I am not an IT pro, but I simply just don't trust Microsoft. For instance, install Windows media encoder and it quietly (without telling you) removes MP3 codecs. I won't install something unless I am told *exactly* what it does - otherwise I may just wake up and find out that I have done something like irremovably infested my system with DRM (*cough* media player 9 *cough*).
If an official "update" is able to do that then it should hardly come as a suprise to anyone how much non-Microsoft sponsored malware exists for Windows...
The next thing to consider is: WHY would someone want to jam GPS at all? (Ask yourself: What's the major difference between a V-2 rocket and a cruise missle? A highly accurate guidance system.)
A V-2 is a ballistic missile. Just about all launchers, including the Delta, are ballistic missile derivatives. A cruise missile is a missile derived from an aircraft design e.g. the V-1. A Kamikazi plane is a cruise missile where the guidance system is a human pilot.
It should be possible to jam the civilian US GPS system and any "unsecured" foreign GPS system with out shutting down EU or US secured GPS.
Most of the world would probably be more interested in jamming any GPS system usable by the US military. Especially if their own military is not dependent on such a system...
This is crucial in preventing the production of budget cruise missles, etc by non-US, non-EU countries.
Guided missiles are expensive and complex. Cruise missiles are quite vulnerable to being shot down. If you have some suitable "special forces" available it's easier to have them steal an aircraft...
If these criteria are not met the only two options open to the US will be: let the missles hit their targets or shoot down the Galileo system.
A ballistic missile does not need an kind of GPS system to be effective, especially as a "terror weapon". A 60 year old INS will do the trick against something like a city.
I installed Powerpoint (and ONLY powerpoint) from Office 2000 Professional because I didn't have time to work out the weird incompatibilities between my PPT files and OO Impress, and I told it "NO, I DON'T WANT OUTLOOK EXPRESS." But at some point, perhaps then, perhaps one of the times I went to Windows Update and said "NO, I DON'T WANT OUTLOOK EXPRESS," it got installed... very quietly.
Which might be why OE is such a good virus vector. It is itself rather viral.
So the customer service rep states that he can't help me. I ask if there's anyone with any authority that can help me get the card back (it takes me a while to get a new one from Norway). He says: "Sorry, Sir. The ATM in question not being directly attached physically to a bank, a contractor does that job for us. Your card will be destroyed when the ATM is serviced."
Even though your card most likely has instructions to return it to the issuer if found.
I state something to the extent of Ulster bank being poorly organized. The little turd on the other end of the line proceeds to tell me: "I'm sorry, but we took the network down for a few minutes. You must have inserted the card just at that moment."
In which case the machine is broken. Since what it should have done is to return the card and put up an out of service message.
Our current foreign policy isn't working out very well.
Or maybe it is working for some people in Washington...
We need to do something about it no matter who's running the show next January. Bush, Kerry, whatever.
Is there any presidential candidate likely to consider something new? Does he or she stand any chance of being elected? With either Bush or Kerry the most likely situation is more of the same.
Let's try something that more often embraces the world instead of making others wonder where our baseball bat will strike next.
Fundermentally the "War on Terror" is little different from the way the US has been acting for quite a while. The only difference has been a shift from covert "regime change" to doing this overly. But this process has already started with the US invasions of Granada and Panama. Convincing the rest of the world that the US is out of the regime change business might take 20 years. Especially in those countries which have been on the receiving end of it. About the best way the US could start would be to pull all "foreign aid" and draw up a timetable of "decolonialization".
So how can you tell if the bomb was created with U-233, U-235, or Pu-239? Well, there is a statistical distribution of fission products created during fission of any fisionable nuclide.
There is a slight complication with Pu-239 in that decays to U-235. In theory this should enable you to tell how long ago the fissile material was made...
Second, and most important, a nuclear bomb has lots of neutrons flying around. Depending upon the size of the bomb, the tamper, they type (atomic bomb, thermonuclear bomb, etc.), --basically the design--the concentration of neutrons in time for the bomb will vary. Whats important about this is not that all the fissionable material will be used up--thats the point of the bomb--but that the fission fragments will also be exposed to a neutron flux and transmuted.
Bomb components and anything near the bomb will also be massivly neutron irradiated.
"Putting aside the controversy surrounding security at U.S. nuclear power plants, a would-be dirty bomber faces a Herculean task. A spent fuel rod weighs about 28 kilograms, with 36 rods weighing more than a metric ton. Heavy shielding and remote controls are required in their handling, because each rod exposes anyone standing nearby (within a meter) to a lethal dose within seconds.... "
How radioactive is a fuel rod before it's been in a reactor? If someone can steal a fuel rod they probably have the sense to get one which isn't in the bottom of a large tank of water, full of fission products and surrounded by a blue glow...
As I said, bulldozing the contaminated buildings will solve much of the radiation issue particularly with the most likely kind of dirty bomb, one that has relatively little radioactive material.
Actually it's probably a good way to spread the contamination...
A dirty bomb is not much more destructive than a regular bomb. Fear and paranoia are the main effects of a dirty bomb, perpetuated by word of mouth and the "media."
At one point the IRA were using the technique that making a bomb threat was just as good for causing panic as actaully planting a bomb. But with less risk of getting caught...
Actually, most Americans would be more than glad to leave the rest of the world alone.
The problem is that the US does not leave the rest of the world alone. The US Government distributes large amounts of money to keep questionable governments in power.
In fact, most would like to forget that there is a world outside the United States and whenever they are reminded what goes on there it just reminds them *why* they'd rather just lie back and think of America. However people from other countries insist on coming here and flying planes into buildings
Maybe if they wern't being attacked with weapons which say "made in USA" paid for in US Dollers the problem wouldn't exist in the first place. Instead of avoiding foreign entanglements the US is up to it's neck in them. Quite possibly it would be a good thing for the US to actually leave the rest of the planet alone for a decade or three. That would mean no "foreign aid" to anywhere; no special trading status with any other country; removal of all foreign military bases; withdrawing from Guam, Puerto Rico, Hawaii and anywhere else which might have been "picked up" in the Spanish American war; etc.
Problem is, out here in the real world, folks, even otherwise semi-stable dictators have been loath to let the weapons get out of the direct control off their security forces. Essentially this is for two reasons a) they think the weapon could be used against them and b) if the weapon *is* found in another country in advance of it being detonated, it's a clear and unequivocal sign of intent, and an open invitation to retaliation
These are nation states, as opposed to terrorists.
There's a reason why every single nation that has developed or sought nuclear arms has an IRBM/ICBM program. Sometimes it's disguised as a space program, *cough*Brazil*cough*, but it's invariably there.
Even though it is actually harder to build a rocket which works reliably than a nuke...
At the nation state level, nuclear arms are not weapons of war, but levers of deterrence and diplomacy.
Hence MAD and "nuclear deterance". That does not mean that a terrorist will think the same way, they might want to dupe two of their enemies into obliterating each other.
I used to work in the Port of Houston - what a security nightmare. Entire ships full of containers loaded with god-knows-what checked by guys who really could not give a shit about what is in them. I imagine it has gotten better since 9/11,
It's equally possible that the level of security has gone down. The problem is that effective security is hard, you need to take account of the fact that the "bad guys" (which includes smugglers just as much as terrorists) will attempt to get around it. Measures introduced quickly, backed by politicans who do not understand the subject, are more likely to give poor than good security.
Presuming you're talking about Iraq, let me remind you that even considering that their WMD program was a failure, there was still ample reasons to invade.
If the UN inspectors had found actual weapons that would have been a good reason to not invade...
The objective of this skill - is to find the "fingerprint" of the bomb or dirty bomb - and using this information - perform a return to sender operation. In most cases this will be a parking lot after we are through.
Thus if you are a terrorist who plans on attacking the US with a nuke your best policy is to get your materials from a country you also don't like... What happens if the analysis points to either a US or "friendly" source? Maybe just nuke the current US "enemy of the week"...
If running a bundle of planes into buildings wasn't enough, exploding a dirty bomb somewhere isn't either. Of course, now that Saddam's detained, the US will have to find an entirely new best enemy they can invade in order to restore their pride when Osama strikes next. Any bets Osama bin Laden will be captured about a month before the next US elections?
Probably not, considering there dosn't appear to be another obvious candidate to play an "Emmanuel Goldstein" role.
Do you really believe this? My point is that the way the west acts (I'm including my corner of the west in this) - i.e. walking into countries, announcing new governments and taking the oil,
Actually for the US this behaviour appears to have started with sugar rather than oil. Under cover of a war, but not the "War of Terrorism" not even the "Cold War". But one which started almost by "mistake"... This is one of those things which appears to have become part of the "corporate identity" of the US Government. It has nothing to do with Democratic/Republican and very little to do with who might be living in the White House.
destroying the planet with pollution and being more concerned over "conquering" mars than solving world poverty, is what causes people to hate it, not that someone randomly pointed at the West and said "let's kill them."
Actually these arn't the reasons either. It has more to do with imposing dictatorships (not infrequently by toppling democratic governments in the process) in order to help American big business. A democratic government is likely to take an interest in a foreign employer paying fair taxes and wages, having appropriate safety standards, etc. Nothing like the threat of unemployment to motivate politicans. A dictator is likely to be happy so long as they personally get a cut of the profit a foreign company is making, with minimal safety standards and low wages.
Do you have any concept of the level of killing involved here? Israel is not just killing one or two terrorists you know - they are bombing, bulldozing, flattening and slaughtering whole villages,
"Israel" has been doing this since before it made a UDI (from the fledgeling UN in 1948). As for Zionism causing trouble (and death) in that part of the world that has been going on since the 1920's.
hey are effectively incarcerating and repressing an entire population, they would have been condemned hundreds of times by the UN for their actions if the US had not used its veto.
Even with the US applying its veto Israel has a pile of resolutions condeming it. (Far more than were ever even proposed to condem Iraq...)
They are using tanks, planes, bombs, guns, the biggest army in the middle east supplied and supported by US money to repress a population without access to more than basic weaponry, bottled in and left to die in squalid conditions.
Note that Palestinian "terrorists" did not appear until decades after Israel started what we now call "ethnic cleansing". The situation with respect to US support gets even more interesting. Whilst the US had offered some support since 1948 the level vastly increased after the 1967 war in which Israel attacked a US spy ship.
When the Moors invaded Spain, they considered Christians and Jews as beneath them. If was a crime worthy of death if they spoke ill of a Muslim, or used the prophet's name in vain.
When the Catholics pushed the Arabs out of Spain they also expelled all the Jews from the country. There is also the term "Sephardic Jew" which literally means "Spanish Jew", but is applied to people who might more accuratly be called "Arab Jews". It's applied to all Arab Jews, not just those in North West Africa.
When the Jews took their land,
"Jew" and "Israeli" are not synonyms. Not all Israelis even nominally Jewish. There are plenty of Jews who oppose the existance of Israel.
which was rightfully theirs,
According to a subjective interpretation of a religious text. It would be just as valid to claim that the land belongs to the group of Jews, Christans, Muslims (or other variation of the "Religion of Abraham") who's ancestors have lived there since the Bronze age. (Since we don't have census records going back that far a useful rule of thumb would probably be to use any pre 20th century census data which might exist.)
they took the land fair and square the same way anyone else takes land -- with blood.
By that reasoning anything the Palestinians might do to regain their land is "fair and square".
Would you care to explain how blowing up known terrorists is similar to murdering innocent children whose only crime is to live in a country run by Israelis?
Israel isn't exactly that subtle when it comes to blowing up "known terrorists". Or even very good at checking such basic facts like "is the person we want to kill actually where we are targeting the bomb?" Sometimes the only obvious difference between the Israeli army and "terrorists" is that the former are better armed. That's before considering that there are Israeli terrorist groups involved as well here.
By identifying the ratio of isotopes, they can determine the probable lab of origin (if it is one of the main labs and not someone's garage.)
Assuming you have access to the relevent source. Which, considering at least one nuclear armed Asian country dosn't even like to admit it has them, is questionable.
I remember the day when USA went out public that they weren't pointing their nukes straight at russia, but rather out in the pacific, russia followed shortly after. this meaning that if someone hit the button by mistake, all that would be nuked was this piece of water.
As well as any shipping in the area... Potentially far more damaging to the US than Russia too, if you manage to throw enough nukes into the ocean to generate a decent sized tsunami.
The problem is inherently intractable, when viewed from the top like that. There will always be a large, single-minded group intent on writing its taxonomy onto everyone's sky. And, where there's one group, there's many. The only approach that's even theoretically workable is from the other end, via opt-in domains, e.g. '.angel' or '.moral'. Then, every sect that finds itself blessed with the One True View could spawn its own hallowed domain, and guard it with the vigilance of Rottweilers.
Except that this approach will only work with those groups which are not authoritarian, which generally arn't a problem in the first place. Authoritarian groups would not accept such a "solution", because they want to enforce their views on everyone.
I think there is another subtle problem, and one that has occurred to me after seeing how our legislators have reacted to the situation regarding Janet Jackson; a.xxx domain will become a bin that the government will want to sweep everything that could be considered remotely offensive into.
Very dangerous in a country such as the US, which lacks the democratic tradition needed to handle government authoritarianism. You also get the same problems which exist with "censorware". i.e. adding things which don't actually fit the public criteria.
What YOU classify as inappropriate for your children maybe different from what I or others belive. Just because someone says "It's for the children", does not make it so.
"It's for the children" makes a good cover for all types of political extremism. No doubt the motivation is "lets make it harder for people to find out that we are complete nutcases" in more than a few cases.
I belive violence is a worse threat to kids than sex is, what about a.violent domain?
For some people the issue is politics, either in general or specific political views, ditto for religion, etc...
Slashdot Mirror
I am not an IT pro, but I simply just don't trust Microsoft. For instance, install Windows media encoder and it quietly (without telling you) removes MP3 codecs. I won't install something unless I am told *exactly* what it does - otherwise I may just wake up and find out that I have done something like irremovably infested my system with DRM (*cough* media player 9 *cough*).
If an official "update" is able to do that then it should hardly come as a suprise to anyone how much non-Microsoft sponsored malware exists for Windows...
The next thing to consider is: WHY would someone want to jam GPS at all? (Ask yourself: What's the major difference between a V-2 rocket and a cruise missle? A highly accurate guidance system.)
A V-2 is a ballistic missile. Just about all launchers, including the Delta, are ballistic missile derivatives.
A cruise missile is a missile derived from an aircraft design e.g. the V-1. A Kamikazi plane is a cruise missile where the guidance system is a human pilot.
It should be possible to jam the civilian US GPS system and any "unsecured" foreign GPS system with out shutting down EU or US secured GPS.
Most of the world would probably be more interested in jamming any GPS system usable by the US military. Especially if their own military is not dependent on such a system...
This is crucial in preventing the production of budget cruise missles, etc by non-US, non-EU countries.
Guided missiles are expensive and complex. Cruise missiles are quite vulnerable to being shot down. If you have some suitable "special forces" available it's easier to have them steal an aircraft...
If these criteria are not met the only two options open to the US will be: let the missles hit their targets or shoot down the Galileo system.
A ballistic missile does not need an kind of GPS system to be effective, especially as a "terror weapon". A 60 year old INS will do the trick against something like a city.
But if few releases in a row could each make 10% improvements, the cumulative 50% improvement damn certainly is noticeable.
4 increments of 10% would give you 46%, 5 would give you 61%. 3 would only give you 33%.
I installed Powerpoint (and ONLY powerpoint) from Office 2000 Professional because I didn't have time to work out the weird incompatibilities between my PPT files and OO Impress, and I told it "NO, I DON'T WANT OUTLOOK EXPRESS." But at some point, perhaps then, perhaps one of the times I went to Windows Update and said "NO, I DON'T WANT OUTLOOK EXPRESS," it got installed... very quietly.
Which might be why OE is such a good virus vector. It is itself rather viral.
So the customer service rep states that he can't help me. I ask if there's anyone with any authority that can help me get the card back (it takes me a while to get a new one from Norway). He says: "Sorry, Sir. The ATM in question not being directly attached physically to a bank, a contractor does that job for us. Your card will be destroyed when the ATM is serviced."
Even though your card most likely has instructions to return it to the issuer if found.
I state something to the extent of Ulster bank being poorly organized. The little turd on the other end of the line proceeds to tell me: "I'm sorry, but we took the network down for a few minutes. You must have inserted the card just at that moment."
In which case the machine is broken. Since what it should have done is to return the card and put up an out of service message.
Our current foreign policy isn't working out very well.
Or maybe it is working for some people in Washington...
We need to do something about it no matter who's running the show next January. Bush, Kerry, whatever.
Is there any presidential candidate likely to consider something new? Does he or she stand any chance of being elected?
With either Bush or Kerry the most likely situation is more of the same.
Let's try something that more often embraces the world instead of making others wonder where our baseball bat will strike next.
Fundermentally the "War on Terror" is little different from the way the US has been acting for quite a while. The only difference has been a shift from covert "regime change" to doing this overly. But this process has already started with the US invasions of Granada and Panama.
Convincing the rest of the world that the US is out of the regime change business might take 20 years. Especially in those countries which have been on the receiving end of it.
About the best way the US could start would be to pull all "foreign aid" and draw up a timetable of "decolonialization".
So how can you tell if the bomb was created with U-233, U-235, or Pu-239? Well, there is a statistical distribution of fission products created during fission of any fisionable nuclide.
There is a slight complication with Pu-239 in that decays to U-235. In theory this should enable you to tell how long ago the fissile material was made...
Second, and most important, a nuclear bomb has lots of neutrons flying around. Depending upon the size of the bomb, the tamper, they type (atomic bomb, thermonuclear bomb, etc.), --basically the design--the concentration of neutrons in time for the bomb will vary. Whats important about this is not that all the fissionable material will be used up--thats the point of the bomb--but that the fission fragments will also be exposed to a neutron flux and transmuted.
Bomb components and anything near the bomb will also be massivly neutron irradiated.
"Putting aside the controversy surrounding security at U.S. nuclear power plants, a would-be dirty bomber faces a Herculean task. A spent fuel rod weighs about 28 kilograms, with 36 rods weighing more than a metric ton. Heavy shielding and remote controls are required in their handling, because each rod exposes anyone standing nearby (within a meter) to a lethal dose within seconds. ... "
How radioactive is a fuel rod before it's been in a reactor? If someone can steal a fuel rod they probably have the sense to get one which isn't in the bottom of a large tank of water, full of fission products and surrounded by a blue glow...
As I said, bulldozing the contaminated buildings will solve much of the radiation issue particularly with the most likely kind of dirty bomb, one that has relatively little radioactive material.
Actually it's probably a good way to spread the contamination...
A dirty bomb is not much more destructive than a regular bomb. Fear and paranoia are the main effects of a dirty bomb, perpetuated by word of mouth and the "media."
At one point the IRA were using the technique that making a bomb threat was just as good for causing panic as actaully planting a bomb. But with less risk of getting caught...
Actually, most Americans would be more than glad to leave the rest of the world alone.
The problem is that the US does not leave the rest of the world alone. The US Government distributes large amounts of money to keep questionable governments in power.
In fact, most would like to forget that there is a world outside the United States and whenever they are reminded what goes on there it just reminds them *why* they'd rather just lie back and think of America. However people from other countries insist on coming here and flying planes into buildings
Maybe if they wern't being attacked with weapons which say "made in USA" paid for in US Dollers the problem wouldn't exist in the first place.
Instead of avoiding foreign entanglements the US is up to it's neck in them.
Quite possibly it would be a good thing for the US to actually leave the rest of the planet alone for a decade or three. That would mean no "foreign aid" to anywhere; no special trading status with any other country; removal of all foreign military bases; withdrawing from Guam, Puerto Rico, Hawaii and anywhere else which might have been "picked up" in the Spanish American war; etc.
Problem is, out here in the real world, folks, even otherwise semi-stable dictators have been loath to let the weapons get out of the direct control off their security forces. Essentially this is for two reasons a) they think the weapon could be used against them and b) if the weapon *is* found in another country in advance of it being detonated, it's a clear and unequivocal sign of intent, and an open invitation to retaliation
These are nation states, as opposed to terrorists.
There's a reason why every single nation that has developed or sought nuclear arms has an IRBM/ICBM program. Sometimes it's disguised as a space program, *cough*Brazil*cough*, but it's invariably there.
Even though it is actually harder to build a rocket which works reliably than a nuke...
At the nation state level, nuclear arms are not weapons of war, but levers of deterrence and diplomacy.
Hence MAD and "nuclear deterance". That does not mean that a terrorist will think the same way, they might want to dupe two of their enemies into obliterating each other.
I used to work in the Port of Houston - what a security nightmare. Entire ships full of containers loaded with god-knows-what checked by guys who really could not give a shit about what is in them.
I imagine it has gotten better since 9/11,
It's equally possible that the level of security has gone down. The problem is that effective security is hard, you need to take account of the fact that the "bad guys" (which includes smugglers just as much as terrorists) will attempt to get around it. Measures introduced quickly, backed by politicans who do not understand the subject, are more likely to give poor than good security.
Presuming you're talking about Iraq, let me remind you that even considering that their WMD program was a failure, there was still ample reasons to invade.
If the UN inspectors had found actual weapons that would have been a good reason to not invade...
The objective of this skill - is to find the "fingerprint" of the bomb or dirty bomb - and using this information - perform a return to sender operation. In most cases this will be a parking lot after we are through.
Thus if you are a terrorist who plans on attacking the US with a nuke your best policy is to get your materials from a country you also don't like...
What happens if the analysis points to either a US or "friendly" source? Maybe just nuke the current US "enemy of the week"...
We never did get around to punishing anyone though or even publicly pursue it for any length of time.
As with the "insider trading" related to the September 11th 2001 attack the investigation didn't lead to "Arab terrorists" so was quietly dropped.
If running a bundle of planes into buildings wasn't enough, exploding a dirty bomb somewhere isn't either. Of course, now that Saddam's detained, the US will have to find an entirely new best enemy they can invade in order to restore their pride when Osama strikes next. Any bets Osama bin Laden will be captured about a month before the next US elections?
Probably not, considering there dosn't appear to be another obvious candidate to play an "Emmanuel Goldstein" role.
Do you really believe this? My point is that the way the west acts (I'm including my corner of the west in this) - i.e. walking into countries, announcing new governments and taking the oil,
Actually for the US this behaviour appears to have started with sugar rather than oil. Under cover of a war, but not the "War of Terrorism" not even the "Cold War". But one which started almost by "mistake"... This is one of those things which appears to have become part of the "corporate identity" of the US Government. It has nothing to do with Democratic/Republican and very little to do with who might be living in the White House.
destroying the planet with pollution and being more concerned over "conquering" mars than solving world poverty, is what causes people to hate it, not that someone randomly pointed at the West and said "let's kill them."
Actually these arn't the reasons either. It has more to do with imposing dictatorships (not infrequently by toppling democratic governments in the process) in order to help American big business.
A democratic government is likely to take an interest in a foreign employer paying fair taxes and wages, having appropriate safety standards, etc. Nothing like the threat of unemployment to motivate politicans. A dictator is likely to be happy so long as they personally get a cut of the profit a foreign company is making, with minimal safety standards and low wages.
Do you have any concept of the level of killing involved here? Israel is not just killing one or two terrorists you know - they are bombing, bulldozing, flattening and slaughtering whole villages,
"Israel" has been doing this since before it made a UDI (from the fledgeling UN in 1948). As for Zionism causing trouble (and death) in that part of the world that has been going on since the 1920's.
hey are effectively incarcerating and repressing an entire population, they would have been condemned hundreds of times by the UN for their actions if the US had not used its veto.
Even with the US applying its veto Israel has a pile of resolutions condeming it. (Far more than were ever even proposed to condem Iraq...)
They are using tanks, planes, bombs, guns, the biggest army in the middle east supplied and supported by US money to repress a population without access to more than basic weaponry, bottled in and left to die in squalid conditions.
Note that Palestinian "terrorists" did not appear until decades after Israel started what we now call "ethnic cleansing".
The situation with respect to US support gets even more interesting. Whilst the US had offered some support since 1948 the level vastly increased after the 1967 war in which Israel attacked a US spy ship.
When the Moors invaded Spain, they considered Christians and Jews as beneath them. If was a crime worthy of death if they spoke ill of a Muslim, or used the prophet's name in vain.
When the Catholics pushed the Arabs out of Spain they also expelled all the Jews from the country. There is also the term "Sephardic Jew" which literally means "Spanish Jew", but is applied to people who might more accuratly be called "Arab Jews". It's applied to all Arab Jews, not just those in North West Africa.
When the Jews took their land,
"Jew" and "Israeli" are not synonyms. Not all Israelis even nominally Jewish. There are plenty of Jews who oppose the existance of Israel.
which was rightfully theirs,
According to a subjective interpretation of a religious text. It would be just as valid to claim that the land belongs to the group of Jews, Christans, Muslims (or other variation of the "Religion of Abraham") who's ancestors have lived there since the Bronze age. (Since we don't have census records going back that far a useful rule of thumb would probably be to use any pre 20th century census data which might exist.)
they took the land fair and square the same way anyone else takes land -- with blood.
By that reasoning anything the Palestinians might do to regain their land is "fair and square".
Would you care to explain how blowing up known terrorists is similar to murdering innocent children whose only crime is to live in a country run by Israelis?
Israel isn't exactly that subtle when it comes to blowing up "known terrorists". Or even very good at checking such basic facts like "is the person we want to kill actually where we are targeting the bomb?" Sometimes the only obvious difference between the Israeli army and "terrorists" is that the former are better armed. That's before considering that there are Israeli terrorist groups involved as well here.
By identifying the ratio of isotopes, they can determine the probable lab of origin (if it is one of the main labs and not someone's garage.)
Assuming you have access to the relevent source. Which, considering at least one nuclear armed Asian country dosn't even like to admit it has them, is questionable.
I remember the day when USA went out public that they weren't pointing their nukes straight at russia, but rather out in the pacific, russia followed shortly after. this meaning that if someone hit the button by mistake, all that would be nuked was this piece of water.
As well as any shipping in the area... Potentially far more damaging to the US than Russia too, if you manage to throw enough nukes into the ocean to generate a decent sized tsunami.
The problem is inherently intractable, when viewed from the top like that. There will always be a large, single-minded group intent on writing its taxonomy onto everyone's sky. And, where there's one group, there's many.
The only approach that's even theoretically workable is from the other end, via opt-in domains, e.g. '.angel' or '.moral'. Then, every sect that finds itself blessed with the One True View could spawn its own hallowed domain, and guard it with the vigilance of Rottweilers.
Except that this approach will only work with those groups which are not authoritarian, which generally arn't a problem in the first place. Authoritarian groups would not accept such a "solution", because they want to enforce their views on everyone.
I think there is another subtle problem, and one that has occurred to me after seeing how our legislators have reacted to the situation regarding Janet Jackson; a .xxx domain will become a bin that the government will want to sweep everything that could be considered remotely offensive into.
Very dangerous in a country such as the US, which lacks the democratic tradition needed to handle government authoritarianism. You also get the same problems which exist with "censorware". i.e. adding things which don't actually fit the public criteria.
What YOU classify as inappropriate for your children maybe different from what I or others belive. Just because someone says "It's for the children", does not make it so.
.violent domain?
"It's for the children" makes a good cover for all types of political extremism. No doubt the motivation is "lets make it harder for people to find out that we are complete nutcases" in more than a few cases.
I belive violence is a worse threat to kids than sex is, what about a
For some people the issue is politics, either in general or specific political views, ditto for religion, etc...