He said they had chemical weapons that could be launched with 45 minutes notice (which has since been confirmed by the Iraqi Airforce officer who was the original source). He never suggested that these weapons could "destroy the west".
(1) Uh.. can you even "sell" the copyright of mathematical proofs like this? Mathematics is truly in a scary and sorry state if you have to hand over full copyright of such a work to get it published...
You can't copyright a mathematical proof, but you can copyright an article in which a proof is given. In accademia there is nothing unusual about having to hand over the copyright to your work in order to get it published. In some fields accademics can't even give their work away - they have to pay journals to publish their articles. No big surprise either. If you ever spend any time reading the crap that gets published you will soon wish that you were being paid to read it.
If you're going to crack open the schemes of the corporate overlords, do so anonymously....or visit India to publish your results (or some other jurisdiction with weak IP law).
I disagree. Saudi funded terrorists killed thousands of innocent Americans on 9/11, but political expediency meant the US overthrew the government of a completely different country.
I think I already pointed out that the two situations are quite different. Blowing up some satelites would piss the EU off. Toppling the Saudi regime would not just piss the Saudi Arabians off, it would probably result in the creation of a Theocracy, which wouldn't exactly serve US interests.
Apples and oranges.
Politicians do not have the same high regard for the lives of servicemen that we do, only remembering to strike the right poses when election time comes around (remember Bush's "Bring 'Em On" comments about pro-Saddam counter-insurgents?)
Most US servicemen who sign up for combat units would much rather face any attacks made on US citizens themselves than see those attacks directed at US civillians. That's why most of military personel that I know entirely supported Bush's comment.
Even superpowers do not, by and large, go around pissing off their largest single trading partner and greatest ally of the past 100 years.
Given a choice between pissing off the EU or allowing the EU to aid and abet the killing of US citizens I don't think there could be any doubt that the US would rather piss off the EU.
Still you are quite right in one respect. Neither the US nor the EU would want to find themselves having the sort of discussion that we have just had. No doubt that is why the EU decided to avoid any such conflict by making Galileo jammable.
True, but in the now-common usage shooting down satellites of a third party is an "act of armed aggression" (which is a well defined term, especially within NATO)
I think you have two different terms mixed up.
The term "act of agression" is used in the UN charter. What counts as an act of agression is far from clear, because the charter clearly excludes any action taken in self-defense, and that covers a great variety of actions (it would arguably cover the destruction of guidance satelites being used by another belligerent).
The term "armed attack" is the one used in NATO, but that expressly excludes anything that happens outside of the geogrpahical area covered by the treaty, and arguably excludes anything that happens in space.
Look how carefully even the present hawkish administration has ignored continued Saudi support for terrorism, because they're nominally allies.
The US appears to think that the current regime in Saudi Arabia is about the best they can hope for. Are you suggesting that an attack on EU satelites would result in the EU collapsing and degenerating into an Islamic Theocracy?
The term "act of war" is pretty much obsolete in modern international law, but in any case providing guidance signals for munuitions being used against the US or US forces could just as easily be cited as an act of war by the US (in general anything which aids another belligerent can be called an act of war).
Obviously the diplomatic costs of destroying the Galileo system would be high, but there is *zero* chance of the EU calling it an act of war (if you think the US would find a war with the EU inconvenient, consider how much more inconvenient the EU would find it). On the other hand, it would be a one off cost. The US fights lots of wars, so the benefits of destroying the system would probably extend far beyond one particular war.
If such a system eventually gets built and many years down the road the U.S. decides to invade a country which uses the Galileo system for its weaponry, what's to keep the U.S. from jamming and disabling their systems for a clean sweep?
...he did not do so with vigor or to make a buck...
Wrong again, he was employed as a military engineer by Cesare Borgia for a while.
..but i believe both of them did so because that was their societial obligation at the time...
(1) Leonardo wasn't fighting for his country when he worked as a military engineer and (2) nothing has changed regarding societal obligations. Decent people who value freedom and justice still feel an obligation to do what they can to defend both.
I've seen a few people i went to school with die.
So now you want to publicly take a piss on their memories? They died defending freedom, but as far as you are concerned they were just "bullies" in a "frightingly large military-industrial complex".
You like being a global bully and/or wanna fight? Go join the Army and get killed.
Let's make a deal. I will join the Marines if you emmigrate to North Korea. You can go enjoy the "peace" that you think is so wonderful, and you won't have to free load on the efforts of all those "global bullies" in the US military, or pay taxes to support that "frightingly large military-industrial complex" anymore. Sound fair?
...John Ashcroft was a man so despised by the people who best understood his personality and performance, that his first contribution to U.S. history was losing an election to someone the electorate knew to be deceased.
Ashcroft was leading in that race until his opponent died. All this story shows is that the only Democrat who can get elected these days is a dead one.
Yes, this guy is a troll, and its bad to feed trolls, but he is not *just* a troll, he is also a propagandist and I think it is worthwhile to point out a couple of the more subtle lies in this propaganda piece.
(1) Religious name calling. Some people think that there are moral arguments for using free software. Enderle uses religious terminology to refer to these people: "priest" for the more reasonable; "zealot" for the less reasonable. He uses religious terminology because that allows him to pretend that these people support free software because an entirely irrational "faith", rather than because of some quite rational and well articulated moral argument. If Enderle ever dropped the name calling then he would have to actually address their arguments.
(2) Making sure that the trains run on time. Enderle is trying very hard to make sure that the question of freedom never comes up, so the only position that he acknowledges as reasonable is the position of the "pro" who only cares about whether the software "does the job". In doing so he is using a well worn tactic, familiar to anyone who has read pre-WWII defenses of Fascism and Communism. Like Enderle the defenders of totalitarianism did not want to address the question of freedom (they either claimed that there was no such thing, or that it didn't matter) and instead insisted that the only question was whether a given form of government could "get the job done" or as it used to be put "could keep the trains running on time".
Liberty is important. Like train schedules, the particular job done by any given piece of software is usually fairly trivial. People like Enderle don't want to touch the arguments about freedom because they know that if they lose those arguments then questions about which particular piece of software does a paricular job best will be irrelevant. If free software really does make a difference to how free people are then proprietary software is a bad buy at any price.
Does it matter that the correspondence seems to have been intentionally leaked by someone at Diebold? It just seems ludicrous for Diebold to claim copyright ownership of correspondence, especially correspondence that was made public by someone at Diebold.
Anything writen by their employees will be copyrighted, and will probably belong to the company (there are exceptions, and it depends on their employment contracts to some extent). In this case Diebold might be able to claim some trade secret protection as well (although it is probably a little late for that).
If so, isn't the security of the nation just a little bit more important?
Yes, it is. Even though this memo is almost certainly copyrighted, Indymedia's use of the memo is certainly not infringing. Publication of it is political speech concerning one of the most vitally important parts of the political process. There is no chance at all of that a court would prevent it from being published by the press.
Diebold is also being remarkably clueless if this is actually an attempt to keep this memo under wraps. Attacking the right of the press to publish this sort of document is a good way to ensure that the storry gets picked up by larger media organisations.
If the military are working on anything, it should be the ability to fight without sat-aid.
They are. This , this, and a number of other projects, are effectively satelite substitutes.
And of course, when all American's TV broadcasts suddenly stop, the US will turn into a postapocalyptic cityscape with dazed citizens wandering the streets not knowing what to do without TV...
Maybe Homeland Defense should encourage people to maintain a supply of taped TV shows just in case.
No invasion of Iraq, no reconstruction costs. Thus it is perfectly legitimate to consider the latter as part of the defense budget.
No Mexican-American war, no Federal spending for the states of Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. Are you going to start counting that as military expenditure as well? If you start counting anything at all related to war or the military then sure you get a higher figure, but it will be useless for international comparisons, because you will not be able to get similar standardized figures for any other country (any idea how much the occupation of Tibet costs China, for example?).
If the neocons have their way, 5% of GDP would be only the beginning of the pressure on the treasury. Syria is evidently next on the program; after that would be an endless series of further conquests and reconstructions, and frequent pacifications and repacifications of rebellious populations. The neverending strain on the treasury is what will eventually break the U.S., just as it broke the Soviet Union and the Roman Empire.
Hmmm...well the US was spending 8% of GDP on the military at the end of the cold war, and had often spent more than that when engaged in "hot" wars, like Vietnam and Korea. The USSR spent around 15% of GDP for decades before it collapsed (and that spending level was only one part of cause of the collapse of the Soviet Empire). The Roman empire may well have been worn down by wars all over the place - but it took centuries for that to result in the collapse of the Roman Empire.
If US military spending trippled, and then stayed at that level for a decade, then maybe the US would have a problem.
According to the Annual Defense Report by Donald Rumsfeld, the defense budget, adjusted for inflation, has risen from $310 billion in 1999 to $379 billion in 2003, which is a jump of 22 percent -- hardly "slight".
Over a period of four years, that included a major attack on the US, and two major wars, 22% is a very modest increase. It works out to about 5% growth per year. Over the same period total US government spending grew by around 10% per year.
Furthermore, the report was written before the invasion of Iraq, the costs of which will probably push the defense budget to well over 5% of GDP.
Not according to any estimates that I have seen. I suppose that if you ignore economic growth, and count reconstruction costs in Iraq as defense spending, then you might get to a figure like that, but there is no reason why those costs should count as defense spending when other types of foreign aid do not.
This is likely to exceed everybody but the corrupt and insane kleptocracies of the Middle East.
It is unlikely to exceed any other country that is at war.
Defense spending as a fraction of GDP has gone up slighlty since 2000. It is now around 3.5% of GDP, which is still far below places like Saudi Arabia.
The problem the United States of America had with communism had nothing to do with massacres or democracy (else, the USA should have deposited Hitler in 1935...
Why? The holocaust did not get under way until quite a bit later. It only became obvious after the US had already joined the war. In fact the USSR, pre-WWII, would have been a better example because even in the 1930's Stallin had already managed to murder millions. Of course few people outside of the USSR knew about it because too many of the people who should have told the rest of the world (i.e. journalists who witnessed the events) were communist sympathizers.
...behaved quite differently in Viet-Nam...
I don't follow this either. The North Vietnamese carried out mass murders in the just like every other communist regime. When they did capture cities in the south (like Hue) they did the same thing there. The US intervened in Vietnam in part to check those sorts of mass killings.
...and have had a quite different foreign policy toward South America, for instance...
In South America the US backed regimes that were, in some cases, responsible for killing thousands or perhaps even tens of thousands. That is quite a bit better than the millions who would have been killed by the communists if they had gained control of those countries.
I should also point out that all of the countries where the US got the dictator they wanted are now democracies. Many of the places where they failed to halt the advance of communism are still communist. Chile, for example, is free and prosperous. Cuba is still enslaved, and Castro is still imprisoning and murdering people.
Military expenditures - dollar figure: This entry gives current military expenditures in US dollars; the figure is calculated by multiplying the estimated defense spending in percentage terms by the gross domestic product (GDP) calculated on an exchange rate basis not purchasing power parity (PPP) terms. Dollar figures for military expenditures should be treated with caution because of different price patterns and accounting methods among nations, as well as wide variations in the strength of their currencies.
GDP: This entry gives the gross domestic product (GDP) or value of all final goods and services produced within a nation in a given year. GDP dollar estimates in the Factbook are derived from purchasing power parity (PPP) calculations. See the note on GDP methodology for more information.
Spot the difference? The military expenditure figure is an actual dollar figure. The GDP figure is a PPP value. You can't get the % of GDP figure for military expenditure by just dividing one by the other.
The CIA is not entirely reliable, but they can do arithmetic. If you make use of these sites then you could at least make the effort to find out what the numbers mean.
Slashdot Mirror
He said they had chemical weapons that could be launched with 45 minutes notice (which has since been confirmed by the Iraqi Airforce officer who was the original source). He never suggested that these weapons could "destroy the west".
(1) Uh.. can you even "sell" the copyright of mathematical proofs like this? Mathematics is truly in a scary and sorry state if you have to hand over full copyright of such a work to get it published...
You can't copyright a mathematical proof, but you can copyright an article in which a proof is given. In accademia there is nothing unusual about having to hand over the copyright to your work in order to get it published. In some fields accademics can't even give their work away - they have to pay journals to publish their articles. No big surprise either. If you ever spend any time reading the crap that gets published you will soon wish that you were being paid to read it.
If you're going to crack open the schemes of the corporate overlords, do so anonymously. ...or visit India to publish your results (or some other jurisdiction with weak IP law).
I disagree. Saudi funded terrorists killed thousands of innocent Americans on 9/11, but political expediency meant the US overthrew the government of a completely different country.
I think I already pointed out that the two situations are quite different. Blowing up some satelites would piss the EU off. Toppling the Saudi regime would not just piss the Saudi Arabians off, it would probably result in the creation of a Theocracy, which wouldn't exactly serve US interests.
Apples and oranges.
Politicians do not have the same high regard for the lives of servicemen that we do, only remembering to strike the right poses when election time comes around (remember Bush's "Bring 'Em On" comments about pro-Saddam counter-insurgents?)
Most US servicemen who sign up for combat units would much rather face any attacks made on US citizens themselves than see those attacks directed at US civillians. That's why most of military personel that I know entirely supported Bush's comment.
Even superpowers do not, by and large, go around pissing off their largest single trading partner and greatest ally of the past 100 years.
Given a choice between pissing off the EU or allowing the EU to aid and abet the killing of US citizens I don't think there could be any doubt that the US would rather piss off the EU.
Still you are quite right in one respect. Neither the US nor the EU would want to find themselves having the sort of discussion that we have just had. No doubt that is why the EU decided to avoid any such conflict by making Galileo jammable.
True, but in the now-common usage shooting down satellites of a third party is an "act of armed aggression" (which is a well defined term, especially within NATO)
I think you have two different terms mixed up.
The term "act of agression" is used in the UN charter. What counts as an act of agression is far from clear, because the charter clearly excludes any action taken in self-defense, and that covers a great variety of actions (it would arguably cover the destruction of guidance satelites being used by another belligerent).
The term "armed attack" is the one used in NATO, but that expressly excludes anything that happens outside of the geogrpahical area covered by the treaty, and arguably excludes anything that happens in space.
Look how carefully even the present hawkish administration has ignored continued Saudi support for terrorism, because they're nominally allies.
The US appears to think that the current regime in Saudi Arabia is about the best they can hope for. Are you suggesting that an attack on EU satelites would result in the EU collapsing and degenerating into an Islamic Theocracy?
...because that would be an act of war?
The term "act of war" is pretty much obsolete in modern international law, but in any case providing guidance signals for munuitions being used against the US or US forces could just as easily be cited as an act of war by the US (in general anything which aids another belligerent can be called an act of war).
Obviously the diplomatic costs of destroying the Galileo system would be high, but there is *zero* chance of the EU calling it an act of war (if you think the US would find a war with the EU inconvenient, consider how much more inconvenient the EU would find it). On the other hand, it would be a one off cost. The US fights lots of wars, so the benefits of destroying the system would probably extend far beyond one particular war.
If such a system eventually gets built and many years down the road the U.S. decides to invade a country which uses the Galileo system for its weaponry, what's to keep the U.S. from jamming and disabling their systems for a clean sweep?
What's to keep them from just trashing the whole system? The alternative to jamming is destruction.
Wrong again, he was employed as a military engineer by Cesare Borgia for a while.
(1) Leonardo wasn't fighting for his country when he worked as a military engineer and (2) nothing has changed regarding societal obligations. Decent people who value freedom and justice still feel an obligation to do what they can to defend both.
I've seen a few people i went to school with die.
So now you want to publicly take a piss on their memories? They died defending freedom, but as far as you are concerned they were just "bullies" in a "frightingly large military-industrial complex".
You like being a global bully and/or wanna fight? Go join the Army and get killed.
Let's make a deal. I will join the Marines if you emmigrate to North Korea. You can go enjoy the "peace" that you think is so wonderful, and you won't have to free load on the efforts of all those "global bullies" in the US military, or pay taxes to support that "frightingly large military-industrial complex" anymore. Sound fair?
Well, isnt that nice. He's certainly no Divinci is he?
Hate to burst your bubble, but Leonardo da Vinci also invented war machines.
P.S. You can bite my shinny metal...
...John Ashcroft was a man so despised by the people who best understood his personality and performance, that his first contribution to U.S. history was losing an election to someone the electorate knew to be deceased.
Ashcroft was leading in that race until his opponent died. All this story shows is that the only Democrat who can get elected these days is a dead one.
Why are you posting this on /. instead of contacting RedHat sales? They sell site licenses.
Yes, this guy is a troll, and its bad to feed trolls, but he is not *just* a troll, he is also a propagandist and I think it is worthwhile to point out a couple of the more subtle lies in this propaganda piece.
(1) Religious name calling. Some people think that there are moral arguments for using free software. Enderle uses religious terminology to refer to these people: "priest" for the more reasonable; "zealot" for the less reasonable. He uses religious terminology because that allows him to pretend that these people support free software because an entirely irrational "faith", rather than because of some quite rational and well articulated moral argument. If Enderle ever dropped the name calling then he would have to actually address their arguments.
(2) Making sure that the trains run on time. Enderle is trying very hard to make sure that the question of freedom never comes up, so the only position that he acknowledges as reasonable is the position of the "pro" who only cares about whether the software "does the job". In doing so he is using a well worn tactic, familiar to anyone who has read pre-WWII defenses of Fascism and Communism. Like Enderle the defenders of totalitarianism did not want to address the question of freedom (they either claimed that there was no such thing, or that it didn't matter) and instead insisted that the only question was whether a given form of government could "get the job done" or as it used to be put "could keep the trains running on time".
Liberty is important. Like train schedules, the particular job done by any given piece of software is usually fairly trivial. People like Enderle don't want to touch the arguments about freedom because they know that if they lose those arguments then questions about which particular piece of software does a paricular job best will be irrelevant. If free software really does make a difference to how free people are then proprietary software is a bad buy at any price.
Does it matter that the correspondence seems to have been intentionally leaked by someone at Diebold? It just seems ludicrous for Diebold to claim copyright ownership of correspondence, especially correspondence that was made public by someone at Diebold.
Anything writen by their employees will be copyrighted, and will probably belong to the company (there are exceptions, and it depends on their employment contracts to some extent). In this case Diebold might be able to claim some trade secret protection as well (although it is probably a little late for that).
If so, isn't the security of the nation just a little bit more important?
Yes, it is. Even though this memo is almost certainly copyrighted, Indymedia's use of the memo is certainly not infringing. Publication of it is political speech concerning one of the most vitally important parts of the political process. There is no chance at all of that a court would prevent it from being published by the press.
Diebold is also being remarkably clueless if this is actually an attempt to keep this memo under wraps. Attacking the right of the press to publish this sort of document is a good way to ensure that the storry gets picked up by larger media organisations.
The US government, at least the current one, is not interested in keeping anything peaceful...
The US has had the ability to put weapons in space for 45 years. No weapons yet.
If the military are working on anything, it should be the ability to fight without sat-aid.
They are. This , this, and a number of other projects, are effectively satelite substitutes.
And of course, when all American's TV broadcasts suddenly stop, the US will turn into a postapocalyptic cityscape with dazed citizens wandering the streets not knowing what to do without TV...
Maybe Homeland Defense should encourage people to maintain a supply of taped TV shows just in case.
No invasion of Iraq, no reconstruction costs. Thus it is perfectly legitimate to consider the latter as part of the defense budget.
No Mexican-American war, no Federal spending for the states of Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. Are you going to start counting that as military expenditure as well? If you start counting anything at all related to war or the military then sure you get a higher figure, but it will be useless for international comparisons, because you will not be able to get similar standardized figures for any other country (any idea how much the occupation of Tibet costs China, for example?).
If the neocons have their way, 5% of GDP would be only the beginning of the pressure on the treasury. Syria is evidently next on the program; after that would be an endless series of further conquests and reconstructions, and frequent pacifications and repacifications of rebellious populations. The neverending strain on the treasury is what will eventually break the U.S., just as it broke the Soviet Union and the Roman Empire.
Hmmm...well the US was spending 8% of GDP on the military at the end of the cold war, and had often spent more than that when engaged in "hot" wars, like Vietnam and Korea. The USSR spent around 15% of GDP for decades before it collapsed (and that spending level was only one part of cause of the collapse of the Soviet Empire). The Roman empire may well have been worn down by wars all over the place - but it took centuries for that to result in the collapse of the Roman Empire.
If US military spending trippled, and then stayed at that level for a decade, then maybe the US would have a problem.
According to the Annual Defense Report by Donald Rumsfeld, the defense budget, adjusted for inflation, has risen from $310 billion in 1999 to $379 billion in 2003, which is a jump of 22 percent -- hardly "slight".
Over a period of four years, that included a major attack on the US, and two major wars, 22% is a very modest increase. It works out to about 5% growth per year. Over the same period total US government spending grew by around 10% per year.
Furthermore, the report was written before the invasion of Iraq, the costs of which will probably push the defense budget to well over 5% of GDP.
Not according to any estimates that I have seen. I suppose that if you ignore economic growth, and count reconstruction costs in Iraq as defense spending, then you might get to a figure like that, but there is no reason why those costs should count as defense spending when other types of foreign aid do not.
This is likely to exceed everybody but the corrupt and insane kleptocracies of the Middle East.
It is unlikely to exceed any other country that is at war.
Defense spending as a fraction of GDP has gone up slighlty since 2000. It is now around 3.5% of GDP, which is still far below places like Saudi Arabia.
Why? The holocaust did not get under way until quite a bit later. It only became obvious after the US had already joined the war. In fact the USSR, pre-WWII, would have been a better example because even in the 1930's Stallin had already managed to murder millions. Of course few people outside of the USSR knew about it because too many of the people who should have told the rest of the world (i.e. journalists who witnessed the events) were communist sympathizers.
I don't follow this either. The North Vietnamese carried out mass murders in the just like every other communist regime. When they did capture cities in the south (like Hue) they did the same thing there. The US intervened in Vietnam in part to check those sorts of mass killings.
In South America the US backed regimes that were, in some cases, responsible for killing thousands or perhaps even tens of thousands. That is quite a bit better than the millions who would have been killed by the communists if they had gained control of those countries.
I should also point out that all of the countries where the US got the dictator they wanted are now democracies. Many of the places where they failed to halt the advance of communism are still communist. Chile, for example, is free and prosperous. Cuba is still enslaved, and Castro is still imprisoning and murdering people.
Spot the difference? The military expenditure figure is an actual dollar figure. The GDP figure is a PPP value. You can't get the % of GDP figure for military expenditure by just dividing one by the other.
The CIA is not entirely reliable, but they can do arithmetic. If you make use of these sites then you could at least make the effort to find out what the numbers mean.
In absolute terms yes, the US spends more than any other single country, but not in % of GDP terms.
0 00 /chartIII-3.html
http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/allied_contrib2
http://www.nationmaster.com/country/ch/Military
h ttp://www.faqs.org/docs/factbook/print/ch.html
Get a clue, and go look for a 2002 figure. Try Google, it worked fine for me.