You wont be able to fake these ID's with customs agents, or anyone else with the biometric scanners, because they will mostly likely be checking the biometric information against a central database. If you stole the passport information your biometric info won't match it unless you have the sophistication to produce contact lenses that fool the eye scans or synthetic finger prints to fool the finger print scan.
These ID's really are hard to forge though the use of the RFID chip is particularly scary since they may allow any government agent with a reader to ID you at any time without your knowledge or consent. These RFID chips need either a switch to allow you to enable them for scanning or a PIN you have to enter in the reader. Even then you couldn't count on there not be a back door so a RF proof shield would be the only reliable way to insure you aren't being ID'ed without your consent.
"And it's sad people have strong reasons not to trust the government enough to willingly provide it with their personal data....or, maybe, are there so many wannabe criminals?;)"
Many of the people that are afraid of intrusive government are political dissidents who object to the actions of the people currently in power. These "security" measures usually start out aimed at foreign enemies and criminals and nearly inevitably end up being using to punish political dissidents who are vocal opponents of the people in power.
For example, there are strong indications that the Bush administration is already using their no fly list to punish antiwar activists and political dissidents. A bunch of agencies can add your name to this list at their whim. There is no protocol to find out why your name was added to the list, or legal process to get your name taken off it. There are people that are guilty of nothing more than vocal opposition to the current regime that are being turned away at the airport or being subjected to detainment and intrusive searches thanks to this list. It slows down an antiwar activist if they have to drive cross country to a protest to voice their first amendment rights. Taken to the next level, as it is in full blown police states, the same list will be checked at train and bus stations and then at check points on the highway. At that point you stop traveling. At that point its to late to realize where all these intrusive measures you thought were so benign were leading.
http://www.counterpunch.org/cassel08062003.html http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,58386,00.h t ml
You just can't trust a benevolent government because they often turn malevolent and you may not know it until its too late. The U.S. has had its share of malevolent abusers of information in Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover who used their knowledge to attack and destroy political opponents. Hoover in particular went to great lengths to destroy Martin Luther King because he was advocating equal rights for blacks and was opposing the U.S. war in Vietnam. He also apparently neglected to return a call from Hoover and no one was allowed to no answer when Hoover called. King was no criminal but Hoover treated him like one.
You simply can never trust people who have power. As the saying goes it corrupts. The people who get it want to keep it and will often do anything to that end, reference Richard Nixon, 1972. The people that have power also want to inflict pain and discomfort on anyone who opposes how they are using their power.
If the people in power decide to launch a stupid war, get a lot of people killed, and people start objecting to it, they people in power can abuse all these databases to make life hard for their political opponents and dissidents.
"There is zero loss of privacy with this new system."
Except that thanks to the RFID chip any government agent with a portable reader can instantly ID you any time you carry one of these passports unless you take measures to block the RF signal which most people wont.
Its probably a CIA agents wet dream to walk in to a bar or airport in a hot spot in the world and in the space of about a minute ID everyone in the place with one of these passports. Using a wireless link to the central database they will instantly know who in the room are terrorism suspects, who are political dissidents and who are esteemed citizens of the police state and to be shown deference at all times. As with most invasions of privacy the people with something to hide will know how to beat them and most ordinary people won't.
"How many "known" terrorists enter the US? How many of those enter on stolen passports? As far as I know, all of the Sept. 11 terrorists were: a) unknown as terrorists and b) here on valid passports and visas."
At least two of the 9/11 hijackers where known terrorists and known members of Al Quaeda and entered the U.S. semi legally. The CIA knew when they entered the U.S. they just neglected to tell the FBI so they weren't followed and quickly disappeared. If they had been tailed 9/11 probably wouldn't have happened. So we are getting a bunch of intrusive big brotherish measures when 9/11 could have been stopped if the CIA and just communicated a simple fact to the FBI. The conservatives try to blame this absence of communication on the chinese wall placed between these two agencies in the 70's but its more likely that they are constantly fighting turf wars, reticent to share information with each other and generally just don't work well with each other.
You would have to figure at this point forward, Al Quaeda will use people who aren't known terrorists which probably slows them down a little and it does add some uncertainty since they don't know with great certainty who has been ID'ed. The U.S. is holding most Al Quaeda terror suspects anonymously and incommunicado precisely so Al Quaeda is in the dark on who in their networks might have been compromised
I am less concerned about identity thieves getting the data from the RFID chips than government agents. The article says:
"Questions of privacy also had to be addressed because the chips will use radio frequency identification technology to transmit data. Without protection, the technology theoretically might allow people--identity thieves, for example, or intelligence agents other than immigration officials--to electronically and surreptitiously determine the identity of a passport holder."
The biometric data would be hard for an identity thief to fake and its presumably going to be in a central database and checked when customs scan you fingerprints or iris. You would need good fake fingerprints or contacts to beat that. I am hoping the RFID chip isn't going to have address, phone and social security #, but I wager it will, because then identity thieves might crack it for conventional identity theft, as in getting credit cards.
But there is NO solution to protect against CIA, FBI, ATF, homeland security and military intelligence agents getting access to portable readers that have the keys. We just have to trust that custom agents will be the only one with readers and that is a lot to trust. You have to figure that every nation using this system is going to have to interoperate so the keys to this are going to be all over the world.
For example a CIA agent with a portable reader could ID everyone carrying one of these passports in an instant in a bar overseas, clandestinely and without authority. Sure is a lot easier than having to take pictures or try to steal a fingerprint off a glass. So I would agree with the original poster. If you want to protect your privacy you better find a sleeve that blocks the RF. If the government really wanted to protect your privacy they would install a switch so it could only be read when you authorize it. I am pretty sure the governments involved WANT to be able to clandestinely ID everyone who is carrying one of these passports, and most people do carry them when traveling since they are the main form of ID overseas.
"And many of the opponents of the war were bribed or coerced into not participating. So your point is what?"
Maybe you could explain who you're talking about or cite an example. Most countries and the majority of the population of most countries were against the war without any bribery or coercion. France lobbied against the war but I'm pretty sure they didn't bribe anyone and didn't have nearly the coercion power the U.S. did.
As you recall the U.S. was going to give Turkey billions to buy their support.
The Foreign Minister of Poland, one of the larger members of the coalition, flat out said they were in it to get a chunk of Iraq's oil business. If you recall you had to be part of the "coalition of the willing" to bid on the contracts in Iraq which are the modern form of the spoils of war.
"As stated numerous times, in fact over and over and over again. Saddam paid families of suicide bombers in Israel. Therefore Saddam is a supporter of terrorism. Even if you think Saddam was no threat to us he was clearly a threat to Isreal who is our ally. "
So what exactly does suicide bombers in Israel have to do with defending the U.S. If you're saying the U.S. invaded Iraq under orders from Israel, I'd say I wouldn't be surprised, but thats more disturbing than the U.S. doing it for its own motives. Why would it be the job of the U.S. to waste hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of American soldiers lives to defend Israel in such an enormously round about way. There have been more people killed in Iraq in the last year than in decades of suicide bombers in Israel. There are still and will continue to be Palestinian suicide bombers whether Saddam pays their next of kin or not. The fact is Palestinians in Israel have no hope and nothing to live for. Fix that if you want to get rid of suicide bombers.
"No one is trying too. See the 2000 plus times they fired at our aircraft who were enforcing U.N. no-fly zones. Attacking us is provocation, clearly against the agreement signed after Desert Storm. Also see the state sponsored terrorism mentioned before. Attacking our friend(Israel) using a proxy(Hezbollah, et. al.) is supposed to be treated as an attack on us. Unfortunately most of the decision makers in the U.N. were on the take and were delaying action for years."
Apparently you don't know what you are talking about. Hezbollah is a Shia group, its Iran's proxy, not Iraq's. Saddam is Sunni. Not likely he is going to be on good terms with a Shia terrorist group since he massively persecuted the Shia's in Iraq and waged war with Iran. I guess your saying the U.S. should get the tanks warmed up and take down Iran now in our apparently never ending duty to exterminate all of Israel's enemies, which is most of the Arab and Muslim world?
I doubt you could sort out who was shooting at who in the no fly zone. The whole concept was deeply flawed. The first Bush administration should have taken down Saddam in the first war when there was justification instead of setting up that decades long disaster. The one time it should have been enforced is when George H.W. Bush goaded the Kurd's and Shia's into revolting against Saddam after the first war. When they did he turned his back on them and let Saddam slaughter them and filled a lot of those mass graves the current Bush administration is so upset about.
"Please explain that to Zarqawi, who is Al Queda and in Iraq...wait...that seems like a link to me."
Please explain to my how Zarqawi's presence in Iraq today, when Saddam is no longer in power, proves a link between Al Quaeda and Saddam before the war. The logic of your argument, like all your arguments, b-baggins is deeply flawed.
The Al Quaeda link was claimed by the Bush administration before the U.S. invasion and was based on deeply flawed intelligence, like most of their case for war, in particular there was one, I repeat one, supposed meeting in Eastern Europe between Al Quaeda and Iraqi intelligence which has since been debunked or at least there is no evidence it ever happened, just like there is no creditable evidence Saddam was trying to by yellowcake in Niger other than really badly forged documents.
All indications are Zarqawi moved in to Iraq after the U.S. invasion when the country was in chaos. Islamic fundamentalists have been streaming in to Iraq to fight the U.S. invasion just like they streamed in to Afghanistan and Chechnya when the Russians invaded them. This roving Muslim army has existed since the CIA and Pakistan intelligence created it to us as a proxy against the U.S.S.R in Afghanistan. Al Quaeda was born in these same CIA sponsored camps in Pakistan with CIA funding. Now this ever expanding roving Muslim army goes whereever Muslims are being attacked. Today they are in Iraq fighting the U.S.
I would agree that it was not exactly unilateral since the U.S. did have allies, but so did Germany in World War II. There is a near certainty, and in fact Bush has said it, he would have invaded Iraq if he the U.S. went alone so for all practical purposes it was unilateral he just managed to scrape together a ragged coalition to make it kind of look like it wasn't. When Bush decided he was going to do it and do it alone if necessary he made it unilateral. Many of the members of the coalition were also either bribed or coerced in to participation. The chances are pretty good all the leaders who willingly participated will get voted out of office at the first opportunity, Spain already having done so and Australia may well towards the end of the year.
A better description of Iraq is "aggressive warfare". That is when you preemptively attack someone who is not posing an immediate threat to your nation. It is against international law. The backing of the U.N. is desirable precisely because it gives a war international legitimacy. Iraq engaged in aggressive warfare when it attacked Kuwait, thats why the U.N. and the world backed the first gulf war. The U.S. and U.N. should have taken down Saddam then when they had justification. To come back more than a decade later and do it with no real provacation, and at enormous expense($200 billion and counting, nearly 800 dead and counting, and thousands wounded) was just unwise.
"Anyone who still doesn't think AL Qaeda and Iraq have links after the beheading of a kidnapped American and the Jordanian bomb plot is self-delusional."
Al Quaeda's presence in Iraq NOW is a product of the U.S. invasion. Its simply irrational to point to the fact they are there now and say "See I told you so" when they weren't there before the war. The only part of Iraq Al Quaeda was known to be in before the war wasn't under Saddam's control. Saddam was a socialist, and Muslim only when convenient. Fundamentalists like those in Al Quaeda despised him as a result.
"2. WMD was not the only reason given for the attack on Iraq (read the actual transcript of the State of the Union address instead of your DNC talking points)."
It was the ONLY reason the Bush administration had that they could use to sucker Congress and the American people in to backing the war. Cheney in particular constantly invoked the prospect of a nuclear cloud of an American city if we didn't invade Iraq immediately. It was shameful in its deceit. Even recently Cheney was still trying to claim some vans seized could be used to produce biological weapons when no expert will back him.
Number 2 on the list was this bizarre assertion that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 when there is NO evidence of that whatsoever. 9/11 was perpetrated by Saudi's. If you were going to invade some nation besides Afghanistan over it the next country most responsible was Saudi Arabia. Thats why the Bush Administration had to censor huge tracts about Saudi Arabia in the congressional report on 9/11.
Number 3 was to bring "Freedom and Democracy". I'll give you that one when there is real "Freedom and Democracy" in Iraq. Not an American puppet state or a repressive Shia dominated Islamic republic which would be the near certain outcome the day there is a fair election in Iraq.
"3. Iraq is a battle in the war. The war is on terror."
Iraq is a huge distraction from the war on terrorism. The fact the Bush administration did a half assed job in Afghanistan where the real war should have been fought was because they were in a rush to attack Iraq for no good readson. In fact invading Iraq wass pouring gasoline on the war on terror. The massive humiliation the U.S. is heaping on the Arab and Muslim world is driving moderate Arabs in to the hands of Al Quaeda and is a recruiting poster for a new army of suicide bombers. When Bush recently expressed unabashed support for Sharon and Israel and took it upon himself to make unilate
If you want to see the context of this often used, and used out of context quote, its from "The Contest in America":
http://www.gutenberg.net/etext04/conam10h.htm
It is a justification of the North's position in the civil war, speaks out against slavery and assaults England for backing the South in the war.
For some odd reason you see this quote all over and its usually misquoted by people seeking to justify war. In particular they leave out this antiwar part:
"When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people."
I'm assuming you are using the quote to justify the war in Iraq on the grounds the U.S. is freeing the Iraqis from the tyranny of Saddam as Mill was praising the North for freeing the slaves from tyranny.
Unfortunately the war in Iraq could as easily fall under the category of "when a people are used...for the selfish purposes of a master".
The U.S. pretty clearly had some mixed motives in invading Iraq to the point no one can actually tell you why the Bush administration really did it. Freeing the Iraqi's from tyranny was way down on the list when it started if you recall, it was preceded by WMD's, none of which were found and by some kind of revenge for 9/11 though Iraq had NOTHING to do with 9/11 despite the propaganda to the contrary. The unspoken selfish rationale's could as easily be control of the oil rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia, installing military bases in the region, potentially as a precursor for taking down Iran and Syria, or reshaping the Middle East in an American mold and in particular opening it up to exploitation by American corporations.
If you look at the state of things today the U.S. seems to be inflicting a lot of tyranny of its own on Iraq these days so its pretty hard to make the case that the U.S. is bringing freedom and democracy to Iraqis though we can all hope that, by some miracle, that does happen someday.
I guess I'm saying its impossible to say if the war in Iraq is really about fighting tyranny. Mill's quote could just as easily be used to condemn the U.S. and its leaders are obsessing over "personal safety" or people are being used for the "selfish purposes of a master".
You could also just as easily use Mill's quote to advocate Americans rising against their own increasingly tyrannical government, or to justify the Iraqi insurgent's efforts to throw out a foreign occupier who is imprisoning them unjustly. The CPA itself admits 90% of the prisoners its holding aren't guilty of anything and its very likely some of those being tortured are innocent.
"You wanna be mad at somebody? Point to the asshole that thinks the right way to express himself is to brainwash people into flying planes into buildings."
OK I'm mad at them but I'm also mad at the assholes that are going out of their way to piss off the entire Muslim world. Their names are Bush, with a little help from his friends, and Sharon.
I also kind of doubt brain wash is exactly the right word. The fact is many Arab's simply hate the U.S. and Israel with an unbridled passion, they have real reasons, and more of them hate the U.S. more every day. Its not because they hate our "Freedom and Democracy" because as this thread once again points out there sure as hell isn't any meaningful Democracy left, the two party system has devoured it, and the Freedom part is disappearing rapidly..
The world would be a lot better off if both sides backed off, Judeo-Christian being one side and Muslim being the other. But instead we appear headed for one of those never ending tit for tat escalations just like the one between Israel and Palestine which is been going on for 50 years with no end in sight. Lots of people will get killed, life will suck, no one wins, each side says its the others fault, THEY are barbarians. It ain't worth it.
"Basically, Al-Hussayen's crime was to be associated with a web site that praised suicide bombing in Chechnia and Israel."
I doubt the DOJ could care less about suicide bombers in Chechnia, unless maybe Putin lobbied them to care, but they will come after you for expressing any sympathy for the Palestinians or the suicide bombers who are resisting Israel's occupation with one of the few means at their disposal. The fact is Israel has massive military superiority over everyone in the region thanks to the U.S. and the Palestinians haven't got much but rifles and C4. I guess they could just lay down and let the Israeli push them in to a new diaspora which is Israel's plan ultimately. Suicide bombings are an unfortunate means of resistance, perhaps a non violent resistance in the mold of Ghandi would work better but the Palestinians are a desperate people.
Its kind of a fact of life Israel and the Friends of Israel lobby in the U.S. has acquired massive influence over the U.S., especially over the current administration and you simply can't say anything critical of Israel or express any support for the Palastinians without risking the current administration's wrath.
Having lived in both places I'm at a loss to know how this got moded to a 5. Its more like a troll by American who just has no appreciation for the good parts of life in Canada. There is a lot less violent crime just for starters. The pubs are generally a lot friendlier, the beer is waaayyy better. If you live in Toronto and go to a pub is pretty easy to spot the American's over the border for the weekend because they tend towards rude, pushy and snotty.
You kind of know its a troll when you hit "In the United States healthcare is still affordable". You've obviously never spent any time in a American hospital without insurance. It will cost you at least $20K for a week for something not major. I'm doubting you've paid for your own insurance either. If your company's paying for most of it you might lack an appreciation for how much it costs and how fast the rates are going up, especially in states with serious malpractice litigation problems. I think everyone knows the cost of healthcare and drugs is spiraling out of control in the U.S. and its probably one of the biggest threats to U.S. global competitiveness since most countries have socialized healthcare to one degree or another and they don't have corporations draining the life out the economy. Sure healthcare in the U.S. is great if you are rich or have gold plated insurance, its OK if you have Medicare, but if you are among the 40 million uninsured you are one illness away from bankruptcy.
It is the truth you may hit a boss who is a dick in the the U.S. or Canada. I have had bosses who are dicks who are American, Canadian and Indian but my experience is the American bosses are way more likely to be dicks than the Canadians. The Candian engineers I've worked with have been on average far better to work with. There is substantially less back stabbing, and climbing over your coworker to get to the top than there is in the U.S.
As I said a few weeks ago, the U.S. has a problem with its culture, education, media, military/gun obsession that is tending to cultivate a people who have a real tendency to be arrogant and ignorant which is a dangerous combination. Its not a surprise to most of the world that Bush is the President since he is the poster boy for arrogant and ignorant.
Well I think I mentioned this possibility in my post. But I don't think its real productive to spurn all corporations, especially ones making contributions to open source, just because there is always a chance a dickhead management team will take power and turn them to the dark side. When it happens then you deal with it. Maybe it is a good idea to make make sure no corporation has you by the balls so that it will get ugly if they are turned. Mono being an example of a technology looking to pervade open source that could prove to be a disaster if it does indeed became pervasive and it proves to be patent encumbered by a company that already would prefer to see open source burn in hell.
I'd say you are jumping to a conclusion without much basis in reality. The companies that are embracing and endorsing Linux are NOT going to be the stupid enough to launch law suites against the open source community. They would destroy their software business in the same way SCO has. Geeks would stop buying their software and services just on principal. The only company that would do it is one currently embracing open source, has a management change, and then decides to try and milk it or kill it like SCO.
The company with the patent portfolio to fear is pretty obviously Microsoft who is filing about a patent an hour. They aren't dumb and they know that:
A. The patent office is a push over in granting software patents so they can patent all kinds of obvious things and will reach a point you wont be able to write software without infringing their patents or at least you wont be able to right software that has lots of cool features in new versions of Windows because they will be patented.
B. With patents in hand Microsoft can, at will start going after open source software. Presumably this will commence 4 or so years after they decided to kill open source using patents and at a point they've accumulated enough patents to successfully do it which you would figure is probably a year or two from now. SCO could probably be considered as just their first salvo since they didn't need to wait on patent awards to fire that one. They know they can't compete on price but they also know they can strangle open source in the court room in the U.S. and eventually Europe. Of course this will likely just further improve the economic and technology positions of countries like China who will probably accelerate their progress while the west is mired in frivolous law suits.
C. Microsoft knows that the open source community doesn't have the war chest to fight a long string of protracted law suits unless places like IBM or HP pony up money and lawyers. Even if some of Microsoft's patents are thrown out based on prior art, some will win and even the ones that don't will drain the open source community's resources, time and will.
All in all the U.S. especially and the western world in general is setting itself up to destroy its software industry thanks to software patents and the army of lawyers who are going to get rich litigating them while just about everyone else loses, except the countries with the sense to ban them.
Exactly right. The technology does exist to disseminate war information quickly but in fact Iraq has been one of the most poorly reported wars in a long time at least as far as the U.S. media coverage goes. You pretty much have to turn to the Arab networks to see any of the reality of what's been going on in Iraq. Those networks are, no doubt, slanted against the U.S. but the U.S. networks have been sanitized to the point they aren't giving any information at all about the real situation there. Pretty simply the American media has been completely cowed by the Pentagon through a variety of means.
In particular most journalists have been embedded which gives them unprecedented access to military units but at the price that the military has gained massive control of what the journalists do and don't report and when. Since they live with the soldiers they were also showing a severe propensity to see things the soldiers way and not objectively. I'm guessing journalists who aren't embedded are having a real problem moving around Iraq or covering the story. You see very little truly independent coverage by American journalists. Embedding journalists was a stroke of genius by the military propagandists.
Its also a simple fact of life most of the major media outlets have been incredibly reticent to cover controversial aspects of the war until recently for fear they will be branded unpatriotic, and that it will hurt their ratings which will hurt their advertising revenue. They know Fox will launch a broadside at them if they stray away from the party line that all is well in Iraq, and a host of politicians like Tom Delay will accuse them of treacherously undermining our troops in the field.
If you look at the coverage of Vietnam those journalists actually covered the real war in all its gore and ugliness. It caused Vietnam to become extremely unpopular, but mostly because people actually saw what was happening. The Pentagon has gone to great lengths to make Iraq appear to be clean, neat, tidy and heroic, though only by covering up most of the blood and the brutality which only came to light because a private with a conscience made a report they couldn't ignore and someone else with a conscience finally leaked the pictures at great personal risk, just like Daniel Elsberg did with the Pentagon papers during Vietnam. If that person hadn't stuck there neck out to expose this I doubt you would have ever seen the pictures because the were classified and DOD would have buried them, while they court martialed some little fish.
Its a simple fact that since 9/11 the Bush Administration decided to take the gloves off and have been condoning torture in myriad ways but with plausible deniability, by doing it at Guantanamo off shore, by sending prisoners to foreign governments like Syria and Saudi Arabia for torture, and by just looking the other way in Iraq and Afghanistan. The whole point of creating the term "enemy combatants" in place of POW's and in side stepping Geneva convention protections was precisely so that intelligence could be gathered by any means necessary. The soldiers in Iraq are probably being court martialed for being stupid enough to take pictures that destroyed plausible deniability more than for the actual torturing.
Its important to note Cheney and Rumsfeld are experts at hiding brutality by the American military. They are the leading suspects for having buried the investigation of the 101st Airborne's Tiger force that went on a civilian killing spree in central Vietnam. That investigation died in the Nixon administration during Rumsfeld's first stint as Secretary of Defense and while Cheney was Nixon's chief of staff.
Fact is since 9/11 the Bush administration felt they were facing a ruthless enemy and if they wanted to win they had to be equally ruthless. Unfortunately in Iraq, with the surfacing of these pictures, its undermined the only remaining rationale for the war in Iraq, that the U.S. was liberating the Iraqi's from Saddam's brutality when in fact the U.S. is being pretty brutal itself. Its hard for the Bush administration to rant against "Saddam's rape rooms" when proof has surfaced that the rape rooms are still in use today.
Lets see, the U.S. spends six billion dollars in less than a month on the circus in Iraq which isn't producing any useful result. The U.S. has spent 6 or 7 times this on the F-22 and its still barely in limited production. Estimates very but the F-22 will run $200-$300 million a pop. Kind of shows you how screwed up our priorities are.
I really doubt the major powers will let a private company own a space elevator. It will so dramatically alter the balance of power I wager the U.S., E.U., Russia, China, Japan and India in particular will vie for control of it as soon as the technology arrives to make it look viable. It will be interesting to see if it becomes the object of a new space race which will be the BEST way to insure that it actually gets built. You have to wonder if the world will pull together and build one or will fight like cats and dogs and we end up with 3 or 4.
Don't recall if it has to be based at the equator. If it does when it becomes viable it will be interesting to see the major powers vie for control of the best spots for the base on the equator.
I think its more likely that the Secret Service has a detachment at U of T to guard the President's daughter who is a student there. I imagine they hang out at the Campus police department since I doubt she appreciates them tailing every minute of the day. This somewhat unusual request comes in and it was pretty much sure to set off some alarm bells as a potential threat to the President's daughter. If they didn't follow up on it would have been perceived as dereliction of their duty.
I supposed its possible it might have just set off an alarm as a plain old terrorism threat. To know for sure you would need to make the same request at some university's who don't have someone on campus with a secret service guard and see if they do or don't get the same treatment.
One of the President's daughters goes to U of T. I'm pretty sure she has a Secret Service detachment so they probably practically live at U of T when she is there.
If you really want to go to Mars, building a new space station or a base on the moon is unlikely to add anything other than hundreds of billions of dollars to the price tag. A direct launch from earth or launching modules in to orbit, docking them and then going to Mars is far more economical than trying to build a space station in orbit or on the moon.
About the only thing you might want from either is to get raw mass for shielding or propellent off the moon or water if there is any at the polls. All in all probably not worth the money and complexity to get it from the moon, versus going to great lengths to reduce launch costs and increase launch mass from Earth which is what you really need to enable a trip to Mars. Its a nice sci fi fantasy to think you are going to build a space ship at a space station but it would be absurdly expensive and impractical to do so.
Unfortunately there really isn't any likelihood of making it to Mars because the political leaders in the world today are not great men or great visionaries, they seem to be nearly universally small men, maybe because thats all civilization produces these days, or more certainly only small men make it through the filters that decide who acquires the power to decide where money is spent. Kennedy did have some vision though Apollo was unfortunately just a way to fight the cold war by other means rather than an example of humanity really seeking to advance itself, so the rationale for it fizzled as soon as the Russian's dropped out of the race.
Its just much easier, and politically safer, for politicians to squander vast sums of money and effort on wars, weapons and competition than to do something that would really advance the human race which a Mars colony would do. As long as you have political leaders who lack vision they are going to keep wasting the Earth's resources by fighting over the Earth's dwindling resources, rather than seeking ways to tap new resources. People are for the most part seeking wealth and power, and the easiest way to get it is to take it from someone else than to do something hard to create new wealth.
For example, you could've take the $87 billion that was poured down the drain in Iraq just for part of this year and funded a gigantic jumpstart for a colony to Mars. Since it appears likely a large occupation army will be in Iraq for decades the money for your Mars mission went down a rat hole right there. What we get out of Iraq in the end is even more poorly defined that what we would get out of a Mars colony. At a minimum spending that $87 billion in the U.S. would have generated a bunch of high quality jobs here and maybe produced some big leaps in technology that would have contributed to the U.S. economy. It would have also motivated young people to pursue science and engineering careers. At present one of the few sectors still hiring in those fields for jobs in the U.S. is to build weapons so its not surprising fewer and fewer American's pursue those fields. Maybe its just me but making a career out of making better ways to kill people just doesn't seem real worthwhile. So what we have now is that $87 billion is going to contractors in Iraq to give the Iraqi's power and schools. To be honest I think they should pay for those things themselves. So next time some politician argues spending money on a Mars colony is a waste of money just stop and think of all the really stupid stuff those same people are already wasting money on. They also pay billions every year to farmers to not grow stuff.
The other key problem with going to Mars in the U.S. at least is that NASA, rather than leading the way, is a gigantic bureaucratic impediment to doing anything useful in space. If a visionary leader came along that could round up the political support and the funding, that leader would have to create a new agency or company dedicated to the objective, one with a can do attitude, versus the can't do attitude thats infected NASA and its current contractors.
"be designing Internet voting using the Online Banking Model"
Excepting for the obvious fact that online banking is predicated on rigorous identification of the user while the most basic tenet of voting is rigorous defense of the anonymity of the user. This is the fatal, pretty much unfixable, flaw in using the Internet to vote.
Not having anonymity when you vote is all well and good in a kind and benevolent society. But as soon as the people in power can instill a little fear in the minds of voters that Big Brother might know how you vote and if you vote the wrong way you will pay for it, one way or another, you have crossed over in to dictatorship in one easy step.
That is why its immensely scary to hear the Department of Defense continually raise the concept of online voting for soldiers, soldiers who are already in a dictatorial system and can easily be intimidated in to voting to keep the Secretary of Defense and the President, their bosses, in power if they aren't assured of anonymity when they vote,
On the whole subject of voting being a luddite is the only rational course:
- Check in at desk manned by little old ladies and gents representing all interested parties - Get a piece of paper - Mark paper with a pen in a private booth - shove paper in a box - the box is guarded by little old ladies representing all interested parties - Contents are counted by little old ladies representing all interested parties
"Is he also critical of Monopoly, with it's trivialized depiction of pre-tax-reform US industry and culture?"
OK. you confused me on that one. I think George W. Bush just instituted "tax-reform" and the "fat little men in top hats" are making out like bandits afterwards. Your statement would have been accurate four years ago but now I think you need to revise it to:
"Is he also critical of Monopoly, with it's trivialized depiction of post-tax-reform US industry and culture?"
Also don't forget that George's administration gave Microsoft a get out of jail free card, after being convicted for abuse of their monopoly.
I'm pretty sure Monopoly must either be making a big comeback today, or maybe its flopping. Who wants to play the game when get to live it every day.
Oh yeah sure. Sour grapes for suggesting that it might be wise to spend a million dollars on orphans or a scholarship fund instead of wasting it on a car that is neither a good street car nor a good race car. I think the original poster suggested something about people who appreciate the engineering. In my book, good engineering is designing something that is well suited for the objective. This car is ridiculous overkill for a street car and bad for racing so where exactly is the good engineering.
If you can explain the wisdom in wasting a million dollars on this car I'm all ears.
How old are you. You sound like you must be in your late teens or twenties or you haven't been maturing at a normal rate. Most people after a few years of growing up realize what your doing just isn't worth it, either because you get busted a few times or you experience the horrors, one way or another, of auto accidents.
All I think you did was prove my point. There is no reason to license cars for the public highways that can run ridiculously in excess of the maximum speed limit and the maximum safe speed for those highways. You admit your using one to break the speed limit by 60-70 MPH pretty much every day. You are also clearly operating under the illusion/delusion you can safely run those kinds of speeds on public highways when you simply can't. Ever contemplate what will happen if you run over debris and have a blow out at those speeds. If your lucky you'll only kill yourself but you will be imposing on the emergency crew that has to cut your bloody carcass out of your car and clean up the mess.
I imagine you probably can run those speeds most of the time, but just stop and think about the possibility someone might have a breakdown in the middle of the night or be stuck on foot on that highway in dark clothing and you don't see them in time. I don't care how good you're brakes are, you still have to factor in reaction time and the foibles of human vision and concentration. Running those kind of speeds at night is especially stupid since your vision is dramaticly impaired, I don't care how good your headlights are. If something unexpected pops up at those speeds you must be about 10 times more likely to kill someone.
As I said in the original post, if you want to drive those speed go to a race track thats designed for it and have at it. There you are on a closed course and you aren't subjecting the rest of the world to what is apparently either immaturity or absence of wisdom. It only takes about 10 seconds for you to move from being stuck on your own superiority and the superiority of your car to regretting the rest of your life that you killed someone or maimed yourself or some innocent victim.
Here is an interesting link to a story from Fortune Magazine on the Sultan of Brunei and his family. Its a little hard to find online but it is still in Google cache. You keep hearing people oooh and aaah about the Sultan but this is the first time I found out the details of his whacky little world. In at least one case I think it proves my point that the people who collect these silly cars tend to not be the best of people. When it was written in 1999 Brunei's finances were a disaster area though a continuing stream of oil can patch over a pretty big financial disaster.
The Sultan is a descendent of a 600 year old royal family, they didn't preside over much but the steaming jungles of Borneo until Shell struck oil in the 1970's. The article refers to them as the Muslim version of the Beverly Hillbillies with a propensity for marrying first cousins which translates in to inbreeding, and a probably a penchant for all the ill effects that go with 600 years of inbreeding.
The Sultan, the Emir of Kuwait, the Saudi Royal family, all of these corrupt Muslim monarchies that struck it rich on oil are at the heart of why the Muslim world is exploding today and are the #1 customer for silly super cars.
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You wont be able to fake these ID's with customs agents, or anyone else with the biometric scanners, because they will mostly likely be checking the biometric information against a central database. If you stole the passport information your biometric info won't match it unless you have the sophistication to produce contact lenses that fool the eye scans or synthetic finger prints to fool the finger print scan.
These ID's really are hard to forge though the use of the RFID chip is particularly scary since they may allow any government agent with a reader to ID you at any time without your knowledge or consent. These RFID chips need either a switch to allow you to enable them for scanning or a PIN you have to enter in the reader. Even then you couldn't count on there not be a back door so a RF proof shield would be the only reliable way to insure you aren't being ID'ed without your consent.
"And it's sad people have strong reasons not to trust the government enough to willingly provide it with their personal data. ...or, maybe, are there so many wannabe criminals? ;)"
h t ml
Many of the people that are afraid of intrusive government are political dissidents who object to the actions of the people currently in power. These "security" measures usually start out aimed at foreign enemies and criminals and nearly inevitably end up being using to punish political dissidents who are vocal opponents of the people in power.
For example, there are strong indications that the Bush administration is already using their no fly list to punish antiwar activists and political dissidents. A bunch of agencies can add your name to this list at their whim. There is no protocol to find out why your name was added to the list, or legal process to get your name taken off it. There are people that are guilty of nothing more than vocal opposition to the current regime that are being turned away at the airport or being subjected to detainment and intrusive searches thanks to this list. It slows down an antiwar activist if they have to drive cross country to a protest to voice their first amendment rights. Taken to the next level, as it is in full blown police states, the same list will be checked at train and bus stations and then at check points on the highway. At that point you stop traveling. At that point its to late to realize where all these intrusive measures you thought were so benign were leading.
http://www.counterpunch.org/cassel08062003.html
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,58386,00.
You just can't trust a benevolent government because they often turn malevolent and you may not know it until its too late. The U.S. has had its share of malevolent abusers of information in Richard Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover who used their knowledge to attack and destroy political opponents. Hoover in particular went to great lengths to destroy Martin Luther King because he was advocating equal rights for blacks and was opposing the U.S. war in Vietnam. He also apparently neglected to return a call from Hoover and no one was allowed to no answer when Hoover called. King was no criminal but Hoover treated him like one.
You simply can never trust people who have power. As the saying goes it corrupts. The people who get it want to keep it and will often do anything to that end, reference Richard Nixon, 1972. The people that have power also want to inflict pain and discomfort on anyone who opposes how they are using their power.
If the people in power decide to launch a stupid war, get a lot of people killed, and people start objecting to it, they people in power can abuse all these databases to make life hard for their political opponents and dissidents.
"There is zero loss of privacy with this new system."
Except that thanks to the RFID chip any government agent with a portable reader can instantly ID you any time you carry one of these passports unless you take measures to block the RF signal which most people wont.
Its probably a CIA agents wet dream to walk in to a bar or airport in a hot spot in the world and in the space of about a minute ID everyone in the place with one of these passports. Using a wireless link to the central database they will instantly know who in the room are terrorism suspects, who are political dissidents and who are esteemed citizens of the police state and to be shown deference at all times. As with most invasions of privacy the people with something to hide will know how to beat them and most ordinary people won't.
"How many "known" terrorists enter the US? How many of those enter on stolen passports? As far as I know, all of the Sept. 11 terrorists were: a) unknown as terrorists and b) here on valid passports and visas."
At least two of the 9/11 hijackers where known terrorists and known members of Al Quaeda and entered the U.S. semi legally. The CIA knew when they entered the U.S. they just neglected to tell the FBI so they weren't followed and quickly disappeared. If they had been tailed 9/11 probably wouldn't have happened. So we are getting a bunch of intrusive big brotherish measures when 9/11 could have been stopped if the CIA and just communicated a simple fact to the FBI. The conservatives try to blame this absence of communication on the chinese wall placed between these two agencies in the 70's but its more likely that they are constantly fighting turf wars, reticent to share information with each other and generally just don't work well with each other.
You would have to figure at this point forward, Al Quaeda will use people who aren't known terrorists which probably slows them down a little and it does add some uncertainty since they don't know with great certainty who has been ID'ed. The U.S. is holding most Al Quaeda terror suspects anonymously and incommunicado precisely so Al Quaeda is in the dark on who in their networks might have been compromised
I am less concerned about identity thieves getting the data from the RFID chips than government agents. The article says:
"Questions of privacy also had to be addressed because the chips will use radio frequency identification technology to transmit data. Without protection, the technology theoretically might allow people--identity thieves, for example, or intelligence agents other than immigration officials--to electronically and surreptitiously determine the identity of a passport holder."
The biometric data would be hard for an identity thief to fake and its presumably going to be in a central database and checked when customs scan you fingerprints or iris. You would need good fake fingerprints or contacts to beat that. I am hoping the RFID chip isn't going to have address, phone and social security #, but I wager it will, because then identity thieves might crack it for conventional identity theft, as in getting credit cards.
But there is NO solution to protect against CIA, FBI, ATF, homeland security and military intelligence agents getting access to portable readers that have the keys. We just have to trust that custom agents will be the only one with readers and that is a lot to trust. You have to figure that every nation using this system is going to have to interoperate so the keys to this are going to be all over the world.
For example a CIA agent with a portable reader could ID everyone carrying one of these passports in an instant in a bar overseas, clandestinely and without authority. Sure is a lot easier than having to take pictures or try to steal a fingerprint off a glass. So I would agree with the original poster. If you want to protect your privacy you better find a sleeve that blocks the RF. If the government really wanted to protect your privacy they would install a switch so it could only be read when you authorize it. I am pretty sure the governments involved WANT to be able to clandestinely ID everyone who is carrying one of these passports, and most people do carry them when traveling since they are the main form of ID overseas.
"And many of the opponents of the war were bribed or coerced into not participating. So your point is what?"
Maybe you could explain who you're talking about or cite an example. Most countries and the majority of the population of most countries were against the war without any bribery or coercion. France lobbied against the war but I'm pretty sure they didn't bribe anyone and didn't have nearly the coercion power the U.S. did.
As you recall the U.S. was going to give Turkey billions to buy their support.
The Foreign Minister of Poland, one of the larger members of the coalition, flat out said they were in it to get a chunk of Iraq's oil business. If you recall you had to be part of the "coalition of the willing" to bid on the contracts in Iraq which are the modern form of the spoils of war.
"As stated numerous times, in fact over and over and over again. Saddam paid families of suicide bombers in Israel. Therefore Saddam is a supporter of terrorism. Even if you think Saddam was no threat to us he was clearly a threat to Isreal who is our ally. "
So what exactly does suicide bombers in Israel have to do with defending the U.S. If you're saying the U.S. invaded Iraq under orders from Israel, I'd say I wouldn't be surprised, but thats more disturbing than the U.S. doing it for its own motives. Why would it be the job of the U.S. to waste hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of American soldiers lives to defend Israel in such an enormously round about way. There have been more people killed in Iraq in the last year than in decades of suicide bombers in Israel. There are still and will continue to be Palestinian suicide bombers whether Saddam pays their next of kin or not. The fact is Palestinians in Israel have no hope and nothing to live for. Fix that if you want to get rid of suicide bombers.
"No one is trying too. See the 2000 plus times they fired at our aircraft who were enforcing U.N. no-fly zones. Attacking us is provocation, clearly against the agreement signed after Desert Storm. Also see the state sponsored terrorism mentioned before. Attacking our friend(Israel) using a proxy(Hezbollah, et. al.) is supposed to be treated as an attack on us. Unfortunately most of the decision makers in the U.N. were on the take and were delaying action for years."
Apparently you don't know what you are talking about. Hezbollah is a Shia group, its Iran's proxy, not Iraq's. Saddam is Sunni. Not likely he is going to be on good terms with a Shia terrorist group since he massively persecuted the Shia's in Iraq and waged war with Iran. I guess your saying the U.S. should get the tanks warmed up and take down Iran now in our apparently never ending duty to exterminate all of Israel's enemies, which is most of the Arab and Muslim world?
I doubt you could sort out who was shooting at who in the no fly zone. The whole concept was deeply flawed. The first Bush administration should have taken down Saddam in the first war when there was justification instead of setting up that decades long disaster. The one time it should have been enforced is when George H.W. Bush goaded the Kurd's and Shia's into revolting against Saddam after the first war. When they did he turned his back on them and let Saddam slaughter them and filled a lot of those mass graves the current Bush administration is so upset about.
"Please explain that to Zarqawi, who is Al Queda and in Iraq...wait...that seems like a link to me."
Please explain to my how Zarqawi's presence in Iraq today, when Saddam is no longer in power, proves a link between Al Quaeda and Saddam before the war. The logic of your argument, like all your arguments, b-baggins is deeply flawed.
The Al Quaeda link was claimed by the Bush administration before the U.S. invasion and was based on deeply flawed intelligence, like most of their case for war, in particular there was one, I repeat one, supposed meeting in Eastern Europe between Al Quaeda and Iraqi intelligence which has since been debunked or at least there is no evidence it ever happened, just like there is no creditable evidence Saddam was trying to by yellowcake in Niger other than really badly forged documents.
All indications are Zarqawi moved in to Iraq after the U.S. invasion when the country was in chaos. Islamic fundamentalists have been streaming in to Iraq to fight the U.S. invasion just like they streamed in to Afghanistan and Chechnya when the Russians invaded them. This roving Muslim army has existed since the CIA and Pakistan intelligence created it to us as a proxy against the U.S.S.R in Afghanistan. Al Quaeda was born in these same CIA sponsored camps in Pakistan with CIA funding. Now this ever expanding roving Muslim army goes whereever Muslims are being attacked. Today they are in Iraq fighting the U.S.
"1. No U.N. does not equal unilateral."
I would agree that it was not exactly unilateral since the U.S. did have allies, but so did Germany in World War II. There is a near certainty, and in fact Bush has said it, he would have invaded Iraq if he the U.S. went alone so for all practical purposes it was unilateral he just managed to scrape together a ragged coalition to make it kind of look like it wasn't. When Bush decided he was going to do it and do it alone if necessary he made it unilateral. Many of the members of the coalition were also either bribed or coerced in to participation. The chances are pretty good all the leaders who willingly participated will get voted out of office at the first opportunity, Spain already having done so and Australia may well towards the end of the year.
A better description of Iraq is "aggressive warfare". That is when you preemptively attack someone who is not posing an immediate threat to your nation. It is against international law. The backing of the U.N. is desirable precisely because it gives a war international legitimacy. Iraq engaged in aggressive warfare when it attacked Kuwait, thats why the U.N. and the world backed the first gulf war. The U.S. and U.N. should have taken down Saddam then when they had justification. To come back more than a decade later and do it with no real provacation, and at enormous expense($200 billion and counting, nearly 800 dead and counting, and thousands wounded) was just unwise.
"Anyone who still doesn't think AL Qaeda and Iraq have links after the beheading of a kidnapped American and the Jordanian bomb plot is self-delusional."
Al Quaeda's presence in Iraq NOW is a product of the U.S. invasion. Its simply irrational to point to the fact they are there now and say "See I told you so" when they weren't there before the war. The only part of Iraq Al Quaeda was known to be in before the war wasn't under Saddam's control. Saddam was a socialist, and Muslim only when convenient. Fundamentalists like those in Al Quaeda despised him as a result.
"2. WMD was not the only reason given for the attack on Iraq (read the actual transcript of the State of the Union address instead of your DNC talking points)."
It was the ONLY reason the Bush administration had that they could use to sucker Congress and the American people in to backing the war. Cheney in particular constantly invoked the prospect of a nuclear cloud of an American city if we didn't invade Iraq immediately. It was shameful in its deceit. Even recently Cheney was still trying to claim some vans seized could be used to produce biological weapons when no expert will back him.
Number 2 on the list was this bizarre assertion that Iraq had something to do with 9/11 when there is NO evidence of that whatsoever. 9/11 was perpetrated by Saudi's. If you were going to invade some nation besides Afghanistan over it the next country most responsible was Saudi Arabia. Thats why the Bush Administration had to censor huge tracts about Saudi Arabia in the congressional report on 9/11.
Number 3 was to bring "Freedom and Democracy". I'll give you that one when there is real "Freedom and Democracy" in Iraq. Not an American puppet state or a repressive Shia dominated Islamic republic which would be the near certain outcome the day there is a fair election in Iraq.
"3. Iraq is a battle in the war. The war is on terror."
Iraq is a huge distraction from the war on terrorism. The fact the Bush administration did a half assed job in Afghanistan where the real war should have been fought was because they were in a rush to attack Iraq for no good readson. In fact invading Iraq wass pouring gasoline on the war on terror. The massive humiliation the U.S. is heaping on the Arab and Muslim world is driving moderate Arabs in to the hands of Al Quaeda and is a recruiting poster for a new army of suicide bombers. When Bush recently expressed unabashed support for Sharon and Israel and took it upon himself to make unilate
If you want to see the context of this often used, and used out of context quote, its from "The Contest in America":
http://www.gutenberg.net/etext04/conam10h.htm
It is a justification of the North's position in the civil war, speaks out against slavery and assaults England for backing the South in the war.
For some odd reason you see this quote all over and its usually misquoted by people seeking to justify war. In particular they leave out this antiwar part:
"When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people."
I'm assuming you are using the quote to justify the war in Iraq on the grounds the U.S. is freeing the Iraqis from the tyranny of Saddam as Mill was praising the North for freeing the slaves from tyranny.
Unfortunately the war in Iraq could as easily fall under the category of "when a people are used...for the selfish purposes of a master".
The U.S. pretty clearly had some mixed motives in invading Iraq to the point no one can actually tell you why the Bush administration really did it. Freeing the Iraqi's from tyranny was way down on the list when it started if you recall, it was preceded by WMD's, none of which were found and by some kind of revenge for 9/11 though Iraq had NOTHING to do with 9/11 despite the propaganda to the contrary. The unspoken selfish rationale's could as easily be control of the oil rich regions of the Middle East and Central Asia, installing military bases in the region, potentially as a precursor for taking down Iran and Syria, or reshaping the Middle East in an American mold and in particular opening it up to exploitation by American corporations.
If you look at the state of things today the U.S. seems to be inflicting a lot of tyranny of its own on Iraq these days so its pretty hard to make the case that the U.S. is bringing freedom and democracy to Iraqis though we can all hope that, by some miracle, that does happen someday.
I guess I'm saying its impossible to say if the war in Iraq is really about fighting tyranny. Mill's quote could just as easily be used to condemn the U.S. and its leaders are obsessing over "personal safety" or people are being used for the "selfish purposes of a master".
You could also just as easily use Mill's quote to advocate Americans rising against their own increasingly tyrannical government, or to justify the Iraqi insurgent's efforts to throw out a foreign occupier who is imprisoning them unjustly. The CPA itself admits 90% of the prisoners its holding aren't guilty of anything and its very likely some of those being tortured are innocent.
"You wanna be mad at somebody? Point to the asshole that thinks the right way to express himself is to brainwash people into flying planes into buildings."
OK I'm mad at them but I'm also mad at the assholes that are going out of their way to piss off the entire Muslim world. Their names are Bush, with a little help from his friends, and Sharon.
I also kind of doubt brain wash is exactly the right word. The fact is many Arab's simply hate the U.S. and Israel with an unbridled passion, they have real reasons, and more of them hate the U.S. more every day. Its not because they hate our "Freedom and Democracy" because as this thread once again points out there sure as hell isn't any meaningful Democracy left, the two party system has devoured it, and the Freedom part is disappearing rapidly..
The world would be a lot better off if both sides backed off, Judeo-Christian being one side and Muslim being the other. But instead we appear headed for one of those never ending tit for tat escalations just like the one between Israel and Palestine which is been going on for 50 years with no end in sight. Lots of people will get killed, life will suck, no one wins, each side says its the others fault, THEY are barbarians. It ain't worth it.
"Basically, Al-Hussayen's crime was to be associated with a web site that praised suicide bombing in Chechnia and Israel."
I doubt the DOJ could care less about suicide bombers in Chechnia, unless maybe Putin lobbied them to care, but they will come after you for expressing any sympathy for the Palestinians or the suicide bombers who are resisting Israel's occupation with one of the few means at their disposal. The fact is Israel has massive military superiority over everyone in the region thanks to the U.S. and the Palestinians haven't got much but rifles and C4. I guess they could just lay down and let the Israeli push them in to a new diaspora which is Israel's plan ultimately. Suicide bombings are an unfortunate means of resistance, perhaps a non violent resistance in the mold of Ghandi would work better but the Palestinians are a desperate people.
Its kind of a fact of life Israel and the Friends of Israel lobby in the U.S. has acquired massive influence over the U.S., especially over the current administration and you simply can't say anything critical of Israel or express any support for the Palastinians without risking the current administration's wrath.
Having lived in both places I'm at a loss to know how this got moded to a 5. Its more like a troll by American who just has no appreciation for the good parts of life in Canada. There is a lot less violent crime just for starters. The pubs are generally a lot friendlier, the beer is waaayyy better. If you live in Toronto and go to a pub is pretty easy to spot the American's over the border for the weekend because they tend towards rude, pushy and snotty.
You kind of know its a troll when you hit "In the United States healthcare is still affordable". You've obviously never spent any time in a American hospital without insurance. It will cost you at least $20K for a week for something not major. I'm doubting you've paid for your own insurance either. If your company's paying for most of it you might lack an appreciation for how much it costs and how fast the rates are going up, especially in states with serious malpractice litigation problems. I think everyone knows the cost of healthcare and drugs is spiraling out of control in the U.S. and its probably one of the biggest threats to U.S. global competitiveness since most countries have socialized healthcare to one degree or another and they don't have corporations draining the life out the economy. Sure healthcare in the U.S. is great if you are rich or have gold plated insurance, its OK if you have Medicare, but if you are among the 40 million uninsured you are one illness away from bankruptcy.
It is the truth you may hit a boss who is a dick in the the U.S. or Canada. I have had bosses who are dicks who are American, Canadian and Indian but my experience is the American bosses are way more likely to be dicks than the Canadians. The Candian engineers I've worked with have been on average far better to work with. There is substantially less back stabbing, and climbing over your coworker to get to the top than there is in the U.S.
As I said a few weeks ago, the U.S. has a problem with its culture, education, media, military/gun obsession that is tending to cultivate a people who have a real tendency to be arrogant and ignorant which is a dangerous combination. Its not a surprise to most of the world that Bush is the President since he is the poster boy for arrogant and ignorant.
Well I think I mentioned this possibility in my post. But I don't think its real productive to spurn all corporations, especially ones making contributions to open source, just because there is always a chance a dickhead management team will take power and turn them to the dark side. When it happens then you deal with it. Maybe it is a good idea to make make sure no corporation has you by the balls so that it will get ugly if they are turned. Mono being an example of a technology looking to pervade open source that could prove to be a disaster if it does indeed became pervasive and it proves to be patent encumbered by a company that already would prefer to see open source burn in hell.
I'd say you are jumping to a conclusion without much basis in reality. The companies that are embracing and endorsing Linux are NOT going to be the stupid enough to launch law suites against the open source community. They would destroy their software business in the same way SCO has. Geeks would stop buying their software and services just on principal. The only company that would do it is one currently embracing open source, has a management change, and then decides to try and milk it or kill it like SCO.
The company with the patent portfolio to fear is pretty obviously Microsoft who is filing about a patent an hour. They aren't dumb and they know that:
A. The patent office is a push over in granting software patents so they can patent all kinds of obvious things and will reach a point you wont be able to write software without infringing their patents or at least you wont be able to right software that has lots of cool features in new versions of Windows because they will be patented.
B. With patents in hand Microsoft can, at will start going after open source software. Presumably this will commence 4 or so years after they decided to kill open source using patents and at a point they've accumulated enough patents to successfully do it which you would figure is probably a year or two from now. SCO could probably be considered as just their first salvo since they didn't need to wait on patent awards to fire that one. They know they can't compete on price but they also know they can strangle open source in the court room in the U.S. and eventually Europe. Of course this will likely just further improve the economic and technology positions of countries like China who will probably accelerate their progress while the west is mired in frivolous law suits.
C. Microsoft knows that the open source community doesn't have the war chest to fight a long string of protracted law suits unless places like IBM or HP pony up money and lawyers. Even if some of Microsoft's patents are thrown out based on prior art, some will win and even the ones that don't will drain the open source community's resources, time and will.
All in all the U.S. especially and the western world in general is setting itself up to destroy its software industry thanks to software patents and the army of lawyers who are going to get rich litigating them while just about everyone else loses, except the countries with the sense to ban them.
Exactly right. The technology does exist to disseminate war information quickly but in fact Iraq has been one of the most poorly reported wars in a long time at least as far as the U.S. media coverage goes. You pretty much have to turn to the Arab networks to see any of the reality of what's been going on in Iraq. Those networks are, no doubt, slanted against the U.S. but the U.S. networks have been sanitized to the point they aren't giving any information at all about the real situation there. Pretty simply the American media has been completely cowed by the Pentagon through a variety of means.
In particular most journalists have been embedded which gives them unprecedented access to military units but at the price that the military has gained massive control of what the journalists do and don't report and when. Since they live with the soldiers they were also showing a severe propensity to see things the soldiers way and not objectively. I'm guessing journalists who aren't embedded are having a real problem moving around Iraq or covering the story. You see very little truly independent coverage by American journalists. Embedding journalists was a stroke of genius by the military propagandists.
Its also a simple fact of life most of the major media outlets have been incredibly reticent to cover controversial aspects of the war until recently for fear they will be branded unpatriotic, and that it will hurt their ratings which will hurt their advertising revenue. They know Fox will launch a broadside at them if they stray away from the party line that all is well in Iraq, and a host of politicians like Tom Delay will accuse them of treacherously undermining our troops in the field.
If you look at the coverage of Vietnam those journalists actually covered the real war in all its gore and ugliness. It caused Vietnam to become extremely unpopular, but mostly because people actually saw what was happening. The Pentagon has gone to great lengths to make Iraq appear to be clean, neat, tidy and heroic, though only by covering up most of the blood and the brutality which only came to light because a private with a conscience made a report they couldn't ignore and someone else with a conscience finally leaked the pictures at great personal risk, just like Daniel Elsberg did with the Pentagon papers during Vietnam. If that person hadn't stuck there neck out to expose this I doubt you would have ever seen the pictures because the were classified and DOD would have buried them, while they court martialed some little fish.
Its a simple fact that since 9/11 the Bush Administration decided to take the gloves off and have been condoning torture in myriad ways but with plausible deniability, by doing it at Guantanamo off shore, by sending prisoners to foreign governments like Syria and Saudi Arabia for torture, and by just looking the other way in Iraq and Afghanistan. The whole point of creating the term "enemy combatants" in place of POW's and in side stepping Geneva convention protections was precisely so that intelligence could be gathered by any means necessary. The soldiers in Iraq are probably being court martialed for being stupid enough to take pictures that destroyed plausible deniability more than for the actual torturing.
Its important to note Cheney and Rumsfeld are experts at hiding brutality by the American military. They are the leading suspects for having buried the investigation of the 101st Airborne's Tiger force that went on a civilian killing spree in central Vietnam. That investigation died in the Nixon administration during Rumsfeld's first stint as Secretary of Defense and while Cheney was Nixon's chief of staff.
Fact is since 9/11 the Bush administration felt they were facing a ruthless enemy and if they wanted to win they had to be equally ruthless. Unfortunately in Iraq, with the surfacing of these pictures, its undermined the only remaining rationale for the war in Iraq, that the U.S. was liberating the Iraqi's from Saddam's brutality when in fact the U.S. is being pretty brutal itself. Its hard for the Bush administration to rant against "Saddam's rape rooms" when proof has surfaced that the rape rooms are still in use today.
Lets see, the U.S. spends six billion dollars in less than a month on the circus in Iraq which isn't producing any useful result. The U.S. has spent 6 or 7 times this on the F-22 and its still barely in limited production. Estimates very but the F-22 will run $200-$300 million a pop. Kind of shows you how screwed up our priorities are.
I really doubt the major powers will let a private company own a space elevator. It will so dramatically alter the balance of power I wager the U.S., E.U., Russia, China, Japan and India in particular will vie for control of it as soon as the technology arrives to make it look viable. It will be interesting to see if it becomes the object of a new space race which will be the BEST way to insure that it actually gets built. You have to wonder if the world will pull together and build one or will fight like cats and dogs and we end up with 3 or 4.
Don't recall if it has to be based at the equator. If it does when it becomes viable it will be interesting to see the major powers vie for control of the best spots for the base on the equator.
I think its more likely that the Secret Service has a detachment at U of T to guard the President's daughter who is a student there. I imagine they hang out at the Campus police department since I doubt she appreciates them tailing every minute of the day. This somewhat unusual request comes in and it was pretty much sure to set off some alarm bells as a potential threat to the President's daughter. If they didn't follow up on it would have been perceived as dereliction of their duty.
I supposed its possible it might have just set off an alarm as a plain old terrorism threat. To know for sure you would need to make the same request at some university's who don't have someone on campus with a secret service guard and see if they do or don't get the same treatment.
One of the President's daughters goes to U of T. I'm pretty sure she has a Secret Service detachment so they probably practically live at U of T when she is there.
If you really want to go to Mars, building a new space station or a base on the moon is unlikely to add anything other than hundreds of billions of dollars to the price tag. A direct launch from earth or launching modules in to orbit, docking them and then going to Mars is far more economical than trying to build a space station in orbit or on the moon.
About the only thing you might want from either is to get raw mass for shielding or propellent off the moon or water if there is any at the polls. All in all probably not worth the money and complexity to get it from the moon, versus going to great lengths to reduce launch costs and increase launch mass from Earth which is what you really need to enable a trip to Mars. Its a nice sci fi fantasy to think you are going to build a space ship at a space station but it would be absurdly expensive and impractical to do so.
Unfortunately there really isn't any likelihood of making it to Mars because the political leaders in the world today are not great men or great visionaries, they seem to be nearly universally small men, maybe because thats all civilization produces these days, or more certainly only small men make it through the filters that decide who acquires the power to decide where money is spent. Kennedy did have some vision though Apollo was unfortunately just a way to fight the cold war by other means rather than an example of humanity really seeking to advance itself, so the rationale for it fizzled as soon as the Russian's dropped out of the race.
Its just much easier, and politically safer, for politicians to squander vast sums of money and effort on wars, weapons and competition than to do something that would really advance the human race which a Mars colony would do. As long as you have political leaders who lack vision they are going to keep wasting the Earth's resources by fighting over the Earth's dwindling resources, rather than seeking ways to tap new resources. People are for the most part seeking wealth and power, and the easiest way to get it is to take it from someone else than to do something hard to create new wealth.
For example, you could've take the $87 billion that was poured down the drain in Iraq just for part of this year and funded a gigantic jumpstart for a colony to Mars. Since it appears likely a large occupation army will be in Iraq for decades the money for your Mars mission went down a rat hole right there. What we get out of Iraq in the end is even more poorly defined that what we would get out of a Mars colony. At a minimum spending that $87 billion in the U.S. would have generated a bunch of high quality jobs here and maybe produced some big leaps in technology that would have contributed to the U.S. economy. It would have also motivated young people to pursue science and engineering careers. At present one of the few sectors still hiring in those fields for jobs in the U.S. is to build weapons so its not surprising fewer and fewer American's pursue those fields. Maybe its just me but making a career out of making better ways to kill people just doesn't seem real worthwhile. So what we have now is that $87 billion is going to contractors in Iraq to give the Iraqi's power and schools. To be honest I think they should pay for those things themselves. So next time some politician argues spending money on a Mars colony is a waste of money just stop and think of all the really stupid stuff those same people are already wasting money on. They also pay billions every year to farmers to not grow stuff.
The other key problem with going to Mars in the U.S. at least is that NASA, rather than leading the way, is a gigantic bureaucratic impediment to doing anything useful in space. If a visionary leader came along that could round up the political support and the funding, that leader would have to create a new agency or company dedicated to the objective, one with a can do attitude, versus the can't do attitude thats infected NASA and its current contractors.
"To vote in the student election, we simply had to log on to the internet to vote."
Did a geek, with long hair and a beard, always wears T shirts, win student body President?
"be designing Internet voting using the Online Banking Model"
Excepting for the obvious fact that online banking is predicated on rigorous identification of the user while the most basic tenet of voting is rigorous defense of the anonymity of the user. This is the fatal, pretty much unfixable, flaw in using the Internet to vote.
Not having anonymity when you vote is all well and good in a kind and benevolent society. But as soon as the people in power can instill a little fear in the minds of voters that Big Brother might know how you vote and if you vote the wrong way you will pay for it, one way or another, you have crossed over in to dictatorship in one easy step.
That is why its immensely scary to hear the Department of Defense continually raise the concept of online voting for soldiers, soldiers who are already in a dictatorial system and can easily be intimidated in to voting to keep the Secretary of Defense and the President, their bosses, in power if they aren't assured of anonymity when they vote,
On the whole subject of voting being a luddite is the only rational course:
- Check in at desk manned by little old ladies and gents representing all interested parties
- Get a piece of paper
- Mark paper with a pen in a private booth
- shove paper in a box
- the box is guarded by little old ladies representing all interested parties
- Contents are counted by little old ladies representing all interested parties
"Is he also critical of Monopoly, with it's trivialized depiction of pre-tax-reform US industry and culture?"
OK. you confused me on that one. I think George W. Bush just instituted "tax-reform" and the "fat little men in top hats" are making out like bandits afterwards. Your statement would have been accurate four years ago but now I think you need to revise it to:
"Is he also critical of Monopoly, with it's trivialized depiction of post-tax-reform US industry and culture?"
Also don't forget that George's administration gave Microsoft a get out of jail free card, after being convicted for abuse of their monopoly.
I'm pretty sure Monopoly must either be making a big comeback today, or maybe its flopping. Who wants to play the game when get to live it every day.
Oh yeah sure. Sour grapes for suggesting that it might be wise to spend a million dollars on orphans or a scholarship fund instead of wasting it on a car that is neither a good street car nor a good race car. I think the original poster suggested something about people who appreciate the engineering. In my book, good engineering is designing something that is well suited for the objective. This car is ridiculous overkill for a street car and bad for racing so where exactly is the good engineering.
If you can explain the wisdom in wasting a million dollars on this car I'm all ears.
"Who died and made you queen?"
How old are you. You sound like you must be in your late teens or twenties or you haven't been maturing at a normal rate. Most people after a few years of growing up realize what your doing just isn't worth it, either because you get busted a few times or you experience the horrors, one way or another, of auto accidents.
All I think you did was prove my point. There is no reason to license cars for the public highways that can run ridiculously in excess of the maximum speed limit and the maximum safe speed for those highways. You admit your using one to break the speed limit by 60-70 MPH pretty much every day. You are also clearly operating under the illusion/delusion you can safely run those kinds of speeds on public highways when you simply can't. Ever contemplate what will happen if you run over debris and have a blow out at those speeds. If your lucky you'll only kill yourself but you will be imposing on the emergency crew that has to cut your bloody carcass out of your car and clean up the mess.
I imagine you probably can run those speeds most of the time, but just stop and think about the possibility someone might have a breakdown in the middle of the night or be stuck on foot on that highway in dark clothing and you don't see them in time. I don't care how good you're brakes are, you still have to factor in reaction time and the foibles of human vision and concentration. Running those kind of speeds at night is especially stupid since your vision is dramaticly impaired, I don't care how good your headlights are. If something unexpected pops up at those speeds you must be about 10 times more likely to kill someone.
As I said in the original post, if you want to drive those speed go to a race track thats designed for it and have at it. There you are on a closed course and you aren't subjecting the rest of the world to what is apparently either immaturity or absence of wisdom. It only takes about 10 seconds for you to move from being stuck on your own superiority and the superiority of your car to regretting the rest of your life that you killed someone or maimed yourself or some innocent victim.
The Sultan is a descendent of a 600 year old royal family, they didn't preside over much but the steaming jungles of Borneo until Shell struck oil in the 1970's. The article refers to them as the Muslim version of the Beverly Hillbillies with a propensity for marrying first cousins which translates in to inbreeding, and a probably a penchant for all the ill effects that go with 600 years of inbreeding.
The Sultan, the Emir of Kuwait, the Saudi Royal family, all of these corrupt Muslim monarchies that struck it rich on oil are at the heart of why the Muslim world is exploding today and are the #1 customer for silly super cars.