Apple puts out a proprietary, defective-by-design consumer electronics product and won't port the required software to platforms other than Mac OS or Windows and it's somehow a Linux shortcoming?
It is when that's the mp3 player people want to use.
Wait. This is just nonsensical paranoia. Please tell explain to me how, "There's this video thats put out by liars," is positive exposure? How can being caught in a sham and a lie "get your point across." That makes no sense at all.
A child porn database already exists. It's run by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The government searches it everytime they prosecute a child porn case, because the same photos are circled around the Internet for years. Once the child in the photo is confirmed by medical examination to be both a real child under 18 years of age, the photo is flagged as such. US attorneys tell grand juries this every time they bring an indictment against someone. Given this, it strikes me as basically just a showey "we're doing something" move.
Open source means you can read the source, much like an "open book exam" means you can read the book.
That's not true. Open source means much more than that, and you know it. There are plenty of proprietary software that is distributed with source, sometimes as a necessity, as in the case of scripting languages, or cross platform compatability. (Proprietary UNIX programs have frequently been distributed as source, since that was the only way to ensure the program could run on the users' actual hardware.) Other times a source license would be sold as an option to the usage license to a proprietary program. These source licenses are typically accompanied by a nondisclosure agreement. Even Microsoft will distributed the source to certain things as part of their Shared Source inititive.
So open source is not merely being able to read the source. To qualify as open source, you must be granted the right to:
Free Redistribution
Access to Source Code
Maked Derivitive Works
Protect the Integrity of the Author's Work (i.e. you cant take my name off it, and you can't say I made something I didn't. Unless, I give you permission to do so.)
Be Non-Discrimitory to Person, Groups, or Fields of Endevor
All Rights Must Be Transferable
The License Must Not Be Product Specific
The License Must Not Restrict Other Software
The License Must be Technology Neutral
I may not be a big fan of RMS, but I'm not fan or ESR either. They're both self-rightous idealogues as far as I'm concerned. However, I'm not going to let someone willfully misrepresent the other side.
so it's as i suspected, it's just circular logic. graphic artists use macs because graphic artists use macs. The original reasoning has long become moot.
They also had Einstein and Jim Henson, and I've never heard Apple is working on theoretical Physics or making puppets...
Clearly you haven't seen their Jon Hodgeman commercials.
The Think Different campaign was clearly aimed at giving the impression that Apple was creative, revolutionary, perhaps even iconclastic. It dove-tailed in to the perception that macs are for artsy types. (Why macs are used for graphic design over pcs, I never understood. They are though. Personally, I suspect there's a bit of circular logic at work here.) Those ideals, are by definition, progressive. If Apple wants to protray themselves as being progressive, then they should act like it, at least a little bit, They don't have to go all Ben & Jerry's, but sweatshops? Yeah, they're bad. If they don't, they at best look like everyone else, and at worse, like hypocritical Google, or perhaps even Yahoo (, there's a democracy adovcate over here Comrade Police State)!.
Not to minimize the copious consumption of Americans, by far the largest consumers on the planet. (Hell, even my family has more cars than people, even not counting the collector car (69 Charger, all original)), but I don't know if the Japanese can be considered that frugal. Afterall, thats a culture that replaces all their electronics at least every two years, simply because they're not stylish anymore. Now that's consumption.
Strictly speaking, shortwave's point of origin is traceable. Certain number stations are known to originate from specific locations, including Havana, the Yugoslav embassy in Washington DC, Albuquerque, and the CIA spy school. Origin doesn't matter though, it's the receiver that's clandestine.
BoingBoing posted about strange 5 digit spam last week.
we'd like to start sharing stuff via a VPN. The only problem is I'm the only marginally tech savvy one in the bunch,
In other words, you decided to share stuff via a VPN. I haveto ask what are you trying to share that can't be shared using simpilar approach (e.g. email)?
A commander-in-chief who is committed to this conflict.
Yes, but also equally commited to an ineffective strategy. From the very beginning the administration botched this. How? They didn't decided years prior to the 2003 and 9/11 that they wanted to invade Iraq, and do it on the cheap. Quick! Fast! Nimble! Light! That was the military of of the future, or so they, with their lack of military knowledge, decided. They planned this out over three martini lunches, rounds of golf, and essays at the Weekly Standard. They gain power, and decide to implement their ideas. When the military leadership balked at the plans, as Gen. Shinseki did, they publicly humilated him and undercut his authority by naming his successor more than a year in advance of his retirement. What made Gen Shenseki think he could question Richard Perle and Doug Feith? Oh, I don't know. Pehaps it was the fact that he spent his entire adult life planning wars.
The war was going to to topple a repressive government and cause a tsunami of democracy to spread throughout the region. I'm sure many an eye needed to be dried at PNAC when this scenario was outlined. However, to the career diplomats and analysts at the State Department it was absurd. It was so absurd that they issued a report entitled, "Iraq, the Middle East and Change: No Dominoes" But what do they know? It's just their job to study the politics and culture of the Middle East.
More than anything, what angers me the most about the war isn't the lies, or the fabrications. It's that Bush didn't even listen to his own advisors on how to do it right. That is arrogance. That is incompetence. The fact that he wouldn't change tactics when the insurgency was still at a manageable size, has doomed the occupation. Even if a change in tactics today would increase the likelihood of succcess, he wouldn't do it. It is more important to prove his and his friends ideas about how to fight a war were right, than winning the war. If you're not in a war to win, you're just murdering people.
Our training of the Iraqi National Army so they can stand up to the insurgents when we leave.
Sounds good, but again incompetence has doomed that. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200512/iraq-army Don't get me wrong. The US military is doing the best job they can, and I'm sure they've achieved more success than others would, it's just that they're in bad situation that has been made worse through incompetent political leadership.
Just listen to the White House and Pentagon estimates of the number of divisions trained and how many are combat ready. It fluctuates all the time. One month is 100,000 Iraqi troops with three divisions ready. Next month it's 60,000 with only one division ready. That doesn't make any sense. Even if you take those numbers at face value, like the White House wants you to, it doesn't make any sense. Where do these soldiers go? Oh wait. We do know.
Bush says, "As they stand up, we'll stand down." Heard that 40 years ago, only then it was was "vietnamization."
We have adopted a plan which we have worked out in cooperation with the South Vietnamese for the complete withdrawal of all U.S. combat ground forces, and their replacement by South Vietnamese forces on an orderly scheduled timetable. This withdrawal will be made from strength and not from weakness. As South Vietnamese forces become stronger, the rate of American withdrawal can become greater.
I have not and do not intend to announce the timetable for our program. And there are obvious reasons for this decision which I am sure you will understand. As I have indicated on several occasions, the rate of withdrawal will depend on developments on three fronts.
One of these is the progress which can be or might be made in the Paris talks. An announcement of a fixed timetable for our withdrawal would c
That sounds all well and good until you realize that this is an insurgency, not a straight forward war. There's a truism about guerilla wars. "The guerrilla wins by not losing and the government loses by not winning." Using the Pentagon's own public estimates, the insurgency has grown in the past three years, from 5,000 to 20,000 [http://www.brookings.edu/fp/saban/iraq/index.pdf page 18.]. Even if you assume that the initial estimates of 5,000 were off, it's clear that the insurgency is definately not abating, and that's all an insurgency needs to do to win.
You defeat and insurgency two ways. You dry up its support in the populace, and you subvert it from within. Body counts don't mean a thing. It's like the story from about the two generals after the Vietnam war. The American general said to the Vietnamese general, "You know we never lost a battle." To which the Vietnamese general said, "True. But it is also completely irrelevant."
Demand that the DoD and other government agencies reduce their budgets while maintaining manpower to accomplish their missions. Do we really need to spend $200m on the F-22 when the $40m F-16 and F-18 is still good? Sure, the F-22 is nice, but would you rather be defended by a single F-22 or 5 F-16s? Do you really think a pilot in an F-22 could take out 5 F-16s?
First, we''re not going to be fighting F-16s, MiGs? Sus? Yeah. Mirages and ChengDus? Maybe. But not Fs. Anyway, it might be able to, I don't know. The F-14 was capable of downing six over the horizon targets simultaneously, and we retired that.
You're bigger point about weapon systems being political decisions rather than military decisions is dead on though. The RAH-66 Comanche program started in 1983, and 21 years and $31 billion laters it was canceled. What did Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker say in February 2004 about its cancelation?
[The] Comanche was a wonderful idea up until about 1989. [...] We started seeing that kind of threat disappear, and then it continued to disappear over the last decade." Commenting on the Schoomaker statement, Defense News wrote on 1 March: "Army officials say the move reflects the more elusive enemies and weapons that have emerged since Comanche was conceived in 1983 to find and fight Soviet tank formations. Stealth, once the RAH-66's biggest selling point, is now deemed unnecessary and expensive.
That's just one example of an unneeded, and unwanted weapon systems. Unwanted by the military mind you. Why does this happen? The weapons mean jobs. And one one is going to vote against jobs in their district, and no one is going to vote against jobs in someone else's district for fear of retaliation. Why do you think the BRAC is now (supposably) apolitical and is hella hard to appeal?
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two finely equipped hospitals.
It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
As a result the FBI have gotten court orders to get the call detail records of those suspected of being complicit in this crime. From my time in telecom, I can tell you that this is a routine occurance, and most telcos even have an office that deals with these things, one that is in weekly contact with the local FBI field offices. The surprising thing is that they dont even need a warrant - a simple "Section 2701" court order suffices - and the law even orders that the judge "Shall Issue" such an order when it comes to these kinds of records (in other words the judge doesn't have much choice if the FBI says the need it for investigation into a possible criminal offense - they show up, tell them what they want and walk out with a court order for the telco). There is very little legal protection for this sort of record when a crime is being investigated.
Are the wiretaps being conducted by the FBI? The article doesn't say. Now they should be conducted by the FBI, since the FBI has sole jurisdiction within the United States, but as we've seen recently, the adminstration has little regard for that as seen with the NSA operating within the borders of the United States, which is explictly forbidden to do so. Was the required warrant issued? That's the question. If government did get a court order, then everything is cool. They showed probable cause to an independent judiciary. That's the way the system works, and how it should work. Unfortunately, there's real doubt these days that actually happened.
Currently there's a program, in violation of the 4th Amendment by the NSA. It's conducting surveillance on American cititzens without any judical oversight. Why is that? The FISA court was setup to issue secret warrants, and it only rejected only a handfull of requests in 30 years. Speed? The government could start wiretaps immediately and get a retroactive wiretap within 72 hours. That's plenty of time to fill out paper work.
The president has argued that he (through the executive) doesn't require court orders in manners of national security. Revealing state secrets would definately fall under the national security umbrella. So by this logic, no court order is required, so why would one be sought?
Just to recap what this adminstration has publically argued:
The president can unilaterally order surveillance on American citizens.
The president can order the arrest of an American citizen, and hold that citizen for an inderterminate amount of time in a secret location without charge.
The president can declare that American citizen an "enemy combatant" and try him in an extra-judicial proceeding that where the executive branch serves as prosecutor, judge, and jury. This proceeding can order the death penalty.
The president can order "extraordinary interogations" (i.e. torture) or individuals.
The president has the power to violate the law in manners related to national security.
The president is the sole determiner of when this may occur.
The president's power in these matters are above oversight.
This is distrurbing. This is too much power for one man. That's why the founding fathers created a system of checks and balances on the executive. What does the adminstration say to a lay my fears? "Trust us." No. No I don't, and more importantly, I live in a country with a form a government where I don't have to.
Just though a few facts might counter the hysteria. The sky isnt falling - at least in this instance - the laws are working as they are written to do. And those of you who cite "Secret Prison Camps" - go back and re-research that. They apparently never existed and were a
Lando and G'Kar's relationship was the best part of that whole show. Those two characters were well done. I liked how Lando was pretty much always playing out of his depth. Sure he could advance politically by knowing who and when to shiv, but he never could really perform at whatever position he had. G'Kar meanwhile was perennially kept down, but always the bigger man.
The other characters however were pretty forgettable, or worse yet stock characters of scifi cum fantasy.[*] I watched B5 for the four main years, It was enjoyable, but ds9 was better.
[*] Yes, I'm the anonymous coward that used that term above.
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Same here, only I got a mac.
Apple puts out a proprietary, defective-by-design consumer electronics product and won't port the required software to platforms other than Mac OS or Windows and it's somehow a Linux shortcoming?
It is when that's the mp3 player people want to use.
Users come first. It's just that simple.
With Communist computer, keyboard spy on YOU!
In freedom loving countries, keyboard KEEPS YOU SAFE!
Be afraid! Or the terrorists' goal to make us change our lives and live in terror will succeed!
Wait. This is just nonsensical paranoia. Please tell explain to me how, "There's this video thats put out by liars," is positive exposure? How can being caught in a sham and a lie "get your point across." That makes no sense at all.
Google is your friend.
Actually, the initiative to being SD/SDA landmines and to phase out "dumb" mines began in 1997 under Clinton.
Listen jackass, you can self-destruct without actually detonating the mine. Car radios do that. All you do is fry the electronics.
Jeez.
The United States already deploys self-destructing and self-deactivating land mines. In fact by 2010, all landmines used by the United States will be SD/SDA. The mines can be be set to self-destruct from anywhere from 48 hours to 15 days. If they fail to self-destruct, they will automatically deactivate after 90 days.
Yet there's no one to replace the US.
Well since Christianity is a splinter off of Judaism...
A child porn database already exists. It's run by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The government searches it everytime they prosecute a child porn case, because the same photos are circled around the Internet for years. Once the child in the photo is confirmed by medical examination to be both a real child under 18 years of age, the photo is flagged as such. US attorneys tell grand juries this every time they bring an indictment against someone. Given this, it strikes me as basically just a showey "we're doing something" move.
Hopefully Her Royal Australian Army will meet with more success in the Great Toad War than they did in the Great Emu War.
That's not true. Open source means much more than that, and you know it. There are plenty of proprietary software that is distributed with source, sometimes as a necessity, as in the case of scripting languages, or cross platform compatability. (Proprietary UNIX programs have frequently been distributed as source, since that was the only way to ensure the program could run on the users' actual hardware.) Other times a source license would be sold as an option to the usage license to a proprietary program. These source licenses are typically accompanied by a nondisclosure agreement. Even Microsoft will distributed the source to certain things as part of their Shared Source inititive.
So open source is not merely being able to read the source. To qualify as open source, you must be granted the right to:
I may not be a big fan of RMS, but I'm not fan or ESR either. They're both self-rightous idealogues as far as I'm concerned. However, I'm not going to let someone willfully misrepresent the other side.
so it's as i suspected, it's just circular logic. graphic artists use macs because graphic artists use macs. The original reasoning has long become moot.
They also had Einstein and Jim Henson, and I've never heard Apple is working on theoretical Physics or making puppets...
Clearly you haven't seen their Jon Hodgeman commercials.
The Think Different campaign was clearly aimed at giving the impression that Apple was creative, revolutionary, perhaps even iconclastic. It dove-tailed in to the perception that macs are for artsy types. (Why macs are used for graphic design over pcs, I never understood. They are though. Personally, I suspect there's a bit of circular logic at work here.) Those ideals, are by definition, progressive. If Apple wants to protray themselves as being progressive, then they should act like it, at least a little bit, They don't have to go all Ben & Jerry's, but sweatshops? Yeah, they're bad. If they don't, they at best look like everyone else, and at worse, like hypocritical Google, or perhaps even Yahoo (, there's a democracy adovcate over here Comrade Police State)!.
Not to minimize the copious consumption of Americans, by far the largest consumers on the planet. (Hell, even my family has more cars than people, even not counting the collector car (69 Charger, all original)), but I don't know if the Japanese can be considered that frugal. Afterall, thats a culture that replaces all their electronics at least every two years, simply because they're not stylish anymore. Now that's consumption.
The SCA isn't applicable here. He should have brought a civil suit citing breach of contract. That's just standard licensing/contract law.
Strictly speaking, shortwave's point of origin is traceable. Certain number stations are known to originate from specific locations, including Havana, the Yugoslav embassy in Washington DC, Albuquerque, and the CIA spy school. Origin doesn't matter though, it's the receiver that's clandestine.
BoingBoing posted about strange 5 digit spam last week.
Fromt TFA:
we'd like to start sharing stuff via a VPN. The only problem is I'm the only marginally tech savvy one in the bunch,
In other words, you decided to share stuff via a VPN. I haveto ask what are you trying to share that can't be shared using simpilar approach (e.g. email)?
Yes, but also equally commited to an ineffective strategy. From the very beginning the administration botched this. How? They didn't decided years prior to the 2003 and 9/11 that they wanted to invade Iraq, and do it on the cheap. Quick! Fast! Nimble! Light! That was the military of of the future, or so they, with their lack of military knowledge, decided. They planned this out over three martini lunches, rounds of golf, and essays at the Weekly Standard. They gain power, and decide to implement their ideas. When the military leadership balked at the plans, as Gen. Shinseki did, they publicly humilated him and undercut his authority by naming his successor more than a year in advance of his retirement. What made Gen Shenseki think he could question Richard Perle and Doug Feith? Oh, I don't know. Pehaps it was the fact that he spent his entire adult life planning wars.
The war was going to to topple a repressive government and cause a tsunami of democracy to spread throughout the region. I'm sure many an eye needed to be dried at PNAC when this scenario was outlined. However, to the career diplomats and analysts at the State Department it was absurd. It was so absurd that they issued a report entitled, "Iraq, the Middle East and Change: No Dominoes" But what do they know? It's just their job to study the politics and culture of the Middle East.
More than anything, what angers me the most about the war isn't the lies, or the fabrications. It's that Bush didn't even listen to his own advisors on how to do it right. That is arrogance. That is incompetence. The fact that he wouldn't change tactics when the insurgency was still at a manageable size, has doomed the occupation. Even if a change in tactics today would increase the likelihood of succcess, he wouldn't do it. It is more important to prove his and his friends ideas about how to fight a war were right, than winning the war. If you're not in a war to win, you're just murdering people.
Our training of the Iraqi National Army so they can stand up to the insurgents when we leave.
Sounds good, but again incompetence has doomed that. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200512/iraq-army Don't get me wrong. The US military is doing the best job they can, and I'm sure they've achieved more success than others would, it's just that they're in bad situation that has been made worse through incompetent political leadership.
Just listen to the White House and Pentagon estimates of the number of divisions trained and how many are combat ready. It fluctuates all the time. One month is 100,000 Iraqi troops with three divisions ready. Next month it's 60,000 with only one division ready. That doesn't make any sense. Even if you take those numbers at face value, like the White House wants you to, it doesn't make any sense. Where do these soldiers go? Oh wait. We do know.
Bush says, "As they stand up, we'll stand down." Heard that 40 years ago, only then it was was "vietnamization."
That sounds all well and good until you realize that this is an insurgency, not a straight forward war. There's a truism about guerilla wars. "The guerrilla wins by not losing and the government loses by not winning." Using the Pentagon's own public estimates, the insurgency has grown in the past three years, from 5,000 to 20,000 [http://www.brookings.edu/fp/saban/iraq/index.pdf page 18.]. Even if you assume that the initial estimates of 5,000 were off, it's clear that the insurgency is definately not abating, and that's all an insurgency needs to do to win.
You defeat and insurgency two ways. You dry up its support in the populace, and you subvert it from within. Body counts don't mean a thing. It's like the story from about the two generals after the Vietnam war. The American general said to the Vietnamese general, "You know we never lost a battle." To which the Vietnamese general said, "True. But it is also completely irrelevant."
First, we''re not going to be fighting F-16s, MiGs? Sus? Yeah. Mirages and ChengDus? Maybe. But not Fs. Anyway, it might be able to, I don't know. The F-14 was capable of downing six over the horizon targets simultaneously, and we retired that.
You're bigger point about weapon systems being political decisions rather than military decisions is dead on though. The RAH-66 Comanche program started in 1983, and 21 years and $31 billion laters it was canceled. What did Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker say in February 2004 about its cancelation?
That's just one example of an unneeded, and unwanted weapon systems. Unwanted by the military mind you. Why does this happen? The weapons mean jobs. And one one is going to vote against jobs in their district, and no one is going to vote against jobs in someone else's district for fear of retaliation. Why do you think the BRAC is now (supposably) apolitical and is hella hard to appeal?
Whenever I think about how much money is being wasted on undesired weapons, I think of Eisenhower's 1953 speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors:
Of course he was nothing but a goddamn pinko.
One word of about the legal defination of "shall." "Shall" doesn't always mean "will" or "must." It can also mean "may." As they say, "If you can't argue the facts, argue the law."
Now, on to the wiretaps.
Are the wiretaps being conducted by the FBI? The article doesn't say. Now they should be conducted by the FBI, since the FBI has sole jurisdiction within the United States, but as we've seen recently, the adminstration has little regard for that as seen with the NSA operating within the borders of the United States, which is explictly forbidden to do so. Was the required warrant issued? That's the question. If government did get a court order, then everything is cool. They showed probable cause to an independent judiciary. That's the way the system works, and how it should work. Unfortunately, there's real doubt these days that actually happened.
Currently there's a program, in violation of the 4th Amendment by the NSA. It's conducting surveillance on American cititzens without any judical oversight. Why is that? The FISA court was setup to issue secret warrants, and it only rejected only a handfull of requests in 30 years. Speed? The government could start wiretaps immediately and get a retroactive wiretap within 72 hours. That's plenty of time to fill out paper work.
The president has argued that he (through the executive) doesn't require court orders in manners of national security. Revealing state secrets would definately fall under the national security umbrella. So by this logic, no court order is required, so why would one be sought?
Just to recap what this adminstration has publically argued:
This is distrurbing. This is too much power for one man. That's why the founding fathers created a system of checks and balances on the executive. What does the adminstration say to a lay my fears? "Trust us." No. No I don't, and more importantly, I live in a country with a form a government where I don't have to.
Just though a few facts might counter the hysteria. The sky isnt falling - at least in this instance - the laws are working as they are written to do. And those of you who cite "Secret Prison Camps" - go back and re-research that. They apparently never existed and were a
Back off man. I'm a scientist.
-- Dr. Peter Venkman
"Ghostbusters"
Lando and G'Kar's relationship was the best part of that whole show. Those two characters were well done. I liked how Lando was pretty much always playing out of his depth. Sure he could advance politically by knowing who and when to shiv, but he never could really perform at whatever position he had. G'Kar meanwhile was perennially kept down, but always the bigger man.
The other characters however were pretty forgettable, or worse yet stock characters of scifi cum fantasy.[*] I watched B5 for the four main years, It was enjoyable, but ds9 was better.
[*] Yes, I'm the anonymous coward that used that term above.