Todays current crop of gamers is largly composed of yester days crop of gamers. People like you, and myself, dont need to be sold on gaming as a viable hobby. The problem is that the games you and I like are not attracting any new gamers. Let me put this more plainly.
Everyone who wants to play complicated games is already doing so.
Personally I would like it to stay like that.
Why would someone who is perfectly happy with the latest ID games want them to dumb down the game and make it more "user friendly" (read: more friendly to the masses)?
I guess its a nice stratgy for ID however, the potentiall market for agame increases as it becomes more "user friendly" and "easier". But I don't have to like it. I don't care about ID's market share or if they make x or xx milions a year, all I want is to keep the games I like.
I can take some "improvements" in the way the default setup in the game is. If ID wants to remove the crouch or use button from default; fine by me. And I don't mind if the game is "easy" to "get into". But if they start dumbing down the game or gameplay in order to capture a larger market, well then they will loose the thing that IMO is specilal about some of their games such as the Quake series.
If they remove the possibility to addjust gameplay on the server or client side or if they downscale the tweaking possibilities to "even out the game" they will loos the dedicated players. I hope, and think that they know this. So lets hope that if they are thinking about creating games you "can just pick up and play for 5 or 15 minutes at a time" this will be outside the Quake series.
[...text..] You can literally hand it to any random person on the street and they will know basically what they are doing in 30 seconds. Can you say the same for Quake? Starcraft? Warcraft?
As long as the person playing these games is above 10 years old and average IQ: Yes, Yes, Yes.
I don't see that there is some high limit in usability when it comes to FPS or strategy games. Maybe for some simulators or MMORGS, but not for the typical ID game.
The "thing" that makes for example the Quake series so addictive is that the game is easy to get into and start with, but because of the depth in the game difficault to really master agains someone that has played the game alot. The depth in the game makes it possible to build up skill by playing a lot which adds treamendous life to the game. If you compare for example Wolfenstein and Quake and look apart from the obvious lack of connectivity in Wolfenstein you will see that Quake got treamendous value in gameplay from a relatively small improvement; the ability to jump.
So I disagree with Carmack here, taking away elements can actually harm gameplay.
I'm thinking about restricting the possibility to send out mail but about providing laws that makes it illegal to send out unsollicted email(spam) I did not think about some central(government) or decentralized(ISP) autority restricting the flow of emails.
I'm a subsricber to a Debian list and i would hate if if that list would have to disappear.
There will of course be a decision to make wheter an email sent out is spam or not but I do think that the law could be formulated in a way that don't restrict ordinary communication.
The obvious analogy would be laws that makes it illegal to kill people in some cases (self defence) but illegal in other situations (drive by shooting).
Wheter the law(s) are federal or up to the states woul of couse be up to each country. I'm really not that familiar with the how USA does this but i would assume that a federal law would be better since it would prevent one single state (Florida ? )to become safe haven for spam.
Just to clarify, my post was ment as irony and should be modded Funny if anything.
But on the restriction/behavior controll vs. freedom subject, and without going too much into the commercialism debate; I do belive that this could have a _limited_ effect within LA. (without knowing much about LA)
But what I don't understand is why they allow spam (as in unsolicted advertising via smtp) anyway.
I have yet to see any good arguments why they can not ban sending out *thousands* of emails.
I don't really belive in the "spam should be protected as freedom of speech". IMO you don't have the right to send a message to someone in a way that forks over the cost to the reciver.
You can send as much sendmail as you please and you can talk to a person as much as you wan't (within harrasment laws) but no one should have a right to send a advertising to someone.
As far as I know; baning unsolicted email actually works. Several European countries have done this and this reduces the spam sent from within the country to the country's innhabitants.
Yes, I know most of the spam is sent from another country, but independant of this the recived spam goes down for the population. With EU (probably ) banning spam within a couple of years the number of spam sent from EU to EU willl go down.
And I don't belive in "if we allow banning of spam the government may as well reduce our rights (to freedom of speech)". And I consider myself to be among the paranoid people here.
I think think this is a *cough* really great idea. And this is *cough* very likely to work.
But if they had expanded it beyond only adv-adult it would have been so much better.
Then I could have deleted my scam-419 mail together with the adv-adult mail.
Whatever the cause of the outage is; its quite obvious that America Needs More Power(TM). The ANMP movement will soon come to aplace near you in a form of a person running for some election.
The ANMP is safe way to win some cheap votes, who does not want power? How can anyone be against more power?
Some of the proposals won't be that smart but the oublic will suck it in and accpect Anything That Gives More Power.
Some of the solution wil be at stupid like this one here. (DOOM3)
just wish enough of my fellow Europeans knew enough, or cared enough, to head it off *before* it arrives - chances of that fading fast...
I don't see thats happening anytime soon.
Mainstream media coverage of for example the EU IP Enforcement directive is slim and most people don't seem to care right now. At the same time lobbying pro this seems to be something the big conglomerats invests much money into.
If you look at the speed the Infosoc directive went through the EU system the prospects look grim. I think that the conditions will get much much worse before people see how bad this is.
If you look at the Nickpicker site under the "The Top 20 Nitpickers" catergory you will find thiss guy called "NikkiWGB" who has posted 1224 nickpicks to the site!!!!
Since this is internet we have all heard our fair share of things and encountered some weird individials, but *thats* *insane*.
Imagine meeting this guy somewhere and trying to discuss a movie!
Amen. I'm also disappointed that as computers get faster, software finds a way to require more cpu cycles to do the same work. I was burning cd's with a 486, why is my xp box sluggish as all hell when i burn one now at just 12x? (2.5ghz, 512ram) I ran a 2 line bbs on a 386SX with 4mb of ram, and qemm, 2400 and the new 14.4... it just seems like you could do relatively more then because the software was simpler and more optimized.
The software bloat in much of the software released is devastating to the speed, even on new computers as yours.
Possible solution to your problem exist though:
-Downgrade, actually an upgrade, your OS to Win2000.
-Try to find a older CD-burning program. Last week I tested the new Roxio. Extremly bloted with xxx number of new fuctions. I went back to a old version of Easy Cd Creator.
-Even more RAM.
-Get some SCSI disks instead of the IDE disk(s).
I strongly recommends two medium fast (10k rpm) disks in RAID 1 to all my friend that spends lots of time with the computer. In win2k I am using two Seagate 9.1 GB disks in RAID 1 for the following partition:
-OS
-swap
-prog
For most of the data I use cheap IDE disks (Seagate Barracuda IV) because of cost vs. space. I have found this setup to be superior to both a "only SCSI" setup or "only IDE" setup. My comp. XP1800@2000 with 1 GB RAM and SCSI-disks feels much faster than the setup a friend of mine has, P4 2400MHz, 512MB RAM, WD IDE and XP. When he runs many programs at once his computer slooooows doooown after a couple of hours because of lack of RAM and IDE swapping while my machine just speeds on.:-)
Re:And what's good, too, is that...
on
The Diamond Age
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Well, If this company succeedes, no one will care anymore.
Who would want some shine stones if everyone have them? It's the false sense of rarenes that makes them valuable. Hopefully diamonds will become a commodity like just any other rock.
It won't happen over night, but it will happen in a couple of years.
It's about time that someone challenges the De Beers and sell these stones below market value. There is absolutly no reason that diamonds should continue to have such a ridiculous price.
I'm looking forward to a colapse in the pricing of diamonds where one can get a *large* diamons for a couple of bucks.
So those of you that have diamonds other than for some sentimental reason: Sell why you still can.
soo... who's going to be the first to get linux running on it?
For all that we know it could allready be running Linux.
iRobot also makes the PackBot, a unmanned robust robot for reconnaissance operations in urban terrain.
The robot is developed for the US Military, its DARPA founded, and it runs Linux.
Through the Tactical Mobile Robotics Program (TMR), the PackBot mobile robot got a new rugged hardware housing that supported significantly more substantial electronics. In fact, the new processor and motherboard booted a Linux kernel in under 12 seconds - just turn on and go! With such substantial computing on-board, the first robot operating system AWARE(TM) was born.
Personally I find this far more interesting than this "sweeper".
What the fuck happened?
Ahhh sometimes I hate html and at the same time I frgot the Preview button. At the same time I did a Ctrl-v from some posting in a journal and everything got screwed up. So my post above is just pure crap, missing context, sentences, logic and uhh everything.
Someone please mod it down.
Thanks.
Please, all these lame SCO jokes are starting to get on my nerves. In the last 50+ stories I have yet to se one without a bad SCO joke.
Okay, some of them are funny and all that stuff but common.
And people should respect SCO's right to come with claims about Intellectual Property just as any other company. I'm pretty certain that they would not have made such a fuzz about it unless they have some basis behind their claims. So I guess they know what they are doing.
14 months ago, yes I still remember the date, I tried to install Debian 2.2 on a 486 for a friend of mine. Since the *crappy* MB without any documantation did not support boot from CD-ROM , I installed base from diskettes. He only had a very slow connection.
But the CD-ROM just didn't want to work. After reading some old SuSe manuals I found out that the the CD-ROM was a Sony CDU33A. Since autoprobing did not work i tried to set the parameters the and the . I tired to load the parameters as moduls but nothing worked.
Extremly frustrating.
After three hours in anger I gave up, trashed the CD-ROM to get out some frustration, and carried the 486 home to my place for a net-install.
If you go to those same regions (north of the arctic circle), you'll find abnormally high suicide rates during the winter due to depression from the excessive darkness.
Althoug I partially agree on the problem of lack of light for some people, the alleged problem in Northern Regions has other causes.
Lack of light can cause depression becaues most people are not used periods of excessive darkness.
But the problems with somewhat higher suicides rates probably comes more from faltered economy, way too much drinking and uneemployment, in for example Siberia, than from lack of light.
Irregular combatants may or may not be, but generally would not be covered. The foreign combatants in Afghanistan directly associated with Al Quaeda were clearly not covered: they were not commanded by a responsible officer, they wore no distinctive signs, they concealed their weapons, and they did not conform to the standard laws and customs of warfare (including the Third Geneva Convention, which forbids the taking of hostages and direct attacks on civilians, both of which many of the GB detainees had done.)
The point is wheter you like it or not, the Geneva Convention says; "Should any doubt arise as to whether persons" [is POWs or not POWs] their status should be "determined by a competent tribunal".
Several countries have questioned the case, so there is doubt on the point wheter the prisoners are POWs or not.
The International Committee of the Red Cross the most authoritative body on the provisions of the Geneva Conventions revealed that there were diverging wiews betwween the United States and the ICRC on wheter the prisoners are entitled to POW status. Again there is doubt on wheter the the prisoners are POWs or not.
a) Some of the captured persons where commanded by a responsible officer for example fighters under the Taliban 55th brigade.
b) Some of the fighters weared uniforms with distinct insignia, not necessarily all, both some.
c) Some of them carried their arms openly, (doesn't say much this is Afghanistan after all)
d) Some of the fought in bathles according to standard laws and customs of warfare. As you point out some of them also violated the Third Geneva Convention, but that does not take awway the right of those that did not participate in these actions. (Just because a person, troop, regiment violates the GC, that does not strip away the rights of the other people in the army)
In any conflict under the GC, its not up to one of the Parties to decide wheter the people captured are POWs or not. In cases where the captured persons don't have a state reresenting them(either because their states have collapsed, don't exist or are unwilling to interfere) the ICRC can take over the responsibility on behalf on the persons if this is in the captured persons interest. I this case this is clearly in the interest of the captured persons.
All this *clearly* leads to *doubt* of wheter the captured persons are POWs or not.
It might be that the "competent tribunal" finds that the prisoners are not entitled to POW status, but until that happens USA isvilating the GC by not designating a "competent tribunal"
Anyway, USA is in good company when it commes to ignoring the question on wheter captured persons are POWs or not:
-North Korea ignored some of the claims of the ICRC during the Korean War.
-North Vietnam ignored some of the claims of the USA.
-Idi Amin, dictator of Uganda from 1971 to 1979 ignored everything under the GC.
-Israel's policy in Palestina violates the Fourth Geneva Convention.
-Fidel Castro on Cuba is a notorious violator of the GC.
-In Rwanda/Kongo all Parties ignored the GC
-Iraq violated the GC in some cases during Gulf War I.
-Serbia violated the GC during the wars on Balkan.
In short, GB may be wrong, and is a PR disaster, but it is not illegal, no matter what HRW wants you to believe.
I disagree with you wheter GB is illegal, and thats my opinion, HRW did not get me to belive anything.
I have studied this part and it looks like I was, as you point out somewhat inaccurate in saying that the Geneva Convention requires an independent court.
The present Convention shall apply to the persons referred to in Article 4 from the time they fall into the power of the enemy and until their final release and repatriation.
Should any doubt arise as to whether persons, having committed a belligerent act and having fallen into the hands of the enemy, belong to any of the categories enumerated in Article 4, such persons shall enjoy the protection of the present Convention until such time as their status has been determined by a competent tribunal.
Somewhere else in the Convention text there is something about the how the Parties shall "seek to establish impartial tribunals etc". I could not find this and I'm not 100% shure on this point, but that what i reckon from reading the text a couple of years ago.
We could always argue what a "Competent tribunal" is, but I'm pretty shure that any tribunal consisting only of people only from the US Military or from a US court would be outside the ramification of the Geneva Convention as such a tribunal would violate the Conventions on the impartial point.
So far USA has ignored all this and still claims that the prisoners at GB are "unlawful combatants".
Humans Right Watch wrote a nice letter to Condoleezza Rice ripping apart her arguments that she still continues to spread on various press conferences.
I don't know what you are insinuating, but yeah, they are probablly all in it only for his money.
Their whole life they planned this. All his friend thought this out; convincing Mike to support and fight for Taliban. Taking uni degrees and getting jobs in the communiyty close to him, lurking around him for the whole purpose of becoming his friends etc.
But it was all a giant scam; through the support side and the extremly lucerative Paypal system they planned to "rack in" money. Doing this they planned and still hope to one day take over the whole world, still "racking in" money through the Paypal system, and one day achive Total World Domination(TM).
Guess what? The Geneva conventions don't protect irregular combatants. Combatant nations are not legally bound to return irregular combatants to their countries of origin when conflict ends.
Wrong.
First; there is under international law in this area (the Geneeva Convention, which USA signed and ratified) any category as "irregular combatants" or the often used "unlawful combatant". Classifying a person as such a thing is actually in itself a violation of the Geneva Convention.
However there are categorys , such as mercenaries, who are not accorded the full protection of the Third Geneva Convention. But, and here comes the crucial part: If there is any doubt whether someone is a POW, an independent court must decide their status.
In this case I'm not shure wheter he is in any way "covered" by the Geneva Convention as the article is not very extensive on information.
But the US government don't have a very good track record when it comes to following the GC.
For example in the Guantanamo Bay case, since the status of the prisoners is unclear (POW or not POW) the case should have been decided by an independant court such as a court in Switzerland, Sweden or any other national court in a country that is not a part in the conflict.
Ok, your post is so flaimebait, but since some moderator on crack moderated you post as 4, Insightful and I have used my mod.points I will bite just to show that you are a Troll.
He actually said, "Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." (one reference). By "with us", he was meaning with us against the fight against terrorism.
I'm not exactly Shakespeare when it comes to the English language but I fail to the political difference between this statement and the original "You're either for us or against us" expression.
The direct consequence is still the same; he still tries to divide the possible positions in the "War Against Terror" into only two possible possitions, either with us(against the terrorist) or with the terrorrist(against us).
I must say that Mr. Bush masters the art of speaking in a medieval rhetoric.
[rant]
But I guess that is not very disappointing, we all knew that this guy is not the brightest person. The really diappointing thing though; is that American voters probablly will elect him this time in the upcomming 2004 election.
[/rant]
Ahh, I forgot the whole thing.
Sorry for late reply.
He lives in Norway and his new ISP is Firstmile. (www.firstmile.no). Its a new ISP, a subsidiary of ZyXEL Comunnications. Unfortunately, they only deliver in limited parts of Norway.
Products and pricing at the bottom of this page. Prices in NOK, so you have to divide with 7 to get $.
No special hurdles, but he had to terminate his old ISP-agreement and pay them 3-months extra because of a 2 year agreement setup.
I was looking into this yesterday.
Basicly, the "scoring" in the Common Criteria is based uppon Evaluation Assurance Levels from EAL1 to EAL7. List of the levelss here.
After evaluation product get on the CCPL (Centralised Certified Product List) here
Apperantly this is not a complete list; and Linux via IBM is not listed yet.
It is not o the "Products in Evaluation List" here either, so I guess they are uppdating their lists now.
No product has a higher rating than 5 right now. Most product get a 4 or 4+.
The list is crowded by firewalls and all the "old UNIX derivates" such as HP-UX, AIX, Solaris,etc. Microsoft got Win 2000 SP3. Cisco, Symantec, SecureLogic and Entrust also got product on the list.
But one company is missing form the list:..
The company we all ehh love: SCO.;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I would like it to stay like that.
Why would someone who is perfectly happy with the latest ID games want them to dumb down the game and make it more "user friendly" (read: more friendly to the masses)?
I guess its a nice stratgy for ID however, the potentiall market for agame increases as it becomes more "user friendly" and "easier". But I don't have to like it. I don't care about ID's market share or if they make x or xx milions a year, all I want is to keep the games I like.
I can take some "improvements" in the way the default setup in the game is. If ID wants to remove the crouch or use button from default; fine by me. And I don't mind if the game is "easy" to "get into". But if they start dumbing down the game or gameplay in order to capture a larger market, well then they will loose the thing that IMO is specilal about some of their games such as the Quake series.
If they remove the possibility to addjust gameplay on the server or client side or if they downscale the tweaking possibilities to "even out the game" they will loos the dedicated players. I hope, and think that they know this. So lets hope that if they are thinking about creating games you "can just pick up and play for 5 or 15 minutes at a time" this will be outside the Quake series.
As long as the person playing these games is above 10 years old and average IQ: Yes, Yes, Yes.I don't see that there is some high limit in usability when it comes to FPS or strategy games. Maybe for some simulators or MMORGS, but not for the typical ID game.
The "thing" that makes for example the Quake series so addictive is that the game is easy to get into and start with, but because of the depth in the game difficault to really master agains someone that has played the game alot. The depth in the game makes it possible to build up skill by playing a lot which adds treamendous life to the game. If you compare for example Wolfenstein and Quake and look apart from the obvious lack of connectivity in Wolfenstein you will see that Quake got treamendous value in gameplay from a relatively small improvement; the ability to jump.
So I disagree with Carmack here, taking away elements can actually harm gameplay.
Yeah, because you trust the worm writer right?
I'm a subsricber to a Debian list and i would hate if if that list would have to disappear.
There will of course be a decision to make wheter an email sent out is spam or not but I do think that the law could be formulated in a way that don't restrict ordinary communication.
The obvious analogy would be laws that makes it illegal to kill people in some cases (self defence) but illegal in other situations (drive by shooting).
Wheter the law(s) are federal or up to the states woul of couse be up to each country. I'm really not that familiar with the how USA does this but i would assume that a federal law would be better since it would prevent one single state (Florida ? )to become safe haven for spam.
I guess the correct word is snailmail not "sendmail"...
But on the restriction/behavior controll vs. freedom subject, and without going too much into the commercialism debate; I do belive that this could have a _limited_ effect within LA. (without knowing much about LA)
But what I don't understand is why they allow spam (as in unsolicted advertising via smtp) anyway.
I have yet to see any good arguments why they can not ban sending out *thousands* of emails.
I don't really belive in the "spam should be protected as freedom of speech". IMO you don't have the right to send a message to someone in a way that forks over the cost to the reciver.
You can send as much sendmail as you please and you can talk to a person as much as you wan't (within harrasment laws) but no one should have a right to send a advertising to someone.
As far as I know; baning unsolicted email actually works. Several European countries have done this and this reduces the spam sent from within the country to the country's innhabitants.
Yes, I know most of the spam is sent from another country, but independant of this the recived spam goes down for the population. With EU (probably ) banning spam within a couple of years the number of spam sent from EU to EU willl go down.
And I don't belive in "if we allow banning of spam the government may as well reduce our rights (to freedom of speech)". And I consider myself to be among the paranoid people here.
But if they had expanded it beyond only adv-adult it would have been so much better.
Then I could have deleted my scam-419 mail together with the adv-adult mail.
The ANMP is safe way to win some cheap votes, who does not want power? How can anyone be against more power?
Some of the proposals won't be that smart but the oublic will suck it in and accpect Anything That Gives More Power.
Some of the solution wil be at stupid like this one here. (DOOM3)
Mainstream media coverage of for example the EU IP Enforcement directive is slim and most people don't seem to care right now. At the same time lobbying pro this seems to be something the big conglomerats invests much money into.
If you look at the speed the Infosoc directive went through the EU system the prospects look grim. I think that the conditions will get much much worse before people see how bad this is.
If you look at the Nickpicker site under the "The Top 20 Nitpickers" catergory you will find thiss guy called "NikkiWGB" who has posted 1224 nickpicks to the site!!!!
Since this is internet we have all heard our fair share of things and encountered some weird individials, but *thats* *insane*.
Imagine meeting this guy somewhere and trying to discuss a movie!
Possible solution to your problem exist though:
-Downgrade, actually an upgrade, your OS to Win2000.
-Try to find a older CD-burning program. Last week I tested the new Roxio. Extremly bloted with xxx number of new fuctions. I went back to a old version of Easy Cd Creator.
-Even more RAM.
-Get some SCSI disks instead of the IDE disk(s).
I strongly recommends two medium fast (10k rpm) disks in RAID 1 to all my friend that spends lots of time with the computer. In win2k I am using two Seagate 9.1 GB disks in RAID 1 for the following partition:
-OS
-swap
-prog
For most of the data I use cheap IDE disks (Seagate Barracuda IV) because of cost vs. space. I have found this setup to be superior to both a "only SCSI" setup or "only IDE" setup. My comp. XP1800@2000 with 1 GB RAM and SCSI-disks feels much faster than the setup a friend of mine has, P4 2400MHz, 512MB RAM, WD IDE and XP. When he runs many programs at once his computer slooooows doooown after a couple of hours because of lack of RAM and IDE swapping while my machine just speeds on. :-)
Who would want some shine stones if everyone have them? It's the false sense of rarenes that makes them valuable. Hopefully diamonds will become a commodity like just any other rock.
It won't happen over night, but it will happen in a couple of years.
It's about time that someone challenges the De Beers and sell these stones below market value. There is absolutly no reason that diamonds should continue to have such a ridiculous price.
I'm looking forward to a colapse in the pricing of diamonds where one can get a *large* diamons for a couple of bucks.
So those of you that have diamonds other than for some sentimental reason: Sell why you still can.
iRobot also makes the PackBot, a unmanned robust robot for reconnaissance operations in urban terrain.
The robot is developed for the US Military, its DARPA founded, and it runs Linux.
More info here
Personally I find this far more interesting than this "sweeper".
What the fuck happened?
Ahhh sometimes I hate html and at the same time I frgot the Preview button. At the same time I did a Ctrl-v from some posting in a journal and everything got screwed up. So my post above is just pure crap, missing context, sentences, logic and uhh everything. Someone please mod it down. Thanks.
Please, all these lame SCO jokes are starting to get on my nerves. In the last 50+ stories I have yet to se one without a bad SCO joke.
Okay, some of them are funny and all that stuff but common.
And people should respect SCO's right to come with claims about Intellectual Property just as any other company. I'm pretty certain that they would not have made such a fuzz about it unless they have some basis behind their claims. So I guess they know what they are doing.
14 months ago, yes I still remember the date, I tried to install Debian 2.2 on a 486 for a friend of mine. Since the *crappy* MB without any documantation did not support boot from CD-ROM , I installed base from diskettes. He only had a very slow connection.
But the CD-ROM just didn't want to work. After reading some old SuSe manuals I found out that the the CD-ROM was a Sony CDU33A. Since autoprobing did not work i tried to set the parameters the and the . I tired to load the parameters as moduls but nothing worked. .
Extremly frustrating
After three hours in anger I gave up, trashed the CD-ROM to get out some frustration, and carried the 486 home to my place for a net-install.
Lack of light can cause depression becaues most people are not used periods of excessive darkness.
But the problems with somewhat higher suicides rates probably comes more from faltered economy, way too much drinking and uneemployment, in for example Siberia, than from lack of light.
The url's to the stories:
ahref ="
Found the two stories I thought about:
MMORPG Economies Explored in Depth
and
There.com's Virtual World & Economy
Several countries have questioned the case, so there is doubt on the point wheter the prisoners are POWs or not.
The International Committee of the Red Cross the most authoritative body on the provisions of the Geneva Conventions revealed that there were diverging wiews betwween the United States and the ICRC on wheter the prisoners are entitled to POW status. Again there is doubt on wheter the the prisoners are POWs or not.
a) Some of the captured persons where commanded by a responsible officer for example fighters under the Taliban 55th brigade.
b) Some of the fighters weared uniforms with distinct insignia, not necessarily all, both some.
c) Some of them carried their arms openly, (doesn't say much this is Afghanistan after all)
d) Some of the fought in bathles according to standard laws and customs of warfare. As you point out some of them also violated the Third Geneva Convention, but that does not take awway the right of those that did not participate in these actions. (Just because a person, troop, regiment violates the GC, that does not strip away the rights of the other people in the army)
In any conflict under the GC, its not up to one of the Parties to decide wheter the people captured are POWs or not. In cases where the captured persons don't have a state reresenting them(either because their states have collapsed, don't exist or are unwilling to interfere) the ICRC can take over the responsibility on behalf on the persons if this is in the captured persons interest. I this case this is clearly in the interest of the captured persons.
All this *clearly* leads to *doubt* of wheter the captured persons are POWs or not.
It might be that the "competent tribunal" finds that the prisoners are not entitled to POW status, but until that happens USA isvilating the GC by not designating a "competent tribunal"
Anyway, USA is in good company when it commes to ignoring the question on wheter captured persons are POWs or not:
I disagree with you wheter GB is illegal, and thats my opinion, HRW did not get me to belive anything.-North Korea ignored some of the claims of the ICRC during the Korean War.
-North Vietnam ignored some of the claims of the USA.
-Idi Amin, dictator of Uganda from 1971 to 1979 ignored everything under the GC.
-Israel's policy in Palestina violates the Fourth Geneva Convention.
-Fidel Castro on Cuba is a notorious violator of the GC.
-In Rwanda/Kongo all Parties ignored the GC
-Iraq violated the GC in some cases during Gulf War I.
-Serbia violated the GC during the wars on Balkan.
Quoted from the Geneva Convention
Somewhere else in the Convention text there is something about the how the Parties shall "seek to establish impartial tribunals etc". I could not find this and I'm not 100% shure on this point, but that what i reckon from reading the text a couple of years ago.We could always argue what a "Competent tribunal" is, but I'm pretty shure that any tribunal consisting only of people only from the US Military or from a US court would be outside the ramification of the Geneva Convention as such a tribunal would violate the Conventions on the impartial point.
So far USA has ignored all this and still claims that the prisoners at GB are "unlawful combatants".
Humans Right Watch wrote a nice letter to Condoleezza Rice ripping apart her arguments that she still continues to spread on various press conferences.
Their whole life they planned this. All his friend thought this out; convincing Mike to support and fight for Taliban. Taking uni degrees and getting jobs in the communiyty close to him, lurking around him for the whole purpose of becoming his friends etc.
But it was all a giant scam; through the support side and the extremly lucerative Paypal system they planned to "rack in" money. Doing this they planned and still hope to one day take over the whole world, still "racking in" money through the Paypal system, and one day achive Total World Domination(TM).
First; there is under international law in this area (the Geneeva Convention, which USA signed and ratified) any category as "irregular combatants" or the often used "unlawful combatant". Classifying a person as such a thing is actually in itself a violation of the Geneva Convention.
However there are categorys , such as mercenaries, who are not accorded the full protection of the Third Geneva Convention. But, and here comes the crucial part: If there is any doubt whether someone is a POW, an independent court must decide their status.
In this case I'm not shure wheter he is in any way "covered" by the Geneva Convention as the article is not very extensive on information.
But the US government don't have a very good track record when it comes to following the GC.
For example in the Guantanamo Bay case, since the status of the prisoners is unclear (POW or not POW) the case should have been decided by an independant court such as a court in Switzerland, Sweden or any other national court in a country that is not a part in the conflict.
I'm not exactly Shakespeare when it comes to the English language but I fail to the political difference between this statement and the original "You're either for us or against us" expression.
The direct consequence is still the same; he still tries to divide the possible positions in the "War Against Terror" into only two possible possitions, either with us(against the terrorist) or with the terrorrist(against us).
I must say that Mr. Bush masters the art of speaking in a medieval rhetoric.
[rant]
But I guess that is not very disappointing, we all knew that this guy is not the brightest person. The really diappointing thing though; is that American voters probablly will elect him this time in the upcomming 2004 election.
[/rant]
Sorry for late reply.
He lives in Norway and his new ISP is Firstmile. (www.firstmile.no). Its a new ISP, a subsidiary of ZyXEL Comunnications. Unfortunately, they only deliver in limited parts of Norway.
Products and pricing at the bottom of this page. Prices in NOK, so you have to divide with 7 to get $.
No special hurdles, but he had to terminate his old ISP-agreement and pay them 3-months extra because of a 2 year agreement setup.
Basicly, the "scoring" in the Common Criteria is based uppon Evaluation Assurance Levels from EAL1 to EAL7. List of the levelss here.
After evaluation product get on the CCPL (Centralised Certified Product List) here
Apperantly this is not a complete list; and Linux via IBM is not listed yet.
It is not o the "Products in Evaluation List" here either, so I guess they are uppdating their lists now.
No product has a higher rating than 5 right now. Most product get a 4 or 4+.
The list is crowded by firewalls and all the "old UNIX derivates" such as HP-UX, AIX, Solaris,etc. Microsoft got Win 2000 SP3. Cisco, Symantec, SecureLogic and Entrust also got product on the list.
But one company is missing form the list:.. The company we all ehh love: SCO. ;-)