My opinion is that we should allow patents on absolutely everything, and simply let the patent trolls cause the entire system to implode on itself.
Back in the '60s a LOT of people thought the same things would work on the drug laws (as they believed it had on alcohol prohibition). So they tried it.
Didn't work worth a damn.
Instead the US now has the largest percentage of population in prison of any country in the world. It has federal laws requiring long-term incarceration for drug offenders creating prison overcrowding that results in court decisions releasing violent felons. It has prison tent camps in the desert on the model of WWII concentration camps. And it has the RICO laws creating the same incentive structure that drove the Spanish Inquisition: The "criminal"'s property is forfeit to the law enforcement organization that accused him.
And you think this will work with patents, where the main entities that would have to be "civilly disobedient" would be corporations, whose officers have a fiduciary duty to their stockholders to avoid breaking the law, even in tiny ways, and thus have their assets siezed?
I am not very familiar with US legislation but here in Yurop courts can't create laws, they can decide only based on existing laws.
Which is exactly how software patents were originally created, by lawyers and courts, in the US (as I, who ANAP(atent)L understand what happened.)
US law explicitly excluded "mathematical algorithms" from patentability. The patent office and the courts interpreted this to include programs (which are algorithms for performing computations involving arithmetic and boolean logic, both of which are branches of mathematics.)
But an inventor and his lawyers rendered a computation for process control into a logic circuit and applied for a patent on it, as an invention in process control (or perhaps a patent on the process itself). There were plenty of similar patents on the books going back to the foundation of automation, so this was nothing new, and the invention was clearly patentable.
But they included a claim on replacing the complex logic circuit implementing one part of the process with a computer programmed to do the same thing. This seemed reasonable. So the patent office granted the patent.
The claim was challenged as patenting an algorithm, and the courts upheld it. (Absent such a ruling, anybody could sidestep the patent on a process involving automation by replacing the special-purpose circuitry with a general-purpose piece of process-control hardware programmed to emulated it.)
And the camel's nose was in the tent.
Further rulings clarified the doctrine: You couldn't patent a mathematical algorithm per se. But you COULD patent doing something USEFUL with it.
So a program, or component of it, that does something useful becomes something patentable.
Thus, for instance, the RSA patent doesn't patent the COMPUTATION. It patents the USE of the computation to ENCRYPT INFORMATION.
Now tell me how the EU's courts couldn't do the equivalent, and thus "legislate by interpreting".
(Please note, by the way, that the US legal system is explicitly based on English Common Law, which shares principals with much of the law of Europe (excluding France's Code Napoleon). I would presume the EU's system would be compatible with that, if only to enable the EU to include England.)
(In case this posts as "Anonymous Coward": it's really by "Ungrounded Lightning (Rod)". yro.slashdot.org doesn't seem to understand cookies today.)
Customers may continue to use the notebook computers safely by turning the system off, ejecting the battery, and using the AC adapter and power cord to power the system until the replacement battery is received.
This lets us know that operating on plug-in power without the battery to serve as a filter is a safe and manufacturer approved operating mode for this model of laptop. The machine is not dependent on the battery and can be run for long periods without it.
That is good for alternative energy users, those thinking of using them in commercial server rooms, and people wanting to use them for personal computer-room firewalls/routers/fileservers/other home servers long after they're obsolete as laptops, just for starters.
Had it been the Dutch in the 18th century rather than the Brits in the 20th, you better better believe Gandhi and his followers would've been been shot and dragged off immediately.
Speaking of the Dutch, or at least people of largely Dutch descent: Before Ghandi had his success in India he tried the same tactics in an attempt to end the repression of blacks in South Africa. This was a resounding failure. South African blacks remained repressed throughout Ghandi's carreer and for decades after his death.
He also had advice for the Jews of Germany under the rising Third Reich: Commit mass suicide as a peaceful protest of their oppression.
"... the RIAA's demands for an audio broadcast flag came relatively late in the digital radio game. Many stations have already purchased and implemented new technologies to support digital radio, not to mention the launch of satellite radio, but these investments could be made worthless if the RIAA successfully lobbies for the audio flag in the 11th hour.
Though IANAL it seems to me that, should such legislation pass, any such broadcasters would have a FINE suit against the government for the replacement value of the equipment rendered worthless, under the "takings" caluse of the 5th Amendment.
All the music piracy told me is that a lot of people will happily accept a lower quality version of some content if it comes to them free. Why - because the actual content doesn't have the right value for money - its DRM laden and doesn't respect fair use, or its not as portable as a digital file or even *gasp* the actual content is just not worth enough to merit buying outright.
FTS: BusinessWeek looks at the world's fastest kayak, which floats over the water rather than nosing through waves like more typical boats.
Huh? Not remotely -- this is not a hovercraft. This is simply an ultra-light kayak with a differently shaped hull based on racing boat designs.
The blurb makes it sound like he added hydrofoils, so it would actually "fly", rasiing the hull (mostly?) out of the water.
I was excited by this, thinking that maybe somebody had figured out a way to do man-powered hydrofoils simply, in a solid, unjointed form. Perhaps by letting the hull tuch water occasionally to provide pitch control rather than providing something like a "skimmer" to sense the surface level and adjust the angle of the fore foil (requiring a pivot joint - a moving part in a seawater environment) or using angled foils penetrating the surface for feedback (and wasting power by having foils with lift in two directions canceling each other without canceling the associated drag).
But then I read the article.
It looks like he hung a couple "wing keels" on the hull, one fore one aft. Absent any lift on the wing (entirely separate from its normal function) to lift the hull and reduce its friction, this should do nothing but improve the hull's resistance to crosswise slippage from wind and improve its ability to maintain a course by resisting turning without adding appreciable drag. (Judging by the writeup, it didn't even do that well, or at all.)
(A wing keel is essentially a fin keel - a straight-down waterfoil - with the end cut off and a short crosswise wing (also foil-shaped for minimum friction) substituted, making an inverted "t" with a narrow crossbar. A fin keel resists side-slippage. But water runs around the end, so the last foot or so provides little side force and is just there to make the water take enough of a trip to keep the rest of the fin operating. Substituting a short crosswise wing for the end of the fin does the same job without penetrating as deep into the water - important if you want to work in shallows. The main downside is that as the hull heels over to one side you lose resistance to side-slippage a bit more abruptly.)
It would be interesting to see a writeup that actually tells us what this hull's design is supposedly accomplishing and how it does it, rather than making puffy claims followed by a meandering story that doesn't support them.
I bet the next week or two will show a major drop in office worker productivity, as this article inspires a significant number of people to drop everthing else and clean out their inboxes.
I'm keeping all of my SPAM as evidence for the day when I can sue all those motherfuckers.
I used to do that, too. I had this file with all the spam I'd received, back to the first one I ever got: An offer to sell me software to automate sending email to multiple recipients and a list of email addresses.
I recall thinking, at the time: "Oh oh! There goes email. We'll be buried in junkmail within a couple months, once this guy's customers and all the copycats get deployed." (This is time I've most hated being dead-on with a prediction. B-( )
Unfortunately, that was a while ago, when disk space was far more precious. My disk filled up to the point that I had to dump something to keep the system going, and couldn't get expanded in time. The collected spam file was the main culprit so it had to go.
"they're a resistance movement trying to oust an occupying force in accordance with international law,"
Really? [link to wikipedia writeup of UN Security Council Resolution 1559]
The UN has no monopoly on the making of international law - much of which predates its foundation. In fact it is quite limited by its charter on what international law it can even claim to modify, and (like most governments including the US) it isn't even internally consistent.
Though the article is long gone from the front page, you did not post anonymously. So I'll reply and perhaps you'll see it.
So are you suggesting that the Republican party can build its own military and attack Mexico in order to stop illegal immigrants?
How about if the Liberal Democrats in the UK had its own army and launched attacks on Northern Ireland in response to IRA bombings in London?
These are perfectly acceptable by your logic.
If you'll read my post more carefully you'll find I did not in any way say such things are PROPER. I just said that they HAPPEN.
I imagine that if Mexico successfully invaded the Southwestern United States with tanks, planes, bombs, and artillery, captured Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, and parts of California and Utah, held them for decades, and the Federal Government was either unable or unwilling to fight them off, you'd see such a resistance form in and around the occupied portion. And that it would either be associated with some branch of the Republican party or have a number of former Republican officials among its ranks as it formed a new party. (No doubt some Democrats would participate as well.)
Meanwhile, such a party/paramilitary paring has happened at least twice in the US, once leading up to the Revolution, once just after the Civil War. In the latter case the party was called the Democrats and the paramilitary wing was called the Ku Klux Klan.
"they're a resistance movement trying to oust an occupying force in accordance with international law,"
Really? Perhaps you might like to consider...
Again, please read my posting more carefully, in this case the portion of the sentence you deleted. That was not my claim, but the claim of "Hezbolla and a number of its allies".... if you want to look at the big picture, then let's look at everything in it.
Indeed, let's. (Perhaps this subject will come up again on the front page, and we can continue there.)
Meanwhile, in my posting I was merely elucidating the PART of the "big picture" that is necessary to support my disagreement with the grandparent poster's aparent misconceptions about the perception of Hezbolla by various factions worldwide.
Seems to me that combining "Blue Pill" with the WiFi driver hack would produce a truly nasty piece of malware.
Think about it: If you ever turn on the WiFi system on a machine with a vulnerably driver it can be sliently infected wirelessly with malware that would, from then on, run the OS and its herd of applications in a virtual environment within which it can not even DETECT that it has been compromosed.
The Matrix reference was by the author of the malware.
Since the malware works by creating a virtual machine environment and effectively running the OS and its entire herd of applications within it, the Matrix reference seems entirely appropos. The Matrix is the closest match in popular fiction to the situation.
("True Names" and the Cyberspace/Cyberpunk stories are earlier. But the core premise of "The Matrix" is that the entities within it are normally unaware of this fact and don't normally have any way to determine that they ARE within a simulation.)
(This is an elaboration of points in the parent post directed mainly at the grandparent post.)
Hezbollah was formed in 1982, as an answer to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
Hezbolla is considered a terrorist organization by Israel, the US, and Canada. But the Islamic countries consider it a resistance movement, as do a number of other countries worldwide. It is not just a military organization (though it has a military wing) but also a poltical party.
When Israel withdrew from Lebanon, they didn't withdraw from all of it. They still occupy the Shebba Farms, and continue to hold civilians there hostage after decades of occupation. Further, they diverted some of its water to other Israeli sites.
So as far as Hezbolla is concerned, Israel is still occupying part of Lebanon.
Israel also captured a number of Hezbolla officials and continuee to hold them prisoner, rather than releasing them as part of their withdrawal from the bulk of the occupied part of Lebanon.
Hezbollah didn't start firing rockets a few weeks ago. They've been launching rockets into Israel for years. Until this most recent set of events, Israel would respond with an occasional air
Further, the Hezbolla attack that precipitated this incident was not a "terrorist" rocket launch, nor was it a "terrorist kidnapping". It was a military raid on an Israeli military unit, attempting (successfully) to capture Israeli military personnel to use for a prisoner exchange. (As sometimes happens in a battle, other Israeli solders were killed attempting to defend their unit.)
Hezbolla offered the exchnage. Israel, continuing to characterize Hezbolla's actions as terrorism, responded by a massive attack on Lebanon.
The attack began by cuting off the transportation routes across its borders, then continued by destroying much of its infrastructure (including an attack on a power station's fuel dump that cut off most of the power for the country - including that needed to pump water for drinking and fire fighting.) Additionally they attacked regions they considered to be Hezbolla hideouts, demolishing apartment buildings and killing their occupants. They also attacked the vehicles of people evacuating their homes (as demanded by Israel's military).
Hezbolla responded to these attacks - as the military (official or otherwise) of any country under attack might - by launching rockets against Israel. Unfortunately, the missiles they have available have limited guidance capability (unlike those of Israel.)
Israel claims the civilian casualties (in apartment buildings, vehicles, a hospital, and at least one well-known UN site) are the result of Hezbolla using the general population as "human shields". Hezbolla (and a number of governments in the region and elsewhere) claim they are a deliberate attempt by Israel to punish the civilian population of Lebanon for the actions of the Hezbolla fighters (in violation of the generally accepted "rules of war", which consider such actions, if deliberate policy, to be a war crime - and "terrorism").
At this point the claimed casualty counts on both sides show about a 10:1 ratio of Lebanese to Israeli dead.
Some opposed to Israel claim their actual agenda is to expand their borders by siezing and settling more of the land between their current borders and their pre-diaspora historic borders - as advocated by a faction in Israel. Those historic borders, at their greatest reach, include much of southern Lebanon. (The faction's stated claim for the border is the Litani River - which, you'll notice, is the river beyond which the Israeli army intends to push Hezbolla to create their "security zone".)
So with Israel and a few of its allies claiming that Hezbolla started it all with an act of terrorism and kidnapping, and Hezbolla and a number of its allies claiming that Israel started it decades ago, never stopped, and they're a resistance movement trying to oust an occupying force in accordance with international law, don't expect it to end soon.
And don't expect the rest of the world to view Hezbolla's attempt to grab some soldiers to trade for their own imprisoned politicians and officers as the moral equivalent of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Doesn't make it right, but I'd like to see them jail every internet user on the planet when they all do the same thing.
Back in the '60s a lot of people thought the solution to the drug laws was civil disobedience - lots of people buying and using drugs clogging the legal system, forcing the government to throw in the towel.
For most PC manufacturers, having their own "look and feel" has been part of what has given them a strong brand name. [Goes on to examine boost to little guys from common look-and-feel".
Seems to me that what the hardware companies who are establishing their own brand identity need is not a Microsoft-standard look-and-feel, which will detract from their hard-built brand identification.
Instead they need a way to customize the appearance of the software's look-and-feel. (Without affecting its ease-of-use or functionality, of course, so customers who learned on something else can feel at home despite their prettifications.)
First off, I am still waiting on some cites of this happening recently.
Sorry, don't have one. I read about that a decade or more before ARPAnet was created. (In a Popular Science or Popular Mechanics article on how voting machines worked, if I remember correctly. But it was a LONG time ago.)
This requires large scale corruption by multiple local electoral officials. If they are corrupt then the whole system fails.
Not at all. You only need one corrupt maintainence man to do the setup on a few precincts to swing an election.
The point of the hack is that it can be done at a stage where only one or a very fiew people are working on the machine. At the stage where multiple people, including some form opposing parties, are checking, the inner door is already sealed.
Sort of like you only need one or a few corrupt programmers to corrupt a large number of computer-voting machines' programming, and by the time the election officials try to check the guts are sealed and beyond their view and reach.
Having been a poll watcher, I have had to instill some trust in those operating the controls.
Then you didn't do your job. A poll watcher's job is to catch corruption, not trust the oppostion.
If everyone is doing their job, they will not allow one person to set the machine and they also should notice stickers.
If the procedures don't give them access to the inner workings they have no chance to spot the stickers.
Do you have any links of evidence of this happening recently? I honestly think that this process is too high risk for most politicians, even the most corrupt.
What risk? When was the last time you heard of a politician going to jail for vote fixing? Or any form of voting corruption? Despite such things as the San Francisco Bay ballot box navigation hazards, or the 5,000 plus absentee ballots addressed to one address in Berzerkley.
If you could use it to prove to YOURSELF that your vote was counted as cast in a particular way, you could use it to prove to SOMEONE ELSE that your vote was cast in a particular way.
This enables vote-buying schemes.
As a result, such reciepts are generally banned by law.
We've had the Diebold machines in Georgia since 2002... and... Georgia has gone from one of the worst states ranked around 49 regarding voter fraud and miscounted ballots (with 94,000 undervotes in the 2000 election) to one of the best.
Since there is no way to check that the Diebold machines are counting corretly - or even that they're not making up votes on the fly to be a close match to the number of voters using them - all you've proven is that now that youv'e switched to Diebold machines you no longer can FIND fraud.
... AFAICT, such a system would need:
* A private, confidential paper receipt, for each vote...
* A secure, electronic, computer version of this receipt that has some kind of data integrity...
All you need is the human readable paper reciept. You just make THAT the official ballot. (You also have the machine produce a hardcopy of its count, or at least one of the total of the machine counts at the precinct.)
Then the machines can count as insecurely and potentially hackably as the most corrupt politician could want. Doesn't matter: The machines' counts are just for a quick news media tally, while the voter-checked paper ballot IS the vote. It can be counted later, by a separate card-reading machine (reading the human-readable text), by humans, or by both, as many times as necessary.
It even makes the machine count more trustworthy, by making fraud likely to be noticed and easy to be corrected if spotted: If somebody doesn't like the machines' numbers he requests a recount - and you also machine recount and hand count two random samples of precincts chosen after the election. Any discrepancy and you know something fishy is going on with the machine count and count 'em all the hard way.
You can even catch screwing around with a central tabulatior, by checking:
- The centrally reported precinct numbers against the centrally reported total.
- The centrally reported precinct numbers against the hardcopies of the precinct counts.
- The hardcopies of the precinct counts against the various recounts.
Slashdot Mirror
My opinion is that we should allow patents on absolutely everything, and simply let the patent trolls cause the entire system to implode on itself.
Back in the '60s a LOT of people thought the same things would work on the drug laws (as they believed it had on alcohol prohibition). So they tried it.
Didn't work worth a damn.
Instead the US now has the largest percentage of population in prison of any country in the world. It has federal laws requiring long-term incarceration for drug offenders creating prison overcrowding that results in court decisions releasing violent felons. It has prison tent camps in the desert on the model of WWII concentration camps. And it has the RICO laws creating the same incentive structure that drove the Spanish Inquisition: The "criminal"'s property is forfeit to the law enforcement organization that accused him.
And you think this will work with patents, where the main entities that would have to be "civilly disobedient" would be corporations, whose officers have a fiduciary duty to their stockholders to avoid breaking the law, even in tiny ways, and thus have their assets siezed?
No, I don't think so.
I am not very familiar with US legislation but here in Yurop courts can't create laws, they can decide only based on existing laws.
Which is exactly how software patents were originally created, by lawyers and courts, in the US (as I, who ANAP(atent)L understand what happened.)
US law explicitly excluded "mathematical algorithms" from patentability. The patent office and the courts interpreted this to include programs (which are algorithms for performing computations involving arithmetic and boolean logic, both of which are branches of mathematics.)
But an inventor and his lawyers rendered a computation for process control into a logic circuit and applied for a patent on it, as an invention in process control (or perhaps a patent on the process itself). There were plenty of similar patents on the books going back to the foundation of automation, so this was nothing new, and the invention was clearly patentable.
But they included a claim on replacing the complex logic circuit implementing one part of the process with a computer programmed to do the same thing. This seemed reasonable. So the patent office granted the patent.
The claim was challenged as patenting an algorithm, and the courts upheld it. (Absent such a ruling, anybody could sidestep the patent on a process involving automation by replacing the special-purpose circuitry with a general-purpose piece of process-control hardware programmed to emulated it.)
And the camel's nose was in the tent.
Further rulings clarified the doctrine: You couldn't patent a mathematical algorithm per se. But you COULD patent doing something USEFUL with it.
So a program, or component of it, that does something useful becomes something patentable.
Thus, for instance, the RSA patent doesn't patent the COMPUTATION. It patents the USE of the computation to ENCRYPT INFORMATION.
Now tell me how the EU's courts couldn't do the equivalent, and thus "legislate by interpreting".
(Please note, by the way, that the US legal system is explicitly based on English Common Law, which shares principals with much of the law of Europe (excluding France's Code Napoleon). I would presume the EU's system would be compatible with that, if only to enable the EU to include England.)
(In case this posts as "Anonymous Coward": it's really by "Ungrounded Lightning (Rod)". yro.slashdot.org doesn't seem to understand cookies today.)
Customers may continue to use the notebook computers safely by turning the system off, ejecting the battery, and using the AC adapter and power cord to power the system until the replacement battery is received.
This lets us know that operating on plug-in power without the battery to serve as a filter is a safe and manufacturer approved operating mode for this model of laptop. The machine is not dependent on the battery and can be run for long periods without it.
That is good for alternative energy users, those thinking of using them in commercial server rooms, and people wanting to use them for personal computer-room firewalls/routers/fileservers/other home servers long after they're obsolete as laptops, just for starters.
Had it been the Dutch in the 18th century rather than the Brits in the 20th, you better better believe Gandhi and his followers would've been been shot and dragged off immediately.
Speaking of the Dutch, or at least people of largely Dutch descent: Before Ghandi had his success in India he tried the same tactics in an attempt to end the repression of blacks in South Africa. This was a resounding failure. South African blacks remained repressed throughout Ghandi's carreer and for decades after his death.
He also had advice for the Jews of Germany under the rising Third Reich: Commit mass suicide as a peaceful protest of their oppression.
In TFA, Shapiro is quoted as saying:
"... the RIAA's demands for an audio broadcast flag came relatively late in the digital radio game. Many stations have already purchased and implemented new technologies to support digital radio, not to mention the launch of satellite radio, but these investments could be made worthless if the RIAA successfully lobbies for the audio flag in the 11th hour.
Though IANAL it seems to me that, should such legislation pass, any such broadcasters would have a FINE suit against the government for the replacement value of the equipment rendered worthless, under the "takings" caluse of the 5th Amendment.
All the music piracy told me is that a lot of people will happily accept a lower quality version of some content if it comes to them free. Why - because the actual content doesn't have the right value for money - its DRM laden and doesn't respect fair use, or its not as portable as a digital file or even *gasp* the actual content is just not worth enough to merit buying outright.
and/or "legitimate" outlets aren't conveniently available, raising the effective cost further.
If the legislation is passed it will serve as a mandate to the FCC, requiring it to issue a ruling standardizing such a flag.
It will have to either pick one from your hypothetical crowd or invent one of its own.
FTS:
BusinessWeek looks at the world's fastest kayak, which floats over the water rather than nosing through waves like more typical boats.
Huh? Not remotely -- this is not a hovercraft. This is simply an ultra-light kayak with a differently shaped hull based on racing boat designs.
The blurb makes it sound like he added hydrofoils, so it would actually "fly", rasiing the hull (mostly?) out of the water.
I was excited by this, thinking that maybe somebody had figured out a way to do man-powered hydrofoils simply, in a solid, unjointed form. Perhaps by letting the hull tuch water occasionally to provide pitch control rather than providing something like a "skimmer" to sense the surface level and adjust the angle of the fore foil (requiring a pivot joint - a moving part in a seawater environment) or using angled foils penetrating the surface for feedback (and wasting power by having foils with lift in two directions canceling each other without canceling the associated drag).
But then I read the article.
It looks like he hung a couple "wing keels" on the hull, one fore one aft. Absent any lift on the wing (entirely separate from its normal function) to lift the hull and reduce its friction, this should do nothing but improve the hull's resistance to crosswise slippage from wind and improve its ability to maintain a course by resisting turning without adding appreciable drag. (Judging by the writeup, it didn't even do that well, or at all.)
(A wing keel is essentially a fin keel - a straight-down waterfoil - with the end cut off and a short crosswise wing (also foil-shaped for minimum friction) substituted, making an inverted "t" with a narrow crossbar. A fin keel resists side-slippage. But water runs around the end, so the last foot or so provides little side force and is just there to make the water take enough of a trip to keep the rest of the fin operating. Substituting a short crosswise wing for the end of the fin does the same job without penetrating as deep into the water - important if you want to work in shallows. The main downside is that as the hull heels over to one side you lose resistance to side-slippage a bit more abruptly.)
It would be interesting to see a writeup that actually tells us what this hull's design is supposedly accomplishing and how it does it, rather than making puffy claims followed by a meandering story that doesn't support them.
I bet the next week or two will show a major drop in office worker productivity, as this article inspires a significant number of people to drop everthing else and clean out their inboxes.
B-)
I think Pluto should retain its status as a planet.
If that means we need to declare more things planets, to be fair, that's fine with me.
Of course we're running out of old gods' names to borrow.
So lets name the next two "Mickey" and "Goofy".
Then Pluto can have the distinction of being a member of BOTH naming systems. B-)
I'm keeping all of my SPAM as evidence for the day when I can sue all those motherfuckers.
I used to do that, too. I had this file with all the spam I'd received, back to the first one I ever got: An offer to sell me software to automate sending email to multiple recipients and a list of email addresses.
I recall thinking, at the time: "Oh oh! There goes email. We'll be buried in junkmail within a couple months, once this guy's customers and all the copycats get deployed." (This is time I've most hated being dead-on with a prediction. B-( )
Unfortunately, that was a while ago, when disk space was far more precious. My disk filled up to the point that I had to dump something to keep the system going, and couldn't get expanded in time. The collected spam file was the main culprit so it had to go.
"they're a resistance movement trying to oust an occupying force in accordance with international law,"
Really? [link to wikipedia writeup of UN Security Council Resolution 1559]
The UN has no monopoly on the making of international law - much of which predates its foundation. In fact it is quite limited by its charter on what international law it can even claim to modify, and (like most governments including the US) it isn't even internally consistent.
Though the article is long gone from the front page, you did not post anonymously. So I'll reply and perhaps you'll see it.
...
... if you want to look at the big picture, then let's look at everything in it.
So are you suggesting that the Republican party can build its own military and attack Mexico in order to stop illegal immigrants?
How about if the Liberal Democrats in the UK had its own army and launched attacks on Northern Ireland in response to IRA bombings in London?
These are perfectly acceptable by your logic.
If you'll read my post more carefully you'll find I did not in any way say such things are PROPER. I just said that they HAPPEN.
I imagine that if Mexico successfully invaded the Southwestern United States with tanks, planes, bombs, and artillery, captured Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, and parts of California and Utah, held them for decades, and the Federal Government was either unable or unwilling to fight them off, you'd see such a resistance form in and around the occupied portion. And that it would either be associated with some branch of the Republican party or have a number of former Republican officials among its ranks as it formed a new party. (No doubt some Democrats would participate as well.)
Meanwhile, such a party/paramilitary paring has happened at least twice in the US, once leading up to the Revolution, once just after the Civil War. In the latter case the party was called the Democrats and the paramilitary wing was called the Ku Klux Klan.
"they're a resistance movement trying to oust an occupying force in accordance with international law,"
Really? Perhaps you might like to consider
Again, please read my posting more carefully, in this case the portion of the sentence you deleted. That was not my claim, but the claim of "Hezbolla and a number of its allies".
Indeed, let's. (Perhaps this subject will come up again on the front page, and we can continue there.)
Meanwhile, in my posting I was merely elucidating the PART of the "big picture" that is necessary to support my disagreement with the grandparent poster's aparent misconceptions about the perception of Hezbolla by various factions worldwide.
So how long until we see, in the wild, a virus/worm/whatever with a birthday payload that makes WGA think the compromised machine is pirate.
Or one that makes WGA think it's legit.
Either could cause all sorts of havoc.
I wonder if it's already happened?
(Wouldn't it be interesting if it had happened to the author of TFA? B-) )
Seems to me that combining "Blue Pill" with the WiFi driver hack would produce a truly nasty piece of malware.
Think about it: If you ever turn on the WiFi system on a machine with a vulnerably driver it can be sliently infected wirelessly with malware that would, from then on, run the OS and its herd of applications in a virtual environment within which it can not even DETECT that it has been compromosed.
The Matrix reference was by the author of the malware.
Since the malware works by creating a virtual machine environment and effectively running the OS and its entire herd of applications within it, the Matrix reference seems entirely appropos. The Matrix is the closest match in popular fiction to the situation.
("True Names" and the Cyberspace/Cyberpunk stories are earlier. But the core premise of "The Matrix" is that the entities within it are normally unaware of this fact and don't normally have any way to determine that they ARE within a simulation.)
(This is an elaboration of points in the parent post directed mainly at the grandparent post.)
Hezbollah was formed in 1982, as an answer to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon.
Hezbolla is considered a terrorist organization by Israel, the US, and Canada. But the Islamic countries consider it a resistance movement, as do a number of other countries worldwide. It is not just a military organization (though it has a military wing) but also a poltical party.
When Israel withdrew from Lebanon, they didn't withdraw from all of it. They still occupy the Shebba Farms, and continue to hold civilians there hostage after decades of occupation. Further, they diverted some of its water to other Israeli sites.
So as far as Hezbolla is concerned, Israel is still occupying part of Lebanon.
Israel also captured a number of Hezbolla officials and continuee to hold them prisoner, rather than releasing them as part of their withdrawal from the bulk of the occupied part of Lebanon.
Hezbollah didn't start firing rockets a few weeks ago. They've been launching rockets into Israel for years. Until this most recent set of events, Israel would respond with an occasional air
Further, the Hezbolla attack that precipitated this incident was not a "terrorist" rocket launch, nor was it a "terrorist kidnapping". It was a military raid on an Israeli military unit, attempting (successfully) to capture Israeli military personnel to use for a prisoner exchange. (As sometimes happens in a battle, other Israeli solders were killed attempting to defend their unit.)
Hezbolla offered the exchnage. Israel, continuing to characterize Hezbolla's actions as terrorism, responded by a massive attack on Lebanon.
The attack began by cuting off the transportation routes across its borders, then continued by destroying much of its infrastructure (including an attack on a power station's fuel dump that cut off most of the power for the country - including that needed to pump water for drinking and fire fighting.) Additionally they attacked regions they considered to be Hezbolla hideouts, demolishing apartment buildings and killing their occupants. They also attacked the vehicles of people evacuating their homes (as demanded by Israel's military).
Hezbolla responded to these attacks - as the military (official or otherwise) of any country under attack might - by launching rockets against Israel. Unfortunately, the missiles they have available have limited guidance capability (unlike those of Israel.)
Israel claims the civilian casualties (in apartment buildings, vehicles, a hospital, and at least one well-known UN site) are the result of Hezbolla using the general population as "human shields". Hezbolla (and a number of governments in the region and elsewhere) claim they are a deliberate attempt by Israel to punish the civilian population of Lebanon for the actions of the Hezbolla fighters (in violation of the generally accepted "rules of war", which consider such actions, if deliberate policy, to be a war crime - and "terrorism").
At this point the claimed casualty counts on both sides show about a 10:1 ratio of Lebanese to Israeli dead.
Some opposed to Israel claim their actual agenda is to expand their borders by siezing and settling more of the land between their current borders and their pre-diaspora historic borders - as advocated by a faction in Israel. Those historic borders, at their greatest reach, include much of southern Lebanon. (The faction's stated claim for the border is the Litani River - which, you'll notice, is the river beyond which the Israeli army intends to push Hezbolla to create their "security zone".)
So with Israel and a few of its allies claiming that Hezbolla started it all with an act of terrorism and kidnapping, and Hezbolla and a number of its allies claiming that Israel started it decades ago, never stopped, and they're a resistance movement trying to oust an occupying force in accordance with international law, don't expect it to end soon.
And don't expect the rest of the world to view Hezbolla's attempt to grab some soldiers to trade for their own imprisoned politicians and officers as the moral equivalent of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Doesn't make it right, but I'd like to see them jail every internet user on the planet when they all do the same thing.
Back in the '60s a lot of people thought the solution to the drug laws was civil disobedience - lots of people buying and using drugs clogging the legal system, forcing the government to throw in the towel.
You can see how well THAT worked.
dada21 is quoted:
For most PC manufacturers, having their own "look and feel" has been part of what has given them a strong brand name. [Goes on to examine boost to little guys from common look-and-feel".
Seems to me that what the hardware companies who are establishing their own brand identity need is not a Microsoft-standard look-and-feel, which will detract from their hard-built brand identification.
Instead they need a way to customize the appearance of the software's look-and-feel. (Without affecting its ease-of-use or functionality, of course, so customers who learned on something else can feel at home despite their prettifications.)
First off, I am still waiting on some cites of this happening recently.
Sorry, don't have one. I read about that a decade or more before ARPAnet was created. (In a Popular Science or Popular Mechanics article on how voting machines worked, if I remember correctly. But it was a LONG time ago.)
This requires large scale corruption by multiple local electoral officials. If they are corrupt then the whole system fails.
Not at all. You only need one corrupt maintainence man to do the setup on a few precincts to swing an election.
The point of the hack is that it can be done at a stage where only one or a very fiew people are working on the machine. At the stage where multiple people, including some form opposing parties, are checking, the inner door is already sealed.
Sort of like you only need one or a few corrupt programmers to corrupt a large number of computer-voting machines' programming, and by the time the election officials try to check the guts are sealed and beyond their view and reach.
Having been a poll watcher, I have had to instill some trust in those operating the controls.
Then you didn't do your job. A poll watcher's job is to catch corruption, not trust the oppostion.
If everyone is doing their job, they will not allow one person to set the machine and they also should notice stickers.
If the procedures don't give them access to the inner workings they have no chance to spot the stickers.
Do you have any links of evidence of this happening recently? I honestly think that this process is too high risk for most politicians, even the most corrupt.
What risk? When was the last time you heard of a politician going to jail for vote fixing? Or any form of voting corruption? Despite such things as the San Francisco Bay ballot box navigation hazards, or the 5,000 plus absentee ballots addressed to one address in Berzerkley.
Giving you a "keeper" reciept is illegal.
If you could use it to prove to YOURSELF that your vote was counted as cast in a particular way, you could use it to prove to SOMEONE ELSE that your vote was cast in a particular way.
This enables vote-buying schemes.
As a result, such reciepts are generally banned by law.
We've had the Diebold machines in Georgia since 2002 ... and ... Georgia has gone from one of the worst states ranked around 49 regarding voter fraud and miscounted ballots (with 94,000 undervotes in the 2000 election) to one of the best.
Since there is no way to check that the Diebold machines are counting corretly - or even that they're not making up votes on the fly to be a close match to the number of voters using them - all you've proven is that now that youv'e switched to Diebold machines you no longer can FIND fraud.
In the lecture he described how, in theory, he COULD have done it. Later he reportedly admitted that he HAD done it. Separate incidents.
... AFAICT, such a system would need: ... ...
* A private, confidential paper receipt, for each vote
* A secure, electronic, computer version of this receipt that has some kind of data integrity
All you need is the human readable paper reciept. You just make THAT the official ballot. (You also have the machine produce a hardcopy of its count, or at least one of the total of the machine counts at the precinct.)
Then the machines can count as insecurely and potentially hackably as the most corrupt politician could want. Doesn't matter: The machines' counts are just for a quick news media tally, while the voter-checked paper ballot IS the vote. It can be counted later, by a separate card-reading machine (reading the human-readable text), by humans, or by both, as many times as necessary.
It even makes the machine count more trustworthy, by making fraud likely to be noticed and easy to be corrected if spotted: If somebody doesn't like the machines' numbers he requests a recount - and you also machine recount and hand count two random samples of precincts chosen after the election. Any discrepancy and you know something fishy is going on with the machine count and count 'em all the hard way.
You can even catch screwing around with a central tabulatior, by checking:
- The centrally reported precinct numbers against the centrally reported total.
- The centrally reported precinct numbers against the hardcopies of the precinct counts.
- The hardcopies of the precinct counts against the various recounts.