I think that page is mistaken. It seems to imply that Approval Voting requires strategic reversal. In other words, I want the Democrats but I vote Republican to achieve that. This is contrary to what every other source I've seen about Approval Voting says.
In a democracy it matters how many people feel a certain way. Do a majority of the representatives in the party in power feel that they are charged by god to destroy the Palestinians and everyone of their race and religion? Hell, do even a minority feel this way?
An occupying force has no right under international law to commit reprisals against civilians under occupation. These are considered war crimes.
I don't see the UN offering a better solution. If someone shoots at you, you shoot back. If he hides (with the cooperation of the civilians) in the civilian population, some "innocent" people will die with him. Or are you going to tell me that for every suicide bomber who blows up a bus, the Israelis pick a Palestinian bus and blow it up?
They are certainly more tolerant of civilian casualties than other countries, but I feel it's right in line with what any country would feel, were they being attacked by civilian suicide bombers on a continual basis.
Personally I think the settlements are a bad idea. They should make the land unlivable and just use it as a buffer zone. Obviously the Palestinians and Israel's other neighbors can't be trusted, as shown by the military attacks and the support for the terrorists, but you don't need to settle the land to use it as a buffer zone.
Because it would seem a bit stupid for Aragorn to run off and make some chick his queen without any backstory.
Tolkein fans are forgetting that they know the story in the context of the unabridged text and the Silmarillion, plus Tolkein's writings, and so on.
That's why hard-core fans care about the exclusion of Glorfindel who was just a bit-part in the LotR. IMHO it makes sense to use his part to pump up Arwen. We have to assume that she was a brave and useful person, and that Aragorn had seen a lot of that, so showing the audience some of it makes sense. Let them understand why the events in the story are happening.
I think it removes a bit of the Hollywood ending phenomenon where the leading lady always falls for the hero, regardless of circumstances. Here, where a romantic ending was dictated they're trying to make it feel like it fits.
Why introduce another character (Glorfindel) who didn't do anything else useful for the rest of the story?
Why not combine his bit-part with Arwen's bit-part to show her as being someone that Aragorn would consider marrying.
It's wrong in the context of the Silmarillion, and the huge backstory, but it's easier to show in the context of a few movies that aren't ever going to cover all that. If you read the Silmarillion, you will see that Glorfindel features elsewhere, but if you only read LotR he's just a spear carrier.
Anyways, it wasn't presented, imho anyway, as Arwen calling the water, more as her triggering an existing spell. It's not like it suggested that she's a mage like Gandalf.
But the "deapths to which Saruman falls" were the dumbest part of the book. Sure, war could have touched the Hobbits, but why did it have to be Sharky, and why was he so effective at this, taking the war to the hobbits, and yet so pathetically easy to kill at the end?
It was a setup for a moral. As such, it was overdone and weakly told.
Besides, pretty much all that it teaches is that you should kill bad guys instead of letting them go free because they always come back by the end of the movie. And you should always shoot them after they're down because a bad guy always takes ten times the bullets to kill.
It's good that Saddam is gone. His people wanted him gone, the civilized world wanted him gone. Really, the only people who didn't are the anti-USA factions in the area who want anyone who hates the USA. And they're pretty scummy themselves, not much to recommend their point of view.
Sure, the Shrub is an idiot. And he lied. Yeah. We'd all be better off if he choked on a pretzel. I agree. So do many Americans. But, that doesn't mean that Saddam's a good guy, or that his people aren't better off without him.
But, if the rest of the world sits and watches, and hinders, eventually the USA will pull out and Iran or someone will go in. The UN needs to say that however the USA got there, and however Saddam got kicked out, they're going to go in and help the Iraqi people who are suffering. Staying back and making the USA go it alone might let you say "I told you so" when it crumbles but you're only hurting the innocents.
I'm not from the USA, and I don't like Bush, but I can't honestly say that the Afghani and Iraqi people aren't better off without their dictators. And in the case of the Afghani, their delusional religious nutcase dictators who hated women.
We "provoked" (the allies, not blaming the US directly) by stopping their supply of fuel oil. That's like saying that we provoked the Columbine killers by cutting off their supply of ammunition.
Japan didn't have to join Germany and go to war. If they'd stayed out of it, they wouldn't have been a threat and wouldn't have had sanctions put on them.
Besides, arguing that Japan was provoked into brutality is a bit silly. Have you ever heard of The Rape of Nanking? That's pretty much par for the course for Japan's armies. Japan at the time was under a corrupt ruler and geared up for mass destruction and genocide. Their actions in mainland China didn't show that they planned on being benevolent rules.
Rarely does a war provide such a clear cut case of right and wrong. Germany, Italy, and Japan were all what we would call evil empires today. Facist, Non-representative governments. Genocidal towards certain "undesirable" populations. They invaded other countries, and planned to take all of Eurasia and Africa, then perhaps the world.
I'm not from the US, and the Taliban never attacked me, or anyone I'd ever met personally, but I still support their removal.
You know how Europeans really hate it when the USAians talk about how they came to bail you out in WW1 and WW2, despite not being directly attacked? Well it's valid. If they'd followed your current advice you'd be speaking German. (If you're anywhere but North America.) I'd think you should encourage their willingness to kick out bad guys where they see them.
Get more involved. Help them kick out the bad guys and don't let the CIA put in a puppet. If the UN didn't piss around about kicking the Taliban out there'd be better prospects for holding the country together until it could become a democracy. Instead the USA went it alone and now it does depend on them to put in a good system.
The Taliban *needed* to be ousted. It's the revisionist thinking of some people that really bugs me. There were tons of calls for people to do something about them before 9/11. Remember when they destroyed the Buddha statues? Remember when they were stoning women for getting raped? Everyone wanted them out but nobody was willing to do anything. Then along came the US, for the wrong reasons maybe, and kicked them out. And people are now going on about how the Taliban never did anything wrong... Ugh. That's just plain clueless.
And no, I'm not saying you should support Bush. He is an idiot. But occasionally something useful comes from the blundering of idiots. Don't let your government fuck this up just because Bush is involved. Get them to go in there and help hold those countries together until a real government can be formed. Show the world that it's not just the USA that's willing to do the hard things that need to be done. Show them that everyone wants to help them have a better life and that everyone thinks that happens by getting rid of Saddams and Talibans.
Sometimes diplomacy won't work. Like, for instance, when dealing with religious nutcases. Suicide bombers are killing themselves because they believe it'll secure their place in the afterlife. Their cultures are supporting this, praising dead suicide bombers and encouraging the next generation to follow them.
How can you deal with people like that? Bush is a nut, and I'm not trying to suggest that he's ever had a good idea. I'm saying that sometimes there aren't any good ideas.
Those terrorists hate our liberal attitudes. They hate our openness about sex, the fact that women are educated, can vote, don't wear veils, etc. They hate our moral laxness. Pretty much everything that makes the Western world a nice place to live is what the terrorists hate. They've dedicated their lives to wiping us out and there are countries full of them. People who think we're essentially posessed by the devil and must be destroyed. What do you do when people like this are dedicated to killing you? Diplomacy won't work, they want you dead.
Perhaps we should take the "Evil American Imperialist Solution". Take over, allow them their delusions (ie religion) and build McDonalds and Starbucks, and porno stores, and whatever else they hate. Educate their children. Make it mandatory till high-school and make university cheap. Deal with their hate for a few generations, but eventually their children will abandon the stupid old ways and perhaps be useful members of civilisation instead of grunting cavemen in huts, beating their wives and pissing away any chance they had of ever doing anything useful in life.
It's that or build a huge wall around them and pretend they don't exist. Or, wait till they start lobbing nukes out and our options get even more limited.
And I want to put a GeForce card in my old Apple 2, but it's not going to happen.
Sorry, but "real OSes" have ways of taking snapshots of running filesystems and backing those up. In other words with a few seconds(!) of downtime while you stop some services (like a database) you can have a completely consistent backup. If you're willing to do a database dump as a seperate process, you can ignore this. Just issues a sync command and when it returns, create the snapshot and copy that device (or the files on it) onto the backup media. The best(?) way of doing this with Linux is LVM, for other *NIXes I'm not sure.
Unfortunately, Windows isn't a server OS. It just doesn't have the really high-end capabilities. As we've seen here, you can't even image a drive properly, without another OS. So you need to reboot and get a tool to do it, either Ghost, or dd, or whatever.
Well, assuming you're like me and you keep your files (including backups of the Windows machines) on Linux, you can mount the disk image in loopback mode and browse through it.
This is hard with compressed images, but if you either temporarily uncompress them or investigate a compressed filesystem driver.
One party in Israeli politics issues unreasonable statements. Hell, one party in Canadian politics believes they can fly through the power of meditation. Doesn't mean it's government policy.
Those statements for the Arab governments were not only by the ruling party, but they were obviously intended because they were followed shortly by full-blown military invasion.
See the difference?
And as for the number of civilians killed, the Israeli retributions, while not the best way of dealing with anything, at least target terrorists. Those terrorists surround themselves with civilians, and the civilians support this action, so there really isn't a way to avoid it.
The Palestinian suicide bombers on the other hand seek out malls and busses of absolutely no military or strategic value, in order to kill as many civilians as possible.
See the difference?
You're blinded by propoganda, showing evil white people killing the poor little brown people.
It's really not race related. It's pretty much all about countries and people who embrace a religion whose leaders have declared that all Jews must die and that if you kill jews, you will be a martyr and live the good life in 'heaven'. The real case is pretty much religious nutballs versus a people fighting for their life. If the Israelis gave the Palestinians their land (which land, the land captured when the Israelis were attacked, or all of Israel?) they wouldn't be happy, they'd just keep following their religious leaders insistence that they kill Jews. They'd simply have a closer place to do it from.
Yes, I think MS is perfectly capable of saying "By installing this software, etc, etc, etc" when they have no legal ground for enforcing it. Then they threaten the user with insane legal bills unless they comply, despite the actual laws that may apply.
If those are the cases I remember, they hinged more on general copyright and fair use. The shrinkwrap discussion was a red herring and, I think, would not be accepted as a precedent in a case where MS said that you accepted their disclaiming of responsibility for all defects.
"Equally evil"? The Arab governments in the area have publicly and frequently stated their intent to destroy the Jewish race. That means that everyone living in Israel is targetted for death, as (ideally in their eyes) every Jewish person in the world. These countries have a state sponsored religion and you can't hold a position of power without professing belief in that religion.
The Israeli government on the other hand has not engaged in the mass slaughter of their foes, or backed suicide bombers targetting civilian populations. The Israeli government has stated their intention to fight back against agression with whatever means are necessary, but they have not stated any desire (collectively - I assume some are very anti-Palestinian, but not enough to dictate policy) to destroy the Palestinians, or other Arabs. The Israeli government, while historically religious, is as secular as most Western countries. Issues like religious marriage being the only kind to have significance are being dealt with faster than similar issues in the USA.
One set of countries are religious dictatorships, where being of the wrong religion, or sexual persuasion will get you tortured and sometimes killed. The other government is actually a haven for gays and refugees from the other countries.
Israel builds walls because there are snipers and enemy soldiers nearby who would attack civilians if they could. This is why they captured enemy territory (when attacked) and use it as a buffer zone.
The Palestinians (and the Arab states nearby) are continuing the same pathetic game people have played for thousands of years: "We hate them and we'll look as far back in history as necessary to justify it."
I'll side with the secular government that hasn't declared it's intent to destroy a whole race/religion of people.
When the Palestinians actually disarm and stop killing civilians, and when the non-suicide bombers actually distance themselves from this by trying to stop the bombers, or at least not celebrate their efforts and deify them, I might think that they're serious about peace. Until then, they're just another bunch of idiots demonstrating the problems of religion.
Yawn. The Native Americans didn't issue threats like "Destroy the Jewish Race". "Push them back into the sea and kill every last Jew alive". The neighbors of Israel did though.
Israel has a fairly secular government and is tolerant (racially) of Arabs, though it denies access to Palestinians where possible, but only because Palestinians have been coming is as suicide bombers. Contrast this to the governments around them that encourage suicide bombers, will tolerate the murder or a jew (or anyone who looks like one) and have publicly declared (since before the creation of the Israeli state) that they hope for the destruction of the Jews.
They've actually figured out how to degrade civilian service over just part of the planet. They'd probably have a hard time cutting France off, without hitting their allies next-door, but they can cut the middle-east off without affecting the rest of the world. It means that only large countries need to fear to "no GPS" threat. Look out Canada and Russia! (Except that 90% of Canadians are withing 200km of the USA border. Russians though...)
Have you considered using rsync? I haven't used it much, but it's supposed to be made for this. It also has a 'delete file on secondary system when delete on primary system' option that sounds just like what you want.
I agree. The world has changed since copyright law was created, and copyright law has changed, but the changes in the law tend not to reflect the changes in the world.
Copyrights are now over a hundred years for all practical purposes, and might be infinite. (Not only endless extensions, but some lobbying groups are trying to fight the idea that copyrights should ever expire.)
Meanwhile, computers and the internet have brought about a new world where publishing is trivial and where the relevant lifetime of a document is often measured in days.
Further, some basic things that people take for granted as being legal, such as quoting someone, are being labelled as copyright violations and websites are being removed with DMCA takedown letters.
Eventually something needs to change. My view is that copyright should exist mainly to protect potential marketability (of the work itself - not to lock down Diebold's memos which would destroy marketability of their lousy product) and to maintain proper attribution. Copying that mimics the storing of an old magazine, or the photocopying of personal corespondence (and potential inclusion in memoirs) should be expected and allowed. Further, copyrights need to be quite time limited, and potentially this figure should be based on content. A disney movie might be copyrighted longer than a commercial, and software for less time again.
Mostly though, we need to explain to people that there are valid reasons to create derivative work. Disney's _Snow White_ is a derivative work, yet they strongly resist anyone creating derivative works of Mickey Mouse. Culture is, by definition, shared and collaborative. If I'm not free to retell stories of my youth, and to invent new ones, I'm being denied a right that previous generations had. If I can't sing popular songs around a campfire and make up new verses, I'm hampered in my ability to become a musician and contribute my own ideas to the world.
Why should I have to prosecute a truth-in-advertising case personally? Lying in advertising is fraud, a crime. The government should handle these cases.
IRV is better than First-Past-the-Post, like we have now, but it still has some problems. It doesn't cope very well with more than two strong parties and can actually cause your vote to have the opposite effect.
Check out Approval Voting. It's even easier than IRV, requires less recounts, and easier at the polls. (Unlike Condorcet and some of the mathematically sound, but hard to understand methods.)
I too was a supporter of IRV before I realized that it had problems, and that Approval Voting didn't have those bugs. Especially in Canada because we're closer to having more than two parties in our elections than the USA and some other countries.
They claimed that they checked the ownership of the code. They couldn't have. I mean, they saw similar code and thought it was theirs, but even the most basic check would show the origins of it.
But I'm sure you're right. Hopefully someone will kill them. It should happen with the Enron execs too. The courts will never punish them properly so we should just get rid of them. It really sucks when the law allows this kind of nonsense, or at least doesn't attach any real penalties to it.
Console gamers are more numerous, but PC gamers look down on them because console games usually involve following an in-game movie, seperated by frustrating jumping puzzles. Rarely does anything in-depth come out and when it does, usually they resort to save-spots and other crap in order to reduce the size of save-games so they can fit them on flash-ram.
PCs on the other hand have games with tons of content, easily downloadable extras, user mods, complex games where you can save *all* the state, not just which area you're in, etc.
Why the difference? The distribution media (fixed these days with CD/DVD consoles) and a HD to store data on.
Morrowind, an example of the depth of PC RPGs, came out on the XBox, not the PS2 or Nintendo because you can talk to thousands of NPCs and be involved with hundreds of quests at any given time. GTA3 on the other hand merely records which missions you've done, at one bit each, your cash, a small number of cars, and which save spot you're at. It's even made for a console with just a few meg of ram, face away from a car and it probably won't be there when you get back. And suprise, it was developed for a PS2... Even the best of console graphics look like PC games from two or three years ago. Crappy lighting, low-poly, jerky graphics, low-res textures.
Poor console schmucks. Here's a nickel, buy yourselves a real gaming platform, one with a HD.
Slashdot Mirror
I think that page is mistaken. It seems to imply that Approval Voting requires strategic reversal. In other words, I want the Democrats but I vote Republican to achieve that. This is contrary to what every other source I've seen about Approval Voting says.
[in Approval Voting] "Defensive reversal of true preferences is never needed as it often is under plurality and IRV."
In a democracy it matters how many people feel a certain way. Do a majority of the representatives in the party in power feel that they are charged by god to destroy the Palestinians and everyone of their race and religion? Hell, do even a minority feel this way?
An occupying force has no right under international law to commit reprisals against civilians under occupation. These are considered war crimes.
I don't see the UN offering a better solution. If someone shoots at you, you shoot back. If he hides (with the cooperation of the civilians) in the civilian population, some "innocent" people will die with him. Or are you going to tell me that for every suicide bomber who blows up a bus, the Israelis pick a Palestinian bus and blow it up?
They are certainly more tolerant of civilian casualties than other countries, but I feel it's right in line with what any country would feel, were they being attacked by civilian suicide bombers on a continual basis.
Personally I think the settlements are a bad idea. They should make the land unlivable and just use it as a buffer zone. Obviously the Palestinians and Israel's other neighbors can't be trusted, as shown by the military attacks and the support for the terrorists, but you don't need to settle the land to use it as a buffer zone.
That's my point. It's not a racist issue, but people keep comparing it to South Africa which distorts the issue.
Because it would seem a bit stupid for Aragorn to run off and make some chick his queen without any backstory.
Tolkein fans are forgetting that they know the story in the context of the unabridged text and the Silmarillion, plus Tolkein's writings, and so on.
That's why hard-core fans care about the exclusion of Glorfindel who was just a bit-part in the LotR. IMHO it makes sense to use his part to pump up Arwen. We have to assume that she was a brave and useful person, and that Aragorn had seen a lot of that, so showing the audience some of it makes sense. Let them understand why the events in the story are happening.
I think it removes a bit of the Hollywood ending phenomenon where the leading lady always falls for the hero, regardless of circumstances. Here, where a romantic ending was dictated they're trying to make it feel like it fits.
Why introduce another character (Glorfindel) who didn't do anything else useful for the rest of the story?
Why not combine his bit-part with Arwen's bit-part to show her as being someone that Aragorn would consider marrying.
It's wrong in the context of the Silmarillion, and the huge backstory, but it's easier to show in the context of a few movies that aren't ever going to cover all that. If you read the Silmarillion, you will see that Glorfindel features elsewhere, but if you only read LotR he's just a spear carrier.
Anyways, it wasn't presented, imho anyway, as Arwen calling the water, more as her triggering an existing spell. It's not like it suggested that she's a mage like Gandalf.
But the "deapths to which Saruman falls" were the dumbest part of the book. Sure, war could have touched the Hobbits, but why did it have to be Sharky, and why was he so effective at this, taking the war to the hobbits, and yet so pathetically easy to kill at the end?
It was a setup for a moral. As such, it was overdone and weakly told.
Besides, pretty much all that it teaches is that you should kill bad guys instead of letting them go free because they always come back by the end of the movie. And you should always shoot them after they're down because a bad guy always takes ten times the bullets to kill.
It's good that Saddam is gone. His people wanted him gone, the civilized world wanted him gone. Really, the only people who didn't are the anti-USA factions in the area who want anyone who hates the USA. And they're pretty scummy themselves, not much to recommend their point of view.
Sure, the Shrub is an idiot. And he lied. Yeah. We'd all be better off if he choked on a pretzel. I agree. So do many Americans. But, that doesn't mean that Saddam's a good guy, or that his people aren't better off without him.
But, if the rest of the world sits and watches, and hinders, eventually the USA will pull out and Iran or someone will go in. The UN needs to say that however the USA got there, and however Saddam got kicked out, they're going to go in and help the Iraqi people who are suffering. Staying back and making the USA go it alone might let you say "I told you so" when it crumbles but you're only hurting the innocents.
I'm not from the USA, and I don't like Bush, but I can't honestly say that the Afghani and Iraqi people aren't better off without their dictators. And in the case of the Afghani, their delusional religious nutcase dictators who hated women.
We "provoked" (the allies, not blaming the US directly) by stopping their supply of fuel oil. That's like saying that we provoked the Columbine killers by cutting off their supply of ammunition.
Japan didn't have to join Germany and go to war. If they'd stayed out of it, they wouldn't have been a threat and wouldn't have had sanctions put on them.
Besides, arguing that Japan was provoked into brutality is a bit silly. Have you ever heard of The Rape of Nanking? That's pretty much par for the course for Japan's armies. Japan at the time was under a corrupt ruler and geared up for mass destruction and genocide. Their actions in mainland China didn't show that they planned on being benevolent rules.
Rarely does a war provide such a clear cut case of right and wrong. Germany, Italy, and Japan were all what we would call evil empires today. Facist, Non-representative governments. Genocidal towards certain "undesirable" populations. They invaded other countries, and planned to take all of Eurasia and Africa, then perhaps the world.
I'm not from the US, and the Taliban never attacked me, or anyone I'd ever met personally, but I still support their removal.
You know how Europeans really hate it when the USAians talk about how they came to bail you out in WW1 and WW2, despite not being directly attacked? Well it's valid. If they'd followed your current advice you'd be speaking German. (If you're anywhere but North America.) I'd think you should encourage their willingness to kick out bad guys where they see them.
Get more involved. Help them kick out the bad guys and don't let the CIA put in a puppet. If the UN didn't piss around about kicking the Taliban out there'd be better prospects for holding the country together until it could become a democracy. Instead the USA went it alone and now it does depend on them to put in a good system.
The Taliban *needed* to be ousted. It's the revisionist thinking of some people that really bugs me. There were tons of calls for people to do something about them before 9/11. Remember when they destroyed the Buddha statues? Remember when they were stoning women for getting raped? Everyone wanted them out but nobody was willing to do anything. Then along came the US, for the wrong reasons maybe, and kicked them out. And people are now going on about how the Taliban never did anything wrong... Ugh. That's just plain clueless.
And no, I'm not saying you should support Bush. He is an idiot. But occasionally something useful comes from the blundering of idiots. Don't let your government fuck this up just because Bush is involved. Get them to go in there and help hold those countries together until a real government can be formed. Show the world that it's not just the USA that's willing to do the hard things that need to be done. Show them that everyone wants to help them have a better life and that everyone thinks that happens by getting rid of Saddams and Talibans.
Sometimes diplomacy won't work. Like, for instance, when dealing with religious nutcases. Suicide bombers are killing themselves because they believe it'll secure their place in the afterlife. Their cultures are supporting this, praising dead suicide bombers and encouraging the next generation to follow them.
How can you deal with people like that? Bush is a nut, and I'm not trying to suggest that he's ever had a good idea. I'm saying that sometimes there aren't any good ideas.
Those terrorists hate our liberal attitudes. They hate our openness about sex, the fact that women are educated, can vote, don't wear veils, etc. They hate our moral laxness. Pretty much everything that makes the Western world a nice place to live is what the terrorists hate. They've dedicated their lives to wiping us out and there are countries full of them. People who think we're essentially posessed by the devil and must be destroyed. What do you do when people like this are dedicated to killing you? Diplomacy won't work, they want you dead.
Perhaps we should take the "Evil American Imperialist Solution". Take over, allow them their delusions (ie religion) and build McDonalds and Starbucks, and porno stores, and whatever else they hate. Educate their children. Make it mandatory till high-school and make university cheap. Deal with their hate for a few generations, but eventually their children will abandon the stupid old ways and perhaps be useful members of civilisation instead of grunting cavemen in huts, beating their wives and pissing away any chance they had of ever doing anything useful in life.
It's that or build a huge wall around them and pretend they don't exist. Or, wait till they start lobbing nukes out and our options get even more limited.
And I want to put a GeForce card in my old Apple 2, but it's not going to happen.
Sorry, but "real OSes" have ways of taking snapshots of running filesystems and backing those up. In other words with a few seconds(!) of downtime while you stop some services (like a database) you can have a completely consistent backup. If you're willing to do a database dump as a seperate process, you can ignore this. Just issues a sync command and when it returns, create the snapshot and copy that device (or the files on it) onto the backup media. The best(?) way of doing this with Linux is LVM, for other *NIXes I'm not sure.
Unfortunately, Windows isn't a server OS. It just doesn't have the really high-end capabilities. As we've seen here, you can't even image a drive properly, without another OS. So you need to reboot and get a tool to do it, either Ghost, or dd, or whatever.
Well, assuming you're like me and you keep your files (including backups of the Windows machines) on Linux, you can mount the disk image in loopback mode and browse through it.
This is hard with compressed images, but if you either temporarily uncompress them or investigate a compressed filesystem driver.
One party in Israeli politics issues unreasonable statements. Hell, one party in Canadian politics believes they can fly through the power of meditation. Doesn't mean it's government policy.
Those statements for the Arab governments were not only by the ruling party, but they were obviously intended because they were followed shortly by full-blown military invasion.
See the difference?
And as for the number of civilians killed, the Israeli retributions, while not the best way of dealing with anything, at least target terrorists. Those terrorists surround themselves with civilians, and the civilians support this action, so there really isn't a way to avoid it.
The Palestinian suicide bombers on the other hand seek out malls and busses of absolutely no military or strategic value, in order to kill as many civilians as possible.
See the difference?
You're blinded by propoganda, showing evil white people killing the poor little brown people.
It's really not race related. It's pretty much all about countries and people who embrace a religion whose leaders have declared that all Jews must die and that if you kill jews, you will be a martyr and live the good life in 'heaven'. The real case is pretty much religious nutballs versus a people fighting for their life. If the Israelis gave the Palestinians their land (which land, the land captured when the Israelis were attacked, or all of Israel?) they wouldn't be happy, they'd just keep following their religious leaders insistence that they kill Jews. They'd simply have a closer place to do it from.
Yes, I think MS is perfectly capable of saying "By installing this software, etc, etc, etc" when they have no legal ground for enforcing it. Then they threaten the user with insane legal bills unless they comply, despite the actual laws that may apply.
If those are the cases I remember, they hinged more on general copyright and fair use. The shrinkwrap discussion was a red herring and, I think, would not be accepted as a precedent in a case where MS said that you accepted their disclaiming of responsibility for all defects.
Ahh yes, those non-binding licenses.
The day those things become binding contracts, let me know.
"Equally evil"? The Arab governments in the area have publicly and frequently stated their intent to destroy the Jewish race. That means that everyone living in Israel is targetted for death, as (ideally in their eyes) every Jewish person in the world. These countries have a state sponsored religion and you can't hold a position of power without professing belief in that religion.
The Israeli government on the other hand has not engaged in the mass slaughter of their foes, or backed suicide bombers targetting civilian populations. The Israeli government has stated their intention to fight back against agression with whatever means are necessary, but they have not stated any desire (collectively - I assume some are very anti-Palestinian, but not enough to dictate policy) to destroy the Palestinians, or other Arabs. The Israeli government, while historically religious, is as secular as most Western countries. Issues like religious marriage being the only kind to have significance are being dealt with faster than similar issues in the USA.
One set of countries are religious dictatorships, where being of the wrong religion, or sexual persuasion will get you tortured and sometimes killed. The other government is actually a haven for gays and refugees from the other countries.
Israel builds walls because there are snipers and enemy soldiers nearby who would attack civilians if they could. This is why they captured enemy territory (when attacked) and use it as a buffer zone.
The Palestinians (and the Arab states nearby) are continuing the same pathetic game people have played for thousands of years: "We hate them and we'll look as far back in history as necessary to justify it."
I'll side with the secular government that hasn't declared it's intent to destroy a whole race/religion of people.
When the Palestinians actually disarm and stop killing civilians, and when the non-suicide bombers actually distance themselves from this by trying to stop the bombers, or at least not celebrate their efforts and deify them, I might think that they're serious about peace. Until then, they're just another bunch of idiots demonstrating the problems of religion.
Yawn. The Native Americans didn't issue threats like "Destroy the Jewish Race". "Push them back into the sea and kill every last Jew alive". The neighbors of Israel did though.
Israel has a fairly secular government and is tolerant (racially) of Arabs, though it denies access to Palestinians where possible, but only because Palestinians have been coming is as suicide bombers. Contrast this to the governments around them that encourage suicide bombers, will tolerate the murder or a jew (or anyone who looks like one) and have publicly declared (since before the creation of the Israeli state) that they hope for the destruction of the Jews.
Which one deserves support?
They've actually figured out how to degrade civilian service over just part of the planet. They'd probably have a hard time cutting France off, without hitting their allies next-door, but they can cut the middle-east off without affecting the rest of the world. It means that only large countries need to fear to "no GPS" threat. Look out Canada and Russia! (Except that 90% of Canadians are withing 200km of the USA border. Russians though...)
Have you considered using rsync? I haven't used it much, but it's supposed to be made for this. It also has a 'delete file on secondary system when delete on primary system' option that sounds just like what you want.
What makes FreeBSD better? I know it's an option but as far as I can tell it's just another *nix, but with fewer drivers.
I agree. The world has changed since copyright law was created, and copyright law has changed, but the changes in the law tend not to reflect the changes in the world.
Copyrights are now over a hundred years for all practical purposes, and might be infinite. (Not only endless extensions, but some lobbying groups are trying to fight the idea that copyrights should ever expire.)
Meanwhile, computers and the internet have brought about a new world where publishing is trivial and where the relevant lifetime of a document is often measured in days.
Further, some basic things that people take for granted as being legal, such as quoting someone, are being labelled as copyright violations and websites are being removed with DMCA takedown letters.
Eventually something needs to change. My view is that copyright should exist mainly to protect potential marketability (of the work itself - not to lock down Diebold's memos which would destroy marketability of their lousy product) and to maintain proper attribution. Copying that mimics the storing of an old magazine, or the photocopying of personal corespondence (and potential inclusion in memoirs) should be expected and allowed. Further, copyrights need to be quite time limited, and potentially this figure should be based on content. A disney movie might be copyrighted longer than a commercial, and software for less time again.
Mostly though, we need to explain to people that there are valid reasons to create derivative work. Disney's _Snow White_ is a derivative work, yet they strongly resist anyone creating derivative works of Mickey Mouse. Culture is, by definition, shared and collaborative. If I'm not free to retell stories of my youth, and to invent new ones, I'm being denied a right that previous generations had. If I can't sing popular songs around a campfire and make up new verses, I'm hampered in my ability to become a musician and contribute my own ideas to the world.
Why should I have to prosecute a truth-in-advertising case personally? Lying in advertising is fraud, a crime. The government should handle these cases.
Re: Your sig about Instant Runoff Voting...
t p://www.kellogg.nwu.edu/faculty/weber/papers/ap proval.htmp provalvote/c enter.html
IRV is better than First-Past-the-Post, like we have now, but it still has some problems. It doesn't cope very well with more than two strong parties and can actually cause your vote to have the opposite effect.
Check out Approval Voting. It's even easier than IRV, requires less recounts, and easier at the polls. (Unlike Condorcet and some of the mathematically sound, but hard to understand methods.)
http://www.electionmethods.org/approved.htm
ht
http://bcn.boulder.co.us/government/a
I too was a supporter of IRV before I realized that it had problems, and that Approval Voting didn't have those bugs. Especially in Canada because we're closer to having more than two parties in our elections than the USA and some other countries.
They claimed that they checked the ownership of the code. They couldn't have. I mean, they saw similar code and thought it was theirs, but even the most basic check would show the origins of it.
But I'm sure you're right. Hopefully someone will kill them. It should happen with the Enron execs too. The courts will never punish them properly so we should just get rid of them. It really sucks when the law allows this kind of nonsense, or at least doesn't attach any real penalties to it.
Console gamers are more numerous, but PC gamers look down on them because console games usually involve following an in-game movie, seperated by frustrating jumping puzzles. Rarely does anything in-depth come out and when it does, usually they resort to save-spots and other crap in order to reduce the size of save-games so they can fit them on flash-ram.
PCs on the other hand have games with tons of content, easily downloadable extras, user mods, complex games where you can save *all* the state, not just which area you're in, etc.
Why the difference? The distribution media (fixed these days with CD/DVD consoles) and a HD to store data on.
Morrowind, an example of the depth of PC RPGs, came out on the XBox, not the PS2 or Nintendo because you can talk to thousands of NPCs and be involved with hundreds of quests at any given time. GTA3 on the other hand merely records which missions you've done, at one bit each, your cash, a small number of cars, and which save spot you're at. It's even made for a console with just a few meg of ram, face away from a car and it probably won't be there when you get back. And suprise, it was developed for a PS2... Even the best of console graphics look like PC games from two or three years ago. Crappy lighting, low-poly, jerky graphics, low-res textures.
Poor console schmucks. Here's a nickel, buy yourselves a real gaming platform, one with a HD.