'the statement "wiped off the map" was never made and that Ahmadinejad did not refer to the nation or land mass of Israel, but to the "regime occupying Jerusalem". Norouzi translated the original Persian to English, word for word, with the result, "the Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." Juan Cole, a University of Michigan Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History, agrees that Ahmadinejad's statement should be translated as, "the Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e eshghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad).' -
If you believe that the Iranian government wants to wipe out all the Jews, then explain Iran's proud but discreet Jews. These are Jews who have the right to settle in Israel and become Israeli citizens, but who instead choose to live in Iran: 'Imam Khomeini, recognised Jews as a religious minority that should be protected. As a result Jews have one representative in the Iranian parliament. "Imam Khomeini made a distinction between Jews and Zionists and he supported us," says Mr Hammami.
Heh, Iran and Iraq was at war for 8 years in the 1980s including chemical warfare. Saddam was no friend of Iran either, for as long as he was in power. They're both muslims like most of the Middle East but I don't think they're all that close.
The problem with that argument is that Saddam brutally oppressed the Shia. Saddams military was dominated by Sunnis. Saddam was no friend of Iran, but he was also no friend of Iraqi Shia.
"Shia Muslims were oppressed by Iraq's Baathist regime for more than 30 years and excluded from the highest ranks of power..... Under his rule, Shia opposition groups were fiercely oppressed and political and religious leaders murdered. As a result, the opposition tended to look to neighbouring Iran, which is also governed by Shia religious leaders, for support."Who are the Iraqi Shia?
Actually, there is a fundamental reason for that. The problem is that, at least presently, we use TTL logic that requires distinct and stable detection of on and off states. Without that, errors creep in and things go wonky after that. It's the way we have designed every bit of digital electronic gear to date.
There is a large body of research on analog VLSI and neural systems, e.g. Carver Mead's book is 20 years old now.
**IT DOES NOT MATTER** what he "leaked" or why, it just matters that he broke the law.
Some people think that he broke the law. Some people think that he didn't. What matters is whether he is charged and convicted in a court of law. He may deny that he was the source of the leak. There may be insufficient evidence for a guilty verdict. He may admit to being the source of the leak, but be able to argue that the classification of the material itself violated Executive Order 13292 (Sec 1.7) ("in no case shall information be classified in order to conceal violations of law").
There have been similar precedents of not prosecuting or convicting whistleblowers. Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, and stated that the documents "demonstrated unconstitutional behavior by a succession of presidents, the violation of their oath and the violation of the oath of every one of their subordinates". "Deepthroat" leaked the details of Watergate to the press and was never prosecuted.
Hypothetically, if Obama were ordering intelligence operatives to wiretap every American citizen, would leaking this information be a crime of treason, punishable by death? How about publishing it?
If a computer were made to emulate such behavior, it would be slow, extremely power hungry and inefficient.
There is no fundamental reason why a silicon implementation of a biological brain would have to be "slow, extremely power hungry and inefficient". At the end of the day, the neural cells within the brain obey the laws of physics. The functionality of the cells can be reduced to abstract mathematical models, which can be implemented in silicon, in wetware, or any other computational medium. These computational mediums will determine the speed and power of the system; at worst, a brain could be implemented as a collection of interconnected living cells, which is the technology that every brain on the planet currently uses. But do you really believe that this medium is the most powerful? There is no doubt that evolved, living cells are remarkably efficient, but there is also no doubt that a plane will outfly the fastest bird in the skies. Similarly, I highly doubt that biological cells, which evolved with the severe constraints of power consumption, bandwidth, noise etc. will turn out to be the most powerful implementation medium for neural models.
The human brain has an estimated power requirement of around 10-20 Watts. Could you imagine what intelligence may be possible if this constraint alone were removed? Apart from cooling issues, there is no reason why we couldn't easily provide an artificial brain with 100 times the amount of energy that the human brain can receive. This will obviously not magically enable a greater intelligence, but it does at least suggest the possibility that biological cells can be bettered.
Kurzweil -clearly- never said we'd reverse engineer the brain by 2020. He argued against exactly that (his prediction was late 2020s, shading into 2030
Trying to predict a timeline for this is futile. There are too many possibilities, or avenues of research, that could lead to some breakthrough. On the one hand we have neural-silicon interfaces appearing, high resolution scanners, and other technologies that allow observing and probing the physical structure of the brain, and on the other, the genome and cell studies will enable the instructions and interactions that construct the brain to slowly be decoded.
Myers' criticism is essentially that the brain is an emergent system, and we'll have to understand all the protein-protein interactions, functional attributes of proteins, etc. in order to actually model the brain.
Myers is right to say that decoding every single protein interaction is a difficult task, but he is completely wrong to insist that this is the only way that a functional reverse-engineered brain model could be created. To use an old analogy; his claim is like saying that it will be impossible to build an airplane until we fully understand how the genome of a bird orchestrates thousands of proteins and millions of cells into creating a three-dimensional articulated living body.
There are convincing and accurate models of single neuron dynamics. All it will take for a large step to be made in this field is for someone to figure out how these neuron models combine to form a larger coherent computational system that displays learning and adaptation properties. Unlike some other huge scientific leaps, we already have working examples in the millions of creatures that inhabit this planet. It is not such a huge step to imagine that an explanation of this emergent phenomenon could appear overnight (after all, who predicted that the Poincaré conjecture would already be solved?). It is an interesting research field, and one where a dedicated individual with a working model could change everything.
How long before every country decides that in order to allow RIM to operate they need to open up their servers?
The vast majority of countries with cell networks already have laws in place that require cell providers to enable lawful intercept of calls and messages. RIM were an anomaly because they provided no lawful intercept capability to these countries. Now, they do.. RIM devices in the USA and EU are already subject to lawful intercepts - these moves are just providing the same capability to other nations.
People who pay for dope should realize that they are funding a network of gangs and cartels that murders far more people than the more familiar flavor of terrorist does.
The problem is that this market will always exist. Asking people to stop consuming alcohol, cigarettes and other narcotics "for the common good" is like asking teenagers to practice abstinence. It goes against human nature, and will fall on deaf ears. The market is unstoppable. And when the government fails to control the market, it will instead become controlled by criminals through the methodology of violence.
Same goes for optical interconnect to memory: the flood may be Biblical when it arrives
But it won't be - the system is fundamentally limited by all of the rest of the components. A top end front-side bus can already push 80Gb; scaling that upto the 400Gbit that this optical link promises will probably be practical within a few years, but the latency of encoding and decoding a laser signal and pushing it over several meters is going to be a killer for computational applications. It will be great for USBX, and for high end networking it will challenge Infiniband (which currently tops out at around 300Gb). Infiniband is already used for networking high-performance computational clusters, but nobody is using it for the CPU to memory bus because of the high latency. Even with high bandwidth, computation still has to be carried out on the data, and so it still makes sense to put the data and processor as close together as possible.
In the last decade there were many research papers proposing that co-processors would be placed on DRAM cards, or Embedded DRAM would allow CPU and processors to be fabricated on a single die (e.g. 1, 2). But if you have a processor and DRAM connected to similar units via an optical interconnnect, guess what - the architecture begins to look awfully similar to a regular network with optical ethernet. So, it looks likely that this will be just another incremental improvement in architecture rather than the radical shift that TFA envisions.
Every aspect of manufacturing and industry is regulated in the Western world. The factories that manufacturing solar cells are also regulated. Regulation is a cost of doing business. The BP spill should remind everyone of what happens when regulation fails.
"green" subsidies for solar
The study authors already thought of that - from TFA: "While the study includes subsidies for both solar and nuclear power, it estimates that if subsidies were removed from solar power, the crossover point would be delayed by a maximum of nine years."
"politically correct" as opposed to "environmentally correct" disposal of waste
Do you have any evidence that this occurs? Storage and disposal of nuclear waste has real costs - even nuclear industry scientists acknowledge that disposing of the UK's nuclear waste stockpile will cost £85 billion. Cleaning up decommissioned sites is costing £72 billion Who do you think pays for this - the nuclear industry, or the tax payer? Why are taxpayers subsidising disposal costs for new-build plants? The nuclear industry benefits enormously from the taxpayer.
A big criticism of Julian Assange is his constant courting of the media
Seasoned intelligence analysts have warned that Assange may be arrested or "disappeared" due to the leaked information. His best defence against this is to be very visible. Courting the media also helps to further the mission of Wikileaks and Assange's aims of "just reform". Why, exactly, is talking to the press a problem, when your aim is to leak information and get the attention of said press?
Be cautious of stories that try to smear Assange, for they may well not be true. The Guardian said: "Since the release of the Apache helicopter video, there has been some evidence of low-level attempts to smear Wikileaks. Online stories accuse Assange of spending Wikileaks money on expensive hotels (at a follow-up meeting in Stockholm, he slept on an office floor); of selling data to mainstream media (the subject of money was never mentioned); or charging for media interviews (also never mentioned)."
his past, which is hardly whiter than white given all the suspected hacking he has done... Assange isn't angel or particularly 'moral'
Having once been a hacker does not make one immoral. I'm reminded of this quote:"We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals."
The only thing which seperates him from older, more seasoned leaking website owners is that he is talented at courting PR and media
Except that Wikileaks was famous before Assange became famous, or to say it another way - Assange is famous because of Wikileaks; Wikileaks is not famous because of Assange. At the end of the day, Wikileaks can only leak material that is in turn leaked to them. If the only thing that they offered were better PR, why did initial leakers choose to leak via Wikileaks, rather than some other web site? And if they do indeed offer better PR, and you believe some information you have is so important to the public that it should be leaked, then surely good PR is exactly what you want?
Hans Blix admitted several times in the leadup to the war that Saddam was in violation of UN Resolutions which called for military enforcement.
Except that the relevant Resolution - United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441 - did not call for military enforcement. In fact, it was made quite clear at the time that the resolution did not authorise war; U.S. ambassador John Negroponte said: "This resolution contains no "hidden triggers" and no "automaticity" with respect to the use of force. If there is a further Iraqi breach, reported to the Council by UNMOVIC, the IAEA or a Member State, the matter will return to the Council for discussions as required in paragraph 12." The UK ambassador similarly stated "There is no "automaticity" in this resolution. If there is a further Iraqi breach of its disarmament obligations, the matter will return to the Council for discussion".
Most people in the world outside of United States understand to STOP when a group of soilders with guns standing by the side of the road.
Not really - there are many scenarios in other countries where a group of soldiers by the roadside would consider it very suspicious that a car slow down or stop near them.
Civilians in cars do not want to be shot and killed, especially when they have their families with them. And yet, this exact situation occurred thousands of times in Iraq. Something was clearly going very wrong. "Blame the victim" is not a good answer - you would not accept military/police at a roadblock in the United States shooting and killing thousands of unarmed civilians who posed no threat, so why should the same actions be acceptable in another country?
"We really ask a lot of our young service people out on the checkpoints because there's danger, they're asked to make very rapid decisions in often very unclear situations. However, to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I've been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it" - General McChrystal. Does it sound reasonable to shoot hundreds of people, sometimes killing whole families, in response to a low-level threat of carbombing?
I know giant STOP signs in their native language with army men pointing guns at you are far too ambiguous.
They are when 26% of the population can't read or write...
"We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat... We really ask a lot of our young service people out on the checkpoints because there's danger, they're asked to make very rapid decisions in often very unclear situations. However, to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I've been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it." - General McChrystal (transcript)
wiretapping legislation specifically forbids monitoring of telephone communications except in specific circumstances
The circumstances are more specific than most people think. Basically, unless you are a police force carrying out a criminal investigation, then you are on very shaky legal ground when intercepting communications. From The laws relating to monitoring your employees:
An employer who controls the system will be open to a civil action from either party to the communication if it intercepts communications without either:
* reasonable belief that both parties to the communication consent to the interception; or
* lawful authority
The point that a lot of companies miss is that, although an employee may have signed a contract, both parties to the communication must consent to the interception. For general web browsing - given that the visited web site (Google etc.) has not consented to the intercept, then the intercept is illegal. This can not be overridden by a contract of employment, except in the situation where both communicating parties are employees of the company and have signed such a contract. What makes this even more interesting is that filtering companies like Bluecoat and Smoothwall sell products that do SSL based interception. With SSL, there is a clear expectation from both communicating parties that the communication is going to be private, and yet the intercept is carried out when only one party has even potentially been notified that it may occur. This is a lawsuit waiting to happen, and I'm surprised that nobody has brought the issue to court yet.
Don't mess with porn, it's the only thing keeping some people sane.
Pornography is regulated everywhere in the world; the lawmakers of various nations have mostly decided that bestiality, child porn, etc. are not to be allowed. In addition to the laws covering the actual pornographic content, there are laws regulating who you may sell pornography to, where, at what times, and under what circumstances.
So, the question is not "regulation?" but "how much regulation?".
DAB has terrible audio quality, terrible error correction, and pretty bad reception compared to FM.
And compact discs have terrible audio quality, terrible error correction compared to vinyl...
The rest of the world is dumping or not implementing DAB and implementing DAB+ instead.
The BBC began broadcasting DAB in 1995. DAB+ wasn't released until 2007. Maybe everyone everywhere is making a mistake, and we should be holding out for DAB++ in 2022?
The German Aerospace Center deal with the scientific utilization.
Yes, it appears that the dataset is available under license to select individuals at university type establishments, after applying for permission, telling them what your research project is, and paying a license fee. You will have no right to reproduce the data, etc. etc. Will an individual unconnected with a research institute be allowed to use the data? Will OpenStreetMap be allowed to use the data? Can the dataset be reproduced and distributed alongside open source GIS software?
Unfortunately, despite being partly publically funded by the German taxpayer, it appears the complete dataset will be considered proprietary for the commercial exploitation of Infoterra GmbH.
When any doctor can be sued for not detecting a disease
Would you prefer that a doctor, who fails to detect a disease because he is grossly incompetent and/or misrepresents his skills, be protected from being sued? What is the alternative - criminal charges?
Solar energy that. It's all fantasy dreamed up by hippies.
High efficiency cheap plastic solar cells covering an area of about 230sq km would power the whole Earth. The technology is in the research phase now, and is expected to be rapidly commercialised. 230sq km of plastic is easily achievable - the Great Pacific Garbage Patch covers an area of 700,000 sq km to 15,000,000 sq km, and that was made by accident.
You are forgetting Saudi Arabia, made an incredibly wealthy country by any standard
What about the income of the average Saudi citizen? What is the distribution of incomes across all of society? Unequal distribution of wealth is a known driver of social unrest.
NY Times: "While poor Saudis line up for hours to obtain water in Jidda, others are able to take advantage of America's new-found disdain for gas-guzzling four-wheel-drives by snapping up imported cars."
American Chronicle"Currently, almost all of the oil wealth that flows into Saudi Arabia goes directly into the hands of the royal family. What that means is, roughly 5000 people control all of the money in the country leaving the other 20,850,000 living anywhere between lower middle class and abject poverty. "
Regardless, I would argue that Saudi Arabia is in fact getting more open - there are almost 8 million internet users. Even behind an Internet filter, the average citizen is getting access to more information than they did 10 years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Iran speaks of wiping out a nation.
Mistranslation:
'the statement "wiped off the map" was never made and that Ahmadinejad did not refer to the nation or land mass of Israel, but to the "regime occupying Jerusalem". Norouzi translated the original Persian to English, word for word, with the result, "the Imam said this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time." Juan Cole, a University of Michigan Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History, agrees that Ahmadinejad's statement should be translated as, "the Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e eshghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad).' -
If you believe that the Iranian government wants to wipe out all the Jews, then explain Iran's proud but discreet Jews. These are Jews who have the right to settle in Israel and become Israeli citizens, but who instead choose to live in Iran: 'Imam Khomeini, recognised Jews as a religious minority that should be protected. As a result Jews have one representative in the Iranian parliament. "Imam Khomeini made a distinction between Jews and Zionists and he supported us," says Mr Hammami.
They keep threatening to wipe an entire country off the map.
Do they? Or is that just a reference to a famously disputed translation of a single speech fives years ago?
they keep passing sentences to have people stoned to death even today.
Many states in the U.S. keep passing sentences to have people executed, even today. Does it really matter what the method of execution is? Dead is still dead.
Heh, Iran and Iraq was at war for 8 years in the 1980s including chemical warfare. Saddam was no friend of Iran either, for as long as he was in power. They're both muslims like most of the Middle East but I don't think they're all that close.
The problem with that argument is that Saddam brutally oppressed the Shia. Saddams military was dominated by Sunnis. Saddam was no friend of Iran, but he was also no friend of Iraqi Shia.
"Shia Muslims were oppressed by Iraq's Baathist regime for more than 30 years and excluded from the highest ranks of power..... Under his rule, Shia opposition groups were fiercely oppressed and political and religious leaders murdered. As a result, the opposition tended to look to neighbouring Iran, which is also governed by Shia religious leaders, for support." Who are the Iraqi Shia?
I don't think it does bode well for Linux.
If you think that's bad, you should see the graph for OS X. Hell, even Android is ten times more popular.
Or maybe there is some problem with this methodology for comparing distributions?
Actually, there is a fundamental reason for that. The problem is that, at least presently, we use TTL logic that requires distinct and stable detection of on and off states. Without that, errors creep in and things go wonky after that. It's the way we have designed every bit of digital electronic gear to date.
There is a large body of research on analog VLSI and neural systems, e.g. Carver Mead's book is 20 years old now.
**IT DOES NOT MATTER** what he "leaked" or why, it just matters that he broke the law.
Some people think that he broke the law. Some people think that he didn't. What matters is whether he is charged and convicted in a court of law. He may deny that he was the source of the leak. There may be insufficient evidence for a guilty verdict. He may admit to being the source of the leak, but be able to argue that the classification of the material itself violated Executive Order 13292 (Sec 1.7) ("in no case shall information be classified in order to conceal violations of law").
There have been similar precedents of not prosecuting or convicting whistleblowers. Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, and stated that the documents "demonstrated unconstitutional behavior by a succession of presidents, the violation of their oath and the violation of the oath of every one of their subordinates". "Deepthroat" leaked the details of Watergate to the press and was never prosecuted.
Hypothetically, if Obama were ordering intelligence operatives to wiretap every American citizen, would leaking this information be a crime of treason, punishable by death? How about publishing it?
If a computer were made to emulate such behavior, it would be slow, extremely power hungry and inefficient.
There is no fundamental reason why a silicon implementation of a biological brain would have to be "slow, extremely power hungry and inefficient". At the end of the day, the neural cells within the brain obey the laws of physics. The functionality of the cells can be reduced to abstract mathematical models, which can be implemented in silicon, in wetware, or any other computational medium. These computational mediums will determine the speed and power of the system; at worst, a brain could be implemented as a collection of interconnected living cells, which is the technology that every brain on the planet currently uses. But do you really believe that this medium is the most powerful? There is no doubt that evolved, living cells are remarkably efficient, but there is also no doubt that a plane will outfly the fastest bird in the skies. Similarly, I highly doubt that biological cells, which evolved with the severe constraints of power consumption, bandwidth, noise etc. will turn out to be the most powerful implementation medium for neural models.
The human brain has an estimated power requirement of around 10-20 Watts. Could you imagine what intelligence may be possible if this constraint alone were removed? Apart from cooling issues, there is no reason why we couldn't easily provide an artificial brain with 100 times the amount of energy that the human brain can receive. This will obviously not magically enable a greater intelligence, but it does at least suggest the possibility that biological cells can be bettered.
Kurzweil -clearly- never said we'd reverse engineer the brain by 2020. He argued against exactly that (his prediction was late 2020s, shading into 2030
Trying to predict a timeline for this is futile. There are too many possibilities, or avenues of research, that could lead to some breakthrough. On the one hand we have neural-silicon interfaces appearing, high resolution scanners, and other technologies that allow observing and probing the physical structure of the brain, and on the other, the genome and cell studies will enable the instructions and interactions that construct the brain to slowly be decoded.
Myers' criticism is essentially that the brain is an emergent system, and we'll have to understand all the protein-protein interactions, functional attributes of proteins, etc. in order to actually model the brain.
Myers is right to say that decoding every single protein interaction is a difficult task, but he is completely wrong to insist that this is the only way that a functional reverse-engineered brain model could be created. To use an old analogy; his claim is like saying that it will be impossible to build an airplane until we fully understand how the genome of a bird orchestrates thousands of proteins and millions of cells into creating a three-dimensional articulated living body.
There are convincing and accurate models of single neuron dynamics. All it will take for a large step to be made in this field is for someone to figure out how these neuron models combine to form a larger coherent computational system that displays learning and adaptation properties. Unlike some other huge scientific leaps, we already have working examples in the millions of creatures that inhabit this planet. It is not such a huge step to imagine that an explanation of this emergent phenomenon could appear overnight (after all, who predicted that the Poincaré conjecture would already be solved?). It is an interesting research field, and one where a dedicated individual with a working model could change everything.
How long before every country decides that in order to allow RIM to operate they need to open up their servers?
The vast majority of countries with cell networks already have laws in place that require cell providers to enable lawful intercept of calls and messages. RIM were an anomaly because they provided no lawful intercept capability to these countries. Now, they do.. RIM devices in the USA and EU are already subject to lawful intercepts - these moves are just providing the same capability to other nations.
People who pay for dope should realize that they are funding a network of gangs and cartels that murders far more people than the more familiar flavor of terrorist does.
The problem is that this market will always exist. Asking people to stop consuming alcohol, cigarettes and other narcotics "for the common good" is like asking teenagers to practice abstinence. It goes against human nature, and will fall on deaf ears. The market is unstoppable. And when the government fails to control the market, it will instead become controlled by criminals through the methodology of violence.
Same goes for optical interconnect to memory: the flood may be Biblical when it arrives
But it won't be - the system is fundamentally limited by all of the rest of the components. A top end front-side bus can already push 80Gb; scaling that upto the 400Gbit that this optical link promises will probably be practical within a few years, but the latency of encoding and decoding a laser signal and pushing it over several meters is going to be a killer for computational applications. It will be great for USBX, and for high end networking it will challenge Infiniband (which currently tops out at around 300Gb). Infiniband is already used for networking high-performance computational clusters, but nobody is using it for the CPU to memory bus because of the high latency. Even with high bandwidth, computation still has to be carried out on the data, and so it still makes sense to put the data and processor as close together as possible.
In the last decade there were many research papers proposing that co-processors would be placed on DRAM cards, or Embedded DRAM would allow CPU and processors to be fabricated on a single die (e.g. 1, 2). But if you have a processor and DRAM connected to similar units via an optical interconnnect, guess what - the architecture begins to look awfully similar to a regular network with optical ethernet. So, it looks likely that this will be just another incremental improvement in architecture rather than the radical shift that TFA envisions.
the amount of regulation in plant creation
Every aspect of manufacturing and industry is regulated in the Western world. The factories that manufacturing solar cells are also regulated. Regulation is a cost of doing business. The BP spill should remind everyone of what happens when regulation fails.
"green" subsidies for solar
The study authors already thought of that - from TFA: "While the study includes subsidies for both solar and nuclear power, it estimates that if subsidies were removed from solar power, the crossover point would be delayed by a maximum of nine years."
"politically correct" as opposed to "environmentally correct" disposal of waste
Do you have any evidence that this occurs? Storage and disposal of nuclear waste has real costs - even nuclear industry scientists acknowledge that disposing of the UK's nuclear waste stockpile will cost £85 billion. Cleaning up decommissioned sites is costing £72 billion Who do you think pays for this - the nuclear industry, or the tax payer? Why are taxpayers subsidising disposal costs for new-build plants? The nuclear industry benefits enormously from the taxpayer.
A big criticism of Julian Assange is his constant courting of the media
Seasoned intelligence analysts have warned that Assange may be arrested or "disappeared" due to the leaked information. His best defence against this is to be very visible. Courting the media also helps to further the mission of Wikileaks and Assange's aims of "just reform". Why, exactly, is talking to the press a problem, when your aim is to leak information and get the attention of said press?
Be cautious of stories that try to smear Assange, for they may well not be true. The Guardian said: "Since the release of the Apache helicopter video, there has been some evidence of low-level attempts to smear Wikileaks. Online stories accuse Assange of spending Wikileaks money on expensive hotels (at a follow-up meeting in Stockholm, he slept on an office floor); of selling data to mainstream media (the subject of money was never mentioned); or charging for media interviews (also never mentioned)."
his past, which is hardly whiter than white given all the suspected hacking he has done... Assange isn't angel or particularly 'moral'
Having once been a hacker does not make one immoral. I'm reminded of this quote: "We explore... and you call us criminals. We seek after knowledge... and you call us criminals. We exist without skin color, without nationality, without religious bias... and you call us criminals. You build atomic bombs, you wage wars, you murder, cheat, and lie to us and try to make us believe it's for our own good, yet we're the criminals."
The only thing which seperates him from older, more seasoned leaking website owners is that he is talented at courting PR and media
Except that Wikileaks was famous before Assange became famous, or to say it another way - Assange is famous because of Wikileaks; Wikileaks is not famous because of Assange. At the end of the day, Wikileaks can only leak material that is in turn leaked to them. If the only thing that they offered were better PR, why did initial leakers choose to leak via Wikileaks, rather than some other web site? And if they do indeed offer better PR, and you believe some information you have is so important to the public that it should be leaked, then surely good PR is exactly what you want?
Hans Blix admitted several times in the leadup to the war that Saddam was in violation of UN Resolutions which called for military enforcement.
Except that the relevant Resolution - United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441 - did not call for military enforcement. In fact, it was made quite clear at the time that the resolution did not authorise war; U.S. ambassador John Negroponte said: "This resolution contains no "hidden triggers" and no "automaticity" with respect to the use of force. If there is a further Iraqi breach, reported to the Council by UNMOVIC, the IAEA or a Member State, the matter will return to the Council for discussions as required in paragraph 12." The UK ambassador similarly stated "There is no "automaticity" in this resolution. If there is a further Iraqi breach of its disarmament obligations, the matter will return to the Council for discussion".
Most people in the world outside of United States understand to STOP when a group of soilders with guns standing by the side of the road.
Not really - there are many scenarios in other countries where a group of soldiers by the roadside would consider it very suspicious that a car slow down or stop near them.
Civilians in cars do not want to be shot and killed, especially when they have their families with them. And yet, this exact situation occurred thousands of times in Iraq. Something was clearly going very wrong. "Blame the victim" is not a good answer - you would not accept military/police at a roadblock in the United States shooting and killing thousands of unarmed civilians who posed no threat, so why should the same actions be acceptable in another country?
"We really ask a lot of our young service people out on the checkpoints because there's danger, they're asked to make very rapid decisions in often very unclear situations. However, to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I've been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it" - General McChrystal. Does it sound reasonable to shoot hundreds of people, sometimes killing whole families, in response to a low-level threat of carbombing?
I know giant STOP signs in their native language with army men pointing guns at you are far too ambiguous.
They are when 26% of the population can't read or write...
"We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat... We really ask a lot of our young service people out on the checkpoints because there's danger, they're asked to make very rapid decisions in often very unclear situations. However, to my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I've been here, not a single case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it." - General McChrystal (transcript)
wiretapping legislation specifically forbids monitoring of telephone communications except in specific circumstances
The circumstances are more specific than most people think. Basically, unless you are a police force carrying out a criminal investigation, then you are on very shaky legal ground when intercepting communications. From The laws relating to monitoring your employees:
An employer who controls the system will be open to a civil action from either party to the communication if it intercepts communications without either:
* reasonable belief that both parties to the communication consent to the interception; or
* lawful authority
The point that a lot of companies miss is that, although an employee may have signed a contract, both parties to the communication must consent to the interception. For general web browsing - given that the visited web site (Google etc.) has not consented to the intercept, then the intercept is illegal. This can not be overridden by a contract of employment, except in the situation where both communicating parties are employees of the company and have signed such a contract. What makes this even more interesting is that filtering companies like Bluecoat and Smoothwall sell products that do SSL based interception. With SSL, there is a clear expectation from both communicating parties that the communication is going to be private, and yet the intercept is carried out when only one party has even potentially been notified that it may occur. This is a lawsuit waiting to happen, and I'm surprised that nobody has brought the issue to court yet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_terrorism [wikipedia.org]
An interesting article; from reading the Talk archives it appears that older revisions (like this) had much more information.
Don't mess with porn, it's the only thing keeping some people sane.
Pornography is regulated everywhere in the world; the lawmakers of various nations have mostly decided that bestiality, child porn, etc. are not to be allowed. In addition to the laws covering the actual pornographic content, there are laws regulating who you may sell pornography to, where, at what times, and under what circumstances.
So, the question is not "regulation?" but "how much regulation?".
DAB has terrible audio quality, terrible error correction, and pretty bad reception compared to FM.
And compact discs have terrible audio quality, terrible error correction compared to vinyl...
The rest of the world is dumping or not implementing DAB and implementing DAB+ instead.
The BBC began broadcasting DAB in 1995. DAB+ wasn't released until 2007. Maybe everyone everywhere is making a mistake, and we should be holding out for DAB++ in 2022?
The German Aerospace Center deal with the scientific utilization.
Yes, it appears that the dataset is available under license to select individuals at university type establishments, after applying for permission, telling them what your research project is, and paying a license fee. You will have no right to reproduce the data, etc. etc. Will an individual unconnected with a research institute be allowed to use the data? Will OpenStreetMap be allowed to use the data? Can the dataset be reproduced and distributed alongside open source GIS software?
Unfortunately, despite being partly publically funded by the German taxpayer, it appears the complete dataset will be considered proprietary for the commercial exploitation of Infoterra GmbH.
When any doctor can be sued for not detecting a disease
Would you prefer that a doctor, who fails to detect a disease because he is grossly incompetent and/or misrepresents his skills, be protected from being sued? What is the alternative - criminal charges?
Solar energy that. It's all fantasy dreamed up by hippies.
High efficiency cheap plastic solar cells covering an area of about 230sq km would power the whole Earth. The technology is in the research phase now, and is expected to be rapidly commercialised. 230sq km of plastic is easily achievable - the Great Pacific Garbage Patch covers an area of 700,000 sq km to 15,000,000 sq km, and that was made by accident.
Nuclear power is here now.
Yes, we already have a working nuclear fusion energy source.
You are forgetting Saudi Arabia, made an incredibly wealthy country by any standard
What about the income of the average Saudi citizen? What is the distribution of incomes across all of society? Unequal distribution of wealth is a known driver of social unrest.
NY Times: "While poor Saudis line up for hours to obtain water in Jidda, others are able to take advantage of America's new-found disdain for gas-guzzling four-wheel-drives by snapping up imported cars."
American Chronicle "Currently, almost all of the oil wealth that flows into Saudi Arabia goes directly into the hands of the royal family. What that means is, roughly 5000 people control all of the money in the country leaving the other 20,850,000 living anywhere between lower middle class and abject poverty. "
Regardless, I would argue that Saudi Arabia is in fact getting more open - there are almost 8 million internet users. Even behind an Internet filter, the average citizen is getting access to more information than they did 10 years ago.