Re:there's an argument to be made....
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Naah. I'd still disdain Arafat as a corrupt (the man profits off of casinos, et al, while his people starve) terrorist leader. After all, he's released from prison many terrorists (double-digits, methinks), and exactly zero peace offers. Yup, that's how to negotiate -- reject an offer that gives the entire Gaza Strip and almost all the West Bank, and not bother to make a counteroffer.
Re:there's an argument to be made....
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All America needs to do to incense a fanatic is, frankly, to keep existing.
Think about its reach in terms of financial and cultural power alone, for instance -- there are symbols of American influence practically everywhere in the world. This most certainly causes resentment.
And, er, some of these people aren't happy with anybody BUT radical Islamic states. So merely being meek in foreign policy ain't going to help.
It seems that Hizbollah even has an English section. They've been linked to various incidents, IIRC.
Re:Airport Security... Is that enough?
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Knives are now banned in-flight, at least for now. Apparently, the rule was that anything under 4 inches was legal, albeit that doesn't mean that airport security wouldn't hassle you, but today's ban is total. I could see a razor being included in this ban.
'course, to find the non-metallic ones, you may need to do a cavity search.
The US has nominally been at war with terrorists for a long, long, time providing training and equipment to militaries and law enforcement groups around the world. Remember that in the age of hijackings and air marshals, it was common practice for hijackers to collect everybody's passports, to locate Americans.
The US Marine Barracks incident in Beirut certainly served as a tip-off that the US has its enemies in the Middle East, largely due to its continued support of Israel but also other regimes (like backing the Shah of Iran didn't win us many friends in the Islamic Revolutionary government. We're STILL the Great Satan to them). Our treatment of Iraq hasn't won us many friends over there, either.
Re:What can be done about terrorism?
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Well,
a) Security was pretty lax on the domestic flights I've been on -- e.g. I've never been searched, nor had my carryons examined beyond being X-rayed (guess I don't fit the profile of a drug courier...), and the one time I brought a laptop, even that wasn't examined at all (and that was on an international flight).
So that means that I basically could have concealed all sorts of plastic / ceramic / wood / rope weapons. For instance, at one point the cord that closes off my backpack broke, so I replaced it with braided, knotted twine -- which could probably serve as a crude garotte if cut with, say, seemingly harmless safety scissors. Fishing line would also pass the detectors, and could easily be palmed when walking up the aisle (seemingly, to use the forwards restroom). And a backpack is a lot more innocent than, oh, a ceramic knife.
My watch passes metal detectors without causing a blip, and it's a normal-size Timex with a metal band. My eyeglasses (metal core beneath the plastic) also have never been examined (say, the tips of a spare pair could have been sharpened).
Pittsburgh Int'l, AFAICT, doesn't even use nitrogen detectors. FYI, those devices go back at least a few years, and are meant to detect the nitrogen found in many, many explosives -- but at least back then, they were expensive and often generated false positives, meaning inconvenience and longer delays. Convenience and cost won out over security.
Another tidbit: pilots don't go through the detectors, and I've never seen any pilot need to go through an ID check at that checkpoint.
b) It's not like the entire passenger section could have rushed at a few guys at once. Figure that an aisle is pretty narrow, and anybody climbing over seats to get at them is going to be at a huge disadvantage, so with three to four guys, they could probably watch each others' backs and keep passengers at bay. And that's *if* the passengers act in unison, and before the bad guys gain entry to the cockpit (which they may be able to re-lock, depending on how they breached it)... which, up until yesterday, was unlikely given that most hijackings have not had the intention of mass death (and hence, the passengers had a better chance of survival if they sat tight).
No weapons? That'd basically require full body cavity searches on everybody entering a terminal (or, immediately before entering the plane. Now THAT would increase boarding time...).
Well, he also happened to be the enemy of our best ally in the region (Israel), and also the enemy of a nation with middling ties to the US (Saudi Arabia), and Iraq's army, while not particularly modernized, was not of inconsiderable size -- within the top 10 in manpower, ISTR.
And the whole "I'm going to invade because I've got a historical claim to your land" is more than slightly destabilizing; if allowed to stand as precedent, probably just about every reasonably-old nation on Earth could use that as an excuse. That situation might make enormous amounts of money in the short term for the US (being the world's leading provider of small arms, IIRC), but isn't desirable from, oh, just about any other point of view.
Oh, and it also wouldn't have helped if Israel decided it a) had been abandoned by its one historical major ally, b) was surrounded by people obsessed with killing them, and c) was facing a madman with a rather large army, chemical-weapon warhead artillery, and a nuclear ambition. Given that Israel is thought to be a nuclear power, after all.
Today, shareholders in Russia's _Media Most_ group (which ran the main Russian independent television station) voted to dissolve it -- after, of course, it was taken over by Gazprom, a company with very strong ties to the Kremlin (and which had *its* hierarchy reorganized by allies of Putin not that long ago). The one-time head is a fugitive, under a warrant that Interpol does NOT respect on the grounds that it appears to be political. Oh, and yes, armed tax police were involved.
That's when a government basically says to an industry: "We own you." Without compensation or recourse, and with an underlying threat -- that governments have troops, and often -- for the ones doing this sort of thing -- populist, left-wing support. IOW, executives can either pack up and leave, or be attacked by either police or angry mobs...
And it's rather profitable for all sorts of government functionaries who then get involved in business.
Well, a government is a bit more likely to harrass, imprison, openly execute, or simply "disappear" somebody it doesn't like.
Companies are obligated to make a profit to survive (for long -- barring gullible investors willing to plough in more cash year after year); a government need not be efficient or well-liked as long as it's got a loyal, powerful and ruthless core [read: military/intelligence/police] along the lines of, say, Mao and Lenin.
- Bad keyphrase management, resulting in easily-cracked keyfiles should one be leaked.
- Buggy implementations that don't fail on very many test cases at all, unless you relish testing your mailer with the infinite number of possible messages.
- Bad handling of macros, attachments, and other things certain modern e-mailers try.
- Bad coding practices such as buffer overflows, which can exacerbate the above.
- Deliberate back-doors, such as automatically processing specially-formatted messages as instructions...
- Other misc bad behaviors such as eating file handles, zombie processes, and other examples of lousy coding practices.
There's also the matter of various principles involved, and questions worth asking, such as...
* Is this fraud? Namely, what should a consumer legally *expect* to be able to do with a CD, and how much can one differ from that without explicit warning before it's deceptive marketing?
* Is space-shifting still legal as fair use? And is it legal for a publisher to take measures to that block this?
We don't know much about the plaintiff -- perhaps she's a lawyer, perhaps she's wealthy enough not to care about legal fees (or it's contingency-fee, or even pro bono for the publicity [!]), perhaps she's interested in establishing a legal precedent before access-protection becomes ubiquitous on CDs, or so forth.
I'm pretty sure that your right to resell an item (in toto, substantially unmodified [read: not as a derivative work], and with no "backups" still lying around) is generally protected by first-sale doctrine, 'tho that may be on a state-by-state basis rather than by Federal fiat.
Are you aware that the law has protections for those that use working procedures for voluntarily removing infringing material?
And that the law takes into account whether or not something is primarily aimed at infringement, or whether it is marketed as such?
Do you believe that 2600 does *not* seek readers via hyping up a "cracking" approach, and that they would remove infringing material if asked (as the DMCA requires)?
Do you now see how low *your* standards are -- apparently criticizing a law you apparently have not even read, using situations you don't even understand?
eBay also has provisions for complainants to ask for the removal of a product. They've done that before, and even removed entire categories of merchandise to avoid controversy. They also have primarily non-infringing uses.
Both the removal procedure (one that actually works) and the significant non-infringing use bits *are specifically mentioned* in the DMCA. eBay isn't advertising as an infringing service, either (marketing something as a copyright infringement device or service is sufficient to be nailed under DMCA, even if such marketing is an out-right lie, IIRC).
Napster, in contrast, wasn't particularly amenable to having.MP3s removed (until they were forced to do so, they in fact claimed that they couldn't -- never mind that they control the search engine, and thus could 'hide' files by preprocessing results), and they were fully aware before-hand that they were going to be used primarily for infringement. BIG legal difference, and why eBay won this case and Napster did not.
You think that this type of lawsuit hasn't been tried?
Why do you think Smith & Wesson caved, when threatened with a suit by the Clinton administration? S&W was in dire-enough financial straits already that a lawsuit would have been overly expensive to fight, and they couldn't assume that it'd be laughed out of court, so they rolled ever.
*sigh*
You don't know how the government is organized, do you? And you aren't aware that it's the executive branch's decision to decide how to enforce the law?
Perfectly legal decision. It may or may not be good -- depends on how much teeth the proposed conduct remedies have, after all; those restrictions were the real force behind Jackson's proposed penalty anyway, since a breakup is meaningless if the halves are permitted to act as if they were one -- but it's legal.
Feh. Earnings -- in general -- are bad, forecasts for future earnings are bad, and there's a possibility of a nasty recession if consumers stop spending; in case you haven't been paying attention to financial news for the last, oh, year or so, there don't seem to be many analysts who lean towards Abby Cohen's bullish views anymore. The Microsoft decision isn't particularly relevant, compared to the fact that overall economy is pretty stagnant; crazy rates of growth don't last forever, after all.
If he wanted to be politically safe on stem cells, he wouldn't have made a whole big deal out of it -- it's not like that many people cared or even knew about the issue before they went on and on about how agonizing the decision was, eh?
'sides, how happy people feel about their pocketbooks will probably be the main factor in whether or not he's re-elected, anyhow, assuming that he's not caught with an intern or managing to save Kuwait in Desert Storm II: Smackin' Saddam S'more.
It's about leverage. A combined company offering a broad spectrum of products, each of which gives preferential treatment to others within the same spectrum, has a much stronger monopoly than the sum of the parts. Keep in mind that Jackson wanted not only a split, but also conduct restrictions (such as disallowing various kinds of bundling arrangements, and so forth).
DOJ = Executive Branch. Period. DOJ deals with prosecutions, investigations, administrivia, and so forth, and does NOT include the actual court systems themselves (the *true* judicial branch, to people who are more familiar with reality than yourself).
Consider reading the article next time -- it states that the administration was aware, and did not consider this a problem, believing that since experimental implantation in humans isn't going to happen anytime soon (Federal funding or no), they'll have time to find ways to work within FDA guidelines.
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Naah. I'd still disdain Arafat as a corrupt (the man profits off of casinos, et al, while his people starve) terrorist leader. After all, he's released from prison many terrorists (double-digits, methinks), and exactly zero peace offers. Yup, that's how to negotiate -- reject an offer that gives the entire Gaza Strip and almost all the West Bank, and not bother to make a counteroffer.
All America needs to do to incense a fanatic is, frankly, to keep existing.
Think about its reach in terms of financial and cultural power alone, for instance -- there are symbols of American influence practically everywhere in the world. This most certainly causes resentment.
And, er, some of these people aren't happy with anybody BUT radical Islamic states. So merely being meek in foreign policy ain't going to help.
It seems that Hizbollah even has an English section. They've been linked to various incidents, IIRC.
Knives are now banned in-flight, at least for now. Apparently, the rule was that anything under 4 inches was legal, albeit that doesn't mean that airport security wouldn't hassle you, but today's ban is total. I could see a razor being included in this ban.
'course, to find the non-metallic ones, you may need to do a cavity search.
A drone, and quite probably shot down -- there was another drone earlier that'd been destroyed. Seems that Iraq's air defenses are improving.
Of course, these are unarmed, unmanned craft. Locking a targetting radar onto an armed plane tends to attract HARMs and their ilk, IIRC.
The US has nominally been at war with terrorists for a long, long, time providing training and equipment to militaries and law enforcement groups around the world. Remember that in the age of hijackings and air marshals, it was common practice for hijackers to collect everybody's passports, to locate Americans.
The US Marine Barracks incident in Beirut certainly served as a tip-off that the US has its enemies in the Middle East, largely due to its continued support of Israel but also other regimes (like backing the Shah of Iran didn't win us many friends in the Islamic Revolutionary government. We're STILL the Great Satan to them). Our treatment of Iraq hasn't won us many friends over there, either.
Well,
a) Security was pretty lax on the domestic flights I've been on -- e.g. I've never been searched, nor had my carryons examined beyond being X-rayed (guess I don't fit the profile of a drug courier...), and the one time I brought a laptop, even that wasn't examined at all (and that was on an international flight).
So that means that I basically could have concealed all sorts of plastic / ceramic / wood / rope weapons. For instance, at one point the cord that closes off my backpack broke, so I replaced it with braided, knotted twine -- which could probably serve as a crude garotte if cut with, say, seemingly harmless safety scissors. Fishing line would also pass the detectors, and could easily be palmed when walking up the aisle (seemingly, to use the forwards restroom). And a backpack is a lot more innocent than, oh, a ceramic knife.
My watch passes metal detectors without causing a blip, and it's a normal-size Timex with a metal band. My eyeglasses (metal core beneath the plastic) also have never been examined (say, the tips of a spare pair could have been sharpened).
Pittsburgh Int'l, AFAICT, doesn't even use nitrogen detectors. FYI, those devices go back at least a few years, and are meant to detect the nitrogen found in many, many explosives -- but at least back then, they were expensive and often generated false positives, meaning inconvenience and longer delays. Convenience and cost won out over security.
Another tidbit: pilots don't go through the detectors, and I've never seen any pilot need to go through an ID check at that checkpoint.
b) It's not like the entire passenger section could have rushed at a few guys at once. Figure that an aisle is pretty narrow, and anybody climbing over seats to get at them is going to be at a huge disadvantage, so with three to four guys, they could probably watch each others' backs and keep passengers at bay. And that's *if* the passengers act in unison, and before the bad guys gain entry to the cockpit (which they may be able to re-lock, depending on how they breached it)... which, up until yesterday, was unlikely given that most hijackings have not had the intention of mass death (and hence, the passengers had a better chance of survival if they sat tight).
No weapons? That'd basically require full body cavity searches on everybody entering a terminal (or, immediately before entering the plane. Now THAT would increase boarding time...).
Terrorists generally use "retalliation" as an excuse. Do you honestly believe that they would *not* attack if left unmolested?
Well, he also happened to be the enemy of our best ally in the region (Israel), and also the enemy of a nation with middling ties to the US (Saudi Arabia), and Iraq's army, while not particularly modernized, was not of inconsiderable size -- within the top 10 in manpower, ISTR.
And the whole "I'm going to invade because I've got a historical claim to your land" is more than slightly destabilizing; if allowed to stand as precedent, probably just about every reasonably-old nation on Earth could use that as an excuse. That situation might make enormous amounts of money in the short term for the US (being the world's leading provider of small arms, IIRC), but isn't desirable from, oh, just about any other point of view.
Oh, and it also wouldn't have helped if Israel decided it a) had been abandoned by its one historical major ally, b) was surrounded by people obsessed with killing them, and c) was facing a madman with a rather large army, chemical-weapon warhead artillery, and a nuclear ambition. Given that Israel is thought to be a nuclear power, after all.
Today, shareholders in Russia's _Media Most_ group (which ran the main Russian independent television station) voted to dissolve it -- after, of course, it was taken over by Gazprom, a company with very strong ties to the Kremlin (and which had *its* hierarchy reorganized by allies of Putin not that long ago). The one-time head is a fugitive, under a warrant that Interpol does NOT respect on the grounds that it appears to be political. Oh, and yes, armed tax police were involved.
Ever hear about nationalization?
That's when a government basically says to an industry: "We own you." Without compensation or recourse, and with an underlying threat -- that governments have troops, and often -- for the ones doing this sort of thing -- populist, left-wing support. IOW, executives can either pack up and leave, or be attacked by either police or angry mobs...
And it's rather profitable for all sorts of government functionaries who then get involved in business.
Well, a government is a bit more likely to harrass, imprison, openly execute, or simply "disappear" somebody it doesn't like. Companies are obligated to make a profit to survive (for long -- barring gullible investors willing to plough in more cash year after year); a government need not be efficient or well-liked as long as it's got a loyal, powerful and ruthless core [read: military/intelligence/police] along the lines of, say, Mao and Lenin.
- Bad keyphrase management, resulting in easily-cracked keyfiles should one be leaked.
- Buggy implementations that don't fail on very many test cases at all, unless you relish testing your mailer with the infinite number of possible messages.
- Bad handling of macros, attachments, and other things certain modern e-mailers try.
- Bad coding practices such as buffer overflows, which can exacerbate the above.
- Deliberate back-doors, such as automatically processing specially-formatted messages as instructions...
- Other misc bad behaviors such as eating file handles, zombie processes, and other examples of lousy coding practices.
There's also the matter of various principles involved, and questions worth asking, such as...
* Is this fraud? Namely, what should a consumer legally *expect* to be able to do with a CD, and how much can one differ from that without explicit warning before it's deceptive marketing?
* Is space-shifting still legal as fair use? And is it legal for a publisher to take measures to that block this?
We don't know much about the plaintiff -- perhaps she's a lawyer, perhaps she's wealthy enough not to care about legal fees (or it's contingency-fee, or even pro bono for the publicity [!]), perhaps she's interested in establishing a legal precedent before access-protection becomes ubiquitous on CDs, or so forth.
I'm pretty sure that your right to resell an item (in toto, substantially unmodified [read: not as a derivative work], and with no "backups" still lying around) is generally protected by first-sale doctrine, 'tho that may be on a state-by-state basis rather than by Federal fiat.
Have you read actually read the entire DMCA?
Are you aware that the law has protections for those that use working procedures for voluntarily removing infringing material?
And that the law takes into account whether or not something is primarily aimed at infringement, or whether it is marketed as such?
Do you believe that 2600 does *not* seek readers via hyping up a "cracking" approach, and that they would remove infringing material if asked (as the DMCA requires)?
Do you now see how low *your* standards are -- apparently criticizing a law you apparently have not even read, using situations you don't even understand?
eBay also has provisions for complainants to ask for the removal of a product. They've done that before, and even removed entire categories of merchandise to avoid controversy. They also have primarily non-infringing uses.
.MP3s removed (until they were forced to do so, they in fact claimed that they couldn't -- never mind that they control the search engine, and thus could 'hide' files by preprocessing results), and they were fully aware before-hand that they were going to be used primarily for infringement. BIG legal difference, and why eBay won this case and Napster did not.
Both the removal procedure (one that actually works) and the significant non-infringing use bits *are specifically mentioned* in the DMCA. eBay isn't advertising as an infringing service, either (marketing something as a copyright infringement device or service is sufficient to be nailed under DMCA, even if such marketing is an out-right lie, IIRC).
Napster, in contrast, wasn't particularly amenable to having
You think that this type of lawsuit hasn't been tried?
Why do you think Smith & Wesson caved, when threatened with a suit by the Clinton administration? S&W was in dire-enough financial straits already that a lawsuit would have been overly expensive to fight, and they couldn't assume that it'd be laughed out of court, so they rolled ever.
Perfectly legal decision. It may or may not be good -- depends on how much teeth the proposed conduct remedies have, after all; those restrictions were the real force behind Jackson's proposed penalty anyway, since a breakup is meaningless if the halves are permitted to act as if they were one -- but it's legal.
Feh. Earnings -- in general -- are bad, forecasts for future earnings are bad, and there's a possibility of a nasty recession if consumers stop spending; in case you haven't been paying attention to financial news for the last, oh, year or so, there don't seem to be many analysts who lean towards Abby Cohen's bullish views anymore. The Microsoft decision isn't particularly relevant, compared to the fact that overall economy is pretty stagnant; crazy rates of growth don't last forever, after all.
If he wanted to be politically safe on stem cells, he wouldn't have made a whole big deal out of it -- it's not like that many people cared or even knew about the issue before they went on and on about how agonizing the decision was, eh?
'sides, how happy people feel about their pocketbooks will probably be the main factor in whether or not he's re-elected, anyhow, assuming that he's not caught with an intern or managing to save Kuwait in Desert Storm II: Smackin' Saddam S'more.
It's about leverage. A combined company offering a broad spectrum of products, each of which gives preferential treatment to others within the same spectrum, has a much stronger monopoly than the sum of the parts. Keep in mind that Jackson wanted not only a split, but also conduct restrictions (such as disallowing various kinds of bundling arrangements, and so forth).
Not you, apparently.
DOJ = Executive Branch. Period. DOJ deals with prosecutions, investigations, administrivia, and so forth, and does NOT include the actual court systems themselves (the *true* judicial branch, to people who are more familiar with reality than yourself).
Consider reading the article next time -- it states that the administration was aware, and did not consider this a problem, believing that since experimental implantation in humans isn't going to happen anytime soon (Federal funding or no), they'll have time to find ways to work within FDA guidelines.