It's probably safer too. Bittorrent is going to be a civil matter. Exploiting a hole in Apple's POS system to get free stuff probably qualifies as fraud and would bring criminal charges.
Random thought: Reminds me of the old days when you could create credit card "numbers" that weren't actually valid but passed the checksum test and use them to create AOL accounts. Kind of surprised that Apple wouldn't know better.
Going 5mph over the limit could get someone killed
So could going 5mph under the limit.
How come we don't have three strikes for speeding?
Actually a lot of states do. Here in New York if you get three speeding tickets in a 18 month timeframe (or two in work zones) you'll lose your license for a period of time. Of course with a speeding ticket you get a day in court and the chance to confront your accusers......
How the hell is is fairer than suing someone? At least in a court of law you receive some semblance of due process. Think Roadrunner is going to give you the same due process?
But that doesn't mean we should refuse to condemn anything the Allies did.
Ah, but you would condemn it without even looking at the context or what was gained from those actions. Do some research on the bomber offensives and then tell me that you wouldn't have done the exact same thing in the shoes of the Allies.
The biggest problem is that China has a virtually unlimited pool of cheap labor, and we don't. China doesn't have to spend the money on robotics or worker benefits or anything like that to get work done. If something big needs to be done, they keep throwing people at it until it's done.
As I recall that strategy didn't work out so well for the Soviet Union.....
That was with two planeloads of bombs; I'd've thought it were possible to figure that one out, or at least, not respond with the escalation to full-scale bombing raids on Berlin
Escalation? They were already involved in a total war. Claiming that bombing production centers and assets represents an "escalation" seems like a stretch to me.
Wheras you seem unwilling to accept that anything the Allies did during the war could possibly have been wrong.
I just think it's questionable logic to accuse the Allies of war crimes when the Allies absorbed the overwhelming majority (>80%) of the civilian and military casualties in the conflict. As far as I'm concerned if the bombing of Axis cities shortened the war by one day or saved the life of a single Allied solider then it was perfectly justifiable.
Go read up on the combined bomber offensive sometime -- discover how it kept the Germans from getting the Type XXI U-Boats (which could have flipped the Battle of the Atlantic and cost the Allies the war) into mass production. Learn how the bombing of Japan forced the Japanese to capitulate without a bloody ground invasion that would have killed a million Allied soldiers and tens of millions of Japanese civilians. Then tell me that it wasn't justifiable.
I suppose you think there's no difference between a civilian and a soldier?
Not in a total war. In a total war the nation-state mobilizes every single asset that it has to support the war effort. In a total war civilians become legitimate targets.
So you'd rather have just exterminated the Japanese entirely? Why stop at two nukes, in that case?
If they hadn't surrendered, yes, we should have kept dropping nukes on them. Extermination is a bit of a stretch though -- we killed more Japanese with conventional bombing than we did with the nuclear attacks and even those attacks didn't come close to "exterminating" the Japanese. Japan lost 3.8% of her 1939 population. Contrast that to 16.1% for Poland or 13.7% for the Soviet Union. You'll forgive me if I roll my eyes at the idea that we were trying to (or even could have) exterminate the Japanese.
Hmm, earlier than I thought; perhaps not. (But certainly don't leave out Berlin, which is the one that started it all)
Actually Berlin wasn't bombed until London was (accidentally, though nobody figured that out until after the war) bombed by the Luftwaffe.
but don't try and pretend a bombing in support of a military invasion is the same thing as a deliberate attack on the civilian population.
Oh, so it's ok for the Axis powers to bomb cities immediately before they invade them but not ok for the Allies to do the same thing if the invasion is a year or so off? Nice double standard you have there. I suppose the civilian working in a munitions or aircraft plant is innocent in your eyes?
Putting large amounts of money into the reconstruction of western europe was what forged a stable peace.
I'm pretty sure mutually assured destruction deserves some credit too.
You're making a horrible assumption that a victim will know ahead of time that she is getting raped, by ahead of time I mean have enough time to recognize she's being attacked because once the confrontation has begun the attacker is just as close to the weapon as the defender, the shot will never get off.
If your aware of your surroundings (generally the first thing taught in any self-defense class -- whether armed or unarmed) then you aren't likely to be surprised. In any case, I'm curious if you have any actual experience with firearms to base your "the shot will never get off" claim on or if you are just regurgitating arguments that you've read/heard somewhere?
If as you pointed out the gun was used as a deterrent then you've just committed a crime unless some very specific criteria is met
No, actually you haven't. The standard varies by state but it generally boils down to what a reasonable person would do in your situation. If you legitimately fear for your life then you have every right to draw that gun. What's reasonable comes down to case law, the DA and the jury (if it gets that far) but that's the general idea.
Concealed handguns can give you real security, but not in close quarters where you don't even see your attacker
If you get surprised by your attacker then you are screwed regardless of whether or not you or they are armed. That's why awareness of your surroundings is self-defense 101. Try sneaking up on someone with a modicum of self-defense training and let me know how it works out for you.
and ignore that the effect is to make miserable 'the people of the country' who have nothing to do with it.
The effect of war is always to make the population miserable. Lower Manhattan was pretty miserable after it was attacked. It's regrettable but the 'people of the country' were the ones that allowed the Taliban to remain in power.
PS, I believe in the war in Afghanistan, but the tactics used in some cases have been extremely dubious in value
I agree. We should have gone in with overwhelming force instead of outsourcing the job to local warlords of questionable loyalty. We should have dispatched the full weight of our armed forces into Afghanistan instead of holding them back to attack Iraq.
I'm not condoning what they did, but the Taliban offered to turn Osama Bin Laden over to US troops if the White House could show evidence of his involvement in 9/11.
Umm, no they offered to turn him over to an Islamic Court in a third country. Hardly an acceptable offer.
we went to war, getting 5,679 of our allies (and over 11,000 innocent civilians) killed in the process.
There are no innocent civilians when they allow a Government to remain in power that provides refuge to multinational terrorist organizations that attack other countries.
Nice work.
*shrug*, we didn't start the war, but we'll sure as hell finish it.
Thinking like yours only serves to perpetuate this ridiculous cycle
And thinking like yours only serves to embolden aggressors that seek to impose their will upon their neighbors and the free peoples of the world.
You seem to love random destruction and welcome the killing of innocents.
No, I just recognize that the best way to win a war is to completely and utterly destroy the will of the people you are fighting to resist. For better or worse we accomplished that in WW2.
Not sure if I can address every concern because that gets into methods
I'm not asking you to address "methods". I'm simply asking the question of how could the Israeli's be sure that sinking the Liberty would keep whatever secret they thought she had?
The first thing the Israelis did was cripple communications. The first torpedo hit the com center killing all within.
Well, 1) The torpedo strike didn't happen first, the air strikes did. 2) You think the torpedo hit on the comm center was by design? Torpedoes (particularly of the 1960s vintage) aren't known for being precision weapons and as I recall they actually fired five of them and only got one hit.
Because of that, it would be very difficult for the government to pretend they didn't know it was an American ship.
I don't know what they knew. I still haven't heard a good explanation for why they would want to attack the ship and more importantly how they could be sure that they would have gotten away with it. If they wanted to sink the ship why would they only dispatch four planes to do the job? Why hit a ship with napalm when there are more effective weapons for the job?
Everyone needs to remember that the United States is the one that funded Hussein and Bin Laden in the first place
I really wish people would stop repeating this line. We never funded Bin Ladin. We funded the various Afghani Mujahideen groups via Pakistan. Bin Ladin went in with his own resources (recall that he comes from wealth), his own agenda and his own non-Afghani fighters.
Re:Bamford - USS Liberty
on
The Shadow Factory
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
There are suggestions that they feared the USS Liberty had intercepted info that could have exposed Israel to war crime charges. The whole story will come out someday.
Even if that's true it still begs two questions:
1) Why would the Israeli's sink an American ship when they could just ask the American Government to keep secret whatever the Liberty intercepted? They trust us enough not to retaliate when they kill our servicemen but not enough to keep a secret?
2) How would sinking the Liberty keep such information a secret anyway? The Liberty was presumably in constant communications with her base. How could the Israeli's know that whatever information she had hadn't already been communicated?
I still find the conspiracy theories hard to swallow......
My first thought was that the encrypted hard drives will probably have a back door built into them to keep us safe from all those kiddie pornographers..... Think of the children!
I've never known what to believe regarding the Liberty incident. The one question I've never heard answered though is what motive would the Israeli's have for attacking an American ship? What would they stand to gain from doing so?
No, you should have negotiated more. Make a few small concessions - allowing the emperor to remain in power, perhaps.
Bullshit. There's no reason to negotiate with a power that started an unprovoked war against your country when you have that power on the ropes. It also would have been a violation of our wartime agreements with the British and Chinese to not seek a separate peace or anything less than an unconditional surrender.
only said at all because your nation never had its civilian towns bombed.
My nation has never started wars of aggression.
the deliberate bombing of civilian populations that was done towards the end of the war
The London Blitz was towards the end of the war? The bombing of Warsaw occurred at the end of the war? Shanghai? Belgrade? Rotterdam?
and should not be repeated
I disagree. It should be repeated. The reason we had a peaceful occupation of Germany is because the German population was utterly and completely demoralized and defeated. When you start a war you should expect to pay the consequences.
I always find it amusing that the same brilliant government overlords who are supposedly micromanaging every detail of our lives can't seem to even get the mail delivered reliably, or a single branch of the government running efficiently, or even bother to cover up the most blatant evidence of their supposed plots.
They just do that to make you think they are incompetent. Otherwise we'd figure out the truth about 9/11 (Israeli cruise missiles), the JFK assassination (Vice President Johnson) and TWA Flight 800 (shot down by the US Navy).
And killing 100 times as many innocent bystanders in the process -- that's ok how?
Because there are no "innocent" bystanders. Those "innocent" bystanders allowed a Government to come to power that provided support to the terrorist group that attacked the United States. I always find it amusing how the anti-war crowd clams that all Americans have blood on our hands because we allowed GWB to come to power but don't apply the same argument to the civilians placed in harms way by the actions of other governments......
And of course in that war the Stark got hit by two exocets
The Stark was operating alone and not on a war footing. In an actual shooting war there would be airborne radar coverage and satellite support. Care to place a bet on the ability of Iranians to defeat the US Air Force and Navy in a air-sea battle?
Slashdot Mirror
It's still easier to use BitTorrent.
It's probably safer too. Bittorrent is going to be a civil matter. Exploiting a hole in Apple's POS system to get free stuff probably qualifies as fraud and would bring criminal charges.
Random thought: Reminds me of the old days when you could create credit card "numbers" that weren't actually valid but passed the checksum test and use them to create AOL accounts. Kind of surprised that Apple wouldn't know better.
The grandparents comment was so retarded that I didn't feel the need to use proper grammar in my response to him ;)
Going 5mph over the limit could get someone killed
So could going 5mph under the limit.
How come we don't have three strikes for speeding?
Actually a lot of states do. Here in New York if you get three speeding tickets in a 18 month timeframe (or two in work zones) you'll lose your license for a period of time. Of course with a speeding ticket you get a day in court and the chance to confront your accusers......
How the hell is is fairer than suing someone? At least in a court of law you receive some semblance of due process. Think Roadrunner is going to give you the same due process?
But what I'd want to have done, what I'd expect of myself, and what I believe to be right, is not to attack civilians, under any circumstances.
I hope you are fluent in German and not Jewish then.....
But that doesn't mean we should refuse to condemn anything the Allies did.
Ah, but you would condemn it without even looking at the context or what was gained from those actions. Do some research on the bomber offensives and then tell me that you wouldn't have done the exact same thing in the shoes of the Allies.
The biggest problem is that China has a virtually unlimited pool of cheap labor, and we don't. China doesn't have to spend the money on robotics or worker benefits or anything like that to get work done. If something big needs to be done, they keep throwing people at it until it's done.
As I recall that strategy didn't work out so well for the Soviet Union.....
That was with two planeloads of bombs; I'd've thought it were possible to figure that one out, or at least, not respond with the escalation to full-scale bombing raids on Berlin
Escalation? They were already involved in a total war. Claiming that bombing production centers and assets represents an "escalation" seems like a stretch to me.
Wheras you seem unwilling to accept that anything the Allies did during the war could possibly have been wrong.
I just think it's questionable logic to accuse the Allies of war crimes when the Allies absorbed the overwhelming majority (>80%) of the civilian and military casualties in the conflict. As far as I'm concerned if the bombing of Axis cities shortened the war by one day or saved the life of a single Allied solider then it was perfectly justifiable.
Go read up on the combined bomber offensive sometime -- discover how it kept the Germans from getting the Type XXI U-Boats (which could have flipped the Battle of the Atlantic and cost the Allies the war) into mass production. Learn how the bombing of Japan forced the Japanese to capitulate without a bloody ground invasion that would have killed a million Allied soldiers and tens of millions of Japanese civilians. Then tell me that it wasn't justifiable.
I suppose you think there's no difference between a civilian and a soldier?
Not in a total war. In a total war the nation-state mobilizes every single asset that it has to support the war effort. In a total war civilians become legitimate targets.
Feeling Vichy this morning?
That little gem gets you put on my friends list. Bravo!
So you'd rather have just exterminated the Japanese entirely? Why stop at two nukes, in that case?
If they hadn't surrendered, yes, we should have kept dropping nukes on them. Extermination is a bit of a stretch though -- we killed more Japanese with conventional bombing than we did with the nuclear attacks and even those attacks didn't come close to "exterminating" the Japanese. Japan lost 3.8% of her 1939 population. Contrast that to 16.1% for Poland or 13.7% for the Soviet Union. You'll forgive me if I roll my eyes at the idea that we were trying to (or even could have) exterminate the Japanese.
Hmm, earlier than I thought; perhaps not. (But certainly don't leave out Berlin, which is the one that started it all)
Actually Berlin wasn't bombed until London was (accidentally, though nobody figured that out until after the war) bombed by the Luftwaffe.
but don't try and pretend a bombing in support of a military invasion is the same thing as a deliberate attack on the civilian population.
Oh, so it's ok for the Axis powers to bomb cities immediately before they invade them but not ok for the Allies to do the same thing if the invasion is a year or so off? Nice double standard you have there. I suppose the civilian working in a munitions or aircraft plant is innocent in your eyes?
Putting large amounts of money into the reconstruction of western europe was what forged a stable peace.
I'm pretty sure mutually assured destruction deserves some credit too.
You're making a horrible assumption that a victim will know ahead of time that she is getting raped, by ahead of time I mean have enough time to recognize she's being attacked because once the confrontation has begun the attacker is just as close to the weapon as the defender, the shot will never get off.
If your aware of your surroundings (generally the first thing taught in any self-defense class -- whether armed or unarmed) then you aren't likely to be surprised. In any case, I'm curious if you have any actual experience with firearms to base your "the shot will never get off" claim on or if you are just regurgitating arguments that you've read/heard somewhere?
If as you pointed out the gun was used as a deterrent then you've just committed a crime unless some very specific criteria is met
No, actually you haven't. The standard varies by state but it generally boils down to what a reasonable person would do in your situation. If you legitimately fear for your life then you have every right to draw that gun. What's reasonable comes down to case law, the DA and the jury (if it gets that far) but that's the general idea.
Concealed handguns can give you real security, but not in close quarters where you don't even see your attacker
If you get surprised by your attacker then you are screwed regardless of whether or not you or they are armed. That's why awareness of your surroundings is self-defense 101. Try sneaking up on someone with a modicum of self-defense training and let me know how it works out for you.
and ignore that the effect is to make miserable 'the people of the country' who have nothing to do with it.
The effect of war is always to make the population miserable. Lower Manhattan was pretty miserable after it was attacked. It's regrettable but the 'people of the country' were the ones that allowed the Taliban to remain in power.
PS, I believe in the war in Afghanistan, but the tactics used in some cases have been extremely dubious in value
I agree. We should have gone in with overwhelming force instead of outsourcing the job to local warlords of questionable loyalty. We should have dispatched the full weight of our armed forces into Afghanistan instead of holding them back to attack Iraq.
and have high civilian casualty rates.
Cry me a river.
I'm not condoning what they did, but the Taliban offered to turn Osama Bin Laden over to US troops if the White House could show evidence of his involvement in 9/11.
Umm, no they offered to turn him over to an Islamic Court in a third country. Hardly an acceptable offer.
we went to war, getting 5,679 of our allies (and over 11,000 innocent civilians) killed in the process.
There are no innocent civilians when they allow a Government to remain in power that provides refuge to multinational terrorist organizations that attack other countries.
Nice work.
*shrug*, we didn't start the war, but we'll sure as hell finish it.
Thinking like yours only serves to perpetuate this ridiculous cycle
And thinking like yours only serves to embolden aggressors that seek to impose their will upon their neighbors and the free peoples of the world.
You seem to love random destruction and welcome the killing of innocents.
No, I just recognize that the best way to win a war is to completely and utterly destroy the will of the people you are fighting to resist. For better or worse we accomplished that in WW2.
Israeli's are right wingers
-1, drastic oversimplification and inaccurate statement
Right winger's don't need reasons, or logic, and they don't use much of them either.
-1, political bias
Not sure if I can address every concern because that gets into methods
I'm not asking you to address "methods". I'm simply asking the question of how could the Israeli's be sure that sinking the Liberty would keep whatever secret they thought she had?
The first thing the Israelis did was cripple communications. The first torpedo hit the com center killing all within.
Well, 1) The torpedo strike didn't happen first, the air strikes did. 2) You think the torpedo hit on the comm center was by design? Torpedoes (particularly of the 1960s vintage) aren't known for being precision weapons and as I recall they actually fired five of them and only got one hit.
Because of that, it would be very difficult for the government to pretend they didn't know it was an American ship.
I don't know what they knew. I still haven't heard a good explanation for why they would want to attack the ship and more importantly how they could be sure that they would have gotten away with it. If they wanted to sink the ship why would they only dispatch four planes to do the job? Why hit a ship with napalm when there are more effective weapons for the job?
Everyone needs to remember that the United States is the one that funded Hussein and Bin Laden in the first place
I really wish people would stop repeating this line. We never funded Bin Ladin. We funded the various Afghani Mujahideen groups via Pakistan. Bin Ladin went in with his own resources (recall that he comes from wealth), his own agenda and his own non-Afghani fighters.
There are suggestions that they feared the USS Liberty had intercepted info that could have exposed Israel to war crime charges. The whole story will come out someday.
Even if that's true it still begs two questions:
1) Why would the Israeli's sink an American ship when they could just ask the American Government to keep secret whatever the Liberty intercepted? They trust us enough not to retaliate when they kill our servicemen but not enough to keep a secret?
2) How would sinking the Liberty keep such information a secret anyway? The Liberty was presumably in constant communications with her base. How could the Israeli's know that whatever information she had hadn't already been communicated?
I still find the conspiracy theories hard to swallow......
You got a funny mod but it should be insightful. That was my first thought......
Don't worry though, it's for your protection. Think of the children/terrorists!
My first thought was that the encrypted hard drives will probably have a back door built into them to keep us safe from all those kiddie pornographers..... Think of the children!
I've never known what to believe regarding the Liberty incident. The one question I've never heard answered though is what motive would the Israeli's have for attacking an American ship? What would they stand to gain from doing so?
No, you should have negotiated more. Make a few small concessions - allowing the emperor to remain in power, perhaps.
Bullshit. There's no reason to negotiate with a power that started an unprovoked war against your country when you have that power on the ropes. It also would have been a violation of our wartime agreements with the British and Chinese to not seek a separate peace or anything less than an unconditional surrender.
only said at all because your nation never had its civilian towns bombed.
My nation has never started wars of aggression.
the deliberate bombing of civilian populations that was done towards the end of the war
The London Blitz was towards the end of the war? The bombing of Warsaw occurred at the end of the war? Shanghai? Belgrade? Rotterdam?
and should not be repeated
I disagree. It should be repeated. The reason we had a peaceful occupation of Germany is because the German population was utterly and completely demoralized and defeated. When you start a war you should expect to pay the consequences.
I always find it amusing that the same brilliant government overlords who are supposedly micromanaging every detail of our lives can't seem to even get the mail delivered reliably, or a single branch of the government running efficiently, or even bother to cover up the most blatant evidence of their supposed plots.
They just do that to make you think they are incompetent. Otherwise we'd figure out the truth about 9/11 (Israeli cruise missiles), the JFK assassination (Vice President Johnson) and TWA Flight 800 (shot down by the US Navy).
And killing 100 times as many innocent bystanders in the process -- that's ok how?
Because there are no "innocent" bystanders. Those "innocent" bystanders allowed a Government to come to power that provided support to the terrorist group that attacked the United States. I always find it amusing how the anti-war crowd clams that all Americans have blood on our hands because we allowed GWB to come to power but don't apply the same argument to the civilians placed in harms way by the actions of other governments......
And of course in that war the Stark got hit by two exocets
The Stark was operating alone and not on a war footing. In an actual shooting war there would be airborne radar coverage and satellite support. Care to place a bet on the ability of Iranians to defeat the US Air Force and Navy in a air-sea battle?