They're talking about a means by which you can avoid having the virus set in in the first place, by preventing it from being able to replicate. This would be something you'd do to yourself, genetically, before you are even exposed to HIV. If you don't already HAVE the virus, and don't do the things that, for most people, are what increase your odds of getting the virus, perhaps you wouldn't want your DNA messed with? That's the sort of thing to examine. Risk/cost/benefit.
looking at things like the internet, which is inherently nonviolent, as a place for warfare
You probably got moddded down because your choice of language suggests a certain naivete.
The internet is nothing until someone uses it. Just like a roadside bomb, a watering can, a butterknife. Since it's pointless to talk about it unless you talk about how it's used, then what you're really talking about are the people that use it, and how they use it. To say that it's inherently non-violent is to say that the people who use it are. Which is demonstrably false. And before someone mentions the non-violence of ones and zeros, please remember that much of warfare (including heading it off before someone tries to start one) is communications, awareness, readiness, and the health of your government, industry and other large systems... all of which now depend on the network. War is about controlling, or denying other people the use of the things that allow them to have power or influence over others - and a mammoth, globe-spanning communications system is now forever going to be a central venue for things very much related to violence. It already is.
getting pretty tiresome to see the police always trotting out the public safety angle
No more tiresome than it is to see someone on slashdot trotting the "The Pigs are only working for The Man" socialist hippy crap whenever another country's counterfitting efforts are exposed or someone's work is ripped off and they actually get some help dealing with it.
protect the corporation
Yeah, that evil Cisco. We sure wouldn't want to protect the millions of people who own stock in it, the billions of people who depend on data that passes through their equipment, or the thousands of people who work for the company. We should only protect routing equipment makers with 20 or fewer employees that work in organic huts owned by families of no more than three living generations and a just enough net worth to buy a Yugo that's been converted to run on oil pressed from chicken feathers that have been voluntarily offered up by free range chickens living in harmony with other birds, including predators that have been converted to veganism, no matter how much they want to eat that chicken.
So, what are you saying? That the executive branch's boss should insist that a vendor that agreed to perform a certain task actually follow through and do it? Or that the president should personally understand every technical nuance of tens of thousands of technical contracts and subcontracts right down to the third party OTC tools that are being selected? I don't see any indication here that the White House doesn't care that Boeing dropped the ball, and isn't holding their feet to the fire. Do you? Is that what you're saying?
Ah, but a troll that so closely matches the dimwitted, but frequently tossed-around memes that one sees here, whether a troll or not, requires that rebutal. Otherwise, the rest of the bunch that simply see a rant that dovetails with their world view say, "Yeah, man - tell it like is! The Man..." blah blah. If you're going to troll, you've got to do a much more nuanced job of it. At least invoke the Trilateral Commission, or fake up some money-making scheme that allows Dick Cheney to somehow end up owning the manufacturer of the video cameras that were used. Come on, you can do better than that. This is slashdot. There's no excuse for lame, so-mundane-it-sounds-like-most-of-the-local-demographic trolling. Where's the spice? Where's the theater? Where's the gold plated tinfoil?
In a recent conversation with a tour guide/historian while standing in the ancient Roman coluseum in Verona, Italy, this exact topic came up. The structure was built with slave labor at the height of the Roman empire's economic/military juice (it's quite a thing to see, really - but a shame that the outer ring of the thing got clobbered in an earthquake... though that provided lots of nice Extreme Makeover supplies for the local architects working on the town's other buildings). During the summer, they have a regular rotation of opera performances (sans amplification - very quaint, very cool) on stages/sets that have to be loaded in and out and rapidly changed. The work is done in the sweltering heat during the day. It's hugely labor intensive, and almost entirely done by eastern Europeans who are the equivalent of the migrant workers that pick lettuce in California. The guide (herself a native Veronese) said, "Oh, Italians would never do that job - it would kill them!" She also made jokes about how it would scuff their shoes. Mind you, she's a local, so she's allowed.
But she also talked about the utter lack of affordable housing for the workers, the huge crime problem that comes with (and between) them, the large camps of them that live under bridges, etc. But the Romanians (largely) she referred to come and do it, rack up the cash, and them take it or send it home. The main point was that this is as old as time (well, as old as relatively modern civilization, anyway). Sure, the Romans did it at the point of a spear, and the (ironically named) Romanians are doing it out of an interest in clawing their way back from the ravages of life under a typically nasty Socialist regime... but the notion of having "other people" do certain kinds of work is, literally, a classic.
And the Bush administration once again puts politics above effective governance and management.
And a slashdot user once again trots out their favorite villain without actually using their damn head.
So, you're saying that Boeing told DHS that this would not work in its first prototype/deployment? They were under orders to deploy something they knew would not work? Or is it possible that the procurement people said, "We need something that can do X, can you provide that on this timetable?" And the vendor said they could, and that it would work. Is your position that the president looked over their proposal, saw the technical flaws and systems integrations problems with the laptops and software, and said, "no one will notice, do it anyway," or that perhaps it's not the executive branch's leadership job to know when a vendor is lying about the compatibility of the components they're stitching together? Why aren't you complaining about Boeing, for lying about their ability to actually do this, and agreeing to take the contract?
Don't you think these Muslims are sick of hearing about it?
Sure. Why is it do you suppose that they don't do anything about it?
Can you blame them for being defensive?
Sure. I wouldn't blame them for actually stepping up and putting a stop to it, though. But that's where the total passivity kicks in, except for a few very brave people down at the police-officer level... and they tend to get killed for doing so. Killed, by people operating out of basements, building bombs made from materials bought with cash that could be dried up in an instant, if the wider body of Islam actually wanted to stop it. They SHOULD feel defensive about it.
When some addled-brained US serviceman pulls some sort of crap overseas, he winds up in a court martial. When a foreigner from Syria is in Iraq with a bomb he bought using cash that laundered its way to him from a jewelry kiosk in a mall in Detroit straps it onto a mentally retarded woman and sends her into a market full of kids to die and take dozens with her... that person's family gets treated like neighborhood celebrities. Yeah, that's worth getting defensive over, I'd say.
The offense is in condemning Islam and all Muslims not just the radicals. You're setting up a straw man here. I doubt any normal Muslim has an issue with you condemning the Taliban or similar groups.
We've had years and years now, since the radicals have been showing their colors in places like Iran, or in the streets of the Palestinian territories, or more recently in their fading attempt to walk into Iraq and start a civil war that will delay the establishment of a civil society there. They cannot function without substantial popular and economic support. It's not like we're talking about a few crazies that are holed up in a basement or in the forest somewhere. This is a substantial movement with manifestations in every predominantly Muslim - and many hardly-at-all-Muslim - country in the world. Muslims in Indonesia, and Syria, and Turkey, and London, and Egypt, and Sudan, and Michigan DO all need to act, as the single culture that they choose one word with which to identify themselves, to stop this. But they can't, because there are millions - not dozens - who seem to consider people like Khalid Sheik Mohammad to be Robin-Hood-esque heroes. It's an ugly, self-destructive streak that would hardly matter if it didn't happen to involve a culture with its historical and demographic roots in a place where the fact of sitting on the ground there makes you the owner of trillions of dollars worth of fuel. Just as Hugo Chavez is using his oil cash to prop up an increasingly brutal, counter-productive bit of tyranny, it's the story in the middle east. And to the extent that the ugliest bunch of hot heads within that mess proclaim themselves to be the voices and hand of Islam... and other Muslims don't bother to stop them, but instead send them their money and their sons, well, there you have it.
The condemnations of extremism and terrorism from Muslim leaders are legion - if you haven't been paying attention thats your problem and your error.
Sorry, no. Those condemnations are completely toothless. Why? Because the people that could make them really stick - the leaders of the countries that could actually, right now, this minute, put a stop to such radicals - do not. Why? Because large swaths of their populations - Muslims - do not want them to. Try too hard to stop it, and they are killed for doing so - from police officers, through legislators, and right on up to top officials and their families. The only thing that's legion is the deafening roar that such minority moderates have to face, and from which they usually back down.
Their positive influence extends as far as living their own lives peacefully.
And that's exactly what I'm talking about. Their radical brothers choose to extend their influence through violence visited upon other people. Those who want peace have to do MORE than simply live quietly and shake their heads at the folks down the street who are harboring a bombmaker or delivery food to training camp, or sending cash to Hezbollah.
you're the first person who has me marked as a foe on slashdot that i have marked as a friend on slashdot
Um... Dude back at you. For what it's worth, though, I've never marked anyone as a foe... that was you, who had ME marked as a foe, from some earlier snotting contest that I think we probably were having over copyright issues (knowing me!). Always nice to find some common ground, ain't it?
I dismiss criticism which amounts to saying that the whole of Islam and the Muslim world may be fairly judged as being indistinguishable from the Taliban
The problem is that you lead off with a pre-emptory attack on anyone that might consider Islamic culture conducive to the breeding of these crazies, and you don't - in your own words - personally condemn them. That's exactly the problem, here. You attack - as your opening sentiment - everyone else, and not a peep out of you, in the same breath, about how little you think of the people who are trying so hard to defame the wider Muslim culture through their actual, murderous actions. This is exactly what I encounter in almost every conversation I have with Muslims. A completely defensive posture about the whole thing - so defensive, in fact, that they sweep defense of retrograde mysoginst killers like the Taliban right up into their piety and wounded feelings. In essence, people who think and act like the Taliban are busy making the world a more miserable place for Muslims, and Muslims are so busy saying how offended they are when lumped together with the Taliban that they forget to bother to proactively differentiate themselves from those clowns. If a culture of untold millions of people is unable to regularly figure out that they're not helping themselves by aggessively shouting down and personally doing everything they can to extinguish movements like the Taliban, then I have a hard time feeling sorry for them when they're perceived as being part of the problem.
The people in quesition kill women for teaching their daughters to read. They stone women to death for having been raped. And what do I hear from somewhat more modern Muslims? Not, "These people have to be stopped, especially since they want to run the entire middle east that way (and London, and Canada) - how can I help?" but rather, "Oh, we're not all like that, and you're a bigot for even wondering if Islam itself, by its nature, seems to be built around these notions." Passively allowing violent medieval theocracies to try, again, to take root and spread is only scarecly worse than actively pushing for it. Making the people who honestly express disgust at that entire world view sound like the villains is your primary mistake, and if anyone should be insulted it's them, not you.
One being that professional care is VERY expensive in the United States
No, it's expensive everywhere, because any profession that requires years of solid schooling and a lifetime of academic maintenance is expensive. To the degree that the treatment is as available but for less money somewhere else, it's only that it's because someone else is paying for it. That's not less expensive, it's just someone else's expense.
I've had to fight tooth and nail with my insurer to get them to help out with the bills
Meaning, you've had to fight tooth and nail to get them to find a way to charge their other customers more money. If they can't get enough customers to be willing to pay higher rates, then they have to decide what is, and isn't something they can afford to cover. They're businesses. And if they weren't businesses, you'd just be asking taxpayers to pay more, rather than fellow insurance customers. It's true of every one of those decisions, and the factors that play into are exactly what you'd expect: what are most of that business's cusomters like? It's no different than an airline making the simple decision that they're going to have to charge more when a customer is too wide to fit in a single seat.
An everyday crime, at the feet of insurers
Really? An actual crime? Which law is being broken? I think my insurance company's other customers should buy me new shoes every week so I'll feel better about myself, and thus more productive. But they refuse! Criminals!
there is a very negative stigma here about talking your problems out
Are you kidding? We've turned into a culture where your only virtue is your ability to showcase your syndromes, your misfortunes, your membership in victim groups, etc. Kids do nothing but talk about how put-upon they are, how injured their psyches are, and how only emo-musicians truly understand their angsty view of the world, which they catalog in excruciating detail on any web site to which they have access. They "friend" each other for doing a better job than the next person at choosing MySpace wallpaper and Flash animations that illustrate their problems and moods. So which is it? Problems that can be "talked out," or chemistry? I'm all for diagnosing and treating actual chemical problems. But it's no different than any other diagnosis and treatment: if if costs more than what you're paying for your insurance, you're asking someone else to pay for it. And if we were to switch over to having the government do all of that, it would cost even more. Hillary knows this, which is why she said in an interview the other day that she'd consider garnishing the wages of people that refused to buy health insurance. So, soon perhaps you'll have your wish.
Sure you did, by framing your objection to the reporter's coverage of the events in political terms.
i would rate BBC News at least a 6 or 7
Fine. Again - who is more credible to you on this? Who gets a 10? Chavez's own propogandists? Cuba's? The events in question are political. If your sympathies lie with Chavez, then any reporting that mentions the possibility of his troops trashing the mining facilities of a rival neighbor are going to annoy you, I suppose.
Right. His profession is (or was, for CNN) in the production of new-ish information for a network that (laughably, but none-the-less) professes objective reporting. How could anyone who considers themselves smart enough to work in that role pretend that they're not smart enough to realize that it can make an journalistic entity look bad (and take the fun out of their protestations that their main competitor isn't objective) when the people producing their news go out of their way to make idealogical, opinionated stuff public? He's too dumb to have that job.
Got me thinking about how, in a two-story house, there's all sorts of vertical movement. I was picturing a way to step on a platform (sort of like those that parking lot attendants sometimes use) to ride from the second floor to the first. That buffered ride down could throw some energy into a flywheel. And, how about all of the greywater from upstairs? Three people taking their morning showers send many pounds of water down a vertical path to ground level. I wonder if passing that through some sort of screw drive might give up a few watts.
do you have that from any *credible* news source? fox news certainly isn't.
Really? You'd prefer Venezuela's state-run news, and Chavez-controlled airwaves? Which information presented in the article I happened to link to did you find to be actually incorrect, historically or in terms of its representations of current events? Or, are you just a blowhard? Ah, I see.
Still, do a little homework. Venezuela can't stand the idea of US firms doing things like setting up rocket launch sites in Guyana. You'll recall that Chavez's nationalization of other people's investments is now his normal behavior, and his inclinations in this area are the same.
Don't like Fox? How about the The SF Gate?. Is that idealogically left-enough of a publication for you? They report on Guyana's complaint about Chavez's military destroying Guyana-operated dredging equipment outside of Venezuela's borders. The border agreement to which Venezuela a signee a century ago is now "null," according to Chavez (funny how he's recently decided that, now that third parties are investing in mineral extraction work in an area he'd like to harvest - since he can't make money off of his heavily sulfurous crude oil without sending to the US for refinement).
Yeah, that Hugo Chavez... he's just misunderstood. Did he mention to you that he's also trying to annex the oil-rich part of a neighboring country right now? You know, the ol' "the maps were drawn wrong - it's always been mine" method.
Hell, we killed Ghaddafi's daughter with a cruise missile and now we're toasting his health. What gives?
He saw the light, unlike Castro. Libya has given up on its nuclear weapons programs, has stopped writing checks to terrorists, and so on.
We milked Libya for $2 Billion and made them grovel in order get back on the party invite list
We didn't "make" them. They wanted back into the world of commerce. The price they had to pay was to stop attacking it, or paying other people to do so.
dirty little socialist tendencies
Like, say, killing the people that try to escape it? Oh, it's just a little socialism! Who cares about gunning down people who don't want a part of it - the health care is free! And there are so many opportunities to own cars made in the 1940s.
A personal apology to each member of the Clinton family (including pets and household staff)
A personal apology from each member of the Clinton family
There, that's more like it. Why should anyone apologize to them? They're a completely oily, power-hungry pair of triangulating, platitude-uttering, poll-driven sharks. They haven't changed a bit, and still haven't apologized for bringing FBI records on political opponents into the White House for campaign research, crucifying people in their travel office for their own misdeeds, getting Bill's staff to lie for him about his own lies in front of a judge, issuing pardons to rich fugitive felon/donors on Bill's way out the door, and so on. Why should anyone apologize to them, of all people? I have no intention of voting for Obama, but I think he deserves an apology from Bill, too. Just wait to see what the next several weeks of the Democrat primary campaign looks like - the Clintons have only just begun to get really desparate, and their machine is going to go into full politics-of-personal-destruction mode. They're the masters of it.
Who cares? The only thing that matters is that a service provider is providing a service to its customers. It has to do so within the bounds of what it can do and still stay in business doing so (which includes actually showing a profit). The use of their network is going to be constantly evolving, but it's certain that the vast majority of the bandwidth used by their customers is going to continue to lean towards streaming media and big binaries moving around. They have to decide how to reasonably provide what their customers - as a group - can and should get at the prices they charge. I use a different carrier, and don't care about Comcast, per se (except for the fact that their users tend to be a big source bot-powered spam). The use of the word "unlimited" is pretty much always a bad idea, I think, because no one can actually provide it - not in literal terms.
So slow down the kid when the bandwidth usage requires it (but based on his bandwidth, available bandwidth, and current total demand, rather than how important you think his network activity is).
Much, much harder to compare that particular user's account, history, and moment-to-moment usage to the overall flow of things, relative to other people's more legit-smelling traffic. Easier, at this stage of the game, to think about protocols, as understood by a long-term, net-wide observed general pattern. I can't blame the carriers for saying, "In general, moving movie torrents around is looking less important to most of our customers than being able to check mail, connect to work, and handle normal surfing." That's easy/ier to shape on the routing side. Handling the analytics needed to do what you're saying involves way more horsepower and moving parts.
Slashdot Mirror
Well how much more wrong can it get than AIDs?
They're talking about a means by which you can avoid having the virus set in in the first place, by preventing it from being able to replicate. This would be something you'd do to yourself, genetically, before you are even exposed to HIV. If you don't already HAVE the virus, and don't do the things that, for most people, are what increase your odds of getting the virus, perhaps you wouldn't want your DNA messed with? That's the sort of thing to examine. Risk/cost/benefit.
Does anyone know if gene therapy has progressed far enough to actually apply this to cell DNA? Is this actually a real cure for AIDS
Sure. They just use a mostly-dead other virus to permanently change your genetic code. Nothing could possibly go wrong.
That was the biggest load of jibber jabber since time cube.
Perhaps, once you've become immortal, you'll live long enough to understand the time cube. Foolish mortals!
looking at things like the internet, which is inherently nonviolent, as a place for warfare
You probably got moddded down because your choice of language suggests a certain naivete.
The internet is nothing until someone uses it. Just like a roadside bomb, a watering can, a butterknife. Since it's pointless to talk about it unless you talk about how it's used, then what you're really talking about are the people that use it, and how they use it. To say that it's inherently non-violent is to say that the people who use it are. Which is demonstrably false. And before someone mentions the non-violence of ones and zeros, please remember that much of warfare (including heading it off before someone tries to start one) is communications, awareness, readiness, and the health of your government, industry and other large systems... all of which now depend on the network. War is about controlling, or denying other people the use of the things that allow them to have power or influence over others - and a mammoth, globe-spanning communications system is now forever going to be a central venue for things very much related to violence. It already is.
getting pretty tiresome to see the police always trotting out the public safety angle
No more tiresome than it is to see someone on slashdot trotting the "The Pigs are only working for The Man" socialist hippy crap whenever another country's counterfitting efforts are exposed or someone's work is ripped off and they actually get some help dealing with it.
protect the corporation
Yeah, that evil Cisco. We sure wouldn't want to protect the millions of people who own stock in it, the billions of people who depend on data that passes through their equipment, or the thousands of people who work for the company. We should only protect routing equipment makers with 20 or fewer employees that work in organic huts owned by families of no more than three living generations and a just enough net worth to buy a Yugo that's been converted to run on oil pressed from chicken feathers that have been voluntarily offered up by free range chickens living in harmony with other birds, including predators that have been converted to veganism, no matter how much they want to eat that chicken.
So, what are you saying? That the executive branch's boss should insist that a vendor that agreed to perform a certain task actually follow through and do it? Or that the president should personally understand every technical nuance of tens of thousands of technical contracts and subcontracts right down to the third party OTC tools that are being selected? I don't see any indication here that the White House doesn't care that Boeing dropped the ball, and isn't holding their feet to the fire. Do you? Is that what you're saying?
Nah. I was trolling. And I got you!
Ah, but a troll that so closely matches the dimwitted, but frequently tossed-around memes that one sees here, whether a troll or not, requires that rebutal. Otherwise, the rest of the bunch that simply see a rant that dovetails with their world view say, "Yeah, man - tell it like is! The Man..." blah blah. If you're going to troll, you've got to do a much more nuanced job of it. At least invoke the Trilateral Commission, or fake up some money-making scheme that allows Dick Cheney to somehow end up owning the manufacturer of the video cameras that were used. Come on, you can do better than that. This is slashdot. There's no excuse for lame, so-mundane-it-sounds-like-most-of-the-local-demographic trolling. Where's the spice? Where's the theater? Where's the gold plated tinfoil?
In a recent conversation with a tour guide/historian while standing in the ancient Roman coluseum in Verona, Italy, this exact topic came up. The structure was built with slave labor at the height of the Roman empire's economic/military juice (it's quite a thing to see, really - but a shame that the outer ring of the thing got clobbered in an earthquake... though that provided lots of nice Extreme Makeover supplies for the local architects working on the town's other buildings). During the summer, they have a regular rotation of opera performances (sans amplification - very quaint, very cool) on stages/sets that have to be loaded in and out and rapidly changed. The work is done in the sweltering heat during the day. It's hugely labor intensive, and almost entirely done by eastern Europeans who are the equivalent of the migrant workers that pick lettuce in California. The guide (herself a native Veronese) said, "Oh, Italians would never do that job - it would kill them!" She also made jokes about how it would scuff their shoes. Mind you, she's a local, so she's allowed.
But she also talked about the utter lack of affordable housing for the workers, the huge crime problem that comes with (and between) them, the large camps of them that live under bridges, etc. But the Romanians (largely) she referred to come and do it, rack up the cash, and them take it or send it home. The main point was that this is as old as time (well, as old as relatively modern civilization, anyway). Sure, the Romans did it at the point of a spear, and the (ironically named) Romanians are doing it out of an interest in clawing their way back from the ravages of life under a typically nasty Socialist regime... but the notion of having "other people" do certain kinds of work is, literally, a classic.
And the Bush administration once again puts politics above effective governance and management.
And a slashdot user once again trots out their favorite villain without actually using their damn head.
So, you're saying that Boeing told DHS that this would not work in its first prototype/deployment? They were under orders to deploy something they knew would not work? Or is it possible that the procurement people said, "We need something that can do X, can you provide that on this timetable?" And the vendor said they could, and that it would work. Is your position that the president looked over their proposal, saw the technical flaws and systems integrations problems with the laptops and software, and said, "no one will notice, do it anyway," or that perhaps it's not the executive branch's leadership job to know when a vendor is lying about the compatibility of the components they're stitching together? Why aren't you complaining about Boeing, for lying about their ability to actually do this, and agreeing to take the contract?
I didn't have time to RTFA, but this is about writing resumes, right?
Don't you think these Muslims are sick of hearing about it?
Sure. Why is it do you suppose that they don't do anything about it?
Can you blame them for being defensive?
Sure. I wouldn't blame them for actually stepping up and putting a stop to it, though. But that's where the total passivity kicks in, except for a few very brave people down at the police-officer level... and they tend to get killed for doing so. Killed, by people operating out of basements, building bombs made from materials bought with cash that could be dried up in an instant, if the wider body of Islam actually wanted to stop it. They SHOULD feel defensive about it.
When some addled-brained US serviceman pulls some sort of crap overseas, he winds up in a court martial. When a foreigner from Syria is in Iraq with a bomb he bought using cash that laundered its way to him from a jewelry kiosk in a mall in Detroit straps it onto a mentally retarded woman and sends her into a market full of kids to die and take dozens with her... that person's family gets treated like neighborhood celebrities. Yeah, that's worth getting defensive over, I'd say.
The offense is in condemning Islam and all Muslims not just the radicals. You're setting up a straw man here. I doubt any normal Muslim has an issue with you condemning the Taliban or similar groups.
We've had years and years now, since the radicals have been showing their colors in places like Iran, or in the streets of the Palestinian territories, or more recently in their fading attempt to walk into Iraq and start a civil war that will delay the establishment of a civil society there. They cannot function without substantial popular and economic support. It's not like we're talking about a few crazies that are holed up in a basement or in the forest somewhere. This is a substantial movement with manifestations in every predominantly Muslim - and many hardly-at-all-Muslim - country in the world. Muslims in Indonesia, and Syria, and Turkey, and London, and Egypt, and Sudan, and Michigan DO all need to act, as the single culture that they choose one word with which to identify themselves, to stop this. But they can't, because there are millions - not dozens - who seem to consider people like Khalid Sheik Mohammad to be Robin-Hood-esque heroes. It's an ugly, self-destructive streak that would hardly matter if it didn't happen to involve a culture with its historical and demographic roots in a place where the fact of sitting on the ground there makes you the owner of trillions of dollars worth of fuel. Just as Hugo Chavez is using his oil cash to prop up an increasingly brutal, counter-productive bit of tyranny, it's the story in the middle east. And to the extent that the ugliest bunch of hot heads within that mess proclaim themselves to be the voices and hand of Islam... and other Muslims don't bother to stop them, but instead send them their money and their sons, well, there you have it.
The condemnations of extremism and terrorism from Muslim leaders are legion - if you haven't been paying attention thats your problem and your error.
Sorry, no. Those condemnations are completely toothless. Why? Because the people that could make them really stick - the leaders of the countries that could actually, right now, this minute, put a stop to such radicals - do not. Why? Because large swaths of their populations - Muslims - do not want them to. Try too hard to stop it, and they are killed for doing so - from police officers, through legislators, and right on up to top officials and their families. The only thing that's legion is the deafening roar that such minority moderates have to face, and from which they usually back down.
Their positive influence extends as far as living their own lives peacefully.
And that's exactly what I'm talking about. Their radical brothers choose to extend their influence through violence visited upon other people. Those who want peace have to do MORE than simply live quietly and shake their heads at the folks down the street who are harboring a bombmaker or delivery food to training camp, or sending cash to Hezbollah.
you're the first person who has me marked as a foe on slashdot that i have marked as a friend on slashdot
Um... Dude back at you. For what it's worth, though, I've never marked anyone as a foe... that was you, who had ME marked as a foe, from some earlier snotting contest that I think we probably were having over copyright issues (knowing me!). Always nice to find some common ground, ain't it?
I dismiss criticism which amounts to saying that the whole of Islam and the Muslim world may be fairly judged as being indistinguishable from the Taliban
The problem is that you lead off with a pre-emptory attack on anyone that might consider Islamic culture conducive to the breeding of these crazies, and you don't - in your own words - personally condemn them. That's exactly the problem, here. You attack - as your opening sentiment - everyone else, and not a peep out of you, in the same breath, about how little you think of the people who are trying so hard to defame the wider Muslim culture through their actual, murderous actions. This is exactly what I encounter in almost every conversation I have with Muslims. A completely defensive posture about the whole thing - so defensive, in fact, that they sweep defense of retrograde mysoginst killers like the Taliban right up into their piety and wounded feelings. In essence, people who think and act like the Taliban are busy making the world a more miserable place for Muslims, and Muslims are so busy saying how offended they are when lumped together with the Taliban that they forget to bother to proactively differentiate themselves from those clowns. If a culture of untold millions of people is unable to regularly figure out that they're not helping themselves by aggessively shouting down and personally doing everything they can to extinguish movements like the Taliban, then I have a hard time feeling sorry for them when they're perceived as being part of the problem.
The people in quesition kill women for teaching their daughters to read. They stone women to death for having been raped. And what do I hear from somewhat more modern Muslims? Not, "These people have to be stopped, especially since they want to run the entire middle east that way (and London, and Canada) - how can I help?" but rather, "Oh, we're not all like that, and you're a bigot for even wondering if Islam itself, by its nature, seems to be built around these notions." Passively allowing violent medieval theocracies to try, again, to take root and spread is only scarecly worse than actively pushing for it. Making the people who honestly express disgust at that entire world view sound like the villains is your primary mistake, and if anyone should be insulted it's them, not you.
One being that professional care is VERY expensive in the United States
No, it's expensive everywhere, because any profession that requires years of solid schooling and a lifetime of academic maintenance is expensive. To the degree that the treatment is as available but for less money somewhere else, it's only that it's because someone else is paying for it. That's not less expensive, it's just someone else's expense.
I've had to fight tooth and nail with my insurer to get them to help out with the bills
Meaning, you've had to fight tooth and nail to get them to find a way to charge their other customers more money. If they can't get enough customers to be willing to pay higher rates, then they have to decide what is, and isn't something they can afford to cover. They're businesses. And if they weren't businesses, you'd just be asking taxpayers to pay more, rather than fellow insurance customers. It's true of every one of those decisions, and the factors that play into are exactly what you'd expect: what are most of that business's cusomters like? It's no different than an airline making the simple decision that they're going to have to charge more when a customer is too wide to fit in a single seat.
An everyday crime, at the feet of insurers
Really? An actual crime? Which law is being broken? I think my insurance company's other customers should buy me new shoes every week so I'll feel better about myself, and thus more productive. But they refuse! Criminals!
there is a very negative stigma here about talking your problems out
Are you kidding? We've turned into a culture where your only virtue is your ability to showcase your syndromes, your misfortunes, your membership in victim groups, etc. Kids do nothing but talk about how put-upon they are, how injured their psyches are, and how only emo-musicians truly understand their angsty view of the world, which they catalog in excruciating detail on any web site to which they have access. They "friend" each other for doing a better job than the next person at choosing MySpace wallpaper and Flash animations that illustrate their problems and moods. So which is it? Problems that can be "talked out," or chemistry? I'm all for diagnosing and treating actual chemical problems. But it's no different than any other diagnosis and treatment: if if costs more than what you're paying for your insurance, you're asking someone else to pay for it. And if we were to switch over to having the government do all of that, it would cost even more. Hillary knows this, which is why she said in an interview the other day that she'd consider garnishing the wages of people that refused to buy health insurance. So, soon perhaps you'll have your wish.
i didn't ask for a right-wing propaganda rant
Sure you did, by framing your objection to the reporter's coverage of the events in political terms.
i would rate BBC News at least a 6 or 7
Fine . Again - who is more credible to you on this? Who gets a 10? Chavez's own propogandists? Cuba's? The events in question are political. If your sympathies lie with Chavez, then any reporting that mentions the possibility of his troops trashing the mining facilities of a rival neighbor are going to annoy you, I suppose.
because of what they wrote in it
Right. His profession is (or was, for CNN) in the production of new-ish information for a network that (laughably, but none-the-less) professes objective reporting. How could anyone who considers themselves smart enough to work in that role pretend that they're not smart enough to realize that it can make an journalistic entity look bad (and take the fun out of their protestations that their main competitor isn't objective) when the people producing their news go out of their way to make idealogical, opinionated stuff public? He's too dumb to have that job.
Got me thinking about how, in a two-story house, there's all sorts of vertical movement. I was picturing a way to step on a platform (sort of like those that parking lot attendants sometimes use) to ride from the second floor to the first. That buffered ride down could throw some energy into a flywheel. And, how about all of the greywater from upstairs? Three people taking their morning showers send many pounds of water down a vertical path to ground level. I wonder if passing that through some sort of screw drive might give up a few watts.
do you have that from any *credible* news source? fox news certainly isn't.
Really? You'd prefer Venezuela's state-run news, and Chavez-controlled airwaves? Which information presented in the article I happened to link to did you find to be actually incorrect, historically or in terms of its representations of current events? Or, are you just a blowhard? Ah, I see.
Still, do a little homework. Venezuela can't stand the idea of US firms doing things like setting up rocket launch sites in Guyana . You'll recall that Chavez's nationalization of other people's investments is now his normal behavior, and his inclinations in this area are the same.
Don't like Fox? How about the The SF Gate? . Is that idealogically left-enough of a publication for you? They report on Guyana's complaint about Chavez's military destroying Guyana-operated dredging equipment outside of Venezuela's borders. The border agreement to which Venezuela a signee a century ago is now "null," according to Chavez (funny how he's recently decided that, now that third parties are investing in mineral extraction work in an area he'd like to harvest - since he can't make money off of his heavily sulfurous crude oil without sending to the US for refinement).
Could I get a link for that please?
Just takes some Googling. Apparently this spat has been evolving for a while.
So did Venezuela
Yeah, that Hugo Chavez... he's just misunderstood. Did he mention to you that he's also trying to annex the oil-rich part of a neighboring country right now? You know, the ol' "the maps were drawn wrong - it's always been mine" method.
Hell, we killed Ghaddafi's daughter with a cruise missile and now we're toasting his health. What gives?
He saw the light, unlike Castro. Libya has given up on its nuclear weapons programs, has stopped writing checks to terrorists, and so on.
We milked Libya for $2 Billion and made them grovel in order get back on the party invite list
We didn't "make" them. They wanted back into the world of commerce. The price they had to pay was to stop attacking it, or paying other people to do so.
dirty little socialist tendencies
Like, say, killing the people that try to escape it? Oh, it's just a little socialism! Who cares about gunning down people who don't want a part of it - the health care is free! And there are so many opportunities to own cars made in the 1940s.
I mean, that whole pictorial is just screen captures from Halflife.
Actually, let me fix your reply.
A personal apology to each member of the Clinton family (including pets and household staff)
A personal apology from each member of the Clinton family
There, that's more like it. Why should anyone apologize to them? They're a completely oily, power-hungry pair of triangulating, platitude-uttering, poll-driven sharks. They haven't changed a bit, and still haven't apologized for bringing FBI records on political opponents into the White House for campaign research, crucifying people in their travel office for their own misdeeds, getting Bill's staff to lie for him about his own lies in front of a judge, issuing pardons to rich fugitive felon/donors on Bill's way out the door, and so on. Why should anyone apologize to them, of all people? I have no intention of voting for Obama, but I think he deserves an apology from Bill, too. Just wait to see what the next several weeks of the Democrat primary campaign looks like - the Clintons have only just begun to get really desparate, and their machine is going to go into full politics-of-personal-destruction mode. They're the masters of it.
Who's to say what the Internet's "purpose" is?
Who cares? The only thing that matters is that a service provider is providing a service to its customers. It has to do so within the bounds of what it can do and still stay in business doing so (which includes actually showing a profit). The use of their network is going to be constantly evolving, but it's certain that the vast majority of the bandwidth used by their customers is going to continue to lean towards streaming media and big binaries moving around. They have to decide how to reasonably provide what their customers - as a group - can and should get at the prices they charge. I use a different carrier, and don't care about Comcast, per se (except for the fact that their users tend to be a big source bot-powered spam). The use of the word "unlimited" is pretty much always a bad idea, I think, because no one can actually provide it - not in literal terms.
So slow down the kid when the bandwidth usage requires it (but based on his bandwidth, available bandwidth, and current total demand, rather than how important you think his network activity is).
Much, much harder to compare that particular user's account, history, and moment-to-moment usage to the overall flow of things, relative to other people's more legit-smelling traffic. Easier, at this stage of the game, to think about protocols, as understood by a long-term, net-wide observed general pattern. I can't blame the carriers for saying, "In general, moving movie torrents around is looking less important to most of our customers than being able to check mail, connect to work, and handle normal surfing." That's easy/ier to shape on the routing side. Handling the analytics needed to do what you're saying involves way more horsepower and moving parts.