Bin Laden was really upset by the presence of 'infidel' troops in Saudi Arabia. They were a bit inconveniently situated for Bin Laden's aspiration of starting a coup.
Bin Laden's primary focus has always been Saud but Al Zawahiri, often misleadingly referred to as 'Bin Laden's number 2' has been a terrorist for 30 years and his primary focus is Israel. Al Zawahiri was heavily involved in the murder of President Saddat for signing the camp David agreement. Al Zawahiri is the ideological leader of Al Qaeda.
The issue here is not what triggered the attack, the issue is why Al Qaeda was allowed to escape. The Afghan campaign should have been completed before any new military engagement was planned. Instead troops were being pulled from Afghanistan before the job was done. The result was that instead of putting NATO troops on the ground at the Torra Borra the US was withdrawing its specialist forces to prepare for the invasion of Iraq.
Even if Bush's claim that Saddam was involved in 9/11 were true (it has never been substantiated) it was a major tactical error to open a second front before the first was secure.
A second major error was trusting Musharaff, the prime funder and instigator of the Taleban. The democratically elected government of Pakistan had tried to dismiss Musharaff because he had been supporting terrorist groups in Cashmire that looked likely to start a full scale war with India.
The idea that Musharaff is seriously committed to the 'war on terror' is ridiculous. He is only providing the minimum of compliance. He depends on the support of the Islamists to remain in power.
Microsoft generates the default actions by looking at the feedback from people who have opted to communicate their actions to Microsoft.
Before getting into a stew it would be worthwhile considering whether it is likely that a significant number of people with Claria crap are opting to keep it.
No way would I have Claria crap on my machine but it does appear that there are people downloading the trash intentionally.
With DECNET you can access a network disk as if it was connected locally.
Sounds like some sort of Network File System. Voodoo!
No, NFS does not even get close. If you have used a real DECNEt file system you soon realize that NFS is grossly inferior fare.
In DECNET you have a unified file system identifier, similar to a URI. NFS suffers from being designed around the limitations of UNIX's 'everything is a file' and demonstrates the weakness of that approach: network file locations are contingent on the system configuration of the local machine.
Umm no. I also run v6 (6.2) on VAX and there's no dec tcp/ip in site.
Wrong, I never used V7 of VMS but I certainly wrote code for TCP/IP. DEC used to sell the TCP/IP stack as 'The Ultrix Connection'.
It was certainly as much a part of the O/S as the video drivers I am using on my Windows laptop. Of course in those days everyone expected TCP/IP to die and for OSI to take over. That might have happened as well if the Web had not come along when it did. Back in 1994 HEPNET had already gone through exhaustion of its address space and the Internet was headed in the same direction.
Define built in. It is still a separate product and optional component. and I'm running v7...
VMS is a modular operating system, networking stacks were ALWAYS layered products that were installed separately and would boot separately.
DEC shipped their own TCP/IP drivers since version 6 at the very least and before that came out there were third party products. One of the main reasons to run the TCP/IP stack was to talk to UNIX systems.
As far as the basic technology goes DECNET is pretty similar to CHAOS and IP. At the time there was generally considered to be a divide between local and wide area network protocols. TCP/IP was originally promoted as providing the glue between independent networks.
The main advantage of DECNET over TCP was that the client software was vastly better than anything that UNIX ever produced. With DECNET you can access a network disk as if it was connected locally. The DECNET clustering software was also way ahead of its time. With clustering you could administer a hundred machines as if they were a single unit. Microsoft has tried to replicate the same capability with SMS without success - but that might also be because there never were VMS laptops...
I think the real question is "why does the USA want the DNS root servers" (most of them, anyway)?
It really is not as strategic as some folk think. The only thing that the root does is to hand off to the TLDs. Provided it does that and does not go down and there is no political idiocy there is no real problem.
What some countries are worried by is the possibility that some idiot Congressman looking to court the Florida Cuban or the Israeli lobby vote would stick an ammendment into some critical bill that requires the US to cause domains that they don't like (e.g..ps or.cu).
I don't think there is a need to worry. Everyone who understands the voluntary nature of the network knows that if any bill of that type did get passed the US would loose whatever theoretical control it has in a New York minute.
I would have fired her too. I would fire anyone who's not able to use a keyboard, or doesn't check their input twice, especially when they are responsible for huge amounts of money.
I would fire the person who designed the input scheme.
This type of mistake usually comes down to a usability error. Unless you know what derranged system they were using it is difficult to know who was at fault.
The most likely way that the error occurred is that the input field takes scientific format as an option. This means that a miskey of e for 3 or 4 can lead to seriously bad results 1335 becomes 13e5
Before people jump and say that we don't need IPv6 because NAT is good enough: No, NAT is not good enough. While I am grateful for NAT (and I am sure every other pood sod stuck with a single address only is grateful too), NAT has some serious shortcomings and limitations which increase the need for sometimes ugly, drastic or awkward workarounds for many things. It would be nice to be able to communicate with machines behind routers directly, though the security aspect that NAT provides really is useful.
The problem I see with IPv6 is that nobody has ever managed to describe a transition strategy that looks remotely viable to me.
One of the big problems is that instead of looking to see what NAT technology could do for them to facilitate the transition what we get is really a flag day strategy under a different name.
What we need is Ipv6 capable NAT boxes that are capable of doinf 4/6 translation on the fly. The main barrier to adoption of that type of strategy is folk who really can't see beyond the end-to-end principle.
The laws of the land here in the usa are supposed to be made by representatives of the
citizens of the usa. Just like any other country.
Since the US has taken the lead in asserting extraterritorial judgement in human rights matters you are dead wrong on this.
The US is bound by treaty obligations it has accepted, in fact the Constitution explicitly states that treaties signed by the US are part of US law.
That is why sooner or later there is going to be an accounting for the crimes being committed at Guantanamo. Regardless of whether Guantanamo is under US sovereignty US law clains extraterritorial jurisdiction in cases of torture.
This is not a bad thing, it would be a bad thing if the US ended up extraditing US troops to Cuba for trial for war crimes committed on their territory. On the other hand it means that Bush cannot block prosecutions by granting pardons.
My point is they are not elected by US citizens, nor do they represent US citizens. Thus what they do in their own countries should have no bearing upon our laws. "Unusual" IMO should mean unusual by the majority of these United States period.
Neither is the supreme court - by express intent of the framers.
If the US people want to change the constitution they have a mechanism for doing so. The interpretation of that constitution is not subject to popular opinion.
Regardless of its morality using international law sets a precedent that the rulings and laws of other nations (which are unelected and not beholden to the american public) can be used to
justify other issues.
Since the framers of the US Constitution framed it in the context of English law the idea of applying foreign law in interpreting the constitution is not new. In fact judgements from other common law jurisdictions are routinely considered in US courts, 'common law' really is just that. Foreign rulings are not binding precedent but they are considered illustrative.
The ammendment the court was asked to rule on in the execution of juveniles case specifically states 'cruel and unusual'. There are two ways in which the term 'unusual' can be interpreted. The first is by reference to the laws of the various states of the Union, the second is in the wider context of world standards. Execution of minors was found to be 'unusual' in both contexts. It is unusual at the state level and it is exceptionally unusual at the international level. The only countries that executed minors at the time of the rulling were despotic regimes like Sudan and Iran.
The Supremes do not have a great deal of other context in which to interpret terms like 'unusual' except by reference to international standards. If only five states executed minors but this was common internationally it could not really be considered unusual. On the other hand five states out of fifty and three nations out of 197 is very unusual.
As for not being elected, it may suprise you but many other countries also hold elections these days. Some of them for hundreds of years. Most of them even count the votes in those elections as well.
Although she was a Reagan appointee, she's generally regarded as a "swing" vote on a lot of the high-visibility social issues. A lot of 5-4 decisions over the years came down to 4 conservatives, 4 liberals, and Sandra Day O'Connor breaking the tie one way or the other.
In general she has backed the right on most matters, the main standout issue being abortion rights and other social issues.
We have reached a point which almost nobody in Washington ever wanted to reach apart from the tiny number of hard core abortion opponents. Bush is going to have to appoint a new judge to the court that the 'religious' right hopes will overturn Roe vs. Wade.
The two groups who are really upset over this are the pro-abortion folk and the bulk of the Republican party for whom this is a major major crisis which puts them in a no-win situation.
If the judge Bush appoints does not help overturn Roe vs Wade then the right wing fundies abandon Bush and the GOP.
But if Roe vs Wade is overturned abortion disappears as a vote puller for the GOP, instead it brings out much larger numbers of pro-abortion rights women. Moreover the pro-abortion rights groups are forced to campaign for abortion rights in every state of the union.
The GOP expects that the result is going to be a major net loss of votes. In most states the sentiment runs strongly pro-abortion rights. The reason that it is a vote getter for the right but not the left is that at the moment due to Roe vs Wade most women beleive that their rights are protected by the constitution and they don't need to fight for them.
So now we have a whole new situation. I expect that Bush will try to put off the decision as long as possible by nominating someone who is clearly unacceptable such as Gonzales, the author of the infamous Gitmo memo redefining the term 'torture'.
I never said anything about whether Sealand is a real country, I only quoted wiki. The GP made it seem like he was screwed if he shot at the authorities. He shot at the Royal Navy attempting to evict him, and was summoned to a court appearance. If you have any better source of info about Sealand, let's hear it.
How about a source that does not allow anyone to fill in whatever 'facts' they might have invented there on the spot? As for your claim that quoting Wiki is somehow different from saying anything thats yet more sophistry.
Wiki is a great resource but it ain't authoritative, neither is Britianica on this sort of issue.
WikiPedia is a great resource for getting pointers to find information, but it is not an authoritative source and not even close to being an authoritative source where contentious issues are involved.
The legal theory on which Bates won the earlier case is now irrelevant. 'Sealand' is now firmly within the area that the UK claims territorial jurisdiction over.
Since 'Sealand' is not self sufficient for food or energy there are obvious ways that the Royal Navy can enforce an embargo if the 'Sealand' folk refuse to respond to court sub poenas, injunctions etc. The only reason they continue to exist is that so far they have not pissed people off sufficiently to make it worth while making an example of them. Hosting an apparently trotskyite news service that appears to be inciting terrorist acts would piss people off sufficiently for action to ensue.
The alleged Principality of Sealand is an alleged micronation that claims to be an independent sovereign principality, though it is not officially recognized as such by any member of the United Nations.
Locating the server at Sealand would not have any more effect than the spurious claims made by Indymedia that journalism has a special status under UK law.
The fact of the matter is that UK law does not recognise any specific privileges for journalists. There is no public interest defense in UK law, many people beleive that their should be but it does not exist today. Equally there is no equivalent of the first ammendment.
The 'Sealand' platform is located within the 12 mile territorial limit claimed by the UK and recognized internationally. The UK government has never recognized 'Sealand' as a nation, an act that can only be performed by the Crown through orders in council.
The sophistry employed by the proponents of 'Sealand' is only equalled by the sophistry employed by the Bush administration in pretending that the Geneva Conventions do not apply universally, that there is an additional class of prisoner called an illegal combattant that is outside the protection of all conventions and that torture is not torture.
Given the serious consequences that this type of sophistry has led to I am not well disposed to people who make similarly sophisticated arguments in an attempt to claim that a selective litteral interpretation of the text of an international treaty gives rise to a consequence that was against the expressed intent of the drafters and signatories. The purpose of the various conventions on sovereignty was expressly to limit the cases in which independent sovereign rights could be asserted.
The reference to the opinion given by a judge that Sealand was then outside the UK territorial limit and thus outside UK jurisdiction actually proves the opposite of what Sealand supporters claim. The judge did not accept a motion to quash the action on the grounds that it was covered by either diplomatic immunity or sovereign immunity, nor would such a motion be accepted unless supported by the Lord Chancellor's department.
Regardless of what the purported status of Sealand is under international law it is an empirical fact that the current UK government has used force to attack other countries it recognised as sovereign territory on two separate occasions. In the case of Afghanistan the UK did not recognise the Taleban as a legitimate government but recognised Afghanistan as a sovereign territory. In the case of Iraq the UK recognised Saddam as the head of government.
If Sealand chooses to act in a lawless manner and encourages lawlessness that has direct effect on the UK mainland the UK has a right under international law to respond regardless of the alledged status of the platform.
Maybe in the future anyone to the right of michael more will be considered a bigoted prick.
The real problem with Moore is not where he is on the political spectrum, its the fact that he is almost as sloppy with facts as the likes of Rush Limbaugh.
Being sloppy with facts is even worse when the majority of the facts are on your side. Take the whole memogate incident. The evidence that Bush went AWOL from the national Guard is overwhelming but when CBS introduced one piece of evidence from a source that nobody in their right mind should ever trust the GOP was able to pretend that the whole story must be fake. (Contrast this with the media treatment of the Smear Boat Liars for Bush who were repreatedly proven to have lied and contradicted their own contemporary accounts)
Ideological zealots like Bush or Moore can be very popular for a short while. After a time however people tend to tire of them and when they do the result is usually that the party that embraced them is out of office for a very very long time. Bush is not worthy to lick the boots of Margaret Thatcher or Clement Atlee but once the country tired of them they turned against their party for more than a decade.
Ideology is a very effective tool for mobilising your base, it also cuts you off from everyone who is not part of your base.
The indymedia crew appear to be a bunch of hard left zealots whose only real common platform is that they hate everything about the current political scene.
Fox News really is not journalism. They just take people with different points of view and let them argue on television. Then they give more air time to the conservative guy who yells a lot.
Actually a closer description would be that they take people with the same point of view and have them argue about how evil liberals are.
The head of Fox News was one of the major figures in Watergate, he was deeply involved in corruption and political dirty tricks then, he is utterly unsuited to being in charge of a news organization.
Faux news is simply a 24 hoyur propaganda outlet for the Republican party and it will break them in the end the same way that Murdoch destroyed the British Conservative party. At this point the Republican party listens to nothing other than Fox news, they are completely out of touch with the country outside the beltway.
What will happen sooner or later is that a single event will occur that causes people to suddenly decide that the Republican party cannot be trusted. In the UK what happened was that the UK fell out of the exchange rate mechanism and people suddenly lost their faith in the Conservatives as being competent on eceonomic affairs.
Once that point is reaches Murdoch will do what he has done many times before, he will switch sides. Republicans who think they have a solid ideological aly in Murdoch are fooling themselves, Murdoch has never looked out for anything apart from his own wallet. He supports socialists like Blair and outright Communists like the Chinese government. Supporting the republican party in the US is a tactic, not a commitment.
The same thing would happen with indymedia if any significant political movement relied upon it for news. Since their readership is negligible and confined to the fringes this is not a major risk.
The occupied country has to really, really want to win if it wants to kick out invaders by pistol power. You have to be utterly ruthless. Taking a potshot at a passing tank wouldn't qualify. You'd have to blow up installations, knowing full well you're taking your own people out as well. More than a rifle, more than a shotgun -- it takes will, and organization.
It is worth noting that no country that has annexed territory gained in a war of aggression since the start of the 20th century has been able to prevent reversion, either back to the original state or to an independent state. The level of arms in the occupied terriotry at the start of occupation is more or less irrelevant, plenty of arms flood in after the event. Machiavelli noted this tendency back in the 1500s, the only way to make long term territorial gain is by building settlements and creating an integrated political unit.
The main exceptions to the rule are cases where the original aggression was performed by a different state. So the USSR was able to expand significantly after WWII into areas that it 'liberated' from the NAZIs. Certain parts of Germany reverted back to France after WWI and so on. Even so the effort required to maintain the occupation was significant and the teritory annexed was contiguous.
I don't think it very likely that either Mexico or Canada is going to invade the US any time soon.
What the US is currently proving in Iraq is that it is now impossible for any military power on the planet to sustain an occupation of a country with a population of more than about 5 million. The Soviets made a similar discovery in Afghanistan.
You can't win revolutions by sniping at tanks from behind a tree. The guns in our houses won't win us a lick of freedom. They just make us feel better. Freedom comes from watching who you vote for, watching what they vote for, watching where the money is going, caring about foreign policy, understanding history, understanding current events, and never, ever letting an idiot run your country.
Well you can deter an occupation that way but it is not the most effective way. The big problem with the Iraqi resistance is that any government that comes to power by the methods they have adopted is going to be utterly dreadful. Large parts of Iraqi society realize this and so when the US withdraws a civil war is inevitable. About the only thing that is likely to prevent a Lebanon style civil war is foreign intervention by a neighbor. The only neighbor with the capability is Iran. I do not beleive that the US people have yet been prepared for the fact that the most likely long term outcome of the invasion of Iraq is effectively annexation of Iraq by Iran to form a single theocratic state that effectively controls the entire gulf region.
The problem with the NRA nutters prancing around waving guns is that it is very difficult to be sure that they will protect the rights of the people rather than work against them as KKK and Hitler's blackshirts did.
Microsoft are planning to release a completely new framework for developing user interfaces, codenamed "Avalon". Avalon will (probably) be available in Longhorn, and backported to Windows XP. Avalon will be completely vector-based. So, to develop the best-looking UIs in Avalon, you will need a vector graphics tool.
Aside from icons I don't see why you need a graphics drawing tool to develop a GUI at all.
One of the most irritating features of MP3 players is the fact that the designers seem to always imagine it is necessary to make the UI look like a flying saucer, a race car, a wombat, pretty much anything apart from a windows application. Even Microsoft has gone down that path.
I find photoshop very counter-intuitive and difficult to use. A large part of the problem is that it is clearly a mac application with mac look and feel, or rather was in the edition I have. Icons only really work as a user interface if the number is small or you use the program every day.
Incidentally, Microsoft already has a photoshop competitor, Digital Image pro or something. It is aimed at folk doing digital photography but I find it a lot better for my needs than relearning photoshop yet again.
Second, most spyware is well written. Badly written spyware is ineffective -- by screwing up your system, it calls attention to itself, and encourages you to run a scan. Spyware and adware wouldn't have spread so thoroughly if it were all written by hacks.
Tell that to the folk whose machines have been made completely unstable by filthware.
The type of programers you can get to write code that is utterly unwanted and corrupt tend to apply the same work ethic towards their employers. Getting a good programmer is difficult enough for honest companies.
Most of the spyware I have looked at has serious security issues, some of these may even be deliberate, a way of creating a deniable backdoor.
The spyware attempts to make itself uninstallable. Often the programers use O/S facilities that they do not understand properly to do so.
Our synagogue now has a scroll that was at one point stolen from a synagogue during the holocaust. The synagogue it came from most likely isn't around anymore (we don't know exactly where it is from). It's no longer kosher anyway, so it's not useable, just on display, but no one really has any idea where it's come from. At any rate, yes, it is a stolen torah, but it's not like we were looking for cheap torah goods...it's a religious artifact.
That is an entirely different question. It is one thing to buy a stolen torah from the theif, quite a different thing to recover one, even if it is not possible to return it to the original owner.
The point here is to remove the incentive to steal by reducing the value of a stolen torah to as near zero as is possible. It is the same principle that is behind VIN numbers on cars, a stolen car is added to a registry of stolen vehicles and it is impossible to register a vehicle that is on the registry. That is why stolen cars have to be shipped out of the country.
Michael Jackson bought the rights to the beatles music way back in the 80's. Thats one reason to not buy beatles CD's.
No, Jackson owns the performance copyrights to the songs not the reproduction copyrights to the recordings. Jackson gets royalties when any Beatles song recorded by any artist is played on the radio.
It doesn't solve the problem of theft. If one is stolen, it might take years to recover it, if at all. Once it is recoevered, it isn't in pristine condition anymore.
How are you going to pursuade a synagogue to buy a stolen Torah? It kind of goes against the purpose of the exercise.
There are some private collectors but most of those are going to be observant.
The point is not so much recovery as to ruin the market for stolen Torahs. An antique copy might be worth $50K but a stolen one is going to be worth very much less.
The 'rebreather' was used in Thunderball which came out in 1965.
Star wars came out three weeks ago, so Bond was first by years.
After the film the US special forces called the special effects people to ask how long someone could last underwater using the rebreather. 'About three minutes', 'but our guys can do three minutes just holding their breath', 'that's what Sean Connery was doing, its just a piece of coloured plastic tube'.
Slashdot Mirror
Bin Laden was really upset by the presence of 'infidel' troops in Saudi Arabia. They were a bit inconveniently situated for Bin Laden's aspiration of starting a coup.
Bin Laden's primary focus has always been Saud but Al Zawahiri, often misleadingly referred to as 'Bin Laden's number 2' has been a terrorist for 30 years and his primary focus is Israel. Al Zawahiri was heavily involved in the murder of President Saddat for signing the camp David agreement. Al Zawahiri is the ideological leader of Al Qaeda.
The issue here is not what triggered the attack, the issue is why Al Qaeda was allowed to escape. The Afghan campaign should have been completed before any new military engagement was planned. Instead troops were being pulled from Afghanistan before the job was done. The result was that instead of putting NATO troops on the ground at the Torra Borra the US was withdrawing its specialist forces to prepare for the invasion of Iraq.
Even if Bush's claim that Saddam was involved in 9/11 were true (it has never been substantiated) it was a major tactical error to open a second front before the first was secure.
A second major error was trusting Musharaff, the prime funder and instigator of the Taleban. The democratically elected government of Pakistan had tried to dismiss Musharaff because he had been supporting terrorist groups in Cashmire that looked likely to start a full scale war with India.
The idea that Musharaff is seriously committed to the 'war on terror' is ridiculous. He is only providing the minimum of compliance. He depends on the support of the Islamists to remain in power.
Before getting into a stew it would be worthwhile considering whether it is likely that a significant number of people with Claria crap are opting to keep it.
No way would I have Claria crap on my machine but it does appear that there are people downloading the trash intentionally.
Sounds like some sort of Network File System. Voodoo!
No, NFS does not even get close. If you have used a real DECNEt file system you soon realize that NFS is grossly inferior fare.
In DECNET you have a unified file system identifier, similar to a URI. NFS suffers from being designed around the limitations of UNIX's 'everything is a file' and demonstrates the weakness of that approach: network file locations are contingent on the system configuration of the local machine.
Wrong, I never used V7 of VMS but I certainly wrote code for TCP/IP. DEC used to sell the TCP/IP stack as 'The Ultrix Connection'.
It was certainly as much a part of the O/S as the video drivers I am using on my Windows laptop. Of course in those days everyone expected TCP/IP to die and for OSI to take over. That might have happened as well if the Web had not come along when it did. Back in 1994 HEPNET had already gone through exhaustion of its address space and the Internet was headed in the same direction.
VMS is a modular operating system, networking stacks were ALWAYS layered products that were installed separately and would boot separately.
DEC shipped their own TCP/IP drivers since version 6 at the very least and before that came out there were third party products. One of the main reasons to run the TCP/IP stack was to talk to UNIX systems.
As far as the basic technology goes DECNET is pretty similar to CHAOS and IP. At the time there was generally considered to be a divide between local and wide area network protocols. TCP/IP was originally promoted as providing the glue between independent networks.
The main advantage of DECNET over TCP was that the client software was vastly better than anything that UNIX ever produced. With DECNET you can access a network disk as if it was connected locally. The DECNET clustering software was also way ahead of its time. With clustering you could administer a hundred machines as if they were a single unit. Microsoft has tried to replicate the same capability with SMS without success - but that might also be because there never were VMS laptops...
Never
It really is not as strategic as some folk think. The only thing that the root does is to hand off to the TLDs. Provided it does that and does not go down and there is no political idiocy there is no real problem.
What some countries are worried by is the possibility that some idiot Congressman looking to court the Florida Cuban or the Israeli lobby vote would stick an ammendment into some critical bill that requires the US to cause domains that they don't like (e.g. .ps or .cu).
I don't think there is a need to worry. Everyone who understands the voluntary nature of the network knows that if any bill of that type did get passed the US would loose whatever theoretical control it has in a New York minute.
I would fire the person who designed the input scheme.
This type of mistake usually comes down to a usability error. Unless you know what derranged system they were using it is difficult to know who was at fault.
The most likely way that the error occurred is that the input field takes scientific format as an option. This means that a miskey of e for 3 or 4 can lead to seriously bad results 1335 becomes 13e5
The problem I see with IPv6 is that nobody has ever managed to describe a transition strategy that looks remotely viable to me.
One of the big problems is that instead of looking to see what NAT technology could do for them to facilitate the transition what we get is really a flag day strategy under a different name.
What we need is Ipv6 capable NAT boxes that are capable of doinf 4/6 translation on the fly. The main barrier to adoption of that type of strategy is folk who really can't see beyond the end-to-end principle.
Since the US has taken the lead in asserting extraterritorial judgement in human rights matters you are dead wrong on this.
The US is bound by treaty obligations it has accepted, in fact the Constitution explicitly states that treaties signed by the US are part of US law.
That is why sooner or later there is going to be an accounting for the crimes being committed at Guantanamo. Regardless of whether Guantanamo is under US sovereignty US law clains extraterritorial jurisdiction in cases of torture.
This is not a bad thing, it would be a bad thing if the US ended up extraditing US troops to Cuba for trial for war crimes committed on their territory. On the other hand it means that Bush cannot block prosecutions by granting pardons.
Neither is the supreme court - by express intent of the framers.
If the US people want to change the constitution they have a mechanism for doing so. The interpretation of that constitution is not subject to popular opinion.
Since the framers of the US Constitution framed it in the context of English law the idea of applying foreign law in interpreting the constitution is not new. In fact judgements from other common law jurisdictions are routinely considered in US courts, 'common law' really is just that. Foreign rulings are not binding precedent but they are considered illustrative.
The ammendment the court was asked to rule on in the execution of juveniles case specifically states 'cruel and unusual'. There are two ways in which the term 'unusual' can be interpreted. The first is by reference to the laws of the various states of the Union, the second is in the wider context of world standards. Execution of minors was found to be 'unusual' in both contexts. It is unusual at the state level and it is exceptionally unusual at the international level. The only countries that executed minors at the time of the rulling were despotic regimes like Sudan and Iran.
The Supremes do not have a great deal of other context in which to interpret terms like 'unusual' except by reference to international standards. If only five states executed minors but this was common internationally it could not really be considered unusual. On the other hand five states out of fifty and three nations out of 197 is very unusual.
As for not being elected, it may suprise you but many other countries also hold elections these days. Some of them for hundreds of years. Most of them even count the votes in those elections as well.
In general she has backed the right on most matters, the main standout issue being abortion rights and other social issues.
We have reached a point which almost nobody in Washington ever wanted to reach apart from the tiny number of hard core abortion opponents. Bush is going to have to appoint a new judge to the court that the 'religious' right hopes will overturn Roe vs. Wade.
The two groups who are really upset over this are the pro-abortion folk and the bulk of the Republican party for whom this is a major major crisis which puts them in a no-win situation.
If the judge Bush appoints does not help overturn Roe vs Wade then the right wing fundies abandon Bush and the GOP.
But if Roe vs Wade is overturned abortion disappears as a vote puller for the GOP, instead it brings out much larger numbers of pro-abortion rights women. Moreover the pro-abortion rights groups are forced to campaign for abortion rights in every state of the union.
The GOP expects that the result is going to be a major net loss of votes. In most states the sentiment runs strongly pro-abortion rights. The reason that it is a vote getter for the right but not the left is that at the moment due to Roe vs Wade most women beleive that their rights are protected by the constitution and they don't need to fight for them.
So now we have a whole new situation. I expect that Bush will try to put off the decision as long as possible by nominating someone who is clearly unacceptable such as Gonzales, the author of the infamous Gitmo memo redefining the term 'torture'.
How about a source that does not allow anyone to fill in whatever 'facts' they might have invented there on the spot? As for your claim that quoting Wiki is somehow different from saying anything thats yet more sophistry.
Wiki is a great resource but it ain't authoritative, neither is Britianica on this sort of issue.
WikiPedia is a great resource for getting pointers to find information, but it is not an authoritative source and not even close to being an authoritative source where contentious issues are involved.
The legal theory on which Bates won the earlier case is now irrelevant. 'Sealand' is now firmly within the area that the UK claims territorial jurisdiction over.
Since 'Sealand' is not self sufficient for food or energy there are obvious ways that the Royal Navy can enforce an embargo if the 'Sealand' folk refuse to respond to court sub poenas, injunctions etc. The only reason they continue to exist is that so far they have not pissed people off sufficiently to make it worth while making an example of them. Hosting an apparently trotskyite news service that appears to be inciting terrorist acts would piss people off sufficiently for action to ensue.
What a great source to cite!
Locating the server at Sealand would not have any more effect than the spurious claims made by Indymedia that journalism has a special status under UK law.
The fact of the matter is that UK law does not recognise any specific privileges for journalists. There is no public interest defense in UK law, many people beleive that their should be but it does not exist today. Equally there is no equivalent of the first ammendment.
The 'Sealand' platform is located within the 12 mile territorial limit claimed by the UK and recognized internationally. The UK government has never recognized 'Sealand' as a nation, an act that can only be performed by the Crown through orders in council.
The sophistry employed by the proponents of 'Sealand' is only equalled by the sophistry employed by the Bush administration in pretending that the Geneva Conventions do not apply universally, that there is an additional class of prisoner called an illegal combattant that is outside the protection of all conventions and that torture is not torture.
Given the serious consequences that this type of sophistry has led to I am not well disposed to people who make similarly sophisticated arguments in an attempt to claim that a selective litteral interpretation of the text of an international treaty gives rise to a consequence that was against the expressed intent of the drafters and signatories. The purpose of the various conventions on sovereignty was expressly to limit the cases in which independent sovereign rights could be asserted.
The reference to the opinion given by a judge that Sealand was then outside the UK territorial limit and thus outside UK jurisdiction actually proves the opposite of what Sealand supporters claim. The judge did not accept a motion to quash the action on the grounds that it was covered by either diplomatic immunity or sovereign immunity, nor would such a motion be accepted unless supported by the Lord Chancellor's department.
Regardless of what the purported status of Sealand is under international law it is an empirical fact that the current UK government has used force to attack other countries it recognised as sovereign territory on two separate occasions. In the case of Afghanistan the UK did not recognise the Taleban as a legitimate government but recognised Afghanistan as a sovereign territory. In the case of Iraq the UK recognised Saddam as the head of government.
If Sealand chooses to act in a lawless manner and encourages lawlessness that has direct effect on the UK mainland the UK has a right under international law to respond regardless of the alledged status of the platform.
The real problem with Moore is not where he is on the political spectrum, its the fact that he is almost as sloppy with facts as the likes of Rush Limbaugh.
Being sloppy with facts is even worse when the majority of the facts are on your side. Take the whole memogate incident. The evidence that Bush went AWOL from the national Guard is overwhelming but when CBS introduced one piece of evidence from a source that nobody in their right mind should ever trust the GOP was able to pretend that the whole story must be fake. (Contrast this with the media treatment of the Smear Boat Liars for Bush who were repreatedly proven to have lied and contradicted their own contemporary accounts)
Ideological zealots like Bush or Moore can be very popular for a short while. After a time however people tend to tire of them and when they do the result is usually that the party that embraced them is out of office for a very very long time. Bush is not worthy to lick the boots of Margaret Thatcher or Clement Atlee but once the country tired of them they turned against their party for more than a decade.
Ideology is a very effective tool for mobilising your base, it also cuts you off from everyone who is not part of your base.
The indymedia crew appear to be a bunch of hard left zealots whose only real common platform is that they hate everything about the current political scene.
Actually a closer description would be that they take people with the same point of view and have them argue about how evil liberals are.
The head of Fox News was one of the major figures in Watergate, he was deeply involved in corruption and political dirty tricks then, he is utterly unsuited to being in charge of a news organization.
Faux news is simply a 24 hoyur propaganda outlet for the Republican party and it will break them in the end the same way that Murdoch destroyed the British Conservative party. At this point the Republican party listens to nothing other than Fox news, they are completely out of touch with the country outside the beltway.
What will happen sooner or later is that a single event will occur that causes people to suddenly decide that the Republican party cannot be trusted. In the UK what happened was that the UK fell out of the exchange rate mechanism and people suddenly lost their faith in the Conservatives as being competent on eceonomic affairs.
Once that point is reaches Murdoch will do what he has done many times before, he will switch sides. Republicans who think they have a solid ideological aly in Murdoch are fooling themselves, Murdoch has never looked out for anything apart from his own wallet. He supports socialists like Blair and outright Communists like the Chinese government. Supporting the republican party in the US is a tactic, not a commitment.
The same thing would happen with indymedia if any significant political movement relied upon it for news. Since their readership is negligible and confined to the fringes this is not a major risk.
It is worth noting that no country that has annexed territory gained in a war of aggression since the start of the 20th century has been able to prevent reversion, either back to the original state or to an independent state. The level of arms in the occupied terriotry at the start of occupation is more or less irrelevant, plenty of arms flood in after the event. Machiavelli noted this tendency back in the 1500s, the only way to make long term territorial gain is by building settlements and creating an integrated political unit.
The main exceptions to the rule are cases where the original aggression was performed by a different state. So the USSR was able to expand significantly after WWII into areas that it 'liberated' from the NAZIs. Certain parts of Germany reverted back to France after WWI and so on. Even so the effort required to maintain the occupation was significant and the teritory annexed was contiguous.
I don't think it very likely that either Mexico or Canada is going to invade the US any time soon.
What the US is currently proving in Iraq is that it is now impossible for any military power on the planet to sustain an occupation of a country with a population of more than about 5 million. The Soviets made a similar discovery in Afghanistan.
You can't win revolutions by sniping at tanks from behind a tree. The guns in our houses won't win us a lick of freedom. They just make us feel better. Freedom comes from watching who you vote for, watching what they vote for, watching where the money is going, caring about foreign policy, understanding history, understanding current events, and never, ever letting an idiot run your country.
Well you can deter an occupation that way but it is not the most effective way. The big problem with the Iraqi resistance is that any government that comes to power by the methods they have adopted is going to be utterly dreadful. Large parts of Iraqi society realize this and so when the US withdraws a civil war is inevitable. About the only thing that is likely to prevent a Lebanon style civil war is foreign intervention by a neighbor. The only neighbor with the capability is Iran. I do not beleive that the US people have yet been prepared for the fact that the most likely long term outcome of the invasion of Iraq is effectively annexation of Iraq by Iran to form a single theocratic state that effectively controls the entire gulf region.
The problem with the NRA nutters prancing around waving guns is that it is very difficult to be sure that they will protect the rights of the people rather than work against them as KKK and Hitler's blackshirts did.
Aside from icons I don't see why you need a graphics drawing tool to develop a GUI at all.
One of the most irritating features of MP3 players is the fact that the designers seem to always imagine it is necessary to make the UI look like a flying saucer, a race car, a wombat, pretty much anything apart from a windows application. Even Microsoft has gone down that path.
I find photoshop very counter-intuitive and difficult to use. A large part of the problem is that it is clearly a mac application with mac look and feel, or rather was in the edition I have. Icons only really work as a user interface if the number is small or you use the program every day.
Incidentally, Microsoft already has a photoshop competitor, Digital Image pro or something. It is aimed at folk doing digital photography but I find it a lot better for my needs than relearning photoshop yet again.
Tell that to the folk whose machines have been made completely unstable by filthware.
The type of programers you can get to write code that is utterly unwanted and corrupt tend to apply the same work ethic towards their employers. Getting a good programmer is difficult enough for honest companies.
Most of the spyware I have looked at has serious security issues, some of these may even be deliberate, a way of creating a deniable backdoor.
The spyware attempts to make itself uninstallable. Often the programers use O/S facilities that they do not understand properly to do so.
That is an entirely different question. It is one thing to buy a stolen torah from the theif, quite a different thing to recover one, even if it is not possible to return it to the original owner.
The point here is to remove the incentive to steal by reducing the value of a stolen torah to as near zero as is possible. It is the same principle that is behind VIN numbers on cars, a stolen car is added to a registry of stolen vehicles and it is impossible to register a vehicle that is on the registry. That is why stolen cars have to be shipped out of the country.
No, Jackson owns the performance copyrights to the songs not the reproduction copyrights to the recordings. Jackson gets royalties when any Beatles song recorded by any artist is played on the radio.
Two words: Crazy Frog.
How are you going to pursuade a synagogue to buy a stolen Torah? It kind of goes against the purpose of the exercise.
There are some private collectors but most of those are going to be observant.
The point is not so much recovery as to ruin the market for stolen Torahs. An antique copy might be worth $50K but a stolen one is going to be worth very much less.
Star wars came out three weeks ago, so Bond was first by years.
After the film the US special forces called the special effects people to ask how long someone could last underwater using the rebreather. 'About three minutes', 'but our guys can do three minutes just holding their breath', 'that's what Sean Connery was doing, its just a piece of coloured plastic tube'.