According to Federal law the armed forces can allow drinking by service members as young as 18 on bases in or near locations where the legal age limit is lower than 21 - the military enforces the local drinking age laws. The degree to which such leniency is actually applied differs from service to service (if you're in the Air Force, you're out of luck), but the Army and marines have been pretty good about such things.
. . . there is no reason for an organisation not to take a donation for a good cause just because it came from a company you personally don't like.
Actually, there is. It makes you dependent on them.
Let's say that you use Microsoft's $100,000 to hire a new employee or two (salaried, not contractual). You are now in a position where if Microsoft decides that they don't like what you're doing they can refuse to repeat their donation the next year, forcing you to lay off those two employees. I can see Microsoft trying to use the threat of discontinued donations as leverage to steer the ASF into a vulnerable position, then refusing to make a donation at a critical time in order to take advantage of the disruption it would cause.
Argue all you want about excessive paranoia, accepting money makes you beholden to your donors. We call musicians with record contracts "sellouts", we consider politicians who have accepted large "campaign donations" from lobbyists to have been "bought", and the ASF is now in danger of falling into the same territory for the same reasons. There is already talk about the World Health Organization being steered by politics instead of sound science ever since accepting large donations from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Life would be simpler for the ASF if they had refused the money when it was offered.
Counter-terrorism == work to stop terrorist operations
Anti-terrorism == work to kill the terrorists themselves
Perhaps the usage has changed since I went to my CT training courses in the U.S. Army, but I really, REALLY hope that the TSA isn't conducting anti-terrorism operations! "Sorry, you're on the no-fly list, please step into the euthanasia chamber to your right..."
As established by court precedent the minimum number of notes required for a song to be "infringing" on another is four. It would not be difficult with modern computing to create a database of all copyrighted songs and start suing songwriters and musicians who "copy" a previous work. The chilling effect on new music would be as bad or worse than software patents are now for the software industry. There is only a limited number of possible note sequences, after all...
Regardless, the purpose of a rich public domain is to allow artists to draw on the works of the past to create the art of today. Perpetual copyright makes Big Media (TM) the gatekeeper of our cultural history and makes it a crime to derive new works from the old. The issue at hand with too-long copyright length (IMHO) is not the creation of innovation, it's the prevention of it that will inevitably occur.
It's tempting to look upon this huge landscape of art that's already been made and conclude . . . that there's no reason to make it anymore. That thinking would make this a pretty poor society.
While I agree with you, there is a disturbing trend in modern society to go to the other extreme: ignore the past entirely and only focus on new works. Society is already being impoverished by copyright law preventing works from entering the public domain. If Big Media (TM) had its way then making a derivative of any work "owned" by them would require their permission (gained by licensing fee) for the rest of eternity. This has the potential to create a chilling effect on music, film, and literature similar to the one patent law is currently having on software. I don't want to live in a world where the works of the past are forgotten by new artists because they're all stored in DRM-laden (and perpetual-copyright-encumbered) corporate vaults instead of public libraries.
And the 'Engineer' that designed our local highway, forgot about this thing called 'grade' and why it's important to have water run off the road rather than pooling in the middle of it. Many millions of dollars later in court, it was verified that the Engineer f'ed up the plans and the construction crews were not at fault. So care to tell me about the 'rigours' of this so called Engineer?
(emphasis added)
I think you've already found your answer. That Engineer who made the mistake is held accountable for his mistakes, and there is a system in place to enable that accountability. No such thing exists in the Software world. When programming has matured enough as a field for a certified "Software Engineer" to be held accountable for errors made by a third party based on correctly following the Engineer's faulty recommendation then I'll gladly welcome Software Engineering into the fold.
I suspect, though, that computer programmers (taken as a whole) would rather not be held to that sort of standard. Most EULAs have language such as "this product is sold without warranties as to performance of merchantability or suitability for any purpose", and Software companies seem to like it that way. The way things stand, writers of tax software are not liable for you getting fined by the IRS due to a bug in their software. Microsoft will never pay anyone a dime over the multiplication error in Excel 2007. And even if the companies did end up liable for those mistakes, there is currently no way to hold the individual "Software Engineer" accountable for his mistake(s) that caused the problems.
You can't have both the prestige of an Engineering title and the lack of accountability that the Software world currently embraces. As a result, you are very correct in criticizing the Auto industry's lack of rigor in their electronic vehicle controls. One day that behavior will catch up to them. All it will take is people to start dying because of a software bug in their vehicles; the manufacturer will held liable for the deaths, and the Mechanical/Manufacturing/Automotive engineers who signed off on the design will be (unfairly, in my opinion) accountable for the mistakes of the programmer.
Congratulations on having been so easily hoodwinked by a racist ideology. Congratulations on having swallowed the propaganda hook, line and sinker, and for having demonstrated yourself to be the kind of mindless, gullible, twat who uncritically parrots whatever he is told, and so makes the world a much more miserable and difficult place in which to live.
Far from accepting it blindly, I was skeptical about it. Then I had to talk to the Iraqis, and without some critical advanced warnings about their culture I'd have been very confused. I've personally debriefed completely cooperative Iraqi government officials, and it was a struggle getting important events in the proper order. It was just as hard to get the landmarks they described organized into a route we could follow on the map. These Iraqis were highly intelligent, and fully capable of functioning in their society; their thought processes just don't revolve around the same things as ours.
The arabs have an uninterrupted tradition of philosophy--including Aristotelean logic--that's more than a thousand years old. The only way that the European world had any access to most of Aristotle and much other Greek philosophy during the medieval period was via the Islamic world.
I'm aware that much of our knowledge of Greek philosophy and mathematics was only preserved because of the scholarship of the Arabs. Unfortunately, the Islamic Golden Age ended somewhere between the 13th and 15th centuries. Since that time certain reasoning skills that we take for granted stopped being part of the Arabic cultural tradition.
I never said that it was a bad thing, nor that it makes them inferior to us; it's just different and hard for us to understand.
When I went to Iraq I was given a very clear explanation for why more Islamic terrorists are college-educated than not:
Arabs as a culture do not teach their children about the relationship between cause and effect, so the typical Arab is not suitable as a terrorist operative.
For example, the typical Arab could not draw you a map of how he gets to work if you held a gun to his head. The same is true for reconstructing timelines - for some reason Arabs just don't think in those terms. Anyone who can't understand that event B must come before event C and both must occur after event A just can't pull off effective covert operations.
This is why Al Qaeda wrote in their manual (see the Manchester document (pdf warning)) that "The confrontation that we are calling for with the apostate regimes does not know Socratic debates..., Platonic ideals..., nor Aristotelian diplomacy." The Arab culture simply is not equipped to discuss their goals with us in terms of the Logic we embrace because they don't teach it or learn it among themselves.
Classical (ie. "western") university educations teach things like cause-and-effect, ordered sequencing of events, and Logic in the Greek traditions. To succeed in college you need to learn to think that way, so as a terrorist you would have a strong incentive to recruit people who have succeeded in the college environment.
In summary, there are more engineers and scientists among terrorist operatives because they are better prepared intellectually than the uneducated Arabs, and therefore they get preferentially recruited over uneducated Arabs. It has nothing to do with engineers being predisposed towards extremism, and everything to do with them already having the mental skills necessary.
It's a strange idea, I know, but you do want your policymakers to listen to the will of the people and support it, and you'd like them to do that even when it is at odds with their own personal belief . ..
No, I don't want that. I'd rather that the candidate express his/her true opinion and clearly represent their values when running for election. I'd rather vote for someone who I know disagrees with me on some issues, but who I can reasonably predict will act in keeping with their values.
It's called integrity.
In this last election that was the issue that led me to vote for Bush instead of Kerry - I may not have liked Bush's position on business, but I still have no idea what Kerry's position is. After two terms (and two of my votes) I'm satisfied that Bush acted in accordance with his values and that my vote was not wasted.
I never voted for Bill Clinton because he came across as a poll-watching sociopath who would do whatever he thought would build him a better "legacy". The fact that in retrospect I liked Bill Clinton's positions on prosecuting corrupt businessmen and balancing the budget would not have changed my vote, even if I'd known in advance that he'd pull them off.
I have no reason to believe that Bill's wife is any different from him in the integrity department, and until that changes I doubt that I'll be voting for her, either.
When I was there I got to live in one of his palaces for a bit. The marble was high quality and of appropriate thickness (3/4 inch or more, in most cases). The problem was that it was shipped and assembled incompetently.
Instead of keeping the marble slabs organized so that the grain matches on the edges when assembled, the workers just grabbed whatever piece was lying close at hand; the effect looked a little like plywood paneling. You're dead on, though, about the cheap construction underneath; I found a place where an empty cigarette packet had been mortared into the wall behind the marble (exposed when shaken loose by the bombing). They didn't use welders, either, they just held a couple of wires close together that were connected (unbreakered) to the generator. An OSHA inspector would go into full-body convulsions looking at the work site.
Back to the analogy, though, it was an expensively purchased and poorly assembled copy of other palaces. That puts Saddam firmly in the Windows 95 camp =) Rumors on base suggested that the computers we captured were, true to form, unpatched *English language* copies of Win 95, with no encryption or passwords in use anywhere.
It is my understanding that Bill Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists was the first recorded instance of the "share code == theft" idea. Granted, the grandparent poster was talking about the use of "pirate", not "theft", but he's not far off.
It would be an interesting academic exercise to see where the first usage of "share code == piracy" came from; however, "copy==pirate" is clearly a derivative of the "copy==theft" idea, and owes its roots to Microsoft, even if it wasn't born there.
Thank you, that was enlightening. I was considering a knee-jerk response along the lines of, "Why don't we hear this more often?", but I bet it gets rather tedious repeating yourself every time some crackpot does something stupid.
It's probably related to the question of "Why don't we hear news reports about Iraqis who are happy that the Americans are there?" I've concluded that it isn't because they aren't there (I've met them), and possibly not even due to political axe-grinding in the media. I think it's because hate and violence sell more newspapers and get better Nielson ratings: "if it bleeds, it leads." Similarly, "The Council on American- Islamic Relations denounces terrorist actions" is about all figure we'll see in the Media, and they'll use about the same number of words as I just did...
You won't find a (reasonable) imam that does the same. . . In any case my point is that the imams who do preach that shit are unreasonable fanatics, and, as you note at the end of your post, most Muslims do not support this garbage.
Neither, however, do you find right-minded imams willing to decry the statements/actions of the unreasonable ones and publicly declare them to be heretical. I find it odd that the response from the "reasonable" imams is not, "The death's caused by [unreasonable imam's name here]'s followers are tragic; [unreasonable imam's name here] has misinterpreted the Koran and is not teaching the truth." Instead, when you question a Muslim about a suicide bombing, the response often starts out like this: "Well, you have to look at it from the bomber's point of view . .."
I have friends who are Arabic. I've served in the U.S. Army with some of them. I find it simply amazing that they are offended by the generalization that Islam condones terrorism when they themselves are so hesitant to criticize terrorist actions. Islam as a religion would benefit greatly if the "reasonable" Muslims who "do not support this garbage" would start actively opposing it as well.
I sincerely hope that you are a Muslim and that this is the beginning of a favorable trend.
I was in Baghdad when it happened, cut the guy some slack. It was in the January-April timeframe of this year, though.
And, no, no-one was treated for exposure. The poeple who set up the charge forgot (or perhaps weren't informed? that sarin degrades almost instantly when heated - the detonator they attached it to cooked it off the moment it was triggered. If I rememer right, the reason we knew it was sarin was that the residue was consistent with sarin decompositon byproducts.
I'm just glad that the insurgents aren't better shots, they might actually become a threat.
People with my specialty in the U.S. Army are occasionally required to perform these investigations. A lot more happens than you see on the surface.
I've read the rest of this thread, and I can tell you've gone through the request process more than once. It doesn't surprise me that you haven't been contacted regarding your employees who made clearance requests; as you say, there are higher priorities.
On the other hand, there are two big things that always happen, even with a secret clearance: local and national agency checks. Essentially, the local police are contacted for each area you've lived in, and the FBI is contacted to check on your criminal record. If your record is clean/you've fully disclosed everything on your record, this will never come up in your interview.
Congratulations on your clean criminal record.
However, undisclosed criminal prosecutions (especially convictions) are a quick way to get shown the door. Granted, if you tell them about it in advance it drastically improves your chances of getting cleared (a girl I know admitted to holding the gun in an attempted drive-by-shooting, and she got her clearance) but it's more about honest disclosure than "explaining it away".
The Congressmen are pushing the bill under the claim that too many minorities are fighting for our country (CNN.com, February, 2003).
You just can't make this stuff up. This bill is an insult to the fine men and women I served with in the US Army who come from "minority" backgrounds. Once a man or woman enters the Army that person is no longer, in my mind, an ethnic minority; that person is a soldier. The fact that many soldiers come from underprivileged families or are ethnically other-than-Caucasian is due in large part to the fact that the Army (and US Armed Forces in general) treats you like a person once you're in uniform. There are few other employers with as broad of a recruiting scope and as egalitarian a promotion policy. Many of the recruits learn skills that are directly applicable to civilian employment; for the rest, college funds are established to help them join the ranks of the "more privileged" classes by getting a good education.
These people become soldiers of their own choice because being a soldier is a good job, and can provide them with a future. Forcing these volunteer soldiers to serve together with people who don't want to be there simply to "balance out the races" is inexcusable, and can only result in poor morale and reduced effectiveness in the armed forces.
If Congress wants more of a particular ethnic group represented in the armed forces, fine; have a meeting with the Joint Chiefs and remind them who approves their funding. Target recruiting advertisements at the people you want to see more of. If Congress wants more people in the Army, let's get rid of the "Army of One" campaign and switch to something that people understand (like "Be all that you can be", that was working fine). But don't insult the willingness these "minority" solders show to give their lives for their country by saying they are too many of them with the wrong skin color.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying that there is no discrimination in the Army; it's still hard for women to get promoted to high-ranking leadership (that generally requires Combat Arms leadership time, which is not available to women). Neither am I saying that the Army trains every soldier with skills that will get them a 5-or-6-figure job after their honorable discharge (77F - refueling specialist - comes to mind; yeah, being a gas station attendant really pays well). On the other hand, there are no underprivileged classes in the Army - they'll take care of you and your family's needs as long as you're a soldier. And no one who leaves the Army with an honorable discharge can complain that they don't have the resources available to them to get a better education or job. There's no other employer like it in the US, and possibly not in the world.
Your recruiter was probably right. When I was going through US Army Intel school one of my classmates listed on her application:
marijuana use
gang membership
participation (as the shooter!) in a drive-by shooting attempt
She got her clearance before the training was over. It's when you don't tell them things and they find out about them during the investigation that they deny your clearance.
I've even heard that they'll give you a chance to fess up after they find stuff ("derogatory information") on you. My recruiter told me about a guy who had forged several checks, ranging in value from $10 to $1,500, but hadn't reported them on his application. They brought him in and asked if he'd ever bounced a check, and let him deny it before pulling out the $10 check as evidence. They then asked if he'd ever bounced any other checks, which he denied until they pulled out the next check. Lather, rinse, repeat all the way through $1,500 to an airlines company.
Needless to say, he didn't get a clearance. It's all about trust; if they can't trust you to tell them the truth, then you're worthless to any sort of Intelligence(TM)-based security program. And, if they already know eveything you've done wrong, you can't be blackmailed with it!
I grew up near Fort Meade, and both of my parents have had jobs at the Agency. Not having SCI clearance means that you can't be admitted into any special access programs. That basically rules out anything crypto, language, or data processing related.
So, sure, if you want to get a job as a janitor or secretary (and perhaps not secretary, either), don't worry about SCI, it's not important to you.
When I was there the main use I saw for the dinar was selling them to GIs who wanted souvenirs. I figured the rise in price was due to the Iraqis learning what passed as an acceptable price, as well as the Gis realizing that the supply of good-quality bills was diminishing (ie. fixed demand but dwindling supply).
When I left people in the shops were still selling large quantites of former regime currency for prices ranging from $1 per bill to $20 for a bundle of identical bills. There's a good chance I just wasn't in touch with the local economy, but when the locals are consistently selling their old bills for loose change over the course of a year I have trouble seeing their dead currency as picking up value.
It's funny that you want to criticize "otherwise intelligent people" for not wanting to "reason with the terrorists". From what I've learned, they don't want to reason with us, either. Check out this quote:
"The confrontation that we are calling for with the apostate regimes does not know Socratic debates..., Platonic ideals..., nor Aristotelian diplomacy. But it knows the dialogue of bullets, the ideals of assassination, bombing, and destruction, and the diplomacy of the cannon and machine-gun."
It is taken from what is known as the "Manchester Document", an Al Qaeda training manual located by the Manchester (England) Metropolitan Police during a search of an Al Qaeda member's home. Selected passages from the manual are available in PDF format from the U.S. Department of Justice website. Go through it, it's a fun read. The quote above is from page four of the "Cover - Lesson Four" PDF.
It would seem to me that they don't want to "reason with" the rest of us (the "apostate regimes", which incidentally includes any Arab governments that they view as tinted by foreign influence) any more than your "otherwise intelligent" friends want to talk to them. In fact, it looks like they [the terrorists] will answer any invitation to dialog with a bullet to the face.
Please do some more research before discrediting those whose ideas you don't agree with. In this case I think you're both right - the terrorists do hate America because of its freedoms and religious beliefs, and the parading of civilian casualties on the Al Jazeera news channels is certainly being used by terrorists as a recruitment tool. Unfortunately, global politics is not as simple as we may want it to be, and neither negotiation nor cessation of the "never-ending war campaigns" will stop the violence.
For what it's worth (probably not much), in my opinion Al Qaeda picked the fight and are determined to fight it to the death. Since they refuse to even talk about it (see exhibit A above), and I'm not willing to accept their demands (things like relinquishing national sovereignty and accepting forced conversion to Islam), G. W.'s solution of going to them and inviting them to bring it on is a (perhaps the only?) valid solution.
Feel free to come up with another solution. I'll be willing to listen as long as it doesn't involve giving up my religion or nationality. You'll be doing the world a big favor.
One of the soldiers in my (US Army) unit was shot in the leg by a British officer who was drunk a the time and was showing off his Browning high power pistol. The American specialist got lucky - despite the fact that the bullet entered his thigh and exited from his calf (crossing the knee joint) the 9mm round managed to miss all of the bones, ligaments, and major blood vessels. This was last November in Baghdad.
It's unfortunate. It shouldn't have happened. But things like this do happen, even outside of combat situations. So cut the poor Patriot crew a bit of slack:
If you saw incoming aircraft and no "I'm a friend" signature," you'd launch, too.
When I saw the headline I immediately thought, "why is the Coalition Provisional Authority suing anyone? I didn't think they had time or money for that..."
So you try to tell us that those Columbine shooters were unable to handle guns and dit not know of the "risks and everything"?
Ummm... Yeah, I'd take that opinion.
I watched the (admittedly short) bits of the films they showed on the news. I listened to the newscasters complaining about the fact that the Columbine kids were comparing bowling pins to human outlines. Honestly, I was much more offended by the lack of respect that the kids showed for their weapons and the lack of control that they displayed while firing.
Granted, my idea of gun control is keeping a good sight picture and being aware of what's beyond the target. In my mind anyone who uses a gun should have a firm understanding that it's a tool whose sole intended purpose is to inflict mortal harm. Anyone who gives anyone else a gun - regardless of the age of the recipient - has a responsibility to make sure that the new gun owner fully appreciates the nature of their new tool and further understands that the user of such a tool must be ready to stand accountable for its use.
The Columbine kids seemed to have grasped the nature of the gun as a tool. I have no problem with that.
They also showed little or none of the respect to the tool or the weight of responsibility that should be associated with it. I have a serious problem with that. So, yes, I'd argue that they did not have a firm grip on the "risks and everything."
I don't know where to start...
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Wow. In the United States there are federal laws protecting both the content and *addresses* for all mail sent through the US Postal Service. If Big Brother wants to watch you there are oversight requirements (ie. the watcher must be watched) for the simple act of scanning the addresses on an envleope. The requirements are more stringent if BB wants to actually open your letter and read its contents. I don't remember off hand at what point it takes a Judge to sign off on it, I'd have to look it up.
If you're using this "Scan Me" service, however, they can intercept your mail once it leaves US Postal Service channels with much lower levels of scrutiny - they'd just need to walk up and ask the nice people at Planetwide to do their civic duty. In fact, if Carnivore is still running (and I'm paranoid enough to believe it might be) then they wouldn't need to contact the Planetwide staff at all. The Feds could just go to Planetwide's ISP and monitor the traffic, reading the information unencrypted as it flies by on the 'Net.
The ACLU can't protect your civil liberties if you are asking third parties to copy all of your private correspondence into the electronic equivalent of postcards. No, scratch that, postcards are still covered by the same Federal laws as normal (sealed) mail. This is copying to postacrds and re-routing through a network of untrusted private couriers. =[
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According to Federal law the armed forces can allow drinking by service members as young as 18 on bases in or near locations where the legal age limit is lower than 21 - the military enforces the local drinking age laws. The degree to which such leniency is actually applied differs from service to service (if you're in the Air Force, you're out of luck), but the Army and marines have been pretty good about such things.
Actually, there is. It makes you dependent on them.
Let's say that you use Microsoft's $100,000 to hire a new employee or two (salaried, not contractual). You are now in a position where if Microsoft decides that they don't like what you're doing they can refuse to repeat their donation the next year, forcing you to lay off those two employees.
I can see Microsoft trying to use the threat of discontinued donations as leverage to steer the ASF into a vulnerable position, then refusing to make a donation at a critical time in order to take advantage of the disruption it would cause.
Argue all you want about excessive paranoia, accepting money makes you beholden to your donors. We call musicians with record contracts "sellouts", we consider politicians who have accepted large "campaign donations" from lobbyists to have been "bought", and the ASF is now in danger of falling into the same territory for the same reasons. There is already talk about the World Health Organization being steered by politics instead of sound science ever since accepting large donations from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Life would be simpler for the ASF if they had refused the money when it was offered.
Counter-terrorism == work to stop terrorist operations
Anti-terrorism == work to kill the terrorists themselves
Perhaps the usage has changed since I went to my CT training courses in the U.S. Army, but I really, REALLY hope that the TSA isn't conducting anti-terrorism operations! "Sorry, you're on the no-fly list, please step into the euthanasia chamber to your right..."
As established by court precedent the minimum number of notes required for a song to be "infringing" on another is four. It would not be difficult with modern computing to create a database of all copyrighted songs and start suing songwriters and musicians who "copy" a previous work. The chilling effect on new music would be as bad or worse than software patents are now for the software industry. There is only a limited number of possible note sequences, after all...
Regardless, the purpose of a rich public domain is to allow artists to draw on the works of the past to create the art of today. Perpetual copyright makes Big Media (TM) the gatekeeper of our cultural history and makes it a crime to derive new works from the old. The issue at hand with too-long copyright length (IMHO) is not the creation of innovation, it's the prevention of it that will inevitably occur.
(emphasis added)
I think you've already found your answer. That Engineer who made the mistake is held accountable for his mistakes, and there is a system in place to enable that accountability. No such thing exists in the Software world. When programming has matured enough as a field for a certified "Software Engineer" to be held accountable for errors made by a third party based on correctly following the Engineer's faulty recommendation then I'll gladly welcome Software Engineering into the fold.
I suspect, though, that computer programmers (taken as a whole) would rather not be held to that sort of standard. Most EULAs have language such as "this product is sold without warranties as to performance of merchantability or suitability for any purpose", and Software companies seem to like it that way. The way things stand, writers of tax software are not liable for you getting fined by the IRS due to a bug in their software. Microsoft will never pay anyone a dime over the multiplication error in Excel 2007. And even if the companies did end up liable for those mistakes, there is currently no way to hold the individual "Software Engineer" accountable for his mistake(s) that caused the problems.
You can't have both the prestige of an Engineering title and the lack of accountability that the Software world currently embraces. As a result, you are very correct in criticizing the Auto industry's lack of rigor in their electronic vehicle controls. One day that behavior will catch up to them. All it will take is people to start dying because of a software bug in their vehicles; the manufacturer will held liable for the deaths, and the Mechanical/Manufacturing/Automotive engineers who signed off on the design will be (unfairly, in my opinion) accountable for the mistakes of the programmer.
Far from accepting it blindly, I was skeptical about it. Then I had to talk to the Iraqis, and without some critical advanced warnings about their culture I'd have been very confused.
I've personally debriefed completely cooperative Iraqi government officials, and it was a struggle getting important events in the proper order. It was just as hard to get the landmarks they described organized into a route we could follow on the map. These Iraqis were highly intelligent, and fully capable of functioning in their society; their thought processes just don't revolve around the same things as ours.
I'm aware that much of our knowledge of Greek philosophy and mathematics was only preserved because of the scholarship of the Arabs. Unfortunately, the Islamic Golden Age ended somewhere between the 13th and 15th centuries. Since that time certain reasoning skills that we take for granted stopped being part of the Arabic cultural tradition.
I never said that it was a bad thing, nor that it makes them inferior to us; it's just different and hard for us to understand.
When I went to Iraq I was given a very clear explanation for why more Islamic terrorists are college-educated than not:
Arabs as a culture do not teach their children about the relationship between cause and effect, so the typical Arab is not suitable as a terrorist operative.
For example, the typical Arab could not draw you a map of how he gets to work if you held a gun to his head. The same is true for reconstructing timelines - for some reason Arabs just don't think in those terms. Anyone who can't understand that event B must come before event C and both must occur after event A just can't pull off effective covert operations.
This is why Al Qaeda wrote in their manual (see the Manchester document (pdf warning)) that "The confrontation that we are calling for with the apostate regimes does not know Socratic debates..., Platonic ideals..., nor Aristotelian diplomacy." The Arab culture simply is not equipped to discuss their goals with us in terms of the Logic we embrace because they don't teach it or learn it among themselves.
Classical (ie. "western") university educations teach things like cause-and-effect, ordered sequencing of events, and Logic in the Greek traditions. To succeed in college you need to learn to think that way, so as a terrorist you would have a strong incentive to recruit people who have succeeded in the college environment.
In summary, there are more engineers and scientists among terrorist operatives because they are better prepared intellectually than the uneducated Arabs, and therefore they get preferentially recruited over uneducated Arabs. It has nothing to do with engineers being predisposed towards extremism, and everything to do with them already having the mental skills necessary.
No, I don't want that. I'd rather that the candidate express his/her true opinion and clearly represent their values when running for election. I'd rather vote for someone who I know disagrees with me on some issues, but who I can reasonably predict will act in keeping with their values.
It's called integrity.
In this last election that was the issue that led me to vote for Bush instead of Kerry - I may not have liked Bush's position on business, but I still have no idea what Kerry's position is. After two terms (and two of my votes) I'm satisfied that Bush acted in accordance with his values and that my vote was not wasted.
I never voted for Bill Clinton because he came across as a poll-watching sociopath who would do whatever he thought would build him a better "legacy". The fact that in retrospect I liked Bill Clinton's positions on prosecuting corrupt businessmen and balancing the budget would not have changed my vote, even if I'd known in advance that he'd pull them off.
I have no reason to believe that Bill's wife is any different from him in the integrity department, and until that changes I doubt that I'll be voting for her, either.
When I was there I got to live in one of his palaces for a bit. The marble was high quality and of appropriate thickness (3/4 inch or more, in most cases). The problem was that it was shipped and assembled incompetently.
Instead of keeping the marble slabs organized so that the grain matches on the edges when assembled, the workers just grabbed whatever piece was lying close at hand; the effect looked a little like plywood paneling. You're dead on, though, about the cheap construction underneath; I found a place where an empty cigarette packet had been mortared into the wall behind the marble (exposed when shaken loose by the bombing). They didn't use welders, either, they just held a couple of wires close together that were connected (unbreakered) to the generator. An OSHA inspector would go into full-body convulsions looking at the work site.
Back to the analogy, though, it was an expensively purchased and poorly assembled copy of other palaces. That puts Saddam firmly in the Windows 95 camp =) Rumors on base suggested that the computers we captured were, true to form, unpatched *English language* copies of Win 95, with no encryption or passwords in use anywhere.
It is my understanding that Bill Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists was the first recorded instance of the "share code == theft" idea. Granted, the grandparent poster was talking about the use of "pirate", not "theft", but he's not far off.
It would be an interesting academic exercise to see where the first usage of "share code == piracy" came from; however, "copy==pirate" is clearly a derivative of the "copy==theft" idea, and owes its roots to Microsoft, even if it wasn't born there.
Cut the guy some slack.
Are you from Gambrills, Maryland, by any chance? That happened at my high school, too, and my sister knows the stupid guy who did it.
Of course, this has probably happened more than once...
Thank you, that was enlightening. I was considering a knee-jerk response along the lines of, "Why don't we hear this more often?", but I bet it gets rather tedious repeating yourself every time some crackpot does something stupid.
It's probably related to the question of "Why don't we hear news reports about Iraqis who are happy that the Americans are there?" I've concluded that it isn't because they aren't there (I've met them), and possibly not even due to political axe-grinding in the media. I think it's because hate and violence sell more newspapers and get better Nielson ratings: "if it bleeds, it leads." Similarly, "The Council on American- Islamic Relations denounces terrorist actions" is about all figure we'll see in the Media, and they'll use about the same number of words as I just did...
I have friends who are Arabic. I've served in the U.S. Army with some of them. I find it simply amazing that they are offended by the generalization that Islam condones terrorism when they themselves are so hesitant to criticize terrorist actions. Islam as a religion would benefit greatly if the "reasonable" Muslims who "do not support this garbage" would start actively opposing it as well.
I sincerely hope that you are a Muslim and that this is the beginning of a favorable trend.
I was in Baghdad when it happened, cut the guy some slack. It was in the January-April timeframe of this year, though.
And, no, no-one was treated for exposure. The poeple who set up the charge forgot (or perhaps weren't informed? that sarin degrades almost instantly when heated - the detonator they attached it to cooked it off the moment it was triggered. If I rememer right, the reason we knew it was sarin was that the residue was consistent with sarin decompositon byproducts.
I'm just glad that the insurgents aren't better shots, they might actually become a threat.
People with my specialty in the U.S. Army are occasionally required to perform these investigations. A lot more happens than you see on the surface.
I've read the rest of this thread, and I can tell you've gone through the request process more than once. It doesn't surprise me that you haven't been contacted regarding your employees who made clearance requests; as you say, there are higher priorities.
On the other hand, there are two big things that always happen, even with a secret clearance: local and national agency checks. Essentially, the local police are contacted for each area you've lived in, and the FBI is contacted to check on your criminal record. If your record is clean/you've fully disclosed everything on your record, this will never come up in your interview.
Congratulations on your clean criminal record.
However, undisclosed criminal prosecutions (especially convictions) are a quick way to get shown the door. Granted, if you tell them about it in advance it drastically improves your chances of getting cleared (a girl I know admitted to holding the gun in an attempted drive-by-shooting, and she got her clearance) but it's more about honest disclosure than "explaining it away".
You just can't make this stuff up. This bill is an insult to the fine men and women I served with in the US Army who come from "minority" backgrounds. Once a man or woman enters the Army that person is no longer, in my mind, an ethnic minority; that person is a soldier. The fact that many soldiers come from underprivileged families or are ethnically other-than-Caucasian is due in large part to the fact that the Army (and US Armed Forces in general) treats you like a person once you're in uniform. There are few other employers with as broad of a recruiting scope and as egalitarian a promotion policy. Many of the recruits learn skills that are directly applicable to civilian employment; for the rest, college funds are established to help them join the ranks of the "more privileged" classes by getting a good education.
These people become soldiers of their own choice because being a soldier is a good job, and can provide them with a future. Forcing these volunteer soldiers to serve together with people who don't want to be there simply to "balance out the races" is inexcusable, and can only result in poor morale and reduced effectiveness in the armed forces.
If Congress wants more of a particular ethnic group represented in the armed forces, fine; have a meeting with the Joint Chiefs and remind them who approves their funding. Target recruiting advertisements at the people you want to see more of. If Congress wants more people in the Army, let's get rid of the "Army of One" campaign and switch to something that people understand (like "Be all that you can be", that was working fine). But don't insult the willingness these "minority" solders show to give their lives for their country by saying they are too many of them with the wrong skin color.
Disclaimer: I'm not saying that there is no discrimination in the Army; it's still hard for women to get promoted to high-ranking leadership (that generally requires Combat Arms leadership time, which is not available to women). Neither am I saying that the Army trains every soldier with skills that will get them a 5-or-6-figure job after their honorable discharge (77F - refueling specialist - comes to mind; yeah, being a gas station attendant really pays well). On the other hand, there are no underprivileged classes in the Army - they'll take care of you and your family's needs as long as you're a soldier. And no one who leaves the Army with an honorable discharge can complain that they don't have the resources available to them to get a better education or job. There's no other employer like it in the US, and possibly not in the world.
Your recruiter was probably right. When I was going through US Army Intel school one of my classmates listed on her application:
She got her clearance before the training was over. It's when you don't tell them things and they find out about them during the investigation that they deny your clearance.
I've even heard that they'll give you a chance to fess up after they find stuff ("derogatory information") on you. My recruiter told me about a guy who had forged several checks, ranging in value from $10 to $1,500, but hadn't reported them on his application. They brought him in and asked if he'd ever bounced a check, and let him deny it before pulling out the $10 check as evidence. They then asked if he'd ever bounced any other checks, which he denied until they pulled out the next check. Lather, rinse, repeat all the way through $1,500 to an airlines company.
Needless to say, he didn't get a clearance. It's all about trust; if they can't trust you to tell them the truth, then you're worthless to any sort of Intelligence(TM)-based security program. And, if they already know eveything you've done wrong, you can't be blackmailed with it!
I grew up near Fort Meade, and both of my parents have had jobs at the Agency. Not having SCI clearance means that you can't be admitted into any special access programs. That basically rules out anything crypto, language, or data processing related.
So, sure, if you want to get a job as a janitor or secretary (and perhaps not secretary, either), don't worry about SCI, it's not important to you.
When I was there the main use I saw for the dinar was selling them to GIs who wanted souvenirs. I figured the rise in price was due to the Iraqis learning what passed as an acceptable price, as well as the Gis realizing that the supply of good-quality bills was diminishing (ie. fixed demand but dwindling supply).
When I left people in the shops were still selling large quantites of former regime currency for prices ranging from $1 per bill to $20 for a bundle of identical bills. There's a good chance I just wasn't in touch with the local economy, but when the locals are consistently selling their old bills for loose change over the course of a year I have trouble seeing their dead currency as picking up value.
It's funny that you want to criticize "otherwise intelligent people" for not wanting to "reason with the terrorists". From what I've learned, they don't want to reason with us, either. Check out this quote:
It is taken from what is known as the "Manchester Document", an Al Qaeda training manual located by the Manchester (England) Metropolitan Police during a search of an Al Qaeda member's home. Selected passages from the manual are available in PDF format from the U.S. Department of Justice website. Go through it, it's a fun read. The quote above is from page four of the "Cover - Lesson Four" PDF.
It would seem to me that they don't want to "reason with" the rest of us (the "apostate regimes", which incidentally includes any Arab governments that they view as tinted by foreign influence) any more than your "otherwise intelligent" friends want to talk to them. In fact, it looks like they [the terrorists] will answer any invitation to dialog with a bullet to the face.
Please do some more research before discrediting those whose ideas you don't agree with. In this case I think you're both right - the terrorists do hate America because of its freedoms and religious beliefs, and the parading of civilian casualties on the Al Jazeera news channels is certainly being used by terrorists as a recruitment tool. Unfortunately, global politics is not as simple as we may want it to be, and neither negotiation nor cessation of the "never-ending war campaigns" will stop the violence.
For what it's worth (probably not much), in my opinion Al Qaeda picked the fight and are determined to fight it to the death. Since they refuse to even talk about it (see exhibit A above), and I'm not willing to accept their demands (things like relinquishing national sovereignty and accepting forced conversion to Islam), G. W.'s solution of going to them and inviting them to bring it on is a (perhaps the only?) valid solution.
Feel free to come up with another solution. I'll be willing to listen as long as it doesn't involve giving up my religion or nationality. You'll be doing the world a big favor.
One of the soldiers in my (US Army) unit was shot in the leg by a British officer who was drunk a the time and was showing off his Browning high power pistol. The American specialist got lucky - despite the fact that the bullet entered his thigh and exited from his calf (crossing the knee joint) the 9mm round managed to miss all of the bones, ligaments, and major blood vessels. This was last November in Baghdad.
It's unfortunate. It shouldn't have happened. But things like this do happen, even outside of combat situations. So cut the poor Patriot crew a bit of slack:
If you saw incoming aircraft and no "I'm a friend" signature," you'd launch, too.
When I saw the headline I immediately thought, "why is the Coalition Provisional Authority suing anyone? I didn't think they had time or money for that..."
Boy do I need to get out of Baghdad...
Ummm... Yeah, I'd take that opinion.
I watched the (admittedly short) bits of the films they showed on the news. I listened to the newscasters complaining about the fact that the Columbine kids were comparing bowling pins to human outlines. Honestly, I was much more offended by the lack of respect that the kids showed for their weapons and the lack of control that they displayed while firing.
Granted, my idea of gun control is keeping a good sight picture and being aware of what's beyond the target. In my mind anyone who uses a gun should have a firm understanding that it's a tool whose sole intended purpose is to inflict mortal harm. Anyone who gives anyone else a gun - regardless of the age of the recipient - has a responsibility to make sure that the new gun owner fully appreciates the nature of their new tool and further understands that the user of such a tool must be ready to stand accountable for its use.
The Columbine kids seemed to have grasped the nature of the gun as a tool. I have no problem with that.
They also showed little or none of the respect to the tool or the weight of responsibility that should be associated with it. I have a serious problem with that. So, yes, I'd argue that they did not have a firm grip on the "risks and everything."
Wow. In the United States there are federal laws protecting both the content and *addresses* for all mail sent through the US Postal Service. If Big Brother wants to watch you there are oversight requirements (ie. the watcher must be watched) for the simple act of scanning the addresses on an envleope. The requirements are more stringent if BB wants to actually open your letter and read its contents. I don't remember off hand at what point it takes a Judge to sign off on it, I'd have to look it up.
If you're using this "Scan Me" service, however, they can intercept your mail once it leaves US Postal Service channels with much lower levels of scrutiny - they'd just need to walk up and ask the nice people at Planetwide to do their civic duty. In fact, if Carnivore is still running (and I'm paranoid enough to believe it might be) then they wouldn't need to contact the Planetwide staff at all. The Feds could just go to Planetwide's ISP and monitor the traffic, reading the information unencrypted as it flies by on the 'Net.
The ACLU can't protect your civil liberties if you are asking third parties to copy all of your private correspondence into the electronic equivalent of postcards. No, scratch that, postcards are still covered by the same Federal laws as normal (sealed) mail. This is copying to postacrds and re-routing through a network of untrusted private couriers. =[