The DPRK's hostile and irrational behavior, bordering on paranoid, far predates the "war on terror."
If I was a clever guy, I would make one of those jokes about the point going way over your head. Instead, I will do it in SAT form - North Korea is to the open-ended Korean War as the US is to the open-ended war on terror.
Anyone who thinks that there was not ample evidence of a strong possibility of Iraqi WMD is, quite frankly, delusional or utterly ignorant of the facts - there is no third possibility. (And, contrary to popular belief, a 'strong possibility' is about as good as it gets in the intel and inspection worlds.)
Cite some of those facts please. It would be compelling if they were from a source without a vested interest in supporting the invasion, since they are facts and not opinions there ought to be enough neutral sources reporting them out there.
The NK test results were recoded in South Korea. Your Pakistan test results were taken in Canada! Gee, I wonder if a seismic event might not last as long, or be as strong when measured from across the frickin' world as opposed to a couple of hundred miles away.
Well then, how about we take a look at the measurements recorded at a similar distant station, say Corvallis, Oregon? Other than a reduction in the magnitude, they don't look all that different to me.
If I had the time to poke around the USGS website, I would dig up the results as reported at Corvallis for the two pakistani tests in 1998 to really have like compared with like.
Actually, this is not so much about terrorists as residual cold war thinking. Most political scietists would treat this as either the fallout of superpower foriegn policy from the cold war, or indeed claim that the cold war is not in fact over.
Something that a lot of Americans do not know or understand is that the DPRK believes the Korean War is not over and they have a pretty valid reason to believe that. They signed an armistice which, despite the name, was not much more than a glorified cease-fire and a long way off from an actual peace treaty. The rest of the world moved on, but the DPRK did not. They have been engaged in a very real cold war for over 50 years now.
When you see all the irrational, self-destructive shit that the US is doing to itself in its "war on terror" the behaviour of the DPRK starts to make a little more sense. Instead of returning to a civilian-run peace-time government, they allowed their military to retain control of the country and the result has not been very pretty. They aren't alone in that, even South Korea was essentially a series of military dictarships up until the early 80s when the assasination of their 'president' in a failed coup attempt finally started the chain of events that lead to the current democratic government.
That's his point. The test in Pakistan had mostly settled down within 20 seconds. The event in the DPRK was still shaking after 5 minutes, that's more than 10x longer. I have no opinion on why they are different, if it indicates the DPRK are faking or if it is just a side-effect from the different geology or type of device involved.
To prevent NK from firing their nukes, we would have to have very thick fighter coverage over suspected nuclear sites and hope that if a silo opens up we could bomb it's missle in time.
Reality check. The DPRK does not have nuclear warheads. They are very much like India and Pakistan in that they've got a pile of fissionable material about the size of a large room. Underground. It is a lot of work to go from a room to a warhead. I'd be surprised if they could get there in less than 5 years.
North Korea is going to collapse in an internal military coup.
Well, a coup of some sort. Chances are, China will be a major backer of any such event too.
From the analyses I've been reading, it is likely that this nuke test was a military coup of sorts, as was the missile test a few months ago. The military is the largest power structure in the DPRK and shooting off their weapons as a show of strength against the perceived threats of just about every other country is a big goal of theirs, big enough to override the concerns of the rest of the government regarding sustainability (foreign aid has dried up to a trickle in the last few years, and their recent efforts at counterfeiting US dollars have not gone over so well either).
Despite the typical demonization of western media, 'dear leader' Kim certainly understands that these tests are not likely to improve relations with any other country and are not in the best interest of maintaining his dictatorship and his role has chief party animal. So in that sense at least, the fact that the tests have occurred suggests that his grip on control of the country is not iron-clad.
Maybe where you live, but over here that kind of radio does not exist, because the host would be in jail indeed.
If that is true, then that is terrible because in the US where we do have all kinds of that stuff on the public airwaves, we have no problem with people understanding that it is just rhetoric.
I think you greatly under estimate the threat of this guys actions. According to TFA he actually suggested the burning of his family. Again this would be illegal regardless of race issues.
I think you greatly over estimate the threat of this guy's actions. Ridicuosly overestimate them.
Do you really believe that someone would have read the messages from an essentially anonymous source with absolutely no social authority and actually been convinced to act on them? Much worse is posted on the net every single day and nobody cares because it has just as little meaning in the real world either.
Try makeing any untoward comments about your almighty presedent, and how to depose him (violently or otherwise) and then see where your constitution gets you....
And I am posting to slashdot from prison because of what my.sig here says.
Inciting crimes is illegal here (in the UK), as it is in the US.
A statement that might have some bearing on the case at hand if the guy had a chance in hell of actually inciting a crime. Shooting your mouth off on a website, especially one in which you have zero reputation or credibility, is not going to do much more than piss off a few people on that site.
That's incitement to murder, hardly a category of protected speech.
Only if there is a reasonable chance that it might actually incite someone to murder.
Considering that the writer was essentially a random net.kook posting his "incitement" on a website specificly for mourning the death of a member of that family, it is extremely unlikely that he would have convinced anyone to go out and kill the rest of the family because of it.
If just saying someone should be killed is incitement to murder, just about every talk-radio host would be in prison by now.
So, as long as the prez declares something is in the interest of national security, that absolves all government agencies involved from following the rule of law?
Failure to support that hardware device which the webpage claims is supported would probably be breach of contract.
Have you read any of the limited warranties that come with all proprietary software for the last 15 years? The most you could ever hope to squeeze out of that lawsuit would be a refund of the original purchase price.
With OSS, I'm just screwed if I'm unable to fix it and no one else is willing to.
Hey, you can get a refund for the purchase price, just like with proprietary software.
You could also spend that money on a contract developer to make it work, unlike most proprietary software (vxworks being one notable exception).
You have completely missed the point. The reason physical analogies don't work when compared to Free software is because software (just like any other pure information product) is non-rivalrous and non-excludable. The hood welded shut analogy has nothing to with those characteristics so simply parroting that no physical good can be an applicable analogy for an information good is rather pointless in this context.
Furthermore, when you claim that Free software licensing prevents authors from making any money from their work by direct means you are 180-degrees out of sync with reality. Free software licensing makes it almost mandatory for authors to make their money directly from their work, more directly than traditionally copyright model does.
With the traditional copyright model, somebody, often the author, must act like a venture capitalist, putting up the time, effort and resources to create the new software with the simple hope that he will recoup the investment with a profit. Free software makes that model infeasible (more proof that the GPL is a hack of copyright law) thus leaving the author to fall back on the contract model - he finds a buyer willing to purchase the results of his work, gets that buyer to sign a contract (and thus assume some, if not all, the risk of development) and then gets busy creating the final product. He gets paid directly on delivery and everyone is happy, customer got he wants and the developer got paid. No risking an investment on the whims of the market and not a very radical market model either since contractors have been working that way with physical goods for aeons, and information goods for at least 40 years, probably millenia if you consider how artists used to be compensated before the advent of the printing press and subsequent development of copyright.
More like thrown out there (and constantly repeated) and expecting people to adopt their "new and improved" business model, while they sit back and take no risks.
I hope no one here is arguing for both because that is hypocrisy - GPL is protected because of copyright law, without it, we probably would not have seen the Linksys router software released, among other things.
You don't understand the intent of the GPL. It is a hack of copyright, intended to turn copyright law against itself. The fact that it depends on copyright law is part of that hack. In RMS's ideal world, there would be no need for the GPL because the market would reject non-Free software as defective, just as the market today would reject a car with the engine compartment welded shut.
So, there is nothing hypocritical in supporting the GPL in the current environment and being for the abolition of copyright law as it stands today.
You posted that on Slashdot, where every third post is a complaint about the tyranny of copyright and payment for the use of intellectual property?
How naive.
You mean the very same slashdot where non-traditional methods of compensating creators are constantly under evalluation and up for debate? Where people recognize that it takes not only time and effort to create something new, but that nothing is ever completely new and that we all stand on the shoulders of the giants who have come before us?
The last time I watched tv commercials, so long ago that I can't really quite remember when, Hardees was doing a similar sort of bizarro advertising. I still remember one ad that must have gone over the line because the best part was edited out within a week of airing.
It had the "hardees guy" (I think it had a big head or something) going across the heartland bringing hardees food to the salt of the eart and describing just why hardees food was good for the sale of the earth - there was one line that went a little something like this, "And milkshakes with so much rich, creamy buttermilk that you could lube a tractor with one."
Confidence going into the election, on the part of the Dems that they would win, and a much-larger-than-usual (and rather shrill) emotion-laden investment on the part of many of Bush's opponents in seeing Kerry win.
Your whole diatribe fails to address the question. The polls in question are not partisan, "attitude" of either party is not statisticly significant.
fix an election and risk bringing down the whole company,
find employees willing to make the code changes and risk jail,
find people willing install the changes and risk jail,
be able to do it on a large enough scale to make a difference, and
be able to keep the entire conspiracy totally silent.
Hubris, especially amoung the privileged upper management class, accounts for a lot of corporate crime like Enron, Worldcomm, etc. It isn't a big leap to political crime.
It only takes one person to make a change like that and people have lots of buttons to press, bribes, threats, whatever it takes
The scale does not need to be large. If it weren't 2 in the morning, I would dig up a link to a study from a few years back that showed that minor changes in the totals in key districts would be enough to easily tip the balance in either direction. The gist of it was that just a couple of hundred votes in the evenly divided districts would be enough to swing many states one way or the other, the winner-takes-all approach of the electoral college makes the system especially susceptible to that sort of light-touch manipulation
?Honestly, it doesn't matter. He could have replaced that claim with "X-type of people don't respond to polls as often as Y-type" (which is almost always true) and his point remains.
Nice theory. But it begs the question.
If the polls were inaccurate this time, why this time and not all the other times before? Same polling organization, mostly the same polling methodologies, in most cases even the same people taking the polls. Yet in the past, the poll results were inline with the ballot results, this time they were not.
I'm more astounded that people aren't asking for not only an audit trail of every vote, but full source code of every piece of every voting machine, firmware, software, the whole shebang.
A very large majority of the people in this country do not understand how a light-bulb works, to them a voting machine might as well be a magic box. They don't even know enough to understand that such things are even available.
in other words the nominal price is dropping, but the nominal wage is dropping faster.. meaning real price is actually rising.. except of course for the wealthy
This is exactly the case -- the developing economies of the world - primarily China and India have brought an abundance of labor, nearly doubling the supply but they have brought very little new capital. So, the ratio of capital to labor has made capital effectively twice as scarce, thus driving up the value of capital while driving down the value of labor.
In other words, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poor.
Slashdot Mirror
The DPRK's hostile and irrational behavior, bordering on paranoid, far predates the "war on terror."
If I was a clever guy, I would make one of those jokes about the point going way over your head.
Instead, I will do it in SAT form - North Korea is to the open-ended Korean War as the US is to the open-ended war on terror.
Anyone who thinks that there was not ample evidence of a strong possibility of Iraqi WMD is, quite frankly, delusional or utterly ignorant of the facts - there is no third possibility. (And, contrary to popular belief, a 'strong possibility' is about as good as it gets in the intel and inspection worlds.)
Cite some of those facts please. It would be compelling if they were from a source without a vested interest in supporting the invasion, since they are facts and not opinions there ought to be enough neutral sources reporting them out there.
The NK test results were recoded in South Korea. Your Pakistan test results were taken in Canada! Gee, I wonder if a seismic event might not last as long, or be as strong when measured from across the frickin' world as opposed to a couple of hundred miles away.
Well then, how about we take a look at the measurements recorded at a similar distant station, say Corvallis, Oregon?
Other than a reduction in the magnitude, they don't look all that different to me.
If I had the time to poke around the USGS website, I would dig up the results as reported at Corvallis for the two pakistani tests in 1998 to really have like compared with like.
Actually, this is not so much about terrorists as residual cold war thinking. Most political scietists would treat this as either the fallout of superpower foriegn policy from the cold war, or indeed claim that the cold war is not in fact over.
Something that a lot of Americans do not know or understand is that the DPRK believes the Korean War is not over and they have a pretty valid reason to believe that. They signed an armistice which, despite the name, was not much more than a glorified cease-fire and a long way off from an actual peace treaty. The rest of the world moved on, but the DPRK did not. They have been engaged in a very real cold war for over 50 years now.
When you see all the irrational, self-destructive shit that the US is doing to itself in its "war on terror" the behaviour of the DPRK starts to make a little more sense. Instead of returning to a civilian-run peace-time government, they allowed their military to retain control of the country and the result has not been very pretty. They aren't alone in that, even South Korea was essentially a series of military dictarships up until the early 80s when the assasination of their 'president' in a failed coup attempt finally started the chain of events that lead to the current democratic government.
Did you look at the time scales?
Doh!
That's his point. The test in Pakistan had mostly settled down within 20 seconds. The event in the DPRK was still shaking after 5 minutes, that's more than 10x longer. I have no opinion on why they are different, if it indicates the DPRK are faking or if it is just a side-effect from the different geology or type of device involved.
To prevent NK from firing their nukes, we would have to have very thick fighter coverage over suspected nuclear sites and hope that if a silo opens up we could bomb it's missle in time.
Reality check. The DPRK does not have nuclear warheads. They are very much like India and Pakistan in that they've got a pile of fissionable material about the size of a large room. Underground. It is a lot of work to go from a room to a warhead. I'd be surprised if they could get there in less than 5 years.
North Korea is going to collapse in an internal military coup.
Well, a coup of some sort. Chances are, China will be a major backer of any such event too.
From the analyses I've been reading, it is likely that this nuke test was a military coup of sorts, as was the missile test a few months ago. The military is the largest power structure in the DPRK and shooting off their weapons as a show of strength against the perceived threats of just about every other country is a big goal of theirs, big enough to override the concerns of the rest of the government regarding sustainability (foreign aid has dried up to a trickle in the last few years, and their recent efforts at counterfeiting US dollars have not gone over so well either).
Despite the typical demonization of western media, 'dear leader' Kim certainly understands that these tests are not likely to improve relations with any other country and are not in the best interest of maintaining his dictatorship and his role has chief party animal. So in that sense at least, the fact that the tests have occurred suggests that his grip on control of the country is not iron-clad.
Maybe where you live, but over here that kind of radio does not exist, because the host would be in jail indeed.
If that is true, then that is terrible because in the US where we do have all kinds of that stuff on the public airwaves, we have no problem with people understanding that it is just rhetoric.
I think you greatly under estimate the threat of this guys actions. According to TFA he actually suggested the burning of his family. Again this would be illegal regardless of race issues.
I think you greatly over estimate the threat of this guy's actions. Ridicuosly overestimate them.
Do you really believe that someone would have read the messages from an essentially anonymous source with absolutely no social authority and actually been convinced to act on them? Much worse is posted on the net every single day and nobody cares because it has just as little meaning in the real world either.
Try makeing any untoward comments about your almighty presedent, and how to depose him (violently or otherwise) and then see where your constitution gets you....
.sig here says.
And I am posting to slashdot from prison because of what my
Inciting crimes is illegal here (in the UK), as it is in the US.
A statement that might have some bearing on the case at hand if the guy had a chance in hell of actually inciting a crime. Shooting your mouth off on a website, especially one in which you have zero reputation or credibility, is not going to do much more than piss off a few people on that site.
That's incitement to murder, hardly a category of protected speech.
Only if there is a reasonable chance that it might actually incite someone to murder.
Considering that the writer was essentially a random net.kook posting his "incitement" on a website specificly for mourning the death of a member of that family, it is extremely unlikely that he would have convinced anyone to go out and kill the rest of the family because of it.
If just saying someone should be killed is incitement to murder, just about every talk-radio host would be in prison by now.
So, as long as the prez declares something is in the interest of national security, that absolves all government agencies involved from following the rule of law?
Failure to support that hardware device which the webpage claims is supported would probably be breach of contract.
Have you read any of the limited warranties that come with all proprietary software for the last 15 years? The most you could ever hope to squeeze out of that lawsuit would be a refund of the original purchase price.
With OSS, I'm just screwed if I'm unable to fix it and no one else is willing to.
Hey, you can get a refund for the purchase price, just like with proprietary software.
You could also spend that money on a contract developer to make it work, unlike most proprietary software (vxworks being one notable exception).
You have completely missed the point. The reason physical analogies don't work when compared to Free software is because software (just like any other pure information product) is non-rivalrous and non-excludable. The hood welded shut analogy has nothing to with those characteristics so simply parroting that no physical good can be an applicable analogy for an information good is rather pointless in this context.
Furthermore, when you claim that Free software licensing prevents authors from making any money from their work by direct means you are 180-degrees out of sync with reality. Free software licensing makes it almost mandatory for authors to make their money directly from their work, more directly than traditionally copyright model does.
With the traditional copyright model, somebody, often the author, must act like a venture capitalist, putting up the time, effort and resources to create the new software with the simple hope that he will recoup the investment with a profit. Free software makes that model infeasible (more proof that the GPL is a hack of copyright law) thus leaving the author to fall back on the contract model - he finds a buyer willing to purchase the results of his work, gets that buyer to sign a contract (and thus assume some, if not all, the risk of development) and then gets busy creating the final product. He gets paid directly on delivery and everyone is happy, customer got he wants and the developer got paid. No risking an investment on the whims of the market and not a very radical market model either since contractors have been working that way with physical goods for aeons, and information goods for at least 40 years, probably millenia if you consider how artists used to be compensated before the advent of the printing press and subsequent development of copyright.
More like thrown out there (and constantly repeated) and expecting people to adopt their "new and improved" business model, while they sit back and take no risks.
Said the AC...
I hope no one here is arguing for both because that is hypocrisy - GPL is protected because of copyright law, without it, we probably would not have seen the Linksys router software released, among other things.
You don't understand the intent of the GPL. It is a hack of copyright, intended to turn copyright law against itself. The fact that it depends on copyright law is part of that hack. In RMS's ideal world, there would be no need for the GPL because the market would reject non-Free software as defective, just as the market today would reject a car with the engine compartment welded shut.
So, there is nothing hypocritical in supporting the GPL in the current environment and being for the abolition of copyright law as it stands today.
You posted that on Slashdot, where every third post is a complaint about the tyranny of copyright and payment for the use of intellectual property?
How naive.
You mean the very same slashdot where non-traditional methods of compensating creators are constantly under evalluation and up for debate? Where people recognize that it takes not only time and effort to create something new, but that nothing is ever completely new and that we all stand on the shoulders of the giants who have come before us?
Yes, how naive indeed.
The last time I watched tv commercials, so long ago that I can't really quite remember when, Hardees was doing a similar sort of bizarro advertising. I still remember one ad that must have gone over the line because the best part was edited out within a week of airing.
It had the "hardees guy" (I think it had a big head or something) going across the heartland bringing hardees food to the salt of the eart and describing just why hardees food was good for the sale of the earth - there was one line that went a little something like this, "And milkshakes with so much rich, creamy buttermilk that you could lube a tractor with one."
Yuhhhhmmmeeee!
Confidence going into the election, on the part of the Dems that they would win, and a much-larger-than-usual (and rather shrill) emotion-laden investment on the part of many of Bush's opponents in seeing Kerry win.
Your whole diatribe fails to address the question. The polls in question are not partisan, "attitude" of either party is not statisticly significant.
?Honestly, it doesn't matter. He could have replaced that claim with "X-type of people don't respond to polls as often as Y-type" (which is almost always true) and his point remains.
Nice theory. But it begs the question.
If the polls were inaccurate this time, why this time and not all the other times before? Same polling organization, mostly the same polling methodologies, in most cases even the same people taking the polls. Yet in the past, the poll results were inline with the ballot results, this time they were not.
What changed?
I'm more astounded that people aren't asking for not only an audit trail of every vote, but full source code of every piece of every voting machine, firmware, software, the whole shebang.
A very large majority of the people in this country do not understand how a light-bulb works, to them a voting machine might as well be a magic box. They don't even know enough to understand that such things are even available.
in other words the nominal price is dropping, but the nominal wage is dropping faster.. meaning real price is actually rising.. except of course for the wealthy
This is exactly the case -- the developing economies of the world - primarily China and India have brought an abundance of labor, nearly doubling the supply but they have brought very little new capital. So, the ratio of capital to labor has made capital effectively twice as scarce, thus driving up the value of capital while driving down the value of labor.
In other words, the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poor.
And this isn't just half-baked bullshit slashdot-rhetoric. You can find one the world's strongest advocates for globalisation saying the exact same thing.
So glad there's finally some real competition for Comcast. I guess it takes one monopoly to take down another monopoly.
It's called an oligopoly and in the long run, it is not much different from a monopoly market.
A high-temperature Bose-Einstein condensate? It can't be.
You know how the saying goes - "No highs, no lows, gotta be Bose!"
Oh wait, that's a different kind of Bose.
Nevermind.