The US may think they don't need anyones sympathy, that they can 'rule the world' on their own.
The US might be able to preasure individual countries or even bomb weak countries like Afganistan and Iraq into the ground. The problem will come when the US finds itself in conflict with more than one other country, even a transnational alliance.
That laws of others don't apply to the US, but that US laws are somehow more just and apply anywhere in the world (and if not, such countries must be pressured into modifying their laws under threat of trade boycotts etc). I however think this is a big mistake and gets the US into deeper trouble.
The US or at least the US government is unlikely to get the message. The signs are there, an attempt to overthrow a South American government failed, countries friendly to the US openly oppose US foreign policy, enemies of a country the US has targeted for destruction offer to stand with that country.
I know some 'patriotic' people will qualify this as flamebait,
"patriotic" can mean "my country right or wrong", "my government right or wrong" or in the case of somewhere the US loyalty to the US Constitution. One intersting definition I recently saw is "Being patriotic is being loyal to your country at all times and loyal to your government when it deserves it".
Perhaps people would apreciate your insight more if you gave some indication what the hell you're talking about. For example a google seach on "important persons act" still leaves me clueless.
Maybe the difference between "corporate people" and real people...
The problem is that the economically rational choice your store made (when it was on the 2nd story) makes sense for *all* stores. Going back to websites; it doesn't make economic sense for *any* site to accomodate blind people because they constitute only a small percentage of the customer base. So the market quite efficiently has found a solution in which blind people are screwed.
Except the "benefits all users" can easily apply just as much to a website. A website usable with a "screen reader" is equally usable to a sighted person. Quite possibly more so than many current websites, since it isn't covered in all sorts of junk which detracts from the content.
Heroin is one of the most addictive substances on the books. If Afghanistan wants to sell it on the international market, then it is our right to conduct a trade embargo against them as a form of protest.
Plenty of things, including various alkaloids are addictive. Nicotine is also highly addictive (and toxic) but since it's produced by Americans that can't be embargoed...
Isn't NATO the "North Atlantic Treaty Organization?" From what I can tell on the map, Russia has every bit as much of a claim to be on the North Atlantic as does, say, Turkey.
Depending exactly where you draw the boundries on bodies of water Russia probably has a stronger claim than Turkey.
There is no death penalty in any state of the European Union. We are civilized people here. That's a reason why the US can't join the European Union.
Not that the US would probably want to. Of more direct relevence is that this no death penalty clause trumps any extradition treaties EU members might have with any other nations. If someone may face execution they cannot be extradited. The US is in the same catagory as any other nation which allows execution here.
What's to stop the RIAA from influencing the USG to send ships to sink or confescate the vessels?
That is known as "piracy" the real kind, not the more modern definition of copyright infringement. The RIAA does not want to get into "piracy upon the high seas".
Yup, it's possible, but it seems a bit like what people say about James Bond villians. It's all overly elaborate and unnecessarily expensive. This is a criminal enterprise about producing CDs as cheaply as possible to sell as many as possible. Such a ship would be expensive and a flashy high tech ship would probably draw unnecessary attention without camoflage (which would be easier for a land operation).
Unless it gets to difficult to do things like paying the manager of a pressing plant to run off a few (thousand) extra...
If the ships used are registered in some nation's maritime registry, then that nation's laws still apply onboard, so why not just do it ashore in that nation?
Maybe because they are a long way from their country of registration, have chosen to register with a country without a substantial navy and conduct their operations somewhere near a place which does not have good diplomatic relations with their country of registration.
I'm not saying i agree with their methods, but how exactly is it going to be disastrous for China in the long run? No-one would buy this software there at full price as it's simply not affordable. With the pirated versions people gain knowledge and skills that can get them jobs everywhere in the world!
If anything it is more of a threat to open source in these Asian countries than a direct threat to the countries themselves.
And it advances Chinas computer industry, so until the US lays a boycot on them for lack of copy-right prevention it'll do nothing but good for the country, seeing it doesn't loose any profit itself.
Easy access to American software could advance China's computer industry rather less than not having such easy access. You could argue that simply cloning US products dosn't do much to advance any Chinese industry. Especially something so trivial to clone as software.
If that is your justification for destroying houses of innocent people and killing of innocent civilians then there is no sense in trying to have an argument with you. You are morally corrupt and are willing to kill any palestenians who happens to live in a city that a terrorist came from. Imagine if the US had the same type of a criminal justice system. Imagine if in response to the columbine attacks the US govt decided to destroy 500 houses in some colorado town and killed a few hundred residents.
Or if the British response to the IRA had been to bomb Belfast. The usual reponse to terrorist attacks in civillized world is improved policing. Instead here we have military weapons designed to be used against armored vehicles and fortified structures deployed against civilians and Palestinian police are routinely murdered by Israeli soldiers.
The settlements are there because the israelis believe that god promised them that land. The israelis don't make the palestenians living under their jurisdiction because they have a religious belief that israel should be a jewish state. At the core this conflict is all about religion.
There are plenty of Jews, including rabbis, who would question that their religion justifies any of this. Reading the same texts they conclude that the time of God promising this land is some time in the future. Things arn't anywhere so simply as the often portrayed idea that the state of Israel represents all Jews and that it's just the Arabs who oppose it. Dressing up politics as religion has been going on since pre-history. Claiming a religious justification for starting a war has been commonplace throughout recorded history. A few hundred years ago some people felt that mixing religion with politics was such a bad idea that they put an explicit clause in the US Constitution forbiding it.
Not all palestinians are terrorists, just like not all israelis agree with what Sharon is doing.
Less well publicised is that there are also Israeli terrorists, especially amongst the settlers. The latest trouble actually started with some Israeli terrorists (who don't appear to have a connection to the Israeli state) attempting to blow up a school, in response to this there were suicide bomb attacks against Israel (most likely by people unconnected to or opposed to the Palestinian authority) resulting in the Israeli state further attempting to crush the Palestinian Authority.
What I think is the worst thing about this is that the rest of the world seems to want to take sides in this war instead of trying to stop it.
In the main the rest of the world isn't taking sides. The side taking is primarily neighbouring Arab states favouring the Palestinians but not offering much material aid and the US (backed to some extent by the UK) both backing Israel politically and giving massive financial and militry aid.
The only way this war is going to end is if the western nations pull together and send troops to the area and try to seperate the two nations with force.
The political will to make things work is probably not present now, any more than it was in 1948. The idea of chopping the Palestine mandate into two states was always going to be a hard sell, since it involved booting many people off their land. Bringing in Western troups as peacekeepers isn't likely to work since you have a lack of troups once you exclude the US and UK, also it would take a lot of force to restrain the Israeli army.
I might also mention that a significant percentage of the settlers are from the united states.
Even then they are only a tiny proportion of American Jews. Most people, even from the US, don't want to live in a "Western"...
Also jewish missionaries have been recruiting in south america (columbia I think). They convert people to Judaism and them ship them to palestine to form new settlements.
Converting in them in a way many Rabbis would not recognise as being in accordance with the Jewish faith.
What I need is to find a god which promised me some land in Fiji or the bahamas or something so I can go there, kill the residents and take over their land in good conscience.
If you are from the US and consider corporate profit to be a religion then there is such a place. Except that the US didn't actually kill that many of the residents, just took their land...
The EULA is a piece of crap, in general, its a bullshit pile of legalese crap and cruft, and no one ever reads them, and when they do, they find all sorts of stupid, irrelevant and contradictory crap.
A lot of EULAs appear to be made up of boilerplate, which contains a large amount of bluff, in the often correct assumption, that few people know what the actual legal situation is. If people don't know they have certain rights it can be quite easy to fool them in to believing that they don't...
And the states and the federal government, particularly a jury of peers, is likely to override bullshit EULA contracts in favor of laws protecting consumers.
Assuming the case actually got to court. Quite often threats of lawsuits are used or the plaintiff wants to stretch the thing out as long as possible (especially if they have deep pockets).
Okay, one other thing I've been wondering about. I read somewhere that to be valid a contract has to include some form of future payment. In other words, both parties to the contract have to gain something from the contract.
The legal term is "consideration" which simply means that something of value (or at least something which all parties agree is of value) must be exchanged.
One cannot contract away protections provided by law (including those enumerated in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights). That is very clear. As for this EULA, if it's found to interfere w/ interstate commerce (and it probably can be interpreted that way), the Feds will be happy to get involved.
Many EULAs contain clauses to the effect that all disputes must be handled under the law of a specific place. Presumably that would satisfy that condition. Or if the user was outside the US it would automatically be a federal matter.
Imagine if H.G. Wells would have declared that anyone reading his books would be strictly forbidden from publishing a novel in the genre that would become known as science-fiction.
Or even forbidden from writing a story, play, poem, screenplay, movie, etc which used the themes of time travel, invention, social class, evolution, etc in any way. Just for having read "The Time machine".
Imagine if you were forbidden from using ketchup in your meatloaf!!
You could use katchup with your meatloaf, but never again eat any other product any part of the tomato or a related plant.
He's in the middle of a group of people who will soon outnumber Israeli's 2:1 or more, and he's sticking to his policy of absolute domination and force. He apparently hasn't studied much history.
Or possibly he has. Being at war can ensure that political opposition is reduced. Claim that the country is under threat and thet not standing behind the leader is unpatriotic often works quite well. Also a policy of aparthied worked for some time South Africa...
Which Middle Eastern country has the right to vote in *fair* elections
There is no such country. The Palestinians do not have a country, so having the fairness of elections verified by third parties dosn't matter. Israel does not count because of their denying the vote to people in the territories they occupy and by forbidding candidates standing on an anti-zionist platform. The last democratic country in the Middle East was Iran, until the US and UK decided to install a tyrant.
None of this is jew bashing but all of it is Israel bashing. If they are the same thing and you plan on accusing me of anti-simitism please start your post by saying "Since zionism is the same thing as racism any criticism of israel is by default criticism of the jewish people".
Whilst, especially in the US, "Zionist" and "Jewish" are seen as synonyms in actual fact many Jewish people don't support Zionism. A useful website is www.jewsnotzionists.com. Some of these Jews hold positions on the Israeli state which make any Arab look moderate.
You may also throw a phrase or two in there about how even though both the jews and the palestenians are semititic people anti semitism only applies to jews.
Actually many of the Jews encouraged to migrate to the Middle East because of Zionism have ancestory from Khazaria thus have more of a claim of the city of Volgograd than Jerusalem. Even in the early 20th century far more Jews migrated to Western Europe and North America than Palestine. Though the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta was started by Jews living in Jerusalem before Zionism even existed, who probably can be accurately called "Semitic Jews".
They did commit a crime in the US. They broke into US computer systems and stole data from the US.
Problem is that the evidence against them was gathered by crooks. Specifically crooks enguaged in the same kind of crimes they were accused of. Sounds like the Russians have good grounds for appeal. Since how can the evidence be trustworthy? Remember that the standard is ment to be "beyond reasonable doubt", if the evidence comes from crooks it's hardly capable of providing that standard of proof.
The US is preparing to invade a sovereign nation -- advertising the fact at the top of its
lungs for months now -- in a war that will add significantly to the over 500,000 Iraqi
civilians murdered by its bombing and sanctions over the past decade.
Currently the US is getting upset about the Iraqis attempting to defend their airspace. Wonder how many Americans will wind up dead too, especially if Iraq actually has the weapons Bush and Blair claim exist. As for the oil issue by the time the war is finished all the Iraqi oil wells will look like those in Kuwait did at the end of the last gulf war. Blowing up an oil well does not require anything high tech.
The point isn't that the russians are "heroes" it's that the FBI broke the law in trying to
catch a crook. Doesn't that make the FBI as bad as the crook?
If anything it makes them considerably worst crooks.
My only question is why
doesn't the KGB arrest the FBI for violating one of their citizens rights.:)
The KGB dosn't exist any more. Through the FBI people involved had better make sure they never set foot in Russia or anywhere which has an extradition treaty with Russia.
Slashdot Mirror
What is with us Americans who are so eager to start these wars that have no end and no possible way of really winning. They just go on and on and on.
Maybe they actually want wars without end. A state of war can be good for big business and can quell political opposition.
The US may think they don't need anyones sympathy, that they can 'rule the world' on their own.
The US might be able to preasure individual countries or even bomb weak countries like Afganistan and Iraq into the ground. The problem will come when the US finds itself in conflict with more than one other country, even a transnational alliance.
That laws of others don't apply to the US, but that US laws are somehow more just and apply anywhere in the world (and if not, such countries must be pressured into modifying their laws under threat of trade boycotts etc). I however think this is a big mistake and gets the US into deeper trouble.
The US or at least the US government is unlikely to get the message. The signs are there, an attempt to overthrow a South American government failed, countries friendly to the US openly oppose US foreign policy, enemies of a country the US has targeted for destruction offer to stand with that country.
I know some 'patriotic' people will qualify this as flamebait,
"patriotic" can mean "my country right or wrong", "my government right or wrong" or in the case of somewhere the US loyalty to the US Constitution. One intersting definition I recently saw is "Being patriotic is being loyal to your country at all times and loyal to your government when it deserves it".
Perhaps people would apreciate your insight more if you gave some indication what the hell you're talking about. For example a google seach on "important persons act" still leaves me clueless.
Maybe the difference between "corporate people" and real people...
The problem is that the economically rational choice your store made (when it was on the 2nd story) makes sense for *all* stores. Going back to websites; it doesn't make economic sense for *any* site to accomodate blind people because they constitute only a small percentage of the customer base. So the market quite efficiently has found a solution in which blind people are screwed.
Except the "benefits all users" can easily apply just as much to a website. A website usable with a "screen reader" is equally usable to a sighted person. Quite possibly more so than many current websites, since it isn't covered in all sorts of junk which detracts from the content.
Heroin is one of the most addictive substances on the books. If Afghanistan wants to sell it on the international market, then it is our right to conduct a trade embargo against them as a form of protest.
Plenty of things, including various alkaloids are addictive. Nicotine is also highly addictive (and toxic) but since it's produced by Americans that can't be embargoed...
Isn't NATO the "North Atlantic Treaty Organization?" From what I can tell on the map, Russia has every bit as much of a claim to be on the North Atlantic as does, say, Turkey.
Depending exactly where you draw the boundries on bodies of water Russia probably has a stronger claim than Turkey.
There is no death penalty in any state of the European Union. We are civilized people here. That's a reason why the US can't join the European Union.
Not that the US would probably want to.
Of more direct relevence is that this no death penalty clause trumps any extradition treaties EU members might have with any other nations. If someone may face execution they cannot be extradited. The US is in the same catagory as any other nation which allows execution here.
What's to stop the RIAA from influencing the USG to send ships to sink or confescate the vessels?
That is known as "piracy" the real kind, not the more modern definition of copyright infringement. The RIAA does not want to get into "piracy upon the high seas".
Yup, it's possible, but it seems a bit like what people say about James Bond villians. It's all overly elaborate and unnecessarily expensive. This is a criminal enterprise about producing CDs as cheaply as possible to sell as many as possible. Such a ship would be expensive and a flashy high tech ship would probably draw unnecessary attention without camoflage (which would be easier for a land operation).
Unless it gets to difficult to do things like paying the manager of a pressing plant to run off a few (thousand) extra...
If the ships used are registered in some nation's maritime registry, then that nation's laws still apply onboard, so why not just do it ashore in that nation?
Maybe because they are a long way from their country of registration, have chosen to register with a country without a substantial navy and conduct their operations somewhere near a place which does not have good diplomatic relations with their country of registration.
I'm not saying i agree with their methods, but how exactly is it going to be disastrous for China in the long run? No-one would buy this software there at full price as it's simply not affordable. With the pirated versions people gain knowledge and skills that can get them jobs everywhere in the world!
If anything it is more of a threat to open source in these Asian countries than a direct threat to the countries themselves.
And it advances Chinas computer industry, so until the US lays a boycot on them for lack of copy-right prevention it'll do nothing but good for the country, seeing it doesn't loose any profit itself.
Easy access to American software could advance China's computer industry rather less than not having such easy access. You could argue that simply cloning US products dosn't do much to advance any Chinese industry. Especially something so trivial to clone as software.
If that is your justification for destroying houses of innocent people and killing of innocent civilians then there is no sense in trying to have an argument with you. You are morally corrupt and are willing to kill any palestenians who happens to live in a city that a terrorist came from. Imagine if the US had the same type of a criminal justice system. Imagine if in response to the columbine attacks the US govt decided to destroy 500 houses in some colorado town and killed a few hundred residents.
Or if the British response to the IRA had been to bomb Belfast. The usual reponse to terrorist attacks in civillized world is improved policing. Instead here we have military weapons designed to be used against armored vehicles and fortified structures deployed against civilians and Palestinian police are routinely murdered by Israeli soldiers.
The settlements are there because the israelis believe that god promised them that land. The israelis don't make the palestenians living under their jurisdiction because they have a religious belief that israel should be a jewish state. At the core this conflict is all about religion.
There are plenty of Jews, including rabbis, who would question that their religion justifies any of this. Reading the same texts they conclude that the time of God promising this land is some time in the future. Things arn't anywhere so simply as the often portrayed idea that the state of Israel represents all Jews and that it's just the Arabs who oppose it.
Dressing up politics as religion has been going on since pre-history. Claiming a religious justification for starting a war has been commonplace throughout recorded history. A few hundred years ago some people felt that mixing religion with politics was such a bad idea that they put an explicit clause in the US Constitution forbiding it.
Not all palestinians are terrorists, just like not all israelis agree with what Sharon is doing.
Less well publicised is that there are also Israeli terrorists, especially amongst the settlers. The latest trouble actually started with some Israeli terrorists (who don't appear to have a connection to the Israeli state) attempting to blow up a school, in response to this there were suicide bomb attacks against Israel (most likely by people unconnected to or opposed to the Palestinian authority) resulting in the Israeli state further attempting to crush the Palestinian Authority.
What I think is the worst thing about this is that the rest of the world seems to want to take sides in this war instead of trying to stop it.
In the main the rest of the world isn't taking sides. The side taking is primarily neighbouring Arab states favouring the Palestinians but not offering much material aid and the US (backed to some extent by the UK) both backing Israel politically and giving massive financial and militry aid.
The only way this war is going to end is if the western nations pull together and send troops to the area and try to seperate the two nations with force.
The political will to make things work is probably not present now, any more than it was in 1948. The idea of chopping the Palestine mandate into two states was always going to be a hard sell, since it involved booting many people off their land.
Bringing in Western troups as peacekeepers isn't likely to work since you have a lack of troups once you exclude the US and UK, also it would take a lot of force to restrain the Israeli army.
I might also mention that a significant percentage of the settlers are from the united states.
Even then they are only a tiny proportion of American Jews. Most people, even from the US, don't want to live in a "Western"...
Also jewish missionaries have been recruiting in south america (columbia I think). They convert people to Judaism and them ship them to palestine to form new settlements.
Converting in them in a way many Rabbis would not recognise as being in accordance with the Jewish faith.
What I need is to find a god which promised me some land in Fiji or the bahamas or something so I can go there, kill the residents and take over their land in good conscience.
If you are from the US and consider corporate profit to be a religion then there is such a place. Except that the US didn't actually kill that many of the residents, just took their land...
The EULA is a piece of crap, in general, its a bullshit pile of legalese crap and cruft, and no one ever reads them, and when they do, they find all sorts of stupid, irrelevant and contradictory crap.
A lot of EULAs appear to be made up of boilerplate, which contains a large amount of bluff, in the often correct assumption, that few people know what the actual legal situation is. If people don't know they have certain rights it can be quite easy to fool them in to believing that they don't...
And the states and the federal government, particularly a jury of peers, is likely to override bullshit EULA contracts in favor of laws protecting consumers.
Assuming the case actually got to court. Quite often threats of lawsuits are used or the plaintiff wants to stretch the thing out as long as possible (especially if they have deep pockets).
Okay, one other thing I've been wondering about. I read somewhere that to be valid a contract has to include some form of future payment. In other words, both parties to the contract have to gain something from the contract.
The legal term is "consideration" which simply means that something of value (or at least something which all parties agree is of value) must be exchanged.
One cannot contract away protections provided by law (including those enumerated in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights). That is very clear. As for this EULA, if it's found to interfere w/ interstate commerce (and it probably can be interpreted that way), the Feds will be happy to get involved.
Many EULAs contain clauses to the effect that all disputes must be handled under the law of a specific place. Presumably that would satisfy that condition. Or if the user was outside the US it would automatically be a federal matter.
Imagine if H.G. Wells would have declared that anyone reading his books would be strictly forbidden from publishing a novel in the genre that would become known as science-fiction.
Or even forbidden from writing a story, play, poem, screenplay, movie, etc which used the themes of time travel, invention, social class, evolution, etc in any way. Just for having read "The Time machine".
Imagine if you were forbidden from using ketchup in your meatloaf!!
You could use katchup with your meatloaf, but never again eat any other product any part of the tomato or a related plant.
He's in the middle of a group of people who will soon outnumber Israeli's 2:1 or more, and he's sticking to his policy of absolute domination and force. He apparently hasn't studied much history.
Or possibly he has. Being at war can ensure that political opposition is reduced. Claim that the country is under threat and thet not standing behind the leader is unpatriotic often works quite well. Also a policy of aparthied worked for some time South Africa...
Which Middle Eastern country has the right to vote in *fair* elections
There is no such country. The Palestinians do not have a country, so having the fairness of elections verified by third parties dosn't matter.
Israel does not count because of their denying the vote to people in the territories they occupy and by forbidding candidates standing on an anti-zionist platform.
The last democratic country in the Middle East was Iran, until the US and UK decided to install a tyrant.
It's a rational response to brutal and bloodthirsty govt in Israel.
Hardly comfined to the Israeli government. There appear to be plenty of bloodthirsty thugs amongst the so called "settlers" supposedly civilians.
None of this is jew bashing but all of it is Israel bashing. If they are the same thing and you plan on accusing me of anti-simitism please start your post by saying "Since zionism is the same thing as racism any criticism of israel is by default criticism of the jewish people".
Whilst, especially in the US, "Zionist" and "Jewish" are seen as synonyms in actual fact many Jewish people don't support Zionism. A useful website is www.jewsnotzionists.com. Some of these Jews hold positions on the Israeli state which make any Arab look moderate.
You may also throw a phrase or two in there about how even though both the jews and the palestenians are semititic people anti semitism only applies to jews.
Actually many of the Jews encouraged to migrate to the Middle East because of Zionism have ancestory from Khazaria thus have more of a claim of the city of Volgograd than Jerusalem. Even in the early 20th century far more Jews migrated to Western Europe and North America than Palestine. Though the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta was started by Jews living in Jerusalem before Zionism even existed, who probably can be accurately called "Semitic Jews".
They did commit a crime in the US. They broke into US computer systems and stole data from the US.
Problem is that the evidence against them was gathered by crooks. Specifically crooks enguaged in the same kind of crimes they were accused of. Sounds like the Russians have good grounds for appeal. Since how can the evidence be trustworthy?
Remember that the standard is ment to be "beyond reasonable doubt", if the evidence comes from crooks it's hardly capable of providing that standard of proof.
The US is preparing to invade a sovereign nation -- advertising the fact at the top of its lungs for months now -- in a war that will add significantly to the over 500,000 Iraqi civilians murdered by its bombing and sanctions over the past decade.
Currently the US is getting upset about the Iraqis attempting to defend their airspace. Wonder how many Americans will wind up dead too, especially if Iraq actually has the weapons Bush and Blair claim exist.
As for the oil issue by the time the war is finished all the Iraqi oil wells will look like those in Kuwait did at the end of the last gulf war. Blowing up an oil well does not require anything high tech.
The point isn't that the russians are "heroes" it's that the FBI broke the law in trying to catch a crook. Doesn't that make the FBI as bad as the crook?
:)
If anything it makes them considerably worst crooks.
My only question is why doesn't the KGB arrest the FBI for violating one of their citizens rights.
The KGB dosn't exist any more. Through the FBI people involved had better make sure they never set foot in Russia or anywhere which has an extradition treaty with Russia.