As a parent, let alone a human being, you should really FIND OUT about who Hugo is and what he has done to the people of his country.
Many of us who follow global politics are quite aware of who Chavez is. It is you who seem to have a rather narrow field of vision based on highly biased personal contacts.
I work with person from Venezuela, his family is here (U.S.) from Venezuela and they are all, everyone, completely opposed to mad-man, his usurping of power, his decimating the what freedoms the people of his country had, etc.
So you work with people who were very likely well-off (comparatively) in Venezuela (who are also the type to most likely flee from Chavez) and whose family's wealth could be very likely traced to slaughter, slavery and other similar pleasantries perpetrated on the locals by their European ancestors. Unfortunately for them, unlike the situation in the USA where almost a complete genocide of the locals was carried out, the completely impoverished indigenous "lesser people" are an actual majority in places like Venezuela. And while keeping them down was a lovely past-time of all sorts of tin-pot tyrants with warm-hearted support of Uncle Sam and more importantly massive US-based conglomerates, some "mistakes" (such as implementing an actual democratic process coupled with an over-estimation of influence of the moneyed-owned media) resulted in an "oops": election of a charismatic indigenous leader whose popularity amongst the most poor indigenous Venezuelans is somewhere around 80%.
Hugo and the antics of his government deserve the ridicule and condemnation of all free people. This gaming thing is just a small small piece of the overwhelming oppression he has rained down on his people.
Which people? Surely the aristocratic rich, the descendants of colonial plantation owners, the well-to-do businessmen whose profit depend on exploitation of the locals are mad as hell at him for screwing up their racket. The indigenous poor on the other hand see him mostly as a great hero. Guess which section of the population constitutes majority.
Oppression? He "oppressed" all the rich by putting their taxes into education for the "filthy" aboriginals, he "oppressed" oil cartels by taking Venezuela's oil and using it to pay for medical care for the same "uppity" locals who do not know any better to be just happy in their place as plantation workers and maids in extravagant mansions of the likes of your friends in the US.
Chavez is what happens when a small ethnic minority with a checkered colonial past hoards all the wealth of a nation and flaunts it in the face of impoverished aboriginals and where the democratic process is even partially operational - sooner or later the majority manages to elect someone on their side. Sometimes the "mistake" of the democratically elected leader can be "taken back" (see Thailand and how a band of army thugs backed by aristocracy and the rich managed to remove any last vestiges of democracy that threatened them because of impoverished majority... in the name of "freedom" and "democracy" of course - Orwell must be chuckling somewhere), sometimes Uncle Sam lend a "helping" hand in form of some CIA assassins or a funding for a coup... but then sometimes these tactics fail and the result is what is going on in Venezuela.
Is Chavez a good leader, is he wise, are his policies sustainable? Probably not. Does he abuse his power? That highly depends on whose side you are on. But he is in power not because of anything he managed to do himself, but because he is the first ever person in power in Venezuela of whom the impoverished majority can truly say of "he is one of us - he is trying to do good by us", irrespective of him being actually able to do it. And at the moment it is all that counts over there. It will take a truly monumental screwup to destroy his popularity amongst the
How so? Why does Israel have more power to control the desire and will of its people in wanting to end the terrorist threat from Palestine than Palestine has the power to control its people in wanting to continue attacking Israel? Oh, you think Israel should turn the army against its own people perhaps? Well whatever politician does that won't last long.
No, Israel has the power because 1) it is the side that profited handsomely from its aggression and is thus the side that not only must but is capable of offering economic reparations 2) it is the side that controls militarily all aspects of lives of the Arabs in the Ghettos including all movements of goods and people 3) it is the side that unilaterally imposed and arbitrarily enforced those conditions on the Arabs, mostly employing brute force with what can only be described as religious-supremacist rationale as the only "justification".
In contrast, the only options available to the Palestinian Arabs at present are: submit and capitulate, thus legitimizing their de-facto status as "sub-humans" "infesting" "rightfully Jewish lands" or fight to the bitter end employing pathetic methods such as rickety home made rockets and suicide bombs, ever more desperately expecting miracles (hence the ever increasing influence of religious loons who promise them) because everything else they tried has failed. So its death of their identity and homeland no matter what choices they take. Most also apparently have chosen to go down with the ship rather then be "remade" into something else.
This is the disparity of power I spoke of.
I really don't understand your crucial point.
See above.
Okay but then you should stop putting that in every single argument you make, e.g. talking about Palestinian actions in terms of "reactions" to Israeli aggression. That's history. It's time to leave it out if you are seeking an honest solution, because history can't be changed.
I did not say that history does not matter, only that it is a part of the equation. Current state of affairs was arrived at by historical events, pretending that it is not so is by definition designed to dis-enfranchise one side or the other in any uneven conflict (and in this particular case it is patently obvious that it would be the Arabs getting the shaft). That is why any proposals involving "starting from blank slate" are inherently disingenuous and suspect.
My proposal is to carve out parts of northern Israel (for sea access) and Syria and Jordan and call that Palestine. Give part of Jordan to Israel to make a slightly wider country (seems more practical). Israel and Palestine will both be entirely contiguous and both have sea access.
Before calling that an injustice to Syria/Jordan, remember that these countries were all arbitrarily defined by colonial powers.
Oh good grief!
Let me get this straight, so you want to "solve" a problem caused by Western meddling full of self-serving and arrogant actions of colonial powers who summarily dismissed any and all opinions of Arabs who lived in these areas, instead treating them like cattle, to be shuffled around, "traded" to newly formed "countries", all of it in favor of well-connected European and American Jewry.... by more arrogant Western meddling arbitrarily ignoring any and all opinions of the local "inferiors", to be moved like cattle, traded and bargained away like pawns on a chess-board and resettled from their ancestral lands at a whim of "those who know better", "for the Arabs own good" of course, right?
Two fallacies: first, obviously the method you mention isn't good, as long as it involves duplicating the identities of Israeli nationals
How so? Do you think anyone sane would believe that a coalition of Irishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Australians and a few random other nationals suddenly decided to collaborate painstakingly for months to take out a Hamas official? The value of picking strictly foreign individuals visiting Israel (as opposed to dual citizenship holders) is rather marginal and in case if Israelis, when the shit really hits the fan, they can be simply reigned in by the Israeli government under auspices of "national defense", something that cannot be done to purely foreign individuals.
you have obviously completely married and committed to your own idea that the passports must have been duplicated on Israeli soil, so you can't see the other possibilities - for instance, oh, I dunno... that they weren't.
The information that these people traveled to Israel and are dual citizenship holders was actually provided by the respective governments of the countries where those passports were issued, post facto - which is why it is considered such a strong indicator. Dubai authorities did not make it up (nor was the Israeli citizenship noted in the passports themselves - dual citizenships usually are not - also the names of the holders were not immediately recognizable as Jewish). So you are barking up the completely wrong tree here.
And because you are so married to that idea, you could never even contemplate the thought that the identities were not stolen by an Israeli secret service, but someone else.
Yes, sure, there is a whole lineup of organizations capable of perfect passport forgeries of passports of multiple nations just queued up to spend months and untold tens of thousands of dollars to do in a Hamas official, whom only Israel was after. Probably some off-shoot of the United Way charity, no?
I mean, how naive (or in your case, willfully blind) can you get?
Finally, your use of the term "Jews", "schmucks" and "rallying around the flag" shows that you're nothing more than a bigoted racist, and hence, firmly limited by the tiny-miny little mental box in which you painted your whole existence.
Ah the, "you said 'Jew' and so you are a card-carrying White Arian Nazi Muslim Commie Anti-Semite... err Fascist!" canard. How unexpected of you! FYI: "Jew" is a name of a religion and a dictionary term found in every English dictionary, "shmuck" is an yiddish slang term for a "dunce", and "rallying around the flag" is a standard phrase very oft used in US politics. But then again, who am I to dissuade you from your "they failed to worship My Awesome Mind and so they are all filthy Anti-Semites!!!" mentality. You just wouldn't be quite your usual self-satisfied supremacist self without it.
Really, the argument you're making for the Palestinian side is self defeating...
No, the argument I am making is that both sides are self-defeating (although for different reasons). The crucial point however is that only Israel (as the vastly dominant side) has the power to stop this nonsense.
Be honest. Here and now, ignoring history, who is more right? Should that have an impact on who is more right when we don't ignore history? You can say it shouldn't, but why? At what point do you accept that people have changed and deserve a new chance?
See above. History is only a part of the equation. Disparity of power and dignity of those oppressed for so long is now the key element, without acknowledging which nothing will get resolved.
Also, time is running out - as the ascendancy of Hamas so pointedly highlights.
Still does not explain two of the alleged operatives fleeing to Iran. If that is accurate it would make Mossad involvement seem very unlikely, especially given that Hamas have plenty of other
enemies.
That depends on two factors: the quality of the forgeries.... and if the individuals in question actually disembarked in Iran instead of just catching the next ship/plane somewhere else, never having set foot outside the duty-free zone.
If one is about to forge passports, what better method then to use facilities under your control to duplicate foreign passports of dual-citizenship holders when they visit Israel (which is the common denominator of the Dubai plot passports). Since very few non-Jews do so these days and given the political climate in Israel it is likely that the misguided Mossad shmucks doing the forging probably expected some sort of patriotic rallying around the flag by the victims if the scheme was discovered, it is quite a reasonable assertion.
... but there is no proof of sloppy Mossad executions.
What was the last Mossad operation you know of in Dubai (or anywhere else for that matter) in the presence of ubiquitous electronic surveillance, again?
Your handwaving does not constitute an argument.
I provided a reasonable assessment of the changing conditions in regards of increasing quality and quantity of electronic surveillance. You've offered nothing other than completely unwarranted assumptions based exclusively on self-serving Israeli propaganda and absence of press releases by the Western powers. It is pretty obvious who is doing the hand-waving here.
The reason they have vast support is you'd have to be blind and stupid not to see the tactics and motivations of the people Israel has to deal with and conclude that Israel is worth supporting.
That theory is somewhat fucked up as soon as one realizes that those tactics and motivations are a reaction to Israeli aggression. But blaming those you step on for daring to try to knife your foot is also a standard Israeli modus operandi since even before the formal formation of that state.
Because reparations have worked SOOOOO well in the past there. Are you failing to note that every time that has been tried, these "peace loving" assholes started killing even more?? When would you say "enough is enough"?
More Israeli double-standard bullshit. No reparations of any significance were ever offered. Given the value of the properties taken by Israel plus compounded interest, the reparations would be in the hundreds of billions of today's US dollars. But it is a typical Israeli maneuver to throw some scraps under the table and then exclaim with great "shock and horror" that the "unreasonable and nasty" Arabs refuse "everything", thus implying that the scraps were some sort of ultimate, cosmic, awe-inspiring gift far and above what's owed - recent example including Arafat "walking away" from an offer of "98%" of "what was ever asked" of Israel (in the form of a haphazard network of untenable Bantustans criss-crossed by Israeli roads and armed settler camps and with no autonomy over anything that matters)...
And again, we got wise to this something like 20 times ago you've tried to pull this crap. It must be a heady mindset to keep doing the same thing over and over and expect that mere mortals like us will never catch on to what the "God's chosen" are doing.
Also, precisely because you've been trying to royally screw the Arabs for so long and so persistently, their internal politics became more and more radicalized and fatalistic. Hence the rise of ever more hard-line fundamentalist religious wackos like Hamas to power over the likes of secular forces of Fatah. Keep it up and the odds of Israel surviving as a "Jewish state" without a bona-fide "final Arab solution" complete with cattle cars and high efficiency ovens are decreasing by the minute.
... Mossad has used two to four people in the past, even for much higher profile targets (we know this from the few botched missions)... which should be enough to discredit the claim that Mossad was in involved....
You've confused propaganda about Mossad activities spread by Israel and US-dwelling Israeli citizens (many of them in positions of great power in US media and entertainment industries) which was until not so long ago the "dominant" view in the absence of the Internet and ubiquitous digital cameras, with reality.
The truth is that Mossad (and most other intelligence agencies) was always this sloppy, but they operated in a very forgiving environment, where all the successes could be safely exaggerated and all the screw-ups completely swept under the carpet.
The Dubai situation is simply what happens when the terrain on which Mossad had chosen to operate differs significantly from a typical impoverished, inept, technologically in the dark-ages back-water where they usually do their dirty deeds.
And it is a sign of things to come. Mossad is being put on notice: your usual shit will not fly anymore and no amount of selective propaganda will compensate for the realities of the digital age and Orwellian police-state mass digital surveillance that is becoming the norm in the Gulf states.
Killing someone who would otherwise kill your and my kids indiscriminately if they happen to be at the wrong place & the wrong time can be cheered, yes.
I assume then that you are cheering for elimination of most of those active in the Israeli political scene, since most of them are Hell-bent on starving and beating the denizens of the West Bank and Gaza Ghettos into obedient submission, no?
I have news for you, Skippy: we in the rest of the world (excepting some parts of the US where they expect Second Coming on the next Tuesday at the latest) have looooong since stopped buying the Pure-as-a-driven-snow Eternal Victimhood crap Israelis are peddling, quite a few "preemptive" wars and "collective punishment" campaigns back. The only reason that Israel is still supplied with vast no-questions-asked transfers of wealth and arms from the unwitting US taxpayers is because Israelis have a strangle-hold on US politics (along with gigantic corporations and other related wannabe global feudal aristocracy). And anyone can already sense that it is only a matter of time until something is going to give, rather violently, if this trend towards neo-feudalism continues unabated.
So I would suggest that pull your heads out of your apartheid asses and do something actually constructive to resolve the problem, beginning with massive reparations for all the land and property you've stolen (incidentally, and quite ironically, a process not much different from that relating to Jewish Nazi-confiscated property).
The tactics the Soviets used were more dangerous that all the money and guns the US ever threw at anything.
That is why the Soviets took over the world! Or at least control most of its finances, shove laws friendly to their business interests down the throat of pretty much every nation out there and have forward military bases in over 60% countries on the planet and spend more on offensive weaponry than the rest of the world combined... oh wait!
The hysterical bullshit US war-mongers spew would be comical if it weren't so blood soaked.
Go watch his videos.
Right after I finish watching the Ahmed Chelabi videos about the great big stockpiles of WMDs in Iraq all set to go off at 5 minutes notice.
You have no idea what you are poo-pooing.
On the contrary, I have pretty good idea, although the verbal feces here are all yours.
It's not about guns and money, it's about dissolving the fabric of a society from the inside over a generation or two before you create a crisis and move in.
Oh so the Soviets invented the doctrine of "Disaster Capitalism". Clever Commie.... err... Capitalist bastards.
The Soviets were invading South Vietnam and South Korea, using the northern counterparts to each to provide the muscle.
Hence the Great Tank Battle of Saigon where thousands of T-72 tanks of the Red Army squared off against the M48s of the US Armored Divisions with the sky above full of Soviet airmen dogfighting with US Air Force, with tactical nukes going off in the background... uhm... what?
Number of US Soldiers killed in the Vietnam War: 58,159. Number of Vietnamese killed: 1.3 million. Soviet citizens dead: 16 (that's six and ten since you are having obvious difficulties with numbers)... who was invading whom, again?
The Soviets were attempting to conquer the world with a poison ideology.
Words of a religious fanatic. Capitalism is also a "poison" ideology that has been used to do countless acts of unspeakable evil.
....And Blah Blah Blah, Bleh Blah Blih.... This Just In: Iraq War Justified Because USA is Always Righteously Right Even When Totally Wrong! Hurrah! We Kick Ass! They Deserved It!... Go USA! Go USA! USA #1... Blah Blah Bleh Blah.... and so on etc, ad nauseum...
So while I sometimes enjoy taunting raving lunatics such as you, I am not in the mood today. Go play by yourself in that delusional universe you've created for yourself.
That's not a similar effort, it's a LOT more work, and I'm not sure that any of it can really be automated.
How so? The existing DRM methods use all sorts of obfuscated CD/DVD-ROM drive operations via OS API calls, the "new" DRM uses all sorts of obfuscated communication operations via OS API calls...
Unless there is actual game contents (not available locally) being transmitted, there is little difference as far as a method of removing these calls and replacing them with dummy sub-routines is concerned.
How difficult it ends up being obviously depends on how much work the server is doing in the first place. Not that any of this will apply to AC2.
Again, unless actual game contents is stored and served online, the amount of obfuscation performed by the server is irrelevant. Simply replacing all calls to the communication subroutines with appropriate fakes will do the trick (which is exactly the same method employed with traditional DRM which also attempts to use the DVD/CD as the obfuscation/verification mechanism).
If the contents is stored online, than this creates additional obstacles but it also penalizes the publisher by removing whole market segments and (depending on amount of the contents) increasing bandwidth and server capacity requirements exponentially, to the point that if enough contents is stored remotely to be effective as DRM, the game architecture is functionally no different from that of an MMORPG, with all the associated costs of maintenance of massive infrastructure and yet no monthly subscriber revenue.
Dude, look at a map of Russia, and then look at a map of the USSR. All of those countries that are the difference between the two had their governments overthrown by the Soviets and literally thousands of people executed in a single night in a wash-rinse-repeat cycle all through Europe.
It is you who is rewriting history. The comparison you should be making is not today's Russia but Tzarist Imperial Russia which is what the Bolsheviks inherited. When compared to what the oh-so-loved-by-the-West Tzars did, the Bolsheviks were downright saints. It is the main reason why they came to power and why they won against the USA and the rest of the West-sponsored and equipped White Army. Hell, it is a little known historical fact that the US led a direct invasion of Russia during the Revolution on the side of the oh-so-enlightened Imperials.
Go watch the Yuri Bezmenov videos and remember while you watch them that he was one of the people orchestrating the process. With all of the bad things the US has done, the Soviets were always more dangerous.
Not by a long shot. The US always had more arms, more defense spending, more aggressive and belligerent foreign policy (it invaded many more countries in the post-WWII era then the Soviets) and US always lied about pretty much everything to do with the Cold War arms race, forcing the Soviets into redirecting all of their industrial capacity into arms production in an attempt to ward off US aggression. All the documents that were released by Kremlin in the post-Soviet times confirm that the USSR was always, in the post-WWII era, in a purely defensive stance, ever harried and harassed on all sides by the US and its NATO allies. It had no offensive plans whatsoever (and all the information to the contrary was pure fabrication on the part of US "intelligence" services, very much like the WMDs in Iraq - examples include such critical lies as the fictitious "missile gap", etc).
Unfortunately for the likes of revisionists like you, all of this is now in easily available public domain record.
Unless contents is served from a server (ala an MMORPG) then all this will require is a different toolkit. Most games are hacked these days semi-automatically, by specialized sotware that detects and replaces calls to "DRM compliance" sub-routines or emulates behavior of various external Windows APIs. With similar effort one can construct a kit that replaces calls to server communication sub-routines -- or better yet, the hackers can emulate the whole "mothership" server system, based on the analysis of the appropriate client sub-routines.
And even if some contents is stored remotely, it will take enterprising hackers only some time to download it all. Then again, if the game is really a bastardized MMO (without the MM component) then a whole market segment - i.e. laptops used in remote work/study locations is nixed.
In short the cost and lost sales is likely exceed any effectiveness of this (and any DRM).
The soviets were actively engaged in subverting governments and taking them over...
And the poor, wittle, innocent US wasn't...
Or for Pete's sake, the US has overthrown (usually democratic) and installed puppets (usually draconian tyrants) in 3 times as many governments during the Cold War as the Soviets managed to even mildly influence. Also, in case you did not notice, "regime change" is NOT a legitimate reason to launch a "pre-emptive" (read "Imperial Conquest") military warfare, when your assassins, propagandists and terror squads fail to overtake some country's government.
Don't forget the Spartan raison d'etre was to smash the rebellious colonies, years prior to the Covenant threat.
I haven't forgotten. It is precisely why I called the UNSC fascists... well... "fascists".
The horrific Spartan backstory along with the internal Covenant politics makes for an overall more interesting story.
SPARTAN program would have certainly back-fired under those conditions in ways that I already described. Without the Covenant the SPARTANs would have certainly turned on UNSC and likely sided with those very rebellious colonies, with Covenant around they would most likely become its allies. Even the most inept general of either the colonies or the Covenant would immediately recognize the potential of helping the SPARTANs and trying to work into their good graces (which would have been rather easy given what UNSC did to them).
Am always serious when I see high-level corporate stooges (many of whom these day have power and resources exceeding those of whole small nations) start to fancy themselves as military commanders... even if it is supposedly in the name of "entertainment".
I am not quite sure if you have been following news lately but corporate power is these days ever more unbalanced versus that of citizens to the point that whole corporations are now para-military entities with an explicit license to kill pretty much anyone they please (e.g. Blackwater/Xe). The thing has long since crossed from the realm of dark futuristic fantasy and make-believe games into reality.
To be accurate its not "Microsoft" which is an abstract entity, although it is convenient to speak of it that way, but the whole corporate culture of which Microsoft is an example and which attracts such individuals and enables them to rise in power by rewarding their sociopathic attitudes. The end result is that these people end up thinking of themselves as superior (after all their traits made them "successful" at the expense of all around them who are not as twisted as they are) and so they proudly promote their way of thinking in part as self-justification, in part as ego-stroking and in part because they actually believe themselves righteous and "good".
History is full of idiots of this kind, in fact pretty much every oppressive social order, all wars, atrocities and campaigns of persecution were instigated and conducted by the personalities just like them.
Bungie is known for having written a rich and detailed backstory, and having a very detailed 'bible' for Halo.
Much of which, if not all, happened after they were assimilated by Microsoft. The game was originally quite different in design and scope and underwent a considerable evolution under Microsoft's direction (and also due to limitations of Xbox). It is no coincidence that all the dolts at "Central Command" Nylund mentions in his books are long-time Microsoft employees in charge of various aspects of Microsoft gaming division.
Would you have felt more comfortable playing as a pacifist running like hell from the aliens the whole game, trying not to crap yourself?
There is a loooong way from the SPARTAN program to any "pacifism". A regular military force defending their homes from an invader is not "pacifism" by any means. SPARTAN program, as described in the books, crossed every line to the point that it essentially gave up any reason for its opposition to Covenant to exist as both sides became just a different faces of the same ugly coin and both became enemies of everyone sane everywhere. This simple fact, that giving up freedom and justice in order to "defend" freedom and justice is one of the most counter-productive things ever, never seems to register with various authoritarians drooling after power and "hero" status.
By all tokens the SPARTAN "graduates", if such a thing existed in real life, would behave quite differently from the wet dreams of the jingoists writing this drivel, they would have every reason to hate the UNSC and none to hate the Covenant, as at the time of their "graduation" all the torture, mutilations and murder were committed on them by the UNSC and none of them even saw anyone from the Covenant. Given this simple fact, in real life a majority would end up as insurgents and terrorists out to exterminate their torturers and all those who benefited from their misery and not quite a few would outright welcome the Covenant's attack side with the invaders (who would gladly welcome them and supply them with equipment and provisions and who would take care to make sure that they never offend these powerful allies, thus becoming vastly superior "Good Guys" to the vicious UNSC "Bad Guys" from the perspective of the SPARTAN victims).
But in actuality these infantile fantasies are so bothersome because the sick morons that think them up would actually try them (as long as it was on people other then themselves) irrespective of any probability of "success", as is evident by the general attitudes of various war-mongering dolts that can be seen everywhere.
And to your parent poster, I doubt that Microsoft had anything to do with the story. And lest we forget, Halo was originally to be a Mac game....
The books were commissioned by Microsoft as part as their "brand tie-in" campaign for Halo. As far as I know Bungie had no book deals for Marathon and had no plans to do so for Halo before Microsoft bought them. Also the game itself had rather ambiguous references to the SPARTAN program, never defining its nature. All the attempts at glorification of the truly repulsive, vicious, sadistic, fascist nonsense is mainly in the accompanying books.
Any of the Halo books written by Eric Nylund are actually pretty good reads. The novelization of the original game is crap.
Nylund for example explicitly thanks Microsoft insiders at Microsoft's "Central Command" and its "Intelligence Officers" etc for "guidance" in the foreword of his Halo books, pretty much openly exposing what sort of thinking is going on at Microsoft where wanna-be fascist idiots are fancying themselves as a military-style operation, not leaving much to imagination or speculation.
The story didn't make much sense and Master Chief is a fairly unlikable hero.
Do not even get me started on the "back-story"... a fascist government that kidnaps kids (replacing them with clones who are sabotaged to die young - and painfully - so that parents do not catch on to the scheme) and puts them through a decade of torturous experiments, maims and kills most of them -- and somehow those kids through some kind of twisted "Stockholm syndrome" become great champions of the fascists, aka the "Good guys", against a bunch of fanatical religious nuts, aka the "Bad guys".
Then again, this is a Microsoft product and so they probably think fondly of this kind of future where corporations like Microsoft get to do this to kids under auspices of "defense of freedom", "protecting the Dumb Masses from Terrible Foes" or some other such utterly self-serving crap.
It is also quite a sad testimony to the current goings on in the American culture that there is so many budding fascists who identify with such ends-justify-all-means "heroics".
... and of course Linux 2.4 was also in 2001. None of those OSes know what to do with anything other than a 512B sector -
And...
... Linux 2.6, and Mac OS X 10.5 know full well what to do with a 4K drive.
Total bullshit.
Linux kernel code had flexible block device sector size since the days of 1.x series of kernels. The "problem" is (and always was) with some of the user-space utilities for some of the file systems available under Linux, file systems specifically designed for... compatibility with DOS and Windows (and through them with the original, ancient IBM PC XT BIOS).
Even then most of the same utilities have various override options that can be used to make them compliant with "unusual" (from the point of view of Windows) sector/block sizes and dive geometries, although it is not their default behavior. The very article you are responding to moans about this very thing, as if it were any news to long-time Linux users.
Windows apologists and their revisionist history are just pathetic.
You probably noticed however that they structured the "reward" in such a way as to prevent that very scenario: the cost of a deep-sea-worthy boat rental, plus freeze dried food and the like, plus the satellite dish + internet + what not far exceeds the $10k they offer.
One can just rent a comfy boat, stock up on freeze-dried food and stay out at sea for months. Even if they find your boat info, how are they going to find you, even with access to satellites? There are tens of thousands of pleasure boats at sea at any given time and they do not have highly visible identification. Any inspections come when you come to port or near some country's shores. And you can always dock in some tropical island that does not have their port authority on the net.
But of course being in the middle of the Pacific would put a damper on all the twittering.
Slashdot Mirror
Many of us who follow global politics are quite aware of who Chavez is. It is you who seem to have a rather narrow field of vision based on highly biased personal contacts.
So you work with people who were very likely well-off (comparatively) in Venezuela (who are also the type to most likely flee from Chavez) and whose family's wealth could be very likely traced to slaughter, slavery and other similar pleasantries perpetrated on the locals by their European ancestors. Unfortunately for them, unlike the situation in the USA where almost a complete genocide of the locals was carried out, the completely impoverished indigenous "lesser people" are an actual majority in places like Venezuela. And while keeping them down was a lovely past-time of all sorts of tin-pot tyrants with warm-hearted support of Uncle Sam and more importantly massive US-based conglomerates, some "mistakes" (such as implementing an actual democratic process coupled with an over-estimation of influence of the moneyed-owned media) resulted in an "oops": election of a charismatic indigenous leader whose popularity amongst the most poor indigenous Venezuelans is somewhere around 80%.
Which people? Surely the aristocratic rich, the descendants of colonial plantation owners, the well-to-do businessmen whose profit depend on exploitation of the locals are mad as hell at him for screwing up their racket. The indigenous poor on the other hand see him mostly as a great hero. Guess which section of the population constitutes majority.
Oppression? He "oppressed" all the rich by putting their taxes into education for the "filthy" aboriginals, he "oppressed" oil cartels by taking Venezuela's oil and using it to pay for medical care for the same "uppity" locals who do not know any better to be just happy in their place as plantation workers and maids in extravagant mansions of the likes of your friends in the US.
Chavez is what happens when a small ethnic minority with a checkered colonial past hoards all the wealth of a nation and flaunts it in the face of impoverished aboriginals and where the democratic process is even partially operational - sooner or later the majority manages to elect someone on their side. Sometimes the "mistake" of the democratically elected leader can be "taken back" (see Thailand and how a band of army thugs backed by aristocracy and the rich managed to remove any last vestiges of democracy that threatened them because of impoverished majority ... in the name of "freedom" and "democracy" of course - Orwell must be chuckling somewhere), sometimes Uncle Sam lend a "helping" hand in form of some CIA assassins or a funding for a coup ... but then sometimes these tactics fail and the result is what is going on in Venezuela.
Is Chavez a good leader, is he wise, are his policies sustainable? Probably not. Does he abuse his power? That highly depends on whose side you are on. But he is in power not because of anything he managed to do himself, but because he is the first ever person in power in Venezuela of whom the impoverished majority can truly say of "he is one of us - he is trying to do good by us", irrespective of him being actually able to do it. And at the moment it is all that counts over there. It will take a truly monumental screwup to destroy his popularity amongst the
No, Israel has the power because 1) it is the side that profited handsomely from its aggression and is thus the side that not only must but is capable of offering economic reparations 2) it is the side that controls militarily all aspects of lives of the Arabs in the Ghettos including all movements of goods and people 3) it is the side that unilaterally imposed and arbitrarily enforced those conditions on the Arabs, mostly employing brute force with what can only be described as religious-supremacist rationale as the only "justification".
In contrast, the only options available to the Palestinian Arabs at present are: submit and capitulate, thus legitimizing their de-facto status as "sub-humans" "infesting" "rightfully Jewish lands" or fight to the bitter end employing pathetic methods such as rickety home made rockets and suicide bombs, ever more desperately expecting miracles (hence the ever increasing influence of religious loons who promise them) because everything else they tried has failed. So its death of their identity and homeland no matter what choices they take. Most also apparently have chosen to go down with the ship rather then be "remade" into something else.
This is the disparity of power I spoke of.
See above.
I did not say that history does not matter, only that it is a part of the equation. Current state of affairs was arrived at by historical events, pretending that it is not so is by definition designed to dis-enfranchise one side or the other in any uneven conflict (and in this particular case it is patently obvious that it would be the Arabs getting the shaft). That is why any proposals involving "starting from blank slate" are inherently disingenuous and suspect.
Oh good grief!
Let me get this straight, so you want to "solve" a problem caused by Western meddling full of self-serving and arrogant actions of colonial powers who summarily dismissed any and all opinions of Arabs who lived in these areas, instead treating them like cattle, to be shuffled around, "traded" to newly formed "countries", all of it in favor of well-connected European and American Jewry .... by more arrogant Western meddling arbitrarily ignoring any and all opinions of the local "inferiors", to be moved like cattle, traded and bargained away like pawns on a chess-board and resettled from their ancestral lands at a whim of "those who know better", "for the Arabs own good" of course, right?
By Jove, that "White Man's Burden" must be getting heavier and heavier...
How so? Do you think anyone sane would believe that a coalition of Irishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Australians and a few random other nationals suddenly decided to collaborate painstakingly for months to take out a Hamas official? The value of picking strictly foreign individuals visiting Israel (as opposed to dual citizenship holders) is rather marginal and in case if Israelis, when the shit really hits the fan, they can be simply reigned in by the Israeli government under auspices of "national defense", something that cannot be done to purely foreign individuals.
The information that these people traveled to Israel and are dual citizenship holders was actually provided by the respective governments of the countries where those passports were issued, post facto - which is why it is considered such a strong indicator. Dubai authorities did not make it up (nor was the Israeli citizenship noted in the passports themselves - dual citizenships usually are not - also the names of the holders were not immediately recognizable as Jewish). So you are barking up the completely wrong tree here.
Yes, sure, there is a whole lineup of organizations capable of perfect passport forgeries of passports of multiple nations just queued up to spend months and untold tens of thousands of dollars to do in a Hamas official, whom only Israel was after. Probably some off-shoot of the United Way charity, no?
I mean, how naive (or in your case, willfully blind) can you get?
Ah the, "you said 'Jew' and so you are a card-carrying White Arian Nazi Muslim Commie Anti-Semite ... err Fascist!" canard. How unexpected of you! FYI: "Jew" is a name of a religion and a dictionary term found in every English dictionary, "shmuck" is an yiddish slang term for a "dunce", and "rallying around the flag" is a standard phrase very oft used in US politics. But then again, who am I to dissuade you from your "they failed to worship My Awesome Mind and so they are all filthy Anti-Semites!!!" mentality. You just wouldn't be quite your usual self-satisfied supremacist self without it.
No, the argument I am making is that both sides are self-defeating (although for different reasons). The crucial point however is that only Israel (as the vastly dominant side) has the power to stop this nonsense.
See above. History is only a part of the equation. Disparity of power and dignity of those oppressed for so long is now the key element, without acknowledging which nothing will get resolved.
Also, time is running out - as the ascendancy of Hamas so pointedly highlights.
That depends on two factors: the quality of the forgeries .... and if the individuals in question actually disembarked in Iran instead of just catching the next ship/plane somewhere else, never having set foot outside the duty-free zone.
If one is about to forge passports, what better method then to use facilities under your control to duplicate foreign passports of dual-citizenship holders when they visit Israel (which is the common denominator of the Dubai plot passports). Since very few non-Jews do so these days and given the political climate in Israel it is likely that the misguided Mossad shmucks doing the forging probably expected some sort of patriotic rallying around the flag by the victims if the scheme was discovered, it is quite a reasonable assertion.
What was the last Mossad operation you know of in Dubai (or anywhere else for that matter) in the presence of ubiquitous electronic surveillance, again?
I provided a reasonable assessment of the changing conditions in regards of increasing quality and quantity of electronic surveillance. You've offered nothing other than completely unwarranted assumptions based exclusively on self-serving Israeli propaganda and absence of press releases by the Western powers. It is pretty obvious who is doing the hand-waving here.
That theory is somewhat fucked up as soon as one realizes that those tactics and motivations are a reaction to Israeli aggression. But blaming those you step on for daring to try to knife your foot is also a standard Israeli modus operandi since even before the formal formation of that state.
More Israeli double-standard bullshit. No reparations of any significance were ever offered. Given the value of the properties taken by Israel plus compounded interest, the reparations would be in the hundreds of billions of today's US dollars. But it is a typical Israeli maneuver to throw some scraps under the table and then exclaim with great "shock and horror" that the "unreasonable and nasty" Arabs refuse "everything", thus implying that the scraps were some sort of ultimate, cosmic, awe-inspiring gift far and above what's owed - recent example including Arafat "walking away" from an offer of "98%" of "what was ever asked" of Israel (in the form of a haphazard network of untenable Bantustans criss-crossed by Israeli roads and armed settler camps and with no autonomy over anything that matters)...
And again, we got wise to this something like 20 times ago you've tried to pull this crap. It must be a heady mindset to keep doing the same thing over and over and expect that mere mortals like us will never catch on to what the "God's chosen" are doing.
Also, precisely because you've been trying to royally screw the Arabs for so long and so persistently, their internal politics became more and more radicalized and fatalistic. Hence the rise of ever more hard-line fundamentalist religious wackos like Hamas to power over the likes of secular forces of Fatah. Keep it up and the odds of Israel surviving as a "Jewish state" without a bona-fide "final Arab solution" complete with cattle cars and high efficiency ovens are decreasing by the minute.
You've confused propaganda about Mossad activities spread by Israel and US-dwelling Israeli citizens (many of them in positions of great power in US media and entertainment industries) which was until not so long ago the "dominant" view in the absence of the Internet and ubiquitous digital cameras, with reality.
The truth is that Mossad (and most other intelligence agencies) was always this sloppy, but they operated in a very forgiving environment, where all the successes could be safely exaggerated and all the screw-ups completely swept under the carpet.
The Dubai situation is simply what happens when the terrain on which Mossad had chosen to operate differs significantly from a typical impoverished, inept, technologically in the dark-ages back-water where they usually do their dirty deeds.
And it is a sign of things to come. Mossad is being put on notice: your usual shit will not fly anymore and no amount of selective propaganda will compensate for the realities of the digital age and Orwellian police-state mass digital surveillance that is becoming the norm in the Gulf states.
I assume then that you are cheering for elimination of most of those active in the Israeli political scene, since most of them are Hell-bent on starving and beating the denizens of the West Bank and Gaza Ghettos into obedient submission, no?
I have news for you, Skippy: we in the rest of the world (excepting some parts of the US where they expect Second Coming on the next Tuesday at the latest) have looooong since stopped buying the Pure-as-a-driven-snow Eternal Victimhood crap Israelis are peddling, quite a few "preemptive" wars and "collective punishment" campaigns back. The only reason that Israel is still supplied with vast no-questions-asked transfers of wealth and arms from the unwitting US taxpayers is because Israelis have a strangle-hold on US politics (along with gigantic corporations and other related wannabe global feudal aristocracy). And anyone can already sense that it is only a matter of time until something is going to give, rather violently, if this trend towards neo-feudalism continues unabated.
So I would suggest that pull your heads out of your apartheid asses and do something actually constructive to resolve the problem, beginning with massive reparations for all the land and property you've stolen (incidentally, and quite ironically, a process not much different from that relating to Jewish Nazi-confiscated property).
That is why the Soviets took over the world! Or at least control most of its finances, shove laws friendly to their business interests down the throat of pretty much every nation out there and have forward military bases in over 60% countries on the planet and spend more on offensive weaponry than the rest of the world combined ... oh wait!
The hysterical bullshit US war-mongers spew would be comical if it weren't so blood soaked.
Right after I finish watching the Ahmed Chelabi videos about the great big stockpiles of WMDs in Iraq all set to go off at 5 minutes notice.
On the contrary, I have pretty good idea, although the verbal feces here are all yours.
Oh so the Soviets invented the doctrine of "Disaster Capitalism". Clever Commie .... err... Capitalist bastards.
Hence the Great Tank Battle of Saigon where thousands of T-72 tanks of the Red Army squared off against the M48s of the US Armored Divisions with the sky above full of Soviet airmen dogfighting with US Air Force, with tactical nukes going off in the background ... uhm ... what?
Number of US Soldiers killed in the Vietnam War: 58,159. Number of Vietnamese killed: 1.3 million. Soviet citizens dead: 16 (that's six and ten since you are having obvious difficulties with numbers) ... who was invading whom, again?
Words of a religious fanatic. Capitalism is also a "poison" ideology that has been used to do countless acts of unspeakable evil.
So while I sometimes enjoy taunting raving lunatics such as you, I am not in the mood today. Go play by yourself in that delusional universe you've created for yourself.
How so? The existing DRM methods use all sorts of obfuscated CD/DVD-ROM drive operations via OS API calls, the "new" DRM uses all sorts of obfuscated communication operations via OS API calls...
Unless there is actual game contents (not available locally) being transmitted, there is little difference as far as a method of removing these calls and replacing them with dummy sub-routines is concerned.
Again, unless actual game contents is stored and served online, the amount of obfuscation performed by the server is irrelevant. Simply replacing all calls to the communication subroutines with appropriate fakes will do the trick (which is exactly the same method employed with traditional DRM which also attempts to use the DVD/CD as the obfuscation/verification mechanism).
If the contents is stored online, than this creates additional obstacles but it also penalizes the publisher by removing whole market segments and (depending on amount of the contents) increasing bandwidth and server capacity requirements exponentially, to the point that if enough contents is stored remotely to be effective as DRM, the game architecture is functionally no different from that of an MMORPG, with all the associated costs of maintenance of massive infrastructure and yet no monthly subscriber revenue.
It is you who is rewriting history. The comparison you should be making is not today's Russia but Tzarist Imperial Russia which is what the Bolsheviks inherited. When compared to what the oh-so-loved-by-the-West Tzars did, the Bolsheviks were downright saints. It is the main reason why they came to power and why they won against the USA and the rest of the West-sponsored and equipped White Army. Hell, it is a little known historical fact that the US led a direct invasion of Russia during the Revolution on the side of the oh-so-enlightened Imperials.
Not by a long shot. The US always had more arms, more defense spending, more aggressive and belligerent foreign policy (it invaded many more countries in the post-WWII era then the Soviets) and US always lied about pretty much everything to do with the Cold War arms race, forcing the Soviets into redirecting all of their industrial capacity into arms production in an attempt to ward off US aggression. All the documents that were released by Kremlin in the post-Soviet times confirm that the USSR was always, in the post-WWII era, in a purely defensive stance, ever harried and harassed on all sides by the US and its NATO allies. It had no offensive plans whatsoever (and all the information to the contrary was pure fabrication on the part of US "intelligence" services, very much like the WMDs in Iraq - examples include such critical lies as the fictitious "missile gap", etc).
Unfortunately for the likes of revisionists like you, all of this is now in easily available public domain record.
Unless contents is served from a server (ala an MMORPG) then all this will require is a different toolkit. Most games are hacked these days semi-automatically, by specialized sotware that detects and replaces calls to "DRM compliance" sub-routines or emulates behavior of various external Windows APIs. With similar effort one can construct a kit that replaces calls to server communication sub-routines -- or better yet, the hackers can emulate the whole "mothership" server system, based on the analysis of the appropriate client sub-routines.
And even if some contents is stored remotely, it will take enterprising hackers only some time to download it all. Then again, if the game is really a bastardized MMO (without the MM component) then a whole market segment - i.e. laptops used in remote work/study locations is nixed.
In short the cost and lost sales is likely exceed any effectiveness of this (and any DRM).
And the poor, wittle, innocent US wasn't...
Or for Pete's sake, the US has overthrown (usually democratic) and installed puppets (usually draconian tyrants) in 3 times as many governments during the Cold War as the Soviets managed to even mildly influence. Also, in case you did not notice, "regime change" is NOT a legitimate reason to launch a "pre-emptive" (read "Imperial Conquest") military warfare, when your assassins, propagandists and terror squads fail to overtake some country's government.
I haven't forgotten. It is precisely why I called the UNSC fascists ... well ... "fascists".
SPARTAN program would have certainly back-fired under those conditions in ways that I already described. Without the Covenant the SPARTANs would have certainly turned on UNSC and likely sided with those very rebellious colonies, with Covenant around they would most likely become its allies. Even the most inept general of either the colonies or the Covenant would immediately recognize the potential of helping the SPARTANs and trying to work into their good graces (which would have been rather easy given what UNSC did to them).
Am always serious when I see high-level corporate stooges (many of whom these day have power and resources exceeding those of whole small nations) start to fancy themselves as military commanders... even if it is supposedly in the name of "entertainment".
I am not quite sure if you have been following news lately but corporate power is these days ever more unbalanced versus that of citizens to the point that whole corporations are now para-military entities with an explicit license to kill pretty much anyone they please (e.g. Blackwater/Xe). The thing has long since crossed from the realm of dark futuristic fantasy and make-believe games into reality.
To be accurate its not "Microsoft" which is an abstract entity, although it is convenient to speak of it that way, but the whole corporate culture of which Microsoft is an example and which attracts such individuals and enables them to rise in power by rewarding their sociopathic attitudes. The end result is that these people end up thinking of themselves as superior (after all their traits made them "successful" at the expense of all around them who are not as twisted as they are) and so they proudly promote their way of thinking in part as self-justification, in part as ego-stroking and in part because they actually believe themselves righteous and "good".
History is full of idiots of this kind, in fact pretty much every oppressive social order, all wars, atrocities and campaigns of persecution were instigated and conducted by the personalities just like them.
Much of which, if not all, happened after they were assimilated by Microsoft. The game was originally quite different in design and scope and underwent a considerable evolution under Microsoft's direction (and also due to limitations of Xbox). It is no coincidence that all the dolts at "Central Command" Nylund mentions in his books are long-time Microsoft employees in charge of various aspects of Microsoft gaming division.
There is a loooong way from the SPARTAN program to any "pacifism". A regular military force defending their homes from an invader is not "pacifism" by any means. SPARTAN program, as described in the books, crossed every line to the point that it essentially gave up any reason for its opposition to Covenant to exist as both sides became just a different faces of the same ugly coin and both became enemies of everyone sane everywhere. This simple fact, that giving up freedom and justice in order to "defend" freedom and justice is one of the most counter-productive things ever, never seems to register with various authoritarians drooling after power and "hero" status.
By all tokens the SPARTAN "graduates", if such a thing existed in real life, would behave quite differently from the wet dreams of the jingoists writing this drivel, they would have every reason to hate the UNSC and none to hate the Covenant, as at the time of their "graduation" all the torture, mutilations and murder were committed on them by the UNSC and none of them even saw anyone from the Covenant. Given this simple fact, in real life a majority would end up as insurgents and terrorists out to exterminate their torturers and all those who benefited from their misery and not quite a few would outright welcome the Covenant's attack side with the invaders (who would gladly welcome them and supply them with equipment and provisions and who would take care to make sure that they never offend these powerful allies, thus becoming vastly superior "Good Guys" to the vicious UNSC "Bad Guys" from the perspective of the SPARTAN victims).
But in actuality these infantile fantasies are so bothersome because the sick morons that think them up would actually try them (as long as it was on people other then themselves) irrespective of any probability of "success", as is evident by the general attitudes of various war-mongering dolts that can be seen everywhere.
The books were commissioned by Microsoft as part as their "brand tie-in" campaign for Halo. As far as I know Bungie had no book deals for Marathon and had no plans to do so for Halo before Microsoft bought them. Also the game itself had rather ambiguous references to the SPARTAN program, never defining its nature. All the attempts at glorification of the truly repulsive, vicious, sadistic, fascist nonsense is mainly in the accompanying books.
Nylund for example explicitly thanks Microsoft insiders at Microsoft's "Central Command" and its "Intelligence Officers" etc for "guidance" in the foreword of his Halo books, pretty much openly exposing what sort of thinking is going on at Microsoft where wanna-be fascist idiots are fancying themselves as a military-style operation, not leaving much to imagination or speculation.
Do not even get me started on the "back-story" ... a fascist government that kidnaps kids (replacing them with clones who are sabotaged to die young - and painfully - so that parents do not catch on to the scheme) and puts them through a decade of torturous experiments, maims and kills most of them -- and somehow those kids through some kind of twisted "Stockholm syndrome" become great champions of the fascists, aka the "Good guys", against a bunch of fanatical religious nuts, aka the "Bad guys".
Then again, this is a Microsoft product and so they probably think fondly of this kind of future where corporations like Microsoft get to do this to kids under auspices of "defense of freedom", "protecting the Dumb Masses from Terrible Foes" or some other such utterly self-serving crap.
It is also quite a sad testimony to the current goings on in the American culture that there is so many budding fascists who identify with such ends-justify-all-means "heroics".
"Unlikable" is a rather large understatement.
And...
Total bullshit.
Linux kernel code had flexible block device sector size since the days of 1.x series of kernels. The "problem" is (and always was) with some of the user-space utilities for some of the file systems available under Linux, file systems specifically designed for ... compatibility with DOS and Windows (and through them with the original, ancient IBM PC XT BIOS).
Even then most of the same utilities have various override options that can be used to make them compliant with "unusual" (from the point of view of Windows) sector/block sizes and dive geometries, although it is not their default behavior. The very article you are responding to moans about this very thing, as if it were any news to long-time Linux users.
Windows apologists and their revisionist history are just pathetic.
You probably noticed however that they structured the "reward" in such a way as to prevent that very scenario: the cost of a deep-sea-worthy boat rental, plus freeze dried food and the like, plus the satellite dish + internet + what not far exceeds the $10k they offer.
Absolutely.
One can just rent a comfy boat, stock up on freeze-dried food and stay out at sea for months. Even if they find your boat info, how are they going to find you, even with access to satellites? There are tens of thousands of pleasure boats at sea at any given time and they do not have highly visible identification. Any inspections come when you come to port or near some country's shores. And you can always dock in some tropical island that does not have their port authority on the net.
But of course being in the middle of the Pacific would put a damper on all the twittering.