Ummm... you sure you came up with that scheme in high-school? You sure you didn't just plagerize Guy Ritchie?
TOM:
Listen to this one then; you open a company called the Arse Tickler's
Faggot Fan Club. You take an advert in the back page of some gay mag,
advertising the latest in arse-intruding dildos, sell it a bit with, er
. . . I dunno, `does what no other dildo can do until now', latest and
greatest in sexual technology. Guaranteed results or money back, all
that bollocks. These dills cost twenty-five each; a snip for all the
pleasure they are going to give the recipients. They send a cheque to
the company name, nothing offensive, er, Bobbie's Bits or something,
for twenty-five. You put these in the bank for two weeks and let them
clear. Now this is the clever bit. Then you send back the cheques for
twenty-five pounds from the real company name, Arse Tickler's Faggot
Fan Club, saying sorry, we couldn't get the supply from America, they
have sold out. Now you see how many of the people cash those cheques;
not a single soul, because who wants his bank manager to know he
tickles arses when he is not paying in cheques!
What's the deal with measuring speed as multiples of ancient cdroms? How long is this gonna go on? Am I supposed to walk around with a pocket calculator in order to figure out what the actally speed of merchandise is? Quick: how many MBps in 48x?
It's like measuring the power of a space shuttle's lunch rockets using horse power. "Oh, you mean if we tie down 1 million and a half horses to the shuttle we'd be able to get it off the ground? Impressive..."
While ThunderBird is ineed impressive it is unusable for users that have a bidirectional locale (Arabic, Hebrew,...). There are many long and outstanding bidi bugs that have been left open since the begining of the Mozilla mail/news client.
As a result, Mozilla cannot be used by newbies that need bidi, only by experts (such as myself!), but even some of them (for example Me!) have switched back to one of the MS clients since they have flawless bidi support.
Far be it for me to question John's research and knowledge in the area, but the gain from phrase recognition seems to me just too high to ignore.
The idea that only words can be suspicious is obviously incorrect, I don't think anyone is arguing with that. However, how much will it complicate things if bayesian filters were to examine pairs and/or triplets of consecutive words? It can't be that much difficult, can it? But it would make a world of difference IMO.
In Soviet Russia: Spam has plan for You! (I had to...)
What was the voice message anyway? "Stop with the spam! All your phone numbers are belong to us!"
I find it very suprising that phrase recognition doesn't add much value. Of course if you say you've done serious research in this area I believe you, but its still seems so counter intuitive. Some words are definately harmless and used in personal mail all the time but when put together are very indicative of spam. e.g. "try it for free"
I'm glad to see POPFile is implementing anti-HTML-tricks schemes, I had assumed it was a much simpler application but I guess I was wrong.
HTML spam tricks are abundant. But you can hardly afford to disable HTML email as protection.
Baysian filtering works well for text messagea and doesn't work at all for emails that employ HTML trick. A solution might be to evaluate the spaminess of a message based on it's displayable/readable text. Just like when you select text off an HTML page with your mouse - let that be what the filters process and not the lower-level stuff. Spam filter should have the abilty to asses the readability of text (font contrast, size, etc) and prioritize it accordingly with regards to the statistical analysis.
Also, bayesian filters need to be able to recognize phrases and not just words. This isn't a new idea of course but it's a shame nobody's doing anything with it.
Or not at all!
Typical of the Japanese to build a subservient female robot that follows the male partner's lead.
I, on the other hand, am looking forward to a dancing robot that's fisty and not affraid to take the initiative.
It's far from apartheid. Humand rights aren't "systematically withheld" from anyone accept terrorists. First, you have to remember that the jews didn't enter Israel as occupiers and they didn't steal it from the arabs. It was under the British control and it was split by the UN into two countries for each nation. from 48 and on the arabs could not agree with the idea of the jews having their own country and so they launched several wars against Isreal and lost every one, until finally in 67 they even lost a bit of land (the west bank). Granted, it was probably a good idea to give the land back sometime after the war but occupying it is hardly immoral - the arabs shouldn't have attacked Israel repeatedly, Israel was the one defending itself. Anyway, the terrotories are in the process of being given back these days and everyone agrees it's only a matter of time.
The idea of a jewish democracy is not impossible. Of course judaism contradicts democracy in some cases, that's the bleeding obvious, but that doens't mean that the democractic nature of this country is non-existant. No democracy is a perfect one, and believe me Israel would love to be able to have "church" and state seperated from each other. It's vast majority of seculars are very much fed up with religious parties controlling many aspect of their lives (marriges, business in Saturday, even citizenship to some extent). But Israel just can't afford it. It has to have some laws that would keep it jewish by nature. The slippery slope argument doesn't hold water in this case. Everyone else gets pushed down, true, but only a little. You have to live in Israel or know it's legal system in order to understand I guess. Non-jews are not opressed in Israel by any authority, it's just harded for them to get citizenship for obvious reasons but once they have it they are totaly equal. The Israeli arabs suffer poor conditions in Israel only because of their historic affiliation with the enemy arab states and the palestinians. But even that doesn't apply to Beduwin and Druzic arabs which even serve in the Army. Every sector has representation in the Israely parliament and it is quite possible that within 20-30 years there would not be a jewish majority anymore and the country would lose it's character. That's considered a probable scenario, mind you, given the demographics. Let's just hope peace is brought to the area by that time.
Also, don't forget Israel is at war and in wars people get killed and injustices happen. This war is waged against Israel, not by Israel. More people died recently in Iraq then in this whole conflict over the last 20 years. So why is noone shouting about the human rights violations by the US? Every anti-Israeli argument about human rights violations, massacres and ethnic clensing is either a front for anti-semitism or just total ignorance of the situation. These views are advocated by arabs across the world and european countries that have arab interests (like france and germany) and are clearly biased and untrue.
Not necessarily a double standard. It all depends on your meta-ethical standpoint. If you're a moral universalist then you believe that there is a set of universal rules of ethics which apply to everyone, for example God's rules. A universalist might say that God is on his side - he is the rightous and therefore he can be allowed to have all the power. A universalist might also take your position, that there's a double standard invovled - it all depends on the choice of the moral authority.
Another approach is a relativist one. A relativist might say that the US has to abide by it's own rules but since there is no universal constitution it can do no wrong to other countries. Just an example. A relativist approach can also lead you to a totaly different conclusion, for example a relativist might say that since these countries are not democratic they are basically prisoners of their own government. Their governments don't represent them and so there's no problem enforcing all kinds of restrictions on them, until of course democarcy is instituted in those countries.
And then there's the nihilist approach. An approach whos earliest advocates date back to Pre-Socratic philosophy. Morality is not a universal rule - it's just a made up rule of people. The people decide what moral and what's not, not the gods or Nature, etc. This takes the sting out of morality. Morality, one might say is only a means to and end - the best way to keep a country stable and law abiding. An act is moral if it is in the interest of the country, even if it is war on another country.
Where I stand is somewhere in between I guess. I think democracy should be a prerequisite for any country to join the UN. I think that every dictatorship is a bad dictatorship (I don't believe in the idea of a benevolant dictator) and that the only immoral thing the US can do, with regards to north korea for example, is not get involved. The US must, for it's own sake and the sake of the democratic world, insure that north korea is taken out of the hands of it's psychotic leader and handed back to the people. Until that happens the only true sufferes are the north korean people and everyone else is a culprit. I believe in the idea of a covenant based democratic society as a pre-condition for morality - morality doesn't exist otherwise, for me at least.
Israel is no more a Theocracy than the US. The US is a democracy yet at some stage it had slavery, women couldn't vote and the idea of a female or non-white president is still a joke. Israel is the only jewish country in a sense that it protects the jewish people. If you don't think that the jews have a right to their own country then have the guts to make that claim. In order to do that Israel has to have laws that would prevent millions of, for example muslim, immigrants from entering it and wiping it's jewish character in one year. It is also a much secular state as any other western country - the vast majority of the population is secular - which is more than I can say about the christian US.
2. Or because Israel has had WMD for more than 20 years now and never even thought about initiating an assault (unlike the US, mind you).
How can you make this claim? Are you intimitely involved in the internal workings of the Israeli government, a most secretive organization? If not, what is your basis for making this claim?
How can you make the opposite claim??
Are you seriously suggesting that Israel considered using nuclear weapons on it's neighbor countries or on the palestinians? God... use your brain.
Saying Israel is a liability for the US is one step away from claiming that the 911 attacks where planned by the Mosad. Get real. Israle is an island of democracy in a fanatically islamic religious part of the world and if you can't see the benefit to the US by siding with Democracy then you're out of touch.
If it wasn't "crazy" of Israel to sink a US military ship flying a US flag, what was it?
This comment right here is what convinced me you're not here for the serious debate. Taking any particular incident and generilizing from it a foreign policy is childish sophism. I can name to you a hunder injustices - horrible ones - done by the US, by accident or on purpose, to other countries. So what? Does that mean that the US is run by crazies? (btw, I didn't bother to check you link and I'm not confirming anything it might say as I think it is totally irrelevant to the discussion).
Israel started the 1967 war
That's like saying the US started WW2 because it drew first blood against the germans. The US was dragged into the war by the japanese. Israel was under siege by the forces of the surrounding arab nations and that's what caused it to finally react. Read your history books. The day Israel was founded it was attacked by 4 arab countries. It doesn't get any simpler than that. They fucking started it. In 67, it was the only occasion where you could technically say that Israeli drew first blood - but that's a blatant distortion of the true. The fact of the matter is that Israel was under siege and had to attack.
Anyway, I think I'll stop here. Every point you make is completely and intentionaly false and you know it. "Nothing complicated about the Israeli PO conflict" ?? Either you're a complete moron or just flamebaiting. Either way I'm done reading or responding to your posts. Get well soon.
Such claims are usually from anti-semites that hide their hatred of the jews as "criticism of the Israeli security policy" and that's why I usually don't even bother to reply. However, it seems that in this case the comment was made by an individial who is just uninformed.
With all due respect, what you father told you about his experience in Israel is not an objective or even a well-informed account of Israel-Palestinians relations. Remember that only the worst behaviors are the ones that get into the media or that people remember. I'm sure your father never told you about the vast majority of soldiers and reserve forces men that do the best they can to treat the palestinian population with diginity - while at the same time making sure nobody explodes on them. Whenever you hear about a palestinian ambulande being delayed at a road block just remember that the palestinian are those who had used such means (wiring ambulances with bombs) in the past. They have tried every conceivable sick and twisted method of terrorism, including using their children as human shield, so don't be suprised if the interaction with the Israeli forces isn't pleasent for everyone. Until you understand the incredible difficulty of dealing with a population that predominantely believes in "Shahidism" you cannot fully asses the situation. You cannot deal with a population whos teenagers are brain washed to believe that there are 72 virgins waiting for them in heaven if they kill Isralies with velvet gloves. And Arafat - the nobel piece prize winner - who started this latest intifada after the failure of the talks in egypt - is making sure the flames are high all the time. He's raging his people on in the media and glorifies martyrdom... you just have to open the arabs channels on TV and know a little arabic to get the facts straight.
While the Israeli government is right-winged it has shown termendous restraint. You cannot possibly argue that it should not be allowed WMD. That's rediculous. It is a moral country just like the US and it will never use those weapons unless attacked first by WMD.
Why can't we give equal amounts of aid and protection to everyone involved...
You are. You've been giving an enourmos amount of money to Egypt, the Palestinians, heck even to the Iranian and the Iraqies at some points. Israel is the only country who occasionaly pays back the aid money. But in any case this money is used to buy US exports and is spent on a government that is alligned with the US - it's money well spent. Perhaps instead of funding revolutions all over the world and getting involved in almost any conflict in the 20th century the US needs to put money into educating the third world and modernizing it - not just giving everyone more money as "aid". No matter how much Aid egypt and Jordan and other countries have received they are still fragile dictatorships that might collapse on any given day if some religious cleriks decide so.
If anything, the US foreign policy needs to get more involved in the peace negotiations. Look at the current Hudna (ceasefire). The palestinians have broken it several times since it came into effect a few weeks ago by murdering Israeli civilians. But Israel hasn't retliated, not even once. The Israeli government is doing what it's predecessors have done in the past - it's giving peace a chance even at the cost of Israeli lives. But again and again the terrorism continues and there's only so much that government can afford to accept lying down. Soon the violence will erupt again as the next bus will explode and the IDF will occupy the palestinians cities again. The US needs to stand by Israel until a sane government is installed in the palestinian terrotories. It's already began with Abu-Mazen - but he's still very far form being in control over the various terrorist oragnizations inside the PO. With time that will happen and what everyone needs is patience. Comments about unfair treatment of the palestinians by the US are false. There's no humanitarian crisis in the territories. It's shit, that's true, but it's not WW2 and it's not Sumalia or south africa and it will only get better once the palestinian population decides that it won't support it's corrupt government and stops sending it's young men to suicide training. No more palestinias died in the last 20 years by the IDF than Iraqies or Aphganistanians dies by the hands of the US forces in the last two years. These are all fact - you are invited to check them out.
Wow, that's some fancy logic! Reasons why Israel should have WMD:
1. Maybe it's because Israel is the only democracy in the middle east.
2. Or because Israel has had WMD for more than 20 years now and never even thought about initiating an assault (unlike the US, mind you). In fact Israel doesn't even declare officially that it has these weapons, unlike many arab nations that declare how much they can't wait to use them on the Infindels (that's you!). The fact that these weapons are quasi-secret just goes to show that they're there for intimidation - in order to keep the arms balance between then Billion arabs surrounding Israel and it's 6 mil. population.
3. Maybe it's because Israel protects the interests of the US in the middle east, provides intelligence for example - the only worthwhile intelligence the US has about the middle east, IMO.
4. Maybe it's because Israel isn't run by "crazies" - at least not more than the US is run by a war mongering illiterate. Such claims are prejudice.
Get your facts straight. The fact of the matter is that Israel has the same right to bare nuclear arms as the US has. Israel hasn't started any of the wars it was engaged in. Israel hasn't sponsered any military coos in south america or east asia. Israel didn't give the Taliban billions of dollars and training to fight the soviets. Israel's foreign policy is much more peacefull than the US's. You might not agree with it's current internal security policy - with regards to the palestinians - but that's a very complicated issue and peace isn't going to come in two years just because Bush decided to draw a RoadMap-To-Peace. It's going to take seperation from the palestinians. It's going to take generations of healing and trust-building. It's going to take a sane palestinian government that would put an end to suicide-summer camps for 6 year olds and fanatic islamic religious text books in the schools. Palenstine needs to be built on a stonrg democratic foundation and not on Jihad. The area in Israel has no natural resources like Saudy Arabia or Kuwait and if a palenstinian state is to rise it has to have a free market, an educated working market that could support it financially. Otherwise, what's stopping it from becoming another Syria? Nothing.
The worst thing you can do is fulfill the stereotype of the ingnorant american cowboy by oversimplifying a painful and serious situation and thinking every problem can be solved by using power and money. Take the time to really study the issue and don't post your Israel-bashing opinions until you read at least a few books about 20 century middle easy history.
Cause you know.. Israelis and Arabs aren't very different. They're all brown people with funny accents. They shouldn't have nuclear weapons - they're such children.. fighting all the time.
To the A$$hole who suggested that there's some reason Israel shouldn't be armed with WMD like the US or europe: check yourself. Put down the hamburger and your shotgun that your dad gave you on your 13th birthday and open a newspaper or a book once in a while.
the minute you guarantee anonymity (something which, IMHO, is required for free speech...
Well now, this is an interesting philosophical question, in'it? Why should free speech require anonymity?
Free speech protects the right of an individual to speak his mind in view of the public. If the individual is indeed protected then he should have no reason to hide his identity. It seems to me that anonymity is only required if freedom of speech is not guaranteed.
It seems to me that coding morality into machines is impossible. For a machine, acting morally would mean weighing the outcome of every possible course of action according to a given set of rules. Every course of action can be described via a Turing machine, but evaluating the outcome of such TMs is not possible according to Rice's theorem. So morality is undecidable. Furthermore, it should be possible to show that morality isn't even semi-decidable. This can be done using a mapping reduction of the Halt-Complement problem to Morality as follows:
Given input to the !Halt problem (a TM B and input X) we map it to a TM P which is connected to an electric chair that holds a nun. P runs a timer for 60 seconds and in parallel simluates B(X), when the 60 seconds are up it let's the juice run, unless B(X) halts in which case it stops the timer.
If B(X) doesn't halt -> the nun fries -> P is moral.
If B(X) halts -> the nun lives -> P is immoral.
Q.E.D.
Good, clean summer fun - aside from 'the scenes of maiming, dismemberment, clubbing, shooting, bayoneting and shoplifting'.
I give up. What can be more fun than scenes of maiming, dismemberment, clubbing, shooting, bayoneting and shoplifting?
Slashdot Mirror
Who scrolls horizontally??
Another fine product concocted without market research... Next: the Diagonal scrolling mouse.
Lock stock script
Linux now costs more than Windows. Cool, perhaps now those shitheads upstairs that run my company will consider switching to it!
What's the deal with measuring speed as multiples of ancient cdroms? How long is this gonna go on? Am I supposed to walk around with a pocket calculator in order to figure out what the actally speed of merchandise is? Quick: how many MBps in 48x?
It's like measuring the power of a space shuttle's lunch rockets using horse power. "Oh, you mean if we tie down 1 million and a half horses to the shuttle we'd be able to get it off the ground? Impressive..."
While ThunderBird is ineed impressive it is unusable for users that have a bidirectional locale (Arabic, Hebrew, ...). There are many long and outstanding bidi bugs that have been left open since the begining of the Mozilla mail/news client.
As a result, Mozilla cannot be used by newbies that need bidi, only by experts (such as myself!), but even some of them (for example Me!) have switched back to one of the MS clients since they have flawless bidi support.
Far be it for me to question John's research and knowledge in the area, but the gain from phrase recognition seems to me just too high to ignore.
The idea that only words can be suspicious is obviously incorrect, I don't think anyone is arguing with that. However, how much will it complicate things if bayesian filters were to examine pairs and/or triplets of consecutive words? It can't be that much difficult, can it? But it would make a world of difference IMO.
In Soviet Russia: Spam has plan for You! (I had to...)
What was the voice message anyway? "Stop with the spam! All your phone numbers are belong to us!"
I find it very suprising that phrase recognition doesn't add much value. Of course if you say you've done serious research in this area I believe you, but its still seems so counter intuitive. Some words are definately harmless and used in personal mail all the time but when put together are very indicative of spam. e.g. "try it for free"
I'm glad to see POPFile is implementing anti-HTML-tricks schemes, I had assumed it was a much simpler application but I guess I was wrong.
HTML spam tricks are abundant. But you can hardly afford to disable HTML email as protection.
Baysian filtering works well for text messagea and doesn't work at all for emails that employ HTML trick. A solution might be to evaluate the spaminess of a message based on it's displayable/readable text. Just like when you select text off an HTML page with your mouse - let that be what the filters process and not the lower-level stuff. Spam filter should have the abilty to asses the readability of text (font contrast, size, etc) and prioritize it accordingly with regards to the statistical analysis.
Also, bayesian filters need to be able to recognize phrases and not just words. This isn't a new idea of course but it's a shame nobody's doing anything with it.
Or not at all!
Typical of the Japanese to build a subservient female robot that follows the male partner's lead. I, on the other hand, am looking forward to a dancing robot that's fisty and not affraid to take the initiative.
It's far from apartheid. Humand rights aren't "systematically withheld" from anyone accept terrorists. First, you have to remember that the jews didn't enter Israel as occupiers and they didn't steal it from the arabs. It was under the British control and it was split by the UN into two countries for each nation. from 48 and on the arabs could not agree with the idea of the jews having their own country and so they launched several wars against Isreal and lost every one, until finally in 67 they even lost a bit of land (the west bank). Granted, it was probably a good idea to give the land back sometime after the war but occupying it is hardly immoral - the arabs shouldn't have attacked Israel repeatedly, Israel was the one defending itself. Anyway, the terrotories are in the process of being given back these days and everyone agrees it's only a matter of time.
The idea of a jewish democracy is not impossible. Of course judaism contradicts democracy in some cases, that's the bleeding obvious, but that doens't mean that the democractic nature of this country is non-existant. No democracy is a perfect one, and believe me Israel would love to be able to have "church" and state seperated from each other. It's vast majority of seculars are very much fed up with religious parties controlling many aspect of their lives (marriges, business in Saturday, even citizenship to some extent). But Israel just can't afford it. It has to have some laws that would keep it jewish by nature. The slippery slope argument doesn't hold water in this case. Everyone else gets pushed down, true, but only a little. You have to live in Israel or know it's legal system in order to understand I guess. Non-jews are not opressed in Israel by any authority, it's just harded for them to get citizenship for obvious reasons but once they have it they are totaly equal. The Israeli arabs suffer poor conditions in Israel only because of their historic affiliation with the enemy arab states and the palestinians. But even that doesn't apply to Beduwin and Druzic arabs which even serve in the Army. Every sector has representation in the Israely parliament and it is quite possible that within 20-30 years there would not be a jewish majority anymore and the country would lose it's character. That's considered a probable scenario, mind you, given the demographics. Let's just hope peace is brought to the area by that time.
Also, don't forget Israel is at war and in wars people get killed and injustices happen. This war is waged against Israel, not by Israel. More people died recently in Iraq then in this whole conflict over the last 20 years. So why is noone shouting about the human rights violations by the US? Every anti-Israeli argument about human rights violations, massacres and ethnic clensing is either a front for anti-semitism or just total ignorance of the situation. These views are advocated by arabs across the world and european countries that have arab interests (like france and germany) and are clearly biased and untrue.
Not necessarily a double standard. It all depends on your meta-ethical standpoint. If you're a moral universalist then you believe that there is a set of universal rules of ethics which apply to everyone, for example God's rules. A universalist might say that God is on his side - he is the rightous and therefore he can be allowed to have all the power. A universalist might also take your position, that there's a double standard invovled - it all depends on the choice of the moral authority.
Another approach is a relativist one. A relativist might say that the US has to abide by it's own rules but since there is no universal constitution it can do no wrong to other countries. Just an example. A relativist approach can also lead you to a totaly different conclusion, for example a relativist might say that since these countries are not democratic they are basically prisoners of their own government. Their governments don't represent them and so there's no problem enforcing all kinds of restrictions on them, until of course democarcy is instituted in those countries.
And then there's the nihilist approach. An approach whos earliest advocates date back to Pre-Socratic philosophy. Morality is not a universal rule - it's just a made up rule of people. The people decide what moral and what's not, not the gods or Nature, etc. This takes the sting out of morality. Morality, one might say is only a means to and end - the best way to keep a country stable and law abiding. An act is moral if it is in the interest of the country, even if it is war on another country.
Where I stand is somewhere in between I guess. I think democracy should be a prerequisite for any country to join the UN. I think that every dictatorship is a bad dictatorship (I don't believe in the idea of a benevolant dictator) and that the only immoral thing the US can do, with regards to north korea for example, is not get involved. The US must, for it's own sake and the sake of the democratic world, insure that north korea is taken out of the hands of it's psychotic leader and handed back to the people. Until that happens the only true sufferes are the north korean people and everyone else is a culprit. I believe in the idea of a covenant based democratic society as a pre-condition for morality - morality doesn't exist otherwise, for me at least.
How can you make the opposite claim?? Are you seriously suggesting that Israel considered using nuclear weapons on it's neighbor countries or on the palestinians? God... use your brain.
Saying Israel is a liability for the US is one step away from claiming that the 911 attacks where planned by the Mosad. Get real. Israle is an island of democracy in a fanatically islamic religious part of the world and if you can't see the benefit to the US by siding with Democracy then you're out of touch.
If it wasn't "crazy" of Israel to sink a US military ship flying a US flag, what was it?
This comment right here is what convinced me you're not here for the serious debate. Taking any particular incident and generilizing from it a foreign policy is childish sophism. I can name to you a hunder injustices - horrible ones - done by the US, by accident or on purpose, to other countries. So what? Does that mean that the US is run by crazies? (btw, I didn't bother to check you link and I'm not confirming anything it might say as I think it is totally irrelevant to the discussion).
Israel started the 1967 war
That's like saying the US started WW2 because it drew first blood against the germans. The US was dragged into the war by the japanese. Israel was under siege by the forces of the surrounding arab nations and that's what caused it to finally react. Read your history books. The day Israel was founded it was attacked by 4 arab countries. It doesn't get any simpler than that. They fucking started it. In 67, it was the only occasion where you could technically say that Israeli drew first blood - but that's a blatant distortion of the true. The fact of the matter is that Israel was under siege and had to attack.
Anyway, I think I'll stop here. Every point you make is completely and intentionaly false and you know it. "Nothing complicated about the Israeli PO conflict" ?? Either you're a complete moron or just flamebaiting. Either way I'm done reading or responding to your posts. Get well soon.
Such claims are usually from anti-semites that hide their hatred of the jews as "criticism of the Israeli security policy" and that's why I usually don't even bother to reply. However, it seems that in this case the comment was made by an individial who is just uninformed.
With all due respect, what you father told you about his experience in Israel is not an objective or even a well-informed account of Israel-Palestinians relations. Remember that only the worst behaviors are the ones that get into the media or that people remember. I'm sure your father never told you about the vast majority of soldiers and reserve forces men that do the best they can to treat the palestinian population with diginity - while at the same time making sure nobody explodes on them. Whenever you hear about a palestinian ambulande being delayed at a road block just remember that the palestinian are those who had used such means (wiring ambulances with bombs) in the past. They have tried every conceivable sick and twisted method of terrorism, including using their children as human shield, so don't be suprised if the interaction with the Israeli forces isn't pleasent for everyone. Until you understand the incredible difficulty of dealing with a population that predominantely believes in "Shahidism" you cannot fully asses the situation. You cannot deal with a population whos teenagers are brain washed to believe that there are 72 virgins waiting for them in heaven if they kill Isralies with velvet gloves. And Arafat - the nobel piece prize winner - who started this latest intifada after the failure of the talks in egypt - is making sure the flames are high all the time. He's raging his people on in the media and glorifies martyrdom... you just have to open the arabs channels on TV and know a little arabic to get the facts straight. While the Israeli government is right-winged it has shown termendous restraint. You cannot possibly argue that it should not be allowed WMD. That's rediculous. It is a moral country just like the US and it will never use those weapons unless attacked first by WMD.
Why can't we give equal amounts of aid and protection to everyone involved...
You are. You've been giving an enourmos amount of money to Egypt, the Palestinians, heck even to the Iranian and the Iraqies at some points. Israel is the only country who occasionaly pays back the aid money. But in any case this money is used to buy US exports and is spent on a government that is alligned with the US - it's money well spent. Perhaps instead of funding revolutions all over the world and getting involved in almost any conflict in the 20th century the US needs to put money into educating the third world and modernizing it - not just giving everyone more money as "aid". No matter how much Aid egypt and Jordan and other countries have received they are still fragile dictatorships that might collapse on any given day if some religious cleriks decide so.
If anything, the US foreign policy needs to get more involved in the peace negotiations. Look at the current Hudna (ceasefire). The palestinians have broken it several times since it came into effect a few weeks ago by murdering Israeli civilians. But Israel hasn't retliated, not even once. The Israeli government is doing what it's predecessors have done in the past - it's giving peace a chance even at the cost of Israeli lives. But again and again the terrorism continues and there's only so much that government can afford to accept lying down. Soon the violence will erupt again as the next bus will explode and the IDF will occupy the palestinians cities again. The US needs to stand by Israel until a sane government is installed in the palestinian terrotories. It's already began with Abu-Mazen - but he's still very far form being in control over the various terrorist oragnizations inside the PO. With time that will happen and what everyone needs is patience. Comments about unfair treatment of the palestinians by the US are false. There's no humanitarian crisis in the territories. It's shit, that's true, but it's not WW2 and it's not Sumalia or south africa and it will only get better once the palestinian population decides that it won't support it's corrupt government and stops sending it's young men to suicide training. No more palestinias died in the last 20 years by the IDF than Iraqies or Aphganistanians dies by the hands of the US forces in the last two years. These are all fact - you are invited to check them out.
To tell the truth, I saw the typo in the preview but it was too good to correct. :)
Wow, that's some fancy logic!
Reasons why Israel should have WMD:
1. Maybe it's because Israel is the only democracy in the middle east.
2. Or because Israel has had WMD for more than 20 years now and never even thought about initiating an assault (unlike the US, mind you). In fact Israel doesn't even declare officially that it has these weapons, unlike many arab nations that declare how much they can't wait to use them on the Infindels (that's you!). The fact that these weapons are quasi-secret just goes to show that they're there for intimidation - in order to keep the arms balance between then Billion arabs surrounding Israel and it's 6 mil. population.
3. Maybe it's because Israel protects the interests of the US in the middle east, provides intelligence for example - the only worthwhile intelligence the US has about the middle east, IMO.
4. Maybe it's because Israel isn't run by "crazies" - at least not more than the US is run by a war mongering illiterate. Such claims are prejudice.
Get your facts straight. The fact of the matter is that Israel has the same right to bare nuclear arms as the US has. Israel hasn't started any of the wars it was engaged in. Israel hasn't sponsered any military coos in south america or east asia. Israel didn't give the Taliban billions of dollars and training to fight the soviets. Israel's foreign policy is much more peacefull than the US's. You might not agree with it's current internal security policy - with regards to the palestinians - but that's a very complicated issue and peace isn't going to come in two years just because Bush decided to draw a RoadMap-To-Peace. It's going to take seperation from the palestinians. It's going to take generations of healing and trust-building. It's going to take a sane palestinian government that would put an end to suicide-summer camps for 6 year olds and fanatic islamic religious text books in the schools. Palenstine needs to be built on a stonrg democratic foundation and not on Jihad. The area in Israel has no natural resources like Saudy Arabia or Kuwait and if a palenstinian state is to rise it has to have a free market, an educated working market that could support it financially. Otherwise, what's stopping it from becoming another Syria? Nothing.
The worst thing you can do is fulfill the stereotype of the ingnorant american cowboy by oversimplifying a painful and serious situation and thinking every problem can be solved by using power and money. Take the time to really study the issue and don't post your Israel-bashing opinions until you read at least a few books about 20 century middle easy history.
Cause you know.. Israelis and Arabs aren't very different. They're all brown people with funny accents. They shouldn't have nuclear weapons - they're such children.. fighting all the time.
To the A$$hole who suggested that there's some reason Israel shouldn't be armed with WMD like the US or europe: check yourself. Put down the hamburger and your shotgun that your dad gave you on your 13th birthday and open a newspaper or a book once in a while.
pony up?
the minute you guarantee anonymity (something which, IMHO, is required for free speech...
Well now, this is an interesting philosophical question, in'it? Why should free speech require anonymity?
Free speech protects the right of an individual to speak his mind in view of the public. If the individual is indeed protected then he should have no reason to hide his identity. It seems to me that anonymity is only required if freedom of speech is not guaranteed.
It seems to me that coding morality into machines is impossible. For a machine, acting morally would mean weighing the outcome of every possible course of action according to a given set of rules.
Every course of action can be described via a Turing machine, but evaluating the outcome of such TMs is not possible according to Rice's theorem. So morality is undecidable.
Furthermore, it should be possible to show that morality isn't even semi-decidable. This can be done using a mapping reduction of the Halt-Complement problem to Morality as follows:
Given input to the !Halt problem (a TM B and input X) we map it to a TM P which is connected to an electric chair that holds a nun. P runs a timer for 60 seconds and in parallel simluates B(X), when the 60 seconds are up it let's the juice run, unless B(X) halts in which case it stops the timer.
If B(X) doesn't halt -> the nun fries -> P is moral.
If B(X) halts -> the nun lives -> P is immoral. Q.E.D.
is that it actually gives you cancer while you scan for cancer. You can't lose!
The bitch is in cleaning the dopamine squirt out of the keyboard.
Good, clean summer fun - aside from 'the scenes of maiming, dismemberment, clubbing, shooting, bayoneting and shoplifting'.
I give up. What can be more fun than scenes of maiming, dismemberment, clubbing, shooting, bayoneting and shoplifting?
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