three offers of surrender previous to the bomb would indicate that their desire was basically gone already.
Bullshit. I'd like to see your citation for this.
Cease-fires don't count BTW. Surrender means running up the white flag and dropping your guns. Keeping your guns, territory and official positions is not surrender, it's a ceasfire or at best a "withdrawl".
Last time I looked you go to technical college to LEARN things like "how to make my computer work".
It's not fair to ding somebody who's ENTERING it for not yet knowing what she's going there to LEARN. If she already knew it all she wouldn't need to go (except for the certification).
Yes it is. See that word "college" there?
It means that you should already have some basic knowledge of the world.
This girl clearly didn't have the motivation for college.
Your computer broke? Well then get to the library/computer lab.
Research it. Ask somebody. Keep trying.
It's not a big secret that you can use Open Office to create word documents.
Quitting the first time her life gets even mildly difficult does not bode well for her college career.
The whole "she's just a student" thing it total bullshit.
I was "just a student" when I set up verizon DSL to work with my Linux computer.
I had to read, try things and spend time on it but I made it work.
And just how long did she have this computer anyways before she complained?
So here we got a borderline psychotic, serious trouble separating famtasy from reality and he's on the fence. Was Halo 3 the push? How much should you pad the world to make sure he doesn't get a push?
NONE. Free speech is fundamental to the functioning of a democracy.
It really is that simple. Reading Shakespeare isn't an excuse for ruuning around stabbing people BTW.
Put the nuts in a nuthose. Leave freedom of speech alone.
What you're missing is that the crime is all of Israel's, not just the IDF.
When you ask questions like "What should the IDF do?" You really should be asking, "What should Israel do?"
Once you start asking the right question, a number of things should become obvious, like giving Palestineans basic human rights.
The arguments you apply are always trying to have it both ways, Palestine is supposed to be its own country and police itself. But how's that going to happen when Israel is bombing police stations?
If Israel is going to systematically dismante the Palestinean gov't, they should be allowing the Palestinieans into their society as equals.
Since they aren't doing this, nor even treating their lives as if they have value a Palestinean is left with two choices:
Sit home and hope that international pressure will stop the slaughter before they're all dead
Take up arms
It's really sad. Israel didn't even have the deceny to let the people who wanted out, get out before the started blowing up schools.
Nazis did all of this on purpose, whereas the civilian deaths the IDF causes are a result of collateral damage from legitimate military targets operating from highly populated areas. This is a crucial difference.
Israel is not accidentally dropping large bombs in the middle of populated areas. The claim that all their targets are "military" is pretty weak. If that was really the case, don't you think they would allow members of the press to be present and document this? What definition of "miliary target" includes schools, police stations, universities, mosques, houses, apartment buildings and medical facilities? Does one person with an small weapon make an entire school a "military target"? Try to consider that such a defintion would make essentially all of Israel a "military target."
Do you have evidence that another possible tactic could yield better results?
Sure. If your goal is simply to mimimize Israeli civilian, Israeli military and Palestinean civilian casualties, in that order, the simplest option is to simply yield the field.
Now if your goal is to keep your borders intact and do the above, a simple option is to create a civilian-free zone in between the two countries. Shoulder-fired rockets have a pretty limited range and even mortars can't make it 10 miles. So if you clear out a 10 mile wide swath of land, your enemy will need large, non-man portable, easy to spot weapons. They also cost more, and are harder to get.
But here's the big problem, if your goal is to gradually kill off the population of and annex the land of Palestine, then you would employ exactly the strategy Isreal is using. I'm not saying that is their adgenda, but their actions are indistinuishable from the case where it is.
Every N years, you find an excuse to invade and do one of the following:
Kill some people
Destroy some property
Annex some land
After enough years Palestine is gone. If you did it all at once then you might piss off another country enough to send troops, but if you eliminate 10% of the country every year, in 30 years 4.2% is all thats left.
If Israel would start treating all Palestineans with respect and dignity, they would make recruiting much harder for Hamas. You know, basic deceny like not blocking medical supppies to a country you are dropping bombs into.
Even if I were a soldier in the IDF, my values would still be irrelevant.
Would you allow Nazis at death camps to use the same excuse?
They took oathes too.
It doesn't matter what oathes you take, what contacts you sign, your values are ALWAYS RELEVANT. YOU ALWAYS HAVE A CHOICE. You may face imprisonment, or even death, but you can always refuse to do what someone else tells you to.
You should be ashamed of yourself for trying to compare this to Nuremberg.
Why? It's a direct comparision. That is where international law has found that "following orders" is not an excuse for immoral actions. If one wants to make this point, one HAS to bring up Nuremberg.
It may not be right, but its the only possibility.
No, it's not. Just because you may not LIKE the other options. does not mean they don't exist.
Again, the IDF has the moral high ground (what you were trying to erode with the Nuremberg reference) precisely because its targets are valid military ones,
Indiscriminate killing of civilians to hit any of these supposed "military" targets destroys any moral high ground they had.
SO what if Ariel Sharon's lawyers did their best to get him off (guilty or not - I'm not making judgments either way)?
That's funny, you seem to have no problem making value judgements regarding Palestinean leadership. This is a pretty obvious double standard.
For one, don't ever link anyone to The Guardian to prove a point. Its drivel, and vehemently anti-Israeli. The article shows massive bias, as most of their crap does.
Just because someone doesn't agree with you doesn't make them anti-Israeli. If you have proof that the facts of the article are wrong, give it. I suspect you don't.
Imagine you live in Southern California, near the border to Tijuana. All of the sudden, mortar shells start flying overhead and exploding around you and your family. The military base nearby, which is aware that these mortar strikes are coming from a school, has two choices: They can 1) bomb the school immediately, killing 30-50 Mexican civilians but ending immediately the mortar fire and resulting in no American lives lost, or 2) they can send in a strike team, causing 10 Americans (or whatever. pick a number - its irrelevant anyway.) to die but only 2 Mexicans - the two militants. Which do you suppose they choose? Which would you? Suppose that one of those 10 Americans killed was your wife? Your child? Now tell me what the military's job is, what their moral responsibility is.
I know Mexicans. I have Mexican friends. I recognize that they have just as much of a right to exist as Americans, therefore I would hope that we try to minimize the loss of civian life period, regardless of what color skin they might have.
If anyone should be ashamed, it is you for suggesting that ethnic differences should be used to place a lower value on the lives of certain memebers of society.
No. I place as much value on a Palestinian life as an Israeli one. My values are not what is under question, though.
Yes they are. I'm questioning them. Right here, right now. You are posting in a public forum, arguing in favor of a set of actions and I am questioning your ethics for doing so.
IDF values, and should value, the lives of the citizens that it is their duty to protect over the lives of Palestinian civilians (which they are under no obligation to keep out of harm's way).
This is a direct contradiction to your claim that you value Palestinian life equally. First you claim their lives are of equal value, then you claim that it's ok for someone to treat them as if they weren't.
Your last comment is simply ignorance. Suicide bombs that purposefully target city buses?
How is this morally different than bombing family homes?
Does Israel kill an entire family when a murder takes place between two Israelis? Or do they only apply "collective responsiblity" to outsiders?
Suggesting that Hamas militants habitually target anything other than innocent civilians
I never suggested otherwise. What I DID suggest is that Israel seems to have no problems doing the same things it claims are "really bad things" when Hamas does them.
Hamas kills 10 civilians in a suicide bombing, and it's a tradgedy.
Israel kills 10 civilians with high-tech weaponry and it's okay?
That's bullshit. Stating that "It's just the soldier's job" is the same nonsense that it was at the Nuremberg trials. Soldiers are people and they are expected to refuse both immoral and illegal orders.
I make no claims that the Hamas leadership is a bunch of nice guys, but you may want to do some more reseach on Israel. I'm sure you can find at least as many bad things to say about Hamas, but as the saying goes:
"Two wrongs don't make a right."
so long as the IDF can do that without endangering the lives of any Israeli citizens
This is the crux of your argument and it is why the world is outraged with Israel.
Innocent Palestineans have just as much of a right to life as innocent Israelis.
Your logic places a value of ZERO on their lives, which is why we have this genocidal madness is going on now.
Doing the right thing means taking the hard road, not killing a bunch of innocents because they happen to be in the same place at the same time and believe in the wrong god. Doing that, is exactly what the people you call terrorists do.
What do you suggest the Israeli military do in a situation where they have a danger coming from a structure that may or not house civilians?
Treat those civilians with the same respect for life that they would Israeli civilians.
That's really not a hard question to answer.
Those Palestinian civilians present in the school should have removed themselves
WHERE THE FUCK ARE THEY SUPPOSED TO GO THAT IS SAFER THAN A UN REFUGEE CAMP?
These people are trapped in a big cage, with bombs being dropped on then at any place and at any time and without warning. Isreal has provided exactly ZERO places where an unarmed civilian may go and wait this out.
There is no excuse for this type of conduct on ANY side. You have no right to label someone a terrorist when you bomb a fucking school. And the nonsense about the rocket fire is pretty stupid. If Isreal wants people to actually believe what they are saying, then they should allow the press to freely document the situation.
If all these bombings are justified, what do they have to hide?
If they actually know the names and locations of these people, then arrest them. Arresting people you don't like and putting them on trial is what makes you different from a terroist.
It depends what you use your computer for and what the password is.
Did you actually try to simulate this, like I suggested? Or are you just whining that there is some imaginary, extermely unlikely situation where it might help? The quantity of "regular" keystrokes is so much greater than the quantity of "passphrase" keystrokes, that even the less frequently used keys will not show up as a statistically significant difference in the overall distribution.
But it is not an uncertainty either.
The idea that we won't be able to come up with a single math problem that is exponentially more difficult to solve backwards than forwards seems pretty extreme for a random person on the internet to put forth in passing. If such "asymmetrical" problems do exist, then they provide a basis for a cryptographic algorithm which becomes essentialy "impossble" to crack, when used with a sufficiently long key. If you could actually back up a claim like that, it would be a HUGE mathematical breakthough. Possibly the biggest thing since calculus. It's like saying "I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this slashdot post is too small to contain."
What you said was like suggesting that gravity might suddenly suspend itself next Tuesday because it would be convenient for your argument.
Having re-read the article I think that the most likely explanation for the breach was the compromise of Butler's physical security during the time leading up to his arrest.
There's a good chance you're right, but I find it just as likely they simply threatened to violate his rights indefinately until he gave them the key. Kevin Mitnick was held in solitary for EIGHT MONTHS without trial until he cracked and gave them what they wanted. To date, there have been no repercussions for that.
He was once an ally, but that is irrelevant because it was not done by the NSA.
Who do you think signs the NSA's paychecks? Their priorities and funding are decided for them, by the same people who decided Saddam was an "ally."
From a military perspective, we were winning prior to the pull-out.
Clearly you live in some parallel dimension filled with revisionist history.
claim that this implies that the NSA has been trying to sabotage national security
Here a classic example of a strawman argument. Respond to an argument that we may unintentionally hurt ourselves by stating the we would never intentionally hurt ourselves.
The are plenty of plausible scenarios where the NSA might suggest a deliberately weak cryptosystem. For example, they know it will be weak only with keys not tested against criteria X. They approve the system and secretly test keys against this criteria while simultaneously exploiting our enemy's adoption of awesome "US military grade cryptography".
analysis of keyboard wear [...] might have assisted the effort greatly
No. It would not. It's pretty simple. How many times do you type your password vs. how many times do you type some other word? Try doing some computer simulations if you don't believe me. The data will be lost in noise.
The point of encryption is not to provide absolute protection for all time against all efforts but rather to provide protection for a limited amount of time as a function of the resources of your adversary.
No. The point is to take advantage of math problems that are asymmetrically hard to solve.
The goal is to create the largest force multiplier you can. This is how crypto differs from regular security.
The perfect cipher would be simple enough for a human to compute readily on a single piece of paper while resisting the brute forcing efforts of a computer built using every atom on earth, clocked at one terahertz and running since the beginning of the universe. It's a issue of scale. The "force multiplier" effect avaible from crypto is greater than anything in the physical security world. Imagine instead that instead of working with of E = MC^2, you were working with E = C*2^M. See how it's different? The work required to brute force a key baloons very quickly.
Even the best encryption will eventually fall to a determined enough adversary with enough resources to throw at the problem.
No, actually that's not a certainty. In order for what you said to be true there would have to be fundamental weaknesses in ever cryptographical scheme ever conceived, now or in the future.
If we find even one decent algorithm, free of shortcuts, then by using a large enough key it is possible to ensure that your data is not decoded before the death of the sun.
which sounds reasonable if government super computers were being enlisted in a distributed brute force search of the keyspace.
BASED ON WHAT? Why is months any more reasonable of a timeline to crack an unknown encryption scheme with unknown resources? Why not milliseconds? Why not millenia?
You have NO IDEA, what a reasonable time scale would be and you're just talking out your ass here.
I suppose some my consider me rude for point that out, but there are those of us who find people randomly making things up to support their argument to be rude.
Basically I think it boils down to being friendly instead of automatically treating police as the "enemy".
It might have more to do with your sex, race, ethnicity, attire and accent than any words that come our of your mouth.
How many white people in expensive suits are killed every year while reaching for their wallet?
have a lot of leeway in how they can respond to any given individual
And this a terrible thing. If doing 65 in a 55 is really a problem, then EVERYONE should get a ticket. The should be no "My cousin's a cop..." nonsense. The law should be applied to everyone equally. The lattitude afforted to police officers allows them to create a self-fulfilling stereotype regarding who is and is not a criminal.
Why is your single anecdote more powerful than the multiple anecdotes posted here? Why should your success completely obliterate any less successful result?
Rather than waste our time with your statistically insignificant sampling of terrible quality CFL's why don't you just GOOGLE IT!
And don't pull that "I've given you my experinece" nonsense, you said:
In real world usage CFL's do not last as long as incandencents.
Did it ever occur to you that compaines have already researched this issue and that information might be publicly availble on the internet? If you're going to claim that an entire industry is wrong, then extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. You are providing none. What models of bulbs? How many? What was the MTBF? Under what conditions?
You opened your mouth and made a statement regarding the lifespan of ALL CFL lights that is in direct contradiction to the established facts. Now you can't seem to admit to it. Instead you're resorting to ad-hominem attacks.
I have an inherently hard time believing they are really doing all that much good for the environment at this point,
So why don't you show us some numbers to back up your argument?
I double dog dare you.
This is the type of half-assed, seat of the pants reasoning that lead people to believe the earth was flat.
IF YOU THINK YOU ACTUALLY KNOW SOMETHING THE REST OF US DON'T KNOW THEN STEP UP AND MAKE SOME *SPECIFIC* STATEMENTS THAT ARE POSSIBLE TO DISPROVE.
Compact flourescents are not bleeding-edge technology. There is a wealth of information already available on this subject. Are you challenging some specific claim that has been made? Or are you simply refusing to connect the dots using basic logic? That CFLs are better for the environment is generally accepted not because of some vast underground conspiracy, but rather because the numbers plainly illustrate this.
Not quite true.... No, its not perfect security, but it does raise the bar.
I does not raise the bar to any degree worth talking about. A competent programmer can parse the page an pass it on with almost zero effort compared to that involved in the rest of the attack.
Setting up the database to store the passwords is hard than something that basic.
I'd like to see your economics credentials since you still haven't acknoledged what the law of diminishing returns actually means.
You made a clear obvious error here and you refuse to admit it or even respond with your own source.
The beliefs he's ridiculing are based on pure, blind FAITH.
It's the same basis that suicide bombers use to support their actions, that was used to justfiy the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition.
The is no such thing as a rational discourse here because these people are not rational.
All you can do is make it blindingly obivous to the people that are not 100% locked into an arbitrary belief system, that beliefs based on nothing more than faith are fundamentally flawed and not worthy of respect.
These people admit up front that nothing you say can change their mind because god told them the "truth". The idea of "keeping the discouse at a high level" is really just a smoke screen for actually saying, "Let's not challenge these peoples belief system by pointing out the obvious logical flaws and inconsistencies."
If I believed that whites were genetically superior to blacks, people would criticize, ridicule and ostracize me. This is a natural, rational response to the problem. My irrational, arbitray beliefs have a negative impact on society and society is actively seeking to discourage them. Although I would be allowed to hold these beliefs, the rest of society is not obligated to treat them as anything more than utter bullshit. (People with those beliefs can still be treated with respect, but an idea must stand on its merits.)
The idea that just because someone somewhere believes something, we have to treat it as a well-founded legitimate proposition is one of the biggest tradgedies in our educational system today, both at the high school and college levels.
Your repsonses have been very dishonest.
It you choose to be ignorant, that is your decision.
I've tried to educate you, but you refuse to acknowedge a single point, even when you were clearly misinterpreting the law of diminishing returns.
You have yet to show how it is simply not possible for a rich kid to do nothing and live off his inheritance.
You choose instead to pose a bunch of strawman arguments and beat around the bush, but you simply are unable to address the fundamental issue.
Sarcasm and misdirection are not a substitue for reason.
You've missed the point. This is a discussion regarding inheritance. See my first post here.
There are many people who are rich because their parents were rich.
It is possible for a person to be rich, not because the personally have contributed anything to society, but because their parents were rich, and their parent before them, etc.
I would love to know of an investment in which I can put my money and be guaranteed a steady return for the rest of my life, my children's lives, my grandchildren's lives...
What you've done here is a classic straw-man argument.
I never argued that there was somewhere you could put your money where it would make money for all eternity.
What I argued is that it is possible for a person to live off interest essentially indefinately. There is no specific mechanism that guarantees this person will run out of money.
When the sun burns out, I'm sure all earth-based investment are going in the crapper, but for practical purposes right now, a person can take a big chunk of money, place it in investments and do nothing useful to society for the rest of their life.
The only alternatives to my assertion, that the rich are more productive than the poor, are luck and malice.
As much as you want to believe that, it's not actually true.
That statment would require that capitial itself cannot generate money, which would require the interest rate to be zero.
The reason you're modded flamebait is that your views are both offensive and poorly backed up with anything resembling a rational argument. You'd *like* to believe certain things, but you are unable to respond to the obvious arguments against your key assumptions. Your statement regarding luck and malice is nothing less than intellectual dishonesty. A rational person thinking for two minutes can come up with additonal alternatives.
Nope, you're wrong. Its called the Law of Diminishing Returns. Overtime any investment in anything will minish to zero as the product or service becomes a commodity.
#1 This does not appy in this situation, since it requires a stipulation that all money has to be invested in a specific service. This law does not guarantee that a managed portfoio of assets, owned by a useless billionare, will disapper.
#2 Your interpretation of this law does not match wikipedia's description. "In economics, diminishing returns is also called diminishing marginal returns or the law of diminishing returns. According to this relationship, in a production system with fixed and variable inputs (say factory size and labor), beyond some point, each additional unit of variable input yields less and less output."
To translate:
Each additional unit of investment yields a smaller amount of return than the previous unit.
This statement is nothing at all like what you claim, which is that a fixed investment is guaranteed over time to lose money.
What you were actually arguing is the "Tendency of the rate of profit to fall" hypothesis.
This argument is far from being a well-tested, widely-accepted law of economics.
So all of this money you collect, you just sit there with it?
You don't get it.
Yes I have money I can spend on a 100 foot mega-yach that otherwise could have paid for 1,000 people's college educations. Yes that will "create jobs".
The thing you just don't comprehend is that I never created any wealth to get that money. Someone else did all the work. I never even managed anything, I just collect checks.
This is money that someone else had to earn, but that goes to me. If it didn't go to me, it could go to the gov't or to the guy who created the wealth in the first place. The money going to me is a de-motivator for the people who actually drive the economy.
The thing you haven't shown is that I would do something that is any better for the economy than any or person or the gov't. Your theorizing is all trickle-down economics. Rich people aren't rich because the give their money away in order to stimulate the economy. Rich people horde their money and use it as a tool to get more money. As more and more money is sucked out of the working class, the reward for actually doing work becomes less and less. Everyone then suffers. While college educations for 1000 people would have employed as least as many people as building my mega-yacht, it has far reaching positive impacts into the future as opposted to my yacht which is just a rich man's toy.
The real problem is the granularity of many bills is too large. That is NOT Obie's fault. You have to vote Yes or No on a big blob of stuff.
He's still responsible for his actions. I don't care if the rest of the bill was giving away gold-plated Ferrari's the immunity was BS.
the relationship between the immunity portion of the bill and employees misbehaving is slim to none
No, actually it's really simple. If I don't have a right to privacy on my telephone, he shouldn't either. I pay the man's salary after all. If anyone is giving up their constitutional protections it should be him. He doesn't seem to think they're that important after all, so it's seems silly to spend effort protecting them for him.
Slashdot Mirror
three offers of surrender previous to the bomb would indicate that their desire was basically gone already.
Bullshit. I'd like to see your citation for this.
Cease-fires don't count BTW. Surrender means running up the white flag and dropping your guns. Keeping your guns, territory and official positions is not surrender, it's a ceasfire or at best a "withdrawl".
Last time I looked you go to technical college to LEARN things like "how to make my computer work". It's not fair to ding somebody who's ENTERING it for not yet knowing what she's going there to LEARN. If she already knew it all she wouldn't need to go (except for the certification).
Yes it is. See that word "college" there?
It means that you should already have some basic knowledge of the world.
This girl clearly didn't have the motivation for college.
Your computer broke? Well then get to the library/computer lab.
Research it. Ask somebody. Keep trying.
It's not a big secret that you can use Open Office to create word documents.
Quitting the first time her life gets even mildly difficult does not bode well for her college career.
The whole "she's just a student" thing it total bullshit.
I was "just a student" when I set up verizon DSL to work with my Linux computer.
I had to read, try things and spend time on it but I made it work.
And just how long did she have this computer anyways before she complained?
So here we got a borderline psychotic, serious trouble separating famtasy from reality and he's on the fence. Was Halo 3 the push? How much should you pad the world to make sure he doesn't get a push?
NONE. Free speech is fundamental to the functioning of a democracy.
It really is that simple. Reading Shakespeare isn't an excuse for ruuning around stabbing people BTW.
Put the nuts in a nuthose. Leave freedom of speech alone.
When you ask questions like "What should the IDF do?" You really should be asking, "What should Israel do?"
Once you start asking the right question, a number of things should become obvious, like giving Palestineans basic human rights.
The arguments you apply are always trying to have it both ways, Palestine is supposed to be its own country and police itself. But how's that going to happen when Israel is bombing police stations?
If Israel is going to systematically dismante the Palestinean gov't, they should be allowing the Palestinieans into their society as equals.
Since they aren't doing this, nor even treating their lives as if they have value a Palestinean is left with two choices:
It's really sad. Israel didn't even have the deceny to let the people who wanted out, get out before the started blowing up schools.
Nazis did all of this on purpose, whereas the civilian deaths the IDF causes are a result of collateral damage from legitimate military targets operating from highly populated areas. This is a crucial difference.
Israel is not accidentally dropping large bombs in the middle of populated areas. The claim that all their targets are "military" is pretty weak. If that was really the case, don't you think they would allow members of the press to be present and document this? What definition of "miliary target" includes schools, police stations, universities, mosques, houses, apartment buildings and medical facilities? Does one person with an small weapon make an entire school a "military target"? Try to consider that such a defintion would make essentially all of Israel a "military target."
Do you have evidence that another possible tactic could yield better results?
Sure. If your goal is simply to mimimize Israeli civilian, Israeli military and Palestinean civilian casualties, in that order, the simplest option is to simply yield the field.
Now if your goal is to keep your borders intact and do the above, a simple option is to create a civilian-free zone in between the two countries. Shoulder-fired rockets have a pretty limited range and even mortars can't make it 10 miles. So if you clear out a 10 mile wide swath of land, your enemy will need large, non-man portable, easy to spot weapons. They also cost more, and are harder to get.
But here's the big problem, if your goal is to gradually kill off the population of and annex the land of Palestine, then you would employ exactly the strategy Isreal is using. I'm not saying that is their adgenda, but their actions are indistinuishable from the case where it is.
Every N years, you find an excuse to invade and do one of the following:
After enough years Palestine is gone. If you did it all at once then you might piss off another country enough to send troops, but if you eliminate 10% of the country every year, in 30 years 4.2% is all thats left.
If Israel would start treating all Palestineans with respect and dignity, they would make recruiting much harder for Hamas. You know, basic deceny like not blocking medical supppies to a country you are dropping bombs into.
Even if I were a soldier in the IDF, my values would still be irrelevant.
Would you allow Nazis at death camps to use the same excuse?
They took oathes too.
It doesn't matter what oathes you take, what contacts you sign, your values are ALWAYS RELEVANT. YOU ALWAYS HAVE A CHOICE. You may face imprisonment, or even death, but you can always refuse to do what someone else tells you to.
You should be ashamed of yourself for trying to compare this to Nuremberg.
Why? It's a direct comparision. That is where international law has found that "following orders" is not an excuse for immoral actions. If one wants to make this point, one HAS to bring up Nuremberg.
It may not be right, but its the only possibility.
No, it's not. Just because you may not LIKE the other options. does not mean they don't exist.
Again, the IDF has the moral high ground (what you were trying to erode with the Nuremberg reference) precisely because its targets are valid military ones,
Indiscriminate killing of civilians to hit any of these supposed "military" targets destroys any moral high ground they had.
SO what if Ariel Sharon's lawyers did their best to get him off (guilty or not - I'm not making judgments either way)?
That's funny, you seem to have no problem making value judgements regarding Palestinean leadership. This is a pretty obvious double standard.
For one, don't ever link anyone to The Guardian to prove a point. Its drivel, and vehemently anti-Israeli. The article shows massive bias, as most of their crap does.
Just because someone doesn't agree with you doesn't make them anti-Israeli. If you have proof that the facts of the article are wrong, give it. I suspect you don't.
Imagine you live in Southern California, near the border to Tijuana. All of the sudden, mortar shells start flying overhead and exploding around you and your family. The military base nearby, which is aware that these mortar strikes are coming from a school, has two choices: They can 1) bomb the school immediately, killing 30-50 Mexican civilians but ending immediately the mortar fire and resulting in no American lives lost, or 2) they can send in a strike team, causing 10 Americans (or whatever. pick a number - its irrelevant anyway.) to die but only 2 Mexicans - the two militants. Which do you suppose they choose? Which would you? Suppose that one of those 10 Americans killed was your wife? Your child? Now tell me what the military's job is, what their moral responsibility is.
I know Mexicans. I have Mexican friends. I recognize that they have just as much of a right to exist as Americans, therefore I would hope that we try to minimize the loss of civian life period, regardless of what color skin they might have.
If anyone should be ashamed, it is you for suggesting that ethnic differences should be used to place a lower value on the lives of certain memebers of society.
Yes they are. I'm questioning them. Right here, right now. You are posting in a public forum, arguing in favor of a set of actions and I am questioning your ethics for doing so.
IDF values, and should value, the lives of the citizens that it is their duty to protect over the lives of Palestinian civilians (which they are under no obligation to keep out of harm's way).
This is a direct contradiction to your claim that you value Palestinian life equally. First you claim their lives are of equal value, then you claim that it's ok for someone to treat them as if they weren't.
Your last comment is simply ignorance. Suicide bombs that purposefully target city buses?
How is this morally different than bombing family homes?
Does Israel kill an entire family when a murder takes place between two Israelis? Or do they only apply "collective responsiblity" to outsiders?
Suggesting that Hamas militants habitually target anything other than innocent civilians
I never suggested otherwise. What I DID suggest is that Israel seems to have no problems doing the same things it claims are "really bad things" when Hamas does them.
Hamas kills 10 civilians in a suicide bombing, and it's a tradgedy.
Israel kills 10 civilians with high-tech weaponry and it's okay?
That's bullshit. Stating that "It's just the soldier's job" is the same nonsense that it was at the Nuremberg trials. Soldiers are people and they are expected to refuse both immoral and illegal orders.
maybe we shouldn't vote in bloodthirsty psychos
As opposed to the Israeli leadership?
Belgium bars Sharon war crimes trial
The man who would testify against Sharon is blown up. Was this another targeted killing?
I make no claims that the Hamas leadership is a bunch of nice guys, but you may want to do some more reseach on Israel. I'm sure you can find at least as many bad things to say about Hamas, but as the saying goes:
"Two wrongs don't make a right."
The IDF has always attacked military targets
so long as the IDF can do that without endangering the lives of any Israeli citizens
This is the crux of your argument and it is why the world is outraged with Israel.
Innocent Palestineans have just as much of a right to life as innocent Israelis.
Your logic places a value of ZERO on their lives, which is why we have this genocidal madness is going on now.
Doing the right thing means taking the hard road, not killing a bunch of innocents because they happen to be in the same place at the same time and believe in the wrong god. Doing that, is exactly what the people you call terrorists do.
What do you suggest the Israeli military do in a situation where they have a danger coming from a structure that may or not house civilians?
Treat those civilians with the same respect for life that they would Israeli civilians.
That's really not a hard question to answer.
Those Palestinian civilians present in the school should have removed themselves
WHERE THE FUCK ARE THEY SUPPOSED TO GO THAT IS SAFER THAN A UN REFUGEE CAMP?
These people are trapped in a big cage, with bombs being dropped on then at any place and at any time and without warning. Isreal has provided exactly ZERO places where an unarmed civilian may go and wait this out.
There is no excuse for this type of conduct on ANY side. You have no right to label someone a terrorist when you bomb a fucking school. And the nonsense about the rocket fire is pretty stupid. If Isreal wants people to actually believe what they are saying, then they should allow the press to freely document the situation.
If all these bombings are justified, what do they have to hide?
If they actually know the names and locations of these people, then arrest them. Arresting people you don't like and putting them on trial is what makes you different from a terroist.
It depends what you use your computer for and what the password is.
Did you actually try to simulate this, like I suggested? Or are you just whining that there is some imaginary, extermely unlikely situation where it might help? The quantity of "regular" keystrokes is so much greater than the quantity of "passphrase" keystrokes, that even the less frequently used keys will not show up as a statistically significant difference in the overall distribution.
But it is not an uncertainty either.
The idea that we won't be able to come up with a single math problem that is exponentially more difficult to solve backwards than forwards seems pretty extreme for a random person on the internet to put forth in passing. If such "asymmetrical" problems do exist, then they provide a basis for a cryptographic algorithm which becomes essentialy "impossble" to crack, when used with a sufficiently long key.
If you could actually back up a claim like that, it would be a HUGE mathematical breakthough. Possibly the biggest thing since calculus. It's like saying "I have discovered a truly remarkable proof which this slashdot post is too small to contain."
What you said was like suggesting that gravity might suddenly suspend itself next Tuesday because it would be convenient for your argument.
Having re-read the article I think that the most likely explanation for the breach was the compromise of Butler's physical security during the time leading up to his arrest.
There's a good chance you're right, but I find it just as likely they simply threatened to violate his rights indefinately until he gave them the key. Kevin Mitnick was held in solitary for EIGHT MONTHS without trial until he cracked and gave them what they wanted. To date, there have been no repercussions for that.
He was once an ally, but that is irrelevant because it was not done by the NSA.
Who do you think signs the NSA's paychecks? Their priorities and funding are decided for them, by the same people who decided Saddam was an "ally."
From a military perspective, we were winning prior to the pull-out.
Clearly you live in some parallel dimension filled with revisionist history.
claim that this implies that the NSA has been trying to sabotage national security
Here a classic example of a strawman argument. Respond to an argument that we may unintentionally hurt ourselves by stating the we would never intentionally hurt ourselves.
The are plenty of plausible scenarios where the NSA might suggest a deliberately weak cryptosystem. For example, they know it will be weak only with keys not tested against criteria X. They approve the system and secretly test keys against this criteria while simultaneously exploiting our enemy's adoption of awesome "US military grade cryptography".
It is very unlikely that the US government would deliberately sabotage the encryption standard for the entire country.
Because the US Government has never done anything stupid before?
We did give Saddam Hussein the key to the city of Detroit.
How'd that Vietnam war ever turn out?
How are things in Iran these days?
No the US would never shortsightedly adopt a policy against its own interests, especially with regard to cryptography.
An appeal to authority isn't a very good argument when that authority has repeatedly show itself unable to think more than a couple years ahead.
What a load of hogwash!
analysis of keyboard wear [...] might have assisted the effort greatly
No. It would not. It's pretty simple. How many times do you type your password vs. how many times do you type some other word? Try doing some computer simulations if you don't believe me. The data will be lost in noise.
The point of encryption is not to provide absolute protection for all time against all efforts but rather to provide protection for a limited amount of time as a function of the resources of your adversary.
No. The point is to take advantage of math problems that are asymmetrically hard to solve.
The goal is to create the largest force multiplier you can. This is how crypto differs from regular security.
The perfect cipher would be simple enough for a human to compute readily on a single piece of paper while resisting the brute forcing efforts of a computer built using every atom on earth, clocked at one terahertz and running since the beginning of the universe. It's a issue of scale. The "force multiplier" effect avaible from crypto is greater than anything in the physical security world. Imagine instead that instead of working with of E = MC^2, you were working with E = C*2^M. See how it's different? The work required to brute force a key baloons very quickly.
Even the best encryption will eventually fall to a determined enough adversary with enough resources to throw at the problem.
No, actually that's not a certainty.
In order for what you said to be true there would have to be fundamental weaknesses in ever cryptographical scheme ever conceived, now or in the future.
If we find even one decent algorithm, free of shortcuts, then by using a large enough key it is possible to ensure that your data is not decoded before the death of the sun.
which sounds reasonable if government super computers were being enlisted in a distributed brute force search of the keyspace.
BASED ON WHAT? Why is months any more reasonable of a timeline to crack an unknown encryption scheme with unknown resources? Why not milliseconds? Why not millenia?
You have NO IDEA, what a reasonable time scale would be and you're just talking out your ass here.
I suppose some my consider me rude for point that out, but there are those of us who find people randomly making things up to support their argument to be rude.
Basically I think it boils down to being friendly instead of automatically treating police as the "enemy".
It might have more to do with your sex, race, ethnicity, attire and accent than any words that come our of your mouth.
How many white people in expensive suits are killed every year while reaching for their wallet?
have a lot of leeway in how they can respond to any given individual
And this a terrible thing. If doing 65 in a 55 is really a problem, then EVERYONE should get a ticket. The should be no "My cousin's a cop..." nonsense. The law should be applied to everyone equally. The lattitude afforted to police officers allows them to create a self-fulfilling stereotype regarding who is and is not a criminal.
Why is your single anecdote more powerful than the multiple anecdotes posted here? Why should your success completely obliterate any less successful result?
Rather than waste our time with your statistically insignificant sampling of terrible quality CFL's why don't you just GOOGLE IT!
And don't pull that "I've given you my experinece" nonsense, you said:
In real world usage CFL's do not last as long as incandencents.
Did it ever occur to you that compaines have already researched this issue and that information might be publicly availble on the internet?
If you're going to claim that an entire industry is wrong, then extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. You are providing none. What models of bulbs? How many? What was the MTBF? Under what conditions?
You opened your mouth and made a statement regarding the lifespan of ALL CFL lights that is in direct contradiction to the established facts. Now you can't seem to admit to it. Instead you're resorting to ad-hominem attacks.
I have an inherently hard time believing they are really doing all that much good for the environment at this point,
So why don't you show us some numbers to back up your argument?
I double dog dare you.
This is the type of half-assed, seat of the pants reasoning that lead people to believe the earth was flat.
IF YOU THINK YOU ACTUALLY KNOW SOMETHING THE REST OF US DON'T KNOW THEN STEP UP AND MAKE SOME *SPECIFIC* STATEMENTS THAT ARE POSSIBLE TO DISPROVE.
Compact flourescents are not bleeding-edge technology. There is a wealth of information already available on this subject. Are you challenging some specific claim that has been made? Or are you simply refusing to connect the dots using basic logic? That CFLs are better for the environment is generally accepted not because of some vast underground conspiracy, but rather because the numbers plainly illustrate this.
Not quite true.... No, its not perfect security, but it does raise the bar.
I does not raise the bar to any degree worth talking about. A competent programmer can parse the page an pass it on with almost zero effort compared to that involved in the rest of the attack.
Setting up the database to store the passwords is hard than something that basic.
I'd like to see your economics credentials since you still haven't acknoledged what the law of diminishing returns actually means.
You made a clear obvious error here and you refuse to admit it or even respond with your own source.
Your post did nothing to advance discourse.
It is not possible to advance the discourse.
The beliefs he's ridiculing are based on pure, blind FAITH.
It's the same basis that suicide bombers use to support their actions, that was used to justfiy the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition.
The is no such thing as a rational discourse here because these people are not rational.
All you can do is make it blindingly obivous to the people that are not 100% locked into an arbitrary belief system, that beliefs based on nothing more than faith are fundamentally flawed and not worthy of respect.
These people admit up front that nothing you say can change their mind because god told them the "truth".
The idea of "keeping the discouse at a high level" is really just a smoke screen for actually saying, "Let's not challenge these peoples belief system by pointing out the obvious logical flaws and inconsistencies."
If I believed that whites were genetically superior to blacks, people would criticize, ridicule and ostracize me. This is a natural, rational response to the problem. My irrational, arbitray beliefs have a negative impact on society and society is actively seeking to discourage them. Although I would be allowed to hold these beliefs, the rest of society is not obligated to treat them as anything more than utter bullshit. (People with those beliefs can still be treated with respect, but an idea must stand on its merits.)
The idea that just because someone somewhere believes something, we have to treat it as a well-founded legitimate proposition is one of the biggest tradgedies in our educational system today, both at the high school and college levels.
Your repsonses have been very dishonest.
It you choose to be ignorant, that is your decision.
I've tried to educate you, but you refuse to acknowedge a single point, even when you were clearly misinterpreting the law of diminishing returns.
You have yet to show how it is simply not possible for a rich kid to do nothing and live off his inheritance.
You choose instead to pose a bunch of strawman arguments and beat around the bush, but you simply are unable to address the fundamental issue.
Sarcasm and misdirection are not a substitue for reason.
You've missed the point. This is a discussion regarding inheritance. See my first post here.
There are many people who are rich because their parents were rich.
It is possible for a person to be rich, not because the personally have contributed anything to society, but because their parents were rich, and their parent before them, etc.
Your arguments simply ignore this.
I would love to know of an investment in which I can put my money and be guaranteed a steady return for the rest of my life, my children's lives, my grandchildren's lives...
What you've done here is a classic straw-man argument.
I never argued that there was somewhere you could put your money where it would make money for all eternity.
What I argued is that it is possible for a person to live off interest essentially indefinately. There is no specific mechanism that guarantees this person will run out of money.
When the sun burns out, I'm sure all earth-based investment are going in the crapper, but for practical purposes right now, a person can take a big chunk of money, place it in investments and do nothing useful to society for the rest of their life.
The only alternatives to my assertion, that the rich are more productive than the poor, are luck and malice.
As much as you want to believe that, it's not actually true.
That statment would require that capitial itself cannot generate money, which would require the interest rate to be zero.
The reason you're modded flamebait is that your views are both offensive and poorly backed up with anything resembling a rational argument. You'd *like* to believe certain things, but you are unable to respond to the obvious arguments against your key assumptions. Your statement regarding luck and malice is nothing less than intellectual dishonesty. A rational person thinking for two minutes can come up with additonal alternatives.
Nope, you're wrong. Its called the Law of Diminishing Returns. Overtime any investment in anything will minish to zero as the product or service becomes a commodity.
#1 This does not appy in this situation, since it requires a stipulation that all money has to be invested in a specific service. This law does not guarantee that a managed portfoio of assets, owned by a useless billionare, will disapper.
#2 Your interpretation of this law does not match wikipedia's description.
"In economics, diminishing returns is also called diminishing marginal returns or the law of diminishing returns. According to this relationship, in a production system with fixed and variable inputs (say factory size and labor), beyond some point, each additional unit of variable input yields less and less output."
To translate:
Each additional unit of investment yields a smaller amount of return than the previous unit.
This statement is nothing at all like what you claim, which is that a fixed investment is guaranteed over time to lose money.
What you were actually arguing is the "Tendency of the rate of profit to fall" hypothesis.
This argument is far from being a well-tested, widely-accepted law of economics.
If you collect checks for no work, and create no value to society, those checks will eventually stop
No, actually they don't. You keep can keep collecting interest checks and dividends indefinately. You don't have to do any work.
So all of this money you collect, you just sit there with it?
You don't get it.
Yes I have money I can spend on a 100 foot mega-yach that otherwise could have paid for 1,000 people's college educations. Yes that will "create jobs".
The thing you just don't comprehend is that I never created any wealth to get that money. Someone else did all the work. I never even managed anything, I just collect checks.
This is money that someone else had to earn, but that goes to me. If it didn't go to me, it could go to the gov't or to the guy who created the wealth in the first place. The money going to me is a de-motivator for the people who actually drive the economy.
The thing you haven't shown is that I would do something that is any better for the economy than any or person or the gov't. Your theorizing is all trickle-down economics. Rich people aren't rich because the give their money away in order to stimulate the economy. Rich people horde their money and use it as a tool to get more money. As more and more money is sucked out of the working class, the reward for actually doing work becomes less and less. Everyone then suffers. While college educations for 1000 people would have employed as least as many people as building my mega-yacht, it has far reaching positive impacts into the future as opposted to my yacht which is just a rich man's toy.
The real problem is the granularity of many bills is too large. That is NOT Obie's fault. You have to vote Yes or No on a big blob of stuff.
He's still responsible for his actions. I don't care if the rest of the bill was giving away gold-plated Ferrari's the immunity was BS.
the relationship between the immunity portion of the bill and employees misbehaving is slim to none
No, actually it's really simple. If I don't have a right to privacy on my telephone, he shouldn't either. I pay the man's salary after all. If anyone is giving up their constitutional protections it should be him. He doesn't seem to think they're that important after all, so it's seems silly to spend effort protecting them for him.