You're right about my misreading your statement about end/means. If I read you right, we agree.
And you're partly right about fighting fire with fire burning everyone. The US should never have gone after the Qaeda bombers with the military. The US did need to bomb Taliban government and military facilities, infrastructure of the foreign government that sponsored the Qaeda plot. Because other countries that would attack the US need to see that not only the specific bureaucrats, politicians and leaders who were guilty will be destroyed, but also the national property. Otherwise the powers behind the powers will just grow new heads.
The US should have gone after the Qaeda entirely with intelligence, police and "special forces". Infiltrating organizations, kidnapping, assassinating, and toppling the Qaeda network of affiliated terrorist cells. Bombing civilians just makes it harder to keep them "on our side", giving info and helping "us" instead of joining "them". And the more bombing of public infrastructure and private property, the harder it is to rebuild a country that prioritizes its own productivity rather than the destruction of others.
But Bush committed us to war by waging real war. The resulting fire is like a forest fire, burning out of control. It is perfectly appropriate, and sometimes necessary, to "fight fire with fire", like burning a firebreak so the major fire won't continue out of control. That's only once the fire is already out of control, the fire already certainly dooms the target firebreak, and there is no other way to save at least the firebreak. Which is what we have now in our various wars with Hezbollah, Qaeda, and various other groups increasingly networked (eg. the opportunistically named '"Qaeda" in Iraq'). Burning down their website to prevent their recruitment, if a necessary part of a winning larger strategy, is appropriate. It keeps more of us from getting burned.
Similarly, Bush has committed US troops to "handling" Iraq. We must stop doing what we're doing there, but pulling out all our troops tomorrow would make things worse for everyone (except the leaders of their several internal factions, and Iran). Instead we should pull out troops to protect only the borders from foreign infiltration, validate and train Iraqi police and military, and let them fight their own civil war. If they produce a theocracy, we should face it with our surrounding military as a state. Meanwhile we should keep the country infiltrated with our counterterrorist intelligence. There are probably other versions of that handoff to Iraqis without handing them over to America's greater enemies. But they will all require some killing.
We've created a monster in Iraq, and one in Afghanistan. By becoming a mother monster ourselves. We have to smother our monstrous children, which makes us even more monstrous, while also less. If there's a practical way to protect America and our foreign "associates" without using some fire, I'd like to consider it. But I don't see one. Just a lesser fire used judiciously. Which, with Bush and his Republican Congress still unequivocally in power "staying the course", is itself still just a post on a website.
"If we take our benchmarks into consideration you can no longer get by without a quad-core processor."
I love HW geeks. This CPU isn't even released, many apps don't even work on it, chipset makers are still scrambling to release the mobos that will actually use it. But even though nearly no one can get one, no one can get by without one.
If HW geeks weren't so demanding, Intel and its competition wouldn't do so much work keeping them packed with the hottest toys.
"Although it can be argued how much choice the Chinese have when it comes to their form of government we cannot immediately assume that our form of democracy is some sort of perfect thing that needs to be instilled in the rest of the world."
That is two arguments. American democracy is far from perfect (and getting further every day). But we're not talking about instilling American democracy in the rest of the world (though some people do, we're not). We're not even talking about instilling it in China, or instilling British, European or any other kind of democracy in China. You are the only one talking about that.
The Chinese government of its own people is bad. That is the argument. The Chinese government controls people by relentless propaganda defined solely in terms of the enforcing their order, starting at birth, and escalating to violence which is also portrayed in some media while denied in others. That is bad. Chinese people don't choose their government. When they try even a little, like the (now ancient) demonstrations in Tiananman Square in 1989, they are violently repressed, killed, and made examples of "bad citizens" for everyone. Smaller repression takes place all day long across China. That is bad. The fact that Chinese people still try to resist shows just how badly they want change, and how badly repressed they are from making it.
There is no reason to respect the "opinions" of people whose "opinions" are violent political repression executed on hundreds of millions of people for decades. Of course they're entitled to their opinions. But I am entitled to call them the bad people that their opinions make them. Hiding totalitarian oppression behind demands for respect that they do not share is a sham.
Enough of this "pretexting" mumbo jumbo. It's "lying", fraud. Just because an exec does it doesn't require a euphamism to protect them from punishment like a mere human would get. They're not royalty who must be referred to with a "royal we" or "your highness". Their problems aren't "issues".
They're criminals. If anything, their crimes are worse, because they have more power and do more damage, while requiring more trust.
You are saying that "good" motivations make some actions that create fear for political control "not terrorism". "The end justifies the means." That is a fallacy. The ends contain the means. And motivations are always a guess, even by the motivated, while actions are concrete. As is the fear they cause, and the political control they create.
There's no need to transcend the physical for the "ultimate consequence" of these distinctions. Acting to cause fear for political control is terrorism, regardless of the "greater good" or the spirituality of the (usually deluded/insane) actors.
That standard is universal. There are, of course, differences in terrorism in different specific cases. Scaring a robber out of your home with an unloaded gun is a tiny terrorist act that most people would agree is acceptable. Scaring them in their own hideout with loaded guns by the police is also justly popular. Shooting one of them in the street to "make an example of them" is already unacceptable, though on the borderline for many and just fine with some. Nuking an industrial city in country whose (nearly) entire population is dedicated to conquering you and everyone else to stop them is debatable, though I agree with reservations (preferring alternatives). Nuking a second city to prove it will happen again until surrender is even more debatable, and I disagree (with converse reservations). Politics is never simple, mass fear is never simple, and their combination is even more complex.
But Hezbollah is not on those boundary lines. Hezbollah has taken over a large part of Lebanon, making a separate country. Turning Lebanon into a de facto confederation rather than a single country, in collaboration with their Syrian ally, which controls much of the rest of the confederation. From which they make war against both military and civilians in Israel, in collaboration with their Iranian ally, as part of Iran's larger Shiite revolution. Their actions mainly create terror, without hope of actual military parity with Israel. Their terrorizing the Israeli military doesn't bother me as much, except where it violates Geneva Conventions, and of course any war bothers me. Their terrorizing civilians, whether Israeli targets or Lebanese shields (or "recruited base") is totally unacceptable.
As is Israeli terrorizing Lebanese. Whether military (though less so, as I've noted in converse) or civilian (which is unacceptable). Whether Israelis are military, or the even more abominable civilian terrorists (many "settlers"). Whether we're talking about Israelis terrorizing Lebanese, Palestinians, or anyone else. Like Israelis also terrorize America by holding themselves hostage in a region they help keep a permanent threat to their existence.
War is hell. Hell has demons, devils and the damned. There are degrees. But they're all "evil". Some are more acceptable, like the damned who put themselves there, others are totally unacceptable like the devils who put everyone there. There's no need to look to a spiritual plane that exists at best in the imagination for the basis of valuation of these terrorists. Right here on Earth they're doing things that are evil. Hezbollah is evil. The existence of other evil working against them just makes more evil - it doesn't lessen theirs.
We're really talking about the legitimacy of US shutting down a Hezbollah website. The US State Department's classification of Hezbollah as a terrorist org, enemy of the US, is certainly justified. And war is the business of "necessary evil" - that's why "war is hell". Shutting down their website is evil, shooting an enemy is evil. That's why this war must stop. But until it does, failing to do that kind of necessary, lesser evil merely enables the growth of the greater evil. Until we stop this war, one way or another, we're all doing evil.
It's obvious that the current security practices we use on the Net are totally inadequate for our society. Most people have adopted some of us geeks' toys, like networks, email and multimedia - even custom T-shirts. But few of the normals have adopted some of the tools we geeks learned we needed to play with our toys without getting hurt. Geek posers are killing themselves, and dragging down our geek paradise with them.
The best solution to all this phishing, spam and other harvesting naive "normals" is the trust web. Everyone has a private key for signing assertions, and a contact list with trust levels. Every message is signed (or default untrusted) by the sender and vouchers. When enough vouchers sign a message, it is trustworthy. The Web contains vouching centers, including diverse security analysts signing messages (including each others' assertions). People subscribe to many vouch sources, as well as "vouchmasters" which publish formulas for securing transactions. This way, anyone who says a transaction is unsafe, and is vouched by someone else, makes that transaction at least subject to review, or blocked, depending on the person's policy. Which depends on whom they trust.
That is the kind of system I'd expect banks and governments to deploy for the public. They are the ones we are paying, and relying on, for security. There's so much efficiency to gain from security compared to the losses from insecurity that I expect a very diverse, competitive market of vouchers to thrive. The underlying tech, like PGP/GPG signing and other trustweb tools, already exists. There are already relatively informal vouchers, like CERT, DHS, and lots of independents.
What's needed are standards for trust degrees, and simple UIs for using the trust web without learning many new skills. UIs simpler than antiphishing techniques will win. UAs like Firefox and Outlook merely coloring buttons red to blue for degrees of trust, keeping personal info stored locally for standard submission to standard requests graded by risk and identified by trustworthyness would go very far. Onetime passwords for every transaction to prevent replay attacks would go even further. And local databases with audit trails of every transaction would make it even easier to use once a transaction is doubted.
All those features hook an automated trust web into many existing security practices already used by most people in person. A really secure regime would include privacy laws prohibiting transfer of personal info outside the transaction expressly required by the requester and expressly permitted by the sender. Putting personal info under copyright in detail, and a US Constitutional Amendment in general, would really lock our existing judicial/police/security system into a consistent defense of people as well as corporations.
The time is now. Why doesn't Novell's Evolution at least require PGP/GPG by default? Why doesn't Firefox keep personal info stored encrypted for form submissions with a separate log? Why don't banks issue onetime password credit "cards" for Web use? We've already gone far enough down the path that it's obvious Microsoft, the US government, Chase Bank aren't going to move first. Let's see some of the UIs start to make it easy, and force the backend of the trust web to catch up. I'm doing it in my own software. What are you doing?
No, you are the one blowing bullshit. Firebombing Dresden was certainly terrorism. As was atomic bombing both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "Motivations" don't determine terrorism or not. It's whether the action creates fear used for political control. I'm sure many crusaders (of all faiths) were motivated by "saving souls", but burning villages for conversion is still terrorism. If it saved their souls, that means god is a terrorist mastermind.
Hezbollah is very obviously terrorist. It's insane to even argue about it. As I keep mentioning for the easily baffled in these subthreads, just because Bush has hijacked a Terror War for more bullshit than benefit doesn't make terrorism any less real or diabolical. Hezbollah is diabolical, regardless of the nonexistence of "the Devil". They are evil regardless of the nonexistence of god, theirs or anyone else's, beyond an imaginary principle we use to personify good and evil.
I know Hezbollah. At what point does seeing their own propaganda, absolutely consistent media presentations (independent, corporate, Arab, Euramerican, Asian, everyone) of them terrorizing people, sink in? Only when they cut the throat of your neighbor in front of your face? Does firing missiles give them some kind of "immunity doubt"? Does giving to charity make a killer less lethal? NO. Hezbollah is a terrorist org. Of course it's not as simple as just killing people - I have never said terrorism is defined by murder. It is defined, as I keep saying, by using fear for political control. Which doesn't exclude using other PR for political control, or doing other things (like fundraising) only indirectly for political control.
I understand all this very well. It is you who is the easy prey for Hezbollah lies masking their obvious terrorist status. If they were feeding you I might understand how you could fall for it. Since I doubt they are feeding you anything but propaganda, you have nothing to teach me about "reality" or anything else, except as a bad example.
You are Elmer FUD, trying to pul a reductio ad absurdum. Your absurd straw man is nonsense. Hezbollah is more than "a few bad apples", less than the whole human race, to indulge your logic with a dose of my sense. Less than all Lebanese, in fact. Hezbollah is Hezbollah, all "in on it", all sworn to terrorize, politically manipulate, kill, conquer. Your argument is like a child's just getting into the language, without understanding the reality the words and phrases represent. Like worshipping an idol.
To explain an obvious truth to your twisted mind, I'll point out that not all Americans are torturers. But everyone "in on it" at Abu Ghraib (and Guantanamo, and Baghram, and prisons in Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, etc) is a torturer. And everyone in Iraq killing, kidnapping, assaulting, threatening civilians, whether "on purpose" or "collateral damage" is a terrorist. All the way up to (especially) Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush. And even the 50M Americans who voted to relect those thugs, knowing what they're doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not to mention the Republicans terrorizing Americans here at home. Yes, they're all terrorists. But the other 250M Americans are not, unless they've got their own nasty little terror operation going, or are helping them. Like you, helping Hezbollah. You're a terrorist, though a rancid little one who doesn't actually cause any terror. Like a shoebomber with your foot in your mouth.
There you go, Elmer FUD. You're not daffy, you've got the big gun pointed right at your head. I'm not your brother, I'm a RABBIT. And you're a terrorist who can't shoot straight.
20/6 vision would indeed be cyborgish, as noted in the Wikipedia article to which I linked: "the maximum acuity of the human eye without visual aids (such as binoculars) is generally thought to be around 20/10 (6/3)".
Yes, they're all terrorist orgs when they create terror to cause political change. Hezbollah is certainly a terrorist org by any definition.
Give me a fucking break. "McArthur era"? Don't you mean McCarthy era? Which is yet another bullshit comparison.
Even that Mandela (who you can't even spell) comparison is bullshit. You want the ultimate form of your bullshit? The American revolutionaries who ditched the British were "terrorists", too. There is a difference between terrorizing civilians and terrorizing military or political leaders. And Hezbollah is terrorist of the worst kind.
And you are helping them with your bullshit. Don't hand me some more bullshit about how that fact is somehow something I saw on CNN. Just because Bush has equated the Terror War with anything he wants to do doesn't mean the reality he's hijacked isn't still true. Saying that Hezbollah is just some "bad apples" is a disgusting lie that ignores their sworn mission to kill everyone who stops them from taking over Israel, Lebanon, anything they think god told them is theirs. And you are working with them in their campaign to gain political success. You're sick. And you won't get any more help from me validating you by arguing with you, when you can't even get simple facts straight and make outrageous lies about Hezbollah terrorists.
6/20 vision (assuming you're using the British/meters notation) means your friend had to stand 6 meters from something that others can see clearly at 20 meters. The only doctors wanting to study those eyes would be optometrists wanting to sell him glasses.
Hezbollah is a terrorist org. Your suggestion that "a few bad apples" are firing missiles into Israel, carving out its own state in Southern Lebanon, running military operations partnered with Iran, while "most of Hezbollah" is just an "unpopular political party" is insane. Insane.
And then you talk about things sometimes being "black and white"? Your Hezbollah fog isn't just "nuanced", it's a deranged lie. I'm curious what you have to say about the "few bad apples" among Americans torturing Iraqis in Abu Ghraib.
The US has also bombed radio/TV broadcast stations and newspapers while at war with their operators.
Despite Bush's perversion of the Terror War to invade Iraq and make peace with Osama, the US actually is at war with Hezbollah, an official State Department terrorist org. And very obviously (especially to readers of its website) Hezbollah is at war with the US.
China is also at war with Falun Gong, as with so many of its citizens who follow any authority other than the Communist government. But Americans don't accept that war. Nor does any sane person think the two are the same, standardized.
And today's Slashdot featured news that Freescale's "other projects" turning its attention might just be giant leveraged buyout attack, not any intrinsic business.
But apart from corporate media war fog, why not blow fibers through these pipes, directly to homes? That seems like a cheap, reliable way to deliver lots and lots of broadband with tech that can join multiple compatible WANs into sites. Without digging or deploying new, specialized "gas radio" equipment in a separate development/deployment/maintenance niche with smaller scale economy.
Your home could become a NAP for multiple carriers not only competing for your business, but getting distributed routing among their backbones around outages. If your block's "telco" WAN is down, they could still get to the Net bridged through you to your "gasco" WAN. Much like solar homes which "run the meters backwards" to supply power to the grid when they've got surplus. You'd sell surplus connectivity to your neighbors, billing the WAN you covered for.
"After being sued by the RIAA, is it feasible to sell all of my wordly possessions and prepay for my own or a relatives college education and start eating at a soup kitchen?"
Is there any way to get lawyers to see these kinds of abusive clients like the RIAA as threats to the lawyers, instead of just threats to defendants (when they win) or the RIAA (when they lose)? Or are we stuck with funded organizations like the RIAA "playing the numbers game" and suing anyone with any chance of being found guilty/liable, getting lawyers paid on both sides of the lawsuit?
Anonymous homophobe Coward, you're a pervert. You can't distinguish between homosexuality, bestiality and incest. Sick freak, your demented obsession with people's private lives is just your projection of your own twisted lusts.
FWIW, if Mormons were among the people who want the state to recognize polygamy, I wouldn't stand in their way, either. What business is it of mine? It's no business of yours, either.
You're a mockery. I'm not "making fun" of you, I'm not "slandering" you. I'm holding a mirror up to your dirty mind.
More immediately, this announcement means that Flash prices should start dropping even more. Maybe not to $0.25:GB like desktop HDs today, but maybe $2:GB (instead of today's $16:GB), for mobiles. When they release PRAM devices in 2008, they'll sell them for much more money than Flash because of the speed, but start dropping prices faster because of the cheaper manufacturing. By the time PRAM costs $2:GB, they'll be dumping Flash for $0.25:GB. HDs will probably cost $10:TB, if they're used outside datacenters at all, maybe sometime around 2010-2.
Can MythTV control my existing cablebox (Scientific Atlanta Explorer 3250)? It's got a USB port, what looks like a smartcard slot, and analog+digital audio/video outs.
If I could use the cablebox's tuner, maybe I would need only a video digitizer, or even just transcoder. It would be great to use the cablebox to covert digital video signals to TV. I've already got the cablebox and TV, I'd like to spend that money on better quality for the parts I actually require.
"The main reason is that such services get tons of flak from all directions if they don't implement any kind of logging."
Can you be more specific about which kinds of flak and which directions? After all, that is the crux of the entire problem we're discussing. If they get a legit warrant and don't have logs, why is it their problem?
If you assume "good faith" on the part of both police and Tor operators (I can't, but for the sake of argument...) then the police should have siezed merely a copy of the logs. I don't know German law, but there is no decision that the operators have committed a crime or caused any damage, so stopping their operation seems unjustified. There seems to be enough reason for police to investigate, therefore get log copies, but not to stop anything. Until a judge makes a decision on laws + evidence - if German law is "justice".
Doesn't that make all ISP proxy servers targets? Won't this chilling effect encourage ISPs to install even more spybugs for police, on all kinds of traffic and application streams?
The majority of Americans don't care about gay marriage. And the Americans who used to care about, say, interracial marriage, stopped caring pretty quickly once they were presented comfortably in new media (like TV and records), rather than just the "old media" of church pulpits and lockerroom beatings.
Why do you care so much about gay marriage, Anonymous homophobe Coward? Looking for another excuse you can't get a date?
Do the laws governing interstate/international gambling that specify "where" a distributed transaction takes place, and under which laws, also govern "Internet marriage"? Can two men get married "in" Wow, but both physically in, say, Massachussets, and be legally bound by the vows? What if the players are a man and a woman, but they're both playing men?
Since America now sees a private, voluntary group of activists working to define the country's legal definition of marriage strictly according to their group's exclusive terms, will we see them attack these games? Campaigning against "miscegenation", "bestiality", "homosexuality" and "unholy" combinations? Will they seek the destruction of online RPGs as 3rd Millennium Sodom and Gomorrahs?
Why do anonymizers keep logs? A perfect anonymizer would keep no logs, be stateless, offer no sign of a transaction once closed. That probably wouldn't actually work, or be maintainable. But why not logs only to Flash, overwritten with random data after every transaction is completed? Transient encrypted logs useable only within the transaction, with the key deleted along with the rest of the log?
Slashdot Mirror
You're right about my misreading your statement about end/means. If I read you right, we agree.
And you're partly right about fighting fire with fire burning everyone. The US should never have gone after the Qaeda bombers with the military. The US did need to bomb Taliban government and military facilities, infrastructure of the foreign government that sponsored the Qaeda plot. Because other countries that would attack the US need to see that not only the specific bureaucrats, politicians and leaders who were guilty will be destroyed, but also the national property. Otherwise the powers behind the powers will just grow new heads.
The US should have gone after the Qaeda entirely with intelligence, police and "special forces". Infiltrating organizations, kidnapping, assassinating, and toppling the Qaeda network of affiliated terrorist cells. Bombing civilians just makes it harder to keep them "on our side", giving info and helping "us" instead of joining "them". And the more bombing of public infrastructure and private property, the harder it is to rebuild a country that prioritizes its own productivity rather than the destruction of others.
But Bush committed us to war by waging real war. The resulting fire is like a forest fire, burning out of control. It is perfectly appropriate, and sometimes necessary, to "fight fire with fire", like burning a firebreak so the major fire won't continue out of control. That's only once the fire is already out of control, the fire already certainly dooms the target firebreak, and there is no other way to save at least the firebreak. Which is what we have now in our various wars with Hezbollah, Qaeda, and various other groups increasingly networked (eg. the opportunistically named '"Qaeda" in Iraq'). Burning down their website to prevent their recruitment, if a necessary part of a winning larger strategy, is appropriate. It keeps more of us from getting burned.
Similarly, Bush has committed US troops to "handling" Iraq. We must stop doing what we're doing there, but pulling out all our troops tomorrow would make things worse for everyone (except the leaders of their several internal factions, and Iran). Instead we should pull out troops to protect only the borders from foreign infiltration, validate and train Iraqi police and military, and let them fight their own civil war. If they produce a theocracy, we should face it with our surrounding military as a state. Meanwhile we should keep the country infiltrated with our counterterrorist intelligence. There are probably other versions of that handoff to Iraqis without handing them over to America's greater enemies. But they will all require some killing.
We've created a monster in Iraq, and one in Afghanistan. By becoming a mother monster ourselves. We have to smother our monstrous children, which makes us even more monstrous, while also less. If there's a practical way to protect America and our foreign "associates" without using some fire, I'd like to consider it. But I don't see one. Just a lesser fire used judiciously. Which, with Bush and his Republican Congress still unequivocally in power "staying the course", is itself still just a post on a website.
"If we take our benchmarks into consideration you can no longer get by without a quad-core processor."
I love HW geeks. This CPU isn't even released, many apps don't even work on it, chipset makers are still scrambling to release the mobos that will actually use it. But even though nearly no one can get one, no one can get by without one.
If HW geeks weren't so demanding, Intel and its competition wouldn't do so much work keeping them packed with the hottest toys.
"Although it can be argued how much choice the Chinese have when it comes to their form of government we cannot immediately assume that our form of democracy is some sort of perfect thing that needs to be instilled in the rest of the world."
That is two arguments. American democracy is far from perfect (and getting further every day). But we're not talking about instilling American democracy in the rest of the world (though some people do, we're not). We're not even talking about instilling it in China, or instilling British, European or any other kind of democracy in China. You are the only one talking about that.
The Chinese government of its own people is bad. That is the argument. The Chinese government controls people by relentless propaganda defined solely in terms of the enforcing their order, starting at birth, and escalating to violence which is also portrayed in some media while denied in others. That is bad. Chinese people don't choose their government. When they try even a little, like the (now ancient) demonstrations in Tiananman Square in 1989, they are violently repressed, killed, and made examples of "bad citizens" for everyone. Smaller repression takes place all day long across China. That is bad. The fact that Chinese people still try to resist shows just how badly they want change, and how badly repressed they are from making it.
There is no reason to respect the "opinions" of people whose "opinions" are violent political repression executed on hundreds of millions of people for decades. Of course they're entitled to their opinions. But I am entitled to call them the bad people that their opinions make them. Hiding totalitarian oppression behind demands for respect that they do not share is a sham.
Enough of this "pretexting" mumbo jumbo. It's "lying", fraud. Just because an exec does it doesn't require a euphamism to protect them from punishment like a mere human would get. They're not royalty who must be referred to with a "royal we" or "your highness". Their problems aren't "issues".
They're criminals. If anything, their crimes are worse, because they have more power and do more damage, while requiring more trust.
You are saying that "good" motivations make some actions that create fear for political control "not terrorism". "The end justifies the means." That is a fallacy. The ends contain the means. And motivations are always a guess, even by the motivated, while actions are concrete. As is the fear they cause, and the political control they create.
There's no need to transcend the physical for the "ultimate consequence" of these distinctions. Acting to cause fear for political control is terrorism, regardless of the "greater good" or the spirituality of the (usually deluded/insane) actors.
That standard is universal. There are, of course, differences in terrorism in different specific cases. Scaring a robber out of your home with an unloaded gun is a tiny terrorist act that most people would agree is acceptable. Scaring them in their own hideout with loaded guns by the police is also justly popular. Shooting one of them in the street to "make an example of them" is already unacceptable, though on the borderline for many and just fine with some. Nuking an industrial city in country whose (nearly) entire population is dedicated to conquering you and everyone else to stop them is debatable, though I agree with reservations (preferring alternatives). Nuking a second city to prove it will happen again until surrender is even more debatable, and I disagree (with converse reservations). Politics is never simple, mass fear is never simple, and their combination is even more complex.
But Hezbollah is not on those boundary lines. Hezbollah has taken over a large part of Lebanon, making a separate country. Turning Lebanon into a de facto confederation rather than a single country, in collaboration with their Syrian ally, which controls much of the rest of the confederation. From which they make war against both military and civilians in Israel, in collaboration with their Iranian ally, as part of Iran's larger Shiite revolution. Their actions mainly create terror, without hope of actual military parity with Israel. Their terrorizing the Israeli military doesn't bother me as much, except where it violates Geneva Conventions, and of course any war bothers me. Their terrorizing civilians, whether Israeli targets or Lebanese shields (or "recruited base") is totally unacceptable.
As is Israeli terrorizing Lebanese. Whether military (though less so, as I've noted in converse) or civilian (which is unacceptable). Whether Israelis are military, or the even more abominable civilian terrorists (many "settlers"). Whether we're talking about Israelis terrorizing Lebanese, Palestinians, or anyone else. Like Israelis also terrorize America by holding themselves hostage in a region they help keep a permanent threat to their existence.
War is hell. Hell has demons, devils and the damned. There are degrees. But they're all "evil". Some are more acceptable, like the damned who put themselves there, others are totally unacceptable like the devils who put everyone there. There's no need to look to a spiritual plane that exists at best in the imagination for the basis of valuation of these terrorists. Right here on Earth they're doing things that are evil. Hezbollah is evil. The existence of other evil working against them just makes more evil - it doesn't lessen theirs.
We're really talking about the legitimacy of US shutting down a Hezbollah website. The US State Department's classification of Hezbollah as a terrorist org, enemy of the US, is certainly justified. And war is the business of "necessary evil" - that's why "war is hell". Shutting down their website is evil, shooting an enemy is evil. That's why this war must stop. But until it does, failing to do that kind of necessary, lesser evil merely enables the growth of the greater evil. Until we stop this war, one way or another, we're all doing evil.
It's obvious that the current security practices we use on the Net are totally inadequate for our society. Most people have adopted some of us geeks' toys, like networks, email and multimedia - even custom T-shirts. But few of the normals have adopted some of the tools we geeks learned we needed to play with our toys without getting hurt. Geek posers are killing themselves, and dragging down our geek paradise with them.
The best solution to all this phishing, spam and other harvesting naive "normals" is the trust web. Everyone has a private key for signing assertions, and a contact list with trust levels. Every message is signed (or default untrusted) by the sender and vouchers. When enough vouchers sign a message, it is trustworthy. The Web contains vouching centers, including diverse security analysts signing messages (including each others' assertions). People subscribe to many vouch sources, as well as "vouchmasters" which publish formulas for securing transactions. This way, anyone who says a transaction is unsafe, and is vouched by someone else, makes that transaction at least subject to review, or blocked, depending on the person's policy. Which depends on whom they trust.
That is the kind of system I'd expect banks and governments to deploy for the public. They are the ones we are paying, and relying on, for security. There's so much efficiency to gain from security compared to the losses from insecurity that I expect a very diverse, competitive market of vouchers to thrive. The underlying tech, like PGP/GPG signing and other trustweb tools, already exists. There are already relatively informal vouchers, like CERT, DHS, and lots of independents.
What's needed are standards for trust degrees, and simple UIs for using the trust web without learning many new skills. UIs simpler than antiphishing techniques will win. UAs like Firefox and Outlook merely coloring buttons red to blue for degrees of trust, keeping personal info stored locally for standard submission to standard requests graded by risk and identified by trustworthyness would go very far. Onetime passwords for every transaction to prevent replay attacks would go even further. And local databases with audit trails of every transaction would make it even easier to use once a transaction is doubted.
All those features hook an automated trust web into many existing security practices already used by most people in person. A really secure regime would include privacy laws prohibiting transfer of personal info outside the transaction expressly required by the requester and expressly permitted by the sender. Putting personal info under copyright in detail, and a US Constitutional Amendment in general, would really lock our existing judicial/police/security system into a consistent defense of people as well as corporations.
The time is now. Why doesn't Novell's Evolution at least require PGP/GPG by default? Why doesn't Firefox keep personal info stored encrypted for form submissions with a separate log? Why don't banks issue onetime password credit "cards" for Web use? We've already gone far enough down the path that it's obvious Microsoft, the US government, Chase Bank aren't going to move first. Let's see some of the UIs start to make it easy, and force the backend of the trust web to catch up. I'm doing it in my own software. What are you doing?
No, you are the one blowing bullshit. Firebombing Dresden was certainly terrorism. As was atomic bombing both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "Motivations" don't determine terrorism or not. It's whether the action creates fear used for political control. I'm sure many crusaders (of all faiths) were motivated by "saving souls", but burning villages for conversion is still terrorism. If it saved their souls, that means god is a terrorist mastermind.
Hezbollah is very obviously terrorist. It's insane to even argue about it. As I keep mentioning for the easily baffled in these subthreads, just because Bush has hijacked a Terror War for more bullshit than benefit doesn't make terrorism any less real or diabolical. Hezbollah is diabolical, regardless of the nonexistence of "the Devil". They are evil regardless of the nonexistence of god, theirs or anyone else's, beyond an imaginary principle we use to personify good and evil.
I know Hezbollah. At what point does seeing their own propaganda, absolutely consistent media presentations (independent, corporate, Arab, Euramerican, Asian, everyone) of them terrorizing people, sink in? Only when they cut the throat of your neighbor in front of your face? Does firing missiles give them some kind of "immunity doubt"? Does giving to charity make a killer less lethal? NO. Hezbollah is a terrorist org. Of course it's not as simple as just killing people - I have never said terrorism is defined by murder. It is defined, as I keep saying, by using fear for political control. Which doesn't exclude using other PR for political control, or doing other things (like fundraising) only indirectly for political control.
I understand all this very well. It is you who is the easy prey for Hezbollah lies masking their obvious terrorist status. If they were feeding you I might understand how you could fall for it. Since I doubt they are feeding you anything but propaganda, you have nothing to teach me about "reality" or anything else, except as a bad example.
You are Elmer FUD, trying to pul a reductio ad absurdum. Your absurd straw man is nonsense. Hezbollah is more than "a few bad apples", less than the whole human race, to indulge your logic with a dose of my sense. Less than all Lebanese, in fact. Hezbollah is Hezbollah, all "in on it", all sworn to terrorize, politically manipulate, kill, conquer. Your argument is like a child's just getting into the language, without understanding the reality the words and phrases represent. Like worshipping an idol.
To explain an obvious truth to your twisted mind, I'll point out that not all Americans are torturers. But everyone "in on it" at Abu Ghraib (and Guantanamo, and Baghram, and prisons in Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, etc) is a torturer. And everyone in Iraq killing, kidnapping, assaulting, threatening civilians, whether "on purpose" or "collateral damage" is a terrorist. All the way up to (especially) Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush. And even the 50M Americans who voted to relect those thugs, knowing what they're doing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not to mention the Republicans terrorizing Americans here at home. Yes, they're all terrorists. But the other 250M Americans are not, unless they've got their own nasty little terror operation going, or are helping them. Like you, helping Hezbollah. You're a terrorist, though a rancid little one who doesn't actually cause any terror. Like a shoebomber with your foot in your mouth.
There you go, Elmer FUD. You're not daffy, you've got the big gun pointed right at your head. I'm not your brother, I'm a RABBIT. And you're a terrorist who can't shoot straight.
20/6 vision would indeed be cyborgish, as noted in the Wikipedia article to which I linked: "the maximum acuity of the human eye without visual aids (such as binoculars) is generally thought to be around 20/10 (6/3)".
Yes, they're all terrorist orgs when they create terror to cause political change. Hezbollah is certainly a terrorist org by any definition.
Give me a fucking break. "McArthur era"? Don't you mean McCarthy era? Which is yet another bullshit comparison.
Even that Mandela (who you can't even spell) comparison is bullshit. You want the ultimate form of your bullshit? The American revolutionaries who ditched the British were "terrorists", too. There is a difference between terrorizing civilians and terrorizing military or political leaders. And Hezbollah is terrorist of the worst kind.
And you are helping them with your bullshit. Don't hand me some more bullshit about how that fact is somehow something I saw on CNN. Just because Bush has equated the Terror War with anything he wants to do doesn't mean the reality he's hijacked isn't still true. Saying that Hezbollah is just some "bad apples" is a disgusting lie that ignores their sworn mission to kill everyone who stops them from taking over Israel, Lebanon, anything they think god told them is theirs. And you are working with them in their campaign to gain political success. You're sick. And you won't get any more help from me validating you by arguing with you, when you can't even get simple facts straight and make outrageous lies about Hezbollah terrorists.
6/20 vision (assuming you're using the British/meters notation) means your friend had to stand 6 meters from something that others can see clearly at 20 meters. The only doctors wanting to study those eyes would be optometrists wanting to sell him glasses.
Hezbollah is a terrorist org. Your suggestion that "a few bad apples" are firing missiles into Israel, carving out its own state in Southern Lebanon, running military operations partnered with Iran, while "most of Hezbollah" is just an "unpopular political party" is insane. Insane.
And then you talk about things sometimes being "black and white"? Your Hezbollah fog isn't just "nuanced", it's a deranged lie. I'm curious what you have to say about the "few bad apples" among Americans torturing Iraqis in Abu Ghraib.
The US has also bombed radio/TV broadcast stations and newspapers while at war with their operators.
Despite Bush's perversion of the Terror War to invade Iraq and make peace with Osama, the US actually is at war with Hezbollah, an official State Department terrorist org. And very obviously (especially to readers of its website) Hezbollah is at war with the US.
China is also at war with Falun Gong, as with so many of its citizens who follow any authority other than the Communist government. But Americans don't accept that war. Nor does any sane person think the two are the same, standardized.
BroadbandReports has a more critical review of the USA Today story.
And today's Slashdot featured news that Freescale's "other projects" turning its attention might just be giant leveraged buyout attack, not any intrinsic business.
But apart from corporate media war fog, why not blow fibers through these pipes, directly to homes? That seems like a cheap, reliable way to deliver lots and lots of broadband with tech that can join multiple compatible WANs into sites. Without digging or deploying new, specialized "gas radio" equipment in a separate development/deployment/maintenance niche with smaller scale economy.
Your home could become a NAP for multiple carriers not only competing for your business, but getting distributed routing among their backbones around outages. If your block's "telco" WAN is down, they could still get to the Net bridged through you to your "gasco" WAN. Much like solar homes which "run the meters backwards" to supply power to the grid when they've got surplus. You'd sell surplus connectivity to your neighbors, billing the WAN you covered for.
"After being sued by the RIAA, is it feasible to sell all of my wordly possessions and prepay for my own or a relatives college education and start eating at a soup kitchen?"
?
Is there any way to get lawyers to see these kinds of abusive clients like the RIAA as threats to the lawyers, instead of just threats to defendants (when they win) or the RIAA (when they lose)? Or are we stuck with funded organizations like the RIAA "playing the numbers game" and suing anyone with any chance of being found guilty/liable, getting lawyers paid on both sides of the lawsuit?
Anonymous homophobe Coward, you're a pervert. You can't distinguish between homosexuality, bestiality and incest. Sick freak, your demented obsession with people's private lives is just your projection of your own twisted lusts.
FWIW, if Mormons were among the people who want the state to recognize polygamy, I wouldn't stand in their way, either. What business is it of mine? It's no business of yours, either.
You're a mockery. I'm not "making fun" of you, I'm not "slandering" you. I'm holding a mirror up to your dirty mind.
More immediately, this announcement means that Flash prices should start dropping even more. Maybe not to $0.25:GB like desktop HDs today, but maybe $2:GB (instead of today's $16:GB), for mobiles. When they release PRAM devices in 2008, they'll sell them for much more money than Flash because of the speed, but start dropping prices faster because of the cheaper manufacturing. By the time PRAM costs $2:GB, they'll be dumping Flash for $0.25:GB. HDs will probably cost $10:TB, if they're used outside datacenters at all, maybe sometime around 2010-2.
Can MythTV control my existing cablebox (Scientific Atlanta Explorer 3250)? It's got a USB port, what looks like a smartcard slot, and analog+digital audio/video outs.
If I could use the cablebox's tuner, maybe I would need only a video digitizer, or even just transcoder. It would be great to use the cablebox to covert digital video signals to TV. I've already got the cablebox and TV, I'd like to spend that money on better quality for the parts I actually require.
"The main reason is that such services get tons of flak from all directions if they don't implement any kind of logging."
Can you be more specific about which kinds of flak and which directions? After all, that is the crux of the entire problem we're discussing. If they get a legit warrant and don't have logs, why is it their problem?
If you assume "good faith" on the part of both police and Tor operators (I can't, but for the sake of argument...) then the police should have siezed merely a copy of the logs. I don't know German law, but there is no decision that the operators have committed a crime or caused any damage, so stopping their operation seems unjustified. There seems to be enough reason for police to investigate, therefore get log copies, but not to stop anything. Until a judge makes a decision on laws + evidence - if German law is "justice".
BTW, what's "tyYtKuVz"?
Doesn't that make all ISP proxy servers targets? Won't this chilling effect encourage ISPs to install even more spybugs for police, on all kinds of traffic and application streams?
The majority of Americans don't care about gay marriage. And the Americans who used to care about, say, interracial marriage, stopped caring pretty quickly once they were presented comfortably in new media (like TV and records), rather than just the "old media" of church pulpits and lockerroom beatings.
Why do you care so much about gay marriage, Anonymous homophobe Coward? Looking for another excuse you can't get a date?
"Relationships begin that flower into marriage"
Do the laws governing interstate/international gambling that specify "where" a distributed transaction takes place, and under which laws, also govern "Internet marriage"? Can two men get married "in" Wow, but both physically in, say, Massachussets, and be legally bound by the vows? What if the players are a man and a woman, but they're both playing men?
Since America now sees a private, voluntary group of activists working to define the country's legal definition of marriage strictly according to their group's exclusive terms, will we see them attack these games? Campaigning against "miscegenation", "bestiality", "homosexuality" and "unholy" combinations? Will they seek the destruction of online RPGs as 3rd Millennium Sodom and Gomorrahs?
Why do anonymizers keep logs? A perfect anonymizer would keep no logs, be stateless, offer no sign of a transaction once closed. That probably wouldn't actually work, or be maintainable. But why not logs only to Flash, overwritten with random data after every transaction is completed? Transient encrypted logs useable only within the transaction, with the key deleted along with the rest of the log?