Yes I have now read the article, it does contain information that I have not previously seen, I did some researh into the Anfal Pogrom quite some time ago and the information I was able to find was quite different from that in the article.
Obviously a CIA analyst has access to far better information than I have (or at least should have), it has been quite some time since I last did the search so it will take some time to dig up anything to refute it (if it is indeed possible to do so).
Moving On:
Yes I am fully aware of the lies that have been told down the years, (btw, I thought the Kuwaiti babies story was actually produced and presented by the Kuwaiti Royal Family not the US Government?), I am also aware of the other incidents you mentioned, for the record, I was not a supporter of the war against Iraq, I believed and still believed that it was illegal under the UN Charter, I believe that the WMD's and links to terrorism were convenient excuses to use to forward US political policies.
That being said, I am more than happy that Saddam has been caught, I hope that he will be brought to justice in front of an independent and Internationally Recognised Court of Law for the Crimes that he did commit during his years in power.
Hmmm
Most of the evidence supporting the 45 minute claim was "rubbished" by the experts of the British Intelligence Services, a number of whom gave reports to the Hutton Enquiry (into the death of Dr Kelly).
Yes, I am aware of the recent story in the Telegraph, however I am not sure that it adds _any_ creditability to the 45 minute claims...
Iraq used both chemical and biological weapons against the Kurdish people during the Anfal Pogroms (mostly) between 1987 and 1989. It is a well documented fact about the Iraqi Anfal Pogrom, it had no relation to activities in the Iran / Iraq war.
To the best of my knowledge the British Empire's War Debt was not erased. Rationing was still in effect for certain items until at least 1953 as it paid off war debts from the Lend Lease Act and also paid towards the reconstruction in Europe.
I think you need to look at the effect that the money from the British Empire had on the US Economy, both prior to and after the Lend Lease Act. The British Empire had to increase the number of exports substantially as it converted more of its manufacturing base to a war footing. The British Empire was at that time the richest Empire in the world and it practically bankrupted itself to finance the war. Huge amounts of monetary reserves were signed over to the US as were a number of key patents.
As a side note, the British Empire wasn't putting much into the war machine prior to the summer of 1939. Like most of Europe it believed another war was inconceivable given the huge cost in lives of the previous war.
" Tariffs are being removed because of economic pressure..."
Correct, Economic Pressure from the US's trading partners, in particular the European Union.
The EU were threatening to increase tarriffs against a number of US imports, the specific imports were chosen as they came from states that were marginal in the last Presidential election.
" Do you have faith in those counting all those paper ballots? Why? (not a rhetorical question)"
Hmmm
Do you need to have faith in _every_ person that is counting the ballots?
When electoral fraud happens it does not tend to be the ballot counters that commit the crime, the fraud tends to happen before the ballot papers get to the counting stations (either arriving at the original ballot stations with votes already in them or arriving at the counting station after being either being switched for a pre-filled box or the original box opened and votes removed / added.
So generally speaking you can have faith in those counting the ballot papers because it would need a significant proportion of the counters to be in on the fraud for them to sway the count, at which point it usually becomes apparent that the fraud is happening.
"This is a good thing. Windows messenger is not used by the bulk of the AOL userbase except to receive spam."
A better way would be to have AOL put together a page explaining the problem and providing the user with a script to run to change the settings (after confirmation dialog asking if they are sure they want to make the changes).
Making changes to a users system without getting explicit permission opens up a whole can of nasty worms.
What happens if the changes they make hose your system? What happens if the changes they make break one of more custom applications that you require?
What happens if the company decides that it wants to monitor all of your activity so it installs spyware on your system? What happens if the company decides they want to lock you into only using approved applications (theirs)?
"And seriously, even if you need to reboot, if your computers are fast, it takes what, 30 seconds? less?"
It normally takes a server more than 30 seconds to shutdown cleanly after a patch. It can take considerably longer than that depending on the function of the server being patched, for instance an Exchange or SQL server will take *much* longer than 30 seconds to go down.
It can easily take upwards of 30 seconds just to do a Power On Self Test on larger servers (the main bulk of the time spent initialising the SCSII array controller & disks).
It certainly takes more than 30 seconds to reboot to a state where the OS & all dependent services have been fully loaded, again in the case of Exchange & SQL it will be considerably longer than 30 seconds.
"It takes me about 1 minutes to patch my single xp machine, so well generously give it 5 minutes if it's a whole bunch of machines."
Define a "whole bunch of machines", are you talking 10, 50, 100, 1000?
You cannot scale the time it takes to patch multiple systems just by comparing how long it takes you to patch your 1 system. There are a number of bottlenecks to take into consideration:
1) Network Speed / Saturation. Sending out a small patch to a lot of computers or a large patch to a small number of computers can cause your network to crawl even in a fully switched evironment.
2) Patch Server processor ultilisation. Both number of computers connecting and patch size have a bearing on how well your server will cope.
"So, I generously estimate 16 minutes it should take to patch a network of windows boxen with the latest fix."
I really do wish it was that easy to patch so many systems.
"It's well known that MS uses Unix stuff in it's operating systems - the BSD TCP/IP stack for instance"
Are you implying that Microsoft is paying License fees to SCO for its use of BSD code? Or is it the case that you cannot come up with a clearer example of what MS would be paying license fees to SCO for?
Yes that is indeed an issue that would have to be addressed, then again unless the person is an expert at editing it will be apparent the first time it is examined that it has been tampered with.
Let us not forget that plenty of innocent people have been wrongly convicted due to being framed by the authorities.
"This is why DRM just wont work. You only need one guy/girl/geek in some country to get past the DRM and it can be all over the net in a few hours."
Totally agree with you, I tend to think of it as co-operative content management, by this I mean that it takes *everyone* to co-operate and not try to bypass the security mechanisms for it to work, and how likely is that?
Of course the RIAA and friends could up the ante, they could use their bought representatives to force laws making it illegal to *not* have DRM software in an OS.
'There is no way they can disable the shift key to make it not by-pass the auto-run "feature"'
Why? Autorun (in both its states) is a feature of the windows operating system, therefore the behavior of autorun can be altered at any time by Microsoft through an OS patch.
How I would see this happening:
The RIAA and other DRM interested parties would agree to use a standard data block to indicate that the media was protected by DRM.
The DRM datablock would be wrote to the media at a consistent place (somewhere on the tracks that would not break usage on non computer music systems).
MS would patch the operating system to change the functionality of Autorun, after the patch all media inserted into a drive would would be scanned for the presence of the DRM Datablock, if the DRM Datablock was found the DRM software would be autorun. If no DRM Datablock was on the media then loading of the media contents would proceed according to the autorun state (ie if shift held down, or autorun disabled don't autorun, if autorun enabled then autorun...
So IMO, it can be done, however I don't believe it should be done..
"How can stop you from using the CD if you say no?"
From what I remember of the original article, if you hit cancel on the EULA it automatically ejects the CD, hence without disabling autorun or using it on a non windows computer you would never be able to gain to access to the cd's contents.
"If you say no, and they still won't let you access the CD, couldn't you sue them, because they didn't have authorization to do that to your PC?"
Good question, which I why I asked if the cd's were clearly labeled that you needed to install the software before you could gain access to the contents.
IANAL, so I will leave it to the lawyers to answer the legal questions:-)
From what I remember of the original article, if you hit cancel on the EULA it automatically ejects the CD, hence without disabling autorun or using it on a non windows computer you would never be able to gain to access to cd's contents.
" it does install unwanted software without the consent of the user"
Incorrect, it was clearly pointed out in the original article that the user is provided with a EULA authorising the installation of the software, if cancel was selected it did not copy the software but it also did not allow you access to the music. The author did not choose to accept the EULA so could not comment on what happens if the EULA is accepted and the software is installed.
So technically, if you accept the EULA, you authorise them to install the software...
It would be interesting to know if the CD's with this type of copy protection on them clearly state that they are protected by a system that requires installation of their software before you can gain access to its content (provided you don't know about disabling autorun, or playing the cd's on a mac or *nix system).
"But if you widen your scope of consideration, you can see that leftist troops were welcomed in Vietnam, China, Cuba, Eastern Europe... yet they quickly became totalitarist"
Of course it is material how they came to power, in the case of china and vietnam both came to power after long and bloody civil wars, Eastern Europe was occupied by the USSR, and the times that people tried to gain democracy for themselves the tanks rolled in.... That is a far cry from gaining power through a free and fair ballot.
"Take China or the Soviet Union at your choice. OK, perhaps the 'order of magnitude' part is not fair given both countries were individually more populous each then Germany, but still they killed more "
You are correct it would not be fair and in the case of the USSR it would not be accurate, by your figures (which I agree with), the USSR was responsible for the deaths of approx 20m (most during the stalin purges), that is only a 3rd of the amount required to meet the order of magnitude you stated in a previous post.
As for China, I have seen different figures mentioned but I do not have enough information / knowledge to know which is accurate, however if we take your figures as being roughly accurate, that would indeed me an order of magnitude higher, however it has to be noted that the population of China was approx 7 times that of Germany and the countries Germany controlled.
Again, I have to state what has totalitarian dictatorships got to do with a democratically elected government?
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm
:
Yes I have now read the article, it does contain information that I have not previously seen, I did some researh into the Anfal Pogrom quite some time ago and the information I was able to find was quite different from that in the article.
Obviously a CIA analyst has access to far better information than I have (or at least should have), it has been quite some time since I last did the search so it will take some time to dig up anything to refute it (if it is indeed possible to do so).
Moving On
Yes I am fully aware of the lies that have been told down the years, (btw, I thought the Kuwaiti babies story was actually produced and presented by the Kuwaiti Royal Family not the US Government?), I am also aware of the other incidents you mentioned, for the record, I was not a supporter of the war against Iraq, I believed and still believed that it was illegal under the UN Charter, I believe that the WMD's and links to terrorism were convenient excuses to use to forward US political policies.
That being said, I am more than happy that Saddam has been caught, I hope that he will be brought to justice in front of an independent and Internationally Recognised Court of Law for the Crimes that he did commit during his years in power.
Hmmm Most of the evidence supporting the 45 minute claim was "rubbished" by the experts of the British Intelligence Services, a number of whom gave reports to the Hutton Enquiry (into the death of Dr Kelly). Yes, I am aware of the recent story in the Telegraph, however I am not sure that it adds _any_ creditability to the 45 minute claims...
Hmmm
Iraq used both chemical and biological weapons against the Kurdish people during the Anfal Pogroms (mostly) between 1987 and 1989. It is a well documented fact about the Iraqi Anfal Pogrom, it had no relation to activities in the Iran / Iraq war.
" It's true the FSF doesn't like copyright..."
Can you please provide evidence of this claim?
If you are mistaking copyright for Software Patents then you may indeed be right; however the FSF is a strong supporter of copyrights.
Hmmm
What was the name of the Book that the film was based on...ah that's right The Two Towers...so what the fuck should he have called the film?
It had _nothing_ to do with the events of sept 11th.
I wish we could Edit our posts...
It should read : The British Empire had to increase the number of imports...
Not exports...doh!!!
Hmmm
To the best of my knowledge the British Empire's War Debt was not erased. Rationing was still in effect for certain items until at least 1953 as it paid off war debts from the Lend Lease Act and also paid towards the reconstruction in Europe.
Hmmm
I think you need to look at the effect that the money from the British Empire had on the US Economy, both prior to and after the Lend Lease Act. The British Empire had to increase the number of exports substantially as it converted more of its manufacturing base to a war footing. The British Empire was at that time the richest Empire in the world and it practically bankrupted itself to finance the war. Huge amounts of monetary reserves were signed over to the US as were a number of key patents.
As a side note, the British Empire wasn't putting much into the war machine prior to the summer of 1939. Like most of Europe it believed another war was inconceivable given the huge cost in lives of the previous war.
Hmmm
Nothing like using figures that are 2 years out of date to make your point...
" Tariffs are being removed because of economic pressure..."
Correct, Economic Pressure from the US's trading partners, in particular the European Union.
The EU were threatening to increase tarriffs against a number of US imports, the specific imports were chosen as they came from states that were marginal in the last Presidential election.
Thanks for the link to the Photo's :-)
Some excellent shots
" Do you have faith in those counting all those paper ballots?
Why? (not a rhetorical question)"
Hmmm
Do you need to have faith in _every_ person that is counting the ballots?
When electoral fraud happens it does not tend to be the ballot counters that commit the crime, the fraud tends to happen before the ballot papers get to the counting stations (either arriving at the original ballot stations with votes already in them or arriving at the counting station after being either being switched for a pre-filled box or the original box opened and votes removed / added.
So generally speaking you can have faith in those counting the ballot papers because it would need a significant proportion of the counters to be in on the fraud for them to sway the count, at which point it usually becomes apparent that the fraud is happening.
"This is a good thing. Windows messenger is not used by the bulk of the AOL userbase except to receive spam."
A better way would be to have AOL put together a page explaining the problem and providing the user with a script to run to change the settings (after confirmation dialog asking if they are sure they want to make the changes).
Making changes to a users system without getting explicit permission opens up a whole can of nasty worms.
What happens if the changes they make hose your system?
What happens if the changes they make break one of more custom applications that you require?
What happens if the company decides that it wants to monitor all of your activity so it installs spyware on your system?
What happens if the company decides they want to lock you into only using approved applications (theirs)?
Hmmm
:
"And seriously, even if you need to reboot, if your computers are fast, it takes what, 30 seconds? less?"
It normally takes a server more than 30 seconds to shutdown cleanly after a patch. It can take considerably longer than that depending on the function of the server being patched, for instance an Exchange or SQL server will take *much* longer than 30 seconds to go down.
It can easily take upwards of 30 seconds just to do a Power On Self Test on larger servers (the main bulk of the time spent initialising the SCSII array controller & disks).
It certainly takes more than 30 seconds to reboot to a state where the OS & all dependent services have been fully loaded, again in the case of Exchange & SQL it will be considerably longer than 30 seconds.
"It takes me about 1 minutes to patch my single xp machine, so well generously give it 5 minutes if it's a whole bunch of machines."
Define a "whole bunch of machines", are you talking 10, 50, 100, 1000?
You cannot scale the time it takes to patch multiple systems just by comparing how long it takes you to patch your 1 system. There are a number of bottlenecks to take into consideration
1) Network Speed / Saturation.
Sending out a small patch to a lot of computers or a large patch to a small number of computers can cause your network to crawl even in a fully switched evironment.
2) Patch Server processor ultilisation.
Both number of computers connecting and patch size have a bearing on how well your server will cope.
"So, I generously estimate 16 minutes it should take to patch a network of windows boxen with the latest fix."
I really do wish it was that easy to patch so many systems.
Hmmm
PrintScreen is also disabled...
Though of course most 3rd party screen capture programs won't be affected...
Hmmm
"It's well known that MS uses Unix stuff in it's operating systems - the BSD TCP/IP stack for instance"
Are you implying that Microsoft is paying License fees to SCO for its use of BSD code? Or is it the case that you cannot come up with a clearer example of what MS would be paying license fees to SCO for?
Yes that is indeed an issue that would have to be addressed, then again unless the person is an expert at editing it will be apparent the first time it is examined that it has been tampered with.
Let us not forget that plenty of innocent people have been wrongly convicted due to being framed by the authorities.
This was first published on Friday...
"This is why DRM just wont work. You only need one guy/girl/geek in some country to get past the DRM and it can be all over the net in a few hours."
Totally agree with you, I tend to think of it as co-operative content management, by this I mean that it takes *everyone* to co-operate and not try to bypass the security mechanisms for it to work, and how likely is that?
Of course the RIAA and friends could up the ante, they could use their bought representatives to force laws making it illegal to *not* have DRM software in an OS.
'There is no way they can disable the shift key to make it not by-pass the auto-run "feature"'
:
Why? Autorun (in both its states) is a feature of the windows operating system, therefore the behavior of autorun can be altered at any time by Microsoft through an OS patch.
How I would see this happening
The RIAA and other DRM interested parties would agree to use a standard data block to indicate that the media was protected by DRM.
The DRM datablock would be wrote to the media at a consistent place (somewhere on the tracks that would not break usage on non computer music systems).
MS would patch the operating system to change the functionality of Autorun, after the patch all media inserted into a drive would would be scanned for the presence of the DRM Datablock, if the DRM Datablock was found the DRM software would be autorun. If no DRM Datablock was on the media then loading of the media contents would proceed according to the autorun state (ie if shift held down, or autorun disabled don't autorun, if autorun enabled then autorun...
So IMO, it can be done, however I don't believe it should be done..
"How can stop you from using the CD if you say no?"
:-)
From what I remember of the original article, if you hit cancel on the EULA it automatically ejects the CD, hence without disabling autorun or using it on a non windows computer you would never be able to gain to access to the cd's contents.
"If you say no, and they still won't let you access the CD, couldn't you sue them, because they didn't have authorization to do that to your PC?"
Good question, which I why I asked if the cd's were clearly labeled that you needed to install the software before you could gain access to the contents.
IANAL, so I will leave it to the lawyers to answer the legal questions
Hmmm
From what I remember of the original article, if you hit cancel on the EULA it automatically ejects the CD, hence without disabling autorun or using it on a non windows computer you would never be able to gain to access to cd's contents.
" it does install unwanted software without the consent of the user"
Incorrect, it was clearly pointed out in the original article that the user is provided with a EULA authorising the installation of the software, if cancel was selected it did not copy the software but it also did not allow you access to the music. The author did not choose to accept the EULA so could not comment on what happens if the EULA is accepted and the software is installed.
So technically, if you accept the EULA, you authorise them to install the software...
It would be interesting to know if the CD's with this type of copy protection on them clearly state that they are protected by a system that requires installation of their software before you can gain access to its content (provided you don't know about disabling autorun, or playing the cd's on a mac or *nix system).
Hmmm poor attempt at trolling by you...
I have zero problem with people trying to defend their Intellectual Property Rights, however to do so they should actually *own* them first.
Yes I will agree your wording was very lax.
"The means of gaining power are immaterial... "
"But if you widen your scope of consideration, you can see that leftist troops were welcomed in Vietnam, China, Cuba, Eastern Europe... yet they quickly became totalitarist"
Of course it is material how they came to power, in the case of china and vietnam both came to power after long and bloody civil wars, Eastern Europe was occupied by the USSR, and the times that people tried to gain democracy for themselves the tanks rolled in.... That is a far cry from gaining power through a free and fair ballot.
"Take China or the Soviet Union at your choice. OK, perhaps the 'order of magnitude' part is not fair given both countries were individually more populous each then Germany, but still they killed more "
You are correct it would not be fair and in the case of the USSR it would not be accurate, by your figures (which I agree with), the USSR was responsible for the deaths of approx 20m (most during the stalin purges), that is only a 3rd of the amount required to meet the order of magnitude you stated in a previous post.
As for China, I have seen different figures mentioned but I do not have enough information / knowledge to know which is accurate, however if we take your figures as being roughly accurate, that would indeed me an order of magnitude higher, however it has to be noted that the population of China was approx 7 times that of Germany and the countries Germany controlled.
Again, I have to state what has totalitarian dictatorships got to do with a democratically elected government?