Civil disobedience is a serious thing, not a tool for disaffected consumers upset at the music cartel. Civil disobedience is a tool that instills fear into the government for the real purpose of causing them buckle or face revolution.
But I'm not willing to give up my privacy in the process.
A key aspect to civil disobedience is in fact getting caught, being a nuisance to the system. Cloaking your identity is the antithesis of civil disobedience.
This decision is a purely procedural thing. We have no new case law, and no new precedent.
When you start telling a group about something news related, you started with a very basic premise:
The nearest family member and defining characteristics of the thing being described.
So the write up could have started:
"Red v Blue, an animated video series featuring scenes rendered with off-the-shelf techniques borrowed from popular video games, has been released into a third season..."
That's it.. a very lines and suddenly a big bunch of people who would have skipped over it can dig in and find out if at least they are interested in the general topic.
I skipped over this article initially because I assumed Red V Blue was some type of political reference. A friend e-mailed me the link with a similiar description and suddenly now I am finding it's pretty cool.
How many people just skip over the poorly written items?
Most all the rulings so far have been bad for fileswapping -- ie, they have all agreed that unauthorized copying is illegal -- this ruling just protects the software itself, and keeps the burden shifted over to fileswappers.
There has never been any legitimate legal question to whether unauthorized sharing of files is copyright infringement. It is.
The only question has been are the companies/individuals who write the software liable for any potential secondary infringement claims.
I disagree with your conclusions over the cease fire, as in practice these things are never so tenuous. I'm not sure, even technically, that these things are authorizations to restart the war. (Shooting at an aircraft.)
Read the cease-fire. It's in there. Any agressive action against coalition aircraft or personell.
The US move to war was all about UN resolutions and how Iraq was violating them. Point was, they weren't really - not 687, and 1441 was moot if no WMD's existed. And further, even if they were, a vote on the UN resolutions and the responses etc would be required to restart a war.
It can't be retroactively moot. I mean to say, it all hinges on co-operation. If Hussein had none (which he didnt) then the burden is on him to prove it, since, before this all started he was known to have them and pursue them. Before the war was started Hussein denied having them - to a degree - yet would not/could 100% to prove it.
I am not saying this war was right to start, but I am saying that on it's face there are many ways this war was technically legal. The illegality of the war is a non-starter in terms of real-world issues and technical legal merit.
The real story is, that he who wins the war is legal. Always is. Doesn't make it reality, but the winner is essence makes reality.
This is what I am speaking of.
Go back and read the cease fire. No additional UN resolution is needed to rekindle the war. Shooting even once at a jet patroling the no-fly zone is a breach worthy of re-opening the war.
The bottom line remains that this war was not technically illegal, but rather, against the spirit of the UN.
This isn't bad. If the Court refuses to hear the case then the current ruling will work its way through different federal courts until (1) there a consenus on the side of file swappers or (2) there is a disagreemnet where at least one court disagrees with a peer or lower court. At that point the Court will either hear the case, or decline.
The only way this can be bad for fileswapping is if the Court hears the case and reverses the Betamax decision.
Re:I code C# for a living
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Java 1.5 vs C#
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· Score: 1
What don't you like about C#? Or do you just feel that C#/.NET and Java are roughly equivalent?
Logic dictates that if two people agree on something and codify it then you have a valid contract.
You are bound to the idea that "private property" must be physical, which is a creation that you have decided to make into existenance. This confounds two hundred years of tradition and law, and rehashes a debate that is years old.
People have dominion over thier creative works. It is a principle that is rooted in the notion that it is the best way to promote the creative arts.
No contracts, anytime. Your argument is all well and good, but it's irrelevant.
No, it's not irrelevant. IP law and contract law are more than just friendly cousins, they are linked.
When you purchase something from soneone, you are entering into an implicit agreement. You get something. They get something. That's the basis of a sale. Layers and layers of laws are built on this premise: an exchange of property, an exchange of rights, an exchange of value.
used in great detail describe "contractual" arrangements involved in "trade" and "ownership" of other human beings.
No, because as I mentioned before, there are broad overarching legal principles involved, which, as I mentioned, trump contract law.
There is another broad overarching principle which is enshrined in the same document that protects against slavery, and that principle is copyright and patent, two fundamental bricks of intellectual property.
Contract law is fundamental to civil society. It is linked beyond seperation to IP law. Any IP laws or amendments to the US constitution you'd like to see enacted would be easily and permanetly avoided by the use of contract law.
The only type of contract that could be drawn is one obligating one party to maintain information in one of its fundamental states: known or unknown.
That's untrue.
You and I can draw a legal contract based only on common law that says you shall not replay to an audience greater than one my works.
Unfortunately this is entirely impossible to apply to enterntainment because the objective of a broadcaster/distributor is to disseminate information and thus break the secrecy.
Wrong. Exclusivity contracts are rampant, everyday, regular old things. You may share this information with X and ONLY X people. All kinds of online databases use this premise.
The consumer cannot be required to work for the music company in guarding the secrecy, even if one ignores the fact that the very medium on which the information is disseminated (air vibrations) is not conducive to secrecy.
That's absurd, and you just made that up.
If you believe that two people can make a legal agreement that is not in-itself illegal on the face, then you must by extension believe that fundamentally individuals ought to have dominion over thier creative works. That's the bottom line. They are linked, permanently.
If you and I agree to do something, and write that down and sign it, should that - assuming some larger overriding principles are true - be enforceable?
From that front, it really does seem to me, that technically, 1441 was a sham, and that the US action was very probably illegal.
I've read both, studied both. As I've noted, they are not the sole rationale for what is and is not legal.
Iraq has been in material breach of it's cease-fire agan and again. The cease-fire is invalid, and the Gulf War is back on again.
That's way number, and it's a slam dunk. Technically legal yes, in the spirit of the UN, no.
Both resolutions 687 and 1441 are based on Hussein's continuing no-compliance with inspectors. I think we both know what Hussein was doing: trying to walk the line between complying with them fully enough to evade a war and still chest-thumping enough to play tough guy to his military guys and international neighbors. Being pushed around the UN must have been a big old slap in the face for him, and seriously damaged his ego. Regardless of his motivatons, and though both resolutions were based on the clearly wrong premise that his weapons programs were running in secret or hiding, he was in technical breach of his obligations.
As an argument, the "legality" of the war is extremely tenuous.
You seem to be echoing a Bush administration propaganda theme that the Saudi's are pure as driven snow. I doubt that is true and you seem to have fallen for some very good propaganda that said, Saddam was involved in 9/11 and Saudi Arabia wasn't. Reality is almost certainly the exact opposite.
NO. Absolutely not. I am claiming that the House of Saud is a far more moderate government for Saudia Arabia than any Wahabist regime would be. And right now we can have the House of Saud OR the Wahabist's that are next in line for power. I know that Saudi Arabians were involed in 9/11 and Iraqis were not. However, the House of Saud does not and did not support these terrorists. I'd love to read about the Saudi's as well, but you know, we aren't going to any time soon I can think of.
The Saudi's have only very recently officially started to fight terrorism, partially thanks to the fact Al Qaeda launched attacks in Saudi Arabia against Arabs. Prior to that they either denied the problem or were indifferent as long as it was targeted at infidels.
I agree they've only started recently fighting terrorism, but not because of indifference. The ruling family in the Kingdom is not all powerful, and any actions they take against the clerical muslims in charge have to be very very carefully balanced. The mullahs are the ones who have the loyalty of the people. Not the royalty.
If they pulled their investment out they could single handedly crash markets.
That's patently false. The largely circulated number about how much the Saudi's own in terms of American assets is deceptive. There is a saying that when you owe the bank 100,000 they own you. But when you owe the bank 100,000,000 you own the bank. Well, in the US, we owe the Saudi's the 100,000,000.
Simply put, the Saudi's cannot pull their investments. It's not possible. If they attempted to quickly remove their capital from the United States the prices for those investments would fall and no buyers would be present. Additionally, all the markets you speak of are designed with systems that prevent them from being short-circuited. Moreover much of the wealth that the Saudi's have are not in the name of the Kingdom of Saudi arabia, but of individuals. Much of the wealth is concentrated in instruments that are long-term and cannot be traded into a short-term liquid asset - government issue bonds, stakes in insurance companies and banks, etc.
and they get to fly their nationals out of the country right after 9/11.
Just so you know, this has been throughly debunked. The 9/11 report that you mentioned says this:
No commercial planes, including chartered flights, were permitted to fly into, out of, or within the United States until September 13, 2001. After the airspace reopened, six chartered flights with 142 people, mostly Saudi Arabian nationals, departed from the United States between September 14 and 24. One flight, the so-called Bin Ladin flight, departed the United States on September 20 with 26 passengers, most of them relatives of Usama Bin Ladin. We have found no credible evidence that any chartered flights of Saudi Arabian nationals departed the United States before the reopening of national airspace.
You make it sound like "they got to fly their nationals out right after 9/11" implies some type of special treatment based on their wealth and representation in the administration. It's simply untrue. They used no special privelages, and there has been no evidence provided to back any other claim.
After Pearl Harbor most Japanese Americans were rounded up, stripped of their property, and eventually landed in concentration camps.
Just as a final side point you statement is wrong. Most Japanese Americans were not rounded up. 110,000 to 120,000 thousand were, the offical number being the lower and the estimated number by historians the latter. It is worth noting that according to the voluntary registraton of aliens before the war th
but you when you either didn't get a vote or lost the vote sanctioning the most extreme form of enforcement
Woah. I am talking pre-Gulf-War-I. Iraq was in material breach of their cease fire agreement. Therefore the first gulf war's negotiated end is over - null and void. This war is nothing but an extension of the Gulf War of the 1990s.
Secondly, you are wrong in thinking that the UN is the arbortor of international law. It is not. International law would maybe be better off, but that is not the case. Put all that aside though.
Thirdly, the security council did pass a resolution which warned Iraq of the "most serious of consequences" - almost a quote - and that did in fact pass. The UN inspection team did report that Iraq was in breach of it's obligations in terms of co-operation even though it was their opinion that they possessed no weapons that were significantly or seriously wrongly in possesion of (I am obviously not going to split hairs on the range of a missle that is a few miles past its allowable range).
Based on all that, this war was not strictly illegal.
Like I said the U.S. should either get out of the U.N. or be thrown out instead of using it when its convenient, and then ignoring it when its convenient
I don't disagree. I am not addressing your position in general, just a detail of that argument. Specifically, that this war was illegal. It was not. This would not even be close in a court of law way. No, was the US administration forthright in it's arguments? No, they weren't. Did they act in good faith with the UN? No. They didn't.
A problem with the UN in general is that it attempts to treat all nations as equals, and elevates some to "first amoung equals" status. This is a bogus idea. To suggest that some nations have equally legitimate status as others is untrue. Specifically, the UN seems to be of the collective mind that inaction is worse than wrong action, and this often leads to the type of indecision that gets it criticized - often rightly.
They did revolt, and the then first Bush administration looked the other way while Saddam slaughtered them.
Even though you disown it, both Jordan and Saudia Arabia warned Bush that mid-east would be thrown into choas if the US removed Hussein, and that the coallition would fall apart. The King of Saudia Arabia spoke with Bush about this himself. Bush had already at this point promised to support the Kurds as a nation seperate from Hussein and to support their revolutionary attempts.
Not sure you were aware but Saudi Arabia already closely resembles Afghanistan under the Taliban, women are deeply oppressed and people are routinely beheaded in public because thats what Islamic law stipulates.
This is a completely false comparison. Women are not routinely executed like in Afganistan under the Taliban. Quite frankly you are terribly wrong. The biggest threat that women face is from execution from family members. These women are offered protection by the Saudi government and their related killers or attempted killers are treated as killers. Women in the Kingdom are clearly not equals with men, but they are not treated as abject victims like in the Taliban controlled Afganistan. Additionally, the degree to which women are mistreated is largely related to the strength in the area of the clergy. As I mentioned before, the House of Saud is not in control of the country in a typical despotic environment. They rule at the pleasure of the clerical Muslims. Much of the military or paramilitary power in the Kingdom is loyal to the mullahs, not to the royal house. This is the great difference between the House of Saud and the Taliban. The House is deeply interested in the Westernization of the country. It is a true balancing act between their impulses and what the religious voice of the nation dictates.
There is a real legitimate reason why the US and specifically any administration with interest in
The bottomline is when the time came for the U.N to authorize the invasion of Iraq it didn't, so as a result, the U.S. invasion was illegal under current international law.
Your argument is flawed. The US invasion wasn't strictly illegal by international law. Hussein was in material breach of the Gulf War cease-fire, and a number of UN treaties.
By any measure of International law, the cease fire that Iraq/Hussein signed was violated in any number of cases over the years. Any one of those violations was enough to justify - legally - renewed military operations.
George H.W. Bush encouraged to revolt and then turned his back on.
One final note. This is again overly simplistic view of the matter. The dynamics of the countries in the middle-east are vastly complex. Countries like Saudi Arabia who are railed against for being on the side terrorists (especially by the left in the media - "18 of 19 hijackers were from there", type of stuff) are a mish-mash of conflicting political entities. Saudia Arabia was nearly torn apart from within due to the US intervention the first time around with Iraq. The ruling family is not in complete control of the nation. They have a tacit agreement with the religious clerics to preserve and protect the order - but the House of Saud knows that this could turn at any moment. Make no mistake: if the House of Saud falls to a fundamentalist regime like the old Taliban or the Iranian government the world as a whole will be in a really nasty spot.
It's hard to underestimate the effect this would have on the world.
HW Bush was warned off deposing Hussein the first time because of tensions in moderate nations, specifically Jordan and Saudia Arabia.
Middle-East politics is an amazingly complex thing. Citing a single reason for anything that happens there is a sure-fire way to be wrong.
Back to your post... We're also thinking of cutting cable also. You just look at the cost of all the media consumption... it really adds up.
I am thinking of setting up a pvr at home for my "friends" to schedule and then download recordings from to help defray the costs of my cable connection.. i figure i have a few geeky friends who'd like to cut cable except for those rare shows they'd watch.. drop me an email if you have any interest:)
Agreed that college kids really fund the MPAA/RIAA more than anyone else.
The other alternative is that you just don't consume much media.
My wife and I are divesting of media consumption in general. The TV we watch is focused, to a point, ad-free (thanks to a time-shifting PVR), and brief. The movies we watch are bought on used DVDs or borrowed from friends. We stopped listening to music pretty much altogether after we got married. We have a few CDs of musical performances and soothing sounds and whatnot for when we are cooking or cleaning or mowing the lawn.
The fact remains that in the last 12 months we've cut our "entertainment" budget by 50% and haven't suffered a bit. In a few weeks that number will be 75% after we further reduce our cable bill.
The media and IP industries are killing themselves slowly. Before we got married we were probably spending $5k a year between the two of us on media: movies, music, concerts, cable tv, rentals, movies, and assorted crap. Now we have season tickets to our local stage company. By this time next year my goal is for our budget to be less than $1250 for a year of entertainment.
Thats nearly $4,000 that the media industry has screwed itself out of.
consumers, holding the corporations that make operating systems that are prone to spyware accountable.
That's a bogus idea.
Spyware is indistingushable from regular software except in the case of the actions of the program. Short of creating a blacklist, no operating system should or could block spyware.
Since a huge portion of spyware is actually adware which installs with other applications, it seems highly likely that no matter what OS is used as long as the user has rights to install software spyware will exisit.
This is actually a re-occuring theme that I keep seeing. Sure ASP.NET is fast to program with "Out-of-the-box". It requires less design and with Visual Studio, less skilled developers can build apps (I'm not saying all ASP.NET developers are less skilled). But in the long run it costs you more, either when it comes time to update existing, un-designed, software or handle security problems like this.
What ASP.NET does is require less of the error prone programming that makes programming for the web rather expensive.
Things like forms programming, session management, database abstraction, etc can take a lot of code in some environments. This code is often pretty static, and fairly prone to errors and maintainability problems.
ASP.NET is both fast develop with and fast to execute. It is also very very easy to write extremely re-usuable code.
The bottom line? Even with the road-bumps that come out from time-to-time it's a choice platform for web application development.
(Pre-note: IIS is a security also-ran. Big time defects in thinking and implementation.)
The thing about IIS is that it is very typical for one installation of IIS to run one or less website, while it is very unlikely that this is the case with Apache.
This occurs for a lot of reasons. Lots of ISPs use Apache, because it's free, easier to configure in a scripted fashion, and generally all around more suitable for a hosting setup.
However, a large number of businesses with sites that are self-hosted run on IIS becaue that's what there IT department knows, what their network runs ons, etc.
If you look at any given site that runs against IIS this generally represents one Windows NT/2k/2k3 server. Again, there are lots of places selling Windows hosting, but for most purposes, it's not very popular. Apache/Linux/Generic hosting is much more popular and heavily advertised.
This leads to a less than accurate view of results. For example, virtually all nerds who run their own server are running Apache or Linux in general. That just makes sense. It's free, runs on less hardware mostly, has a great community for hacking, etc. These sites though are very lightly trafficked generally. They are not the top ten blogs, etc.
I guess what I am saying is this: I'd like to see a breakdown of market share by bytes or pages served. I imagine here we would see much better MS performance.
Surely. As a manufacturer of a car, you take on the responsibility that you are working with a defacto deadly weapon, dangerous object and/or safety hazard. It is your duty to mitigate the risk, and design an appropriate system.
As a driver of a car, you cannot make that decision.
Re:Better drivers and licensing please
on
Linux GPU Performance
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Your money is not as good as everyone elses.
90%+ of the market is Windows. To support your 10% slice of the market is vastly more expensive per sale.
Look at this way. If developing, optimizing, and supporting the drivers for a new line of cards was equally as expensive for Linux as for Windows, at say, $1M USD, and the card was expected to sell 10M units, and 90% of the customers are Windows users or OEMS who sell only Windows, then you are looking at a per-unit cost to develop that Windows driver of about $0.11 USD. For the 10% of Linux users, the cost per unit-sold is $1 USD.
Those are assuming all things are equal. I'd wager that for any given company, developing the Windows drivers, including packaging, tweaking, etc is much easier. Add in that Microsoft through its Windows Harward Quality Labs (WHQL or whatever they call it now) basically will subsidize your development costs, I'd imagine that the cost ratio is not 1:1 but much leaner in favor of developing Windows drivers.
So the bottom line is that, in any company, you try to maximize your profitable customers and ditch your unprotifable customers. If the Linux drivers cost only $2 per unit in volume for each sale generated where as the Windows drivers cost only pennies on that dollar, you have a big problem. Over time ATI and nVIDIA sell an awful lot of chips to OEMs and other re-branders who pay very little for hardware. If you are selling chips at $40 (my guess is that this is a high number.. your typical 800-1000 laptop doesn't cost more than 500-600 to build, and most of that goes to Intel/AMD, Micron for RAM and Samsung for LCDs) a unit that $2 cost is suddenely a huge, huge problem.
Of course these numbers are made-up out of broad cloth. But the ratios are real. Linux drivers would have to cost 10 times less to develop to make you an "equal" customer as a Windows customer.
In fact, you are lucky to get anything from nVIDIA or ATI.
Slashdot Mirror
Civil disobedience is a serious thing, not a tool for disaffected consumers upset at the music cartel. Civil disobedience is a tool that instills fear into the government for the real purpose of causing them buckle or face revolution.
But I'm not willing to give up my privacy in the process.
A key aspect to civil disobedience is in fact getting caught, being a nuisance to the system. Cloaking your identity is the antithesis of civil disobedience.
This decision is a purely procedural thing. We have no new case law, and no new precedent.
No, no, no..
Slashdot could learn alot from Wikipedia.
When you start telling a group about something news related, you started with a very basic premise:
The nearest family member and defining characteristics of the thing being described.
So the write up could have started:
"Red v Blue, an animated video series featuring scenes rendered with off-the-shelf techniques borrowed from popular video games, has been released into a third season..."
That's it.. a very lines and suddenly a big bunch of people who would have skipped over it can dig in and find out if at least they are interested in the general topic.
I skipped over this article initially because I assumed Red V Blue was some type of political reference. A friend e-mailed me the link with a similiar description and suddenly now I am finding it's pretty cool.
How many people just skip over the poorly written items?
"Unauthorized sharing" is distribution of copyrighted works without permission from the holder of the copyright.
"Fair use" means you can use exerpts in other creative works.
"First sale" means that if you can resell the works you are allowed to.
Any other questions?
Most all the rulings so far have been bad for fileswapping -- ie, they have all agreed that unauthorized copying is illegal -- this ruling just protects the software itself, and keeps the burden shifted over to fileswappers.
There has never been any legitimate legal question to whether unauthorized sharing of files is copyright infringement. It is.
The only question has been are the companies/individuals who write the software liable for any potential secondary infringement claims.
I disagree with your conclusions over the cease fire, as in practice these things are never so tenuous. I'm not sure, even technically, that these things are authorizations to restart the war. (Shooting at an aircraft.)
Read the cease-fire. It's in there. Any agressive action against coalition aircraft or personell.
The US move to war was all about UN resolutions and how Iraq was violating them. Point was, they weren't really - not 687, and 1441 was moot if no WMD's existed. And further, even if they were, a vote on the UN resolutions and the responses etc would be required to restart a war.
It can't be retroactively moot. I mean to say, it all hinges on co-operation. If Hussein had none (which he didnt) then the burden is on him to prove it, since, before this all started he was known to have them and pursue them. Before the war was started Hussein denied having them - to a degree - yet would not/could 100% to prove it.
I am not saying this war was right to start, but I am saying that on it's face there are many ways this war was technically legal. The illegality of the war is a non-starter in terms of real-world issues and technical legal merit.
The real story is, that he who wins the war is legal. Always is. Doesn't make it reality, but the winner is essence makes reality.
This is what I am speaking of.
Go back and read the cease fire. No additional UN resolution is needed to rekindle the war. Shooting even once at a jet patroling the no-fly zone is a breach worthy of re-opening the war.
The bottom line remains that this war was not technically illegal, but rather, against the spirit of the UN.
This isn't bad. If the Court refuses to hear the case then the current ruling will work its way through different federal courts until (1) there a consenus on the side of file swappers or (2) there is a disagreemnet where at least one court disagrees with a peer or lower court. At that point the Court will either hear the case, or decline.
The only way this can be bad for fileswapping is if the Court hears the case and reverses the Betamax decision.
What don't you like about C#? Or do you just feel that C#/.NET and Java are roughly equivalent?
Logic dictates that if two people agree on something and codify it then you have a valid contract.
You are bound to the idea that "private property" must be physical, which is a creation that you have decided to make into existenance. This confounds two hundred years of tradition and law, and rehashes a debate that is years old.
People have dominion over thier creative works. It is a principle that is rooted in the notion that it is the best way to promote the creative arts.
No contracts, anytime. Your argument is all well and good, but it's irrelevant.
No, it's not irrelevant. IP law and contract law are more than just friendly cousins, they are linked.
When you purchase something from soneone, you are entering into an implicit agreement. You get something. They get something. That's the basis of a sale. Layers and layers of laws are built on this premise: an exchange of property, an exchange of rights, an exchange of value.
used in great detail describe "contractual" arrangements involved in "trade" and "ownership" of other human beings.
No, because as I mentioned before, there are broad overarching legal principles involved, which, as I mentioned, trump contract law.
There is another broad overarching principle which is enshrined in the same document that protects against slavery, and that principle is copyright and patent, two fundamental bricks of intellectual property.
Contract law is fundamental to civil society. It is linked beyond seperation to IP law. Any IP laws or amendments to the US constitution you'd like to see enacted would be easily and permanetly avoided by the use of contract law.
The only type of contract that could be drawn is one obligating one party to maintain information in one of its fundamental states: known or unknown.
That's untrue.
You and I can draw a legal contract based only on common law that says you shall not replay to an audience greater than one my works.
Unfortunately this is entirely impossible to apply to enterntainment because the objective of a broadcaster/distributor is to disseminate information and thus break the secrecy.
Wrong. Exclusivity contracts are rampant, everyday, regular old things. You may share this information with X and ONLY X people. All kinds of online databases use this premise.
The consumer cannot be required to work for the music company in guarding the secrecy, even if one ignores the fact that the very medium on which the information is disseminated (air vibrations) is not conducive to secrecy.
That's absurd, and you just made that up.
If you believe that two people can make a legal agreement that is not in-itself illegal on the face, then you must by extension believe that fundamentally individuals ought to have dominion over thier creative works. That's the bottom line. They are linked, permanently.
Do you believe in contract law?
If you and I agree to do something, and write that down and sign it, should that - assuming some larger overriding principles are true - be enforceable?
From that front, it really does seem to me, that technically, 1441 was a sham, and that the US action was very probably illegal.
I've read both, studied both. As I've noted, they are not the sole rationale for what is and is not legal.
Iraq has been in material breach of it's cease-fire agan and again. The cease-fire is invalid, and the Gulf War is back on again.
That's way number, and it's a slam dunk. Technically legal yes, in the spirit of the UN, no.
Both resolutions 687 and 1441 are based on Hussein's continuing no-compliance with inspectors. I think we both know what Hussein was doing: trying to walk the line between complying with them fully enough to evade a war and still chest-thumping enough to play tough guy to his military guys and international neighbors. Being pushed around the UN must have been a big old slap in the face for him, and seriously damaged his ego. Regardless of his motivatons, and though both resolutions were based on the clearly wrong premise that his weapons programs were running in secret or hiding, he was in technical breach of his obligations.
As an argument, the "legality" of the war is extremely tenuous.
You seem to be echoing a Bush administration propaganda theme that the Saudi's are pure as driven snow. I doubt that is true and you seem to have fallen for some very good propaganda that said, Saddam was involved in 9/11 and Saudi Arabia wasn't. Reality is almost certainly the exact opposite.
NO. Absolutely not. I am claiming that the House of Saud is a far more moderate government for Saudia Arabia than any Wahabist regime would be. And right now we can have the House of Saud OR the Wahabist's that are next in line for power. I know that Saudi Arabians were involed in 9/11 and Iraqis were not. However, the House of Saud does not and did not support these terrorists. I'd love to read about the Saudi's as well, but you know, we aren't going to any time soon I can think of.
The Saudi's have only very recently officially started to fight terrorism, partially thanks to the fact Al Qaeda launched attacks in Saudi Arabia against Arabs. Prior to that they either denied the problem or were indifferent as long as it was targeted at infidels.
I agree they've only started recently fighting terrorism, but not because of indifference. The ruling family in the Kingdom is not all powerful, and any actions they take against the clerical muslims in charge have to be very very carefully balanced. The mullahs are the ones who have the loyalty of the people. Not the royalty.
If they pulled their investment out they could single handedly crash markets.
That's patently false. The largely circulated number about how much the Saudi's own in terms of American assets is deceptive. There is a saying that when you owe the bank 100,000 they own you. But when you owe the bank 100,000,000 you own the bank. Well, in the US, we owe the Saudi's the 100,000,000.
Simply put, the Saudi's cannot pull their investments. It's not possible. If they attempted to quickly remove their capital from the United States the prices for those investments would fall and no buyers would be present. Additionally, all the markets you speak of are designed with systems that prevent them from being short-circuited. Moreover much of the wealth that the Saudi's have are not in the name of the Kingdom of Saudi arabia, but of individuals. Much of the wealth is concentrated in instruments that are long-term and cannot be traded into a short-term liquid asset - government issue bonds, stakes in insurance companies and banks, etc.
and they get to fly their nationals out of the country right after 9/11.
Just so you know, this has been throughly debunked. The 9/11 report that you mentioned says this:
No commercial planes, including chartered flights, were permitted to fly into, out of, or within the United States until September 13, 2001. After the airspace reopened, six chartered flights with 142 people, mostly Saudi Arabian nationals, departed from the United States between September 14 and 24. One flight, the so-called Bin Ladin flight, departed the United States on September 20 with 26 passengers, most of them relatives of Usama Bin Ladin. We have found no credible evidence that any chartered flights of Saudi Arabian nationals departed the United States before the reopening of national airspace.
You make it sound like "they got to fly their nationals out right after 9/11" implies some type of special treatment based on their wealth and representation in the administration. It's simply untrue. They used no special privelages, and there has been no evidence provided to back any other claim.
After Pearl Harbor most Japanese Americans were rounded up, stripped of their property, and eventually landed in concentration camps.
Just as a final side point you statement is wrong. Most Japanese Americans were not rounded up. 110,000 to 120,000 thousand were, the offical number being the lower and the estimated number by historians the latter. It is worth noting that according to the voluntary registraton of aliens before the war th
Woah.
but you when you either didn't get a vote or lost the vote sanctioning the most extreme form of enforcement
Woah. I am talking pre-Gulf-War-I. Iraq was in material breach of their cease fire agreement. Therefore the first gulf war's negotiated end is over - null and void. This war is nothing but an extension of the Gulf War of the 1990s.
Secondly, you are wrong in thinking that the UN is the arbortor of international law. It is not. International law would maybe be better off, but that is not the case. Put all that aside though.
Thirdly, the security council did pass a resolution which warned Iraq of the "most serious of consequences" - almost a quote - and that did in fact pass. The UN inspection team did report that Iraq was in breach of it's obligations in terms of co-operation even though it was their opinion that they possessed no weapons that were significantly or seriously wrongly in possesion of (I am obviously not going to split hairs on the range of a missle that is a few miles past its allowable range).
Based on all that, this war was not strictly illegal.
Like I said the U.S. should either get out of the U.N. or be thrown out instead of using it when its convenient, and then ignoring it when its convenient
I don't disagree. I am not addressing your position in general, just a detail of that argument. Specifically, that this war was illegal. It was not. This would not even be close in a court of law way. No, was the US administration forthright in it's arguments? No, they weren't. Did they act in good faith with the UN? No. They didn't.
A problem with the UN in general is that it attempts to treat all nations as equals, and elevates some to "first amoung equals" status. This is a bogus idea. To suggest that some nations have equally legitimate status as others is untrue. Specifically, the UN seems to be of the collective mind that inaction is worse than wrong action, and this often leads to the type of indecision that gets it criticized - often rightly.
They did revolt, and the then first Bush administration looked the other way while Saddam slaughtered them.
Even though you disown it, both Jordan and Saudia Arabia warned Bush that mid-east would be thrown into choas if the US removed Hussein, and that the coallition would fall apart. The King of Saudia Arabia spoke with Bush about this himself. Bush had already at this point promised to support the Kurds as a nation seperate from Hussein and to support their revolutionary attempts.
Not sure you were aware but Saudi Arabia already closely resembles Afghanistan under the Taliban, women are deeply oppressed and people are routinely beheaded in public because thats what Islamic law stipulates.
This is a completely false comparison. Women are not routinely executed like in Afganistan under the Taliban. Quite frankly you are terribly wrong. The biggest threat that women face is from execution from family members. These women are offered protection by the Saudi government and their related killers or attempted killers are treated as killers. Women in the Kingdom are clearly not equals with men, but they are not treated as abject victims like in the Taliban controlled Afganistan. Additionally, the degree to which women are mistreated is largely related to the strength in the area of the clergy. As I mentioned before, the House of Saud is not in control of the country in a typical despotic environment. They rule at the pleasure of the clerical Muslims. Much of the military or paramilitary power in the Kingdom is loyal to the mullahs, not to the royal house. This is the great difference between the House of Saud and the Taliban. The House is deeply interested in the Westernization of the country. It is a true balancing act between their impulses and what the religious voice of the nation dictates.
There is a real legitimate reason why the US and specifically any administration with interest in
The bottomline is when the time came for the U.N to authorize the invasion of Iraq it didn't, so as a result, the U.S. invasion was illegal under current international law.
Your argument is flawed. The US invasion wasn't strictly illegal by international law. Hussein was in material breach of the Gulf War cease-fire, and a number of UN treaties.
By any measure of International law, the cease fire that Iraq/Hussein signed was violated in any number of cases over the years. Any one of those violations was enough to justify - legally - renewed military operations.
George H.W. Bush encouraged to revolt and then turned his back on.
One final note. This is again overly simplistic view of the matter. The dynamics of the countries in the middle-east are vastly complex. Countries like Saudi Arabia who are railed against for being on the side terrorists (especially by the left in the media - "18 of 19 hijackers were from there", type of stuff) are a mish-mash of conflicting political entities. Saudia Arabia was nearly torn apart from within due to the US intervention the first time around with Iraq. The ruling family is not in complete control of the nation. They have a tacit agreement with the religious clerics to preserve and protect the order - but the House of Saud knows that this could turn at any moment. Make no mistake: if the House of Saud falls to a fundamentalist regime like the old Taliban or the Iranian government the world as a whole will be in a really nasty spot.
It's hard to underestimate the effect this would have on the world.
HW Bush was warned off deposing Hussein the first time because of tensions in moderate nations, specifically Jordan and Saudia Arabia.
Middle-East politics is an amazingly complex thing. Citing a single reason for anything that happens there is a sure-fire way to be wrong.
Back to your post... We're also thinking of cutting cable also. You just look at the cost of all the media consumption... it really adds up. :)
Agreed that college kids really fund the MPAA/RIAA more than anyone else.
I am thinking of setting up a pvr at home for my "friends" to schedule and then download recordings from to help defray the costs of my cable connection.. i figure i have a few geeky friends who'd like to cut cable except for those rare shows they'd watch.. drop me an email if you have any interest
The other alternative is that you just don't consume much media.
My wife and I are divesting of media consumption in general. The TV we watch is focused, to a point, ad-free (thanks to a time-shifting PVR), and brief. The movies we watch are bought on used DVDs or borrowed from friends. We stopped listening to music pretty much altogether after we got married. We have a few CDs of musical performances and soothing sounds and whatnot for when we are cooking or cleaning or mowing the lawn.
The fact remains that in the last 12 months we've cut our "entertainment" budget by 50% and haven't suffered a bit. In a few weeks that number will be 75% after we further reduce our cable bill.
The media and IP industries are killing themselves slowly. Before we got married we were probably spending $5k a year between the two of us on media: movies, music, concerts, cable tv, rentals, movies, and assorted crap. Now we have season tickets to our local stage company. By this time next year my goal is for our budget to be less than $1250 for a year of entertainment.
Thats nearly $4,000 that the media industry has screwed itself out of.
consumers, holding the corporations that make operating systems that are prone to spyware accountable.
That's a bogus idea.
Spyware is indistingushable from regular software except in the case of the actions of the program. Short of creating a blacklist, no operating system should or could block spyware.
Since a huge portion of spyware is actually adware which installs with other applications, it seems highly likely that no matter what OS is used as long as the user has rights to install software spyware will exisit.
This is actually a re-occuring theme that I keep seeing. Sure ASP.NET is fast to program with "Out-of-the-box". It requires less design and with Visual Studio, less skilled developers can build apps (I'm not saying all ASP.NET developers are less skilled). But in the long run it costs you more, either when it comes time to update existing, un-designed, software or handle security problems like this.
What ASP.NET does is require less of the error prone programming that makes programming for the web rather expensive.
Things like forms programming, session management, database abstraction, etc can take a lot of code in some environments. This code is often pretty static, and fairly prone to errors and maintainability problems.
ASP.NET is both fast develop with and fast to execute. It is also very very easy to write extremely re-usuable code.
The bottom line? Even with the road-bumps that come out from time-to-time it's a choice platform for web application development.
But isn't your whole point, given what you've detailed, oblierated by the fact that this vulnerability does not exisit on Win2k3 with IIS6?
I mean, MS's product that was released after the Trusted Computing initiative does not have this flaw.
It certainly seems like your point is negated.
Calling IIS an "also-ran" is a bit of stretch.
(Pre-note: IIS is a security also-ran. Big time defects in thinking and implementation.)
The thing about IIS is that it is very typical for one installation of IIS to run one or less website, while it is very unlikely that this is the case with Apache.
This occurs for a lot of reasons. Lots of ISPs use Apache, because it's free, easier to configure in a scripted fashion, and generally all around more suitable for a hosting setup.
However, a large number of businesses with sites that are self-hosted run on IIS becaue that's what there IT department knows, what their network runs ons, etc.
If you look at any given site that runs against IIS this generally represents one Windows NT/2k/2k3 server. Again, there are lots of places selling Windows hosting, but for most purposes, it's not very popular. Apache/Linux/Generic hosting is much more popular and heavily advertised.
This leads to a less than accurate view of results. For example, virtually all nerds who run their own server are running Apache or Linux in general. That just makes sense. It's free, runs on less hardware mostly, has a great community for hacking, etc. These sites though are very lightly trafficked generally. They are not the top ten blogs, etc.
I guess what I am saying is this: I'd like to see a breakdown of market share by bytes or pages served. I imagine here we would see much better MS performance.
Can someone explain to me the difference?!
Surely. As a manufacturer of a car, you take on the responsibility that you are working with a defacto deadly weapon, dangerous object and/or safety hazard. It is your duty to mitigate the risk, and design an appropriate system.
As a driver of a car, you cannot make that decision.
Your money is not as good as everyone elses.
90%+ of the market is Windows. To support your 10% slice of the market is vastly more expensive per sale.
Look at this way. If developing, optimizing, and supporting the drivers for a new line of cards was equally as expensive for Linux as for Windows, at say, $1M USD, and the card was expected to sell 10M units, and 90% of the customers are Windows users or OEMS who sell only Windows, then you are looking at a per-unit cost to develop that Windows driver of about $0.11 USD. For the 10% of Linux users, the cost per unit-sold is $1 USD.
Those are assuming all things are equal. I'd wager that for any given company, developing the Windows drivers, including packaging, tweaking, etc is much easier. Add in that Microsoft through its Windows Harward Quality Labs (WHQL or whatever they call it now) basically will subsidize your development costs, I'd imagine that the cost ratio is not 1:1 but much leaner in favor of developing Windows drivers.
So the bottom line is that, in any company, you try to maximize your profitable customers and ditch your unprotifable customers. If the Linux drivers cost only $2 per unit in volume for each sale generated where as the Windows drivers cost only pennies on that dollar, you have a big problem. Over time ATI and nVIDIA sell an awful lot of chips to OEMs and other re-branders who pay very little for hardware. If you are selling chips at $40 (my guess is that this is a high number.. your typical 800-1000 laptop doesn't cost more than 500-600 to build, and most of that goes to Intel/AMD, Micron for RAM and Samsung for LCDs) a unit that $2 cost is suddenely a huge, huge problem.
Of course these numbers are made-up out of broad cloth. But the ratios are real. Linux drivers would have to cost 10 times less to develop to make you an "equal" customer as a Windows customer.
In fact, you are lucky to get anything from nVIDIA or ATI.