Sorry for deviating from the primary discussion topic of female-penis-attraction, and correlations between small genitals and large means of transportation, but this is actually a very good point.
For the sake of perspective, I'm a 4-wheel-driving aussie, I drive a truck (... to places no Prius has gone before...) and am quite exposed to some of the more bizzarre green movements, some of which, I daresay, are just a bunch of tree-hugging idiots.
Now mind you, I like nature, spend time in nature and am all for preserving it. However, some tree-hugging truck-bashers are too resistant to common sense.
For starters, most proper trucks run on Diesel engines, and do twice the mileage per volume of fuel compared to their similar-engine-sized petrol (aka 'gas' in American) brethren.
Now I'd rather refer to human affordable practical vehicles such as Toyota Landcruisers and Nissan Patrols, not utterly-impractical overpriced-by-a-fucking-order-of-magnitude gimmicks for LA rappers ala Hummer H2/H3 or military-grade vehicles ala H1.
This where both the parent comment and TFA touched on. An average 4WD has a lifespan of 2-3 times that of a small private car. Moreso even for a Prius that needs a 7000A$ - circa 5K US$ - at least that's what it costs here in Oz - battery change every so often.
If you factor in the resource costs of making and recycling 2-3 times more cars to service the same amount of need, this sheds some unwelcome light on economic vehicles that last little.
I stand corrected, my aggressive friend who really needs someone to blame.
I meant bacterial infections, not flu. My bad.
Either way, I don't bother diagnosing myself, that being well outside my qualifications. I go to a doctor and let him decide what I should take (and no, I don't "push" him to give me AB's because I "know better")
They probably left in in the anti-phishing filter deliberately. Irony generates news, and news generate truckloads of free exposure.
"Any publicity is good publicity, as long as they spell my name right"
We all think it's ironic that MS software blocks an MS promotion campaign. We generated a truckload of comments laughing our asses off. The REAL irony that escapes us is that we gentoo- and ubuntu- running geeks all talk about it, laugh about it, tell our friends, family and collegues in the office about it, and get the word out to a lot of people, a decent percentage of which (who have student IDs in AU and/or access to someone with such) will hear "blah blah office 2k7 ultimate for 75A$ blah blah microsoft blooper blah". And guess what those of them who use office and can do the math will do then.
Thus, thanks to us slashdot crowd, myself being a gentoo-desktop-running Aussie student (who also runs Windows on some of his machines) who is neither religious about being anti-microsoft nor thinks they do not deserve a sane amount of money for a software suite I wish to use, I promptly went out and paid microsoft 75$. Good'on'em.
And looking back at our beloved slashdot crowd, I think that I, for one, welcome our new microsoft-promoting slashdotter overlords.
What does going organic have to do with the issue at hand? The cattle is not the issue here, and consuming organic or non-organic has no implication on the issue at hand, unless the mass-producing market were to be utterly boycotted by consumers and had their powerful lobby defanged, which is a lala-land statistical impossibility scenario.
The issue at hand is you or me dying of flu in 10 years, because we idly chucked the last antibiotics that still work against resistant bacteria all over the foodchain, resulting in mutated strains of bacteria that are resistant even to these drugs. When those will infects humans, the humans will die. This is why you are told not to take antibiotics without due reason, and to always take everything you've been given (so as to clobber all the bacteria you've got and not have some unkilled 5% bacterium survivors in your system that proved more resistant to the antibiotics you took than the rest, contributing to a move to AB-resistant bacteria).
Scientists have been screaming their heads off about this for decades now. If only anyone would listen.
First, I strongly suggest you upgrade that RC1 copy you've got. Vista doesn't ask confirmation on nearly as much as you seem to imply.
Second, Microsoft made a DESIGN CHOICE, which is what the idiot who was quoted in the article is too stupid to understand.
Let's examine micsosoft's options for a moment, though before we do that, let's concede to an underlying assumption that, as much as you or anyone doesn't like, it is inevitably inescapable:
Installing software and installing drivers requires administrative privilages. . Now, for Microsoft's options:
1. Let users continue to run at administrator privilages on non-domain (read: home/SOHO) PC's a-la WinXP and prior. Pros: no annoyance. Cons: MASSIVELY Insecure. Enormous amounts of malware infect enormous amounts of home/SOHO machines, enormous amounts of people get hurt by it. Essentially any program can trash the OS, and in many cases the program can propagate without either asking the user's permission, or by getting his consent without him knowing he has given it.
2. Apply a unixlike permission system, where users will need to confirm their identities by typing a password every time they stray from their userspace (to install a program or driver, say, or when a piece of malware they've run attempts to install itself in their system). Pros: User is made explicitly aware that he is being asked to give a piece software permission to tamper with the OS guts. Cons: Every time you'd need to elevate yourself to administrator privileges, you'd need to type a password. For users who aren't security-minded sysadmins, this can be more than a tad annoying.
Most modern desktop linux distros - all but Ubuntu I believe - work like this.
That's the basic 2 variants. What the article was screaming was that Vista isn't far enough on the security scale. What you're screaming is that it's TOO far on the security scale.
What the MS guys actually did is, I believe, the best of both worlds. It's not as secure as a password/2-/3-factor-auth system, or a system that has different access levels for installing applications (tetris) and for installing drivers (and mess with OS guts) - lest a tetris setup will install a driver.
All it does is blacken the screen and ask you if you YES or NO - Do you want to give a program - presumeably the one you are running - administrative permissions.
It actually plugs a real, working, activated set of permissions system in place. No more saving files in c:\. That's what home directories are for.
From what I see, it's perfect:
1. Joe "GetInfestedbyMalware" User can easily be educated as to the darkening authentication prompt and what it means. To those who have a tech come in and maintain the computer, a "Just say no" policy should prevent an unimagineable amount of pain, even without him really understanding what is happening. "If you see a darkening screen, say NO". 2. More powerful users (such as yourself) will need to be taught to WORK CORRECTLY (within their userspace) before they become... 3. Users that work correctly, i.e. within their environment (as I am working now on my gentoo box). These users do not get annoyed by the permission system because it does not interfere in the least with their work, except when they're initially setting up the system (the really smart ones will simply log in as an administrator and run all the setups there, to save the annoying screens, then log out and back in as a user).
Yes, you need to pull administrative access occasionally to install a new bit of software, but that should be a rare event (unless the purpose of your using a computer is to install and uninstall programs rather than use them, in which case, go back to working XP-style and work under an admin account). You need to give yourself admin access if you want to run regedit or alter a system file. You don't need admin access to use your productivity software (say, office), play games (be it solitaire or Oblivion), or surf the web.
Playing devil's advocate here, this does not even remotely resemble the truth, as in the alphabet soup case the mechanism used does not provide an immediate facility to reconstruct the original from the bits and pieces whereas bittorrent does, making it matter on the end-result - one facilitates an end result where material was copied, shredded paper alphabet soup doesn't.
Another similar case is whether it would be legal to distribute a copyrighted bitstream with all the original bits run through a NOT gate (or encoded in any other format for that matter). After all, you're not distributing the original copyrighted material, you're distributing something else which is [a] derived and [b] can be used to reconstruct the original. This is, of course, just as illegal (no flames please, I don't use inflaming words like "theft" or "piracy", all this is is copyright infringement), just as illegal as re-encoding a red-book Madonna CD into mp3 and distributing the mp3 files.
Make Wings; Make Thorax; Make Head; Size = 10; if (GrowthStoppingHormonePresent == false){
Size+=20;
if (OtherQueenPresent == true){kill it;}
Spray Growth Stopping Hormone On All Bees Around You; } else {
Behavior = "Go around gathering honey"; }
1. Australia is by-large not religious (I'm not talking about the institutions. I'm talking about the people). Most of the issues that spark heated public debate in the US because of their religious ("""ethical""") implications are non-issues to start with here or minor issues at best. Not because people don't care but simply because religious nutcases don't have anything that even comes close to their US lobby. Oh, and our president doesn't do things because God told him to.
2. The mentality is not a complete (at least to the limited extent of my experience from living in the US and.. well.. TV), utter shitpile. Apologies to whomever lives in the pockets of educated and civilized society in the US (which I acknoledge exist yet are somehow not nearly influential enough when it comes to interacting with the outside world). In Australia, the vast majority of people, both the ones on TV and the ones you meet, don't live in this "my-business-is-none-of-your-business" and "that's-not-my-problem" mindset.
3. Australians don't get forcefed with propaganda dumbing them down and telling them who is good, who is bad and what to think (I think Americans call this "Fox News") and don't view the world through a bipolar "everything is either black or white" oversimplified good-vs-evil prism.
4. While the government is often accused of having its tongue too deep up the royal American Hiney, the government gets things done, and lining up what the country has accomplished and what services (social, educational etc) it provides its citizens - up against any other country you care to name, Australia is world-class and in the lead. The vast majority of things that get done here get done right, and when you ask something along "why did the government do that, there is always a simple and logical solution behind it. Things just make sense. Our policies are made listening to scientists, not celebrities or industry cartels (most of the time, at least).
5. Most aussies don't winge about problems. They sort them.
6. The only two things Australians worship religiously is nature and quality recreation.
7. We don't block vegemite imports (bad, bad folate! vit B12 makes you stupid!) after they make films like "Supersize me!" about what we do consider legal (and by the same coin, not bad for you I guess) to import and/or sell as food. Anyone for an extra-fat supersize cheeseburger and a 5-gallon coke?
Expensive? somewhat. It's the price one pays for living in modern society.
Australian mentality is all the good traits of the American mentality pooled in with all the good traits of some European ones, minus most of the bad stuff of either side. That alone is worth spending one's life here.
Shush you idiot! Don't you understand what parent post is doing? Don't bloody tell everyone on/. the truth! They'll start coming here en-masse!
So it'll probbably be possible with this tech
on
USB To Go Wireless
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
All you have to do is bond several channels together and there's your wireless monitor. Wifi has, what, 11 channels? How many does wireless USB have?
Since the range on this is relatively tiny, you can probbably aggregate, say, 5 or 6 WUB channels into a single 2+Gbit channel to talk to your monitor. Sure, you'll be barred from putting more than 1 or 2 in close proximity, and yet... For the price of 5-6 transmitter chips at each end and a bit more core logic, a manufacturer can probbably piece this together today and it probbably won't cost too much either, at least once some competition throws in.
Gone are the days when you can buy something (an Athlon XP) that delivers 95% of the intel equivalent for half the price (saving hundreds of dollars), or offering a value processor (The good'ol Duron) that kicked the living crap out of a faster Intel mainstream CPU for a tad more than nothing.
It was the fact that they used to deliver the substance without the bull and charge accordingly that made AMD so dear to us back then. Not so now - they realized that if people are willing to pay Intel big bucks for fast CPUs, they'd be willing to pay them too. Unlike then - if you want High-end performance today, you gotta cough up some hard cash.
Frankly, I'm surprised they didn't see Cure 2 Duo coming, or perhaps underestimated it, or perhaps yet again just couldn't do any better, as it seems to have caught them pants down.
I just looked up some CPUs for my near upgrade. For the uber-value dual-core, Intel is practically giving away Pentium D 805's for free - as cheap as the good'ol Athlon XP's, only double the cores. For the value dual-core game box, The 6400 tears the X2's a new one no matter how you line them up. The price difference - 40$ more expensive than the lowest AMD (AM2 X2 3800). HUGE performance difference. And if it ain't worth the extra 40$, see the first clause above. For the performance and extreme markets, the 6600 and 6800 tear the X2 an even bigger new one.
This isn't rocket science. It's second-grade math. This round, AMD lose, no matter which side you're looking at (Save maybe the server side, and I'm not sure there too).
Unless AMD either bites the bullet and does some competitive (additional!) price slashing to bring their products in line with the corresponding Intel alternatives, or comes out with something just as kickass to counter the Core 2 Duo, you have to be a certified idiot to be buying their products for anything.
DNA is a storage medium, not unlike your hard-drive (it's binary, surprise), basic block (base) being 2 bits and every byte (codon) being six bits.
It has (drumroll) a filesystem.
On that filesystem, we store (more drumroll) files (genes) - sequences of information that code into proteins, i.e./do stuff/.
(There's much more to this - it's all sitting on a big RAID1 array, and is even further redundant as on that array we carry not one but two unsimilar copies of the equivalent of c:\windows or/usr from the two seperate machines we replicated ourselves from - just in case explorer.exe on the first copy gets botched (that last bit's a lie but helps draw the picture)- that we carry around with us everywhere. And if you want to go even deeper, to make us more variable and more evolutionally sound our two copies are neither from mum or dad. They're two mixtures of both.)
I don't really like the definition that says "Junk = DNA that doesn't code for proteins".
The fact that certain parts of the data don't belong to genes - don't code for proteins doesn't automatically mean they're junk, just as bits on your filesystem that aren't file contents are not automatically free space either. They could be (surprise!) meta-data. They could even be place-holders when specific offsets are required (imagine doing a raw dd of all the data on the second half of your harddrive 3 bits to the left.. yes, this happens in DNA). So yes. DNA has filesystem meta-data. Horseloads of it.
Accidentally erase some meta-data (which doesn't directly code for proteins) and... well, this is slashdot. We're geeks. We know what it means. Bye Bye filesystem. Somebody recall the tapes.
While we've discovered the 30,000 files (genes) sitting on the human drive (1GB if you were wondering, will pro'lly fit on a 900MB CD), we know they are files, where they start and end, and we know what some of them do and we've reverse-engineered the filesystem to the point of having a good poriton of the meta-data figured out, there's still a crapload of empty space we're.../unsure/ about. While we (again, in a very misleading way IMHO) call it "junk DNA", it is nowhere near certain it doesn't contain yet more essential data for making healthy and functional humans.
And yes, Genetics is fundamentally a field of IT. Wacky hardware that nobody gave us the whitepapers for, fersure, but it's just a filesystem with files. Like cars and OS's, you've used one or twenty, you've seen them all. Underneath they're all the same.
Figure out the filesystem, figure out how to interpret the data in the files and how it translates into real-world stuff and that's about about most of it, hardware [reverse-]engineering aside.
And yes, IAAVSASG (I Am A Veteran System Administrator Studying Genetics)
As long as you completely ignore your (Lebanon's whoever is in charge there) responsibility I don't buy that self-serving rhetoric.
Israel didn't invade lebanon to "occupy" it. It's neither settling it, or claiming the land, it doesn't even want or intend to stay there. It went in to do what your country screwed up doing - something that is Lebanon's duty - to keep its nutcases from arming to the point of having a formidable force, then from staging attacks on your neighbours. Until you can acknowledge that [a] This is your country's responsibility [b] That your country majorly screwed up in curbing this [c] That this led to your neighbour getting harrassed since 2000 (and I'm actually quite surprised Israel chose to hold its guns for 6 years and didn't kick Hezballah's ass much sooner) and [d] The invasion of Lebanon was to curb this immediate threat.
If you can't acknowledge these facts, you're no different from the self-serving-rhetoric-preachers of the Hezbollah that understands not what personal responsibility is, and we have no basis for a discussion.
You seem to be suffering from exactly the same symptoms as most Israelis who don't give a rats ass about what their crazed genocide-preaching fanatics are doing in Gaza and the west bank - they don't care, they ignore that the people on "their side" harrasses the other side, they prefer to bury their head in the sand and pretend it is not happening.
You're exactly the same as they are. Hezbollah has been harassing northern Israel since the Lebanon pullout left and right, putting more and more weapons - guns, rockets etc on the border, raiding Israel, firing at settlements, abducting people... You don't seem to give a shit about that (and I daresay you didn't give a shit before July when Israel invaded - as nobody was busy putting an end to it.
So you the Lebanese people did not give its government a mandate to leash the Hezballah, and now the Lebanese people paid the price of negligent self-policing policy.
You eat what you cook, mate.
Oh, and regarding the ambulance.. That's where you just don't get it. Ever since your Hezballah countrymen put weapons in ambulances, it quite factually/could/ have been a bomb. Quit this habit of throwing trust and morals at westerners (your "We can't just act like barbarians!" bit) while utterly ignoring your countymens utter lack of these morals that led to the breach in trust. The trust (between Israel and whoever operates your ambulances ) is apparently no longer there. They don't trust you to let ambulances do their job. Hezbollah breached the trust. Cope. And if you really want to blame someone that bad, blame them.
>> By talking about the issue I become an enemy without even seeing anyone in the group you are talking about, communicating with them in any way, condoning their actions in any way or even going to Lebanon?
By no means, we're not enemies.
You became the proverbial master of your country, not the enemy. I was just stating that it comes with responsibilities, such as keeping the people who violate the principles of your society's chosen system and hurt your national interests - on a leash. The country I live in - Australia - does it with police and prisons and courts, the US does it likewise, Israel (mostly) does it likewise, Lebanon should too if it wants to be a respected country and if its government wants to be treated like a government. Last I checked, unleashed Lebanese fanatics opened a war against Israel, not the other way around. Israel's genocide-preaching fanatics were not a part of this ordeal. Letting someone other than the government run around with assault rifles, anti-tank munitions, rockets etc means not taking care of your fanatics. This does not imply I am accusing you of affiliation with them, quite on the contrary, you seem quite pragmatic and open on the subject.
I teach my kids to embrace responsibility, not throw it around like blame. I warmly recommend you teach yours the same. Responsibility is power.
Yep. we're definitely transmitting on two different channels here.
You're busy blaming the US for giving Israel financial support. I get your point, and am well aware of this. The US support is/CONDITIONED/ on buying weapons. The US does not only give money to Israel, it gives money to Israel UNDER THE CONDITION that this money will be used to buy weapons from the US, which creates more jobs and more export in the US. Between us boys, the US cares (and will care, regardless of which administration is in) more about creating more jobs for its citizens than about either Israeli or Lebanese lives.
This treatment is not unique to Isreal. The US gives money to every country that serves its interests. Why to you think the Egyptians are flying F-16 fighters and using M-16 rifles? what about the Turks? The Quaitis? The Saudis? The US is giving money to every country it can that will serve its interest,/under the condition/ the money is used to buy US (military) products. And the American people have been very happy with this arrangement for the last half-century or so. I don't see that changing.
You're all fixated about blaming the US, which is exactly the kind of attitude that will get Lebanon screwed over and over again. It's not who about who sold guns to Israel. It's about armed agenda-driven fanatics that should be kept on a leash. By/YOU/, as they are your fanatics. Look at your cousins, the Palestinians. Look at how far blaming and avoiding their own responsibility got them. Think very hard if you want Lebanon going down that road.
The important thing you don't seem to understand is that regardless of who you blame in your private little blame-game (WHO gave Israel weapons?! YOU! Americans! Look what you did!), I'm saying it doesn't matter at all who gave them weapons. Israel WILL have weapons no matter what you or I or George W. Bush does. Even if you prevent all the countries of the world from selling Israel weapons, they will still have weapons. They/make/ them, and judging by Israeli behaviour to date, they'll probably stay armed to the teeth with itchy trigger fingers forever.
You're wasting your time and effort climbing that blame-America tree. You'd probably be wiser to do support Lebanon in doing what Jordan and Egypt did - "If you can't beat them - befriend them".
>> I don't think we should drop it just because the propaganda... I think you're not getting it. I'll make it in several simple points for you: 1. Nobody wants to drop the geneva convention. Not you, not me, not the US. If it were just between us when we make war, it would have been working. 2. What will make you drop it very happily is when someone will start using ambulances to kill you. This happened to Israel, and now Israel delays for searching and under certain conditions even shoots ambulances. If someone uses ambulances to kill YOU, YOU will shoot at them too. We all - you, I prefer to shoot an ambulance and live than to respect the taboo and get killed by someone who doesn't. This has/NOTHING/ to do with propaganda. It has everything to do with moralless fanatics who abused the rules. That's when the rules get tougher and everybody suffers. It's like living in a city that has never known robbery. Nobody locks the door. But the moment robberies start, everyone starts to lock up, which makes everyone more miserable, but there is not enough trust to go around to avoid it. The geneva convention is built on trust - trust that all sides adhere to it. Lacking that trust, as in the case of the Hammas and the Hezbollah, it's worthless. Welcome to the real world.
You completely miss my point. Both of them in fact. 1. I haven't objected your claim about the missiles being american. I just made a complementary claim that preventing America from selling arms to Israel will accomplish nothing. Israel will still have missiles. Isreal itself is one of the largest hi-tech arms exporters in the world and is perfectly capable of satisfying all of its own misslie-manufacturing needs.
I'm saying your suggestion would achieve nothing.
2. You're talking about a/particular/ ambulance incident. I believe everything you say about it, no need to get protective, I'm not going to discredit your witnesses.
I'm trying to tell you that many of the taboos you and I were raised on, such as conduct dictated by the Geneva convention is now in some places and times, void. I'm not implying the rules were broken by the people in the ambulance you are describing. They were probably not. They were, however, broken. By others. But the fact that they were broken changed the rules of the game. Israel is in a position where its enemies do use things like ambulances and hospitals as cover for katyushas or bombs, which are later used for the very very immoral purpose of randomly butchering civilians.
I am not saying ambulances should be shot at, I much prefer it the way it used to be, when such resources were regarded as "sacred ground". But in a world where this is not respected, where they become legitimate means to stash and move arms or bombs, the taboo starts fading away. As of today, September 2006, Israeli don't trust palestinians and probbably Hezbollah in ambulances. I frankly can't say I blame them, and suspect that under circumstances where this is not respected by an opposing side, you and I would act in much the same way.
>> My point is that military actions are very cheap for the current Israeli government with little personal consequence or accountability I understand your point. I can only suggest that some of the accountability is there. Israel's government and its use of their national resources - their money, the lives of their soldiers, etc - is fully accountable to the Israeli people. If they feel the government did not serve the purpose of protecting them adequately, they will elect another.
As for accountability towards damage done in Lebanon - Israel is very unlikely to be be made accountable for it. The only one who has the power to make them accountable for it is the US, and the US is pretty grateful to Israel for having done their (and your, btw) dirty work cooling off the Hezbollah a bit.
Furthermore, Lebanon (as a country) is indirectly responsible for what happened to it by being negligent of its duties to police its turf and prevent armed fanatics from harassing its neighbors. The middle east has a special spot in hell for countries that are too weak to keep their internal affairs under control and thus take care of their own interests. These countries are the ones that get beaten up every time someone uses their weakness to harass someone else. Lebanon will have to work hard to pull itself out of that group.
>> and foreign aid being used to run some of it. As I said, does it really matter if you get hit by Israeli-made or American-made bullets? You sound like you believe that if the US were to stop selling Israel arms, Israel will not have arms. Rest assured, it will.
Several things. [a] You're raising a mute point: Israel is well capable (and is often in the habit of) of manufacturing its own [A-A, A-G, you name it] missiles. If it won't be an american Hellfire, It'll be an Israeli-made Popeye.
Contrary to your understanding, the US taxpayer is not paying for it. Israel buying these missiles from the US rather than manufacturing it means more jobs in the US, more American companies and individuals earn income. It's money recycled from and back to the the American economy, not money spent.
Buying arms with american-provided cash saves Israel some (at the expense of jobs local manufacturing would create), but that will not prevent the next ambulance from being hit by a missile. One way or another, the missle stays in the equation.
Mute point, QED.
[b] Regarding shooting ambulances (we'll take that as a case study, this goes similarly to other moral taboos)
What some fundamentalists do is prey on the fact that they are "morally unencumbered", yet the rest of the world they're selling the show to is not. You speak of shooting at ambulances as a bad thing. Most of us would agree it is. Or at least used to be.
Used to be until people started taking advantage of that fact, smuggling bombs in them, even caught smuggling a bomb under the clothes of a woman made to look pregnant, with Hezballah following suit using them so smuggle guns. Consequently, ambulances passing Israeli checkpoints are now searched, to the great (and sometimes fatal) dismay of the (actually sick/dying) people inside them. The radicals are of course very happy about this as it can now point at Israel and yell "look at these inhuman butchers, searching/firing at ambulances!".
Sadly, the real butchers in this story are those who violate the taboo by taking advantage of the opposing side's respect for it to further their agenda. As of the moment this taboo is not respected by either side, the moment the ambulance becomes a serious security vulnerability that can and is used to transport terrorists, bombs or armaments, the taboo is (sadly, yet unavoidably) void, and ambulances become fair game.
So is life. You can't eat the cake and leave it whole.
The game has changed since the Geneva convention. It's only a matter of time before the official laws of acceptable warfare naturally adjust themselves to the new ballgame being played. A game cannot be played when one side doesn't respect the rules yet can't stop whining about the other not following them at the same time.
Thus, when you say "people in the Israeli army having to account for expensive missiles and perhaps only using them against military targets" is again a mute point. Not unlike my country, Israel doesn't use its army to dick around. It uses its army to defend its citizens. If the offender is an invading military, it points its arms to it. If the offender is a bunch of aliens, it will point its arms to it, and if the offender is a radical muslim army hiding in civillian clothes and carefully choosing their fortified positions to be near schools and mosques, that's where the arms get pointed. Churchill bombed the living shit out of 200,000 civillians in Dresden because there were strategically significant targets there. A threat is a threat and a war is a war. And yes, it's ugly. Smart people who don't want it prevent it, not cause/allow it to start and then bitch.
>> We can't take the line that we'll let one side do bad things because the other side is also doing that Amen. Now if only everyone applied it to themselves and stopped justifying its wrongs by way of the other side's wrongs, wouldn't it be a nicer world?
Every country has radical loonies, but not every country is run by radical loonies. Some countries actually have failsafe mechanisms to prevent the odd radical looney from doing too much damage in office. Things like provisions when a leader is to be removed. Things like separation between government and religion. Things like freedom of press. Things like elections. Things like a transparent system. Others simply don't. Some (not all) are being taken advantage of due to this. Can you tell me what happens after Mubarak in Egypt? is there a system resilient enough to prevent radicals from taking power? Jordan? Turkey? Quwait?
>> One problem in that part of the world is we have idiots that pretend to have Jewish values but actually preach genocide with a major say in politics on one side and a bunch that want to drive the Israeli settlers into the sea on the other
I think that's a fairly good summary, though if you've been following either Israeli or Lebanese politics lately you'd have known said Israeli idiots have much less say than they used to and have and have largely alienated themselves to the marjority of Israelis (for the exact purpose you've quoted). The trend is good on the Lebanese side as well, Seniora's government, while having Hezballah cabinet members, is nothing short of miraculously pragmatic.
I hope we see more of this kind of trend on both sides, and in fact everywhere else throughout the middle-east.
>> It isn't going to get any better by trying to kill everyone that opposes certain views Again, I couldn't agree more.
>> I'd like to ask you this...do you believe Israel is a totally innocent party that is free from having committed grievous acts against the Palestinians and Lebanese?
Shit no, though that's two very different puddles you're mixing there.
Palestinians? I don't agree with Israel's 40-year-old policy regarding them and the Jewish fanatics it funded to go live among them, I do agree there should be a barrier, I don't think it's fairly placed and I do think that barrier is better than no barrier (considering a fair one has no fighting chance in the Israeli ballot box, making it a choice between this one and none at all).
Lebanese? To a very very lessened degree, but still so.
To directly answer your carefully-worded question, is it a "totally innocent party"? no, by no means. Nobody is ever innocent in a war.
While Hezbollah has been issuing provocation after provocation since Israel left Lebanon in 2000, amassing more and more guns at the border, making incursions into Israeli territory, abducting people and firing across the border, I think the 6-year-old policy of taking it standing and ignoring it despite the pain was a policy that served Israel well. Going in full-force did hurt Israeli interests (this is my opinion - Israel gained some, it lost some and it's really a matter of opinion of whether it was justified). To the point, choosing not to do so would have resulted in less innocent loss, both in life and in macro-effect on Lebanon as a nation and all its residents indirectly through the nation getting trashed.
But the fact that Israel could have acted differently (and thus has its hands in the responsibility pile) does not make an even moral ground. Again, just because the Hezbollah was not the only one playing this out and driving at the eventual outcome does not make it any less hitlerian in the incitement/propaganda/teach-kids-to-hate department, or any less a bunch morally bankrupt fanatics with a bought "electoral" base.
Looking at your question, it may be worthwhile to point out that Israel is [a] A democracy. It follows the interests of the people who elect its government. Like any real democracy, its government cannot follow a narrow fanatical agenda without putting its political future on the line. The lebanese government, as of the time one of the parties had an armed militia running around declaring war on neighbours is at most a cynnical parody of a democracy upheld by a fundamentalist mob, and an externally-funded one at that. [b] Motivated by security of its citizens and by removing the threats of armaments pointing at them, not by a religious crusade to dismantle it's neighbouring state and instill its religion on the area. If you're one of those who think the present Israeli incursion into Lebanon is either an imperialistic crusade or religiously-motivated, you're buying too hard into the abovementioned propaganda and should probbably take a shot at trying to prove such a claim. [c] Not brainwashing its 3-year-olds to hate the people on the other side of the fence.
On the other hand, it would have (again, opinion) been much wiser for Israel to have refrained from retaliating a while longer and let the newly-established Lebanese system fall into place and do its own dirty laundry without the need to flatten half the country. We can speculate all day as to how much chance that had of happening, but I do think the Lebanese deserved (still deserve) a fair shot at it.
I daresay you're thinking along the wrong lines. You're thinking "who do we blame?" and "Who is right?" "Who is getting hurt?" The answers to these are always self serving, and the real answer is always "Everybody", "Everybody" and "Everybody" respectively.
The questions smarter people ask is "What can we [each sitting in whatever place in the world he's sitting] do to prevent it from happening further? How can we/fix/ it? An Israeli or Lebanese might make take this question with him to the ballot box. Some may reevaluate the moral
1. Hezbollah *does* hide behind civillians, thank you very much. Not two months ago it was hiding artillery units - rocketry - in urban areas. 2. The fact that they're brainwashing them (al-manaar?), bribing (should I say "buying"?) their political supporters with Iranian cash (12,000$ per household payments?), and offering them a lifeline (employement? social welfare?) does not change the fact that this organization uses the political power thus purchased to push their agenda (as opposed to that of the people it bribed) and doesn't make them any less of what they are - a fundamentalist religious movement intent on zeal, provocation, further conflict and utter elimination of one of its neighbouring countries. 3. Hezbollah uses hitlerian propaganda tactics to brainwash, incite and worst of all teach hate starting at infancy, demonizing the west as lesser human beings. Ask any 3-year-old from a Hezbollah-funded kindergarden, he'll be happy to explain it to you using all the graphic terms you'd expect. All that Iranian money doesn't come for free you know. 4. Hezbollah is "a political party" when it needs to be, and a sovereign not answerable to the government it was claiming to be a part of (i.e. has its own military) when it needs to be. For the life of me I haven't figured this out. How *does* that work? What would happen in the hypothetical situation that it declared war against a neighbour? would it still be... representative of the government it's pretending to go along with while making its own policy? Would that government have a say? Can you be a leading part of a democracy and a traitor wildly betraying its underlying principles at the same time? In Lebanon, as it appears, you very much can. All you need is a solid supply of cash and guns.
You'd have to be either pushing a close agenda or seriously naive (I shy away from harder terms) to be giving the pitch about their legitimacy. So... what/about/ all the/good/ things Hitler did?
Case in point: doing any amount of good does not absolve you of doing evil or driving a zealous agenda opposed to any modern values (values cynically used by offending party left and right, often exagerated or simply lied about, to show the party's suffering and gather support, mind you).
Hezbollah, is busy putting on a snake-oil-salesman smile and buying political support from dirt-poor shia with a serious inferiority complex. Fixing this would first and foremost mean its financial source be replaced with one coming from people that don't blindly hate and are thus socially compatible with the rest of the peoples of the modern world. With money come the macro interests being followed.
If you have 2GB of RAM and a process started leaking violently, providing it with 1.5 gigs of (physical) ram to work before it or the box dies or 3.5 gigs of ram (2 of which are swap) is meaningless. If it'll be chugging so much memory, it's probbably leaking without restraint anyway.
This really depends on how likely you see a scenario where you'll be (legitimately) using more than your physical 2GB. For my office desktop box, that's a "never ever ever, not by a long shot", so I plain don't need the swap. Were I running a 512MB box with 1GB of ram I'd be fine. 2 gigs of real ram? when and how the hell would I be using that swap?
Of course, if I were running software that'd be using up 1.8GB on average, say some game with a chubby 3D engine, it'd be a whole different ballgame.
>> Dude, there is a world of difference between giving money to develop anti-aging treatments and giving money to deploy said treatments around the world. Ellison gave money to keep his own carcass ticking.
That is the plain sillyest thing I've heard anyone say in a long while.
Never mind that you'd need money well beyond ellison to actually get this working, what Ellison contributed to is a research project that does with birds what the M-Prize is doing with mice. A project whose sole purpose is proof-of-concept. When that proof of concept is on the table, the flood gates open and money much bigger than even Ellison has will start pouring in. When people see this is actually *possible to do*, Rest assured, he's not the only one in this world who wants to save his own carcass. There's another half a billion americans right behind him in line. Big Pharma has been eyeballing this for a while now. So have a number of other mighty rich philantropists.
Furthermore
Let's assume you're the lab Ellison hired to do this. Better yet, let's assume you're even Ellison yourself.
Let's, for argument's sake, assume you actually have a solution for aging. What would you do? save your own carcass? or save your own carcass and sell the bloody thing via retail channels to every soul on the planet, earning billions (something that I really fail to see as hurting humanity as a whole).
Face it. ANY investment, in worthwhile ANY age-targeting research today, is helping every last human on the planet plenty more than any specific-disease solutions. Should a cure ever arise of it (which in my humble opinion it definitely shall, it's just a question of when).
Every DAY that you save between today and the day a postponing cure is introduced that gets the first people into actuarial escape velocity is 100,000 LIVES SAVED. Per day. No malaria treatments can compare to that in scale. Moreover, you personally might actually be one of the beneficiaries. You might actually find yourself benefiting from the money Ellison has put down to "save his carcass".
I'm not saying malaria should not be eradicated. I'm saying there's priorities, dictated by how many people die from any single cause. And the one currently topping the list by an inconceivably enormous margin is the one you're suggesting we ignore.
Slashdot Mirror
... and yes, I should use preview so as not to have silly half-sentences stuck to the bottom of what I post.
Sorry for deviating from the primary discussion topic of female-penis-attraction, and correlations between small genitals and large means of transportation, but this is actually a very good point.
...) and am quite exposed to some of the more bizzarre green movements, some of which, I daresay, are just a bunch of tree-hugging idiots.
For the sake of perspective, I'm a 4-wheel-driving aussie, I drive a truck (... to places no Prius has gone before
Now mind you, I like nature, spend time in nature and am all for preserving it. However, some tree-hugging truck-bashers are too resistant to common sense.
For starters, most proper trucks run on Diesel engines, and do twice the mileage per volume of fuel compared to their similar-engine-sized petrol (aka 'gas' in American) brethren.
Now I'd rather refer to human affordable practical vehicles such as Toyota Landcruisers and Nissan Patrols, not utterly-impractical overpriced-by-a-fucking-order-of-magnitude gimmicks for LA rappers ala Hummer H2/H3 or military-grade vehicles ala H1.
This where both the parent comment and TFA touched on. An average 4WD has a lifespan of 2-3 times that of a small private car. Moreso even for a Prius that needs a 7000A$ - circa 5K US$ - at least that's what it costs here in Oz - battery change every so often.
If you factor in the resource costs of making and recycling 2-3 times more cars to service the same amount of need, this sheds some unwelcome light on economic vehicles that last little.
One argument that floats
One point that comes
I stand corrected, my aggressive friend who really needs someone to blame.
I meant bacterial infections, not flu. My bad.
Either way, I don't bother diagnosing myself, that being well outside my qualifications. I go to a doctor and let him decide what I should take (and no, I don't "push" him to give me AB's because I "know better")
Would that be any different with you?
They probably left in in the anti-phishing filter deliberately. Irony generates news, and news generate truckloads of free exposure.
"Any publicity is good publicity, as long as they spell my name right"
We all think it's ironic that MS software blocks an MS promotion campaign. We generated a truckload of comments laughing our asses off.
The REAL irony that escapes us is that we gentoo- and ubuntu- running geeks all talk about it, laugh about it, tell our friends, family and collegues in the office about it, and get the word out to a lot of people, a decent percentage of which (who have student IDs in AU and/or access to someone with such) will hear "blah blah office 2k7 ultimate for 75A$ blah blah microsoft blooper blah". And guess what those of them who use office and can do the math will do then.
Thus, thanks to us slashdot crowd, myself being a gentoo-desktop-running Aussie student (who also runs Windows on some of his machines) who is neither religious about being anti-microsoft nor thinks they do not deserve a sane amount of money for a software suite I wish to use, I promptly went out and paid microsoft 75$. Good'on'em.
And looking back at our beloved slashdot crowd, I think that I, for one, welcome our new microsoft-promoting slashdotter overlords.
What does going organic have to do with the issue at hand?
The cattle is not the issue here, and consuming organic or non-organic has no implication on the issue at hand, unless the mass-producing market were to be utterly boycotted by consumers and had their powerful lobby defanged, which is a lala-land statistical impossibility scenario.
The issue at hand is you or me dying of flu in 10 years, because we idly chucked the last antibiotics that still work against resistant bacteria all over the foodchain, resulting in mutated strains of bacteria that are resistant even to these drugs. When those will infects humans, the humans will die.
This is why you are told not to take antibiotics without due reason, and to always take everything you've been given (so as to clobber all the bacteria you've got and not have some unkilled 5% bacterium survivors in your system that proved more resistant to the antibiotics you took than the rest, contributing to a move to AB-resistant bacteria).
Scientists have been screaming their heads off about this for decades now. If only anyone would listen.
First, I strongly suggest you upgrade that RC1 copy you've got. Vista doesn't ask confirmation on nearly as much as you seem to imply.
Second, Microsoft made a DESIGN CHOICE, which is what the idiot who was quoted in the article is too stupid to understand.
Let's examine micsosoft's options for a moment, though before we do that, let's concede to an underlying assumption that, as much as you or anyone doesn't like, it is inevitably inescapable:
Installing software and installing drivers requires administrative privilages.
.
Now, for Microsoft's options:
1. Let users continue to run at administrator privilages on non-domain (read: home/SOHO) PC's a-la WinXP and prior.
Pros: no annoyance. Cons: MASSIVELY Insecure. Enormous amounts of malware infect enormous amounts of home/SOHO machines, enormous amounts of people get hurt by it. Essentially any program can trash the OS, and in many cases the program can propagate without either asking the user's permission, or by getting his consent without him knowing he has given it.
2. Apply a unixlike permission system, where users will need to confirm their identities by typing a password every time they stray from their userspace (to install a program or driver, say, or when a piece of malware they've run attempts to install itself in their system).
Pros: User is made explicitly aware that he is being asked to give a piece software permission to tamper with the OS guts.
Cons: Every time you'd need to elevate yourself to administrator privileges, you'd need to type a password. For users who aren't security-minded sysadmins, this can be more than a tad annoying.
Most modern desktop linux distros - all but Ubuntu I believe - work like this.
That's the basic 2 variants. What the article was screaming was that Vista isn't far enough on the security scale.
What you're screaming is that it's TOO far on the security scale.
What the MS guys actually did is, I believe, the best of both worlds. It's not as secure as a password/2-/3-factor-auth system, or a system that has different access levels for installing applications (tetris) and for installing drivers (and mess with OS guts) - lest a tetris setup will install a driver.
All it does is blacken the screen and ask you if you YES or NO - Do you want to give a program - presumeably the one you are running - administrative permissions.
It actually plugs a real, working, activated set of permissions system in place.
No more saving files in c:\. That's what home directories are for.
From what I see, it's perfect:
1. Joe "GetInfestedbyMalware" User can easily be educated as to the darkening authentication prompt and what it means. To those who have a tech come in and maintain the computer, a "Just say no" policy should prevent an unimagineable amount of pain, even without him really understanding what is happening. "If you see a darkening screen, say NO".
2. More powerful users (such as yourself) will need to be taught to WORK CORRECTLY (within their userspace) before they become...
3. Users that work correctly, i.e. within their environment (as I am working now on my gentoo box). These users do not get annoyed by the permission system because it does not interfere in the least with their work, except when they're initially setting up the system (the really smart ones will simply log in as an administrator and run all the setups there, to save the annoying screens, then log out and back in as a user).
Yes, you need to pull administrative access occasionally to install a new bit of software, but that should be a rare event (unless the purpose of your using a computer is to install and uninstall programs rather than use them, in which case, go back to working XP-style and work under an admin account). You need to give yourself admin access if you want to run regedit or alter a system file. You don't need admin access to use your productivity software (say, office), play games (be it solitaire or Oblivion), or surf the web.
Ma
You send your video card flying at 60 feet per second? Darn, no wonder you're bitchin about how crappy it works...
Playing devil's advocate here, this does not even remotely resemble the truth, as in the alphabet soup case the mechanism used does not provide an immediate facility to reconstruct the original from the bits and pieces whereas bittorrent does, making it matter on the end-result - one facilitates an end result where material was copied, shredded paper alphabet soup doesn't.
Another similar case is whether it would be legal to distribute a copyrighted bitstream with all the original bits run through a NOT gate (or encoded in any other format for that matter). After all, you're not distributing the original copyrighted material, you're distributing something else which is
[a] derived
and
[b] can be used to reconstruct the original.
This is, of course, just as illegal (no flames please, I don't use inflaming words like "theft" or "piracy", all this is is copyright infringement), just as illegal as re-encoding a red-book Madonna CD into mp3 and distributing the mp3 files.
Not exactly. More like:
Make Wings;
Make Thorax;
Make Head;
Size = 10;
if (GrowthStoppingHormonePresent == false){
Size+=20;
if (OtherQueenPresent == true){kill it;}
Spray Growth Stopping Hormone On All Bees Around You;
}
else
{
Behavior = "Go around gathering honey";
}
US vs Australia? Let's have a go.
1. Australia is by-large not religious (I'm not talking about the institutions. I'm talking about the people). Most of the issues that spark heated public debate in the US because of their religious ("""ethical""") implications are non-issues to start with here or minor issues at best. Not because people don't care but simply because religious nutcases don't have anything that even comes close to their US lobby. Oh, and our president doesn't do things because God told him to.
2. The mentality is not a complete (at least to the limited extent of my experience from living in the US and.. well.. TV), utter shitpile. Apologies to whomever lives in the pockets of educated and civilized society in the US (which I acknoledge exist yet are somehow not nearly influential enough when it comes to interacting with the outside world). In Australia, the vast majority of people, both the ones on TV and the ones you meet, don't live in this "my-business-is-none-of-your-business" and "that's-not-my-problem" mindset.
3. Australians don't get forcefed with propaganda dumbing them down and telling them who is good, who is bad and what to think (I think Americans call this "Fox News") and don't view the world through a bipolar "everything is either black or white" oversimplified good-vs-evil prism.
4. While the government is often accused of having its tongue too deep up the royal American Hiney, the government gets things done, and lining up what the country has accomplished and what services (social, educational etc) it provides its citizens - up against any other country you care to name, Australia is world-class and in the lead. The vast majority of things that get done here get done right, and when you ask something along "why did the government do that, there is always a simple and logical solution behind it. Things just make sense. Our policies are made listening to scientists, not celebrities or industry cartels (most of the time, at least).
5. Most aussies don't winge about problems. They sort them.
6. The only two things Australians worship religiously is nature and quality recreation.
7. We don't block vegemite imports (bad, bad folate! vit B12 makes you stupid!) after they make films like "Supersize me!" about what we do consider legal (and by the same coin, not bad for you I guess) to import and/or sell as food. Anyone for an extra-fat supersize cheeseburger and a 5-gallon coke?
Expensive? somewhat. It's the price one pays for living in modern society.
Australian mentality is all the good traits of the American mentality pooled in with all the good traits of some European ones, minus most of the bad stuff of either side. That alone is worth spending one's life here.
Ok. I'm done. Mod me to hell, American fanboys!
Shush you idiot! Don't you understand what parent post is doing? /. the truth! They'll start coming here en-masse!
Don't bloody tell everyone on
All you have to do is bond several channels together and there's your wireless monitor.
Wifi has, what, 11 channels? How many does wireless USB have?
Since the range on this is relatively tiny, you can probbably aggregate, say, 5 or 6 WUB channels into a single 2+Gbit channel to talk to your monitor. Sure, you'll be barred from putting more than 1 or 2 in close proximity, and yet... For the price of 5-6 transmitter chips at each end and a bit more core logic, a manufacturer can probbably piece this together today and it probbably won't cost too much either, at least once some competition throws in.
Gone are the days when you can buy something (an Athlon XP) that delivers 95% of the intel equivalent for half the price (saving hundreds of dollars), or offering a value processor (The good'ol Duron) that kicked the living crap out of a faster Intel mainstream CPU for a tad more than nothing.
It was the fact that they used to deliver the substance without the bull and charge accordingly that made AMD so dear to us back then. Not so now - they realized that if people are willing to pay Intel big bucks for fast CPUs, they'd be willing to pay them too. Unlike then - if you want High-end performance today, you gotta cough up some hard cash.
Frankly, I'm surprised they didn't see Cure 2 Duo coming, or perhaps underestimated it, or perhaps yet again just couldn't do any better, as it seems to have caught them pants down.
I just looked up some CPUs for my near upgrade.
For the uber-value dual-core, Intel is practically giving away Pentium D 805's for free - as cheap as the good'ol Athlon XP's, only double the cores.
For the value dual-core game box, The 6400 tears the X2's a new one no matter how you line them up. The price difference - 40$ more expensive than the lowest AMD (AM2 X2 3800). HUGE performance difference. And if it ain't worth the extra 40$, see the first clause above.
For the performance and extreme markets, the 6600 and 6800 tear the X2 an even bigger new one.
This isn't rocket science. It's second-grade math. This round, AMD lose, no matter which side you're looking at (Save maybe the server side, and I'm not sure there too).
Unless AMD either bites the bullet and does some competitive (additional!) price slashing to bring their products in line with the corresponding Intel alternatives, or comes out with something just as kickass to counter the Core 2 Duo, you have to be a certified idiot to be buying their products for anything.
My 2 cents.
DNA is a storage medium, not unlike your hard-drive (it's binary, surprise), basic block (base) being 2 bits and every byte (codon) being six bits.
/do stuff/.
/usr from the two seperate machines we replicated ourselves from - just in case explorer.exe on the first copy gets botched (that last bit's a lie but helps draw the picture)- that we carry around with us everywhere. And if you want to go even deeper, to make us more variable and more evolutionally sound our two copies are neither from mum or dad. They're two mixtures of both.)
... well, this is slashdot. We're geeks. We know what it means. Bye Bye filesystem. Somebody recall the tapes.
/unsure/ about. While we (again, in a very misleading way IMHO) call it "junk DNA", it is nowhere near certain it doesn't contain yet more essential data for making healthy and functional humans.
It has (drumroll) a filesystem.
On that filesystem, we store (more drumroll) files (genes) - sequences of information that code into proteins, i.e.
(There's much more to this - it's all sitting on a big RAID1 array, and is even further redundant as on that array we carry not one but two unsimilar copies of the equivalent of c:\windows or
I don't really like the definition that says "Junk = DNA that doesn't code for proteins".
The fact that certain parts of the data don't belong to genes - don't code for proteins doesn't automatically mean they're junk, just as bits on your filesystem that aren't file contents are not automatically free space either. They could be (surprise!) meta-data. They could even be place-holders when specific offsets are required (imagine doing a raw dd of all the data on the second half of your harddrive 3 bits to the left.. yes, this happens in DNA). So yes. DNA has filesystem meta-data. Horseloads of it.
Accidentally erase some meta-data (which doesn't directly code for proteins) and
While we've discovered the 30,000 files (genes) sitting on the human drive (1GB if you were wondering, will pro'lly fit on a 900MB CD), we know they are files, where they start and end, and we know what some of them do and we've reverse-engineered the filesystem to the point of having a good poriton of the meta-data figured out, there's still a crapload of empty space we're...
And yes, Genetics is fundamentally a field of IT. Wacky hardware that nobody gave us the whitepapers for, fersure, but it's just a filesystem with files. Like cars and OS's, you've used one or twenty, you've seen them all. Underneath they're all the same.
Figure out the filesystem, figure out how to interpret the data in the files and how it translates into real-world stuff and that's about about most of it, hardware [reverse-]engineering aside.
And yes, IAAVSASG (I Am A Veteran System Administrator Studying Genetics)
As long as you completely ignore your (Lebanon's whoever is in charge there) responsibility I don't buy that self-serving rhetoric.
/could/ have been a bomb. Quit this habit of throwing trust and morals at westerners (your "We can't just act like barbarians!" bit) while utterly ignoring your countymens utter lack of these morals that led to the breach in trust. The trust (between Israel and whoever operates your ambulances ) is apparently no longer there. They don't trust you to let ambulances do their job. Hezbollah breached the trust. Cope. And if you really want to blame someone that bad, blame them.
Israel didn't invade lebanon to "occupy" it. It's neither settling it, or claiming the land, it doesn't even want or intend to stay there.
It went in to do what your country screwed up doing - something that is Lebanon's duty - to keep its nutcases from arming to the point of having a formidable force, then from staging attacks on your neighbours. Until you can acknowledge that
[a] This is your country's responsibility
[b] That your country majorly screwed up in curbing this
[c] That this led to your neighbour getting harrassed since 2000 (and I'm actually quite surprised Israel chose to hold its guns for 6 years and didn't kick Hezballah's ass much sooner)
and
[d] The invasion of Lebanon was to curb this immediate threat.
If you can't acknowledge these facts, you're no different from the self-serving-rhetoric-preachers of the Hezbollah that understands not what personal responsibility is, and we have no basis for a discussion.
You seem to be suffering from exactly the same symptoms as most Israelis who don't give a rats ass about what their crazed genocide-preaching fanatics are doing in Gaza and the west bank - they don't care, they ignore that the people on "their side" harrasses the other side, they prefer to bury their head in the sand and pretend it is not happening.
You're exactly the same as they are. Hezbollah has been harassing northern Israel since the Lebanon pullout left and right, putting more and more weapons - guns, rockets etc on the border, raiding Israel, firing at settlements, abducting people... You don't seem to give a shit about that (and I daresay you didn't give a shit before July when Israel invaded - as nobody was busy putting an end to it.
So you the Lebanese people did not give its government a mandate to leash the Hezballah, and now the Lebanese people paid the price of negligent self-policing policy.
You eat what you cook, mate.
Oh, and regarding the ambulance.. That's where you just don't get it. Ever since your Hezballah countrymen put weapons in ambulances, it quite factually
>> By talking about the issue I become an enemy without even seeing anyone in the group you are talking about, communicating with them in any way, condoning their actions in any way or even going to Lebanon?
By no means, we're not enemies.
You became the proverbial master of your country, not the enemy. I was just stating that it comes with responsibilities, such as keeping the people who violate the principles of your society's chosen system and hurt your national interests - on a leash. The country I live in - Australia - does it with police and prisons and courts, the US does it likewise, Israel (mostly) does it likewise, Lebanon should too if it wants to be a respected country and if its government wants to be treated like a government. Last I checked, unleashed Lebanese fanatics opened a war against Israel, not the other way around. Israel's genocide-preaching fanatics were not a part of this ordeal.
Letting someone other than the government run around with assault rifles, anti-tank munitions, rockets etc means not taking care of your fanatics. This does not imply I am accusing you of affiliation with them, quite on the contrary, you seem quite pragmatic and open on the subject.
I teach my kids to embrace responsibility, not throw it around like blame. I warmly recommend you teach yours the same. Responsibility is power.
Yep. we're definitely transmitting on two different channels here.
/CONDITIONED/ on buying weapons. The US does not only give money to Israel, it gives money to Israel UNDER THE CONDITION that this money will be used to buy weapons from the US, which creates more jobs and more export in the US. Between us boys, the US cares (and will care, regardless of which administration is in) more about creating more jobs for its citizens than about either Israeli or Lebanese lives.
/under the condition/ the money is used to buy US (military) products. And the American people have been very happy with this arrangement for the last half-century or so. I don't see that changing.
/YOU/, as they are your fanatics.
/make/ them, and judging by Israeli behaviour to date, they'll probably stay armed to the teeth with itchy trigger fingers forever.
... /NOTHING/ to do with propaganda. It has everything to do with moralless fanatics who abused the rules. That's when the rules get tougher and everybody suffers. It's like living in a city that has never known robbery. Nobody locks the door. But the moment robberies start, everyone starts to lock up, which makes everyone more miserable, but there is not enough trust to go around to avoid it. The geneva convention is built on trust - trust that all sides adhere to it. Lacking that trust, as in the case of the Hammas and the Hezbollah, it's worthless. Welcome to the real world.
You're busy blaming the US for giving Israel financial support. I get your point, and am well aware of this.
The US support is
This treatment is not unique to Isreal. The US gives money to every country that serves its interests. Why to you think the Egyptians are flying F-16 fighters and using M-16 rifles? what about the Turks? The Quaitis? The Saudis? The US is giving money to every country it can that will serve its interest,
You're all fixated about blaming the US, which is exactly the kind of attitude that will get Lebanon screwed over and over again. It's not who about who sold guns to Israel. It's about armed agenda-driven fanatics that should be kept on a leash. By
Look at your cousins, the Palestinians. Look at how far blaming and avoiding their own responsibility got them. Think very hard if you want Lebanon going down that road.
The important thing you don't seem to understand is that regardless of who you blame in your private little blame-game (WHO gave Israel weapons?! YOU! Americans! Look what you did!), I'm saying it doesn't matter at all who gave them weapons. Israel WILL have weapons no matter what you or I or George W. Bush does. Even if you prevent all the countries of the world from selling Israel weapons, they will still have weapons. They
You're wasting your time and effort climbing that blame-America tree.
You'd probably be wiser to do support Lebanon in doing what Jordan and Egypt did - "If you can't beat them - befriend them".
>> I don't think we should drop it just because the propaganda
I think you're not getting it. I'll make it in several simple points for you:
1. Nobody wants to drop the geneva convention. Not you, not me, not the US. If it were just between us when we make war, it would have been working.
2. What will make you drop it very happily is when someone will start using ambulances to kill you. This happened to Israel, and now Israel delays for searching and under certain conditions even shoots ambulances. If someone uses ambulances to kill YOU, YOU will shoot at them too. We all - you, I prefer to shoot an ambulance and live than to respect the taboo and get killed by someone who doesn't. This has
You completely miss my point. Both of them in fact.
/particular/ ambulance incident. I believe everything you say about it, no need to get protective, I'm not going to discredit your witnesses.
1.
I haven't objected your claim about the missiles being american. I just made a complementary claim that preventing America from selling arms to Israel will accomplish nothing. Israel will still have missiles. Isreal itself is one of the largest hi-tech arms exporters in the world and is perfectly capable of satisfying all of its own misslie-manufacturing needs.
I'm saying your suggestion would achieve nothing.
2. You're talking about a
I'm trying to tell you that many of the taboos you and I were raised on, such as conduct dictated by the Geneva convention is now in some places and times, void.
I'm not implying the rules were broken by the people in the ambulance you are describing. They were probably not. They were, however, broken. By others. But the fact that they were broken changed the rules of the game.
Israel is in a position where its enemies do use things like ambulances and hospitals as cover for katyushas or bombs, which are later used for the very very immoral purpose of randomly butchering civilians.
I am not saying ambulances should be shot at, I much prefer it the way it used to be, when such resources were regarded as "sacred ground".
But in a world where this is not respected, where they become legitimate means to stash and move arms or bombs, the taboo starts fading away. As of today, September 2006, Israeli don't trust palestinians and probbably Hezbollah in ambulances. I frankly can't say I blame them, and suspect that under circumstances where this is not respected by an opposing side, you and I would act in much the same way.
>> My point is that military actions are very cheap for the current Israeli government with little personal consequence or accountability
I understand your point. I can only suggest that some of the accountability is there. Israel's government and its use of their national resources - their money, the lives of their soldiers, etc - is fully accountable to the Israeli people. If they feel the government did not serve the purpose of protecting them adequately, they will elect another.
As for accountability towards damage done in Lebanon - Israel is very unlikely to be be made accountable for it. The only one who has the power to make them accountable for it is the US, and the US is pretty grateful to Israel for having done their (and your, btw) dirty work cooling off the Hezbollah a bit.
Furthermore, Lebanon (as a country) is indirectly responsible for what happened to it by being negligent of its duties to police its turf and prevent armed fanatics from harassing its neighbors. The middle east has a special spot in hell for countries that are too weak to keep their internal affairs under control and thus take care of their own interests. These countries are the ones that get beaten up every time someone uses their weakness to harass someone else. Lebanon will have to work hard to pull itself out of that group.
>> and foreign aid being used to run some of it.
As I said, does it really matter if you get hit by Israeli-made or American-made bullets? You sound like you believe that if the US were to stop selling Israel arms, Israel will not have arms. Rest assured, it will.
Several things.
[a]
You're raising a mute point: Israel is well capable (and is often in the habit of) of manufacturing its own [A-A, A-G, you name it] missiles. If it won't be an american Hellfire, It'll be an Israeli-made Popeye.
Contrary to your understanding, the US taxpayer is not paying for it. Israel buying these missiles from the US rather than manufacturing it means more jobs in the US, more American companies and individuals earn income. It's money recycled from and back to the the American economy, not money spent.
Buying arms with american-provided cash saves Israel some (at the expense of jobs local manufacturing would create), but that will not prevent the next ambulance from being hit by a missile. One way or another, the missle stays in the equation.
Mute point, QED.
[b]
Regarding shooting ambulances (we'll take that as a case study, this goes similarly to other moral taboos)
What some fundamentalists do is prey on the fact that they are "morally unencumbered", yet the rest of the world they're selling the show to is not.
You speak of shooting at ambulances as a bad thing. Most of us would agree it is. Or at least used to be.
Used to be until people started taking advantage of that fact, smuggling bombs in them, even caught smuggling a bomb under the clothes of a woman made to look pregnant, with Hezballah following suit using them so smuggle guns. Consequently, ambulances passing Israeli checkpoints are now searched, to the great (and sometimes fatal) dismay of the (actually sick/dying) people inside them. The radicals are of course very happy about this as it can now point at Israel and yell "look at these inhuman butchers, searching/firing at ambulances!".
Sadly, the real butchers in this story are those who violate the taboo by taking advantage of the opposing side's respect for it to further their agenda. As of the moment this taboo is not respected by either side, the moment the ambulance becomes a serious security vulnerability that can and is used to transport terrorists, bombs or armaments, the taboo is (sadly, yet unavoidably) void, and ambulances become fair game.
So is life. You can't eat the cake and leave it whole.
The game has changed since the Geneva convention. It's only a matter of time before the official laws of acceptable warfare naturally adjust themselves to the new ballgame being played.
A game cannot be played when one side doesn't respect the rules yet can't stop whining about the other not following them at the same time.
Thus, when you say "people in the Israeli army having to account for expensive missiles and perhaps only using them against military targets" is again a mute point.
Not unlike my country, Israel doesn't use its army to dick around. It uses its army to defend its citizens. If the offender is an invading military, it points its arms to it. If the offender is a bunch of aliens, it will point its arms to it, and if the offender is a radical muslim army hiding in civillian clothes and carefully choosing their fortified positions to be near schools and mosques, that's where the arms get pointed.
Churchill bombed the living shit out of 200,000 civillians in Dresden because there were strategically significant targets there.
A threat is a threat and a war is a war. And yes, it's ugly. Smart people who don't want it prevent it, not cause/allow it to start and then bitch.
>> We can't take the line that we'll let one side do bad things because the other side is also doing that
Amen. Now if only everyone applied it to themselves and stopped justifying its wrongs by way of the other side's wrongs, wouldn't it be a nicer world?
Every country has radical loonies, but not every country is run by radical loonies. Some countries actually have failsafe mechanisms to prevent the odd radical looney from doing too much damage in office. Things like provisions when a leader is to be removed. Things like separation between government and religion. Things like freedom of press. Things like elections. Things like a transparent system. Others simply don't.
Some (not all) are being taken advantage of due to this. Can you tell me what happens after Mubarak in Egypt? is there a system resilient enough to prevent radicals from taking power? Jordan? Turkey? Quwait?
>> One problem in that part of the world is we have idiots that pretend to have Jewish values but actually preach genocide with a major say in politics on one side and a bunch that want to drive the Israeli settlers into the sea on the other
I think that's a fairly good summary, though if you've been following either Israeli or Lebanese politics lately you'd have known said Israeli idiots have much less say than they used to and have and have largely alienated themselves to the marjority of Israelis (for the exact purpose you've quoted). The trend is good on the Lebanese side as well, Seniora's government, while having Hezballah cabinet members, is nothing short of miraculously pragmatic.
I hope we see more of this kind of trend on both sides, and in fact everywhere else throughout the middle-east.
>> It isn't going to get any better by trying to kill everyone that opposes certain views
Again, I couldn't agree more.
So... how do we get dubya on this train?
>> I'd like to ask you this...do you believe Israel is a totally innocent party that is free from having committed grievous acts against the Palestinians and Lebanese?
/fix/ it? An Israeli or Lebanese might make take this question with him to the ballot box. Some may reevaluate the moral
Shit no, though that's two very different puddles you're mixing there.
Palestinians? I don't agree with Israel's 40-year-old policy regarding them and the Jewish fanatics it funded to go live among them, I do agree there should be a barrier, I don't think it's fairly placed and I do think that barrier is better than no barrier (considering a fair one has no fighting chance in the Israeli ballot box, making it a choice between this one and none at all).
Lebanese? To a very very lessened degree, but still so.
To directly answer your carefully-worded question, is it a "totally innocent party"? no, by no means. Nobody is ever innocent in a war.
While Hezbollah has been issuing provocation after provocation since Israel left Lebanon in 2000, amassing more and more guns at the border, making incursions into Israeli territory, abducting people and firing across the border, I think the 6-year-old policy of taking it standing and ignoring it despite the pain was a policy that served Israel well.
Going in full-force did hurt Israeli interests (this is my opinion - Israel gained some, it lost some and it's really a matter of opinion of whether it was justified). To the point, choosing not to do so would have resulted in less innocent loss, both in life and in macro-effect on Lebanon as a nation and all its residents indirectly through the nation getting trashed.
But the fact that Israel could have acted differently (and thus has its hands in the responsibility pile) does not make an even moral ground. Again, just because the Hezbollah was not the only one playing this out and driving at the eventual outcome does not make it any less hitlerian in the incitement/propaganda/teach-kids-to-hate department, or any less a bunch morally bankrupt fanatics with a bought "electoral" base.
Looking at your question, it may be worthwhile to point out that Israel is
[a] A democracy. It follows the interests of the people who elect its government. Like any real democracy, its government cannot follow a narrow fanatical agenda without putting its political future on the line. The lebanese government, as of the time one of the parties had an armed militia running around declaring war on neighbours is at most a cynnical parody of a democracy upheld by a fundamentalist mob, and an externally-funded one at that.
[b] Motivated by security of its citizens and by removing the threats of armaments pointing at them, not by a religious crusade to dismantle it's neighbouring state and instill its religion on the area. If you're one of those who think the present Israeli incursion into Lebanon is either an imperialistic crusade or religiously-motivated, you're buying too hard into the abovementioned propaganda and should probbably take a shot at trying to prove such a claim.
[c] Not brainwashing its 3-year-olds to hate the people on the other side of the fence.
On the other hand, it would have (again, opinion) been much wiser for Israel to have refrained from retaliating a while longer and let the newly-established Lebanese system fall into place and do its own dirty laundry without the need to flatten half the country. We can speculate all day as to how much chance that had of happening, but I do think the Lebanese deserved (still deserve) a fair shot at it.
I daresay you're thinking along the wrong lines. You're thinking "who do we blame?" and "Who is right?" "Who is getting hurt?"
The answers to these are always self serving, and the real answer is always "Everybody", "Everybody" and "Everybody" respectively.
The questions smarter people ask is "What can we [each sitting in whatever place in the world he's sitting] do to prevent it from happening further? How can we
Say, what about all the /good/ things Hitler did?
... representative of the government it's pretending to go along with while making its own policy? Would that government have a say? Can you be a leading part of a democracy and a traitor wildly betraying its underlying principles at the same time?
/about/ all the /good/ things Hitler did?
1. Hezbollah *does* hide behind civillians, thank you very much. Not two months ago it was hiding artillery units - rocketry - in urban areas.
2. The fact that they're brainwashing them (al-manaar?), bribing (should I say "buying"?) their political supporters with Iranian cash (12,000$ per household payments?), and offering them a lifeline (employement? social welfare?) does not change the fact that this organization uses the political power thus purchased to push their agenda (as opposed to that of the people it bribed) and doesn't make them any less of what they are - a fundamentalist religious movement intent on zeal, provocation, further conflict and utter elimination of one of its neighbouring countries.
3. Hezbollah uses hitlerian propaganda tactics to brainwash, incite and worst of all teach hate starting at infancy, demonizing the west as lesser human beings. Ask any 3-year-old from a Hezbollah-funded kindergarden, he'll be happy to explain it to you using all the graphic terms you'd expect. All that Iranian money doesn't come for free you know.
4. Hezbollah is "a political party" when it needs to be, and a sovereign not answerable to the government it was claiming to be a part of (i.e. has its own military) when it needs to be. For the life of me I haven't figured this out. How *does* that work? What would happen in the hypothetical situation that it declared war against a neighbour? would it still be
In Lebanon, as it appears, you very much can. All you need is a solid supply of cash and guns.
You'd have to be either pushing a close agenda or seriously naive (I shy away from harder terms) to be giving the pitch about their legitimacy.
So... what
Case in point: doing any amount of good does not absolve you of doing evil or driving a zealous agenda opposed to any modern values (values cynically used by offending party left and right, often exagerated or simply lied about, to show the party's suffering and gather support, mind you).
Hezbollah, is busy putting on a snake-oil-salesman smile and buying political support from dirt-poor shia with a serious inferiority complex.
Fixing this would first and foremost mean its financial source be replaced with one coming from people that don't blindly hate and are thus socially compatible with the rest of the peoples of the modern world. With money come the macro interests being followed.
But how does swap help?
If you have 2GB of RAM and a process started leaking violently, providing it with 1.5 gigs of (physical) ram to work before it or the box dies or 3.5 gigs of ram (2 of which are swap) is meaningless. If it'll be chugging so much memory, it's probbably leaking without restraint anyway.
This really depends on how likely you see a scenario where you'll be (legitimately) using more than your physical 2GB. For my office desktop box, that's a "never ever ever, not by a long shot", so I plain don't need the swap. Were I running a 512MB box with 1GB of ram I'd be fine. 2 gigs of real ram? when and how the hell would I be using that swap?
Of course, if I were running software that'd be using up 1.8GB on average, say some game with a chubby 3D engine, it'd be a whole different ballgame.
As always, depends on your personal needs.
None, actually.
.. well .. a rock.
Throwing up a rock[et] that will reach the edge of space is one thing. That's roughly what the X-Prize did.
The problem is that the first thing it does once it gets there is fall right back down like
To get it to *stay* up there, you not only need to get it up there, but to also give it a horizontal speed of ~30,000km/hr.
No 30,000km/hr? No satellite contracts for you.
>> Dude, there is a world of difference between giving money to develop anti-aging treatments and giving money to deploy said treatments around the world. Ellison gave money to keep his own carcass ticking.
That is the plain sillyest thing I've heard anyone say in a long while.
Never mind that you'd need money well beyond ellison to actually get this working, what Ellison contributed to is a research project that does with birds what the M-Prize is doing with mice. A project whose sole purpose is proof-of-concept. When that proof of concept is on the table, the flood gates open and money much bigger than even Ellison has will start pouring in. When people see this is actually *possible to do*, Rest assured, he's not the only one in this world who wants to save his own carcass. There's another half a billion americans right behind him in line. Big Pharma has been eyeballing this for a while now. So have a number of other mighty rich philantropists.
Furthermore
Let's assume you're the lab Ellison hired to do this.
Better yet, let's assume you're even Ellison yourself.
Let's, for argument's sake, assume you actually have a solution for aging.
What would you do? save your own carcass? or save your own carcass and sell the bloody thing via retail channels to every soul on the planet, earning billions (something that I really fail to see as hurting humanity as a whole).
Face it. ANY investment, in worthwhile ANY age-targeting research today, is helping every last human on the planet plenty more than any specific-disease solutions. Should a cure ever arise of it (which in my humble opinion it definitely shall, it's just a question of when).
Every DAY that you save between today and the day a postponing cure is introduced that gets the first people into actuarial escape velocity is 100,000 LIVES SAVED. Per day. No malaria treatments can compare to that in scale.
Moreover, you personally might actually be one of the beneficiaries. You might actually find yourself benefiting from the money Ellison has put down to "save his carcass".
I'm not saying malaria should not be eradicated. I'm saying there's priorities, dictated by how many people die from any single cause. And the one currently topping the list by an inconceivably enormous margin is the one you're suggesting we ignore.