Err, there are, here's a little primer The rules of war
Yes, I was aware of those rules.
But it remains largely academic, as the "rules of war" is determined by who wins (usually at any cost).
If Nazi Germany had won WWII (and some historians think this might have been a possibility if Germany had been able to develope some of its technologies further), do you think there would have been the Nuremburg trials??
So if those 19 Saudis and Egyptians attacked us, why did we not start a war with Egypt or Saudi Arabia?
Good question. I thought about including this topic in my post, but I had already managed to wander pretty far from original topic, and the post had become protracted as it is.
I also knew somebody would bring this up.
Since 9/11 some investigations have revealed that Saudi Arabia had played a role, whether intentional or not. Significant funding of groups (namely alqaeda) hostile to the US within Saudi Arabia occurred with either approval or deference.
I think that it is safe to say that the issue of war with Saudi Arabia would be a lot clearer if we did not get a very significant amount of the oil we use from the middle east.
How about timers in land mines so that they blow up/self destruct after two or three year.......Does anyone know if the US does anything like this?
Sadly, even if the US did create a landmine that would turn inert over time, there are a number of other nations in the military sales business that would not bother to do so.
Certainly cost is a factor. Why buy a mine that goes dead after a period of time when you can buy two mines that don't for the same money?
The idea of self destructing landmines is completely counterintuitive not only to the nature of war, but to the purpose of land mines as well.
Landmines today are engineered to not kill a soldier (I do not know about US made landmines or if this is regulated by treaty as hollow point bullets are), but rather to cause horrific harm to him. In fact, there is one landmine that when it is triggered it launches itself in the air about waist high and then explodes.
This deeply injures a soldier in a sensitive area. The purpose of doing this is to not only take him out of action, but to tie up resources to take care of him. But most importantly, it demoralizes those around him and those that come in contact with him. If it kills the soldier, the landmine is considered a "failure".
Which brings up a larger issue of "war". There are no rules in war, period. War is the distillation of evil from the human spirit, with the purpose to cause (usually hurtful) harm to another human being. It might be a "just war" with a purpose (stop Hitler), or it might be "just a war" with the sole purpose of killing (Rwanda).
Either case, the enterprise of evil is present.
Which is why you find toys that are actually explosives so that kids will find them.
In this context, will a new type of landmine be invented that turns inert?
Yes, it will. But they will be so few in number compared to other countries that don't care, who will produce countless millions that don't turn inert. So, it could be argued that any such effort is doomed to be meaningless.
As an aside, I don't excuse what is happening in Iraq with the prisoners of war. But people forget a couple of things. First, it is a war. By definition this kind of thing is going to happen. People would like to think that American soldiers are above this behavior. But the fact is many of those prisoners have American blood on their hands, and many families here in the US will not see their loved ones again because of it.
So, from my perspective, I can see where if you had a buddy killed by a rebel and you manage to catch him, you might want to exact a bit of vigilante justice to show your displeasure.
In fact, when Americans captured such prisoners at the turn of the last century in wars, they were routinely lined up against a wall somewhere and shot. Another thought was never given to it.
I don't fault the Bush administration for going to war with Iraq. I fault the Bush administration trying to fight a "polite" war, to in some way rid the Iraqi people of the evil of Saddam and bring democracy to the Arab world. As some have said, you can win the war, but not necessarily win the piece.
The purpose of war is to inflict pain on, conquer, or kill your enemy. So, the goal of this war, "to help" the Iraqi people, is incongruous with the definition of war itself. Hence, this incongruity has produced instances of abuse in the Iraqi prisoner of war population. It was not the first, nor will it be the last time it happens. I dare say even by other American soldiers at some future date.
I am not saying that it should be accepted or excused. What I am saying is that war is an evil enterprise, no matter how smart your bombs are, or if the landmines are self destructing. And when people are fighting a war, I think it would be safe to assume that whether a landmine will turn inert at some future date or not is the very last thing on their mind. They just want it to explode when somebody steps on it.
when they go out to the woods. That may be one of the reasons they are heading to the woods in the first place!
I think you need to see the forest through the trees, and stop trying to do hikers a favor.
They need to be prepared in the first place before they head into the woods. They need to account for all the risks involved.
Another thought is that it may be statistically impossible to monitor every trail or variation of one, and there is a real question as to whether this would even help anyway. There are many animals (let alone other hikers) that may fool your sensors also.
Also don't forget that the reason many hikers get lost is that they head off the trail, and by time they go missing or realize they are lost they are very far away from a trail.
A much better proposal would be to implement a voluntary scheme where a hiker could carry an emergency locator beacon that could be activated as the need arises, perhaps even remotely.
How do you actually catch the original author of a worm, anyway?
It's amazing that with the patriot act in place, carnivore, and more wiretaps than ever (most placed under the no-judge required clause) that we have yet to see anybody brought to justice since 1999. At least I can't think of anybody.
what is pathetic is the people managing the system.
Unfotunately there is a large segment of the population who does not have somebody to take care of it for them.
Also, many entities simply do not have the money/resources/funding to have a sysadmin on staff to take care of problems like these.
I also do not think this is going to change much either. I suspect a year from now slashdot will still be reporting weekly about the latest worm to hit Microsoft systems.
But to reform the laws would require massive popular support on an issue that few people are even aware of, let alone care about.
The problem is people are too busy trying to survive. Other more important issues like health care, education, the economy will always work to keep this under the radar.
To top it off we have Iraq, Michael Jackson and other Hollywood gossip.
So these issues seem likely to never get the support they need as they will always be crowded out by something else.
Aha! The Christians do it too!" as much as it was an anecdotal reference to "hm, it seems that the RIAA can't even impress the really *good* people.
People often do hold Christians to a higher standard (as the article points out). But the article does offer a more complete view, as it seems there have been discussions about it between a methodist youth pastor and others.
As an aside, the Christian church is quite fragmented as compared to a century ago, with some of the more well known denominations becoming apostate (with other denominations never being "Christian" to begin with). In fact, I would say that quite a few are nothing but a group of secular people socializing on Sunday mornings. Christian in name only.
It's also interesting to note that divorce is the same among Christians as it is non-Christians. You would think that it would not be, but it shows that Christians have the same weaknesses as other people.
I actually ran across some Christian music sharing on IRC and thought to myself huh??? and was somewhat aghast at it.
The economics and ethics of filesharing have been discussed here on slashdot ad nauseum. Personally my view is if you could download a song for around 35 cents and "own" the music (and be allowed to have first sale rights), there would be no problems whatsoever with filesharing. As people would just find it easier to have a decent connection than play around with IRC and Kazaa.
I'm sure that for those 2 million downloads an artist (a Christian one especially) would clamour after such a deal.
The hook is that the middlemen will never go after it. A decade ago I spoke with one Christian musician who was touring with her husband to different churches and selling CDs. She was not a big name by any means, but she had nice music and was a good singer.
I spoke with her a little bit after the show, and she lamented (and was in fact extremely angry) on how she was actually losing money with the way her label was selling her music, and taking all the profits for themselves (not unlike Courtney Love said in Salon.com).
This was before the internet. All the internet did was interrrupt the middleman's profit model of greed. I do not think artists are earning any less, unless the record companies are blaming lost revenue on filesharing and cutting back on the artist's pay (which certainly is not beyond them).
With digital recording equipment becoming plentiful, expect artists to cut out the middleman entirely. Also, there are those artists who really are not going to be overly concerned about how much they make on a song, who will record their own music and release it directly to the consumer. So all this will (have to) lead to extreme downward pressure on the cost of music. Another factor is that there is only 24 hours in a day, and there are numerous interests competing heavily for the average person's attention. I know I watch a lot less TV these days.
The old entertainment industries will not let their monolithic business structure erode in front of there eyes. They are left with no alternative but to sue every music infringer they can find. I suspect that they have warehouses in Bangalore filled with people who do nothing but try to download music from others so that they may prosecute them.
The truth be known, I do not think it is about illegal downloading of music. These people (contrary to what the record insustry wants you to believe) a
Somehow, I don't think this is going to last very long. Anybody who's working on a Pay-Per-Click basis without a way to shut this kind of "unqualified lead" down is going to get wiped out very quickly
They need to IP ban/blackhole India. Not only do they stop the fake clicking, but they bring back all the other jobs that were lost.
2) What is the date that this article appeared in.
As so much as not knowing html goes, most OS have cut and paste that you could use with the URL in the box at the top of most browsers. But without that, name of paper and date would suffice.
I'm not being defensive, just observant to the tone of your parent post.
I do understnd your point, I just wanted to see the article for myself without it being filtered by a third party.
btw, links are easy: <a href="the url goes here inside quotes">some text here for the link</a>
You should have provided a link so that we could determine this for ourselves. Many Christian artists provide free music off their websites (for various reasons).
Trading in these files would not be illegal at all. Your post makes the whole Christian community look guilty of illegal filesharing, which it is not.
So, more details about the original artical, if not a link, then when and where would be appropriate.
on Microsoft if someone started releasing updates to their obsoleted operating systems. It seems that a lot of what MS does is to use newer OS releases (XP, Win2K) to fix problems that they had in earlier releases (an especially egregious example being the requirement to restart Windows any time you touched the fucking TCP stack in Win 3.x, 9x and NT 3.x and 4.0.).
Microsoft is not the only one guilty of this, other software manufacturers are as well. They force you to buy an upgrade if you want the bug fixes. So essentially the consumer is paying for the mistakes the company makes.
I honestly think it's time that people stop letting software manufacturers off the hook and start demanding warranties. What makes software so *special* that consumers put up with this behavior, but car manufacturers see a class action lawsuit over faulty trunk door latches?
Some might worry about what the implications this might have for free software, but that would be missing the point of my entire post. That is _companies earning money off the buggy software they produce_. As long as they are allowed to do this, they will be motivated to produce buggy software. Free software BTW, doesn't charge for any software, so they are not guilty of this practice.
I'm sure that some will want to cloud the issue by stating that upgrades come with new features also. It still is not fair for someone to have to pay for bug fixes.
As an example, the commercial version of PGP is guilty of this.
The fact that this single guy was able to put together a service pact for W98Se and Microsoft with all of its billions and billions (thnx Sagan) of dollars could not, shows you how black their heart is.
But then again, who wouldnt love going into space anyway?
This is what it's all about. There is no other practical reason. It's really just a glorified "E" ticket. Doing it for the "romance of space" is ridiculous in the extreme, considering that it is so expensive and the burden is on the taxpayer.
The mods took a cheap shot by using "overrated" because they know it doesn't show up in metamod. If they really thought your post is bad (rather than simply disagreeing with it) they should have modded differently.
Back in the day we had no fancy shmancy pixels! We had no lens! We had no shutter!
*All* we had was a pinhole. That's all we ever had. We were even darned lucky to have the pin from aunt Emma to make the pinhole with! Life was hard, and we were GRATEFUL.
Why don't you whippersnappers grab a 'toid and make a Pintoid
Return to where your roots are, don't be deceived by megapixel this and megapixel that. It's a myth anyway. If film was good enough for your grandpa, and your parents, it's good enough for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Err, there are, here's a little primer The rules of war
Yes, I was aware of those rules.
But it remains largely academic, as the "rules of war" is determined by who wins (usually at any cost).
If Nazi Germany had won WWII (and some historians think this might have been a possibility if Germany had been able to develope some of its technologies further), do you think there would have been the Nuremburg trials??
So if those 19 Saudis and Egyptians attacked us, why did we not start a war with Egypt or Saudi Arabia?
Good question. I thought about including this topic in my post, but I had already managed to wander pretty far from original topic, and the post had become protracted as it is.
I also knew somebody would bring this up.
Since 9/11 some investigations have revealed that Saudi Arabia had played a role, whether intentional or not. Significant funding of groups (namely alqaeda) hostile to the US within Saudi Arabia occurred with either approval or deference.
I think that it is safe to say that the issue of war with Saudi Arabia would be a lot clearer if we did not get a very significant amount of the oil we use from the middle east.
How about timers in land mines so that they blow up/self destruct after two or three year.......Does anyone know if the US does anything like this?
Sadly, even if the US did create a landmine that would turn inert over time, there are a number of other nations in the military sales business that would not bother to do so.
Certainly cost is a factor. Why buy a mine that goes dead after a period of time when you can buy two mines that don't for the same money?
The idea of self destructing landmines is completely counterintuitive not only to the nature of war, but to the purpose of land mines as well.
Landmines today are engineered to not kill a soldier (I do not know about US made landmines or if this is regulated by treaty as hollow point bullets are), but rather to cause horrific harm to him. In fact, there is one landmine that when it is triggered it launches itself in the air about waist high and then explodes.
This deeply injures a soldier in a sensitive area. The purpose of doing this is to not only take him out of action, but to tie up resources to take care of him. But most importantly, it demoralizes those around him and those that come in contact with him. If it kills the soldier, the landmine is considered a "failure".
Which brings up a larger issue of "war". There are no rules in war, period. War is the distillation of evil from the human spirit, with the purpose to cause (usually hurtful) harm to another human being. It might be a "just war" with a purpose (stop Hitler), or it might be "just a war" with the sole purpose of killing (Rwanda).
Either case, the enterprise of evil is present.
Which is why you find toys that are actually explosives so that kids will find them.
In this context, will a new type of landmine be invented that turns inert?
Yes, it will. But they will be so few in number compared to other countries that don't care, who will produce countless millions that don't turn inert. So, it could be argued that any such effort is doomed to be meaningless.
As an aside, I don't excuse what is happening in Iraq with the prisoners of war. But people forget a couple of things. First, it is a war . By definition this kind of thing is going to happen. People would like to think that American soldiers are above this behavior. But the fact is many of those prisoners have American blood on their hands, and many families here in the US will not see their loved ones again because of it.
So, from my perspective, I can see where if you had a buddy killed by a rebel and you manage to catch him, you might want to exact a bit of vigilante justice to show your displeasure.
In fact, when Americans captured such prisoners at the turn of the last century in wars, they were routinely lined up against a wall somewhere and shot. Another thought was never given to it.
I don't fault the Bush administration for going to war with Iraq. I fault the Bush administration trying to fight a "polite" war, to in some way rid the Iraqi people of the evil of Saddam and bring democracy to the Arab world. As some have said, you can win the war, but not necessarily win the piece.
The purpose of war is to inflict pain on, conquer, or kill your enemy. So, the goal of this war, "to help" the Iraqi people, is incongruous with the definition of war itself. Hence, this incongruity has produced instances of abuse in the Iraqi prisoner of war population. It was not the first, nor will it be the last time it happens. I dare say even by other American soldiers at some future date.
I am not saying that it should be accepted or excused. What I am saying is that war is an evil enterprise, no matter how smart your bombs are, or if the landmines are self destructing. And when people are fighting a war, I think it would be safe to assume that whether a landmine will turn inert at some future date or not is the very last thing on their mind. They just want it to explode when somebody steps on it.
Yes, but the way he said it was much more interesting.
How are they supposed to be making money on this?
Maybe by using hosting in Soviet Russia???
I know, I know, I just couldn't resist.....
Nicholas Petreley uses the tired term "paradigm shift" in his article!
So, it's safe to say that the paradigm shift was embedded in the article??
when they go out to the woods. That may be one of the reasons they are heading to the woods in the first place!
I think you need to see the forest through the trees, and stop trying to do hikers a favor.
They need to be prepared in the first place before they head into the woods. They need to account for all the risks involved.
Another thought is that it may be statistically impossible to monitor every trail or variation of one, and there is a real question as to whether this would even help anyway. There are many animals (let alone other hikers) that may fool your sensors also.
Also don't forget that the reason many hikers get lost is that they head off the trail, and by time they go missing or realize they are lost they are very far away from a trail.
A much better proposal would be to implement a voluntary scheme where a hiker could carry an emergency locator beacon that could be activated as the need arises, perhaps even remotely.
How do you actually catch the original author of a worm, anyway?
It's amazing that with the patriot act in place, carnivore, and more wiretaps than ever (most placed under the no-judge required clause) that we have yet to see anybody brought to justice since 1999. At least I can't think of anybody.
At that time we had no patriot act either.
what is pathetic is the people managing the system.
Unfotunately there is a large segment of the population who does not have somebody to take care of it for them.
Also, many entities simply do not have the money/resources/funding to have a sysadmin on staff to take care of problems like these.
I also do not think this is going to change much either. I suspect a year from now slashdot will still be reporting weekly about the latest worm to hit Microsoft systems.
Like no system except a Microsoft system has ever gone down. The first f---- worm ever written was for Unix, nerds.
I think that there is a difference between going down occasionally and going down every week.
BTW, that is Mr. Nerd to you.
But to reform the laws would require massive popular support on an issue that few people are even aware of, let alone care about.
The problem is people are too busy trying to survive. Other more important issues like health care, education, the economy will always work to keep this under the radar.
To top it off we have Iraq, Michael Jackson and other Hollywood gossip.
So these issues seem likely to never get the support they need as they will always be crowded out by something else.
I have my moments of snotty trollery, but that wasn't one of them
The mods tell me that I do too.
but the html preview converted my post to a working link in the middle of completely unformatted, unreadable text. GAAH!
Use the "Plain Old Text" mode and it will come out ok.
The Roanoke Times (www.roanoke.com), and the article was in the 5/02 paper *I think*.
Actually it was 5/01 here is the link
Aha! The Christians do it too!" as much as it was an anecdotal reference to "hm, it seems that the RIAA can't even impress the really *good* people.
People often do hold Christians to a higher standard (as the article points out). But the article does offer a more complete view, as it seems there have been discussions about it between a methodist youth pastor and others.
As an aside, the Christian church is quite fragmented as compared to a century ago, with some of the more well known denominations becoming apostate (with other denominations never being "Christian" to begin with). In fact, I would say that quite a few are nothing but a group of secular people socializing on Sunday mornings. Christian in name only.
It's also interesting to note that divorce is the same among Christians as it is non-Christians. You would think that it would not be, but it shows that Christians have the same weaknesses as other people.
I actually ran across some Christian music sharing on IRC and thought to myself huh??? and was somewhat aghast at it.
The economics and ethics of filesharing have been discussed here on slashdot ad nauseum. Personally my view is if you could download a song for around 35 cents and "own" the music (and be allowed to have first sale rights), there would be no problems whatsoever with filesharing. As people would just find it easier to have a decent connection than play around with IRC and Kazaa.
I'm sure that for those 2 million downloads an artist (a Christian one especially) would clamour after such a deal.
The hook is that the middlemen will never go after it. A decade ago I spoke with one Christian musician who was touring with her husband to different churches and selling CDs. She was not a big name by any means, but she had nice music and was a good singer.
I spoke with her a little bit after the show, and she lamented (and was in fact extremely angry) on how she was actually losing money with the way her label was selling her music, and taking all the profits for themselves (not unlike Courtney Love said in Salon.com).
This was before the internet. All the internet did was interrrupt the middleman's profit model of greed. I do not think artists are earning any less, unless the record companies are blaming lost revenue on filesharing and cutting back on the artist's pay (which certainly is not beyond them).
With digital recording equipment becoming plentiful, expect artists to cut out the middleman entirely. Also, there are those artists who really are not going to be overly concerned about how much they make on a song, who will record their own music and release it directly to the consumer. So all this will (have to) lead to extreme downward pressure on the cost of music. Another factor is that there is only 24 hours in a day, and there are numerous interests competing heavily for the average person's attention. I know I watch a lot less TV these days.
The old entertainment industries will not let their monolithic business structure erode in front of there eyes. They are left with no alternative but to sue every music infringer they can find. I suspect that they have warehouses in Bangalore filled with people who do nothing but try to download music from others so that they may prosecute them.
The truth be known, I do not think it is about illegal downloading of music. These people (contrary to what the record insustry wants you to believe) a
Thats insane, even by american standards. In India where a average guy gets $300 a month salary, that figure is damn near impossible.
Sounds like you tried pretty hard though.
Somehow, I don't think this is going to last very long. Anybody who's working on a Pay-Per-Click basis without a way to shut this kind of "unqualified lead" down is going to get wiped out very quickly
They need to IP ban/blackhole India. Not only do they stop the fake clicking, but they bring back all the other jobs that were lost.
hey, I should get a patent on this.
I don't want to rummage your trash.
1) What is the name of your paper
2) What is the date that this article appeared in.
As so much as not knowing html goes, most OS have cut and paste that you could use with the URL in the box at the top of most browsers. But without that, name of paper and date would suffice.
I'm not being defensive, just observant to the tone of your parent post.
I do understnd your point, I just wanted to see the article for myself without it being filtered by a third party.
btw, links are easy: <a href="the url goes here inside quotes">some text here for the link</a>
You should have provided a link so that we could determine this for ourselves. Many Christian artists provide free music off their websites (for various reasons).
Trading in these files would not be illegal at all. Your post makes the whole Christian community look guilty of illegal filesharing, which it is not.
So, more details about the original artical, if not a link, then when and where would be appropriate.
Nope, you cannot "plead the 5th" when a private party sues you.
Heh. This is where "Gee, I don't recall" comes in.
If the movie was truly forgettable, I would use it.
If the patent holder loses it's case in court, it's forced to pay the legal fees of the defendant.
Oh yes, they get kicked in the nuts afterwords.
Also, the patent office needs to be held accountable as well. Maybe they could fire the examiner that issued the patent.
I'm not saying that this is the difinitive answer, just some ideas to change things for the better.
Whereas Slashdot uses nothing but solar power
Slashdot runs on hot air.
Except for the mods - they use crack.
on Microsoft if someone started releasing updates to their obsoleted operating systems. It seems that a lot of what MS does is to use newer OS releases (XP, Win2K) to fix problems that they had in earlier releases (an especially egregious example being the requirement to restart Windows any time you touched the fucking TCP stack in Win 3.x, 9x and NT 3.x and 4.0.).
Microsoft is not the only one guilty of this, other software manufacturers are as well. They force you to buy an upgrade if you want the bug fixes. So essentially the consumer is paying for the mistakes the company makes.
I honestly think it's time that people stop letting software manufacturers off the hook and start demanding warranties. What makes software so *special* that consumers put up with this behavior, but car manufacturers see a class action lawsuit over faulty trunk door latches?
Some might worry about what the implications this might have for free software, but that would be missing the point of my entire post. That is _companies earning money off the buggy software they produce_. As long as they are allowed to do this, they will be motivated to produce buggy software. Free software BTW, doesn't charge for any software, so they are not guilty of this practice.
I'm sure that some will want to cloud the issue by stating that upgrades come with new features also. It still is not fair for someone to have to pay for bug fixes.
As an example, the commercial version of PGP is guilty of this.
The fact that this single guy was able to put together a service pact for W98Se and Microsoft with all of its billions and billions (thnx Sagan) of dollars could not, shows you how black their heart is.
But then again, who wouldnt love going into space anyway?
This is what it's all about. There is no other practical reason. It's really just a glorified "E" ticket. Doing it for the "romance of space" is ridiculous in the extreme, considering that it is so expensive and the burden is on the taxpayer.
The mods took a cheap shot by using "overrated" because they know it doesn't show up in metamod. If they really thought your post is bad (rather than simply disagreeing with it) they should have modded differently.
Back in the day we had no fancy shmancy pixels! We had no lens! We had no shutter!
*All* we had was a pinhole. That's all we ever had. We were even darned lucky to have the pin from aunt Emma to make the pinhole with! Life was hard, and we were GRATEFUL.
Why don't you whippersnappers grab a 'toid and make a Pintoid
Return to where your roots are, don't be deceived by megapixel this and megapixel that. It's a myth anyway. If film was good enough for your grandpa, and your parents, it's good enough for you.
Someday you will thank me for this.
see what a 'toid can do here
They could make it Mil-Spec, all they would need to do is add a couple of miniguns.
It's not even very interesting -- just a big crane made to look like a dinosaur.
/kid at heart.
Yes, but kids and juveniles love it. Hence slashdot.
I bet that could go a long way to solving the "fallujah" problem.