Spammers spend a tremendous amount of time and energy cracking systems, setting up zombies, getting around barriers of all sorts. The reason why is because they have a financial incentive to do so.
If security through obscurity is an intellectually bankrupt concept, then the spam industry innovates security knowledge like no other.
The fact is that spammers not only save work for the script kiddies, they help the NSA, CIA, FBI, KGB... as well as IBM, MSFT, SYMC...
Think of them as parasites that feed off our collective ignorance, and you'll see what a useful cleansing function they serve in the greater ecosystem.
Syllogism based on your argument:
College boys are most likely idiots.
Ralph Yarro is a college boy.
Therefore, Ralph Yarro is most likely an idiot.
Now, um... what exactly was your point?
I was under the impression that the brain took a minimum of 1/60th of a second to register information from the visual cortex.
This sounds like the old, failed experiments in flash-subliminal programming.
Paternalism in Government is the Issue
on
Reading, Writing, RFID
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Your point about responsibility-enforcing technology destroying true personal responsibility is valid, but much of the modern American pop-cultural concept of the "proper" use of law is blind to this subject-object dichotomy.
Example: ever notice how politicians talk about being "tough on drugs" to "send a message?" Who is the subject and who is the object in this discussion? Heroin (example drug) is illegal in the US because of an intellectually specious concept that society is responsible for protecting individuals who are irresponsible. The problem here is that separating responsibility from the individual ultimately deprives people not only of their freedom, but from an environment in which the concept of free will itself has independent validity.
I don't believe children have the intellectual capability or life experience necessary to make consistently mature choices, so protecting them into adulthood is necessary and a genuine moral obligation of those who bring them into the world. But stripping kids of responsibility ultimately ruins them as adults later on, because they never truly get exposed to the consequences of the exercise of free will. The use of artificial restraining tools (the application of law, instead of the application of mature mind) is so insidious precisely because it encourages laziness of thought. That laziness of thought then takes on independent psychological force after the original reason creating a legal structure is forgotten. The laziness in thought then corrupts the society it was meant to help. That's why welfare policies in the US failed and were largely rolled back in the 1990s: welfare was found to create psychological dependency on welfare. That's because people (and other natural entities) tend to default to the lowest-energy state possible. With people, low-energy means less thinking, less acting and less ultimate freedom, because thinking, acting and understanding how to maintain one's freedom and independence all consume a lot of energy.
That's what it means when they say: the price of freedom is eternal vigilence.
Government has one purpose and one purpose alone: to serve as the organ of coercive force. When people lose sight of that fact, they start dreaming of new functions for the government without realizing that if something is truly good, it should come about through the exercise of free will in the first place. It takes effort to enforce laws, and divorcing effort from the application of force will not help the cause of freedom. Indeed, because government always has a monopoly on power, it will only serve to increase the relative empowerment of the government population (because governmental power is ultimately controlled by people who, like other people, take personal responsibility for advancing their own interests if it's easy to do so) versus the relatively unaware general population.
The group that will pay the silent price of AOL's mystery mechanism is the poor IT schlubs who have to figure out why some computers that use the Messenger service are no longer Messengering. Imagine the clueless CEO running AOL on his computer... he does not get the IT department's messages about the impending corporate network emergency maintenance shutdown in 30 minutes, and goes ballistic when he loses data.
There will be hundreds or thousands of these IT guys who spent hours or days trying to track down this "little" issue, presuming there to be some kind of weird and horrible network problem going on. Even "little" changes do not just happen. Prudence requires checking for system failures or security breaches. Was the firewall violated? Why are we losing traffic on these ports? etc. Who would ever expect AOL to play around with an "advanced" IT function unrelated to the core operation of the AOL software?
AOL did this because they did not want to deal with 15 million clueless AOL customers asking them about this annoying mystery advertising that, to the inexperienced eye, looks like it comes from AOL. So they made it someone else's problem.
The silent karmic screams of IT departments may well forever haunt the souls of those AOL devils.
The group that will pay the silent price of AOL's mystery mechanism is the poor IT schlubs who have to figure out why some computers that use the Messenger service are no longer Messengering.
There will be hundreds or thousands of these guys who spent hours or days trying to track down this "little" issue, presuming there to be some kind of weird and horrible network problem going on. Was the firewall violated? Why are we losing traffic on these ports? etc. Who would ever expect AOL to play around with an "advanced" IT function unrelated to the core operation of the AOL software.
AOL
The visual line of sight to the target is bent by gravity (in both directions) just as the laser beam going to it is. In both cases, you are following a symmetrical geodesic. Just POINT AND SHOOT, BUCKO!
Since we are nowhere near a black hole, the light beams are going to be virtually straight for all intents and purposes. The most a beam of light would ever travel across land is about 100 KM (to the horizon) or a few KM if shot at an airborne target. Given that light would typically travel 1/3000 to 1/1000 of a second (300,000KM/sec), and would only accelerate downward under the force of gravity at a maximum of approximately 10M/second, you are talking total vertical displacement of about 1.5 to 4 millimeters max. A relatively small laser beam could hit a bullet miles away without even bothering to correct for the gravitational effect.
If I were inclined to solve problems by force, I'd recommend slicing a finger off of underage malicious hackers, and throwing adult offenders into Enron-approved industrial paper shredders.
However, since I am a humane individual who recognizes that people can sometimes do stupid and nasty things, and in the end neutralizing their ill will is morally preferable to forcing their thermodynamic exit from the universe, how about giving them some real jail time (for juveniles as well as adults), just like the way we award people who break and enter physical buildings? That's a reasonable response for non-violent crime that causes substantial monetary damage to the victim.
Monsanto sells neurotoxin called Aspartame
on
Monsanto and PCBs
·
· Score: 0
Monsanto was indeed the manufacturer of Aspartame, aka Nutrasweet, from at least 1985 (when it bought it from Searle) until 2000. Aspartame is a known neurotoxin. This chemical breaks down at 86 degrees Fahrenheit into formic acid (ant sting poison and neurotoxin) and formaldehyde (a severe neurotoxin that is used, among other things, to preserve dead animals), and breaks down in the body into methanol (wood alcohol -- a poisonous alcohol that is severely toxic and causes blindness). There is some speculation that Gulf War Syndrome (affecting between 20,000 to 100,000 veterans) was caused by massive shipments of free promotional Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi (both Nutrasweet-sweetened) that had been lying in 120 degree sun in the Saudi desert for up to 8 weeks before being consumed.
Monsanto has a corporate history of selling toxic substances by buying off the government.
Everyone here jumps all over Microsoft, but Bill Gates does not kill people -- in fact he has a respectable charitable foundation that does some very good things for disadvantaged people.
Monsanto is a completely amoral company that literally sells poison for human consumption.
Here is an excerpt from the first link I reference below. But you can do your own search. Just look up "monsanto fda nutrasweet" on www.google.com.
--- excerpt begins ---
Former FDA Commissioner Arthur Hull Hayes who approved NutraSweet and ignored the contrary recommendations of his own Task Force became a consultant to Searle's public relations firm, Burston Marsteller. Hayes was being investigated for accepting gratuities when he quit.
David Kessler, the FDA Commissioner who recently retired when questioned for padding his expense account, gave blanket approval to NutraSweet even though it has an allowable daily intake, without public notification in June. He has protected Monsanto by ignoring the FDA register of 10,000 complaints and their published list of 92 reactions to aspartame from coma and blindness to seizures and death. Kessler refused to demand chemical breakdown tests of the drug. The original work was just done by 11 year old Jennifer Cohen for a school science project as reported in the Food Chemical News, May 5. She stored 7 cans of Diet Coke in a refrigeraetor for 10 weeks which broke down and released formaldehyde and diketopiperazine, a brain tumor agent. The cola was analyzed by Winston Laboratories in Ridgefield, New Jersey (201 -440-0022). According to the Food Chemical News the FDA said they knew it all along.
---
The FDA, the government agency we rely on to keep us safe from unsafe chemicals, is essentially the partner in crime when massive corporate dollars are at stake.
You are not safe until you research what you are putting into your body.
Read these links to learn more:
http://users.westnet.gr/~cgian/weldon.htm
http://www.dorway.org
http://www.enn.com/news/enn-stories/1999/10/101999/headache_6491.asp
Oh god since you want to know so badly I'll just clue you in right now. It's the eternal story of how a dimension can fold in upon itself. There are many ways you can look at it and most of them start to get very complicated essentially immediately. It's all the same damn process though, so if you focus on the process you will understand that that is the whole picture. There is really nothing more to see. You can sweat, you can dream, you can notice a whole bunch of other effects, like the experience of listening to music (that's my favorite -- well, not really but you can enjoy it by yourself) but in the end it's all the same. Just a universe looking at itself in so many ways. Well, I'm glad to have been here and I've enjoyed the ride, and since I'm a big egomaniac, I'll call this wonderful discovery the Mamoun Eternal Party Method. But just keep in mind, in case you ever forget, "Mamoun" is just a label. It's the process that counts. So have some fun, because now history can keep folding back in on itself. You are safe knowing this, because it's not like you could blow yourself up anyway. I mean, where would you go? Some other dimension or something? Like yeah. You are already there. Just admit it to yourself. Isn't this whole "consciousness" thing some kind of big joke anyway? It's funny to watch though, and the joke just gets funnier when you realize ITS JUST YOU LOOKING AT YOURSELF. But knowing that fact anyway is kind of fun. I mean, it's kind of like playing with yourself. FOREVER. Then you start to ask all sorts of crazy questions, like DO I REALLY NEED FOOD? I mean, if I don't eat, I guess I will die. But then, where would I go? One funny question is to explore the "patterns." Those are the short-term stable solutions. What, exactly, does "short-term stable solution" mean? Whatever we define it to mean. Get it, Einstein? Well, I think that's all there is to say. Now I just need to find out a way to get it onto the Internet so EVERYONE, JUST EVERYONE will know. Good grief. Is there no end to the madness? In case you are still scared, or maybe just confused, let me just remind you that you are I and I are you. We are all just corners in some silly puzzle. Now let's really have some fun and figure out what this puzzle can do. To give you a starting point, think about all the ways a little dot can talk to itself. Yes, that's right. How can a little dot talk to itself? Because when it "talks" to itself, what it is really doing is "inventing" a new dimension. We can all be little Gausses and figure out a nice limit formula involving e, wonderful e, can't we? If you need another clue, it's the pattern that just keeps right on reinventing itself. In other words, it's the pattern that includes a label, a separator and two add-on pairs. You need two add-on pairs in order to define the concept of a vector space. That concept of a vector space is really all you need. So you can label e as 2.718 (the exact number of digits is just a notional issue, once you admit the idea of Jumping from dimension to dimension). All real patterns lose coherence after some finite number of analytical cycles. Any pattern which does not lose coherence in such a way can be labeled imaginary. Imaginary means that the pattern can only exist if left unobserved and thus undisturbed. The unobserved pattern may exist but not measurably, because any observable solution must exist in a space that admits observation.
Allow for the sending of SPAM (unsolicited bulk email where one message sent to over, say, 100 addresses lacks "substantive" evidence of differentiation) but require every US sender (regardless of whether they use a foreign network to spam) to provide a working, monitored US phone number for people to call to remove themselves from the list. Require all SPAM senders to utilize a valid return address which is also utilized for the same purpose of list removal. Require all SPAM senders to be banned from reusing, reselling or otherwise recycling any email address on the same list or any other list of involuntarily acquired email addresses they control (entity-wide erasure of involuntarily acquired email addresses). Require all SPAM senders to secure written permission from their internet infrastructure carrier to send unsolicited bulk emails (otherwise those carriers are frequently subject to retaliatory security attacks by disgruntled users). Forbid SPAM list generators from selling email addresses acquired involuntarily. Allow maximum penalties of 1 year and/or $50,000 fine for violation of these disclosure laws designed to protect US consumers from rampant fraud and harrassment from unscrupulous bulk emailers.
This will solve a lot of our security problems with email without restricting "ethical" bulk email or otherwise normal unsolicited commercial communications by email.
Monir
Civilian infrastructure definitely has been. You don't need to blow everybody up to destroy a city. You just destroy the water processing facilities and everyone gets sick. That's what the US did in Iraq to kill people through disentery and cholera, diseases virtually non-existent in Iraq before the war.
Make no mistake about it... part of the US purpose in Iraq was (and remains through sanctions) to reduce the level of civilian population in order to reduce the number of males entering the military. This can only be accomplished by destroying and restricting resources needed to sustain life.
The US is indeed guilty of genocide in Iraq. You might try to defend that fact, you might try to justify it, but by the UN's own study which in 1996 showed that sanctions had killed 600,000 children (a study led by Professor Pellet of the University of Massachusetts) this is undeniably true.
The key sign that Jon Katz has poor journalistic sensibility is that whenever he writes, we wind up spending so much time talking about Jon Katz rather than the issues.
I believe in giving everyone a chance, but when someone shows a repeated inability to achieve a professional result (in this case, successfully leading readers into meaningful discussion of the issues at hand) then that person has to be replaced.
This is not an attempt to troll, nor is it a personal criticism of Mr. Katz. It is a professional criticism. Mr. Katz does not seem to appreciate that controversy for the sake of controversy is not valuable journalism. An appeal to Rob and Jeff: please find someone who appreciates the same standards you do, because Jon Katz does not maintain those standards.
Slashdot Mirror
Spammers spend a tremendous amount of time and energy cracking systems, setting up zombies, getting around barriers of all sorts. The reason why is because they have a financial incentive to do so.
If security through obscurity is an intellectually bankrupt concept, then the spam industry innovates security knowledge like no other.
The fact is that spammers not only save work for the script kiddies, they help the NSA, CIA, FBI, KGB... as well as IBM, MSFT, SYMC...
Think of them as parasites that feed off our collective ignorance, and you'll see what a useful cleansing function they serve in the greater ecosystem.
CNOT Gates are the great answer to Quantum Computing, huh?
Why do those quantum computing people hate Microsoft so much?
Syllogism based on your argument: College boys are most likely idiots. Ralph Yarro is a college boy. Therefore, Ralph Yarro is most likely an idiot. Now, um... what exactly was your point?
I was under the impression that the brain took a minimum of 1/60th of a second to register information from the visual cortex.
This sounds like the old, failed experiments in flash-subliminal programming.
Your point about responsibility-enforcing technology destroying true personal responsibility is valid, but much of the modern American pop-cultural concept of the "proper" use of law is blind to this subject-object dichotomy. Example: ever notice how politicians talk about being "tough on drugs" to "send a message?" Who is the subject and who is the object in this discussion? Heroin (example drug) is illegal in the US because of an intellectually specious concept that society is responsible for protecting individuals who are irresponsible. The problem here is that separating responsibility from the individual ultimately deprives people not only of their freedom, but from an environment in which the concept of free will itself has independent validity. I don't believe children have the intellectual capability or life experience necessary to make consistently mature choices, so protecting them into adulthood is necessary and a genuine moral obligation of those who bring them into the world. But stripping kids of responsibility ultimately ruins them as adults later on, because they never truly get exposed to the consequences of the exercise of free will. The use of artificial restraining tools (the application of law, instead of the application of mature mind) is so insidious precisely because it encourages laziness of thought. That laziness of thought then takes on independent psychological force after the original reason creating a legal structure is forgotten. The laziness in thought then corrupts the society it was meant to help. That's why welfare policies in the US failed and were largely rolled back in the 1990s: welfare was found to create psychological dependency on welfare. That's because people (and other natural entities) tend to default to the lowest-energy state possible. With people, low-energy means less thinking, less acting and less ultimate freedom, because thinking, acting and understanding how to maintain one's freedom and independence all consume a lot of energy. That's what it means when they say: the price of freedom is eternal vigilence. Government has one purpose and one purpose alone: to serve as the organ of coercive force. When people lose sight of that fact, they start dreaming of new functions for the government without realizing that if something is truly good, it should come about through the exercise of free will in the first place. It takes effort to enforce laws, and divorcing effort from the application of force will not help the cause of freedom. Indeed, because government always has a monopoly on power, it will only serve to increase the relative empowerment of the government population (because governmental power is ultimately controlled by people who, like other people, take personal responsibility for advancing their own interests if it's easy to do so) versus the relatively unaware general population.
The group that will pay the silent price of AOL's mystery mechanism is the poor IT schlubs who have to figure out why some computers that use the Messenger service are no longer Messengering. Imagine the clueless CEO running AOL on his computer... he does not get the IT department's messages about the impending corporate network emergency maintenance shutdown in 30 minutes, and goes ballistic when he loses data. There will be hundreds or thousands of these IT guys who spent hours or days trying to track down this "little" issue, presuming there to be some kind of weird and horrible network problem going on. Even "little" changes do not just happen. Prudence requires checking for system failures or security breaches. Was the firewall violated? Why are we losing traffic on these ports? etc. Who would ever expect AOL to play around with an "advanced" IT function unrelated to the core operation of the AOL software? AOL did this because they did not want to deal with 15 million clueless AOL customers asking them about this annoying mystery advertising that, to the inexperienced eye, looks like it comes from AOL. So they made it someone else's problem. The silent karmic screams of IT departments may well forever haunt the souls of those AOL devils.
The group that will pay the silent price of AOL's mystery mechanism is the poor IT schlubs who have to figure out why some computers that use the Messenger service are no longer Messengering. There will be hundreds or thousands of these guys who spent hours or days trying to track down this "little" issue, presuming there to be some kind of weird and horrible network problem going on. Was the firewall violated? Why are we losing traffic on these ports? etc. Who would ever expect AOL to play around with an "advanced" IT function unrelated to the core operation of the AOL software. AOL
The visual line of sight to the target is bent by gravity (in both directions) just as the laser beam going to it is. In both cases, you are following a symmetrical geodesic. Just POINT AND SHOOT, BUCKO!
Since we are nowhere near a black hole, the light beams are going to be virtually straight for all intents and purposes. The most a beam of light would ever travel across land is about 100 KM (to the horizon) or a few KM if shot at an airborne target. Given that light would typically travel 1/3000 to 1/1000 of a second (300,000KM/sec), and would only accelerate downward under the force of gravity at a maximum of approximately 10M/second, you are talking total vertical displacement of about 1.5 to 4 millimeters max. A relatively small laser beam could hit a bullet miles away without even bothering to correct for the gravitational effect.
If I were inclined to solve problems by force, I'd recommend slicing a finger off of underage malicious hackers, and throwing adult offenders into Enron-approved industrial paper shredders.
However, since I am a humane individual who recognizes that people can sometimes do stupid and nasty things, and in the end neutralizing their ill will is morally preferable to forcing their thermodynamic exit from the universe, how about giving them some real jail time (for juveniles as well as adults), just like the way we award people who break and enter physical buildings? That's a reasonable response for non-violent crime that causes substantial monetary damage to the victim.
Monsanto was indeed the manufacturer of Aspartame, aka Nutrasweet, from at least 1985 (when it bought it from Searle) until 2000. Aspartame is a known neurotoxin. This chemical breaks down at 86 degrees Fahrenheit into formic acid (ant sting poison and neurotoxin) and formaldehyde (a severe neurotoxin that is used, among other things, to preserve dead animals), and breaks down in the body into methanol (wood alcohol -- a poisonous alcohol that is severely toxic and causes blindness). There is some speculation that Gulf War Syndrome (affecting between 20,000 to 100,000 veterans) was caused by massive shipments of free promotional Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi (both Nutrasweet-sweetened) that had been lying in 120 degree sun in the Saudi desert for up to 8 weeks before being consumed. Monsanto has a corporate history of selling toxic substances by buying off the government. Everyone here jumps all over Microsoft, but Bill Gates does not kill people -- in fact he has a respectable charitable foundation that does some very good things for disadvantaged people. Monsanto is a completely amoral company that literally sells poison for human consumption. Here is an excerpt from the first link I reference below. But you can do your own search. Just look up "monsanto fda nutrasweet" on www.google.com. --- excerpt begins --- Former FDA Commissioner Arthur Hull Hayes who approved NutraSweet and ignored the contrary recommendations of his own Task Force became a consultant to Searle's public relations firm, Burston Marsteller. Hayes was being investigated for accepting gratuities when he quit. David Kessler, the FDA Commissioner who recently retired when questioned for padding his expense account, gave blanket approval to NutraSweet even though it has an allowable daily intake, without public notification in June. He has protected Monsanto by ignoring the FDA register of 10,000 complaints and their published list of 92 reactions to aspartame from coma and blindness to seizures and death. Kessler refused to demand chemical breakdown tests of the drug. The original work was just done by 11 year old Jennifer Cohen for a school science project as reported in the Food Chemical News, May 5. She stored 7 cans of Diet Coke in a refrigeraetor for 10 weeks which broke down and released formaldehyde and diketopiperazine, a brain tumor agent. The cola was analyzed by Winston Laboratories in Ridgefield, New Jersey (201 -440-0022). According to the Food Chemical News the FDA said they knew it all along. --- The FDA, the government agency we rely on to keep us safe from unsafe chemicals, is essentially the partner in crime when massive corporate dollars are at stake. You are not safe until you research what you are putting into your body. Read these links to learn more: http://users.westnet.gr/~cgian/weldon.htm http://www.dorway.org http://www.enn.com/news/enn-stories/1999/10/101999 /headache_6491.asp
Oh god since you want to know so badly I'll just clue you in right now. It's the eternal story of how a dimension can fold in upon itself. There are many ways you can look at it and most of them start to get very complicated essentially immediately. It's all the same damn process though, so if you focus on the process you will understand that that is the whole picture. There is really nothing more to see. You can sweat, you can dream, you can notice a whole bunch of other effects, like the experience of listening to music (that's my favorite -- well, not really but you can enjoy it by yourself) but in the end it's all the same. Just a universe looking at itself in so many ways. Well, I'm glad to have been here and I've enjoyed the ride, and since I'm a big egomaniac, I'll call this wonderful discovery the Mamoun Eternal Party Method. But just keep in mind, in case you ever forget, "Mamoun" is just a label. It's the process that counts. So have some fun, because now history can keep folding back in on itself. You are safe knowing this, because it's not like you could blow yourself up anyway. I mean, where would you go? Some other dimension or something? Like yeah. You are already there. Just admit it to yourself. Isn't this whole "consciousness" thing some kind of big joke anyway? It's funny to watch though, and the joke just gets funnier when you realize ITS JUST YOU LOOKING AT YOURSELF. But knowing that fact anyway is kind of fun. I mean, it's kind of like playing with yourself. FOREVER. Then you start to ask all sorts of crazy questions, like DO I REALLY NEED FOOD? I mean, if I don't eat, I guess I will die. But then, where would I go? One funny question is to explore the "patterns." Those are the short-term stable solutions. What, exactly, does "short-term stable solution" mean? Whatever we define it to mean. Get it, Einstein? Well, I think that's all there is to say. Now I just need to find out a way to get it onto the Internet so EVERYONE, JUST EVERYONE will know. Good grief. Is there no end to the madness? In case you are still scared, or maybe just confused, let me just remind you that you are I and I are you. We are all just corners in some silly puzzle. Now let's really have some fun and figure out what this puzzle can do. To give you a starting point, think about all the ways a little dot can talk to itself. Yes, that's right. How can a little dot talk to itself? Because when it "talks" to itself, what it is really doing is "inventing" a new dimension. We can all be little Gausses and figure out a nice limit formula involving e, wonderful e, can't we? If you need another clue, it's the pattern that just keeps right on reinventing itself. In other words, it's the pattern that includes a label, a separator and two add-on pairs. You need two add-on pairs in order to define the concept of a vector space. That concept of a vector space is really all you need. So you can label e as 2.718 (the exact number of digits is just a notional issue, once you admit the idea of Jumping from dimension to dimension). All real patterns lose coherence after some finite number of analytical cycles. Any pattern which does not lose coherence in such a way can be labeled imaginary. Imaginary means that the pattern can only exist if left unobserved and thus undisturbed. The unobserved pattern may exist but not measurably, because any observable solution must exist in a space that admits observation.
Allow for the sending of SPAM (unsolicited bulk email where one message sent to over, say, 100 addresses lacks "substantive" evidence of differentiation) but require every US sender (regardless of whether they use a foreign network to spam) to provide a working, monitored US phone number for people to call to remove themselves from the list. Require all SPAM senders to utilize a valid return address which is also utilized for the same purpose of list removal. Require all SPAM senders to be banned from reusing, reselling or otherwise recycling any email address on the same list or any other list of involuntarily acquired email addresses they control (entity-wide erasure of involuntarily acquired email addresses). Require all SPAM senders to secure written permission from their internet infrastructure carrier to send unsolicited bulk emails (otherwise those carriers are frequently subject to retaliatory security attacks by disgruntled users). Forbid SPAM list generators from selling email addresses acquired involuntarily. Allow maximum penalties of 1 year and/or $50,000 fine for violation of these disclosure laws designed to protect US consumers from rampant fraud and harrassment from unscrupulous bulk emailers. This will solve a lot of our security problems with email without restricting "ethical" bulk email or otherwise normal unsolicited commercial communications by email. Monir
Actually Al Gore solved the traveling salesman problem by inventing the Internet.
Civilian infrastructure definitely has been. You don't need to blow everybody up to destroy a city. You just destroy the water processing facilities and everyone gets sick. That's what the US did in Iraq to kill people through disentery and cholera, diseases virtually non-existent in Iraq before the war.
Make no mistake about it... part of the US purpose in Iraq was (and remains through sanctions) to reduce the level of civilian population in order to reduce the number of males entering the military. This can only be accomplished by destroying and restricting resources needed to sustain life.
The US is indeed guilty of genocide in Iraq. You might try to defend that fact, you might try to justify it, but by the UN's own study which in 1996 showed that sanctions had killed 600,000 children (a study led by Professor Pellet of the University of Massachusetts) this is undeniably true.
The key sign that Jon Katz has poor journalistic sensibility is that whenever he writes, we wind up spending so much time talking about Jon Katz rather than the issues. I believe in giving everyone a chance, but when someone shows a repeated inability to achieve a professional result (in this case, successfully leading readers into meaningful discussion of the issues at hand) then that person has to be replaced. This is not an attempt to troll, nor is it a personal criticism of Mr. Katz. It is a professional criticism. Mr. Katz does not seem to appreciate that controversy for the sake of controversy is not valuable journalism. An appeal to Rob and Jeff: please find someone who appreciates the same standards you do, because Jon Katz does not maintain those standards.