You mean Osama Bin Ladin and the Taliban? The guys that the US trained and supplied with weapons back in the 80's?
That is not actually the case. Bin Laden was the Saudi money man for the Afghan resistance. The Saudis agreed to deliver matching funds to those supplied by the US.
Bin Laden's real issue is that he would prefer to be in charge in Saudi Arabia than the House of Saud. He can't do that with the US army camped on Saudi Arabia.
The real organizer of AQ is a guy called Zawahiri. He was the leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and was a ringleader in the assasination of Sadat.
Taking out Bin Laden and Zawahiri would have a major impact in reducing terrorism. Torturing random Iraqis picked up by the US occupation will only increase terrorism.
And as for the wingnut campaign to mod down the original post as 'offtopic' circulating on their mailing lists. What could be more ontopic here than the fact that the Bush administration is lawless and refuses to comply with the most basic provisions of international law? The use of torture means that every new power grab must be resisted.
Of course, that pantie torture is NOTHING compared to the three square meals, prayer time and air conditioning (that part the Prez DID order, that fucker!). I mean, all these guys were doing was planning to blow up a grade school in their home country and then ambushing the American invaders when they showed up to help save the Muslim children. How dare we treat them so rough!
The pictures from Abu Ghraib demonstrate how ridiculous your statement is.
And don't try to pretend that they were an exception. Someone decided to apply the Resistance to Interogation training protocol as an interogation protocol. it is stupid tactically and stupid strategically.
Lets take tactics first. Yes you can make people talk with torture. Everyone talks, even people who don't know anything. And those who do know what you want to know lie. A real life Jack Bauer would spend his entire time chasing dead end leads.
Remember the run up to the 2004 election when there was a security scare every week which would quickly be exposed as fake? Thats the quality of information you get from torture.
Now lets look at the strategic side. In particular lets look at the career of Zarqawi, who was a small time crook who didn't amount to anything until he was arrested by Jordanian police and tortured.
Instead of turning the US into a police state looking for terrorists lets stop making more of them.
The pictures of Abu Ghraib have entirely erased the images of 9/11 in the eyes of most of the world. They are the biggest recruiting sargeant for Al Qaeda, the Sunni insurgents in Iraq, the Shi'ia insurgents, and all the other groups in the region who mostly spend their time fighting each other but thanks to the incompetent in chief are fighting US forces instead.
I could look at all the people who the US killed at the death camps in Guantanamo Bay (zero at last count). I could look at all the US citizens who have been falsely imprisoned for terrorism -- but no one can ever come up with a list of names. So it's hard.
The number of people who have died during interrogation is certainly greater than zero. We don't know the details as they refuse to prosecute unless they have no alternative and when they do prosecute they give the officers immunity to testify against the enlisted men.
It is called a cover-up.
If the FBI want to look into domestic supporters of terrorism they could take a look at all the New York City politicians who have supported NORAID over the years under the pretence that it is not an IRA fundraising front. People like Rudy Giuliani.
As for there being no US citizens being imprisoned illegally, I don't think that the Padilla or Hamdi cases will stand up.
And yes, it is quite likely that they actually were terrorists, but at this point there is absolutely no possibility of a safe conviction. I also expect that John Walker Lindh ends up getting released long before he would have done if the law had been followed.
We tried the extra-legal approach in the UK when the IRA started their campaign. It was a total failure and only made the situation worse.
Well not exactly... US soldiers cannot stand trial before either Hague or Rome Tribunal (newer version of the Hague), since they have immunity:) So, since they cannot be convicted, they cannot commit war crimes:)
That is not the case at all. The International Criminal Court is simply a permanent court to replace the ad-hoc courts convened to prosecute previous war crimes. The US or more particularly the Bush administration opposes the ICC. That can be reversed by a future administration.
The ICC only has jurisdiction if the national courts are unable or refuse to prosecute. US law has multiple provisions to prosecute war crimes in federal courts.
The only situation in which an international court would be required would be if Bush were to pardon himself or his accomplices.
The constitution only allows the President to pardon offenses against the United States. Gitmo is in Cuba and according to the Bush administration not under the jurisdiction of the US courts. If the US is not sovereign Cuba must be. I am sure that the authorities there would deal with the situation appropriately.
Did universities in the United States become part of the FBI?
Tell you what, when they arrest the Attorney General, Vice President and President and charge them with the long list of crimes they have committed against the US people, against the US constitution and against humanity, then lets talk about this stuff eh?
They have by any objective standards ordered torture and committed other war crimes.
Please resign from the IETF, or whatever body you are part of.
I do not want such illucid thinking within a mile of any standards body.
Where the conference was hosted, constitutionally, everyone can be press.
If you do not want the press, you do not want anyone.
Somewhat ironic that the comment would be posted as anonymous coward here. So he can speak off the record but nobody else should be allowed to.
anonymity has a place on the Internet, so do closed door meetings. The IETF, W3C and OASIS do not issue press credentials, they are working meetings, not opportunities for people to pimp their companies to the press.
The first meeting of the ASRG (anti-spam) at the SF IETF the then chair ran the whole meeting as a press opportunity for his own company. That is not the way a working group meeting is meant to work.
We have processes in which public comment is solicited and processes where private discussion takes place. In this case the meeting was public in the sense that you did not have to pay $6,000 or $60,000 to join W3C.
We did as a matter of fact have bloggers there, but they were talking about the technology of blogging, not blogging the meeting.
If we were going to do a press call it would have been an entirely different affair. Gingrich and Gore would probably have been invited to keynote, the presentations would have been describing technology that exists today, not technology we might create in the future.
Many of the speakers do not have permission to speak to the press. Others such as myself do have press speaking rights
Geez... Welcome to Soviet Amerika.
One of the consequences of SEC regulation is that if you are an employee of a public company and speak to the press on behalf of the company you can get into real trouble if you say the wrong thing, as in cause a lawsuit.
Although I do understand that this was actually "by invitation only" and only the results were public, I think your argument that the reporter was known for misrepresentations is irrelevant. If there is a truly public you can't selectively throw out people who may or may not be total liars.
There are two issues here. First no press of any kind were invited so that people could speak off the record. Second the reason that no press was admitted was precisely because of journalists who follow their own agenda.
True, "creating" isn't quite the same as "inventing", but it's still a highly over-inflated claim and it's very easy to see how people could get the two confused.
Gore appropriated the money for us. Without a legislative champion such as Gore the Internet would not exist in its current form. The NSF backbone would never have been funded.
Declan was fully aware that he misrepresented Gore at the time he did it. In Senate terms 'took the initiative' means that he was the lead person in getting the money into the bill.
The W3C was engaging in a private meeting, not a secret one.
Actually it is a Web Science Research Institute Workshop that is sponsored by the W3C.
And Danny has not been at W3C for some time, he is at WSRI. The difference is likely to be easier to understand after WSRI has a building, see my proposal.
I have an advantage here since I am actually in the meeting.
For the reasons Declan in particular would be excluded, see my blog. Declan has a history of deliberately misrepresenting statements, in particular he was the origin of the myth that Gore claimed to have invented the Internet.
We are talking about using technology to support E-Government. Many of the speakers do not have permission to speak to the press. Others such as myself do have press speaking rights, but are not speaking for our companies. The history of why we built the Web 15 years ago are not something my employer would or should share.
Anyone could attend the workshop, there isn't even an entry fee. All you had to do is to register in advance, to submit a position paper and to agree that the statements made are not for attribution. This is incidentally the press terms that the IETF operates on, we do not speak for our employers at the IETF.
The PLO was active long before the IRA planted its first bomb. And the concept of the 'urban guerilla' was developed by the Bader-Meinhof gang (Red Army Faction).
They did it without major funding for many many years. A lack of money will not stop determined enough people getting what they want.
The history of the Bader-Meinhof shows otherwise. Andreas Bader was not a notable figure of the German extreme left early on, he bombed a couple of department stores with pipe bombs but nothing of major consequence. It was only after Bader was sprung from jail by Meinhof and they went to Jordan for PLO training school that they became a significant terrorist movement. On their return they robbed five banks in succession before Meinhof got round to writing a manifesto for the group.
The ability to raise funds is everything in the terrorist world. It is what separates Bin Laden from his other Whahhabi ultras.
So the fact that Rudy let the IRA use his name to raise money to buy bombs in the early 1990s when the group was still killing people is very relevant to his current attempts to become leader of the free world.
You can't have a US president who has in the past supported a terrorist campaign against one of the few allies that still supports the US and does not look for a handout in return.
Their foray into peace away from violent means began way before 9/11.
I am fully aware that the Good Friday agreement preceeded 9/11. The IRA broke the previous ceasefire and until 9/11 were still making it clear that they intended to hold onto their arms.
The problem is that Rudy was supporting the IRA while they were still murdering people. Rudy says we should not talk to terrorists under any circumstances, yet he was handing out medals to them and helping them raise money to buy bombs while they were still murdering people.
You're saying that the IRA stopped fighting for their idea of freedom because some Islamic radicals flew aeroplanes into New York skyscrapers? Wow. Just wow.
9/11 proved that terrorism was simply never going to work for them. Adams and co knew that they were never going to get their lads to fly airplanes into buildings and even if they could find a suicide squad they couldn't bomb people into submission.
A faction called the 'Real IRA' murdered another 28 people until they were put out of business by a combination of the Irish police, British police and a couple of assasinations by their former comrades.
Rudy attended an IRA fundraiser immediately after 9/11 (the organizers wisely decided to give the money to the 9/11 victim's families fund, or at least claim to), but he made sure that nobody photographed him next to his old friend Gerry Adams. Even Rudy could tell that terrorism was no longer a vote winner, time for a flippety-flop.
OTOH the IRA in its heyday were not supporters of terrorism. They were just terrorists
Of course there is no difference between the person who plants the bomb and a person like Rudy Giuliani who helps the IRA raise funds.
Of course according to Rudy appologists he never actually raised money for the IRA, he was raising money for NORAID which claims to be a humanitarian organization - just like the front groups that collect money for Hamas.
In 1994 Rudy gave Gerry Adams, the leader of the IRA a 'humanitarian' award, the Crystal Apple. 18 months later Gerry had a bomb planted in a Birmingham shopping mall.
Just imagine what Giuliani's state visit to the UK would be like:
Queen Eliabeth II: And what do you do when you are not out raising money to slaughter my cabinet?
Sure the IRA have since become inactive. 9/11 gave them no choice. After 9/11 there was no way that fools like Rudy could continue to hide behind the 'NORAID' nonsense, they knew they were really buying bombs all along of course. After 9/11 the US fundraising was permanently shut down.
It's like having Satanists run a local Baptist Church. No good will come of it.
According to Bob Jones, Satan is already running the Catholic church. But that didn't stop John McCain going there for a pander to the virulently racist wing of the Republican party.
The three front runners for the GOP nomination are a guy who panders to anti-Catholic bigots, a guy who panders to supporters of terrorism by attending IRA fundraisers and flip-flip Mitt.
Nice point about the superpower. While there is no doubt that W. has caused America to lose a lot of power, I wonder if he has destroyed our superpower status. In light of how much we have to negotiate over North Korea and Iran, It would appear so. I suspect that his occupation combined with his deficits (and reagan's), is our undoing. Sadly, it takes about a decade to tell how things go. For example, USSR died in the 70's. It was not until the 80's that it became apparent. Of course, reagan helped extend the USSR by restoring the selling of cheap grain and other trade to them, in spite of their invasion of Afghanistan.
If Reagan had understood quite how close to collapse the USSR was he would probably have done more to keep it together. The splintering of the USSR created a lot of uncertainty that many would have liked to avoid.
The US has been losing power in relative terms since the Eisenhower Presidency. The apex of US power was immediately after WWII when the US was the only world power with nuclear weapons, the only power with a military left in one piece.
Since then the rest of the world has been catching up, or rather parts of the world have. A second rank power like the UK was able to polish off a fourth rank power like Argentina in a short time. It is not exactly to be a suprise that the US can polish off a fifth (Iraq) or sixth (Taleban) rank force with little difficulty. That does not mean that the US can attack a second rank power such as Iran with impunity.
The Arab states made a similar miscalculation in 1967. They were in military terms the stronger power. By the time the Arab states had realized their mistake they had lost.
The US is the only world power that has a single carrier strike group. The general belief in the US is that this is because nobody else could afford to build one. There may be some truth in that, or it might just be that the whole notion has been rendered obsolete by advanced missile technology as the cavalry charge was rendered obsolete by the machine gun.
Only a fool would want to put such a proposition to the test. Unfortunately a fool is precisely what we have to deal with here.
The current iraq war seems to be a new frontier in warfare style. I'm not sure we've ever fought an insurgency quite like that before.
Bollocks
The British fought essentially the same type of campaign during the 1930s with essentially the same outcome, 50,000 civilians were slaughtered by the end. The US fought similar campaigns in the Philippines and are generally reconed by independent tallies to have slaughtered upwars of a million. Then there is Vietnam.
The US has fought colonial wars, it just fought them within borders of the US for the most part. The displacement and massacre of the majority of the native population too most of the 19th century.
History is full of examples where a superior military force is defeated by an insurgency. Napoleon was in the end defeated by Wellington's peninsular campaign, but that would not have succeeded if the French had not been fighting the Guerilla.
What is taking place in Iraq is the outcome many of us predicted at the start. It is the outcome that Bush I predicted when he decided not to follow Saddam into Iraq.
What the Neo-Cons can't get into their thick skulls is that there is a huge difference between being able to defend against an attack launched by any imaginable opponent and being able to launch unprovoked wars any time the country choses.
The Neo-Cons think that war is costless and that the US can launch attacks with impunity. It is just not true. Some of them are lobbying for an attack on Iran which they think will surrender after the first few bombs. Does not take more than a cursory reading of the history of the Iran-Iraq war to realze that this is yet more wishful thinking. Iran can shut the Straits of Hormuz and the oil supply of the West any time it choses. Iran has state of the art Chinese surface to ship missiles capable of sinking the US capital ships.
People who advocate indiscriminate violence can sound very brave and clever. They tend to be neither.
It has taken sixty years and ten Presidents to establish the US as the worlds last superpower. It only takes one President to destroy all that.
And just to put this in historical context, this patent was filed (never mind prep time) a scant 45 days after Alta Vista went live. It would be a couple years before Google would enter the scene. The big search engine of the day was AOL's WebCrawler. Compared to WebCrawler, this certainly is not an obvious idea.
There is prior art, a bunch of patents filed (by Bell labs?) relating to the use of GPS based location data for a variety of network applications. They were filed on their return from the first US Gulf war in 1991.
Why anyone would expect brakes on cars to work 100% till the first service visit it beyond me.
Bad analogy, the brakes on your car are the result of over a century of engineering effort.
We actually use less effective brakes than we could these days, drum brakes are actually superior in stopping power. The switch to disk brakes took place because disks are less prone to fade.
At the end of the day the stopping power of your brakes is no greater than the ability of your tires in any case.
Turbo memory is not an essential safety feature, to make the comparison is idiotic
What appears to be going on here is that Microsoft is technically correct in stating that Turbo Memory is supported. Sony appears to be incorrect in claiming that it is not but may well be correct in stating that first generation support does not improve performance as it should.
Looks to me more like Sony overstating their case in explaining why they are not offering support now.
Why anyone would expect this to work 100% till the first service patch is beyond me.
Imagine what a couple hundred dedicated and knowledgeable geeks can dig in terms of prior art.
With several thousand patents issued and even more in process the effect that 2000 geeks could make is effectively nil.
The point here is not infringement but enforcement. If Microsoft were to attempt to eliminate Linux using patents they would put themselves in a serious anti-trust bind.
From the 1930s through the Carter Presidency there were real limits on what a patent could be used for, largely as a result of earlier IBM run ins during the Watson era. Reagan changed the basis for administrative interpretation of the anti-trust statutes but not the statutes themselves.
The pendulum can swing back any time.
Since 1980 there have only been two years when the GOP did not have complete control of either the Whitehouse, Congress or both. At this point it is pretty clear that Corporativism has reached its apex and is already in rapid decline.
This is quite parallel to Gerald Ford pardoning Nixon - probably lost him the next election, and considered a horrible move at the time - but it is now (generally) considered to be a good thing. It allowed the nation to heal, and it allowed the government to move on, rather than dwelling, and dwelling on a scandal.
On the contrary, it allowed the GOP to pretend that nothing criminal had taken place and that Nixon had been the victim of foul play for thenext thirty years.
The impeachment of Clinton was a direct result of the Ford pardon.
If Bush pardons his collaborators for his crimes he will be prosecuted in their place. If he pardons himself he will be put on trial elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
That is not actually the case. Bin Laden was the Saudi money man for the Afghan resistance. The Saudis agreed to deliver matching funds to those supplied by the US.
Bin Laden's real issue is that he would prefer to be in charge in Saudi Arabia than the House of Saud. He can't do that with the US army camped on Saudi Arabia.
The real organizer of AQ is a guy called Zawahiri. He was the leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and was a ringleader in the assasination of Sadat.
Taking out Bin Laden and Zawahiri would have a major impact in reducing terrorism. Torturing random Iraqis picked up by the US occupation will only increase terrorism.
And as for the wingnut campaign to mod down the original post as 'offtopic' circulating on their mailing lists. What could be more ontopic here than the fact that the Bush administration is lawless and refuses to comply with the most basic provisions of international law? The use of torture means that every new power grab must be resisted.
The pictures from Abu Ghraib demonstrate how ridiculous your statement is.
And don't try to pretend that they were an exception. Someone decided to apply the Resistance to Interogation training protocol as an interogation protocol. it is stupid tactically and stupid strategically.
Lets take tactics first. Yes you can make people talk with torture. Everyone talks, even people who don't know anything. And those who do know what you want to know lie. A real life Jack Bauer would spend his entire time chasing dead end leads.
Remember the run up to the 2004 election when there was a security scare every week which would quickly be exposed as fake? Thats the quality of information you get from torture.
Now lets look at the strategic side. In particular lets look at the career of Zarqawi, who was a small time crook who didn't amount to anything until he was arrested by Jordanian police and tortured.
Instead of turning the US into a police state looking for terrorists lets stop making more of them.
The pictures of Abu Ghraib have entirely erased the images of 9/11 in the eyes of most of the world. They are the biggest recruiting sargeant for Al Qaeda, the Sunni insurgents in Iraq, the Shi'ia insurgents, and all the other groups in the region who mostly spend their time fighting each other but thanks to the incompetent in chief are fighting US forces instead.
The number of people who have died during interrogation is certainly greater than zero. We don't know the details as they refuse to prosecute unless they have no alternative and when they do prosecute they give the officers immunity to testify against the enlisted men.
It is called a cover-up.
If the FBI want to look into domestic supporters of terrorism they could take a look at all the New York City politicians who have supported NORAID over the years under the pretence that it is not an IRA fundraising front. People like Rudy Giuliani.
As for there being no US citizens being imprisoned illegally, I don't think that the Padilla or Hamdi cases will stand up.
And yes, it is quite likely that they actually were terrorists, but at this point there is absolutely no possibility of a safe conviction. I also expect that John Walker Lindh ends up getting released long before he would have done if the law had been followed.
We tried the extra-legal approach in the UK when the IRA started their campaign. It was a total failure and only made the situation worse.
That is not the case at all. The International Criminal Court is simply a permanent court to replace the ad-hoc courts convened to prosecute previous war crimes. The US or more particularly the Bush administration opposes the ICC. That can be reversed by a future administration.
The ICC only has jurisdiction if the national courts are unable or refuse to prosecute. US law has multiple provisions to prosecute war crimes in federal courts. The only situation in which an international court would be required would be if Bush were to pardon himself or his accomplices.
The constitution only allows the President to pardon offenses against the United States. Gitmo is in Cuba and according to the Bush administration not under the jurisdiction of the US courts. If the US is not sovereign Cuba must be. I am sure that the authorities there would deal with the situation appropriately.
Tell you what, when they arrest the Attorney General, Vice President and President and charge them with the long list of crimes they have committed against the US people, against the US constitution and against humanity, then lets talk about this stuff eh?
They have by any objective standards ordered torture and committed other war crimes.
Manufacturers make their own DVD-ROM drivers?!
HP own VooDoo and put their own drive in. The lightscribe driver seems to be buggy.
Runs fine for me. Only problem I have had is a faulty HP DVD-Rom driver.
All you need to run Vista happily is an Intel quad-core overclocked to 4GHz, 4Gb RAM and twin nVidia 8800 GTX video cards.
Please resign from the IETF, or whatever body you are part of. I do not want such illucid thinking within a mile of any standards body. Where the conference was hosted, constitutionally, everyone can be press. If you do not want the press, you do not want anyone.
Somewhat ironic that the comment would be posted as anonymous coward here. So he can speak off the record but nobody else should be allowed to.
anonymity has a place on the Internet, so do closed door meetings. The IETF, W3C and OASIS do not issue press credentials, they are working meetings, not opportunities for people to pimp their companies to the press.
The first meeting of the ASRG (anti-spam) at the SF IETF the then chair ran the whole meeting as a press opportunity for his own company. That is not the way a working group meeting is meant to work.
We have processes in which public comment is solicited and processes where private discussion takes place. In this case the meeting was public in the sense that you did not have to pay $6,000 or $60,000 to join W3C.
We did as a matter of fact have bloggers there, but they were talking about the technology of blogging, not blogging the meeting.
If we were going to do a press call it would have been an entirely different affair. Gingrich and Gore would probably have been invited to keynote, the presentations would have been describing technology that exists today, not technology we might create in the future.
Geez... Welcome to Soviet Amerika.
One of the consequences of SEC regulation is that if you are an employee of a public company and speak to the press on behalf of the company you can get into real trouble if you say the wrong thing, as in cause a lawsuit.
There are two issues here. First no press of any kind were invited so that people could speak off the record. Second the reason that no press was admitted was precisely because of journalists who follow their own agenda.
Declan failed on both counts.
If you are press, you are not the public.
Gore appropriated the money for us. Without a legislative champion such as Gore the Internet would not exist in its current form. The NSF backbone would never have been funded.
Declan was fully aware that he misrepresented Gore at the time he did it. In Senate terms 'took the initiative' means that he was the lead person in getting the money into the bill.
Actually it is a Web Science Research Institute Workshop that is sponsored by the W3C.
And Danny has not been at W3C for some time, he is at WSRI. The difference is likely to be easier to understand after WSRI has a building, see my proposal.
I have an advantage here since I am actually in the meeting. For the reasons Declan in particular would be excluded, see my blog. Declan has a history of deliberately misrepresenting statements, in particular he was the origin of the myth that Gore claimed to have invented the Internet. We are talking about using technology to support E-Government. Many of the speakers do not have permission to speak to the press. Others such as myself do have press speaking rights, but are not speaking for our companies. The history of why we built the Web 15 years ago are not something my employer would or should share. Anyone could attend the workshop, there isn't even an entry fee. All you had to do is to register in advance, to submit a position paper and to agree that the statements made are not for attribution. This is incidentally the press terms that the IETF operates on, we do not speak for our employers at the IETF.
That is not remotely close to being true.
The PLO was active long before the IRA planted its first bomb. And the concept of the 'urban guerilla' was developed by the Bader-Meinhof gang (Red Army Faction).
They did it without major funding for many many years. A lack of money will not stop determined enough people getting what they want.
The history of the Bader-Meinhof shows otherwise. Andreas Bader was not a notable figure of the German extreme left early on, he bombed a couple of department stores with pipe bombs but nothing of major consequence. It was only after Bader was sprung from jail by Meinhof and they went to Jordan for PLO training school that they became a significant terrorist movement. On their return they robbed five banks in succession before Meinhof got round to writing a manifesto for the group.
The ability to raise funds is everything in the terrorist world. It is what separates Bin Laden from his other Whahhabi ultras.
So the fact that Rudy let the IRA use his name to raise money to buy bombs in the early 1990s when the group was still killing people is very relevant to his current attempts to become leader of the free world.
You can't have a US president who has in the past supported a terrorist campaign against one of the few allies that still supports the US and does not look for a handout in return.
Their foray into peace away from violent means began way before 9/11.
I am fully aware that the Good Friday agreement preceeded 9/11. The IRA broke the previous ceasefire and until 9/11 were still making it clear that they intended to hold onto their arms.
The problem is that Rudy was supporting the IRA while they were still murdering people. Rudy says we should not talk to terrorists under any circumstances, yet he was handing out medals to them and helping them raise money to buy bombs while they were still murdering people.
9/11 proved that terrorism was simply never going to work for them. Adams and co knew that they were never going to get their lads to fly airplanes into buildings and even if they could find a suicide squad they couldn't bomb people into submission.
A faction called the 'Real IRA' murdered another 28 people until they were put out of business by a combination of the Irish police, British police and a couple of assasinations by their former comrades.
Rudy attended an IRA fundraiser immediately after 9/11 (the organizers wisely decided to give the money to the 9/11 victim's families fund, or at least claim to), but he made sure that nobody photographed him next to his old friend Gerry Adams. Even Rudy could tell that terrorism was no longer a vote winner, time for a flippety-flop.
Of course there is no difference between the person who plants the bomb and a person like Rudy Giuliani who helps the IRA raise funds.
Of course according to Rudy appologists he never actually raised money for the IRA, he was raising money for NORAID which claims to be a humanitarian organization - just like the front groups that collect money for Hamas.
In 1994 Rudy gave Gerry Adams, the leader of the IRA a 'humanitarian' award, the Crystal Apple. 18 months later Gerry had a bomb planted in a Birmingham shopping mall.
Just imagine what Giuliani's state visit to the UK would be like:
Queen Eliabeth II: And what do you do when you are not out raising money to slaughter my cabinet?Sure the IRA have since become inactive. 9/11 gave them no choice. After 9/11 there was no way that fools like Rudy could continue to hide behind the 'NORAID' nonsense, they knew they were really buying bombs all along of course. After 9/11 the US fundraising was permanently shut down.
According to Bob Jones, Satan is already running the Catholic church. But that didn't stop John McCain going there for a pander to the virulently racist wing of the Republican party.
The three front runners for the GOP nomination are a guy who panders to anti-Catholic bigots, a guy who panders to supporters of terrorism by attending IRA fundraisers and flip-flip Mitt.
As it happens the first time I met Tim in 1992 it was a couple of weeks after visiting the Gutenberg museum.
Gutenberg didn't invent movable type either, but he was the first person to put all the different pieces together to create a system.
If Reagan had understood quite how close to collapse the USSR was he would probably have done more to keep it together. The splintering of the USSR created a lot of uncertainty that many would have liked to avoid.
The US has been losing power in relative terms since the Eisenhower Presidency. The apex of US power was immediately after WWII when the US was the only world power with nuclear weapons, the only power with a military left in one piece.
Since then the rest of the world has been catching up, or rather parts of the world have. A second rank power like the UK was able to polish off a fourth rank power like Argentina in a short time. It is not exactly to be a suprise that the US can polish off a fifth (Iraq) or sixth (Taleban) rank force with little difficulty. That does not mean that the US can attack a second rank power such as Iran with impunity.
The Arab states made a similar miscalculation in 1967. They were in military terms the stronger power. By the time the Arab states had realized their mistake they had lost.
The US is the only world power that has a single carrier strike group. The general belief in the US is that this is because nobody else could afford to build one. There may be some truth in that, or it might just be that the whole notion has been rendered obsolete by advanced missile technology as the cavalry charge was rendered obsolete by the machine gun.
Only a fool would want to put such a proposition to the test. Unfortunately a fool is precisely what we have to deal with here.
Bollocks
The British fought essentially the same type of campaign during the 1930s with essentially the same outcome, 50,000 civilians were slaughtered by the end. The US fought similar campaigns in the Philippines and are generally reconed by independent tallies to have slaughtered upwars of a million. Then there is Vietnam.
The US has fought colonial wars, it just fought them within borders of the US for the most part. The displacement and massacre of the majority of the native population too most of the 19th century.
History is full of examples where a superior military force is defeated by an insurgency. Napoleon was in the end defeated by Wellington's peninsular campaign, but that would not have succeeded if the French had not been fighting the Guerilla.
What is taking place in Iraq is the outcome many of us predicted at the start. It is the outcome that Bush I predicted when he decided not to follow Saddam into Iraq.
What the Neo-Cons can't get into their thick skulls is that there is a huge difference between being able to defend against an attack launched by any imaginable opponent and being able to launch unprovoked wars any time the country choses.
The Neo-Cons think that war is costless and that the US can launch attacks with impunity. It is just not true. Some of them are lobbying for an attack on Iran which they think will surrender after the first few bombs. Does not take more than a cursory reading of the history of the Iran-Iraq war to realze that this is yet more wishful thinking. Iran can shut the Straits of Hormuz and the oil supply of the West any time it choses. Iran has state of the art Chinese surface to ship missiles capable of sinking the US capital ships.
People who advocate indiscriminate violence can sound very brave and clever. They tend to be neither.
It has taken sixty years and ten Presidents to establish the US as the worlds last superpower. It only takes one President to destroy all that.
There is prior art, a bunch of patents filed (by Bell labs?) relating to the use of GPS based location data for a variety of network applications. They were filed on their return from the first US Gulf war in 1991.
Bad analogy, the brakes on your car are the result of over a century of engineering effort.
We actually use less effective brakes than we could these days, drum brakes are actually superior in stopping power. The switch to disk brakes took place because disks are less prone to fade.
At the end of the day the stopping power of your brakes is no greater than the ability of your tires in any case.
Turbo memory is not an essential safety feature, to make the comparison is idiotic
Looks to me more like Sony overstating their case in explaining why they are not offering support now.
Why anyone would expect this to work 100% till the first service patch is beyond me.
With several thousand patents issued and even more in process the effect that 2000 geeks could make is effectively nil.
The point here is not infringement but enforcement. If Microsoft were to attempt to eliminate Linux using patents they would put themselves in a serious anti-trust bind.
From the 1930s through the Carter Presidency there were real limits on what a patent could be used for, largely as a result of earlier IBM run ins during the Watson era. Reagan changed the basis for administrative interpretation of the anti-trust statutes but not the statutes themselves.
The pendulum can swing back any time.
Since 1980 there have only been two years when the GOP did not have complete control of either the Whitehouse, Congress or both. At this point it is pretty clear that Corporativism has reached its apex and is already in rapid decline.
On the contrary, it allowed the GOP to pretend that nothing criminal had taken place and that Nixon had been the victim of foul play for thenext thirty years.
The impeachment of Clinton was a direct result of the Ford pardon.
If Bush pardons his collaborators for his crimes he will be prosecuted in their place. If he pardons himself he will be put on trial elsewhere.