You know, we're not talking about searching completely innocent passengers looking to fly across the country. That much, I feel, IS stepping on people's rights in a paranoid act to try and protect the U.S.
What I'm saying is, this guy IS a combatant; he is involved, whether innocently or not, in espionage and terrorism, and he's being held as a material witness and treated as a combatant (for which the definition is up in the air). My feeling is, if someone is believed, strongly, to be a combatant, he should be put away, de-clawed, neutered, shaven, shackled and buried up to his neck before you even start asking questions.
No...it's not balls to let him go, it's stupid. We have more at stake here than you are acknowledging. You like our way of life? Our values and our freedoms? Well, a "combatant" would take them away from you. Take no chances, AT ALL. There's just a point where, what's at stake is worth so much, it means so much, that when someone threatens the core of it, you don't treat them fairly. You don't give them a fair shake. You can't. If you do, and the system fails in their favor, you are putting your neck on the chopping block, hoping an axe doesn't fall on it.
Whether the material witness issue is upheld or not, whether the definition of combatant turns out to include Hawash, I believe they've done the right thing. My feeling is, we can't afford people more than simple human rights when it comes to national security. When you make yourself a threat to the very core of the existence of the U.S., that's it: grab them by the neck, hold them at arm's length and keep them there until they are proven innocent. Yes, not innocent until proven guilty, guilty until proven innocent. They may be U.S. citizens, but they are pledging allegiance to another country, so let's treat them as attacking soldiers.
Which is how they're treating combatants right now. Rightly so.
If you don't want to be held indefinitely without council, you be a good monkey and don't throw poop on the nice citizens.
You know, at this point it's apparently you've all been tit-fed off of some limp-wristed, frightened professor who's more worried about whether "the man" is going to hassle him at the airport than whether another WTC is right around the corner. So many of you are "wishing" applications into the constitution, because of passages you focus on, which you think then excludes our government from making policies which you *think* contradicts the constitution, but which actually doesn't.
Debate all you want, but two things are not going to change. One, you won't be making me feel like you folks are anything but scared, soft-bellied vaginas with mouths. Two, when someone represents a serious threat to national security, you won't be changing how they're handled.
Oh fucking well! The alternative is...people who represent a threat to national security get a weekend on the pokie while prosecutors figure out what to charge him with? Come monday, he's free to be picked up by foreign agents and whisked to safety, or perhaps back into hiding to complete his mission?
So, you think that we can only do this to soldiers and only when our congress has declared war against the country of the soldier in question.
Let's roll back a little. First of all, this treatment is not something that is contitutionally guaranteed. Perhaps this *used* to be the way the U.S. did things, but that was a simple matter of policy, not a right. The policy has changed.
Come try it asswipe. I believe you can contact me privately, I'm sure we can arrange something. I would be more than happy to let you try.
Speaking of needing a big fucking hint: we don't have to declare war to protect ourselves from combatants. What crack-smoking school teachers have YOU been listening to?
Where you do fucking deep-dish morons get these assumptions? Has someone promised you a safe, happy life in cushyland or something and now that reality is slapping you around, you're shocked and dismayed?
That's sort of the point of being categorized "enemy combatant." We can drop a nuke on you once you place yourself into that category. Sucks to be anyone plotting against the U.S.
If this Hawash fellow is innocent, he will be found not guilty and set free. It's not unheard of for prosecutors to "invent" evidence, but I don't believe Hawash is a victim of this. He's simply being held as a combatant, and when he's been certified "de-fanged" he will brought to trial and all the real evidence against him will shown. If it's circumstantial or just plain crap, he'll go free.
If he's here threatening national security, wouldn't that make him an invader? I'm afraid I can't tell the difference between the soldier lobbing a grenade and me and a fellow citizen planting a live grenade under my sleeping bag.
I guess, one I can shoot, the other I have to try in court?
An Iraqi is sitting in a small fenced-off area outside Baghdad, held by American forces. Why? What is he being charged with? The rumor is, a private saw him with a gun, but no one can name the private and there is no written documentation about the circumstances under which he was apprehended.
How can this be!?!? Oh no! What evil forces are at work here!?!?
It's called combat, and the guy is considered a combatant. They don't have to prove or present ANYTHING so long as they feel he poses a danger to national security. They can't do this indefinitely, but they can do it. It's how you keep guys you've caught trying to kill from getting away and killing you. It's smart, not stupid. Anyone who wishes it were otherwise should maybe go start another country and calling themselves Dumbassland. Or France.
He was held because he was a combatant. He is no different than a soldier fighting against the U.S.. You cannot simply arraign him and allow him to post bail. Only when he is deemed no longer a threat to national security can he be let out and then tried.
I'm sorry if you vagina gets chaffed by this, but this is how it is.
Rob a liquor store: arraignment and bail. Rape the neighbor: arraignment and bail. Plot to destroy the United States: the fucking hole for as long as it takes to be sure you can't do us any harm.
You're another one who doesn't get the "and/or" joined conjunction. So much for the state of public education these days.
Aside from that, I don't agree with you. They are treasonous, sure, but this guy is also a combatant. He was treated like a combatant, and when they are sure that he has been de-fanged, they'll bring him out of the hole and then try him, as usual, for treason.
So, where is the justification for prisoners of war then?
One part of the constitution does not rule out others. A spy or terrorist is a combatant; a soldier, for all intents and purposes, allied to a foreign nation.
Think about that. It means the 4th and 5th amendments do not apply here. You see? Great you can cut-and-paste Abby, but it doesn't apply here.
First: get a fucking clue you dolt-level morons, I said "and/or." I can't edit my post, so the original text is there. Hire a fucking tutor if you need help understanding what I said.
Now, back to the program, kids:
No, this person is NOT a simple criminal.
If some random country decided to conquer the U.S., what would we do, hold trials for those leaders who ordered their troops into combat? Hold trials for the soldiers? No, because they're not simple criminals. A spy or terrorist working against the U.S. is no different than a general ordering their troops into combat, or even the troops themselves; both seek to dismantle the very mechanisms under which you feel they should be tried.
Those mechanisms are for rape, murder, theft, corporate espionage, etc., committed in the U.S. which were not a direct threat to national security. When national security is threatened, we react differently. We activate armies, bomb targets and hold individuals NOT as simple criminals, but as combatants.
Imagine having to let prisoners of war go because they were not given arraignment within a reasonable period of time, and those soldiers go straight home and pick up their weapons get right back into combat against.
Now, imagine this terrorist is held as a simple criminal, and they don't have enough proof to charge him right away. Or, the proof they have is sort of lightweight and he gets bail, posts it and walks away. He gets to go home and detonate the bomb he just finished building which wipes out all of Washington D.C.?
This is the level of crime we are talking about; a threat to our security as an entire nation.
Paranoid? Uh, sure...as if something like WTC couldn't happen. It can and it does happen, especially if you're so busy worry about people farting in your daisies that you go limp-wristed and are terrified to shoot spies.
You should be more concerned with policing up the public education system that belched you forth and less concerned with cases of international espionage. Unless, that is, you're perfectly happy making an ass of yourself while calling other people idiots.
If he is not a U.S. citizen and/or is committing acts that demomonstrate a lack of allegiance to the U.S., I don't see why he should be treated as such.
He isn't merely a criminal; he is a combatant and a threat to U.S. national security. The nature of his crimes are an entirely different beast than stealing, rape or murder. There are, hard as it may be to fathom, much worse things. The issue is much bigger, and much more complicated, than simply charging and trying a simple criminal.
Why is when folks try to induce others to do things a certain way, no matter how often they are reminded that their system is not natural for people to use (at least in the fashion they envision), they cling to the notion that the problem is with the people using it and not the system itself?
This is the nature of people. If you want something better than this, you're free to search it out, but standing around stamping your feet insisting that everyone behave is pointless.
What is it people expect from Usenet? Write it down on paper and make a list of "properties" that you folks (whomever that would be) would like to get out of Usenet -- then imagine you're holding a pool that represents the entire population of the world and say to yourself "how do I get just these certain types of people to post on Usenet and no one else?"
For starters, the answer is simply to close off Usenet to the public. If you want a certain set of behaviors, you need to be able to enforce your rules (which are, in the context of human nature, unnatural and arbitrary). Perhaps create tiers, in which only those who have graduated from the lower tiers may participate in the upper tiers. The public at large (including all the porn and get-rich-quick schemes) can post at the bottom, and as people prove themselves, move them up through the tiers. Use certified PGP signatures to enforce posting rights.
You have a wide-open system. You have people acting like humans act, and will always act. If you want something different than what you get with Usenet, go build it.
...a wi-fi voip have to do with free overseas calls? Voip gives you that already. The additional property of being wi-fi doesn't add that capability; any voip phone does that. Not well, but it does it.
Open source certainly DOES support terrorism. So does freedom of speech. The right to keep and bear arms does as well. I, personally, believe that farmers are growing food and offering this food (at fair market prices, of course) to terrorists to sustain them. I've heard that some of the oxygen produced by trees in countries such as Canada and South America are allowed to drift to places like Pakistan and Syria and are breathed by terrorists who need that vital oxygen to keep them going while they plot against America and its allies.
I was there, brother. I was on Netcom too. That was back when they only had shell accounts; they weren't issuing out regular TCP/IP accounts. To get winsock to work, I bought a shareware program called TIA which ran on the shell account and fed TCP/IP packets over a simple telnet connection back to trumpet winsock running on Windows 3.x. That was to get Mosaic working, and man, there was nothing there but a whole lot of gray text-only sites. Most web sites were just conversions of gopher document hierarchies anyway. There was NO searching...just university directories that you could navigate around. I got pretty far, too...navigated to sites in Germany, Korea, lots of overseas places. That was hard to do though...you really had to try EVERY link you came across. What a blast that was though...wow, was it really 10 years ago!?
This would be a good opportunity for all the new protocol implementations to include use of the "evil bit" we first heard about sometime around the beginning of this month.
...are long since debunked, and a vibrating phone that recharges itself falls prey to the same principles. Any vibration you absorbed *could* be converted back into energy, but you would regain MUCH less energy than it took to generate the vibrations because you could only trap energy that was transmitted to certain points on the machine where you planned to transmit the vibration into your "generator." The more vibration you absorb, the less the phone owner would feel. Any amount of vibration you absorbed would be better converted into energy by simply reducing the amount that the phone vibrates and conserving the energy in the first place.
Even with machines for which vibration is a side-effect, sure you could generate energy from the vibrations. However, vibration causes machines to waste energy as the vibrations are transmitted into all sorts of directions and objects nearby, and while converting the vibration back into energy is plausible, you would gain more energy if you simply braced the machine against vibration and prevented it in the first place.
The only way generating energy from the vibration of a machine is the best idea is when the vibration CANNOT be reduced or eliminated. However, logic says that if you can absorb the vibration and convert it into energy, you can absorb the vibration and hold the machine steady, causing it to operate more efficiently.
I'm sure there will be some instances where you cannot eliminate vibration and you stand to gain back a tiny fraction of the energy put into the vibration, but it won't come NEAR to the amounts needed to allow a vibrating cell-phone to recharge itself; that's ludicrous.
They say "gas clouds" like there are known clouds of gas following the earth. I am certainly a neophyte when it comes to astronomy, but I would have thought SOMEONE would have mentioned this to me at SOME point.
Agreed, Ruby is fantastic. Classes/objects, exception handling, namespaces, introspection, oodles of libraries, iterators (these are SO addicting), etc. I've programmed in just about everything, and I can't say enough about this language. Pick up a Ruby book and give it a solid try...clean, fun, easy...can't beat it with a stick.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah...back to the warm and fuzzy world of American Life, the old "nothing can touch me" syndrome?
Change things then, if you want your neck drawn back constantly. I'm betting there aren't enough like you around to make it happen.
You know, we're not talking about searching completely innocent passengers looking to fly across the country. That much, I feel, IS stepping on people's rights in a paranoid act to try and protect the U.S.
What I'm saying is, this guy IS a combatant; he is involved, whether innocently or not, in espionage and terrorism, and he's being held as a material witness and treated as a combatant (for which the definition is up in the air). My feeling is, if someone is believed, strongly, to be a combatant, he should be put away, de-clawed, neutered, shaven, shackled and buried up to his neck before you even start asking questions.
No...it's not balls to let him go, it's stupid. We have more at stake here than you are acknowledging. You like our way of life? Our values and our freedoms? Well, a "combatant" would take them away from you. Take no chances, AT ALL. There's just a point where, what's at stake is worth so much, it means so much, that when someone threatens the core of it, you don't treat them fairly. You don't give them a fair shake. You can't. If you do, and the system fails in their favor, you are putting your neck on the chopping block, hoping an axe doesn't fall on it.
Whether the material witness issue is upheld or not, whether the definition of combatant turns out to include Hawash, I believe they've done the right thing. My feeling is, we can't afford people more than simple human rights when it comes to national security. When you make yourself a threat to the very core of the existence of the U.S., that's it: grab them by the neck, hold them at arm's length and keep them there until they are proven innocent. Yes, not innocent until proven guilty, guilty until proven innocent. They may be U.S. citizens, but they are pledging allegiance to another country, so let's treat them as attacking soldiers.
Which is how they're treating combatants right now. Rightly so.
If you don't want to be held indefinitely without council, you be a good monkey and don't throw poop on the nice citizens.
You know, at this point it's apparently you've all been tit-fed off of some limp-wristed, frightened professor who's more worried about whether "the man" is going to hassle him at the airport than whether another WTC is right around the corner. So many of you are "wishing" applications into the constitution, because of passages you focus on, which you think then excludes our government from making policies which you *think* contradicts the constitution, but which actually doesn't.
Debate all you want, but two things are not going to change. One, you won't be making me feel like you folks are anything but scared, soft-bellied vaginas with mouths. Two, when someone represents a serious threat to national security, you won't be changing how they're handled.
So, cry all you want about it.
Oh fucking well! The alternative is...people who represent a threat to national security get a weekend on the pokie while prosecutors figure out what to charge him with? Come monday, he's free to be picked up by foreign agents and whisked to safety, or perhaps back into hiding to complete his mission?
What a warm, fuzzy world this is.
So, you think that we can only do this to soldiers and only when our congress has declared war against the country of the soldier in question.
Let's roll back a little. First of all, this treatment is not something that is contitutionally guaranteed. Perhaps this *used* to be the way the U.S. did things, but that was a simple matter of policy, not a right. The policy has changed.
Come try it asswipe. I believe you can contact me privately, I'm sure we can arrange something. I would be more than happy to let you try.
Speaking of needing a big fucking hint: we don't have to declare war to protect ourselves from combatants. What crack-smoking school teachers have YOU been listening to?
Where you do fucking deep-dish morons get these assumptions? Has someone promised you a safe, happy life in cushyland or something and now that reality is slapping you around, you're shocked and dismayed?
Back under your rock, fuckwad.
That's sort of the point of being categorized "enemy combatant." We can drop a nuke on you once you place yourself into that category. Sucks to be anyone plotting against the U.S.
If this Hawash fellow is innocent, he will be found not guilty and set free. It's not unheard of for prosecutors to "invent" evidence, but I don't believe Hawash is a victim of this. He's simply being held as a combatant, and when he's been certified "de-fanged" he will brought to trial and all the real evidence against him will shown. If it's circumstantial or just plain crap, he'll go free.
And that's how it is. Real life here, suck it up.
If he's here threatening national security, wouldn't that make him an invader? I'm afraid I can't tell the difference between the soldier lobbing a grenade and me and a fellow citizen planting a live grenade under my sleeping bag.
I guess, one I can shoot, the other I have to try in court?
Alright, Perry Mason, riddle me this:
An Iraqi is sitting in a small fenced-off area outside Baghdad, held by American forces. Why? What is he being charged with? The rumor is, a private saw him with a gun, but no one can name the private and there is no written documentation about the circumstances under which he was apprehended.
How can this be!?!? Oh no! What evil forces are at work here!?!?
It's called combat, and the guy is considered a combatant. They don't have to prove or present ANYTHING so long as they feel he poses a danger to national security. They can't do this indefinitely, but they can do it. It's how you keep guys you've caught trying to kill from getting away and killing you. It's smart, not stupid. Anyone who wishes it were otherwise should maybe go start another country and calling themselves Dumbassland. Or France.
He was held because he was a combatant. He is no different than a soldier fighting against the U.S.. You cannot simply arraign him and allow him to post bail. Only when he is deemed no longer a threat to national security can he be let out and then tried.
I'm sorry if you vagina gets chaffed by this, but this is how it is.
Rob a liquor store: arraignment and bail. Rape the neighbor: arraignment and bail. Plot to destroy the United States: the fucking hole for as long as it takes to be sure you can't do us any harm.
Oh fucking well.
You're another one who doesn't get the "and/or" joined conjunction. So much for the state of public education these days.
Aside from that, I don't agree with you. They are treasonous, sure, but this guy is also a combatant. He was treated like a combatant, and when they are sure that he has been de-fanged, they'll bring him out of the hole and then try him, as usual, for treason.
So, where is the justification for prisoners of war then?
One part of the constitution does not rule out others. A spy or terrorist is a combatant; a soldier, for all intents and purposes, allied to a foreign nation.
Think about that. It means the 4th and 5th amendments do not apply here. You see? Great you can cut-and-paste Abby, but it doesn't apply here.
First: get a fucking clue you dolt-level morons, I said "and/or." I can't edit my post, so the original text is there. Hire a fucking tutor if you need help understanding what I said.
Now, back to the program, kids:
No, this person is NOT a simple criminal.
If some random country decided to conquer the U.S., what would we do, hold trials for those leaders who ordered their troops into combat? Hold trials for the soldiers? No, because they're not simple criminals. A spy or terrorist working against the U.S. is no different than a general ordering their troops into combat, or even the troops themselves; both seek to dismantle the very mechanisms under which you feel they should be tried.
Those mechanisms are for rape, murder, theft, corporate espionage, etc., committed in the U.S. which were not a direct threat to national security. When national security is threatened, we react differently. We activate armies, bomb targets and hold individuals NOT as simple criminals, but as combatants.
Imagine having to let prisoners of war go because they were not given arraignment within a reasonable period of time, and those soldiers go straight home and pick up their weapons get right back into combat against.
Now, imagine this terrorist is held as a simple criminal, and they don't have enough proof to charge him right away. Or, the proof they have is sort of lightweight and he gets bail, posts it and walks away. He gets to go home and detonate the bomb he just finished building which wipes out all of Washington D.C.?
This is the level of crime we are talking about; a threat to our security as an entire nation.
Paranoid? Uh, sure...as if something like WTC couldn't happen. It can and it does happen, especially if you're so busy worry about people farting in your daisies that you go limp-wristed and are terrified to shoot spies.
You people are idiots, the lot of you.
There was an "and/or" in my post, idiot.
You should be more concerned with policing up the public education system that belched you forth and less concerned with cases of international espionage. Unless, that is, you're perfectly happy making an ass of yourself while calling other people idiots.
If he is not a U.S. citizen and/or is committing acts that demomonstrate a lack of allegiance to the U.S., I don't see why he should be treated as such.
He isn't merely a criminal; he is a combatant and a threat to U.S. national security. The nature of his crimes are an entirely different beast than stealing, rape or murder. There are, hard as it may be to fathom, much worse things. The issue is much bigger, and much more complicated, than simply charging and trying a simple criminal.
Why is when folks try to induce others to do things a certain way, no matter how often they are reminded that their system is not natural for people to use (at least in the fashion they envision), they cling to the notion that the problem is with the people using it and not the system itself?
This is the nature of people. If you want something better than this, you're free to search it out, but standing around stamping your feet insisting that everyone behave is pointless.
What is it people expect from Usenet? Write it down on paper and make a list of "properties" that you folks (whomever that would be) would like to get out of Usenet -- then imagine you're holding a pool that represents the entire population of the world and say to yourself "how do I get just these certain types of people to post on Usenet and no one else?"
For starters, the answer is simply to close off Usenet to the public. If you want a certain set of behaviors, you need to be able to enforce your rules (which are, in the context of human nature, unnatural and arbitrary). Perhaps create tiers, in which only those who have graduated from the lower tiers may participate in the upper tiers. The public at large (including all the porn and get-rich-quick schemes) can post at the bottom, and as people prove themselves, move them up through the tiers. Use certified PGP signatures to enforce posting rights.
You have a wide-open system. You have people acting like humans act, and will always act. If you want something different than what you get with Usenet, go build it.
...a wi-fi voip have to do with free overseas calls? Voip gives you that already. The additional property of being wi-fi doesn't add that capability; any voip phone does that. Not well, but it does it.
...now I have one question: why?
Open source certainly DOES support terrorism. So does freedom of speech. The right to keep and bear arms does as well. I, personally, believe that farmers are growing food and offering this food (at fair market prices, of course) to terrorists to sustain them. I've heard that some of the oxygen produced by trees in countries such as Canada and South America are allowed to drift to places like Pakistan and Syria and are breathed by terrorists who need that vital oxygen to keep them going while they plot against America and its allies.
I was there, brother. I was on Netcom too. That was back when they only had shell accounts; they weren't issuing out regular TCP/IP accounts. To get winsock to work, I bought a shareware program called TIA which ran on the shell account and fed TCP/IP packets over a simple telnet connection back to trumpet winsock running on Windows 3.x. That was to get Mosaic working, and man, there was nothing there but a whole lot of gray text-only sites. Most web sites were just conversions of gopher document hierarchies anyway. There was NO searching...just university directories that you could navigate around. I got pretty far, too...navigated to sites in Germany, Korea, lots of overseas places. That was hard to do though...you really had to try EVERY link you came across. What a blast that was though...wow, was it really 10 years ago!?
This would be a good opportunity for all the new protocol implementations to include use of the "evil bit" we first heard about sometime around the beginning of this month.
...are long since debunked, and a vibrating phone that recharges itself falls prey to the same principles. Any vibration you absorbed *could* be converted back into energy, but you would regain MUCH less energy than it took to generate the vibrations because you could only trap energy that was transmitted to certain points on the machine where you planned to transmit the vibration into your "generator." The more vibration you absorb, the less the phone owner would feel. Any amount of vibration you absorbed would be better converted into energy by simply reducing the amount that the phone vibrates and conserving the energy in the first place.
Even with machines for which vibration is a side-effect, sure you could generate energy from the vibrations. However, vibration causes machines to waste energy as the vibrations are transmitted into all sorts of directions and objects nearby, and while converting the vibration back into energy is plausible, you would gain more energy if you simply braced the machine against vibration and prevented it in the first place.
The only way generating energy from the vibration of a machine is the best idea is when the vibration CANNOT be reduced or eliminated. However, logic says that if you can absorb the vibration and convert it into energy, you can absorb the vibration and hold the machine steady, causing it to operate more efficiently.
I'm sure there will be some instances where you cannot eliminate vibration and you stand to gain back a tiny fraction of the energy put into the vibration, but it won't come NEAR to the amounts needed to allow a vibrating cell-phone to recharge itself; that's ludicrous.
Blunten? Don't you mean "embluntenate?"
They say "gas clouds" like there are known clouds of gas following the earth. I am certainly a neophyte when it comes to astronomy, but I would have thought SOMEONE would have mentioned this to me at SOME point.
What gas clouds?
Agreed, Ruby is fantastic. Classes/objects, exception handling, namespaces, introspection, oodles of libraries, iterators (these are SO addicting), etc. I've programmed in just about everything, and I can't say enough about this language. Pick up a Ruby book and give it a solid try...clean, fun, easy...can't beat it with a stick.