Secondly, approaching with infantry exposes far more people to harm.
Urg.. Please...
This wasn't the conquest phase of a war, where an army must try gain control over as much territory as fast as possible and with the least loss of life and resources. It was the occupation phase, where they're supposed to be bringing order and stability, and winning the trust of the populace.
Unleashing cannon fire on crowds on the scantest of evidence, and (worse, far worse) pulverising the vehicle of good samaritans, does not help in that goal.
I'm not even trying to look at it from the legal and Iraqi sides here, just the "Whats best for US" side. Your analysis fails completely.
Even if the wounded man was an insurgent, the ROEs state the laws of war must be honoured and that means you don't shoot up those who are wounded and clearly not part of combat. The gunner even demonstrates *awareness* of this in begging the wounded man to pick up a weapon.
They then lie over the RT and say people are picking up bodies and get permission to engage on that basis.
So:
1. The crew had absolutely no reason, based on what we know they *knew*, to engage (the gunner clearly was itching to kill the wounded man - he sounds like a disturbed young man). It is a clear-cut war-crime.
2. Even the decision to allow the crew to engage seems very dodgy - what military objective is served by engaging people who are collecting bodies?
I am staggered that people can watch this and call it a "tragic mistake", but I guess those who took King W's shilling to go abroad as his imperial stormtroopers have to rationalise the murder and mayhem they have caused to themselves somehow.
I find it hard to take you seriously, as you keep saying "Once someone is dead, he's dead.". You say you've watched the video, but then how could you have missed the fact the gunner *says* the man is *wounded* and *clearly* is begging the man to reach for a gun so he can finish him off.
It's like you're watching a different video.
1. They knew the man was wounded and still alive - the gunner says so!!
2. They could see the people who arrived were trying to help the wounded man.
3. They lied to their command and said the arrivals were picking up weapons
Thanks for pointing out the kids survived. I noticed that too since - their pictures (with impressive scars) are on the website.
Seriously though, you havn't really watched the video. Go watch it again, and *listen* (or read the subtitles).
05:30 There's one guy moving down there but he's uh, he's wounded.
05:35 All right, we'll let 'em know so they can hurry up and get over here.
05:40 One-Eight, we also have one individual, uh, appears to be wounded trying to crawl away.
07:36 Pilot: Picking up the wounded?
07:38 Gunner: Yeah, we're trying to get permission to engage.
07:41 Gunner: Come on, let us shoot!
07:49 Gunner: They're taking him.
The gunner can then be heard getting very frustrated as he watches the man (who the gunner knows is badly wounded, but who he's still itching to kill) being loaded into the van. The pilot is asking for permission and gets it and the gunner fires.
That's clearly a war-crime.
I am absolutely staggered at the energy you are willing to put in to try defend it (lots of irrelevant rubbish mostly - it doesn't matter *why* the AH-64 was there, it doesn't matter what happened earlier - and the US ROE agrees with me). Particularly the way you misrepresent what happened. The man being loaded in the van was *wounded* and anyone who watched the video must know the crew were fully aware of this!
Have a read of the ROE, they're on the linked site - it doesn't seem to me that:
- their actions were proportional and/or in accordance with military objectives
- doesn't seem they carried out a "Collateral Damage Assessment"
- doesn't seem like they did much to "Positively ID" the targets and discriminate combatants from non-combatants.
- further, this group of people clearly were not in contact with any US forces, and my reading of the 2006 ROE suggests that after 10 minutes of no-contact that use of force requires a more careful assessment than otherwise.
In a previous post I wrote the crew ought to be thrown in a hole for the rest of their lives, but it also seems to me now that whoever gave them the OK to engage was also highly negligent in acting on such scanty information. They should be in a hole for a few years too.
Course, it's the US military, so that's never going to happen..
Helicopters can get additional lift from the airflow of forward flight. Hovering costs significantly more energy (i.e. fuel / station time) than flying circles. Also, as they need more energy to hover, they tend to make a *lot* more noise.
The Geneva conventions were updated after WWII precisely because they did not cover resistance fighters. The current GC protects non-uniformed combatants on the battlefield when captured, wounded or otherwise hors de combat just as it does for regular, uniformed combatants. Those protections remain in place till the point where their case can be decided on by "competent tribunal" (i.e., well away from the battlefield).
The protection I'm talking about is that offered to civilians by the 4th GC. It applies *generally* to civilians:
(1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause,...
To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:
(a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
(2) The wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for....
They didn't fuck up. They murdered civilians who:
- constituted no threat - were acting to tend to wounded
The AH-64 crew, according to the 4th GC, were bound to *protect* those civilians - not execute them! The gunner can clearly be heard itching to finish off the wounded man! At the end the crew are *laughing* about humvees driving over bodies, and later they're blaming the civilians for the death of the kids!
You have no type-safety there: some_call() may be the method that fulfills the intent of the template then again, maybe it's something completely different that just happens to have the same name.
What you're describing is basically a pre-processor/macro system. And it's a triviality to use one with Java or any other language - just add cpp, m4, whatever floats your boat, to your build process. Guess what, this is basically what C++ templates are.
Generics that act on well-defined types are a different and far more powerful thing, and C++ doesn't have it.
Also, though I havn't used C#, I think you may be wrong to claim C# generics are template based like C++. AFAICT, they're proper type-based generics. All in all, I'm left wondering if you understand generics/templates and am suspicious of your claims about which languages do what..
It provides no such protection for evacuating the dead;
Civilians do not need specific protection. It is *always* incumbent upon the military to try avoid killing civilians, whether they're walking down the street, picking up bodies, whatever..
Anyway, it's irrelevant - the crew clearly were aware the civilians were helping a wounded man.
You think they acted correctly when they shot up the civilians attempting to aid the wounded man?
(1. Even soldiers have protected status once hors de combat - and the gunner knew that, it is clear. 2. Civilians are always protected, particularly when attending to the wounded. 3. The crew lied when they called in for permission to engage the 2nd time.)
It's a clear-cut case of war-crime, and that crew should be thrown in a hole for the rest of their lives.
You can only have a trusted mesh when you trust all of the nodes. You can only trust all of the nodes if you own them all and they are all under your control.
Might be worth your while googling for byzantine general problem. You do not per se need to trust every element in order to draw useful conclusions.
They don't have to list every possible example that supports their judgement, they just have to give sufficient examples to support their reasoning. Further, we expect judges to be experts in the law, not in computers. It was their expertise in law that was being called upon, not the latter.
Cows are climate neutral. All the carbon they produce is from the grass they eat, which, as it grows back, absorbs it ready for the next munch.... Subsistence farmers generally don't use much in the way of petroleum-fuled heavy machinery, or petroleum-based fertiliser
Why not connect the dots between your own words?;) The petroleum heavy fertiliser production processes go to grow the feeds for livestock in modern, industrial farming. There's no way livestock fed on it are carbon neutral, surely?
I'm not an american either, but am from a country that had a history of similarly religiously motivated "idiocy". I've had this discussion before, and experience has conditioned me to assume the other side will be deliberately ignorant.
Here's what annoys me:
- You can not separate the educational issues from the method. If some preventative method must be self-administered and if it requires public education to do so successfully, then the efficacy of the education *is part of the efficacy of the method*.
- The theoretical and laboratory efficacy of some method are *NOT* the same as the *epidemiological* efficacy.
- Theoretical and laboratory efficacy, informed by estimates of the efficacy of education, should be used as inputs to determine whether it is worth trialling a method - for real-world epidemiological study.
- Public health, across the population, should be informed by *epidemiological* studies.
E.g. if abstinence under "lab conditions" is 100% effective, but if 40% of the time people can't "use" abstinence correctly in the real-world despite education, then the epidemiological efficacy of abstinence is 60%. Similarly, if condoms are 98% effective under lab conditions, and 10% failure rate in the real-world, then their real effectiveness is 88%.
The public health messages you're quoting are part of the public health *education* campaign to encourage people to use condoms. They're deliberately picking the higher, clinical conditions / perfect-use statistic for *educational* purposes. I.e. they're stressing how good condoms can be when used correctly to encourage people to use them, and to stress the need to use them correctly.
If you were having an honest debate about the merits of one form of preventative health care versus another then, presuming the real-world, epidemiological studies are settled, you must use those - not the theoretical, peak lab efficacy! And anyone using the lab figures for, e.g., condoms, in a debate on pregnancy rates or STD rates would be as guilty of dishonesty as someone claiming abstinence to be 100%. Note that public education is different from public debate (e.g. latter occurs before you'd decide to roll out a campaign to do the former).
Do you see the difference?
If we want to try keep things objective and avoid making public health decisions on political whims, then we need to rely on apolitical, real-world data. We need to make sure our processes are data driven. I.e. we should try apply some kind of scientific method. We can't eliminate politics altogether, but we can at least agree to honour the best available factual data.
Sorry if I mistook you for a religious nut incorrectly, but "abstinence is the best" kind of ill-informed thinking now just annoys me greatly.
I really worry about the poor grasp of science many slashdot mods must have for you have to reached +5 insightful.
a) If a method is hard to keep to, and if someone people fail, then this counts against the efficacy of the method.
If you think that's the case, then you must also think that condoms are far more effective than the studies show.
b) We have **DATA**, from real world *studies* across large populations, which show that, all else being equal, a group of teens who are told to use abstinence as a birth control mechanism will have higher pregnancy rates amongst their females than those who are told to use other forms of birth control. By implication, this means abstinence is also a much much worse form of STD control.
So you have to simply be on crack, or endowed with an incredibly tiny mind, to think that abstinence is an effective birth or STD control method for populations of people.
Now, you may want to argue abstinence is more effective at preventing kid having sex, and I suspect this is the real motivation with any espousing abstinence as a birth control method, but I'm not sure there's even any evidence for *that*.
Sun made it very hard for external people to jump in and contribute, yes. Even within Sun there can be an obstacle course of processes to overcome to commit anything bigger than bug fixes.
However short-sighted it would be for Oracle to strangle OpenSolaris development, the OpenSolaris code that's out there is forever licensed under the CDDL - which is a cleaned up version of the Mozilla Public Licence don't forget.
Abstinence is less effective than condoms. Anyone who says abstinence is 100% perfect is an idiot, probably with an agenda. It's the equivalent of saying "condoms would be 100%, if they didn't tear, or get put on wrong, or...".
Let's say it again and again till it sticks: Abstinence is *less* effective than condoms, based on real-world data.
Slashdot Mirror
Secondly, approaching with infantry exposes far more people to harm.
Urg.. Please...
This wasn't the conquest phase of a war, where an army must try gain control over as much territory as fast as possible and with the least loss of life and resources. It was the occupation phase, where they're supposed to be bringing order and stability, and winning the trust of the populace.
Unleashing cannon fire on crowds on the scantest of evidence, and (worse, far worse) pulverising the vehicle of good samaritans, does not help in that goal.
I'm not even trying to look at it from the legal and Iraqi sides here, just the "Whats best for US" side. Your analysis fails completely.
Even if the wounded man was an insurgent, the ROEs state the laws of war must be honoured and that means you don't shoot up those who are wounded and clearly not part of combat. The gunner even demonstrates *awareness* of this in begging the wounded man to pick up a weapon.
They then lie over the RT and say people are picking up bodies and get permission to engage on that basis.
So:
1. The crew had absolutely no reason, based on what we know they *knew*, to engage (the gunner clearly was itching to kill the wounded man - he sounds like a disturbed young man). It is a clear-cut war-crime.
2. Even the decision to allow the crew to engage seems very dodgy - what military objective is served by engaging people who are collecting bodies?
I am staggered that people can watch this and call it a "tragic mistake", but I guess those who took King W's shilling to go abroad as his imperial stormtroopers have to rationalise the murder and mayhem they have caused to themselves somehow.
I find it hard to take you seriously, as you keep saying "Once someone is dead, he's dead.". You say you've watched the video, but then how could you have missed the fact the gunner *says* the man is *wounded* and *clearly* is begging the man to reach for a gun so he can finish him off.
It's like you're watching a different video.
1. They knew the man was wounded and still alive - the gunner says so!!
2. They could see the people who arrived were trying to help the wounded man.
3. They lied to their command and said the arrivals were picking up weapons
Thanks for pointing out the kids survived. I noticed that too since - their pictures (with impressive scars) are on the website.
Seriously though, you havn't really watched the video. Go watch it again, and *listen* (or read the subtitles).
05:30 There's one guy moving down there but he's uh, he's wounded.
05:35 All right, we'll let 'em know so they can hurry up and get over here.
05:40 One-Eight, we also have one individual, uh, appears to be wounded trying to crawl away.
07:36 Pilot: Picking up the wounded?
07:38 Gunner: Yeah, we're trying to get permission to engage.
07:41 Gunner: Come on, let us shoot!
07:49 Gunner: They're taking him.
The gunner can then be heard getting very frustrated as he watches the man (who the gunner knows is badly wounded, but who he's still itching to kill) being loaded into the van. The pilot is asking for permission and gets it and the gunner fires.
That's clearly a war-crime.
I am absolutely staggered at the energy you are willing to put in to try defend it (lots of irrelevant rubbish mostly - it doesn't matter *why* the AH-64 was there, it doesn't matter what happened earlier - and the US ROE agrees with me). Particularly the way you misrepresent what happened. The man being loaded in the van was *wounded* and anyone who watched the video must know the crew were fully aware of this!
I remain appalled at your mind-set.
Have a read of the ROE, they're on the linked site - it doesn't seem to me that:
- their actions were proportional and/or in accordance with military objectives
- doesn't seem they carried out a "Collateral Damage Assessment"
- doesn't seem like they did much to "Positively ID" the targets and discriminate combatants from non-combatants.
- further, this group of people clearly were not in contact with any US forces, and my reading of the 2006 ROE suggests that after 10 minutes of no-contact that use of force requires a more careful assessment than otherwise.
In a previous post I wrote the crew ought to be thrown in a hole for the rest of their lives, but it also seems to me now that whoever gave them the OK to engage was also highly negligent in acting on such scanty information. They should be in a hole for a few years too.
Course, it's the US military, so that's never going to happen..
Helicopters can get additional lift from the airflow of forward flight. Hovering costs significantly more energy (i.e. fuel / station time) than flying circles. Also, as they need more energy to hover, they tend to make a *lot* more noise.
You are mistaken, the post-WWII GC update allow for irregular, non-uniformed insurgents, and protects them similarly to regular, uniformed combatants.
The Geneva conventions were updated after WWII precisely because they did not cover resistance fighters. The current GC protects non-uniformed combatants on the battlefield when captured, wounded or otherwise hors de combat just as it does for regular, uniformed combatants. Those protections remain in place till the point where their case can be decided on by "competent tribunal" (i.e., well away from the battlefield).
The USA signed and ratified the 1949 conventions.
The protection I'm talking about is that offered to civilians by the 4th GC. It applies *generally* to civilians:
(1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, ...
To this end the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:
(a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;
(2) The wounded and sick shall be collected and cared for. ...
They didn't fuck up. They murdered civilians who:
- constituted no threat
- were acting to tend to wounded
The AH-64 crew, according to the 4th GC, were bound to *protect* those civilians - not execute them! The gunner can clearly be heard itching to finish off the wounded man! At the end the crew are *laughing* about humvees driving over bodies, and later they're blaming the civilians for the death of the kids!
Your mind-set frightens me.
You have no type-safety there: some_call() may be the method that fulfills the intent of the template then again, maybe it's something completely different that just happens to have the same name.
What you're describing is basically a pre-processor/macro system. And it's a triviality to use one with Java or any other language - just add cpp, m4, whatever floats your boat, to your build process. Guess what, this is basically what C++ templates are.
Generics that act on well-defined types are a different and far more powerful thing, and C++ doesn't have it.
Also, though I havn't used C#, I think you may be wrong to claim C# generics are template based like C++. AFAICT, they're proper type-based generics. All in all, I'm left wondering if you understand generics/templates and am suspicious of your claims about which languages do what..
It provides no such protection for evacuating the dead;
Civilians do not need specific protection. It is *always* incumbent upon the military to try avoid killing civilians, whether they're walking down the street, picking up bodies, whatever..
Anyway, it's irrelevant - the crew clearly were aware the civilians were helping a wounded man.
You think they acted correctly when they shot up the civilians attempting to aid the wounded man?
(1. Even soldiers have protected status once hors de combat - and the gunner knew that, it is clear. 2. Civilians are always protected, particularly when attending to the wounded. 3. The crew lied when they called in for permission to engage the 2nd time.)
It's a clear-cut case of war-crime, and that crew should be thrown in a hole for the rest of their lives.
You can only have a trusted mesh when you trust all of the nodes. You can only trust all of the nodes if you own them all and they are all under your control.
Might be worth your while googling for byzantine general problem. You do not per se need to trust every element in order to draw useful conclusions.
They don't have to list every possible example that supports their judgement, they just have to give sufficient examples to support their reasoning. Further, we expect judges to be experts in the law, not in computers. It was their expertise in law that was being called upon, not the latter.
But modern population levels are only sustainable because of industrialised farming requiring lots of energy..
Cows are climate neutral. All the carbon they produce is from the grass they eat, which, as it grows back, absorbs it ready for the next munch. ...
Subsistence farmers generally don't use much in the way of petroleum-fuled heavy machinery, or petroleum-based fertiliser
Why not connect the dots between your own words? ;) The petroleum heavy fertiliser production processes go to grow the feeds for livestock in modern, industrial farming. There's no way livestock fed on it are carbon neutral, surely?
I'm not an american either, but am from a country that had a history of similarly religiously motivated "idiocy". I've had this discussion before, and experience has conditioned me to assume the other side will be deliberately ignorant.
Here's what annoys me:
- You can not separate the educational issues from the method. If some preventative method must be self-administered and if it requires public education to do so successfully, then the efficacy of the education *is part of the efficacy of the method*.
- The theoretical and laboratory efficacy of some method are *NOT* the same as the *epidemiological* efficacy.
- Theoretical and laboratory efficacy, informed by estimates of the efficacy of education, should be used as inputs to determine whether it is worth trialling a method - for real-world epidemiological study.
- Public health, across the population, should be informed by *epidemiological* studies.
E.g. if abstinence under "lab conditions" is 100% effective, but if 40% of the time people can't "use" abstinence correctly in the real-world despite education, then the epidemiological efficacy of abstinence is 60%. Similarly, if condoms are 98% effective under lab conditions, and 10% failure rate in the real-world, then their real effectiveness is 88%.
The public health messages you're quoting are part of the public health *education* campaign to encourage people to use condoms. They're deliberately picking the higher, clinical conditions / perfect-use statistic for *educational* purposes. I.e. they're stressing how good condoms can be when used correctly to encourage people to use them, and to stress the need to use them correctly.
If you were having an honest debate about the merits of one form of preventative health care versus another then, presuming the real-world, epidemiological studies are settled, you must use those - not the theoretical, peak lab efficacy! And anyone using the lab figures for, e.g., condoms, in a debate on pregnancy rates or STD rates would be as guilty of dishonesty as someone claiming abstinence to be 100%. Note that public education is different from public debate (e.g. latter occurs before you'd decide to roll out a campaign to do the former).
Do you see the difference?
If we want to try keep things objective and avoid making public health decisions on political whims, then we need to rely on apolitical, real-world data. We need to make sure our processes are data driven. I.e. we should try apply some kind of scientific method. We can't eliminate politics altogether, but we can at least agree to honour the best available factual data.
Sorry if I mistook you for a religious nut incorrectly, but "abstinence is the best" kind of ill-informed thinking now just annoys me greatly.
correction: If you think's /not/ the case.
I really worry about the poor grasp of science many slashdot mods must have for you have to reached +5 insightful.
a) If a method is hard to keep to, and if someone people fail, then this counts against the efficacy of the method.
If you think that's the case, then you must also think that condoms are far more effective than the studies show.
b) We have **DATA**, from real world *studies* across large populations, which show that, all else being equal, a group of teens who are told to use abstinence as a birth control mechanism will have higher pregnancy rates amongst their females than those who are told to use other forms of birth control. By implication, this means abstinence is also a much much worse form of STD control.
So you have to simply be on crack, or endowed with an incredibly tiny mind, to think that abstinence is an effective birth or STD control method for populations of people.
Now, you may want to argue abstinence is more effective at preventing kid having sex, and I suspect this is the real motivation with any espousing abstinence as a birth control method, but I'm not sure there's even any evidence for *that*.
Anyway.. you're a prize idiot.
Sun made it very hard for external people to jump in and contribute, yes. Even within Sun there can be an obstacle course of processes to overcome to commit anything bigger than bug fixes.
How is this insightful?
However short-sighted it would be for Oracle to strangle OpenSolaris development, the OpenSolaris code that's out there is forever licensed under the CDDL - which is a cleaned up version of the Mozilla Public Licence don't forget.
Abstinence is less effective than condoms. Anyone who says abstinence is 100% perfect is an idiot, probably with an agenda. It's the equivalent of saying "condoms would be 100%, if they didn't tear, or get put on wrong, or ...".
Let's say it again and again till it sticks: Abstinence is *less* effective than condoms, based on real-world data.
Ok, it's just a distribution glitch that some stuff still downloads without SWFV. See Linuxcentre.
Do me a favour, try sampling some of the other programmes. I think you're downloading a pre-SWF verification programme.
Mod parent up / +1.
Ok, that's weird. The flashvhigh works for me now too.