She didn't force the state to conduct this search.
Are you certain she didn't alert the rescue services and ask them to search for her husband? If I've locked myself out of my house at 2am, and call a locksmith saying "please help me", I'd have a hard time in court if I didn't want to pay his bill.
One interesting point for me would be that in the case of the locksmith you should have an expectation of getting a bill, whereas if you call the fire brigade maybe your assumption might be that the help is free.
I think it's quite reasonable to assume that a person missing in a plane crash wanted to be found, and therefore you can treat the situation like he asked for help. Would be similar to the situation of finding someone passed-out on the sidewalk - it's reasonable to assume that they'd want to be taken to a medical professional, even though they are not able to give their consent.
If I go visit Nevada and explore the state in the hope of stumbling across the wreckage, can I bill the widow for the cost of my vacation?
Hmm - interesting, but unlike you the state services were either asked to perform the search, or had a reasonable expectation that the person involved would want them to search. However if you'd rescue someone this way, the rescued would probably feel some obligation to you, likely offering you a reward of some kind. If it was me, I'd certainly want to you to have something for your efforts.
So if they are going to charge me directly for the use of state services, why am i still paying taxes?
Presumably you are still using other state services on a daily basis - like public roads, a standing army, police force, fire fighters etc. Just because you pay your share for these services to the community, doesn't mean that the community is obligated to provide lots of other services for free, too. It's the same as with medical services - the state could provide it (as it does in many countries) or it could leave it to private companies. If you'd want the state to handle medical insurance too, you'd have to pay more taxes to the state and less money to the insurance company. Doesn't mean the state could suddenly provide medical services for free. Were you want to draw the line depends partly on you - that's why you've been given the right to vote.
Similarly, a person who commonly flies, solo, over mountainous terrain should probably have some form of insurance. Especially somebody as well-funded as Bill Fossett.
Insurance is not always a good idea. Insurance companies need to make money and need to pay overhead (e.g. administration, advertising etc) in addition to paying out money if the insured claim benefits. So at best (assuming no profits and overhead) an
insurance company would equally distribute the costs amongst the insured - which means that on average you'd pay as much as you receive. However the overhead is never zero, so in reality on average you necessarily receive less than you pay. Insurance may provide peace of mind though, and that's a benefit, too.
My personal take is, that insurance makes sense if you can't take a single hit of the risk you want to insure. So in your case it probably makes good sense to have rescue insurance. In the case of Bill Fossett I'd take the same approach he did, and not get insurance - he had enough money to pay for the resue.
In all these cases the bill should go to the party who wanted to find something or someone. Of course, this principle could become problematic in cases where the future widow is not all that interested in the search being successful...
It's really about the kind of country you want to live in - it's a choice. I don't want employers to have the rights to snoop on people who happen to work for them, because I want to live in a free society despite the fact that most of us will have to be employees of someone else. I also don't think that e.g. technically-oriented people are less valuable to society than entrepreneurial-oriented people, both are needed to build a successful economy. To me that means that one of these groups doesn't have the right to treat the other like slaves. And certainly just because someone gives me a phone and expects me to use it, doesn't mean they automatically get the right to snoop on me. Just as they wouldn't get that right by giving me a shovel. If you pay someone to work for you, you should have the right to get good quality work from that person. That's it. No right to look at the employees underwear, no right to sexually harass them, no right to rifle through their wallet, no right to decide what they eat, no right to restrict their private life.
I guess you'd probably agree that employers are not entitled to install cameras in employees restrooms, just as I think we are in agreement that an employer must have the right to monitor the quality of an employees work. The question is where to draw the line. One important aspect is economical necessity - if it's not possible to run a business under the restriction put in place, then those restrictions don't make sense. So that's my view of it: no intrusion beyond what's absolutely necessary. As for snooping on employees: many rich countries don't allow that, so clearly it doesn't fall into that category.
It's a rather absurd approach to management, anyway. If you waste all your time reading employees' emails, you'll lack that time for the work which counts. If you want to run a successful company make sure you have good employees and keep them motivated. Measure the quality of their work, not how they get there. That's not just my opinion, pretty much any management handbook will tell you the same.
I don't know why this is so difficult to understand: not everywhere in the world people follow US rules. In particular this discussion is not about the US, it's about Australia. I doesn't matter much what US employee manuals say in this context. And if you start your own company you will obey the laws of the country which you are in - if you don't like that go someplace else.
Well the "people" that own the company should have the right to monitor, audit, evaluate, etc. their employees.
What rights company owners have and not have depends on the laws of the country they operate in. In a democratic society its for us to decide which those rights are. In some cases company owners may like it, in others they won't. If we decide that they can't snoop on people: to fucking bad, that's what the law is in that case.
Let's get real, you are at WORK. What is so hard to understand that you are being paid to do something for somebody else and that they dictate the terms?
Let's get real: I live in a society of LAWS. What is so hard to understand that these laws set limits on what my employer can do (among many other things) and that in a democracy the people can influence what these are?
If you want employers to have some particular rights - fine: argue your point and campaign for it by showing that society as a whole benefits. Alternatively you can just keep saying "they should have this right", but that's not very interesting, and I think they shouldn't.
Spying on someone and watching someone are two distinct different concepts. When your boss watches you, you know that he's there doing that - when your boss is spying on you, you may not be aware of it. Using your concept of watching what the plumber is doing: in the first case you are standing around looking at his work - in the second you install a video camera to secretly observer him. People are very uncomfortable with the second scenario - they feel violated. That's why companies shouldn't be permitted to do it.
If a person isn't comfortable being watched by the people that are paying him to do the job, he is always free to quit and not be paid for it.
If a company doesn't like to observe a countries privacy laws - well too bad then, they have to do it anyway. Companies don't have rights, people do.
Ok lets see: you started the Iraq war in 2003, it cost ~$845 billion so far, the occupation costs continue at $195 million per day. There is no way you can use terms like "things are mostly going rather well over there" in this context. Apart from that ~100000 dead are accurately described as a bloodbath.
On the definition of what the UN is: Let's say you get together with 4 friends and call yourself "Fun Adventure Club", then go on trip to Florida. However on the way down there you start arguing, and eventually give up on the plan. Would you say "this was the fault of the Fun Adventure Club" or would you put the blame on yourself and your 4 friends?
The UN exists as an organization of it's members - it doesn't raise it's own taxes, it doesn't have it's own military force. Where it succeeds it's because it's members (working together) have succeeded, if it fails it's the responsibility of it's members, too.
As for numbers, anybody making an argument needs to take care of backing it up, just as it's your own responsibility to actually state your argument - how on earth could I do that for you? I don't know what you want to say before you do it.
Now the reference you cite states that the sanctions imposed on Iraq (on initiative of the US) have led to high child mortality, and that the UN oil for food program did not solve the problem. The way you phrase it you make it sound like it was actually the fault of the oil for food program, but the article makes it quite clear that this program did improve the situation somewhat, though not nearly enough.
What you leave out though, is any information how the destruction of the Iraqi infrastructure by the US, and the subsequent occupation have improved the situation. Has it? If so by how much? Your calculations seem to assume some fantasy number like a child mortality of 0 - which would be impossible to achieve anywhere in the world. Additionally you do not explain why this presumed improvement would last. Even if the US were currently managing to deliver adequate food, water and medical resources to the children of Iraq - how long do you expect this to work? If you haven't noticed you haven't exactly put a stable government in place, once the US troops leave - not too long after the election I suspect, it will likely collapse. Will the child mortality situation then be improved compared with Hussein's time? That's very unlikely. In Basra we already have an example what happens after the occupation troops withdraw.
I killed exactly ZERO.
What are you doing there then? In any case the blood of these Iraqis is on your hands, because they died of the policy you've supported. Sure it's not your fault alone, but it is yours too.
We found mass graves filled with women and children.
How did you find them - digging up the ground to make space for the children you killed with cluster bombs? Saddam was an asshole, but what he did to the Iraqis was nowhere near as horrific as your actions.
We know that entire villages were gassed [...] And you call the US action to stop such atrocities a disaster.
If you wait 10 years after the last villages were gassed until you invade you are not actually "stopping" anything. Quite apart from the fact that you were complicit to this gassing in the first place. Saddam did it with direct US support and US supplied material. For the US to claim to be concerned about this now, is as brazen as it can get.
What the UN did in the 90's toward Iraq and Rwanda and what they are doing today in Darfur is criminal.
The UN isn't a political entity, it's a debating forum and with an organization entirely controlled by the security council. What it does reflects the agreement of the security council's members, the US being the most powerful of them.
You speak of facts! Look up how [..]
No sorry, if you want me to debate your numbers, you need to have some first.
I signed up. I went there to fight for these people who can not fight for themselves.
No you didn't, you went there and killed those people. You bombed women and children, you destroyed their infrastructure, and you plunged their country into civil war. You are illegally occupying a country which was no threat to you. You are "just following orders" and you are not man enough to admit to yourself what you are actually doing.
Go to Iraq yourself.
If you had the guts, you would admit to yourself what you've participated in, and refuse to server anymore. It's just way easier to follow orders.
Find a father who is walking his little girl to school and tell him that what he is doing is the result of a criminal act.
What's the point of this, do you believe girls weren't allowed to go to school under Saddam? You must be confusing the place with Afghanistan.
Go to a polling place and find some old lady with a purple finger and call her a criminal.
Why? She hasn't done anything: you are the criminal, not her.
Tell her she shouldn't have the right to vote.
Ask her if she'd prefer her grandchildren were still alive, or if she prefers her ability to vote for a government which can only stay in power as long as the US occupation troops supports it. A right to vote is only of value in a country governed by law. If you live in civil war, voting is essentially meaningless. The power is not controlled by the vote.
Go tell the husband and father of one of those families found in a mass grave and tell him how you wish that Saddam Hussein was still in power and removing him was cowardly, criminal act.
Did you go and apologize to the families of the ~100,000 Iraqi's *you* killed? Nobody is sorry Hussein is dead, but plunging an entire country into disaster to achieve that is not just unjustified it's criminal. Just as you can't bomb an entire neighbourhood merely because there are some drug dealers are living there - sure you'd kill some bad guys, but you'd also murder lots of innocents.
If this racist piece of shit really cared about "brown people" he'd be asking why we were not in Iraq sooner to prevent all those brown people from getting killed and thrown into mass graves.
Pathetic - take some personal responsibility for the disaster you've created in Iraq. Pretending that you did good there is nothing but moral cowardice - rather than admitting to yourself that you've been supporting a criminal act and start working to remedy the situation, you go with the easy option and just deny the facts.
I don't think secrecy and fair taxation are generally incompatible. There is no need for the government to know how much money you have, in order to get their share - provided the banks deduct that share and transfer it to the government directly. So the swiss banks would need to add information to the account which states where the account holder is liable to pay tax, and which percentage of the interest that is. They would directly transfer that money where it belongs, and the account holder can use the bank's account statement to claim deductions where applicable.
A system like that was already proposed once in Germany ("Quellensteuer") unfortunately the government at the time was too weak to actually implement it. There were attacks from the right ("people will move their money abroad" - so what, they are not paying taxes now) and from the left ("little old ladies will have to pay tax on their savings" - they could claim it back, and if the amount is significant then they _can_ pay tax).
Er, how about this: people who run websites need to be competent at it.
If you run a bank you need to put measures in place to protect against armed robberies. If you run a paysite you need to put measures into place to protect payment details. If you run a school you need to put measures in place to protect yourself against pranks. That's reasonable. However it's not reasonable to expect the organizer of an AA meeting to protect against armed robberies, and it's not reasonable to expect an organization running a kindergarten to protect against tank attacks.
Intentionally causing physical harm is way over the line, and the perpetrators must be found and brought to justice. It doesn't matter that there is a way to protect against a specific attack - there is no way to shield yourself from any possible attack. Programmers have put in zero effort to make web browsers safe for suffers of epilepsy - they are trying to make it safe for online payments or for playing movies, and they don't even succeed with that. There is no maintained web browser which doesn't have a long history of exploits - if it's a good browser the exploits are fixed quickly, that's all. There is no way to build an attack-proof system from components like that.
There is a good reason why there are plenty of spam bots, and no history of intentional physical harm to web users - there is no gray area there, no freedom of speech conflicts - people who do that need to go to jail.
Going out on a limp there - but maybe they thought: "Ok, we are developing all kinds of cool technology here - some of it is for military use only, some of it may be for dual use though. This technology has been developed with the tax money of the US - the benefits therefore should belong to the citizens of the US. So let's file patent applications for some of the interesting stuff. Obviously now it's all top-secret, but for some of the things there may be commercial uses in a few years time. If we just file but don't patent we don't have to publish just yet, and we don't relinquish the rights of the US citizens either."
Or maybe they thought "Let's file a patent on this, then the axis can't use it." I don't know.
The scientist quoted in the article, Philip Morrison, was still alive. So Wellerstein called him up. "He told me yes there was a patent, and he had to sign over his rights to it," Wellerstein says. "He was supposed to be paid a dollar, and they never paid him." Morrison died a few weeks after that call.
Remember he had a dispute with them over a single dollar...
PDF import is nice, but are there any Linux tools which can edit framemaker mif documents? FrameMaker still seems to have a large following in the technical documentation field, but there doesn't appear to be any support to edit those documents in Linux. Is that for legal reasons maybe? Or is there just not enough mainstream interest?
One of the reasons I am wary of this whole Tibet issue is that China happens to be the West's main economic rival, and now it is convenient for Western governments to support the Dalai Lama's cause.
I don't actually think it would be convenient, but regardless - it clearly isn't happening. Where in the West is the support for Tibet? The thing is - China may be an economic rival, but it's also a market. Every western country would like to have access to this market. If you critizise China, but another western country doesn't - well then China will give preferential treatment to that country and not to yours. That's why our governments let the Chinese get away with everything.
Since the Chinese population, for cultural and historical reasons, seems okay with what's going on, is blocking the Internet even necessary?
I think the Chinese government is worried about people seeing the reality of it. It's one thing to approve of military action on an abstract level - it's another to see people actually killed and maimed - to see parents lose their children or children becoming orphans.
It only qualifies as vaporware if someone says "I have it" but can not actually deliver it. Just because something is technologically or politically far away doesn't mean it's vaporware. In medieval times someone could have made a list like this:
1) machines allowing humans to fly
2) power transferred over copper wires
3) instantaneous voice communication to other continents
4) machines which can add, subtract and multiply
5) settling new continents
6) peace in Europe
The engineer's motto is "if it works, don't fix it,"
Is it, really? I've never actually seen a good engineer who lives by that. In my experience engineers like to play with things until they break, and most of the good ones became good because they needed to fix things which they had broken.:-)
Personally I'm glad I'm not entirely surrounded by people who are afraid to touch things because they might break. In order to improve you need to try new ideas and tools.
The residents of Sderot have every right to expect their government to protect them
Sure they have the right to that expectation. However in a representative democracy, you control your government by electing representatives. You chose the people who make the decisions - they decide how to spend the available money, which weapons program is better suited than others, how much money to spend on defence, schools, housing, which policy to conduct towards neighbours etc. The courts can be used if the elected government breaks laws - it's a sensible action to sue in such a case. However if you merely think that the government is wrong in it's setting of priorities, if you think that another set of representatives would do a better job - but the majority of the voters doesn't: Well, in this case you should convince other voters of your position, campaign for your ideas and vote. Otherwise you are replacing democracy with a rule by the courts.
Well on the EeePC I can run Linux-Applications in the same way I can on a conventional machine. It doesn't need to be adapted for a different input method or anything like that. For example I can take an application like hanzim (a tool for learning chinese characters with a tcl/tk GUI) and just use it, I can use the same office suite as I use on my main PC etc. Depends what you want to do, I guess - I wouldn't pay $300 for a smartphone, but I really like the EeePC.
I have been hearing people saying how the Eee PC will bring Linux to the personal user, How it is really popular... But I havent seen any evidence of this is Real Life.
I'm not sure I understand your argument there. Are you comparing sales figures from e.g. Amazon and other companies (see e.g.: http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/07/12/29/1959244.shtml ) with anecdotal evidence observed amongst your acquaintances?
Re:That kind of attitude is the problem
on
Hacking a Pacemaker
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Why _does_ a pacemaker need a WiFi interface anyway?
Well it's not a pacemaker, it's a combination pacemaker/defibrilator. The second part is the reason why it can "deliver potentially fatal jolts" - that's just the range a defibrilator operates in. A connection via the internet allows a doctor to be notified of problems while the patient is at home, and the doctor could even take corrective actions right away. That's presumably why one of the doctors involved in this investigation said "If I needed a defibrillator, I'd ask for one with wireless technology." This is great research though - while it may not be possible to prevent any attack, it's quite possible to put safeguards in place and these guys are pushing the FDA and the industry to make that happen.
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Are you certain she didn't alert the rescue services and ask them to search for her husband? If I've locked myself out of my house at 2am, and call a locksmith saying "please help me", I'd have a hard time in court if I didn't want to pay his bill.
One interesting point for me would be that in the case of the locksmith you should have an expectation of getting a bill, whereas if you call the fire brigade maybe your assumption might be that the help is free.
I think it's quite reasonable to assume that a person missing in a plane crash wanted to be found, and therefore you can treat the situation like he asked for help. Would be similar to the situation of finding someone passed-out on the sidewalk - it's reasonable to assume that they'd want to be taken to a medical professional, even though they are not able to give their consent.
If I go visit Nevada and explore the state in the hope of stumbling across the wreckage, can I bill the widow for the cost of my vacation?
Hmm - interesting, but unlike you the state services were either asked to perform the search, or had a reasonable expectation that the person involved would want them to search. However if you'd rescue someone this way, the rescued would probably feel some obligation to you, likely offering you a reward of some kind. If it was me, I'd certainly want to you to have something for your efforts.
So if they are going to charge me directly for the use of state services, why am i still paying taxes?
Presumably you are still using other state services on a daily basis - like public roads, a standing army, police force, fire fighters etc. Just because you pay your share for these services to the community, doesn't mean that the community is obligated to provide lots of other services for free, too. It's the same as with medical services - the state could provide it (as it does in many countries) or it could leave it to private companies. If you'd want the state to handle medical insurance too, you'd have to pay more taxes to the state and less money to the insurance company. Doesn't mean the state could suddenly provide medical services for free. Were you want to draw the line depends partly on you - that's why you've been given the right to vote.
Insurance is not always a good idea. Insurance companies need to make money and need to pay overhead (e.g. administration, advertising etc) in addition to paying out money if the insured claim benefits. So at best (assuming no profits and overhead) an insurance company would equally distribute the costs amongst the insured - which means that on average you'd pay as much as you receive. However the overhead is never zero, so in reality on average you necessarily receive less than you pay. Insurance may provide peace of mind though, and that's a benefit, too.
My personal take is, that insurance makes sense if you can't take a single hit of the risk you want to insure. So in your case it probably makes good sense to have rescue insurance. In the case of Bill Fossett I'd take the same approach he did, and not get insurance - he had enough money to pay for the resue.
In all these cases the bill should go to the party who wanted to find something or someone. Of course, this principle could become problematic in cases where the future widow is not all that interested in the search being successful...
I guess you'd probably agree that employers are not entitled to install cameras in employees restrooms, just as I think we are in agreement that an employer must have the right to monitor the quality of an employees work. The question is where to draw the line. One important aspect is economical necessity - if it's not possible to run a business under the restriction put in place, then those restrictions don't make sense. So that's my view of it: no intrusion beyond what's absolutely necessary. As for snooping on employees: many rich countries don't allow that, so clearly it doesn't fall into that category.
It's a rather absurd approach to management, anyway. If you waste all your time reading employees' emails, you'll lack that time for the work which counts. If you want to run a successful company make sure you have good employees and keep them motivated. Measure the quality of their work, not how they get there. That's not just my opinion, pretty much any management handbook will tell you the same.
Well the "people" that own the company should have the right to monitor, audit, evaluate, etc. their employees.
What rights company owners have and not have depends on the laws of the country they operate in. In a democratic society its for us to decide which those rights are. In some cases company owners may like it, in others they won't. If we decide that they can't snoop on people: to fucking bad, that's what the law is in that case.
Let's get real, you are at WORK. What is so hard to understand that you are being paid to do something for somebody else and that they dictate the terms?
Let's get real: I live in a society of LAWS. What is so hard to understand that these laws set limits on what my employer can do (among many other things) and that in a democracy the people can influence what these are?
If you want employers to have some particular rights - fine: argue your point and campaign for it by showing that society as a whole benefits. Alternatively you can just keep saying "they should have this right", but that's not very interesting, and I think they shouldn't.
If a person isn't comfortable being watched by the people that are paying him to do the job, he is always free to quit and not be paid for it.
If a company doesn't like to observe a countries privacy laws - well too bad then, they have to do it anyway. Companies don't have rights, people do.
Ok lets see: you started the Iraq war in 2003, it cost ~$845 billion so far, the occupation costs continue at $195 million per day. There is no way you can use terms like "things are mostly going rather well over there" in this context. Apart from that ~100000 dead are accurately described as a bloodbath.
The UN exists as an organization of it's members - it doesn't raise it's own taxes, it doesn't have it's own military force. Where it succeeds it's because it's members (working together) have succeeded, if it fails it's the responsibility of it's members, too.
As for numbers, anybody making an argument needs to take care of backing it up, just as it's your own responsibility to actually state your argument - how on earth could I do that for you? I don't know what you want to say before you do it.
Now the reference you cite states that the sanctions imposed on Iraq (on initiative of the US) have led to high child mortality, and that the UN oil for food program did not solve the problem. The way you phrase it you make it sound like it was actually the fault of the oil for food program, but the article makes it quite clear that this program did improve the situation somewhat, though not nearly enough.
What you leave out though, is any information how the destruction of the Iraqi infrastructure by the US, and the subsequent occupation have improved the situation. Has it? If so by how much? Your calculations seem to assume some fantasy number like a child mortality of 0 - which would be impossible to achieve anywhere in the world. Additionally you do not explain why this presumed improvement would last. Even if the US were currently managing to deliver adequate food, water and medical resources to the children of Iraq - how long do you expect this to work? If you haven't noticed you haven't exactly put a stable government in place, once the US troops leave - not too long after the election I suspect, it will likely collapse. Will the child mortality situation then be improved compared with Hussein's time? That's very unlikely. In Basra we already have an example what happens after the occupation troops withdraw.
I killed exactly ZERO.
What are you doing there then? In any case the blood of these Iraqis is on your hands, because they died of the policy you've supported. Sure it's not your fault alone, but it is yours too.
How did you find them - digging up the ground to make space for the children you killed with cluster bombs? Saddam was an asshole, but what he did to the Iraqis was nowhere near as horrific as your actions.
We know that entire villages were gassed [...] And you call the US action to stop such atrocities a disaster.
If you wait 10 years after the last villages were gassed until you invade you are not actually "stopping" anything. Quite apart from the fact that you were complicit to this gassing in the first place. Saddam did it with direct US support and US supplied material. For the US to claim to be concerned about this now, is as brazen as it can get.
What the UN did in the 90's toward Iraq and Rwanda and what they are doing today in Darfur is criminal.
The UN isn't a political entity, it's a debating forum and with an organization entirely controlled by the security council. What it does reflects the agreement of the security council's members, the US being the most powerful of them.
You speak of facts! Look up how [..]
No sorry, if you want me to debate your numbers, you need to have some first.
I signed up. I went there to fight for these people who can not fight for themselves.
No you didn't, you went there and killed those people. You bombed women and children, you destroyed their infrastructure, and you plunged their country into civil war. You are illegally occupying a country which was no threat to you. You are "just following orders" and you are not man enough to admit to yourself what you are actually doing.
Go to Iraq yourself.
If you had the guts, you would admit to yourself what you've participated in, and refuse to server anymore. It's just way easier to follow orders.
Find a father who is walking his little girl to school and tell him that what he is doing is the result of a criminal act.
What's the point of this, do you believe girls weren't allowed to go to school under Saddam? You must be confusing the place with Afghanistan.
Go to a polling place and find some old lady with a purple finger and call her a criminal.
Why? She hasn't done anything: you are the criminal, not her.
Tell her she shouldn't have the right to vote.
Ask her if she'd prefer her grandchildren were still alive, or if she prefers her ability to vote for a government which can only stay in power as long as the US occupation troops supports it. A right to vote is only of value in a country governed by law. If you live in civil war, voting is essentially meaningless. The power is not controlled by the vote.
Go tell the husband and father of one of those families found in a mass grave and tell him how you wish that Saddam Hussein was still in power and removing him was cowardly, criminal act.
Did you go and apologize to the families of the ~100,000 Iraqi's *you* killed? Nobody is sorry Hussein is dead, but plunging an entire country into disaster to achieve that is not just unjustified it's criminal. Just as you can't bomb an entire neighbourhood merely because there are some drug dealers are living there - sure you'd kill some bad guys, but you'd also murder lots of innocents.
Pathetic - take some personal responsibility for the disaster you've created in Iraq. Pretending that you did good there is nothing but moral cowardice - rather than admitting to yourself that you've been supporting a criminal act and start working to remedy the situation, you go with the easy option and just deny the facts.
A system like that was already proposed once in Germany ("Quellensteuer") unfortunately the government at the time was too weak to actually implement it. There were attacks from the right ("people will move their money abroad" - so what, they are not paying taxes now) and from the left ("little old ladies will have to pay tax on their savings" - they could claim it back, and if the amount is significant then they _can_ pay tax).
If you run a bank you need to put measures in place to protect against armed robberies. If you run a paysite you need to put measures into place to protect payment details. If you run a school you need to put measures in place to protect yourself against pranks. That's reasonable. However it's not reasonable to expect the organizer of an AA meeting to protect against armed robberies, and it's not reasonable to expect an organization running a kindergarten to protect against tank attacks.
Intentionally causing physical harm is way over the line, and the perpetrators must be found and brought to justice. It doesn't matter that there is a way to protect against a specific attack - there is no way to shield yourself from any possible attack. Programmers have put in zero effort to make web browsers safe for suffers of epilepsy - they are trying to make it safe for online payments or for playing movies, and they don't even succeed with that. There is no maintained web browser which doesn't have a long history of exploits - if it's a good browser the exploits are fixed quickly, that's all. There is no way to build an attack-proof system from components like that.
There is a good reason why there are plenty of spam bots, and no history of intentional physical harm to web users - there is no gray area there, no freedom of speech conflicts - people who do that need to go to jail.
Or maybe they thought "Let's file a patent on this, then the axis can't use it." I don't know.
Well:
The scientist quoted in the article, Philip Morrison, was still alive. So Wellerstein called him up. "He told me yes there was a patent, and he had to sign over his rights to it," Wellerstein says. "He was supposed to be paid a dollar, and they never paid him." Morrison died a few weeks after that call.
Remember he had a dispute with them over a single dollar...
PDF import is nice, but are there any Linux tools which can edit framemaker mif documents? FrameMaker still seems to have a large following in the technical documentation field, but there doesn't appear to be any support to edit those documents in Linux. Is that for legal reasons maybe? Or is there just not enough mainstream interest?
I don't actually think it would be convenient, but regardless - it clearly isn't happening. Where in the West is the support for Tibet? The thing is - China may be an economic rival, but it's also a market. Every western country would like to have access to this market. If you critizise China, but another western country doesn't - well then China will give preferential treatment to that country and not to yours. That's why our governments let the Chinese get away with everything.
I think it's going to be hard to find an organization that's as openly corrupt as the international olympic committee.
I think the Chinese government is worried about people seeing the reality of it. It's one thing to approve of military action on an abstract level - it's another to see people actually killed and maimed - to see parents lose their children or children becoming orphans.
1) machines allowing humans to fly
2) power transferred over copper wires
3) instantaneous voice communication to other continents
4) machines which can add, subtract and multiply
5) settling new continents
6) peace in Europe
Is it, really? I've never actually seen a good engineer who lives by that. In my experience engineers like to play with things until they break, and most of the good ones became good because they needed to fix things which they had broken. :-)
Personally I'm glad I'm not entirely surrounded by people who are afraid to touch things because they might break. In order to improve you need to try new ideas and tools.
Sure they have the right to that expectation. However in a representative democracy, you control your government by electing representatives. You chose the people who make the decisions - they decide how to spend the available money, which weapons program is better suited than others, how much money to spend on defence, schools, housing, which policy to conduct towards neighbours etc. The courts can be used if the elected government breaks laws - it's a sensible action to sue in such a case. However if you merely think that the government is wrong in it's setting of priorities, if you think that another set of representatives would do a better job - but the majority of the voters doesn't: Well, in this case you should convince other voters of your position, campaign for your ideas and vote. Otherwise you are replacing democracy with a rule by the courts.
Well on the EeePC I can run Linux-Applications in the same way I can on a conventional machine. It doesn't need to be adapted for a different input method or anything like that. For example I can take an application like hanzim (a tool for learning chinese characters with a tcl/tk GUI) and just use it, I can use the same office suite as I use on my main PC etc. Depends what you want to do, I guess - I wouldn't pay $300 for a smartphone, but I really like the EeePC.
I'm not sure I understand your argument there. Are you comparing sales figures from e.g. Amazon and other companies (see e.g.: http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/07/12/29/1959244.shtml ) with anecdotal evidence observed amongst your acquaintances?
Well it's not a pacemaker, it's a combination pacemaker/defibrilator. The second part is the reason why it can "deliver potentially fatal jolts" - that's just the range a defibrilator operates in. A connection via the internet allows a doctor to be notified of problems while the patient is at home, and the doctor could even take corrective actions right away. That's presumably why one of the doctors involved in this investigation said "If I needed a defibrillator, I'd ask for one with wireless technology." This is great research though - while it may not be possible to prevent any attack, it's quite possible to put safeguards in place and these guys are pushing the FDA and the industry to make that happen.