There are slashdotters who claim that every single American citizen who has ever worn a uniform is a baby killer, serving the industrial war machine. If you actually read through the whole thing, you'll quickly see that I'm no demagogue defending either politicians, or the military industry. I will defend the troops, though - unless and until the troops actually violate law. Then, I'll support the court martial proceedings which send those rogue soldiers to prison, or to their graves.
Demagogue? I don't think so - you just go read, and judge for yourself.
True, we aided the Afghan's during the Soviet invasion. But, no one is supplying the Taliban with stingers and crap today, and they still manage to hand our asses to us on a platter from time to time. The Taliban is making a comeback.
As I said, a punitive expedition to punish them for supporting Al Queda would have had us in, the Taliban bloodied, and the population upset, and our troops safely at home, all within a year. Actually, six months should have been long enough. The population would have lost faith in that Taliban, and created new parties and powers when we withdrew. The only interest we should have shown the world as we withdrew, was to warn the OTHER local powers that we wouldn't tolerate any of them invading after we left.
See, that shit scares me. You're part of a hive mentality. You've been borged. You have implants, I'm sure, telling you what the Queen Liberal wants you to think. GAAAHHHHH!!!!
I'll help you. Electricity, and air conditioning, private shelters complete with running water and private baths, enough food that they can put 100 pounds or more of lard on their skanky asses, television, - I could go on.
So long as there is a welfare system for people who are to lazy to work, the recipients will sponge up all the available resources. Which welfare system are you aware of, that has a surplus, or has turned down allocations from Congress or state governments, because the recipients just didn't spend all the money?
And, there is no need to put my "the worthless" into quotations. There are plenty of people living on welfare who have never contributed ANYTHING to society - other than the next generation of welfare recipients.
Well - my kids are all in their teens and twenties. If they can't feed THEMSELVES by now, they never will. Unlike city dwellers, we have acreage, we have livestock and seed available, we have water, we even have wildlife. If they can't feed themselves, then my kids will join the rest of the worthless bastards, as statistics on Darwin's charts.
Needless to say, I'm not a collectivist, of any kind. I'm not much into society working towards a common good, especially when 1/2 or more of society are worthless shits anyway. That business of society working towards a common good mostly means that hard working people are supporting lazy asses, no matter how you slice that money redistribution thing.
Dude, I'm unpopular with a lot of slashdotters for defending the troops. But, really, Iraq wasn't a "gotta fight" war. Afghanistan was, but we've done it all wrong. We should have just done a punitive expedition into Afghanistan, punished the Taliban for harboring Al Queda, then got the hell out. But, nooooo, we have to play some silly game of "nation building".
Aren't we the morons? Those Afghanis have been right there, in the same place, for thousands of years, defying any and all comers - most recently the Soviet. When the invaders go home, those Afghanis just go back to growing poppies, herding goats, and whatever else they do in those hills of theirs.
Gotta fight wars. Crap, I could have fought that Afghan war for less than pennies on the dollar, and avoided the Iraq war altogether.
I wanna go too. And, we're taking our air with us. And, maybe some of yours too. It's not like you'll need it when the sky does fall.
Whether it's some new disease, a catastrophic meteorite hit, volcanic and tectonic action - SOMETHING will bring the population explosion of the past 200 years to an end. When people start dying off, from whatever cause, civilization will falter. We could even see another dark age, if things get bad enough.
I'd love to have my DNA firmly planted in space, where the however many times removed grandchildren won't have to suffer with the rest of humanity.
I know slashdot is a piss poor place to quote any Biblical people - but Jesus said the poor will always be with us.
I don't give a small rat's ASS what kind of Utopia mankind might build in the future, here, or in space - there will ALWAYS be poor people. There will be those with no drive, who are to lazy to feed themselves. There will be those who are just to damned stupid to earn or to save a dollar. There will be those who are just plain unlucky, and everything they ever attempt to do will go to shit. There will be those who expect government to take care of them, so they settle for a shitty life at government's expense.
If you taxed every working man, and every investor at 99%, and taxed all corporations at 99% of gross profits - you STILL wouldn't have enough money to feed and clothe and shelter the worthless to the standards that they demand.
I'm not wealthy, and I could be dirt poor real easy if the economy takes another bad dive - but I still say, "Fuck the poor!" No matter how bad the economy might get, I'll feed myself, and my family. Those who can't or won't do the same can and should become statistics on one of Darwin's charts.
Repeat the feat? That would just be another waste. If we go back to the mooon at all (and I hope we do) I want to see a BASE STATION built, with personnel stationed there permanently. Hydroponics, mining, extraction of atmospheric gases, as well as water - you know, built a habitat for a few thousand people, then grow it to a few million people.
But, what I REALLY want to see, are manned missions to the Mars and the various moons that might be made habitable with a minimal effort. (Minimal effort, meaning the erection of domes, and/or digging into the surface, as opposed to some moronic effort to put a base on a gas giant, or a hot planet, like mercury.)
Nope, I don't want to see a stupid scrap of cloth hung out on some barren rock. I want PEOPLE there, to transform the barren rock into something useful.
I guess so. They've lost the dream, they've lost the initiative, they've lost everything needed to get off the earth. The future is either overseas, or with the private sector. The only question is, "When did the US cede dominance in space?" I say, it was when they decided to build a stupid fucking space plane, and fly it repeatedly, when a space plane is OBVIOUSLY NOT a viable method of moving deeper into space.
I hated the idea of a space plane when it was first publicized. Morons. Space planes don't explore space - they only explore planets and atmospheres. Every real exploratory space ship should carry something LIKE a space plane, for deployment when a really intersting planet is discovered, but no one with a dream of space exploration even things of winged craft.
That would be a great thing. We don't really need Hollywierd. Give it away, please. Paris might be a good place for it. Hell, let's throw in Gay Bay, and maybe Greece will take it!
Honestly - what do the movie studios do for us? Oh - I forgot - they've given us the MPAA, which is actively working on ACTA. Ship them bastards overseas, to whoever will accept them, and dump ACTA, disband the MPAA, then go after RIAA. A few public executions would be nice, but I don't want to get anyone's hopes up.
Depends on how sophisticated the malware is, really. And, it also depends on how your Wine bottles are set up. Installing malware to it's own bottle would allow it almost no resources to work with. Installing to your "main" default bottle would provide a lot of resources, with their potential exploits. Of course, even with a rather sophisticated malware, and a lot of resources in the Wine bottle to which it was installed, you can just kill the process at any time. I've not yet seen the malware that can fool the various Linux resource monitors, like they can fool Task Manager.
To date, the worst malware that I've seen run on Linux are browser hijacks. The kind that grab your browser, runs a fake security scan, and tells you that you have various infection on Drive C:/ And, I've been Rickrolled. Running Noscript pretty much takes care of that nonsense, though.
Hey, I happen to LIKE Google. I pretty much trust them, too. Or, at least, I find them to be more trustworthy than any of the competition. But, where does Google make their money? That's right - ADVERTISING. How does that work again? Lemme think real hard - first, Google tracks my web browsing, and my searches, and they analyze all the data they can get on me. Then, based on their "profile" of me, they try to sell me things that are simply irre-fucking-sistable. They serve up advertisemenst that are calculated to be appealing to me. Like putting honey or sugar out to attract ants.
Google is using your data to make money, just as surely as any other individual, group, or entity on the web is trying to do the same.
Just don't tell Google that I never see the ads they serve up, alright? They just might come up with some "agreement", similar to Microsoft's EULA. "By using any or all of our services, you agree that we can track everything you do online, and you promise to disable any ad blockers, or other software that might prevent us serving advertisements."
There are legitimate reasons to lock down your wifi, of course. It isn't just media hype and government fear mongering. Personally, I run TWO wifis. One is completely unsecured, and available to anyone who happens by. The other is secured, and only responds to select MAC addresses. Thus, like yourself, I do a little bit of that "share the wealth" thing, but, I also ensure that only a pretty sophisticated haxor is going to grab my packets. The average script kiddie isn't going to get my stuff!
Embarassing, in that, "Yes we screwed up, and we shouldn't have." or embarassing as in, "Oh shit, open source really isn't any better than security through obfuscation!"?
If you mean the first, I'm with you. We all screw up - and sometimes we need a reminder that we can't duck, or blame on someone else to keep us on our toes.
If you mean the second, well, I call bullshit. Several people have already pointed out that closed source shops are frequently the victims of malware. You can find a half dozen gadgets or softwares that have been SHIPPED FROM THE FACTORY with malware of some kind, just in the last year.
Personally, I really prefer the situation at Unreal. It's open source. Everyone who gives a small damn had the opportunity to check it out. Anyone could have run any number of monitoring tools on the software, and caught it doing it's thing. When it was found, the administrators made an announcement. I like honesty and open communications.
It's a helluva lot better than, for example, a closed source shop pushing an update to your telephone which opens your communications up to government monitoring. The only way THAT was discovered, was the relatively dramatic decrease in battery life immediately after the update was pushed.
To each his own though. Those who put their faith in corporate masters are welcome to buy only proprietary stuff. I'll go with open source whenever possible!!
"And, to get that "live CD" behavior," just boot the CD image.
I've set up a VM in which to run LiveCD images, just to compare the various distros. The only "hard drive" available is a small swap file. I don't even need the swap file, but I supply it just in case something on the LiveCD wants to complain about the absence of the swap.
A shame you posted as AC - I would have modded you up.
Yes, of course malware will run on Linux. And, you do point out that the malware was installed from a subverted "trusted source".
You also remind me that I've been stupid sometimes. I've been lazy, and failed to double check the md5 checksums of tarballs on occasion. With that Unreal story in mind, maybe I'll be less lazy in the future. Thanks for the reminder, Mr. Coward.
War and justice have almost nothing in common. That is why I argued so hard against going into Iraq. Dubya spent months trying to justify the invasion, before he actually launched the invasion. He spent years trying to justify the invasion after he launched.
The war was all about vengeance. Dubya was pissed that Hussein had made an attempt on his daddy's life, years ago. In my honest opinion, that fact weighed more on Dubya's mind than almost any other consideration. Well, that and the fear of some imaginary WMD's that competent research would have allayed. All Dubya had to do was listen to the CIA, who repeatedly told Dubya and all the world that Iraq was no threat to the US of A.
Let me state again, as clearly as possible - the war in Iraq was NEVER justified. We had only poor excuses for invading Iraq. No good reasons at all, only poor excuses based on fear mongering.
Justice. If there were justice in the world, Dubya would have called out Saddam Hussein, and the two would have met, with seconds, in some field somewhere at dawn, and the two of them would have decided everything that needed to be settled in just a few minutes. If there were justice in the world, politicians would do the fighting, instead of sending kids out to fight for them.
Don't look for justice once war has been declared. There is no justice when politicians, or spiritual leaders, or anyone else have declared a war.
Let's not forget the proliferation of java IRC clients found on many sites today. I've joined a few channels through a Java client, then shut it down so that I could use a real IRC client to return to the channel. I have little idea how many users on any server might be technically savvy enough to set up an IRC client, how many are using Java, or how many are using a preconfigured mIRC client. It's probably worth studying, if anyone with the resources cares enough to study it.
"and to distinguish between a warzone and a bunch of harmless, unarmed civilians."
Key word, "unarmed". There were indeed weapons among the dead. It has never been established that the dead were all innocents. SOMEONE in that area had fired upon our ground troops, and that is the reason the Apache was called into the area. It COULD HAVE BEEN some of the armed men accompanying the journalist.
You are either mistaken, or deliberately painting the soldiers to be baby killers. I heard that statement, "It's their own fault". The statement was made LONG AFTER the shots were fired, and after the ground troops arrived. Go back and watch again. There was absolutely NOTHING to indicate that there were children in that van when the decision to fire was made.
You seem to be looking to civilian criminal law for your definition of "homicide". I used homicide more as a clinical term, than a legal term. But, I can't avoid the legal definition, can I?
Critical to judging these soldiers, you must understand their motives. What they saw, and reality, didn't exactly jive. They saw a rocket launcher, when in reality, they actually saw a television camera. In any criminal proceeding, the court does try to understand the motives. First degree murder requires not only malicious intent, but careful planning. Second degree murder requires no planning. So, the prosecutor does his best to prove intent, or he'll be stuck with a third degree murder at best.
So - intent. They SAW a rocket launcher. They SAW enemy combatants. They SAW a threat to their compadres on the ground. None of those three things existed, but those three things are what the helicopter crew SAW.
Self defense and defense of others would most certainly work for them, if they were ever brought to court to answer for this tragic mistake.
BUT - these guys are NOT subject to civilian law, while serving in a combat zone. They are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. At worst, some of these guys MIGHT be charged with incompetence for failing to identify that camera as a camera. Not that he would ever be convicted, but he could conceiveably be charged.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhhh - no. Maybe you should read this thread?
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1683756&threshold=-1&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=32549240
There are slashdotters who claim that every single American citizen who has ever worn a uniform is a baby killer, serving the industrial war machine. If you actually read through the whole thing, you'll quickly see that I'm no demagogue defending either politicians, or the military industry. I will defend the troops, though - unless and until the troops actually violate law. Then, I'll support the court martial proceedings which send those rogue soldiers to prison, or to their graves.
Demagogue? I don't think so - you just go read, and judge for yourself.
ROFLMAO Thanks, I needed that. Next, you'll be telling me that I'm unstable, and should seek psychiatric help. Typical liberal trash talk.
True, we aided the Afghan's during the Soviet invasion. But, no one is supplying the Taliban with stingers and crap today, and they still manage to hand our asses to us on a platter from time to time. The Taliban is making a comeback.
As I said, a punitive expedition to punish them for supporting Al Queda would have had us in, the Taliban bloodied, and the population upset, and our troops safely at home, all within a year. Actually, six months should have been long enough. The population would have lost faith in that Taliban, and created new parties and powers when we withdrew. The only interest we should have shown the world as we withdrew, was to warn the OTHER local powers that we wouldn't tolerate any of them invading after we left.
"the collective"
See, that shit scares me. You're part of a hive mentality. You've been borged. You have implants, I'm sure, telling you what the Queen Liberal wants you to think. GAAAHHHHH!!!!
I'll help you. Electricity, and air conditioning, private shelters complete with running water and private baths, enough food that they can put 100 pounds or more of lard on their skanky asses, television, - I could go on.
So long as there is a welfare system for people who are to lazy to work, the recipients will sponge up all the available resources. Which welfare system are you aware of, that has a surplus, or has turned down allocations from Congress or state governments, because the recipients just didn't spend all the money?
And, there is no need to put my "the worthless" into quotations. There are plenty of people living on welfare who have never contributed ANYTHING to society - other than the next generation of welfare recipients.
Well - my kids are all in their teens and twenties. If they can't feed THEMSELVES by now, they never will. Unlike city dwellers, we have acreage, we have livestock and seed available, we have water, we even have wildlife. If they can't feed themselves, then my kids will join the rest of the worthless bastards, as statistics on Darwin's charts.
Needless to say, I'm not a collectivist, of any kind. I'm not much into society working towards a common good, especially when 1/2 or more of society are worthless shits anyway. That business of society working towards a common good mostly means that hard working people are supporting lazy asses, no matter how you slice that money redistribution thing.
Gotta fight wars?
Dude, I'm unpopular with a lot of slashdotters for defending the troops. But, really, Iraq wasn't a "gotta fight" war. Afghanistan was, but we've done it all wrong. We should have just done a punitive expedition into Afghanistan, punished the Taliban for harboring Al Queda, then got the hell out. But, nooooo, we have to play some silly game of "nation building".
Aren't we the morons? Those Afghanis have been right there, in the same place, for thousands of years, defying any and all comers - most recently the Soviet. When the invaders go home, those Afghanis just go back to growing poppies, herding goats, and whatever else they do in those hills of theirs.
Gotta fight wars. Crap, I could have fought that Afghan war for less than pennies on the dollar, and avoided the Iraq war altogether.
I wanna go too. And, we're taking our air with us. And, maybe some of yours too. It's not like you'll need it when the sky does fall.
Whether it's some new disease, a catastrophic meteorite hit, volcanic and tectonic action - SOMETHING will bring the population explosion of the past 200 years to an end. When people start dying off, from whatever cause, civilization will falter. We could even see another dark age, if things get bad enough.
I'd love to have my DNA firmly planted in space, where the however many times removed grandchildren won't have to suffer with the rest of humanity.
I know slashdot is a piss poor place to quote any Biblical people - but Jesus said the poor will always be with us.
I don't give a small rat's ASS what kind of Utopia mankind might build in the future, here, or in space - there will ALWAYS be poor people. There will be those with no drive, who are to lazy to feed themselves. There will be those who are just to damned stupid to earn or to save a dollar. There will be those who are just plain unlucky, and everything they ever attempt to do will go to shit. There will be those who expect government to take care of them, so they settle for a shitty life at government's expense.
If you taxed every working man, and every investor at 99%, and taxed all corporations at 99% of gross profits - you STILL wouldn't have enough money to feed and clothe and shelter the worthless to the standards that they demand.
I'm not wealthy, and I could be dirt poor real easy if the economy takes another bad dive - but I still say, "Fuck the poor!" No matter how bad the economy might get, I'll feed myself, and my family. Those who can't or won't do the same can and should become statistics on one of Darwin's charts.
Repeat the feat? That would just be another waste. If we go back to the mooon at all (and I hope we do) I want to see a BASE STATION built, with personnel stationed there permanently. Hydroponics, mining, extraction of atmospheric gases, as well as water - you know, built a habitat for a few thousand people, then grow it to a few million people.
But, what I REALLY want to see, are manned missions to the Mars and the various moons that might be made habitable with a minimal effort. (Minimal effort, meaning the erection of domes, and/or digging into the surface, as opposed to some moronic effort to put a base on a gas giant, or a hot planet, like mercury.)
Nope, I don't want to see a stupid scrap of cloth hung out on some barren rock. I want PEOPLE there, to transform the barren rock into something useful.
I guess so. They've lost the dream, they've lost the initiative, they've lost everything needed to get off the earth. The future is either overseas, or with the private sector. The only question is, "When did the US cede dominance in space?" I say, it was when they decided to build a stupid fucking space plane, and fly it repeatedly, when a space plane is OBVIOUSLY NOT a viable method of moving deeper into space.
I hated the idea of a space plane when it was first publicized. Morons. Space planes don't explore space - they only explore planets and atmospheres. Every real exploratory space ship should carry something LIKE a space plane, for deployment when a really intersting planet is discovered, but no one with a dream of space exploration even things of winged craft.
That partly depends on whether you can afford a trunk monkey.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bKnbZySK5I
That would be a great thing. We don't really need Hollywierd. Give it away, please. Paris might be a good place for it. Hell, let's throw in Gay Bay, and maybe Greece will take it!
Honestly - what do the movie studios do for us? Oh - I forgot - they've given us the MPAA, which is actively working on ACTA. Ship them bastards overseas, to whoever will accept them, and dump ACTA, disband the MPAA, then go after RIAA. A few public executions would be nice, but I don't want to get anyone's hopes up.
Depends on how sophisticated the malware is, really. And, it also depends on how your Wine bottles are set up. Installing malware to it's own bottle would allow it almost no resources to work with. Installing to your "main" default bottle would provide a lot of resources, with their potential exploits. Of course, even with a rather sophisticated malware, and a lot of resources in the Wine bottle to which it was installed, you can just kill the process at any time. I've not yet seen the malware that can fool the various Linux resource monitors, like they can fool Task Manager.
To date, the worst malware that I've seen run on Linux are browser hijacks. The kind that grab your browser, runs a fake security scan, and tells you that you have various infection on Drive C:/ And, I've been Rickrolled. Running Noscript pretty much takes care of that nonsense, though.
Oh, come on. Grow up, alright?
Hey, I happen to LIKE Google. I pretty much trust them, too. Or, at least, I find them to be more trustworthy than any of the competition. But, where does Google make their money? That's right - ADVERTISING. How does that work again? Lemme think real hard - first, Google tracks my web browsing, and my searches, and they analyze all the data they can get on me. Then, based on their "profile" of me, they try to sell me things that are simply irre-fucking-sistable. They serve up advertisemenst that are calculated to be appealing to me. Like putting honey or sugar out to attract ants.
Google is using your data to make money, just as surely as any other individual, group, or entity on the web is trying to do the same.
Just don't tell Google that I never see the ads they serve up, alright? They just might come up with some "agreement", similar to Microsoft's EULA. "By using any or all of our services, you agree that we can track everything you do online, and you promise to disable any ad blockers, or other software that might prevent us serving advertisements."
There are legitimate reasons to lock down your wifi, of course. It isn't just media hype and government fear mongering. Personally, I run TWO wifis. One is completely unsecured, and available to anyone who happens by. The other is secured, and only responds to select MAC addresses. Thus, like yourself, I do a little bit of that "share the wealth" thing, but, I also ensure that only a pretty sophisticated haxor is going to grab my packets. The average script kiddie isn't going to get my stuff!
Embarassing, in that, "Yes we screwed up, and we shouldn't have." or embarassing as in, "Oh shit, open source really isn't any better than security through obfuscation!"?
If you mean the first, I'm with you. We all screw up - and sometimes we need a reminder that we can't duck, or blame on someone else to keep us on our toes.
If you mean the second, well, I call bullshit. Several people have already pointed out that closed source shops are frequently the victims of malware. You can find a half dozen gadgets or softwares that have been SHIPPED FROM THE FACTORY with malware of some kind, just in the last year.
Personally, I really prefer the situation at Unreal. It's open source. Everyone who gives a small damn had the opportunity to check it out. Anyone could have run any number of monitoring tools on the software, and caught it doing it's thing. When it was found, the administrators made an announcement. I like honesty and open communications.
It's a helluva lot better than, for example, a closed source shop pushing an update to your telephone which opens your communications up to government monitoring. The only way THAT was discovered, was the relatively dramatic decrease in battery life immediately after the update was pushed.
To each his own though. Those who put their faith in corporate masters are welcome to buy only proprietary stuff. I'll go with open source whenever possible!!
What would Jimmy Buffet say? Oh yeah - "It's five o'clock SOMEWHERE!"
"And, to get that "live CD" behavior," just boot the CD image.
I've set up a VM in which to run LiveCD images, just to compare the various distros. The only "hard drive" available is a small swap file. I don't even need the swap file, but I supply it just in case something on the LiveCD wants to complain about the absence of the swap.
A shame you posted as AC - I would have modded you up.
Yes, of course malware will run on Linux. And, you do point out that the malware was installed from a subverted "trusted source".
You also remind me that I've been stupid sometimes. I've been lazy, and failed to double check the md5 checksums of tarballs on occasion. With that Unreal story in mind, maybe I'll be less lazy in the future. Thanks for the reminder, Mr. Coward.
War and justice have almost nothing in common. That is why I argued so hard against going into Iraq. Dubya spent months trying to justify the invasion, before he actually launched the invasion. He spent years trying to justify the invasion after he launched.
The war was all about vengeance. Dubya was pissed that Hussein had made an attempt on his daddy's life, years ago. In my honest opinion, that fact weighed more on Dubya's mind than almost any other consideration. Well, that and the fear of some imaginary WMD's that competent research would have allayed. All Dubya had to do was listen to the CIA, who repeatedly told Dubya and all the world that Iraq was no threat to the US of A.
Let me state again, as clearly as possible - the war in Iraq was NEVER justified. We had only poor excuses for invading Iraq. No good reasons at all, only poor excuses based on fear mongering.
Justice. If there were justice in the world, Dubya would have called out Saddam Hussein, and the two would have met, with seconds, in some field somewhere at dawn, and the two of them would have decided everything that needed to be settled in just a few minutes. If there were justice in the world, politicians would do the fighting, instead of sending kids out to fight for them.
Don't look for justice once war has been declared. There is no justice when politicians, or spiritual leaders, or anyone else have declared a war.
Let's not forget the proliferation of java IRC clients found on many sites today. I've joined a few channels through a Java client, then shut it down so that I could use a real IRC client to return to the channel. I have little idea how many users on any server might be technically savvy enough to set up an IRC client, how many are using Java, or how many are using a preconfigured mIRC client. It's probably worth studying, if anyone with the resources cares enough to study it.
"and to distinguish between a warzone and a bunch of harmless, unarmed civilians."
Key word, "unarmed". There were indeed weapons among the dead. It has never been established that the dead were all innocents. SOMEONE in that area had fired upon our ground troops, and that is the reason the Apache was called into the area. It COULD HAVE BEEN some of the armed men accompanying the journalist.
You are either mistaken, or deliberately painting the soldiers to be baby killers. I heard that statement, "It's their own fault". The statement was made LONG AFTER the shots were fired, and after the ground troops arrived. Go back and watch again. There was absolutely NOTHING to indicate that there were children in that van when the decision to fire was made.
You seem to be looking to civilian criminal law for your definition of "homicide". I used homicide more as a clinical term, than a legal term. But, I can't avoid the legal definition, can I?
Critical to judging these soldiers, you must understand their motives. What they saw, and reality, didn't exactly jive. They saw a rocket launcher, when in reality, they actually saw a television camera. In any criminal proceeding, the court does try to understand the motives. First degree murder requires not only malicious intent, but careful planning. Second degree murder requires no planning. So, the prosecutor does his best to prove intent, or he'll be stuck with a third degree murder at best.
So - intent. They SAW a rocket launcher. They SAW enemy combatants. They SAW a threat to their compadres on the ground. None of those three things existed, but those three things are what the helicopter crew SAW.
Self defense and defense of others would most certainly work for them, if they were ever brought to court to answer for this tragic mistake.
BUT - these guys are NOT subject to civilian law, while serving in a combat zone. They are subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice. At worst, some of these guys MIGHT be charged with incompetence for failing to identify that camera as a camera. Not that he would ever be convicted, but he could conceiveably be charged.