Could happen to Bluetooth as well. My employer's already shelved Bluetooth support in our new telecom product, and we are now talking about following rather than leading demand.
In other words, our internal evangelists are currently skimming the trade glossies for a new buzzword compliant technology to beat us round the head with...;)
I don't believe you. You tell us that our foreign policy is wrong and corrupt and we should get out of international politics and then have the balls to tell me that we should have rolled in there and deposed him despite the outcry of the international community, the UN, and the Arab Nations in particular
I'm saying: pick one.
The rank hypocrisy of the US government (not the people, stop making that confusion) sickens me. They'd rather have a million civilians die off camera in Iraq than lose one US serviceman on camera.
Fine, but terrorist incidents can't compared to normal in-flight situations
What the fuck is wrong with this site? I am so sick and tired of everything that I post having imaginary context added to it, and attacked on a point of principle.
All I was saying is that planes already have autopilots that override the pilot. That's it. That's all I fucking well said. You want to pick a fight, go ahead, punch your monitor out. Go on, take a good hard swing.
The US has NOT been targetting civilian populations since 1943. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were sad event
I said 1943. At that time, the European powers were still trying to precision bomb targets. It was the USA that introduced the idea of area bombing in civilian areas. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just the ultimate evolution of that, unless you count the large scale use of chemical weapons in Vietnam as being equally abhorent.
The Sanctions in Iraq are a simple matter, and I can't believe that you're naive enough to bring them up
I'm sorry? The fuck? You tell that to the good, decent family folks dying in Iraq right now through lack of basic medical care. You ask them who they blame, Saddam or the USA, and then tell me that sanctioning a country back to the stone age on the deranged belief that they will blame their own government is "a simple matter".
Are you now saying that it would have been more merciful to roll into Bagdad (sp?) with tanks?
Yes. What's your problem with that? If the aim of the USA was to resolve the situation rather than just restore the status quo, why stop at the Iraqi border? The loss of civilian life could hardly have been higher than it has been under the sanctions, and with the continuing genocide of the marsh arabs.
Or perhaps we should have just let the Iraqi army roll across Kuwait, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia.
Stop creating straw men. My preference is the other way; if you're going to set up Hussein as the Big Bad Wolf, then the situation isn't resolved until you remove him. Anything else is rank hypocrisy.
Re:And here comes Carnivore...
on
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One, the terrorists did not blow up a bomb factory or a cruise missile factory
Are you being willfully ignorant? I picked a hypothecial example that more closely mirrors the kind of targetted strike that the USA likes to carry out, the point being to try and actually make you think about how you would feel about even such limited retaliatory action.
After you make the retaliation, it's too late to review your policies and see if you'd better play nice. You've already created yourself a new bunch of fanatics right there and then. You can't retaliate and then say "That's everything squared away, everybody stop now." You have to break the cycle yourself.
Don't try and apply personal relationship rules to this. Think how you feel about any losses that you have just suffered in the WTC/Pentagon and ask yourself why the fuck you think anyone else in the world would feel differently about the loss of their loved ones.
The USA has a chance to wake up and break the cycle of hate and fear. Please, please, don't let your politicians blow it.
are we just planning to ignore international law, and bring anyone we capture to trial anyway
I seriously doubt that bin Laden could be allowed to reach the USA alive. There would be years of trial - which could not possibly be fair or unbaised - and would you want to ask any US citizen to act as his bodyguard considering the strength of feeling against him?
I don't think that we have any precedent for this. Would we have tried to take Hitler alive? It's just too big to grasp. I'd hate to be the guy in charge of making these decisions.:(
Re:What the hell do you expect?
on
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Right now I think we should save our criticism for when and IF they don't take the boxes away afterward.
Define "afterward"? After we win the "War on Terrorism"? When will that be? Two days after we win the "War or Drugs"? It would make as much sense to say that it will be after we win the "War on People Who Don't like us Being at War with Them".
Re:And here comes Carnivore...
on
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· Score: 2
The only way to prevent these attacks is to decrease the motivation to perform them. This is done by being a nicer country, and by being implacably and harshly punitive in our response to such attacks
How on earth can you reconcile those two statements?
Picture this: a Serbian faction blows up a US factory that makes the cruise missiles that killed innocent Serbian civilans. Dozens of US civilians are in turn killed in the factory. What's your response?
While I condemn their actions, I have to agree that they are only being firm but fair, and I respect their motives.
Arrogant bastards! How dare they! We will have our revenge.
Now. Why would it be different for any of the good, honest, family folks in any country anywhere in the world?
If you take any kind of military action in any country anywhere in the world, you will be hated and feared for it.
You can be nicer, or you can be punative. Pick one.
Re:Loss of privacy is not necessarily loss of libe
on
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His core arguement is for complete transparency - that all citizens should be allowed to observe the activities of individuals, government, and business
And this was modded up why?
The whole point about FISA warrants is that they are not transparent, that there's no oversight, no accountability, no way to contest or challenge them or even to know why one was issued.
The loss of privacy isn't the main issue, it's the loss of any pretence to having any respect for the individual. It's the view that unelected officials can decide your fate without even the common courtesy of telling you why. It's the precedent that a faceless man in a locked room can decide that are so likely to be guilty that your ability to show otherwise can be suspended.
As an aside, the British government has given itself similar powers, specifically to combat the situation in Northern Irelend. They are used sparingly, the bill has a duration of one year, and Parliament has to keep voting to renew it. The thinking there is that this sort of measure is abhorent, and should be done away with as soon as it is no longer necessary.
50 years is a long time to not have major conflict
Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf were minor skirmishes? A higher tonnage of iron bombs was dropped on Iraq during the Gulf conflict (sorry, war, we won that one) than during the whole of WWII! The millions of Iraqi civilian dead (mostly through sanctions and lack of access to basic medical care) is no less of a human tragedy than if they'd been innocent US citizens.
The people who carried out the WTC murders see themselves as soldiers, and have viewed themselves as being at war with the USA for years. They point out that the USA has been deliberatly targetting civilian populations since 1943, and that they are retaliating in kind using the only means available. Their actions are vile and cowardly, but that doesn't excuse similar actions by the USA.
The hijackings were utterly abhorent, but no more so than what the US has been doing to civilian populations for the past 50 years directly and indirectly, all in the interests of avoiding a direct military confrontation with an equally matched opponent.
I just point this out, I'm not necessarily condemning it. The fact is that by policing the world and maintaining the balance of power, the USA has stopped the middle east or Balkans going up in flames and dragging everyone in. It probably was lesser of two evils, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't evil, or that we should pretend that the USA isn't also guilty of appalling crimes against humanity.
This looks like USA bashing, but that's not the intention. The only aim is to ask US citizens to take a good long honest look at what the US has been doing, and ask themselves whether they are ready to step up to the line again and keep making enemies as well as friends every time that they pick a side to support.
Sure. It's political grandstanding, but there is also the issue that it frees up resources to focus on decrypting the messages that you can now easily identify as being from dangerous criminals like terrorists, paedophiles, drug dealers, GNU/Linux/BSD users and/or 4th/10th Amendment crackpots.
See, when you can own guns, you have power over the government. They even wrote it into the law of the land, the Constitution, to ensure that the american people could have guns for cases just like this one
Bollocks. Read your own Constitution. US citizens have a right to have and bear arms for the formation of militias, the clear intention being to create an armed populace to fight foreign powers, not the American government.
I actually agree with you, but don't kid yourself that the Consitution is on your side.
Carnivore is a crock. Sure, it will pick up plaintext, but who's going to be idiotic enough to use plaintext (unless they're making a final point, like the murderers on the planes)?
But do you really think that it can scan all traffic? And that anything that isn't provably innocent will be handed on to a MiB for analysis?
So, my binary file, "abstract_art.jpg". Is that an image, or an encrypted text file wrapped in jpg headers? Do you really think that the FBI can vet every attachment and piece of data flying around the 'net?
I really do think you're wrong. We tried a policy of non-involvement and isolationism once before, and the result was World War II
The one that ran from 1942-1945 (as I'm now increasingly hearing on gonzo US history programming), or the 1939-1945 one that the USA seriously considered joining on the Axis side before Hitler really lost the plot and it became apparent that Japan wasn't prepared to share the Pacific with the USA?
Check your history before you flame this.
I do agree that the stakes are higher now, which is exactly why the USA cannot keep policing the world. I honestly believe that we are seeing a watershed where the USA can decide whether it wants to get along with everyone, or whether it wants to be a global dictatorship. I can't see a third option, unless you count more of this appalling carnage as an option.
Are you really such a fucked up sack of shit that you actually thought that I was criticising the response? The point was exactly and only that we now need a whole new set of definitions, for a new type of war.
Now, go awau and pick a fight with someone who actually disagrees with you.
Why can they release it in Japan before they can release it here (by several months apparently)...
The games. The console sells itself, but you have to come up with a line of A+++ games targetted and marketed at that region, plan which ones you want at launch, which ones you will hold back, and how fast you will release them. It's all about the games.
By the way, I'll lay down money that M$ will miss that completely by spending their reported $500,000,000 marketing budget telling us how great the box is.
For the record, I'll follow up my own post, as it was so badly misinterpreted
I do not hate America or Americans. These deaths were vile and abhorent, utterly unjustifiable and completely wrong.
But the question that I was responding to was: why us?
The US is hated because it projects power across the world, and further, because it is hypocritical in the application of that power and often applies it not through principle, but for political and economic ends, or as a public relations exercise or even just to try out new weapons systems against a hostile enemy.
The US goes into battle with a cry of "good will triumph" and "we are defending freedom.". Not always. The USA prolongs regional conflicts, preferably by supporting the underdog with arms, but occasionally with direct action. It supported the dictatorship of Iraq against the theocracy of Iran, then when Iraq got the upper hand, sided with the monarchy of Kuwait against Iraq. Where was the "good" side there, and the "freedom"? If the goal was to eradicate evil, to end the conflict, then why stop once the status quo was restored? The invasion of Kuwait by Iraq was wrong, but the ongoing genocide of the marsh Arabs inside Iraq is worse, and the only responses to that are to starve the civilian population, and to enforce no fly zones that are thinly veiled excuses to remind Iraq who the boss is, and to give pilots combat experience (just as they used to use Libya, before that got too dangerous and unpopular). There is no will, nor any apparent desire to actually resolve the plight of the marsh arabs, or indeed to stop denying the civilians of Iraq access to food and medical supplies, now that it is all happening conveniently off camera.
You can argue with that, and I might very well be wrong. Certainly, the intervention in former Yugoslavia saved tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives, and I reserve my cynicism in that conflict. But the plain fact is that while one side welcomed the USA, the other rejected it, and the USA made another enemy. The USA chooses to police the world, and in the process it causes a lot of deaths, and the good, decent family folks suffering those deaths hate the USA, with a heartfelt and genuine passion. They feel exactly the same shock and revulsion and anger that you feel now. It's not right, and it's not justifiable, but that is why this happened, because there are now a sufficient number of people and countries who wish revenge on the USA to support the murderers who did this.
The way to address that is not to deny it, nor to keep bombing those who hate you, so that they keep fearing you as well, but simply to stop policing the world. The arms companies and the politicians will have to find other things to do, but think of it this way: if nobody hates you, then you don't need a huge military, or the NSA, or even the CIA. In the long term, you could add 50% to health and education spending. Isn't that a goal worth pursuing?
The USA has a chance to decide now, and for the next century, whether it wants to escalate the cycle of hatred and fear, or whether it wants to actually lead the world and bring the aircraft carriers home for good.
Thank God not all Scottish will tell Americans in their moment of terrible tragedy that we deserve it
No! No, no no! Nobody, ever, anywhere deserves this. That's my point. That the US is genuinely hated and feared, by good, decent, family folks who are feeling the same horror and anger that you feel right now. The violence has to end everywhere before that will be solved.
The question was: why us?
The answer is simply that the US chooses to police the world, and that this was inevitable. It wasn't deseved, it's vile, it's abhorent, but it will keep happening so long as the USA projects power across the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Could happen to Bluetooth as well. My employer's already shelved Bluetooth support in our new telecom product, and we are now talking about following rather than leading demand.
In other words, our internal evangelists are currently skimming the trade glossies for a new buzzword compliant technology to beat us round the head with... ;)
I'm saying: pick one.
The rank hypocrisy of the US government (not the people, stop making that confusion) sickens me. They'd rather have a million civilians die off camera in Iraq than lose one US serviceman on camera.
What the fuck is wrong with this site? I am so sick and tired of everything that I post having imaginary context added to it, and attacked on a point of principle.
All I was saying is that planes already have autopilots that override the pilot. That's it. That's all I fucking well said . You want to pick a fight, go ahead, punch your monitor out. Go on, take a good hard swing.
I said 1943. At that time, the European powers were still trying to precision bomb targets. It was the USA that introduced the idea of area bombing in civilian areas. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just the ultimate evolution of that, unless you count the large scale use of chemical weapons in Vietnam as being equally abhorent.
I'm sorry? The fuck? You tell that to the good, decent family folks dying in Iraq right now through lack of basic medical care. You ask them who they blame, Saddam or the USA, and then tell me that sanctioning a country back to the stone age on the deranged belief that they will blame their own government is "a simple matter".
Yes. What's your problem with that? If the aim of the USA was to resolve the situation rather than just restore the status quo, why stop at the Iraqi border? The loss of civilian life could hardly have been higher than it has been under the sanctions, and with the continuing genocide of the marsh arabs.
Stop creating straw men. My preference is the other way; if you're going to set up Hussein as the Big Bad Wolf, then the situation isn't resolved until you remove him. Anything else is rank hypocrisy.
Are you being willfully ignorant? I picked a hypothecial example that more closely mirrors the kind of targetted strike that the USA likes to carry out, the point being to try and actually make you think about how you would feel about even such limited retaliatory action.
After you make the retaliation, it's too late to review your policies and see if you'd better play nice. You've already created yourself a new bunch of fanatics right there and then. You can't retaliate and then say "That's everything squared away, everybody stop now." You have to break the cycle yourself.
Don't try and apply personal relationship rules to this. Think how you feel about any losses that you have just suffered in the WTC/Pentagon and ask yourself why the fuck you think anyone else in the world would feel differently about the loss of their loved ones.
The USA has a chance to wake up and break the cycle of hate and fear. Please, please, don't let your politicians blow it.
Sure, if you accept that at the time of writing, "government" meant "the other guy".
I seriously doubt that bin Laden could be allowed to reach the USA alive. There would be years of trial - which could not possibly be fair or unbaised - and would you want to ask any US citizen to act as his bodyguard considering the strength of feeling against him?
I don't think that we have any precedent for this. Would we have tried to take Hitler alive? It's just too big to grasp. I'd hate to be the guy in charge of making these decisions. :(
Define "afterward"? After we win the "War on Terrorism"? When will that be? Two days after we win the "War or Drugs"? It would make as much sense to say that it will be after we win the "War on People Who Don't like us Being at War with Them".
How on earth can you reconcile those two statements?
Picture this: a Serbian faction blows up a US factory that makes the cruise missiles that killed innocent Serbian civilans. Dozens of US civilians are in turn killed in the factory. What's your response?
Now. Why would it be different for any of the good, honest, family folks in any country anywhere in the world?
If you take any kind of military action in any country anywhere in the world, you will be hated and feared for it.
You can be nicer, or you can be punative. Pick one.
And this was modded up why?
The whole point about FISA warrants is that they are not transparent, that there's no oversight, no accountability, no way to contest or challenge them or even to know why one was issued.
The loss of privacy isn't the main issue, it's the loss of any pretence to having any respect for the individual. It's the view that unelected officials can decide your fate without even the common courtesy of telling you why. It's the precedent that a faceless man in a locked room can decide that are so likely to be guilty that your ability to show otherwise can be suspended.
As an aside, the British government has given itself similar powers, specifically to combat the situation in Northern Irelend. They are used sparingly, the bill has a duration of one year, and Parliament has to keep voting to renew it. The thinking there is that this sort of measure is abhorent, and should be done away with as soon as it is no longer necessary.
Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf were minor skirmishes? A higher tonnage of iron bombs was dropped on Iraq during the Gulf conflict (sorry, war, we won that one) than during the whole of WWII! The millions of Iraqi civilian dead (mostly through sanctions and lack of access to basic medical care) is no less of a human tragedy than if they'd been innocent US citizens.
The people who carried out the WTC murders see themselves as soldiers, and have viewed themselves as being at war with the USA for years. They point out that the USA has been deliberatly targetting civilian populations since 1943, and that they are retaliating in kind using the only means available. Their actions are vile and cowardly, but that doesn't excuse similar actions by the USA.
The hijackings were utterly abhorent, but no more so than what the US has been doing to civilian populations for the past 50 years directly and indirectly, all in the interests of avoiding a direct military confrontation with an equally matched opponent.
I just point this out, I'm not necessarily condemning it. The fact is that by policing the world and maintaining the balance of power, the USA has stopped the middle east or Balkans going up in flames and dragging everyone in. It probably was lesser of two evils, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't evil, or that we should pretend that the USA isn't also guilty of appalling crimes against humanity.
This looks like USA bashing, but that's not the intention. The only aim is to ask US citizens to take a good long honest look at what the US has been doing, and ask themselves whether they are ready to step up to the line again and keep making enemies as well as friends every time that they pick a side to support.
Sure. It's political grandstanding, but there is also the issue that it frees up resources to focus on decrypting the messages that you can now easily identify as being from dangerous criminals like terrorists, paedophiles, drug dealers, GNU/Linux/BSD users and/or 4th/10th Amendment crackpots.
Been on an Airbus recently? Pilots hate them, because the safety autopilot overrides the pilot, not the other way around.
Bollocks. Read your own Constitution. US citizens have a right to have and bear arms for the formation of militias, the clear intention being to create an armed populace to fight foreign powers, not the American government.
I actually agree with you, but don't kid yourself that the Consitution is on your side.
Addenda: Bin Laden was CIA trained and funded during the Russian (nee Soviet) occupation of Afganistan. Dear god.
Thanks for raising a good point. If I write an encryption program for my own use, do I get locked up?
Carnivore is a crock. Sure, it will pick up plaintext, but who's going to be idiotic enough to use plaintext (unless they're making a final point, like the murderers on the planes)?
But do you really think that it can scan all traffic? And that anything that isn't provably innocent will be handed on to a MiB for analysis?
So, my binary file, "abstract_art.jpg". Is that an image, or an encrypted text file wrapped in jpg headers? Do you really think that the FBI can vet every attachment and piece of data flying around the 'net?
The one that ran from 1942-1945 (as I'm now increasingly hearing on gonzo US history programming), or the 1939-1945 one that the USA seriously considered joining on the Axis side before Hitler really lost the plot and it became apparent that Japan wasn't prepared to share the Pacific with the USA?
Check your history before you flame this.
I do agree that the stakes are higher now, which is exactly why the USA cannot keep policing the world. I honestly believe that we are seeing a watershed where the USA can decide whether it wants to get along with everyone, or whether it wants to be a global dictatorship. I can't see a third option, unless you count more of this appalling carnage as an option.
Are you really such a fucked up sack of shit that you actually thought that I was criticising the response? The point was exactly and only that we now need a whole new set of definitions, for a new type of war.
Now, go awau and pick a fight with someone who actually disagrees with you.
Yes, thanks, that's my GOD DAMN FUCKING POINT.
The games. The console sells itself, but you have to come up with a line of A+++ games targetted and marketed at that region, plan which ones you want at launch, which ones you will hold back, and how fast you will release them. It's all about the games.
By the way, I'll lay down money that M$ will miss that completely by spending their reported $500,000,000 marketing budget telling us how great the box is.
I don't think so; if they get swamped, all they have to do is to not answer and hope for the best, rather than the other way around.
Neat idea, by the way, and probably worth doing anyway by concerned entrepeneurs.
For the record, I'll follow up my own post, as it was so badly misinterpreted
I do not hate America or Americans. These deaths were vile and abhorent, utterly unjustifiable and completely wrong.
But the question that I was responding to was: why us?
The US is hated because it projects power across the world, and further, because it is hypocritical in the application of that power and often applies it not through principle, but for political and economic ends, or as a public relations exercise or even just to try out new weapons systems against a hostile enemy.
The US goes into battle with a cry of "good will triumph" and "we are defending freedom.". Not always. The USA prolongs regional conflicts, preferably by supporting the underdog with arms, but occasionally with direct action. It supported the dictatorship of Iraq against the theocracy of Iran, then when Iraq got the upper hand, sided with the monarchy of Kuwait against Iraq. Where was the "good" side there, and the "freedom"? If the goal was to eradicate evil, to end the conflict, then why stop once the status quo was restored? The invasion of Kuwait by Iraq was wrong, but the ongoing genocide of the marsh Arabs inside Iraq is worse, and the only responses to that are to starve the civilian population, and to enforce no fly zones that are thinly veiled excuses to remind Iraq who the boss is, and to give pilots combat experience (just as they used to use Libya, before that got too dangerous and unpopular). There is no will, nor any apparent desire to actually resolve the plight of the marsh arabs, or indeed to stop denying the civilians of Iraq access to food and medical supplies, now that it is all happening conveniently off camera.
You can argue with that, and I might very well be wrong. Certainly, the intervention in former Yugoslavia saved tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives, and I reserve my cynicism in that conflict. But the plain fact is that while one side welcomed the USA, the other rejected it, and the USA made another enemy. The USA chooses to police the world, and in the process it causes a lot of deaths, and the good, decent family folks suffering those deaths hate the USA, with a heartfelt and genuine passion. They feel exactly the same shock and revulsion and anger that you feel now. It's not right, and it's not justifiable, but that is why this happened, because there are now a sufficient number of people and countries who wish revenge on the USA to support the murderers who did this.
The way to address that is not to deny it, nor to keep bombing those who hate you, so that they keep fearing you as well, but simply to stop policing the world. The arms companies and the politicians will have to find other things to do, but think of it this way: if nobody hates you, then you don't need a huge military, or the NSA, or even the CIA. In the long term, you could add 50% to health and education spending. Isn't that a goal worth pursuing?
The USA has a chance to decide now, and for the next century, whether it wants to escalate the cycle of hatred and fear, or whether it wants to actually lead the world and bring the aircraft carriers home for good.
It's your choice.
Um, who are you talking to? I followed up as myself. I don't AC post.
No! No, no no! Nobody, ever, anywhere deserves this. That's my point. That the US is genuinely hated and feared, by good, decent, family folks who are feeling the same horror and anger that you feel right now. The violence has to end everywhere before that will be solved.
The question was: why us?
The answer is simply that the US chooses to police the world, and that this was inevitable. It wasn't deseved, it's vile, it's abhorent, but it will keep happening so long as the USA projects power across the world.
You have a chance to stop that, here and now.