As soon as the Oyster card was launched, I knew this sort of thing would happen, just like I knew the police DNA database would expand to the ridiculous degree it has despite government assurances to the contrary. This is why we must vigorously oppose every since little infringement of our privacy, because if we don't the problem will just get much worse.
He is against net neutrality. Both Clinton and Obama are for it, although I suppose they are quite capable of doing a 360 on that.
I found this helpful Matrix of their policies.
Ah, so pretty much all 10,000 were "the enemy" and deserved to be ethnically cleansed from their own town in their own country? They were penned into a ghetto in Al-Majdal before being moved to Gaza. Al-Majdal is far from the only place it happened as well. Whether there is a war or not, ethnic cleansing is not acceptable.
I really think Ashkelon (or al-Majdal before the 10,000 Arabs were ethnically cleansed in 1948) is a bigger issue. The population is a lot bigger (108,300 vs 19,800).
Also, has anyone of you ever seen the damage katyushas make? Calling those things rockets or spending money to intercept them is ludicrous.
They are pretty pathetic in terms of damage. However, their military value is in their psychological impact, and to a certain extent, economic impact (with everyone running to shelters several times a day). Hamas' thinking is that they will be able to use the rockets in response to future IDF attacks as a form of deterrent. It's a dangerous game.
I should imagine that the fact that a larger town like Ashkelon has also been hit by rockets might result in this Laser project being revived. It should be noted that up until 1948 Ashkelon used to be called al-Majdal and was home to some 10,000 Arabs. Their homes were taken and they were ethnically cleansed and moved to Gaza. A few years later the name al-Majdal was also erased and it was renamed Ashkelon. Don't expect the news reports to tell you any of this stuff though.
To pre-empt the comments that will follow, it's not relevant to point out Israeli action in Gaza and get into a debate over whether it's justified or not - this topic is about residents of Sderot taking completely non-violent, legal action, over repeated aggressive and violent attacks from a neighbouring region.
Plenty of Palestinians think that non-violent methods such as protests are the best way forward as well. The problem is they often get beaten up or shot either with real or plastic bullets. In the recent crisis the IDF shot dead an unarmed 13 year old boy at a protest. A while back I watched a video of the IDF spokeswoman trying to explain why they had fired tank shells at unarmed protesters. She said they were just firing near to them to "warn them". Tanks shells for crowd control?
It's good that the people of Sderot can use legal action. If they were Palestinians they would have far less options and that anger would find other more bloody ways of expressing itself. Indeed, if you go back to the 40s in Israel, you will find exactly that situation.
You kidding me? If the Saudis ever had a popular revolution start up, the US would send everything we got to keep them propped up and in place.
Yes, I should imagine they would. It would be tricky to explain to the US public why the US was opposing democracy though. I suppose the easiest thing to do would be to say that Al Qaeda are behind the revolution, so it has to be stopped.
...a generator of resources that the Cuban regime uses to oppress its people
Well what about the billions in military aid given to Saudi Arabia, one of the most oppressive regimes in the world?. Cuba is Disney Land compared to Saudi Arabia. What about all that money going towards oppressing the Saudi people? Imagine some big democracy movement started in Saudi Arabia and tried to overthrow the dictatorship. The Saudi government would no doubt use all the weapons we have been selling them against their own people.
US policy toward Cuba is not about the dictatorship. The US has supported and created many dictatorships in that part of the world. The US policy towards Cuba is based on anger over losing control of the country. It's like Britain banning citizens from travelling to the US because the US had the cheek to declare independence.
The fact there is a US base in an 'enemy' country is a little clue as to how Cuba has been treated in the past. Don't expect the mainstream media to talk about it though. The US occupied Cuba after independence from Spain and refused to leave unless the Cubans agreed to a list of items (the Platt Amendment). Among that rather imperialistic list of requirements was a permanent military base at Guantanamo bay.
Of course if Castro had been a business friendly right-wing dictator, it could have been a smooth transition from Batista's rule. You wouldn't be hearing the US making big noises about the lack of democracy at all.
More and more people are downloading legitimate video from Itunes etc, yet some ISPs have ridiculous policies of throttling users after just 350mb. Virgin Media in the UK are one of the worst offenders in this area. They keep offering super speeds but what's the point of paying for it if they just throttle you when you use it?
It's true that western militaries are much better at media management now. Aside from preventing journalists from seeing bad things, they can also use the embedding to ensure that the journalist talks to the right people. For example, they can take a journalist to see particular individuals in an Afghan village who miraculously all think the US or UK military are great.
The idea of embedded journalism goes beyond the military though. The journalist Pepe Escobar recently coined the term "Embedded With Power", recognising that the media is embedded with governments in much the same way that journalists in Iraq and Afghanistan are embedded with the military.
I have no respect for your opinion (free as you are to spew it) or those who modded you "Informative."
I'm not quite sure what respect has to do with it. It's simply a case of looking up information. I apologize for not providing a link. I should have realised that doing a quick search is too much of an effort for most people. There are several reports, but here is the one from Associated Press.
The ultimate source in this case though is the US military itself which has backtracked on the claim. The people involved may have been depressed or even a little schizophrenic, but I should imagine that kind of thing is massively on the rise in Iraq. Also, the very fact that someone agrees to be a suicide bomber in the first place probably indicates some form of insanity (at least temporary) is in effect. The main point though is that it wasn't a case of strapping explosives to a donkey and slapping its backside. It's not even clear whether the women were working for Al Qaeda either, yet that was claimed immediately.
The Daily Mail (or Daily Heil as it became known due to it's support of Fascism in the 30s) report you provided was published the day after the attack on 3rd Feb and almost certainly made use of information provided by the military. The Associated Press report is from 20th Feb and its clearly more up to date. You should be careful with these shock headlines that suddenly appear. In this case the story was corrected by some big players like the AP and the New York times, but often the media never correct things despite new information coming along.
There are plenty of possibilities for terrorism with "robots". Model Aircraft can be easily adapted to drop a grenade or two. You could even pack a model plane with explosives and ball bearings and just fly it into your target. You can already buy cheap video cameras that transmit live pictures back from your models while they are in flight, so you could basically make a video-guided bomb on a fairly low budget. We will probably see this sort of thing before too long.
Of course for the Taliban, there really is only one recourse, give up.
That's unlikely since in a guerilla war like this they could go on for a long time. They come from the largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns (42% of the population). The United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan (or the Northern Alliance as the media prefers) is mostly made up of Tajiks (27% of the Population), Hazara and Uzbeks.
This whole thing is broken down on ethnic grounds and NATO have chosen to back one ethnic group over the others. The United Islamic Front (UIF) are really no better than the Taliban if you look at the human rights reports.
Either they will lose gradually, or they will cause massive casualties
The UN recently reported that NATO and US forces had killed more civilians than the Taliban, mostly in air-strikes. There is a policy of sacrificing civilians in order to keep military casualties down. It's safer to bomb something than to send troops in. 10 dead Afghan civilians is more politically acceptable than 10 dead US soldiers. In the unlikely even of the media kicking up a real fuss about the civilian deaths, you can always just dredge up the tired old excuse that it's the enemy's fault for "hiding among the civilians".
Off the top of my head I can think of many basic design patterns you could put to use in Learning Management Software (LMS). You would quickly identify many of them in a day or so, given the task of designing a system. In fact you could just go through the classic book "Design Patterns" and the applications of the patterns to LMS will probably just leap off the page. If you were to patent a few of these basic concepts in the specific area of LMS, it could totally prevent development of other competing systems or force them to use really weird and non-intuitive constructs.
The patenting of basic ideas when applied to specific problem domains massively threatens open source, small software houses and innovation in general. These patents have to be killed ASAP.
And even if you work around their "amazing innovative" multiple role idea, they can just patent some other obvious idea like "saving user preferences to disk in a learning management system".
I've seen "multiple role" examples in various database books going way back. It's not rocket science. This patent is just taking a basic concept and saying that it a narrower context than the general example, it's patentable. It's like saying you can't have a headteacher object inheriting all the features of the basic teacher object in a teaching application, because we have patented the idea.
What other general concepts shall we patent in narrower contexts? How about patenting the basic concept of parent child relationships in Cinema Seat allocation software. It could get quite ridiculous.
Slashdot Mirror
This DNA database is more of a threat to society than all the criminals put together.
As soon as the Oyster card was launched, I knew this sort of thing would happen, just like I knew the police DNA database would expand to the ridiculous degree it has despite government assurances to the contrary. This is why we must vigorously oppose every since little infringement of our privacy, because if we don't the problem will just get much worse.
How about a "Boycott Oyster" campaign?
With flash, surely you can just make use of parallelism to increase write speeds. e.g. Writing to 5 flash chips at once etc.
Smeg, I made it funny by mistake. That post was worthy of Ronald Reagan :)
He is against net neutrality. Both Clinton and Obama are for it, although I suppose they are quite capable of doing a 360 on that. I found this helpful Matrix of their policies.
M&Ms
Ah, so pretty much all 10,000 were "the enemy" and deserved to be ethnically cleansed from their own town in their own country? They were penned into a ghetto in Al-Majdal before being moved to Gaza. Al-Majdal is far from the only place it happened as well. Whether there is a war or not, ethnic cleansing is not acceptable.
Also, has anyone of you ever seen the damage katyushas make? Calling those things rockets or spending money to intercept them is ludicrous.
They are pretty pathetic in terms of damage. However, their military value is in their psychological impact, and to a certain extent, economic impact (with everyone running to shelters several times a day). Hamas' thinking is that they will be able to use the rockets in response to future IDF attacks as a form of deterrent. It's a dangerous game.
To pre-empt the comments that will follow, it's not relevant to point out Israeli action in Gaza and get into a debate over whether it's justified or not - this topic is about residents of Sderot taking completely non-violent, legal action, over repeated aggressive and violent attacks from a neighbouring region.
Plenty of Palestinians think that non-violent methods such as protests are the best way forward as well. The problem is they often get beaten up or shot either with real or plastic bullets. In the recent crisis the IDF shot dead an unarmed 13 year old boy at a protest. A while back I watched a video of the IDF spokeswoman trying to explain why they had fired tank shells at unarmed protesters. She said they were just firing near to them to "warn them". Tanks shells for crowd control?
It's good that the people of Sderot can use legal action. If they were Palestinians they would have far less options and that anger would find other more bloody ways of expressing itself. Indeed, if you go back to the 40s in Israel, you will find exactly that situation.
Yes, I should imagine they would. It would be tricky to explain to the US public why the US was opposing democracy though. I suppose the easiest thing to do would be to say that Al Qaeda are behind the revolution, so it has to be stopped.
35% of the value of the contracts go into "offset deals" which benefit the Saudi economy to the tune of billions. There are other tricks to.
...a generator of resources that the Cuban regime uses to oppress its peopleWell what about the billions in military aid given to Saudi Arabia, one of the most oppressive regimes in the world?. Cuba is Disney Land compared to Saudi Arabia. What about all that money going towards oppressing the Saudi people? Imagine some big democracy movement started in Saudi Arabia and tried to overthrow the dictatorship. The Saudi government would no doubt use all the weapons we have been selling them against their own people.
US policy toward Cuba is not about the dictatorship. The US has supported and created many dictatorships in that part of the world. The US policy towards Cuba is based on anger over losing control of the country. It's like Britain banning citizens from travelling to the US because the US had the cheek to declare independence.
The fact there is a US base in an 'enemy' country is a little clue as to how Cuba has been treated in the past. Don't expect the mainstream media to talk about it though. The US occupied Cuba after independence from Spain and refused to leave unless the Cubans agreed to a list of items (the Platt Amendment). Among that rather imperialistic list of requirements was a permanent military base at Guantanamo bay.
Of course if Castro had been a business friendly right-wing dictator, it could have been a smooth transition from Batista's rule. You wouldn't be hearing the US making big noises about the lack of democracy at all.
More and more people are downloading legitimate video from Itunes etc, yet some ISPs have ridiculous policies of throttling users after just 350mb. Virgin Media in the UK are one of the worst offenders in this area. They keep offering super speeds but what's the point of paying for it if they just throttle you when you use it?
Hmm, I seem to have put the entire joke in the subject line :)
It's true that western militaries are much better at media management now. Aside from preventing journalists from seeing bad things, they can also use the embedding to ensure that the journalist talks to the right people. For example, they can take a journalist to see particular individuals in an Afghan village who miraculously all think the US or UK military are great.
The idea of embedded journalism goes beyond the military though. The journalist Pepe Escobar recently coined the term "Embedded With Power", recognising that the media is embedded with governments in much the same way that journalists in Iraq and Afghanistan are embedded with the military.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cointelpro
Just one of an incredibly long list of reasons not to give governments one inch when it comes to our privacy, on-line or otherwise.
I'm not quite sure what respect has to do with it. It's simply a case of looking up information. I apologize for not providing a link. I should have realised that doing a quick search is too much of an effort for most people. There are several reports, but here is the one from Associated Press.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080220/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_bombers
The ultimate source in this case though is the US military itself which has backtracked on the claim. The people involved may have been depressed or even a little schizophrenic, but I should imagine that kind of thing is massively on the rise in Iraq. Also, the very fact that someone agrees to be a suicide bomber in the first place probably indicates some form of insanity (at least temporary) is in effect. The main point though is that it wasn't a case of strapping explosives to a donkey and slapping its backside. It's not even clear whether the women were working for Al Qaeda either, yet that was claimed immediately.
The Daily Mail (or Daily Heil as it became known due to it's support of Fascism in the 30s) report you provided was published the day after the attack on 3rd Feb and almost certainly made use of information provided by the military. The Associated Press report is from 20th Feb and its clearly more up to date. You should be careful with these shock headlines that suddenly appear. In this case the story was corrected by some big players like the AP and the New York times, but often the media never correct things despite new information coming along.
There are plenty of possibilities for terrorism with "robots". Model Aircraft can be easily adapted to drop a grenade or two. You could even pack a model plane with explosives and ball bearings and just fly it into your target. You can already buy cheap video cameras that transmit live pictures back from your models while they are in flight, so you could basically make a video-guided bomb on a fairly low budget. We will probably see this sort of thing before too long.
Well the "Mentally Handicapped Suicide Bombers" story was perpetuated by the US Military. It has since turned out to be false.
The EU should give the money to FOSS projects as an extra punishment :)
That's unlikely since in a guerilla war like this they could go on for a long time. They come from the largest ethnic group, the Pashtuns (42% of the population). The United Islamic Front for the Salvation of Afghanistan (or the Northern Alliance as the media prefers) is mostly made up of Tajiks (27% of the Population), Hazara and Uzbeks.
This whole thing is broken down on ethnic grounds and NATO have chosen to back one ethnic group over the others. The United Islamic Front (UIF) are really no better than the Taliban if you look at the human rights reports.
Either they will lose gradually, or they will cause massive casualties
The UN recently reported that NATO and US forces had killed more civilians than the Taliban, mostly in air-strikes. There is a policy of sacrificing civilians in order to keep military casualties down. It's safer to bomb something than to send troops in. 10 dead Afghan civilians is more politically acceptable than 10 dead US soldiers. In the unlikely even of the media kicking up a real fuss about the civilian deaths, you can always just dredge up the tired old excuse that it's the enemy's fault for "hiding among the civilians".
Off the top of my head I can think of many basic design patterns you could put to use in Learning Management Software (LMS). You would quickly identify many of them in a day or so, given the task of designing a system. In fact you could just go through the classic book "Design Patterns" and the applications of the patterns to LMS will probably just leap off the page. If you were to patent a few of these basic concepts in the specific area of LMS, it could totally prevent development of other competing systems or force them to use really weird and non-intuitive constructs.
The patenting of basic ideas when applied to specific problem domains massively threatens open source, small software houses and innovation in general. These patents have to be killed ASAP.
And even if you work around their "amazing innovative" multiple role idea, they can just patent some other obvious idea like "saving user preferences to disk in a learning management system".
I've seen "multiple role" examples in various database books going way back. It's not rocket science. This patent is just taking a basic concept and saying that it a narrower context than the general example, it's patentable. It's like saying you can't have a headteacher object inheriting all the features of the basic teacher object in a teaching application, because we have patented the idea.
What other general concepts shall we patent in narrower contexts? How about patenting the basic concept of parent child relationships in Cinema Seat allocation software. It could get quite ridiculous.
I wouldn't have had to hammer my socks until the were bendable again :)