Because China has a strong "non interference with internal issues" foreign policy doctrine and also views international borders to be pretty much indisputable. This has a lot to do with Tibet. Maybe they wouldn't vote in favour of an Anti-Russian-Resolution, but they would never veto it.
Brazil and India don't matter in the UNSC. Everyone wants to reform the UN to change some of that, but it didn't happen yet.
Whatever Georgians did seems to be foolish, but there must be more behind it. For once there is the pipeline issue and the Russian-US tension over influence in that region especially because of the oil. Apart from the killings by Georgians Russia invaded Georgia and also ethincally cleansed Southern Ossetia from the last remaining Georgian settlements as well as helped destroy the last Georgian foothold in Abkhazia. So the Russians are at least even in doing evil stuff. They also bombed cities all over Georgia and blocked their port. And they are still moving within Georgia. This is not over yet. Russia is putting their foot down and many nations are watching if and how the EU and the US react. So far it didn't look very promising.
But for all the "back to the cold war" talk I think while we should very strongly confront Russia about Georgia some channels should remain open. And the ISS could be one of them.
This discussion is getting more and more interesting. Just to be clear here, I do believe that my country (Germany) is on the same side as the US, since both of us and a couple more countries make up the western world of democratic nations with a free press and modern economies and many shared values stemming from the American and French revolution.
Even though Germany did not contribute troops to the Iraq disaster we, as an ally, are still part of it if we want it or not. This makes it so much more difficult for me to accept so many little things that are part of the GWOT. I am against torture in any form. I do not believe there is much useful information to gain from it and John McCain, who suffered from torture as well as many of the top brass at the DoD are with me. Because they don't want the other side to do the same with our guys.
But still the chicken hawks at the white house made it legal! And the guy who helped them do it was made Attorney General for it. And because they became legal torture happened at Abu Ghraib. Do you remeber the picture of the guy standing on a box with a hood over his had and wires attached to his hands? It was quite famous. And it shows a special signature move to torture prisoners only known inside certain interrigator circles. They even had a special name for it that I can't recall right now. Anyways, that picture already proves that the people that were prosecuted in the end could not have been responsible (they could have never known of this method). Also all the pictures of naked men hints the orders of very smart people, since the shame is much bigger in the middle east than in the west hence the horror is much bigger.
So torture was made legal and specialized people where sent all over the world to torture POWs. All legal. And this makes us, at least in part, the "bad guys". And that makes it easier for the other side to kill us and justify it to their conscience. Usually the "bad guys" have to have very little education and have to be indoctrinated by propaganda to fight us, but when we act like the "bad guys" ourselves, they don't need propaganda any more. And they get more support.
So better check your conscience for what to do and not to do. Legal standards change. Basic morals don't. Believe me. Everyone knows that it is bad to kill someone else. That is a basic understanding among humans. As well as hurting others.
And non-mainsteam media don't even attempt to tell the truth. Most blogs are just rants, and if they are not they only show part of the picture. And everyone knows. You can always lie best by using only true facts.
The point I was trying to make was that because of the complexity of the LOAC (and the somewhat questionable ethics of recent versions of it), as well as the fact that they only constitute the US governments opinion, the conscience (as the supposed basis of all laws) is still the best guide to what course of action to take. It's only a rough guide, but the general direction is clear. Maybe our differences in that point stem from the fact that you were raised in a country with a legal system based on common law, whereas I was raised in a country with code law. So I might be more comfortable with a limited set of basic "codes" to base my decisions on.
You might also want to note that only treaties signed and ratified by the US government go into the LOAC (as your link states) and that the US did not sign or ratify some very important international treaties that deal with international conflict. Therefore those are not part of the LOAC. For example the UN CRC: http://www.globalissues.org/HumanRights/Abuses/Child.asp Also the US decided to withdraw from other treaties. For example the ABMT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Ballistic_Missile_Treaty
So I can safely assume that given the complexity and chaos of war and the complexity of the legal background it is in fact
IMpossible to be a professional and fight wars in a legal manner. Contrary to your earlier statement.
But when war happens I suppose it is possible to try and fight in a professional manner consulting your conscience and later on try to reason with it that it was necessary to kill a bunch of people even though it feels bad. And that is a process every soldier has to go through if they are not a psychopath.
I don't like it that politicians send soldiers in harms way to kill and be killed. Politicians should carry the guilt then. But that is not how humans operate unfortunately. In my country it was possible to opt out of military service and that is the exact reason why I opted out. Because I did not feel that out politicians act in a responsible way when it comes to military means. I still look up to our military for defending our freedom.
I did not want to come into a situation where I had to fight and kill (being told by said politicians) even though I thought it to be wrong. Incidentally I was right, because right when it would have been my time (finished training, active service) our country bombed Serbia for what turned out to be trumped up charges of war crimes against Albanian people in Kosovo. The pictures shown in parliament of a massarce in Kosovo were correct, but that massacre was committed by the Albanians themselves. Still those pictures prompted our parliament to sanction air strikes. Much like the incubators in the first war against Iraq ( http://backissues.cjrarchives.org/year/92/5/war.asp ) and the WMDs in the second.
All our laws and principles are based fundamentally on our understanding of what is right and wrong. And that is our conscience.
You are saying in your comment that "It is possible to be a professional and fight wars in a legal manner." That is interesting. I never looked at it this way, because I did not think it is possible because of the chaos of war. Also AFAIR the laws of war were: 1. Soldier killing civillian ist murder. 2. Civillian killing soldier is murder. 3. Soldier killing soldier is legal if war has been declared between the two countries that the soldiers belong to. But in the new "war on terror" there is no "other country". Civillians are "enemy combatants" and the White House is churning out new laws by the minute that govern this conflict. How does the LOAC work there? Is it updated every time? Because all the LOACs change all the time to adapt the current administrations feeling of what should be allowed and what not the conscience is (and was, since it is the basis of all laws) a very good guide as to what a soldier should do and what not. I would be very afraid of a soldier that is not guilt ridden after killing a bunch of people. That is very normal. And it is part of the job. It should be very hard. That is a reason why I did not want to go to the military. Because I did not want that on my conscience. When you are part of the military it is. You know it before you join. And it is on our collective conscience for having voted this administration into office. It definately should be dealt with. But is important to be there. Very important. Just ask the prision guards at Abu Ghraib.
Insisting that DRM from Apple is good and that everyone needs Steve to protect them from "evil apps". This story proves that the Apple store does not, in any way, protect people from scams. This was such an obvious scam and still it was put up.
Just like a computer game. The future is bright and shiny (at least for those of us that live in the "right" countries and don't talk back at the authorities).
In fact Innotek credits their decision to use the GPL licsence as one of the major reasons their product took off in the first place. It was bought by Sun later on.
That's what's called an open source success story. Maybe the poster should have mentioned that. This being/. and all.
But I do not believe anyone killed Ledger for marketing reasons. They were just really lucky they focused all their marketing on the guy who happened to die. That way they already had the connection between the movie and the guy. It did sell an awful lot of tickets.
I guess you misunderstood my post. I did read my quote. They did some good marketing AND the star died.
The fact that the marketing focused on the guy who dies right up to his death might have contributed.
Still. Marketing AND Death was what made for a great opening weekend. And if (and I am not saying either way) the movie is good, it will sell more tickets down the line.
have a big opening weekend? Making a good movie.... or getting your star killed.
Also: (from Wikipedia): Warner Bros. created a viral marketing campaign for The Dark Knight, developing promotional websites and trailers highlighting screenshots of Heath Ledger as the Joker. After Ledger's death in January 2008, however, the studio refocused its promotional campaign.[3][4] The film was released on July 16, 2008 in Australia, on July 18, 2008 in North America, and on July 24, 2008 in the United Kingdom. Prior to its box office debut in North America, record numbers of advance tickets were sold for The Dark Knight. The film has broken multiple box office records, and achieved an overall approval rating of 95% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
Think about it. They monopolized the os and the office market and then stiffeled innovation in both markets for at least eight to ten years. That gave oss the time to catch up.
If there would have been competition I suppose we could talk to our operating systems now and they would read everything that came into range of their web cams. I mean look at OS/2 and Windows 95. Vista is the first os that has a gui that is a little different from that of Windows 95. Imagine the innovation if they would have plowed ahead at the speed they had in the early 90s when there was still competition. Look at the difference between Windows 3.1 and OS/2. When did BeOS come out?
At that speed I can't imagine oss keeping up on the desktop.
Maybe on the server. But with so much competition on the desktop who knows what would have been on the server.
So to all those that know of the political implications of closed vs. open source at least give Microsoft the nod. Maybe we lost a couple years of innovation (I mean who knows how much we really lost, I am just blowing steam, nobody really knows what could have been), but we gained freedom.
I couldn't find the article, but I read one on CNN which stated that sex is treated as a currency in womens prison where often times male guards are working even thought that is not supposed to be the case. AFAIR it was talking about cases where female prisoners were routinely "rented" out to male prisoners by the guards.
The male population in prison is much higher, which makes for a higher number of rape cases, but relatively speaking the problem is even worse among the female prison population.
There are still hosting companies that offer virtual machines and even complete servers with Red Hat 7.3 So I would be interested in the time it takes for that one to be infected.
Do they even give patches for that any more?
I am not trying to say Linux or Windows is safer. I am just trying to say it might not be wise to put an unpatched machine on the net without a firewall to download patches. Regardless of the os.
Now I am supposed to set up a second system the laptop defaults to boot into just to install this software? Not thx, not on my limited laptop hard drive. I mean the whole point of my completely encrypted laptop is so that I don't have to worry about it getting stolen, because they won't be able to use the data aginst me or my customers.
The summary has it right, the caption does not. I was a little confused when I read that: "Telsa motors. Mmh. Maybe competition for Tesla motors or something."
Andreas Stiller from c't speculates about the P54C in the current issue of the German magazine. That guy is one of the most well informed people in that particular area. If Stiller speculates on something it usually means that it is true, but the sources didn't want to be named or identified. They probabely spilled the news over a beer or sth.
Saddam has WMDs. We have to take him out or he will use them against us.
Saddam had WMDs, but moved them to Syria. Read the book by his former top general.
Saddam didn't have WMDs, but everyone (including other countries) thought he did.
Saddam had yellowcake. We were right all along. Yellowcake can't even be used in dirty bombs, but what the hell. It is radioactive.
Why do I read so much bs on/. even though I am surfing at +4?
Just for the record: First the decision was made to invade Iraq, then they started looking for reasons: Remove Saddam (he gassed his own people), WMDs, try to start democratic change in the whole region (I still don't get why even people like Fareed Zakaria from Newsweek bought that one. I cancelled my subscription for that very reason. If you want democratic change you have to stop supporting all the kings and dictators from that region.), you name it. Once, because it was so obvious, Rumsfeld even said it out loud. Pick whatever reason you like. We have many good ones. Why the decision was made in the first place I do not know for certain. And there is a lot of bs floating around that as well. In the end the Bush administration won the 2004 election. Is that good enough? I dunno and I don't want to put my own bs about it here, because I can't prove it.
Slashdot Mirror
Because China has a strong "non interference with internal issues" foreign policy doctrine and also views international borders to be pretty much indisputable. This has a lot to do with Tibet. Maybe they wouldn't vote in favour of an Anti-Russian-Resolution, but they would never veto it.
Brazil and India don't matter in the UNSC. Everyone wants to reform the UN to change some of that, but it didn't happen yet.
Whatever Georgians did seems to be foolish, but there must be more behind it. For once there is the pipeline issue and the Russian-US tension over influence in that region especially because of the oil. Apart from the killings by Georgians Russia invaded Georgia and also ethincally cleansed Southern Ossetia from the last remaining Georgian settlements as well as helped destroy the last Georgian foothold in Abkhazia. So the Russians are at least even in doing evil stuff. They also bombed cities all over Georgia and blocked their port. And they are still moving within Georgia. This is not over yet.
Russia is putting their foot down and many nations are watching if and how the EU and the US react. So far it didn't look very promising.
But for all the "back to the cold war" talk I think while we should very strongly confront Russia about Georgia some channels should remain open. And the ISS could be one of them.
This discussion is getting more and more interesting. Just to be clear here, I do believe that my country (Germany) is on the same side as the US, since both of us and a couple more countries make up the western world of democratic nations with a free press and modern economies and many shared values stemming from the American and French revolution.
Even though Germany did not contribute troops to the Iraq disaster we, as an ally, are still part of it if we want it or not. This makes it so much more difficult for me to accept so many little things that are part of the GWOT. I am against torture in any form. I do not believe there is much useful information to gain from it and John McCain, who suffered from torture as well as many of the top brass at the DoD are with me. Because they don't want the other side to do the same with our guys.
But still the chicken hawks at the white house made it legal! And the guy who helped them do it was made Attorney General for it. And because they became legal torture happened at Abu Ghraib. Do you remeber the picture of the guy standing on a box with a hood over his had and wires attached to his hands? It was quite famous. And it shows a special signature move to torture prisoners only known inside certain interrigator circles. They even had a special name for it that I can't recall right now. Anyways, that picture already proves that the people that were prosecuted in the end could not have been responsible (they could have never known of this method). Also all the pictures of naked men hints the orders of very smart people, since the shame is much bigger in the middle east than in the west hence the horror is much bigger.
So torture was made legal and specialized people where sent all over the world to torture POWs. All legal. And this makes us, at least in part, the "bad guys". And that makes it easier for the other side to kill us and justify it to their conscience. Usually the "bad guys" have to have very little education and have to be indoctrinated by propaganda to fight us, but when we act like the "bad guys" ourselves, they don't need propaganda any more. And they get more support.
So better check your conscience for what to do and not to do. Legal standards change. Basic morals don't. Believe me. Everyone knows that it is bad to kill someone else. That is a basic understanding among humans. As well as hurting others.
And non-mainsteam media don't even attempt to tell the truth. Most blogs are just rants, and if they are not they only show part of the picture. And everyone knows. You can always lie best by using only true facts.
The point I was trying to make was that because of the complexity of the LOAC (and the somewhat questionable ethics of recent versions of it), as well as the fact that they only constitute the US governments opinion, the conscience (as the supposed basis of all laws) is still the best guide to what course of action to take. It's only a rough guide, but the general direction is clear. Maybe our differences in that point stem from the fact that you were raised in a country with a legal system based on common law, whereas I was raised in a country with code law. So I might be more comfortable with a limited set of basic "codes" to base my decisions on.
You might also want to note that only treaties signed and ratified by the US government go into the LOAC (as your link states) and that the US did not sign or ratify some very important international treaties that deal with international conflict. Therefore those are not part of the LOAC. For example the UN CRC:
http://www.globalissues.org/HumanRights/Abuses/Child.asp
Also the US decided to withdraw from other treaties. For example the ABMT:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Ballistic_Missile_Treaty
So I can safely assume that given the complexity and chaos of war and the complexity of the legal background it is in fact
IMpossible to be a professional and fight wars in a legal manner.
Contrary to your earlier statement.
But when war happens I suppose it is possible to try and fight in a professional manner consulting your conscience and later on try to reason with it that it was necessary to kill a bunch of people even though it feels bad. And that is a process every soldier has to go through if they are not a psychopath.
I don't like it that politicians send soldiers in harms way to kill and be killed. Politicians should carry the guilt then. But that is not how humans operate unfortunately. In my country it was possible to opt out of military service and that is the exact reason why I opted out. Because I did not feel that out politicians act in a responsible way when it comes to military means. I still look up to our military for defending our freedom.
I did not want to come into a situation where I had to fight and kill (being told by said politicians) even though I thought it to be wrong. Incidentally I was right, because right when it would have been my time (finished training, active service) our country bombed Serbia for what turned out to be trumped up charges of war crimes against Albanian people in Kosovo. The pictures shown in parliament of a massarce in Kosovo were correct, but that massacre was committed by the Albanians themselves. Still those pictures prompted our parliament to sanction air strikes. Much like the incubators in the first war against Iraq ( http://backissues.cjrarchives.org/year/92/5/war.asp ) and the WMDs in the second.
All our laws and principles are based fundamentally on our understanding of what is right and wrong. And that is our conscience.
You are saying in your comment that "It is possible to be a professional and fight wars in a legal manner." That is interesting. I never looked at it this way, because I did not think it is possible because of the chaos of war. Also AFAIR the laws of war were: 1. Soldier killing civillian ist murder. 2. Civillian killing soldier is murder. 3. Soldier killing soldier is legal if war has been declared between the two countries that the soldiers belong to.
But in the new "war on terror" there is no "other country". Civillians are "enemy combatants" and the White House is churning out new laws by the minute that govern this conflict. How does the LOAC work there? Is it updated every time?
Because all the LOACs change all the time to adapt the current administrations feeling of what should be allowed and what not the conscience is (and was, since it is the basis of all laws) a very good guide as to what a soldier should do and what not. I would be very afraid of a soldier that is not guilt ridden after killing a bunch of people. That is very normal. And it is part of the job. It should be very hard. That is a reason why I did not want to go to the military. Because I did not want that on my conscience. When you are part of the military it is. You know it before you join. And it is on our collective conscience for having voted this administration into office.
It definately should be dealt with. But is important to be there. Very important. Just ask the prision guards at Abu Ghraib.
Insisting that DRM from Apple is good and that everyone needs Steve to protect them from "evil apps". This story proves that the Apple store does not, in any way, protect people from scams. This was such an obvious scam and still it was put up.
This little Youtube video is about the TCPA, but it fits the IPhone as well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPyqRObDX3c
Just like a computer game.
The future is bright and shiny (at least for those of us that live in the "right" countries and don't talk back at the authorities).
Killing without remorse on orders "from above". I guess you would have made an awsome prison guard at Auschwitz back then.
Stand with pride, soldier.
Funny, I always thought that was what Echolon was for. Wasn't that even confirmed by the EU parlament?
It looks fine to me. I use Iceweasel 3.0 (Debianized rebranded version of Firefox 3.0 and current Iceweasel version in Lenny).
In fact Innotek credits their decision to use the GPL licsence as one of the major reasons their product took off in the first place. It was bought by Sun later on.
That's what's called an open source success story. Maybe the poster should have mentioned that. This being /. and all.
How much is a humans live worth?
But I do not believe anyone killed Ledger for marketing reasons. They were just really lucky they focused all their marketing on the guy who happened to die. That way they already had the connection between the movie and the guy. It did sell an awful lot of tickets.
I don't think it is about the movie on opening weekend. More about the marketing. And having you star die creates more hype. Simple as ist is true.
I guess you misunderstood my post. I did read my quote. They did some good marketing AND the star died.
The fact that the marketing focused on the guy who dies right up to his death might have contributed.
Still. Marketing AND Death was what made for a great opening weekend. And if (and I am not saying either way) the movie is good, it will sell more tickets down the line.
have a big opening weekend? Making a good movie. ... or getting your star killed.
Also:
(from Wikipedia):
Warner Bros. created a viral marketing campaign for The Dark Knight, developing promotional websites and trailers highlighting screenshots of Heath Ledger as the Joker. After Ledger's death in January 2008, however, the studio refocused its promotional campaign.[3][4] The film was released on July 16, 2008 in Australia, on July 18, 2008 in North America, and on July 24, 2008 in the United Kingdom. Prior to its box office debut in North America, record numbers of advance tickets were sold for The Dark Knight. The film has broken multiple box office records, and achieved an overall approval rating of 95% on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.
That's called good ol' fashioned marketing.
Think about it. They monopolized the os and the office market and then stiffeled innovation in both markets for at least eight to ten years. That gave oss the time to catch up.
If there would have been competition I suppose we could talk to our operating systems now and they would read everything that came into range of their web cams. I mean look at OS/2 and Windows 95. Vista is the first os that has a gui that is a little different from that of Windows 95. Imagine the innovation if they would have plowed ahead at the speed they had in the early 90s when there was still competition. Look at the difference between Windows 3.1 and OS/2. When did BeOS come out?
At that speed I can't imagine oss keeping up on the desktop.
Maybe on the server. But with so much competition on the desktop who knows what would have been on the server.
So to all those that know of the political implications of closed vs. open source at least give Microsoft the nod. Maybe we lost a couple years of innovation (I mean who knows how much we really lost, I am just blowing steam, nobody really knows what could have been), but we gained freedom.
The rate at which female inmates are raped is even higher than among males.
http://stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle-old/382/tellthestories.shtml
I couldn't find the article, but I read one on CNN which stated that sex is treated as a currency in womens prison where often times male guards are working even thought that is not supposed to be the case. AFAIR it was talking about cases where female prisoners were routinely "rented" out to male prisoners by the guards.
The male population in prison is much higher, which makes for a higher number of rape cases, but relatively speaking the problem is even worse among the female prison population.
Maybe the poster should've RTFA. But this is Slashdot after all. Nobody reads the articles.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=467856&cid=22568696
There are still hosting companies that offer virtual machines and even complete servers with Red Hat 7.3
So I would be interested in the time it takes for that one to be infected.
Do they even give patches for that any more?
I am not trying to say Linux or Windows is safer. I am just trying to say it might not be wise to put an unpatched machine on the net without a firewall to download patches. Regardless of the os.
Now I am supposed to set up a second system the laptop defaults to boot into just to install this software? Not thx, not on my limited laptop hard drive. I mean the whole point of my completely encrypted laptop is so that I don't have to worry about it getting stolen, because they won't be able to use the data aginst me or my customers.
The summary has it right, the caption does not. I was a little confused when I read that: "Telsa motors. Mmh. Maybe competition for Tesla motors or something."
This could be a permanent solution to make everything a lot saver.
And because those bracelets would be uncomfortable to the wearer at some point why not implant the technology in the wearer.
We could even make a little ceremony out of it. At the age of six everyone gets their implant at a big "coming of age" party.
Andreas Stiller from c't speculates about the P54C in the current issue of the German magazine. That guy is one of the most well informed people in that particular area. If Stiller speculates on something it usually means that it is true, but the sources didn't want to be named or identified. They probabely spilled the news over a beer or sth.
Saddam has WMDs. We have to take him out or he will use them against us.
Saddam had WMDs, but moved them to Syria. Read the book by his former top general.
Saddam didn't have WMDs, but everyone (including other countries) thought he did.
Saddam had yellowcake. We were right all along. Yellowcake can't even be used in dirty bombs, but what the hell. It is radioactive.
Why do I read so much bs on /. even though I am surfing at +4?
Just for the record: First the decision was made to invade Iraq, then they started looking for reasons: Remove Saddam (he gassed his own people), WMDs, try to start democratic change in the whole region (I still don't get why even people like Fareed Zakaria from Newsweek bought that one. I cancelled my subscription for that very reason. If you want democratic change you have to stop supporting all the kings and dictators from that region.), you name it. Once, because it was so obvious, Rumsfeld even said it out loud. Pick whatever reason you like. We have many good ones.
Why the decision was made in the first place I do not know for certain. And there is a lot of bs floating around that as well. In the end the Bush administration won the 2004 election. Is that good enough? I dunno and I don't want to put my own bs about it here, because I can't prove it.
and used 0,89 Liters at 72 km/h on average.
All in here:
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/VW_1-Liter-Auto
(only in the German version of this Wikipedia article)
This seems like VERY old news.