Unless that particular Saudi "religious leader" was actually influential, it may not really be a fair point to make.
However, it would be consistent with al-Riyadh's recent (retracted after criticism) two-part article on Jewish dietary customs with regards to Purim (notably, repeating the ol' canard that Jews celebrate the holidays by torturing and eating Gentile children), and the Saudi ambassador to the UK writing a poem that praised a recent Palestinian suicide bomber, writing that the gates of Heaven were opened to her. Oh, and the recent Saudi telethon that raised money for Palestinian "martyrs". And it's the same Saudi government that concurred with the OIC's decision to support the US war against terrorism... but also declaring that the Israelis were the only terrorists in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
To be a bit cynical, violence and atrocities in the Middle East isn't particularly "new" news compared to large-scale attacks on the United States, which have been rather surprisingly rare, considering how many groups would be pleased to be have completed such an attack.
Is it surprising that Palestinians still talk about Palestinian land, "from the river to the sea", or that "In the Palestinian lexicon, Israel has no place on the map" (Frontline interviews)? Not really; even a "peacemaker" like Arafat has made, well, pretty much zero concessions. Ever. Other than saying, well, that he'd consider destroying Israel with demographics (unlimited "right of return" to Israeli land) than with military force.
And as a result of Arafat going against even his own negotiators and screwing over both Barak and Clinton by never making concessions, let alone a peace plan, and stipulating only additional demands, they got Gen. Sharon. The results are obvious.
Hell, we've been in an undeclared war against Iraq ever since Desert Storm, at least if you count the embargo, air patrols, explicit support for anti-Saddam movements, winking at Turkish violations of Iraqi sovereignty, the Iraqi plot to assassinate Bush the Elder when he visited Kuwait, the Iraqi bounties on American pilots...
It would be amusing if a HUGE sticker were required to be slapped on the outside of software boxes containing such licenses, stating that "Food for thought: The publisher of this product would like you to know that he feels entitled to FUCK OVER YOUR COMPUTER AND ALL ITS CONTENTS and he won't owe you a dime."
20:1 is not terribly surprising given the disparity in training, unity and material, no? It's not like there is one Palestinian resistance movement; there are multiple rival organizations, and there's probably a fair bit of duplication of effort. I suspect that the various Colonial wars (Brits. vs Zulus and Sudanese -- think Khartoum) were pretty one-sided in loss ratios, as well.
It also doesn't take a genius to realize that standing in a street, lobbing rocks with a slingshot at troops, is not a terribly great military tactic. Nor, for that matter, is standing in a a street and firing an assault rifle at a buttoned-up Merkava(*). Of course, both may be useful POLITICALLY. Notice, for instance, that Palestinian funerals tend to be political rallies and propaganda events...
(*) Given the questionable Israeli habit of sending tanks through hostile cities mere scores of feet from enemies, and the amount of explosives in the West Bank -- TNT-laden mortar shells and improvised explosive compounds -- it's surprising that they've not lost more. The PA has tried to import RPGs through Iranian channels, but apparently hasn't been too successful.
It's probably just a not particularly subtle jab at the US DOE nuclear weapon simulations research which gets done on the big American gov't supercomputers -- in other words, pointing out that they're using their CPU cycles for what theyc consider a better purpose. Japan isn't particularly fond of nuclear weapons at all.
Why? Remember that Godjira was woken up by nuclear bomb tests. I don't think they want to have to deal with MORE giant monsters, even if they eventually become defenders of Earth against Planet X.
What might they have to repress? Well, they're not even in the same league as North Korea as far as repression goes, but...
It would not be too surprising if their entrance in the WTO eventually leads to greater unrest in urban areas, considering that the lowering of trade barriers will hurt the more inefficient state industries, and that the guaranteed-job entitlement may need to be sharply cut back...
Figure that they're also probably a bit more paranoid than most nations with regards to unrest, dissent and insurrections. They've had some pretty significant rebellions and civil wars in their long history, and they're even now still having to deal with separatist terrorists...
In Chavez's case, it's not surprising that suspicion fell on him pretty rapidly. Recall that he was involved in two previous armed conspiracies to overthrow the government... it's actually quite remarkable that they allowed him to run at all, really. Apparently Venezuela's more forgiving than most countries in that regard.
Hmm. Wasn't the Speer in charge of setting industrial targets, planning a centralized economic strategy, and managing the various businessmen under the Nazi administration? Or was that only for materials judged necessary for the war effort?
Of course it'd be used to seek out traitors -- or, more precisely, anybody whose loyalties would be "interesting" to the government. And yes, it'd be abused, perhaps for political reasons. I doubt that Nixon was the only president with an "enemies list", or the will to use it.
Much like how the intelligence establishment has abused its powers before and to this day, of course. For instance, the whole "sell arms to Iran for cash to redirect to the Contras" bit was quite illegal...
But for obvious reasons, opening up the whole list of intelligence activities to, say, public scrutiny, is not the brightest thing to do. A wiretap is most likely pointless if you alert the victim that when and where you're going to start tapping; even tipping a subject off that he IS a subject can bollix up an investigation. Hence, either such methods are not used at all, or they are used in secret.
If they are forgone, then logically existing wiretapping powers should be discarded as well, since they have the same issues. However, if you don't trust an intelligence establishment at all, you might as well completely emasculate it; no SIGINT capabilities of any kind, leaving largely HUMINT, parsing of public newsfeeds, and aerial recon. HUMINT may not work that well when dealing with homogeneous, fanatical organizations, in contrast to more mercenary types...
On who monitors the monitors, it's the same issue as who polices the police, to a certain degree. The analogy would hold better for the FBI wiretapping since police abuses tend to be more noticeable, but...
You need a strong, independent (in the sense that the rest of the government does not pressure them) judiciary willing and capable of imposing severe penalties for corruption and abuse of power. Any government power can be abused, just about -- everything from a spiteful postman stealing your time-critical mail to an IRS insider facilitating the bogus "slavery reparations deduction" on people's tax returns to police shooting unarmed suspects and planting guns.
It's impossible to prevent governmental abuses unless it has NO power, in which case it might as well not exist. Even if you do in-depth psychological profiles and intrusively monitor their (the gov't workers) every action, somebody will try to abuse it.
When it comes to intelligence gathering, you'd likely need to have a strong internal auditing section dedicated to rooting out abuses or corruption, plus protection for whistleblowers. In addition, you'd need judges who pay attention to anything that's entered in as evidence, at least as to whether or not it was legally gathered...
Not all terrorists are criminal masterminds, nor are the necessarily quick to adapt. Did the Mafia stop using phones even after wiretapping became a known tool of the US? No; in fact, it's still used to nail organized crime. Did the WTC bombers (the truck bombers, that is) behave intelligently? Not particularly; they managed to go back to claim the deposit on the rental truck used, which contributed heavily to the ease of catching them...
I wouldn't bet on them ALL being adaptable enough to switch communications systems that rapidly, or being shrewd enough to even try.
There's no deterrent effect if they can't catch the criminals because they cannot find them, nor is there much evidence to suggest that "bait" cars turn non-thieves into thieves, instead of misdirecting those who intend to be car thieves into stealing the wrong cars.
That ignores another possibility -- that the copy of Windows is neither kept nor transferred, but destroyed, which may be the case if the original owner harbors a dislike for Windows and had replaced it shortly after purchase.
Unless Passport's implementation is incredibly computationally expensive, I don't think this argument would hold. After all, they're not talking at removing offline services; this merely would enable authentication for online services, of which they already offer quite a few (notably, filing income taxes).
If the ACLU didn't complain about an online method for paying income taxes, then they probably shouldn't complain about such a system with a different authentication system unless the new system imposes some additional burden. Which, unless Passport uses, say, RSA keys of ungodly size, seems unlikely.
Ah, another one who didn't read the article. This has nothing to do with terrorism, dumbass, and they're not selling it as such. In case you didn't notice, there are plenty of reasons why having good identity authentication is useful for services -- and simply typing in an SSN isn't a particularly strong measure.
The AC was almost certainly confused, as the BOFH refers to the "Bastard Operator from Hell" stories, which have nothing to do with the excerpt from the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" excerpt you posted.
Mostly it's because it's difficult to have an objective standard of what's porn and what's not. While the "community standards" approach that's currently used for defining obscenity may work for some things (e.g. restricting the sale of a magazine -- within the community that dislikes it), domain names are global. Some communities, notably certain religious sects, have rather prudish views on women's appearances.
And if the response is "Well, you always have to ask a lawyer", that gets pretty expensive.
The second provision -- at least, the one that's claimed in a CNN article and in Landrieu's press release; as far as I can tell, there's no "Family Privacy and Protection Act" yet listed on thomas.loc.gov so I have no full text of the actual bill -- may be more troubling. The press release merely states "material harmful to minors", which is pretty damn vague. I could claim that trashy pop culture is harmful to minors by getting teenyboppers to spend ridiculous amounts of money on drivel, but I don't think that's what they had in mind, so the bill should be a bit more specific than the press release.
This, of course, raises the question of whether it should really be a Federal issue at all instead of, say, merely a resolution expressing support for such bills...
It also had to do with how the contractors accounted for overhead; at least at one time, they divided it up pretty much evenly among all items instead of using a more detailed system.
Of course, the "journalist" who first picked up and ran with the non-story apparently never bothered to check... or, perhaps, did check but decided that it'd hurt the story.
Re:BINGO! New game idea for "Post-9/11"
on
Byte Wars
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· Score: 2
...or do something that affects a lot of people, like trying to gradually introduce numerous small errors into the electronic trading systems, or a DOS of emergency communications systems coincident with a real-world attack.
Or, for that matter, being able to plant stories on the wire services could be interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
If your populace is anything like what we have over on the other side of the pond, cameras generate something else: votes from frightened residents.
Unless that particular Saudi "religious leader" was actually influential, it may not really be a fair point to make.
However, it would be consistent with al-Riyadh's recent (retracted after criticism) two-part article on Jewish dietary customs with regards to Purim (notably, repeating the ol' canard that Jews celebrate the holidays by torturing and eating Gentile children), and the Saudi ambassador to the UK writing a poem that praised a recent Palestinian suicide bomber, writing that the gates of Heaven were opened to her. Oh, and the recent Saudi telethon that raised money for Palestinian "martyrs". And it's the same Saudi government that concurred with the OIC's decision to support the US war against terrorism... but also declaring that the Israelis were the only terrorists in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
To be a bit cynical, violence and atrocities in the Middle East isn't particularly "new" news compared to large-scale attacks on the United States, which have been rather surprisingly rare, considering how many groups would be pleased to be have completed such an attack.
Is it surprising that Palestinians still talk about Palestinian land, "from the river to the sea", or that "In the Palestinian lexicon, Israel has no place on the map" (Frontline interviews)? Not really; even a "peacemaker" like Arafat has made, well, pretty much zero concessions. Ever. Other than saying, well, that he'd consider destroying Israel with demographics (unlimited "right of return" to Israeli land) than with military force.
And as a result of Arafat going against even his own negotiators and screwing over both Barak and Clinton by never making concessions, let alone a peace plan, and stipulating only additional demands, they got Gen. Sharon. The results are obvious.
Hell, we've been in an undeclared war against Iraq ever since Desert Storm, at least if you count the embargo, air patrols, explicit support for anti-Saddam movements, winking at Turkish violations of Iraqi sovereignty, the Iraqi plot to assassinate Bush the Elder when he visited Kuwait, the Iraqi bounties on American pilots...
It would be amusing if a HUGE sticker were required to be slapped on the outside of software boxes containing such licenses, stating that "Food for thought: The publisher of this product would like you to know that he feels entitled to FUCK OVER YOUR COMPUTER AND ALL ITS CONTENTS and he won't owe you a dime."
In big alarming black-on-yellow letters.
Pity it'd never happen, but...
20:1 is not terribly surprising given the disparity in training, unity and material, no? It's not like there is one Palestinian resistance movement; there are multiple rival organizations, and there's probably a fair bit of duplication of effort. I suspect that the various Colonial wars (Brits. vs Zulus and Sudanese -- think Khartoum) were pretty one-sided in loss ratios, as well.
It also doesn't take a genius to realize that standing in a street, lobbing rocks with a slingshot at troops, is not a terribly great military tactic. Nor, for that matter, is standing in a a street and firing an assault rifle at a buttoned-up Merkava(*). Of course, both may be useful POLITICALLY. Notice, for instance, that Palestinian funerals tend to be political rallies and propaganda events...
(*) Given the questionable Israeli habit of sending tanks through hostile cities mere scores of feet from enemies, and the amount of explosives in the West Bank -- TNT-laden mortar shells and improvised explosive compounds -- it's surprising that they've not lost more. The PA has tried to import RPGs through Iranian channels, but apparently hasn't been too successful.
Nope. You rejected their terms by adding your own requirements, and that's a cancellation.
*shrug*
It's probably just a not particularly subtle jab at the US DOE nuclear weapon simulations research which gets done on the big American gov't supercomputers -- in other words, pointing out that they're using their CPU cycles for what theyc consider a better purpose. Japan isn't particularly fond of nuclear weapons at all.
Why? Remember that Godjira was woken up by nuclear bomb tests. I don't think they want to have to deal with MORE giant monsters, even if they eventually become defenders of Earth against Planet X.
What might they have to repress? Well, they're not even in the same league as North Korea as far as repression goes, but...
It would not be too surprising if their entrance in the WTO eventually leads to greater unrest in urban areas, considering that the lowering of trade barriers will hurt the more inefficient state industries, and that the guaranteed-job entitlement may need to be sharply cut back...
Figure that they're also probably a bit more paranoid than most nations with regards to unrest, dissent and insurrections. They've had some pretty significant rebellions and civil wars in their long history, and they're even now still having to deal with separatist terrorists...
In Chavez's case, it's not surprising that suspicion fell on him pretty rapidly. Recall that he was involved in two previous armed conspiracies to overthrow the government... it's actually quite remarkable that they allowed him to run at all, really. Apparently Venezuela's more forgiving than most countries in that regard.
Hmm. Wasn't the Speer in charge of setting industrial targets, planning a centralized economic strategy, and managing the various businessmen under the Nazi administration? Or was that only for materials judged necessary for the war effort?
Of course it'd be used to seek out traitors -- or, more precisely, anybody whose loyalties would be "interesting" to the government. And yes, it'd be abused, perhaps for political reasons. I doubt that Nixon was the only president with an "enemies list", or the will to use it.
Much like how the intelligence establishment has abused its powers before and to this day, of course. For instance, the whole "sell arms to Iran for cash to redirect to the Contras" bit was quite illegal...
But for obvious reasons, opening up the whole list of intelligence activities to, say, public scrutiny, is not the brightest thing to do. A wiretap is most likely pointless if you alert the victim that when and where you're going to start tapping; even tipping a subject off that he IS a subject can bollix up an investigation. Hence, either such methods are not used at all, or they are used in secret.
If they are forgone, then logically existing wiretapping powers should be discarded as well, since they have the same issues. However, if you don't trust an intelligence establishment at all, you might as well completely emasculate it; no SIGINT capabilities of any kind, leaving largely HUMINT, parsing of public newsfeeds, and aerial recon. HUMINT may not work that well when dealing with homogeneous, fanatical organizations, in contrast to more mercenary types...
On who monitors the monitors, it's the same issue as who polices the police, to a certain degree. The analogy would hold better for the FBI wiretapping since police abuses tend to be more noticeable, but...
You need a strong, independent (in the sense that the rest of the government does not pressure them) judiciary willing and capable of imposing severe penalties for corruption and abuse of power. Any government power can be abused, just about -- everything from a spiteful postman stealing your time-critical mail to an IRS insider facilitating the bogus "slavery reparations deduction" on people's tax returns to police shooting unarmed suspects and planting guns.
It's impossible to prevent governmental abuses unless it has NO power, in which case it might as well not exist. Even if you do in-depth psychological profiles and intrusively monitor their (the gov't workers) every action, somebody will try to abuse it.
When it comes to intelligence gathering, you'd likely need to have a strong internal auditing section dedicated to rooting out abuses or corruption, plus protection for whistleblowers. In addition, you'd need judges who pay attention to anything that's entered in as evidence, at least as to whether or not it was legally gathered...
Not all terrorists are criminal masterminds, nor are the necessarily quick to adapt. Did the Mafia stop using phones even after wiretapping became a known tool of the US? No; in fact, it's still used to nail organized crime. Did the WTC bombers (the truck bombers, that is) behave intelligently? Not particularly; they managed to go back to claim the deposit on the rental truck used, which contributed heavily to the ease of catching them...
I wouldn't bet on them ALL being adaptable enough to switch communications systems that rapidly, or being shrewd enough to even try.
There's no deterrent effect if they can't catch the criminals because they cannot find them, nor is there much evidence to suggest that "bait" cars turn non-thieves into thieves, instead of misdirecting those who intend to be car thieves into stealing the wrong cars.
It would be amusing if it continuously played Celine Dion warbling the "Titanic" theme. Or would that be police brutality?
(Heh. The car phone rings... "You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law...").
That ignores another possibility -- that the copy of Windows is neither kept nor transferred, but destroyed, which may be the case if the original owner harbors a dislike for Windows and had replaced it shortly after purchase.
Unless Passport's implementation is incredibly computationally expensive, I don't think this argument would hold. After all, they're not talking at removing offline services; this merely would enable authentication for online services, of which they already offer quite a few (notably, filing income taxes).
If the ACLU didn't complain about an online method for paying income taxes, then they probably shouldn't complain about such a system with a different authentication system unless the new system imposes some additional burden. Which, unless Passport uses, say, RSA keys of ungodly size, seems unlikely.
Ah, another one who didn't read the article. This has nothing to do with terrorism, dumbass, and they're not selling it as such. In case you didn't notice, there are plenty of reasons why having good identity authentication is useful for services -- and simply typing in an SSN isn't a particularly strong measure.
The AC was almost certainly confused, as the BOFH refers to the "Bastard Operator from Hell" stories, which have nothing to do with the excerpt from the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" excerpt you posted.
Mostly it's because it's difficult to have an objective standard of what's porn and what's not. While the "community standards" approach that's currently used for defining obscenity may work for some things (e.g. restricting the sale of a magazine -- within the community that dislikes it), domain names are global. Some communities, notably certain religious sects, have rather prudish views on women's appearances.
And if the response is "Well, you always have to ask a lawyer", that gets pretty expensive.
The second provision -- at least, the one that's claimed in a CNN article and in Landrieu's press release; as far as I can tell, there's no "Family Privacy and Protection Act" yet listed on thomas.loc.gov so I have no full text of the actual bill -- may be more troubling. The press release merely states "material harmful to minors", which is pretty damn vague. I could claim that trashy pop culture is harmful to minors by getting teenyboppers to spend ridiculous amounts of money on drivel, but I don't think that's what they had in mind, so the bill should be a bit more specific than the press release.
This, of course, raises the question of whether it should really be a Federal issue at all instead of, say, merely a resolution expressing support for such bills...
It also had to do with how the contractors accounted for overhead; at least at one time, they divided it up pretty much evenly among all items instead of using a more detailed system.
Of course, the "journalist" who first picked up and ran with the non-story apparently never bothered to check... or, perhaps, did check but decided that it'd hurt the story.
...or do something that affects a lot of people, like trying to gradually introduce numerous small errors into the electronic trading systems, or a DOS of emergency communications systems coincident with a real-world attack.
Or, for that matter, being able to plant stories on the wire services could be interesting.