Or Israel, which is to this day supported by US funding and weapons, and which freely executes alleged "terrorists" (including a paraplegic in a wheelchair)
That so called "paraplegic" is the co-founder of Hamas, a terrorist organization which probably wouldn't care about killing even a helpless baby just because it is Jewish. After Israel released him following a peace accord mediated through Jordan, Yassin went back to lead Hamas once again and started a new wave of attacks -- this time through suicide bombings.
So, by International Laws he was a terrorist, and the leader of a terrorist organization. I don't fucking care if he was blind or quadriplegic or whatever the fuck he was -- he was a terrorist who blew up innocent civilians, who broke a peace accord and initiated more in the form of suicide bombings.
If you want such people to be excused just because of their physical condition, I pity you -- because as someone who receives his order from Allah, he'd not care a fuck about you even if you were lying on your deathbed.
Some people deserve mercy, but motherfuckers like these don't.
Right on all counts - however, post colonialism and post INA, the constitution was drafted and the system designed by them good ole founding fathers in a way that the army would/could never control the people.
This was largely because India had one of the highest body counts during WW2, and after the whole INA vs. Japan fiasco and the killing of Subash Chandra Bose - not to mention the violence during the freedom struggle - it was decided that army should act as protectors of the people, and never otherwise.
That is why our military was first formed as a civilian facilitator (build bridges, take part in Nehru's five year plans, etc) and grew from there.
Which was why I mentioned the colonialism. And my bad at having forgotten Vishnu Bhagawat's impeachment.
That's why I mentioned Windows in the original post.:-)
Windows has got a weird implementation of Java (surprise!) - so, embedded Java applets need to be verified locally to be safe, and are then run (Windows has some weird implementation of this). And firefox has a weird implementation of Java, which compounds the problem.
But funnily, it's only the/. ads that seem to freeze up FF - wonder why. Like you said, works fine on FF 1.0 pre on Fed & Mdk, which is what I use at home.
I must add that Indira Gandhi's attempt at taking over by initiating a state of emergency was to initiate massive economic reforms to help the nation recover after an India-Pakistan conflict.
This largely worked, and had the added benefit of bringing together the Hindu and Muslim population together.
This was indeed a democratically elected government, but owing to public protest, re elections were called for and conducted - she lost, and stepped down.
Cause damage in terms of people and resources, yes. A lasting coup is almost impossible - the only person who ever even tried it was the democratically elected Indira Gandhi - she did cause some damage, but nothing substantial that couldn't be undone.
Besides, our leaders are fairly well educated - our president is a rocket scientist and our prime minister is an economist from Oxford:-)
It's a very cultural thing that I cannot quite get across to you, but trust me when I say that the socio-political system in India has been built ground up to prevent just this sort of thing. If we were to lose our democracy, we'd have a long time ago. In fact, the US is more likely to be taken over by a coup than India is - simply because the President has complete control over the country. For instance, a war like the one on Iraq would simply not have taken place because of the way the democratic coalitions and the military hierarchy is designed (the military board is headed by economists and other strategic advisors).
There is no single command for the Indian army - the military heads are ceremonial. The real power vests with the regional heads.
You do not simply take over the seventh largest country with over a billion people - even if a large chunk did try, it would simply fail because the failsafe mechanisms are designed to trigger other sections of the armed forces to confront the aggressors.
India has the best airforce in the world, and a really multi-ethnic army. There is no central cause that would unite these people together.
That said, you do not seem to understand the cultural basis in India. War is not good. India is a very family oriented culture, with a strong bias towards values more than money or power - we've a religion that forbids most of us from eating meat, and our principles are largely very pacifist (Gandhi, Buddha, for instance). Culturally, there would be such large scale uprisings against this.
To give you an example, some Hindu fanatics decided to tear down a mosque built in the birthplace of a certain Hindu God called Ram, and there were nation wide riots for more than three months that nobody could even control.
The previous political party that was in power was voted out of power because they focussed on international trade rather than the local economies. The Indian system is quite well rooted in family values, and there is no way that no one no matter how psychotic, could even try something like that -- if they did, it would not last even a day.
And oh, I realized that you might misinterpret this statement -
And the military in India is entirely governed by the parliamentary system, which makes it impossible to be controlled by ONE single general without ratification by a board and a committee.
What I meant was that it is impossible for any military general to initiate any kind of military action - military movement, arming of the troops or anything - without ratification by the parliament. If such an action is indeed observed, India has a stop first, ask questions later policy.
And incidentally, no three generals of the three armed forces (army, navy, airforce) can meet at the same time except in the presence of the President, and even then not under pre-ordained conditions.
The Indian system has been staunchly designed to withstand any kind of military takeover, hostile or civil, after the British colonialism.
I'm sorry if I came across as a little harsh, but your previous uninformed post kinda pissed me off.
In all the three wars the first aggressor was Pakistan.
Two of the times, Pakistan refused to go by the UN draft of troop withdrawal and attacked, and India had to retaliate - both of these times, Pakistan was taken over by a military dictator.
And the third time was when Pakistan was involved in genocide in Eastern Pakistan, in what is now known as Bangladesh. Legally elected Bangladeshi representatives petitioned the Indian government for help, and India offered troop support -- completely abiding by International Law.
And regarding India's space program - they have an educational space program, to bring media to the remote areas of the country where other facilities are scarce - most of it is in fact monitored by US institutions. I would hardly consider that threatening.
India is still a wonky enough country that a military coup isn't out of the question. It could be run by Osama Bin Laden tomorrow for all we know.
Do you even know what you are talking about?
Apparently you don't.
India's military and socio-political system is designed in such a way that military coup is impossible. It's almost next to impossible to initiate any kind of military activity without being ratified by a board that includes three levels of authority, the lowest being parliamentary and the highest being presidential.
There are more than a billion people there -- they've a Muslim President and a Sikh Prime Minister whose party president is a white caucasian Roman Catholic in a country of 800 million Hindus. India's democracy has not failed even once - the only time it even vaguely faltered was when a state of emergency was declared in the 1970 when Pakistan attacked India from the North.
India has more of a stable democracy that works far better than how it does in the US -- they've a multi-party system that does not ask people to choose between black or white.
After the state of emergency that was declared, laws were drafted to prevent democracy being threatened at anytime, even during war. There is no constitutionally legal way in which a military coup could ever take place in India.
And the military in India is entirely governed by the parliamentary system, which makes it impossible to be controlled by ONE single general without ratification by a board and a committee.
Not to mention that the Indian social setup would not even allow something like this to come up in the first place.
I mean, sure we could use our nuclear arsenal to obliterate any nation that looks at us funny but we don't I don't think we need to start knocking other countries stuff out of the sky either.
It won't happen.
It's just people showing off power, nothing more. Think of it as the equivalent of nukes -- sure, a lot of countries have nukes -- but we still do not see us wiping each other out.
True, it's a threat - but there is a BIG difference between something being a threat and the realization of that threat.
It's just a game of power. Not quite unlike the cold war, only more complicated than that.
The thing is, I actually like some of the ads that come on Slashdot, especially since they are targetted at me and usually have stuff that I'm interested in.
I've clicked through the ads here several times, and I like the stuff that they put up.
What irritates me is the need to use an applet -- this freezes up Firefox on XP for a good while, and it's getting to be a pain.
So, now my solution is either to turn off Java so that I can read Slashdot, or block all the ads off Slashdot. No guesses which one I'd choose.
It's their choice - if Taco & gang made a retarded decision of using applets in ads, too bad. They'd be losing a lot of people who'd actually click the ads - these people would simply end up blocking all the ads to get away from the applet hell.
Ironically, it works fine on IE, while Firefox and Mozilla are the only browsers on which Slashdot does not render properly, and which has the applet issue.
Nice, I thought Slashdot was all about Opensource? I suppose they don't really practice what they preach.
I've got a gremlin and a huge rubber band... now if I only had 4 friends!
The confessions of a true geek, eh Taco?;)
That said, the time frame for this thing seems a little too high -
And one more thing. They have to do it by Jan. 10, 2010.
I'm not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing -- 3 years might have been nice, but 5 years seems a little too long to me.
Anyway, this is really good. Hopefully, the space race has started again!
PS - why the _HELL_ is Slashdot having an applet in the ads? It freezes up my browser in Windows for a while. It's getting to be a pain. At the very least, provide some way of turning off Applet ads.
Like I mentioned in this post, I can vouch for this.
For the longest time, the search for my name on Google images would bring up really old images and it would never update them. So, in order to test this, I just removed those images and used a redirect (this was about 3-4 months ago) -- Google still did not update the pictures.
However, my academic page at my school did show up pretty soon, although it was created just recently. What more, it even showed the image of my latest schedule, and not an earlier one as in the other case.
So I guess Google probably uses some kinda weird algorithm to determine which sites are likely to be dynamic, and which are not -- and update/not update them accordingly.
Besides, everytime there's been a problem/censorship (say, due to DMCA) -- Google has been nice enough to notify the users during the search. Not to mention the amount of scalability doing something like this would require of them (which makes even less sense if they were the ONLY ones asked to do so).
I can kinda vouch for this -- my website (metlin.org) has some images which were uploaded in 2001, and these still show up in Google Images, although they're long gone.
While Google hasn't updated these pics, some of the newer pics from my school website gets updated pretty darn quickly.
Although I cannot fathom why, I'd say it's probably true especially since I've experienced it first-hand.
It is quite unlikely that Google would do any such thing, especially since everytime that they have done this in the past, they've specifically pointed out that the information has been censored.
For DMCA blocked pages, they explicitly mention so, etc.
Even if they have been asked to censor the results, Google would most certainly mention that fact -- and if they have been asked not to, they need not oblige if other search engines haven't been as well, especially since it would be hurtful to their business.
Of all these guys, I'm the most worrried about Sun and HP, because they're both sinking ships -- and consequently, more dangerous.
When a company is making profits, it would not try to do something stupid like file a quintillion lawsuits and try to make money off that, especially when they have a legitimate business -- unless they absolutely have to.
However -- HP is run by Carly, a management PHB with absolutely no respect for technology, and no signs of any ethics or morals (just look at the number of techie people she's laid off, while taking fat hikes herself). And Sun, after the courtship ritual with MS has been patent-sue-happy, too.
On the other hand, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and the like have a thriving business - and are less likely to sue. I'm not too sure about Lucent, though. I would imagine that a lot of their patents are spread around AT&T and the other breakoff parts.
Okay, I realized that I contradicted myself a little up there -- I meant that these guys don't go by any cue based on any serious evidence (like your statements or insider operations) -- they probably look up your e-mail address from your website or Blog or whatever, guess where you are from and use that information to target the bank you're likely to be from.
Because, I'd a page at which listed me as working in a certain lab that I used to work at - and some of these scams used to contain spoof elements of those banks, too.
Not to mention the eBay spams that I seem to be getting lately. Sheesh.
Slashdot Mirror
Or Israel, which is to this day supported by US funding and weapons, and which freely executes alleged "terrorists" (including a paraplegic in a wheelchair)
Bah! You're probably referring to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.
That so called "paraplegic" is the co-founder of Hamas, a terrorist organization which probably wouldn't care about killing even a helpless baby just because it is Jewish. After Israel released him following a peace accord mediated through Jordan, Yassin went back to lead Hamas once again and started a new wave of attacks -- this time through suicide bombings.
So, by International Laws he was a terrorist, and the leader of a terrorist organization. I don't fucking care if he was blind or quadriplegic or whatever the fuck he was -- he was a terrorist who blew up innocent civilians, who broke a peace accord and initiated more in the form of suicide bombings.
If you want such people to be excused just because of their physical condition, I pity you -- because as someone who receives his order from Allah, he'd not care a fuck about you even if you were lying on your deathbed.
Some people deserve mercy, but motherfuckers like these don't.
And oh yeah.
Just because other countries do not show off their "toys" like the US likes to does not mean that they don't have any.
Be careful - India atleast is largely pacifist, China is not. When it all spills over, it may get ugly.
Oh yeah?
Seems like you're wrong.
The US isn't the only country with "toys".
Right on all counts - however, post colonialism and post INA, the constitution was drafted and the system designed by them good ole founding fathers in a way that the army would/could never control the people.
This was largely because India had one of the highest body counts during WW2, and after the whole INA vs. Japan fiasco and the killing of Subash Chandra Bose - not to mention the violence during the freedom struggle - it was decided that army should act as protectors of the people, and never otherwise.
That is why our military was first formed as a civilian facilitator (build bridges, take part in Nehru's five year plans, etc) and grew from there.
Which was why I mentioned the colonialism. And my bad at having forgotten Vishnu Bhagawat's impeachment.
Yup.
:-)
/. ads that seem to freeze up FF - wonder why. Like you said, works fine on FF 1.0 pre on Fed & Mdk, which is what I use at home.
That's why I mentioned Windows in the original post.
Windows has got a weird implementation of Java (surprise!) - so, embedded Java applets need to be verified locally to be safe, and are then run (Windows has some weird implementation of this). And firefox has a weird implementation of Java, which compounds the problem.
But funnily, it's only the
I must add that Indira Gandhi's attempt at taking over by initiating a state of emergency was to initiate massive economic reforms to help the nation recover after an India-Pakistan conflict.
This largely worked, and had the added benefit of bringing together the Hindu and Muslim population together.
This was indeed a democratically elected government, but owing to public protest, re elections were called for and conducted - she lost, and stepped down.
Cause damage in terms of people and resources, yes. A lasting coup is almost impossible - the only person who ever even tried it was the democratically elected Indira Gandhi - she did cause some damage, but nothing substantial that couldn't be undone.
:-)
Besides, our leaders are fairly well educated - our president is a rocket scientist and our prime minister is an economist from Oxford
It's a very cultural thing that I cannot quite get across to you, but trust me when I say that the socio-political system in India has been built ground up to prevent just this sort of thing. If we were to lose our democracy, we'd have a long time ago. In fact, the US is more likely to be taken over by a coup than India is - simply because the President has complete control over the country. For instance, a war like the one on Iraq would simply not have taken place because of the way the democratic coalitions and the military hierarchy is designed (the military board is headed by economists and other strategic advisors).
They can neither try, nor can they succeed.
There is no single command for the Indian army - the military heads are ceremonial. The real power vests with the regional heads.
You do not simply take over the seventh largest country with over a billion people - even if a large chunk did try, it would simply fail because the failsafe mechanisms are designed to trigger other sections of the armed forces to confront the aggressors.
India has the best airforce in the world, and a really multi-ethnic army. There is no central cause that would unite these people together.
That said, you do not seem to understand the cultural basis in India. War is not good. India is a very family oriented culture, with a strong bias towards values more than money or power - we've a religion that forbids most of us from eating meat, and our principles are largely very pacifist (Gandhi, Buddha, for instance). Culturally, there would be such large scale uprisings against this.
To give you an example, some Hindu fanatics decided to tear down a mosque built in the birthplace of a certain Hindu God called Ram, and there were nation wide riots for more than three months that nobody could even control.
The previous political party that was in power was voted out of power because they focussed on international trade rather than the local economies. The Indian system is quite well rooted in family values, and there is no way that no one no matter how psychotic, could even try something like that -- if they did, it would not last even a day.
And oh, I realized that you might misinterpret this statement -
And the military in India is entirely governed by the parliamentary system, which makes it impossible to be controlled by ONE single general without ratification by a board and a committee.
What I meant was that it is impossible for any military general to initiate any kind of military action - military movement, arming of the troops or anything - without ratification by the parliament. If such an action is indeed observed, India has a stop first, ask questions later policy.
And incidentally, no three generals of the three armed forces (army, navy, airforce) can meet at the same time except in the presence of the President, and even then not under pre-ordained conditions.
The Indian system has been staunchly designed to withstand any kind of military takeover, hostile or civil, after the British colonialism.
I'm sorry if I came across as a little harsh, but your previous uninformed post kinda pissed me off.
In all the three wars the first aggressor was Pakistan.
Two of the times, Pakistan refused to go by the UN draft of troop withdrawal and attacked, and India had to retaliate - both of these times, Pakistan was taken over by a military dictator.
And the third time was when Pakistan was involved in genocide in Eastern Pakistan, in what is now known as Bangladesh. Legally elected Bangladeshi representatives petitioned the Indian government for help, and India offered troop support -- completely abiding by International Law.
And regarding India's space program - they have an educational space program, to bring media to the remote areas of the country where other facilities are scarce - most of it is in fact monitored by US institutions. I would hardly consider that threatening.
India is still a wonky enough country that a military coup isn't out of the question. It could be run by Osama Bin Laden tomorrow for all we know.
Do you even know what you are talking about?
Apparently you don't.
India's military and socio-political system is designed in such a way that military coup is impossible. It's almost next to impossible to initiate any kind of military activity without being ratified by a board that includes three levels of authority, the lowest being parliamentary and the highest being presidential.
There are more than a billion people there -- they've a Muslim President and a Sikh Prime Minister whose party president is a white caucasian Roman Catholic in a country of 800 million Hindus. India's democracy has not failed even once - the only time it even vaguely faltered was when a state of emergency was declared in the 1970 when Pakistan attacked India from the North.
India has more of a stable democracy that works far better than how it does in the US -- they've a multi-party system that does not ask people to choose between black or white.
After the state of emergency that was declared, laws were drafted to prevent democracy being threatened at anytime, even during war. There is no constitutionally legal way in which a military coup could ever take place in India.
And the military in India is entirely governed by the parliamentary system, which makes it impossible to be controlled by ONE single general without ratification by a board and a committee.
Not to mention that the Indian social setup would not even allow something like this to come up in the first place.
Sheesh! You're so ignorant that it disgusts me.
I mean, sure we could use our nuclear arsenal to obliterate any nation that looks at us funny but we don't I don't think we need to start knocking other countries stuff out of the sky either.
It won't happen.
It's just people showing off power, nothing more. Think of it as the equivalent of nukes -- sure, a lot of countries have nukes -- but we still do not see us wiping each other out.
True, it's a threat - but there is a BIG difference between something being a threat and the realization of that threat.
It's just a game of power. Not quite unlike the cold war, only more complicated than that.
Yes, but you are forgetting that a lot of the technology is already out there.
:-)
For all that the Slashdot crowd bashes NASA, they have done a lot of fundamental groundbreaking work that others can use.
If they were starting out from scratch, I can understand - but they are not. They've something to work from, which would make a lot of difference.
I think 5 years would be neat, with a few extra months thrown in for testing -- however I'm worried that this may make the teams complacent.
Oh well, I suppose I'm being too optimistic here
Dude, I know that I could block it out.
The thing is, I actually like some of the ads that come on Slashdot, especially since they are targetted at me and usually have stuff that I'm interested in.
I've clicked through the ads here several times, and I like the stuff that they put up.
What irritates me is the need to use an applet -- this freezes up Firefox on XP for a good while, and it's getting to be a pain.
So, now my solution is either to turn off Java so that I can read Slashdot, or block all the ads off Slashdot. No guesses which one I'd choose.
It's their choice - if Taco & gang made a retarded decision of using applets in ads, too bad. They'd be losing a lot of people who'd actually click the ads - these people would simply end up blocking all the ads to get away from the applet hell.
One would think that they would learn.
So much for opensource.
Ironically, it works fine on IE, while Firefox and Mozilla are the only browsers on which Slashdot does not render properly, and which has the applet issue.
Nice, I thought Slashdot was all about Opensource? I suppose they don't really practice what they preach.
PS -- I'm a subscriber.
If I turn off the ads on stories and the home page, I lose a couple of plums, so I have to keep them on.
Besides, I actually like some of the ads that come on Slashdot, but I'd just have to block them.
Applet ads for Christ's sake! This was the same shit that people here used to complain about. What next, click on the monkey ad?
Sheesh.
I've got a gremlin and a huge rubber band... now if I only had 4 friends!
;)
The confessions of a true geek, eh Taco?
That said, the time frame for this thing seems a little too high -
And one more thing. They have to do it by Jan. 10, 2010.
I'm not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing -- 3 years might have been nice, but 5 years seems a little too long to me.
Anyway, this is really good. Hopefully, the space race has started again!
PS - why the _HELL_ is Slashdot having an applet in the ads? It freezes up my browser in Windows for a while. It's getting to be a pain. At the very least, provide some way of turning off Applet ads.
...back to back.
Like I mentioned in this post, I can vouch for this.
For the longest time, the search for my name on Google images would bring up really old images and it would never update them. So, in order to test this, I just removed those images and used a redirect (this was about 3-4 months ago) -- Google still did not update the pictures.
However, my academic page at my school did show up pretty soon, although it was created just recently. What more, it even showed the image of my latest schedule, and not an earlier one as in the other case.
So I guess Google probably uses some kinda weird algorithm to determine which sites are likely to be dynamic, and which are not -- and update/not update them accordingly.
Besides, everytime there's been a problem/censorship (say, due to DMCA) -- Google has been nice enough to notify the users during the search. Not to mention the amount of scalability doing something like this would require of them (which makes even less sense if they were the ONLY ones asked to do so).
So all in all, just a false alarm, I suppose.
I can kinda vouch for this -- my website (metlin.org) has some images which were uploaded in 2001, and these still show up in Google Images, although they're long gone.
While Google hasn't updated these pics, some of the newer pics from my school website gets updated pretty darn quickly.
Although I cannot fathom why, I'd say it's probably true especially since I've experienced it first-hand.
Cool!
;)
Now that GWB is back in office, someone send up a note quick that there is oil and wealth on the moon!
Maybe something useful could come out of his re-election, afterall!
It is quite unlikely that Google would do any such thing, especially since everytime that they have done this in the past, they've specifically pointed out that the information has been censored.
For DMCA blocked pages, they explicitly mention so, etc.
Even if they have been asked to censor the results, Google would most certainly mention that fact -- and if they have been asked not to, they need not oblige if other search engines haven't been as well, especially since it would be hurtful to their business.
Of all these guys, I'm the most worrried about Sun and HP, because they're both sinking ships -- and consequently, more dangerous.
When a company is making profits, it would not try to do something stupid like file a quintillion lawsuits and try to make money off that, especially when they have a legitimate business -- unless they absolutely have to.
However -- HP is run by Carly, a management PHB with absolutely no respect for technology, and no signs of any ethics or morals (just look at the number of techie people she's laid off, while taking fat hikes herself). And Sun, after the courtship ritual with MS has been patent-sue-happy, too.
On the other hand, Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and the like have a thriving business - and are less likely to sue. I'm not too sure about Lucent, though. I would imagine that a lot of their patents are spread around AT&T and the other breakoff parts.
Dude!! There are _way_ better uses for the money.
Two chicks, same time, baby
Okay, I realized that I contradicted myself a little up there -- I meant that these guys don't go by any cue based on any serious evidence (like your statements or insider operations) -- they probably look up your e-mail address from your website or Blog or whatever, guess where you are from and use that information to target the bank you're likely to be from.
Because, I'd a page at which listed me as working in a certain lab that I used to work at - and some of these scams used to contain spoof elements of those banks, too.
Not to mention the eBay spams that I seem to be getting lately. Sheesh.