What INTERPOL has is *BETTER* than a license to kill!!! It says, you can use deadly force within the US, and can't be prosecuted by the US! It's a get out jail free card!!!!
If International Organisation Immunity were actually diplomatic immunity, which it isn't, it wouldn't be a "license to kill". It would be a license to be expelled from the country and tried by your own country, possibly for treason (or whatever your own country does to people who cause international incidents) as well as whatever you did.
Diplomatic immunity is granted to ambassadors and an awful lot of embassy staff already*, including those of countries that don't get on well with the host country, but international organisation immunity is not the same thing. For a start, it doesn't grant immunity from local prosecution (except for official acts - which murder is most certainly not).
* This works fairly well, apart from things like traffic violations, which aren't really worth expelling ambassadors over and are therefore commonplace amongst diplomats the world over.
Indeed, and the reason that diplomatic immunity is not a "do whatever you want" license is that any laws you break result in embarrassing complaints to your home country, who will recall you and punish you in their own system.
Genetic diversity is useful, as it make it much harder for a single pathogen to wipe out a population in a short space of time.
As for the rest, nobody is going to claim that each individual is a species. You've constructed a rather unconvincing straw man to hijack an interesting article, because you have a problem with some imaginary "greenies".
Don't attach your comment to the first post if it's not related. It's slightly annoying, the mods are wise to it, and the comment system won't keep your comment at the top of the page if the FP gets modded down.
The person who knowingly sells parts or software or equipment to the government is attempting sabotage. We need to return to the quite legal custom of executing saboteurs.
You've missed my point, which is that the Government agent who knowingly *purchased* the defective software is also a saboteur (and in this case I find it extremely difficult to believe that they did not know the software was nonsense).
And it's a coincidence that the one hoax that happened to click with their existing obsession with spy-thriller plots to down airliners got accepted and the ones which can predict when Canada will invade or identify terrorists from their shoe sizes or estimate the odds of Mickey Mouse defecting to the Russians didn't? (I consider these to make about as much sense as each other).
Yes, people should lose their jobs if they judge things based on the professionalism of the presentation instead of its content ("Good god! This isn't in green ball-point! Get me the President right away!"). Such a presentation, for something this wacky, would either have to be basically free of content, contain a different explanation from the one given now, or be detectable bullshit from even a quite cursory examination.
And even if some bored guy in an office somewhere flagged it as potentially interesting, I cannot believe that, at some later point, they didn't ask even vaguely what it was supposed to do before paying the fraudster, or at least before closing airports.
Also consider it can be just as bad (or worse) if you turn someone away who did have something novel, especially if it costs lives.
This may not actually be true. What sort of odds can they have thought this had of actually working? What is an acceptable level of risk? Would you, for example, shut all the US's airports to avoid a 1% chance of one flight being blown up? How about 0.01%, etc., etc. The risk of coded messages in Al-Jazeera's signal (especially in the form of "barcodes", FFS) being used to communicate with terrorists vanishes into "background noise", buried beneath the various potential mechanical and human failures that we inevitably risk by flying (yes, I know flying is very safe; I'm just reminding you that nothing we do is risk-free).
"At least 99.9% of Muslim men aren't terrorists. You're arguing for strip searching about 800 million people in order to find a few thousand people. Your odds are only slightly better than strip searching the 99.99% of Christian men who aren't terrorists to find the 0.01% who are (e.g. Tim McVeigh or members of the Real IRA).
Yeah, but nearly 99.9% of terrorists are Muslim.
[Citation needed], unless you're defining white people as automatically not terrorists (not that "nearly 99.9%" is a particularly meaningful claim). Where I live, the terrorists seem to be neo-fascist fuckwits or animal rights bombers. But that's beside the point. What fraction of the "terrorists" do you think are men? Maybe all men should be kept off flights? I suspect you fundamentally do not grasp statistics.
An example of Timithy [sic] McVeigh is more like.000000001% than.01%
If McVeigh represents.000000001% of terrorists, the human race is pretty much fucked, finding itself vastly outnumbered by the 100 billion terrorists on this planet. I wonder where they all find space to live?
So, who do you think will be prosecuted for this? The guy who told them this nonsense, or the CIA guy who payed him to produce the "intel" they wanted to hear?
Along with the recently-revealed origin of the "45 minutes" claim here in the UK, this starts to paint a picture of the way the War on Terror is justified: agencies don't make stuff up: they pay some idiot to make stuff up, so that when questions are asked, blame can go to the idiot instead of the highly-trained people that somehow end up listening to idiots.
This also shows how easy it is to fool most people by treating computers like magic. You can't say stuff came to you in a vision anymore, but claim that magic software told you and most people are too scared of technical stuff to think to hard about it.
They'd never get away with that, but they will get away with this:
You must install one of: A) Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 *
C) Mozilla Firefox 3
And let the users form their own uninformed opinions of which one comes with the newest, shiniest internet. And of course, if they avoid the phrase "which web browser", a lot of users will think they're being asked to choose between the internet and something they've never heard of (these are the ones who successfully got through XP's network setup wizard by clicking on whatever button was closest to the word "Internet" until it worked).
* Remember, they are currently working on incrementing their version number as fast as they think they can get away with.
I notice from the Wiki article on the place that it's pretty easy to get a guided tour of the place if you want one, so I don't think the radiation levels there are the bugaboo you think they are.
With dosimeters and guides keeping you out of the places were radiation has accumulated.
Other posters have claimed that the loudness is achieved not so much by higher gain as by limiting the dynamic range of the commercials (in much the same way that record labels wreck music to make their CDs sound louder, see "loudness wars").
a) Any author of part of the software gets to sue (unless they had to assign copyright to the project*). In short, whoever owns the rights to the work! It's just copyright. The SFLC often gets asked to help by the people who's work has been stolen. I do not believe the poster above me who says that anyone can claim to own it.
b) In the past, the end result has been future compliance, and various "undisclosed contributions" to projects (no idea how you keep the amount of a donation to an open-source project a secret).
c) I Don't think the good guys have lost yet, but I guess SFLC would be out the (donated, I think) money it funds the lawsuits with.
d) SFLC funds the lawsuit (that's part of its purpose); they have a fund including $4 million from OSDL.
e) Trolls would have to get code accepted into the project to have a case, and then wait a bit and hope the violators upgrade to the latest version. That, or contribute to lots of projects in the hope someone infringes one of them (I'm not sure the community would mind). I doubt the SFLC would help a random small contributor, and as mentioned above, past SFLC lawsuits have resulted in contributions to the project involved, not payoffs of individuals.
*Having individual contributors keep the copyright is a great safeguard against a project leader taking a project closed-source. It is, however, also why Linux can't switch to GPLv3 even if it wants to.
While technically military the "Gendarmerie Nationale" aren't exactly soldiers
They are, for example, one of about two police forces in the world with a parachute division, and GIGN is more often compared to the SAS than to SWAT teams (for example, GIGN has helped French marines arrest Somali pirates).
OpenOffice is a total mess of staggeringly bloated Java components.
OpenOffice is written in C++. The Java bits are optional (I don't use them, though I use Gentoo and it may be harder to disable them completely on other platforms).
Now, I'm not saying OpenOffice isn't a bloated mess, but have you tried MS Office? It's kinda another bloated mess.
I would go so far as to claim that they're all either "short lived" or "long lived". You've defined radioactive material as basically safe, which is demonstrably false. In any case:
Not being radioactive for very long doesn't really help if you're going to contaminate the majority of the world's farmland. Everyone not eating for only a few months will probably be unpopular.
And if you aren't bothered by long-lived radioactive isotopes, I suggest you move to Pripyat (property is pretty cheap there).
People who've been modding this Insightful instead of Funny:
The material has to go somewhere. Specifically, it gets blown to a fine dust, which settles over probably most of the rest of the world. Said dust will be radioactive (there will be far more than just the radioactivity from the remains of the weapon, since much of that soil will have been exposed to extreme neutron flux and transmuted into unstable isotopes).
Slashdot Mirror
If International Organisation Immunity were actually diplomatic immunity, which it isn't, it wouldn't be a "license to kill". It would be a license to be expelled from the country and tried by your own country, possibly for treason (or whatever your own country does to people who cause international incidents) as well as whatever you did.
Diplomatic immunity is granted to ambassadors and an awful lot of embassy staff already*, including those of countries that don't get on well with the host country, but international organisation immunity is not the same thing. For a start, it doesn't grant immunity from local prosecution (except for official acts - which murder is most certainly not).
* This works fairly well, apart from things like traffic violations, which aren't really worth expelling ambassadors over and are therefore commonplace amongst diplomats the world over.
Indeed, and the reason that diplomatic immunity is not a "do whatever you want" license is that any laws you break result in embarrassing complaints to your home country, who will recall you and punish you in their own system.
Genetic diversity is useful, as it make it much harder for a single pathogen to wipe out a population in a short space of time.
As for the rest, nobody is going to claim that each individual is a species. You've constructed a rather unconvincing straw man to hijack an interesting article, because you have a problem with some imaginary "greenies".
Don't attach your comment to the first post if it's not related. It's slightly annoying, the mods are wise to it, and the comment system won't keep your comment at the top of the page if the FP gets modded down.
(Offtopic, so posting without my bonus).
Robotic surgeons integrating electronics with the human body?
DARPA is run by the Strogg!
You've missed my point, which is that the Government agent who knowingly *purchased* the defective software is also a saboteur (and in this case I find it extremely difficult to believe that they did not know the software was nonsense).
Yes, people should lose their jobs if they judge things based on the professionalism of the presentation instead of its content ("Good god! This isn't in green ball-point! Get me the President right away!"). Such a presentation, for something this wacky, would either have to be basically free of content, contain a different explanation from the one given now, or be detectable bullshit from even a quite cursory examination.
And even if some bored guy in an office somewhere flagged it as potentially interesting, I cannot believe that, at some later point, they didn't ask even vaguely what it was supposed to do before paying the fraudster, or at least before closing airports.
This may not actually be true. What sort of odds can they have thought this had of actually working? What is an acceptable level of risk? Would you, for example, shut all the US's airports to avoid a 1% chance of one flight being blown up? How about 0.01%, etc., etc. The risk of coded messages in Al-Jazeera's signal (especially in the form of "barcodes", FFS) being used to communicate with terrorists vanishes into "background noise", buried beneath the various potential mechanical and human failures that we inevitably risk by flying (yes, I know flying is very safe; I'm just reminding you that nothing we do is risk-free).
[Citation needed], unless you're defining white people as automatically not terrorists (not that "nearly 99.9%" is a particularly meaningful claim). Where I live, the terrorists seem to be neo-fascist fuckwits or animal rights bombers.
But that's beside the point. What fraction of the "terrorists" do you think are men? Maybe all men should be kept off flights? I suspect you fundamentally do not grasp statistics.
If McVeigh represents .000000001% of terrorists, the human race is pretty much fucked, finding itself vastly outnumbered by the 100 billion terrorists on this planet. I wonder where they all find space to live?
Or the eggheads took one look and facepalmed, but the political masters used it anyway, fully aware it was bullshit. Fear is useful to them.
So, who do you think will be prosecuted for this? The guy who told them this nonsense, or the CIA guy who payed him to produce the "intel" they wanted to hear?
Along with the recently-revealed origin of the "45 minutes" claim here in the UK, this starts to paint a picture of the way the War on Terror is justified: agencies don't make stuff up: they pay some idiot to make stuff up, so that when questions are asked, blame can go to the idiot instead of the highly-trained people that somehow end up listening to idiots.
This also shows how easy it is to fool most people by treating computers like magic. You can't say stuff came to you in a vision anymore, but claim that magic software told you and most people are too scared of technical stuff to think to hard about it.
Seriously, if that command isn't on the default install for every *nix distro yet, it should be.
They'd never get away with that, but they will get away with this:
You must install one of:
A) Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 *
C) Mozilla Firefox 3
And let the users form their own uninformed opinions of which one comes with the newest, shiniest internet.
And of course, if they avoid the phrase "which web browser", a lot of users will think they're being asked to choose between the internet and something they've never heard of (these are the ones who successfully got through XP's network setup wizard by clicking on whatever button was closest to the word "Internet" until it worked).
* Remember, they are currently working on incrementing their version number as fast as they think they can get away with.
With dosimeters and guides keeping you out of the places were radiation has accumulated.
Other posters have claimed that the loudness is achieved not so much by higher gain as by limiting the dynamic range of the commercials (in much the same way that record labels wreck music to make their CDs sound louder, see "loudness wars").
IANAL.
a) Any author of part of the software gets to sue (unless they had to assign copyright to the project*). In short, whoever owns the rights to the work! It's just copyright. The SFLC often gets asked to help by the people who's work has been stolen. I do not believe the poster above me who says that anyone can claim to own it.
b) In the past, the end result has been future compliance, and various "undisclosed contributions" to projects (no idea how you keep the amount of a donation to an open-source project a secret).
c) I Don't think the good guys have lost yet, but I guess SFLC would be out the (donated, I think) money it funds the lawsuits with.
d) SFLC funds the lawsuit (that's part of its purpose); they have a fund including $4 million from OSDL.
e) Trolls would have to get code accepted into the project to have a case, and then wait a bit and hope the violators upgrade to the latest version. That, or contribute to lots of projects in the hope someone infringes one of them (I'm not sure the community would mind). I doubt the SFLC would help a random small contributor, and as mentioned above, past SFLC lawsuits have resulted in contributions to the project involved, not payoffs of individuals.
*Having individual contributors keep the copyright is a great safeguard against a project leader taking a project closed-source. It is, however, also why Linux can't switch to GPLv3 even if it wants to.
The problem with thermonuclear earthmoving has never been that it doesn't "work well", and I didn't say it was.
India is warm!
What? Grammar aside, if that's true, it's rather more newsworthy than this somewhat confused story,
They are, for example, one of about two police forces in the world with a parachute division, and GIGN is more often compared to the SAS than to SWAT teams (for example, GIGN has helped French marines arrest Somali pirates).
OpenOffice is written in C++. The Java bits are optional (I don't use them, though I use Gentoo and it may be harder to disable them completely on other platforms).
Now, I'm not saying OpenOffice isn't a bloated mess, but have you tried MS Office? It's kinda another bloated mess.
I would go so far as to claim that they're all either "short lived" or "long lived". You've defined radioactive material as basically safe, which is demonstrably false. In any case:
Not being radioactive for very long doesn't really help if you're going to contaminate the majority of the world's farmland. Everyone not eating for only a few months will probably be unpopular.
And if you aren't bothered by long-lived radioactive isotopes, I suggest you move to Pripyat (property is pretty cheap there).
Not really relevant compared to the amount of fallout caused by material that was not part of the bomb.
I worry that they'll just have to add the cost of a built-in ohmmeter to all MP3 players from now on.
People who've been modding this Insightful instead of Funny:
The material has to go somewhere. Specifically, it gets blown to a fine dust, which settles over probably most of the rest of the world. Said dust will be radioactive (there will be far more than just the radioactivity from the remains of the weapon, since much of that soil will have been exposed to extreme neutron flux and transmuted into unstable isotopes).
Proprietary software is not legitimate as a component of Gnome (this is, after all, why Gnome exists in the first place).