Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.
They threw the brick, but it was the kind of girlie throw that doesn't quite reach the batter. I thought it was pretty amateurish for someone who has been in parliament for as long as Conroy, but it's entirely the kind of behavior I'd expect:-)
Has anyone ever actually demonstrated that looking at porn is harmful to children/teens? Everyone seems to be taking it as a forgone conclusion, but I've never seen any scientific evidence in a psychology journal. If looking at porn is really as dangerous as many people like to believe, it should be very easy to demonstrate the harm - but so far as I know, nobody has ever done that.
If it was anywhere near as dangerous as the censors claim, the last 20-odd years worth of ubiquitous availability of unfiltered Internet access should surely have destroyed society. We'd have psychologically damaged kids turning into psychologically-damaged adults all over the place. Sex crime would be skyrocketing. All the kids the censors claimed would turn into moral vacuums would have, god help us, turned into moral vacuums.
Hasn't really happened, has it? Society now is no better or worse than it's ever been. Day by day, the only prominent child molester stories I ever see concern priests and members of congress, and I'm not sure we can blame the Internet for that.
No, I think the whole "threat" is overblown. If it was even fractionally as harmful as "they" claim it is, our whole society would be toast. And it isn't. It just isn't.
Sure, now it's optional and only in Australia. Soon it'll be in the UK, and then the US.
Ha. One of the amusing things is that the Minister in Australia is claiming that he's been inspired by the similar systems in the UK, Norway, Finland, and various other European countries.
it definitely does NOT say that sanctions were working.
Senator Jay Rockefeller (Dem, WV): "The report does further document Saddam's attempts to deceive the world and get out from under the sanctions, but the fact remains, the sanctions combined with inspections were working and Saddam was restrained."
Trying to evade sanctions != actually evading sanctions. He could try as much as he wanted to; As long as he was unsuccessful, nobody needed to give a shit, and nobody needed to invade anything.
The entire world's intelligence services were dead wrong on WMDs, for example.
Well, yes. Australia and the UK have both produced reports which say that the reason their intelligence services were so wrong about WMDs was because they relied too much on information from the US.
Face it: The information produced by intelligence services all over the world was heavily filtered by politics. That's the only explanation for the fact that all of the world's intelligence services produced some information which said there were lots of WMDs, other information which said there weren't any, and that one of those categories was heavily discussed in the media and fed into the political decisionmaking process while the other category wasn't.
Germany, Russia and France made their decisions on the basis of their own intelligence services -- Which, apparently, have been proved to be superior to the CIA in this instance.
You have selective deafness. That article says the CIA agrees with me -- Saddam WAS flouting UN sanctions.
No, Saddam was unsuccessfully attempting to flout UN sanctions.
At the end of the day, he had no WMDs, and no programmes to develop WMDs. So the justification for invading would be...? (silence, followed by sound of crickets)
Like I said in my last message: This attitude that the only option available was a war is, frankly, absurd. America is the smartest, most powerful nation on earth, I simply don't believe that our leaders were so profoundly out-maneuvered by Saddam that their hands were completely tied and they had only one option left. Do you really think that Saddam had that much control over the US Government?
(that response also applies to your comments about Pakistan, Libya, and North Korea: do you really believe that the United States of America was so overwhelmed, so outclassed, so desperate, and so diplomatically powerless that the only way it had to communicate with those nations was by starting a war? Puh-lease! You're just using the end as a convenient way to justify the means)
Assassination You DO know that this is illegal, right? No matter who does it, no matter why, no matter the international consensus, assassination is frowned upon. You may agree that this is silly, but it's the facts.
Ha-ha, very funny. So is invading a sovereign nation which never attacked you, without UN Security Council approval, and which poses no threat whatsoever to you.
GWB can talk about Iraq's flouting of UN Security Council Resolutions as much as he likes, but surely the penalty for the aforementioned flouting is up to the UN Security Council to decide, yes? Why did America get so heavily involved?
Most of the countries who hate us "because" of this war hated us before it as well.
You're kidding, aren't you? When, previously, has France EVER failed to come to the aid of the United States? EVER? Ferchrissakes, the French sent us the Statue of Liberty! They've been one of our strongest allies for CENTURIES!
Can't you see that the mere fact that they didn't support us ALONE is evidence of a MASSIVE sea-change in the way America is perceived abroad?
Saddam would have continued to do what he was doing -- subverting UN sanctions, playing Europe against the US via bribes, and struggling to develop more offensive weapons to do what he's always wanted to do. Play the game long enough, and people like you forget why it's being played.
Even if that's true (and the article I referenced above seems to indicate that the CIA disagrees with you), I repeat that that's nothing that can't be solved by a targetted attack on the one man who was causing the problem.
This attitude that the only option available was a war is, frankly, absurd. America is the smartest, most powerful nation on earth, I simply don't believe that our leaders were so profoundly out-maneuvered by Saddam that their hands were completely tied and they had only one option left. Do you really think that Saddam had that much control over the US Government?
Once you acknowledge that there were other options, you then need to think about whether some of those options were better than the one that was taken.
Then when you think about the fact that options which would have been at least as effective at carrying out the stated aims, only without the loss of life, human rights violations, and so on, then you really need to question why the war happened in the first place.
And before you pick out the phrase "human rights violations" in the paragraph above for rebuttal, think about this: If a nation invades another nation on the pretext of protecting the human rights of the citizens of the occupied country (as we have apparently done), and then proceeds to carry out ANY human rights violations itself, it should be prepared to answer to the global community about what it has done and why it has done it. Abu Garab should never have happened. If it happened due to the actions of a few individuals, then the chain of command should answer to dereliction of duty charges for not preventing it. If it was a systemic, deliberate policy of the United States of America then George W. Bush should be on trial in The Hague on war crimes charges.
Have you been sleeping? These has been a terrorist problem for decades. That's the entire reason we invaded.
Amazing. And here I was thinking that Bush spent two entire years thumping the table about WMDs, and that that was the reason we invaded. How stupid of me.
You're engaging in historical revisionism. Afghanistan was invaded to protect America against terrorism, and the world approved, it was a just war, and nobody is criticizing Dubya for sending soldiers there.
But the fact of the matter is that Iraq was invaded on the pretext of preventing Saddam from using his stockpiles of WMDs (which don't exist). Colin Powell went to the UN to lay out the case for war in early 2003. Since that occurred, every single major point he put forward to justify an invasion has been shown to be incorrect. So now the administration says Iraq was about terrorism (no Iraqi terrorist ever attacked an American before the Iraq war) or about protect
In hindsight you can claim that he wasn't cooperating, but we also need to remember that his standard of cooperation was a non-issue for over a decade.
If it wasn't a cause for war in March, why was it suddenly a cause for war in April? Even the CIA admits that the UN Sanctions were working, and as a direct result of those sanctions Iraq wasn't a threat to anyone. So why was it suddenly necessary to invade?
Resumption of the war was inevitable, yes; but not because of Bush. Any president who wasn't determined to do _nothing_ would have to act.
Really? What bad things would have happened if the president didn't do anything? (Look at my last paragraph: Even the CIA has acknowledged that the UN sanctions were working) Not even the President talks about how the war was inevitable due to violation of UN Security Council Resolutions anymore, because the whole topic is too embarrassing and it's easier to just say that we invaded because Saddam was a sadistic, despotic shithead.
Why was it the president of the US's job/responsibility in the first place?
This attitude that the US had to do something about Saddam is mystifying. The US didn't have to do a damn thing. The rest of the UN Security Council certainly didn't think it was the America's job to invade...
Excellent reasoning; you're correct. The war wasn't illegal.
Someone had better tell Kofi:-)
Applying 20-20 hindsight, it's difficult to conclude anything other than the fact that the war was a big mistake.
It's going to cost trillions. Thousands of American troops are dead, tens of thousands more are maimed for life. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead. Other countries have lost respect for America. And there's now going to be a terrorism problem for decades: Every Iraqi child mourning the death of his or her parents in the rubble of their homes, or every innocent Iraqi who was tortured at Abu Garab, is a potential terrorist. It's going to take years for America to feel the impact of that.
Any argument which says the war is justified because it got rid of Saddam is also an argument which says it'd have been better to quietly send in a six-man covert assassination squad instead of sending 300,000 Marines.
Perhaps the legality of the war is the least of our problems:-(
I further believe that Bush was justified in this. Saddam got a ceasefire, and was violating it.
I've seen a few people make this comment. It has left me wondering: How, exactly, did he violate the ceasefire?
I know the stated explanation was that the big condition of the ceasefire was that he opened himself up to UN arms inspectors so they could search for WMDs. So kicking out the inspectors was a violation of UN Security Council resolutions, and that justified the invasion.
But we now know there were no WMDs.
He eventually kicked the arms inspectors out, but only after it was obvious to just about everyone in the world that a war was going to start no matter what happened. When you have Bush thumping the table about how you're going to get invaded unless you tell the truth about your WMDs, and your only possible response is, "But I have told the truth about WMDs!" there's no point in cooperating with the UN anymore, is there? He spent an entire decade cooperating with them, and all it got him was an escalating cycle of aggressive posturing from the US.
So I really want to know how, exactly, he violated the ceasefire. It seems to me that war was inevitable due to Bush's completely blockheaded attitude about WMDs, not due to any action or inaction on Hussain's part.
Kofi Annan seems to have asked the same question, in making his comments about the illegality of the US's actions in Iraq. If Hussain had really been in violation of UN resolutions, the war wouldn't have been illegal.
And remember, listening to Bush say he was in violation of UN Security Council resolutions doesn't make it so...
The Jargon File quotes that one as "pi = 3, for small values of pi and large values of 3."
(particularly unfunny in FORTRAN, where you could redefine the value of integers by saying things like "LET 1 = 4". Try debugging the code that comes after THAT!
False positives wouldn't exactly lead to malfunctions of this kind of device:-)
My point of posting that scenario, by the way, was to point out that the US Govt is completely braindead if they think they can justify addition of RFID tags to passports on national security grounds (as they are).
Sure, it's simpler and more likely that someone who wants to blow something up will use the gasoline in a car's fuel tank with an oily rag as a fuse; But those who think the State Department is looking out for their best interests (heh) really need to question what new vulnerabilities are opened up by each step the Government CLAIMS is intended to aid security.
RFID chips can be read from up to 50 feet away. Sure, most readers only work from a few inches, but there is off-the-shelf equipment available for a moderate number of dollars with a much, much greater range.
So, lets assume that the RFID chips in US Passports will be readable from "a long way away". Doesn't matter if it's 10 feet, 20 feet or 50 feet. Lets just say it's more than a few inches.
What does this mean? It means that a bomber with a moderate budget could build a detonator for an explosive device which goes off when it can detect the presence of an RFID chip.
It doesn't need to actually read the chip (lets assume the passport data is encrypted), it just needs to know it's there.
Furthermore, it could count the number of unique RFIDs which are currently in range, and only detonate the explosive when enough of them are seen at the same time.
It could be planted days, weeks or months in advance, and it'd sit there until its batteries ran down waiting for the right moment to go off.
The result is a bomb which only goes off when a sufficiently large density of American citizens is present.
If Sun genuinely wanted to they could be a dominant player in the linux market, ahead of Redhat and Novell
Sun doesn't genuinely want to do this. They're a hardware company. They don't want to get into software, it doesn't have anywhere near the kind of margins they want.
This isn't new. You can do exactly the same thing with a PABX with ISDN ports. The ability to set your own caller-ID is part of the ISDN call setup protocol.
What you can't do, though, is set the ANI data (which is used by the telcos to find out who gets billed for the call and for call interception). And I can't see how that capability changes at all just because you're using a VoIP gateway either.
If you're working in a lab, and you need a precisely calibrated kilogram mass, you can derive it all to exact precision with a light source and a clock:
You can calibrate your clock by counting oscillations of a caesium atom (I can't remember how many oscillations there are per second; But the point is that it's readily obtainable by physical measurement)
If your clock can measure 1/299,792,458th of a second, you can measure how far a photon of light can travel -- That's 1 metre.
You can obtain the standard unit of speed (metres per second) from that, using your clock and your metre.
If you divide your metre up into 100ths you get centimetres. 1000 of them (a volume 10 x 10 x 10 cm) gives you a cubic decilitre, otherwise known as a litre.
A litre of water weighs exactly 1 kilogram.
Furthermore, the temperature at which that water freezes at sea level is 0 degress celsius, and the temperature at which it boils is 100 degrees celsius.
The point of all this is that it's possible to derive units of mass, distance, temperature, volume (and electrical charge, and force, and torque, and everything else you ever need to measure) using nothing more than OBSERVATIONS of physical phenomena. Anyone in any laboratory can perform these observations, and they'll always come out with the same answers. It's a readily duplicatable system of measurement.
Even better: if you have an arbitrarily precise measurement of any one of these units, you can use it to derive the others. E.g., in the example above I could use a precise derivation of a meter to work out what a degree celsius was. I can just as easily use (say) electron volts to work out hectopascals (pressure), for example.
Now -- Can you do any of that with American imperial units? How does every single laboratory in the world derive an imperial pound? Or a mile? And if you know what a mile is, can you use it to determine a 100% precise degree farenheit (like you can with the SI system?)
That's the science behind the superiority of the metric system. It's the only complete system of measurement which is derived 100% from measurable physical phenomena, and which is interlinked sufficiently well such that knowledge of any one unit is sufficient to derive every other unit in the system -- regardless of how obscure that unit is.
Even better, it all works in powers of ten. Nobody needs to remember how many inches there are in a furlong to convert between them; you'd think about how many millimetres (10^-3 meters) there are in a kilometre (10^3 metres), any any middle-school kid can do exponential arithmetic like that and conclude that there's a million (10^6) of 'em.
For some reason, the US has resisted converting while the rest of the world has moved on (it isn't just france and germany -- it's EVERYWHERE). The US says, "But it'll cost too much to convert," while the rest of the world has proven that conversion is well within their somewhat inferior resource limitations. I'd have thought that it'd be EASIER for the US to convert than anyone else, because they actually have the money to spend on it, but no, it isn't happening.
The US State Dept wants US passports to include biometric identification on an RFID tag by 2007.
The data will, of course, be encrypted. But you can buy off-the-shelf RFID scanners today which have a range of about 50 feet, so even if you can't tell that someone has brown eyes and blue hair you'd at least be able to tell that they were carrying an American passport from quite a decent distance away.
One of those readers connected to a small microcontroller which counts how many unique RFIDs have been seen during the last few seconds wouldn't be too hard to build, and would give you a reading of how many Americans are currently in a 50 foot radius.
If the output on that microcontroller is connected to an explosives detonator, then you have a bomb which will only go off in the presence of Americans. Perfect for airports, taxis and foreign embassies! Set the "American Density" (unique counts in a 50 foot radius) threshold to a value which gives you optimal yield for the application at hand; small numbers for a taxi, large numbers for an airport concourse.
Note that I didn't come up with this idea; It was discussed on RISKS-DIGEST a couple of months ago.
IBM had a stand at a technology conference I attended last month where they were showcasing their RFID technology solutions. I mentioned this to one of their people, and suggested that we could call the explosives an "IBM Bomb", since it'd be enabled by off the shelf IBM technology. That wasn't really fair because IBM isn't the only vendor doing this stuff, but it was funny to see his sales pitch stop in mid-flow as he thought about the PR effects:-)
I think the US has larger issues it needs to consider than the effects on the retail industry and privacy. Like it or not, US foreign policy has lead to a world which features various groups scattered across the planet who want to kill Americans. RFIDs in passports give those groups a way to distinguish between Americans and non-Americans at a distance, which doesn't strike me as a particularly clever idea in the current political environment...
What I'm about to ask is really off-topic, but I don't get much opporunity to learn about how other countries work. Registerred voters were fined for not voting? Are they allowed to vote 'none of the above'?
The original poster is over-exaggerating. He didn't get fined for not voting, he got fined for not attending a voting booth on election day.
It's mandatory to register to vote in Australia. And, once registered, it's mandatory to get your name ticked-off on the electoral roll each time there's a State or Federal election. But once your name is ticked off you can leave if you don't want to vote.
The Australian situation is no different from the situation in most countries where you had an old telecom monopoly - like in most of Europe.
Yup -- And Europe is the canonical example of a place where regulation is used to curb the excesses of the free market. I mean, you don't seriously think that the likes of Sprint and WorldCom compete with European telcos on an equal footing, do you? Of course not - the local regulators restrict the activities of the incumbent telcos to give the new entrants (mainly US companies) assistance.
(There is regulation like that in Australia: For example, Telstra is not permitted to give geographically-specific discounts off its published price schedule. So they can't react to a small carrier which is only operating in Sydney by lowering their Sydney prices, unless they also lower their prices everywhere else in Australia. Other carriers don't have that restriction. In market spaces where there is no competition, most of the restrictions on Telstra are pretty useless -- which gets us back to the peering situation, and the suppression of same by high monopoly rents)
As for last mile technologies -- You're missing the point completely. Peering between ISPs has very little to do with last-mile links, unless the ISPs are within a few miles of each other. In many countries you also have the Government regulating the rollout of wireless gear, because the regulatory treatment which a wireless link receives is exactly the same as the regulatory treatment a wired link receives -- And if you can't dig-up the road to install fibre without a Government license, then you damn-well can't stick up a pair of antennae to achieve the same result wirelessly either. It's not the fibre which matters to the lawmakers, it's the fact that you've built a link which the Govt doesn't know about and can't wiretap.
BGP already provides some of these benefits for smaller ISPs by allowing peering relationships. Let's say there is a parent ISP A, with smaller ISPs B and C in a transit relationship to A (in other words, they pay A). If B wants to send to C, it normally has to go through A, and both B and C end up paying for it. If there is significant traffic between B and C, they may decide to set up a peering relationship, sending packets directly between one another and bypassing A. Many peering relationships are set up such that B and C don't pay each other anything, since they both end up saving money by bypassing A.
The situation in Australia is that A is "Telstra", and B and C are "everyone else".
Telstra also owns 100% of the installed base of copper lines in Australia, and about 90% of the installed base of fibre optic capacity, so if B and C decide that they want to talk to each other directly they almost always have to lease carrier services from Telstra... which has set the tarrifs so that the cost of directly linking is very similar to the cost of sending transit through Telstra in the first place.
The monopoly sitation with respect to installed telecommunications infrastructure distorts the way the peering arrangements you have described occur. The Australian situation is similar to what you would have had in the US if AT&T were never broken up.
For long-haul and metropolitan peering, US ISPs can obtain competitive bids from any of a number of CLECs and national carriers, or they can dig-up the sidewalks and install their own fibre. In Australia, digging up the sidewalk for laying cable is illegal without a Government-sanctioned carrier license, and there is very little in the way of competitive telecommunications infrastructure, so Telstra effectively becomes the sole provider.
The situation is slowly changing, but it's a very fragile ecosystem at the moment. Almost all of the Telstra competitors are either in the infancy or in bankruptcy... so if you were a major ISP, would you think that peering was an economically viable long-term option?
Finally, Telstra themselves never peer with anyone -- As far as they're concerned, every single other ISP in Australia, including the likes of Worldcom, falls into the "customer" category. Oh, hang on, there is one exception: about five years ago, the ACCC forced Telstra into peering arrangements with OzEmail and Optus (the number-2 and number-3 ISPs at the time). The terms of those arrangements remain a commercial secret, and no further peering arrangements have ever been entered by Telstra.
* Users can protect their computers from viruses or other unapproved malware.
You don't seriously believe this, do you?
Let me put it this way: Microsoft and a hoard of third-party software vendors try their hardest to prevent malware TODAY, and yet they fail.
So tell me how, exactly, a digital signature on a piece of software prevents, say, a buffer-overflow attack. Or a scripting bug. Or any of the other countless bugs which viruses exploit, have always exploited, and will always continue to exploit?
When Windows NT came onto the market, MS touted memory protection as a defence against viruses -- But virus writers just treated it as a hurdle to be jumped over, and we still have viruses on Windows systems today. I see nothing in TCPA which will change that; The only thing TCPA achieves is control over my systems ceded to people I don't know or trust. The "T" in TCPA means that RIAA and MPAA trust my computer, it doesn't mean that I trust it.
Should payphones be thought of as something essential like public transportation, and possibly subsidized by the govt?
They are in most countries (either directly as a public service, or indirectly as a consequence of the fact that the Government usually owns the phone company).
It's only in the US that payphones depend on the corporate whim of a for-profit company.
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Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.
They threw the brick, but it was the kind of girlie throw that doesn't quite reach the batter. I thought it was pretty amateurish for someone who has been in parliament for as long as Conroy, but it's entirely the kind of behavior I'd expect :-)
Cheers!
- mark
If it was anywhere near as dangerous as the censors claim, the last 20-odd years worth of ubiquitous availability of unfiltered Internet access should surely have destroyed society. We'd have psychologically damaged kids turning into psychologically-damaged adults all over the place. Sex crime would be skyrocketing. All the kids the censors claimed would turn into moral vacuums would have, god help us, turned into moral vacuums.
Hasn't really happened, has it? Society now is no better or worse than it's ever been. Day by day, the only prominent child molester stories I ever see concern priests and members of congress, and I'm not sure we can blame the Internet for that.
No, I think the whole "threat" is overblown. If it was even fractionally as harmful as "they" claim it is, our whole society would be toast. And it isn't. It just isn't.
- mark
Ha. One of the amusing things is that the Minister in Australia is claiming that he's been inspired by the similar systems in the UK, Norway, Finland, and various other European countries.
Of course, those countries have nothing like what he's proposed:
http://libertus.net/censor/ispfiltering-gl.html
- mark
Senator Jay Rockefeller (Dem, WV): "The report does further document Saddam's attempts to deceive the world and get out from under the sanctions, but the fact remains, the sanctions combined with inspections were working and Saddam was restrained."
Trying to evade sanctions != actually evading sanctions. He could try as much as he wanted to; As long as he was unsuccessful, nobody needed to give a shit, and nobody needed to invade anything.
Well, yes. Australia and the UK have both produced reports which say that the reason their intelligence services were so wrong about WMDs was because they relied too much on information from the US.
Face it: The information produced by intelligence services all over the world was heavily filtered by politics. That's the only explanation for the fact that all of the world's intelligence services produced some information which said there were lots of WMDs, other information which said there weren't any, and that one of those categories was heavily discussed in the media and fed into the political decisionmaking process while the other category wasn't.
Germany, Russia and France made their decisions on the basis of their own intelligence services -- Which, apparently, have been proved to be superior to the CIA in this instance.
No, Saddam was unsuccessfully attempting to flout UN sanctions.
At the end of the day, he had no WMDs, and no programmes to develop WMDs. So the justification for invading would be...? (silence, followed by sound of crickets)
Like I said in my last message: This attitude that the only option available was a war is, frankly, absurd. America is the smartest, most powerful nation on earth, I simply don't believe that our leaders were so profoundly out-maneuvered by Saddam that their hands were completely tied and they had only one option left. Do you really think that Saddam had that much control over the US Government?
(that response also applies to your comments about Pakistan, Libya, and North Korea: do you really believe that the United States of America was so overwhelmed, so outclassed, so desperate, and so diplomatically powerless that the only way it had to communicate with those nations was by starting a war? Puh-lease! You're just using the end as a convenient way to justify the means)
Ha-ha, very funny. So is invading a sovereign nation which never attacked you, without UN Security Council approval, and which poses no threat whatsoever to you.
GWB can talk about Iraq's flouting of UN Security Council Resolutions as much as he likes, but surely the penalty for the aforementioned flouting is up to the UN Security Council to decide, yes? Why did America get so heavily involved?
http://edition.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/10/06/iraq .wmd.report/index.html is what you're looking for.
You're kidding, aren't you? When, previously, has France EVER failed to come to the aid of the United States? EVER? Ferchrissakes, the French sent us the Statue of Liberty! They've been one of our strongest allies for CENTURIES!
Can't you see that the mere fact that they didn't support us ALONE is evidence of a MASSIVE sea-change in the way America is perceived abroad?
Even if that's true (and the article I referenced above seems to indicate that the CIA disagrees with you), I repeat that that's nothing that can't be solved by a targetted attack on the one man who was causing the problem.
This attitude that the only option available was a war is, frankly, absurd. America is the smartest, most powerful nation on earth, I simply don't believe that our leaders were so profoundly out-maneuvered by Saddam that their hands were completely tied and they had only one option left. Do you really think that Saddam had that much control over the US Government?
Once you acknowledge that there were other options, you then need to think about whether some of those options were better than the one that was taken.
Then when you think about the fact that options which would have been at least as effective at carrying out the stated aims, only without the loss of life, human rights violations, and so on, then you really need to question why the war happened in the first place.
And before you pick out the phrase "human rights violations" in the paragraph above for rebuttal, think about this: If a nation invades another nation on the pretext of protecting the human rights of the citizens of the occupied country (as we have apparently done), and then proceeds to carry out ANY human rights violations itself, it should be prepared to answer to the global community about what it has done and why it has done it. Abu Garab should never have happened. If it happened due to the actions of a few individuals, then the chain of command should answer to dereliction of duty charges for not preventing it. If it was a systemic, deliberate policy of the United States of America then George W. Bush should be on trial in The Hague on war crimes charges.
Amazing. And here I was thinking that Bush spent two entire years thumping the table about WMDs, and that that was the reason we invaded. How stupid of me.
You're engaging in historical revisionism. Afghanistan was invaded to protect America against terrorism, and the world approved, it was a just war, and nobody is criticizing Dubya for sending soldiers there. But the fact of the matter is that Iraq was invaded on the pretext of preventing Saddam from using his stockpiles of WMDs (which don't exist). Colin Powell went to the UN to lay out the case for war in early 2003. Since that occurred, every single major point he put forward to justify an invasion has been shown to be incorrect. So now the administration says Iraq was about terrorism (no Iraqi terrorist ever attacked an American before the Iraq war) or about protect
Whether or not that's the case is debatable.
In hindsight you can claim that he wasn't cooperating, but we also need to remember that his standard of cooperation was a non-issue for over a decade.
If it wasn't a cause for war in March, why was it suddenly a cause for war in April? Even the CIA admits that the UN Sanctions were working, and as a direct result of those sanctions Iraq wasn't a threat to anyone. So why was it suddenly necessary to invade?
Really? What bad things would have happened if the president didn't do anything? (Look at my last paragraph: Even the CIA has acknowledged that the UN sanctions were working) Not even the President talks about how the war was inevitable due to violation of UN Security Council Resolutions anymore, because the whole topic is too embarrassing and it's easier to just say that we invaded because Saddam was a sadistic, despotic shithead.
Why was it the president of the US's job/responsibility in the first place?
This attitude that the US had to do something about Saddam is mystifying. The US didn't have to do a damn thing. The rest of the UN Security Council certainly didn't think it was the America's job to invade...
Someone had better tell Kofi :-)
Applying 20-20 hindsight, it's difficult to conclude anything other than the fact that the war was a big mistake.
It's going to cost trillions. Thousands of American troops are dead, tens of thousands more are maimed for life. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead. Other countries have lost respect for America. And there's now going to be a terrorism problem for decades: Every Iraqi child mourning the death of his or her parents in the rubble of their homes, or every innocent Iraqi who was tortured at Abu Garab, is a potential terrorist. It's going to take years for America to feel the impact of that.
Any argument which says the war is justified because it got rid of Saddam is also an argument which says it'd have been better to quietly send in a six-man covert assassination squad instead of sending 300,000 Marines.
Perhaps the legality of the war is the least of our problems :-(
I've seen a few people make this comment. It has left me wondering: How, exactly, did he violate the ceasefire?
I know the stated explanation was that the big condition of the ceasefire was that he opened himself up to UN arms inspectors so they could search for WMDs. So kicking out the inspectors was a violation of UN Security Council resolutions, and that justified the invasion.
But we now know there were no WMDs.
He eventually kicked the arms inspectors out, but only after it was obvious to just about everyone in the world that a war was going to start no matter what happened. When you have Bush thumping the table about how you're going to get invaded unless you tell the truth about your WMDs, and your only possible response is, "But I have told the truth about WMDs!" there's no point in cooperating with the UN anymore, is there? He spent an entire decade cooperating with them, and all it got him was an escalating cycle of aggressive posturing from the US.
So I really want to know how, exactly, he violated the ceasefire. It seems to me that war was inevitable due to Bush's completely blockheaded attitude about WMDs, not due to any action or inaction on Hussain's part.
Kofi Annan seems to have asked the same question, in making his comments about the illegality of the US's actions in Iraq. If Hussain had really been in violation of UN resolutions, the war wouldn't have been illegal.
And remember, listening to Bush say he was in violation of UN Security Council resolutions doesn't make it so...
The Jargon File quotes that one as "pi = 3, for small values of pi and large values of 3."
(particularly unfunny in FORTRAN, where you could redefine the value of integers by saying things like "LET 1 = 4". Try debugging the code that comes after THAT!
- mark
Not in third world countries.
:-)
False positives wouldn't exactly lead to malfunctions of this kind of device
My point of posting that scenario, by the way, was to point out that the US Govt is completely braindead if they think they can justify addition of RFID tags to passports on national security grounds (as they are).
Sure, it's simpler and more likely that someone who wants to blow something up will use the gasoline in a car's fuel tank with an oily rag as a fuse; But those who think the State Department is looking out for their best interests (heh) really need to question what new vulnerabilities are opened up by each step the Government CLAIMS is intended to aid security.
- mark
Thanks. You've just demonstrated why the non-American part of the world doesn't like Americans.
Love and kisses,
- mark
Read this month's CRYPTO-GRAM.
Bruce Schneier thinks the reason the RFID chips are being mandated for passwords is to permit the US Govt to read them from long distances in crowds.
He's not exactly the kind of guy who makes this stuff up.
Same principle, different application.
- mark
RFID chips can be read from up to 50 feet away. Sure, most readers only work from a few inches, but there is off-the-shelf equipment available for a moderate number of dollars with a much, much greater range.
So, lets assume that the RFID chips in US Passports will be readable from "a long way away". Doesn't matter if it's 10 feet, 20 feet or 50 feet. Lets just say it's more than a few inches.
What does this mean? It means that a bomber with a moderate budget could build a detonator for an explosive device which goes off when it can detect the presence of an RFID chip.
It doesn't need to actually read the chip (lets assume the passport data is encrypted), it just needs to know it's there.
Furthermore, it could count the number of unique RFIDs which are currently in range, and only detonate the explosive when enough of them are seen at the same time.
It could be planted days, weeks or months in advance, and it'd sit there until its batteries ran down waiting for the right moment to go off.
The result is a bomb which only goes off when a sufficiently large density of American citizens is present.
- mark
Sun doesn't genuinely want to do this. They're a hardware company. They don't want to get into software, it doesn't have anywhere near the kind of margins they want.
Then again, neither days bankruptcy :-)
- mark
This isn't new. You can do exactly the same thing with a PABX with ISDN ports. The ability to set your own caller-ID is part of the ISDN call setup protocol.
What you can't do, though, is set the ANI data (which is used by the telcos to find out who gets billed for the call and for call interception). And I can't see how that capability changes at all just because you're using a VoIP gateway either.
- mark
Wow. Think how much worse this'd be for Microsoft if IE was a core part of the operating system!
- mark
Because American units are arbitrary.
If you're working in a lab, and you need a precisely calibrated kilogram mass, you can derive it all to exact precision with a light source and a clock:
You can calibrate your clock by counting oscillations of a caesium atom (I can't remember how many oscillations there are per second; But the point is that it's readily obtainable by physical measurement)
If your clock can measure 1/299,792,458th of a second, you can measure how far a photon of light can travel -- That's 1 metre.
You can obtain the standard unit of speed (metres per second) from that, using your clock and your metre.
If you divide your metre up into 100ths you get centimetres. 1000 of them (a volume 10 x 10 x 10 cm) gives you a cubic decilitre, otherwise known as a litre.
A litre of water weighs exactly 1 kilogram.
Furthermore, the temperature at which that water freezes at sea level is 0 degress celsius, and the temperature at which it boils is 100 degrees celsius.
The point of all this is that it's possible to derive units of mass, distance, temperature, volume (and electrical charge, and force, and torque, and everything else you ever need to measure) using nothing more than OBSERVATIONS of physical phenomena. Anyone in any laboratory can perform these observations, and they'll always come out with the same answers. It's a readily duplicatable system of measurement.
Even better: if you have an arbitrarily precise measurement of any one of these units, you can use it to derive the others. E.g., in the example above I could use a precise derivation of a meter to work out what a degree celsius was. I can just as easily use (say) electron volts to work out hectopascals (pressure), for example.
Now -- Can you do any of that with American imperial units? How does every single laboratory in the world derive an imperial pound? Or a mile? And if you know what a mile is, can you use it to determine a 100% precise degree farenheit (like you can with the SI system?)
That's the science behind the superiority of the metric system. It's the only complete system of measurement which is derived 100% from measurable physical phenomena, and which is interlinked sufficiently well such that knowledge of any one unit is sufficient to derive every other unit in the system -- regardless of how obscure that unit is.
Even better, it all works in powers of ten. Nobody needs to remember how many inches there are in a furlong to convert between them; you'd think about how many millimetres (10^-3 meters) there are in a kilometre (10^3 metres), any any middle-school kid can do exponential arithmetic like that and conclude that there's a million (10^6) of 'em.
For some reason, the US has resisted converting while the rest of the world has moved on (it isn't just france and germany -- it's EVERYWHERE). The US says, "But it'll cost too much to convert," while the rest of the world has proven that conversion is well within their somewhat inferior resource limitations. I'd have thought that it'd be EASIER for the US to convert than anyone else, because they actually have the money to spend on it, but no, it isn't happening.
I wonder why?
- mark
The data will, of course, be encrypted. But you can buy off-the-shelf RFID scanners today which have a range of about 50 feet, so even if you can't tell that someone has brown eyes and blue hair you'd at least be able to tell that they were carrying an American passport from quite a decent distance away.
One of those readers connected to a small microcontroller which counts how many unique RFIDs have been seen during the last few seconds wouldn't be too hard to build, and would give you a reading of how many Americans are currently in a 50 foot radius.
If the output on that microcontroller is connected to an explosives detonator, then you have a bomb which will only go off in the presence of Americans. Perfect for airports, taxis and foreign embassies! Set the "American Density" (unique counts in a 50 foot radius) threshold to a value which gives you optimal yield for the application at hand; small numbers for a taxi, large numbers for an airport concourse.
Note that I didn't come up with this idea; It was discussed on RISKS-DIGEST a couple of months ago.
IBM had a stand at a technology conference I attended last month where they were showcasing their RFID technology solutions. I mentioned this to one of their people, and suggested that we could call the explosives an "IBM Bomb", since it'd be enabled by off the shelf IBM technology. That wasn't really fair because IBM isn't the only vendor doing this stuff, but it was funny to see his sales pitch stop in mid-flow as he thought about the PR effects
I think the US has larger issues it needs to consider than the effects on the retail industry and privacy. Like it or not, US foreign policy has lead to a world which features various groups scattered across the planet who want to kill Americans. RFIDs in passports give those groups a way to distinguish between Americans and non-Americans at a distance, which doesn't strike me as a particularly clever idea in the current political environment...
- mark
No it doesn't. It requires you by law to turn up to a polling place and have your name ticked off. There's no requirement to actually vote. - mark
Your list has a bug - .de shouldn't be delegation-only.
h tml
See http://www.isc.org/products/BIND/delegation-only.
- mark
Y'know, in a funny sort of way, they'd be right.
- mark
It's mandatory to register to vote in Australia. And, once registered, it's mandatory to get your name ticked-off on the electoral roll each time there's a State or Federal election. But once your name is ticked off you can leave if you don't want to vote.
The fine was for laziness, not for not voting.
Yup -- And Europe is the canonical example of a place where regulation is used to curb the excesses of the free market. I mean, you don't seriously think that the likes of Sprint and WorldCom compete with European telcos on an equal footing, do you? Of course not - the local regulators restrict the activities of the incumbent telcos to give the new entrants (mainly US companies) assistance.
(There is regulation like that in Australia: For example, Telstra is not permitted to give geographically-specific discounts off its published price schedule. So they can't react to a small carrier which is only operating in Sydney by lowering their Sydney prices, unless they also lower their prices everywhere else in Australia. Other carriers don't have that restriction. In market spaces where there is no competition, most of the restrictions on Telstra are pretty useless -- which gets us back to the peering situation, and the suppression of same by high monopoly rents)
As for last mile technologies -- You're missing the point completely. Peering between ISPs has very little to do with last-mile links, unless the ISPs are within a few miles of each other. In many countries you also have the Government regulating the rollout of wireless gear, because the regulatory treatment which a wireless link receives is exactly the same as the regulatory treatment a wired link receives -- And if you can't dig-up the road to install fibre without a Government license, then you damn-well can't stick up a pair of antennae to achieve the same result wirelessly either. It's not the fibre which matters to the lawmakers, it's the fact that you've built a link which the Govt doesn't know about and can't wiretap.
- mark
The situation in Australia is that A is "Telstra", and B and C are "everyone else".
Telstra also owns 100% of the installed base of copper lines in Australia, and about 90% of the installed base of fibre optic capacity, so if B and C decide that they want to talk to each other directly they almost always have to lease carrier services from Telstra... which has set the tarrifs so that the cost of directly linking is very similar to the cost of sending transit through Telstra in the first place.
The monopoly sitation with respect to installed telecommunications infrastructure distorts the way the peering arrangements you have described occur. The Australian situation is similar to what you would have had in the US if AT&T were never broken up.
For long-haul and metropolitan peering, US ISPs can obtain competitive bids from any of a number of CLECs and national carriers, or they can dig-up the sidewalks and install their own fibre. In Australia, digging up the sidewalk for laying cable is illegal without a Government-sanctioned carrier license, and there is very little in the way of competitive telecommunications infrastructure, so Telstra effectively becomes the sole provider.
The situation is slowly changing, but it's a very fragile ecosystem at the moment. Almost all of the Telstra competitors are either in the infancy or in bankruptcy... so if you were a major ISP, would you think that peering was an economically viable long-term option?
Finally, Telstra themselves never peer with anyone -- As far as they're concerned, every single other ISP in Australia, including the likes of Worldcom, falls into the "customer" category. Oh, hang on, there is one exception: about five years ago, the ACCC forced Telstra into peering arrangements with OzEmail and Optus (the number-2 and number-3 ISPs at the time). The terms of those arrangements remain a commercial secret, and no further peering arrangements have ever been entered by Telstra.
- mark
You don't seriously believe this, do you?
Let me put it this way: Microsoft and a hoard of third-party software vendors try their hardest to prevent malware TODAY, and yet they fail.
So tell me how, exactly, a digital signature on a piece of software prevents, say, a buffer-overflow attack. Or a scripting bug. Or any of the other countless bugs which viruses exploit, have always exploited, and will always continue to exploit?
When Windows NT came onto the market, MS touted memory protection as a defence against viruses -- But virus writers just treated it as a hurdle to be jumped over, and we still have viruses on Windows systems today. I see nothing in TCPA which will change that; The only thing TCPA achieves is control over my systems ceded to people I don't know or trust. The "T" in TCPA means that RIAA and MPAA trust my computer, it doesn't mean that I trust it.
- mark
They are in most countries (either directly as a public service, or indirectly as a consequence of the fact that the Government usually owns the phone company).
It's only in the US that payphones depend on the corporate whim of a for-profit company.
- mark