Well, the first point is that before the bombing, it was claimed that 1 person was killed every day. That's the official word. That's why we did it.
Now, the official number is that 20 people are killed every month. OK, I could elaborate this to death, but I don't have time.
The second point, read the Amnesty report I linked to (that is, read the report, not just the press release). It's well documented there.
Besides, NATO broke the mandate from the Security Council. It's bullshit that it had to be done in spite of Security Council decisions, the could have called the full assembly.
It is asking the important question "How much anger can prompt a group of people to do this?"
An important question people seem to ignore in their anger.
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
on
More On Tragedy
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· Score: 2
Do you really think that Osama is angry about GLOBALIZATION?
He is. It is one of the reasons he have explicitly mentioned for his declaration of war against the US.
He sees it as just another way america extends it's imperialism.
Why don't you do some reading (oh, I forgot, this is/.)
Re:His name was Timothy McViegh!
on
More On Tragedy
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· Score: 2
He did. He just wanted the feds to kill him. That's the whole point.
There was a report about the U.S. Embassy in Oslo on Norwegian TV now, and the embassy has not been evacuated. However, large armed police forces (Norwegian police are normally unarmed) are covering the building.
While every peace activist in the world will cry foul, peace is so worth it that we spend umpteen billion dollars a year on defense because it is a deterrent.
So, you're like the romans "if you want peace, prepare for war".
Well, you know what Joseph Rotblat had to say about why it was wrong of him to develop the bomb?
There is no such thing as a deterrent for a sick mind! Do you really think Hitler would have cared if Germany was erased from the face of the earth, if he could make sure England was erased too...?
No, it's not acceptable anymore. If you want peace, prepare for peace.
For example, if there were no nuclear weapons, we would have had WWIII and IV already. Millions of people (including civilians) would have died.
DU is a panic. DU has no effect whatsoever.
And the reason why this isn't a good thing is that it will be even easier to bomb. Now, you can even make it look as if it isn't an environmental catastrophy to blow things up. And those stupid politicians will buy it.
Green bombs? No way: When you blow things up, you are causing destruction. It can't be environmentally friendly in any way. War is the most destructive thing you can do, also to the environment.
I was very much opposed to the bombing, and it is very clear that the bombing was flawed, but the DU panic is taking the focus away from the main point: That war is unacceptable as a political means. Or as the Russell-Einstein manifesto says "shall mankind renounce war?".
I'm also a pacifist and a physicist.
You know, I'm not a conspiracy buff, but I couldn't help notice that the panic took off just after Amnesty published a very critical report and many other reports were made that there hasn't really been any improvement in the region. Before that, it was only a few conspiracy buffs and a well known swindler who favoured the idea.
If there was a conspiracy here, well, you've seen "Wag the dog", so imagine somebody getting upset about it, and decides to take attention away from the fact that the bombing was all flawed:
Senior-Man-in-Dark-suit: OK, Amnesty and several others are pointing out that we broke human rights, and that the campaign in Serbia was flawed. The President has asked us to take the attention away from that fact. Any ideas?
Junior-man-in-Dark-suit: Well, sir, there is this depleted uranium, that some conspiracy buffs have been talking about...
SMIDS: So, were we using it?
JMIDS: Of course, this stuff is really old.
SMIDS: So, what's the deal?
JMIDS: It's uranium, sir. People go nuts every time they hear about uranium.
SMIDS: Right. So, what are scientists saying about this?
JMIDS: They're all very clear, DU has hardly any effect.
SMIDS: Are you sure about that? You know, if we put out a panic about this, and it turns out to have been dangerous, we're in deep shit. You'll be out of a job, son!
JMIDS: I understand, sir, and yes, the scientific evidence is overwhelming.
SMIDS: Excellent. This is what we will do: First, we deny having used it...
JMIDS:...but sir, they allready know we used it...
SMIDS: Son, you've got a lot to learn about Public Opinion Engineering! Listen now, this will work. First, we deny having used it, that should fuel the conspiracy buffs and get them some headlines in the mainstream press. We'll wait a month or two, then we admit it. That's that needs doing. Any questions?
Yep, this is the way it happened;-). And it worked: It took the attention away from the fact that the military action was flawed, that NATO broke human rights principles as well (and should be prosecuted for it), and that the serbs would have thrown Milosevic out themselves if they had a tiny bit of support, they tried many times, and they eventually did.
"Green" Weapons is a lame attempt to make war look acceptable. But it isn't, it can't be. But, I fear, it will work...:-(
We have some good laws here in Norway. Somebody actually did their homework and made a good law. It prohibits spam.
Unfortunately, most of my spam (10 a day, steadily increasing) comes from US sources, so it doesn't have any appreciable effect. But if US got the same law, I think there would be strong impetus for other countries to get good laws as well, because if they didn't we'd blackhole them.
I would want the Final Solution to the spam problem. As with most problems a total solution requires a totalitarian regime. So, if I got one spam a month, and the idiot who did it would be spanked, I would consider the problem solved.
Even better, lots of people standing up and claim they wrote it!
danheskett is right, this must be released with somebody standing up for it. Doing it anonymously will only cause further demonization of hackers. Also, one should have a press-release ready saying it is being released as a genuine act of civil disobedience. You need the media spins right from the first second.
Oh, yes, they are big-time spammers, I've got some e-mail where they brag about it:
Another
successful marketing campaign brought to you buy:
<a href="http://www.monsterhut.com"
[snip] Judging from the address they sent it to, it comes from a web-harvest done about four years ago...
The big guys always wanted this to happen. They want interactive TV, billg always wanted that, as late as 95, he talked all about it in his book, right?
They don't want everybody to make content, that's very dangerous.
OK, this is what we need: We need lots of people to make content, and it must be feasible to make a living from it. Only that way will a large part of the internet remain like we want it.
So, we need, public domain payment standards, for example for making micro-payments, and we need that fast!
I don't know about you, but I certainly want it. I want a single PDA that can do everything, and that's always connected. I want a big desktop computer that is the frontend for all the real work I'm going to do. I want my fridge connected so I can check what's in there from my PDA when I'm standing in a shop, I want my washing machine connected so I don't need to go home before I would know it's finished, and I want my car connected so I can lookup in maps, and download ogg vorbis files to the stereo.
And I'd be happy to pay for it.
What I'm worried about are the privacy issues. With all this being logged, things can go wrong. We need laws that says you're not allowed to record a lot of information. Strong privacy laws.
And that you own whatever information is recorded about you.
Do we want the Internet to be a marketplace, a teacher, a trainer? I would rather have limited resources allocated to training, skills enrichment, and exposure to art and culture, than to a thousand million Doom-playing boxes and gabby cellphones.
As I see it, one of the fundamental pillars of the web is that it is universal. It has to be all. It has to be a marketplace too, but we need to make sure it isn't only a marketplace, because if it becomes, it dies. Now, the web is part of the internet, so the internet must be universal too.
Yep, and then continue to lobby for an explicit ban on lynx, wget, telnet etc... You know, in these troubled times, it is more likely that IE will not have File/Save As... and that lynx, wget and telnet will be banned than that the DMCA will be struck down.
then just don't shop there! It's pretty damn simple if you ask me.
Well, I just returned from a conference in Dublin, Ireland, and I was terrified to see that there are cameras everywhere! I mean, it's probably not an inch of that city that isn't covered, and it's not only indoors, but outdoors as well. Even the university campus has infrared cameras all over the campus. I wasn't really concerned about this issue before I went there, I didn't think it could ever be that bad. But the simple fact is, they are all ready to implement this, if they can get away with it.
When that happens, you have to boycot a whole city. OK, you're not living in Dublin, so why should you care? Because it's going to happen in the city you live in too!
Sigh. Look -- I understand this is how capitalism is supposed to work, but I get a little sick of having to perform an endless series of boycotts in a desperate game of wack-a-corp just to try to get shit upon less frequently
Wow, that's going to be an excellent.sig some day! Thanks a lot!:-)
Well, in the future, when things are getting tighter, the way this is going to be used is that anybody who are critical of e.g. the movie industry will be harassed by the movie industry sending letters to ISPs to make sure that the person critical of the actions will be shut down on no grounds, repeatedly. That way, free speech can be prevented very easily. This is going to be very bad.
Ogg Tarkin!
on
HDTV Over IP
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Yep, and the loudthinking has started. It has even been given a name Ogg Tarkin, and there are mailing lists for it.
And since open standards is my favorite issue, I support these efforts a lot (though I haven't the knowlegde to participate).
1. Lack of portable hardware players. All the players on the market today support mp3 and wma, but none play ogg. This is a problem.
Yep!
I suggest we all start surfing the net, and when you find some hardware there is a remote chance you would find interesting, drop them a note saying "Ogg Vorbis is just around the corner, will you support it?"
Also, search for Vorbis on their on-site search engine. Dell once said the reason why they started supporting Linux was that a lot of people where searching for Linux on their site.
Might work if they actually look through their search logs.
My mother has got some really old audio tapes, and becuase cassette players tend to chew tapes every now and then, she asked if I could make a backup, and I said I could encode them with Vorbis and put them on the computer, and she liked that idea.
It's a Pentium PRO 180 with win95, this computer, and there isn't a lot of space on the disk, and when I last tried, it had 32 megs of RAM. Recently, I got another 64 megs for it.
I ripped to WAVs, but had to settle for 8 bits, mono 11 kHz, that's all my software could do. So, I've got a bunch of large WAVs, but I haven't been able to encode it to Ogg Vorbis.
It seems the best thing to do, is to encode directly from tape, while it is playing, through the sound card to Ogg Vorbis. Anybody know about Win95-software that can do this....?
Because without standards in the public domain, it's practically the end of free expression.
Think about it: The licensor can make any conditions they want. So, they can tell you not to critizise them, or their partners, or whoever pays them money.
There's nothing you can do about it. We haven't really seen bad license conditions up to now. But that doesn't mean it won't happen.
It is if somebody would own all the paper in the world, and you would have to sign a license agreement to publish anything on paper, or even write something on paper. Obviously, you wouldn't have free expression if that was the case.
Now, I emphasize practically, because, obviously, you can still talk, and you can still write on paper. But that's only because it is what audio might not be: it's free as in speech. If the only way you can be heard, is by communicating with audio files, paper is obsolete (which may happen), then the public domain standard is very valuable.
Besides, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes the ability to communicate in any medium, when talking about free expression.
Ogg Vorbis is a way to ensure free expression, and a much more important one than free software too.
He have misunderstood "Information wants to be free", hasn't he?
At least, how I understand it, is that it is information that wants to be free not that "we'd like information to be free". The distinction is very important: It means that you can't control information: Stuff will leak out no matter how hard you try to control it, sooner or later it will be known to many more than you intended. Some information will leak out, at considerable cost to the one who leak it, even the cost of your life. For example Stephen Biko, who was killed after revealing some details about the suppression in South Africa in 1977, if I remember the case correctly.
So, it is not about if somebody like information to be owned or not, it is about if it is possible to keep information under control.
Ukrain has some human rights issues.
Internet Journalist Georgy Gongadze of Ukrajinska Pravda was found beheaded last november. Gongadze had been investigating corruption on high levels in the Ukrainan government. Later, the leader of the opposition socialist party publized recordings that allegdly linked President Kuchma to the murder. On the tapes Kuchma orders the murder of Gongadze. Have a look here.
It has been pointed out however, that Kuchma would hardly have anything to fear from an e-zine like Ukrajinska Pravda, since very few have access to the Internet in Ukrain, and that it was unlikely that he had even heard of Georgy Gongadze.
We had a case with this typo-squatter got it pretty bad. What happened was that one of the biggest companies in Norway, Kvaerner, was being traded seriously, they were talking billions there. This guy had gotten kvearner.com, and somebody managed to send confidential information worth millions to the wrong address, the stuff ended up in the squatters mailbox.
He claimed he wasn't squatting, that he had registered a company "KV-Earner", but when you call your company "Domainname Trading", that excuse seems rather lame. Also, whether or not he was squatting is really irrelevant.
First he warned them that they were sending to the wrong address, but they just continued sending it to him.
When Kvaerner understood what had gone wrong, they tried to buy the domain name from him for nothing, but he refused. Then, they got the police to knock down his doors and arrest him for blackmail...
Well, there is a quite minimal KV-Earner-page there now, so I guess the police lost the case (when it comes to technology, they loose everything in court).
While I don't have much sympathy for squatters, it is completely irrelevant in this case. It is the moron who managed to send information worth millions to the wrong address unencrypted who should pay (and get fired). I find it just incredible that people send confidential information unencrypted.
Slashdot Mirror
The second point, read the Amnesty report I linked to (that is, read the report, not just the press release). It's well documented there.
Besides, NATO broke the mandate from the Security Council. It's bullshit that it had to be done in spite of Security Council decisions, the could have called the full assembly.
It is asking the important question "How much anger can prompt a group of people to do this?" An important question people seem to ignore in their anger.
He is. It is one of the reasons he have explicitly mentioned for his declaration of war against the US.
He sees it as just another way america extends it's imperialism.
Why don't you do some reading (oh, I forgot, this is /.)
He did. He just wanted the feds to kill him. That's the whole point.
There was a report about the U.S. Embassy in Oslo on Norwegian TV now, and the embassy has not been evacuated. However, large armed police forces (Norwegian police are normally unarmed) are covering the building.
So, you're like the romans "if you want peace, prepare for war".
Well, you know what Joseph Rotblat had to say about why it was wrong of him to develop the bomb? There is no such thing as a deterrent for a sick mind! Do you really think Hitler would have cared if Germany was erased from the face of the earth, if he could make sure England was erased too...?
No, it's not acceptable anymore. If you want peace, prepare for peace.
No. Why don't you read what General Lee Butler has to say about that.
If an insane leader had risen to power any of the nuclear powers, it would have been the final world war. Billions would have died.
Green bombs? No way: When you blow things up, you are causing destruction. It can't be environmentally friendly in any way. War is the most destructive thing you can do, also to the environment.
I was very much opposed to the bombing, and it is very clear that the bombing was flawed, but the DU panic is taking the focus away from the main point: That war is unacceptable as a political means. Or as the Russell-Einstein manifesto says "shall mankind renounce war?". I'm also a pacifist and a physicist.
You know, I'm not a conspiracy buff, but I couldn't help notice that the panic took off just after Amnesty published a very critical report and many other reports were made that there hasn't really been any improvement in the region. Before that, it was only a few conspiracy buffs and a well known swindler who favoured the idea.
If there was a conspiracy here, well, you've seen "Wag the dog", so imagine somebody getting upset about it, and decides to take attention away from the fact that the bombing was all flawed:
Senior-Man-in-Dark-suit: OK, Amnesty and several others are pointing out that we broke human rights, and that the campaign in Serbia was flawed. The President has asked us to take the attention away from that fact. Any ideas?
Junior-man-in-Dark-suit: Well, sir, there is this depleted uranium, that some conspiracy buffs have been talking about...
SMIDS: So, were we using it?
JMIDS: Of course, this stuff is really old.
SMIDS: So, what's the deal?
JMIDS: It's uranium, sir. People go nuts every time they hear about uranium.
SMIDS: Right. So, what are scientists saying about this?
JMIDS: They're all very clear, DU has hardly any effect.
SMIDS: Are you sure about that? You know, if we put out a panic about this, and it turns out to have been dangerous, we're in deep shit. You'll be out of a job, son!
JMIDS: I understand, sir, and yes, the scientific evidence is overwhelming.
SMIDS: Excellent. This is what we will do: First, we deny having used it...
JMIDS: ...but sir, they allready know we used it...
SMIDS: Son, you've got a lot to learn about Public Opinion Engineering! Listen now, this will work. First, we deny having used it, that should fuel the conspiracy buffs and get them some headlines in the mainstream press. We'll wait a month or two, then we admit it. That's that needs doing. Any questions?
Yep, this is the way it happened ;-). And it worked: It took the attention away from the fact that the military action was flawed, that NATO broke human rights principles as well (and should be prosecuted for it), and that the serbs would have thrown Milosevic out themselves if they had a tiny bit of support, they tried many times, and they eventually did.
"Green" Weapons is a lame attempt to make war look acceptable. But it isn't, it can't be. But, I fear, it will work... :-(
Unfortunately, most of my spam (10 a day, steadily increasing) comes from US sources, so it doesn't have any appreciable effect. But if US got the same law, I think there would be strong impetus for other countries to get good laws as well, because if they didn't we'd blackhole them.
I would want the Final Solution to the spam problem. As with most problems a total solution requires a totalitarian regime. So, if I got one spam a month, and the idiot who did it would be spanked, I would consider the problem solved.
danheskett is right, this must be released with somebody standing up for it. Doing it anonymously will only cause further demonization of hackers. Also, one should have a press-release ready saying it is being released as a genuine act of civil disobedience. You need the media spins right from the first second.
Oh, yes, they are big-time spammers, I've got some e-mail where they brag about it: Another successful marketing campaign brought to you buy: <a href="http://www.monsterhut.com" [snip] Judging from the address they sent it to, it comes from a web-harvest done about four years ago...
They don't want everybody to make content, that's very dangerous.
OK, this is what we need: We need lots of people to make content, and it must be feasible to make a living from it. Only that way will a large part of the internet remain like we want it.
So, we need, public domain payment standards, for example for making micro-payments, and we need that fast!
So, I have this handful of sites I'm searching for Linux, just in case they'll catch it.
LEGO's site is one of them...
Everybody, join in!
I don't know about you, but I certainly want it. I want a single PDA that can do everything, and that's always connected. I want a big desktop computer that is the frontend for all the real work I'm going to do. I want my fridge connected so I can check what's in there from my PDA when I'm standing in a shop, I want my washing machine connected so I don't need to go home before I would know it's finished, and I want my car connected so I can lookup in maps, and download ogg vorbis files to the stereo.
And I'd be happy to pay for it.
What I'm worried about are the privacy issues. With all this being logged, things can go wrong. We need laws that says you're not allowed to record a lot of information. Strong privacy laws. And that you own whatever information is recorded about you.
As I see it, one of the fundamental pillars of the web is that it is universal. It has to be all. It has to be a marketplace too, but we need to make sure it isn't only a marketplace, because if it becomes, it dies. Now, the web is part of the internet, so the internet must be universal too.
Yep, and then continue to lobby for an explicit ban on lynx, wget, telnet etc... You know, in these troubled times, it is more likely that IE will not have File/Save As... and that lynx, wget and telnet will be banned than that the DMCA will be struck down.
Well, I just returned from a conference in Dublin, Ireland, and I was terrified to see that there are cameras everywhere! I mean, it's probably not an inch of that city that isn't covered, and it's not only indoors, but outdoors as well. Even the university campus has infrared cameras all over the campus. I wasn't really concerned about this issue before I went there, I didn't think it could ever be that bad. But the simple fact is, they are all ready to implement this, if they can get away with it.
When that happens, you have to boycot a whole city. OK, you're not living in Dublin, so why should you care? Because it's going to happen in the city you live in too!
Wow, that's going to be an excellent .sig some day! Thanks a lot! :-)
Well, it isn't really a very good term...
Well, in the future, when things are getting tighter, the way this is going to be used is that anybody who are critical of e.g. the movie industry will be harassed by the movie industry sending letters to ISPs to make sure that the person critical of the actions will be shut down on no grounds, repeatedly. That way, free speech can be prevented very easily. This is going to be very bad.
And since open standards is my favorite issue, I support these efforts a lot (though I haven't the knowlegde to participate).
Yep!
I suggest we all start surfing the net, and when you find some hardware there is a remote chance you would find interesting, drop them a note saying "Ogg Vorbis is just around the corner, will you support it?"
Also, search for Vorbis on their on-site search engine. Dell once said the reason why they started supporting Linux was that a lot of people where searching for Linux on their site. Might work if they actually look through their search logs.
It's a Pentium PRO 180 with win95, this computer, and there isn't a lot of space on the disk, and when I last tried, it had 32 megs of RAM. Recently, I got another 64 megs for it.
I ripped to WAVs, but had to settle for 8 bits, mono 11 kHz, that's all my software could do. So, I've got a bunch of large WAVs, but I haven't been able to encode it to Ogg Vorbis.
It seems the best thing to do, is to encode directly from tape, while it is playing, through the sound card to Ogg Vorbis. Anybody know about Win95-software that can do this....?
Think about it: The licensor can make any conditions they want. So, they can tell you not to critizise them, or their partners, or whoever pays them money. There's nothing you can do about it. We haven't really seen bad license conditions up to now. But that doesn't mean it won't happen.
It is if somebody would own all the paper in the world, and you would have to sign a license agreement to publish anything on paper, or even write something on paper. Obviously, you wouldn't have free expression if that was the case.
Now, I emphasize practically, because, obviously, you can still talk, and you can still write on paper. But that's only because it is what audio might not be: it's free as in speech. If the only way you can be heard, is by communicating with audio files, paper is obsolete (which may happen), then the public domain standard is very valuable.
Besides, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights includes the ability to communicate in any medium, when talking about free expression.
Ogg Vorbis is a way to ensure free expression, and a much more important one than free software too.
At least, how I understand it, is that it is information that wants to be free not that "we'd like information to be free". The distinction is very important: It means that you can't control information: Stuff will leak out no matter how hard you try to control it, sooner or later it will be known to many more than you intended. Some information will leak out, at considerable cost to the one who leak it, even the cost of your life. For example Stephen Biko, who was killed after revealing some details about the suppression in South Africa in 1977, if I remember the case correctly.
So, it is not about if somebody like information to be owned or not, it is about if it is possible to keep information under control.
It has been pointed out however, that Kuchma would hardly have anything to fear from an e-zine like Ukrajinska Pravda, since very few have access to the Internet in Ukrain, and that it was unlikely that he had even heard of Georgy Gongadze.
It is, nevertheless, an issue to be alarmed by.
He claimed he wasn't squatting, that he had registered a company "KV-Earner", but when you call your company "Domainname Trading", that excuse seems rather lame. Also, whether or not he was squatting is really irrelevant.
First he warned them that they were sending to the wrong address, but they just continued sending it to him. When Kvaerner understood what had gone wrong, they tried to buy the domain name from him for nothing, but he refused. Then, they got the police to knock down his doors and arrest him for blackmail...
Well, there is a quite minimal KV-Earner-page there now, so I guess the police lost the case (when it comes to technology, they loose everything in court).
While I don't have much sympathy for squatters, it is completely irrelevant in this case. It is the moron who managed to send information worth millions to the wrong address unencrypted who should pay (and get fired). I find it just incredible that people send confidential information unencrypted.