And in the somewhat further future: people trading tiny Memory Cards in the 100+ terabyte range with entire collections of movies/music on them, more than they'd ever watch/listen in their lifetime.
A return to sneakernet may well be the future. I remember going in to school with a bag full of 90 minute cassettes with pirated albums on them; this being the heyday of Britpop. People swapped, duplicated them - which involved swapping tapes and copying across in real time - and swapped them on again. That school, and I'm sure every other school across the country, was a hub of juvenile music piracy. And occasionally we'd trade boxes of floppies containing the likes of Doom or Duke Nukem 3D, zip archives spanned across a dozen disks and there'd always be a sodding read error on disk 7.
Time goes by, and today my sister goes to the same school. She carries with her a communications device capable of storing as much data as, oh... two thousand floppies? And capable of communicating wirelessly with any similar such device within range and transmitting any file it has stored. In my day something like that was Star Trek material. Nowadays, it's 'the old mobile I passed on to her after I upgraded'. Bluetooth and mp3: a combination we could never have dreamed of. And that's before you count how much music is being traded by passing USB sticks around in the computer lab. USB sticks! I just ran a quick test: seven Blur albums from my PC to the USB stick on my keyring, several of which I remember first obtaining on the schoolyard tape swapping market. It took 31 seconds. To duplicate that much music in the old days would have taken at least as long as to play it - something like six and a half hours. A speedup by a factor of 750.
They'll never get this genie back in the bottle. Our generation found Napster when we got to university and got hold of high-speed internet connections, and we promptly forgot how to pay for music. The next generation thinks it laughable. Tell them how hard we had it, how much sheer hard work was involved in piracy in our day, how much a sack of cassettes equal to that 4GB USB stick actually weighed to carry to school, how much a pack of blank tapes cost out of your pocket money - well, they just won't believe you. Music to them is as free and as weightless as the air. Oh, someone somewhere had to buy a CD, but as soon as they did, they ripped it and then everybody had it. The classic model of music selling is dead and buried at a crossroads with a stake through its heart and its head cut off and thrown into the sea. This generation will never see music as something to buy.
Anyone with an account on the private tracker that is, or have you never heard of private sites?
Private trackers, yeah... or maybe even an account on the secret elite ratio FTP server, yeah? Brilliant solution. That's exactly what they want. Piracy put back in a box, among a minority who only let in the most trusted outsiders who they're sure aren't record company stooges. The way it used to be. The whole problem post-Napster was that piracy became mainstream, that anybody could easily get hold of what they wanted without having to be invited in by a member of some secret speakeasy.
Not a panacea, unfortunately. Suppose I connect to a torrent, and begin downloading. My communication with the tracker site is done via SSL. My communications with all peers are also encrypted. Nobody can tell what I'm doing, right?
Well, er... not quite. Anybody can connect to the same torrent, and they can connect to peers as well. Then all they have to do is nslookup the IP numbers, identify the ISP, and then with the ISP's cooperation they can get my personal details.
You could use systems like Freenet to get deniability in this matter, but that's still pretty slow. And you might not be happy about the high statistical likelihood that your computer will be serving cp.
Compromise. Just put an added pull-down option (up next to the ABP icon) that simply says "View Ads on this page", and a "Remember this choice" checkbox.
OK, you see that big red stop-sign icon at the top right? See the little down-arrow to the right of it? Click on that. See how it drops down a menu?
Now, see where it says 'Disable on tech.slashdot.org'? That will disable Adblock Plus on all pages served from tech.slashdot.org. Handy, eh? You can even call up that menu from the main page and then it says 'Disable on slashdot.org' so you can enable ads across the whole site!
Then, whenever you're on a site where the ads are not being blocked, the red stop-sign icon turns into a green go-sign, and the ads appear. Easy!
I was using adblock anyway but this removes the blank space
What blank space? Just to test, I went back to the front page, found that I had the same option available, and clicked it. Then refreshed to see what changed. Result? Nothing. The layout is identical, both before and after. ABP was tidying away any blank space just fine.
Can't it be assumed by virtue of the ads being placed on the site to begin with that the owner wishes they be shown?
I imagine it can be so assumed. And can it not also be assumed by virtue of Adblock Plus being loaded into a browser that the owner does not intend to grant that wish?
I don't see the point of this at all. Adblock Plus asks me if I want it to display ads? Well... no. No I don't. That's why I installed Adblock Plus in the first place. The clue's in the name. My answer will be no, every single time. If it was ever going to be yes, I would have whitelisted the site myself already.
War is genocide, plain and simple. If someone is looking to destroy me and everyone that looks, talks and walks like me, there is no piece of paper in the world that will protect them from my wrath.
That's not usually the objective of war. War with intent to exterminate the enemy population is uncommon. More usually, war is fought as a result of disputes over land or resources. Your ideal outcome in such a war is that the territory in dispute is seized and becomes firmly yours, and that you are then able to agree a peace treaty with the enemy that recognises this state of affairs and prevents further wasteful violence. The enemy's ideal outcome is exactly the same, except that he ends up in control of the disputed territory.
In such a war it makes sense for both sides to observe rules of conduct with regard to civilians, prisoners of war, and so forth. They expect the war to end relatively soon, and afterwards they expect to have to live as reasonably good neighbours, so committing gross atrocities is a major long-term negative.
Now, since you're speaking English and arguing in favour of extreme belligerence and unrestrained violence, I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you're American. Let me now point out that right now there is only one country on earth capable of destroying all the Americans and that country is Russia. They have absolutely no interest in doing anything of the sort. There are also large stockpiles of WMDs, along with delivery mechanisms that can reach the USA, in Britain, France and China. None of these nations have any particular intention of blowing up America either. So I'm not sure who it is that you're afraid of, but if you can identify this genocidal bogeyman then I'm sure it would be most illuminating.
Although Britain is planning to replace the Trident missile system, the warheads to be loaded onto the new missiles would be the same old ones, so this would not involve any new production of fissile materials. Same probably goes for France. I imagine it would be possible to write Sellafield a large cheque and have a lot of Pu-238 prepared specifically for space applications - God knows there are enough radioactives stacked up there already, it's not like there's a shortage of raw materials - but it would be fantastically expensive, and would be a political nightmare.
What's wrong with buying it in from Russia anyway? Are they really running so short? I understand the Russian landscape is littered with disused RTGs, to the extent that they have a minor problem with thieves looting the metals from the casings, and promptly dropping dead of radiation poisoning. Unmanned fixtures, lighthouses, communications relays, that kind of thing. Mostly old Soviet relics slowly rusting to bits. But the radioactives should still be there, and still hot. There must be enough to keep the world in spaceprobe RTGs for decades.
It seems to assume that there are no slayers. Introduce something that kills off vampires in substantial numbers and the population dynamics change substantially, to the extent that a stable equilibrium can be achieved.
Of course even that only works for the model scenario of one small town in California. For a global solution you'd need large numbers of slayers distributed worldwide. But that shouldn't be a problem. I mean, nobody would be fool enough to set up a vampire-control organisation with only one slayer, right?
Ah yes, but the $80,000 goes to the butler, while most of the profit from the Rolex goes to the very wealthy people holding shares of the Rolex corp.
And to the pension funds. There are an awful lot of institutions investing huge sums of money in the markets, which represents the collective retirement savings of a vast number of regular Joes. They get their cut of the Rolex profits too.
My understanding of the whole affair is this. The UK Government planned a UK law to create an uber communications database. At the same time similar laws have been going through the EU, which have now been passed, so all UK (EU) ISP's have to create uber communications databases. So there is no need now for a specific UK law to create an uber communications database, so we have dropped plans for the specific UK law, as we now have an EU law. And the media reported this as a major back down from the government last week (WTF)
You're missing the real trick here. The EU law has typically been proposed and pushed through by UK representatives and their allies. Nobody from the press is watching, since events in Brussels are boring and mostly involve foreign people. Then once the EU law has been passed, the government implement in the UK what they'd wanted to do all along, and when called on it by the media they say 'Nothing to do with us: European law, we're obliged by treaty to implement it. Blame Brussels. Their fault.' Then the reactionary tabloids go away and whine once more about how these foreigners are trampling ancient British liberties.
And people wonder why the British are so ambivalent about the whole European project.
"Until quite recently, spider silk had the highest tensile strength of any substance known to man, and the name Silksteel pays homage to the arachnid for good reason."
-- Commissioner Pravin Lal, U.N. Scientific Survey, on the discovery of Silksteel Alloys
personally, i do not support complete abolishment of copyright. i believe the pirateparty program of 5 years and no restrictions on personal use is very, very reasonable. i would even support a slightly extended period of 14 years, which i have seen as an optimal lenght, coming out from some studies.
Five years seems quite short. No author would ever again earn money from selling the right to make a movie adaptation, because the studios would simply wait out the five years. Then again, no film studio would ever publish DVDs of their movies - why would they, when any rival could pirate them freely and without consequence? Instead, they would maintain a physical monopoly on copies of their films, and see to it that they aired only in cinemas, where they could still get a cut.
Copyright has a role in bringing new material into the culture. People need this incentive, and it's fair to give them the chance to earn money on it for a time. But I've never seen why a copyright should last so much longer than a patent does. If I invent a new kind of useful device, I can monopolise its reproduction for twenty years, after which anybody can copy my design and make their own. If I write a new song, I can monopolise its reproduction for all my life, then my successors can monopolise it for most of the following century, before anybody else gets to copy it for themselves. This I do not understand.
Had Hitler not been imprisoned and seemingly "martyred" for his beliefs
Er... as I recall, he was imprisoned not for his beliefs, but for acting on them. Specifically, for trying to take over the city of Munich by force of arms at the head of a gang of thugs. I don't know of any jurisdictions in which that kind of behaviour is considered acceptable.
Great. So Ubuntu works if it's accompanied with personal hand-holding from a dedicated and highly knowledgeable guru. That should scale well.
This in a market where there's already an entire industry based on charging a fee for picking off enough of the resident malware to keep a Windows install limping along for another six months or so, and users are convinced that it's just normal for computers to get really slow and crash a lot after a few years? Yeah. I'd say it'll scale just fine.
It is a part of our cultural heritage only because Tolkien chose to create it and to publish it --- on his own terms.
Then again, its position as a major part of our cultural heritage is in quite some part because pirate publishers in the US printed it without Tolkien's permission, following a tradition of American respect for copyrights going back at least to Dickens; the first paperback edition was entirely unauthorised. And cheap.
As a result it became hugely popular over there in the 1960s - the reason for a generation of hippie children called things like Pippin Galadriel Moonchild, and graffiti all over the place saying FRODO LIVES. Without that it would likely be a much more obscure work to this day.
You've got the wrong idea of what constitutes cyber-torture. Drowning a motherboard is a waste of time. So you've captured an unlawful cyber-combatant? Right. Begin with the following: Goatse, Tubgirl, Pain Series, Last Measure, 2girls1cup, 3guys1hammer.
Once they've been softened up by those horrors, you bring out their computer which you seized earlier. You set it up in front of them. Then you reach into your bag and pull out a Windows ME install CD.
After the election which took place as normal. Every member of parliament gets a vote that is proportionate to the number of constituents that are eligible to vote.
Everyone who is eligible to vote can change who represents them to any of the sitting MPs, once every 3 moths or so. This takes a vote away from their MP and gives it to the MP they want to have it. (Suggest that libraries are used for this purpose).
Then you end up with two or three popular celebrity MPs having all the votes, and 600 backbenchers with no influence whatever. That's even worse than the position we're in now: autocratic though the Prime Minister might be, and thoroughly whipped though his party may be, he's still vulnerable to a backbench rebellion if he tries something particularly stupid. This way, if one MP ever finds himself in control of a simple majority of the nation's votes, he's the dictator.
I'd be really suprised if there are any devs out there who could actually put out a game in which you would, by definition, be killing american troops.
I gotta admit, though, it doesn't sound like it would make much of a game: paying off tribal leaders and local politicos to do what they should have been doing to begin with, which is keeping the AQI out of their neighborhood. How would the multiplayer work?
Implement it as strategy rather than as an FPS. The players are all Iraqi political factions. They take payoffs from the American occupation for maintaining a reasonable level of public order in their territories, and they get bounties for handing over al-Qa'eda members to be sent to Cuba (note: it should be possible to hand over pretty much anybody at all and just say they were in al-Qa'eda, but this may lead to consequences when after three years of robust interrogation the Americans finally realise they've been sold a fake). With these payoffs they buy arms and train men, they bribe key members of the collaborationist Iraqi administration, they infiltrate the police and public services, they use the influence thus gained to curry favour with the population at large, and they organise terror attacks on their opponents' patches - the more trouble they cause in other people's territories, the lower the keeping-order payments are to those players. But don't overdo it because an all-out turf war will ruin both sides' income and may even provoke American intervention in force. al-Qa'eda themselves are barbarians who will commit random attacks at any location; instead of funding from the Americans, they earn publicity by pulling off terrorist spectaculars which inspire young hotheads across the Middle East to rally to their cause. For them, the more chaos on al-Jazeera's nightly bulletins the better.
The object of the game is to be the best placed faction to seize power in a coup d'etat at the end of the game, let's say when the Americans withdraw in... call it 2012.
How about we make a game out of 911; Lets see who can hit the tower and knock it down make sure that people are thrown out or jump from the towers. Sounds fun doesn't it.
You could publish it as a boxset with that game where you shoot JFK.
And now you come to mention it, I wonder how many copies of Microsoft Flight Simulator got fired up on September 12th 2001 by people itching to have a ghoulish laugh as they re-enacted the terrorist spectacular of the previous day?
If you let your country be taken over by foreign interests, the enemies of those foreign interests become YOUR enemies as well, and voila, terrorism.
So, what, you reckon that if we declare independence from the USA and start making our own foreign policy again, then the Muslim terrorists will leave us alone? Well, I suppose it might work. Has something of an air of cowardice about it, mind. Leaving because we're sick to death of going off to pointless wars just so the Prime Minister can get applauded in Washington and the President can use the word 'coalition' and not sound like quite such a unilateral warmonger, that would be reasonable. Leaving because we're scared of oh no the terrorists!, that's pretty feeble.
Slashdot Mirror
A return to sneakernet may well be the future. I remember going in to school with a bag full of 90 minute cassettes with pirated albums on them; this being the heyday of Britpop. People swapped, duplicated them - which involved swapping tapes and copying across in real time - and swapped them on again. That school, and I'm sure every other school across the country, was a hub of juvenile music piracy. And occasionally we'd trade boxes of floppies containing the likes of Doom or Duke Nukem 3D, zip archives spanned across a dozen disks and there'd always be a sodding read error on disk 7.
Time goes by, and today my sister goes to the same school. She carries with her a communications device capable of storing as much data as, oh... two thousand floppies? And capable of communicating wirelessly with any similar such device within range and transmitting any file it has stored. In my day something like that was Star Trek material. Nowadays, it's 'the old mobile I passed on to her after I upgraded'. Bluetooth and mp3: a combination we could never have dreamed of. And that's before you count how much music is being traded by passing USB sticks around in the computer lab. USB sticks! I just ran a quick test: seven Blur albums from my PC to the USB stick on my keyring, several of which I remember first obtaining on the schoolyard tape swapping market. It took 31 seconds. To duplicate that much music in the old days would have taken at least as long as to play it - something like six and a half hours. A speedup by a factor of 750.
They'll never get this genie back in the bottle. Our generation found Napster when we got to university and got hold of high-speed internet connections, and we promptly forgot how to pay for music. The next generation thinks it laughable. Tell them how hard we had it, how much sheer hard work was involved in piracy in our day, how much a sack of cassettes equal to that 4GB USB stick actually weighed to carry to school, how much a pack of blank tapes cost out of your pocket money - well, they just won't believe you. Music to them is as free and as weightless as the air. Oh, someone somewhere had to buy a CD, but as soon as they did, they ripped it and then everybody had it. The classic model of music selling is dead and buried at a crossroads with a stake through its heart and its head cut off and thrown into the sea. This generation will never see music as something to buy.
Private trackers, yeah... or maybe even an account on the secret elite ratio FTP server, yeah? Brilliant solution. That's exactly what they want. Piracy put back in a box, among a minority who only let in the most trusted outsiders who they're sure aren't record company stooges. The way it used to be. The whole problem post-Napster was that piracy became mainstream, that anybody could easily get hold of what they wanted without having to be invited in by a member of some secret speakeasy.
Did you catch the bit in the title where it said 'UK'? You know what the 'K' stands for, right? Kingdom, as in 'not a republic'.
Not a panacea, unfortunately. Suppose I connect to a torrent, and begin downloading. My communication with the tracker site is done via SSL. My communications with all peers are also encrypted. Nobody can tell what I'm doing, right?
Well, er... not quite. Anybody can connect to the same torrent, and they can connect to peers as well. Then all they have to do is nslookup the IP numbers, identify the ISP, and then with the ISP's cooperation they can get my personal details.
You could use systems like Freenet to get deniability in this matter, but that's still pretty slow. And you might not be happy about the high statistical likelihood that your computer will be serving cp.
OK, you see that big red stop-sign icon at the top right? See the little down-arrow to the right of it? Click on that. See how it drops down a menu?
Now, see where it says 'Disable on tech.slashdot.org'? That will disable Adblock Plus on all pages served from tech.slashdot.org. Handy, eh? You can even call up that menu from the main page and then it says 'Disable on slashdot.org' so you can enable ads across the whole site!
Then, whenever you're on a site where the ads are not being blocked, the red stop-sign icon turns into a green go-sign, and the ads appear. Easy!
What blank space? Just to test, I went back to the front page, found that I had the same option available, and clicked it. Then refreshed to see what changed. Result? Nothing. The layout is identical, both before and after. ABP was tidying away any blank space just fine.
I imagine it can be so assumed. And can it not also be assumed by virtue of Adblock Plus being loaded into a browser that the owner does not intend to grant that wish?
I don't see the point of this at all. Adblock Plus asks me if I want it to display ads? Well... no. No I don't. That's why I installed Adblock Plus in the first place. The clue's in the name. My answer will be no, every single time. If it was ever going to be yes, I would have whitelisted the site myself already.
That's not usually the objective of war. War with intent to exterminate the enemy population is uncommon. More usually, war is fought as a result of disputes over land or resources. Your ideal outcome in such a war is that the territory in dispute is seized and becomes firmly yours, and that you are then able to agree a peace treaty with the enemy that recognises this state of affairs and prevents further wasteful violence. The enemy's ideal outcome is exactly the same, except that he ends up in control of the disputed territory.
In such a war it makes sense for both sides to observe rules of conduct with regard to civilians, prisoners of war, and so forth. They expect the war to end relatively soon, and afterwards they expect to have to live as reasonably good neighbours, so committing gross atrocities is a major long-term negative.
Now, since you're speaking English and arguing in favour of extreme belligerence and unrestrained violence, I'm going to go out on a limb and assume you're American. Let me now point out that right now there is only one country on earth capable of destroying all the Americans and that country is Russia. They have absolutely no interest in doing anything of the sort. There are also large stockpiles of WMDs, along with delivery mechanisms that can reach the USA, in Britain, France and China. None of these nations have any particular intention of blowing up America either. So I'm not sure who it is that you're afraid of, but if you can identify this genocidal bogeyman then I'm sure it would be most illuminating.
What's wrong with buying it in from Russia anyway? Are they really running so short? I understand the Russian landscape is littered with disused RTGs, to the extent that they have a minor problem with thieves looting the metals from the casings, and promptly dropping dead of radiation poisoning. Unmanned fixtures, lighthouses, communications relays, that kind of thing. Mostly old Soviet relics slowly rusting to bits. But the radioactives should still be there, and still hot. There must be enough to keep the world in spaceprobe RTGs for decades.
Of course even that only works for the model scenario of one small town in California. For a global solution you'd need large numbers of slayers distributed worldwide. But that shouldn't be a problem. I mean, nobody would be fool enough to set up a vampire-control organisation with only one slayer, right?
Right?
And to the pension funds. There are an awful lot of institutions investing huge sums of money in the markets, which represents the collective retirement savings of a vast number of regular Joes. They get their cut of the Rolex profits too.
You're missing the real trick here. The EU law has typically been proposed and pushed through by UK representatives and their allies. Nobody from the press is watching, since events in Brussels are boring and mostly involve foreign people. Then once the EU law has been passed, the government implement in the UK what they'd wanted to do all along, and when called on it by the media they say 'Nothing to do with us: European law, we're obliged by treaty to implement it. Blame Brussels. Their fault.' Then the reactionary tabloids go away and whine once more about how these foreigners are trampling ancient British liberties.
And people wonder why the British are so ambivalent about the whole European project.
"Until quite recently, spider silk had the highest tensile strength of any substance known to man, and the name Silksteel pays homage to the arachnid for good reason." -- Commissioner Pravin Lal, U.N. Scientific Survey, on the discovery of Silksteel Alloys
Five years seems quite short. No author would ever again earn money from selling the right to make a movie adaptation, because the studios would simply wait out the five years. Then again, no film studio would ever publish DVDs of their movies - why would they, when any rival could pirate them freely and without consequence? Instead, they would maintain a physical monopoly on copies of their films, and see to it that they aired only in cinemas, where they could still get a cut.
Copyright has a role in bringing new material into the culture. People need this incentive, and it's fair to give them the chance to earn money on it for a time. But I've never seen why a copyright should last so much longer than a patent does. If I invent a new kind of useful device, I can monopolise its reproduction for twenty years, after which anybody can copy my design and make their own. If I write a new song, I can monopolise its reproduction for all my life, then my successors can monopolise it for most of the following century, before anybody else gets to copy it for themselves. This I do not understand.
Er... as I recall, he was imprisoned not for his beliefs, but for acting on them. Specifically, for trying to take over the city of Munich by force of arms at the head of a gang of thugs. I don't know of any jurisdictions in which that kind of behaviour is considered acceptable.
This in a market where there's already an entire industry based on charging a fee for picking off enough of the resident malware to keep a Windows install limping along for another six months or so, and users are convinced that it's just normal for computers to get really slow and crash a lot after a few years? Yeah. I'd say it'll scale just fine.
Last week I stole £300 by betting on the horses.
Then again, its position as a major part of our cultural heritage is in quite some part because pirate publishers in the US printed it without Tolkien's permission, following a tradition of American respect for copyrights going back at least to Dickens; the first paperback edition was entirely unauthorised. And cheap.
As a result it became hugely popular over there in the 1960s - the reason for a generation of hippie children called things like Pippin Galadriel Moonchild, and graffiti all over the place saying FRODO LIVES. Without that it would likely be a much more obscure work to this day.
Once they've been softened up by those horrors, you bring out their computer which you seized earlier. You set it up in front of them. Then you reach into your bag and pull out a Windows ME install CD.
They'll be begging for mercy in seconds.
Then you end up with two or three popular celebrity MPs having all the votes, and 600 backbenchers with no influence whatever. That's even worse than the position we're in now: autocratic though the Prime Minister might be, and thoroughly whipped though his party may be, he's still vulnerable to a backbench rebellion if he tries something particularly stupid. This way, if one MP ever finds himself in control of a simple majority of the nation's votes, he's the dictator.
Sid Meier's Gettysburg?
Implement it as strategy rather than as an FPS. The players are all Iraqi political factions. They take payoffs from the American occupation for maintaining a reasonable level of public order in their territories, and they get bounties for handing over al-Qa'eda members to be sent to Cuba (note: it should be possible to hand over pretty much anybody at all and just say they were in al-Qa'eda, but this may lead to consequences when after three years of robust interrogation the Americans finally realise they've been sold a fake). With these payoffs they buy arms and train men, they bribe key members of the collaborationist Iraqi administration, they infiltrate the police and public services, they use the influence thus gained to curry favour with the population at large, and they organise terror attacks on their opponents' patches - the more trouble they cause in other people's territories, the lower the keeping-order payments are to those players. But don't overdo it because an all-out turf war will ruin both sides' income and may even provoke American intervention in force. al-Qa'eda themselves are barbarians who will commit random attacks at any location; instead of funding from the Americans, they earn publicity by pulling off terrorist spectaculars which inspire young hotheads across the Middle East to rally to their cause. For them, the more chaos on al-Jazeera's nightly bulletins the better.
The object of the game is to be the best placed faction to seize power in a coup d'etat at the end of the game, let's say when the Americans withdraw in... call it 2012.
You could publish it as a boxset with that game where you shoot JFK.
And now you come to mention it, I wonder how many copies of Microsoft Flight Simulator got fired up on September 12th 2001 by people itching to have a ghoulish laugh as they re-enacted the terrorist spectacular of the previous day?
You've never seen the aquarium in the penthouse at Blofeld Towers, have you?
So, what, you reckon that if we declare independence from the USA and start making our own foreign policy again, then the Muslim terrorists will leave us alone? Well, I suppose it might work. Has something of an air of cowardice about it, mind. Leaving because we're sick to death of going off to pointless wars just so the Prime Minister can get applauded in Washington and the President can use the word 'coalition' and not sound like quite such a unilateral warmonger, that would be reasonable. Leaving because we're scared of oh no the terrorists!, that's pretty feeble.