You're right -- the slaughter of Pakistani UN peacekeapers, followed by a request from the UN that we assist with our military (after we'd pretty much left) had nothing to do with it.
We left the after the initial humanitarian setup because we wanted to psyche out the world and look reluctant -- we knew all along we'd have to go back! everything is a conspiracy!
$10,000 is a good approximation of the cost that it will take for a top secret, yes. It can be more, certainly.
no, these clearances are not awarded to all military personnel, why should they be?
Secret does not cost much money because it isn't a particularly tough clearance to get. If you're a US Citizen and have never been convicted of anything, Secret is pretty much a piece of cake.
Top Secret is a real background check, involving interviews of people you've known for the past 10 years. I know folks who've been turned down for top secret because their uncle used to be involved in shady stuff, or had a history of depression, things like that.
If you have an actual correction to offer, i'd be glad to hear it...
The easiest way is the military -- that's why its easier to get a job if you already have a clearance.
If you have to go for a top secret clearance, it will cost your company about $10,000 to have it done for you. Needless to say, not a lot of companies will do this if they can hire someone who already has the clearance from prior military or private work...
One of the biggest problems I've seen is that the Gov hires complete morons to do a semi-complex job, gives them a watered-down training on how to do the job, and then wonders why the job/project is costing 500% of what was budgeted
And this is different from most large corporations how?
Also, it is no fun working for the government. Career prospects are poor, the people you work with are second or third rate with a job-for-life mentality, and technological change much slowers. No one who has worked for a startup, even one that failed, can stand that kind of stagnent atmosphere.
I've traveled to 5 of the 7 continents (still waiting on Australia and Antarctica), played with high-tech military and NASA toys, flown through the Himilayas in the back of a Russian Mi-17 transport, and met some of the most amazingly eccentric and intelligent people in the world while trying to establish a satellite connection in subzero temperatures.
Plus there's the good feeling you get knowing that your job really helps people live their lives better, safer, and healthier.
There's more to the US government than the Dept of Motor Vehicles -- there are plenty of jobs with Uncle Sam more interesting than the dot-com workplaces I've seen...
If I owe $10,000,000, and spend $2000 on beer per week. I AM NOT FREAKING RICH!
No, you're just a bad budgeter -- which was the original poster's point -- college students spend money more freely than any other demographic, so complaining you don't have the money just doesn't work.
Marketing folks know exactly how much the average college student spend on things, regardless of how much debt they'll have to start repaying a few years from now. Right now you don't have loan payments...
What are the biggest problems with digital music right now?
* hard to find a given song/artist/CD
* quality is uneven
* takes time/effort to rip your own CDs
* tranfers abort, and lots of incomplete songs around
* new, better formats, or bigger drive measn that you might want something other than a 128k MP3 in the future
So what's the solution? To make a crippled pay-per-play system with all of the same shortcomings, except now you have to shell out good money for incomplete downloads?
If the music companies would provide answers to those problems, they could easily be making ten times what they get today within a decade. Every music consumer in the world pays $14.95 a month for unlimited access to complete archives of the companies, in whatever format is most convenient, digitized straight from the original recording, and with always-on dedicated servers for providing the files.
And like TiVo, you've got central servers to compare listening tastes, providing you with constantly updated recommendations based on what you've already listened to.
No more MP3 files with incorrect ID tags, no more ripping and re-ripping, no more aborted downloads. Plus dead-on accurate recommendations for bands you love but never would have known about!
people will pay for convenience and service in music like everything else. This is a market just waiting for the music industry idiots to get off their butts and sell to it. if Napster did this it would take a few years to get going, but eventually become hugely profitable.
How financially limited did cable TV look 30 years ago? Yeah, lots of folks just went over to a friends house to watch HBO rather than pay for it themselves. But over time it just became easier for everyone to pay their 35 bucks a month and get cable into their own home. Now people are starting to pay another $9.95 a month for TiVo service and consider it a bargain.
there's a price point where it's just "too cheap NOT to buy", and the music industry is nowhere near it yet.
I was just trying to point out that anyone with a basic knowlege of computers knows not to have any private information sitting out on servers
From my experience, even intermediate computer users are still pretty unclear on the notion of where exactly their data resides. The folks at my office, for example, are perfectly productive computer users with all the tools they need to get their jobs done and download MP3s and such, but at least half of them don't realize their personal directories are really space on a server (so that they get backed up every night), even though I've explained it several times.
Heck, there are plenty of professional web development people I've run across who aren't real clear on the file location thing, they just know that they check in and check out files and something happens...
Let me get this straight -- he would not be willing to kill one person, and would prefer to maintain his own personal virtue, rather than allow the 6 billion people currently alive (and billions more in the future) to live happy and everlasting lives in paradise?
Why don't we rephrase the question again: would you personally be willing to commit the most heinous of crimes, and suffer eternally in hell for it, if you knew that doing so would uplift the entire human race?
But it's up to the claimants to prove that in a more competitive market the price would have actually declined. That was the allegation that Judge Jackson made in his court that spawned these lawsuits, but it was more of an assumption of the nature of monoply than really supported by facts.
Well, you may not think they were supported by the facts, but as far as any court in the USA, it is a legal fact that MS has a monopoly and overcharged customers. Judge Jackson's legal findings were upheld at appeal, and at this point only the US Supreme court can overturn them.
The suit really doesn't have to rpove much of anything, so long as the supreme court doesn't get involved. With the DOJ trial transcript and jackson's Finding of Facts, they've pretty much got everything they need, and MS has a pretty high hurdle if they want to disprove a fact that has already been upheld on appeal.
Re:But these were non hostile
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I'm not sure what Bill Maher has said about the word 'terrorism' in relation to all this, although what I remember of his comments shortly after 9/11 pretty much made me conclude he's not worth listening to.
Well, he basically said that it was incorrect to say that the suicide pilots were cowards, and that the USA could be considered more cowardly for launching missiles from ships hundreds of miles away. And the point that one mans terrorist is another's freedom fighter.
These are the type of things that people got upset about, but I think its as much a commentary on our use of language as it is a condemnation or blessing for anyone involved.
They're worthwhile points to make (although he didn't necessarily make them effectively) but the real issue isn't what we call people, but the actions we take.
Is firing a missile less dangerous than a suicide mission? You bet. Is it more cowardly? That's entirely based on your point of view. Is it more effective in a military sense? Yes, absolutely.
Re:But these were non hostile
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However what I do feel IS avaoidable is dropping cluster bombs in farms where no military presence exists. This sort of thing is avoidable, and the decision not to avoid is an evil one.
Well, I don't see how it is 100% avoidable (assuming that conflict itself is unavoidable, of course). If you're dropping bombs somewhere, no matter how good the people and equipment are, you're going to miss sometimes. You're going to get bad intelligence, you're going to have mechanical failures, etc. Nobody is happy about it, and we use quarter-million dollar missiles instead of $5,000 bombs because we want to avoid as much failure as possible.
I realize that isn't going to get anyone nominated for a peace prize, but to say its evil is to ignore the fact that we DO go to great lengths to avoid hurting innocent people.
Well, yes I do actually. I think that all you need to do is take a look at the recent history of afghanistan to see that these people are in serious need of a break. Bombing them will acheive nothing at all.
Well, these are three separate things.
To say that a country can't be held responsible because it isn't a democracy is to say that they will have free reign to do whatever they like, which simply isn't tenable as a practical matter. We can't allow Saddam Hussein to invade countries just because we don't want to hurt his soldiers who never volunteered for the army or elected him leader. Sooner or later, people will be held responsible even for indirect or passive support of their leaders. Obviously we're trying to set up a situation there where they can be more directly in control (and responsible) for their government's actions in the future.
And yes, Afghanistan needs a break. No doubt about it -- our biggest shame has to be that we abandoned them after assisting them fighting the Soviets. Now that we are hurting them ourselves, we bear an even greater responsibility in rebuilding and ensuring that they have a better life in the future, free of violence for us both.
But bombing "them" doing nothing, I disagree with -- because you mean "them" to mean afghanistan as a whole, or the innocent civilians. But those are not the "them" we're aiming for -- we're aiming for the "them" that were part of of the military and political groups on Sept 11. And that WILL accomplish something, namely making it harder for them to do it in the future, and more viscerally, robbing them of the power and influence that they had over the people of that country. In the future the greatest victory we can hope for is that the Taliban is a group of forgotton leaders, marginalized by the people of Afghanistan as they make their way in control of their own government. That simply was very unlikely to happen barring some sort of military intervention to deprive the Taliban of the ability to hold onto power with force of arms.
The US military are using weapons with 50% accuracy... What does this mean?... it means that there is a good chance that at least half the deaths caused by these weapons will be civilian.
That's not at all what it means. It means that 50% of the weapons will miss their targets (but usually hit pretty close). Instead of destroying a radar tower, the bomb will land next to it, merely damaging it. Unless civilians are next to the radar tower by chance they won't get hurt (of course in densely populated areas it may well mean that 50% of the casualties would be innocent, but the bombing of populated areas is not very frequent).
All that said, of course no one wants less than 100% accuracy. That's why we use quarter-million dollar missiles instead of $10,000 bombs when attacking certain targets that are more likely to be near civilians. But demanding 100% accuracy as a condition of being able to enter conflict is simply unrealistic (although it would be great if we could get everyone to agree to it, as it would end all war!).
We continuously research more accurate weapons and less lethal weapons because no soldier or aiman feels proud to kill civilians. Whatever you may think of the generals and politicians, the soldiers on the ground are the ones with the targetting lasers and they don't relish the notion of hurting innocent people any more than you or I.
This information is well known, however the actions are still carried out. I can't see then how this is not deliberately targeting civilians.
Because there is nothing "deliberate" about statistical probabilities. If you know ahead of time that a lottery ticket has a certain chance of winning, and you win, that doesn't mean you "deliberately" won the lottery.
If the pilot know that a building was not an ammo storage shed, but was a farmer's home, and he bombed it, that would be deliberately targeting a civilian building. But if he knows that a lot of times, they store ammo in farmer's homes, then it becomes a lot less clear what is and isn't a legitimate target. And if your intelligence guys don't even know it is a farmer's home, but you were aiming for the ammo dump across the street, I don't know how you could call an off-target bomb deliberate in any way. It was deliberately dropped, sure, but that wasn't the deliberate target.
And the deliberate intention was not to frighten people, it was to blow up the target. That's the main reason this isn't terrorism, although i agree with Chomsky (and Bill Maher for that matter) that the word itself is too pejorative and subjective to be really meaningful. It's like using the word "propoganda", which after WW2 simply means "anything the other side says that disagrees with us".
You are trying to frighten the entire world. Look what happens with you f**k with us. That is the message of terror that is being spread. Of course you won't hear about this on CNN, but be sure that the arab nations are reading it loud and clear.
Well, yes and no. It's not the primary intention, but from a military standpoint you do have to show that you are willing and able to use force. It's not intended to scare people in an irrational way (as terrorism does) but to show them that if you do violence against us we will be willing to do a great deal of violence back at you. It's not like we're bombing because they wouldn't enter a trade agreement, we're bombing as a result of a deliberate act of violence against us (well, really several deliberate acts of violence).
That means they are used with the express knowledge that may civilainas will be killed and injured. I can't justify this in any way. Sorry.
Well I agree, i can't justify their inaccuracy any more than you can, nor the harm they cause. But if the alternative is simply inaction, then we can't justify that either. Inaction is a choce that has ramifications, as well, and some of THOSE ramifications involve death of innocents. No choice is good, we're stuck with bad and worse as our only options.
Re:But these were non hostile
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Why not just kill everybody then
Because that doesn't make any sense. There's a big difference between saying "we have to show resolve, and be willing to lose lives and take lives" in a military campaign, and saying "kill them all, God will know his own".
They know the US is willing to commit genocide... We kill them by the hundreds of thousands even though they did nothing against us
Who have we killed by hundreds of thousands?
Even anti-US estimates only reach into the range of a few thousand civilian casualties (about the same as the WTC attack). That's assuming, of course, that ALL of those counted as civilian casualties were 100% non-combatants, which is unlikely.
So lets look at the math here -- in 4 months, we've dropped tens of thousands of bombs and thousands of missiles. Either we're really bad at targetting all those innocent civilians you claim we're aiming for, or else the sad truth is simply that no weapon or intelligence is 100% accurate.
That is, of course, a compelling reason for us to always evaluate the real necessity of any involvement, because you know in advance that in all likelyhood innocent people will get hurt or killed by errors. That's a far cry from genocide.
You live in a black and white world. We must kill them all or they will kill us.
No, but I do believe there are black and white situations. In the case where we are repeatedly, fatally attacked by the same organization over the course of a decade, i suspect that they probably won't stop unless we force them to by killing them, removing their power/resources, or something similar. If you think that bin Laden was totally satisfied with the (second!) WTC attack and was going to retire and never kill again, I simply disagree 100%.
Apparently you actually believe that somalians are willing and able to kill americans by the thousands.
Collectively, no, they aren't. Only some groups are willing and able. Unfortunately its the willing and able ones we have to worry about. No one is suggesting that we attack everyone everywhere, only the ones that are trying to hurt us.
If you leave them alone I guarantee you they will not do anything to you
Oh, well, as long as we have your personal guarantee! The Taliban guaranteed that Osama bin Laden would be staying as a guest in their country and would not be able to use modern equipment or engage in terrorist activities when he moved there.
Most of them are starving and don't have the energy to kill you or your soldiers.
You're right of course -- most of them (Somalians) are malnourished. Because the armies keep taking all the food! Unfortuantely, again, its the people most likely to do us (and their own countrymen) harm that are well-supplied with money, arms, and food.
I know you will be dancing in the streets
It may make you feel better to think so. Because then it would justify your own anti-US sentiments, but it simply isn't true. I'm sorry that I (and most Americans) don't live up to your expectations. We really don't care what color the people who are trying to kill us are, although it seems to mean a great deal to you.
If we were given our druthers, we WOULD ignore the rest of the world and eat fatty foods and watch TV all day. But it's a bit hard to ignore airplanes flying into your downtowns.
You seem to be mistaking our actions for hatred -- it isn't. We don't hate Afghanis or Somalians, we're just doing what we think we need to do to keep from getting attacked ourselves. If you want to chalk that up to racist imperialism, that's your perogative, but it won't get you any clser to understanding our motivations or trying to convince us to do something else that you think is a better solution.
If you were God how would you judge?
If I were God I wouldn't allow any of this to happen in the first place.
You seem to think that the US has been attacked by Afghanistan and is at war with the country.
We were attacked (directly, and for the third time) by people who were guests of the Afghani govt (even though we had warned them years ago not to harbor these people and what the ramifications would be if they did) and they refused to hand them over.
These people also happened to be the primary military support for the existing government.
So no, Afghanistan never declared war on us -- but their de facto army did, and I can guarantee you if a US Army general attacked another country without the presiden't permission or knowledge, I really don't think those attacked would be willing to simply write it off as "oh, well, it wasn't America who attacked us!".
Also, for your information, there is no Somalian government
You had better alert the United Nations, and quickly! There's this guy calling himself President Abdiqassin Salad Hassan who has everyone duped into believing he is the chief executive, and there's a whole parliament of charlatans with him.
Of course, it isn't a powerful government, because the country is still controlled in many areas by ruling warlords (sounds like another place we know) but it exists and is the recognized authority of that nation...
Re:But these were non hostile
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Why don't you fight the fucking terrorists in your own borders first?
I believe we do fight them as well. It isn't an either/or proposition.
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What did the thousands of afgan citizens ever do against the US?
Just as much as the average german citizen did against France in 1943. I'm not saying its noble to kill civilians, only that it is unavoidable.
When a bomb goes off to blow up munitions or soldiers, it will also kill the janitor who works at the munitions plant to feed his family.
The Taliban were not an elected government.
Well this is quite a conundrum. History shows that democracies almost never go into conflict with each other, yet you seem to be claiming that only people in a democracy can be legitimately held responsible for military attacks.
You're right of course that it isn't fair -- why should we be born in the first world while others are unlucky enough to be in places where they have much less influence on the world around them?
In a perfect world people would only be held individually responsible for the amount of individual influence they had on an action. But this isn't a perfect world, and the pragmatic way to fight a war is to make sure that the other side gets hurt more than you do. I am truly sorry that this isn't a perfect world, as I'm sure we all are.
And there is a bit of a contradiction in your thinking. On the one hand, you claim our attacks are terrorist -- meaning that we are trying to frighten civilians into acting a certain way solely to avoid being hurt. On the other hand, you claim that those civilians have no power, and that those who were in power care nothing for the civilians.
So then what would be the point? We're trying to frighten people on the other side of the planet who can't touch us into doing something they have no power to do? Or we're trying to make the taliban suffer by hurting people that they don't care about?
Is it not possible that in fact we are dropping bombs where we think there is a legitimate target? And that the targetting of those weapons, and the weapons themselves, is simply less than perfect? Doesn't that seem more likely?
Re:But these were non hostile
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It's not clear to me how killing people who do not fight the US conveys this message. Would you care to elaborate?
The Somalian government is talking to us on a dialy basis now -- they seem to have understood the point. They're begging us to let them fight against any terrorists in their borders.
The japanese understood the point at the end of WWII -- if you continue fighting, your entire nation will face annihilation. We didn't threaten to destroy all their military bases, or all their munitions factories, we quite explicitly showed them our willingness to destroy them absolutely and completely, and demonstrated our capability to do so.
In the end, fewer people died because of it.
There is no perfect or painless way to do this stuff. We have the choice between bad and worse. We have the choice of killing too many of the other side to keep our soldiers safe, or letting too many of the others live and risking that more of our own will die.
That's the only choice we have -- do more of OUR people die, or do more of THEIR people die? It's been this way for 10,000 years, and its not changing any time soon...
Re:OK, let's kill soldiers instead.
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I don't believe Katz was endorsing drone wars (or any wars), only saying that as the costs for the victor go down, they become almost inevitable.
The only real "cost" we pay any more is one of public relations, international relations, and of course the financial impact of paying for really expensive war materiel...
Re:But these were non hostile
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Killing masses of civilians rather than risking minute losses from your own vastly superior armed forces sends a very clear message to the world about how the US values the lifes of foreigners
And the message is: if you fight us we'll kill you. I think that's the same message that every side in every war tries to send.
The hope is that the other side will understand this, and thus surrender without conflict if you really are clearly strong enough to carry out the threat.
For some reason every other third-world nation has spontaneously decided to help us in our pursuit of terrorist organizations, when only months ago they were reluctant to lift a finger for the USA. I suspect they "got the message", thus saving a lot of lives on both sides.
But I don't expect to pay a fee every month so that the speedometer keeps working past the first few weeks I bought the car (the equivalent of having to pay a fee after the short trial period that comes with it).
they're not selling you a speedometer. they are selling you constantly updated information. if you want to keep the original data on the machine, they won't stop you, but without the new information it can't do a lot of the scheduling stuff.
The data is not free, and it doesn't come out of thin air. Tivo has to pay people for the data. Then they work on that data to make it function in their boxes. They do this every month that there are boxes out there for the data, until the company disappears. You only have to manufacture a speedometer once.
if you went in to the dealer and demanded a tune-up every month they'd charge you, too. Tivo's data stream is a tune-up for the recording schedule.
I won't buy them! That is ALL I said, along with the reason why...
No, you made inaccurate statements that you would own a "$600 paperweight" if you turned off the subscription -- you wouldn't.
You'd still have a functional Tivo with several times more functionality than a normal VCR. The subscription services are icing on the cake -- but the cake is yours to eat with or without it.
I'm not just responding to you personally, I'm also making things clear to the thousands of people who read this thread without posting, so that they don't get an incorrect view of how Tivo works. readers outnumber posters by several orders of magnitude...
And yes! If I pay $200 for some A/V equipment I want to be able to do everything forever (well, until the hardware dies anyway)! What in the world is wrong with that? Do you expect anything else from your VCR or your DVD for example? Why would the Tivo be any different? All the features are self contained - except for the channel guide downloads, and THAT is not worth $10/month or much of anything really.
But the only thing you lose by not subscribing is the download stuff. You lose the auto-scheduling, the suggestions, etc. The box still works fine with all the features that don't require downloading data. All the "self-contained" features do work regardless of you ever giving them another red cent beyond buying it. (the 2.0 boxes are said to be different but no one has seen yet how they will function without a subscription)
And like I said, if someone sets up a competing service to offer the listings (as I understand the network-hacked boxes to use) then you can avoid paying for it. If you just demand that tivo give you the listings forever for free, then the price of the boxes will go up to include the lifetime subscription.
Tivo is a software company, they exist to sell software and sell their listings. If you don't want to buy them, that's fine, but complaining because they won't give them away for free is just rather odd...
Don't get me wrong, they should sell service and make money off it. But you should be able to get the data from a variety of different places. Legally
I don't disagree at all -- if someone else sets up a network that lets you download the data Tivo shouldn't be able to stop you (although I'm sure they might pull a technical hack to do it if it were really cutting into their finances).
But that's a different thing than saying "I paid $200 and want it to do everything forever". The original complaint was that Tivo users had to pay for the service, not that they were being prevented from using a competing service.
However incidental the costs may be, it is an ongoing cost that Tivo must bear to run a network and do the data management to make all the "magic" work.
If you don't want that ongoing magic (or don't want to pay for it), you've still got a box that is a heck of a lot more feature-rich than a standard VCR. Pausing live TV alone is a killer feature, being able to have it read your mind is just a value-add...
I agree totally -- that's why i refuse to buy a car. They make you buy gas every few weeks just to keep it running, and change the oil and tires and stuff just to keep it doing what it was supposed to do in the first place!
Slashdot Mirror
You're right -- the slaughter of Pakistani UN peacekeapers, followed by a request from the UN that we assist with our military (after we'd pretty much left) had nothing to do with it.
We left the after the initial humanitarian setup because we wanted to psyche out the world and look reluctant -- we knew all along we'd have to go back! everything is a conspiracy!
$10,000 is a good approximation of the cost that it will take for a top secret, yes. It can be more, certainly.
no, these clearances are not awarded to all military personnel, why should they be?
Secret does not cost much money because it isn't a particularly tough clearance to get. If you're a US Citizen and have never been convicted of anything, Secret is pretty much a piece of cake.
Top Secret is a real background check, involving interviews of people you've known for the past 10 years. I know folks who've been turned down for top secret because their uncle used to be involved in shady stuff, or had a history of depression, things like that.
If you have an actual correction to offer, i'd be glad to hear it...
The easiest way is the military -- that's why its easier to get a job if you already have a clearance.
If you have to go for a top secret clearance, it will cost your company about $10,000 to have it done for you. Needless to say, not a lot of companies will do this if they can hire someone who already has the clearance from prior military or private work...
One of the biggest problems I've seen is that the Gov hires complete morons to do a semi-complex job, gives them a watered-down training on how to do the job, and then wonders why the job/project is costing 500% of what was budgeted
And this is different from most large corporations how?
Also, it is no fun working for the government. Career prospects are poor, the people you work with are second or third rate with a job-for-life mentality, and technological change much slowers. No one who has worked for a startup, even one that failed, can stand that kind of stagnent atmosphere.
I've traveled to 5 of the 7 continents (still waiting on Australia and Antarctica), played with high-tech military and NASA toys, flown through the Himilayas in the back of a Russian Mi-17 transport, and met some of the most amazingly eccentric and intelligent people in the world while trying to establish a satellite connection in subzero temperatures.
Plus there's the good feeling you get knowing that your job really helps people live their lives better, safer, and healthier.
There's more to the US government than the Dept of Motor Vehicles -- there are plenty of jobs with Uncle Sam more interesting than the dot-com workplaces I've seen...
If I owe $10,000,000, and spend $2000 on beer per week. I AM NOT FREAKING RICH!
No, you're just a bad budgeter -- which was the original poster's point -- college students spend money more freely than any other demographic, so complaining you don't have the money just doesn't work.
Marketing folks know exactly how much the average college student spend on things, regardless of how much debt they'll have to start repaying a few years from now. Right now you don't have loan payments...
Is that spin? Or is that reality?
What are the biggest problems with digital music right now?
* hard to find a given song/artist/CD
* quality is uneven
* takes time/effort to rip your own CDs
* tranfers abort, and lots of incomplete songs around
* new, better formats, or bigger drive measn that you might want something other than a 128k MP3 in the future
So what's the solution? To make a crippled pay-per-play system with all of the same shortcomings, except now you have to shell out good money for incomplete downloads?
If the music companies would provide answers to those problems, they could easily be making ten times what they get today within a decade. Every music consumer in the world pays $14.95 a month for unlimited access to complete archives of the companies, in whatever format is most convenient, digitized straight from the original recording, and with always-on dedicated servers for providing the files.
And like TiVo, you've got central servers to compare listening tastes, providing you with constantly updated recommendations based on what you've already listened to.
No more MP3 files with incorrect ID tags, no more ripping and re-ripping, no more aborted downloads. Plus dead-on accurate recommendations for bands you love but never would have known about!
people will pay for convenience and service in music like everything else. This is a market just waiting for the music industry idiots to get off their butts and sell to it. if Napster did this it would take a few years to get going, but eventually become hugely profitable.
How financially limited did cable TV look 30 years ago? Yeah, lots of folks just went over to a friends house to watch HBO rather than pay for it themselves. But over time it just became easier for everyone to pay their 35 bucks a month and get cable into their own home. Now people are starting to pay another $9.95 a month for TiVo service and consider it a bargain.
there's a price point where it's just "too cheap NOT to buy", and the music industry is nowhere near it yet.
I was just trying to point out that anyone with a basic knowlege of computers knows not to have any private information sitting out on servers
From my experience, even intermediate computer users are still pretty unclear on the notion of where exactly their data resides. The folks at my office, for example, are perfectly productive computer users with all the tools they need to get their jobs done and download MP3s and such, but at least half of them don't realize their personal directories are really space on a server (so that they get backed up every night), even though I've explained it several times.
Heck, there are plenty of professional web development people I've run across who aren't real clear on the file location thing, they just know that they check in and check out files and something happens...
It absolutely should not. "I" is the nominative form, and cannot be used as the object of a preposition, which is "than" in this case.
I'm confused on this. My understanding is that the actual sentence should be:
"Lots of interesting hacking ideas here for people who prefer to spend more time in their cars than I (do)."
Where the "do" is understood, as in the sentence "Go.", where "(You) go." is the understood complete sentence.
It certainly doesn't make any sense to me to say that the sentence should be:
"Lots of interesting hacking ideas here for people who prefer to spend more time in their cars than me (do)"
Let me get this straight -- he would not be willing to kill one person, and would prefer to maintain his own personal virtue, rather than allow the 6 billion people currently alive (and billions more in the future) to live happy and everlasting lives in paradise?
Why don't we rephrase the question again: would you personally be willing to commit the most heinous of crimes, and suffer eternally in hell for it, if you knew that doing so would uplift the entire human race?
But it's up to the claimants to prove that in a more competitive market the price would have actually declined. That was the allegation that Judge Jackson made in his court that spawned these lawsuits, but it was more of an assumption of the nature of monoply than really supported by facts.
Well, you may not think they were supported by the facts, but as far as any court in the USA, it is a legal fact that MS has a monopoly and overcharged customers. Judge Jackson's legal findings were upheld at appeal, and at this point only the US Supreme court can overturn them.
The suit really doesn't have to rpove much of anything, so long as the supreme court doesn't get involved. With the DOJ trial transcript and jackson's Finding of Facts, they've pretty much got everything they need, and MS has a pretty high hurdle if they want to disprove a fact that has already been upheld on appeal.
I'm not sure what Bill Maher has said about the word 'terrorism' in relation to all this, although what I remember of his comments shortly after 9/11 pretty much made me conclude he's not worth listening to.
Well, he basically said that it was incorrect to say that the suicide pilots were cowards, and that the USA could be considered more cowardly for launching missiles from ships hundreds of miles away. And the point that one mans terrorist is another's freedom fighter.
These are the type of things that people got upset about, but I think its as much a commentary on our use of language as it is a condemnation or blessing for anyone involved.
They're worthwhile points to make (although he didn't necessarily make them effectively) but the real issue isn't what we call people, but the actions we take.
Is firing a missile less dangerous than a suicide mission? You bet. Is it more cowardly? That's entirely based on your point of view. Is it more effective in a military sense? Yes, absolutely.
However what I do feel IS avaoidable is dropping cluster bombs in farms where no military presence exists. This sort of thing is avoidable, and the decision not to avoid is an evil one.
... What does this mean? ... it means that there is a good chance that at least half the deaths caused by these weapons will be civilian.
Well, I don't see how it is 100% avoidable (assuming that conflict itself is unavoidable, of course). If you're dropping bombs somewhere, no matter how good the people and equipment are, you're going to miss sometimes. You're going to get bad intelligence, you're going to have mechanical failures, etc. Nobody is happy about it, and we use quarter-million dollar missiles instead of $5,000 bombs because we want to avoid as much failure as possible.
I realize that isn't going to get anyone nominated for a peace prize, but to say its evil is to ignore the fact that we DO go to great lengths to avoid hurting innocent people.
Well, yes I do actually. I think that all you need to do is take a look at the recent history of afghanistan to see that these people are in serious need of a break. Bombing them will acheive nothing at all.
Well, these are three separate things.
To say that a country can't be held responsible because it isn't a democracy is to say that they will have free reign to do whatever they like, which simply isn't tenable as a practical matter. We can't allow Saddam Hussein to invade countries just because we don't want to hurt his soldiers who never volunteered for the army or elected him leader. Sooner or later, people will be held responsible even for indirect or passive support of their leaders. Obviously we're trying to set up a situation there where they can be more directly in control (and responsible) for their government's actions in the future.
And yes, Afghanistan needs a break. No doubt about it -- our biggest shame has to be that we abandoned them after assisting them fighting the Soviets. Now that we are hurting them ourselves, we bear an even greater responsibility in rebuilding and ensuring that they have a better life in the future, free of violence for us both.
But bombing "them" doing nothing, I disagree with -- because you mean "them" to mean afghanistan as a whole, or the innocent civilians. But those are not the "them" we're aiming for -- we're aiming for the "them" that were part of of the military and political groups on Sept 11. And that WILL accomplish something, namely making it harder for them to do it in the future, and more viscerally, robbing them of the power and influence that they had over the people of that country. In the future the greatest victory we can hope for is that the Taliban is a group of forgotton leaders, marginalized by the people of Afghanistan as they make their way in control of their own government. That simply was very unlikely to happen barring some sort of military intervention to deprive the Taliban of the ability to hold onto power with force of arms.
The US military are using weapons with 50% accuracy
That's not at all what it means. It means that 50% of the weapons will miss their targets (but usually hit pretty close). Instead of destroying a radar tower, the bomb will land next to it, merely damaging it. Unless civilians are next to the radar tower by chance they won't get hurt (of course in densely populated areas it may well mean that 50% of the casualties would be innocent, but the bombing of populated areas is not very frequent).
All that said, of course no one wants less than 100% accuracy. That's why we use quarter-million dollar missiles instead of $10,000 bombs when attacking certain targets that are more likely to be near civilians. But demanding 100% accuracy as a condition of being able to enter conflict is simply unrealistic (although it would be great if we could get everyone to agree to it, as it would end all war!).
We continuously research more accurate weapons and less lethal weapons because no soldier or aiman feels proud to kill civilians. Whatever you may think of the generals and politicians, the soldiers on the ground are the ones with the targetting lasers and they don't relish the notion of hurting innocent people any more than you or I.
This information is well known, however the actions are still carried out. I can't see then how this is not deliberately targeting civilians.
Because there is nothing "deliberate" about statistical probabilities. If you know ahead of time that a lottery ticket has a certain chance of winning, and you win, that doesn't mean you "deliberately" won the lottery.
If the pilot know that a building was not an ammo storage shed, but was a farmer's home, and he bombed it, that would be deliberately targeting a civilian building. But if he knows that a lot of times, they store ammo in farmer's homes, then it becomes a lot less clear what is and isn't a legitimate target. And if your intelligence guys don't even know it is a farmer's home, but you were aiming for the ammo dump across the street, I don't know how you could call an off-target bomb deliberate in any way. It was deliberately dropped, sure, but that wasn't the deliberate target.
And the deliberate intention was not to frighten people, it was to blow up the target. That's the main reason this isn't terrorism, although i agree with Chomsky (and Bill Maher for that matter) that the word itself is too pejorative and subjective to be really meaningful. It's like using the word "propoganda", which after WW2 simply means "anything the other side says that disagrees with us".
You are trying to frighten the entire world. Look what happens with you f**k with us. That is the message of terror that is being spread. Of course you won't hear about this on CNN, but be sure that the arab nations are reading it loud and clear.
Well, yes and no. It's not the primary intention, but from a military standpoint you do have to show that you are willing and able to use force. It's not intended to scare people in an irrational way (as terrorism does) but to show them that if you do violence against us we will be willing to do a great deal of violence back at you. It's not like we're bombing because they wouldn't enter a trade agreement, we're bombing as a result of a deliberate act of violence against us (well, really several deliberate acts of violence).
That means they are used with the express knowledge that may civilainas will be killed and injured. I can't justify this in any way. Sorry.
Well I agree, i can't justify their inaccuracy any more than you can, nor the harm they cause. But if the alternative is simply inaction, then we can't justify that either. Inaction is a choce that has ramifications, as well, and some of THOSE ramifications involve death of innocents. No choice is good, we're stuck with bad and worse as our only options.
Why not just kill everybody then
... We kill them by the hundreds of thousands even though they did nothing against us
Because that doesn't make any sense. There's a big difference between saying "we have to show resolve, and be willing to lose lives and take lives" in a military campaign, and saying "kill them all, God will know his own".
They know the US is willing to commit genocide
Who have we killed by hundreds of thousands?
Even anti-US estimates only reach into the range of a few thousand civilian casualties (about the same as the WTC attack). That's assuming, of course, that ALL of those counted as civilian casualties were 100% non-combatants, which is unlikely.
So lets look at the math here -- in 4 months, we've dropped tens of thousands of bombs and thousands of missiles. Either we're really bad at targetting all those innocent civilians you claim we're aiming for, or else the sad truth is simply that no weapon or intelligence is 100% accurate.
That is, of course, a compelling reason for us to always evaluate the real necessity of any involvement, because you know in advance that in all likelyhood innocent people will get hurt or killed by errors. That's a far cry from genocide.
You live in a black and white world. We must kill them all or they will kill us.
No, but I do believe there are black and white situations. In the case where we are repeatedly, fatally attacked by the same organization over the course of a decade, i suspect that they probably won't stop unless we force them to by killing them, removing their power/resources, or something similar. If you think that bin Laden was totally satisfied with the (second!) WTC attack and was going to retire and never kill again, I simply disagree 100%.
Apparently you actually believe that somalians are willing and able to kill americans by the thousands.
Collectively, no, they aren't. Only some groups are willing and able. Unfortunately its the willing and able ones we have to worry about. No one is suggesting that we attack everyone everywhere, only the ones that are trying to hurt us.
If you leave them alone I guarantee you they will not do anything to you
Oh, well, as long as we have your personal guarantee! The Taliban guaranteed that Osama bin Laden would be staying as a guest in their country and would not be able to use modern equipment or engage in terrorist activities when he moved there.
Most of them are starving and don't have the energy to kill you or your soldiers.
You're right of course -- most of them (Somalians) are malnourished. Because the armies keep taking all the food! Unfortuantely, again, its the people most likely to do us (and their own countrymen) harm that are well-supplied with money, arms, and food.
I know you will be dancing in the streets
It may make you feel better to think so. Because then it would justify your own anti-US sentiments, but it simply isn't true. I'm sorry that I (and most Americans) don't live up to your expectations. We really don't care what color the people who are trying to kill us are, although it seems to mean a great deal to you.
If we were given our druthers, we WOULD ignore the rest of the world and eat fatty foods and watch TV all day. But it's a bit hard to ignore airplanes flying into your downtowns.
You seem to be mistaking our actions for hatred -- it isn't. We don't hate Afghanis or Somalians, we're just doing what we think we need to do to keep from getting attacked ourselves. If you want to chalk that up to racist imperialism, that's your perogative, but it won't get you any clser to understanding our motivations or trying to convince us to do something else that you think is a better solution.
If you were God how would you judge?
If I were God I wouldn't allow any of this to happen in the first place.
You seem to think that the US has been attacked by Afghanistan and is at war with the country.
We were attacked (directly, and for the third time) by people who were guests of the Afghani govt (even though we had warned them years ago not to harbor these people and what the ramifications would be if they did) and they refused to hand them over.
These people also happened to be the primary military support for the existing government.
So no, Afghanistan never declared war on us -- but their de facto army did, and I can guarantee you if a US Army general attacked another country without the presiden't permission or knowledge, I really don't think those attacked would be willing to simply write it off as "oh, well, it wasn't America who attacked us!".
Also, for your information, there is no Somalian government
You had better alert the United Nations, and quickly! There's this guy calling himself President Abdiqassin Salad Hassan who has everyone duped into believing he is the chief executive, and there's a whole parliament of charlatans with him.
Of course, it isn't a powerful government, because the country is still controlled in many areas by ruling warlords (sounds like another place we know) but it exists and is the recognized authority of that nation...
Why don't you fight the fucking terrorists in your own borders first?
I believe we do fight them as well. It isn't an either/or proposition.
What did the thousands of afgan citizens ever do against the US?
Just as much as the average german citizen did against France in 1943. I'm not saying its noble to kill civilians, only that it is unavoidable.
When a bomb goes off to blow up munitions or soldiers, it will also kill the janitor who works at the munitions plant to feed his family.
The Taliban were not an elected government.
Well this is quite a conundrum. History shows that democracies almost never go into conflict with each other, yet you seem to be claiming that only people in a democracy can be legitimately held responsible for military attacks.
You're right of course that it isn't fair -- why should we be born in the first world while others are unlucky enough to be in places where they have much less influence on the world around them?
In a perfect world people would only be held individually responsible for the amount of individual influence they had on an action. But this isn't a perfect world, and the pragmatic way to fight a war is to make sure that the other side gets hurt more than you do. I am truly sorry that this isn't a perfect world, as I'm sure we all are.
And there is a bit of a contradiction in your thinking. On the one hand, you claim our attacks are terrorist -- meaning that we are trying to frighten civilians into acting a certain way solely to avoid being hurt. On the other hand, you claim that those civilians have no power, and that those who were in power care nothing for the civilians.
So then what would be the point? We're trying to frighten people on the other side of the planet who can't touch us into doing something they have no power to do? Or we're trying to make the taliban suffer by hurting people that they don't care about?
Is it not possible that in fact we are dropping bombs where we think there is a legitimate target? And that the targetting of those weapons, and the weapons themselves, is simply less than perfect? Doesn't that seem more likely?
It's not clear to me how killing people who do not fight the US conveys this message. Would you care to elaborate?
The Somalian government is talking to us on a dialy basis now -- they seem to have understood the point. They're begging us to let them fight against any terrorists in their borders.
The japanese understood the point at the end of WWII -- if you continue fighting, your entire nation will face annihilation. We didn't threaten to destroy all their military bases, or all their munitions factories, we quite explicitly showed them our willingness to destroy them absolutely and completely, and demonstrated our capability to do so.
In the end, fewer people died because of it.
There is no perfect or painless way to do this stuff. We have the choice between bad and worse. We have the choice of killing too many of the other side to keep our soldiers safe, or letting too many of the others live and risking that more of our own will die.
That's the only choice we have -- do more of OUR people die, or do more of THEIR people die? It's been this way for 10,000 years, and its not changing any time soon...
I don't believe Katz was endorsing drone wars (or any wars), only saying that as the costs for the victor go down, they become almost inevitable.
The only real "cost" we pay any more is one of public relations, international relations, and of course the financial impact of paying for really expensive war materiel...
Killing masses of civilians rather than risking minute losses from your own vastly superior armed forces sends a very clear message to the world about how the US values the lifes of foreigners
And the message is: if you fight us we'll kill you. I think that's the same message that every side in every war tries to send.
The hope is that the other side will understand this, and thus surrender without conflict if you really are clearly strong enough to carry out the threat.
For some reason every other third-world nation has spontaneously decided to help us in our pursuit of terrorist organizations, when only months ago they were reluctant to lift a finger for the USA. I suspect they "got the message", thus saving a lot of lives on both sides.
But I don't expect to pay a fee every month so that the speedometer keeps working past the first few weeks I bought the car (the equivalent of having to pay a fee after the short trial period that comes with it).
they're not selling you a speedometer. they are selling you constantly updated information. if you want to keep the original data on the machine, they won't stop you, but without the new information it can't do a lot of the scheduling stuff.
The data is not free, and it doesn't come out of thin air. Tivo has to pay people for the data. Then they work on that data to make it function in their boxes. They do this every month that there are boxes out there for the data, until the company disappears. You only have to manufacture a speedometer once.
if you went in to the dealer and demanded a tune-up every month they'd charge you, too. Tivo's data stream is a tune-up for the recording schedule.
I won't buy them! That is ALL I said, along with the reason why...
No, you made inaccurate statements that you would own a "$600 paperweight" if you turned off the subscription -- you wouldn't.
You'd still have a functional Tivo with several times more functionality than a normal VCR. The subscription services are icing on the cake -- but the cake is yours to eat with or without it.
I'm not just responding to you personally, I'm also making things clear to the thousands of people who read this thread without posting, so that they don't get an incorrect view of how Tivo works. readers outnumber posters by several orders of magnitude...
And yes! If I pay $200 for some A/V equipment I want to be able to do everything forever (well, until the hardware dies anyway)! What in the world is wrong with that? Do you expect anything else from your VCR or your DVD for example? Why would the Tivo be any different? All the features are self contained - except for the channel guide downloads, and THAT is not worth $10/month or much of anything really.
But the only thing you lose by not subscribing is the download stuff. You lose the auto-scheduling, the suggestions, etc. The box still works fine with all the features that don't require downloading data. All the "self-contained" features do work regardless of you ever giving them another red cent beyond buying it. (the 2.0 boxes are said to be different but no one has seen yet how they will function without a subscription)
And like I said, if someone sets up a competing service to offer the listings (as I understand the network-hacked boxes to use) then you can avoid paying for it. If you just demand that tivo give you the listings forever for free, then the price of the boxes will go up to include the lifetime subscription.
Tivo is a software company, they exist to sell software and sell their listings. If you don't want to buy them, that's fine, but complaining because they won't give them away for free is just rather odd...
Don't get me wrong, they should sell service and make money off it. But you should be able to get the data from a variety of different places. Legally
I don't disagree at all -- if someone else sets up a network that lets you download the data Tivo shouldn't be able to stop you (although I'm sure they might pull a technical hack to do it if it were really cutting into their finances).
But that's a different thing than saying "I paid $200 and want it to do everything forever". The original complaint was that Tivo users had to pay for the service, not that they were being prevented from using a competing service.
However incidental the costs may be, it is an ongoing cost that Tivo must bear to run a network and do the data management to make all the "magic" work.
If you don't want that ongoing magic (or don't want to pay for it), you've still got a box that is a heck of a lot more feature-rich than a standard VCR. Pausing live TV alone is a killer feature, being able to have it read your mind is just a value-add...
I agree totally -- that's why i refuse to buy a car. They make you buy gas every few weeks just to keep it running, and change the oil and tires and stuff just to keep it doing what it was supposed to do in the first place!