Um, what, exactly, else CAN you call it? Whether or not we agree with the perpetrator, whether or not they are correct in their reasoning, people only do these extreme actions because they feel driven
Obviously, but not the parent's point, I think. His tone (correctly, I think) implies "rationally driven," as in, having no choice in the pursuit of an objectively rational goal. There are things (like lethal self defense) that can be objectively viewed as the only response to aggression (something one is thus "driven" to do). There are other "drivers" to action, but not all are morally equivalent. Be careful of moral relativism, here - not all goals are equally valid.
Osama...who can say what his purpose was?
No need to wonder! He and his buddies loudly repeat their goals on a regular basis. That entire movement is focused the re-establishment of, as a start, a pan-Arab caliphate spanning all of the regions once conquered/held by Islam. That would include, of course, places like Spain, and certainly all of the middle east. They want to see those places all ruled by a fundamentalist Islamist theocracy, and they say so on a regular basis - both in word and deed (see their mercifully aborted warm-up act in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan). Their aspirations, of course, include the widening of that influence across the globe. Their vision provides for this taking generations, and they're willing to do anything it takes. That's what it driving Osama, from the horse's mouth.
an abused wife getting out of her abusive relationship the only way she knows how
Funny you should cite that particular example. Reviewing, again, a social setting functioning exactly as the Taliban and their al Queda buddies wanted it, you got spectacles like women being taken to the (former) soccer field in Karachi and shot in front of a crowd at lunchtime for... that's right!... not being dressed correctly. Or for teaching her daughters to read and write. Or for trying to work to buy food since her husband was already murdered for, say, playing music outside. You can't make this stuff up... but it's exactly in line with the extremist culture that is radicalizing bored/cranky teenage Muslims throughout Europe. "Driven" indeed... but by theocratic, mysoginsitic, mideival-minded, superstitious bastards that want to set the clock back a few centuries to a (for them) romanticized set of circumstances that are, objectively, evil. I'm always a little perplexed by people that would let that world-view off the hook and attempt to dispassionately evaluate and equivocate over what's "driving" uncivilized, brutal, murderous behavior. Just ask them! They're happy to explain it, and if you don't sign on, you're an infidel dog.
All's not lost, though. Did you notice the Jordanian protests against Zarqawi today? There are rational people in that part of the world, and they just need help dealing with the people that consider democracy evil (i.e., bin Laden and his local Iraqi franchise operator, Zarqawi).
or sort of like saying the colonists were "driven" to rebel and terrorize the legal british government...;-)
But they were. By an increasingly burdensome, intrusive government presence in their lives. The British wanted to tax people without representation (note that the Fench citizens in question, whether they're rioting or not, can vote), the British routinely stationed troops in people's houses (as opposed to the French ghetto-burbs, where the French police and rescue workers have been afraid, for years, to go because they are routinely ambushed by the thugs that have set up shop there), etc.
On one hand you've got colonists living, working, and risking it all to set up shop under circumstances that are being continually (and sometimes brutally) altered by the parent country. On the other hand you've got people who leave their own country and travel to another country to live in a place where the social structure, economy, laws and current events are plainly known. They choose to have children there, all the while maintaining that their own culture is preferrable to their new host culture (in most cases, choosing not to vote, not to learn the local language, etc) and then bitching when that already-sick local socialist economy doesn't provide them with what they've realized (upon leaving their own much more miserable country and living next to people who've built a long-standing, considerably more prosperous country) they want - even if they don't offer, as they arrive in the country, the skills and work ethic that would improve (rather than drain) that economy.
You've got it backwards. It's identity group affiliation that is the problem. It's not skin color that keeps a kid born to Moroccan parents in a suburb of Paris from being a success. It's the standoff-ish culture into which he's born that is the problem. The neighborhoods in question are largely populated by immigrants that don't (in practical terms, anyway) recognize the prevailing French culture as one that they want to adopt. But since their parents chose to go and live there, and live off of that society's socialist structures there's not much room for complaint about how the French culture that they choose to go an live in isn't to their liking.
So, the people that are setting small fires in the front hallways of public housing buildings, calling in the firefighters, and then dropping furniture on them and shooting at them as they rush in to save the building... they should be "understood?" France is certainly going to have to deal with the cultural problems they've invited, but you can't "understand" someone into stopping them - right that moment - from pulling the trigger a second or a third time as they shoot at police and rescue workers. Anyone that thinks they're somehow making things better by attacking a guy who risks his life to save people isn't worth the trouble.
... would seem to be a no-brainer, in terms of making the distinction. But France (and Germany) has a pretty long post-WWII history of making very strange distinctions (or not) between those things. The mess they're in now is shining a pretty bright light on some of their culture's built-in legal and philosophical oddities. Much is being made about France's supposed inability to integrate immigrants into their wider society, but there's more to it than that.
I spent some time yesterday talking to my neighbor who is from Cameroon, in Africa. Their culture was impacted considerably by German colonialism, and then lurched into Frenchness when the French were handed that German turf after WWII. As a result, many people from his generation head to France for higher education, and indeed, he has relatives there. He fondly recalled traveling there (and across Europe) as a younger man 15 years ago, and says that he hates it now because "it's no longer France."
He's appalled by the unwillingness of many people that move there to even learn French or fully grasp how the country works. He says that some people there do wish that it was easier to snap their fingers and "be" French - with all of the social niceties and better paying work that might suggest - but that the problem is more in the objectives of the immigrants. His personal take on it is that, indeed, it's not Moroccans (as an example) wanting to move to France, it's Morrocans wanting to move Morroco to France.
At any rate, he came here (to the US), and is working his ass off in two different businesses (wireless networking and carpet cleaning!). He came here with very little, and now has a decent house (luxurious, he says, by any standard he would otherwise have enjoyed in Cameroon or in France) and just bought his equally hard working wife a nice Mercedes.
He uses the internet for VoIP chats with his friends in France and Africa, haunts many message boards and blogs in both places, and encourages his relations in France to do the same. His take on it is that the French have become completely schizoid on this entire bundle of issues. They preach a culture/color-blind take on all things governmental (which he applauds), and seem to let into the country pretty much anyone who feels like being there (which he thinks is crazy). But his main observation was that the socialist aspects of the French government/economy are chiefly to blame for everything that's happening. He has a bird feeder out behind his house and laughs when the squirrels fight over the sunflower seeds - but he says that's pretty much what's happening in the immigrant-heavy French suburbs right now... people moving there for the welfare-ish resources, and now erupting into a frenzy over the ramifications of living like that (in contrast to the country's better-off people, but - according to my neighbor - still better off than they would be where they came from). I asked him if his perceptions are typical, and he said that he wishes they were (in the French 'burbs), but that they are among the extended Cameroonian ex-pat community in the DC area. He's shaking his head over the whole thing, and says he wishes that France would lighten up on the whole free speech thing, but that it would tighten up on immigration. The biggest thing, though, is the complete fear (on the part of law enforcement) of even entering some neighborhoods. The police there are completely powerless to deal with the thuggier elements in the public housing ghettos, and have pretty much thrown up their hands.
but communicating between a handful of people among millions there is just no way to prevent it or track it
But there's always more to it than that. Most intel that matters is gathered in the context of alrady having a tip or other information that suggests a need to focus on a particular line of communication. The information that's gathered as two bad guys post notes to each other on some obscure message board is usually complementary to other intel and helps clarify things. The needle-in-the-haystack approach, as you say, is pretty pointless all by itself.
Do you have any idea what how slim the chances really are to be killed by terrorists in the US? Even after 9/11 it's next to none. You are far more likely to be in a car accident, die of cancer, get a heart attack or being shot by a family member.
Do you really think - really - that the only thing we're worried about here is direct death or injury of individuals, personally, by some weapon that is flown, blown up, or shot at them? The impact of 9/11 was pretty horrible for the thousands of dead and their families - but pretty much everyone in the country was impacted, as well. The economics of another serious attack - even a conventional one as before - will be mammoth. The impact of something like a Japan-style Sarin gas attack or two, or of something radiological, will be (just as the bad guys would hope) incredibly costly and disruptive. I can't even imagine something smallpox-ish, in terms of the social freak-out mess.
I live in the DC area and interact with people on the working end of these problems. They're frustrated at how hard it is to fight this crap, but they're even more frustrated at how willingly people paint them as some sort of bad X-Files villains as they do their jobs. Of all the people I've met and talked to, the only common thread that should alarm most of us is their tales of un-fireable incompetent co-workers. There are paper pushers, academics/analysts, operatives, and other people working in all of the three-letter-agencies that are just as dumb, bull-headed, whiny, annoying, distracted by the problems with their drug-using teenagers, etc. as there are in the rest of the world.
Part of the problem is the near impossibility of retaining quality (real quality) people on a government paycheck - especially in areas where the cost of living is off the charts. Living essentially hand-to-mouth in a town where a cheesy two-bedroom townhouse in a bad neighborhood costs half a million dollars, and your 15-mile round trip communute takes over two hours... it's hard to shrug that off (at, say, $45k/year) and spend your time in the office making perfect decisions about how some guy at the Agency should work with some guy from State to draw the line between sniffing a laptop that someone carries, sometimes while visiting in the US, and sometimes back to Syria where he deals in chemicals and transportation.
Developing the tools to know what we need to know is a technical problem. Deciding when and how to use them is a policy problem. I don't sense the police state that you do, perhaps mostly because I'm life-long friends with people who are now in law enforcement and intel, and know that most of the black-helicopter hand wringing is so wildly misplaced as to be just plain funny.
BTW, to put the word "threat" in quotes implies that there simply isn't one. There is, and I'll be curious to hear your take on whether or not, in the wake of the next hit, enough intel was being gathered before hand in an attempt to stop it. Did you catch the news in Australia the other day? 17 guys, stockpiled with chemicals, bomb-making gear and plans, and in what appears to be a two-party race to see who could execute the first serious in-the-name-of-Allah mass casualties in that country first. Major intel gathering, including cyber surveilance of several flavors, was the only reason that Sydney or Melbourne didn't get exactly what just happened in Amman yesterday. And if you think that the only impact on the Jordanian economy is the death and injuries to a couple hundred people, you're way, way wrong. Your initial point (about the odds of any one person being killed by a terrorist) is an often-repeated rhetorical canard that (not out of ignorance, because you have to know better) deliberately pretends that both the intent and impact of terror is person-to-person damage. Wake up, man. Or spend next week in Amman and ask the merchants, the cabbies, the food service people, and everyone else what the odds are that the terrorists only hurt the 57 people that died.
OK, then try flipping the coin over. People with a vested interest in any topic or movement/entity/organization would want to leverage something like this. Want to see what the dev community thinks about some new twist in GPL v.X? How about watching all of the religious crazies chat boards for misinformation about "intelligent design" and how they're talking about using it in an upcoming election? Or, how about using it to spot the frequency of a given keywork collection to help spot how often (and where) people are bitching enough about something to make it worth your time to provide a service, product, or fix to address it.
Granted, this means you won't be refilling from a gallon jug -- you'll be locked in to some form of replaceable, well-sealed cartridges.
And I think this is my point. We're talking about a supposedly convenient new thing... but it only works if you have access to carefully sealed, probably proprietary injectors of nastiness. A pocketful of Li-ion batteries would probably be just as easy to maintain, and still get you that long usage. Just develop some nice little solar handkerchief to unfold and charge them, or something. But I don't find much liberty in having to depend on a source of formic acid - however stabilized - for my phone to work. It's just like printer ink.
Re:Can't blind on purpose
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if you think through the probable results of introducing weapons like this into a place like Iraq, I think you'll find their value to be questionable
But not all conflicts are like Iraq. You've also got places like Somalia (remember the downed chopper there?) where you've got militant-armed local punks who deliberately stand in the middle of crowds of civilians knowing that our troops will resist shooting at them. Or picture, say, a French embassy that's being surrounded with the same sort of stuff that's happening in Paris right now. Or a rescue operation... where you don't want to have to kill people in a semi-hostile village setting, but you want them all to stand well back from where you're putting down an aircraft. If you limit your choices to "lethal force" and "no other option," you either have to be overrun or start killing people that you don't intend to kill.
Just because a stunning laser or skin heater won't help with an IED-placing foreign fighter hitting convoys in Irag doesn't mean the tool shouldn't be available to those troops who do have to deal with more typical rioters or embassy-throngers.
Even if something like this isn't as portable as modern flip phones, it could still mean the difference between communicating, and not being able to when electricity from the wall
You just need a big supply of "highly purified and modified formic acid" and off you go! This sounds suspiciously like inkjet cartridges to me.
I'm a little torn on which I'd rather have break open and spill into/onto my clothes and skin: something flammable which will evaporate pretty quickly, or something that will sting like hell and give you a nice chemical burn. Perhaps some chemists can comment?
Re:Can't blind on purpose
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I mean, i can just as easily blind an enemy combatant by poking him in the eye with a stick as i can with an assault rifle.
Sure, but you can't use that stick from 300 meters away. And you can't use that stick on an entire platoon of guys popping out of a ditch, trying - right now - with lots of weapons, to kill you.
why doesn't the geneva convention just ban all pain inducing weapons straight out? that right there would prevent lots of war.
You're thinking largely about the past, here. The Geneva convention only applies (and then, loosely) to those that actually sign onto it, and substantially adhere to it. Remember those video tapes we found in Afghanistan, where the parts of some of the local training camps had been used to test nerve gas weapons on dogs and goats? The guys thinking of using that stuff, mostly on civilians in what we now think of as terrorist attacks, are not signees to the Geneva Convention(s). The "wars" we're facing (not counting some absurd lashing out by North Korea, or the Chinese deciding to gobble up Taiwan by force) will almost never again be between facing-off uniformed combatants. It's just not like that any more.
So, we can "ban" pain-related weapons all day long, but just like gun control for civilians, it only has meaning to those that adhere to the agreement - and since there always have been, and always will be people who don't give a rat's ass about such agreements/laws, the people that agree to them end up at a disadvantage.
That said, I don't find that a weapon which induces temporary pain (say, on someone who is about to hurl a molotov cocktail through some poor shopkeeper's window because he's mad at the world) is nearly as bad as the use of lethal or maiming force from conventional weapons. A headache that lasts an hour isn't nearly as bad as permanent damage to a limb or major organ. And if that's all that's needed to dispurse a bunch of Parisians burning public transportation vehicles, etc., then that's a far better alternative to slinging lead.
On second thoughts, based on their recent TV marketing campaign (the one where they show a bunch of children with aspirations including for things like music creation that Microsoft doesn't have any software offering for) which basically has no point whatsoever apart from an opportunity to say "Hi we're Microsoft, don't forget about us" and display a Microsoft logo
Except, if you do any sort of work - in almost any capacity - to support or deal with the successful aspirants they portray in those ads (famous musician, famous designer, fashionable scooter manufacturer, whatever), you're going to use business software. Every one of the roles they describe is backed up accountants, tax people, messaging, web sites, and a zillion other things that MS very aggressively wants to be a part of. A lot of people don't even know that Great Plains, Solomon, Navision, and Axapta (all widely-used accounting software packages) are Microsoft products.
They've got armies of custom developers and consulting companies out there adapting those packages for "vertical" integration into all sorts of speciality business models, from mom-and-pop scale bookeeping up to major manufacturing. There's more to that ad campaign than meets the normal desktop user's eye.
Well, at least this will be such a dis-incentive for bright, worldly, intellectual types to live and raise children in Kansas that in short order, the sheer economic depression bound to happen there will make for cheap real estate.
1) Buy a bunch of cheap land in Kansas
2) Wait for current twits to fade away
3) Hope that at least some Kansans come to their senses
4) Watch the local school boards swing the other way
5) Watch local politicians aggressively try to make up for this whole embarassment by doing what they can to woo startups and tech/science companies
6) Start advertising that real estate.
7) Profit! Um, in two or three generations. But your grandkids can still enjoy the proceeds.
While you're waiting, that's pretty good pheasant hunting territory, so you can use the land that way in the meantime.
Speaking of pheasants - ever heard a rooster pheasant break up from cover and take wing? They can let loose with quite a cackle. This is important to pheasant hunters, since you're not allowed to take the hens - only the cockbirds. So, birds that jump up cackling tend to get shot rather readily. I've talked to more than one hunter in the midwest that says, in their lifetimes, they've seen a marked reduction in the number of roosters that cackle when they take to wing. In other words, the quiet ones love longer and reproduce more often... and we're thus selecting for (evolving) quieter rooster pheasants. This is happening in Kansas, too, not that the school board is taking notes.
Why does it make a difference when a lot of websites are localised anyway?
It's not about where the web sites themselves are (or are hosted). It's about what IP address you're pointed to when you type in "www.ibm.com" or any other address that depends on DNS to get you where you're going. Let's say that the Chinese government suddenly decides that they don't like how often Google comes up with information about human rights (well, they already have said that - but work with me here). If they controlled how.COM domains were resolved, they could point traffic to some other Google-looking destination totally under their control. Or worse, they could do that with messaging, banking, or other traffic. In a situation where something like the UN security council plays a role in these things, you might end up not getting your new.COM domain name registered until someone at the UN decides it's OK for you to have that domain name. And if, as they have now, China or another large presence doesn't like some aspect of new domain registrations, they might act to block them.
That's a strange way to say "winning the cold war". I'm glad the US won. Are you?
See, now, your tone suggests that you're making rhetorical point that presupposing that everyone is glad the Soviets lost the Cold War conflict. But it's plain that a lot of readers/contributors here actually think it's bad that the Soviets and their puppets lost ground. It's amazing, but they're out there. They're busy typing away on computers, hooked up to networks, freely expressing ideas in a setting that the Soviets would never have developed or allowed, and they think that the US was evil for having worked to shut them down. Oh well.
If you cause anything to blow up in a public place with the intent to injure or kill people, it sure as hell is terrorism.
If the "public place" is something like a school that has been converted into an insurgent weapons dump and mortar launching ground, then causing it to be turned into dust is not terrorism. It's the opposite.
idiot
Try to make the distinction between a rather abstract rhetorical example and the practicalities. The issue is whether or not you're on the hook for what happens when someone misues your stuff, or uses it without our permission.
Did it wither away because it was inefficient and inferior? Or because we had the strength at the time to hound it into oblivion?
I think that, unchecked, they could have kept it appearing alive by continuing to grind satellite countries into the ground - at least for a while. But the huge toll in human misery, and the genuine fear (before we really saw how empty they were) that they'd just keep steamrolling their way across Europe and down into Asia meant that acting sooner was going to prevent a lot of grief. So we did, and it did. The sooner it died, the better for millions and millions of people.
Element of surprise and a sharp/blunt object would thoroughly put the balance of power in the hands of the civilians. Well, ideally. I keep forgetting we're a culture of fear now.
Anyone without body armor and their own heavy weaponry should be afraid of a bunch of cutthroats with AKs and RPGs. Those guys shot an RPG right into someone's cabin. The passengers might have strength in numbers, but three guys with 40-round magazines would be able to kill over 100 of them more or less immediately. I don't think the remaining couple hundred would so willing to join the frey.
No, the solution is aggressive defenses manned by the ship's crew, and proper weapons training, at least for the officers.
I'm pretty sure that if you made a car which deliberately blew up if someone steals it, and a thief died due to this, you'd be convicted for murder
Oddly, there are a lot of hit-or-miss laws on the books that speak to the issue of making your house dangerous to trespassers. It's always struck me as a little odd that there are jurisdictions where someone trespassing can be shot (dead!) without any crime having been committed... but if the trespasser shows up when you're not around, picks your front door lock, and a 100-pound safe falls on his head and kills him, then that's a crime. This usually revolves around the lack of any personal immediate threat being perceived. But how about the guy that steals your car and then dies when he finds out the hard way that the breaks are no good? Given our cultural litigiousness, I'd be surprised if the dead thief's family didn't press a wrongful death suit against the person who had his car stolen.
Why? Because code that the Soviets stole from the US turned out to be (from their perspective) defective? I don't think it's terrorism if my car blows up while you, having stolen it, are driving it around.
More to the point, though, the CIA's objective was to cripple the cash flow of the Soviet Union, an entity that really was busy terrorizing much of the world. Their murderous, oppressive grip on Eastern Europe and attempts at foisting their cheerful utopia on South America and Africa wasn't going to get anywhere without the cash they were trying to raise by selling Siberian natural gas to the west. Making the Soviet government's cold cash sales operation less workable for them was part of what finished pulling the rug out from under that hellish government. That they so desperately needed western cash was a sign of how hollow that regime actually was, and that event just added clarity to the picture. I doubt the CIA expected that exact outcome, but you never really know what someone's going to do with the stuff they steal from you. Makes you wonder what's ticking under the hood in North Korea's squalid little IT universe, doesn't it? No doubt our team, and China's as well, have planted similar things in case they're needed. Tactics like that are going to be more subtle now, probably.
If all the media they sold was put in libraries, people would be getting just as much media as they do with P2P, for exactly the same price.
Except that you're wrong. Libraries are typically run by local/county/state governments and either purchase, or have donated to them by people who did purchase, the material that they loan out. If I purchase a copy of a Harry Potter book and donate it to a library, a thousand people cannot simultaneously be reading Rowling's work. If the library wants to be able to loan it out to 1000 people, they'll need a 1000 copies of the media on the shelf. Likewise with books on tape, etc. The author of the book is still compensated for the library's ownership of the book, and it's not being spread around to multiple people at a time. Yes, someone could stand there and photocopy the entire book - but that's illegal, and the libraries watch for that degree of infringement. If you take the book home and do it, and start passing around copies, you're infringing just like any other pirate - but even dumber, given the material costs.
They sell *so many* CDs and DVDs that there literally isn't a market for them anymore.
Then, why do they continue to sell more? And, if there's no demand for the artists' work, then surely there's no one out ripping it off, either, right? Except people do. Thousands and thousands of copies every hour for the popular stuff. That's not the same as "no market." No, that's "people ignoring one half of the buyer/seller transaction, and just taking what they want because they've found a way to avoid paying for it." If those people actually respect the artist enough to enjoy their music and call themselves fans, why are they spitting on the artist when it comes to the relationship that the artist has asked the fan to respect?
If it's widely acceptable to copy most anything on xerox machines for personal use, how is it horrificly wrong to copy music to a few other people in the world for their personal use?
Because then it's not for personal use. It's for someone else's use. Once I'm done with a good book, I routinely give it or loan it to a friend. I do the same with movies and music. Especially with movies, it's very rare that I'll ever want to actually watch something more than once. With music, I can get tired of it, or not. But I don't photocopy whole novels for friends, and I don't burn CDs or fileshare digital media because it's cheap to just buy it if I think it's actually worth owning. Someone who just has to have a copy of an artist's work, and can't find the $9.95 it costs to actually get it the way the artist they say they like has asked them to obviously doesn't have the cash on hand to have a lot of the things they'd like to have. But unlike a nicer car or a bigger house, they can rip off the people they want to entertain them with relatively little risk of consequence. But then, most people have almost no capacity for embarassment, so that's not surprising, I guess.
Copiers are, on a per copy basis, probably used MORE than computers for copyright infringement
I'll be very curious about the source of your statistics. How much time do you think your average 20-year-old sophomore in college spends actually photocopying lengthy documents when he can just store the PDF or other media during the course of research? Now, how often does that same person "share" digital entertainment, since he spent all of his ready cash on beer, instead? I would suggest that the impact of his daily activities involves far more digital infringement than old-school analog.
it doesn't make sense to consider weather it's "voluntary" for somebody not involved
If you're beat up and robbed on the street, you're involved, and it's probably not voluntary. When you're not at home, but someone breaks into your house and steals your stuff, you're not there, and it's not voluntary on your part - but I'd scarcely call that "uninvolved."
If you put proprietary, private property in the hands of someone who agrees that it's not to be copied or shared during review, and that person takes that commercial data and spreads it around (contrary to the other party's express recognition that it's private property) to a few thousand anonymous "friends"... that's very much between you and the person with whom you made the agreement. You didn't volunteer your property to be spread around like that - rather, you entered into an agreement wherein the other person says they know they're holding your private property, and that copying and disemminating it will be damaging to your business... and they do it anyway. Your private property loses its value because, involuntarily, the control you have over your property has been destroyed by someone else's deceit.
Second, file sharerers don't spread lies
What? File sharers are users of file sharing software. There are millions of them. You can't make any sweeping comment about their morality as a group. Some of them may "spread lies" and some of them may pirate copyrighted material. Just like others do not.
I am a Mac user, and there are no services for me to legally download movies longer than 2 minutes.
So? Presuming that's even true, I'd say that using a computer that reflects only a small minority of those out there probably leaves you short in a lot of areas. Some web sites surely don't work for you, some games won't run on your machine, etc. That doesn't make it OK to pirate copyrighted material. There are probably country roads that your passenger car can't handle, either. Or some kinds of extreme weather for which you don't have the right gear. There are probably satellite transmissions that you have no way to receive, either. If you find service availability to be a problem for your Mac, set up a cheap Windows box.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, what, exactly, else CAN you call it? Whether or not we agree with the perpetrator, whether or not they are correct in their reasoning, people only do these extreme actions because they feel driven
Obviously, but not the parent's point, I think. His tone (correctly, I think) implies "rationally driven," as in, having no choice in the pursuit of an objectively rational goal. There are things (like lethal self defense) that can be objectively viewed as the only response to aggression (something one is thus "driven" to do). There are other "drivers" to action, but not all are morally equivalent. Be careful of moral relativism, here - not all goals are equally valid.
Osama...who can say what his purpose was?
No need to wonder! He and his buddies loudly repeat their goals on a regular basis. That entire movement is focused the re-establishment of, as a start, a pan-Arab caliphate spanning all of the regions once conquered/held by Islam. That would include, of course, places like Spain, and certainly all of the middle east. They want to see those places all ruled by a fundamentalist Islamist theocracy, and they say so on a regular basis - both in word and deed (see their mercifully aborted warm-up act in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan). Their aspirations, of course, include the widening of that influence across the globe. Their vision provides for this taking generations, and they're willing to do anything it takes. That's what it driving Osama, from the horse's mouth.
an abused wife getting out of her abusive relationship the only way she knows how
Funny you should cite that particular example. Reviewing, again, a social setting functioning exactly as the Taliban and their al Queda buddies wanted it, you got spectacles like women being taken to the (former) soccer field in Karachi and shot in front of a crowd at lunchtime for... that's right!... not being dressed correctly. Or for teaching her daughters to read and write. Or for trying to work to buy food since her husband was already murdered for, say, playing music outside. You can't make this stuff up... but it's exactly in line with the extremist culture that is radicalizing bored/cranky teenage Muslims throughout Europe. "Driven" indeed... but by theocratic, mysoginsitic, mideival-minded, superstitious bastards that want to set the clock back a few centuries to a (for them) romanticized set of circumstances that are, objectively, evil. I'm always a little perplexed by people that would let that world-view off the hook and attempt to dispassionately evaluate and equivocate over what's "driving" uncivilized, brutal, murderous behavior. Just ask them! They're happy to explain it, and if you don't sign on, you're an infidel dog.
All's not lost, though. Did you notice the Jordanian protests against Zarqawi today? There are rational people in that part of the world, and they just need help dealing with the people that consider democracy evil (i.e., bin Laden and his local Iraqi franchise operator, Zarqawi).
or sort of like saying the colonists were "driven" to rebel and terrorize the legal british government... ;-)
But they were. By an increasingly burdensome, intrusive government presence in their lives. The British wanted to tax people without representation (note that the Fench citizens in question, whether they're rioting or not, can vote), the British routinely stationed troops in people's houses (as opposed to the French ghetto-burbs, where the French police and rescue workers have been afraid, for years, to go because they are routinely ambushed by the thugs that have set up shop there), etc.
On one hand you've got colonists living, working, and risking it all to set up shop under circumstances that are being continually (and sometimes brutally) altered by the parent country. On the other hand you've got people who leave their own country and travel to another country to live in a place where the social structure, economy, laws and current events are plainly known. They choose to have children there, all the while maintaining that their own culture is preferrable to their new host culture (in most cases, choosing not to vote, not to learn the local language, etc) and then bitching when that already-sick local socialist economy doesn't provide them with what they've realized (upon leaving their own much more miserable country and living next to people who've built a long-standing, considerably more prosperous country) they want - even if they don't offer, as they arrive in the country, the skills and work ethic that would improve (rather than drain) that economy.
Pah.
as long as we continue to focus on individuals
You've got it backwards. It's identity group affiliation that is the problem. It's not skin color that keeps a kid born to Moroccan parents in a suburb of Paris from being a success. It's the standoff-ish culture into which he's born that is the problem. The neighborhoods in question are largely populated by immigrants that don't (in practical terms, anyway) recognize the prevailing French culture as one that they want to adopt. But since their parents chose to go and live there, and live off of that society's socialist structures there's not much room for complaint about how the French culture that they choose to go an live in isn't to their liking.
So, the people that are setting small fires in the front hallways of public housing buildings, calling in the firefighters, and then dropping furniture on them and shooting at them as they rush in to save the building... they should be "understood?" France is certainly going to have to deal with the cultural problems they've invited, but you can't "understand" someone into stopping them - right that moment - from pulling the trigger a second or a third time as they shoot at police and rescue workers. Anyone that thinks they're somehow making things better by attacking a guy who risks his life to save people isn't worth the trouble.
... would seem to be a no-brainer, in terms of making the distinction. But France (and Germany) has a pretty long post-WWII history of making very strange distinctions (or not) between those things. The mess they're in now is shining a pretty bright light on some of their culture's built-in legal and philosophical oddities. Much is being made about France's supposed inability to integrate immigrants into their wider society, but there's more to it than that.
I spent some time yesterday talking to my neighbor who is from Cameroon, in Africa. Their culture was impacted considerably by German colonialism, and then lurched into Frenchness when the French were handed that German turf after WWII. As a result, many people from his generation head to France for higher education, and indeed, he has relatives there. He fondly recalled traveling there (and across Europe) as a younger man 15 years ago, and says that he hates it now because "it's no longer France."
He's appalled by the unwillingness of many people that move there to even learn French or fully grasp how the country works. He says that some people there do wish that it was easier to snap their fingers and "be" French - with all of the social niceties and better paying work that might suggest - but that the problem is more in the objectives of the immigrants. His personal take on it is that, indeed, it's not Moroccans (as an example) wanting to move to France, it's Morrocans wanting to move Morroco to France.
At any rate, he came here (to the US), and is working his ass off in two different businesses (wireless networking and carpet cleaning!). He came here with very little, and now has a decent house (luxurious, he says, by any standard he would otherwise have enjoyed in Cameroon or in France) and just bought his equally hard working wife a nice Mercedes.
He uses the internet for VoIP chats with his friends in France and Africa, haunts many message boards and blogs in both places, and encourages his relations in France to do the same. His take on it is that the French have become completely schizoid on this entire bundle of issues. They preach a culture/color-blind take on all things governmental (which he applauds), and seem to let into the country pretty much anyone who feels like being there (which he thinks is crazy). But his main observation was that the socialist aspects of the French government/economy are chiefly to blame for everything that's happening. He has a bird feeder out behind his house and laughs when the squirrels fight over the sunflower seeds - but he says that's pretty much what's happening in the immigrant-heavy French suburbs right now... people moving there for the welfare-ish resources, and now erupting into a frenzy over the ramifications of living like that (in contrast to the country's better-off people, but - according to my neighbor - still better off than they would be where they came from). I asked him if his perceptions are typical, and he said that he wishes they were (in the French 'burbs), but that they are among the extended Cameroonian ex-pat community in the DC area. He's shaking his head over the whole thing, and says he wishes that France would lighten up on the whole free speech thing, but that it would tighten up on immigration. The biggest thing, though, is the complete fear (on the part of law enforcement) of even entering some neighborhoods. The police there are completely powerless to deal with the thuggier elements in the public housing ghettos, and have pretty much thrown up their hands.
but communicating between a handful of people among millions there is just no way to prevent it or track it
But there's always more to it than that. Most intel that matters is gathered in the context of alrady having a tip or other information that suggests a need to focus on a particular line of communication. The information that's gathered as two bad guys post notes to each other on some obscure message board is usually complementary to other intel and helps clarify things. The needle-in-the-haystack approach, as you say, is pretty pointless all by itself.
Do you have any idea what how slim the chances really are to be killed by terrorists in the US? Even after 9/11 it's next to none. You are far more likely to be in a car accident, die of cancer, get a heart attack or being shot by a family member.
... it's hard to shrug that off (at, say, $45k/year) and spend your time in the office making perfect decisions about how some guy at the Agency should work with some guy from State to draw the line between sniffing a laptop that someone carries, sometimes while visiting in the US, and sometimes back to Syria where he deals in chemicals and transportation.
Do you really think - really - that the only thing we're worried about here is direct death or injury of individuals, personally, by some weapon that is flown, blown up, or shot at them? The impact of 9/11 was pretty horrible for the thousands of dead and their families - but pretty much everyone in the country was impacted, as well. The economics of another serious attack - even a conventional one as before - will be mammoth. The impact of something like a Japan-style Sarin gas attack or two, or of something radiological, will be (just as the bad guys would hope) incredibly costly and disruptive. I can't even imagine something smallpox-ish, in terms of the social freak-out mess.
I live in the DC area and interact with people on the working end of these problems. They're frustrated at how hard it is to fight this crap, but they're even more frustrated at how willingly people paint them as some sort of bad X-Files villains as they do their jobs. Of all the people I've met and talked to, the only common thread that should alarm most of us is their tales of un-fireable incompetent co-workers. There are paper pushers, academics/analysts, operatives, and other people working in all of the three-letter-agencies that are just as dumb, bull-headed, whiny, annoying, distracted by the problems with their drug-using teenagers, etc. as there are in the rest of the world.
Part of the problem is the near impossibility of retaining quality (real quality) people on a government paycheck - especially in areas where the cost of living is off the charts. Living essentially hand-to-mouth in a town where a cheesy two-bedroom townhouse in a bad neighborhood costs half a million dollars, and your 15-mile round trip communute takes over two hours
Developing the tools to know what we need to know is a technical problem. Deciding when and how to use them is a policy problem. I don't sense the police state that you do, perhaps mostly because I'm life-long friends with people who are now in law enforcement and intel, and know that most of the black-helicopter hand wringing is so wildly misplaced as to be just plain funny.
BTW, to put the word "threat" in quotes implies that there simply isn't one. There is, and I'll be curious to hear your take on whether or not, in the wake of the next hit, enough intel was being gathered before hand in an attempt to stop it. Did you catch the news in Australia the other day? 17 guys, stockpiled with chemicals, bomb-making gear and plans, and in what appears to be a two-party race to see who could execute the first serious in-the-name-of-Allah mass casualties in that country first. Major intel gathering, including cyber surveilance of several flavors, was the only reason that Sydney or Melbourne didn't get exactly what just happened in Amman yesterday. And if you think that the only impact on the Jordanian economy is the death and injuries to a couple hundred people, you're way, way wrong. Your initial point (about the odds of any one person being killed by a terrorist) is an often-repeated rhetorical canard that (not out of ignorance, because you have to know better) deliberately pretends that both the intent and impact of terror is person-to-person damage. Wake up, man. Or spend next week in Amman and ask the merchants, the cabbies, the food service people, and everyone else what the odds are that the terrorists only hurt the 57 people that died.
But then, what good is a game setting in which you have to surrender before anything cool happens?
OK, then try flipping the coin over. People with a vested interest in any topic or movement/entity/organization would want to leverage something like this. Want to see what the dev community thinks about some new twist in GPL v.X? How about watching all of the religious crazies chat boards for misinformation about "intelligent design" and how they're talking about using it in an upcoming election? Or, how about using it to spot the frequency of a given keywork collection to help spot how often (and where) people are bitching enough about something to make it worth your time to provide a service, product, or fix to address it.
Granted, this means you won't be refilling from a gallon jug -- you'll be locked in to some form of replaceable, well-sealed cartridges.
And I think this is my point. We're talking about a supposedly convenient new thing... but it only works if you have access to carefully sealed, probably proprietary injectors of nastiness. A pocketful of Li-ion batteries would probably be just as easy to maintain, and still get you that long usage. Just develop some nice little solar handkerchief to unfold and charge them, or something. But I don't find much liberty in having to depend on a source of formic acid - however stabilized - for my phone to work. It's just like printer ink.
if you think through the probable results of introducing weapons like this into a place like Iraq, I think you'll find their value to be questionable
But not all conflicts are like Iraq. You've also got places like Somalia (remember the downed chopper there?) where you've got militant-armed local punks who deliberately stand in the middle of crowds of civilians knowing that our troops will resist shooting at them. Or picture, say, a French embassy that's being surrounded with the same sort of stuff that's happening in Paris right now. Or a rescue operation... where you don't want to have to kill people in a semi-hostile village setting, but you want them all to stand well back from where you're putting down an aircraft. If you limit your choices to "lethal force" and "no other option," you either have to be overrun or start killing people that you don't intend to kill.
Just because a stunning laser or skin heater won't help with an IED-placing foreign fighter hitting convoys in Irag doesn't mean the tool shouldn't be available to those troops who do have to deal with more typical rioters or embassy-throngers.
Even if something like this isn't as portable as modern flip phones, it could still mean the difference between communicating, and not being able to when electricity from the wall
You just need a big supply of "highly purified and modified formic acid" and off you go! This sounds suspiciously like inkjet cartridges to me.
I'm a little torn on which I'd rather have break open and spill into/onto my clothes and skin: something flammable which will evaporate pretty quickly, or something that will sting like hell and give you a nice chemical burn. Perhaps some chemists can comment?
I mean, i can just as easily blind an enemy combatant by poking him in the eye with a stick as i can with an assault rifle.
Sure, but you can't use that stick from 300 meters away. And you can't use that stick on an entire platoon of guys popping out of a ditch, trying - right now - with lots of weapons, to kill you.
why doesn't the geneva convention just ban all pain inducing weapons straight out? that right there would prevent lots of war.
You're thinking largely about the past, here. The Geneva convention only applies (and then, loosely) to those that actually sign onto it, and substantially adhere to it. Remember those video tapes we found in Afghanistan, where the parts of some of the local training camps had been used to test nerve gas weapons on dogs and goats? The guys thinking of using that stuff, mostly on civilians in what we now think of as terrorist attacks, are not signees to the Geneva Convention(s). The "wars" we're facing (not counting some absurd lashing out by North Korea, or the Chinese deciding to gobble up Taiwan by force) will almost never again be between facing-off uniformed combatants. It's just not like that any more.
So, we can "ban" pain-related weapons all day long, but just like gun control for civilians, it only has meaning to those that adhere to the agreement - and since there always have been, and always will be people who don't give a rat's ass about such agreements/laws, the people that agree to them end up at a disadvantage.
That said, I don't find that a weapon which induces temporary pain (say, on someone who is about to hurl a molotov cocktail through some poor shopkeeper's window because he's mad at the world) is nearly as bad as the use of lethal or maiming force from conventional weapons. A headache that lasts an hour isn't nearly as bad as permanent damage to a limb or major organ. And if that's all that's needed to dispurse a bunch of Parisians burning public transportation vehicles, etc., then that's a far better alternative to slinging lead.
On second thoughts, based on their recent TV marketing campaign (the one where they show a bunch of children with aspirations including for things like music creation that Microsoft doesn't have any software offering for) which basically has no point whatsoever apart from an opportunity to say "Hi we're Microsoft, don't forget about us" and display a Microsoft logo
Except, if you do any sort of work - in almost any capacity - to support or deal with the successful aspirants they portray in those ads (famous musician, famous designer, fashionable scooter manufacturer, whatever), you're going to use business software. Every one of the roles they describe is backed up accountants, tax people, messaging, web sites, and a zillion other things that MS very aggressively wants to be a part of. A lot of people don't even know that Great Plains, Solomon, Navision, and Axapta (all widely-used accounting software packages) are Microsoft products.
They've got armies of custom developers and consulting companies out there adapting those packages for "vertical" integration into all sorts of speciality business models, from mom-and-pop scale bookeeping up to major manufacturing. There's more to that ad campaign than meets the normal desktop user's eye.
Well, at least this will be such a dis-incentive for bright, worldly, intellectual types to live and raise children in Kansas that in short order, the sheer economic depression bound to happen there will make for cheap real estate.
1) Buy a bunch of cheap land in Kansas
2) Wait for current twits to fade away
3) Hope that at least some Kansans come to their senses
4) Watch the local school boards swing the other way
5) Watch local politicians aggressively try to make up for this whole embarassment by doing what they can to woo startups and tech/science companies
6) Start advertising that real estate.
7) Profit! Um, in two or three generations. But your grandkids can still enjoy the proceeds.
While you're waiting, that's pretty good pheasant hunting territory, so you can use the land that way in the meantime.
Speaking of pheasants - ever heard a rooster pheasant break up from cover and take wing? They can let loose with quite a cackle. This is important to pheasant hunters, since you're not allowed to take the hens - only the cockbirds. So, birds that jump up cackling tend to get shot rather readily. I've talked to more than one hunter in the midwest that says, in their lifetimes, they've seen a marked reduction in the number of roosters that cackle when they take to wing. In other words, the quiet ones love longer and reproduce more often... and we're thus selecting for (evolving) quieter rooster pheasants. This is happening in Kansas, too, not that the school board is taking notes.
Why does it make a difference when a lot of websites are localised anyway?
.COM domains were resolved, they could point traffic to some other Google-looking destination totally under their control. Or worse, they could do that with messaging, banking, or other traffic. In a situation where something like the UN security council plays a role in these things, you might end up not getting your new .COM domain name registered until someone at the UN decides it's OK for you to have that domain name. And if, as they have now, China or another large presence doesn't like some aspect of new domain registrations, they might act to block them.
It's not about where the web sites themselves are (or are hosted). It's about what IP address you're pointed to when you type in "www.ibm.com" or any other address that depends on DNS to get you where you're going. Let's say that the Chinese government suddenly decides that they don't like how often Google comes up with information about human rights (well, they already have said that - but work with me here). If they controlled how
That's why.
That's a strange way to say "winning the cold war". I'm glad the US won. Are you?
See, now, your tone suggests that you're making rhetorical point that presupposing that everyone is glad the Soviets lost the Cold War conflict. But it's plain that a lot of readers/contributors here actually think it's bad that the Soviets and their puppets lost ground. It's amazing, but they're out there. They're busy typing away on computers, hooked up to networks, freely expressing ideas in a setting that the Soviets would never have developed or allowed, and they think that the US was evil for having worked to shut them down. Oh well.
If you cause anything to blow up in a public place with the intent to injure or kill people, it sure as hell is terrorism.
If the "public place" is something like a school that has been converted into an insurgent weapons dump and mortar launching ground, then causing it to be turned into dust is not terrorism. It's the opposite.
idiot
Try to make the distinction between a rather abstract rhetorical example and the practicalities. The issue is whether or not you're on the hook for what happens when someone misues your stuff, or uses it without our permission.
Did it wither away because it was inefficient and inferior? Or because we had the strength at the time to hound it into oblivion?
I think that, unchecked, they could have kept it appearing alive by continuing to grind satellite countries into the ground - at least for a while. But the huge toll in human misery, and the genuine fear (before we really saw how empty they were) that they'd just keep steamrolling their way across Europe and down into Asia meant that acting sooner was going to prevent a lot of grief. So we did, and it did. The sooner it died, the better for millions and millions of people.
Element of surprise and a sharp/blunt object would thoroughly put the balance of power in the hands of the civilians. Well, ideally. I keep forgetting we're a culture of fear now.
Anyone without body armor and their own heavy weaponry should be afraid of a bunch of cutthroats with AKs and RPGs. Those guys shot an RPG right into someone's cabin. The passengers might have strength in numbers, but three guys with 40-round magazines would be able to kill over 100 of them more or less immediately. I don't think the remaining couple hundred would so willing to join the frey.
No, the solution is aggressive defenses manned by the ship's crew, and proper weapons training, at least for the officers.
I'm pretty sure that if you made a car which deliberately blew up if someone steals it, and a thief died due to this, you'd be convicted for murder
Oddly, there are a lot of hit-or-miss laws on the books that speak to the issue of making your house dangerous to trespassers. It's always struck me as a little odd that there are jurisdictions where someone trespassing can be shot (dead!) without any crime having been committed... but if the trespasser shows up when you're not around, picks your front door lock, and a 100-pound safe falls on his head and kills him, then that's a crime. This usually revolves around the lack of any personal immediate threat being perceived. But how about the guy that steals your car and then dies when he finds out the hard way that the breaks are no good? Given our cultural litigiousness, I'd be surprised if the dead thief's family didn't press a wrongful death suit against the person who had his car stolen.
I think it would better be called terrorism.
Why? Because code that the Soviets stole from the US turned out to be (from their perspective) defective? I don't think it's terrorism if my car blows up while you, having stolen it, are driving it around.
More to the point, though, the CIA's objective was to cripple the cash flow of the Soviet Union, an entity that really was busy terrorizing much of the world. Their murderous, oppressive grip on Eastern Europe and attempts at foisting their cheerful utopia on South America and Africa wasn't going to get anywhere without the cash they were trying to raise by selling Siberian natural gas to the west. Making the Soviet government's cold cash sales operation less workable for them was part of what finished pulling the rug out from under that hellish government. That they so desperately needed western cash was a sign of how hollow that regime actually was, and that event just added clarity to the picture. I doubt the CIA expected that exact outcome, but you never really know what someone's going to do with the stuff they steal from you. Makes you wonder what's ticking under the hood in North Korea's squalid little IT universe, doesn't it? No doubt our team, and China's as well, have planted similar things in case they're needed. Tactics like that are going to be more subtle now, probably.
If all the media they sold was put in libraries, people would be getting just as much media as they do with P2P, for exactly the same price.
Except that you're wrong. Libraries are typically run by local/county/state governments and either purchase, or have donated to them by people who did purchase, the material that they loan out. If I purchase a copy of a Harry Potter book and donate it to a library, a thousand people cannot simultaneously be reading Rowling's work. If the library wants to be able to loan it out to 1000 people, they'll need a 1000 copies of the media on the shelf. Likewise with books on tape, etc. The author of the book is still compensated for the library's ownership of the book, and it's not being spread around to multiple people at a time. Yes, someone could stand there and photocopy the entire book - but that's illegal, and the libraries watch for that degree of infringement. If you take the book home and do it, and start passing around copies, you're infringing just like any other pirate - but even dumber, given the material costs.
They sell *so many* CDs and DVDs that there literally isn't a market for them anymore.
Then, why do they continue to sell more? And, if there's no demand for the artists' work, then surely there's no one out ripping it off, either, right? Except people do. Thousands and thousands of copies every hour for the popular stuff. That's not the same as "no market." No, that's "people ignoring one half of the buyer/seller transaction, and just taking what they want because they've found a way to avoid paying for it." If those people actually respect the artist enough to enjoy their music and call themselves fans, why are they spitting on the artist when it comes to the relationship that the artist has asked the fan to respect?
If it's widely acceptable to copy most anything on xerox machines for personal use, how is it horrificly wrong to copy music to a few other people in the world for their personal use?
Because then it's not for personal use. It's for someone else's use. Once I'm done with a good book, I routinely give it or loan it to a friend. I do the same with movies and music. Especially with movies, it's very rare that I'll ever want to actually watch something more than once. With music, I can get tired of it, or not. But I don't photocopy whole novels for friends, and I don't burn CDs or fileshare digital media because it's cheap to just buy it if I think it's actually worth owning. Someone who just has to have a copy of an artist's work, and can't find the $9.95 it costs to actually get it the way the artist they say they like has asked them to obviously doesn't have the cash on hand to have a lot of the things they'd like to have. But unlike a nicer car or a bigger house, they can rip off the people they want to entertain them with relatively little risk of consequence. But then, most people have almost no capacity for embarassment, so that's not surprising, I guess.
Copiers are, on a per copy basis, probably used MORE than computers for copyright infringement
I'll be very curious about the source of your statistics. How much time do you think your average 20-year-old sophomore in college spends actually photocopying lengthy documents when he can just store the PDF or other media during the course of research? Now, how often does that same person "share" digital entertainment, since he spent all of his ready cash on beer, instead? I would suggest that the impact of his daily activities involves far more digital infringement than old-school analog.
it doesn't make sense to consider weather it's "voluntary" for somebody not involved
If you're beat up and robbed on the street, you're involved, and it's probably not voluntary. When you're not at home, but someone breaks into your house and steals your stuff, you're not there, and it's not voluntary on your part - but I'd scarcely call that "uninvolved."
If you put proprietary, private property in the hands of someone who agrees that it's not to be copied or shared during review, and that person takes that commercial data and spreads it around (contrary to the other party's express recognition that it's private property) to a few thousand anonymous "friends"... that's very much between you and the person with whom you made the agreement. You didn't volunteer your property to be spread around like that - rather, you entered into an agreement wherein the other person says they know they're holding your private property, and that copying and disemminating it will be damaging to your business... and they do it anyway. Your private property loses its value because, involuntarily, the control you have over your property has been destroyed by someone else's deceit.
Second, file sharerers don't spread lies
What? File sharers are users of file sharing software. There are millions of them. You can't make any sweeping comment about their morality as a group. Some of them may "spread lies" and some of them may pirate copyrighted material. Just like others do not.
I am a Mac user, and there are no services for me to legally download movies longer than 2 minutes.
So? Presuming that's even true, I'd say that using a computer that reflects only a small minority of those out there probably leaves you short in a lot of areas. Some web sites surely don't work for you, some games won't run on your machine, etc. That doesn't make it OK to pirate copyrighted material. There are probably country roads that your passenger car can't handle, either. Or some kinds of extreme weather for which you don't have the right gear. There are probably satellite transmissions that you have no way to receive, either. If you find service availability to be a problem for your Mac, set up a cheap Windows box.