Most of these items are taxpayer funded. It would be possible to use taxes to fund creative works, but I don't think it would be a terribly popular idea in most countries (besides old-style communist countries like North Korea)
You might want to check out the NEA and NEH. While you may be correct in thinking they're not terribly popular, you can have public funding of the arts without repressive totalitarian regimes, starvation, and people trying to escape to China(!) for a better life. Come to think of it, I'd bet the average North Korean cares more about where his next meal is going to come from than whether some poet was commissioned to pen an epic tribute to their "Glorious Leader".
My local supermarket charges 5.99 for chicken unless you carry their wallet cookie, in which case you qualify for the super special 1.99 price. 1.99 just happens to be the pre-shopper-card price. Next, they'll demand a fingerprint in order to qualify to buy food at non-extortionary prices.
Until they do that, do what I do: swap with others. I've been surprised at how many people I know who are willing to swap when you explain that they can retain the discount benefit while avoiding the privacy invasion. Of course, if you don't pay with cash, it defeats the purpose. Even then you only have to memorize two sentences if you're ever asked: "I lost mine. My friend gave me her extra card."
I say pollute their demographics until it's pointless.
hm.. If I clip the corners off a fifty and paste them onto a 1 dollar bill. I effectively have a 50 dollar bill that I paid 51 dollars for. Hmm
Try getting two fifties and ripping an end off each. From these two strips, clip the corners and stick 'em on a $1 bill. Break the two torn (not clipped) fifties at busy stores in different parts of town (most places will take them, provided it's more than 50% of the bill, especially if it looks torn instead of cut.) You are left with a (fake) $50 bill - free money. Better yet, use twenties instead of fifties; they probably aren't scrutinized as thoroughly, if at all.
I think the answer to that has been a resounding no. IIRC, we've had meteors fall that contained earth
organisms still alive on them even after re-entry. There have also been many simulated re-entries that also
show bacteria can withstand huge impacts and heat well enough to contaminate the earth in the event of a
meteor strike.
Actually, I'm willing to bet Earth & Mars have already cross-contaminated each other, though at what point in time, I have no idea. Both planets have been hit hard enough to throw up ejecta which could have escaped the atmosphere and made it to the sister planet. Things change, of course, so the notion that we swapped bacteria with Mars a couple billion years ago is no reason not to wipe our feet before coming inside.
This may sound like a dumb one, but couldn't they plot a return trajectory that gets close enough to the Sun to irradiate or burn stuff off before re-entering Earth orbit? Maybe they would have to slingshot Venus or even Mercury, but I want to think solar radiation is the best guarantee that anything brought back from Mars is sterilized before coming home.
If anyone knows specifics about how close you'd have to get and how long you'd have to stay there and what (if any) effect that'd have on craft and crew, please reply. It seems simple, which is why I think there must be more to it than that.
Face it, wars work. Wars are terrible, despicable crimes against humanity, but they work.
Von Clausewitz said it best... "War is an extension of diplomacy by other means".
Wars work? Wars work for the winner when they work at all. You can't justify a "crime against humanity" by pointing to an outcome that benefits any subset of humanity. Crimes against humanity are crimes against everyone, against the species as a whole. That includes you, in case you'd forgotten.
1) "Two wrongs" fallacy.
2) Failure to acknowledge scope
Hmm. I know two wrongs don't make a right. I'd prefer zero to two, or one. The reason I gave the link was the part of the article that dealt with inmate labor being exploited, which I should have stated in my initial post. Neither one deserves a pass, but for different reasons: for China, I'll go with the 2000% worse. For the US, we should hold ourselves to a much much higher standard. If nothing else, we can afford to. Hell, this prison labor subtracts from the number of jobs available to hard-working, law-abiding people. The people who'd really lose out if private prison labor were abolished are the company owners, who deserve it. They do lobby for mandatory sentencing and harsher penalties, and they do it because they care about profit, not about making society a safer place, or gasp! rehabilitation.
I don't have a problem with convicts doing labor so long as it benefits the society as a whole. They are there to pay a debt to society, not to some anonymous gang of shareholders. There's a tremendous difference between the two.
Not that I agree with this article's conclusion, but I think you should read this. If you won't give China a pass on this, why should you do it for the US?
...a lot of people still make a distinction between corporations and unions.
You mean the distinction between people who work and people who profit from that work? Lots of people still make distinctions between night and day as well. But I mean, come on, do we have to sit here all day and make distinctions between things like hot and cold, on and off, black and white, terrorist and freedom fighter?
Your plan is ridiculous. It would give 10 people with $100,000 each to burn the same power as 100 people with $10,000 each or 1000 people with $1000 each, or 10,000 people with $100 each or 100,000 people with $10 each or 1,000,000 people with $1 each. One citizen, one vote it is not. Please go to the corner and rethink this. When people talk about "voting with your dollar" they mean doing business with businesses that share their values, not buying politicians. I can't believe this has to be said, but there it is.
OK, I jumped w/o checking your link, but that is clearly not a bias-neutral site. Are these the people who post hit-lists of abortion doctors or is that someone else? I understand how you'd take that personally, though; several people close to me have illnesses mental and otherwise not too far up the family tree, and I'd hate to have not ever known them because of anyone's idea of "efficiency". I'll give you that hands-down. So, I must retract my ad hominem attack against you and apologize for it as well.
I do find the idea of state-mandated abortion or sterilization reprehensible. AFAIK, that isn't going on in the US now, although I am aware that it was widespread here in the earlier half of the XXth century. To me, what does not necessarily follow from Sanger's beliefs is that the Planned Parenthood of today espouses the same set of beliefs. My understanding is that the state should not mandate anything: abortion, sterilization, contraception, conception.
If these people are truly outraged about abortion, why do I never hear the pro-life activists clamor for pre-natal care, school nutritional programs, environmental cleanup/safety (remember lead paint?) Why aren't these people lined up around the block offering to adopt the children of moronic inner-city parents? Where are these people when it comes to the death penalty? Life is sacred, right? It's never too late to be saved, right? They really don't seem to care what happens to a kid after s/he is born. You know, "life is sacred until birth, then kick the leeching bitch off the welfare rolls ASAP." If abortion is so bad, why don't they want contraception taught in schools? Surely the "obscenity" of a condom rolled over a banana is preferable to the obscenity of an abortion. And it is an obscene thing. Unlike Sanger, I do not claim to know who is worthy and who is not, so I don't presume to make that decision for others, and would not have anyone make it for me. That includes the state and people who feel strongly that they know what is best, no matter which side they come from.
If I've lumped you in with a group whose views you disagree with, I'm sorry. I can acknowledge eugenicism (sp?) on the left then if you can acknowledge denial of access to birth control on the right today. Deal?
I happen to like a web page that compares Margret Sanger's ideaology with the Aryan ideology. It doesn't say she should be(have been) hanged for crimes against humanity (because she didn't personally commit any).
Wow. Before now, I wasn't sure what a libruhl Freeper sounded like. Here's a link, in case anyone is wondering why this fucking clown thinks someone who was persecuted and prosecuted for spreading information about preventing STDs and unwanted pregnancies is the moral equivalent of a Nazi sympathizer.
If you have a problem with Nazi supporters in the US, you need to look to the right and not to the left. It sure as hell wasn't wobblies, unionists, and labor activists who bankrolled that monster. Think bankers and industrialists, and particularly think the Bushes.
Isn't this is like putting Capt. Hazelwood in charge of an oil tanker?
Actually, no. Captain Hazelwood was drunk at the wheel before the accident. Apparently he was a fine captain when sober. Microsoft has bad security whether or not you consider them to be drunk.
I think it's more like promoting him to captain of a nuclear-powered ICBM-equipped submarine after showing us what he could do with the Valdez.
OK, so we can presume that the FBI will contact the virus companies (anti that is;) and direct them to not include heuristic matches for the magic lantern and it's successors but what'll be the legality of us discussing the virii fingerprint within the various forums?
Obstruction of justice is a very broad brush. My guess is that a copy will get out of the U.S. by hook or by crook, and that solutions might arise from elsewhere due to the increased risk of doing the same here. Good luck downloading from foreign sites w/o being detected. As a P.A.T.R.I.O.T., you really have no business on non-US sites anyway. Try for public access terminals at busy libraries that haven't installed face-recognition tech already. And remember, Russia has always been our ally. We have never been at war with Russia.
Right but what is it going to send? not your PGP passphrase cause that was done via the sandbox and that isn't hooked to the network. Hell don't even install email client, just a text editor and the crypto. so let them put a virus on your "public box" cause there is nothing on there / nothing typed on there that can help them decode your msg. or again am i missing something?
I think so. They can physically search your premises now and not notify you of it for at least six months. Conceivably, they could break in and put a virus on your sandbox that copies itself to your floppy along with the password. Virus then copies itself from floppy to networked computer and sends said password back to HQ. Given the speculation that AV vendors will not counter this stuff, it's certainly not impossible.
In a truly competitive market, other companies would come in to fill the gap left by the departing ones. The problem is, the companies that currently dominate broadband come from industries that are used to having government imposed monopoly status: cable and telephone. The monopoly status is starting to go away in the cable industry, but is persisting for telephone, especially in regards to the "final mile."
Yeah, and in the best of all possible worlds...Monopoly status is not imposed by the government in the sense that the government forbids competition; by and large what they do is amelioration of the effects of an existing monopoly (price controls, etc.) Government does not impose monopoly status so much as it acknowledges an existing reality. You seem to forget that it was government "interference" that opened telephone lines up to DSL competitors in the first place, but that's inconvenient, so we'll just forget that, right? Of course, the RBOCs' incentive for doing so was access to long-distance markets they couldn't get into after the AT&T breakup. One of the many woes that introduced to the average consumer was no longer having to hide extra telephones when the repairman came by. Don't forget choosing your long distance carrier.
Cable was deregged under George I. Guess what? Prices went up. Natural gas prices in GA went up when they deregged last year. CA's electricity woes are partially due to a badly-planned dereg, but the consumers still had to take it up the ass. While competition is always good for the competitors (i.e., drive wholesale up by bidding because we're different companies and therefore not a monopoly,) it's not always good for consumers. Rather than parrot armchair libertarianism, maybe you should look at deregulation on a case-by-case basis and support it where it lowers costs to consumers and oppose it where it doesn't. Unless you have a financial stake in a company assraping consumers in the name of the "free market" you really shouldn't have a dog in this fight. If you do have a financial stake in such a company, you should say so up front so there's no confusion. If your interest is strictly ideological I can't see any explanation other than that you favor the concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few people even when that doesn't include you because you somehow find these people more accountable than politicians who can be voted out or recalled.
The first wave of DSL providers had tremendous problems getting the incumbent carriers (ILECs) to give them support when there were line problems. The ILECs didn't want them to succeed because they wanted to offer their own DSL but hadn't managed to get their act together yet. They had no incentive to provide good service and every incentive to provide bad service. Result: bad service
Who's going to provide those incentives to good service? The Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, or the government? Remember it took legislation just to get the cable companies to answer the phone.
So what you're really talking about is a government "solution" to a problem that was created by government in the first place. No thanks.
In a truly free market you could be bought and ground up for pet food. Never forget that.
Storage with relevant descriptive tags - that's what we need. Trouble then is making sure that the images are filed with accuate tags (that's the sort of work that nobody likes to do). Contextual image recognition anybody?
A very good point. Remember the scene in Sleeper where the scientists show Woody Allen pictures of 20th-century historical figures and ask who they were and what they did? Imagine being a historian in the twenty-fourth century and having nothing more to go on than the word of some guy who's been wrapped up like a baked potato since the 1970's.
Thank God for the PACs that ensure the voice of the American people is heard in D.C.! You know what else is made of PEOPLE?! Soylent Green!! Yep! Charlton Heston said so himself. And you can have his Soylent Green when you pry it from his cold dead liverspotted hands!
If want to hang people for spreading viruses, start with Outlook users and lazy IIS admins. When you're done with that, you can go back to freeping the polls at CNN.
As for citing Websters as some kind of authority on International English, this
reminds me of a recent AP story which stated that the US troops currently in Kurgestan marked the first time American Soldiers have been on soil of the former Soviet Union.
If you want to get pedantic, that assertion is correct for the following reason: K-stan and the other SSRs that made up the USSR only became parts of the former Soviet Union after that union was dissolved. Prior to that, there was no such thing as "the former Soviet Union". The U.S. is an extremely litigious place, so these little things matter (confusing a landmass with a political entity.) It may be misleading, but you have to allow yourself to be misled. What the value in being misleading over an eighty year-old military campaign is, I couldn't tell you. You'd be better off putting it down to ignorance--recall that when Iran's president addressed the American people a couple of years back, he alluded to the long history of U.S. meddling there prior to the '79 revolution. This had to be explained to many of the few people who bothered to listen or read about his address. They don't know this stuff. When people who don't know this stuff grow up and become reporters, they propagate that ignorance.
The other example is factually accurate, though, and your point is valid.
As for sources, you could do worse than AP; they dug up the story of the U.S. massacre at No Gun Ri (sp?) some fifty years after the fact. Not exactly the type of journalism Stars and Stripes is noted for.
Because of equal protection and due process under the constitution (14th amendment)? This would be a quagmire of litigation til the end of eternity. Especially where litigants have the means.
I agree with the broader definition of victim you clarified. What OBL thinks about Jews & Xtians I don't know; I thought they were accorded special status as "Children of the Book". At any rate, he's using religion to justify murder, which is utter bullshit no matter who tries it. But there are always underlying political concerns: The "troubles" in N. Ireland are about who rules there, not about whether the Pope is the antiChrist or not. Religious affiliations become shorthand for political orientations in situations like that, as I'm sure you know.
I also agree that Stalin was a grade-A butcher, which is why saying 3 million human beings "isn't as many as it sounds" is so reprehensible. If you want to figure that we killed a million less than Stalin, you ply the same waters as people like Chomsky, who have pointed out the tremendous cost in human lives owing to our blowing up that Sudanese pharma plant, destroying vaccine stock and to the effects of sanctions against Iraq. Pointing to Stalin and saying, in effect, "See? We're not so bad" is NOT an effective moral argument. While he was unquestionably worse, this shouldn't be a game where you can murder n-1 or n-1,000,000 people and cite someone else's monstrous precedent. I don't really think you mean it that way, but the comparatist approach doesn't hold up here. The original issue was US bombings going back thirty years, so drawing in the actions of others from beyond that time frame doesn't really bolster any assertion.
As for Rwanda and Congo, there are other forms of intervention besides dropping bombs. Calling for intervention should not equate to bombing. The fact that it seems to for so many of us is not an encouraging sign. Kosovo: I never said bombmakers were responsible; I said they made money off of it. And they did. Try to imagine having a vested financial interest in the deaths of others. The more killed, the more money you get. If it goes on long enough, maybe you can redo the kitchen, or put a down payment on a second or third home. Many people sleep very soundly with this weight upon their shoulders. Somalia was such a mess I don't know what to say about it. We did seem to start out trying to do the right thing, but I think taking sides was the big mistake.
I will certainly give you the point that a specific act is as bad as it is, no matter which country did it. As I said, dead is dead. Intent, though, is not always divinable. We don't seem to agree at all on the other point. You sum me up as saying the irreversibility of death precludes killing (which is exactly what I said,) then concoct a scenario for killing innocents while saying you agree with me. I should introduce my caveat: proven willingness to take innocent human lives denies you this cover. This applies to EVERYONE. Terrorists, heads of state, Secretaries of State. If someone kills you, does it matter much whether they were elected, appointed, or self-appointed? You're still dead. If there's no safety in innocence, pray tell why anyone should refrain from mass murder? You're not safe anyway, and you might tag your nemesis in the process if you're lucky. Where does that leave us?
I think I'm asking you to consider the moral perils of action while you're asking me to consider the moral perils of inaction. Plainly, both exist. I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I think "shallow morality" is more descriptive of the popular notion that we now have carte blanche for whatever the hell we want to do whereever the hell we want to do it no matter what and no matter who gets hurt.
There are numerous instances of US POWs and hostages being filmed for propaganda purposes, but when the tape is analyzed, it becomes clear that they are blinking in Morse Code or some similar communication technique. Decoding their blinking usually indicates where/by whom they are being held, how many people are there, how they are being treated, etc. It would be very easy for a few key phrases to be codes telling some terrorist cell to activate.
Simple and brilliant. Do you know of any specific examples? I've read about the crew of the USS Pueblo, who were detained by North Korea during the Vietnam War. Forced to pose for a propaganda photo, they managed to convince their captors that extending their middle fingers to the photographer was a Hawaiian sign of friendship and goodwill that would make them appear to be getting on well with them. Can't find that photo anywhere on the internet, and God knows I've looked....
I know it sounds like a low-probability method of communicating, but I've heard a terrorist quoted that they only need a 10% success rate to be successful
Meaning they have redundant communications, redundant cells, or both. Not to equate the two, but direct marketers find a 3%-5% success rate enough to keep on doing it. Food for thought, I guess...
Next you have the bombing 1 nation every two years argument. Firstly few of these terrorist are victims of bombing. That aside, I wonder how many more peoploe would have died if we had not have dropped a bomb in the last 30 years? It sounds paradoxicall but unfortunately their are some seriously fucked up people in this world and sometimes you have to kill them. The US made mistakes, yes. But it made mistakes while generally *trying to do the right thing*. Explain to me how Somalia or Kosovo can be construed as the US profiteering from bombing? Come on. Perhaps our motives or our analysis haven't always been perfect, but they rarely have been purely economic profit. America had made mistakes like everyone else. You might want to research how much culpability Pakistan has in all this. Their crusade for Kashmire has caused them to fund
some unsavory charecters. We all do stupid things. That does not mean the present situation is one of them or that America is evil. Thirdly there is the profiteering from arm sales argument. This argument has been arround since after world war I where it gained popularity as an explanation for the horific wanton destruction from that war. Because a group stands to profit from a course of action does not mean that they are responsible for it. It is sometimes good grounds for suspicion but it nothing like positive evidence. I think your argument here is much stronger on issues like the missle defense system than on this. I really don't think Bush's main goal right now is "what do the defence contractors want me to do" regardless of how he may think on other occasions. In the end I think this act is justified for one reason only; it may prevent future suffering. Terrorism like any other act of violence causes suffering. This action may create less suffering than it ends.
Few terrorists are bombing victims? Few bombing victims are alive after becoming bombing victims. By your logic, you have no reason to undertake retaliatory action unless YOU were a 9/11 victim PERSONALLY.
As for how many lives bombing saved, that is a question you should pose to every Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, Grenadan, Libyan, Panamanian, Iraqi, Serb, Sudanese, and Afghan (among others) you meet. While many disagreed with their political leadership, I'm sure theyd've preferred that their innocent countrymen not die. Set aside will be our actions in Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia, and Iran, as they don't involve aerial bombardment per se, but rather differing levels of meddling and interference (i.e., assasinations, propaganda and sabotage.) To a lesser extent, our presence in places like Haiti, Japan and the Phillipines brews some resentment, even if the overall effect is stabilizing in some places. Just because there are no bullets flying in a country where we have troops on the ground is an inadequate basis for concluding that they love us. Also to be ignored is our tampering in an Australian PM election in the 1970's. Still, you have to admit that this is a long and varied list.
As to our world being fucked up, yes. I believe there are people whose deaths would make the world a better place. My list differs from yours. Who decides, then?
If we generally try to do the right thing, why did we sit on our asses and let Rwanda and the Congo turn into such bloody messes? If we're the good guys, why didn't we drop support for the Apartheid regime in SA until after institutions starting divesting themselves of their shares of companies who did business there due to grassroots pressure? The boardrooms of America stood up and struck a blow for freedom only after it bit too deeply into their bottom line. This last example is a case of Doing the Right Thing for the Wrong Reason. Do you honestly think wed've given two shits if Kuwait had been a poverty-stricken African or Asian nation?
Bombing is always profitable if you're a bombmaker. Think about it for a second. If planes get shot down, it becomes profitable for aircraft manufacturers. When civilian infrastructure needs to be rebuilt, it becomes profitable for international civil engineering companies. And because you need oil to do all of this, it is always profitable for petroleum producers. If there were companies that cloned humans for use as soldiers, they would profit too.
Everyone else doesn't rule the world. Our mistakes are magnified because of our economic, political and military stature. The more power we have, the more responsibility there is to use it wisely and humanely. IOW, the consequences of a toddler somewhere ordering an aerial bombardment are practically nil, as he doesn't have the power to do so. As for Pakistan's ISI and their culpability, I suggest you research who supported and liased with them. "We all do stupid things?" This is not letting your coonhound steer your pickup into a fishin' hole. This is war. War means killing. Killing is irreversible. It's not a mistake you can fix, no matter how much you wished you'd torched the right hooch. Innocents still die.
The profiteering argument dates from WWI because weapons production was not industrialized on a sufficient scale prior to that war. The assertion that it only arose after a certain point in time does nothing to detract from its cogency. And BTW, Bush, et al still want to go ahead with NMD even after 9/11. Doesn't that make your chest swell with patriotic pride?
Bombing now may prevent future suffering by killing people who were going to bomb us. Bombing can never end the suffering of those already bombed. There is a world of difference between the two. It should also be a given that bombing always creates human suffering. If it's only a matter of where, then all you have to fall back upon are the accidents of race or nationality or religion. Being loyal, honest, compassionate, pious etc. will not save you. That's what terror is.
I want the people who planned and bankrolled 9/11 tormented to the point of insanity, rolled up in a pigskin, and thrown into the coldest stretch of ocean we can find. I know getting to that point will involve innocents being killed. That's the part I have a problem with. We have killed or will soon kill people who had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11, just like the people in WTC had nothing to do with U.S.-Israel policy or U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. Innocent is innocent. Rejoicing in the death of one innocent human being is an expression of our animality and not our humanity. A sober and serious people would know that already.
Box cutters do have a functional purpose for peaceful endeavors. Perhaps their is no equivalent for encryption. That is, the government has taken the responsibility upon itself of keeping prying eyes out of your files.
Perhaps there is an equivalent - the deadbolt lock. It certainly serves a peaceful function. The gov't _can_ do this after the fact, _if_ they choose to do so. There's no guarantee they will. Besides, businesses routinely encrypt information that they don't want rivals to see. The "no peaceful use, gov't will take care of it" line might be a good argument against maintaining your own personal standing army, but not against protecting your personal property, whether it be physical or intellectual.
One of the biggest users of encryption is the military and intelligence community for obvious reasons. A ban on encryption at large would prevent further development in academia from pushing for stronger algorithms (and cracking algorithms as well).
At some point, your backyard nuclear weapon will come to the attention of certain someones. If you have come up with anything new, you might be invited to pursue it with them. Essentially, research of this type is either nationalized or shut down once it goes beyond a certain point. Overall it (all research) doesn't stop, you just stop seeing the results of some researchers.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of these items are taxpayer funded. It would be possible to use taxes to fund creative works, but I don't think it would be a terribly popular idea in most countries (besides old-style communist countries like North Korea)
You might want to check out the NEA and NEH. While you may be correct in thinking they're not terribly popular, you can have public funding of the arts without repressive totalitarian regimes, starvation, and people trying to escape to China(!) for a better life. Come to think of it, I'd bet the average North Korean cares more about where his next meal is going to come from than whether some poet was commissioned to pen an epic tribute to their "Glorious Leader".
My local supermarket charges 5.99 for chicken unless you carry their wallet cookie, in which case you qualify for the super special 1.99 price. 1.99 just happens to be the pre-shopper-card price. Next, they'll demand a fingerprint in order to qualify to buy food at non-extortionary prices.
Until they do that, do what I do: swap with others. I've been surprised at how many people I know who are willing to swap when you explain that they can retain the discount benefit while avoiding the privacy invasion. Of course, if you don't pay with cash, it defeats the purpose. Even then you only have to memorize two sentences if you're ever asked: "I lost mine. My friend gave me her extra card."
I say pollute their demographics until it's pointless.
hm.. If I clip the corners off a fifty and paste them onto a 1 dollar bill. I effectively have a 50 dollar bill that I paid 51 dollars for. Hmm
Try getting two fifties and ripping an end off each. From these two strips, clip the corners and stick 'em on a $1 bill. Break the two torn (not clipped) fifties at busy stores in different parts of town (most places will take them, provided it's more than 50% of the bill, especially if it looks torn instead of cut.) You are left with a (fake) $50 bill - free money. Better yet, use twenties instead of fifties; they probably aren't scrutinized as thoroughly, if at all.
What about the Austronauts contaminating the Mars surface with Earth Bacteria. This sounds much more likely to me!
Austronauts? In that case, I'd be much more concerned about invasions like this.
I think the answer to that has been a resounding no. IIRC, we've had meteors fall that contained earth organisms still alive on them even after re-entry. There have also been many simulated re-entries that also show bacteria can withstand huge impacts and heat well enough to contaminate the earth in the event of a meteor strike.
Actually, I'm willing to bet Earth & Mars have already cross-contaminated each other, though at what point in time, I have no idea. Both planets have been hit hard enough to throw up ejecta which could have escaped the atmosphere and made it to the sister planet. Things change, of course, so the notion that we swapped bacteria with Mars a couple billion years ago is no reason not to wipe our feet before coming inside.
This may sound like a dumb one, but couldn't they plot a return trajectory that gets close enough to the Sun to irradiate or burn stuff off before re-entering Earth orbit? Maybe they would have to slingshot Venus or even Mercury, but I want to think solar radiation is the best guarantee that anything brought back from Mars is sterilized before coming home.
If anyone knows specifics about how close you'd have to get and how long you'd have to stay there and what (if any) effect that'd have on craft and crew, please reply. It seems simple, which is why I think there must be more to it than that.
Face it, wars work. Wars are terrible, despicable crimes against humanity, but they work.
Von Clausewitz said it best... "War is an extension of diplomacy by other means".
Wars work? Wars work for the winner when they work at all. You can't justify a "crime against humanity" by pointing to an outcome that benefits any subset of humanity. Crimes against humanity are crimes against everyone, against the species as a whole. That includes you, in case you'd forgotten.
Getting back to the topic at hand, I'll see your Von Clausewitz and raise you a Latour: "Science is politics by other means."
1) "Two wrongs" fallacy.
2) Failure to acknowledge scope
Hmm. I know two wrongs don't make a right. I'd prefer zero to two, or one. The reason I gave the link was the part of the article that dealt with inmate labor being exploited, which I should have stated in my initial post. Neither one deserves a pass, but for different reasons: for China, I'll go with the 2000% worse. For the US, we should hold ourselves to a much much higher standard. If nothing else, we can afford to. Hell, this prison labor subtracts from the number of jobs available to hard-working, law-abiding people. The people who'd really lose out if private prison labor were abolished are the company owners, who deserve it. They do lobby for mandatory sentencing and harsher penalties, and they do it because they care about profit, not about making society a safer place, or gasp! rehabilitation.
I don't have a problem with convicts doing labor so long as it benefits the society as a whole. They are there to pay a debt to society, not to some anonymous gang of shareholders. There's a tremendous difference between the two.
Yes. Slave labor is great for humankind
Not that I agree with this article's conclusion, but I think you should read this. If you won't give China a pass on this, why should you do it for the US?
...a lot of people still make a distinction between corporations and unions.
You mean the distinction between people who work and people who profit from that work? Lots of people still make distinctions between night and day as well. But I mean, come on, do we have to sit here all day and make distinctions between things like hot and cold, on and off, black and white, terrorist and freedom fighter?
Your plan is ridiculous. It would give 10 people with $100,000 each to burn the same power as 100 people with $10,000 each or 1000 people with $1000 each, or 10,000 people with $100 each or 100,000 people with $10 each or 1,000,000 people with $1 each. One citizen, one vote it is not. Please go to the corner and rethink this. When people talk about "voting with your dollar" they mean doing business with businesses that share their values, not buying politicians. I can't believe this has to be said, but there it is.
OK, I jumped w/o checking your link, but that is clearly not a bias-neutral site. Are these the people who post hit-lists of abortion doctors or is that someone else? I understand how you'd take that personally, though; several people close to me have illnesses mental and otherwise not too far up the family tree, and I'd hate to have not ever known them because of anyone's idea of "efficiency". I'll give you that hands-down. So, I must retract my ad hominem attack against you and apologize for it as well.
I do find the idea of state-mandated abortion or sterilization reprehensible. AFAIK, that isn't going on in the US now, although I am aware that it was widespread here in the earlier half of the XXth century. To me, what does not necessarily follow from Sanger's beliefs is that the Planned Parenthood of today espouses the same set of beliefs. My understanding is that the state should not mandate anything: abortion, sterilization, contraception, conception.
If these people are truly outraged about abortion, why do I never hear the pro-life activists clamor for pre-natal care, school nutritional programs, environmental cleanup/safety (remember lead paint?) Why aren't these people lined up around the block offering to adopt the children of moronic inner-city parents? Where are these people when it comes to the death penalty? Life is sacred, right? It's never too late to be saved, right? They really don't seem to care what happens to a kid after s/he is born. You know, "life is sacred until birth, then kick the leeching bitch off the welfare rolls ASAP." If abortion is so bad, why don't they want contraception taught in schools? Surely the "obscenity" of a condom rolled over a banana is preferable to the obscenity of an abortion. And it is an obscene thing. Unlike Sanger, I do not claim to know who is worthy and who is not, so I don't presume to make that decision for others, and would not have anyone make it for me. That includes the state and people who feel strongly that they know what is best, no matter which side they come from.
If I've lumped you in with a group whose views you disagree with, I'm sorry. I can acknowledge eugenicism (sp?) on the left then if you can acknowledge denial of access to birth control on the right today. Deal?
I happen to like a web page that compares Margret Sanger's ideaology with the Aryan ideology. It doesn't say she should be(have been) hanged for crimes against humanity (because she didn't personally commit any).
Wow. Before now, I wasn't sure what a libruhl Freeper sounded like. Here's a link, in case anyone is wondering why this fucking clown thinks someone who was persecuted and prosecuted for spreading information about preventing STDs and unwanted pregnancies is the moral equivalent of a Nazi sympathizer.
If you have a problem with Nazi supporters in the US, you need to look to the right and not to the left. It sure as hell wasn't wobblies, unionists, and labor activists who bankrolled that monster. Think bankers and industrialists, and particularly think the Bushes.
Isn't this is like putting Capt. Hazelwood in charge of an oil tanker?
Actually, no. Captain Hazelwood was drunk at the wheel before the accident. Apparently he was a fine captain when sober. Microsoft has bad security whether or not you consider them to be drunk.
I think it's more like promoting him to captain of a nuclear-powered ICBM-equipped submarine after showing us what he could do with the Valdez.
OK, so we can presume that the FBI will contact the virus companies (anti that is ;) and direct them to not include heuristic matches for the magic lantern and it's successors but what'll be the legality of us discussing the virii fingerprint within the various forums?
Obstruction of justice is a very broad brush. My guess is that a copy will get out of the U.S. by hook or by crook, and that solutions might arise from elsewhere due to the increased risk of doing the same here. Good luck downloading from foreign sites w/o being detected. As a P.A.T.R.I.O.T., you really have no business on non-US sites anyway. Try for public access terminals at busy libraries that haven't installed face-recognition tech already. And remember, Russia has always been our ally. We have never been at war with Russia.
Right but what is it going to send? not your PGP passphrase cause that was done via the sandbox and that isn't hooked to the network. Hell don't even install email client, just a text editor and the crypto. so let them put a virus on your "public box" cause there is nothing on there / nothing typed on there that can help them decode your msg. or again am i missing something?
I think so. They can physically search your premises now and not notify you of it for at least six months. Conceivably, they could break in and put a virus on your sandbox that copies itself to your floppy along with the password. Virus then copies itself from floppy to networked computer and sends said password back to HQ. Given the speculation that AV vendors will not counter this stuff, it's certainly not impossible.
In a truly competitive market, other companies would come in to fill the gap left by the departing ones. The problem is, the companies that currently dominate broadband come from industries that are used to having government imposed monopoly status: cable and telephone. The monopoly status is starting to go away in the cable industry, but is persisting for telephone, especially in regards to the "final mile."
Yeah, and in the best of all possible worlds...Monopoly status is not imposed by the government in the sense that the government forbids competition; by and large what they do is amelioration of the effects of an existing monopoly (price controls, etc.) Government does not impose monopoly status so much as it acknowledges an existing reality. You seem to forget that it was government "interference" that opened telephone lines up to DSL competitors in the first place, but that's inconvenient, so we'll just forget that, right? Of course, the RBOCs' incentive for doing so was access to long-distance markets they couldn't get into after the AT&T breakup. One of the many woes that introduced to the average consumer was no longer having to hide extra telephones when the repairman came by. Don't forget choosing your long distance carrier.
Cable was deregged under George I. Guess what? Prices went up. Natural gas prices in GA went up when they deregged last year. CA's electricity woes are partially due to a badly-planned dereg, but the consumers still had to take it up the ass. While competition is always good for the competitors (i.e., drive wholesale up by bidding because we're different companies and therefore not a monopoly,) it's not always good for consumers. Rather than parrot armchair libertarianism, maybe you should look at deregulation on a case-by-case basis and support it where it lowers costs to consumers and oppose it where it doesn't. Unless you have a financial stake in a company assraping consumers in the name of the "free market" you really shouldn't have a dog in this fight. If you do have a financial stake in such a company, you should say so up front so there's no confusion. If your interest is strictly ideological I can't see any explanation other than that you favor the concentration of wealth in the hands of a very few people even when that doesn't include you because you somehow find these people more accountable than politicians who can be voted out or recalled.
The first wave of DSL providers had tremendous problems getting the incumbent carriers (ILECs) to give them support when there were line problems. The ILECs didn't want them to succeed because they wanted to offer their own DSL but hadn't managed to get their act together yet. They had no incentive to provide good service and every incentive to provide bad service. Result: bad service
Who's going to provide those incentives to good service? The Tooth Fairy, the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, or the government? Remember it took legislation just to get the cable companies to answer the phone.
So what you're really talking about is a government "solution" to a problem that was created by government in the first place. No thanks.
In a truly free market you could be bought and ground up for pet food. Never forget that.
Storage with relevant descriptive tags - that's what we need. Trouble then is making sure that the images are filed with accuate tags (that's the sort of work that nobody likes to do). Contextual image recognition anybody?
A very good point. Remember the scene in Sleeper where the scientists show Woody Allen pictures of 20th-century historical figures and ask who they were and what they did? Imagine being a historian in the twenty-fourth century and having nothing more to go on than the word of some guy who's been wrapped up like a baked potato since the 1970's.
Thank God for the PACs that ensure the voice of the American people is heard in D.C.! You know what else is made of PEOPLE?! Soylent Green!! Yep! Charlton Heston said so himself. And you can have his Soylent Green when you pry it from his cold dead liverspotted hands!
If want to hang people for spreading viruses, start with Outlook users and lazy IIS admins. When you're done with that, you can go back to freeping the polls at CNN.
As for citing Websters as some kind of authority on International English, this reminds me of a recent AP story which stated that the US troops currently in Kurgestan marked the first time American Soldiers have been on soil of the former Soviet Union.
If you want to get pedantic, that assertion is correct for the following reason: K-stan and the other SSRs that made up the USSR only became parts of the former Soviet Union after that union was dissolved. Prior to that, there was no such thing as "the former Soviet Union". The U.S. is an extremely litigious place, so these little things matter (confusing a landmass with a political entity.) It may be misleading, but you have to allow yourself to be misled. What the value in being misleading over an eighty year-old military campaign is, I couldn't tell you. You'd be better off putting it down to ignorance--recall that when Iran's president addressed the American people a couple of years back, he alluded to the long history of U.S. meddling there prior to the '79 revolution. This had to be explained to many of the few people who bothered to listen or read about his address. They don't know this stuff. When people who don't know this stuff grow up and become reporters, they propagate that ignorance.
The other example is factually accurate, though, and your point is valid.
As for sources, you could do worse than AP; they dug up the story of the U.S. massacre at No Gun Ri (sp?) some fifty years after the fact. Not exactly the type of journalism Stars and Stripes is noted for.
Because of equal protection and due process under the constitution (14th amendment)? This would be a quagmire of litigation til the end of eternity. Especially where litigants have the means.
Don't bet on that.
I agree with the broader definition of victim you clarified. What OBL thinks about Jews & Xtians I don't know; I thought they were accorded special status as "Children of the Book". At any rate, he's using religion to justify murder, which is utter bullshit no matter who tries it. But there are always underlying political concerns: The "troubles" in N. Ireland are about who rules there, not about whether the Pope is the antiChrist or not. Religious affiliations become shorthand for political orientations in situations like that, as I'm sure you know.
I also agree that Stalin was a grade-A butcher, which is why saying 3 million human beings "isn't as many as it sounds" is so reprehensible. If you want to figure that we killed a million less than Stalin, you ply the same waters as people like Chomsky, who have pointed out the tremendous cost in human lives owing to our blowing up that Sudanese pharma plant, destroying vaccine stock and to the effects of sanctions against Iraq. Pointing to Stalin and saying, in effect, "See? We're not so bad" is NOT an effective moral argument. While he was unquestionably worse, this shouldn't be a game where you can murder n-1 or n-1,000,000 people and cite someone else's monstrous precedent. I don't really think you mean it that way, but the comparatist approach doesn't hold up here. The original issue was US bombings going back thirty years, so drawing in the actions of others from beyond that time frame doesn't really bolster any assertion.
As for Rwanda and Congo, there are other forms of intervention besides dropping bombs. Calling for intervention should not equate to bombing. The fact that it seems to for so many of us is not an encouraging sign. Kosovo: I never said bombmakers were responsible; I said they made money off of it. And they did. Try to imagine having a vested financial interest in the deaths of others. The more killed, the more money you get. If it goes on long enough, maybe you can redo the kitchen, or put a down payment on a second or third home. Many people sleep very soundly with this weight upon their shoulders. Somalia was such a mess I don't know what to say about it. We did seem to start out trying to do the right thing, but I think taking sides was the big mistake.
I will certainly give you the point that a specific act is as bad as it is, no matter which country did it. As I said, dead is dead. Intent, though, is not always divinable. We don't seem to agree at all on the other point. You sum me up as saying the irreversibility of death precludes killing (which is exactly what I said,) then concoct a scenario for killing innocents while saying you agree with me. I should introduce my caveat: proven willingness to take innocent human lives denies you this cover. This applies to EVERYONE. Terrorists, heads of state, Secretaries of State. If someone kills you, does it matter much whether they were elected, appointed, or self-appointed? You're still dead. If there's no safety in innocence, pray tell why anyone should refrain from mass murder? You're not safe anyway, and you might tag your nemesis in the process if you're lucky. Where does that leave us?
I think I'm asking you to consider the moral perils of action while you're asking me to consider the moral perils of inaction. Plainly, both exist. I can't speak for anyone but myself, but I think "shallow morality" is more descriptive of the popular notion that we now have carte blanche for whatever the hell we want to do whereever the hell we want to do it no matter what and no matter who gets hurt.
Obviously I didn't look hard enough...Thanks.
There are numerous instances of US POWs and hostages being filmed for propaganda purposes, but when the tape is analyzed, it becomes clear that they are blinking in Morse Code or some similar communication technique. Decoding their blinking usually indicates where/by whom they are being held, how many people are there, how they are being treated, etc. It would be very easy for a few key phrases to be codes telling some terrorist cell to activate.
Simple and brilliant. Do you know of any specific examples? I've read about the crew of the USS Pueblo, who were detained by North Korea during the Vietnam War. Forced to pose for a propaganda photo, they managed to convince their captors that extending their middle fingers to the photographer was a Hawaiian sign of friendship and goodwill that would make them appear to be getting on well with them. Can't find that photo anywhere on the internet, and God knows I've looked....
I know it sounds like a low-probability method of communicating, but I've heard a terrorist quoted that they only need a 10% success rate to be successful
Meaning they have redundant communications, redundant cells, or both. Not to equate the two, but direct marketers find a 3%-5% success rate enough to keep on doing it. Food for thought, I guess...
Next you have the bombing 1 nation every two years argument. Firstly few of these terrorist are victims of bombing. That aside, I wonder how many more peoploe would have died if we had not have dropped a bomb in the last 30 years? It sounds paradoxicall but unfortunately their are some seriously fucked up people in this world and sometimes you have to kill them. The US made mistakes, yes. But it made mistakes while generally *trying to do the right thing*. Explain to me how Somalia or Kosovo can be construed as the US profiteering from bombing? Come on. Perhaps our motives or our analysis haven't always been perfect, but they rarely have been purely economic profit. America had made mistakes like everyone else. You might want to research how much culpability Pakistan has in all this. Their crusade for Kashmire has caused them to fund some unsavory charecters. We all do stupid things. That does not mean the present situation is one of them or that America is evil. Thirdly there is the profiteering from arm sales argument. This argument has been arround since after world war I where it gained popularity as an explanation for the horific wanton destruction from that war. Because a group stands to profit from a course of action does not mean that they are responsible for it. It is sometimes good grounds for suspicion but it nothing like positive evidence. I think your argument here is much stronger on issues like the missle defense system than on this. I really don't think Bush's main goal right now is "what do the defence contractors want me to do" regardless of how he may think on other occasions. In the end I think this act is justified for one reason only; it may prevent future suffering. Terrorism like any other act of violence causes suffering. This action may create less suffering than it ends.
Few terrorists are bombing victims? Few bombing victims are alive after becoming bombing victims. By your logic, you have no reason to undertake retaliatory action unless YOU were a 9/11 victim PERSONALLY.
As for how many lives bombing saved, that is a question you should pose to every Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian, Grenadan, Libyan, Panamanian, Iraqi, Serb, Sudanese, and Afghan (among others) you meet. While many disagreed with their political leadership, I'm sure theyd've preferred that their innocent countrymen not die. Set aside will be our actions in Chile, Argentina, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia, and Iran, as they don't involve aerial bombardment per se, but rather differing levels of meddling and interference (i.e., assasinations, propaganda and sabotage.) To a lesser extent, our presence in places like Haiti, Japan and the Phillipines brews some resentment, even if the overall effect is stabilizing in some places. Just because there are no bullets flying in a country where we have troops on the ground is an inadequate basis for concluding that they love us. Also to be ignored is our tampering in an Australian PM election in the 1970's. Still, you have to admit that this is a long and varied list.
As to our world being fucked up, yes. I believe there are people whose deaths would make the world a better place. My list differs from yours. Who decides, then?
If we generally try to do the right thing, why did we sit on our asses and let Rwanda and the Congo turn into such bloody messes? If we're the good guys, why didn't we drop support for the Apartheid regime in SA until after institutions starting divesting themselves of their shares of companies who did business there due to grassroots pressure? The boardrooms of America stood up and struck a blow for freedom only after it bit too deeply into their bottom line. This last example is a case of Doing the Right Thing for the Wrong Reason. Do you honestly think wed've given two shits if Kuwait had been a poverty-stricken African or Asian nation?
Bombing is always profitable if you're a bombmaker. Think about it for a second. If planes get shot down, it becomes profitable for aircraft manufacturers. When civilian infrastructure needs to be rebuilt, it becomes profitable for international civil engineering companies. And because you need oil to do all of this, it is always profitable for petroleum producers. If there were companies that cloned humans for use as soldiers, they would profit too.
Everyone else doesn't rule the world. Our mistakes are magnified because of our economic, political and military stature. The more power we have, the more responsibility there is to use it wisely and humanely. IOW, the consequences of a toddler somewhere ordering an aerial bombardment are practically nil, as he doesn't have the power to do so. As for Pakistan's ISI and their culpability, I suggest you research who supported and liased with them. "We all do stupid things?" This is not letting your coonhound steer your pickup into a fishin' hole. This is war. War means killing. Killing is irreversible. It's not a mistake you can fix, no matter how much you wished you'd torched the right hooch. Innocents still die.
The profiteering argument dates from WWI because weapons production was not industrialized on a sufficient scale prior to that war. The assertion that it only arose after a certain point in time does nothing to detract from its cogency. And BTW, Bush, et al still want to go ahead with NMD even after 9/11. Doesn't that make your chest swell with patriotic pride?
Bombing now may prevent future suffering by killing people who were going to bomb us. Bombing can never end the suffering of those already bombed. There is a world of difference between the two. It should also be a given that bombing always creates human suffering. If it's only a matter of where, then all you have to fall back upon are the accidents of race or nationality or religion. Being loyal, honest, compassionate, pious etc. will not save you. That's what terror is.
I want the people who planned and bankrolled 9/11 tormented to the point of insanity, rolled up in a pigskin, and thrown into the coldest stretch of ocean we can find. I know getting to that point will involve innocents being killed. That's the part I have a problem with. We have killed or will soon kill people who had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11, just like the people in WTC had nothing to do with U.S.-Israel policy or U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. Innocent is innocent. Rejoicing in the death of one innocent human being is an expression of our animality and not our humanity. A sober and serious people would know that already.
Box cutters do have a functional purpose for peaceful endeavors. Perhaps their is no equivalent for encryption. That is, the government has taken the responsibility upon itself of keeping prying eyes out of your files.
Perhaps there is an equivalent - the deadbolt lock. It certainly serves a peaceful function. The gov't _can_ do this after the fact, _if_ they choose to do so. There's no guarantee they will. Besides, businesses routinely encrypt information that they don't want rivals to see. The "no peaceful use, gov't will take care of it" line might be a good argument against maintaining your own personal standing army, but not against protecting your personal property, whether it be physical or intellectual.
One of the biggest users of encryption is the military and intelligence community for obvious reasons. A ban on encryption at large would prevent further development in academia from pushing for stronger algorithms (and cracking algorithms as well).
At some point, your backyard nuclear weapon will come to the attention of certain someones. If you have come up with anything new, you might be invited to pursue it with them. Essentially, research of this type is either nationalized or shut down once it goes beyond a certain point. Overall it (all research) doesn't stop, you just stop seeing the results of some researchers.