Typical pseudo-RNGs do not return a gaussian distribution. Usually they return a uniform distribution
True, true. However, when combined with a source of entropy, you can get a nice bell shape. Typical pure pseudo algorithms are seeded with a clock value. Instead, what we can do is seed a good pseudo generator with our entropal value once we have enough entropy bits. We then take the first number that the pseudo generator returns, and start over when we have enough entropy bits again.
(c) Who says that getting a gaussian distribution satisfies each and every possible criterion for randomness? Maybe it is good enough for you, but I'm not that easily convinced. Perhaps you should spend some time thinking/reading what "random" means
Let's not have a peeing contest about who has read more about the subject. I've read plenty. Yes, I know that a gaussian distro is not the only criteria for evaluation of randomness. However, you seemed to be laboring under the impression that a chip can only produce random numbers with a pseudo-RNG. I'm giving you information that apparently you were unaware of. There are sources of entropy even on a deterministic machine. Examples include interrupt timings, and IO timings. In linux, these numbers can be found at/dev/random. Read about it here:. If you accuse everyone who tries to educate you an idiot, people are going to be a bit shy of helping you. How about you learn something instead?
That is not really true. What look like random fluctuations exist, but they are also a function of environment.
Background electromagnetic radiation is not truly random either. The fact of the matter is, it's random enough. The same is true of common electronic RNGs.
Isn't there something wrong with a news source when the first thing I do is a research before I can trust anything I read? Isn't that a job of editors to verify their sources before posting stories? I just don't get it.)
I hate to pull your soapbox out from under you bub, but, well, no. It's not the job of the editors. In fact, they explicitly tell you that in the FAQ, and you'd know that if you bothered to read it. I guess you'd rather just complain about not getting something you were explicitly not offered, for free.:)
Don't take this too harshly, I'm just razzing you. But really, go ahead and read the FAQ. Click the topic "How do you verify the accuracy of Slashdot stories?"
GUID does not stand for global universal ID. That would be redundant. It stands for globally unique identifier.
In light of your mistake, I hereby revoke your geek license. You are no longer allowed to quote Douglas Adams, Monty python, or any of the original Star Wars movies. The only science fiction you are allowed to watch until and unless you are allowed to renew your license is Lost In Space, or the remake of Planet of the Apes.
The upside is, now you can have a girlfriend, or a significant other of your gender preference.
Clearly, a deterministic machine (=chip) cannot produce really random sequences. I did not bother to check the actual working details of those machines, but I would say that the only truly random phenomena are quantum phenomena and only these would be acceptable in a serious scientific study.
Clearly you have no clue what you are talking about. There are many random fluctuations in electronic devices which can be measured, and when combined with a pseudo RNG, produce perfectly gaussian distribution. This is the principle under which black box RNGs operate.
If somebody has a box that they say can predict the future, when every piece of science we currently understand says that this is impossible, I can say that it's crap without any evidence.
While I tend to agree with you that this experiment is highly suspect, what science can you point to that proves future predictions are impossible? Your post is a perfect example of a knee-jerk reaction. Meteorologists predict the future all the time on the nightly news! Sure, they're wrong most of the time, but they're right often enough to be statistically significant. You should choose your words more carefully.
Manufacturers of consumer devices such as Canon, as well as mobile-phone companies such as Nokia, have argued for a binary XML format. Without it, large files such as images will take too long to download to devices such as mobile phones, they argue.
Ehh...... are they encoding images in xml? Is the reporter just typically wrong in the techno babble translation, or are people really doing that?
Please don't ever link to talkorigins.org when discussing open minds again.
Is is a site notorious for exaggeration and plain misinformation about such topics.
Please don't make sweeping generalizations with not as much as a shred of evidence to back them up, when faced with an overwhelming amount of evidence which proves you incorrect. Please do not try to censor other posters because you are too intellectually lazy to recognize a valuable resource when you see it.
Well, there is the epitemological argument that nothing can be considered a fact, even in science. However, I am confident enough that nuclear theory is factual that I would not want to be next to an atom bomb when it explodes.
Evolution is a fact. There are layers of sediment going back billions of years. In the lowest layers where life is found, you find only simple bacteria. As you travel upwards in the layers, you find more complex and more diverse organisms, which are comparable to the organisms from the layers beneath them. Never will you find a trilobyte in the upper layers, and never will you find a mammal in the lower ones.
The theory of evolution is about how it happened, not about *whether* it happened. Numerous predictions have been made based on the theory which have been proven true. It is falsifiable, in that certain evidences could emerge which could prove it false. No such falsifying evidence has been found, but millions of validating evidences have been found.
You may be correct in stating it's not a fact, from the philosophical viewpoint. However, the philosophical viewpoint doesn't allow you to use the vast knowledge which we have gained from our understanding of evolution. In fact, with that sort of viewpoint you couldn't make a computer or a bridge.
Furthermore, if such a sticker is placed on biology textbooks, shouldn't another sticker be placed on which reads "Creationism is a belief which makes no testable predictions and is not falsifiable therefore cannot be considered a science, by the strict definition of the term"?
Why ruin my uptime just for a game? If there's no linux version of a game, I don't buy the game, end of story. There's already more native linux games available than I can ever hope to find time to play, so if having fewer titles available for linux than for ms windows is my biggest problem, life is good.
What is uptime but some l33t bragging rights thing? And what gives you the idea Windows is unstable? I've run both Windows 2000 and Windows XP for months at a time between reboots. That's plenty good enough for me. Win98 and below are very unstable, buggy, crappy products. Win2k and WinXP are the real deal shameel.
Now say that you want better security, a more efficient kernal, a better webserver, or any number of other things and I'm with you. Uptime/stability is not an issue. You're living in the past.
And of course after that you will be blacklisted so you can change careers because you will never be accepted as a 'real scientist' again, because all 'real scientists' believe in Global Warming about like Christians believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus.
Except that global warming isn't a matter of belief at all, it's a matter of a mountain of evidence for it and no credible evidence to the coutrary, whereas there is absolutely no tangible evidence of the virgin birth of Jesus, and quite a bit of evidence that Saul of Tarsus invented the whole thing decades after Jesus died in order to convert pagan goddess worshipers to "Judaism".
Math is not a matter of belief. Does your computer stop working if you stop believing in it? Okay, bad example.
I'm a software engineer. In a closed source system, there is no guarantee that what you put into the system matches what comes out of it. You can't prove the election was fair and square, and I can't prove that it wasn't. You made a categorical statement that it wasn't stolen, and then you committed several common logical fallacies, including multiple appeals to authority (which seems to be the thrust of your argument), but you haven't shown that your categorical statement is correct, and indeed, there is no possible way that you can. I don't have time to teach you logic, son. You can build strawmen and attack them, you can make appeals to authority, you can argue that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, but you haven't even come close to proving your statement that the election wasn't stolen.
I merely said that it was an unknown. Indeed I would argue further that the true results cannot ever be known because of the technology that was used. I agree with you that reform is needed.
No matter what, you'll think that the big, bad, evil Republicans stole the election to further their goals of warmongering, lining pockets, and kicking pussy cats.
Actually, I said I didn't know for sure. You said categorically that it wasn't.
But don't let me get in the way of you kicking down your strawman.....
We can argue this all the way back to Cartesian first principles if necessary, but for any claim likely to be encountered in the real world, Sagan's statement is correct.
Well, I respectfully disagree, and I offer as evidence the fact that Darwin was required to validate his findings beyond the standards required of any other researcher - he was required to show a mechanism for evolution. This, even though the scientific method does not require a mechanism to be shown or proven, only that the data can be independently verified. Darwin was correct in the scientific sense before he provided the mechanism of natural selection, because his data showed that he was correct. However, scientists of the day considered it an extraordinary claim, and required extraordinary evidence on his part.
The point is that the determination of whether a claim is extraordinary is a subjective one. The scientific method does not require subjectivity. It merely requires an adequate amount of empirical data, and a controlled, repeatable experiment.
Support the bills already in the House and Senate that will fix this, instead of fantasizing about how the 2004 election was "stolen" (it wasn't).
Oh, you know that for sure, do you? There's more than one way to skin a cat, and I've seen very credible evidence of voter intimidation, voting machine irregularities, disparities in equipment between rich and poor counties, and many other little pieces of puzzle that seem to fit together and show that a great amount of fraud occurred. Was the election stolen? Well, I can't say for sure. Apparently you can. Thanks for that tidbit!
If John Doe told you "I just saw a 5'11" white guy with one eye" and Joe Blow told you "I just saw a 11'5" green guy with two heads", would you treat the two assertions as equally credible?
In the scientific sense, neither assertion is credible unless somehow independently verified. In practical terms, one could probably not evaluate either claim scientifically. There's simply not enough evidence, nor a way to verify the evidence that exists.
Your post actually brings up a good point. Even though the statement "I just saw a 5'11" white guy with one eye" seems reasonable, without proof, one cannot validate that claim scientifically. In fact, the claim is no more or less scientifically valid than "I just saw a 11'5" green guy with two heads". Neither claim has any empirical evidence to back them up, therefore neither are valid in the scientific sense.
For instance, in the above example, you would weigh the two claims using the total evidence available to you (including a lot of background information about humans). This would probably lead you to accept the first claim and reject the second.
You have given me no scientific reason I should accept the first claim. In addition, you've given me no reason to reject the second. Perhaps the 11'5" tall green person with two heads was a siamese twin walking on stilts and wearing body paint.
My point was tangental to TFA. The phrase "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" is often applied to science. It is an untrue statement. Extraordinary claims require empirical proof and an independently verifiable method, just like ordinary claims do.
This is an extraordinary claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
Let's bury this Carl Sagan canard once and for all. I'm so tired of hearing it.
The scientific method does not require extraordinary evidence based on the type of claim being made. Period. Every claim is evaluated on the same basis. If a scientist accepts less than complete data because they are sympathetic to the theory or theorist, they are in error. Likewise, if a scientist rejects a claim that has been independently verified enough that the results fall outside of the realm of chance, they commit an error.
In this particular case, I do think it wise to learn more facts before you come to a conclusion. In the general case, you should not require any more evidence from an extraordinary claim, or any less evidence from an ordinary one. Every claim should be evaluated without regard to emotional attachments! That is the scientific way of doing things, anything else is not science.
Well now there IS a risk. You can get your sued to the point of losing everything,
You can get your sued?
I think I speak for all the grammar nazis out there when I say that there's no such thing as an implicit ass in a sentence. That's Latin you're thinking of. Remember, English is a Germanic language. If you want to say ass, you pretty much have to just say it.
It's some kind of fancy light bouncing device that can tell you what time it is every 5 minutes. It's not incredibly useful at night. You can't play doom on it.
Why not use the resources used to develop this program to work on better spam filtering software? If nobody sees the messages, nobody buys the spamvertised products, and the spammers go away.
Do you honestly believe that? In "A plan for spam", Paul Graham lays out a neat idea: make spam filters good enough, and spammers will have to bury their message in unreadable garbage to get through. People won't buy from an email with unreadable crap in it, and spam will just wither away.
I thought it sounded great too, but here I am, receiving thousands of spams a week that are 99% completely unreadable garbage, and it just keeps on coming.
I have high hopes for SPF, but who knows when that will be widely adopted?
Bottom line is, spammers see no problem with sending me messages like this:
[begin spam]
Buy my peins enalrgemnet p1lls so you can make better use of the v1@gr@ while you're looking at h0t teen5.
Horse monticello machiavelli sunstorm fire happy joy television garfunkle weasel sculpture firebrand household thumbtack. [end spam]
My theory is that it will never go away, for the same reason people keep buying into pyramid schemes. There's a sucker born every minute. I'm not talking about the suckers who BUY the stuff in the spam. I'm talking about the suckers who SEND the spam. Sure, they never make a profit, they get burned out and quit. But the people at the top of the pyramid make a little trickle of money from all the people at the bottom that they burned.
You can tell people that pyramid schemes don't work until you're out of breath, but suckers will keep on lining up to get in the door. It's the way of things. No, we have to do something about it. I'm not saying the lycos thing is the right thing, but something's gotta give here. Filters are not working, and they won't work in the long run.
I think you mistake me for a bush backer. Yes, the way the whole thing was implemented was horrible and wrong. I'm in agreement with practically everything you said.
My point was that the stated purpose was legitimate enough for me, not that the implementation was anything like the stated purpose, or that the intentions were the ones which were stated.
Bottom line, everything about Iraq war II sucks, except, in my opinion, the theoretical goals.
Next we have the whole "peace process" which is always framed in an "Israel has the right to exsist" while often a) Ignoring a reciprical arrangement for the Palestinians and/or b) ignoring that no other country in the world has such an arrangement and c) that international law has provisions for repelling invaders and that Israel went farther than allowed by international law.
As always, it's not that simple. First of all, I think the right to exist is pretty much standard for a sovereign country. Are you saying it's not a guaranteed right? What does that mean exactly?
Secondly, I find it frankly quite amusing that you bring up international law in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the implicit judgement that Israel has broken it and the Palestinians are just defending themselves.
There are problems on both sides, surely, and the Palestinians are every bit as wrong as Israel (in my opinion more so, but that's another discussion). The Geneva convention clearly says that soldiers may not wear civilian clothes. Would you contend that a suicide bomber is not a soldier? The Geneva convention clearly says that soldiers and military apparatus may not be placed in civilian areas, near schools, hospitals and the like. The Palestinian militants conduct practically all of their meetings and business in these areas.
Face it, the Palestinian leadership has made a policy of fighting a guerrilla war without following either the letter or spirit of the Geneva convention. To say the Israelis are wrong and the Palestinians are just fighting the good fight is completely ridiculous. There are wrongs on both sides, and to favor one over the other because you think they follow the rules better is just ignorant and ludicrous.
They both break the rules, but Israel is painted in the UN as the villian and the Palestinians are painted as the poor, put-upon saints with no recourse but to violate every civilized rule of war. That's bullcrap, and I think you either know it, or are deliberately deceiving yourself.
Slashdot Mirror
True, true. However, when combined with a source of entropy, you can get a nice bell shape. Typical pure pseudo algorithms are seeded with a clock value. Instead, what we can do is seed a good pseudo generator with our entropal value once we have enough entropy bits. We then take the first number that the pseudo generator returns, and start over when we have enough entropy bits again.
(c) Who says that getting a gaussian distribution satisfies each and every possible criterion for randomness? Maybe it is good enough for you, but I'm not that easily convinced. Perhaps you should spend some time thinking/reading what "random" means
Let's not have a peeing contest about who has read more about the subject. I've read plenty. Yes, I know that a gaussian distro is not the only criteria for evaluation of randomness. However, you seemed to be laboring under the impression that a chip can only produce random numbers with a pseudo-RNG. I'm giving you information that apparently you were unaware of. There are sources of entropy even on a deterministic machine. Examples include interrupt timings, and IO timings. In linux, these numbers can be found at /dev/random. Read about it here:. If you accuse everyone who tries to educate you an idiot, people are going to be a bit shy of helping you. How about you learn something instead?
Background electromagnetic radiation is not truly random either. The fact of the matter is, it's random enough. The same is true of common electronic RNGs.
I hate to pull your soapbox out from under you bub, but, well, no. It's not the job of the editors. In fact, they explicitly tell you that in the FAQ, and you'd know that if you bothered to read it. I guess you'd rather just complain about not getting something you were explicitly not offered, for free. :)
Don't take this too harshly, I'm just razzing you. But really, go ahead and read the FAQ. Click the topic "How do you verify the accuracy of Slashdot stories?"
In light of your mistake, I hereby revoke your geek license. You are no longer allowed to quote Douglas Adams, Monty python, or any of the original Star Wars movies. The only science fiction you are allowed to watch until and unless you are allowed to renew your license is Lost In Space, or the remake of Planet of the Apes.
The upside is, now you can have a girlfriend, or a significant other of your gender preference.
Clearly you have no clue what you are talking about. There are many random fluctuations in electronic devices which can be measured, and when combined with a pseudo RNG, produce perfectly gaussian distribution. This is the principle under which black box RNGs operate.
While I tend to agree with you that this experiment is highly suspect, what science can you point to that proves future predictions are impossible? Your post is a perfect example of a knee-jerk reaction. Meteorologists predict the future all the time on the nightly news! Sure, they're wrong most of the time, but they're right often enough to be statistically significant. You should choose your words more carefully.
Ehh...... are they encoding images in xml? Is the reporter just typically wrong in the techno babble translation, or are people really doing that?
Is is a site notorious for exaggeration and plain misinformation about such topics.
Please don't make sweeping generalizations with not as much as a shred of evidence to back them up, when faced with an overwhelming amount of evidence which proves you incorrect. Please do not try to censor other posters because you are too intellectually lazy to recognize a valuable resource when you see it.
Evolution is a fact. There are layers of sediment going back billions of years. In the lowest layers where life is found, you find only simple bacteria. As you travel upwards in the layers, you find more complex and more diverse organisms, which are comparable to the organisms from the layers beneath them. Never will you find a trilobyte in the upper layers, and never will you find a mammal in the lower ones.
The theory of evolution is about how it happened, not about *whether* it happened. Numerous predictions have been made based on the theory which have been proven true. It is falsifiable, in that certain evidences could emerge which could prove it false. No such falsifying evidence has been found, but millions of validating evidences have been found.
You may be correct in stating it's not a fact, from the philosophical viewpoint. However, the philosophical viewpoint doesn't allow you to use the vast knowledge which we have gained from our understanding of evolution. In fact, with that sort of viewpoint you couldn't make a computer or a bridge.
Furthermore, if such a sticker is placed on biology textbooks, shouldn't another sticker be placed on which reads "Creationism is a belief which makes no testable predictions and is not falsifiable therefore cannot be considered a science, by the strict definition of the term"?
Shouldn't the price for the mini be 4096? Or 5120?
What is uptime but some l33t bragging rights thing? And what gives you the idea Windows is unstable? I've run both Windows 2000 and Windows XP for months at a time between reboots. That's plenty good enough for me. Win98 and below are very unstable, buggy, crappy products. Win2k and WinXP are the real deal shameel.
Now say that you want better security, a more efficient kernal, a better webserver, or any number of other things and I'm with you. Uptime/stability is not an issue. You're living in the past.
Except that global warming isn't a matter of belief at all, it's a matter of a mountain of evidence for it and no credible evidence to the coutrary, whereas there is absolutely no tangible evidence of the virgin birth of Jesus, and quite a bit of evidence that Saul of Tarsus invented the whole thing decades after Jesus died in order to convert pagan goddess worshipers to "Judaism".
Math is not a matter of belief. Does your computer stop working if you stop believing in it? Okay, bad example.
The people who count what? The votes?
I'm a software engineer. In a closed source system, there is no guarantee that what you put into the system matches what comes out of it. You can't prove the election was fair and square, and I can't prove that it wasn't. You made a categorical statement that it wasn't stolen, and then you committed several common logical fallacies, including multiple appeals to authority (which seems to be the thrust of your argument), but you haven't shown that your categorical statement is correct, and indeed, there is no possible way that you can. I don't have time to teach you logic, son. You can build strawmen and attack them, you can make appeals to authority, you can argue that absence of evidence is evidence of absence, but you haven't even come close to proving your statement that the election wasn't stolen.
I merely said that it was an unknown. Indeed I would argue further that the true results cannot ever be known because of the technology that was used. I agree with you that reform is needed.
Actually, I said I didn't know for sure. You said categorically that it wasn't.
But don't let me get in the way of you kicking down your strawman.....
Well, I respectfully disagree, and I offer as evidence the fact that Darwin was required to validate his findings beyond the standards required of any other researcher - he was required to show a mechanism for evolution. This, even though the scientific method does not require a mechanism to be shown or proven, only that the data can be independently verified. Darwin was correct in the scientific sense before he provided the mechanism of natural selection, because his data showed that he was correct. However, scientists of the day considered it an extraordinary claim, and required extraordinary evidence on his part.
The point is that the determination of whether a claim is extraordinary is a subjective one. The scientific method does not require subjectivity. It merely requires an adequate amount of empirical data, and a controlled, repeatable experiment.
Oh, you know that for sure, do you? There's more than one way to skin a cat, and I've seen very credible evidence of voter intimidation, voting machine irregularities, disparities in equipment between rich and poor counties, and many other little pieces of puzzle that seem to fit together and show that a great amount of fraud occurred. Was the election stolen? Well, I can't say for sure. Apparently you can. Thanks for that tidbit!
In the scientific sense, neither assertion is credible unless somehow independently verified. In practical terms, one could probably not evaluate either claim scientifically. There's simply not enough evidence, nor a way to verify the evidence that exists.
Your post actually brings up a good point. Even though the statement "I just saw a 5'11" white guy with one eye" seems reasonable, without proof, one cannot validate that claim scientifically. In fact, the claim is no more or less scientifically valid than "I just saw a 11'5" green guy with two heads". Neither claim has any empirical evidence to back them up, therefore neither are valid in the scientific sense.
For instance, in the above example, you would weigh the two claims using the total evidence available to you (including a lot of background information about humans). This would probably lead you to accept the first claim and reject the second.
You have given me no scientific reason I should accept the first claim. In addition, you've given me no reason to reject the second. Perhaps the 11'5" tall green person with two heads was a siamese twin walking on stilts and wearing body paint.
My point was tangental to TFA. The phrase "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof" is often applied to science. It is an untrue statement. Extraordinary claims require empirical proof and an independently verifiable method, just like ordinary claims do.
Let's bury this Carl Sagan canard once and for all. I'm so tired of hearing it.
The scientific method does not require extraordinary evidence based on the type of claim being made. Period. Every claim is evaluated on the same basis. If a scientist accepts less than complete data because they are sympathetic to the theory or theorist, they are in error. Likewise, if a scientist rejects a claim that has been independently verified enough that the results fall outside of the realm of chance, they commit an error.
In this particular case, I do think it wise to learn more facts before you come to a conclusion. In the general case, you should not require any more evidence from an extraordinary claim, or any less evidence from an ordinary one. Every claim should be evaluated without regard to emotional attachments! That is the scientific way of doing things, anything else is not science.
You can get your sued?
I think I speak for all the grammar nazis out there when I say that there's no such thing as an implicit ass in a sentence. That's Latin you're thinking of. Remember, English is a Germanic language. If you want to say ass, you pretty much have to just say it.
[/parody]
Next!
Do you honestly believe that? In "A plan for spam", Paul Graham lays out a neat idea: make spam filters good enough, and spammers will have to bury their message in unreadable garbage to get through. People won't buy from an email with unreadable crap in it, and spam will just wither away.
I thought it sounded great too, but here I am, receiving thousands of spams a week that are 99% completely unreadable garbage, and it just keeps on coming.
I have high hopes for SPF, but who knows when that will be widely adopted?
Bottom line is, spammers see no problem with sending me messages like this:
[begin spam] Buy my peins enalrgemnet p1lls so you can make better use of the v1@gr@ while you're looking at h0t teen5.
Horse monticello machiavelli sunstorm fire happy joy television garfunkle weasel sculpture firebrand household thumbtack. [end spam]
My theory is that it will never go away, for the same reason people keep buying into pyramid schemes. There's a sucker born every minute. I'm not talking about the suckers who BUY the stuff in the spam. I'm talking about the suckers who SEND the spam. Sure, they never make a profit, they get burned out and quit. But the people at the top of the pyramid make a little trickle of money from all the people at the bottom that they burned.
You can tell people that pyramid schemes don't work until you're out of breath, but suckers will keep on lining up to get in the door. It's the way of things. No, we have to do something about it. I'm not saying the lycos thing is the right thing, but something's gotta give here. Filters are not working, and they won't work in the long run.
Is Katz working for the associated press now or something?
Jeez, if you want five years to sound impressive, everyone knows you need to say "a twentieth of a century", or "a two-hundreth of a millenium".
My point was that the stated purpose was legitimate enough for me, not that the implementation was anything like the stated purpose, or that the intentions were the ones which were stated.
Bottom line, everything about Iraq war II sucks, except, in my opinion, the theoretical goals.
As always, it's not that simple. First of all, I think the right to exist is pretty much standard for a sovereign country. Are you saying it's not a guaranteed right? What does that mean exactly?
Secondly, I find it frankly quite amusing that you bring up international law in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the implicit judgement that Israel has broken it and the Palestinians are just defending themselves.
There are problems on both sides, surely, and the Palestinians are every bit as wrong as Israel (in my opinion more so, but that's another discussion). The Geneva convention clearly says that soldiers may not wear civilian clothes. Would you contend that a suicide bomber is not a soldier? The Geneva convention clearly says that soldiers and military apparatus may not be placed in civilian areas, near schools, hospitals and the like. The Palestinian militants conduct practically all of their meetings and business in these areas.
Face it, the Palestinian leadership has made a policy of fighting a guerrilla war without following either the letter or spirit of the Geneva convention. To say the Israelis are wrong and the Palestinians are just fighting the good fight is completely ridiculous. There are wrongs on both sides, and to favor one over the other because you think they follow the rules better is just ignorant and ludicrous.
They both break the rules, but Israel is painted in the UN as the villian and the Palestinians are painted as the poor, put-upon saints with no recourse but to violate every civilized rule of war. That's bullcrap, and I think you either know it, or are deliberately deceiving yourself.