...which illustrates nicely that of all the threats facing the USA and her allies, this one was not worth cost in blood and money and limited resources.
The Iraq oil contracts have recently been let to multinational companies, who will cap extraction at 2-3 million bbl per day so as to keep the price high.
The prudent moment is a low market price, so the west can cut a good deal with the Iraqi govt.
"Jul 31, 2007 Canada.com,The price of partly refined uranium ore known as yellowcake soared to a record US$138 a pound last month, about triple what it was trading at a year ago."
In April this year it was $71. Some analysysts predict price rebounds to $90 due to demand from India, if that means anything. In any case it's non-renewable and demand is growing, so it's a safe bet that prices will rise. Countries with nuclear plants are "locked in" up to a very high price per pound before it cost-effective to shut down the plants.
$58 is clearly a low price for the future of the market; and that's just started a rise from $57 so it's clearly a buying time.
$58 pr lb x 2,240 lbs per met ton x 550 METRIC tons
is $71,456,000.
I'd love to know how many tens of millions it really sold for so that I can complete my conspiracy theory. How can a govt sell off potentially a hundered million dollars of publicly owned assets in secret and claim it to be a democratic one?
you also assert that it's appropriate to kill people when:
"their actions constitute , and offences against humanity and human dignity"
This is a rhetorical gem. Not only do you assert that the if behaviour is kept secret then it's ok, you also claim that only people who offend against humanity AND human dignity get killed, so I guess so long as you're respectful while you slaughter then it's ok.
Basically you're willing to kill millions of people to maintain US influence on the other side of the planet in an area that's none of your effing business. If you think it's acceptable to kill for economic security (ie money) then I hope you don't think you're any sort of Christian!
You have assumed that somehow not only is it a given that the USA has a moral right to strategic interests in other parts of the world, but that other people's strategic interests are completely unacceptable!!
You are too abstract about all this, 4,000 deaths is not neutral compared to the murder rate; you might as well declare that it's all neutral because everyone's going to die anyway. And why not count Iraqis? Don't their kids miss them?
The oil is THEIRS!! It's in their country! God help us if you ever want Australia's uranium and we want to keep it for ourselves.
People like you remind me of the slogan I saw on a wall as a child:
"Rich old men grow fat on the blood of young soldiers".
Why don't you get it? This isn't about war, it's about occupation.
There are three problems here:
1) Some of these are "war crimes", especially where they result in civilian deaths.
2) The hypocrisy involved in preaching to the rest of the world about freedom and democracy.
- Many people would not object so strongly to USA policies if they were more honest. If the US Govt said "We are the world's biggest oil consumer per capita, and we can't feed our nation without oil, so we are claiming the right to seize Iraq's oil. Any opposition to this policy will be met with extreme force." Or whatever else along those lines then it wouldn't be such a problem, like when China says "Tibet is part of China, this is an internal matter and none of your business", or when South Africa said "They are black, we have apartheid because they are black, of course we can't share toilets", or when the Nazis said there was a Jewish problem.
The frustration and anger comes partly from the USA claiming the high moral ground while not even pretending to maintain high ethical standards in any aspect of its behaviour, from the army to the WTO to the tax rates t imposes to the electoral system it uses.
3) What is the mechanism by which these methods won't be (or aren't already being) imposed on the US civilian population? Even if you are ok with these methods being used overseas, the fact that it's all secret and sneaky means that there's no proper legislative oversight to establish mechanisms to prevent, or detect and stop, their use in "The Homeland".
While you are technically right, your reaction is the same as we've seen before.
Speaking of slashdotters, how many thought that:
Direct net connection was less private and more dangerous than a BBS?
Always on broadband was less private and more dangerous than connect on demand?
Automatic updates the same...
MMORPGs the same....
Cookies...
RHN...
We all know the technical implications and what it means for the info available to the service owners, but you need to understand that not everyone cares about this stuff, and the companies are just trying to maximise revenue.
If you don't want to use a service that does this, that's fine. Your points are valid. However, no matter how depressing it is, the fact remains that 87% of people see it as a great trade to give away info in order to simplify the operations of the PC, since it's not as though they could sell that info to anyone else for a better price.
As for myself, I can't even make changes to my WoW account, because I gave them a fake name and now I can't remember it, so I can't prove I'm not me.
You miss the main point with rigging elections, and so does the original asker.
For details on how it's really done, read "The Armed Madhouse" by Greg Palast. It more about providing crappy or insufficient machines for non-republican precincts than about hacking the electronic booths. If you don't provide enough vote machines, then people get turned away without voting.
If you don't provide working machines, the votes get damaged and miscounted. It's nota bout machines being sneaky and evil, it's about machines just being flaky and unreliable; mis-calibrated touch screens, power downs, reboots.
In Australia we must vote, which makes it almost impossible to turn people away at the end of the day because the people all know they'll be fined! If you don't want to vote then when you get the fine you just claim to be a Jehovah's witness or whatever.
We vote using paper and pencil writing numbers in boxes. It's really very easy. If you can draw a 1, you can make a legitimate vote. No machines needed. You can even use sans serif, they will acecpt a |.
I don't know if the votes are counted by hand or machine, but we could certainly count by machine if we wanted, and still have all the paper votes for a hand recount.
It's cheap. It's easy. It works in rural areas with no power. It's reliable, auditable and sensible.
There's no legal compulsion in Australia to have any ID, so you can't ask for it for people to vote. They ask you for your name and address and they cross it off a list. It's your responsibility to enrol and get on that list when you turn 18 or move to a new area, or you can be fined for every election that you were off the books for. The list is public, but in text form. If you want to find someone's address then you need to travel to each district and search for them in the roll.
AFAIK It's legal to enroll as "John Doe" with the correct address, as the use of false names/pseudonyms is only a crime when associated with other crimes, typically fraud. Taken together, these make the electoral roll a low threat for people's privacy.
If you want to vote lots of times by driving to different booths then you can, at probably takes at least ten minutes per vote plus travel time. Fines will later be sent to anyone who's name is crossed off more than once, but they can dispute this and probably get away with it. If they find that lots of repeat votes happened then that gets understood as a margin of error, and if the result is so close that the margin is relevant then you could call a revote. There is no way to make more votes just appear, as has happened in some US elections.
The hassle involved in voting 3 times makes it not worth the potential penalties if you do get caught somehow. The time and hassle involved in organising a handful of dodgy votes pays off better is spent on actual electioneering; that is, the ROI for successful overvoting is lower than the ROI on just lying to the people as usual.
If you live somewhere a bit more dodgy where this might not be the case, then you use the purple ink on the finger trick, which works fine but isn't needed here because fraud is more readily apparent.
The idea that a working voting system is somehow technically difficult for a nation capable of "winning" WW2, running nuclear power stations and running a high-tech space program is ludicrous. Any technical voting problems in the USA exist because the people responsible want them to. Democracy has many flaws, but voting is a solved problem.
Please provide figures and sources displaying that the bulk of taxation falls upon the personal finances of the rich people in your country, because I bet it's not true.
I'd also point out that the poor people end up in the armed forces protecting the cash flows of the rich, so I reckon they get the worse end of the deal.
Lastly, I'd point out that the poor people were/are by and large pretty happy with the TV sets they have, and it was not the poor people who made the decision to shut off the broadcast signal.
In both cases the aim was to spread panic in order to do what was perceived as necessary to protect the oil business. Given the oil prices today, this was probably misguided. As was the rest of that war. Um, you know the prices are high, right? And higher prices favour the seller, that'd be... the oil businesses.
So as a strategy for Houston oil, it worked. As a strategy to dump the price and cutoff the flow of $ to other ME nations, and conquer the ME (see PNAC) it failed, so far.
For example, US marines getting blown up in Iraq on a daily basis was kind of hard to keep out of the news but you can always try to give a positive swing to it and try to keep the pictures of the flag covered coffins out of the news. Like everything George Bush does, he botched that as well since the pictures got out. And yet, the war goes on! Seems like the strategy worked just fine, a few leaked photos is still different from public arrivals and displays of the coffins.
Risk assessment for total destruction of this planet and all life on it should probably be biased a little towards being overly pessimistic on things happening side rather than optimistic on the things not happening side. After all, if you are wrong nothing happens and if you are right, you had some time to do something about it. Consequently, claiming everything is fine is rather fatalistic. exactly.
The wheat price is high because some food crops are being used for ethanol instead, so there's less food.
The wheat price is also high because their is higher demand as China (Asia) moves like Russia did in the 70s to more meat in the average diet, so they need more grain to feed to animals. 10 calories of grain is needed to make 1 calorie of meat, IIRC.
You see flour shortages in Pakistan, and massive queues and shortages, and that's not because of the USA dollar.
It all comes back to the oil price, and the available energy per capita.
Re:Not what tor was intended for!
on
Spying On Tor
·
· Score: 1
Movie Piracy is an example of the tragedy of the commons at work.
It is not intended that someone download the latest Britney Spears video, it's intended that people purchase a copy from the legitimate owner of the copyright. Running P2P to download commercial works only causes artists to have to lose sales or be forced to shut down their creations completely (because a lot of artists have to pay for every single work they create, and every, and enough free downloads means at least one lost sale), which hurts the industry as a whole.
If people are setting up TOR exit points which do not correctly forward packets, doesn't this kinda break TOR for everyone? Since you can't choose your exit node I can imagine that this might cause problems. Am I wrong here?
Slashdot Mirror
yellowcake is not nuclear material. It's a rock, you know, like in the stone age.
...which illustrates nicely that of all the threats facing the USA and her allies, this one was not worth cost in blood and money and limited resources.
The Iraq oil contracts have recently been let to multinational companies, who will cap extraction at 2-3 million bbl per day so as to keep the price high.
wait for price rises and profit?
a weapon being a dirty bomb, one assumes.
The prudent moment is a low market price, so the west can cut a good deal with the Iraqi govt.
"Jul 31, 2007
Canada.com,The price of partly refined uranium ore known as yellowcake soared to a record US$138 a pound last month, about triple what it was trading at a year ago."
In April this year it was $71. Some analysysts predict price rebounds to $90 due to demand from India, if that means anything. In any case it's non-renewable and demand is growing, so it's a safe bet that prices will rise. Countries with nuclear plants are "locked in" up to a very high price per pound before it cost-effective to shut down the plants.
$58 is clearly a low price for the future of the market; and that's just started a rise from $57 so it's clearly a buying time.
$58 pr lb x 2,240 lbs per met ton x 550 METRIC tons
is $71,456,000.
I'd love to know how many tens of millions it really sold for so that I can complete my conspiracy theory. How can a govt sell off potentially a hundered million dollars of publicly owned assets in secret and claim it to be a democratic one?
"I ... will ... advocate killing people "
FAIL. Right there you got it wrong.
Universal rights to LIFE, liberty etc....
you also assert that it's appropriate to kill people when:
"their actions constitute , and offences against humanity and human dignity"
This is a rhetorical gem. Not only do you assert that the if behaviour is kept secret then it's ok, you also claim that only people who offend against humanity AND human dignity get killed, so I guess so long as you're respectful while you slaughter then it's ok.
Basically you're willing to kill millions of people to maintain US influence on the other side of the planet in an area that's none of your effing business. If you think it's acceptable to kill for economic security (ie money) then I hope you don't think you're any sort of Christian!
You have assumed that somehow not only is it a given that the USA has a moral right to strategic interests in other parts of the world, but that other people's strategic interests are completely unacceptable!!
You are too abstract about all this, 4,000 deaths is not neutral compared to the murder rate; you might as well declare that it's all neutral because everyone's going to die anyway. And why not count Iraqis? Don't their kids miss them?
The oil is THEIRS!! It's in their country! God help us if you ever want Australia's uranium and we want to keep it for ourselves.
People like you remind me of the slogan I saw on a wall as a child:
"Rich old men grow fat on the blood of young soldiers".
I hope you're a troll.
Why don't you get it? This isn't about war, it's about occupation.
There are three problems here:
1) Some of these are "war crimes", especially where they result in civilian deaths.
2) The hypocrisy involved in preaching to the rest of the world about freedom and democracy.
- Many people would not object so strongly to USA policies if they were more honest. If the US Govt said "We are the world's biggest oil consumer per capita, and we can't feed our nation without oil, so we are claiming the right to seize Iraq's oil. Any opposition to this policy will be met with extreme force." Or whatever else along those lines then it wouldn't be such a problem, like when China says "Tibet is part of China, this is an internal matter and none of your business", or when South Africa said "They are black, we have apartheid because they are black, of course we can't share toilets", or when the Nazis said there was a Jewish problem.
The frustration and anger comes partly from the USA claiming the high moral ground while not even pretending to maintain high ethical standards in any aspect of its behaviour, from the army to the WTO to the tax rates t imposes to the electoral system it uses.
3) What is the mechanism by which these methods won't be (or aren't already being) imposed on the US civilian population? Even if you are ok with these methods being used overseas, the fact that it's all secret and sneaky means that there's no proper legislative oversight to establish mechanisms to prevent, or detect and stop, their use in "The Homeland".
While you are technically right, your reaction is the same as we've seen before.
Speaking of slashdotters, how many thought that:
Direct net connection was less private and more dangerous than a BBS?
Always on broadband was less private and more dangerous than connect on demand?
Automatic updates the same...
MMORPGs the same....
Cookies...
RHN...
We all know the technical implications and what it means for the info available to the service owners, but you need to understand that not everyone cares about this stuff, and the companies are just trying to maximise revenue.
If you don't want to use a service that does this, that's fine. Your points are valid. However, no matter how depressing it is, the fact remains that 87% of people see it as a great trade to give away info in order to simplify the operations of the PC, since it's not as though they could sell that info to anyone else for a better price.
As for myself, I can't even make changes to my WoW account, because I gave them a fake name and now I can't remember it, so I can't prove I'm not me.
You miss the main point with rigging elections, and so does the original asker.
For details on how it's really done, read "The Armed Madhouse" by Greg Palast. It more about providing crappy or insufficient machines for non-republican precincts than about hacking the electronic booths. If you don't provide enough vote machines, then people get turned away without voting.
If you don't provide working machines, the votes get damaged and miscounted. It's nota bout machines being sneaky and evil, it's about machines just being flaky and unreliable; mis-calibrated touch screens, power downs, reboots.
In Australia we must vote, which makes it almost impossible to turn people away at the end of the day because the people all know they'll be fined! If you don't want to vote then when you get the fine you just claim to be a Jehovah's witness or whatever.
We vote using paper and pencil writing numbers in boxes. It's really very easy. If you can draw a 1, you can make a legitimate vote. No machines needed. You can even use sans serif, they will acecpt a |.
I don't know if the votes are counted by hand or machine, but we could certainly count by machine if we wanted, and still have all the paper votes for a hand recount.
It's cheap. It's easy. It works in rural areas with no power. It's reliable, auditable and sensible.
There's no legal compulsion in Australia to have any ID, so you can't ask for it for people to vote. They ask you for your name and address and they cross it off a list. It's your responsibility to enrol and get on that list when you turn 18 or move to a new area, or you can be fined for every election that you were off the books for. The list is public, but in text form. If you want to find someone's address then you need to travel to each district and search for them in the roll.
AFAIK It's legal to enroll as "John Doe" with the correct address, as the use of false names/pseudonyms is only a crime when associated with other crimes, typically fraud. Taken together, these make the electoral roll a low threat for people's privacy.
If you want to vote lots of times by driving to different booths then you can, at probably takes at least ten minutes per vote plus travel time. Fines will later be sent to anyone who's name is crossed off more than once, but they can dispute this and probably get away with it. If they find that lots of repeat votes happened then that gets understood as a margin of error, and if the result is so close that the margin is relevant then you could call a revote. There is no way to make more votes just appear, as has happened in some US elections.
The hassle involved in voting 3 times makes it not worth the potential penalties if you do get caught somehow. The time and hassle involved in organising a handful of dodgy votes pays off better is spent on actual electioneering; that is, the ROI for successful overvoting is lower than the ROI on just lying to the people as usual.
If you live somewhere a bit more dodgy where this might not be the case, then you use the purple ink on the finger trick, which works fine but isn't needed here because fraud is more readily apparent.
The idea that a working voting system is somehow technically difficult for a nation capable of "winning" WW2, running nuclear power stations and running a high-tech space program is ludicrous. Any technical voting problems in the USA exist because the people responsible want them to. Democracy has many flaws, but voting is a solved problem.
Please provide figures and sources displaying that the bulk of taxation falls upon the personal finances of the rich people in your country, because I bet it's not true.
I'd also point out that the poor people end up in the armed forces protecting the cash flows of the rich, so I reckon they get the worse end of the deal.
Lastly, I'd point out that the poor people were/are by and large pretty happy with the TV sets they have, and it was not the poor people who made the decision to shut off the broadcast signal.
So as a strategy for Houston oil, it worked. As a strategy to dump the price and cutoff the flow of $ to other ME nations, and conquer the ME (see PNAC) it failed, so far. For example, US marines getting blown up in Iraq on a daily basis was kind of hard to keep out of the news but you can always try to give a positive swing to it and try to keep the pictures of the flag covered coffins out of the news. Like everything George Bush does, he botched that as well since the pictures got out. And yet, the war goes on! Seems like the strategy worked just fine, a few leaked photos is still different from public arrivals and displays of the coffins. Risk assessment for total destruction of this planet and all life on it should probably be biased a little towards being overly pessimistic on things happening side rather than optimistic on the things not happening side. After all, if you are wrong nothing happens and if you are right, you had some time to do something about it. Consequently, claiming everything is fine is rather fatalistic. exactly.
fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity
~ John Lennon
So other people send you packets you don't want, and you pay for it?
A theoretical flaw in your plan. I can just stream UDP at you for free on my unmetered account and you have to pay extra to your ISP.
wrong.
The wheat price is high because some food crops are being used for ethanol instead, so there's less food.
The wheat price is also high because their is higher demand as China (Asia) moves like Russia did in the 70s to more meat in the average diet, so they need more grain to feed to animals. 10 calories of grain is needed to make 1 calorie of meat, IIRC.
You see flour shortages in Pakistan, and massive queues and shortages, and that's not because of the USA dollar.
It all comes back to the oil price, and the available energy per capita.
You are the first person to use intelligence on this page. You are arguing against a claim that was never made.
The claim of intelligence doesn't even appear in TFA, so you're assuming that someone somewhere is claiming something they are not.
Maybe you should fire a few of your own neurons...
company != corporation.
I don't use lookout any more, but either pressing DEL or CTRL-del with the suggested address selected will make outlook forget it.
1) How do you know that junior-year engineers haven't made these as college projects, but never taken it further?
2) In answer to your question, one reason they might not have is because it's not an interesting or exciting robot project.
open office. I sell it quite happily!
Movie Piracy is an example of the tragedy of the commons at work.
It is not intended that someone download the latest Britney Spears video, it's intended that people purchase a copy from the legitimate owner of the copyright. Running P2P to download commercial works only causes artists to have to lose sales or be forced to shut down their creations completely (because a lot of artists have to pay for every single work they create, and every, and enough free downloads means at least one lost sale), which hurts the industry as a whole.
Sucks to be on the other side!
If people are setting up TOR exit points which do not correctly forward packets, doesn't this kinda break TOR for everyone? Since you can't choose your exit node I can imagine that this might cause problems. Am I wrong here?
"Also, Google cannot declare me an 'enemy combatant' and suspend my right to a trial."
I bet they could declare you a terrorist by placing the right search results and adding a few incriminating pages.
The Govt would just follow along, lock you up and declare the evidence as secret.
Easy peasy.
"Look: either the government pervades your life, or it does not."
Here in grown-up land we call that a false dichotomy.
I was turned down by McDonalds.
bad metaphor.
.arc files from 1993 then that's fine.
it's his car; so long as he doesn't lock my car or mess with my l33t bomb making