..[was] an inevitable response to the targetting of civilian populations by the USA and her lap dogs
When has this happened? I'm dying to hear when or where these attacks are.
UNICEF says that 5,000 Iraqi children die each month due to US sanctions. Off camera. Out of sight, out of mind. I'd go on, but I've reached my contempt threshhold for the day. Go watch WWF Bitchslap and chug some beers. All is well. Hush, little man, all is well.
We could probably come up with 8,000 highly trained individuals if we wanted to, but at the cost of gutting elite organizations like the FBI HRT, Delta Force, Green Berets, Navy SEALS, Secret Service protective services, etc. Are we willing to make that sacrifice?
Short term, maybe. Long term, I think we'll end up with exactly the calibre of rentacop that we're willing to not pay for.
You forgot the tens of thousands of good, decent family folks dead through lack of access to basic medical supplies.
Bzzz, wrong, thanks for playing. The US and the Western style democracies, have donated so many medical supplies and vaccines...
Do you honestly not know (or care) that tens of thousands of civilians have died in Iraq - and are still dying - due to the crippling sanctions imposed by the US after the Gulf war?
It's not enough to say that you're the good guys. You actually have to act like it as well.
It disturbs me greatly to see so many apparently intelligent people here whining for peaceful solutions to the present problem. Wake up! It won't happen because it won't work
You mean: it will be hard. It will take a long time. Politicians will have to make agreements and stick to them. People, lots of people, will die in the meantime, and I mean on camera, not just the hidden and deniable civilian deaths in Iraq and Palestine. We'll have to turn the other cheek again and again. We'll actually have to be the good guys, not just claim it.
Or, if I thought for one second that the response from career politician the world over was more than short term bandstanding, that there was actually a will to engage in a long term campaign of spending military lives in avoidable actions against individuals, then I would support that.
But neither of those will happen. We'll see a couple of airdrops, some new smart bomb footage to get the WTC images off the TV, maybe even a dash of carpet bombing to appease the rabid. We'll get bin Laden, at the cost of creating another two bin Ladens to take his place.
And in six months time, we'll be back to business as usual, except we'll have more enemies, fewer freedoms, and we'll be paying more taxes.
I say, ackowledge the inevitable. The US government wants to put this out of sight and out of mind as quickly as possible, after making as much political capital as they can. There will be no firm resolve. No winning of the ludicrous War Against Terrorism. Just a return to the bitching and the infighting and the propping up of puppet states. So how about we stop waving our dicks in the air, and just skip the bullshit and get back to business as usual?
So, I fail to see where nukes apply to combat terrorism
The idea is that you nuke (carpet bomb/smart bomb/sanction) host states until they fear you more than they hate you, and then they wo;; proactively police themselves and suppress the Osama bin Ladens of this world faster than you are creating them.
It's an abhorent and risible idea, but there it is.
Even somebody like Bin Laden should realize that there is little to be gained from a nuclear attack on the US (fingers crossed.)
Osama bin Laden's goal is to have revenge on the USA for setting foot on the Holy Land (speficially Saudi Arabia) both physically and culturally. His revenge means killing as many non-Islamic people as possible, US citizens by choice, but Europeans and Russians given half a chance (note that the CIA trained and funded him when he was killing Russians). He also wants to set up a world wide Islamic state, but that's icing on the cake. Just killing people is his short term objective.
That's it. There's no subtelty involved. There's no negotiations to be entered into, no wider political scene to interpret.
He may be crazy and willing to shed blood, but he wants there to be a middle east left when the jihad is over
I think you're missing the point of a jihad. It's a Holy War. He can't lose. Don't transpose cynical US career politics onto him. Understand that he believes that, and that there are no limits in this conflict. There are no rules here, no precedent, no guarantees that either side can or will see sense or admit that they might not triumph.
Osama bin Laden will kill people as long as he is alive. The USA will create more bin Ladens every time they take any military action in any hostile country anywhere in the world. Those are the only two certainties.
I trust the US government will not even consider using a nuclear device. That would make them far worse than the terrorists thay are after
How can it make them worse than they already are? US bombs and sanctions have killed far more civilians worldwide in the last ten years than one nuclear device on an Afghan city would. It'll just be more obvious than tens of thousands of children dying off camera in Iraq through lack of access to basic medical supplies.
Any murder of civilians (or conscripts) is vile and abhorent, but the bin Ladens of this world are really small fry compared to the US government, both past and present. bin Laden is evil, but the US government is evil on a scale almost too vast to comprehend.
Trust me, once non-suicidal hijackers realize that this is going to become the normal course of action, they will soon give up the hijacking of large vessels. What would be the point?
How many non-suicidal hijackers have flown planes into the WTC and Pentagon?
You forgot the tens of thousands of good, decent family folks dead through lack of access to basic medical supplies.
I'm 100% with you on this one. The US has a long history of targetting civilian populations deliberately. From WW2, through Cuba, Vietnam and Iraq, the USA has clung to the farcical idea that you can win hearts and minds by bombing and starving a population back to the stone age. Or maybe it's really just good old fashioned spiteful revenge. At least that would be honest.
Big problem. If this is coupled with autopilot, all it takes is a single flick of a switch to disable the autopilot
The Airbus A330 already has a safety autopilot that overrides the pilot and can't be switched off.
It's unpopular as hell with the pilots (especially after it crashed an early version, and Airbus tried to pin it on the pilot), but they bit the pillow, and the precedent has been set.
Why can't we insist: Every country in the world must respect basic human rights and freedoms or suffer OUR consequences!
Or what? Remove their basic human right to life? Or pull a Cuba on them and deny them access to the outside world? Works on a small scale, but on a large scale it denies us our basic human right to exploit cheap foreign labor.
It's a nice sentiment, but it fails both the idealism and the pragmatism test.
Wake up people. This is a war. And you either fight it now like a crazed motherfucker, or sit around watching rental movies and playing video games and watch the World Trade Center happen again
What's wrong with surrendering?
Really, what's wrong with that? All that it would take is to scuttle a few aircraft carriers. Is it really so vital that the US defends its right to kill good, decent family folks in other countries with bombs and sanctions, just to prop up political careers or give the arms industry a shot in the arm?
From now on... You can bet your bottom dollar that there are armed plainclothes police on every flight, with orders to shoot to kill.
I'll take that bet. Once I have your money, I'll explain why you can't whistle up 8,000 police on the spot, let alone 8,000 trained police, let alone 8,000 trained affordable police.
I do believe that it might well happen, but it will take time.
Nobody ever thought that they'd ever fly an airplane into a building using knives to hijack the airplane
Nobody except Tom Clancy, me, and anybody else who bothered to think about how it must actually feel to watch good, decent, innocent family folks being murdered in their thousands... before it happened in NYC and Washinton.
We [the British people] support the US without hesitation in your time of need,
Speak for yourself. Don't lump the rest of us in with your jingoism. The vile nature of the WTC murders doesn't change the fact that they were an inevitable response to the targetting of civilian populations by the USA and her lap dogs, and that military action (which you advocate by context) will just generate more bin Ladens.
just as you have supported us in the Falklands
Oh, wait, you mean with rhetoric and belated and token economic pressure? That's all right then.
Those Americans who don't vote, no matter how they excuse this failure, have no right to criticize their government.
That statement sounds like unarguable truth, but it's really not
Don't be so... diplomatic. It's a steaming pile of crap.
A representative democracy with a 4+ year term in the current state of economic and political change is a joke, a travesty. 90% of US incumbents retain their seats, 50% of both Senate and Congress are lawyers (separation of powers?), we have an hereditary political class, and the huge sums paid in bribes (sorry, "campaign contributions") to support the incumbents ensure that third parties or attempts at reforms can be snowed under by a media blitz. Even statements like this are written off as whacko subversion, when all I'm saying is: government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Supporting the current national political system in any way is treason. The government is not the nation. The political process is not the nation. The US government has never even been remotely representative of the people. Initially it was composed of white male slave owning landlords. Now it is a system of political dynasties and career politicians who are taught from birth that the aquisition and retention of power overrides everything else.
The only acceptable solution is to remove the policital class, and have constant referenda at local, state and national level on all issues. Retain the beaurocracy, but as the instrument of the people, not of the political class.
It's perfectly achievable. No policitian in her right mind is going to put herself out of a career by admitting it, but it can be done. Heck, it could be done with a fraction of the $37 bllion annual budget of the NSA, which we've just seen is a criminal waste of money. So why isn't it done?
You guys view everthing through a "it's all a Bush/Microsoft/MPAA/RIAA conspiracy".
Yeah, I know, we fall for that old ploy of businesses declaring that they've given millions of dollars to politicians, when really the situation is much worse because... no... wait... how could it be worse?
The people accepting linux are graphics studios, and they are not part of 'hollywood' and have nothing to do with the MPAA, therefore they are not hypocrites
They rely completely on "Hollywood" to pay their mortgages and build up their kids' college funds. Don't be so sure that they support your idealism
Feel free to provide a reference to a statement by any animation studio that they oppose the stand of the MPAA, and want to see their end product being watched on Linux.
So, someone has convinced the powers-that-be that middleware, with a certified OS (no Root access/no binary tools) is the holy grail. That way, you can validate the object chain -- guaranteed.
By 2005, you will need a license to run a non-government approved OS. Don't waste our time explaining how stupid or unenforcable that is, it's what's going to happen.
There would be horrific penalties for cracking the rights infrastructure, or distributing the tools to do so.
More horrific than the DMCA? Cracking lame-o-whiz protection is worse than rape and murder?
I was with you up to there. But let's criminalise the act itself, not just having the potential to commit it.
The Problem with XP Won't be its Quality... It will be its price.
Actually, I'd consider paying for it (first time for everything, right?) as it looks as though M$ have finally gotten it right, but I do not want to support a phone-home product.
Actually, I may consider buying a retail version, shelving in, and using a ripped non-phone-home warez version. Work through the morality of that one.
In 10 years, you'll be running a government approved operating system (Windows 2010, MacOS 16, GovIx 4.0), and it won't only trash your MP3, it'll use your (mandatory) net connection to whistle up an RIAA goon squad.
This isn't meant to be funny. We're hearing this language right here and now.
PS: If anyone has any MP3's (or any other un-hindered audio format) on their disk in ~10 years, I'll change my name.
I'm going to make it a point to save at least one MP3, just so I can you on that.
The mists of time roll back in my crystal ball, and I see... your application for a license to run a non-government approved OS is refused, you decide that it's better to comply than go to jail, and when you try to copy your MP3 from backup media to your CPRM hard drive, Windows 2010 detects and blocks it while simultaneously sending your details to the RIAA through your (mandatory) net connection.
The manufacturers I've talked to have a goal of about a $5.00 cost for the bluetooth solution. When we get there (802.11 is a more complex solution that is aimed for the higher end, and that is getting pretty cheap- the cards are way under $100, which means that the chipsets are probably under $20).
And let's all bear in mind economies of scale. Bluetooth will only get cheap to make when lots of people are buying it. Flipside, it'll only take off when it's cheap at retail. Early adopters are really going to take it in the shorts, and someone will have to bite the bullet and absorb those costs to drive demand.
As an equivelant HP935C can be had for $200 as opposed to the $400 for this beastie, it looks like HP won't be the ones doing the biting.
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- ..[was] an inevitable response to the targetting of civilian populations by the USA and her lap dogs
When has this happened? I'm dying to hear when or where these attacks are.UNICEF says that 5,000 Iraqi children die each month due to US sanctions. Off camera. Out of sight, out of mind. I'd go on, but I've reached my contempt threshhold for the day. Go watch WWF Bitchslap and chug some beers. All is well. Hush, little man, all is well.
Short term, maybe. Long term, I think we'll end up with exactly the calibre of rentacop that we're willing to not pay for.
- You forgot the tens of thousands of good, decent family folks dead through lack of access to basic medical supplies.
Bzzz, wrong, thanks for playing. The US and the Western style democracies, have donated so many medical supplies and vaccines...Do you honestly not know (or care) that tens of thousands of civilians have died in Iraq - and are still dying - due to the crippling sanctions imposed by the US after the Gulf war?
It's not enough to say that you're the good guys. You actually have to act like it as well.
You mean: it will be hard. It will take a long time. Politicians will have to make agreements and stick to them. People, lots of people, will die in the meantime, and I mean on camera, not just the hidden and deniable civilian deaths in Iraq and Palestine. We'll have to turn the other cheek again and again. We'll actually have to be the good guys, not just claim it.
Or, if I thought for one second that the response from career politician the world over was more than short term bandstanding, that there was actually a will to engage in a long term campaign of spending military lives in avoidable actions against individuals, then I would support that.
But neither of those will happen. We'll see a couple of airdrops, some new smart bomb footage to get the WTC images off the TV, maybe even a dash of carpet bombing to appease the rabid. We'll get bin Laden, at the cost of creating another two bin Ladens to take his place.
And in six months time, we'll be back to business as usual, except we'll have more enemies, fewer freedoms, and we'll be paying more taxes.
I say, ackowledge the inevitable. The US government wants to put this out of sight and out of mind as quickly as possible, after making as much political capital as they can. There will be no firm resolve. No winning of the ludicrous War Against Terrorism. Just a return to the bitching and the infighting and the propping up of puppet states. So how about we stop waving our dicks in the air, and just skip the bullshit and get back to business as usual?
Are you being wilfully ignorant?
The idea is that you nuke (carpet bomb/smart bomb/sanction) host states until they fear you more than they hate you, and then they wo;; proactively police themselves and suppress the Osama bin Ladens of this world faster than you are creating them.
It's an abhorent and risible idea, but there it is.
Osama bin Laden's goal is to have revenge on the USA for setting foot on the Holy Land (speficially Saudi Arabia) both physically and culturally. His revenge means killing as many non-Islamic people as possible, US citizens by choice, but Europeans and Russians given half a chance (note that the CIA trained and funded him when he was killing Russians). He also wants to set up a world wide Islamic state, but that's icing on the cake. Just killing people is his short term objective.
That's it. There's no subtelty involved. There's no negotiations to be entered into, no wider political scene to interpret.
I think you're missing the point of a jihad. It's a Holy War. He can't lose. Don't transpose cynical US career politics onto him. Understand that he believes that, and that there are no limits in this conflict. There are no rules here, no precedent, no guarantees that either side can or will see sense or admit that they might not triumph.
Osama bin Laden will kill people as long as he is alive. The USA will create more bin Ladens every time they take any military action in any hostile country anywhere in the world. Those are the only two certainties.
How can it make them worse than they already are? US bombs and sanctions have killed far more civilians worldwide in the last ten years than one nuclear device on an Afghan city would. It'll just be more obvious than tens of thousands of children dying off camera in Iraq through lack of access to basic medical supplies.
Any murder of civilians (or conscripts) is vile and abhorent, but the bin Ladens of this world are really small fry compared to the US government, both past and present. bin Laden is evil, but the US government is evil on a scale almost too vast to comprehend.
And you then go on to say that there's nothing worth nuking. But, still, we "should" nuke something?
I don't really expect that you "thought" much about that at all.
How many non-suicidal hijackers have flown planes into the WTC and Pentagon?
You forgot the tens of thousands of good, decent family folks dead through lack of access to basic medical supplies.
I'm 100% with you on this one. The US has a long history of targetting civilian populations deliberately. From WW2, through Cuba, Vietnam and Iraq, the USA has clung to the farcical idea that you can win hearts and minds by bombing and starving a population back to the stone age. Or maybe it's really just good old fashioned spiteful revenge. At least that would be honest.
The Airbus A330 already has a safety autopilot that overrides the pilot and can't be switched off.
It's unpopular as hell with the pilots (especially after it crashed an early version, and Airbus tried to pin it on the pilot), but they bit the pillow, and the precedent has been set.
Or what? Remove their basic human right to life? Or pull a Cuba on them and deny them access to the outside world? Works on a small scale, but on a large scale it denies us our basic human right to exploit cheap foreign labor.
It's a nice sentiment, but it fails both the idealism and the pragmatism test.
What's wrong with surrendering?
Really, what's wrong with that? All that it would take is to scuttle a few aircraft carriers. Is it really so vital that the US defends its right to kill good, decent family folks in other countries with bombs and sanctions, just to prop up political careers or give the arms industry a shot in the arm?
I'll take that bet. Once I have your money, I'll explain why you can't whistle up 8,000 police on the spot, let alone 8,000 trained police, let alone 8,000 trained affordable police.
I do believe that it might well happen, but it will take time.
Nobody except Tom Clancy, me, and anybody else who bothered to think about how it must actually feel to watch good, decent, innocent family folks being murdered in their thousands... before it happened in NYC and Washinton.
Speak for yourself. Don't lump the rest of us in with your jingoism. The vile nature of the WTC murders doesn't change the fact that they were an inevitable response to the targetting of civilian populations by the USA and her lap dogs, and that military action (which you advocate by context) will just generate more bin Ladens.
Oh, wait, you mean with rhetoric and belated and token economic pressure? That's all right then.
I'd argue that it's a different set of supported hardware.
For example, my Acer Travelmate 507 and Creative Webcam Go that I want to use for videoconferencing:
You pays your money, you takes your chances.
- Those Americans who don't vote, no matter how they excuse this failure, have no right to criticize their government.
That statement sounds like unarguable truth, but it's really notDon't be so... diplomatic. It's a steaming pile of crap.
A representative democracy with a 4+ year term in the current state of economic and political change is a joke, a travesty. 90% of US incumbents retain their seats, 50% of both Senate and Congress are lawyers (separation of powers?), we have an hereditary political class, and the huge sums paid in bribes (sorry, "campaign contributions") to support the incumbents ensure that third parties or attempts at reforms can be snowed under by a media blitz. Even statements like this are written off as whacko subversion, when all I'm saying is: government of the people, by the people, and for the people.
Supporting the current national political system in any way is treason. The government is not the nation. The political process is not the nation. The US government has never even been remotely representative of the people. Initially it was composed of white male slave owning landlords. Now it is a system of political dynasties and career politicians who are taught from birth that the aquisition and retention of power overrides everything else.
The only acceptable solution is to remove the policital class, and have constant referenda at local, state and national level on all issues. Retain the beaurocracy, but as the instrument of the people, not of the political class.
It's perfectly achievable. No policitian in her right mind is going to put herself out of a career by admitting it, but it can be done. Heck, it could be done with a fraction of the $37 bllion annual budget of the NSA, which we've just seen is a criminal waste of money. So why isn't it done?
Yeah, I know, we fall for that old ploy of businesses declaring that they've given millions of dollars to politicians, when really the situation is much worse because... no... wait... how could it be worse?
They rely completely on "Hollywood" to pay their mortgages and build up their kids' college funds. Don't be so sure that they support your idealism
Feel free to provide a reference to a statement by any animation studio that they oppose the stand of the MPAA, and want to see their end product being watched on Linux.
By 2005, you will need a license to run a non-government approved OS. Don't waste our time explaining how stupid or unenforcable that is, it's what's going to happen.
More horrific than the DMCA? Cracking lame-o-whiz protection is worse than rape and murder?
I was with you up to there. But let's criminalise the act itself, not just having the potential to commit it.
Actually, I'd consider paying for it (first time for everything, right?) as it looks as though M$ have finally gotten it right, but I do not want to support a phone-home product.
Actually, I may consider buying a retail version, shelving in, and using a ripped non-phone-home warez version. Work through the morality of that one.
In 10 years, you'll be running a government approved operating system (Windows 2010, MacOS 16, GovIx 4.0), and it won't only trash your MP3, it'll use your (mandatory) net connection to whistle up an RIAA goon squad.
This isn't meant to be funny. We're hearing this language right here and now.
- PS: If anyone has any MP3's (or any other un-hindered audio format) on their disk in ~10 years, I'll change my name.
I'm going to make it a point to save at least one MP3, just so I can you on that.The mists of time roll back in my crystal ball, and I see... your application for a license to run a non-government approved OS is refused, you decide that it's better to comply than go to jail, and when you try to copy your MP3 from backup media to your CPRM hard drive, Windows 2010 detects and blocks it while simultaneously sending your details to the RIAA through your (mandatory) net connection.
And no, I am not joking.
And let's all bear in mind economies of scale. Bluetooth will only get cheap to make when lots of people are buying it. Flipside, it'll only take off when it's cheap at retail. Early adopters are really going to take it in the shorts, and someone will have to bite the bullet and absorb those costs to drive demand.
As an equivelant HP935C can be had for $200 as opposed to the $400 for this beastie, it looks like HP won't be the ones doing the biting.