consumer groups and some Internet companies argue that the networks should not be permitted to block or slow users' access to the Web
It's precisely so that what most users ARE trying to do (access "the web") will continuie to work that some giant, bandwidth-hogging apps are throttled. A crush of bittorrent traffic isn't, for most people, "the web." They want their mail to flow, and their CNN.com and facebook etc to work. The audience here on this message board are way, way outside the norm in terms of the type of traffic they'd rather burn bandwidth on. But here in my town yesterday and this morning, we had a nasty ice storm. I'm sure a lot of people were very glad to have a workable RDP session, and would certainly prefer that the chunk of router they're sharing with their fellow neighborhood broadband users didn't dry up because one kid three doors down is busy "sharing" his anime collection.
Who's locked in? Just go away, and use someone else's bandwidth. You're not locked into anything. This is their way of keeping their network resources tied to their customers, not to just anyone to whom a paper reciept is handed on the way out of door. It's not a public service, it's a coffee vendor providing something that many of their customers want, at no charge.
Are you really so worried about tying up $10 in a card? If you're that tight, you have absolutely no excuse for irresponsibly blowing $1.50 on a cup of coffee in the first place.
As usual this doesn't make front page news anywhere
Gee, maybe because we've seen methane on other planets in our own solar system, and this discovery - while interesting - doesn't even begin to point, specifically, to life elsewhere just yet?
Fox starts with a pleasant "Pregnant women as bombers" fear mongering
Well, let's see. As I write this, the BBC web site is talking about a Russia/Ukraine gas deal, Danish cartoon plotters, and the US election primaries. No mention of alien methane. CNN? Mexican earthquake, sub-prime mortgage trouble, a yachting accident, primaries, hollywood writers strike, etc. No mention of alien methane. Hmm. Maybe if we look around the world a bit more... Times Of India? No mention. Spiegel in Germany? Nothing. Internazionale.it? Nothing. Home page of Agence France-Presse? Nothing.
Wow, the evil anti-science Bush adminisration sure has a lot of control over the world's media!
The other week I missed my bus so decided to take refuge from the cold in the Starbucks across the way, bought a coffee and tried play with my new internet tablet for half an hour. Turns out Starbucks doesn't have free wifi. I won't be going back. It is bad enough that the coffee is mediocre, but no wifi??
I know it's too much trouble to actually read the article and everything, but how about reading the comment to which you just replied? The point is that you CAN get free WiFi there as a coffee-buying customer. That's what this new deal is all about.
If you RTFA, you'll see that people who use one of those Starbucks cards at the register (which you can fill by dropping some cash in it once in a while) will get 2 hours of no-extra-charge WiFi while they're there. Sure you can be a parasite at Panera without buying anything, but it's fairly bad form. Starbucks will get clobbered on bandwidth, but they'll sell some more coffee, and they'll earn a little interest on the $5 everyone will have sitting on those pre-loaded cards.
You do realise that he wasn't calling all their staff dumb
True. He was just referring to most of their staff. No doubt that's far more accurate, since I'm sure he actually knows most of the people that work there, and has a lot to go on, in terms of interactions with their thousands of employees.
Sniffing is an incredibly stupid approach in general, regardless of "fine-tuning". There are exceptions, but they are few and far between and that doesn't justify sniffing as a general-purpose strategy
Right, poor choice of words on my part. "Inspecting at the firewall," to make sure that it's - generally - normal, human-used browsers interacting with their web-based mail UI - is a better way to describe it. They may be using agent inspection to decide, server-side, what to serve up to a given user's desktop... and simply not have a properly configured case for the specific agent in question. There are endless possibilities, here. But "punish the evil Firefox users, at the expense of publishing our paying advertisers content" is going to be very low on that list.
Microsoft's online services division increased its loss in the last quarter to $245 million, from $118 million a year ago
Thank you. That reinforces my point that they (especially that division) have absolutely no interest in preventing people from seeing the ads that they serve by preventing them from using a mainstream browser while accessing the service they provide. The GP's confidence that this is a deliberate bit of sabotage to punish people not using MS platforms on their desktop is simply absurd, on the face of it.
most of their staff are so dumb that they might have thought they could get away with it
Really? That's really what you think about the people that administer a giant network used by millions of people - that they're just dumb? If there IS an oversight here, why are you assuming that it's some amateur attempt to punish Firefox users (who have been using the service happily for years now), when it's more likely just a misconfigured agent sniffer that needs to be fine tuned around the new FF version's specific appearance on a Linux box? If you, personally, are so much smarter than the software and network engineers that maintain that system, and really think that MS would not care about preventing people from using their system and seeing the advertisements there, which generate revenue, then why aren't you doing something more successful than they are? Or, are you just taking time away from whatever your "smarter than most of the staff at Microsoft" talents normally have you doing on a typical Friday? Give it a rest.
While the article doesn't (and can't) have all of the facts related to the cable damage in question, the main fact that they're presenting is that this is not a statistical anomoly. This stuff happens all the time, didn't cut any country off from the net, and really doesn't amount to anything. If there's anything that's interesting here, it's that there is so little technically informed reporting in the world (as aimed at the wider media audience) that any report by any of the networks that focuses on something that can be spun as somehow ominous gets put into the hyperbolic spin cycle by everyone else, ricochets around the blogs at high speed, and becomes a circus of ignorance... just right for the conspiracy nut cases. And anyone with some political axe to grind - say, the types who blame Bush personally for a favorite parking space not being available that morning - are going to just eat stuff like this up. Even the ones that know better (about the reality of undersea cable damage as a routine thing being tended to by expensive fleets of ships, every day of the year) are still willing to feed the wider ignorance by stamping their feet and screaming "black helicopters! new world order! teh fascists!" just for the sport of it. Embarassing.
America and Bush went ON AND ON AND ON AND ON about how they had definitive proof that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
I'm not talking about US assertions. I'm talking about the actual nerve gas that Saddam used, many times, on Iran and on his own people. UN inspectors in the country following Saddam's attack on and invasion of Kuwait found many such stockpiles (don't you pay attention at all?). Much of it was destroyed. The inspectors found records and much evidence that there was a LOT of VX and other very, very nasty stuff unaccounted for. YEARS went by while Saddam refused to account for it. Considerable truck traffic to Syria jumped up in frequency as more pressure was put on that very topic. UN inspectors were run out of facilities at gunpoint when they showed up - in accordance with the surrender that Saddam signed - to follow up on leads along these lines. I'm sure it's convenient to ignore that history, which was playing out while Saddam was actively shooting anti-aircraft weapons at aircraft patroling the no-fly zones to which he agreed, also as part of his kicked-out-of-Kuwait surrender. You know, shooting? With missles and heavy guns? For YEARS?
You did have definitive proof didn't you?
Actually, that was the UN inspectors.
Oh wait, its harmful to America's economy
Yes, having your people killed in spectacular terrorist attacks that destroy thousands of lives DOES tend to impact your economy, and how you conduct your international affairs. So, the people who were harboring those that conducted that attack, and the organization that they were friendly to, were deprived of their playground in Afghanistan. Much of that organization wandered into Pakistan. Some of it was already in touch with Iraq, and starting to fish around in that country for indirect support. Saddam, of course, openly praised bombers, and made a large display of sending $50,000 to the families of successful suicide bombers. Saddam was a regular trafficker in weapons, including long range missles (remember the ones he lobbed at Israel as he was getting routed from Kuwait?) and had considerable ties with Baathists in Syria - also a major hub for weapons from Iran, and supplier to well-oiled terrorist organizations throughout the middle east. Saddam's regime was well and truly tangled up in all of that, and with Al Queda having miscalculated the longevity of its comfort zone in Afghanistan - but still flush with cash (which Saddam always needed, despite how much he was stealing from the UN during the sanctions) - Iraq was quickly shaping up as a time bomb. Combine that with Saddam throwing out the weapons inspectors, and with intelligence from many sources indicating his interest in more WMD production and a place in the local market to sell them - all while still firing weapons at the UN-provided troops patrolling his borders... and you have a lot more than "harmless to the US." And a lot more than harmless to neighboring countries friendlier to western civilization, like Jordan, or Turkey.
You believe that policing the world is both smart, morally correct, and even affordable
No, I believe that you have to prevent people like Saddam from repeating his long history of lethal lashing out, especially in the context of his proximity to just-displaced Al Queda, and his increasing hunger for cash and military trade with places like North Korea, now a country with nukes. If Saddam ever had actually honored the terms of his surrender after attacking yet another neighboring country, he would have actually been on track back to a productivity-based place in the world, rather than the Stalinist mode that he preferred. And I don't believe it's affordable - it's just more affordable than the alternatives.
Sunnis, whatever
Way to show your awareness of the situation!
Its debatable if an democracy can be forcefully installed if the populace isn't willing
your opinions on how the world would of turned out if it was policed
You're confusing "policed" with "not destabilized by murderous tyrants with scuds, one of the largest standing in the armies in the world, a habit of ethnic cleansing and invading neighboring countries, shooting at UN-sanctions-enforcing aircraft, not coming clean on what they did with tons of VX nerve gas, regularly making comments about wiping other countries off the map... and, sitting on, next to, and in a position to disrupt the commerce in something that is still fundamental to the functioning and prosperity of the entire world."
Was the world "policed" when Japan's territory and resource grab, combined with mammoth doses of raced-based cruelty and murder (a la Saddam, actually), was shut down through a huge war effort? Is it "policed" now that that episode is decades in the past, after a long-term occupation with governorship, infrastructure rebuilding, and overhaul of their form of government, winding up with democracy? If you think that's policing, but the result is a country like modern Japan, or today's Germany, then sure, let's use that word. Since the results speak for themselves, no matter how you mis-use the word.
I meant harmless to America
How is a guy like Saddam, who repeatedly made attempts to expand - through violence, extortion, mass murder, terrorist-funding, etc - his influence and control throughout a part of the world that's important to the entire world's economy harmless to anyone? The US is part of "everyone," you know? As are all of the countries that worked to push him back into his borders, and at whom he has his troops continue to shoot for years as they attempted to enforce the sanctions to which he agreed - but never met (except by appearance in some cases, as a way to scrape cash out of the UN's oil-for-food program).
they invaded because of weapons of mass destruction, so they said
Just like the intel depts of every other country that has a facility to determine that. Not like it was mysterious, of course, since he was making and testing long range missiles, and was known to have very large stockpiles of chemical weapons (what part of that is so hard to follow, exactly, anyway?).
They were not authorized to invade to protect the Sunnis.
What are you talking about? Saddam was the one protecting the Sunnis, and using his military on his non-Sunni countrymen to preserve his tribe's power.
because there are a lot of ron paul supporters doesn't mean the internet is bad.
Who said the internet is bad? I'm saying that many Ron Paul supporters are doing the equivalent of vandalizing public spaces in the name of their candidate. Says a lot about their mind set, and how shallow they are.
Please explain how America's policy of attacking 3rd world nations have anything to do with stopping Germany in WW2
Which third world nations would those be, exactly? Do you mean, working with many allies and with the blessings of the UN to route the Taliban out of Afghanistan? Afghanistan wasn't "attacked," but the cruel, medieval theocrats who were using it as a base of operations after they took it over by force were, themselves, removed by force. If the US simply wanted to "attack a third world nation," then that would be easy, cheap, and completely devestating. That you don't understand that shows, again, that your thinking on such matters is childish. The wahabbists, with millions of dollars to work with, who set up shop in Afghanistan to plan, train for, and execute mass killings in other countries were not just some local, third-world villagers.
As for WWII... again, you're missing the point. If western Europe and its allies (the US) had acted before Germany had become the threat that it did (following WWI), there would have been millions of lives spared. Likewise with Japan. But back to your comment: what policy of attacking third world countries are you referring to?
If Ron Paul was president, perhaps you would of avoided Vietnam
And even more of Asia would look like North Korea, right now. Is that your preference? Since you're just plain wildly speculating, why not ask how Vietnam would have turned out if the presidents dealing with that conflict (which was really a conflict with the communist puppet masters behind the scenes, obviously) had decided that it was OK to actually fight and win the conflict? What if Reagan had been president then? Or Truman? It would have ended quickly, more violently, and in the long run, with many fewer lives lost.
It can't afford to keep up its military operations
Even while other countries fail to contribute what they've agreed to contribute in peace keeping missions. Who is it you're complaining about, exactly? The people actually doing the work, or the people who promise to help with logistics, money, and their own people, but then fail to do so?
paying off a war that they weren't even alive in
Just like WWII? The Germans are still paying for that. So are the Japanese. And so are all of the Allies that had to push them back from their aggression. Just like Saddam had to be pushed back from invading his neighbors. But unlike his WWII counterparts, he never honored the terms of his surrender, and they had to be enforced the hard way.
just so that we could snuff out a nation's government that was harmless
You have a very strange definition of "harmless." Do you suppose that the ditches filled with the people that regime wiped out would consider that to be harmless? The millions killed in the regional wars started by the Baathists? When the UN established no-fly zones over the northern and southern parts of that country to prevent him from continuing to slaughter more people basedon their tribal affiliation, would you consider that regime harmless for continually trying to shoot down the aircraft flying to enforce those UN sanctions? Or, do you only consider "harmless to Sunnis, especially from his own village" to be how you define "harmless?"
The USD itself has no value
No value? That's funny, you can exchange it anywhere in the world, and it's still the single currency that you're most likely to be able to USE anywhere in the world if you must.
America needs to change its policies before the debt collectors are called in
long live corporate media: deciding votes of the uninformed and easily swayed since 1948
So, armies of people spamming message boards with context-less, frequently illiterate support for Ron Paul is... what? It comes across like a lot of people trying to shout someone into office, since actually looking closely at his positions guarantees that he'll never make it.
As in answers provided by his "campaign," above (gee, we wouldn't want anyone in his camp to be brave enough to say those are actually his words):
America should stop subsidizing the defenses of the rest of the world and worry more about its own national security interests
This spectacularly naive, head-in-the-sand take on things is exactly why he'll never get anywhere. It is precisely in our own national security interests to generally support the defenses of our allies. Militarily weak allies get bullied by militarily stronger opponents. It's as simple as that. Either we support them financially, or we have to do the actual work with our own people, equipment, and supplies. Disengaging from those issues, as Ron Paul would us do, would just repeat the setup for conflict that we saw before WWII. This whole "no military involvement until it's pretty much too late" nonsense is... nonsense. Dangerous, too. Would he prefer that Hugo Chavez, or China are the more important players in such scenarios? The world won't go away just because he wants it to.
Yes, because having lots of your fellow countrymen and women die early so you can spend a few dollars on beer is your goddam constitutional right.
Oh, you mean as opposed to the constitutional right of a family that saw fit to have four babies but didn't see fit to think through the costs of keeping them healthy to get the government to take the required money from someone else in order to pay for it? That constitutional right? Or were you referring to the constitutional right to have ready access to advanced chemical and imaging tests that cost tens of thousands of dollars using multi-million-dollar hardware and crews of skilled technicians, even though the person getting those tests will never be paying enough into the system to begin to pay off even their one use of those systems? Or were you referring to the constitutional right to get rich suing doctors into oblivion for not making you magically healthy when you smoke all day and eat nothing but sugar and grease? That constitutional right?
Should we also have Hillary arrange for mandatory collective car care, since not everyone can afford a routine physical OR keeping up with their oil changes to avoid costly emergencies? How about mandatory collective cost sharing on re-shingling your roof, or having nicer shoes? You know, you WILL get sick and die without eating. I'm thinking that perhaps Hillary can set us up with a system where the government uses tax dollars to pay for all of the food that people eat, what with it being essential to good health, and all. I'm thinking maybe that since clean water is health-related, that maybe Hillary-Care can also use someone else's tax dollars to pay for your tap water, no matter how long you spend in the shower.
Yeah, so was Fidel Castro. Being young, in and of itself, doesn't improve your ability to be Commander in Chief. Being inspirational doesn't mean anything unless you analyze what he is inspiring people to actually do. So, what specific things would you say he is inspiring people to do, beside idolize him as someone with a good stage presence (if that particular style of presence is what does it for you). Saying, "I'm your guy for change," while not saying exactly what it is that you're going to change, other than that which you can describe in broad platitudes, is pretty damn disengenuous.
economic stability
You mean, like the recession we were already in as Bill Clinton was leaving office? Or the economic impact of dealing with militant islamist nutballs that really started ramping up their efforts to destabilize the middle east (and thus much of the world's economy) under his watch?
the most committed to change
So, you don't care what the changes are, as long we have "change?" Identify specifically what he's going to change, or what the person sitting in the White House CAN change. Will he make Nancy Pelosi stop wasting our time and millions of dollars on congressional investigations of hormone use in baseball leagues? Should the president be able to tell congress what to do? Is that what you want to change? They raise the money, and the are in charge of where it goes. Has Obama said that he's somehow going to change that?
who will represent a new image for the U.S.
Which image is that, out of curiosity? One where, say, North Korea gets more free stuff in exchange for their extortion programs? One where less, rather than more pressure is put on Iran's nuke programs and funding of terrorists throughout the middle east? One where we put less pressure on Sudan to stop slaughtering people in Darfur? Or, perhaps you think he'll send in troops to stop it? Or he'll just ask everyone else to? Or he'll ask everyone else to stop worrying so much about it?
"Agent of change" is the most empty phrase imaginable. It doesn't mean squat unless you're being specific, and you can't be, because HE won't be. Other than on things like issuing drivers licenses to illegal aliens, etc. Not that the president can do that anyway. Or, was that one of the changes you're hoping he'll talk congress into enacting... federal drivers licenses, instead of state documents? Get specific.
one can barely tell where her beliefs begin and where those constraints end
I don't know. Sometimes she says what she really thinks. Just yesterday, she talked about garnishing the wages of people who don't buy health insurance. Now that's letting her colors show.
When my bike was stolen the police took a report but said it was unlikely it would amount to anything. Did the school have to screen everyone who had a bike on campus to see it the bike was stolen?
On you campus, are hundreds and thousands of bicycles stolen every day, using facilities provided by the school to perform those thefts? No? If that was happening, do you think the school might be called upon to get involved?
I have heard that Bush was furious that Texas was not chosen, pulled a few strings and the project was cancelled.
Please link to the source of this fact. Or, consider the possibility that it's just a bunch of shrill nonsense being passed around by someone suffering from classic BDS. Read up a thread or two, and consider the fact that the notion of this approach has already been completely eclipsed by other developments.
How something is 'described' by someone else with an agenda matters very little (unless a lot of people fall for it). It's just as reasonable to 'describe' millions of college students as "people who want to force their favorite artists to provide them with entertainment for free." Which is more accurate? That performers, and the studios they work with, want to actually "force" someone to buy something, or that many people who swear they love a particular performer or recording artist are none the less happy to rip of that person's work, despite the wishes of the very performer they claim to respect?
Neither description covers everyone. But saying that a recording artist wants to "force" people to pay for the entertainment they're providing is a lot like saying that a movie theater wants to force people to actually pay for a ticket on their way in to see a movie. It's absurd. No one is forcing you to listen to a recording, and no one is forcing you to see or hear any other performance, either. Don't be a consumer of it, and no need to pay for it. Except, of course, those countries that are insane enough to think it's reasonable to levy taxes (and thus, literally force people to pay) which are then spread around to artists - whether or not the people paying the taxes would ever want to be entertained by those artists or not. That's the only "forced to pay for entertainment" that it's worth talking about. Otherwise we may as well talk about how grocery stores are forcing their customer to pay for what they want, or how a chef is forcing his customers to pay for the creative services she provides.
Don't use the word "force" when it doesn't apply. Don't want to pay for Bruce Springteen's latest recording? Then don't acquire it, unless HE chooses to give it to you.
As I mentioned a little farther up in the thread, I was recalling the first report I heard about this (shortly after it happened). The reporter said "shotgun," and that's that. I'm perfectly happy being corrected on what they were carrying and used, but I'm still correct that a slug gun would be what you'd really want, given the choice.
Well, there you have it. My first take on the story when I heard it reported said shotguns. Doesn't matter. You use what you have, and a slug from a shotgun would have been better, if they'd had it handy. But, several rounds from a.40 is certainly going to do the job, too, especially because of the capacity.
The reason a shotgun is effective in an urban setting is because it's a spray&pray weapon.
Unless you're using the shotgun as a slug gun. In which case it delivers enormous large-mammal-stopping power up to 100 yards, no problem. I have had many a venison dinner as proof of concept.
I can also shoot, off hand, no scope, with a 12GA 3" mag slug from most shotguns into a target smaller than a dinner plate at over 50 yards. The vitals on a tiger are larger than a dinner plate.
first, it's coming from a rifled barrel
My 12 gauge slug gun has a rifled barrel. I also shoot from smooth-bore shotguns, using rifled projectiles. These are readily available, and work very well. Again, fine dinners made from large mammals that dropped where they were standing when hit with a single shot from a shotgun slug is a fine proof of concept. I have, on the other hand, shot high-powered rifles at deer, and have seen the round pass right through the animal without giving up drop-dead energy. I hate that, since it means having to finish off the animal with another shot, often after trailing it as it suffers. That's to be avoided at all costs.
The cruising cops that need to respond to something like the tiger event are NOT the SWAT guys with.308s who know who to evaluate all of the down-range considerations, and have overwatch from other positions to make sure they're not going to hurt someone else. They use shotguns all time time, and for good reason. They carry slugs, buckshot, and other loads, and use them judiciously, based on what they're trying to damage, and how.
But that's my point: they were in an urban setting with an unknown number of people likely to be hiding behind trashcans, in the kitchen behind some drywall, or well within ricochet range. For the same reason that you aren't allowed to use a high-powered rifle on a 200-pound whitetail deer in a semi-suburban setting, you don't want to use one at the SF zoo. Of COURSE a.30-06 is going to kill the animal more surely, more accurately, and more quickly. But it's a hell of a thing to be using in a setting like that... so, the shotgun's really the right too, all things considered.
Slashdot Mirror
consumer groups and some Internet companies argue that the networks should not be permitted to block or slow users' access to the Web
It's precisely so that what most users ARE trying to do (access "the web") will continuie to work that some giant, bandwidth-hogging apps are throttled. A crush of bittorrent traffic isn't, for most people, "the web." They want their mail to flow, and their CNN.com and facebook etc to work. The audience here on this message board are way, way outside the norm in terms of the type of traffic they'd rather burn bandwidth on. But here in my town yesterday and this morning, we had a nasty ice storm. I'm sure a lot of people were very glad to have a workable RDP session, and would certainly prefer that the chunk of router they're sharing with their fellow neighborhood broadband users didn't dry up because one kid three doors down is busy "sharing" his anime collection.
it isn't free
Other than not costing you anything.
It is lock-in
Who's locked in? Just go away, and use someone else's bandwidth. You're not locked into anything. This is their way of keeping their network resources tied to their customers, not to just anyone to whom a paper reciept is handed on the way out of door. It's not a public service, it's a coffee vendor providing something that many of their customers want, at no charge.
Are you really so worried about tying up $10 in a card? If you're that tight, you have absolutely no excuse for irresponsibly blowing $1.50 on a cup of coffee in the first place.
As usual this doesn't make front page news anywhere
Gee, maybe because we've seen methane on other planets in our own solar system, and this discovery - while interesting - doesn't even begin to point, specifically, to life elsewhere just yet?
Fox starts with a pleasant "Pregnant women as bombers" fear mongering
Well, let's see. As I write this, the BBC web site is talking about a Russia/Ukraine gas deal, Danish cartoon plotters, and the US election primaries. No mention of alien methane. CNN? Mexican earthquake, sub-prime mortgage trouble, a yachting accident, primaries, hollywood writers strike, etc. No mention of alien methane. Hmm. Maybe if we look around the world a bit more... Times Of India? No mention. Spiegel in Germany? Nothing. Internazionale.it? Nothing. Home page of Agence France-Presse? Nothing.
Wow, the evil anti-science Bush adminisration sure has a lot of control over the world's media!
The other week I missed my bus so decided to take refuge from the cold in the Starbucks across the way, bought a coffee and tried play with my new internet tablet for half an hour. Turns out Starbucks doesn't have free wifi. I won't be going back. It is bad enough that the coffee is mediocre, but no wifi??
I know it's too much trouble to actually read the article and everything, but how about reading the comment to which you just replied? The point is that you CAN get free WiFi there as a coffee-buying customer. That's what this new deal is all about.
If you RTFA, you'll see that people who use one of those Starbucks cards at the register (which you can fill by dropping some cash in it once in a while) will get 2 hours of no-extra-charge WiFi while they're there. Sure you can be a parasite at Panera without buying anything, but it's fairly bad form. Starbucks will get clobbered on bandwidth, but they'll sell some more coffee, and they'll earn a little interest on the $5 everyone will have sitting on those pre-loaded cards.
You do realise that he wasn't calling all their staff dumb
True. He was just referring to most of their staff. No doubt that's far more accurate, since I'm sure he actually knows most of the people that work there, and has a lot to go on, in terms of interactions with their thousands of employees.
Sniffing is an incredibly stupid approach in general, regardless of "fine-tuning". There are exceptions, but they are few and far between and that doesn't justify sniffing as a general-purpose strategy
Right, poor choice of words on my part. "Inspecting at the firewall," to make sure that it's - generally - normal, human-used browsers interacting with their web-based mail UI - is a better way to describe it. They may be using agent inspection to decide, server-side, what to serve up to a given user's desktop... and simply not have a properly configured case for the specific agent in question. There are endless possibilities, here. But "punish the evil Firefox users, at the expense of publishing our paying advertisers content" is going to be very low on that list.
Interesting spin.
You must work in marketing.
No. I just don't have a sophomoric urge to bash MS. You don't have to be a fanboy to recognize that someone else is being one.
Microsoft's online services division increased its loss in the last quarter to $245 million, from $118 million a year ago
Thank you. That reinforces my point that they (especially that division) have absolutely no interest in preventing people from seeing the ads that they serve by preventing them from using a mainstream browser while accessing the service they provide. The GP's confidence that this is a deliberate bit of sabotage to punish people not using MS platforms on their desktop is simply absurd, on the face of it.
most of their staff are so dumb that they might have thought they could get away with it
Really? That's really what you think about the people that administer a giant network used by millions of people - that they're just dumb? If there IS an oversight here, why are you assuming that it's some amateur attempt to punish Firefox users (who have been using the service happily for years now), when it's more likely just a misconfigured agent sniffer that needs to be fine tuned around the new FF version's specific appearance on a Linux box? If you, personally, are so much smarter than the software and network engineers that maintain that system, and really think that MS would not care about preventing people from using their system and seeing the advertisements there, which generate revenue, then why aren't you doing something more successful than they are? Or, are you just taking time away from whatever your "smarter than most of the staff at Microsoft" talents normally have you doing on a typical Friday? Give it a rest.
rather than it just being a statistical anomaly.
While the article doesn't (and can't) have all of the facts related to the cable damage in question, the main fact that they're presenting is that this is not a statistical anomoly. This stuff happens all the time, didn't cut any country off from the net, and really doesn't amount to anything. If there's anything that's interesting here, it's that there is so little technically informed reporting in the world (as aimed at the wider media audience) that any report by any of the networks that focuses on something that can be spun as somehow ominous gets put into the hyperbolic spin cycle by everyone else, ricochets around the blogs at high speed, and becomes a circus of ignorance... just right for the conspiracy nut cases. And anyone with some political axe to grind - say, the types who blame Bush personally for a favorite parking space not being available that morning - are going to just eat stuff like this up. Even the ones that know better (about the reality of undersea cable damage as a routine thing being tended to by expensive fleets of ships, every day of the year) are still willing to feed the wider ignorance by stamping their feet and screaming "black helicopters! new world order! teh fascists!" just for the sport of it. Embarassing.
America and Bush went ON AND ON AND ON AND ON about how they had definitive proof that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
I'm not talking about US assertions. I'm talking about the actual nerve gas that Saddam used, many times, on Iran and on his own people. UN inspectors in the country following Saddam's attack on and invasion of Kuwait found many such stockpiles (don't you pay attention at all?). Much of it was destroyed. The inspectors found records and much evidence that there was a LOT of VX and other very, very nasty stuff unaccounted for. YEARS went by while Saddam refused to account for it. Considerable truck traffic to Syria jumped up in frequency as more pressure was put on that very topic. UN inspectors were run out of facilities at gunpoint when they showed up - in accordance with the surrender that Saddam signed - to follow up on leads along these lines. I'm sure it's convenient to ignore that history, which was playing out while Saddam was actively shooting anti-aircraft weapons at aircraft patroling the no-fly zones to which he agreed, also as part of his kicked-out-of-Kuwait surrender. You know, shooting? With missles and heavy guns? For YEARS?
You did have definitive proof didn't you?
Actually, that was the UN inspectors.
Oh wait, its harmful to America's economy
Yes, having your people killed in spectacular terrorist attacks that destroy thousands of lives DOES tend to impact your economy, and how you conduct your international affairs. So, the people who were harboring those that conducted that attack, and the organization that they were friendly to, were deprived of their playground in Afghanistan. Much of that organization wandered into Pakistan. Some of it was already in touch with Iraq, and starting to fish around in that country for indirect support. Saddam, of course, openly praised bombers, and made a large display of sending $50,000 to the families of successful suicide bombers. Saddam was a regular trafficker in weapons, including long range missles (remember the ones he lobbed at Israel as he was getting routed from Kuwait?) and had considerable ties with Baathists in Syria - also a major hub for weapons from Iran, and supplier to well-oiled terrorist organizations throughout the middle east. Saddam's regime was well and truly tangled up in all of that, and with Al Queda having miscalculated the longevity of its comfort zone in Afghanistan - but still flush with cash (which Saddam always needed, despite how much he was stealing from the UN during the sanctions) - Iraq was quickly shaping up as a time bomb. Combine that with Saddam throwing out the weapons inspectors, and with intelligence from many sources indicating his interest in more WMD production and a place in the local market to sell them - all while still firing weapons at the UN-provided troops patrolling his borders... and you have a lot more than "harmless to the US." And a lot more than harmless to neighboring countries friendlier to western civilization, like Jordan, or Turkey.
You believe that policing the world is both smart, morally correct, and even affordable
No, I believe that you have to prevent people like Saddam from repeating his long history of lethal lashing out, especially in the context of his proximity to just-displaced Al Queda, and his increasing hunger for cash and military trade with places like North Korea, now a country with nukes. If Saddam ever had actually honored the terms of his surrender after attacking yet another neighboring country, he would have actually been on track back to a productivity-based place in the world, rather than the Stalinist mode that he preferred. And I don't believe it's affordable - it's just more affordable than the alternatives.
Sunnis, whatever
Way to show your awareness of the situation!
Its debatable if an democracy can be forcefully installed if the populace isn't willing
Well, good thing, then, that millions of Iraqis n
your opinions on how the world would of turned out if it was policed
You're confusing "policed" with "not destabilized by murderous tyrants with scuds, one of the largest standing in the armies in the world, a habit of ethnic cleansing and invading neighboring countries, shooting at UN-sanctions-enforcing aircraft, not coming clean on what they did with tons of VX nerve gas, regularly making comments about wiping other countries off the map... and, sitting on, next to, and in a position to disrupt the commerce in something that is still fundamental to the functioning and prosperity of the entire world."
Was the world "policed" when Japan's territory and resource grab, combined with mammoth doses of raced-based cruelty and murder (a la Saddam, actually), was shut down through a huge war effort? Is it "policed" now that that episode is decades in the past, after a long-term occupation with governorship, infrastructure rebuilding, and overhaul of their form of government, winding up with democracy? If you think that's policing, but the result is a country like modern Japan, or today's Germany, then sure, let's use that word. Since the results speak for themselves, no matter how you mis-use the word.
I meant harmless to America
How is a guy like Saddam, who repeatedly made attempts to expand - through violence, extortion, mass murder, terrorist-funding, etc - his influence and control throughout a part of the world that's important to the entire world's economy harmless to anyone? The US is part of "everyone," you know? As are all of the countries that worked to push him back into his borders, and at whom he has his troops continue to shoot for years as they attempted to enforce the sanctions to which he agreed - but never met (except by appearance in some cases, as a way to scrape cash out of the UN's oil-for-food program).
they invaded because of weapons of mass destruction, so they said
Just like the intel depts of every other country that has a facility to determine that. Not like it was mysterious, of course, since he was making and testing long range missiles, and was known to have very large stockpiles of chemical weapons (what part of that is so hard to follow, exactly, anyway?).
They were not authorized to invade to protect the Sunnis.
What are you talking about? Saddam was the one protecting the Sunnis, and using his military on his non-Sunni countrymen to preserve his tribe's power.
because there are a lot of ron paul supporters doesn't mean the internet is bad.
Who said the internet is bad? I'm saying that many Ron Paul supporters are doing the equivalent of vandalizing public spaces in the name of their candidate. Says a lot about their mind set, and how shallow they are.
Please explain how America's policy of attacking 3rd world nations have anything to do with stopping Germany in WW2
Which third world nations would those be, exactly? Do you mean, working with many allies and with the blessings of the UN to route the Taliban out of Afghanistan? Afghanistan wasn't "attacked," but the cruel, medieval theocrats who were using it as a base of operations after they took it over by force were, themselves, removed by force. If the US simply wanted to "attack a third world nation," then that would be easy, cheap, and completely devestating. That you don't understand that shows, again, that your thinking on such matters is childish. The wahabbists, with millions of dollars to work with, who set up shop in Afghanistan to plan, train for, and execute mass killings in other countries were not just some local, third-world villagers.
As for WWII... again, you're missing the point. If western Europe and its allies (the US) had acted before Germany had become the threat that it did (following WWI), there would have been millions of lives spared. Likewise with Japan. But back to your comment: what policy of attacking third world countries are you referring to?
If Ron Paul was president, perhaps you would of avoided Vietnam
And even more of Asia would look like North Korea, right now. Is that your preference? Since you're just plain wildly speculating, why not ask how Vietnam would have turned out if the presidents dealing with that conflict (which was really a conflict with the communist puppet masters behind the scenes, obviously) had decided that it was OK to actually fight and win the conflict? What if Reagan had been president then? Or Truman? It would have ended quickly, more violently, and in the long run, with many fewer lives lost.
It can't afford to keep up its military operations
Even while other countries fail to contribute what they've agreed to contribute in peace keeping missions. Who is it you're complaining about, exactly? The people actually doing the work, or the people who promise to help with logistics, money, and their own people, but then fail to do so?
paying off a war that they weren't even alive in
Just like WWII? The Germans are still paying for that. So are the Japanese. And so are all of the Allies that had to push them back from their aggression. Just like Saddam had to be pushed back from invading his neighbors. But unlike his WWII counterparts, he never honored the terms of his surrender, and they had to be enforced the hard way.
just so that we could snuff out a nation's government that was harmless
You have a very strange definition of "harmless." Do you suppose that the ditches filled with the people that regime wiped out would consider that to be harmless? The millions killed in the regional wars started by the Baathists? When the UN established no-fly zones over the northern and southern parts of that country to prevent him from continuing to slaughter more people basedon their tribal affiliation, would you consider that regime harmless for continually trying to shoot down the aircraft flying to enforce those UN sanctions? Or, do you only consider "harmless to Sunnis, especially from his own village" to be how you define "harmless?"
The USD itself has no value
No value? That's funny, you can exchange it anywhere in the world, and it's still the single currency that you're most likely to be able to USE anywhere in the world if you must.
America needs to change its policies before the debt collectors are called in
And, who would that be, exactly?
long live corporate media: deciding votes of the uninformed and easily swayed since 1948
... nonsense. Dangerous, too. Would he prefer that Hugo Chavez, or China are the more important players in such scenarios? The world won't go away just because he wants it to.
So, armies of people spamming message boards with context-less, frequently illiterate support for Ron Paul is... what? It comes across like a lot of people trying to shout someone into office, since actually looking closely at his positions guarantees that he'll never make it.
As in answers provided by his "campaign," above (gee, we wouldn't want anyone in his camp to be brave enough to say those are actually his words):
America should stop subsidizing the defenses of the rest of the world and worry more about its own national security interests
This spectacularly naive, head-in-the-sand take on things is exactly why he'll never get anywhere. It is precisely in our own national security interests to generally support the defenses of our allies. Militarily weak allies get bullied by militarily stronger opponents. It's as simple as that. Either we support them financially, or we have to do the actual work with our own people, equipment, and supplies. Disengaging from those issues, as Ron Paul would us do, would just repeat the setup for conflict that we saw before WWII. This whole "no military involvement until it's pretty much too late" nonsense is
Yes, because having lots of your fellow countrymen and women die early so you can spend a few dollars on beer is your goddam constitutional right.
Oh, you mean as opposed to the constitutional right of a family that saw fit to have four babies but didn't see fit to think through the costs of keeping them healthy to get the government to take the required money from someone else in order to pay for it? That constitutional right? Or were you referring to the constitutional right to have ready access to advanced chemical and imaging tests that cost tens of thousands of dollars using multi-million-dollar hardware and crews of skilled technicians, even though the person getting those tests will never be paying enough into the system to begin to pay off even their one use of those systems? Or were you referring to the constitutional right to get rich suing doctors into oblivion for not making you magically healthy when you smoke all day and eat nothing but sugar and grease? That constitutional right?
Should we also have Hillary arrange for mandatory collective car care, since not everyone can afford a routine physical OR keeping up with their oil changes to avoid costly emergencies? How about mandatory collective cost sharing on re-shingling your roof, or having nicer shoes? You know, you WILL get sick and die without eating. I'm thinking that perhaps Hillary can set us up with a system where the government uses tax dollars to pay for all of the food that people eat, what with it being essential to good health, and all. I'm thinking maybe that since clean water is health-related, that maybe Hillary-Care can also use someone else's tax dollars to pay for your tap water, no matter how long you spend in the shower.
Barack Obama is young and inspirational
Yeah, so was Fidel Castro. Being young, in and of itself, doesn't improve your ability to be Commander in Chief. Being inspirational doesn't mean anything unless you analyze what he is inspiring people to actually do. So, what specific things would you say he is inspiring people to do, beside idolize him as someone with a good stage presence (if that particular style of presence is what does it for you). Saying, "I'm your guy for change," while not saying exactly what it is that you're going to change, other than that which you can describe in broad platitudes, is pretty damn disengenuous.
economic stability
You mean, like the recession we were already in as Bill Clinton was leaving office? Or the economic impact of dealing with militant islamist nutballs that really started ramping up their efforts to destabilize the middle east (and thus much of the world's economy) under his watch?
the most committed to change
So, you don't care what the changes are, as long we have "change?" Identify specifically what he's going to change, or what the person sitting in the White House CAN change. Will he make Nancy Pelosi stop wasting our time and millions of dollars on congressional investigations of hormone use in baseball leagues? Should the president be able to tell congress what to do? Is that what you want to change? They raise the money, and the are in charge of where it goes. Has Obama said that he's somehow going to change that?
who will represent a new image for the U.S.
Which image is that, out of curiosity? One where, say, North Korea gets more free stuff in exchange for their extortion programs? One where less, rather than more pressure is put on Iran's nuke programs and funding of terrorists throughout the middle east? One where we put less pressure on Sudan to stop slaughtering people in Darfur? Or, perhaps you think he'll send in troops to stop it? Or he'll just ask everyone else to? Or he'll ask everyone else to stop worrying so much about it?
"Agent of change" is the most empty phrase imaginable. It doesn't mean squat unless you're being specific, and you can't be, because HE won't be. Other than on things like issuing drivers licenses to illegal aliens, etc. Not that the president can do that anyway. Or, was that one of the changes you're hoping he'll talk congress into enacting... federal drivers licenses, instead of state documents? Get specific.
Sorry, she said what?
That's right, you heard me .
one can barely tell where her beliefs begin and where those constraints end
I don't know. Sometimes she says what she really thinks. Just yesterday, she talked about garnishing the wages of people who don't buy health insurance. Now that's letting her colors show.
When my bike was stolen the police took a report but said it was unlikely it would amount to anything. Did the school have to screen everyone who had a bike on campus to see it the bike was stolen?
On you campus, are hundreds and thousands of bicycles stolen every day, using facilities provided by the school to perform those thefts? No? If that was happening, do you think the school might be called upon to get involved?
I have heard that Bush was furious that Texas was not chosen, pulled a few strings and the project was cancelled.
Please link to the source of this fact. Or, consider the possibility that it's just a bunch of shrill nonsense being passed around by someone suffering from classic BDS. Read up a thread or two, and consider the fact that the notion of this approach has already been completely eclipsed by other developments.
How something is 'described' by someone else with an agenda matters very little (unless a lot of people fall for it). It's just as reasonable to 'describe' millions of college students as "people who want to force their favorite artists to provide them with entertainment for free." Which is more accurate? That performers, and the studios they work with, want to actually "force" someone to buy something, or that many people who swear they love a particular performer or recording artist are none the less happy to rip of that person's work, despite the wishes of the very performer they claim to respect?
Neither description covers everyone. But saying that a recording artist wants to "force" people to pay for the entertainment they're providing is a lot like saying that a movie theater wants to force people to actually pay for a ticket on their way in to see a movie. It's absurd. No one is forcing you to listen to a recording, and no one is forcing you to see or hear any other performance, either. Don't be a consumer of it, and no need to pay for it. Except, of course, those countries that are insane enough to think it's reasonable to levy taxes (and thus, literally force people to pay) which are then spread around to artists - whether or not the people paying the taxes would ever want to be entertained by those artists or not. That's the only "forced to pay for entertainment" that it's worth talking about. Otherwise we may as well talk about how grocery stores are forcing their customer to pay for what they want, or how a chef is forcing his customers to pay for the creative services she provides.
Don't use the word "force" when it doesn't apply. Don't want to pay for Bruce Springteen's latest recording? Then don't acquire it, unless HE chooses to give it to you.
however you are mistaken
As I mentioned a little farther up in the thread, I was recalling the first report I heard about this (shortly after it happened). The reporter said "shotgun," and that's that. I'm perfectly happy being corrected on what they were carrying and used, but I'm still correct that a slug gun would be what you'd really want, given the choice.
Well, there you have it. My first take on the story when I heard it reported said shotguns. Doesn't matter. You use what you have, and a slug from a shotgun would have been better, if they'd had it handy. But, several rounds from a .40 is certainly going to do the job, too, especially because of the capacity.
The reason a shotgun is effective in an urban setting is because it's a spray&pray weapon.
.308s who know who to evaluate all of the down-range considerations, and have overwatch from other positions to make sure they're not going to hurt someone else. They use shotguns all time time, and for good reason. They carry slugs, buckshot, and other loads, and use them judiciously, based on what they're trying to damage, and how.
Unless you're using the shotgun as a slug gun. In which case it delivers enormous large-mammal-stopping power up to 100 yards, no problem. I have had many a venison dinner as proof of concept.
I can also shoot, off hand, no scope, with a 12GA 3" mag slug from most shotguns into a target smaller than a dinner plate at over 50 yards. The vitals on a tiger are larger than a dinner plate.
first, it's coming from a rifled barrel
My 12 gauge slug gun has a rifled barrel. I also shoot from smooth-bore shotguns, using rifled projectiles. These are readily available, and work very well. Again, fine dinners made from large mammals that dropped where they were standing when hit with a single shot from a shotgun slug is a fine proof of concept. I have, on the other hand, shot high-powered rifles at deer, and have seen the round pass right through the animal without giving up drop-dead energy. I hate that, since it means having to finish off the animal with another shot, often after trailing it as it suffers. That's to be avoided at all costs.
The cruising cops that need to respond to something like the tiger event are NOT the SWAT guys with
But that's my point: they were in an urban setting with an unknown number of people likely to be hiding behind trashcans, in the kitchen behind some drywall, or well within ricochet range. For the same reason that you aren't allowed to use a high-powered rifle on a 200-pound whitetail deer in a semi-suburban setting, you don't want to use one at the SF zoo. Of COURSE a .30-06 is going to kill the animal more surely, more accurately, and more quickly. But it's a hell of a thing to be using in a setting like that... so, the shotgun's really the right too, all things considered.