while for advertisers to clue in, but the nice thing about that is they can tell exactly how many people watch the show, or at least download it.
The shows might have some sort of trivial DRM designed only to inform back how many times the show's been watched, and keep commercials from being skipped, nothing else. 99.999% of people wouldn't bother cracking that, especially if it was some embedded downloader/player. If it was really clever, it could rotate in different ads.
It really just needs a start, someone willing to risk the money to get a season on the air. Luckily, there are a lot of desperate and rejected people in Hollywood, so all that's needed is one of them with an idea they're convinced will work, enough money to film a season, and some tech skills.
Even if the show 'fails', it will almost certainly make money, and suddenly people will realize: Wait a second. Before, it was 'Is this making us the most money possible?', and shows that made money would get shifted off the schedule for shows that could make more money...but we don't have a limited schedule here. If it makes us 120% of what we put into it, we should keep it going until it stops making money.
Yeah, that's the fun little secret of Hollywood. Almost ever show ever filmed has made back the money spent on it within five years. From the most popular show to the ones that ran only twelve episodes. There have been maybe two dozen total that were so bad they didn't. Well, what happens when, suddenly, profitable shows don't start disappearing because more profitable ones come along? (Or, at least, shows people thought would be more profitable.) This, too, has already happened to some extent as cable expanded the possible timeslots.
Of course, everyone thought this about CGI five years ago, and that didn't really happen...we got some CGI comics, and that was about it. People were imagining dozens of Toy Story-like TV shows and stuff, and that didn't materialize. So I could be wrong.
The contention that information wants to be free is a catchy way of ignoring that "the properties of digital goods are such that their natural startup cost is non-zero for any information which is concise, categorized, and subject to quality assurance/quality control."
No it's not. It's not asserting that content producers want information to be free, and, hence, it's not 'ignoring' anything.
It's asserting that information wants itself to be copied, although that's actually a metaphor for the fact that random people want to copy information to wherever they think it will be useful. Yes, it's sometimes rivalrous, but people do not normally compete with random strangers to have watched the newest movie, although that probably explains why there is no p2p live stock ticker.
There is a very very tiny set of information that people keep secret to gain an advantage, and everything else they consider public knowledge, so will, for example, tell someone else the time or who won the game last night or the plot of a new movie. Society says that 'If you can help someone without hurting yourself, you should', and 99.9999% of the information people know would not harm them in the least if someone else knew, including almost all copyrighted works they possess copies of, so if someone asks for that information, they will share it.
'Information wants to be free' isn't saying, despite people seeming to think so, that information should be free. It's saying that ('Almost all' instead of 'all'.) information 'naturally' frees itself due to the social nature of people, and that work must be done to keep it non-free. That isn't a moral judgment, and it doesn't mean that it can't be kept non-free, just that work must be done in that regard.
Saying 'But bad thing will happen if you're correct' does not, in fact, stop someone from being correct. If advances in technology have, indeed, rendered copyright law meaningless, that isn't magically less true if it will stop movies from being made.
The really fun thing about any copyright discussion here is watching one set of people arguing 'What is needed', namely, how we 'need' copyright law, against people who say that copyright law is a violation of their rights, past people who are arguing 'What is true', that copyright law used to rely on a level of inconvenience that is now gone and thus is almost totally unenforceable.
We may, indeed, need copyright law to continue to encourage content producers. That is totally orthagontal to whether or not enforcing copyright law is possible in a digital world.
If you fall out of an airplane without a parachute, you can argue that you 'need' to reduce your speed before you hit the ground, and you'd be correct. You could argue that free-falling is kinda fun, and you'd be right too. Or you could argue that you have no way to do the first thing, and you'd also be correct. Sometimes there is not actually a 'correct' solution.
We may, indeed, smash into the ground so hard we destroy quite a lot of produced content. Arguing that we 'shouldn't' do that is rather surreal, considering we already jumped from the plane.
If everyone works together, they might be able to invent, at least, a hang glider or at least aim for a lake. But we have way too many people arguing about what 'should' happen, without considering that there is absolutely no way to do what they think 'should' happen so perhaps they should aim for something a bit more likely.
Re:Wrong Use of "anti-semitic"
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DRM Causes Piracy
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You dumbass. The word 'anti-semitic' does, in fact, mean 'anti-jewish', or, more specifically, 'jew-hater'.
Why? Because that's what it was coined to mean, fairly recently, and that's what people use it to mean. You cannot deconstruct words into their root forms and argue that the roots mean the word means something different, language doesn't work that way.
In your universe, a 'light switch' is a misnomer because it's actually controlling electricity, not 'light', and an 'automobile' would include those subway trains that drive themselves, but not cars.
HPV isn't airborne, and won't be spread from school activities.
You, apparently, haven't been paying attention to schools.
Incidentally, HPV is not an 'STD'. There are plenty of other ways to get it besides sex, including, yes, toilet seats. Or public showers. Or sharing clothing. Do those things suddenly not happen at school? There's a reason something like 50% of all women have it, and a large segment of them get it before exiting the public school system.
It's a good deal more contagious than Hepatitis B, and many place now require that. (Which is not a good idea, because the Hep-B vaccine is actually somewhat dangerous, so a lot of people legitimately object to it on that grounds. The HPV vaccine is not dangerous.)
That's not to say I approve of how fast Texas approved it outside of the legislative process, nor do I approve of Merck lobbying for it being mandatory. And mandatory vaccines are one of the most obvious places for a socialized approach if I've ever seen them...if the government has a compelling interesting in making sure people aren't sick, it can damn well pay for them not to be, instead of requiring they pay for themselves not to be.
That a person's body is sovereign, and the government should not be using law to forcibly medicate people against their will.
If that was so, they they should feel free to, you know, not get vaccinated, which has always been an option. Have fun not being allowed in public schools, though, because, duh, you're dangerous.
You can argue against all mandatory vaccinations if want, but you can't be selective about it. HPV is just as dangerous as, for example, polio. If HPV were any other disease, it would be a no-brainer as this vaccine is fairly-well tested and stops some very bad stuff that is pretty common, but apparently fucking imbeciles think it's acceptable to threaten their children with cancer to keep them from having sex.
Yes, yes, if you object to all vaccines on religious grounds or some stupid shit like that, whatever. Apparently it's legal for those morons to keep their children, although not in my schools. But just objecting to one so your children will be threatened? No.
It's like being a conscientious objector. You can't object to a war and be one, you have to object to all wars, or all violence, or have some sort of global belief in that regard. So logically you can object to all medicine, or all surgery, or all vaccines, or all blood transfusions, or whatever, and keep them from your kid. But not just one.
And, yes, there is a religious belief involved, but it's not anything to do with the vaccine, or the cancer. It, instead, is the idea that pre-martial sex should be dangerous. Believing your own child's choices should be dangerous for them and causing it to be so sounds like a textbook case of child endangerment to me.
Except this thing has been through years of testing and is safe as any other vaccine, in fact, it's safer than a good many of them.
There is no legitimate medical opposition to this. The opposition is coming from the fucking imbeciles who thinks it's good to threaten children, even their own, with cancer to keep them from having sex.
I don't know why they're so indirect about it, though, it seems like a lot of work. Why not just inspect women once on their wedding day to see if they're virgins and kill them if they aren't? I can't believe no one's ever thought of that before. If they don't get married, we can just inspect them when they hit 30 or so.
This whole 'Let's try to make as many consequences to women who have sex' thing seems like a good idea in theory, but those filthy whores having sex outside of marriage get genital warts from this thing, which turns me off when I'm having sex with them. Let's keep them from getting HPV and the various STDs and whatnot that could affect us men, and stone them later for seducing innocent men, instead of trying to kill them with indiscriminate diseases.
As long as you don't have to pay for it to be removed, you still came out ahead.
It's really hard to see how you could lose money on this deal unless, as people said, electricity prices drop below what you agreed to pay. (And you're still not 'losing' money, you're still paying less than originally, it's just that that is now more than everyone else.) Also the laws could change where the energy credit goes up, but as they collect that, you get no help from that, but as long as the power is still
If the company goes under, you may even come out ahead. Even if they come by and remove it from you, often companies in bankruptcy are very disorganized and they might say they're removing it, and not actually get around to doing so for three moneys, during which you get free electricity.
That's a known Mozilla bug. Instead of crashing when clicking on a link, the browser attempts to open the URL listed in the href of the A tag, and will actually do so if the server is reachable and returns a page.
This is technically correct according to HTTP and HTML specifications, but unexpected behavior with users used to IE's 'crash feature'. As a workaround, instead of clicking on a link, you can press Alt+F4 or click on the X in the upper-right corner of the browser window, which will close your browser window.
Microsoft ads here are somewhat ironic, but aren't harmful to anyone, except maybe MS for wasting their money. All places that serve third-party ads, especially places that diss specific companies and services, usually end up with some mildly ironic ads at some point, thanks to keyword matching.
That's not really the same thing as serving malware ads.
I don't know what you're trying to get across, but you're either wrong or not explaining it well.
Qubits are are not just bits. Qubits are bits in a quantum superposition, and as such do not 'assume' a state from zero to one, but are, instead, all such states at once(1), just like the GP said. (Or all such states in different universes, if that's the interpretation that floats your boat.)
The probability may be writable by physicists, but the actual state of a qubit isn't. (At least not before the calculation is over and it is measured.)
That isn't something that's mildly important, that's how qubits work. Once we actually have multi-qubit quantum computing, and possibly this is going on in this machine, the qubits won't hold 'all' states, but instead specific patterns of states, with different areas being different probabilities. Like interference pattern in a two-slit experiment, where there are likely areas (well-lit), unlikely areas (grey), and impossible areas (unlit). Qubits would 'interfere' with each other until only one (or a few) areas were lit (or dark), and that's the answer. Or, at least, close enough to the answer that a tiny bit of classical checking can nail it down.
There's a quantitative difference between something that holds values that can be measured, and something that holds values that cannot. qubit!=bit
Slashdot Mirror
All in all, I agree with filtering in this case. This is the state, and we are browsing on your dollar.
No, you're not. You're paying for internet access on our dollar. Presumably, you have a good reason for that (Internet access is basically needed for anyone to function) and presumably you're paying a flat rate, so how much internet usage there is is completely irrelevant.
However, you're also paying for filtering on our dollar. I'd like an explanation of how blocking access to certain sites helps 'develop children, youth and families', and how paying money to make purchased services less useful is a good use of taxpayer money.
And I'd also like to know when the fact you're investigating 'several abuse cases per week' with only 2500 employees will clue you in the fact you're really wasting taxpayer money.
Oh, I agree.
What's really absurd is that Israel had already agreed to release those specific prisoners, yet had then not actually done so. Hezbollah was pretty much out of diplomatic options to get them back.
Marine barracks, Beirut, 1983.
Holy crap, Hezbollah has time machines now! They're bombing things before they even existed!
And I believe you've mistaken 'attacked' for 'fought'. I didn't say Iran had never 'fought' the US. Just a few weeks ago, the US captured Iranian diplomats in Iraq and they fought back, IIRC. I said Iran hadn't attacked the US, or anyone in fact.
Even if you can attribute that bombing to the group that eventually formed into Hezbollah, and even if that group was being funded and directed by Iran at that time, neither of which is certain, the US was helping Israel occupy Lebanon at that time. (Hence the, you know, US military barracks in Lebanon.) Israel and Palestine started that war, which they decided to hold in Lebanon for some reason. (Lebanon was already holding their own war, so perhaps 'The more the merrier' was the thinking.)
We, and a lot of the international community, stupidly decided to join on the side of Israel, and Iran joined on the side of Lebanon. (Not Palestine. Palestine=Sunni, Hezbollah=Shi'ite. Very recently, Hamas and Hezbollah have made some peace, but not back then.) Lebanon, being quite rightly pissed about other people holding a war inside of them, especially as they were trying to hold their own civil war, was fighting everyone. Interpeting Iran supporting a group in a civil war as 'attacking' the US is somewhat stretching things. Hezbollah, or, at least, a group that might have eventually turned into Hezbollah, had a hell of a lot more right to be there than the US.
I blame Hezbolla for the Israeli civilian deaths since they INTENTIONALLY TARGETED CIVILIANS, which is something Israel never did.
Hehehe. You bring up, at least indirectly, the 1981 invasion of Lebanon by Israel, and then you have the gall to claim that Israel doesn't deliberately target civilians. Oh, man, you should do stand up. Two words: Sabra and Shatila.
Were those soldiers ever released? It's funny how Israel will decide that the cost in civilian casualties and world-wide condemnation had grown too much to continue the attacks. Hesbolla still has not released those soldiers to the best of my knowledge, which tells me that the costs to their own civilians is minuscule to the benefit of holding those soldiers.
Hezbollah was expecting the same thing to happen that had happened every other time it had kidnapped Israeli soldiers. Namely, that Israel would sputter and yell and then, quietly, negotiate a prisoner exchange for the Hezbollah soldiers it had kidnapped. (Which it had already agreed to return, but was not actually doing.) I quote the leader of Hezbollah's apology to Lebanon: "Had we known that the kidnapping of the soldiers would have led to this, we would definitely not have done it."
Israel, however, had been working on an invasion plan of Lebanon for a few years, thanks in parts of our government thinking of it as a sort of trial run for the invasion of Iran. So Israel was actually just waiting for an excuse.
But, hey, we're not talking about Hezbollah, we're talking about Iran. You really don't want to drag puppet states into this discussion, because our puppet state actually attacked Iran in full force for 8 damn years, with direct military support from the US.
And I like how you just dropped all the other stuff I brought up. To repeat:
Iran is not killing US soldiers in Iraq. Iran is diplomatically 'meddling' in Iraq with the full knowledge and consent of the Iraqi government. If Iran is supplying weapons to Iraq, it is supplying them to 'our guys'. (Yes, we call them 'Iraqi troops', but their night job is the militia. It's often exactly the same people!) We may not like this, but tough shit, we are not in charge of the Iraqi government or who they choose to let influence them. Iran is a regional superpower and they can cuddle
Uh, let's see. Embassies are considered sovereign territory, right? In the 1970's, didn't Iran capture and hold Americans from our embassy over there? I think that pretty much proves that YES, IRAN HAS ATTACKED US AND YES, THEY HAVE ATTACKED SOMEONE. Granted, it was a long time ago, but it does invalidate your point. I assume you had forgotten about it or never knew that it happened, otherwise, you are fucking liar.
*sigh*
You don't know anything about the hostage crisis, do you? Because you apparently unaware the Iran government didn't do it. A bunch of college students did, without permission or even advanced knowledge by the government. (And before you come up with some conspiracy theories, pretty much everyone accepts this as true.)
Iran was really pissed at the US at that time for quite logical reasons, like, uh, the US had recently overthrow Iran's government, which Iran had just over-thrown back, and the US-installed puppet had fled to the US, for, as the US had claimed, health reasons, which the Iranians didn't really buy, considering they wanted to put him on trial. (Hence the crisis getting to the point of being resolvable when said puppet died, although Reagan managed to delay that until he got into office.)
So Iran was not incredibly helpful in resolving the issue, barring the US from sending in their military, and was probably laughing the entire time, at how a bunch of college students had managed to take over an embassy. But they didn't do it. Legally, their police were required to provide external security for the embassy, which they failed to do, but there's no indication they deliberately failed in that duty.
Of course there are all the Iranian made weapons we are finding all over Iraq. But I'm sure you think those were planted by the NSA, CIA, FBI or Bush himself. Maybe that's what Rice was doing while she was visiting Iraq recently
You delusional freak. Iran is on the side of our allies. They are Shi'ite. They are not the insurgents setting roadside bombs, who are Sunni. If Iran is arming anyone, they're arming the militias fighting the insurgents, which operate with quasi-Iraqi-government approval, and don't shoot at us unless we shoot at them.
And, no, the CIA isn't planting anything. If they were planted, the Administration could show them to us, which it has not, you know, actually done. In fact, it's presented absolutely no evidence of that except one morter. Considering both Iran and Iraq, you know, speak the same language, and it's not English, and they both date from something Mohammed did, which makes it the year 14xx not 2007, excuse me if I'm not quite buying a morter labeled in English with the year 200x printed on it as an Iranian-supplied weapon, nor do I think anonymous military officials showing pictures of it is 'proof' of anything except that the Administration knows how dodgy that evidence is.
There may, indeed, be Iranian weapons in Iraq, although I doubt any deliberate intent on the part of Iran, and I would wager on guns, and some might even be used against us. Once weapons get somewhere, they tend not to just vanish. Every army in the world takes weapons off the bodies of enemies, and non-well-funded ones use those weapons themselves. But I'll wager there are a good deal more American and Russian weapons floating around. (Hilariously, Iran could probably supply some American weapons to Iraq.)
And finally, let us not forget Iran supplying Hesbolla with thousands of missiles, missiles that are made with ball bearings all along the casing so when they hit, they will shred anyone near by. Of course, these missiles were both designed for and targeted at civilians, with the intention of causing as much terror on the civilian population as possible and to kill or injure as many men, women and children as possible.
Ah, yes. Who can forget the vicious Hezbollah attack on Fort Sumte
I'd be much more convinced by your argument if Iranian's president came out and said "It's okay for Israel, the nation, to exist, just get rid of those pesky Zionists"
That's what the ACTUAL leader of Iran, the 'Supreme Leader', an Ayatollah named Khamenei, has indicated quite a few times.
Just because someone's title is translated as 'president' doesn't mean they run the country. The president of Iran has no authority if the Supreme Leader doesn't give it to him.
Well, the USA wants military bases in Iraq and Iran wants a (Palestinian) ethnic homeland in Israel.
Nah, not so much. The actual leader of Iran spewing much less rhetoric than the 'President' of Iran is. He doesn't really seem to care that much about Israel and Palestine, and favors the Arab League's suggestions, which is basically 'Both of you, stop acting like idiots and agree on the very tiny sticking points of the plan you've already agreed to implement. If you can't, find someone to figure them out for you.'.
The President of Iran has no authority over foreign relations or war at all, and the only reason anyone is listening to him is because the US government is trying to justify the war they haven't managed to provoke yet.
I feel exactly the same say, except about England. They could do exactly the same thing, and are a good deal more likely to.
Iran, after all, not only hasn't ever attacked us, it hasn't attacked anyone for as long as the US has existed, nor have they ever threatened us. (Perhaps you have confused us with Israel?)
England, on the other hand, has repeatedly attacked us, in at least two wars, and has more technology than Iran. They threatened us with war as recent as 1861.
And while Iran has meddled in countries around Israel (Which, I again remind people, is not the US.), England has close ties to Canada, which shares a many thousand-mile long border with us.
And, even more relevant, England already has a nuclear program. They've already admitted to nuclear power, and have had it so long they could have trivially developed nuclear weapons. They have more than enough territory to hide their development in.
So I'm with you on the whole Iran thing, I just think we need to take care of England first.
Ahmadinejad doesn't run Iran, you lunatic. The Ayatollah Ali Khamenei(1) runs Iran, and he's repeatedly said relations with Israel should be normalized and has supported the Arab League's quite sane position on Israel and Palestine. He's also said that any use of nuclear weapons is inconsistent with Islam.
But keep drinking the Kool-Aide, buddy.
1) It's not damn rocket science, his title is 'Supreme Leader'.
That said, as far as I understand Iran is within its rights to develop nuclear power options for civilian use.
Iran, unlike Iraq, is not the loser in any recent war and has no requirement not to develop whatever the hell nuclear weapons it wants. ;)
Yes, it's signed the non-proliferation treaty, under which it's limited to civilian uses, but it can exit that at any time with a three month window, and it's not in violation until it actually start building nukes. Here, I'll quote 'Each non-nuclear-weapon State Party to the Treaty undertakes not to receive the transfer from any transferor whatsoever of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or of control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly; not to manufacture or otherwise acquire nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices; and not to seek or receive any assistance in the manufacture of nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices.'
And even then there's no actual penalty for breaking the treaty except that you get kicked out. Which means...well, the only advantage of being in the club is that nuclear powers are legally required to sell you cheap nuclear devices for no-weapon use, such as blasting mountains and stuff.
Anyway, Iran's not like Iraq, which had signed a surrender agreement that included not building WMDs. Even if Iran came flat out and said 'We're making nuclear weapons, bitch, what are you going to do about it?', it's not actually engaged in any illegal behavior.
That's probably what's going to actually happen. Technological advances in video, editing, computer generator, etc, have made movies cheaper and cheaper to produce. Within 10 years, the entire process probably will cost less, tech-wise, than a current well-constructed stage set, with computers that draw in walls and outdoor scenes and fix amateur camera work and lighting and whatnot.
At some point around there, the whole process is going to 'crash', when people start putting out a season of a 'good enough' TV shows for $100,000, and distribute it online with commercials. (The unions will scream and moan, but won't get anywhere because they have nothing to threaten with. They will be able to block successful shows from 'graduating' to TV unless they unionize, but until them, they're pretty powerless.)
In fact, to some extent, this has already happened. Isn't there a Star Trek show thingy going on right now?
But I suspect the real 'first' shows will be sitcoms, filmed in people's houses, starring local comedians and actors. Extremely cheap to make and easy enough to write a dozen episodes or so. It might take a while for advertisers to clue in, but the nice thing about that is they can tell exactly how many people watch the show, or at least download it.
The shows might have some sort of trivial DRM designed only to inform back how many times the show's been watched, and keep commercials from being skipped, nothing else. 99.999% of people wouldn't bother cracking that, especially if it was some embedded downloader/player. If it was really clever, it could rotate in different ads.
It really just needs a start, someone willing to risk the money to get a season on the air. Luckily, there are a lot of desperate and rejected people in Hollywood, so all that's needed is one of them with an idea they're convinced will work, enough money to film a season, and some tech skills.
Even if the show 'fails', it will almost certainly make money, and suddenly people will realize: Wait a second. Before, it was 'Is this making us the most money possible?', and shows that made money would get shifted off the schedule for shows that could make more money...but we don't have a limited schedule here. If it makes us 120% of what we put into it, we should keep it going until it stops making money.
Yeah, that's the fun little secret of Hollywood. Almost ever show ever filmed has made back the money spent on it within five years. From the most popular show to the ones that ran only twelve episodes. There have been maybe two dozen total that were so bad they didn't. Well, what happens when, suddenly, profitable shows don't start disappearing because more profitable ones come along? (Or, at least, shows people thought would be more profitable.) This, too, has already happened to some extent as cable expanded the possible timeslots.
Of course, everyone thought this about CGI five years ago, and that didn't really happen...we got some CGI comics, and that was about it. People were imagining dozens of Toy Story-like TV shows and stuff, and that didn't materialize. So I could be wrong.
The contention that information wants to be free is a catchy way of ignoring that "the properties of digital goods are such that their natural startup cost is non-zero for any information which is concise, categorized, and subject to quality assurance/quality control."
No it's not. It's not asserting that content producers want information to be free, and, hence, it's not 'ignoring' anything.
It's asserting that information wants itself to be copied, although that's actually a metaphor for the fact that random people want to copy information to wherever they think it will be useful. Yes, it's sometimes rivalrous, but people do not normally compete with random strangers to have watched the newest movie, although that probably explains why there is no p2p live stock ticker.
There is a very very tiny set of information that people keep secret to gain an advantage, and everything else they consider public knowledge, so will, for example, tell someone else the time or who won the game last night or the plot of a new movie. Society says that 'If you can help someone without hurting yourself, you should', and 99.9999% of the information people know would not harm them in the least if someone else knew, including almost all copyrighted works they possess copies of, so if someone asks for that information, they will share it.
'Information wants to be free' isn't saying, despite people seeming to think so, that information should be free. It's saying that ('Almost all' instead of 'all'.) information 'naturally' frees itself due to the social nature of people, and that work must be done to keep it non-free. That isn't a moral judgment, and it doesn't mean that it can't be kept non-free, just that work must be done in that regard.
HA! Someone else gets it.
Saying 'But bad thing will happen if you're correct' does not, in fact, stop someone from being correct. If advances in technology have, indeed, rendered copyright law meaningless, that isn't magically less true if it will stop movies from being made.
The really fun thing about any copyright discussion here is watching one set of people arguing 'What is needed', namely, how we 'need' copyright law, against people who say that copyright law is a violation of their rights, past people who are arguing 'What is true', that copyright law used to rely on a level of inconvenience that is now gone and thus is almost totally unenforceable.
We may, indeed, need copyright law to continue to encourage content producers. That is totally orthagontal to whether or not enforcing copyright law is possible in a digital world.
If you fall out of an airplane without a parachute, you can argue that you 'need' to reduce your speed before you hit the ground, and you'd be correct. You could argue that free-falling is kinda fun, and you'd be right too. Or you could argue that you have no way to do the first thing, and you'd also be correct. Sometimes there is not actually a 'correct' solution.
We may, indeed, smash into the ground so hard we destroy quite a lot of produced content. Arguing that we 'shouldn't' do that is rather surreal, considering we already jumped from the plane.
If everyone works together, they might be able to invent, at least, a hang glider or at least aim for a lake. But we have way too many people arguing about what 'should' happen, without considering that there is absolutely no way to do what they think 'should' happen so perhaps they should aim for something a bit more likely.
You dumbass. The word 'anti-semitic' does, in fact, mean 'anti-jewish', or, more specifically, 'jew-hater'.
Why? Because that's what it was coined to mean, fairly recently, and that's what people use it to mean. You cannot deconstruct words into their root forms and argue that the roots mean the word means something different, language doesn't work that way.
In your universe, a 'light switch' is a misnomer because it's actually controlling electricity, not 'light', and an 'automobile' would include those subway trains that drive themselves, but not cars.
HPV isn't airborne, and won't be spread from school activities.
You, apparently, haven't been paying attention to schools.
Incidentally, HPV is not an 'STD'. There are plenty of other ways to get it besides sex, including, yes, toilet seats. Or public showers. Or sharing clothing. Do those things suddenly not happen at school? There's a reason something like 50% of all women have it, and a large segment of them get it before exiting the public school system.
It's a good deal more contagious than Hepatitis B, and many place now require that. (Which is not a good idea, because the Hep-B vaccine is actually somewhat dangerous, so a lot of people legitimately object to it on that grounds. The HPV vaccine is not dangerous.)
That's not to say I approve of how fast Texas approved it outside of the legislative process, nor do I approve of Merck lobbying for it being mandatory. And mandatory vaccines are one of the most obvious places for a socialized approach if I've ever seen them...if the government has a compelling interesting in making sure people aren't sick, it can damn well pay for them not to be, instead of requiring they pay for themselves not to be.
Ah, see, it's even less consequences than I thought.
The problem, of course, is that these people don't object to vaccines. They object to their child being safe while having sex.
That a person's body is sovereign, and the government should not be using law to forcibly medicate people against their will.
If that was so, they they should feel free to, you know, not get vaccinated, which has always been an option. Have fun not being allowed in public schools, though, because, duh, you're dangerous.
No, they're objecting just to this vaccine.
You can argue against all mandatory vaccinations if want, but you can't be selective about it. HPV is just as dangerous as, for example, polio. If HPV were any other disease, it would be a no-brainer as this vaccine is fairly-well tested and stops some very bad stuff that is pretty common, but apparently fucking imbeciles think it's acceptable to threaten their children with cancer to keep them from having sex.
Yes, yes, if you object to all vaccines on religious grounds or some stupid shit like that, whatever. Apparently it's legal for those morons to keep their children, although not in my schools. But just objecting to one so your children will be threatened? No.
It's like being a conscientious objector. You can't object to a war and be one, you have to object to all wars, or all violence, or have some sort of global belief in that regard. So logically you can object to all medicine, or all surgery, or all vaccines, or all blood transfusions, or whatever, and keep them from your kid. But not just one.
And, yes, there is a religious belief involved, but it's not anything to do with the vaccine, or the cancer. It, instead, is the idea that pre-martial sex should be dangerous. Believing your own child's choices should be dangerous for them and causing it to be so sounds like a textbook case of child endangerment to me.
Except this thing has been through years of testing and is safe as any other vaccine, in fact, it's safer than a good many of them.
There is no legitimate medical opposition to this. The opposition is coming from the fucking imbeciles who thinks it's good to threaten children, even their own, with cancer to keep them from having sex.
I don't know why they're so indirect about it, though, it seems like a lot of work. Why not just inspect women once on their wedding day to see if they're virgins and kill them if they aren't? I can't believe no one's ever thought of that before. If they don't get married, we can just inspect them when they hit 30 or so.
This whole 'Let's try to make as many consequences to women who have sex' thing seems like a good idea in theory, but those filthy whores having sex outside of marriage get genital warts from this thing, which turns me off when I'm having sex with them. Let's keep them from getting HPV and the various STDs and whatnot that could affect us men, and stone them later for seducing innocent men, instead of trying to kill them with indiscriminate diseases.
Who cares if they take it back?
As long as you don't have to pay for it to be removed, you still came out ahead.
It's really hard to see how you could lose money on this deal unless, as people said, electricity prices drop below what you agreed to pay. (And you're still not 'losing' money, you're still paying less than originally, it's just that that is now more than everyone else.) Also the laws could change where the energy credit goes up, but as they collect that, you get no help from that, but as long as the power is still
If the company goes under, you may even come out ahead. Even if they come by and remove it from you, often companies in bankruptcy are very disorganized and they might say they're removing it, and not actually get around to doing so for three moneys, during which you get free electricity.
That's a known Mozilla bug. Instead of crashing when clicking on a link, the browser attempts to open the URL listed in the href of the A tag, and will actually do so if the server is reachable and returns a page.
This is technically correct according to HTTP and HTML specifications, but unexpected behavior with users used to IE's 'crash feature'. As a workaround, instead of clicking on a link, you can press Alt+F4 or click on the X in the upper-right corner of the browser window, which will close your browser window.
Microsoft ads here are somewhat ironic, but aren't harmful to anyone, except maybe MS for wasting their money. All places that serve third-party ads, especially places that diss specific companies and services, usually end up with some mildly ironic ads at some point, thanks to keyword matching.
That's not really the same thing as serving malware ads.
Maybe those places just have invisible trees, smarty-pants. Have you thought of that?
No, it is in a superposition of both being a quantum computer and a classical computer until it is measured. ;)
I don't know what you're trying to get across, but you're either wrong or not explaining it well.
Qubits are are not just bits. Qubits are bits in a quantum superposition, and as such do not 'assume' a state from zero to one, but are, instead, all such states at once(1), just like the GP said. (Or all such states in different universes, if that's the interpretation that floats your boat.)
The probability may be writable by physicists, but the actual state of a qubit isn't. (At least not before the calculation is over and it is measured.)
That isn't something that's mildly important, that's how qubits work. Once we actually have multi-qubit quantum computing, and possibly this is going on in this machine, the qubits won't hold 'all' states, but instead specific patterns of states, with different areas being different probabilities. Like interference pattern in a two-slit experiment, where there are likely areas (well-lit), unlikely areas (grey), and impossible areas (unlit). Qubits would 'interfere' with each other until only one (or a few) areas were lit (or dark), and that's the answer. Or, at least, close enough to the answer that a tiny bit of classical checking can nail it down.
There's a quantitative difference between something that holds values that can be measured, and something that holds values that cannot. qubit!=bit