You either misread or misunderstand. The claims were made by Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast and former Chief of the Staff of the Pakistani Army General Mirza Aslam Beg. Those are both high profile sources. The claims were not made by presstv.ir or inforwars.com - those are just media outlets that reported the claims.
In a speech last night Gaddafi, an ally of the ousted president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, said he was "pained" by the fall of the Tunisian government. He claimed protesters had been led astray by WikiLeaks disclosures detailing the corruption in Ben Ali's family and his repressive regime.
The leaked cables were written by "ambassadors in order to create chaos", Deutsche Press-Agentur reported Gaddafi as saying.
the release was an organized coordinated move, adding that such a huge volume of documents could not have been released without the cooperation of intelligence services of Western governments, in particular the US.
Known terrorists have literally been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
Yassir Arafat.
Arafat jointly won the Nobel Prize along with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres for their part in the Oslo Peace Accords. Arafat was not a terrorist at the time of winning. He had just negotiated and signed the Peace Accords - which formally renounced violence and recognised the state of Israel. He led a secular organisation, and fought against Hamas and Islamist influence in Palestine. He was seen as a traitor by some of his people for conceding too much in the negotiations, was sidelined by Israel and the West, which ultimately enabled Hamas to seize power.
Arafat's fate wasn't as bad as that of Rabin, who was also viewed as a traitor to his people for signing the Peace Accords, was condemned to death by some Jewish religious scholars for the crime of "treason", and then assassinated by someone who believed in that verdict.
It's too bad that both were seen as traitors for pursuing peace; the failure of the Peace Accords was probably the biggest squandered opportunity for regional peace in the last few decades.
That is what you said. You implied that there is some huge influx of scientists suddenly switching over to the "deny AGW" position. That claim is no more valid than the claim that the number of people scientists called Steve "continues to swell". Trying to avoid that fact, by claiming a false analogy and quoting Wikipedia, does not an argument make. Ask yourself - honestly - what percentage of qualified climatologists deny that AGW is occurring? Are the numbers really swelling? Or staying steady? I'd imagine most people, climatologists included, have already made up their minds, and there isn't much change happening at all.
"SONY was today at my home"? That's not how raids work. In the US, Sony had to go through some rather extensive legal action to be able to get a TRO on geohot, and now they've convinced the German police to raid some random hacker's house out of nowhere
Why is this so unbelievable? They have evidence that he has worked on the PS3 hypervisor, work that either has or could lead to "circumvention of anti-piracy technology measures". Sony tell the police that what he is doing is illegal, and so they raid him. Seems entirely believable to me. Not so long ago, it was common for the police to take along industry experts on a raid - several phone phreakers reported that technical representatives of their local telco were present and directed the police in evidence gathering at their raid. Since the law hasn't been changed, it's probably still possible for third parties to be present at a raid, it just standard procedure anymore.
Not saying that what Tivo are doing is acceptable (although they never promised eternal service in the UK, or did they?
Actually they did. You could pay a monthly fee, or pay a single fee of £250 for "lifetime updates". I expect the people who paid that are going to be a bit annoyed.
However, there was an unofficial "gentleman's agreement" that hackers wouldn't release any code that screenscrapes or otherwise downloads the EPG data over the net (using the ethernet card addon), and if anyone did that, then talk of it on the forums was banned. That agreement is now null and void, so there's a good chance that someone will finally release free code, if anyone still cares.
do we really want Amazon downloading everything it thinks you want to your tablet?
If Amazon can predict with high accuracy the stories that a user will read/watch that day, then preloading them absolutely makes sense. Especially for the use case where the device has morning wifi access, but is then going to be limited by 3g/gprs or disconnected for much of the day, or where the device user turns off wireless to save battery power. There are a bunch of tools that already do this for ebook readers - e.g. Calibre can prefetch stories from hundreds of feeds and load them up ready for the day.
How is a video based system any different from using RSS & BitTorrent, which seems to be a pretty popular way of downloading?
The more than 12 defendants in the case were ordered to pay $100 million in damages to abortion clinics and doctors. They had argued that they have a free speech right to publish details about the doctors, but after a three-week trial, an eight-person jury found that such sites were a "true threat" to physicians who perform abortions, according to the Planned Parenthood Columbia/Willamette (PPCW) in Portland.
Note that the Christian web site in question never said that they planned to or were going to carry out acts of violence - it merely collated information about what they termed "baby butchers" and called for them to be "brought to justice".
Corporations are made up of people... just thought you might like to know.
Not true. In a legal sense, corporations are independent entities; in most jurisdictions the only "person" requirement is that the company have a Director and Secretary, and often these can be the same person. That person is often a lawyer acting on behalf of other corporations, and he is contractually obligated to not have any free will to make any decisions on behalf of the corporation. These corporations may employ no one, and exist physically only as "brass plates" at the lawyer's place of work or post office:
In June 2008, the high street chemist, Boots, which has a 150-year history in Nottingham, moved the registered head office of its parent company, Alliance Boots, to Zug.
On its website the company gives its address as Baarerstrasse, a central street in Zug.
But a visit to the address, an office block, opposite a pizza takeaway and a hotel, revealed that there is no physical office location in the town. Instead, the registered office is housed in a Swiss post office - in an anonymous post office box alongside dozens of others.
Of course, offshore tax avoidance is completely legal.
"The London Stock Exchange's new open source trading system"... except, the trading system isn't open source. Sure, it runs on the Linux kernel, which is open source, but so does Oracle...
"There were major problems on the exchange on 24 August, when stock prices of five large companies collapsed. Most notably, BT shares lost £968 million, and the LSE was forced to halt trading for the day." On 24 August the LSE was running the Windows.NET trading platform... the halt of trading had nothing to do with the new Linux platform.
So, the big story here is that the LSE Windows based platform was possibly hacked and manipulated for financial gain. Why Computer World focuses on the Linux angle is a mystery.
First off, the biggest obstacle to American success is China and their unfair trade practices. By keeping their currency pegged to the US dollar at artificially low rate they are creating trade barriers to real free trade.
When were the international trade interests of either the Chinese or U.S. ever "fair"? As a sovereign nation, the Chinese are free to do whatever they want with their own currency. Americans would be outraged if the Chinese (or Europeans) demanded that the financial policy of the U.S. and the dollar should be determined by the interests of foreigners. The government of the United States is free to devalue its own currency, and so is the government of China. But if a government weakens their currency, then imports will cost more. Hence wages are lower, and people have to work much harder to be competitive. It appears the Chinese are willing to accept this, but Americans (or, at least, Republicans?) are not. And if the U.S. restricts the money supply to manipulate the value, then the dollar may fall out of favour as the world's reserve currency, and the petrodollar may be replaced by the petroeuro, which might hurt the United States much more in the long term than the current trade imbalance with China.
Interesting that Qaddafi directly blames Wikileaks for the Tunisian revolt:
In a Jan. 17 televised address, Qaddafi denounced the mass upheaval in Tunisia as a Western plot. He implicated WikiLeaks as a product of "lying ambassadors in order to create chaos."... "Qaddafi railed against WikiLeaks because he, too, wants to blame something other than the power of the people.... His speech to Tunisians could be summarized thus: I am scared witless by what happened in your country.""
They are unquestionably racist, patronising various minorities via national policy [bbc.co.uk] intended to display the range of fashionable backgrounds rather than be nationally and regionally representative
Criticising the (largely based in London) BBC for not having an employee ethnic demography that follows the national average is remarkably uniformed. In London, 31% of people are non-white. The majority of BBC staff are based in London, because that is where the BBC is based. Therefore, it stands to reason that the ethnic distribution of BBC employees is going to tend towards the ethnic distribution of London (or Manchester, their second largest base). The BBC's "target" for non-white staff is only 12.5%, which isn't that high.
Given that there are more Muslims in the Israeli Parliament than there are in the US Congress
Statistics fail : Israel has a greater percentage of Muslim citizens than the U.S. (about 10 times more) i.e. you are comparing values without accounting for population demographics.
I'd say they're probably more secular than the US in reality
Do you really think that a system of government that includes state religious schools is more secular than the U.S., where the Constitution explicitly prohibits that kind of thing?
Not quite. The "peace" process has been the Group of Four telling Israel to, essentially, "relax and enjoy it", while the Palestinians commit frequent acts of terrorism against the Israelis, and the Palestinian leadership refuse to concede even the most basic realities (Israel's existence as a Jewish state, and its right to exist as a Jewish state).
Not true - the PLO recognised the state of Israel in 1993. Israel – Palestine Liberation Organization letters of recognition:"The PLO recognizes the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security. The PLO accepts United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. The PLO commits itself...to a peaceful resolution of the conflict between the two sides and declares that all outstanding issues relating to permanent status will be resolved through negotiations...the PLO renounces the use of terrorism and other acts of violence"
Another example: a cessation to terrorism is one of the first steps on the Road Map, and yet Abbas (the guy who was supposedly more peace-loving than Arafat) refused to commit to that, claiming that it would cause a "civil war".
I don't know if he actually said that - but if he did, then he was right: Palestinian civil war.
Then there was the case of Israel leaving Gaza, only to be rewarded with MORE rocket attacks. Some "partner for peace" those Palestinians were.
Making a basic rocket isn't that hard. There are at about ten different groups that have fired rockets - these groups are not unified, have different leadership, sometimes have conflicting goals, and at times openly war against each other. The rockets are a problem, but to consider these groups as unified is incorrect. I think it was Hamas who said that they can request and reason with the other groups to stop rocket attacks, but these groups are not part of the Hamas military. Hence Hamas ceasefires only apply to groups under Hamas, not to every single Palestinian group. This is not really a surprising situation - look at the "Real IRA" etc. in Northern Ireland, who have carried out a number of attacks despite the IRA/Sinn Fein being committed to the peace process.
If you roll a 6 sided die 6 times, you don't "expect" to see each side exactly once
You do if you are using the word "expect" in the sense of mathematical expectation Of course, the outcome of your experiment may (and probably will) be completely different to the statistical expectation.
but over 600 rolls, you'd expect approximately 100 of each side.
The original post was arguing that over 600 rolls we couldn't "expect" anything - because it's completely random. If you "expect" something, then it isn't random. That argument is clearly not using the mathematical sense of "expect", and neither was yours - the expectation for an equal probability event doesn't change because you carry out more samples.
Random numbers does not mean "evenly distributed" numbers
He didn't say that random numbers had to be evenly distributed. He was talking about the matematical expectation, which is a completely different thing from "true randomness" that you are talking about.
Car analogy: there is some probability that a random driver will be in a crash each year. If this probability remains constant throughout the lifetime of an individual, then the mathematical expectation would be that crash incidents would be evenly distributed throughout the lifetime of a person. There is variability, but in the absence of that variation, the incidence of crashes would be equal every year. But, say the crash record of an individual begins to increase rapidly after 80 years of age, then we can say with some statistical probability that this is an anomaly that is due to a non-constant probability caused by some other relevant factors. And that is what may be going on with the recent years of record global termperature.
You jest, but check out The top-rated comments in this article. I know, I know, Daily Mail readers and science do not go well together, but seriously - the zoom in on the ISS proves that the photo is fake? The sun spots are birds? I despair, I really do...
As far as I know, CDMA is still vulnerable to a Man In the Middle attack, where the eavesdropper's equipment pretends to be a basestation. This is the method Chris Paget demonstrated against GSM at Defcon with $1500 of equipment. The equipment cost may be slightly higher with CDMA, but apart from that, the technique should work fine - a MITM attack is independent of the physical layer. Qualcomm have stated that CDMA can be cracked; there was some scandal in South Korea about this, and it was revealed that they issue their cabinet members with phones that do end to end encryption because they assume CDMA has been cracked by the North.
Given that he has (apparently) been on anti-depressants for years, there is likely more than just Aspergers at work there. I know people with Aspergers - none of them have ever been involuntarily committed to a mental hospital. His Aspergers diagnosis is relatively recent, and given how Aspergers is apparently viewed as some kind of awesome hacker trait, I would question whether it is really what Lamo suffers from, or a convenient diagnosis... the people who I know with the Aspergers traits and severe depression issues are diagnosed Aspergers and bipolar. Of course, Wired is going to write articles about super-leet Aspergers hackers, not bipolar hackers...
The phrase mentally ill tends to carry a lot more negative connotations than Aspergers, especially here on/.
It may be true that people on/. equate Aspergers with superhuman computer skills, and look less favourably on other mental issues, but that's not really my fault... if it turns out that Lamo is bipolar, would your opinion change? If so, then that is your bias at work, not mine.
I don't have any issue with Aspergers, bipolar people - with medication and time they can be great contributors to society. But being involved in such a high-profile case during a severe breakdown, it is legitimate to question his mental state. Maybe he was fine; having known several bipolar people (but not pure Aspergers people) who have had similar involuntary hospitalisations, I doubt this to be the case.
what do you do when your source tells you he is responsible for a criminal act, more importantly what do you do when they tell you they plan to do more criminal acts?... Now consider if the source was a member of some fringe group that thinks freedom of expression extends to blowing up things as a form of protest.
In such scenarios, journalists need first to address the moral dilemma: are they investigative journalists first, or citizens of the State first? They cannot jump between the two. If they decide it is the latter, then they should not be giving confidential sources worthless guarantees that at some point in the future they will abandon. In the issue of collusion, for journalists to identity their confidential sources makes them no better than the agents of the State they are exposing.
Let me state categorically where I stand on the issue of a journalist's confidential sources of information. For me, the fundamental ethical principle of journalism is that we have a moral imperative to give a guarantee of anonymity to genuine confidential sources providing bona fide information. There can be no transparency in the trust that our sources must have in us as professional journalists. If we sacrifice that trust, we betray our credibility as reporters of the truth. Likewise, if there is no trust between the confidential source and the journalist, it destroys the concept of honesty in the verification of the evidence given by that source.
The remaining chat logs can contain details deemed to be national secrets. Releasing them publicly could get them in legal trouble.
The problem is that Lamo has spent the last few months revealing information from the chat logs. Journalists are repeating what he says as fact without being able to check them against the chat logs. Lamo has been making contradictory statements and changing his statements to apparently support the needs of the DOJ - he said that there was no explicit evidence of anyone helping Manning in the logs, the DOJ said it needed evidence of Assange directly helping Manning, and suddenly Lamo claims the logs contain explicit statements that Assange instructed Manning in how to upload files to Wikileaks. Convenient!
Lamo was involuntarily committed to a mental hospital three weeks before Manning's arrest. Now he is talking to the press about these supposed confidential chat logs that they are unwilling to release. They are unwilling to release even the portion of chat statements that would directly confirm or deny Lamo's public statements. There are rumours that Poulsen and Lamo are both informants, and that both are somehow linked to Project Vigilant - a group that tracks internet users and hands the data over to the Federal Government ("what they essentially are is some sort of vigilante group that collects vast amount of private data about the Internet activities of millions of citizens, processes that data into usable form, and then literally turns it over to the U.S. Government, claiming its motive is to help the Government detect Terrorists and other criminals..")
The article has been updated saying that Wired has promised a response, and Greenwald says "What they ought to do, at the absolute minimum, is post the portions of the chat logs about which Lamo had made public statements or make clear that they do not exist." Is that so unreasonable? Or is the world expected to believe verbatim the contradictory statements of a mentally ill man who refuses to show anyone the evidence behind those statements?
If he does possess such information, then what he has is information about a confidential source relationship... I don't know where the fuck Greenwald went to school, but the protection of source confidentiality is one of the tenets of journalism.
You do realise that it was Lamo (Wired journalist) who turned his source over to the FBI? The evidence suggests that Wired and/or their journalist staff do not have an absolute policy of protecting their sources.
Slashdot Mirror
You either misread or misunderstand. The claims were made by Iranian Foreign Ministry Spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast and former Chief of the Staff of the Pakistani Army General Mirza Aslam Beg. Those are both high profile sources. The claims were not made by presstv.ir or inforwars.com - those are just media outlets that reported the claims.
In a speech last night Gaddafi, an ally of the ousted president, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, said he was "pained" by the fall of the Tunisian government. He claimed protesters had been led astray by WikiLeaks disclosures detailing the corruption in Ben Ali's family and his repressive regime. The leaked cables were written by "ambassadors in order to create chaos", Deutsche Press-Agentur reported Gaddafi as saying.
The Iranian government have claimed that Wikileaks is a U.S. plot to destabilise anti-colonislist governments.
the release was an organized coordinated move, adding that such a huge volume of documents could not have been released without the cooperation of intelligence services of Western governments, in particular the US.
A former Pakistanti General has also claimed Wikileaks is a CIA/Mossad plot:
The US has a hand in this plot, and these reports (posted by the WikiLeaks website) are part of the US psychological warfare
Disclaimer: Tunisia: Don't Call It a WikiLeaks Revolution
Known terrorists have literally been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
Yassir Arafat.
Arafat jointly won the Nobel Prize along with Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres for their part in the Oslo Peace Accords. Arafat was not a terrorist at the time of winning. He had just negotiated and signed the Peace Accords - which formally renounced violence and recognised the state of Israel. He led a secular organisation, and fought against Hamas and Islamist influence in Palestine. He was seen as a traitor by some of his people for conceding too much in the negotiations, was sidelined by Israel and the West, which ultimately enabled Hamas to seize power.
Arafat's fate wasn't as bad as that of Rabin, who was also viewed as a traitor to his people for signing the Peace Accords, was condemned to death by some Jewish religious scholars for the crime of "treason", and then assassinated by someone who believed in that verdict.
It's too bad that both were seen as traitors for pursuing peace; the failure of the Peace Accords was probably the biggest squandered opportunity for regional peace in the last few decades.
That is what you said. You implied that there is some huge influx of scientists suddenly switching over to the "deny AGW" position. That claim is no more valid than the claim that the number of people scientists called Steve "continues to swell". Trying to avoid that fact, by claiming a false analogy and quoting Wikipedia, does not an argument make. Ask yourself - honestly - what percentage of qualified climatologists deny that AGW is occurring? Are the numbers really swelling? Or staying steady? I'd imagine most people, climatologists included, have already made up their minds, and there isn't much change happening at all.
Meanwhile, the number of scientists expressing significant issues with that '95% confidence level' continues to swell
Meanwhile, the number of scientists called Steve continues to swell...
"SONY was today at my home"? That's not how raids work. In the US, Sony had to go through some rather extensive legal action to be able to get a TRO on geohot, and now they've convinced the German police to raid some random hacker's house out of nowhere
Why is this so unbelievable? They have evidence that he has worked on the PS3 hypervisor, work that either has or could lead to "circumvention of anti-piracy technology measures". Sony tell the police that what he is doing is illegal, and so they raid him. Seems entirely believable to me. Not so long ago, it was common for the police to take along industry experts on a raid - several phone phreakers reported that technical representatives of their local telco were present and directed the police in evidence gathering at their raid. Since the law hasn't been changed, it's probably still possible for third parties to be present at a raid, it just standard procedure anymore.
Not saying that what Tivo are doing is acceptable (although they never promised eternal service in the UK, or did they?
Actually they did. You could pay a monthly fee, or pay a single fee of £250 for "lifetime updates". I expect the people who paid that are going to be a bit annoyed.
However, there was an unofficial "gentleman's agreement" that hackers wouldn't release any code that screenscrapes or otherwise downloads the EPG data over the net (using the ethernet card addon), and if anyone did that, then talk of it on the forums was banned. That agreement is now null and void, so there's a good chance that someone will finally release free code, if anyone still cares.
do we really want Amazon downloading everything it thinks you want to your tablet?
If Amazon can predict with high accuracy the stories that a user will read/watch that day, then preloading them absolutely makes sense. Especially for the use case where the device has morning wifi access, but is then going to be limited by 3g/gprs or disconnected for much of the day, or where the device user turns off wireless to save battery power. There are a bunch of tools that already do this for ebook readers - e.g. Calibre can prefetch stories from hundreds of feeds and load them up ready for the day.
How is a video based system any different from using RSS & BitTorrent, which seems to be a pretty popular way of downloading?
It is not illegal until you say "I plan to" or "I am going to."
Not true. Speech is not protected if a court finds that it incites violence:
The more than 12 defendants in the case were ordered to pay $100 million in damages to abortion clinics and doctors. They had argued that they have a free speech right to publish details about the doctors, but after a three-week trial, an eight-person jury found that such sites were a "true threat" to physicians who perform abortions, according to the Planned Parenthood Columbia/Willamette (PPCW) in Portland.
Note that the Christian web site in question never said that they planned to or were going to carry out acts of violence - it merely collated information about what they termed "baby butchers" and called for them to be "brought to justice".
Corporations are made up of people... just thought you might like to know.
Not true. In a legal sense, corporations are independent entities; in most jurisdictions the only "person" requirement is that the company have a Director and Secretary, and often these can be the same person. That person is often a lawyer acting on behalf of other corporations, and he is contractually obligated to not have any free will to make any decisions on behalf of the corporation. These corporations may employ no one, and exist physically only as "brass plates" at the lawyer's place of work or post office:
In June 2008, the high street chemist, Boots, which has a 150-year history in Nottingham, moved the registered head office of its parent company, Alliance Boots, to Zug. On its website the company gives its address as Baarerstrasse, a central street in Zug. But a visit to the address, an office block, opposite a pizza takeaway and a hotel, revealed that there is no physical office location in the town. Instead, the registered office is housed in a Swiss post office - in an anonymous post office box alongside dozens of others.
Of course, offshore tax avoidance is completely legal.
So, the big story here is that the LSE Windows based platform was possibly hacked and manipulated for financial gain. Why Computer World focuses on the Linux angle is a mystery.
First off, the biggest obstacle to American success is China and their unfair trade practices. By keeping their currency pegged to the US dollar at artificially low rate they are creating trade barriers to real free trade.
When were the international trade interests of either the Chinese or U.S. ever "fair"? As a sovereign nation, the Chinese are free to do whatever they want with their own currency. Americans would be outraged if the Chinese (or Europeans) demanded that the financial policy of the U.S. and the dollar should be determined by the interests of foreigners. The government of the United States is free to devalue its own currency, and so is the government of China. But if a government weakens their currency, then imports will cost more. Hence wages are lower, and people have to work much harder to be competitive. It appears the Chinese are willing to accept this, but Americans (or, at least, Republicans?) are not. And if the U.S. restricts the money supply to manipulate the value, then the dollar may fall out of favour as the world's reserve currency, and the petrodollar may be replaced by the petroeuro, which might hurt the United States much more in the long term than the current trade imbalance with China.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/01/wikileaks-reveal-what-made-tunisians-revolt.html
Interesting that Qaddafi directly blames Wikileaks for the Tunisian revolt:
In a Jan. 17 televised address, Qaddafi denounced the mass upheaval in Tunisia as a Western plot. He implicated WikiLeaks as a product of "lying ambassadors in order to create chaos."... "Qaddafi railed against WikiLeaks because he, too, wants to blame something other than the power of the people. ... His speech to Tunisians could be summarized thus: I am scared witless by what happened in your country.""
They are unquestionably racist, patronising various minorities via national policy [bbc.co.uk] intended to display the range of fashionable backgrounds rather than be nationally and regionally representative
Criticising the (largely based in London) BBC for not having an employee ethnic demography that follows the national average is remarkably uniformed. In London, 31% of people are non-white. The majority of BBC staff are based in London, because that is where the BBC is based. Therefore, it stands to reason that the ethnic distribution of BBC employees is going to tend towards the ethnic distribution of London (or Manchester, their second largest base). The BBC's "target" for non-white staff is only 12.5%, which isn't that high.
Given that there are more Muslims in the Israeli Parliament than there are in the US Congress
Statistics fail : Israel has a greater percentage of Muslim citizens than the U.S. (about 10 times more) i.e. you are comparing values without accounting for population demographics.
I'd say they're probably more secular than the US in reality
Do you really think that a system of government that includes state religious schools is more secular than the U.S., where the Constitution explicitly prohibits that kind of thing?
Not quite. The "peace" process has been the Group of Four telling Israel to, essentially, "relax and enjoy it", while the Palestinians commit frequent acts of terrorism against the Israelis, and the Palestinian leadership refuse to concede even the most basic realities (Israel's existence as a Jewish state, and its right to exist as a Jewish state).
Not true - the PLO recognised the state of Israel in 1993. Israel – Palestine Liberation Organization letters of recognition: "The PLO recognizes the right of the State of Israel to exist in peace and security. The PLO accepts United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. The PLO commits itself...to a peaceful resolution of the conflict between the two sides and declares that all outstanding issues relating to permanent status will be resolved through negotiations...the PLO renounces the use of terrorism and other acts of violence"
Another example: a cessation to terrorism is one of the first steps on the Road Map, and yet Abbas (the guy who was supposedly more peace-loving than Arafat) refused to commit to that, claiming that it would cause a "civil war".
I don't know if he actually said that - but if he did, then he was right: Palestinian civil war.
Then there was the case of Israel leaving Gaza, only to be rewarded with MORE rocket attacks. Some "partner for peace" those Palestinians were.
Making a basic rocket isn't that hard. There are at about ten different groups that have fired rockets - these groups are not unified, have different leadership, sometimes have conflicting goals, and at times openly war against each other. The rockets are a problem, but to consider these groups as unified is incorrect. I think it was Hamas who said that they can request and reason with the other groups to stop rocket attacks, but these groups are not part of the Hamas military. Hence Hamas ceasefires only apply to groups under Hamas, not to every single Palestinian group. This is not really a surprising situation - look at the "Real IRA" etc. in Northern Ireland, who have carried out a number of attacks despite the IRA/Sinn Fein being committed to the peace process.
If anybody knows the academic research behind this (without the politicking) that would be really useful.
Summary and citations.
If you roll a 6 sided die 6 times, you don't "expect" to see each side exactly once
You do if you are using the word "expect" in the sense of mathematical expectation Of course, the outcome of your experiment may (and probably will) be completely different to the statistical expectation.
but over 600 rolls, you'd expect approximately 100 of each side.
The original post was arguing that over 600 rolls we couldn't "expect" anything - because it's completely random. If you "expect" something, then it isn't random. That argument is clearly not using the mathematical sense of "expect", and neither was yours - the expectation for an equal probability event doesn't change because you carry out more samples.
Random numbers does not mean "evenly distributed" numbers
He didn't say that random numbers had to be evenly distributed. He was talking about the matematical expectation, which is a completely different thing from "true randomness" that you are talking about.
Car analogy: there is some probability that a random driver will be in a crash each year. If this probability remains constant throughout the lifetime of an individual, then the mathematical expectation would be that crash incidents would be evenly distributed throughout the lifetime of a person. There is variability, but in the absence of that variation, the incidence of crashes would be equal every year. But, say the crash record of an individual begins to increase rapidly after 80 years of age, then we can say with some statistical probability that this is an anomaly that is due to a non-constant probability caused by some other relevant factors. And that is what may be going on with the recent years of record global termperature.
You jest, but check out The top-rated comments in this article. I know, I know, Daily Mail readers and science do not go well together, but seriously - the zoom in on the ISS proves that the photo is fake? The sun spots are birds? I despair, I really do...
As far as I know, CDMA is still vulnerable to a Man In the Middle attack, where the eavesdropper's equipment pretends to be a basestation. This is the method Chris Paget demonstrated against GSM at Defcon with $1500 of equipment. The equipment cost may be slightly higher with CDMA, but apart from that, the technique should work fine - a MITM attack is independent of the physical layer. Qualcomm have stated that CDMA can be cracked; there was some scandal in South Korea about this, and it was revealed that they issue their cabinet members with phones that do end to end encryption because they assume CDMA has been cracked by the North.
Lamo has been diagnosed Aspergers disorder,
Given that he has (apparently) been on anti-depressants for years, there is likely more than just Aspergers at work there. I know people with Aspergers - none of them have ever been involuntarily committed to a mental hospital. His Aspergers diagnosis is relatively recent, and given how Aspergers is apparently viewed as some kind of awesome hacker trait, I would question whether it is really what Lamo suffers from, or a convenient diagnosis... the people who I know with the Aspergers traits and severe depression issues are diagnosed Aspergers and bipolar. Of course, Wired is going to write articles about super-leet Aspergers hackers, not bipolar hackers...
The phrase mentally ill tends to carry a lot more negative connotations than Aspergers, especially here on /.
It may be true that people on /. equate Aspergers with superhuman computer skills, and look less favourably on other mental issues, but that's not really my fault... if it turns out that Lamo is bipolar, would your opinion change? If so, then that is your bias at work, not mine.
I don't have any issue with Aspergers, bipolar people - with medication and time they can be great contributors to society. But being involved in such a high-profile case during a severe breakdown, it is legitimate to question his mental state. Maybe he was fine; having known several bipolar people (but not pure Aspergers people) who have had similar involuntary hospitalisations, I doubt this to be the case.
what do you do when your source tells you he is responsible for a criminal act, more importantly what do you do when they tell you they plan to do more criminal acts?... Now consider if the source was a member of some fringe group that thinks freedom of expression extends to blowing up things as a form of protest.
I don't have to imagine this situation - it happened with terrorist groups in Northern Ireland: The moral reason never to tell (British Journalism Review 2005):
In such scenarios, journalists need first to address the moral dilemma: are they investigative journalists first, or citizens of the State first? They cannot jump between the two. If they decide it is the latter, then they should not be giving confidential sources worthless guarantees that at some point in the future they will abandon. In the issue of collusion, for journalists to identity their confidential sources makes them no better than the agents of the State they are exposing.
Let me state categorically where I stand on the issue of a journalist's confidential sources of information. For me, the fundamental ethical principle of journalism is that we have a moral imperative to give a guarantee of anonymity to genuine confidential sources providing bona fide information. There can be no transparency in the trust that our sources must have in us as professional journalists. If we sacrifice that trust, we betray our credibility as reporters of the truth. Likewise, if there is no trust between the confidential source and the journalist, it destroys the concept of honesty in the verification of the evidence given by that source.
The remaining chat logs can contain details deemed to be national secrets. Releasing them publicly could get them in legal trouble.
The problem is that Lamo has spent the last few months revealing information from the chat logs. Journalists are repeating what he says as fact without being able to check them against the chat logs. Lamo has been making contradictory statements and changing his statements to apparently support the needs of the DOJ - he said that there was no explicit evidence of anyone helping Manning in the logs, the DOJ said it needed evidence of Assange directly helping Manning, and suddenly Lamo claims the logs contain explicit statements that Assange instructed Manning in how to upload files to Wikileaks. Convenient!
Lamo was involuntarily committed to a mental hospital three weeks before Manning's arrest. Now he is talking to the press about these supposed confidential chat logs that they are unwilling to release. They are unwilling to release even the portion of chat statements that would directly confirm or deny Lamo's public statements. There are rumours that Poulsen and Lamo are both informants, and that both are somehow linked to Project Vigilant - a group that tracks internet users and hands the data over to the Federal Government ("what they essentially are is some sort of vigilante group that collects vast amount of private data about the Internet activities of millions of citizens, processes that data into usable form, and then literally turns it over to the U.S. Government, claiming its motive is to help the Government detect Terrorists and other criminals..")
The article has been updated saying that Wired has promised a response, and Greenwald says "What they ought to do, at the absolute minimum, is post the portions of the chat logs about which Lamo had made public statements or make clear that they do not exist." Is that so unreasonable? Or is the world expected to believe verbatim the contradictory statements of a mentally ill man who refuses to show anyone the evidence behind those statements?
If he does possess such information, then what he has is information about a confidential source relationship... I don't know where the fuck Greenwald went to school, but the protection of source confidentiality is one of the tenets of journalism.
You do realise that it was Lamo (Wired journalist) who turned his source over to the FBI? The evidence suggests that Wired and/or their journalist staff do not have an absolute policy of protecting their sources.