Can't you use traceroute or something ? Also I thought that although they can set up the proxies etc so you can't change them you can usually see them in the same place in IE.
"Today, scientists can't say anything that appears to agree with the church, because they'll loose their funding, their credibility and possibly their lives."
That's rubbish, science is science and based on facts and evidence. The church is not based on facts or evidence but belief.
Were the Church to make claims which could be backed up by facts or proof then scientists would have no choice, and in fact be eager to agree with those claims.
If the Church, or fanatical elements of it, believe that Evolution is a lie and are willing to peddle all kinds of spurious arguments to support that point of view and not offer any alternative hypothesis which can be backed up by facts, evidence or predictions then Scientists are obviously not going to go along with that.
Maybe it's because I am not used to this kind of 'debate' show but most of that transcript was just unintelligble gibberish.
If that is what passes for political debate on American news channels ( and I am sure real debates must happen somewhere on US TV ) then Jon is absolutely right to say that the show is doing no one any favours except paying the wages of those involved.
Anyone who has had the chance to see what evidence such a person can produce for their stance. If people continually cannot back up their opinions with any evidence then it's quite right that their opinions should be ignored since they are just unintersting personal beliefs.
"Well, it's not like we're the only big economy, the only country in the G8 summit or the only veto on the security council. There are countries all over the world that have _incredible_ direct power over US lives. Just as one example, look at the effect on the US of the OPEC oil embargo in the 70's."
And I'm sure you take an interest in what motivates this power and what it's likely to do next.
Maybe this discussion should stop right here, since we're pretty clearly on different pages. I have no idea where you get the idea that there's no 'global terrorist enemy'. Does it hinge on the word global? The word terrorist? I was at the WTC site yesterday, and I _assure_ you, even if it's not global or terrorist, we do have some kind of enemy hell bent on killing Americans (at least).
I agree that you have Osama Bin Laden and a bunch of religious crazies bent on the destruction of "decadent and corrupting USA" and that they are terrorists. However they are a very specific and isolated terrorist group with the very specific aim of killing as many Americans or members of other Western Democracies as they can.
I have nothing against the USA doing everything it can to bring Bin Laden to justice and support them 100% in that aim and I think you should be engaged in a "War On Bin Laden".
However I do not class that as a war, it is essentially a man hunt. There are many hundreds of other terrorist organisation across the world but they are not linked into any kind of "Global Terror Network", they are seperate groups fighting for different aims seperately.
The USA is not now doing anything differently to what it would normally do to fight terrorists like the IRA or ETA or the Chechen terrorists and these groups are doing nothing to attack the US so to say you are engaged in a "War On Terror" is wrong when actually you are engaged ( or should be ) in a hunt for Bin Laden.
Justifies, probably not but you can see that there was an actual reason why these steps were taken - WWII was an actual physical war against real opponents whereas GW is happy to lock people up in Guantanamo bay on, basically, a whim without demonstrating that his "War On Terror" is even 1% as real as WWII was.
Now that I have read all those links I can't see anything in any of them which suggests you are engaged in a War on Terror.
You need to find and deal with Bin Laden but that would seem to be the only terrorist threat you are facing right now and even he has killed less people than probably die in car accidents each month and I see no evidence of a War on Cars either.
Yes but they are basically wrong. You are not at war with anyone, it's true that a bunch of terrorists did destroy the twin towers but they are not part of some massive multi tentacled world wide terrorist conspiracy.
You can be at war against other countries but not against amorphous undefined ideas.
Almost every country in the world suffers from terrorism of one sort or another but the terrorists involved are not part of some world wide umbrella terrorist organisation they are small groups with specific aims usually trying to achieve a specific thing their country will not provide them with, the IRA is not connected to ETA or the terrorists in Palestine because they are entirely seperate groups.
Osama Bin Laden is the result of the US and USSR war in Afghanistan, having failed to get fellow muslims to rise up and form hardline religious states ( by blowing them up ) he decided to attack the root of the western decadence directly instead, this happened to be the US. So you can see that he too is acting for some specific aims the same as every terrorist organisation is throughout the world - seperately.
There is probably no reasoning with the guy since his goals are ridiculous but it would help to tackle him directly rather than get sidetracked in other directions if you want to stop that specific threat to America.
I've heard on, possibly, the news yesterday that Jeb Bush is organising free cruises for African Americans and other minorities on Tuesday. All you have to do is turn up on the pier before 6:59 and you will get a free cruise around the harbour before being dropped back at just after 7ish in the evening.
I am a European and judging from the amount of news coverage and general debate this US election is getting it's fair to say that yes we do give a damn how the US is about to enact it's leadership choices.
I'm not saying that anyone in the US should necessarily take any notice of what we think but it's not going to stop us taking an interest. The US at the moment has the power and global influence to dictate aspects of our own lives so it's probably not surprising that we interested about the outcome.
I would say that point 1 ( We are at War ) is the main thing us Europeans would like to address, you are not at war. There is no global terrorist enemy, it is a figment of George Bush and friends collective imagination in some kind of weird reaction to September 11th.
I really hope that whoever is in power on Wednesday addresses real world problems and stops cranking up the paranoia levels and dumping all of us in a situation we really do not want to be in.
Oh, I see - so there is currently this vast budget being pumped into the third world providing clean water, sanitary sewage and innoculations and if you sign the Kyoto agreement you have to cut off this massive river of funds and divert them elsewhere.
It's a simple black and white choice; feed the starving Africans or sign the Kyoto Agreement and watch them die.
Reflexive knee jerking is almost certainly not the solution but there are other types of reaction which are the right solution and those are the actions we should be taking.
If we think there is a good chance that we may be contributing to some kind of climatic change, and most people seem to agree this is likely to be the case, then we should do something about it in order to maintain the type of enviroment which will not cause huge, expensive and dangerous changes to our lifestyle and infrastructure.
If we cut down or stop using fossil fuels then the people who are in the business of producing, processing or transporting these fuels are going to lose out but on the other hand we are still going to need energy sources and they are going to require industries equally as big and equally profitable as the fossil fuel industries are today.
Whether or not you believe in climate change it's a definate fact that fossil fuels will not last for ever and so rather than hoping something will happen along to replace them when they are gone doesn't it make more sense to gear your industry and science towards finding and utilising that alternate source of energy as soon as possible ?
Look at what the current problems in Iraq are doing the price of oil, any county which comes up with a viable energy plan which doesn't rely on oil is going to place it's self in a very advantageous position, a position which will become ever more attractive as fossil fuels become more scarce, I would like to be that in position rather than having to spend money and lives involved in wars to protect the dwindling oil supplies.
However you look at it society has nothing to lose by making a change now rather than later, oil companies and other vested interests may have a lot to lose but they are not society and they have no incentive to look or plan as far into the future as our governments should be.
Yes, not to mention all the ice which is currently frozen on the land in the Artic Circle such as in Greenland, Alaska and Northern Russia.
I think I remember seeing some study which shows the amount of water flowing into the Arctic Ocean from a few large Russian rivers has increased by a factor of 3 or 4 in the last few decades.
At least it would be an honourable course of action, as Sean Connery has just said on TV now
"If men wish to fight they do so with swords so that they may see each others eyes, if it is 'inconvienient' to use swords then a man uses a rifle and still the matter is settled between men.
You Americans are not men, men do not need promiscuous devices shooting hundreds of rounds a second, men do not use guns to shoot at their enemy dozens of miles away. This is not the way men fight, nothing is settled - there is no honour in that."
Admittedly if you value winning more than honour then it's a stupid idea.
Not so much ironic as exactly what the Neo-Con elements in your government are aiming at, so far as I understand their position ( and I admit it may not be much of an understanding ) they want to create a state where individual will is overridden by the "will" of the state and therefore a situation where the state is always right.
Unfortunatley the practicalities of this, given that people do have individual wills, is that the "will of the state" is determined by those in power to suit there own interests and requires a firm rule to persuade everyone else it's best for them, or else.
"...taken God out of them and replaced them with lies..."
That's a very amusing statement but not quite as amusing as your closing paragraph where you accept you are in the wrong and fail to realise that your own stance if far more arrogant and driven by pride than than the liberal position you are attacking.
At the moment these things need to be remote controlled in order to be properly effective and that is a big weakness, if you can interfere or block the communication to the craft then it's useless.
The other route involves a lot of artificial intelligence and will certainly usher in the end of humanity as we know it.
The only support you have had has been yourself, almost without exception everyone else has been opposed to your point of view - maybe this has changed since I last read the thread but I doubt that it has.
At least everyone elses arguments are grounded in something, your argument appears to revolve around these points:
1) Downloading something is copying it. 2) If it's you doing the downloading then it's you who are responsible.
No one is disputing that you do indeed download music from allofmp3.com and no one is disputing that you are not doing this unknowingly or by accident or whilst you are dreaming.
The point you have dodged in previous posts is that the music you are buying has been provided under a licence from the music companies, allofmp3.com is licenced to sell music.
You have conceded that you have no idea of what the terms of that licence is or whether or not it is enforceable in the US. Given this lack of knowledge it's hard to see how you can be so sure that this is an illegal enterprise or that downloading music from them may be illegal ?
Maybe if you could back up your opinion with some facts or evidence you may persuade some of us doubters that there is some truth in what you are saying.
Slashdot Mirror
How about I come round and conquer you ? Maybe once I've beaten the crap out of you and raped your partner I'll let you sleep in the dog kennel.
Can't you use traceroute or something ? Also I thought that although they can set up the proxies etc so you can't change them you can usually see them in the same place in IE.
I think a lot of them also believe that Evolution is a lie.
What makes you think it is either of those two things ?
"Today, scientists can't say anything that appears to agree with the church, because they'll loose their funding, their credibility and possibly their lives."
That's rubbish, science is science and based on facts and evidence. The church is not based on facts or evidence but belief.
Were the Church to make claims which could be backed up by facts or proof then scientists would have no choice, and in fact be eager to agree with those claims.
If the Church, or fanatical elements of it, believe that Evolution is a lie and are willing to peddle all kinds of spurious arguments to support that point of view and not offer any alternative hypothesis which can be backed up by facts, evidence or predictions then Scientists are obviously not going to go along with that.
Maybe it's because I am not used to this kind of 'debate' show but most of that transcript was just unintelligble gibberish. If that is what passes for political debate on American news channels ( and I am sure real debates must happen somewhere on US TV ) then Jon is absolutely right to say that the show is doing no one any favours except paying the wages of those involved.
Anyone who has had the chance to see what evidence such a person can produce for their stance. If people continually cannot back up their opinions with any evidence then it's quite right that their opinions should be ignored since they are just unintersting personal beliefs.
It must be lonely being such a genius.
I am going to learn up hard about the problems that could bring.
And I'm sure you take an interest in what motivates this power and what it's likely to do next.
Maybe this discussion should stop right here, since we're pretty clearly on different pages. I have no idea where you get the idea that there's no 'global terrorist enemy'. Does it hinge on the word global? The word terrorist? I was at the WTC site yesterday, and I _assure_ you, even if it's not global or terrorist, we do have some kind of enemy hell bent on killing Americans (at least).
I agree that you have Osama Bin Laden and a bunch of religious crazies bent on the destruction of "decadent and corrupting USA" and that they are terrorists. However they are a very specific and isolated terrorist group with the very specific aim of killing as many Americans or members of other Western Democracies as they can.
I have nothing against the USA doing everything it can to bring Bin Laden to justice and support them 100% in that aim and I think you should be engaged in a "War On Bin Laden".
However I do not class that as a war, it is essentially a man hunt. There are many hundreds of other terrorist organisation across the world but they are not linked into any kind of "Global Terror Network", they are seperate groups fighting for different aims seperately.
The USA is not now doing anything differently to what it would normally do to fight terrorists like the IRA or ETA or the Chechen terrorists and these groups are doing nothing to attack the US so to say you are engaged in a "War On Terror" is wrong when actually you are engaged ( or should be ) in a hunt for Bin Laden.
Justifies, probably not but you can see that there was an actual reason why these steps were taken - WWII was an actual physical war against real opponents whereas GW is happy to lock people up in Guantanamo bay on, basically, a whim without demonstrating that his "War On Terror" is even 1% as real as WWII was.
Now that I have read all those links I can't see anything in any of them which suggests you are engaged in a War on Terror.
You need to find and deal with Bin Laden but that would seem to be the only terrorist threat you are facing right now and even he has killed less people than probably die in car accidents each month and I see no evidence of a War on Cars either.
Yes but they are basically wrong. You are not at war with anyone, it's true that a bunch of terrorists did destroy the twin towers but they are not part of some massive multi tentacled world wide terrorist conspiracy.
You can be at war against other countries but not against amorphous undefined ideas.
Almost every country in the world suffers from terrorism of one sort or another but the terrorists involved are not part of some world wide umbrella terrorist organisation they are small groups with specific aims usually trying to achieve a specific thing their country will not provide them with, the IRA is not connected to ETA or the terrorists in Palestine because they are entirely seperate groups.
Osama Bin Laden is the result of the US and USSR war in Afghanistan, having failed to get fellow muslims to rise up and form hardline religious states ( by blowing them up ) he decided to attack the root of the western decadence directly instead, this happened to be the US. So you can see that he too is acting for some specific aims the same as every terrorist organisation is throughout the world - seperately.
There is probably no reasoning with the guy since his goals are ridiculous but it would help to tackle him directly rather than get sidetracked in other directions if you want to stop that specific threat to America.
I've heard on, possibly, the news yesterday that Jeb Bush is organising free cruises for African Americans and other minorities on Tuesday. All you have to do is turn up on the pier before 6:59 and you will get a free cruise around the harbour before being dropped back at just after 7ish in the evening.
Er, I think a key factor at play then - and you mentioned it yourself - was WWII.
Is the US at war now ? No.
I am a European and judging from the amount of news coverage and general debate this US election is getting it's fair to say that yes we do give a damn how the US is about to enact it's leadership choices.
I'm not saying that anyone in the US should necessarily take any notice of what we think but it's not going to stop us taking an interest. The US at the moment has the power and global influence to dictate aspects of our own lives so it's probably not surprising that we interested about the outcome.
I would say that point 1 ( We are at War ) is the main thing us Europeans would like to address, you are not at war. There is no global terrorist enemy, it is a figment of George Bush and friends collective imagination in some kind of weird reaction to September 11th.
I really hope that whoever is in power on Wednesday addresses real world problems and stops cranking up the paranoia levels and dumping all of us in a situation we really do not want to be in.
Oh, I see - so there is currently this vast budget being pumped into the third world providing clean water, sanitary sewage and innoculations and if you sign the Kyoto agreement you have to cut off this massive river of funds and divert them elsewhere.
It's a simple black and white choice; feed the starving Africans or sign the Kyoto Agreement and watch them die.
Reflexive knee jerking is almost certainly not the solution but there are other types of reaction which are the right solution and those are the actions we should be taking.
If we think there is a good chance that we may be contributing to some kind of climatic change, and most people seem to agree this is likely to be the case, then we should do something about it in order to maintain the type of enviroment which will not cause huge, expensive and dangerous changes to our lifestyle and infrastructure.
If we cut down or stop using fossil fuels then the people who are in the business of producing, processing or transporting these fuels are going to lose out but on the other hand we are still going to need energy sources and they are going to require industries equally as big and equally profitable as the fossil fuel industries are today.
Whether or not you believe in climate change it's a definate fact that fossil fuels will not last for ever and so rather than hoping something will happen along to replace them when they are gone doesn't it make more sense to gear your industry and science towards finding and utilising that alternate source of energy as soon as possible ?
Look at what the current problems in Iraq are doing the price of oil, any county which comes up with a viable energy plan which doesn't rely on oil is going to place it's self in a very advantageous position, a position which will become ever more attractive as fossil fuels become more scarce, I would like to be that in position rather than having to spend money and lives involved in wars to protect the dwindling oil supplies.
However you look at it society has nothing to lose by making a change now rather than later, oil companies and other vested interests may have a lot to lose but they are not society and they have no incentive to look or plan as far into the future as our governments should be.
Yes, not to mention all the ice which is currently frozen on the land in the Artic Circle such as in Greenland, Alaska and Northern Russia.
I think I remember seeing some study which shows the amount of water flowing into the Arctic Ocean from a few large Russian rivers has increased by a factor of 3 or 4 in the last few decades.
At least it would be an honourable course of action, as Sean Connery has just said on TV now
"If men wish to fight they do so with swords so that they may see each others eyes, if it is 'inconvienient' to use swords then a man uses a rifle and still the matter is settled between men.
You Americans are not men, men do not need promiscuous devices shooting hundreds of rounds a second, men do not use guns to shoot at their enemy dozens of miles away. This is not the way men fight, nothing is settled - there is no honour in that."
Admittedly if you value winning more than honour then it's a stupid idea.
In fact in % terms based on the number of troops the British and American forces have in place the British have had a similar % of fatalities.
In real terms that's around the 70 mark at the moment.
Not so much ironic as exactly what the Neo-Con elements in your government are aiming at, so far as I understand their position ( and I admit it may not be much of an understanding ) they want to create a state where individual will is overridden by the "will" of the state and therefore a situation where the state is always right.
Unfortunatley the practicalities of this, given that people do have individual wills, is that the "will of the state" is determined by those in power to suit there own interests and requires a firm rule to persuade everyone else it's best for them, or else.
"...taken God out of them and replaced them with lies..."
That's a very amusing statement but not quite as amusing as your closing paragraph where you accept you are in the wrong and fail to realise that your own stance if far more arrogant and driven by pride than than the liberal position you are attacking.
At the moment these things need to be remote controlled in order to be properly effective and that is a big weakness, if you can interfere or block the communication to the craft then it's useless.
The other route involves a lot of artificial intelligence and will certainly usher in the end of humanity as we know it.
Unless you're not ... what ?
The only support you have had has been yourself, almost without exception everyone else has been opposed to your point of view - maybe this has changed since I last read the thread but I doubt that it has.
At least everyone elses arguments are grounded in something, your argument appears to revolve around these points:
1) Downloading something is copying it.
2) If it's you doing the downloading then it's you who are responsible.
No one is disputing that you do indeed download music from allofmp3.com and no one is disputing that you are not doing this unknowingly or by accident or whilst you are dreaming.
The point you have dodged in previous posts is that the music you are buying has been provided under a licence from the music companies, allofmp3.com is licenced to sell music.
You have conceded that you have no idea of what the terms of that licence is or whether or not it is enforceable in the US. Given this lack of knowledge it's hard to see how you can be so sure that this is an illegal enterprise or that downloading music from them may be illegal ?
Maybe if you could back up your opinion with some facts or evidence you may persuade some of us doubters that there is some truth in what you are saying.