Re:I thought the article missed the point.
on
SSSCA Editorials
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· Score: 2
The point is still missed; everybody is talking about computers, dvd player, mp3 players, video games ect. But when you actualy read the act it in only refers to digital interactive devices . Sorry guys but that also includes my wrist watch (it has a chip and two buttons) as well as my car, (a computer and many buttons).
It includes the radio in your car, your television, your cellphone, your fixed line phone, etc.
Hopefully, as more and more editorials criticize this law, the general public will begin to see what is at stake and demand that Congress abandon this Disney law.
Simply getting this law abandoned would simply be "winning the battle", in order to "win the war". You'd need a fundermental change in attitude of the US government. But a change which does not require too much loss of face in admitting that all which has been done to aid corporates was wrong (even "Unamerican".)
Unfortunatly the American idea of freedom has been transformed, and what remains is solely a concern with the freedom to make money.
Thing is that this didn't happen "overnight". Things have been going wrong since the nineteenth century. It's also more "freedom for (especially large) corporate entities to make money" than a plain and simple "freedome to make money". Whilst it dosn't actually say it anywhere this "Digital Rights Management" is clearly not intended for the "little guy" to use to bypass or even directly oppose the existing publishing industry...
With our losses of GBP£8bn per year, this sort of system could be used to help reduce benefit fraud, illegal immigration, monitor health service usage...
How do you design an ID which is cheap enough to issue to 60 million people. But hard to forge? Even if you have system where the ID is simply a key to a database how do you then ensure that the database is secure? Especially if you only have one database used for everything... It's quite possible that this will deter the casual criminal whilst making things far easier for organised crime (including terrorism).
That would be bad design. Systems controlling critical functions should be physically secured and certainly not anywhere near *any* kind of wider network access, least of all Outlook.
Also the system probably shouldn't be running under any general purpose OS in the first place. Which means that Windows may well be out because you can't easily remove all the baggage from it. Open Source is much safer, since you can restrict it to doing only what it needs to do.
Never trust a single system or OS for any mission critical service. Also I find its best to just use cheap PC hardware since you can't expect better uptime from the more expensive proprietary stuff and it can't get much more modular than racked PCs
Though you don't want to put all of these in one place, especially if they are doing something like controlling the weapons on a warship.
(keep in mind I know nothing about the condition aboard a ship, I know Sun make special cases designed for this).
Not only do you have the problems of keeping salt water out of the electronics you also have to ensure that things such as hard disks can cope with rapid movement about any axis.
Design of ship control systems is a real time control problem. As such it is not an application for which 'Linux' is a solution, you have to be much more precise and specify exactly which real-time enhanced Linux you are considering. It would also kinda help to actually specify the problems to be addressed.
Also it may well matter quite a bit if the ship in question is a supertanker, aircraft carrier, bulk carrier, destroyer, liner, ferry, etc.
Some OSS advocate asked at a conference how many people in the audience worked for a company that made its money by selling the software they wrote and hardly anyone was. The vast majority of developers are creating in house tools, web systems and the like rather than software for sale.
Hardly surprising since the number of companies producing software is minute. Even if Microsoft hadn't distorted the whole software market the number of software producers probably wouldn't be very large anyway...
Linux admins script a fix and don't touch it again, they just re-run the script. Windows admins don't script, for the most part. They push the same buttons on each system.
All this serves to show is that there are a fair number of so called "Windows admins" who don't really know what they are doing.
Publishers want to own copyright (i.e., control), something I am unwilling to give up.
Just about all publishers appear to want this, regardless of the media. People appear to have forgotten that the US constitution (and the Queen Anne copyright statute on which the clause in the US consitution is based on) removed the practice of giving copyright to publishers.
But I don't want to die, or even have my life threatened. So, if the Iraqi people, or any other people of any other country, can't reign in their own government, or an organization inside their borders, and that entity threatens me
Wonder if the Iraqi people ever say the same about Washington...
If they can't control their own wild dogs, what the fuck do you expect the U.S. to do when one of them bites?
Hopefully not try to be the biggest, baddest, "wild dog" on the planet...
Survival of the United States. Unlikely to come into play, but if the survival of the United States(I mean the 50 states and various territories, not our embassies and overseas military bases) is threatened
So you want to nuke the Hawaiian nationalists who simply want their country back? That sounds a little extreme. The plebsites for both Hawaii and Alaska both have enough irregulatities to be considered void. I'm not sure off hand about the various US held territories... Quite a bit of what is considered US territory may actually be more correctly considered "disputed".
They do a lot of bad things that we don't like, but the government usually covers that up because Saudi Arabia provides the US with military bases and oil. If we were to become enemies with Saudi Arabia, our stronghold in the region would disappear and your gas prices will rise by about $1 or $2
Would the former actually be a bad thing anyway. Not sure if the latter is true. Since the US has a domestic oil industry. Or is this one of these situations where it somehow works out cheaper to send something half way around the world.
wonder why U-236 was found in Gulf War veterans urine, because supposedly no U-236 would be present in DU which is manufactured only from naturally occuring uranium supposedly?
Most likely this DU came not directly from natural uranium which had the U235 extracted but from reprocessed nuclear fuel which had had fission products, U235 and Pu239 extracted. How stable is U236, since it is effectivly a failed U235 fission?
NO. they do NOT contaminate. U238 is a naturally occurring element and DU shell dust is NOT toxic.
Most heavy metals are highly toxic, there would have to be something unusual about the chemical properties of uranium. That they are naturally occurring is irrelevent so is lead....
Of course, I don't believe for a second bin Laden cares about the Palestinians; but their situation is involved in his ability to recruit people for his cause.
So doing something, positive, about the situation would give Bin Laden less ability to recruit people to his cause. Would this not be a good thing? Would it not be a positive thing for the US to both stop any supply of weapons into the war and to condem the killing of civilians regardless of if they are Isralie or Palestinian. What rational person can regard shooting at civilian doctors and paramedica as anything other than barbaric.
Likewise, Somalia. The UN sent a *lot* of aid into Somalia... and the aid merely ended up being a tool of the warlords. Now, unless you're suggesting that the US saddle up and go on a worldwide spree of crushing warlords, tyrants and brigands, and forcibly rebuilding nations to have democratic systems
Whilst that might be an improvment on the current policy it probably isn't the best idea. A better idea might be a strict policy of not supporting any side in a war. Not supporting dictatorships and certainly to never again topple democratic governments, because they don't want to be the lapdogs of US corporate interests. A good first start would be for the US get out of the middle east, no more "aid" to Israel, no more troops in Saudi Arabia. Wouldn't hurt to consider article 73 of the UN charter in respect og Hawaii either...
Me neither, but concentrating solely on our defense ignores the larger and important issue of why do they hate us?
Except none of this is defensive anyway. Bombing a country because some terrorist might be there is offensive, as is planning to bomb some country because you don't like their government or their head of state. Indeed if US had concentrated on being defensive quite likely none of the hijacked aircraft would have hit any buildings, worst case senario only WTC 1 hit and other 3 airlines shot down. (One of 4 hijacked aircraft hitting a building should certainly change whatever rules of enguagement might be in operation.) How much has the US spent on "air defence" over the years? Yet the first time it faces a live threat it utterly fails.What use is a defence system which dosn't even work? Yet the American people arn't asking questions about why their military failed to protect them. These wern't some kind of stealth missiles they were large commercial transports, even without transponders they have a huge RCS.
The US's refusal to see beyond its own commercial/political interests and become a true citizen of the world comes back to haunt it in a thousand different ways. Maintaining a huge nuclear arsenal and pretending that it will make us 'safe' is a dangerous distraction that keeps us from focussing on the real solution -- helping the rest of the world solve its problems and improve its lot, so that we are no longer hated, and thus we no longer need vast mililtary capabilities. Every dollar we spend helping the world improves our security more than a thousand dollars spent on weaponry.
Does the current US government (N.B. the entirity of the US government, nothing to do with if the Republican or Democratic party dominates in the executive or in Congress) have the first clue on how to spend money in a way which is actually helpful. IIRC currently the largest recipient of US "aid" is the government of Israel. Hardly the best starting point for building world peace.
The US is responsible, but this is not just about the US. It is about freedom and security.
All too often rather than protecting "freedom and security" the policy of the US has been to destroy stable democratic governments, because they wern't friendly towards the interests of US based corporates. If the US really were what it believes itself to be it would never be supporting dictators. It would also be smaller by at least one current "state" and have Israel on it's list of countries not to export anything with possible military use to.
Actually, the bunker buster is laser-guided, and will probably never be dropped by a high-altitude bomber such as the B-52.
In which case whatever aircraft is dropping it had better be capable of rapid transonic acceleration or capable of surviving being hit by a March 1 shockwave.
Strange how people seem to believe that a superior force using bigger weapons is going to help against the inferior force that doesn't fight in a way where the size of weapons matter.
The war in Israel shows this. You have one side fighting with tanks and helicopter gunships and the other has only small arms and suicide bombers.
Face it - the U.S. is a superior military force today. Using bigger or smaller bombs is not going to make one bit of difference.
The US was on paper far superior to the opposition in Vietnam, yet they lost.
You post scares me. You refer to the Anglo-American military machine.
I'm scared because you're right and I'm British.
I get the feeling there is a significant anti-war feeling in my country. Trouble is, the person that counts is very much taken with the US way of things
Even members of Tony Blair's own political party arn't happy with the way he has been behaving.
Public support is an issue. He keeps in power by giving people token gifts like refridgerators in huge ceremonies to show how nice and benelovent he is. A nuclear strike definately would put a damper on his tupperware parties.
If the US dropped a nuke on Bagdad he'd have exactly the same kind of support G W Bush got in the wake of September the 11th. Public support through anger against an organisation which murdered civilians. Indeed he could use all the same arguments Bush used to gather support.
A lot of people in the world hate the USA, and not all of them are insane. A lot of them quite rationally detest US foreign policy, because every time the USA steps in to a third party conflict, it makes a friend and an enemy (remember, in any conflict, both sides view themselves as the Good Guys, or the justified victims, or the Chosen of God).
The most obvious current example is Israel. Where there is a very much tit for tat civil war going on...
After September 11th, we had two choices. We could have said "Sorry for taking lives to save lives, we won't get involved again,", or we could have done what we did and said (effectively) "No more Mr Nice Guy. You will fear us more than you hate us."
Problem is that the latter can easily inflame more than deter... There was a third alternative. Which would have been to put out a reward for the capture of the suspects and to have quietly sent commandos after them.
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The point is still missed; everybody is talking about computers, dvd player, mp3 players, video games ect. But when you actualy read the act it in only refers to digital interactive devices . Sorry guys but that also includes my wrist watch (it has a chip and two buttons) as well as my car, (a computer and many buttons).
It includes the radio in your car, your television, your cellphone, your fixed line phone, etc.
Hopefully, as more and more editorials criticize this law, the general public will begin to see what is at stake and demand that Congress abandon this Disney law.
Simply getting this law abandoned would simply be "winning the battle", in order to "win the war". You'd need a fundermental change in attitude of the US government. But a change which does not require too much loss of face in admitting that all which has been done to aid corporates was wrong (even "Unamerican".)
Unfortunatly the American idea of freedom has been transformed, and what remains is solely a concern with the freedom to make money.
Thing is that this didn't happen "overnight". Things have been going wrong since the nineteenth century. It's also more "freedom for (especially large) corporate entities to make money" than a plain and simple "freedome to make money".
Whilst it dosn't actually say it anywhere this "Digital Rights Management" is clearly not intended for the "little guy" to use to bypass or even directly oppose the existing publishing industry...
With our losses of GBP£8bn per year, this sort of system could be used to help reduce benefit fraud, illegal immigration, monitor health service usage...
How do you design an ID which is cheap enough to issue to 60 million people. But hard to forge? Even if you have system where the ID is simply a key to a database how do you then ensure that the database is secure? Especially if you only have one database used for everything...
It's quite possible that this will deter the casual criminal whilst making things far easier for organised crime (including terrorism).
The sr71 needs a very good autopilot or else you end up hundreds of miles of course.
Also the aircraft is perfectly capable of tearing itself apart under certain circumstances.
That would be bad design. Systems controlling critical functions should be physically secured and certainly not anywhere near *any* kind of wider network access, least of all Outlook.
Also the system probably shouldn't be running under any general purpose OS in the first place. Which means that Windows may well be out because you can't easily remove all the baggage from it. Open Source is much safer, since you can restrict it to doing only what it needs to do.
Never trust a single system or OS for any mission critical service. Also I find its best to just use cheap PC hardware since you can't expect better uptime from the more expensive proprietary stuff and it can't get much more modular than racked PCs
Though you don't want to put all of these in one place, especially if they are doing something like controlling the weapons on a warship.
(keep in mind I know nothing about the condition aboard a ship, I know Sun make special cases designed for this).
Not only do you have the problems of keeping salt water out of the electronics you also have to ensure that things such as hard disks can cope with rapid movement about any axis.
Design of ship control systems is a real time control problem. As such it is not an application for which 'Linux' is a solution, you have to be much more precise and specify exactly which real-time enhanced Linux you are considering. It would also kinda help to actually specify the problems to be addressed.
Also it may well matter quite a bit if the ship in question is a supertanker, aircraft carrier, bulk carrier, destroyer, liner, ferry, etc.
Some OSS advocate asked at a conference how many people in the audience worked for a company that made its money by selling the software they wrote and hardly anyone was. The vast majority of developers are creating in house tools, web systems and the like rather than software for sale.
Hardly surprising since the number of companies producing software is minute. Even if Microsoft hadn't distorted the whole software market the number of software producers probably wouldn't be very large anyway...
Linux admins script a fix and don't touch it again, they just re-run the script. Windows admins don't script, for the most part. They push the same buttons on each system.
All this serves to show is that there are a fair number of so called "Windows admins" who don't really know what they are doing.
Publishers want to own copyright (i.e., control), something I am unwilling to give up.
Just about all publishers appear to want this, regardless of the media. People appear to have forgotten that the US constitution (and the Queen Anne copyright statute on which the clause in the US consitution is based on) removed the practice of giving copyright to publishers.
The biggest problem with online publishing is that anybody could do it. Hence, there is no quality control.
However it is perfectly possible to have direct review from other writers and readers where something is published online.
Publishers won't publish any junk you send them.
Some people would claim that publishers; be the book, music or film; most definitly do publish "junk".
But I don't want to die, or even have my life threatened. So, if the Iraqi people, or any other people of any other country, can't reign in their own government, or an organization inside their borders, and that entity threatens me
Wonder if the Iraqi people ever say the same about Washington...
If they can't control their own wild dogs, what the fuck do you expect the U.S. to do when one of them bites?
Hopefully not try to be the biggest, baddest, "wild dog" on the planet...
Survival of the United States. Unlikely to come into play, but if the survival of the United States(I mean the 50 states and various territories, not our embassies and overseas military bases) is threatened
So you want to nuke the Hawaiian nationalists who simply want their country back? That sounds a little extreme. The plebsites for both Hawaii and Alaska both have enough irregulatities to be considered void. I'm not sure off hand about the various US held territories... Quite a bit of what is considered US territory may actually be more correctly considered "disputed".
They do a lot of bad things that we don't like, but the government usually covers that up because Saudi Arabia provides the US with military bases and oil. If we were to become enemies with Saudi Arabia, our stronghold in the region would disappear and your gas prices will rise by about $1 or $2
Would the former actually be a bad thing anyway. Not sure if the latter is true. Since the US has a domestic oil industry. Or is this one of these situations where it somehow works out cheaper to send something half way around the world.
wonder why U-236 was found in Gulf War veterans urine, because supposedly no U-236 would be present in DU which is manufactured only from naturally occuring uranium supposedly?
Most likely this DU came not directly from natural uranium which had the U235 extracted but from reprocessed nuclear fuel which had had fission products, U235 and Pu239 extracted. How stable is U236, since it is effectivly a failed U235 fission?
NO. they do NOT contaminate. U238 is a naturally occurring element and DU shell dust is NOT toxic.
Most heavy metals are highly toxic, there would have to be something unusual about the chemical properties of uranium. That they are naturally occurring is irrelevent so is lead....
Of course, I don't believe for a second bin Laden cares about the Palestinians; but their situation is involved in his ability to recruit people for his cause.
So doing something, positive, about the situation would give Bin Laden less ability to recruit people to his cause. Would this not be a good thing?
Would it not be a positive thing for the US to both stop any supply of weapons into the war and to condem the killing of civilians regardless of if they are Isralie or Palestinian. What rational person can regard shooting at civilian doctors and paramedica as anything other than barbaric.
Likewise, Somalia. The UN sent a *lot* of aid into Somalia... and the aid merely ended up being a tool of the warlords. Now, unless you're suggesting that the US saddle up and go on a worldwide spree of crushing warlords, tyrants and brigands, and forcibly rebuilding nations to have democratic systems
Whilst that might be an improvment on the current policy it probably isn't the best idea. A better idea might be a strict policy of not supporting any side in a war. Not supporting dictatorships and certainly to never again topple democratic governments, because they don't want to be the lapdogs of US corporate interests.
A good first start would be for the US get out of the middle east, no more "aid" to Israel, no more troops in Saudi Arabia.
Wouldn't hurt to consider article 73 of the UN charter in respect og Hawaii either...
Me neither, but concentrating solely on our defense ignores the larger and important issue of why do they hate us?
Except none of this is defensive anyway. Bombing a country because some terrorist might be there is offensive, as is planning to bomb some country because you don't like their government or their head of state. Indeed if US had concentrated on being defensive quite likely none of the hijacked aircraft would have hit any buildings, worst case senario only WTC 1 hit and other 3 airlines shot down. (One of 4 hijacked aircraft hitting a building should certainly change whatever rules of enguagement might be in operation.)
How much has the US spent on "air defence" over the years? Yet the first time it faces a live threat it utterly fails.What use is a defence system which dosn't even work? Yet the American people arn't asking questions about why their military failed to protect them. These wern't some kind of stealth missiles they were large commercial transports, even without transponders they have a huge RCS.
The US's refusal to see beyond its own commercial/political interests and become a true citizen of the world comes back to haunt it in a thousand different ways. Maintaining a huge nuclear arsenal and pretending that it will make us 'safe' is a dangerous distraction that keeps us from focussing on the real solution -- helping the rest of the world solve its problems and improve its lot, so that we are no longer hated, and thus we no longer need vast mililtary capabilities. Every dollar we spend helping the world improves our security more than a thousand dollars spent on weaponry.
Does the current US government (N.B. the entirity of the US government, nothing to do with if the Republican or Democratic party dominates in the executive or in Congress) have the first clue on how to spend money in a way which is actually helpful. IIRC currently the largest recipient of US "aid" is the government of Israel. Hardly the best starting point for building world peace.
The US is responsible, but this is not just about the US. It is about freedom and security.
All too often rather than protecting "freedom and security" the policy of the US has been to destroy stable democratic governments, because they wern't friendly towards the interests of US based corporates.
If the US really were what it believes itself to be it would never be supporting dictators. It would also be smaller by at least one current "state" and have Israel on it's list of countries not to export anything with possible military use to.
Actually, the bunker buster is laser-guided, and will probably never be dropped by a high-altitude bomber such as the B-52.
In which case whatever aircraft is dropping it had better be capable of rapid transonic acceleration or capable of surviving being hit by a March 1 shockwave.
Strange how people seem to believe that a superior force using bigger weapons is going to help against the inferior force that doesn't fight in a way where the size of weapons matter.
The war in Israel shows this. You have one side fighting with tanks and helicopter gunships and the other has only small arms and suicide bombers.
Face it - the U.S. is a superior military force today. Using bigger or smaller bombs is not going to make one bit of difference.
The US was on paper far superior to the opposition in Vietnam, yet they lost.
You post scares me. You refer to the Anglo-American military machine.
I'm scared because you're right and I'm British.
I get the feeling there is a significant anti-war feeling in my country. Trouble is, the person that counts is very much taken with the US way of things
Even members of Tony Blair's own political party arn't happy with the way he has been behaving.
Public support is an issue. He keeps in power by giving people token gifts like refridgerators in huge ceremonies to show how nice and benelovent he is. A nuclear strike definately would put a damper on his tupperware parties.
If the US dropped a nuke on Bagdad he'd have exactly the same kind of support G W Bush got in the wake of September the 11th. Public support through anger against an organisation which murdered civilians.
Indeed he could use all the same arguments Bush used to gather support.
A lot of people in the world hate the USA, and not all of them are insane. A lot of them quite rationally detest US foreign policy, because every time the USA steps in to a third party conflict, it makes a friend and an enemy (remember, in any conflict, both sides view themselves as the Good Guys, or the justified victims, or the Chosen of God).
The most obvious current example is Israel. Where there is a very much tit for tat civil war going on...
After September 11th, we had two choices. We could have said "Sorry for taking lives to save lives, we won't get involved again,", or we could have done what we did and said (effectively) "No more Mr Nice Guy. You will fear us more than you hate us."
Problem is that the latter can easily inflame more than deter...
There was a third alternative. Which would have been to put out a reward for the capture of the suspects and to have quietly sent commandos after them.