The court order seems to only be aimed at collecting aggregate data on user habits (though perhaps specific habits of users will be available as well), but regardless, the information is only going to be used in a civil suit against Sonic Blue.
It seems to me that neither the court, nor the plaintiffs, can use this information against any of the individual users in civil or criminal suits because of the lack of proper search warrants. While this case is still very concerning for the privacy violations, it only really gets interesting when you analyze what the data is used for and who obtains it. I think the court system, if they are not extremely responsible with controlling this data, is going to leave itself wide open to class action civil suits.
I have a procedure that is very similar to what this 'telezapper' device does...
When the phone rings I pick it up and say 'hello' once and if someone doesn't immediately say 'hello' back (or worse, if I hear the clicking of some kind of phone switch) I hang up. Then, when I get into work the next day I punch the DBA who sits down the hallway from me to 'remove my name from the database' (sometimes while saying 'zap'). Studies have shown that my technique is 40% more effective than the 'telezapper'.
I've been the lead techical achitect on a corporate systems integration project (fluctuating between 20 and 80 developers) for almost 2 years now, and though I'm not the version control expert, (we use ClearCase and I've learned to become pretty competent in release management) I've definitely understood the pain that comes when you have merge conflicts. Because we use exlusive locking in our files, the issue only comes up most prominently at bug-fix time when we branch the tree to do production fixes and have to re-merge.
The best solution we have come to is in pure communication. We divide all developer actions into developer-defined ClearCase activites, and for every activity we not only log our changes in CC, but also send out emails to the group mailing list detailing the nature of the activity and the files changed. This definitely has encouraged active communication within our developer group and resulted in far fewer migration/release issues.
If the developers are talking to each other through a structured process, they can resolve issues informally and ensure that code meshes. Currently, are comm. processes are manually, but we are looking at CC triggers to automate the process.
IMHO, what you're describing is a contractor, not a consultant. A consultant's job is to give advice, based on a broad-based experience of what works and what is in the best interests of the company as a whole. It doesn't always work that way and a lot of 'consultants' out there are just in the game to milk companies. It is unfortunate. There are a lot of hacks out there, in both consulting and industry. I say this with a disclaimer that I am a consultant...but I'm not in it for the short term. I've been developling a huge resuable middleware application for an international bank for almost 2 years. The client, while never completely happy, has acknowledged that it is the closest thing to a complete solution to a infinitely complex problem that has ever been delivered to a company in this industry. I am a consultant. I don't give a damn about this company, but I deliver because I want to build something good, sometimes in spite of what the client's short-term interests are. As for the client being right: the business people (users) have little vision and don't know how to extrapolate outside their own narrow needs, and the technical clients are either straight out of college or completely grounded in small-time projects they have done in the past. Perhaps this is the exception to the rule, but I believe that, in this case, consultants can deliver that which internal resources would never be able to deliver (if for no other reason than than the qualified architects from the client work at such a high level that they cannot involve themselves in the details of a specific project). There is a time and place for consultants, but, unfortunately, consulting is pushed onto a client in too many situations where it is not needed. Don't blame all the consultants, however, just blame the sales guys.
Now, to answer the question at hand: A good tech manager falls into one of two categories (this coming from an experience pool of around 15 managers,,,and myself being one occasionally....though I'm not a particularly great manager myself), either they are the best tech person in the room, or they understand tech at a medium level, know how to abstract the relevent political and planning logic and can protect the geeks from PHBes. I've never found the former, but the latter I have experienced and there are few people I respect more.
In general, big consulting firms like KPMG don't tend to generate much business from web-trawling, as they make most of their sales through inside relationships with CxOs at Fortune 100-type companies, so I don't think the added links are going to do them much good. It does, however, make them look pretty backwards.
"One way to solve a production problem is to bring on more people," matter-of-factly states Matsuhana. A core team of 35 to 40 employees had been working on the game since 1999, but during the final months of development the team would balloon to 70 members, most of whom were brought over from other development teams at Konami."
They actually hit a deadline by adding more developers onto a project? I don't know much about game programming, but in business systems development that would be a miracle to say the least. I wonder what is different between game programming and system development?
I've run into this problem in the past as well. My solution was to abandon Bourne shell as a scripting shell and use ksh instead. To be 100% portable, you should use Bourne, but most of your major *NIXes have support for ksh (including linux, Solaris and AIX..not sure about HP-UX) and it has a lot of nice scripting gizmos like associative arrays, printf command, co-processes, pattern matching, etc. Of course, maybe you don't need all of that stuff.
This [salon.com]article is saying that GW is now meeting with his advisors about whether or not there is enough of a chance of this being a terrorist attack that it warrants shutting down US airspace again. At this time, they have made no decision on the matter.
My personal thought on the matter is that the only way we are going to know if this was a terrorist attack is:
A) Somebody claims responisbility (not too likely)
B) Another plane goes down
C) The NTSB comes back (after a couple of weeks) and says it was a bomb
It seems to me that the government is either just going to have to wait and see if it happens again before they make that decision OR, they could shut everything down and start searching engines for bombs, but, in light of the fact that there is no evidence that this is terrorist-related, isn't shutting it all down giving in to terrorism?
Two thoughts on this:
1) Most of the sites are probably more available today than on 9/11 because today is a holiday in the US and many people are not at work. Not being at work means they have reduced Internet access(read: dialup) in most cases, but abundant access to TV. My guess is that most people are at home watching it on the tube today.
2) Sites like BBC (Brits aren't on holiday today) have gone into reduced-bandwidth mode with limited graphics. This is to support the extra load created by the sudden increased in hits.
A) No one is forcing you to upgrade. If you are throwing the bleeding edge onto Prod servers you deserve what you get. That doesn't just apply to Linux, it applies to Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Windoze and everything else. Get a clue.
B) At least Linus isn't terrified of making changes to the existing code base and fixing inherent problems, regardless of his testing base. I just ran into an issue on Solaris where as we had a middleware daemon (TIBCO Rendezvous) which hit upon a rather serious flaw in 32-bit Solaris where it could not resolve more than 256 calls to alias a port/service. At 257 the call to resolve a service alias would just fail. We talked to Sun about it and they said they knew it was an issue an refused to change it (ever) cause it would require them to change a foundation C struct that might break a bunch of apps. I understand Sun's viewpoint, but they have taken the 'safe' approach where they are locked into code limitations of the past. Great, so I get stuck with un-documented bug-crap forever.
C) Linus is the visionary, not the tester. If you don't trust RedHat or others to test the upgrades, and you don't have the desire/bandwidth to do it yourself, then you either shouldn't be running Linux or shouldn't be considering upgrades.
I've been using ext3 for a couple months on a non-prod system and haven't seen a noticible increase or decrease in performance. Some people say it adds to overhead cuz of the write 2x implications, but the FAQs say it's an improvement in performance over ext2 because it maximizes efficiencies in the disk head acesses.
f*ck fsck. Thank Linus it's gone
Of course, 2 days ago I (and a number of Solaris SA's I called in for moral support) blamed ext3 for some really weird problems with me not being able to write/chmod/touch anything in/usr/bin shortly after my new RH7.2 upgrade, even though I had the proper permissions. It turned out not to be some weird ext3 issue, but the fact that the RH7.2 install had secretly used (without my knowledge or permission) two of the dirtiest words in the fs language: chattr and immutable. bah. Having eventually figured out the problem, I now stand firm behind ext3.
However, it is supremely foolish to have an upgrade CD without the original upgradeable system. For example, let's say I buy an XP upgrade to NT, upgrade my machine, then sell my original NT full version on Ebay. A week later my hard drive tosses a platter and now I have to re-install everything. Oh no! I only have the upgrade CD! Arggghhh... Never a good idea
I can't see this as being more dangerous than carrying around butane cigarette lighters, and they let those on planes. Especially since lighters will probably have more fuel in them than the battery rechargers, and are made out of cheap plastic for a dime a pop.
One of my best friends is one Afghani ancestry. She was born in America, but her parents came here from Afghanistan in the late 60's. She is Catholic, as are her parents. According to her, though many Afghanis are of the Islamic faith and support the more extremist angles of Islam, it is not so much by choice as by imposition. Many Afghanis left their country to come to the US and other nations to embrace the choices available in free countries. The Afghanis who are there now have no choice. Be extremist Muslim or die. The fact that they are Muslim should not be confused with the notion that they openly support the ideals of bin Laden or the Taliban. I'm not sure we can say, with absolute confidence, that this is a 'way of life' for these people, given choices. By no means am I saying the Islam is bad or that these people should denounce their religion. I'm just saying that they are people, and given the same opportunites as the rest of us, the majority would choose right over wrong. I've read much of the Koran, and it definitely expresses a difference between right and wrong, much of which is in-sync with Judeo-Christian beliefs. There are plenty of Muslims in the world who are willing to embrace a more temporate view of Islam. We must never judge people by their labels, but by their actions. Give them an opportunity to make the right decisions and actions.
Killing Afghanis is not the answer, just like killing Vietnemese was not the answer. How can you take from a people that have nothing? The answer is not to take, but to give. Give the people of Afghanistan something to live for, give them something to fight for, clear the line between those who are with us or indifferent and those who are against us.
We should move into Afghanistan and build a citadel of protection, of liberty. Pick a place in the geography, one that is large but easily defended. Move our troops in there, protect them, and then do not attack anything. As the Taliban and the terrorists run for the mountains, we begin to build. We build airstrips, and entrenchments and walls and checkpoints. We build a fortress. And then, we build hospitals, and schools and mosques and housing. We fly food in, and medicine and clothing. And then we invite all those who want it, to come and get it. We respect there idealogies, their way of life. We don't impose. We give them what they need to live and we protect them. With some clauses:
- Everyone who comes in is checked for weapons, bombs and other items of war. None will be permitted.
- Once you are 'in' you are 'in'. There is no leaving until a future date when the situation is more 'under control'. Those who want to leave, will be allowed to, but can never come back.
And then, we wait. We wait to see if they will come. If the people who have nothing, will come to get something. And once they come, we welcome them with open arms. After a while, it becomes clear who is with you and who is against you. We build military bases and begin hunting the mountains for those who are against us. Encourage those who have sided with us to help us. We've driven out the government, and now the people will be empowered to govern themselves. We'll help them.
What resort will the terrorists and the Taliban have then? Attack the fortress, which is filled with Muslims wanting only food and shelter and medicine? Kill their fellow Muslims...that will most certainly not gain them support, will not unite the 'nation of Islam'. Give those who do not agree with these extremists a chance to voice it.
This approach is just on variation on a common concept that is the only way to overthrow despotic governments. I'm not saying that it is militarily possible, but the ideal holds true. Empower the people. Protect them. Be their friends. Allow them to fight their own battles.
You can prevent your computer from being infected by disabling the security loophole that allows you to inadvertently execute the worm with Outlook or IE5.
In IE5, go into Tools->InternetOptions->Security->CustomL evel and change the Scripting->Active Scripting to DISABLE. Make sure you do this for each of the 4 Levels (Internet, Intranet, Trusted, Untrusted) to be safe until this thing is under control.
Outlook will inherit your IE settings, but if you want to check and make sure, goto Tools->Options->Security->Zone Settings and check for yourself.
Supposedly this will prevent your IE from executing the website-placed viruses and prevent Outlook from loading the virus when you open the message.
After reading the salon.com articles, this doesn't seem the behavior of a company like Clear Channel. It seems like their whole corporate culture is founded around greed and tastlessness. This is the same company who has tortured and/or killed live animals on a number of their morning talk shows. Companies like this aren't normally into censorship, because it limits their ability to profit. Censorship usually comes from a misguided ethical or moral sense, or an urge to protect/cover up something.
I can't even understand their rationale for putting _any_ songs on the list, much less the specific songs that they did.
I think it's more of a result of the kind of programming that is prevalent on Clear Channel stations. Clear Channel owns 10% of the total national radio market and 60% of rock and roll market. Since most of what they play is rock and roll, the list makes sense from this perspective.
I don't know if CNN re-used footage or not, but the story of Palestinian reactions appears accurate. I say this only because the story seems supported by the Jerusalem Post http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/09/14/News/News.34841.html , who are indicating that actual footage of the rallies are not being allowed to be reported:
Foreign Press Association protests PA threats to journalists
By Jerusalem Post Staff
JERUSALEM (September 14) - The Foreign Press Association expressed deep concern yesterday over life threats made to journalists by the Palestinian Authority, after PA security personnel on Tuesday tried to prevent photo and video coverage of a rally in Nablus where hundreds of Palestinians celebrated the terror attacks in New York and Washington.
The videographer, on assignment for Associated Press Television News, was summoned to a PA security office and told that the material must not be aired. Calls in the name of the Tanzim militia, an armed group associated with Yasser Arafat's Fatah group, warned him he would be held responsible, and made what he interpreted as threats on his life.
Several Palestinian Authority officials spoke to AP in Jerusalem urging that the material not be broadcast. Ahmed Abdel Rahman, Arafat's cabinet secretary, said the Palestinian Authority "cannot guarantee the life" of the cameraman if the footage was broadcast.
The cameraman then requested that the material not be aired. In light of the danger, APTN has not released the footage of the rally in Nablus.
The protest by AP Chief of Bureau Dan Perry said, "I ask the assurances of the Palestinian Authority that you will protect our journalists from threats and attempts at intimidation, and that no harm would come to our freelance cameraman from distribution of the film.
"We strongly condemn the direct threats made against local videographers by local militia members, and the attitude of Palestinian officials who made no effort to counter the threats, control the situation, or to guarantee the safety of the journalists and the freedom of the press," said the FPA.
"We hold the PA fully responsible for the safety of each and every journalist operating within their areas, especially those who were filming and covering Tuesday's events in Nablus."
Asked by telephone about the allegations of harassment, Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo said: "We deny that."
(AP contributed to this report.)
Re:Trent Lott: Retaliation plans
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 1
I feel it is doubtful that Congressman Lott would phrase his hints in this manner if 'tactical nuclear strike' was a viable solution that was being seriously debated. That would be a very damning political move. I have a feeling, if the actions he alluded to are enacted, they will present an unexpected, but potentially ingenious solution to a very tricky problem. One that minmizes civilian casulties and collateral damage, but makes retribution for this act relatively satisfying.
Re:Donate directly to the Red Cross (avoid Amazon)
on
More On Tragedy
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· Score: 2, Informative
Amazon.com as removed their normal fee for transactions in this case. Red Cross' web servers cannot handle the load that Amazon has already borne the brunt of. Their (Amazon.com) actions are noble and respectable. They are reaching out to the American people in this time of need by by donating their substantial infrastructure. We should not call their intentions into question, but be thankful that the resources are there to help us support those who have been afflicted by this horror. Now is not the time for petty grievances about spam and privacy. Now is the time when all of us should ban together and do what we can. Stand by your fellow Americans, whether they be private citizens, government entities or corporations. Now is not the time for dissent.
Just saw on the news that the FBI has traced two of the suspected terrorists to Florida, where they recevied rudimentary flight training. It was said the two men kept to themselves except for last Friday night, where they had an altercation with a bar owner. It seems these Islamic-fundamentalist radicals had run up a huge bar bill and refused to pay. When the manager confronted them with "Look, if you just tell me that there is some problem where you can't pay, just let me know and we can work it out". One of them responded, apparently very insulted, with "I can pay, I'm an airline pilot".
It seems our 'principled' terrorists have no problem with killing thousands of innocent civilians in the name of their faith, but can't seem to avoid alcohol, which, if I'm not mistaken, is forbidden by the Koran. Hypocrite cowards.
Slashdot Mirror
The court order seems to only be aimed at collecting aggregate data on user habits (though perhaps specific habits of users will be available as well), but regardless, the information is only going to be used in a civil suit against Sonic Blue.
It seems to me that neither the court, nor the plaintiffs, can use this information against any of the individual users in civil or criminal suits because of the lack of proper search warrants. While this case is still very concerning for the privacy violations, it only really gets interesting when you analyze what the data is used for and who obtains it. I think the court system, if they are not extremely responsible with controlling this data, is going to leave itself wide open to class action civil suits.
I have a procedure that is very similar to what this 'telezapper' device does...
When the phone rings I pick it up and say 'hello' once and if someone doesn't immediately say 'hello' back (or worse, if I hear the clicking of some kind of phone switch) I hang up. Then, when I get into work the next day I punch the DBA who sits down the hallway from me to 'remove my name from the database' (sometimes while saying 'zap'). Studies have shown that my technique is 40% more effective than the 'telezapper'.
I've been the lead techical achitect on a corporate systems integration project (fluctuating between 20 and 80 developers) for almost 2 years now, and though I'm not the version control expert, (we use ClearCase and I've learned to become pretty competent in release management) I've definitely understood the pain that comes when you have merge conflicts. Because we use exlusive locking in our files, the issue only comes up most prominently at bug-fix time when we branch the tree to do production fixes and have to re-merge.
The best solution we have come to is in pure communication. We divide all developer actions into developer-defined ClearCase activites, and for every activity we not only log our changes in CC, but also send out emails to the group mailing list detailing the nature of the activity and the files changed. This definitely has encouraged active communication within our developer group and resulted in far fewer migration/release issues.
If the developers are talking to each other through a structured process, they can resolve issues informally and ensure that code meshes. Currently, are comm. processes are manually, but we are looking at CC triggers to automate the process.
Wouldn't it just be easier to extend the exisiting HTML standards to include a tag rather than having macromedia try to wedge flash in?
Results are in for Country for Page Views.....
And the winner is....
USA in a remarkable blowout (48%)! Gold for tha Americans!
Canada takes the silver
Netherlands takes the bronze
Interesting profiling of slahdot viewers (or maybe the rest of the world doesn't give a damn about case mods)
IMHO, what you're describing is a contractor, not a consultant. A consultant's job is to give advice, based on a broad-based experience of what works and what is in the best interests of the company as a whole. It doesn't always work that way and a lot of 'consultants' out there are just in the game to milk companies. It is unfortunate. There are a lot of hacks out there, in both consulting and industry. I say this with a disclaimer that I am a consultant...but I'm not in it for the short term. I've been developling a huge resuable middleware application for an international bank for almost 2 years. The client, while never completely happy, has acknowledged that it is the closest thing to a complete solution to a infinitely complex problem that has ever been delivered to a company in this industry. I am a consultant. I don't give a damn about this company, but I deliver because I want to build something good, sometimes in spite of what the client's short-term interests are. As for the client being right: the business people (users) have little vision and don't know how to extrapolate outside their own narrow needs, and the technical clients are either straight out of college or completely grounded in small-time projects they have done in the past. Perhaps this is the exception to the rule, but I believe that, in this case, consultants can deliver that which internal resources would never be able to deliver (if for no other reason than than the qualified architects from the client work at such a high level that they cannot involve themselves in the details of a specific project). There is a time and place for consultants, but, unfortunately, consulting is pushed onto a client in too many situations where it is not needed. Don't blame all the consultants, however, just blame the sales guys.
Now, to answer the question at hand: A good tech manager falls into one of two categories (this coming from an experience pool of around 15 managers,,,and myself being one occasionally....though I'm not a particularly great manager myself), either they are the best tech person in the room, or they understand tech at a medium level, know how to abstract the relevent political and planning logic and can protect the geeks from PHBes. I've never found the former, but the latter I have experienced and there are few people I respect more.
In general, big consulting firms like KPMG don't tend to generate much business from web-trawling, as they make most of their sales through inside relationships with CxOs at Fortune 100-type companies, so I don't think the added links are going to do them much good. It does, however, make them look pretty backwards.
I find this quote from the article interesting:
"One way to solve a production problem is to bring on more people," matter-of-factly states Matsuhana. A core team of 35 to 40 employees had been working on the game since 1999, but during the final months of development the team would balloon to 70 members, most of whom were brought over from other development teams at Konami."
They actually hit a deadline by adding more developers onto a project? I don't know much about game programming, but in business systems development that would be a miracle to say the least. I wonder what is different between game programming and system development?
I've run into this problem in the past as well. My solution was to abandon Bourne shell as a scripting shell and use ksh instead. To be 100% portable, you should use Bourne, but most of your major *NIXes have support for ksh (including linux, Solaris and AIX..not sure about HP-UX) and it has a lot of nice scripting gizmos like associative arrays, printf command, co-processes, pattern matching, etc. Of course, maybe you don't need all of that stuff.
As an aside, there has been a lot of extensive research on making portable shell scripts. Bruce Blinn's book Portable Shell Programming: An Extensive Collection of Bourne Shell Examples is a good resource that might help as well as GNU Autotools documentation, which is the definitive guide on this sort of thing. Another useful jumping off point that has some good materials and a lot of useful links is Shell Script Porting Guidelines
This [salon.com]article is saying that GW is now meeting with his advisors about whether or not there is enough of a chance of this being a terrorist attack that it warrants shutting down US airspace again. At this time, they have made no decision on the matter.
My personal thought on the matter is that the only way we are going to know if this was a terrorist attack is:
A) Somebody claims responisbility (not too likely)
B) Another plane goes down
C) The NTSB comes back (after a couple of weeks) and says it was a bomb
It seems to me that the government is either just going to have to wait and see if it happens again before they make that decision OR, they could shut everything down and start searching engines for bombs, but, in light of the fact that there is no evidence that this is terrorist-related, isn't shutting it all down giving in to terrorism?
Two thoughts on this:
1) Most of the sites are probably more available today than on 9/11 because today is a holiday in the US and many people are not at work. Not being at work means they have reduced Internet access(read: dialup) in most cases, but abundant access to TV. My guess is that most people are at home watching it on the tube today.
2) Sites like BBC (Brits aren't on holiday today) have gone into reduced-bandwidth mode with limited graphics. This is to support the extra load created by the sudden increased in hits.
A) No one is forcing you to upgrade. If you are throwing the bleeding edge onto Prod servers you deserve what you get. That doesn't just apply to Linux, it applies to Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, Windoze and everything else. Get a clue.
B) At least Linus isn't terrified of making changes to the existing code base and fixing inherent problems, regardless of his testing base. I just ran into an issue on Solaris where as we had a middleware daemon (TIBCO Rendezvous) which hit upon a rather serious flaw in 32-bit Solaris where it could not resolve more than 256 calls to alias a port/service. At 257 the call to resolve a service alias would just fail. We talked to Sun about it and they said they knew it was an issue an refused to change it (ever) cause it would require them to change a foundation C struct that might break a bunch of apps. I understand Sun's viewpoint, but they have taken the 'safe' approach where they are locked into code limitations of the past. Great, so I get stuck with un-documented bug-crap forever.
C) Linus is the visionary, not the tester. If you don't trust RedHat or others to test the upgrades, and you don't have the desire/bandwidth to do it yourself, then you either shouldn't be running Linux or shouldn't be considering upgrades.
I've been using ext3 for a couple months on a non-prod system and haven't seen a noticible increase or decrease in performance. Some people say it adds to overhead cuz of the write 2x implications, but the FAQs say it's an improvement in performance over ext2 because it maximizes efficiencies in the disk head acesses.
f*ck fsck. Thank Linus it's gone /usr/bin shortly after my new RH7.2 upgrade, even though I had the proper permissions. It turned out not to be some weird ext3 issue, but the fact that the RH7.2 install had secretly used (without my knowledge or permission) two of the dirtiest words in the fs language: chattr and immutable. bah. Having eventually figured out the problem, I now stand firm behind ext3.
Of course, 2 days ago I (and a number of Solaris SA's I called in for moral support) blamed ext3 for some really weird problems with me not being able to write/chmod/touch anything in
However, it is supremely foolish to have an upgrade CD without the original upgradeable system. For example, let's say I buy an XP upgrade to NT, upgrade my machine, then sell my original NT full version on Ebay. A week later my hard drive tosses a platter and now I have to re-install everything. Oh no! I only have the upgrade CD! Arggghhh ... Never a good idea
I can't see this as being more dangerous than carrying around butane cigarette lighters, and they let those on planes. Especially since lighters will probably have more fuel in them than the battery rechargers, and are made out of cheap plastic for a dime a pop.
One of my best friends is one Afghani ancestry. She was born in America, but her parents came here from Afghanistan in the late 60's. She is Catholic, as are her parents. According to her, though many Afghanis are of the Islamic faith and support the more extremist angles of Islam, it is not so much by choice as by imposition. Many Afghanis left their country to come to the US and other nations to embrace the choices available in free countries. The Afghanis who are there now have no choice. Be extremist Muslim or die. The fact that they are Muslim should not be confused with the notion that they openly support the ideals of bin Laden or the Taliban. I'm not sure we can say, with absolute confidence, that this is a 'way of life' for these people, given choices. By no means am I saying the Islam is bad or that these people should denounce their religion. I'm just saying that they are people, and given the same opportunites as the rest of us, the majority would choose right over wrong. I've read much of the Koran, and it definitely expresses a difference between right and wrong, much of which is in-sync with Judeo-Christian beliefs. There are plenty of Muslims in the world who are willing to embrace a more temporate view of Islam. We must never judge people by their labels, but by their actions. Give them an opportunity to make the right decisions and actions.
Killing Afghanis is not the answer, just like killing Vietnemese was not the answer. How can you take from a people that have nothing? The answer is not to take, but to give. Give the people of Afghanistan something to live for, give them something to fight for, clear the line between those who are with us or indifferent and those who are against us.
We should move into Afghanistan and build a citadel of protection, of liberty. Pick a place in the geography, one that is large but easily defended. Move our troops in there, protect them, and then do not attack anything. As the Taliban and the terrorists run for the mountains, we begin to build. We build airstrips, and entrenchments and walls and checkpoints. We build a fortress. And then, we build hospitals, and schools and mosques and housing. We fly food in, and medicine and clothing. And then we invite all those who want it, to come and get it. We respect there idealogies, their way of life. We don't impose. We give them what they need to live and we protect them. With some clauses:
- Everyone who comes in is checked for weapons, bombs and other items of war. None will be permitted.
- Once you are 'in' you are 'in'. There is no leaving until a future date when the situation is more 'under control'. Those who want to leave, will be allowed to, but can never come back.
And then, we wait. We wait to see if they will come. If the people who have nothing, will come to get something. And once they come, we welcome them with open arms. After a while, it becomes clear who is with you and who is against you. We build military bases and begin hunting the mountains for those who are against us. Encourage those who have sided with us to help us. We've driven out the government, and now the people will be empowered to govern themselves. We'll help them.
What resort will the terrorists and the Taliban have then? Attack the fortress, which is filled with Muslims wanting only food and shelter and medicine? Kill their fellow Muslims...that will most certainly not gain them support, will not unite the 'nation of Islam'. Give those who do not agree with these extremists a chance to voice it.
This approach is just on variation on a common concept that is the only way to overthrow despotic governments. I'm not saying that it is militarily possible, but the ideal holds true. Empower the people. Protect them. Be their friends. Allow them to fight their own battles.
You can prevent your computer from being infected by disabling the security loophole that allows you to inadvertently execute the worm with Outlook or IE5.
In IE5, go into Tools->InternetOptions->Security->CustomL evel and change the Scripting->Active Scripting to DISABLE. Make sure you do this for each of the 4 Levels (Internet, Intranet, Trusted, Untrusted) to be safe until this thing is under control.
Outlook will inherit your IE settings, but if you want to check and make sure, goto Tools->Options->Security->Zone Settings and check for yourself.
Supposedly this will prevent your IE from executing the website-placed viruses and prevent Outlook from loading the virus when you open the message.
After reading the salon.com articles, this doesn't seem the behavior of a company like Clear Channel. It seems like their whole corporate culture is founded around greed and tastlessness. This is the same company who has tortured and/or killed live animals on a number of their morning talk shows. Companies like this aren't normally into censorship, because it limits their ability to profit. Censorship usually comes from a misguided ethical or moral sense, or an urge to protect/cover up something.
I can't even understand their rationale for putting _any_ songs on the list, much less the specific songs that they did.
I think it's more of a result of the kind of programming that is prevalent on Clear Channel stations. Clear Channel owns 10% of the total national radio market and 60% of rock and roll market. Since most of what they play is rock and roll, the list makes sense from this perspective.
I don't know if CNN re-used footage or not, but the story of Palestinian reactions appears accurate. I say this only because the story seems supported by the Jerusalem Post http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2001/09/14/News/News .34841.html , who are indicating that actual footage of the rallies are not being allowed to be reported:
Foreign Press Association protests PA threats to journalists
By Jerusalem Post Staff
JERUSALEM (September 14) - The Foreign Press Association expressed deep concern yesterday over life threats made to journalists by the Palestinian Authority, after PA security personnel on Tuesday tried to prevent photo and video coverage of a rally in Nablus where hundreds of Palestinians celebrated the terror attacks in New York and Washington.
The videographer, on assignment for Associated Press Television News, was summoned to a PA security office and told that the material must not be aired. Calls in the name of the Tanzim militia, an armed group associated with Yasser Arafat's Fatah group, warned him he would be held responsible, and made what he interpreted as threats on his life.
Several Palestinian Authority officials spoke to AP in Jerusalem urging that the material not be broadcast. Ahmed Abdel Rahman, Arafat's cabinet secretary, said the Palestinian Authority "cannot guarantee the life" of the cameraman if the footage was broadcast.
The cameraman then requested that the material not be aired. In light of the danger, APTN has not released the footage of the rally in Nablus.
The protest by AP Chief of Bureau Dan Perry said, "I ask the assurances of the Palestinian Authority that you will protect our journalists from threats and attempts at intimidation, and that no harm would come to our freelance cameraman from distribution of the film.
"We strongly condemn the direct threats made against local videographers by local militia members, and the attitude of Palestinian officials who made no effort to counter the threats, control the situation, or to guarantee the safety of the journalists and the freedom of the press," said the FPA.
"We hold the PA fully responsible for the safety of each and every journalist operating within their areas, especially those who were filming and covering Tuesday's events in Nablus."
Asked by telephone about the allegations of harassment, Palestinian Information Minister Yasser Abed Rabbo said: "We deny that."
(AP contributed to this report.)
I feel it is doubtful that Congressman Lott would phrase his hints in this manner if 'tactical nuclear strike' was a viable solution that was being seriously debated. That would be a very damning political move. I have a feeling, if the actions he alluded to are enacted, they will present an unexpected, but potentially ingenious solution to a very tricky problem. One that minmizes civilian casulties and collateral damage, but makes retribution for this act relatively satisfying.
Amazon.com as removed their normal fee for transactions in this case. Red Cross' web servers cannot handle the load that Amazon has already borne the brunt of. Their (Amazon.com) actions are noble and respectable. They are reaching out to the American people in this time of need by by donating their substantial infrastructure. We should not call their intentions into question, but be thankful that the resources are there to help us support those who have been afflicted by this horror. Now is not the time for petty grievances about spam and privacy. Now is the time when all of us should ban together and do what we can. Stand by your fellow Americans, whether they be private citizens, government entities or corporations. Now is not the time for dissent.
Just saw on the news that the FBI has traced two of the suspected terrorists to Florida, where they recevied rudimentary flight training. It was said the two men kept to themselves except for last Friday night, where they had an altercation with a bar owner. It seems these Islamic-fundamentalist radicals had run up a huge bar bill and refused to pay. When the manager confronted them with "Look, if you just tell me that there is some problem where you can't pay, just let me know and we can work it out". One of them responded, apparently very insulted, with "I can pay, I'm an airline pilot".
It seems our 'principled' terrorists have no problem with killing thousands of innocent civilians in the name of their faith, but can't seem to avoid alcohol, which, if I'm not mistaken, is forbidden by the Koran. Hypocrite cowards.