What's so confusing about 'congress shall pass no law'? It shouldn't matter if any religion offends you. As long as there are no legal requirements to be one religion or another, the second amendment is upheld.
I cannot believe that having the ten commandments on public property is less acceptable, less reasonable, than burning a flag. An act which sends a message that the constitution and it's amendments are meaningless and/or vile and should be repudiated.
Flag burning spits on the first amendments, but it's protected speech, while Christmas trees are forbidden as religious expressions. What's wrong with that picture?
(BTW- I'm an atheist. )
I look at this article and consider it simply a legal reprisal for the shenanigans the ACLU pulls. Besides, it's not like the ACLE doesn't push first ammendment violations.
WHatever happened to 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...' Yet we find all sorts of laws defining what religious expressions are and are not allowed backed by the ACLU.
Re:yeah who cares about Earth?
on
Melting Europa
·
· Score: 1
Well if the radioactive space turd lands on your lawn. Don't touch it. Don't take it to school. And don't use it as a top piece for your tin foil hat.
...but the BBC has a world wide reputation for unbiased news reporting.
I think that much of it's audience has figured out by now that BBC News and objectivity were divorced some time ago. The Royal Navy, at the insistence of the enlisted, switched from BBC to SkyNews aboard ship because of the BBC's blatant bias. Their ability to ignore pertinetnn facts about stories and effectively cover only a single angle at a time has been well documented elsewhere.
Time to realize that no, they aren't as pure as the driven snow.
Get your tinfoil party hat at the door
on
The Future of NASA
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· Score: 1
Actually, the original is pretty much a tinfoil hat post.
Normally I would say that naivete and paranoia are mutually exclusive, but this one proves me wrong.
- space was militarized the first time a camera went into orbit ( check into the history of WWI air warfare if you don't understand the connection )
- plans to put honest to god weapons in space are as old as flight. The Germans worked on plans for a space bomber at one point.
- The US isn't pushing the issue any harder than anyone else. The Chinese and Russians both have put considerable effort into anti-satellite technology
- The article actually says that the military is/unlikely/ to have much influence in the Bush Moon/Mars program
- Bush isn't rushing to conquer space for some kind of political joy ride. He pushed the issue, even specified that it the program should be multi-national, over his political advisors advice. ( RTFA if you think I'm making that up. )
- I read about the decision to dump Hubble (RIP) some months ago. Given the haphazard directions NASA has taken the past decade, it came as no great shock. A number of great programs were axed in favor of whatever the middle manager of the day felt inclined to do. ( Look at the history of the space shuttle and it's many supposed replacement programs.)
NASA has been underfunded at least since Freedom was scrapped in favor of the ISS ( since Apollo if you ask me ). People at NASA have been trying to kill the ISS since before the first module went up, whick makes dumping Hubble a natural part of that fucked up bureacracy, certainly not likely to be a result of any new or sudden shifting of priorities. Besides, in NASA, given how often priorities change, the only way you could tell was by the timing of the announcements.
Just because you don't like or agree with Bush is no reason to ascribe/everything/ that he touches as some sort of military power play. The fact is, Bush is really upsetting his core base by suggesting the program, and it's not likely to garner him or any successor any usable recognition, so please don't throw partisan politics into the one thing you say you want peaceful: space.
If you really think it's a bad idea for the US to take the lead in space exploration, please explain how it would be so much better to let the CHinese establish an unchallenged presence. In a decade we might get to watch a reenactment of Tiennamen Square on the moon.
Yeah, if you listened to the demagogues on national and international tv talking about how americans were so oppressed by the new Gestapo, you'd wonder why these thigns keep coming out for public scrutiny.
Perhaps, just perhaps, there is no Gestapo? Maybe the Constituion hasn't been burned in a secret Satanic ritual by John Ashcroft?
Heh. Actually, the local paper descirbed the academies as a project designed by BMGF. If I'm wrong, then I must have missed the Jayson Blair byline.
As for why Mac, if they're cheaper, that means less assistance needed to keep them running, total cost of ownership is lower. For me, as a taxpayer, I think that is the thing to keep in mind. Less money on computers means more money for teachers and field trips.
I'm not defensive when coke, pepsi, Apple, Boeing, Intel, etc begin to get involved for each of the reasons I clarified before.
The basic premise, is that I don't think BMGF is in this soley for the benefit of the community ( big shock) but I believe it is actucally dangerous to associate with such a manipulative group in such a naive fashion.
I'm not against money, I'm against strings. I'm against outside meddlers. If I had wanted BMGF to run my schools, I would have elected Bill and Melinda to the school board myself.
Yeah, okay, it's neat that Bill saves on taxes by giving directly to school districts. However, this is not like Coke or Pepsi or Apple for a few reasons.
Apple never wielded monopolistic power ( As an aside, since Mac networks are cheaper to support, wouldn't it be a much better investment to use them instead in a school function? )
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is building the school and determining how schools should function. There are twelve schools accordng to my local paper ( Seattle Times, story is archived out of reach ) that the BMGF have had restructured into three mini-schools each, as an experiment. ( Which is nice, but why is BMGF pushing this instead of local government? ) So I doubt how much 'input' the local school board has on the development of the new high school.
The BMGF gives money with many many strings attached ( My local hs, one of the recpipents of BMGF money, turned down $30k in computer equipment this year in order to avoid accepting any non-M$ equipment, despite the concurrent existence of a mac network on campus. ) and frequently results in a BSA audit. Several Portland, OR districts were audited within months of recieving BMGF grants, causing them to spend much of those grants against the BSA fines.
Whether our children grow up caring for either Coke or Pepsi is really immaterial. Whether our children grow up in an enviroment defined by the BSA, RIAA, DRM and Big Borther or not seems a more significant issue than whether our kids experience the Pepsi challenge in the halls.
With these things in mind, I am incredibly skeptical of any initiative associated with the BMGF. I would counsel anyone to avoid dealing with the BMGF because they don't appear to be looking out for either our children or our regional budgets ( boiling down to the same thing in this case ).
If the BMGF or M$ want to create schools for our kids, I think that's great. But call them as they are, M$ academies. Keep them private but allow vouchers to pay for tuition. That way everyone has an opportunity to decide if their children should go or not.
I didn't see anything in the report that tied CO2 to the shrinking ice cap. He just claimed CO2 was the culprit because he had discovered the ice cap getting smaller. That's poor reporting and even worse science.
I have to wonder, what about all the studies showing that the ice cap is getting thicker?
Check out an article on Greenland and on the ice pack itself. There are others about the antarctic ice thickening too.
Can't we, the/. community, perform a basic reality check before spreading chicken little stories? ( I also found it funny/sad that google is prejudiced against the idea that the pole ice is thickening. )
Notice that the proposal Hatch is talking about is merely a rider onto a bill Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Jon Kyl (R-AZ) has already submitted that would actually put into law some of possible consequences of USA-Patriot Act that bother civil libertarians.
If Hatch's clause were added as an ammendment to Schumer's bill, that would make Schumer's bill more likely to crash and burn. If that's what you want, root Hatch on and tell your senator to dump Schumer's bill.
When griping about the USA-Patriot act, please remember that it was a bipartisan effort, half of the law was written by Patrick Leahy (D-VT).
Why are self-promoting civil libertarians so anxious about infringements against the first ammendment or the fourth, but never the second?
What part of 'science' includes a title like 'Drug Making Genes Added To Corn Jump To Soya' when referring to a story about a logistical mistake?
Here we have one crop, untested and whose long-term effects have never been fully studied, growing accidentially side-by-side with seed currently undergoing testing of the crop's potential long term effects.
It's these kinds of tactics that hide the weak underpinnings of the anti-GM rabble-rousing, which is not to be confused with informed debate. Posting this story in this fashion is as ethically valid as fighting corporatism by smashing a row of small shops. Such attempts to raise people's awareness of the problems undermines the very attempt to educate by clouding the issue with baseless accusations.
I saw this product at the Mac Business Expo here in Seattle last week. It looked pretty slick. It scans the page, runs it through OCR, and inserts the text right into whatever app you have open. It will do one line at a time or multiple lines. It obviously does not do images, but if you want text, I recommend it. I would have bought it, but I'm in school instead of working these days. Check out:
www.irisusa.com I saw the demonstration (manual and interactive, not scripted) running under OSX.
There comes a point where talk is counterproductive. Sanctions only do so much. Containing Yugoslavia was the preferred method for Western Europe to manage the Balkans. The result was a free hand for Milosovic to purge and pillage throughout the region. He refused to comply with the simplist UN requests, and when the UN decided to let its troops become hostages, the US prodded NATO to get involved before the surrounding nations did become drawn into a larger war.
Talking to Saddam Hussein did nothing for the Kuwaitis who were being extinguished, whose lives were being erased as Iraqi forced destroyed any records that might have contradicted the story they gave the world.
In the end, it was our talking and economic sanctions, not our military intervention, that brought the Japanese to bomb Pearl Harbor.
Discussion and compromise did nothing for the Jews in Germany, Poland, or Chechoslovakia. Debate did not shield the Chinese of Shanghai or the vitims of the Soviet gulags.
I suggest that a closer review of history will bear out the suggestion that military might is the only sure way to stop the mass death of innocents when ambitous tyrants such as Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden challenge domestic tranquility at home and abroad. Easing the US stance towards Iraq and al-Qaida will only provide them more opprotunites to cause harm.
I'm not sure which is the bigger marketing ploy, the pro- or con- side of the argument. Rings have been around longer than talking movies, and De Beers owns nearly the entire diamond market.
Reading about Conflict Diamonds, I find no great connection between buying an engagement ring and endangering kids in Africa. It sounds a lot like the "Eat your food, there are starving kids in Africa" argument. The first half of the sentence has nothing to do with the latter.
There is a greater liklihood, I think, that any given geek will work in a Mac-centric shop than that the purchase of their wife's ring will have supported an African terrorist group.
Yes, I feel for the people who suffer in Africa. What no convienient activism website or post offers, is a hard link between my wife's hand to one lost by a child in Africa. I would suggest, in absence of this evidence and in conjunction with verifiable fact that most diamonds on the retail market here in the US comes from de Beers, that the issue of the conflict diamonds in fact has little bearing on what choice I make for a ring.
I would hope that an educated group such as this would use the same 'assume nothing' approach to an issue as emotionally bound as this as it does to say, a Microsoft security alert.
How about this, where have you done research that says no research has been done? Have you heard of, say, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, or mayhaps the Environmental Protection Agency (to list only Federal groups, there are other industiry, scientific and advocacy groups looking in this issue, you'd be surprised) which requires, and perfoms, tests on any really new product before allowing onto the market.
http://www.gao.gov/docdblite/summary.php?recflag =& accno=A03410&rptno=GAO-02-566 http://www.cdc.gov/ nceh/ehhe/Cry9cReport/default.h tm http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~lrd/hhbioen2.html
There is some light reading if you intend to do any research.
Oh, and if you had read the original article, you might have notices that Mugabe's excuse not to sell to Europe, is because Europe's agro-import barriers are set by Luddites, not by Monsanto's lawyers.
It's clear you have strong feelings, but few facts on the issue of GE foods. It's not a matter of 'overclocking' the grain. It's about making food that's healthier for both people and the environment because you don't need pesticides. It's about making it cheaper and easier for farmers to grow food because they don't have to buy or use pesticides. It's also about getting more nutrients in the food per acre than you used to. For Monsanto, its about the buck, for the rest of us, its about feeding EVERYONE, a win win situation.
The reason US farmers are so into GE foods is because they're educated. The USGovernment requires farmers be chemists, dieticians, and ecologists. In europe, one might think all you have to be is ignorant.
If you're worried about the spread of improved corn genes, then why are you worried about 'terminator' seeds, you'd think you would be happy that Monsanto and others found a way to prevent your fears form coming true.
Unmodifyed plants who through some bizzare twist of science took on the traits of the terminator seed crop, would be replaced either by *gasp* new planting, or *gasp* its neighbor in normal biological fashion.
If you want me to believe GMO food is bad, fine. Just show me empirical data.
Is it contamination when you cross two roses to create a pretty rose that needs less water?
If not, why is anyone afraid of GM corn? What difference does it make if they cross-pollinate? If we allow lawyers on either side of the debate to define our perceptions of the truth, who then do we blame when children starve?
If GM corn was found to help against AIDS, would people still be complaining?
Are you saying that Europeans cannot afford to educate their populace? Remember, Mugabe's primary excuse is/not/ legalities, it's European ignorance. Because Europeans chose by their emotions what the truth is about GM food and not fact (stamping out any government research is not the way to find the truth), Mugabe has an excuse to starve his people and deflect blame for his policies.
Mugabe has spent the last several years kicking the most productive farmers off of their lands and handing it to people with little if any experience in agriculture. Should we be surprised tha tthe man who just imprisoned his political opponents refuses to admit his mistakes?
First off, no one seems to know or care much about a) the ariticle in question, or b) jamming methods.
The article pointed out that the RCMP are not allowed to block either cell phones or commerical radio broadcasts. (More likely to get complaints from interrupting NPR than interrupting the notoriously unreliable cell-phone network.)
As for responsiblility, how about the responsiblility the organizers of past protests should assume for forcing these measures onto the police. If, to maintain some kind of control over the situation, the RCMP and others need to block radio, tv, cell, or other freqs, all power to them. If someone dies because of that, the responsiblity falls on the anarchic fools who seek to bring down the very institutions that give them their voice.
Look at Seattle, look at Genoa, and Switzerland before that. Shutting down business, closing roads, vandalism, fires, riots. THESE things are far more of a danger to the regular people than interrupted ham or family band communications.
I have heard no attempt to apologize to the bystanders in these useless confrontations. So I seriously doubt there is anyone sensible, or responsible enough among the 'valiant', 'couragous' (more accurately, vagrant) protesters to assume responsibility.
I also find it cute, that this indignation stems from the overblown egos of the whiner groups. Perhaps, just/perhaps/, the move by the RCMP has/something/ to do with 9-11, and the fact that there are hundreds of people out there willing to sacrifice themselves to take out tens of thousands of innocents.
Will you compainers out there please step back and think about this more clearly?
Slashdot Mirror
What's so confusing about 'congress shall pass no law'? It shouldn't matter if any religion offends you. As long as there are no legal requirements to be one religion or another, the second amendment is upheld. I cannot believe that having the ten commandments on public property is less acceptable, less reasonable, than burning a flag. An act which sends a message that the constitution and it's amendments are meaningless and/or vile and should be repudiated. Flag burning spits on the first amendments, but it's protected speech, while Christmas trees are forbidden as religious expressions. What's wrong with that picture? (BTW- I'm an atheist. )
I look at this article and consider it simply a legal reprisal for the shenanigans the ACLU pulls. Besides, it's not like the ACLE doesn't push first ammendment violations. WHatever happened to 'Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion...' Yet we find all sorts of laws defining what religious expressions are and are not allowed backed by the ACLU.
Well if the radioactive space turd lands on your lawn. Don't touch it. Don't take it to school. And don't use it as a top piece for your tin foil hat.
I think that much of it's audience has figured out by now that BBC News and objectivity were divorced some time ago. The Royal Navy, at the insistence of the enlisted, switched from BBC to SkyNews aboard ship because of the BBC's blatant bias. Their ability to ignore pertinetnn facts about stories and effectively cover only a single angle at a time has been well documented elsewhere.
Time to realize that no, they aren't as pure as the driven snow.
Normally I would say that naivete and paranoia are mutually exclusive, but this one proves me wrong.
- space was militarized the first time a camera went into orbit ( check into the history of WWI air warfare if you don't understand the connection )
- plans to put honest to god weapons in space are as old as flight. The Germans worked on plans for a space bomber at one point.
- The US isn't pushing the issue any harder than anyone else. The Chinese and Russians both have put considerable effort into anti-satellite technology
- The article actually says that the military is
- Bush isn't rushing to conquer space for some kind of political joy ride. He pushed the issue, even specified that it the program should be multi-national, over his political advisors advice. ( RTFA if you think I'm making that up. )
- I read about the decision to dump Hubble (RIP) some months ago. Given the haphazard directions NASA has taken the past decade, it came as no great shock. A number of great programs were axed in favor of whatever the middle manager of the day felt inclined to do. ( Look at the history of the space shuttle and it's many supposed replacement programs.)
NASA has been underfunded at least since Freedom was scrapped in favor of the ISS ( since Apollo if you ask me ). People at NASA have been trying to kill the ISS since before the first module went up, whick makes dumping Hubble a natural part of that fucked up bureacracy, certainly not likely to be a result of any new or sudden shifting of priorities. Besides, in NASA, given how often priorities change, the only way you could tell was by the timing of the announcements.
Just because you don't like or agree with Bush is no reason to ascribe /everything/ that he touches as some sort of military power play. The fact is, Bush is really upsetting his core base by suggesting the program, and it's not likely to garner him or any successor any usable recognition, so please don't throw partisan politics into the one thing you say you want peaceful: space.
If you really think it's a bad idea for the US to take the lead in space exploration, please explain how it would be so much better to let the CHinese establish an unchallenged presence. In a decade we might get to watch a reenactment of Tiennamen Square on the moon.
Thats my 2 Euros...
Yeah, if you listened to the demagogues on national and international tv talking about how americans were so oppressed by the new Gestapo, you'd wonder why these thigns keep coming out for public scrutiny. Perhaps, just perhaps, there is no Gestapo? Maybe the Constituion hasn't been burned in a secret Satanic ritual by John Ashcroft?
It amuses me that a Clinton aid picks an alcoholic womanizer as a model citizen scientist.
Heh. Actually, the local paper descirbed the academies as a project designed by BMGF. If I'm wrong, then I must have missed the Jayson Blair byline.
As for why Mac, if they're cheaper, that means less assistance needed to keep them running, total cost of ownership is lower. For me, as a taxpayer, I think that is the thing to keep in mind. Less money on computers means more money for teachers and field trips.
I'm not defensive when coke, pepsi, Apple, Boeing, Intel, etc begin to get involved for each of the reasons I clarified before.
The basic premise, is that I don't think BMGF is in this soley for the benefit of the community ( big shock) but I believe it is actucally dangerous to associate with such a manipulative group in such a naive fashion.
I'm not against money, I'm against strings. I'm against outside meddlers. If I had wanted BMGF to run my schools, I would have elected Bill and Melinda to the school board myself.
With these things in mind, I am incredibly skeptical of any initiative associated with the BMGF. I would counsel anyone to avoid dealing with the BMGF because they don't appear to be looking out for either our children or our regional budgets ( boiling down to the same thing in this case ).
If the BMGF or M$ want to create schools for our kids, I think that's great. But call them as they are, M$ academies. Keep them private but allow vouchers to pay for tuition. That way everyone has an opportunity to decide if their children should go or not.
I have to wonder, what about all the studies showing that the ice cap is getting thicker?
Check out an article on Greenland and on the ice pack itself. There are others about the antarctic ice thickening too. Can't we, the /. community, perform a basic reality check before spreading chicken little stories? ( I also found it funny/sad that google is prejudiced against the idea that the pole ice is thickening. )
If Hatch's clause were added as an ammendment to Schumer's bill, that would make Schumer's bill more likely to crash and burn. If that's what you want, root Hatch on and tell your senator to dump Schumer's bill.
When griping about the USA-Patriot act, please remember that it was a bipartisan effort, half of the law was written by Patrick Leahy (D-VT).
Why are self-promoting civil libertarians so anxious about infringements against the first ammendment or the fourth, but never the second?
What part of 'science' includes a title like 'Drug Making Genes Added To Corn Jump To Soya' when referring to a story about a logistical mistake?
Here we have one crop, untested and whose long-term effects have never been fully studied, growing accidentially side-by-side with seed currently undergoing testing of the crop's potential long term effects.
It's these kinds of tactics that hide the weak underpinnings of the anti-GM rabble-rousing, which is not to be confused with informed debate. Posting this story in this fashion is as ethically valid as fighting corporatism by smashing a row of small shops. Such attempts to raise people's awareness of the problems undermines the very attempt to educate by clouding the issue with baseless accusations.
I saw this product at the Mac Business Expo here in Seattle last week. It looked pretty slick. It scans the page, runs it through OCR, and inserts the text right into whatever app you have open. It will do one line at a time or multiple lines. It obviously does not do images, but if you want text, I recommend it. I would have bought it, but I'm in school instead of working these days. Check out: www.irisusa.com I saw the demonstration (manual and interactive, not scripted) running under OSX.
There comes a point where talk is counterproductive. Sanctions only do so much. Containing Yugoslavia was the preferred method for Western Europe to manage the Balkans. The result was a free hand for Milosovic to purge and pillage throughout the region. He refused to comply with the simplist UN requests, and when the UN decided to let its troops become hostages, the US prodded NATO to get involved before the surrounding nations did become drawn into a larger war.
Talking to Saddam Hussein did nothing for the Kuwaitis who were being extinguished, whose lives were being erased as Iraqi forced destroyed any records that might have contradicted the story they gave the world.
In the end, it was our talking and economic sanctions, not our military intervention, that brought the Japanese to bomb Pearl Harbor.
Discussion and compromise did nothing for the Jews in Germany, Poland, or Chechoslovakia. Debate did not shield the Chinese of Shanghai or the vitims of the Soviet gulags.
I suggest that a closer review of history will bear out the suggestion that military might is the only sure way to stop the mass death of innocents when ambitous tyrants such as Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden challenge domestic tranquility at home and abroad. Easing the US stance towards Iraq and al-Qaida will only provide them more opprotunites to cause harm.
I'm not sure which is the bigger marketing ploy, the pro- or con- side of the argument. Rings have been around longer than talking movies, and De Beers owns nearly the entire diamond market.
Reading about Conflict Diamonds, I find no great connection between buying an engagement ring and endangering kids in Africa. It sounds a lot like the "Eat your food, there are starving kids in Africa" argument. The first half of the sentence has nothing to do with the latter.
There is a greater liklihood, I think, that any given geek will work in a Mac-centric shop than that the purchase of their wife's ring will have supported an African terrorist group.
Yes, I feel for the people who suffer in Africa. What no convienient activism website or post offers, is a hard link between my wife's hand to one lost by a child in Africa. I would suggest, in absence of this evidence and in conjunction with verifiable fact that most diamonds on the retail market here in the US comes from de Beers, that the issue of the conflict diamonds in fact has little bearing on what choice I make for a ring.
I would hope that an educated group such as this would use the same 'assume nothing' approach to an issue as emotionally bound as this as it does to say, a Microsoft security alert.
How about this, where have you done research that says no research has been done? Have you heard of, say, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control, or mayhaps the Environmental Protection Agency (to list only Federal groups, there are other industiry, scientific and advocacy groups looking in this issue, you'd be surprised) which requires, and perfoms, tests on any really new product before allowing onto the market.
g =& accno=A03410&rptno=GAO-02-566/ nceh/ehhe/Cry9cReport/default.h tm
http://www.gao.gov/docdblite/summary.php?recfla
http://www.cdc.gov
http://www.cfsan.fda.gov/~lrd/hhbioen2.html
There is some light reading if you intend to do any research.
Oh, and if you had read the original article, you might have notices that Mugabe's excuse not to sell to Europe, is because Europe's agro-import barriers are set by Luddites, not by Monsanto's lawyers.
It's clear you have strong feelings, but few facts on the issue of GE foods. It's not a matter of 'overclocking' the grain. It's about making food that's healthier for both people and the environment because you don't need pesticides. It's about making it cheaper and easier for farmers to grow food because they don't have to buy or use pesticides. It's also about getting more nutrients in the food per acre than you used to. For Monsanto, its about the buck, for the rest of us, its about feeding EVERYONE, a win win situation.
The reason US farmers are so into GE foods is because they're educated. The USGovernment requires farmers be chemists, dieticians, and ecologists. In europe, one might think all you have to be is ignorant.
If you're worried about the spread of improved corn genes, then why are you worried about 'terminator' seeds, you'd think you would be happy that Monsanto and others found a way to prevent your fears form coming true.
Unmodifyed plants who through some bizzare twist of science took on the traits of the terminator seed crop, would be replaced either by *gasp* new planting, or *gasp* its neighbor in normal biological fashion.
If you want me to believe GMO food is bad, fine. Just show me empirical data.
Is it contamination when you cross two roses to create a pretty rose that needs less water?
If not, why is anyone afraid of GM corn? What difference does it make if they cross-pollinate? If we allow lawyers on either side of the debate to define our perceptions of the truth, who then do we blame when children starve?
If GM corn was found to help against AIDS, would people still be complaining?
Are you saying that Europeans cannot afford to educate their populace? Remember, Mugabe's primary excuse is /not/ legalities, it's European ignorance. Because Europeans chose by their emotions what the truth is about GM food and not fact (stamping out any government research is not the way to find the truth), Mugabe has an excuse to starve his people and deflect blame for his policies.
Mugabe has spent the last several years kicking the most productive farmers off of their lands and handing it to people with little if any experience in agriculture. Should we be surprised tha tthe man who just imprisoned his political opponents refuses to admit his mistakes?
First off, no one seems to know or care much about a) the ariticle in question, or b) jamming methods. /perhaps/, the move by the RCMP has /something/ to do with 9-11, and the fact that there are hundreds of people out there willing to sacrifice themselves to take out tens of thousands of innocents.
The article pointed out that the RCMP are not allowed to block either cell phones or commerical radio broadcasts. (More likely to get complaints from interrupting NPR than interrupting the notoriously unreliable cell-phone network.)
As for responsiblility, how about the responsiblility the organizers of past protests should assume for forcing these measures onto the police. If, to maintain some kind of control over the situation, the RCMP and others need to block radio, tv, cell, or other freqs, all power to them. If someone dies because of that, the responsiblity falls on the anarchic fools who seek to bring down the very institutions that give them their voice.
Look at Seattle, look at Genoa, and Switzerland before that. Shutting down business, closing roads, vandalism, fires, riots. THESE things are far more of a danger to the regular people than interrupted ham or family band communications.
I have heard no attempt to apologize to the bystanders in these useless confrontations. So I seriously doubt there is anyone sensible, or responsible enough among the 'valiant', 'couragous' (more accurately, vagrant) protesters to assume responsibility.
I also find it cute, that this indignation stems from the overblown egos of the whiner groups. Perhaps, just
Will you compainers out there please step back and think about this more clearly?