If there's a drone hovering over my land, or my 'charge' if I am hired security, it is guilty until proven innocent.
Airspace ownership is a complex issue and will only become more so as new categories of flying devices appear. Making your own rules and destroying other people's property based on them is unlikely to go well for you.
I never quite got why plea bargains are permissible in the first place.
They're a form of punishment. Being forced to testify against yourself humiliates the accused and empowers the prosecutor. It dehumanizes the accused, by showing that no, he doesn't have any of those Constitutional rights. The prosecutor is, in effect, establishing his superiority to reality itself: pretend that what happened is what he said happened, or be severely punished.
Plea bargains are basically a sadist's wet dream. And US legal system is built on the idea that justice is institutionalized sadism. Every single aspect of it is geared towards maximum harm to those caught in it, from criminal records (meant to extend punishment to infinity) to keeping people in death row for decades to uncertain methods of execution (as opposed to a simply breathing nitrogen) to private prisons (who have very incentive to make recidivism rate as high as possible). Hence the popular notion that everyone accused must be guilty, so you can enjoy watching the system grind them to bits with good conscience.
Plea bargains are a symptom, but the disease itself is simply bloodlust.
In other words, they are the indigenous for their ancestors, for thousands of years, have settled in that place
Which is impossible for any human being to prove. Or do you have records of all or even most - or even a single one - of your ancestral lines going back to the height of the Roman Empire?
Furthermore, nations are not genetic but memetic. Being French means nothing more and nothing less than that you think of yourself as French. People born in France typically do, as do some of the people who've lived there for a while. That is true even if said people don't agree with every aspect of their nation's culture. You're simply trying to use thinly disguised racism to disqualify the opinions of people you don't agree with.
TL;DR Ein volk, ein reich, ein this bullshit again.
Stripping Western citizenship from dual nationals could be effective: you only have to see all the satellite dishes and ethnic dress in crap parts of Paris to know where peoples' real loyalty lies.
Crimes against fashion don't count as terrorism, bro. Reality TV might, but the viewers are victims, not perpetrators.
Europe will start having to do something similar with both illegal arrivals, and 2nd/3rd generation fifth-columists. Time to make ourselves the master of our own house again.
Who's us? Last time I checked, the people mandating dress codes for minorities or prohibiting listening to subversive foreign radio stations were the enemies.
That said, given the percentage of a lot of local police budgets currently covered by stealing stuff, it will be interesting to see whether the people who are always drifting toward the theory that freedom can be measured as a direct function of tax rate will be able to keep it together when next year's municipal budgets start being adjusted to account for this.
You know, you could simply cut the costs - tell the police to focus on thieves and murderers and leave pot smokers and prostitutes alone. Maybe stop sending SWAT teams to storm people's houses over anonymous phone calls, cease harassing black people for walking on the streets, take it easy with surplus military gear...
If anything, forcing people to actually pay for police activity might cause some much-needed reconsideration of what, exactly speaking, is necessary police activity and what is someone play-acting action movies on other people's expense.
the current sentiment is "wait, who did this wonderful thing, I must have heard you wrong"
And soon it'll turn into "it was really our doing, those dastardly wabbits just took the credit! Go our team!"
Or, alternatively: "They let druggies keep their drug money! Why do you hate our boys in blue so much?"
Cognitive dissonance is like a Higgs field of psychology: it's bound to collapse into some unpredictable nonzero value, and once it does, all of reality is caught and twisted into a completely new shape.
"in which inborn ability is prized over hard work"
It's not. How could it be? What is prized is your ability to do math or model clothes. No one knows or cares if that ability was a result of natural talent, hard work or a blood pact with the devil.
Look, the guy's hardly going to say it's OK to blaspheme, is he? It's just not in his job description.
Really? Because I seem to dimly recall some dude who challenged religious authorities of the day and was consequently accused of blasphemy and executed. Jesus something.
And the issue isn't as black/white as that either. Freedom comes with a price-tag; are we all willing to pay the price?
The price is that you can't punch people for badmouthing your mother. The payoff is that no would-be tyrant can silence his critics. Frankly, that's about as black and white as it gets.
If you actually believe in freedom, then you have to accept that others have the freedom to not want the same as you.
Certainly. You don't want freedom? Very well then, bow down before me as I begin to rule the world. Oh, you thought you would be the master?
We didn't all just wake up one morning and decide freedom would be a fun thing to try. We simply proved, way beyond reasonable doubt, that every other way of organizing society leads to very bad things. Modern-day theocracies and secular dictatorships keep on proving that over and over again.
The people who make noises about not wanting freedom are simply self-centered egotistic assholes who want everything their way. That's simply not possible, no matter how many temper tantrums they throw.
"Worker drone" is a bit vague. What are these drones doing, exactly speaking? Do they require unfiltered Internet access? If not, XP is still fine, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
Everyone always talks about "enterprise" like it implied high reliability requirements. But in my experience, "enterprise" means things get duct taped back together when they break. And why not? For most companies, IT is like lighting: it exists to help actual business, and it's no big deal if a few fixtures go dark every now and then.
We have lots of hoops because of two things: 1.a) our patchwork of federal, state, and municipal programs and 1.b) the American idea of self-help and individualism.
No, the truth is uglier than that. A society committed to "self-help and individualism" would strive to ensure opportunities are available to anyone who cares to take them, no matter where they happen to be, and that one can actually risk failing without also risking homelessness. Such societies exist, and are typically derided as "nanny states" by Americans - because compensating for human frailties and failings is what it takes to actually make it possible for people to follow their own path and seek their dreams.
Someone once said US's problem is that everyone thinks they're a temporarily embarassed millionaire. But that leaves out a key fact: everyone thinks they're a temporarily embarassed millionaire who wants to ensure they can stomp on those below them, once they get to the top, and votes accordingly. Thus the seemingly irrational support from middle class to policies destructive to said middle class. It's a self-made hell.
Origin doesn't "steal" information - you don't lose it. It spies on you, which is a completely different thing. Although I suppose you could say it steals your privacy.
Oh well, any cracker groups out there care to reverse engineer the protocol and make a privacy proxy for Origin?
A certain irreducible background incidence of cancer is to be expected regardless of circumstances: mutations can never be absolutely avoided, because they are an inescapable consequence of fundamental limitations on the accuracy of DNA replication, as discussed in Chapter 5.
Of course mutations can be completely avoided. DNA is digital information, which can be copied perfectly. Whether any particular living organism actually does so is another matter, and likely one of the issues that need to be adjusted. Not that it really matters: cancer is actually pretty simple to treat (just kill all of the malfunctioning cells), is only a problem due to the limited accuracy of the knifes we can currently wield, and with nanotechnology and robotics advancing at geometric rate will likely fall within a century to fleets of medical micro-killbots.
In any case, we need to decouple our minds from our bodies at some point. The only place our current physical forms are at home is Earth. Furthermore, while our brains are impressive their inherent biases are worse and worse fit for modern circumstances, and most of their power is not easily accessible to consciousness. We must figure out how to transfer that consciousness from one physical shell to another. That way, we can inhabit human bodies when appropriate, move to supercomputer cluster to do physics, become a spaceship to set up a space colony in outer solar system, and make that colony itself a vast virtual world with high-power transmitters for moving people in and out - much more efficient than building a metal shell filled with oxygenating gasses. And as a nice side effect, it moves cancer from a killer to "damn, ruined my clothes" status.
If a human could live long enough, it is inevitable that at least one of his or her cells would eventually accumulate a set of mutations sufficient for cancer to develop.
That is a tautology: if you live long enough for event X to happen, then it's inevitable that X happens, since if it doesn't, then you haven't lived long enough yet. You can replace "cancer" with "every atom in your body randomly undergoing cold fusion into iron at the same time" and your statement will still be just as true - and just as meaningless - as before.
That'd be his job as a security professional. Corporate ethics is another role that is obviously necessary, but that is not the subject of IT/enterprise security. It would be a stretch (and a very disingenuous one) to make inferences about Schneie's ethics from his professional position in the matter (in the context of security) alone.
tl;dr He's only following orders.
Ethics, either for organizations or individuals, isn't something that can be slapped on as an afterthought. It's either part of every role, every process, every decision, or it's non-existent. Trying to make corporate ethics the responsibility of an "ethics department" simply makes that department an obstacle everyone and their dog will do their best to sidestep, avoid, and keep in the dark at every turn. It might make for fine black comedy, but it's not even remotely related to ethics.
So yes, we can absolutely make inferences about Schneier's ethics based on how he conducts his job.
If direct sell is the only available option then the customer gets screwed. The company sets the price and acts in indirect collusion with other companies.
What's stopping the company from setting the price and acting in indirect collusion with other companies when selling to or through a dealership? How would removing dealerships result in anything except some combination of lower prices for the consumer and higher profits for the auto industry?
And of course, the consumer could simply buy a used car directly from the previous owner. If that's too much hassle, then there's a business opportunity a dealership who's actually willing to provide a service can survive on.
I'm asking for one climate model that was tested under falsifiable conditions and passed.
All you're asking is delaying any action on Climate Change until every last drop of oil, lump of goal and cloud of gas has been burned and the final consequences measured. How very clever of you - turning those libural science-wizards own weapons against them! Surely the thermostat will go down again now that the spell has been broken.
IF MAN CAME FROM MONKEY, WHY THERE STILL BE MONKEYS?!?
Let's take as an example a typical person currently bringing home $30,000. Under your scenario, they'd have a choice: they could continue working and bringing home $30,000, or they could stop working, play video games all day, and get $25,000. For many people, that would be an easy decision, and they wouldn't decide to keep working for $25,000 as you assume they would.
But this is also an oversimplification. Why is staying home and working for imaginary achievements even remotely tempting over getting out and achieving something for real while earning some cash on the side? Because work is currently built on the assumption that the employee has no choice. Remove the element of involuntary subservience from the equation, and the relative attractiveness of choices changes.
Do we really want a computer program to learn from its mistakes at running a nuclear power plant?
Shouldn't matter. Even non-nuclear plants tend to have a "physical" layer of security beneath the computer. If, for example, a reactor vessel becomes overly full, it triggers a switch which directly closes all the feed valves, overriding the computer in the process. The computer only has control when processes are running within safe parameters.
I love the concept in theory, but a society rich enough to afford one is pretty unimaginable in today's world.
Every society that is currently stable is rich enough to guarantee income good enough to live by to all its members (because otherwise they're starving and the society is about to collapse). The reason they typically won't do so is because it would free people to live as they please. Wealth disparity makes the majority of people dependent on the whims of those with wealth, which is just peachy with the wealthy. But of course that can't be openly admitted, thus it's put in terms of "incentivizing".
Plenty of people have criticised Islam and not been shot -- have you ever read a newspaper?
Salman Rushdie hasn't been shot yet despite having a standing fatva demanding his assasination. In fact, no secret police, no matter how brutal, is ever 100% successful in catching all dissidents.
The images CH has published in the past do not qualify as criticism or as satire -- they were purely and deliberately antagonistic. They certainly did not deserve to be shot, but they should all have been fired a long time ago.
And that girl with the really short skirt didn't deserve to be raped, but...
Freedom of speech is not subject to quality filter. Right to be secure from physical attacks is not conditional to keeping your mouth shut. And peace bought through appeasement of anyone willing to use violence is not peace, but simply a veil hiding bruises beneath; even if you were willing to do so, it would only last until people snapped, at which point no one controls the situation anymore.
Look up the Wikipedia article on Finlandization. It's what you're suggesting we do. But unlike Soviet Union of old, Muhammed's fanclub has neither any real power nor a vision for better future, no matter how flawed; what they want is a new and endless Dark Age. You can justify appeasing a superpower to your people, but you can't justify appeasing people who's only notable quality is sheer cruelty.
The cost of oeace with my next door neighbour is not screaming "My next door neighbour has three testicles and he stinks of Brylcream and sweat" out the window. Is that self-censorship or manners?
Whichever it is, it's both untrue and irrelevant. It's untrue because if your neighbour shoots you for insulting him, he'll go to prison for murder, and be rightly regarded as a violent criminal sociopath. And it's irrelevant because the issue is not whether you may shout random garbage about your Muslim neighbour, the issue is whether you can criticize Islam - which inevitably means criticizing Mohammed - without having to worry about being shot. And if you can't, where do you draw the line; if an imam claims Islam requires a particular political position, does that position now become above criticism too?
Many Christians claim that everything from health insurance covering contraception to gay marriage violates their religious rights. Do you want Muslims to start doing the same, only this time backed with threats of violence? Once you give in to that kind of blackmail once, why would the demands ever stop?
If the price of peace is that I avoid anything my neighbour finds offensive, he's not my neighbour but my master. And even if you were willing to live in an Islamic theocracy, you have multiple neighbours/masters; what are you going to do when they disagree with each other?
If you consider drawing images of Muhammed to be a retaliation against the extremists, then it is one akin to nuking Baghdad just to be sure of getting Saddam Hussein. The depiction of Muhammed is haram, and therefore an affront to a great many Muslims, the vast of whom have no thoughts of reprisals. It is an attack on the whole religion, not just the fundamentalists. It creates that sense of opposition that the terrorists want -- it's tells Muslims that Western society is against them.
The problem is, modern Western society is built on the idea that anything can be questioned, and that includes outright ridicule. Furthermore, we didn't just wake up one day and decide it might be fun; rather, we went through Dark Age after Dark Age trying to keep our holy cows untouchable. It didn't work. Every single time it brought nothing but shame on those who did it, misery and death on everyone else, and rot for the whole society. So this is the one thing we can't do.
If Islam cannot abide depicting Mohammed, then Islam is not compatible with Western civilization. You can ignore those saying things you don't like; you can condemn them to the deepest pit of Hell and glorify in their coming torture; but the second you actually take up arms to silence them you've crossed a line. If the price of peace with Islam is self-censorship, then there can be no peace because that's the one price that West can't pay.
Of course, it could well be that Muslims can't give up this point either. I'm not a religious scholar, so I can't say. But if it's true, then we - Muslims and non-Muslims alike - should begin negotiations on how to separate Islam from the West peacefully ASAP, seeing how the alternative is open war.
Slashdot Mirror
Airspace ownership is a complex issue and will only become more so as new categories of flying devices appear. Making your own rules and destroying other people's property based on them is unlikely to go well for you.
Yes we can! Just need some more silicon lube.
They're a form of punishment. Being forced to testify against yourself humiliates the accused and empowers the prosecutor. It dehumanizes the accused, by showing that no, he doesn't have any of those Constitutional rights. The prosecutor is, in effect, establishing his superiority to reality itself: pretend that what happened is what he said happened, or be severely punished.
Plea bargains are basically a sadist's wet dream. And US legal system is built on the idea that justice is institutionalized sadism. Every single aspect of it is geared towards maximum harm to those caught in it, from criminal records (meant to extend punishment to infinity) to keeping people in death row for decades to uncertain methods of execution (as opposed to a simply breathing nitrogen) to private prisons (who have very incentive to make recidivism rate as high as possible). Hence the popular notion that everyone accused must be guilty, so you can enjoy watching the system grind them to bits with good conscience.
Plea bargains are a symptom, but the disease itself is simply bloodlust.
Which is impossible for any human being to prove. Or do you have records of all or even most - or even a single one - of your ancestral lines going back to the height of the Roman Empire?
Furthermore, nations are not genetic but memetic. Being French means nothing more and nothing less than that you think of yourself as French. People born in France typically do, as do some of the people who've lived there for a while. That is true even if said people don't agree with every aspect of their nation's culture. You're simply trying to use thinly disguised racism to disqualify the opinions of people you don't agree with.
TL;DR Ein volk, ein reich, ein this bullshit again.
Crimes against fashion don't count as terrorism, bro. Reality TV might, but the viewers are victims, not perpetrators.
Who's us? Last time I checked, the people mandating dress codes for minorities or prohibiting listening to subversive foreign radio stations were the enemies.
So that's why Slashdot has had broken formatting when opening subthreads in new tabs recently!
What agency is fighting this dastardly Betaist plot?
You know, you could simply cut the costs - tell the police to focus on thieves and murderers and leave pot smokers and prostitutes alone. Maybe stop sending SWAT teams to storm people's houses over anonymous phone calls, cease harassing black people for walking on the streets, take it easy with surplus military gear...
If anything, forcing people to actually pay for police activity might cause some much-needed reconsideration of what, exactly speaking, is necessary police activity and what is someone play-acting action movies on other people's expense.
And soon it'll turn into "it was really our doing, those dastardly wabbits just took the credit! Go our team!"
Or, alternatively: "They let druggies keep their drug money! Why do you hate our boys in blue so much?"
Cognitive dissonance is like a Higgs field of psychology: it's bound to collapse into some unpredictable nonzero value, and once it does, all of reality is caught and twisted into a completely new shape.
It's not. How could it be? What is prized is your ability to do math or model clothes. No one knows or cares if that ability was a result of natural talent, hard work or a blood pact with the devil.
Really? Because I seem to dimly recall some dude who challenged religious authorities of the day and was consequently accused of blasphemy and executed. Jesus something.
The price is that you can't punch people for badmouthing your mother. The payoff is that no would-be tyrant can silence his critics. Frankly, that's about as black and white as it gets.
Certainly. You don't want freedom? Very well then, bow down before me as I begin to rule the world. Oh, you thought you would be the master?
We didn't all just wake up one morning and decide freedom would be a fun thing to try. We simply proved, way beyond reasonable doubt, that every other way of organizing society leads to very bad things. Modern-day theocracies and secular dictatorships keep on proving that over and over again.
The people who make noises about not wanting freedom are simply self-centered egotistic assholes who want everything their way. That's simply not possible, no matter how many temper tantrums they throw.
"Worker drone" is a bit vague. What are these drones doing, exactly speaking? Do they require unfiltered Internet access? If not, XP is still fine, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
Everyone always talks about "enterprise" like it implied high reliability requirements. But in my experience, "enterprise" means things get duct taped back together when they break. And why not? For most companies, IT is like lighting: it exists to help actual business, and it's no big deal if a few fixtures go dark every now and then.
No, the truth is uglier than that. A society committed to "self-help and individualism" would strive to ensure opportunities are available to anyone who cares to take them, no matter where they happen to be, and that one can actually risk failing without also risking homelessness. Such societies exist, and are typically derided as "nanny states" by Americans - because compensating for human frailties and failings is what it takes to actually make it possible for people to follow their own path and seek their dreams.
Someone once said US's problem is that everyone thinks they're a temporarily embarassed millionaire. But that leaves out a key fact: everyone thinks they're a temporarily embarassed millionaire who wants to ensure they can stomp on those below them, once they get to the top, and votes accordingly. Thus the seemingly irrational support from middle class to policies destructive to said middle class. It's a self-made hell.
Origin doesn't "steal" information - you don't lose it. It spies on you, which is a completely different thing. Although I suppose you could say it steals your privacy.
Oh well, any cracker groups out there care to reverse engineer the protocol and make a privacy proxy for Origin?
Of course mutations can be completely avoided. DNA is digital information, which can be copied perfectly. Whether any particular living organism actually does so is another matter, and likely one of the issues that need to be adjusted. Not that it really matters: cancer is actually pretty simple to treat (just kill all of the malfunctioning cells), is only a problem due to the limited accuracy of the knifes we can currently wield, and with nanotechnology and robotics advancing at geometric rate will likely fall within a century to fleets of medical micro-killbots.
In any case, we need to decouple our minds from our bodies at some point. The only place our current physical forms are at home is Earth. Furthermore, while our brains are impressive their inherent biases are worse and worse fit for modern circumstances, and most of their power is not easily accessible to consciousness. We must figure out how to transfer that consciousness from one physical shell to another. That way, we can inhabit human bodies when appropriate, move to supercomputer cluster to do physics, become a spaceship to set up a space colony in outer solar system, and make that colony itself a vast virtual world with high-power transmitters for moving people in and out - much more efficient than building a metal shell filled with oxygenating gasses. And as a nice side effect, it moves cancer from a killer to "damn, ruined my clothes" status.
That is a tautology: if you live long enough for event X to happen, then it's inevitable that X happens, since if it doesn't, then you haven't lived long enough yet. You can replace "cancer" with "every atom in your body randomly undergoing cold fusion into iron at the same time" and your statement will still be just as true - and just as meaningless - as before.
tl;dr He's only following orders.
Ethics, either for organizations or individuals, isn't something that can be slapped on as an afterthought. It's either part of every role, every process, every decision, or it's non-existent. Trying to make corporate ethics the responsibility of an "ethics department" simply makes that department an obstacle everyone and their dog will do their best to sidestep, avoid, and keep in the dark at every turn. It might make for fine black comedy, but it's not even remotely related to ethics.
So yes, we can absolutely make inferences about Schneier's ethics based on how he conducts his job.
Sometimes the terrorists win, sometimes the counter-terrorists win. But either way, the Devil always gets his cut.
What's stopping the company from setting the price and acting in indirect collusion with other companies when selling to or through a dealership? How would removing dealerships result in anything except some combination of lower prices for the consumer and higher profits for the auto industry?
And of course, the consumer could simply buy a used car directly from the previous owner. If that's too much hassle, then there's a business opportunity a dealership who's actually willing to provide a service can survive on.
All you're asking is delaying any action on Climate Change until every last drop of oil, lump of goal and cloud of gas has been burned and the final consequences measured. How very clever of you - turning those libural science-wizards own weapons against them! Surely the thermostat will go down again now that the spell has been broken.
IF MAN CAME FROM MONKEY, WHY THERE STILL BE MONKEYS?!?
"Know your place, shut your face" isn't really an option when the place is slowly turning into a frying pan.
But this is also an oversimplification. Why is staying home and working for imaginary achievements even remotely tempting over getting out and achieving something for real while earning some cash on the side? Because work is currently built on the assumption that the employee has no choice. Remove the element of involuntary subservience from the equation, and the relative attractiveness of choices changes.
Shouldn't matter. Even non-nuclear plants tend to have a "physical" layer of security beneath the computer. If, for example, a reactor vessel becomes overly full, it triggers a switch which directly closes all the feed valves, overriding the computer in the process. The computer only has control when processes are running within safe parameters.
Every society that is currently stable is rich enough to guarantee income good enough to live by to all its members (because otherwise they're starving and the society is about to collapse). The reason they typically won't do so is because it would free people to live as they please. Wealth disparity makes the majority of people dependent on the whims of those with wealth, which is just peachy with the wealthy. But of course that can't be openly admitted, thus it's put in terms of "incentivizing".
Salman Rushdie hasn't been shot yet despite having a standing fatva demanding his assasination. In fact, no secret police, no matter how brutal, is ever 100% successful in catching all dissidents.
And that girl with the really short skirt didn't deserve to be raped, but...
Freedom of speech is not subject to quality filter. Right to be secure from physical attacks is not conditional to keeping your mouth shut. And peace bought through appeasement of anyone willing to use violence is not peace, but simply a veil hiding bruises beneath; even if you were willing to do so, it would only last until people snapped, at which point no one controls the situation anymore.
Look up the Wikipedia article on Finlandization. It's what you're suggesting we do. But unlike Soviet Union of old, Muhammed's fanclub has neither any real power nor a vision for better future, no matter how flawed; what they want is a new and endless Dark Age. You can justify appeasing a superpower to your people, but you can't justify appeasing people who's only notable quality is sheer cruelty.
Whichever it is, it's both untrue and irrelevant. It's untrue because if your neighbour shoots you for insulting him, he'll go to prison for murder, and be rightly regarded as a violent criminal sociopath. And it's irrelevant because the issue is not whether you may shout random garbage about your Muslim neighbour, the issue is whether you can criticize Islam - which inevitably means criticizing Mohammed - without having to worry about being shot. And if you can't, where do you draw the line; if an imam claims Islam requires a particular political position, does that position now become above criticism too?
Many Christians claim that everything from health insurance covering contraception to gay marriage violates their religious rights. Do you want Muslims to start doing the same, only this time backed with threats of violence? Once you give in to that kind of blackmail once, why would the demands ever stop?
If the price of peace is that I avoid anything my neighbour finds offensive, he's not my neighbour but my master. And even if you were willing to live in an Islamic theocracy, you have multiple neighbours/masters; what are you going to do when they disagree with each other?
The problem is, modern Western society is built on the idea that anything can be questioned, and that includes outright ridicule. Furthermore, we didn't just wake up one day and decide it might be fun; rather, we went through Dark Age after Dark Age trying to keep our holy cows untouchable. It didn't work. Every single time it brought nothing but shame on those who did it, misery and death on everyone else, and rot for the whole society. So this is the one thing we can't do.
If Islam cannot abide depicting Mohammed, then Islam is not compatible with Western civilization. You can ignore those saying things you don't like; you can condemn them to the deepest pit of Hell and glorify in their coming torture; but the second you actually take up arms to silence them you've crossed a line. If the price of peace with Islam is self-censorship, then there can be no peace because that's the one price that West can't pay.
Of course, it could well be that Muslims can't give up this point either. I'm not a religious scholar, so I can't say. But if it's true, then we - Muslims and non-Muslims alike - should begin negotiations on how to separate Islam from the West peacefully ASAP, seeing how the alternative is open war.