A fundamental principle of the current international order is that states cannot make their subjects effectively stateless.
Generally, Israel hasn't made any of its Palestinians subject "effectively stateless". There are three major groups of Palestinians today:
Those living in various other Arab countries - obviously, Israel is not obliged in any way to give them citizenship.
Those living inside the state of Israel - except for very few exceptions, those have full Israeli citizenship. One of the reasons I'm outraged by comparisons of Israel to South-Africa is how tolerant Israel actually is. Note that many of these full citizens are actively supporting the Palestinian "cause" - more bluntly: Palestinian terror - against Jews on the land that gave them full citizenship. I suspect many other countries, if not the vast majority of them, would reserve quite a different treatment to a minority supporting the enemy at the time of war, even less bloody then the one (with thousands of casualties) we're having with the Palestinians now. Yet we, who grant them such status, are condemned by countries like Syria (directly involved in numerous massacres of its racial minorities) with the cooperation not only of villains like China but also much of the western world. Appearantly, Jews can never do anything right.
The Palestinians who were outside the borders of Israel since its inception - to whom I really don't see why Israel should grant citizenship. Even if they weren't actively involved in attempts to harm Israel as a state in the lives of its inhabitants, no moral obligation stemming from reason or the internation laws which you quoted, obliges Israel to grant them citizenship. Even the original UN decisions recognized that the rights of the Jewish people to self-expression, and indeed the very lives of its members, would be threatened by forcing it to "assimilate" hostile Palestinians population. The decision called for two states - Israel, and Palestine. The Palestinians objected to this. Not that they wanted a state or anything like that - there hasn't been a soverign state in the land of Israel for hundreds of years before modern Zionism emerged. They just didn't like the Jews. Their plan was generally to massacre the most they can, which would cause the survivors to escape and the "problem" to go away. It's amazing how little the Palestinian approach has changed: the above is explicitly endoresed by Hamas today.
In my opinion creating a static defence line against enemies is a perfectly proportional solution. Nobody ever questioned the existence of Hadrian's wall, the Great Wall of China, or the Maginot line. Unfortunately it is in a provocative place. This is more a pragmatic than a principled judgment. I don't believe for a minute that all Palestinians are going to be happy and satisfied if they get a sovereign state along the 1967 borders, but at least it creates a situation where Israel can wash its hands in innocence when further violence occurs.
Unfortunately, the Israeli experience indicates that we can never "wash our hands in innocence", not as far as the world's opinion (not to mention the Arab world) is concerned. Israel is always painted by the Arabs as an unlawful aggressor. And this caricature is usually accepted, pretty much as delivered, on other parts of the world.
Whenever Israel makes a concession, it is always - always! presented as:
1. A proof Israel has been doing wrong all along, and frequently a proof of Israel's "crimes", whichever they might be.
2. "Too little, too late". Generally, there's always something wrong with Israeli concessions. Our Arab enemies never accept concessions as they are, always use them as basis for further demands. This is especially true with the Palestinians. When we withdrew to the internationally recognized borders in Lebanon, Hizbullah suddently decided that they have a right to Mount Dov and the Shaba Ranches as well, so the
The MPAA can hack servers and harvest private information if it wants; not a single MPAA employee would suffer any sort of police harrassment. But someone ostensibly assists violation of MPAA copyrights and BAM! - 200 servers are confiscated by police authorities.
The reason for this is explained in Sterling's account of the first major institutional crackdown on hackers, ezine publishers and other dispensers of information which some powerful corporation don't want to see in the wild. From the text:
Another problem is very little publicized, but it is a cause of genuine concern. Where there is persistent crime, but no effective police protection, then vigilantism can result. Telcos, banks, credit companies, the major corporations who maintain extensive computer networks vulnerable to hacking -- these organizations are powerful, wealthy, and politically influential. They are disinclined to be pushed around by crooks (or by most anyone else, for that matter). They often maintain well-organized private security forces, commonly run by experienced veterans of military and police units, who have left public service for the greener pastures of the private sector. For police, the corporate security manager can be a powerful ally; but if this gentleman finds no allies in the police, and the pressure is on from his board-of-directors, he may quietly take certain matters into his own hands.
So police is acting as mercenaries for the big corporations, since otherwise they'd hire their own. Not a very comforting thought, especially considering you are nowadays likely to be arrested for suspicion of violating corporate copyrights. Remember when police and laws were used to protect citizens, not criminialize millions for hurting corporate profit machines...?
I'm pretty sure that if you equiped the Jews and Palestinians with the same weapons, you wouldn't have seen suicide bombings.
So the Palestinians' acts of intentional mass-murder of innocent civilians is justified because you speculate Israelis would do the same?
You judge people on the acts they actually commit, not on what others might have done in their place. The Palestinian people (like quite a lot of the Arab world these days) chose the path of murder. Justifications for their bad choice, like the ones you are trying to make, don't mitigate their responsibility for their crimes.
The only thing that could stop the blood shed is their realization and taking of responsibility over what they do. Any status-quo in which Israeli Jews are routinely being killed is simply not acceptable. And I cannot help but view proponents of such status quo as deeply anti-semithic. There are quite a few such proponents out there, but since less than 60 years ago a third of our people were massacred, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. The Jews have many enemies.
So, things like this, isn't glorifying mass-murder?
Free speech allows the expression of dissenting views in the western world. But please don't compare a few negligble western extremists to the mainstream idealogies and leaders of the Arab world. Some posting on some website by someone ostensibly American isn't remotely equivalent to the president of Iran congratulating in front of cheering crowds acts of terror in which westerns were killed. When was the last time President Bush (frequent target of attack now days for his "extreme" views) expressed his happiness with the killing of any foreigner, much less a civilian one? Yet congratulations upon the killing of Israeli Jewish civilians appear in Arab newspapers every day. Condoning racist murders occur in the most negliglbe, extreme fringes of western idealogies; it is the mainstream in many Arab countries today.
What happened in New York on September 11 was a cowardice act, but it was an act of desperation.
Killing out of desperation is justified when your back is to the wall and its either you or your victims. Surely you do not claim that was the situation for the WTC attackers. In fact they led quite comfortable lives. If they wanted to promote prosperity on their homelands, they had many ways to do so. Choosing to be murderous was their decision. I can't see any sense in which they were "desperate", but they might have convinced themselves they are. That doesn't mitigate their crime.
Whoever you are, wherever you are... live in peace. Take care.
The great spokesmen for the poor and oppressed usually come from a privileged background themselves
I regret to see you alluding to murderous criminals like the 9/11 kidnappers as "great spokesmen".
Such people are not "spokesmen". They are filthy murderers.
Your other arguments are interesting. I think this whole process became, in a sense, so self-aware that it sprung another degree of agency. The terrorists are not spokesmen, though they perceive or represent themselves as such. The actual spokesmen are now the western liberal thikers, who retroactively construe the acts of those terrorists according to their favorite world view. E.g. socialist thinkers construe the terrorist acts as social protests.
This might be clearer if you notice that the "violent mob" element of the equation has changed. Technology has rendered obsolete the large group of unqualified, under-equipped commiters of violence. There is no "violent mob" today. The small group of terrorist replaced the large "violent mob" of the past. While the real "violent mob" was taken out of the equation, and reduced to a supporting role at most. The 9/11 terrorists are not the spokesmen of some "violent mob" - they constitute it.
I'm not an expert on South-African apartheid regime. But your quote implies the victims of it were South-African citizens before apartheid was implemented, or in any case were virtually citizens or at least entitled to be such.
This is really not the case for Israeli vs. Palestinians. The Palestinians outside the borders of Israel were never Israeli citizens. They are in no way entitiled to become Israeli citizens, not any more than Mexicans are "entitled" to become American citizens just because they perceive the States to be a better place to live in.
Moreover, to judge by the recent elections, most Palestinians in fact do not want to become Israeli citizens. Hamas's platform clearly states its objection to Israel's existence in any shape or form. It does not wish to become a part of Israel. The explicit goals of Hamas are to drive away - preferably kill - the entire Jewish population of Israel. Then take the land were Israel formerly was, and establish a fundamentalist Islamic state there.
The Palestinians define themselves as our enemy. They do not wish to become Israeli citizens, but rather to eliminate Israel and its entire Jewish population. They act upon those wishes every day, killing several Israeli Jews every day. Before we erected our "racist" wall of defence, they killed about 30 Israeli Jews every week. I think any comparison to the situation in South Africa is frankly, ridiculous.
Your unconditional support of Israel and what it stands for is just sickening.
I find any support or "understanding" for heinous attacks on civilian women and children to be much more sickening.
Don't you realize that suicide bombing is a sympton of desperation?
I wish it was. However, facts point in the opposite direction. Take the 9/11 bombers for instance. They were anything but "desperate", living normal (in fact, better than normal) lives in U.S., the country which they bombed. Take Bin-Laden, born to one of the richest families in the world (!), born into every comfort and luxury in the world - yet decided to embark on a path of global religious war and murderous terror.
Contrast that with many millions of people in Africa, compared to which even the poorest Palestinians are living like kings (how many Palestinians die of hunger or thirst annually? As the "inhumane" Olmert said a few days ago, 'we would not allow a single Palestinian child to die of hunger'). Yet you won't see those trully poor people commit mass-murder through systematic bombing of civilian population.
The current wave of terroristic mass-murder is fueled not by economic "desperation", but by extreme religious hate and idealogy condoning - nay, glorifying! - mass-murder. Most of the terrorists have an average (or not much below) quality of life. Quite a few had much better. Try reading the fundamentalistic Islamic propaganda suicide bombers (and non-suicidal terrorists) subscribe to. Learn about the concept of Jihad, and its current application. I believe you'll gain quite a few new insights into the nature of the conflict between Middle Eastern Muslims and Israel, and the rest of the modern western world.
Now if the people living on the West Bank were voting in Jordanian elections you might have an analogy but Israeli border guards are for some reason not letting them be part of Jordan.
It's the Jordanian border guards who are preventing tht. Please familiarize yourself with the facts about Jordanian policy towards the Palestinian people and refugess. The events of Black September are a good place to start. I promise you: you'll be very surprised.
Sure they can vote in Palestinian elections for a sham government that has no sovereign power
The Palestinian elections would be a sham even if Israel and the US wouldn't have existed. They basically have a choice between openly corrupt officials and militant Islamic fundamentalists, both of which about as democratic as Mao Tse-Tung. Like the vast majority of Arab people, the Palestinians have a lot of internal work to do before real democracy emerges. And there are a lot of strong powers working against such maturation processes.
They still routinely evict Palestinians from homes, farms and businesses to make way for Jewish settlements
No, they don't. Things like that were generally never done.
and for their wall which is create one big ghetto
The decision to build the wall came at a time Israel suffered 3 Palestinian suicide bomber attacks per day (!). Its purpose is to protect Israeli men, women and children against Palestinian terrorist who bomb them alive (those you claim have "somewhat extreme" views). I know, it's easy to bash the wall, since we all know walls are Wrong. Just like we know the strong party is always the aggressor.
both of which are completely illegal but sanctioned by the Israeli government and the rest of the world endorses them or looks the other way.
Again, familiarize yourself with the facts. Illegal settlements are harshly evacuated by Israeli armed forces. Just look at the recent Atzmona evacuation.
If protecting Israeli lives is illegal, then the wall is illegal. But I find your mention of the world "looking the other way" interesitng. I don't think the world "looks the other way" very much when it comes to Israeli acts. Our enemies wouldn't allow it. The world does, however, do nothing against much worse attrocities, for example to occupation of Tibet by China. You know, China, the country from which came the chairman of the Hague court which ruled the Israeli defensive wall to be "an illegal act of occupation".
The whole world rises against us when we accidentally kill a single Palestinian child. But nobody cares when hundreds of thousands of civilians are massacred by the government of Sudan. It's politics, man, not justice. Don't delude yourself that you are upholding moral. You're just dancing to the rhythm of the huge propaganda machine Israel's enemies have erected against it.
And oh, look who's blaming us for "violating human rights"! Countries like Saudi-Arabia where you can be thrown in jail without trial for condoning democracy. Countries like Iran, where non-submissive women are routinely wounded or killed. And do I really have to list the attrocities done by countries like Syria or Sudan? Maybe I do, after all, they're not Israel.
Yes and the Israeli military has killed thousands of innocent Palestinian civilians during the same period, Sabra and Shatila being one of the darker stains on Israel's credibility.
Total and complete bullshit. I'm sorry, do you even read the links you paste? Here's the beginning of the text you just linked:
The Sabra and Shatila massacre (or Sabra and Chatila massacre) was carried out in September 1982 by Lebanese Maronite Christian militias in the Sabra and Shatila ( ) refugee camps.
I don't think an Israeli citizen can easily move to the West Bank to live with their spouse either.
They can. The border between Israel and the PA is occassionaly closed for security reasons. Other than that, traffic from Israel to the PA is open. Anyone willing to move to the PA - or any other place in the world - is free to do so. The interesting fact is that most Palesitinans prefer to live here, in the "apartheid state". That's why this issue got appealed to the Israeli Supreme Court.
Israeli Palestinians can marry whoever they want. But Palestinians are prevented from gaining Israeli citizenship until the conflict between our people is resolved. In the last 5 years, 10,000 (yes, ten thousands) Palestinians were granted Israeli citizenship through marriage. That's not a bunch of cases; it's a huge wave of migration from an enemy state. And as I already said, many such marriage were proven in court to lead directly to establishments of Palestinian terror networks in Israel. Which isn't very surprising, considering the nature and intensity of hostility in the conflict.
Any Jew from anywhere in the world can easily move to Israel and get citizenship
Yes, and thank God for that! Israel was established after the holocaust, during which many Jews were murdered after failing desperate attempts to be gain assylum in foreign countries. Since the British Empire controlled the land of Israel, many Jews were sent back to be massacred in Europe by the British occupation forces. Israel is the one and only assylum for the prosecuted Jewish people in the entire world. (And people who deny Israel's right to exist feel like, shall we say, old enemies?)
like the massacre at Deir Yassin
The "massacre at Deir Yassin", like the more recent "massacre at Jenin", is a hystorical myth. No credible historical evidence supports that. When there are incidents where civilians are being harmed by Israeli armed forces, they are severely punished (see Kafar Kassem). Those are pretty rare. Massacres of Jewish population by Palestinian more-or-less organized mob are much more common.
the Israelis have been at war with the Palestinians since they pushed them out of the homes 60 years ago
You are claiming the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began when "Israelis pushed the Palestinians out of their homes". This is a gross misconception, fueled by the Palestinian propaganda machine. Read the actual history, not the pamphlets. There were several major Palestinian attacks against defenseless Israeli population before 1948. For example, the attacks on peaceful, defeseless Jewish population in Jaffa in 1921, and the infamous massacre of 66 Jews in Hebron in 1929. Most Jews in Israel held very peacful views towards the Palestinians before (and even after) those incidents.
In 1948 the Palestinians attacked the Jewish population. Obviously, we responded. Those who attacked were driven away. Those who did not remained in Israel to this day.
Its also unlikely there will ever be any real peace short of the Palestinians completely capitulating and accepting life in walled ghettos in Gaza and the West Bank for the rest of time, most probably in eternal povery
Yes, you are right about that. Isn't it interesting how every refugee camp is generally disbanded within months, while the Palestnian refugee camps remained for almost 60 years? Isn't it even more surprising, considering those camps are within few miles of Palestinian states like Jordan?
The truth is that the Palestinian refugees are played like pawns by their cynical siblings in the surrounding states. Countries like Syria have an interest in keeping the "Palestinian problem" alive and well as means of bashing Israel.
alestinians completely capitulating and accepting life in walled ghettos in Gaza and the West Bank for the rest of time, most probably in eternal po
You are conveniently differentiating between Israel Palestinians and Palestinians in the occupied lands
The Palestinians living outside the state of Israel are - obviously - not Israelis. They are not Israeli citizens. They should not have voting rights in Israel, not any more than Americans should have voting rights in Canada. Claiming I'm "conveniently differentiating" between people who are full citizens of Israel (though happen to be of Palestinian decent) and people who are not Israeli citizens is like claiming to "conveniently differentiate" between Americans and Canadians on the issue of voting rights in Canada.
I'm not sure how to tackle the rest of your comment, since you're leaving off (should I say "conveniently"?) the factual domain of human-rights laws in Israel, and moving into the subjective field of theorizing about what Israel and the PA should or shouldn't do to resolve the current conflict.
I think I should say this: look at the results of the elections for the past 15 years. If you actually do that, you won't be able to escape one blatant conclusion: the Israeli public is consistently voting for the candidates who promise to do everything for fair peace with the Palestinians.
It began in 1990 with the loss of the Likud party (after more than 10 years of winning every election!) because it was perceived as reluctant to go to every reasonable compromise to establish peace. From then on, only candidates who promised to make every effort for just peace got elected.
I wish I could say the same for our Palestinian neighbors. You mentioned Hamas being elected recently by the vast majority of the Palestinian public. Hamas is a party which organized hundreds of suicide bombings against Israeli population through the 90s. Hamas is openly anti-semithic (read its object statment), it rejects peace, or any acknoledgment of Israel and its right to exist. Hamas stated ideology is to eliminate Israel and its Jewish population by any means necessary. Israel and most of the reasonable world (not including, e.g., China or Russia) insist that Hamas change those views before it is granted cooperation. So far, Hamas is holding on to its murderous, militant views.
It's easy to perceive Israel as being the more militant and aggressive party in this conflict, simply because it is militarilly stronger. However, it is a cognitive error, stemming from a falliable heuristic.
Since Israel wants to maintain the facade it is a representative democracy it must do everything in its power to prevent Palestinians from becoming the majority, because when they are either Jews surrender power at the polls or for all practical purposes Israel is an apartheid state, which is pretty much already is, with a minority controlling power through non Democratic means and ethnic "cleansing".
This part is so objectively wrong, it has to be motivated by extreme ignorance, extreme bias, or both.
In an apartheid state racial segregation is upheld by law. How can Israel be "an apartheid state... for all practical cases" when it has strict, explicit laws (yes, enforced ones) against such segregation? Please give one example of a segregation act upheld in Israeli court. Until you do, I'd have to call your statements baseless, biased propaganda.
You're in fact contradicting yourself. Since if Israel is "an apartheid state", and of course in such a state minorities don't have real voting rights, why should it worry (as you claim) about Palestinians becoming a political majority?
The simple fact is that Israeli Palestinians have the exact same voting rights as any Israeli. They are well represented in the Israeli parlament, and they have every right that any Israeli citizen has. Again, feel free to provide any facts to the contrary. But I don't think you'll find any. Especially considering such claims like the one about "minority controlling power through non Democratic means". Which minority are you speaking of, exactly? The Jewish population is a majority in Israel itself, and it has a (very Democratic, elected) majority in the Israeli Parliament. I'm sorry, but some of your statments simply don't make any sense.
Just last week Israel's Supreme court affirmed a law effectively banning a Palestinian from marrying an Israeli citizen, a law so much like the Nazi prohibition of intermarriage with Jews.
This is, quite simply, false. The law you're refering to does not prevent anyone from marrying anyone.
What that law does state is that Palestinians who marry Israeli citizens would not be automatically granted Israeli citizenship.
So first of all, that's hardly a human-rights violation; it's a rule about who can and cannot become an Israeli citizen, and how. Japan, for instance, does not grant a man citizenship if he marries a Japanese woman. Every country has the right to determine who can and cannot gain citizenship, and many do enforce strict laws.
Moreover, you can hardly call that rule unreasonable. The Palestinians are currently at war with Israel. Many of them state their commitment to wiping us out of the face of the Earth. Are we out of line by denying them the ability to become citizens of our country? Can a country not prevent its enemies from gaining its citizenship? I think the answer to these questions is obvious.
And one other important fact. That rule was only established recently. After 5 years of intense conflict, during which 25 Palestinians who gained Israeli citizenship by marriage were involved in suicide bombings againt Israeli population. Each such bombing causes on average 10-30 casualties, and the order of 50-300 wounded. I believe the Israeli people have the right to defend themselves.
This type of spam isn't too bad given traditional spam methods, as smarter users won't open attachments from people they don't know.
From the article:
The SANS ISC (Internet Storm Center) said in a diary entry that it received reports of the exploit from an unnamed organization that was targeted. "The e-mail was written to look like an internal e-mail, including signature. It was addressed by name to the intended victim and not detected by the anti-virus software," said Chris Carboni, an ISC incident handler tracking the attack.
Having worked in several large MS-enslaved organizations, I can attest that a lot of workers are receiving such attachments daily, as a normal part of the proceedings of work. Someone refusing to open such attachments would amount to someone refusing to do his job. Let me stress this: most workers are required to open Word document attachments they recieve from other workers. That's the policy in many organizations, perhaps most of those using MS technology.
I agree that it would be less dangerous for random users (though we all know how successful things like the love-worm were in the past before the AV companies began hunting them, and even later. And consider, in this case, they can do nothing: you're vulnurable until MS patches your Word program files). But it woud wreak havoc in organizationanl networks. Considering how well-constructed it is - "The e-mail was written to look like an internal e-mail, including signature. It was addressed by name to the intended victim and not detected by the anti-virus software", I'd say it could pwn an entire organization within days or even hours of infecting one or two workers. And there's very little the organization can do to defend itself ("stop opening Word documents" in many such organizations amounts to "stop working"). What can a hacker do with an entire organizational network at his bidding - including things like LANs, servers, and dozens of slave stations - is left as an exercise to the reader.
Sorry, I miss-clicked the Submit instead of Preview button. Here are some format corrections and clarifications of parent post:
Actually, Deep Blue was "Fast and Dumb" - it could indeed search fast and thus foresee many moves ahead ("into the future"), but it didn't have a good sense of which moves are worth checking out. If there were 10 moves available in the position, DB would generally check all of them out. Which meant that:
It wasted a lot of power calculating hopeless and downright stupid moves. That's especially evident when you consider the huge branching factor of exploring all moves in each position.
It would make mistakes if the position required calculating beyond 20-30 moves ahead - i.e. making a strategic move, as opposed to tactical (short range, immediate appearant profit) moves.
Contrary to popular opinion, DB wasn't the best chess computer that could be built at the time. It was the strongest chess playing hardware ever created up until that point. The software recieved relatively little attention, so if you'd swap the rather generic software engine DB used with a decent professional program on the same hardware, it would be deliver much stronger performance. In fact, you could substantially reduce the hardware and still get a stronger chess game with a better program. DB was very dumb, even more than the dumbest "fast searchers" professional level playing software.
It's pretty evident that fast searching has reached its limits. The branching factor makes "more muscle" (as per the famous "brute force" method) pretty useless. The current top programs are the "smart searchers": Hiarcs especially (the epitome of a very wise, very "slow" program), and also Shredder. In fact, even the formerly "fast and dumb" programs need to be smarter than they used to be to remain competitive at the top of the computer chess league. But, as mentioned above, none of them ever was as dumb as the fastest, dumbest program ever: Deep Blue.
Actually, Deep Blue was "Fast and Dumb" - it could indeed search fast and thus foresee many moves ahead ("into the future"), but it didn't have a good sense of which moves are worth checking out. If there are 10 moves available in the position, DB would generally check all of them out. Which meant that:
It wasted a lot of power calculating hopeless and downright stupid moves. That's especially evident when you consider the huge branching factor of exploring all moves in each position.
It would make mistakes if the position required calculating beyond 20-30 moves ahead - i.e. making a strategic move, as opposed to tactical (short range, immediate appearant profit) moves.
Contrary to popular opinion, DB wasn't the best chess computer that could be built at the time. It was the strongest chess playing hardware ever created (at that point). The software recieved very little attention, and if you'd swap the generic DB engine with a decent program on the same hardware, it would be much better. In fact, you could substantially reduce the hardware and still get a stronger chess game with a better program. DB was very dumb, even more than the dumbest "fast searchers" professional level playing software.
It's pretty evident that fast searching has reached its limits. The branching factor makes "more muscle" (as per the famous "brute force" method) pretty useless. The current top programs are the "smart searchers": Hiarcs especially (the epitome of a very wise, very "slow" program), and also Shredder. In fact, even the formerly "fast and dumb" programs need to be smarter than they used to be to remain competitive at the top of the computer chess league. But, as mentioned above, none of them ever was as dumb as the fastest, dumbest program ever: Deep Blue.
If they had gotten a restrictive corporation-style patent on that technology, they would have made billions of dollars. Sure, industry and inovation would be hampered, but that's a small price to pay for someone getting obscenely rich with money he couldn't spend in a donzen lifetimes...
It is a well known fact that several p2p programs were attacked by the minions of various **AA, injecting malicious pseudo-clients into the essentially closed networks. Those attacks wouldn't have been possible without extensive technical analysis of the modus operandi of those networks. At least in most of those cases, it is pretty appearant that the attack was accomplished by downloading and examining the official client for that network.
Couldn't those p2p networks utilize the same defense? I.e. establish in their EULA that their code and protocol may not be examined for the purpose of a malicious sabotage in their operation?
I seem to recall that some p2p EULAs actually had such a clause. Was it ignored with no consequnces?
IANAL, but it seems to me the only way to stop this is to establish a legal custom of awarding the people subject to such Corporate Terror with massive punitive damages, to the amounts that can actually deter a corporation from practicing such terroristic behaviours. Also, right now it's a loss-only game for the defendents: they either lose a small quantity of their time and money, or a great quantity of those (assuming of course they don't immediately back down). In the event of a serious loss, this can be a life-wrecking event. Inserting a potential for massive compensation would make it a loss/win script, with the potential to radically change the defendants' life for good, not just for the bad. And of course, it would mean corporations would file lawsuits against private people only in extreme cases (read: the cases they meant to be filed in), and not as part of a standard-practice policy of corporate muscle, getting what they want from common people and stomping their civil rights in the process.
This is basically a commercial for some source software package. They haven't released code. They haven't even releasd a closed source evaluation version. All they "released" is some web page with lots of hysterical marketing hype and unsubstantiated vague buzzwords ("JST").
People - at least, the majority of them - do avoid things they deeply view as "wrong".
I wouldn't grab from p2p a book by a young struggling author. I certainly wouldn't read it, enjoy it, appreciate it - and then fail to compensate the author. Not just because we have great interest in encouraging literary works of high quality.
But I would grab a copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's work, although with recent extensions the various **AA managed to keep it copyrighted in America still.
I and others cannot yet enjoy the works of an author 70 years deceased. Fitzgerald is a relatively benign example; there are thousands of long deceased authors that have long gone out of print, whose works you just cannot access in any way thanks to the corps indifferently protecting their "copyrights". These authors are in effect going extinct; instead of being duplicated and archived in thousands of hard-drives and other permanent media all over the world, their works are rapidly becoming lost to the world.
That's all well and good, but Python and Ruby don't have decent Apache Modules.
Sheer nonesense. Rails in a production environment is almost always used under Apach/fastcgi. Python has mod_python, on top of which Django runs (though I like that approach less than Rails').
As for scaling, both scale just fine, thank you. And several seasoned frameworks, like Zope, have scaling facilities that make mod_php look like a toy. I'm not saying mod_php doesn't scale; it does. But claiming it scales better than Rails or Zope is not just wrong; in fact, the opposite is true.
Slashdot Mirror
Great, so Perl 6 is legal now. Any chance of seeing her while we still have our youth?
Generally, Israel hasn't made any of its Palestinians subject "effectively stateless". There are three major groups of Palestinians today:
Unfortunately, the Israeli experience indicates that we can never "wash our hands in innocence", not as far as the world's opinion (not to mention the Arab world) is concerned. Israel is always painted by the Arabs as an unlawful aggressor. And this caricature is usually accepted, pretty much as delivered, on other parts of the world.
Whenever Israel makes a concession, it is always - always! presented as:
1. A proof Israel has been doing wrong all along, and frequently a proof of Israel's "crimes", whichever they might be.
2. "Too little, too late". Generally, there's always something wrong with Israeli concessions. Our Arab enemies never accept concessions as they are, always use them as basis for further demands. This is especially true with the Palestinians. When we withdrew to the internationally recognized borders in Lebanon, Hizbullah suddently decided that they have a right to Mount Dov and the Shaba Ranches as well, so the
The MPAA can hack servers and harvest private information if it wants; not a single MPAA employee would suffer any sort of police harrassment. But someone ostensibly assists violation of MPAA copyrights and BAM! - 200 servers are confiscated by police authorities.
The reason for this is explained in Sterling's account of the first major institutional crackdown on hackers, ezine publishers and other dispensers of information which some powerful corporation don't want to see in the wild. From the text:
So police is acting as mercenaries for the big corporations, since otherwise they'd hire their own. Not a very comforting thought, especially considering you are nowadays likely to be arrested for suspicion of violating corporate copyrights. Remember when police and laws were used to protect citizens, not criminialize millions for hurting corporate profit machines...?
So the Palestinians' acts of intentional mass-murder of innocent civilians is justified because you speculate Israelis would do the same?
You judge people on the acts they actually commit, not on what others might have done in their place. The Palestinian people (like quite a lot of the Arab world these days) chose the path of murder. Justifications for their bad choice, like the ones you are trying to make, don't mitigate their responsibility for their crimes.
The only thing that could stop the blood shed is their realization and taking of responsibility over what they do. Any status-quo in which Israeli Jews are routinely being killed is simply not acceptable. And I cannot help but view proponents of such status quo as deeply anti-semithic. There are quite a few such proponents out there, but since less than 60 years ago a third of our people were massacred, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. The Jews have many enemies.
Free speech allows the expression of dissenting views in the western world. But please don't compare a few negligble western extremists to the mainstream idealogies and leaders of the Arab world. Some posting on some website by someone ostensibly American isn't remotely equivalent to the president of Iran congratulating in front of cheering crowds acts of terror in which westerns were killed. When was the last time President Bush (frequent target of attack now days for his "extreme" views) expressed his happiness with the killing of any foreigner, much less a civilian one? Yet congratulations upon the killing of Israeli Jewish civilians appear in Arab newspapers every day. Condoning racist murders occur in the most negliglbe, extreme fringes of western idealogies; it is the mainstream in many Arab countries today.
Killing out of desperation is justified when your back is to the wall and its either you or your victims. Surely you do not claim that was the situation for the WTC attackers. In fact they led quite comfortable lives. If they wanted to promote prosperity on their homelands, they had many ways to do so. Choosing to be murderous was their decision. I can't see any sense in which they were "desperate", but they might have convinced themselves they are. That doesn't mitigate their crime.
Thanks you. You too.
I regret to see you alluding to murderous criminals like the 9/11 kidnappers as "great spokesmen".
Such people are not "spokesmen". They are filthy murderers.
Your other arguments are interesting. I think this whole process became, in a sense, so self-aware that it sprung another degree of agency. The terrorists are not spokesmen, though they perceive or represent themselves as such. The actual spokesmen are now the western liberal thikers, who retroactively construe the acts of those terrorists according to their favorite world view. E.g. socialist thinkers construe the terrorist acts as social protests.
This might be clearer if you notice that the "violent mob" element of the equation has changed. Technology has rendered obsolete the large group of unqualified, under-equipped commiters of violence. There is no "violent mob" today. The small group of terrorist replaced the large "violent mob" of the past. While the real "violent mob" was taken out of the equation, and reduced to a supporting role at most. The 9/11 terrorists are not the spokesmen of some "violent mob" - they constitute it.
I'm not an expert on South-African apartheid regime. But your quote implies the victims of it were South-African citizens before apartheid was implemented, or in any case were virtually citizens or at least entitled to be such.
This is really not the case for Israeli vs. Palestinians. The Palestinians outside the borders of Israel were never Israeli citizens. They are in no way entitiled to become Israeli citizens, not any more than Mexicans are "entitled" to become American citizens just because they perceive the States to be a better place to live in.
Moreover, to judge by the recent elections, most Palestinians in fact do not want to become Israeli citizens. Hamas's platform clearly states its objection to Israel's existence in any shape or form. It does not wish to become a part of Israel. The explicit goals of Hamas are to drive away - preferably kill - the entire Jewish population of Israel. Then take the land were Israel formerly was, and establish a fundamentalist Islamic state there.
The Palestinians define themselves as our enemy. They do not wish to become Israeli citizens, but rather to eliminate Israel and its entire Jewish population. They act upon those wishes every day, killing several Israeli Jews every day. Before we erected our "racist" wall of defence, they killed about 30 Israeli Jews every week. I think any comparison to the situation in South Africa is frankly, ridiculous.
I find any support or "understanding" for heinous attacks on civilian women and children to be much more sickening.
I wish it was. However, facts point in the opposite direction. Take the 9/11 bombers for instance. They were anything but "desperate", living normal (in fact, better than normal) lives in U.S., the country which they bombed. Take Bin-Laden, born to one of the richest families in the world (!), born into every comfort and luxury in the world - yet decided to embark on a path of global religious war and murderous terror.
Contrast that with many millions of people in Africa, compared to which even the poorest Palestinians are living like kings (how many Palestinians die of hunger or thirst annually? As the "inhumane" Olmert said a few days ago, 'we would not allow a single Palestinian child to die of hunger'). Yet you won't see those trully poor people commit mass-murder through systematic bombing of civilian population.
The current wave of terroristic mass-murder is fueled not by economic "desperation", but by extreme religious hate and idealogy condoning - nay, glorifying! - mass-murder. Most of the terrorists have an average (or not much below) quality of life. Quite a few had much better. Try reading the fundamentalistic Islamic propaganda suicide bombers (and non-suicidal terrorists) subscribe to. Learn about the concept of Jihad, and its current application. I believe you'll gain quite a few new insights into the nature of the conflict between Middle Eastern Muslims and Israel, and the rest of the modern western world.
It's the Jordanian border guards who are preventing tht. Please familiarize yourself with the facts about Jordanian policy towards the Palestinian people and refugess. The events of Black September are a good place to start. I promise you: you'll be very surprised.
The Palestinian elections would be a sham even if Israel and the US wouldn't have existed. They basically have a choice between openly corrupt officials and militant Islamic fundamentalists, both of which about as democratic as Mao Tse-Tung. Like the vast majority of Arab people, the Palestinians have a lot of internal work to do before real democracy emerges. And there are a lot of strong powers working against such maturation processes.
No, they don't. Things like that were generally never done.
The decision to build the wall came at a time Israel suffered 3 Palestinian suicide bomber attacks per day (!). Its purpose is to protect Israeli men, women and children against Palestinian terrorist who bomb them alive (those you claim have "somewhat extreme" views). I know, it's easy to bash the wall, since we all know walls are Wrong. Just like we know the strong party is always the aggressor.
Again, familiarize yourself with the facts. Illegal settlements are harshly evacuated by Israeli armed forces. Just look at the recent Atzmona evacuation.
If protecting Israeli lives is illegal, then the wall is illegal. But I find your mention of the world "looking the other way" interesitng. I don't think the world "looks the other way" very much when it comes to Israeli acts. Our enemies wouldn't allow it. The world does, however, do nothing against much worse attrocities, for example to occupation of Tibet by China. You know, China, the country from which came the chairman of the Hague court which ruled the Israeli defensive wall to be "an illegal act of occupation".
The whole world rises against us when we accidentally kill a single Palestinian child. But nobody cares when hundreds of thousands of civilians are massacred by the government of Sudan. It's politics, man, not justice. Don't delude yourself that you are upholding moral. You're just dancing to the rhythm of the huge propaganda machine Israel's enemies have erected against it.
And oh, look who's blaming us for "violating human rights"! Countries like Saudi-Arabia where you can be thrown in jail without trial for condoning democracy. Countries like Iran, where non-submissive women are routinely wounded or killed. And do I really have to list the attrocities done by countries like Syria or Sudan? Maybe I do, after all, they're not Israel.
Total and complete bullshit. I'm sorry, do you even read the links you paste? Here's the beginning of the text you just linked:
Israel's "crime" in that case (f
They can. The border between Israel and the PA is occassionaly closed for security reasons. Other than that, traffic from Israel to the PA is open. Anyone willing to move to the PA - or any other place in the world - is free to do so. The interesting fact is that most Palesitinans prefer to live here, in the "apartheid state". That's why this issue got appealed to the Israeli Supreme Court.
Israeli Palestinians can marry whoever they want. But Palestinians are prevented from gaining Israeli citizenship until the conflict between our people is resolved. In the last 5 years, 10,000 (yes, ten thousands) Palestinians were granted Israeli citizenship through marriage. That's not a bunch of cases; it's a huge wave of migration from an enemy state. And as I already said, many such marriage were proven in court to lead directly to establishments of Palestinian terror networks in Israel. Which isn't very surprising, considering the nature and intensity of hostility in the conflict.
Yes, and thank God for that! Israel was established after the holocaust, during which many Jews were murdered after failing desperate attempts to be gain assylum in foreign countries. Since the British Empire controlled the land of Israel, many Jews were sent back to be massacred in Europe by the British occupation forces. Israel is the one and only assylum for the prosecuted Jewish people in the entire world. (And people who deny Israel's right to exist feel like, shall we say, old enemies?)
The "massacre at Deir Yassin", like the more recent "massacre at Jenin", is a hystorical myth. No credible historical evidence supports that. When there are incidents where civilians are being harmed by Israeli armed forces, they are severely punished (see Kafar Kassem). Those are pretty rare. Massacres of Jewish population by Palestinian more-or-less organized mob are much more common.
You are claiming the Israeli-Palestinian conflict began when "Israelis pushed the Palestinians out of their homes". This is a gross misconception, fueled by the Palestinian propaganda machine. Read the actual history, not the pamphlets. There were several major Palestinian attacks against defenseless Israeli population before 1948. For example, the attacks on peaceful, defeseless Jewish population in Jaffa in 1921, and the infamous massacre of 66 Jews in Hebron in 1929. Most Jews in Israel held very peacful views towards the Palestinians before (and even after) those incidents.
In 1948 the Palestinians attacked the Jewish population. Obviously, we responded. Those who attacked were driven away. Those who did not remained in Israel to this day.
Yes, you are right about that. Isn't it interesting how every refugee camp is generally disbanded within months, while the Palestnian refugee camps remained for almost 60 years? Isn't it even more surprising, considering those camps are within few miles of Palestinian states like Jordan?
The truth is that the Palestinian refugees are played like pawns by their cynical siblings in the surrounding states. Countries like Syria have an interest in keeping the "Palestinian problem" alive and well as means of bashing Israel.
The Palestinians living outside the state of Israel are - obviously - not Israelis. They are not Israeli citizens. They should not have voting rights in Israel, not any more than Americans should have voting rights in Canada. Claiming I'm "conveniently differentiating" between people who are full citizens of Israel (though happen to be of Palestinian decent) and people who are not Israeli citizens is like claiming to "conveniently differentiate" between Americans and Canadians on the issue of voting rights in Canada.
I'm not sure how to tackle the rest of your comment, since you're leaving off (should I say "conveniently"?) the factual domain of human-rights laws in Israel, and moving into the subjective field of theorizing about what Israel and the PA should or shouldn't do to resolve the current conflict.
I think I should say this: look at the results of the elections for the past 15 years. If you actually do that, you won't be able to escape one blatant conclusion: the Israeli public is consistently voting for the candidates who promise to do everything for fair peace with the Palestinians.
It began in 1990 with the loss of the Likud party (after more than 10 years of winning every election!) because it was perceived as reluctant to go to every reasonable compromise to establish peace. From then on, only candidates who promised to make every effort for just peace got elected.
I wish I could say the same for our Palestinian neighbors. You mentioned Hamas being elected recently by the vast majority of the Palestinian public. Hamas is a party which organized hundreds of suicide bombings against Israeli population through the 90s. Hamas is openly anti-semithic (read its object statment), it rejects peace, or any acknoledgment of Israel and its right to exist. Hamas stated ideology is to eliminate Israel and its Jewish population by any means necessary. Israel and most of the reasonable world (not including, e.g., China or Russia) insist that Hamas change those views before it is granted cooperation. So far, Hamas is holding on to its murderous, militant views.
It's easy to perceive Israel as being the more militant and aggressive party in this conflict, simply because it is militarilly stronger. However, it is a cognitive error, stemming from a falliable heuristic.
This part is so objectively wrong, it has to be motivated by extreme ignorance, extreme bias, or both.
In an apartheid state racial segregation is upheld by law. How can Israel be "an apartheid state... for all practical cases" when it has strict, explicit laws (yes, enforced ones) against such segregation? Please give one example of a segregation act upheld in Israeli court. Until you do, I'd have to call your statements baseless, biased propaganda.
You're in fact contradicting yourself. Since if Israel is "an apartheid state", and of course in such a state minorities don't have real voting rights, why should it worry (as you claim) about Palestinians becoming a political majority?
The simple fact is that Israeli Palestinians have the exact same voting rights as any Israeli. They are well represented in the Israeli parlament, and they have every right that any Israeli citizen has. Again, feel free to provide any facts to the contrary. But I don't think you'll find any. Especially considering such claims like the one about "minority controlling power through non Democratic means". Which minority are you speaking of, exactly? The Jewish population is a majority in Israel itself, and it has a (very Democratic, elected) majority in the Israeli Parliament. I'm sorry, but some of your statments simply don't make any sense.
This is, quite simply, false. The law you're refering to does not prevent anyone from marrying anyone.
What that law does state is that Palestinians who marry Israeli citizens would not be automatically granted Israeli citizenship.
So first of all, that's hardly a human-rights violation; it's a rule about who can and cannot become an Israeli citizen, and how. Japan, for instance, does not grant a man citizenship if he marries a Japanese woman. Every country has the right to determine who can and cannot gain citizenship, and many do enforce strict laws.
Moreover, you can hardly call that rule unreasonable. The Palestinians are currently at war with Israel. Many of them state their commitment to wiping us out of the face of the Earth. Are we out of line by denying them the ability to become citizens of our country? Can a country not prevent its enemies from gaining its citizenship? I think the answer to these questions is obvious.
And one other important fact. That rule was only established recently. After 5 years of intense conflict, during which 25 Palestinians who gained Israeli citizenship by marriage were involved in suicide bombings againt Israeli population. Each such bombing causes on average 10-30 casualties, and the order of 50-300 wounded. I believe the Israeli people have the right to defend themselves.
From the article:
Having worked in several large MS-enslaved organizations, I can attest that a lot of workers are receiving such attachments daily, as a normal part of the proceedings of work. Someone refusing to open such attachments would amount to someone refusing to do his job. Let me stress this: most workers are required to open Word document attachments they recieve from other workers. That's the policy in many organizations, perhaps most of those using MS technology.
I agree that it would be less dangerous for random users (though we all know how successful things like the love-worm were in the past before the AV companies began hunting them, and even later. And consider, in this case, they can do nothing: you're vulnurable until MS patches your Word program files). But it woud wreak havoc in organizationanl networks. Considering how well-constructed it is - "The e-mail was written to look like an internal e-mail, including signature. It was addressed by name to the intended victim and not detected by the anti-virus software", I'd say it could pwn an entire organization within days or even hours of infecting one or two workers. And there's very little the organization can do to defend itself ("stop opening Word documents" in many such organizations amounts to "stop working"). What can a hacker do with an entire organizational network at his bidding - including things like LANs, servers, and dozens of slave stations - is left as an exercise to the reader.
Well, they could always ask these guys what it is... ;)
You mess with their illegal profits - they'll mess you up. It's as plain and simple as that. They're not even hiding it anymore.
Let's just hope they'll start receiving the treatement that their real-world counterparts have recieved. In our lifetime.
Sorry, I miss-clicked the Submit instead of Preview button. Here are some format corrections and clarifications of parent post:
Actually, Deep Blue was "Fast and Dumb" - it could indeed search fast and thus foresee many moves ahead ("into the future"), but it didn't have a good sense of which moves are worth checking out. If there were 10 moves available in the position, DB would generally check all of them out. Which meant that:
Contrary to popular opinion, DB wasn't the best chess computer that could be built at the time. It was the strongest chess playing hardware ever created up until that point. The software recieved relatively little attention, so if you'd swap the rather generic software engine DB used with a decent professional program on the same hardware, it would be deliver much stronger performance. In fact, you could substantially reduce the hardware and still get a stronger chess game with a better program. DB was very dumb, even more than the dumbest "fast searchers" professional level playing software.
It's pretty evident that fast searching has reached its limits. The branching factor makes "more muscle" (as per the famous "brute force" method) pretty useless. The current top programs are the "smart searchers": Hiarcs especially (the epitome of a very wise, very "slow" program), and also Shredder. In fact, even the formerly "fast and dumb" programs need to be smarter than they used to be to remain competitive at the top of the computer chess league. But, as mentioned above, none of them ever was as dumb as the fastest, dumbest program ever: Deep Blue.
Actually, Deep Blue was "Fast and Dumb" - it could indeed search fast and thus foresee many moves ahead ("into the future"), but it didn't have a good sense of which moves are worth checking out. If there are 10 moves available in the position, DB would generally check all of them out. Which meant that:
It's pretty evident that fast searching has reached its limits. The branching factor makes "more muscle" (as per the famous "brute force" method) pretty useless. The current top programs are the "smart searchers": Hiarcs especially (the epitome of a very wise, very "slow" program), and also Shredder. In fact, even the formerly "fast and dumb" programs need to be smarter than they used to be to remain competitive at the top of the computer chess league. But, as mentioned above, none of them ever was as dumb as the fastest, dumbest program ever: Deep Blue.
After not releasing the console, they could always sue random people for "lost profits", as seems to be the common policy these days...
If they had gotten a restrictive corporation-style patent on that technology, they would have made billions of dollars. Sure, industry and inovation would be hampered, but that's a small price to pay for someone getting obscenely rich with money he couldn't spend in a donzen lifetimes...
It is a well known fact that several p2p programs were attacked by the minions of various **AA, injecting malicious pseudo-clients into the essentially closed networks. Those attacks wouldn't have been possible without extensive technical analysis of the modus operandi of those networks. At least in most of those cases, it is pretty appearant that the attack was accomplished by downloading and examining the official client for that network.
Couldn't those p2p networks utilize the same defense? I.e. establish in their EULA that their code and protocol may not be examined for the purpose of a malicious sabotage in their operation?
I seem to recall that some p2p EULAs actually had such a clause. Was it ignored with no consequnces?
IANAL, but it seems to me the only way to stop this is to establish a legal custom of awarding the people subject to such Corporate Terror with massive punitive damages, to the amounts that can actually deter a corporation from practicing such terroristic behaviours. Also, right now it's a loss-only game for the defendents: they either lose a small quantity of their time and money, or a great quantity of those (assuming of course they don't immediately back down). In the event of a serious loss, this can be a life-wrecking event. Inserting a potential for massive compensation would make it a loss/win script, with the potential to radically change the defendants' life for good, not just for the bad. And of course, it would mean corporations would file lawsuits against private people only in extreme cases (read: the cases they meant to be filed in), and not as part of a standard-practice policy of corporate muscle, getting what they want from common people and stomping their civil rights in the process.
This is basically a commercial for some source software package. They haven't released code. They haven't even releasd a closed source evaluation version. All they "released" is some web page with lots of hysterical marketing hype and unsubstantiated vague buzzwords ("JST").
So why, again, is this on /.?
that technology sets us free ;)
People - at least, the majority of them - do avoid things they deeply view as "wrong".
I wouldn't grab from p2p a book by a young struggling author. I certainly wouldn't read it, enjoy it, appreciate it - and then fail to compensate the author. Not just because we have great interest in encouraging literary works of high quality.
But I would grab a copy of F. Scott Fitzgerald's work, although with recent extensions the various **AA managed to keep it copyrighted in America still.
I and others cannot yet enjoy the works of an author 70 years deceased. Fitzgerald is a relatively benign example; there are thousands of long deceased authors that have long gone out of print, whose works you just cannot access in any way thanks to the corps indifferently protecting their "copyrights". These authors are in effect going extinct; instead of being duplicated and archived in thousands of hard-drives and other permanent media all over the world, their works are rapidly becoming lost to the world.
Sheer nonesense. Rails in a production environment is almost always used under Apach/fastcgi. Python has mod_python, on top of which Django runs (though I like that approach less than Rails').
As for scaling, both scale just fine, thank you. And several seasoned frameworks, like Zope, have scaling facilities that make mod_php look like a toy. I'm not saying mod_php doesn't scale; it does. But claiming it scales better than Rails or Zope is not just wrong; in fact, the opposite is true.