Well, I think you've proved my point, haven't you?
Your "point" was, it is a favorite tactics of Israeli government. You failed to prove that they use such tactics at all — much less that it is their "favorite".
And, even if they did, their use would be against legitimate targets, while their (and our) enemies target civilians. You have no leg to stand on and have been exposed as a liar. Have a nice day.
Interestingly, even that rag acknowledges, that the tactics they denounce in IDF, was "invented" by the Arabs. Says the article:
For Israelis it is reminiscent of our own traumas, like the Beit Lid double suicide bombing and other terror attacks that used the same tactic.
But your claim of it being "favorite" tactics of Israeli government omitted that important bit. Which makes you a liar (and thus, automatically, an asshole).
Also, you post no evidence to even suggest (much less prove), that this is something, IDF enjoys doing — to justify your claim of it being their "favorite".
And finally, on the legality of it... Killing medical personnel, such as a corpsman trying to evacuate a wounded soldier, is not illegal — not at all. It is perfectly legitimate. Snipers, for example, are trained to shoot their targets in the hip or pelvis, if they can — so that the victim remains conscious, but in pain so severe, his screams compel his comrades to try to get him out. This allows the sniper to shoot more enemies... Shocking — to a civilian like myself — but legal.
So, if your original target was legitimate — and even your link makes no claims to the contrary — shooting people first on the scene is usually Ok too. Not that your link proves IDF actually doing it — an article on some unknown blog, which cites anonymous "experts" is hardly credible...
Yes, but the fact is that quite a few of those people who were killed were completely innocent and had nothing to do with any terrorism.
What does this have to do with drones? Would their deaths have been any more justified, if they were killed by a SEAL from short range, rather than a drone from afar?
Mistakes in targeting are orthogonal to the weapon aimed at the target.
Unfortunately because there was no on-site FAC because [...]
Because whatever. War is war and shit really does happen. The primary responsibility of Forward Air Controller (FAC) is, actually, assuring friendlies aren't accidentally hit from the air. The reporters are there at their own risk. No one wanted to kill journalists, but it happens.
It is not specific to air-borne assaults — when our tanks entered Baghdad, two reporters were killed by a tank shell. No FAC involved — a camera does look like a grenade-launcher. Do not carry one on somebody else's battlefield.
tell the difference between an AK-47 and a TV camera
I'd say, the camera — a shoulder-held one — looks just like a grenade-launcher from even 50 meters. Heck, a weapon can be, and has been — both in fiction and real life — hidden inside a camera so well, you can't tell while holding the device in your hands. Our enemies do not hesitate to masquerade as reporters and use ambulances for military purposes — no amount of camera-resolution can help against that.
That screwup was then made worse by the Pentagon's default reaction to such screws which is to cover them up.
Would their non-covering it up have helped resurrect the victims? No. So, then, exactly how did the cover-up make it worse? Bad publicity? Great — should we, perhaps, blame the leaker, who made the video-recording public for that publicity?
Either way, the very fact, that we are ashamed of it having happened, that we tried to cover it up — all of that makes our society better than our enemies'. The enemies, who deliberately go after civilians and publicize their deaths as part of "glorious" struggle.
Which was why I said "Yes and no" at the start of my reply.
You failed to prove the "no" part, however.
Reducing costs? That depends on what costs you're tallying. Do you have any idea what a fully-staffed drone program costs? It ain't cheap.
Without actual numbers, this argument is meaningless. Yes, a drone is not cheap, but it is reusable and cheaper than losing one or two men — or an entire helicopter full of them — to a dangerous mission.
but stop believing that now everything is a surgical pinpoint strike with no collateral damage
I never held nor expressed any such belief.
We mistakenly kill a *lot* of people
We surely do. And in a number of cases, we should've gone and detained these suspects, instead of just shooting them — Bush's use of Guantanamo was much better, than Obama's use of drones.
But when the only thing to do is to kill a particular asshole, drones are a wonder-weapon...
It's awful what hate and fanaticism drive people to do.
Behind the dumb homicide bombers — full of hate and fanaticism — are the enablers, that provide them with explosives, training, targeting, and other logistics. And behind those are people, who pay for all that.
It is obvious, that France's Le Pen and other European "right" nationalists stand to rise enormously in the wake of this tragedy. It is also a fact, that Vladimir Putin finances these guys. Would he not be happy to see his allies gain ground — while the electorate's attention shifts away from his crimes?
In this case, the answer to the famous question: Cui bono? (who profits?), has an obvious answer.
shows Americans deliberately attacking and killing civilian first responders
Only when it is not obvious, they are "first responders" — and civilian ones at that, because shooting the corpsmen attempting to evacuate a wounded comrade is not at all illegal...
The video's description says:
Wikileaks has obtained and decrypted this previously unreleased video footage from a US Apache helicopter in 2007. It shows Reuters journalist Namir Noor-Eldeen, driver Saeed Chmagh, and several others as the Apache shoots and kills them in a public square in Eastern Baghdad. They are apparently assumed to be insurgents. After the initial shooting, an unarmed group of adults and children in a minivan arrives on the scene and attempts to transport the wounded. They are fired upon as well. The official statement on this incident initially listed all adults as insurgents and claimed the US military did not know how the deaths ocurred. Wikileaks released this video with transcripts and a package of supporting documents on April 5th 2010 on http://collateralmurder.com/
How was an Apache pilot supposed to discern the motives and the allegiances of the newly-arrived group of people?
But, for all your hatred of America and our military, you illustrate the OP's point — if the incident really was a war-crime rather than an unfortunate mistake, it would be a cause for real outrage among the Westerners. This undoubtedly deliberate killings of concert-goers, on contrast, elicit nothing but insincere "official" condemnations from their society.
While the sound can't be heard by the human ear, nearby tablets and smartphones can detect it.
First of all, other than ethics, this is awesome technology... Truly, ad- and porn-sellers are at the forefront of it all.
But is this really true? I mean, speakers and microphones are both designed to produce/recognized sound useful to humans (except some exotic devices meant for dolphins, I suppose). Making them do a reasonably good job on the entire human-audible spectrum is a non-trivial task already and different devices do better/worse on different parts of the spectrum.
Why would a designer of a mobile phone bother with the frequencies, which a human can neither produce nor hear anyway? It certainly increases the costs of both the design and each individual device... Unless, of course, it is to enable exactly the kind of things discussed in TFA...
So, if we really do carry such hardware in our pockets — and neither TFA nor links from it list specific brands/models — then our fingers of blame are to be pointed at the hardware-makers.
Everyone receives $10 worth of public assistance every day
You are conflating everybody's use of "free" public services — like schools, libraries and roads — with actual public assistance. Are you too stupid to distinguish, or do you knowingly lie to confuse matters and drag the discussion away?
You are a horrible person.
Wow! Talk about microaggression — are you in your safe place now? Do you want to talk about your pain and anguish? Counsellors are standing by...
That said, I'm happy, you did not object to the two other easy-sounding rules I proposed. Glad we agree on something...
the people living in the D.C. ghettos have heaps of clout.
Well, most of those folks would be disenfranchised by the other part of my proposal: receiving public assistance in excess of $10 within three months before the poll.
That said, I'm glad, you have no other objections.
the few I have were uniformly egotistical, paranoid, irrational, and rather low on the intellect scales
Exactly the types, in other words, attracted by the tedious stability of working for the government (except the military).
The uniformed kind are even worse, for those jobs provide an occasional right to order other people around — which is especially attractive to assholes, whose most glorious days peaked in highschool.
I haven't heard of any cases where a piece of software has been banned from use in a country because of that country's political policies
Huh? A tonn of software — mostly having to do with encryption — can not (or at some point could not) be exported to places like Iran, for example. You "haven't heard" of it?!
The publication is under an undue burden if it has to comply with a license restricting it from doing certain business in countries it otherwise does business with
Not at all. The publication does not need to comply with the software's license, because it does not need to conduct the research. It is already completed research, which was published 11 years ago! People wishing to verify the study's results — reproducibility being a key of scientific method — can do so in another country.
For example, there is a whole list of medical studies currently considered unethical or even illegal. They can not be recreated for this reason, but their but we can still read the results — as well as cite and discuss them.
almost certainly taken on legal grounds
Nope, by all appearances — including the "fuck this Nazi" reaction of many Slashdotters right here — it was political at least in part.
Hence my question of whether this "software availability" policy has ever been applied before by the same publication.
H1-Bs and green card holders are still guests, not Citizens.
And yet, by your own logic, simply because they can not vote, they don't have to pay taxes nor obey other laws.
On this new topic you raised:
Residents of D.C. do deserve to vote and it's well past time to fix that.
No, they don't "deserve" to vote in the slightest — their physical proximity to the seat of government already gives them undue advantage over the political process.
Look at what happens every once in a while in countries, where capitals are regular cities, rather than ones created for the purpose of hosting the government (like in the US or Australia):
The physical proximity to the government allows residents of the capital to stage protests and demonstrations — if not outright coups/revolutions and assassinations — at far lower costs, than what residents of remote regions of the same country would have to bear. Disenfranchising capital-critters was a very wise decision by the Founding Fathers. No new arguments for "fixing it" have appeared since the founding of the Republic.
It was a nice try to obfuscate the claim by "only asking questions" but it didn't work.
But it did work!
You made the claim it is up to you to prove the claim.
No, I did not make a claim of it having never happened. I merely expressed doubt, that it ever has. I don't have a big enough horse in this race to be troubled with my own investigations.
See the difference?
I see a distinction, but not a difference. Because the policy invoked is based, supposedly, on the software availability. Whether the software is unavailable because a person owns a Che Guevara T-shirt or because he lives in a country, that's too welcoming to immigrants, is of no account...
But let's add in "No taxation without representation" so those who may not vote pay no taxes (including property and sales).
That principle is not absolute. For example, even legal immigrants — such as H1B or Green Card holders — can not vote, yet are expected to pay all sorts of taxes.
Or, to be completely fair since we claim to support democracy, if you can't vote, the law doesn't apply to you.
So, without any changes to rules of franchise, you are going to officially allow the disenfranchised — such as all non-citizens, minors, convicted felons and residents of Washington, D.C. — to commit any crime?
Obviously, it can still be a democracy, even if not everyone is allowed to vote. Ancient Athens — the first known democracy in human history — only allowed free-born men to vote, for example...
You can bet they would have taken the same action if, say, he'd banned usage of the software in countries that host concentration camps, or that have not signed onto the Kyoto protocol.
Ok, can you cite a single example of this same policy applied before by this same publication? And if you find more than one such example at all, let's try to filter anything, which Che Guevara or Bernie Sanders would find disagreeable...
This is attempting to incite a backlash against immigrants.
Does it?
Why isn't it being punished for the hate speech it is?
Because, if your interpretation of the "hate speech" laws were taken, then any speech, that offends anybody, can be classified as "hateful" and thus illegal.
It is for this reason, I might add, America's Founding Fathers have been aghast at the idea of criminalizing any speech. For example::
I request all who are angry
with me on the Account of printing things they don’t like,
calmly to consider these following Particulars
That the Opinions of Men are almost as various as their Faces, an Observation general enough to
become a common Proverb:
So many Men, so many Minds.
That the Business of Printing has chiefly to do with
Men’s Opinions, most things that are printed tending
to promote some, or oppose others.
That hence arises the peculiar Unhappiness of that
Business, which other Callings are no way liable to,
they who follow Printing being scarce able to do anything in their way of getting a Living which shall
not probably give Offense to some, and perhaps to many
breaches the journal's editorial policy on software availability
I wonder, what — if any — other applications of this policy can be found. Has there ever been another case of this same publication withdrawing an already published article over "software availability"?
I also wonder, if they'd have acted, if the license-changes were aimed not at immigration-supporters, but at, say, "Nazi-sympathizers" or "Global Warming-deniers"?
My own license for a tiny open-source program bans owners of Che Guevara items from using it — would these distinguished editors find that offensive as well?
Not all interests are equal. In particular, Paul's interest in Peter's money should not be allowed to gain government's backing. It is bad enough, when heart-bleeding others try to compel Peter to provide for Paul — to allow Paul himself to add his own vote to the scales is an outrage.
Slashdot Mirror
Please, cite the rule you are accusing him of violating.
Your "point" was, it is a favorite tactics of Israeli government. You failed to prove that they use such tactics at all — much less that it is their "favorite".
And, even if they did, their use would be against legitimate targets, while their (and our) enemies target civilians. You have no leg to stand on and have been exposed as a liar. Have a nice day.
Interestingly, even that rag acknowledges, that the tactics they denounce in IDF, was "invented" by the Arabs. Says the article:
But your claim of it being "favorite" tactics of Israeli government omitted that important bit. Which makes you a liar (and thus, automatically, an asshole).
Also, you post no evidence to even suggest (much less prove), that this is something, IDF enjoys doing — to justify your claim of it being their "favorite".
And finally, on the legality of it... Killing medical personnel, such as a corpsman trying to evacuate a wounded soldier, is not illegal — not at all. It is perfectly legitimate. Snipers, for example, are trained to shoot their targets in the hip or pelvis, if they can — so that the victim remains conscious, but in pain so severe, his screams compel his comrades to try to get him out. This allows the sniper to shoot more enemies... Shocking — to a civilian like myself — but legal.
So, if your original target was legitimate — and even your link makes no claims to the contrary — shooting people first on the scene is usually Ok too. Not that your link proves IDF actually doing it — an article on some unknown blog, which cites anonymous "experts" is hardly credible...
What does this have to do with drones? Would their deaths have been any more justified, if they were killed by a SEAL from short range, rather than a drone from afar?
Mistakes in targeting are orthogonal to the weapon aimed at the target.
Because whatever. War is war and shit really does happen. The primary responsibility of Forward Air Controller (FAC) is, actually, assuring friendlies aren't accidentally hit from the air. The reporters are there at their own risk. No one wanted to kill journalists, but it happens.
It is not specific to air-borne assaults — when our tanks entered Baghdad, two reporters were killed by a tank shell. No FAC involved — a camera does look like a grenade-launcher. Do not carry one on somebody else's battlefield.
I'd say, the camera — a shoulder-held one — looks just like a grenade-launcher from even 50 meters. Heck, a weapon can be, and has been — both in fiction and real life — hidden inside a camera so well, you can't tell while holding the device in your hands. Our enemies do not hesitate to masquerade as reporters and use ambulances for military purposes — no amount of camera-resolution can help against that.
Would their non-covering it up have helped resurrect the victims? No. So, then, exactly how did the cover-up make it worse? Bad publicity? Great — should we, perhaps, blame the leaker, who made the video-recording public for that publicity?
Either way, the very fact, that we are ashamed of it having happened, that we tried to cover it up — all of that makes our society better than our enemies'. The enemies, who deliberately go after civilians and publicize their deaths as part of "glorious" struggle.
You failed to prove the "no" part, however.
Without actual numbers, this argument is meaningless. Yes, a drone is not cheap, but it is reusable and cheaper than losing one or two men — or an entire helicopter full of them — to a dangerous mission.
I never held nor expressed any such belief.
We surely do. And in a number of cases, we should've gone and detained these suspects, instead of just shooting them — Bush's use of Guantanamo was much better, than Obama's use of drones.
But when the only thing to do is to kill a particular asshole, drones are a wonder-weapon...
Behind the dumb homicide bombers — full of hate and fanaticism — are the enablers, that provide them with explosives, training, targeting, and other logistics. And behind those are people, who pay for all that.
It is obvious, that France's Le Pen and other European "right" nationalists stand to rise enormously in the wake of this tragedy. It is also a fact, that Vladimir Putin finances these guys. Would he not be happy to see his allies gain ground — while the electorate's attention shifts away from his crimes?
In this case, the answer to the famous question: Cui bono? (who profits?), has an obvious answer.
Citations?
Only when it is not obvious, they are "first responders" — and civilian ones at that, because shooting the corpsmen attempting to evacuate a wounded comrade is not at all illegal...
The video's description says:
How was an Apache pilot supposed to discern the motives and the allegiances of the newly-arrived group of people?
But, for all your hatred of America and our military, you illustrate the OP's point — if the incident really was a war-crime rather than an unfortunate mistake, it would be a cause for real outrage among the Westerners. This undoubtedly deliberate killings of concert-goers, on contrast, elicit nothing but insincere "official" condemnations from their society.
We really are better than they.
Which was and remains true about processes, that do not involve drones. You aren't contradicting slasher999 at all.
First of all, other than ethics, this is awesome technology... Truly, ad- and porn-sellers are at the forefront of it all.
But is this really true? I mean, speakers and microphones are both designed to produce/recognized sound useful to humans (except some exotic devices meant for dolphins, I suppose). Making them do a reasonably good job on the entire human-audible spectrum is a non-trivial task already and different devices do better/worse on different parts of the spectrum.
Why would a designer of a mobile phone bother with the frequencies, which a human can neither produce nor hear anyway? It certainly increases the costs of both the design and each individual device... Unless, of course, it is to enable exactly the kind of things discussed in TFA...
So, if we really do carry such hardware in our pockets — and neither TFA nor links from it list specific brands/models — then our fingers of blame are to be pointed at the hardware-makers.
You are conflating everybody's use of "free" public services — like schools, libraries and roads — with actual public assistance. Are you too stupid to distinguish, or do you knowingly lie to confuse matters and drag the discussion away?
Wow! Talk about microaggression — are you in your safe place now? Do you want to talk about your pain and anguish? Counsellors are standing by...
That said, I'm happy, you did not object to the two other easy-sounding rules I proposed. Glad we agree on something...
Citations?
Well, most of those folks would be disenfranchised by the other part of my proposal: receiving public assistance in excess of $10 within three months before the poll.
That said, I'm glad, you have no other objections.
Exactly the types, in other words, attracted by the tedious stability of working for the government (except the military).
The uniformed kind are even worse, for those jobs provide an occasional right to order other people around — which is especially attractive to assholes, whose most glorious days peaked in highschool.
Next time somebody wonders, why the silly Americans resent their government so much, recall this conversation...
Huh? A tonn of software — mostly having to do with encryption — can not (or at some point could not) be exported to places like Iran, for example. You "haven't heard" of it?!
Not at all. The publication does not need to comply with the software's license, because it does not need to conduct the research. It is already completed research, which was published 11 years ago! People wishing to verify the study's results — reproducibility being a key of scientific method — can do so in another country.
For example, there is a whole list of medical studies currently considered unethical or even illegal. They can not be recreated for this reason, but their but we can still read the results — as well as cite and discuss them.
Nope, by all appearances — including the "fuck this Nazi" reaction of many Slashdotters right here — it was political at least in part.
Hence my question of whether this "software availability" policy has ever been applied before by the same publication.
And yet, by your own logic, simply because they can not vote, they don't have to pay taxes nor obey other laws.
On this new topic you raised:
No, they don't "deserve" to vote in the slightest — their physical proximity to the seat of government already gives them undue advantage over the political process.
Look at what happens every once in a while in countries, where capitals are regular cities, rather than ones created for the purpose of hosting the government (like in the US or Australia):
The physical proximity to the government allows residents of the capital to stage protests and demonstrations — if not outright coups/revolutions and assassinations — at far lower costs, than what residents of remote regions of the same country would have to bear. Disenfranchising capital-critters was a very wise decision by the Founding Fathers. No new arguments for "fixing it" have appeared since the founding of the Republic.
Because they want to prove me wrong...
One way or the other, the software is "unavailable" and therefore any research made using it can not be published.
libmagic(3) and file(1). Plus, if you need to tune them, magic(5).
But it did work!
No, I did not make a claim of it having never happened. I merely expressed doubt, that it ever has. I don't have a big enough horse in this race to be troubled with my own investigations.
I see a distinction, but not a difference. Because the policy invoked is based, supposedly, on the software availability. Whether the software is unavailable because a person owns a Che Guevara T-shirt or because he lives in a country, that's too welcoming to immigrants, is of no account...
That principle is not absolute. For example, even legal immigrants — such as H1B or Green Card holders — can not vote, yet are expected to pay all sorts of taxes.
So, without any changes to rules of franchise, you are going to officially allow the disenfranchised — such as all non-citizens, minors, convicted felons and residents of Washington, D.C. — to commit any crime?
Obviously, it can still be a democracy, even if not everyone is allowed to vote. Ancient Athens — the first known democracy in human history — only allowed free-born men to vote, for example...
Ok, can you cite a single example of this same policy applied before by this same publication? And if you find more than one such example at all, let's try to filter anything, which Che Guevara or Bernie Sanders would find disagreeable...
Does it?
Because, if your interpretation of the "hate speech" laws were taken, then any speech, that offends anybody, can be classified as "hateful" and thus illegal.
It is for this reason, I might add, America's Founding Fathers have been aghast at the idea of criminalizing any speech. For example::
I wonder, what — if any — other applications of this policy can be found. Has there ever been another case of this same publication withdrawing an already published article over "software availability"?
I also wonder, if they'd have acted, if the license-changes were aimed not at immigration-supporters, but at, say, "Nazi-sympathizers" or "Global Warming-deniers"?
My own license for a tiny open-source program bans owners of Che Guevara items from using it — would these distinguished editors find that offensive as well?
Not all interests are equal. In particular, Paul's interest in Peter's money should not be allowed to gain government's backing. It is bad enough, when heart-bleeding others try to compel Peter to provide for Paul — to allow Paul himself to add his own vote to the scales is an outrage.