That's the crux of the problem with gun laws in general. Criminals, by definition aren't interested in following the law, therefore, the stringent gun laws only hamper law abiding citizens.
Yes, it is true that during the temporary transitional phase from war-zone / wild-west to modern civilisation, there is a chance that criminals will hold on to those guns still floating around whilst law-abiding citizens have to rely on the police. Just hang on.
The mega SI prefix is perfectly legit in that context though.
Not really. Are you using an imperial (either long or short) ton? In which case SI prefixes are out of place. Are you using a metric ton, rounded off to 1000kg? That's fine, but it's just a term used in the place of "megagram" for reasons of familiarity.
If you want to refer to larger masses, then either speak of thousands of tons (recommended for most audiences), or use SI prefixes properly. A thousand tons or a million kilograms is a gigagram (Gg). A million tons or a billion kilograms is a teragram (Tg, and not to be confused by a telegram sent by an Oriental).
It was not "stolen" in any way. Before the British mandate, Arabs didn't own any of the land.
Firstly, land was stolen in a direct, literal and legal sense from individuals who owned it. I've just been listening to an interview with a refugee now living in the UK who recalls her family fleeing their house in fear of approaching gunmen, and not being allowed back weeks later or decades later. When she did get later get a tourist visa, she was able to meet the white colonial Canadian family who were occupying the house where she grew up, which belonged to her.
But I'm not even talking about individuals. The Arabs of Palestine were the native population of the land, and had the only claim to it. This idea of yours of the native population not really owning the land is one that comes up every time someone wants to justify white theft of land belonging to Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, and various African tribes. It's the twisting of language, and imposition of our laws on others, all with the intent to justify people turning up with guns from far away and forging a state on other people's land.
while correcting another - by allowing the Jews the right of self-determination in their ancestral homeland.
This is what it all comes down to. Any normal observer looks at the Nakba and sees an injustice. To see it as justice, it is necessary to subscribe to an idea according to which a specific religious group that has had virtually no connection to the land for a couple of millennia can turn up and take it from the natives.
By that standard, hundreds of groups around the world could claim chunks of land that they have not inhabited in any numbers of centuries. I'm sure you would not appreciate losing New York that way.
Of course, Arab nationalists wouldn't accept any non-Arab state in Arabia, no matter how tiny it is.
And no one would accept an Arab state in, for example, the US or Japan, no matter how tiny it is.
As a result, many of the the Arabs who lived in the area fled or were expelled. This is unfortunate, but entirely the Arabs' fault. After all, the Jews couldn't have neighbors that were trying to kill them.
You accept without question the idea that Jewish colonists simply can't accept Arab natives trying to ethically cleanse them, so they have a right to ethnically cleanse the Arabs.
You make no effort to explain why it could not be seen the opposite way: the Arab natives simply couldn't accept Jewish colonists ethnically cleansing them, so they had a right to ethnically cleanse the colonists.
Again, it all comes down to the mistaken premise that it was OK to come to steal someone's country in the first place. All evil that comes from a colonisation is almost by definition the fault of the colonists.
The Jews have a moral and a historical right to that tiny piece of land.
No. Colonists have no such rights.
The Arabs who lived there have a right to that land as well, so the land was justly divided between the Jews and the Arabs who lived there. However, they do not have to right to deny Jews of theirs.
Glad to see you aren't totally in denial about the Arabs' right to the land.
they claimed to have "Arab" or "Southern Syrian" nationality.
I don't care if you call Palestine "Arabia" or "South Syria" or whatever. But European and American colonists didn't have the right to come and steal a big chunk of it. The should never have come, and Palestine should either be an independent Arab state or a semi-autonomous province of a neighbouring Arab state.
Given that much of much of that theft is now a fait accompli, the most pragmatic solution is that of the League of Arab States.
Like it or not, the HAMAS's opinions represent the will of the majority of Palestinians.
Common sense such as yours isn't appreciated in discussions like these on slashdot...
What are you talking about? There are plenty of right-wing wankers like you two on Slashdot, convinced that your own bigotry is common sense. Just look at the modding you got.
Part of right-wing insanity is a massive dose of paranoia and an extensive victim complex.
Actually, even if it WASN'T meant as ironic, it IS the Old English spelling of the word, and it's possible it's still in use in the UK. I'm just saying. That is jaw-droppingly ignorant in at least three different ways.
An oath is a great idea.
However, it should not be seen as a substitute for tackling with systemic causes of misconduct. Only real investment in science at the national and international level can start to do that.
What's your point? My point is... That was a rhetorical question.
So they were "citizens of the Ottoman empire". How does that make them "Palestinians"? When their land was occupied by the Ottoman empire, they had a right to be Ottoman citizens. When that broke down, and they were managed by the British, they had a right to be citizens of the British Mandate of Palestine. Now a large chunk of that has been stolen, and most of them have been ejected from it. They have a right to be citizens of what is left. In fact, they have the right to actually go back to their homes and eject the American and European immigrants currently squatting them, but it would probably be best if they magnanimously let those people keep their ill-gotten gains.
Uhm... what are you talking about? Jordan didn't have a "imperial permission" to annex Palestine. The partition plan did include an independent Arab Palestinian nation. It was the Arabs who rejected the idea of a separate Palestinian nationality. Your comment bears little relation to what I said. You complained about a lack of permission for an independent Arab (Arab, because the Palestinians are Arab) state, and I pointed out that permission is not a moral requirement.
The HAMAS, an organization that officially rejects such that idea, won the Palestinian elections by a landslide. There are two main parties. One officially supports that idea, and the other is rhetorically against it (because it is indeed unjust) whilst realising that it's probably all they will get. Meanwhile, the League of Arab States (which includes Palestine) also supports this two-state solution.
You presented Palestinian nationality as an ancient concept, as opposed to the new, and supposedly artificial concept of Israeli nationality. I pointed out that Palestinian nationality is also new and even more artificial. No, you tried to present Palestinian nationality and new and artificial (in contrast with Israel), and I pointed out that the supreme example of new and artificial nationality is in fact the State of Israel. Palestinians have one which is three decades older (if we look no further than the British Mandate), centuries older (if we look at the Ottoman empire) or ancient (if we look at inhabitation).
What the "world powers" did... The only reservation was that they also wanted to give a tiny piece of the land to a small, persecuted nation. Better described as the only disaster rather than the only reservation. If only they had just gently dismantled the Ottoman empire and handed power over to local groupings in a sensitive and thoughtful fashion. But they decided to appease both Zionists ("We demand a homeland!") and anti-Semites ("Yeah, ship the Jews off to Palestine!") by creating a colonial state of Europeans and Americans in the middle of Arab lands. To this day, we suffer for that.
Mention of the 1948 war is utterly irrelevant unless you believe in the mediaeval right of conquest. I have no idea what you thought I meant, but I'm pretty sure you've misunderstood me. I only wanted to point out that you made the whole conflict sound like some frivolous whim.
Talk of a "whim" is a red herring. Zionism is a clear, long-term plan to seize Palestine for the Jewish people, and I've never said anything to imply otherwise.
The war is often brought up by those trying to justify the theft of land. I repeat that the war is irrelevant to such questions unless you believe in a mediaeval-style right to land via conquest.
Karma: Positive (probably because of superiour intellect) Hey, I'm a Mensan too. So, please, on behalf of the organisation, I ask you to spell "superior" correctly. No, I don't care if it was supposed to be ironic. No, I don't care if you claim dyslexia. Just spell it right!
Gee, why could it be important to shut down a corrupt registrar under circumstances like those? Hm. Figure it out. Shouldn't take you much more than 30 seconds.
That's a straw man because I'm not arguing against action against a corrupt registrar. I'm saying that people should get off their high horse (since their countries produce a lot of spam too) and stop making racist generalisations and calls for data from certain countries to be blocked.
We may have more spammers here, but at least we have a history of prosecuting and convicting at least some of them. What difference does that make to me, sitting here with an inbox full of American spam?
A national term used by the British colonists since they captured the area from the Turks in WWI. Before that, the area was simply a part of the Ottoman empire. There was no independent Palestinian nation, ever.
What's your point?
Again, there were no Israelis until Israel was declared. Palestinians officially existed before that.
You want to de-legitimate them because they had that status by the leave of colonial powers? You do realise that you are contrasting them with Israel, right? You're trying to make their citizenship sound less legitimate than the citizenship that the colonial state of Israel conferred upon itself.
Furthermore, you really have to realise that they, as the native inhabitants, had an inherent right to citizenship of that land or an empire including it. They therefore enjoyed citizenship despite British colonial interference, not because of it. Zionist settlers, on the other hand, have citizenship entirely due to colonial interference.
And by the way, Palestine was never supposed to become an independent nation under modern Arab rule either. First you try to de-legitimate the native population's nationality by linking it with colonial whims, and now you try to limit their rights to a national based on lack of imperial permission for such a nation. You can't have it both ways.
AFAIK, the Arabs who lived in British Palestine simply called themselves "Arabs" and didn't have any nationalistic Palestinian aspirations.
You argue that Palestinians' real nationality is "Arab", rather than "Palestinian". Fine. That is an argument for all of Palestine, from the river to the sea, being part of a larger Arab nation, such as Syria, Saudi Arabia, or some sort of Caliphate comprising all Arab lands.
You can argue for that if you like, but the Palestinians have humbler aspirations: independence and freedom in their land. In fact, they even generally accept that the Zionists can hang on to half the land they stole, call it Israel, and let the Palestinians govern themselves in the other half.
"Started to claim"? How about the UN partition plan, the 1948 war? You make the whole thing sound like a Jewish whim.
Not quite a whim. More the final objective of a long-term plan called Zionism. Surely you've heard of it.
Again, you try to use the authority of Western imperial powers when it suits you. When you wanted them to sound bad, you said "British colonists". Now that you want them to sound legit, you said "UN partition plan". We're still talking about the same thing: world powers do not have the right to take someone's home and country from them.
Mention of the 1948 war is utterly irrelevant unless you believe in the mediaeval right of conquest.
Am I the only one who somehow interpreted the first word in the title as, well, "probable"? No, not in the sense of "likely". Probe-able. Must be the Martian connection.
I also understood "water ice" as a popsicle. A phallic one.
The reason this is the case is because there weren't many people that called themselves a "Palestinian" until Israel was declared a country by the UN
And how many people called themselves "Israeli" before Israel was declared? Zero.
"Palestinian", before that, was a national (like "British" or "American") rather than an ethnic term. Those Jews living in Palestine were happy to accept the official (from the British Mandate of Palestine) appellation of "Palestinian" for all citizens of that territory. The Jewish newspaper now called the Jerusalem Post was at that time called the Palestine Post.
When Jewish Palestinians (in numbers swelled by massive immigration whose stated aim was to take over the country) started to claim that Palestine was actually a country called "Israel" and that they were citizens of it called "Israelis", that left Arab Palestinians (the vast majority of Palestinians) as the only ones still using the term. That had the consequence of making the term more ethnic than national, as there was now an ethnic group denied a nation, rather than a nation with many ethnic groups.
this means that Israelis can't donate to the organization from these pages
Well, no. The summary tries to make the inclusion of Palestine out to be extra bad, when in fact it is the opposite. Without the presence of Palestine on the list, Israelis couldn't donate to the organisation. With the presence of Palestine, Israelis can simply use that option. After all, all of the State of Israel is in Palestine, just as the Kingdom of Spain is in Iberia.
Of course, the whining is nothing to do with donations. It's just to do with the chip Israel carries on its shoulder. They have quite some cheek in complaining about a country being denied to them on paper, when they deny a country to its native population in fact.
Your statement, taken as a whole is correct. I just don't believe the last part "and edit the document you were sending" comes up very often. I can't think of one time I've been sent a document that someone wanted me to edit during the whole 18 years I've had internet access.
That is no doubt true for you, but for many of us it is not. As a translator, I am routinely sent files in.doc format, and very occasionally.rtf. I used to get a lot of faxes too, or scans of paper documents saved as.pdf or.tiff. I am supposed to edit these (or open a new document in the latter cases where editing is impossible) and send back a finished.doc.
It would be nice if they would adopt.odt for sending and receiving.
It was a lovely breath of fresh air recently when an academic sent me a PDF to proofread. I asked for the LaTeX file from which the PDF was generated, and she was able to provide it. The gzipped LaTeX source that I sent back was probably 5% of the size of the clunky word-processng formats I have to work with.
I used to have one of those 500-in-one thingies. It was great. I made every circuit and experimented with it until half the components burnt out.
However, I'd only want to get back into it now if someone showed me a simple way of getting my circuits to interact with my (Linux) computer via USB. I also have parallel, serial and PCI ports sitting there unused. Anyone?
That being the case, Mr. Greenspan, you may want to consult a Latin dictionary for your next book so you can make sure not to use a fake word for your title.
It's a testament to how lowbrow things are around here that this comment gets modded Troll rather than Informative.
OK, who changed my degree symbols into hatted A's (Â)? I actually cut and pasted the degree symbol from the article title. That doesn't work, nor does ° or °.
(It's called an "A-circumflex".)
This is yet another example of Slashdot being anti-standard and anti-international. All manner of important characters cannot be correctly displayed here.
Speeding cars kill. There definitely should be a three-strike policy for that. Plus, there should be a one one-strike policy over a certain speed, or for drunk speedsters.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the crux of the problem with gun laws in general. Criminals, by definition aren't interested in following the law, therefore, the stringent gun laws only hamper law abiding citizens.
Yes, it is true that during the temporary transitional phase from war-zone / wild-west to modern civilisation, there is a chance that criminals will hold on to those guns still floating around whilst law-abiding citizens have to rely on the police. Just hang on.
The mega SI prefix is perfectly legit in that context though.
Not really. Are you using an imperial (either long or short) ton? In which case SI prefixes are out of place. Are you using a metric ton, rounded off to 1000kg? That's fine, but it's just a term used in the place of "megagram" for reasons of familiarity.
If you want to refer to larger masses, then either speak of thousands of tons (recommended for most audiences), or use SI prefixes properly. A thousand tons or a million kilograms is a gigagram (Gg). A million tons or a billion kilograms is a teragram (Tg, and not to be confused by a telegram sent by an Oriental).
It was not "stolen" in any way. Before the British mandate, Arabs didn't own any of the land.
Firstly, land was stolen in a direct, literal and legal sense from individuals who owned it. I've just been listening to an interview with a refugee now living in the UK who recalls her family fleeing their house in fear of approaching gunmen, and not being allowed back weeks later or decades later. When she did get later get a tourist visa, she was able to meet the white colonial Canadian family who were occupying the house where she grew up, which belonged to her.
But I'm not even talking about individuals. The Arabs of Palestine were the native population of the land, and had the only claim to it. This idea of yours of the native population not really owning the land is one that comes up every time someone wants to justify white theft of land belonging to Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, and various African tribes. It's the twisting of language, and imposition of our laws on others, all with the intent to justify people turning up with guns from far away and forging a state on other people's land.
while correcting another - by allowing the Jews the right of self-determination in their ancestral homeland.
This is what it all comes down to. Any normal observer looks at the Nakba and sees an injustice. To see it as justice, it is necessary to subscribe to an idea according to which a specific religious group that has had virtually no connection to the land for a couple of millennia can turn up and take it from the natives.
By that standard, hundreds of groups around the world could claim chunks of land that they have not inhabited in any numbers of centuries. I'm sure you would not appreciate losing New York that way.
Of course, Arab nationalists wouldn't accept any non-Arab state in Arabia, no matter how tiny it is.
And no one would accept an Arab state in, for example, the US or Japan, no matter how tiny it is.
As a result, many of the the Arabs who lived in the area fled or were expelled. This is unfortunate, but entirely the Arabs' fault. After all, the Jews couldn't have neighbors that were trying to kill them.
You accept without question the idea that Jewish colonists simply can't accept Arab natives trying to ethically cleanse them, so they have a right to ethnically cleanse the Arabs.
You make no effort to explain why it could not be seen the opposite way: the Arab natives simply couldn't accept Jewish colonists ethnically cleansing them, so they had a right to ethnically cleanse the colonists.
Again, it all comes down to the mistaken premise that it was OK to come to steal someone's country in the first place. All evil that comes from a colonisation is almost by definition the fault of the colonists.
The Jews have a moral and a historical right to that tiny piece of land.
No. Colonists have no such rights.
The Arabs who lived there have a right to that land as well, so the land was justly divided between the Jews and the Arabs who lived there. However, they do not have to right to deny Jews of theirs.
Glad to see you aren't totally in denial about the Arabs' right to the land.
they claimed to have "Arab" or "Southern Syrian" nationality.
I don't care if you call Palestine "Arabia" or "South Syria" or whatever. But European and American colonists didn't have the right to come and steal a big chunk of it. The should never have come, and Palestine should either be an independent Arab state or a semi-autonomous province of a neighbouring Arab state.
Given that much of much of that theft is now a fait accompli, the most pragmatic solution is that of the League of Arab States.
Like it or not, the HAMAS's opinions represent the will of the majority of Palestinians.
That is part of Israeli dogma.
Common sense such as yours isn't appreciated in discussions like these on slashdot...
What are you talking about? There are plenty of right-wing wankers like you two on Slashdot, convinced that your own bigotry is common sense. Just look at the modding you got.
Part of right-wing insanity is a massive dose of paranoia and an extensive victim complex.
An oath is a great idea. However, it should not be seen as a substitute for tackling with systemic causes of misconduct. Only real investment in science at the national and international level can start to do that.
Talk of a "whim" is a red herring. Zionism is a clear, long-term plan to seize Palestine for the Jewish people, and I've never said anything to imply otherwise.
The war is often brought up by those trying to justify the theft of land. I repeat that the war is irrelevant to such questions unless you believe in a mediaeval-style right to land via conquest.
Gee, why could it be important to shut down a corrupt registrar under circumstances like those? Hm. Figure it out. Shouldn't take you much more than 30 seconds.
That's a straw man because I'm not arguing against action against a corrupt registrar. I'm saying that people should get off their high horse (since their countries produce a lot of spam too) and stop making racist generalisations and calls for data from certain countries to be blocked.What's your point?
Again, there were no Israelis until Israel was declared. Palestinians officially existed before that.
You want to de-legitimate them because they had that status by the leave of colonial powers? You do realise that you are contrasting them with Israel, right? You're trying to make their citizenship sound less legitimate than the citizenship that the colonial state of Israel conferred upon itself.
Furthermore, you really have to realise that they, as the native inhabitants, had an inherent right to citizenship of that land or an empire including it. They therefore enjoyed citizenship despite British colonial interference, not because of it. Zionist settlers, on the other hand, have citizenship entirely due to colonial interference.
And by the way, Palestine was never supposed to become an independent nation under modern Arab rule either. First you try to de-legitimate the native population's nationality by linking it with colonial whims, and now you try to limit their rights to a national based on lack of imperial permission for such a nation. You can't have it both ways. AFAIK, the Arabs who lived in British Palestine simply called themselves "Arabs" and didn't have any nationalistic Palestinian aspirations.You argue that Palestinians' real nationality is "Arab", rather than "Palestinian". Fine. That is an argument for all of Palestine, from the river to the sea, being part of a larger Arab nation, such as Syria, Saudi Arabia, or some sort of Caliphate comprising all Arab lands.
You can argue for that if you like, but the Palestinians have humbler aspirations: independence and freedom in their land. In fact, they even generally accept that the Zionists can hang on to half the land they stole, call it Israel, and let the Palestinians govern themselves in the other half.
"Started to claim"? How about the UN partition plan, the 1948 war? You make the whole thing sound like a Jewish whim.Not quite a whim. More the final objective of a long-term plan called Zionism. Surely you've heard of it.
Again, you try to use the authority of Western imperial powers when it suits you. When you wanted them to sound bad, you said "British colonists". Now that you want them to sound legit, you said "UN partition plan". We're still talking about the same thing: world powers do not have the right to take someone's home and country from them.
Mention of the 1948 war is utterly irrelevant unless you believe in the mediaeval right of conquest.
Am I the only one who somehow interpreted the first word in the title as, well, "probable"? No, not in the sense of "likely". Probe-able. Must be the Martian connection.
I also understood "water ice" as a popsicle. A phallic one.
Yeah, OK, it's probably just me.
And how many people called themselves "Israeli" before Israel was declared? Zero.
"Palestinian", before that, was a national (like "British" or "American") rather than an ethnic term. Those Jews living in Palestine were happy to accept the official (from the British Mandate of Palestine) appellation of "Palestinian" for all citizens of that territory. The Jewish newspaper now called the Jerusalem Post was at that time called the Palestine Post.
When Jewish Palestinians (in numbers swelled by massive immigration whose stated aim was to take over the country) started to claim that Palestine was actually a country called "Israel" and that they were citizens of it called "Israelis", that left Arab Palestinians (the vast majority of Palestinians) as the only ones still using the term. That had the consequence of making the term more ethnic than national, as there was now an ethnic group denied a nation, rather than a nation with many ethnic groups.
Well, no. The summary tries to make the inclusion of Palestine out to be extra bad, when in fact it is the opposite. Without the presence of Palestine on the list, Israelis couldn't donate to the organisation. With the presence of Palestine, Israelis can simply use that option. After all, all of the State of Israel is in Palestine, just as the Kingdom of Spain is in Iberia.
Of course, the whining is nothing to do with donations. It's just to do with the chip Israel carries on its shoulder. They have quite some cheek in complaining about a country being denied to them on paper, when they deny a country to its native population in fact.
You mean "Sir Stephen".
I don't think you would be interested in videos of my kids.
I'm a paedophile, you insensitive clod!That is no doubt true for you, but for many of us it is not. As a translator, I am routinely sent files in .doc format, and very occasionally .rtf. I used to get a lot of faxes too, or scans of paper documents saved as .pdf or .tiff. I am supposed to edit these (or open a new document in the latter cases where editing is impossible) and send back a finished .doc.
It would be nice if they would adopt .odt for sending and receiving.
It was a lovely breath of fresh air recently when an academic sent me a PDF to proofread. I asked for the LaTeX file from which the PDF was generated, and she was able to provide it. The gzipped LaTeX source that I sent back was probably 5% of the size of the clunky word-processng formats I have to work with.
Is that some kind of l33t spelling, like "intarwebs"?
Seriously, I see "sequitar" and "sequitor" and "sequiter" and "sequetor" more frequently than the correct spelling.
Or it could just be a "particle-wave". What is it with you people and your obsessive formation of portmanteaux?
Ah, nostalgia!
I used to have one of those 500-in-one thingies. It was great. I made every circuit and experimented with it until half the components burnt out.
However, I'd only want to get back into it now if someone showed me a simple way of getting my circuits to interact with my (Linux) computer via USB. I also have parallel, serial and PCI ports sitting there unused. Anyone?
That being the case, Mr. Greenspan, you may want to consult a Latin dictionary for your next book so you can make sure not to use a fake word for your title.
It's a testament to how lowbrow things are around here that this comment gets modded Troll rather than Informative.(It's called an "A-circumflex".)
This is yet another example of Slashdot being anti-standard and anti-international. All manner of important characters cannot be correctly displayed here.
That's an extremely crappy reductio ad absurdum.
Speeding cars kill. There definitely should be a three-strike policy for that. Plus, there should be a one one-strike policy over a certain speed, or for drunk speedsters.