Interesting article, which (indirectly) raises an even more interesting question:
If China was behind the StuxNet worm, why would they risk undoing all of their careful origin-obfuscation work by subsequently carrying out two high-risk meat-space operations against high-level Iranian engineers?
One possibility is that they simply didn't. Once the worm came to light, some other intelligence agency with a more direct way of handling things may have decided to seize the opportunity to increase the worm's lifespan by eliminating the people most likely to stop it.
If two different parties were behind the worm and the assassinations, TFA's China theory might indeed be plausible.
I have to wonder if the 11th would have been so quick to insist that the strictest local community standards apply in every case if non-pornographic material was involved. Hypothetical case in point:
1) Some particularly radical bastion of liberalism / progressivism (Berkeley, perhaps, or another community with similar values) passes a city ordinance declaring particularly inflammatory anti-abortion speech as "obscene", "inciting to riot", etc.
2) Arrest warrants are immediately issued throughout the south-eastern US for various high profile clergymen (e.g. Pat Robertson), and other pro-life firebrands as various pieces of inflammatory pro-life literature (e.g. videotapes) are purchased and received by members of the local police.
3) Said individuals are arrested, extradited to California, tried, convicted, sentenced, and begin their prison sentences.
4) During this time, they appeal their sentences through the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
If the members of the 11th Court suddenly "switched team jerseys" and were sitting on the bench of the 9th Circuit court, would they uphold these convictions?
Using the reasoning they applied against Mr. Little (the defendant), they would. However, if you believe that these same judges would actually choose to follow this reasoning, I have a nice bridge to sell you.
Normally, I would expect that the Supreme Court would (eventually) backhand the 11th for such an egregious violation of the 1st Amendment, but given the recent much-broader-than-necessary ruling on campaign finance reform, I suspect that they'll find a way not to.
Given that you were (are?) totally independent, I certainly hope you posted a scanned copy of the letter and mercilessly mocked that manufacturer on your site for weeks.
If more people did this, then manufacturers (in theory) wouldn't get so bent out of shape over getting anything less than a stellar review, and we'd (again in theory) start seeing the bigger review sites "dare" to give more honest reviews, instead of thinly-disguised multi-page advertisements.
The solution to customers' calling your product crap is to stop making crap. Whodathunkit?
if I need Oracle support documents I'm probably going to Google and ignoring any of the responses that go to oracle.com. Generally, some random yahoo on the internet has done a better job of explaining Oracle's products/bugs/problems.
Judging from the first few pages of the complaint (the PDF linked in TFA), the "theft" included software patches and updates, not just documentation.
That said, I can't say that Oracle's documentation is that bad. It's usually pretty useful, once you invest the hours it takes to weed out erroneous crap about products you don't use.
(Oracle, if I'm looking for information on RMAN parameters, I DON'T want to have to look through a hundred search results on your fucking Business Intelligence software! Give me a "Database only" button, and send your marketing weasels to go hump the CTO's leg. *SHE* actually likes going through the devoid-of-meaningful-detail fluff they put out!)
Sorry. The third cup of coffee hasn't kicked in yet...
Again, I'll mention the Commerce Clause, and throw in the Elastic clause as well. You'd do well to read them. "Powers delegated to the United States" do not end at the enumerated powers.
In reality, no. However, that's only due to the willful disregard of the Tenth Ammendment by the Supreme Court. In allowing the Commerce clause to be used to trump any and all state legislation (or inconvenient Constitutional ammendments), a strong argument could be made that they've completely undermined the very principles they've sworn to defend.
Interpreting the Constitution in plain English, the Tenth Ammendment clearly trumps the Commerce clause of the Constitution, just as all ammendments must take precedence over the original text. If ammendments didn't take precedence, then the Constitution itself could not be considered ammendable, since the original text could never be modified.
Although the Federal government has gotten away with it to this point, the use of the Commerce clause to overrule state preferences has been an unconstitutional practice that has been allowed to persist for decades. Although the results have been absolutely fantastic in some cases (e.g. ending voter discrimination and forcing school integration in the 1960s), the practice has opened the door to all sorts of abuse, such as the recent raids of California medical marijuana clinics, which are permitted under state law, but not federal law. (Whether the raids were "morally right" is left to the prejudices of the reader.)
If the Federal government truly wants to seize complete power, they should attempt to pass a new Constitutional ammendment formally revoking the Tenth Ammendment and put an end to their lip service towards state autonomy. Of course, the state legislatures and a substantial number of citizens would promptly tell the Feds to go to hell, so we're probably going to continue with the status quo -- defacto revocation of the Tenth Ammendment, but not dejure revocation.
And he did allow inspectors to resume inspections, the US was the one to kick them out
Cite?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my understanding that Saddam did want WMDs so he could bully neighboring countries, and was trying to secretly rebuild his capacity after destroying it following his slapped-down invasion of Kuwait. His loyal scientists, trying to escape the wrath of his sons and their woodchipper, fabricated glowing reports of their progress, which the US intercepted and overreacted to (assuming that the motives of the Bush administration were entirely pure).
If Saddam had wanted to simply maintain the appearance of having WMDs without actually having them, he was an absolute moron about how he went about it. He could have postured and posed as he was doing during that time period, then "accidentally" let a detailed inventory list (executive summary: "we ain't got shit") fall into the hands of the most convenient CIA operative, and the US would have probably found more interesting things to do than invade the country (again, assuming that the motives of the Bush administration were entirely pure here).
If Saddam didn't want WMDs, then why did he put so many stumbling blocks in front of the inspection teams sent to verify that he didn't have any? Just get them in, show them whatever they want to see, and wave goodbye to them at the airport as they leave. Instead, he whined and whined about "CIA infiltration" and "national security issues" as justification for preventing the inspection teams from getting into his Presidential Palaces and other sites, but if there were no WMD-related materials there, what the hell else would there be to hide? His taste in decor? Saddam's military was already known to be strong enough to keep belligerent neighbors at bay, and as we've seen in interviews with Hans Blix in recent years, Blix didn't care about petty US-Iraq bickering, and likely would have taken steps to weed out any "CIA infiltrators" from his inspection teams, as their presence would only have made his job harder.
Seriously, after 9/11 the push was to Afghanistan and NO ONE protested.
What version of CNN were you watching?
IIRC, most of the pundits at the time were doom-and-glooming the US' plans to take Bin Laden from Afghanistan by force. Although they tried to hide it through sheer quantity of verbiage, the underlying message seemed to be, "How can the lowly US POSSIBLY succeed where the mighty Soviets failed for so many years?"
In fact, the pre-Afghanistan protests were what enabled GW to get a free pass (initially) on Iraq from his marginally-committed supporters (e.g. me). Their reaction to seeing the moaning and wailing over Afghanistan soured them so completely to anti-war arguments (i.e. "What war won't these idiots protest against?") that they stopped listening to EVERY anti-Iraq argument, even those that might have been backed up by pragmatism and solid reasoning. That in turn contributed (if not caused) Kerry to lose his bid for the presidency in 2004. If he'd said, "Many wars are just, but THIS one (Iraq) is not", then he probably would have gotten enough votes to flip the balance in his favor. Instead, he let the election get turned into yet another referendum on Vietnam and war in general, and was defeated for it.
Bah. Bush went into both Afghanistan and Iraq without a good understanding of the distinct cultural pressures involved in each country. He got lucky in Afghanistan (taking out the Taliban "regulars" enabled the masses to establish a sort-of-democratic government), but had his ass handed to him in Iraq, where the masses appear to be more interested in killing each other (Shi'a) or continuing their own private apartheid (Sunni) than establishing an even remotely democratic government.
The US is having difficulty containing Iraqi insurgency. How it would handle the rest of the world is beyond me.
The only reason the US is having difficulty with the insurgency is the near impossibility of telling friend from foe BEFORE the foe has fired the first shot. It's a little hard to win a fight when the other side always gets one free sucker-punch.
That, and the fact that Rumsfeld went in with half the troops needed to defeat an insurgency. Too much of a CEO's "let's downsize the workforce" mentality, I guess.
Anyhow, think back to how long it took for the US military to defeat the regular Iraqi forces a couple years ago. Three, maybe four weeks? One of the more powerful military forces on Earth*, and they're stomped flat in less than a month?
( * They were at least in the upper 50% of nations in the world. Probably even the upper 25%).
If Bush had been bright enough to follow the Powell doctrine, Iraq would be in much better shape than it is today. Unfortunately, he chose to listen to Rumsfeld, and we're STILL trying to clean up the resulting mess.
Are you claiming that significant numbers of people who used to be able to afford food and shelter can no longer do so? Or, are you merely complaining that not everyone can afford their own iPod and plasma TV yet?
Being a "let other people do as they will" Christian myself, I'm happy to see that there's somebody with the time and energy to challenge the "anti-religious groupthink" (love that choice of words) on Slashdot in such a well-written manner.
Just out of curiosity (and a desire to make this more than a "Meee Tooo!!11!!" post), how do you reconcile your philosophy that "God exists - yet I also realize that I could be wrong about that" with the school of thought of many other Christians - namely that everybody who ISN'T a Christian is going to suffer immeasurably after death? (i.e. go to Hell)
Do you hope that perhaps the rule isn't strictly enforced and/or misstated/misrecorded/mistranslated to begin with?
Or do you perhaps write off non-Christians as a "lost cause" in favor of letting them exercise their own free will?
Or do you subscribe to another school of thought entirely?
This is not meant to be an antagonistic question, I'm genuinely curious about what your thoughts are on this issue.
The parent's link was very good reading, but one sentence demands response:
"And there are men that think they can answer hostility with hostility."
While a initially-non-hostile response to hostility can often be more productive in the long run (e.g. in an invite-only social community on the Internet), there are times when you simply MUST respond to hostility WITH hostility (and greater hostility at that).
Failure to do so means that you're going to go through life getting stepped on, or worse.
I doubt they actually would place any one in jail for doing it
I just love laws like this one.
They never seem to be used against 99.9% of the offenders, just that small group of 0.1% that needs to be put in jail for some totally-unrelated reason.
They're also handy as an intimidation tool to threaten people who are breaking the letter of the law, though not the spirit of the law (cf. the DMCA).
Selective enforcement of broadly-written laws is always a quick path to a totalitarian state.
(sadly) obligatory disclaimer: Lest the PC-obsessed be offended, the above statements should not in any way be interpreted as supportive of Holocaust-denial or other neo-Nazi thought. The author regards those ideas as intellectual trash that even moderately-intelligent people will dismiss out of hand.
Any ONE person who votes Civ 3 better than Civ 2 is a travesty.
Sorry, but the lack of borders in Civ 2 almost completely undermine the game. You can have had fortified soldiers within 2 squares of a city for dozens of turns, but the second that the AI decides to build a city within 2 squares of the soldiers, the computer gets to force you to move, or else YOU are held responsible for breaking the peace treaty.
Civ 2 did a few things better than 3 (I never got tired of the high council or wonder movies), but the lack of borders absolutely sucked.
Slashdot Mirror
Just found the page myself, but the periodic downloads from far-eastern Russia / western China every few seconds are what get me.
"Yes, Virginia, there is Firefox in Siberia."
Interesting article, which (indirectly) raises an even more interesting question:
If China was behind the StuxNet worm, why would they risk undoing all of their careful origin-obfuscation work by subsequently carrying out two high-risk meat-space operations against high-level Iranian engineers?
One possibility is that they simply didn't . Once the worm came to light, some other intelligence agency with a more direct way of handling things may have decided to seize the opportunity to increase the worm's lifespan by eliminating the people most likely to stop it.
If two different parties were behind the worm and the assassinations, TFA's China theory might indeed be plausible.
But Bethesda CAN'T release a new Elder Scrolls game!
Elder Scrolls has always been a single-player series, and single-player is DEAD, DEAD, DEAD! Our lords and masters at EA have said so!
I have to wonder if the 11th would have been so quick to insist that the strictest local community standards apply in every case if non-pornographic material was involved. Hypothetical case in point:
1) Some particularly radical bastion of liberalism / progressivism (Berkeley, perhaps, or another community with similar values) passes a city ordinance declaring particularly inflammatory anti-abortion speech as "obscene", "inciting to riot", etc.
2) Arrest warrants are immediately issued throughout the south-eastern US for various high profile clergymen (e.g. Pat Robertson), and other pro-life firebrands as various pieces of inflammatory pro-life literature (e.g. videotapes) are purchased and received by members of the local police.
3) Said individuals are arrested, extradited to California, tried, convicted, sentenced, and begin their prison sentences.
4) During this time, they appeal their sentences through the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
If the members of the 11th Court suddenly "switched team jerseys" and were sitting on the bench of the 9th Circuit court, would they uphold these convictions?
Using the reasoning they applied against Mr. Little (the defendant), they would. However, if you believe that these same judges would actually choose to follow this reasoning, I have a nice bridge to sell you.
Normally, I would expect that the Supreme Court would (eventually) backhand the 11th for such an egregious violation of the 1st Amendment, but given the recent much-broader-than-necessary ruling on campaign finance reform, I suspect that they'll find a way not to.
Given that you were (are?) totally independent, I certainly hope you posted a scanned copy of the letter and mercilessly mocked that manufacturer on your site for weeks.
If more people did this, then manufacturers (in theory) wouldn't get so bent out of shape over getting anything less than a stellar review, and we'd (again in theory) start seeing the bigger review sites "dare" to give more honest reviews, instead of thinly-disguised multi-page advertisements.
The solution to customers' calling your product crap is to stop making crap. Whodathunkit?
Sure, if you came out of ... Georgia Tech with an undergrad in EE you're not likely to be a complete idiot
.
Indeed. With a degree like that, you're probably a hell of an engineer. Maybe even a helluva, helluva, helluva, helluva, hell of an engineer.
(For mods who'll "Off Topic" me if I don't spell out the reference.)
if I need Oracle support documents I'm probably going to Google and ignoring any of the responses that go to oracle.com. Generally, some random yahoo on the internet has done a better job of explaining Oracle's products/bugs/problems.
Judging from the first few pages of the complaint (the PDF linked in TFA), the "theft" included software patches and updates, not just documentation.
That said, I can't say that Oracle's documentation is that bad. It's usually pretty useful, once you invest the hours it takes to weed out erroneous crap about products you don't use.
(Oracle, if I'm looking for information on RMAN parameters, I DON'T want to have to look through a hundred search results on your fucking Business Intelligence software! Give me a "Database only" button, and send your marketing weasels to go hump the CTO's leg. *SHE* actually likes going through the devoid-of-meaningful-detail fluff they put out!)
Sorry. The third cup of coffee hasn't kicked in yet...
Again, I'll mention the Commerce Clause, and throw in the Elastic clause as well. You'd do well to read them. "Powers delegated to the United States" do not end at the enumerated powers.
In reality, no. However, that's only due to the willful disregard of the Tenth Ammendment by the Supreme Court. In allowing the Commerce clause to be used to trump any and all state legislation (or inconvenient Constitutional ammendments), a strong argument could be made that they've completely undermined the very principles they've sworn to defend.
Interpreting the Constitution in plain English, the Tenth Ammendment clearly trumps the Commerce clause of the Constitution, just as all ammendments must take precedence over the original text. If ammendments didn't take precedence, then the Constitution itself could not be considered ammendable, since the original text could never be modified.
Although the Federal government has gotten away with it to this point, the use of the Commerce clause to overrule state preferences has been an unconstitutional practice that has been allowed to persist for decades. Although the results have been absolutely fantastic in some cases (e.g. ending voter discrimination and forcing school integration in the 1960s), the practice has opened the door to all sorts of abuse, such as the recent raids of California medical marijuana clinics, which are permitted under state law, but not federal law. (Whether the raids were "morally right" is left to the prejudices of the reader.)
If the Federal government truly wants to seize complete power, they should attempt to pass a new Constitutional ammendment formally revoking the Tenth Ammendment and put an end to their lip service towards state autonomy. Of course, the state legislatures and a substantial number of citizens would promptly tell the Feds to go to hell, so we're probably going to continue with the status quo -- defacto revocation of the Tenth Ammendment, but not dejure revocation.
That's a persuasive set of statistics...
I don't suppose you'd care to share a similar set of stats comparing tax rate paid versus percentage of total wealth owned?
And he did allow inspectors to resume inspections, the US was the one to kick them out
Cite?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's my understanding that Saddam did want WMDs so he could bully neighboring countries, and was trying to secretly rebuild his capacity after destroying it following his slapped-down invasion of Kuwait. His loyal scientists, trying to escape the wrath of his sons and their woodchipper, fabricated glowing reports of their progress, which the US intercepted and overreacted to (assuming that the motives of the Bush administration were entirely pure).
If Saddam had wanted to simply maintain the appearance of having WMDs without actually having them, he was an absolute moron about how he went about it. He could have postured and posed as he was doing during that time period, then "accidentally" let a detailed inventory list (executive summary: "we ain't got shit") fall into the hands of the most convenient CIA operative, and the US would have probably found more interesting things to do than invade the country (again, assuming that the motives of the Bush administration were entirely pure here).
If Saddam didn't want WMDs, then why did he put so many stumbling blocks in front of the inspection teams sent to verify that he didn't have any? Just get them in, show them whatever they want to see, and wave goodbye to them at the airport as they leave. Instead, he whined and whined about "CIA infiltration" and "national security issues" as justification for preventing the inspection teams from getting into his Presidential Palaces and other sites, but if there were no WMD-related materials there, what the hell else would there be to hide? His taste in decor? Saddam's military was already known to be strong enough to keep belligerent neighbors at bay, and as we've seen in interviews with Hans Blix in recent years, Blix didn't care about petty US-Iraq bickering, and likely would have taken steps to weed out any "CIA infiltrators" from his inspection teams, as their presence would only have made his job harder.
Seriously, after 9/11 the push was to Afghanistan and NO ONE protested.
What version of CNN were you watching?
IIRC, most of the pundits at the time were doom-and-glooming the US' plans to take Bin Laden from Afghanistan by force. Although they tried to hide it through sheer quantity of verbiage, the underlying message seemed to be, "How can the lowly US POSSIBLY succeed where the mighty Soviets failed for so many years?"
In fact, the pre-Afghanistan protests were what enabled GW to get a free pass (initially) on Iraq from his marginally-committed supporters (e.g. me). Their reaction to seeing the moaning and wailing over Afghanistan soured them so completely to anti-war arguments (i.e. "What war won't these idiots protest against?") that they stopped listening to EVERY anti-Iraq argument, even those that might have been backed up by pragmatism and solid reasoning. That in turn contributed (if not caused) Kerry to lose his bid for the presidency in 2004. If he'd said, "Many wars are just, but THIS one (Iraq) is not", then he probably would have gotten enough votes to flip the balance in his favor. Instead, he let the election get turned into yet another referendum on Vietnam and war in general, and was defeated for it.
Bah. Bush went into both Afghanistan and Iraq without a good understanding of the distinct cultural pressures involved in each country. He got lucky in Afghanistan (taking out the Taliban "regulars" enabled the masses to establish a sort-of-democratic government), but had his ass handed to him in Iraq, where the masses appear to be more interested in killing each other (Shi'a) or continuing their own private apartheid (Sunni) than establishing an even remotely democratic government.
Yes, but how many Bacon Jr. Cheeseburgers is that?
Enough to fill up half a Library of Congress.
Some people refer to the Cold War as WWIII.
The US is having difficulty containing Iraqi insurgency. How it would handle the rest of the world is beyond me.
The only reason the US is having difficulty with the insurgency is the near impossibility of telling friend from foe BEFORE the foe has fired the first shot. It's a little hard to win a fight when the other side always gets one free sucker-punch.
That, and the fact that Rumsfeld went in with half the troops needed to defeat an insurgency. Too much of a CEO's "let's downsize the workforce" mentality, I guess.
Anyhow, think back to how long it took for the US military to defeat the regular Iraqi forces a couple years ago. Three, maybe four weeks? One of the more powerful military forces on Earth*, and they're stomped flat in less than a month?
( * They were at least in the upper 50% of nations in the world. Probably even the upper 25%).
If Bush had been bright enough to follow the Powell doctrine, Iraq would be in much better shape than it is today. Unfortunately, he chose to listen to Rumsfeld, and we're STILL trying to clean up the resulting mess.
...the poor are constantly getting poorer...
By what measure?
Are you claiming that significant numbers of people who used to be able to afford food and shelter can no longer do so? Or, are you merely complaining that not everyone can afford their own iPod and plasma TV yet?
Details, man, details!
And his son, Karl Jr, makes a damn tasty hamburger.
Being a "let other people do as they will" Christian myself, I'm happy to see that there's somebody with the time and energy to challenge the "anti-religious groupthink" (love that choice of words) on Slashdot in such a well-written manner.
Just out of curiosity (and a desire to make this more than a "Meee Tooo!!11!!" post), how do you reconcile your philosophy that "God exists - yet I also realize that I could be wrong about that" with the school of thought of many other Christians - namely that everybody who ISN'T a Christian is going to suffer immeasurably after death? (i.e. go to Hell)
Do you hope that perhaps the rule isn't strictly enforced and/or misstated/misrecorded/mistranslated to begin with?
Or do you perhaps write off non-Christians as a "lost cause" in favor of letting them exercise their own free will?
Or do you subscribe to another school of thought entirely?
This is not meant to be an antagonistic question, I'm genuinely curious about what your thoughts are on this issue.
What's a black racist against whites going to do?
"There's a honkey driving through OUR neighborhood! Let's jack her car and shoot her in the street like a dog!"
What if her only "crime" was being a tourist unfamiliar with the city who took a wrong turn with her rental?
QED
Racism is unforgivable no matter who's doing it to whom.
The parent's link was very good reading, but one sentence demands response:
"And there are men that think they can answer hostility with hostility."
While a initially-non-hostile response to hostility can often be more productive in the long run (e.g. in an invite-only social community on the Internet), there are times when you simply MUST respond to hostility WITH hostility (and greater hostility at that).
Failure to do so means that you're going to go through life getting stepped on, or worse.
I doubt they actually would place any one in jail for doing it
I just love laws like this one.
They never seem to be used against 99.9% of the offenders, just that small group of 0.1% that needs to be put in jail for some totally-unrelated reason.
They're also handy as an intimidation tool to threaten people who are breaking the letter of the law, though not the spirit of the law (cf. the DMCA).
Selective enforcement of broadly-written laws is always a quick path to a totalitarian state.
(sadly) obligatory disclaimer: Lest the PC-obsessed be offended, the above statements should not in any way be interpreted as supportive of Holocaust-denial or other neo-Nazi thought. The author regards those ideas as intellectual trash that even moderately-intelligent people will dismiss out of hand.
I heard that the Convenant kidnapped the princess and that the Master Chief Is going to get her back.
"I'm sorry Master Chief, but I heard your princess is in another castle!"
Comes with the Chewbacca Defense system!
What are you babbling about? A Chewbacca defense system?
That does NOT MAKE SENSE!
Any ONE person who votes Civ 3 better than Civ 2 is a travesty.
Sorry, but the lack of borders in Civ 2 almost completely undermine the game. You can have had fortified soldiers within 2 squares of a city for dozens of turns, but the second that the AI decides to build a city within 2 squares of the soldiers, the computer gets to force you to move, or else YOU are held responsible for breaking the peace treaty.
Civ 2 did a few things better than 3 (I never got tired of the high council or wonder movies), but the lack of borders absolutely sucked.
When was the last time your Delta pilot did a barrel roll?
"Please use caution in removing items from the overhead bins, as contents may have shifted during the flight. Buh-bye."
technically, he just had the wrong end of the guy
So Bush was callin' Colin's colon?