First off the Bush Administration keeps saying terrorists hate us for our "Freedom and Democracy"
Just because hey says it does not mean it's true. (Or for that matter that "Al Queda" are whoever the US Government claims they are...)
It should be noted that the U.S now has the highest per capita prison population in the world (though China and North Korea might be higher they just dont report accurately). This honor used to belong to the Soviet Union's gulags but the U.S. now leads Russia who is a close second. How did this happen, primarily by the "War on Drugs" which first and foremost punishes people for recreational drug use and drug addiction which is decidely antisocial behavior.
The "War on Drugs" is a version of the failed "Prohibition", with many of the same problems associated with it. It isn't even against drug use or even addiction, since there are plenty of legal drugs in use...
All this stuff does produce economic activity, often to the benefit of companies who are benefactors of the administration, but its also contributing to massive budget deficits and its pure economic waste because every countermeasure costs billions and the terrorist will just switch to a mode of attack that circumvents the countermeasures, leading to more countermeasures and more economic damage. This is a key objective of the doctrine of guerilla warfare, bleed the target white economicly trying to stop you.
Note also that the "follow the money" principle means that it would be a good idea to investigate if there is any possibility that those benefiting from increasing "security" have any connection to the "terrorists".
You can't win against terrorism by never ending escalation of repressive measures and countermeasures
At best such measures will do nothing, at worst the result is more terrorism...
but the U.S. government will try it anyway because they WANT increased repression to keep people in line, and quiet.
Possibly they also want more terrorism, in order to justify their actions.
It's our fault, too. Less than half the people vote, and those that do mostly shuffle up and yank the D or R lever anyway,because they are scared out of their shorts by the same D's and R's that they will "waste their vote" if they don't support one or the other of those two criminal cartels, so what's the point? D or R, same old lying crooks in the same jobs, now with all sorts of gadgets..
You appear to be blaming people for not voting. In a situation where voting is more or less pointless anyway. Whereas in order to change anything you'd actually need to do something other than voting for someone from a list of candidates already preselected not to change the status quo.
Given that the subject at hand is the way such authority has been used (especially MISused) historically,
From a historical perspective it appears that the primary role of "intelligence services" is to protect the ruling classes from any "threats". Even in countries where "freedom of speach", "democracy", etc are ostensivly allowed, even encouraged. Anything like catching gangsters or terrorists being rather less important than making sure that the "plebs" don't "rock the boat".
Regarding external evidence: Follow some of the leads I've given you (like COINTELPRO), or consult any person who has taken postgraduate courses in history.
N.B. probably dosn't even need to be modern history either:)
The conspiracy-theory tinfoil-hat stereotype is VERY convenient for the people who are actually running such operations.
The irony of such a term is that such "operations" typically have conspiracy theories behind them. The current one being "Al Quada"...
The biggest trouble with these things is that, by the time they come for YOU, it's too late. So you have to head them off while they're still being formed up, or still going after just the genuine scumbags (and the people the operators honestly mistake for genuine scumbags),
Assuming that this is actually is the starting point. The "intelligence communities" appear to contain an above average proportion of paranoid people, who are free to follow their paranoia, just so long as it dosn't go in the direction of the ruling classes.
I don't think this kind of spying on citizens is something new, and I suppose it was rather an exception when it was treated as a gaffe. McCarthyism is known, but most of such activities probably never came to light.
When such things do come to light it tends to be decades after the events.
Just get a low-end job doing something for an airline. Have your terrorists take a flight every now and then. If they're flagged you can find out when the screeners haul them off for a fruitless check (of course on these flights they'd be as clean as a newborn babe) and you remove them from any position they have in your organization. If they aren't on the list they merely establish a background as someone who flies frequently making it even easier to bypass security in the future.
This is basically the "Carnival Booth" method of identifying who is on the list. Except that there is no need for an "inside man". Since the people who get searched know they have been searched. An insider on the airport/airline staff is something a terrorist organisation would need in order to bypass security. e.g. get people/weapons on planes without any record of how they got there.
another problem is "what is the definition of a terrorist?", and the related issue of "who gets to decide?"
There can also be time factors involved. e.g. The US was quite happy with Bin Laden and co when they were attacking the USSR in Afghanistan. The definition the US Government uses means that "friends" are never "terrorists". (But they can be if they stop being "friends".)
Uh, appeasing terrorists generally doesn't make them go away
Far better not to create terrorists in the first place. But for some reason the US dosn't get this. Osama and Saddam were "made in the US"
- it just teaches them that if they blow up your buildings you adjust your foreign policy however they dictate.
How do you know that the US didn't do exactly that in September 2001? Since the demmands of those responsible have never appeared in the public domain...
Consider the former soviet union. Did they have problems with terrorists? Their general lack of terrorism certainly wasn't due to a hands-off foreign policy - they took over eastern europe and were messing around in asia all the time.
But they don't appear to have done much in the way of installing and funding terrorists and dictators. Certainly considerably less than the US.
Now, whether the USA should be interfering with countries all over the world is certainly up for debate and I for one would be happy if we kept a bit more to ourselves. But I advocate first chopping off Osama's head, and then getting ourselves disentagled from the middle east - not the other way around.
In the process of doing this how many more "Osamas" will the US be happy to create? Either directly, funded and trained at the US taxpayers' expense or indirectly when people see the US acting as a brutal imperial power. It's this "interfering" which creates the problem in the first place.
I'm American but I have no desire for us to be global cops.
Then please convince your government.
Frankly I don't give a damn if other countries/peoples want to exterminate themselves (Balkans, Liberia, Haiti, Palestine, etc).
In quite a few of these situations a big part of the problem is Western, especially US, interference in local government and politics. e.g. trying to make sure the "right" set of warlords get in power.
But why is it everyone cries that the US should do something? Send in troops, stop the killing.
Except that "everyone" does not say that. People over most of the planet did not want the US to invade Iraq. Even the US soldiers don't want to be there... For some reason the US insists on continuing the same kind of policies which got thousands of people killed one September morning. As opposed to doing something radical like not sending in the troops, not sending "advisors" and not paying for the weapons. All of which would stop a lot of killing.
I work with UK government, and let me tell you that I've had enough with suppliers supplying us with amateurish-quality software; while charging us an arm and a leg for that.
The perception that "commercial" or "proprietary" equates to "quality" is one which needs close examination. One possible reason for high cost is that competing for a "tender" can be expensive. Thus any business needs to make back the cost of any tenders they have been involved with (regardless of if they were sucessful or not) before they supply any software at all.
How is the availability of source code going to matter the quality of work of government employees? There should be no open source policy as well as no closed source policy, there should be a single software requirements policy to be eligible for government tenders.
Considering the length of time government, as opposed to commercial business, is often required to hold on to data it's possible that many closed source systems are inappropriate. Because the vendor is unwilling to support the same software for a long time.
Once again, the formats and standards should be defined by the government. The fact, whether source_code.zip is shipped with the CD, does not matter.
Actually it matters a lot. Since it places control with the government, preventing them being held to ransom by some company or other.
Better have a look at the unemployment rates in Europe as compared with the US as well.
Uemployment figures from governments everywhere are generally "cooked" in some way or other. One thing which would explain part of any difference between the US and EU countries would be the level of state support to the unemployed.
But I have a question. What happens if MS tells the EU to go fuck themselves? I doubt that they'd want to not sell software to Europe, but what if they just really don't want to open the APIs, so they stop selling in the EU?
In which case Microsoft would stop selling to one of their bigger markets and their plans for world domination go down the tubes. They can also probably kiss goodbye to any assets they have in the EU and possibly be branded a "terrorist organisation".
How can the punishment serve a deterent, if the fine does not hurt??
The problem with fining a monopoly is that they can try to recoup the money from their "customers". Though possibly what will hurt Microsoft the most is that they are not being fined in US Dollers.
Still, I do wonder what the incentive is for the ISPs to use dynamic addresses. Are they oversubscribing their IP ranges? That seems stupid.
It makes sense to a dialup ISP, where you can assign one IP to each "modem".
Otherwise, why not give all customers their own, single, static address? Some of them are reserving this for a higher-cost "business DSL" service, but it would be up to the customers to put pressure on them to remedy this situation.
With a DSL (cable modem) setup you need at least one IP address per customer. Otherwise the result will be unhappy customers (and potential lawsuits for breach of contract). It's most likely a wetware issue.
Actually, by some accounts there were a number of high ranking Nazis who were homosexual. Some even go so far as to suggest that Hitler himself might have been a closet homosexual.
This dosn't prove that Hitler or high ranking Nazi's were not homophobic. It's not unknown for bigots to be completly hypocritical and actually be members of the group they attack.
That a man like John Kerry would get elected to the highest office in the land because of a campaign of hate against Bush.
I'm not talking about ideology, I'm talking about hate. The folks on the Left don't just have pholsphical differences with Bush, they HATE him.
Whilst they may hate the man, do they like or dislike his policies. In terms of these how big a difference is there between Bush and Kerry?
It's a reasonable criterion, but then we'd already have 20+ planets, and you'd have to define the acceptable tolerance for "sphere". The Earth is about 1/1000 off from being a sphere (9 miles wider diameter at the equator than from pole to pole), and with Jupiter, it's much more significant. Of course, that's due to rotation...
It's also due to the fact that on the Earth the it's the solid part of the planet which is being measured, with Jupiter it's the upper atmosphere which is being measured.
The funny thing is when you've got a planet and a large moon... You need to be more precise as to what's a moon too...
Already covered by a "gravity" rule. If the centre of gravity, which is also typically one of the foci of the orbit, between two bodies is "inside" the larger body then the smaller one is a moon. Otherwise you have double planets.
... using email software which doesn't render HTML, and instead shows it as plain text without images?
Actually displaying HTML emails as text is still rendering the HTML. It's just using something other than a web browser engine to do it. Or if you really must use a brower engine to render first pass the email through a preprocessor which removes junk and external links.
Slashdot Mirror
First off the Bush Administration keeps saying terrorists hate us for our "Freedom and Democracy"
Just because hey says it does not mean it's true. (Or for that matter that "Al Queda" are whoever the US Government claims they are...)
It should be noted that the U.S now has the highest per capita prison population in the world (though China and North Korea might be higher they just dont report accurately). This honor used to belong to the Soviet Union's gulags but the U.S. now leads Russia who is a close second. How did this happen, primarily by the "War on Drugs" which first and foremost punishes people for recreational drug use and drug addiction which is decidely antisocial behavior.
The "War on Drugs" is a version of the failed "Prohibition", with many of the same problems associated with it. It isn't even against drug use or even addiction, since there are plenty of legal drugs in use...
All this stuff does produce economic activity, often to the benefit of companies who are benefactors of the administration, but its also contributing to massive budget deficits and its pure economic waste because every countermeasure costs billions and the terrorist will just switch to a mode of attack that circumvents the countermeasures, leading to more countermeasures and more economic damage. This is a key objective of the doctrine of guerilla warfare, bleed the target white economicly trying to stop you.
Note also that the "follow the money" principle means that it would be a good idea to investigate if there is any possibility that those benefiting from increasing "security" have any connection to the "terrorists".
You can't win against terrorism by never ending escalation of repressive measures and countermeasures
At best such measures will do nothing, at worst the result is more terrorism...
but the U.S. government will try it anyway because they WANT increased repression to keep people in line, and quiet.
Possibly they also want more terrorism, in order to justify their actions.
It's our fault, too. Less than half the people vote, and those that do mostly shuffle up and yank the D or R lever anyway,because they are scared out of their shorts by the same D's and R's that they will "waste their vote" if they don't support one or the other of those two criminal cartels, so what's the point? D or R, same old lying crooks in the same jobs, now with all sorts of gadgets..
You appear to be blaming people for not voting. In a situation where voting is more or less pointless anyway.
Whereas in order to change anything you'd actually need to do something other than voting for someone from a list of candidates already preselected not to change the status quo.
How about the witch-hunting? People lost their jobs for simple affiliation with communism. Hoover tore some shit up back in the day.
The only difference between then and now is the definition of "witch".
History indicates the government can do bad things. But we've learned from history too.
There is very little evidence that much has been learned from history at all.
It's going to be harder for government antagonists to get away with it next time.
So howcome they still appear able to get away with using techniques which date back to at least Roman times?
Vigilance is good. But there's less need to be hyper-vigilant when you know what to look for. Ordinary vigilance should be sufficient.
If, and when, people learn what to look for.
Also, terrorism is real too.
But what politicans claim about terrorism and terrorists may well not be. State sponsored terrorism is also quite real.
Given that the subject at hand is the way such authority has been used (especially MISused) historically,
:)
From a historical perspective it appears that the primary role of "intelligence services" is to protect the ruling classes from any "threats". Even in countries where "freedom of speach", "democracy", etc are ostensivly allowed, even encouraged.
Anything like catching gangsters or terrorists being rather less important than making sure that the "plebs" don't "rock the boat".
Regarding external evidence: Follow some of the leads I've given you (like COINTELPRO), or consult any person who has taken postgraduate courses in history.
N.B. probably dosn't even need to be modern history either
The conspiracy-theory tinfoil-hat stereotype is VERY convenient for the people who are actually running such operations.
The irony of such a term is that such "operations" typically have conspiracy theories behind them. The current one being "Al Quada"...
The biggest trouble with these things is that, by the time they come for YOU, it's too late. So you have to head them off while they're still being formed up, or still going after just the genuine scumbags (and the people the operators honestly mistake for genuine scumbags),
Assuming that this is actually is the starting point. The "intelligence communities" appear to contain an above average proportion of paranoid people, who are free to follow their paranoia, just so long as it dosn't go in the direction of the ruling classes.
I don't think this kind of spying on citizens is something new, and I suppose it was rather an exception when it was treated as a gaffe. McCarthyism is known, but most of such activities probably never came to light.
When such things do come to light it tends to be decades after the events.
Just get a low-end job doing something for an airline. Have your terrorists take a flight every now and then. If they're flagged you can find out when the screeners haul them off for a fruitless check (of course on these flights they'd be as clean as a newborn babe) and you remove them from any position they have in your organization. If they aren't on the list they merely establish a background as someone who flies frequently making it even easier to bypass security in the future.
This is basically the "Carnival Booth" method of identifying who is on the list. Except that there is no need for an "inside man". Since the people who get searched know they have been searched. An insider on the airport/airline staff is something a terrorist organisation would need in order to bypass security. e.g. get people/weapons on planes without any record of how they got there.
another problem is "what is the definition of a terrorist?", and the related issue of "who gets to decide?"
There can also be time factors involved. e.g. The US was quite happy with Bin Laden and co when they were attacking the USSR in Afghanistan. The definition the US Government uses means that "friends" are never "terrorists". (But they can be if they stop being "friends".)
Quite ironic, really, given that Linux backers were cheering for Caldera when it was going after Microsoft.
:)
Another case where thinking "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" is a bad idea.
I wonder how many will learn a lesson from this experience.
If this did happen it would show "geeks" as b eing smarter than governments
Uh, appeasing terrorists generally doesn't make them go away
Far better not to create terrorists in the first place. But for some reason the US dosn't get this. Osama and Saddam were "made in the US"
- it just teaches them that if they blow up your buildings you adjust your foreign policy however they dictate.
How do you know that the US didn't do exactly that in September 2001? Since the demmands of those responsible have never appeared in the public domain...
Consider the former soviet union. Did they have problems with terrorists? Their general lack of terrorism certainly wasn't due to a hands-off foreign policy - they took over eastern europe and were messing around in asia all the time.
But they don't appear to have done much in the way of installing and funding terrorists and dictators. Certainly considerably less than the US.
Now, whether the USA should be interfering with countries all over the world is certainly up for debate and I for one would be happy if we kept a bit more to ourselves. But I advocate first chopping off Osama's head, and then getting ourselves disentagled from the middle east - not the other way around.
In the process of doing this how many more "Osamas" will the US be happy to create? Either directly, funded and trained at the US taxpayers' expense or indirectly when people see the US acting as a brutal imperial power. It's this "interfering" which creates the problem in the first place.
I'm American but I have no desire for us to be global cops.
Then please convince your government.
Frankly I don't give a damn if other countries/peoples want to exterminate themselves (Balkans, Liberia, Haiti, Palestine, etc).
In quite a few of these situations a big part of the problem is Western, especially US, interference in local government and politics. e.g. trying to make sure the "right" set of warlords get in power.
But why is it everyone cries that the US should do something? Send in troops, stop the killing.
Except that "everyone" does not say that. People over most of the planet did not want the US to invade Iraq. Even the US soldiers don't want to be there...
For some reason the US insists on continuing the same kind of policies which got thousands of people killed one September morning. As opposed to doing something radical like not sending in the troops, not sending "advisors" and not paying for the weapons. All of which would stop a lot of killing.
Some US pilots hyped up on amphetamines bombed a Canadian army unit. I'm not sure what happened to them but they werent sent to trial in Canada.
IIRC not that much happened to them. But it might have been one of the reasons that Canada wanted nothing to do with the attack on Iraq.
I work with UK government, and let me tell you that I've had enough with suppliers supplying us with amateurish-quality software; while charging us an arm and a leg for that.
The perception that "commercial" or "proprietary" equates to "quality" is one which needs close examination.
One possible reason for high cost is that competing for a "tender" can be expensive. Thus any business needs to make back the cost of any tenders they have been involved with (regardless of if they were sucessful or not) before they supply any software at all.
How is the availability of source code going to matter the quality of work of government employees? There should be no open source policy as well as no closed source policy, there should be a single software requirements policy to be eligible for government tenders.
Considering the length of time government, as opposed to commercial business, is often required to hold on to data it's possible that many closed source systems are inappropriate. Because the vendor is unwilling to support the same software for a long time.
Once again, the formats and standards should be defined by the government. The fact, whether source_code.zip is shipped with the CD, does not matter.
Actually it matters a lot. Since it places control with the government, preventing them being held to ransom by some company or other.
Better have a look at the unemployment rates in Europe as compared with the US as well.
Uemployment figures from governments everywhere are generally "cooked" in some way or other. One thing which would explain part of any difference between the US and EU countries would be the level of state support to the unemployed.
But I have a question. What happens if MS tells the EU to go fuck themselves? I doubt that they'd want to not sell software to Europe, but what if they just really don't want to open the APIs, so they stop selling in the EU?
In which case Microsoft would stop selling to one of their bigger markets and their plans for world domination go down the tubes. They can also probably kiss goodbye to any assets they have in the EU and possibly be branded a "terrorist organisation".
How can the punishment serve a deterent, if the fine does not hurt??
The problem with fining a monopoly is that they can try to recoup the money from their "customers". Though possibly what will hurt Microsoft the most is that they are not being fined in US Dollers.
Still, I do wonder what the incentive is for the ISPs to use dynamic addresses. Are they oversubscribing their IP ranges? That seems stupid.
It makes sense to a dialup ISP, where you can assign one IP to each "modem".
Otherwise, why not give all customers their own, single, static address? Some of them are reserving this for a higher-cost "business DSL" service, but it would be up to the customers to put pressure on them to remedy this situation.
With a DSL (cable modem) setup you need at least one IP address per customer. Otherwise the result will be unhappy customers (and potential lawsuits for breach of contract).
It's most likely a wetware issue.
Actually, by some accounts there were a number of high ranking Nazis who were homosexual. Some even go so far as to suggest that Hitler himself might have been a closet homosexual.
This dosn't prove that Hitler or high ranking Nazi's were not homophobic. It's not unknown for bigots to be completly hypocritical and actually be members of the group they attack.
That a man like John Kerry would get elected to the highest office in the land because of a campaign of hate against Bush.
I'm not talking about ideology, I'm talking about hate. The folks on the Left don't just have pholsphical differences with Bush, they HATE him.
Whilst they may hate the man, do they like or dislike his policies. In terms of these how big a difference is there between Bush and Kerry?
July 13, 2004 Colin Powell declares the EU has "Weapons of mass destruction, without a doubt."
:)
July 14, 2004: Powell fired for telling the truth about the EU having WMDs
It's a reasonable criterion, but then we'd already have 20+ planets, and you'd have to define the acceptable tolerance for "sphere". The Earth is about 1/1000 off from being a sphere (9 miles wider diameter at the equator than from pole to pole), and with Jupiter, it's much more significant. Of course, that's due to rotation...
It's also due to the fact that on the Earth the it's the solid part of the planet which is being measured, with Jupiter it's the upper atmosphere which is being measured.
The funny thing is when you've got a planet and a large moon... You need to be more precise as to what's a moon too...
Already covered by a "gravity" rule. If the centre of gravity, which is also typically one of the foci of the orbit, between two bodies is "inside" the larger body then the smaller one is a moon. Otherwise you have double planets.
... using email software which doesn't render HTML, and instead shows it as plain text without images?
Actually displaying HTML emails as text is still rendering the HTML. It's just using something other than a web browser engine to do it. Or if you really must use a brower engine to render first pass the email through a preprocessor which removes junk and external links.