If the song is good the artists should go on tour and make their own money as they have talent and they don't need your pay-offs.
What happens if the artist is a really supertalented composer, but not all that glamorous on stage? Are they fucked?
What some of you don't seem to understand is that copyright was invented to protect the little guy, the creative people, not to protect big businesses. Sure, big businesses are abusing it now, and this attempt to extend copyright is wrong -- copyright is short-term for good reasons -- but the basic idea of copyright is a good thing.
Picasso is painting a gigantic brown-eye all over the inside of his grave
Picasso was a cynical schlockmeister. He'd be laughing.
The number of birds killed each year by plate glass windows, and various other human structures is huge -- many hundreds of millions in all. It doesn't seem likely that even if the US moved over massively to wind power, that wind turbines would make much difference in that area.
http://www.awea.org/faq/sagrillo/swbirds.html/
So, its little more than an interface to Google. That's okay, I guess. It's quite a neat interface in its way, with the buttons for different categories of search.
But the VZ90 represents a change of direction for Clie. It is not like a Palm. It's mainly an entertainment device. If Sony come back into the market with Clie-branded entertainment devices, they'll not be competing directly with Palm, so the situation will be different from the way it was before they withdrew.
I read a while ago about how OLEDs in the future could be part of an energy revolution, causing electricty consumption for lighting to be reduced to a tenth of present levels. The article I read suggested that the day was about ten years away. Maybe it is a lot closer than that, now.
The new Clie that they've just introduced is more of an entertainment device than a traditional PDA. Since the Clie brand is well-known and respected, it would make very good sense for them to start selling entertainment devices under the Clie brand in the US, I guess.
The division was only meant to be temporary, and the US wanted a united Korea as well
Very probably, it was meant to be temporary, but there's no evidence of any proper planning for ensuring that the split turned out to be temporary in reality. I'm not accusing the US of splitting Korea or provoking the Korean War maliciously, but of doing so out of carelessness, thoughtlessness, and arrogance.
the US military had completely pulled out by 1949, except for 500 advisors...the US military control ended in 1948 after the elections
It is not a meaningful force in terms of defending the country, certainly. But that is what one would expect, given that the US said publicly that it would not defend the country. On the other hand, it is a very meaningful force in terms of maintaining control over the Korean government, and ensuring that "their man" stayed at the nominal helm (or perhaps you think it is usual for governments of sovereign nations to allow an army of military "advisers" from a foreign power to shadow every senior official). South Korea was independent in name only, as Iraq is today, or even as it was before June's so-called handover of sovereignty. The elections were not even remotely free and fair. The US military officials sidelined all the local nationalists, and rejected and suppressed candidate after candidate, only to promote Rhee Syngman, the exile from America, whose strongly anticommunist statements were to their taste.
By so doing, they created the conditions that made the invasion from the North, once Acheson had made his foolish statment, inevitable. If they had let Korea's indigenous civilian-dominated, left-leaning nationalist movement take power, as they certainly would have done in the absence of US interference, there need have been no split (Russia would probably have found them acceptable enough), no vacancy at the helm in the North for the former Moscow resident and committed Stalinist Kim Il Sung, no war, and no creation of a fortress nation in North Korea. All thoese things might still have happened, of course, but they'd have been rather less likely.
This is why India-Pakistan may very well end up being the first nuclear war on the planet.
There is a profound difference between the Indo-Pak conflict and that between North and South Korea, which is that India and Pakistan hate each other, whereas North and South Korea don't. In fact, North and South Korea love each other, and their disagreement, though currently unresolvable, is restricted in its scope: it is solely about which system of government should prevail. It's a deep disagreement, true, but if you compare the measure of violent conflict between the Koreas since 1953 with that between India and Pakistan since 1947, the difference is vast. Yet, India and Pakistan are in dispute over a territory that is economically unimportant, and a small fraction of each country. The Koreas, by contrast, are in dispute over the whole of each other's territory, and the victory of one regime would entail the annihilation of the other.
China does not want even the possibility of a nuclear war on their doorstep.
Nobody does.
that whole region has long memories...
South Korea and Japan are becoming more friendly of late, but China will for some time to come continue to make the occasional anti-Japanese statement, despite increasingly close trading ties. No-one (except an aggressor) has anything to fear from Japan in terms of security if it gets nukes, any more than they have anything to fear from its currently very substantial conventional capability.
Yes, Bin Laden and Pol Pot and Hitler (don't know how Stalin, the evilest of the lot, got missed off the list) were evil. But my point is that if you think someone else is evil, you may or may not be right, but it doesn't mean you are not evil.
Only 5000 bodies so far?
That's not bad for a military dictator who's been in power for thirty years over a country that contains deep internal divisions and has been in two major wars.
In the Leaque of Evilness, Saddam Hussein belongs in the low echelons. His madness and badness have been greatly exaggerated by people who arguably are more evil than he (though, obviously, like Bin Laden and Hitler, they think they're good, and everyone else is evil), in the attempt to justify an unnecessary war.
North and South Korea were created by the United Nations, not any "occupying power".
Nope. It is tiresome hearing people say "The UN did this", "The UN did that". The UN makes no important decisions in international affairs on its own. It only does what its masters tell it. Those masters are the UNSC. Not all members of the UNSC are active in making decisions about every affair. For instance, China rarely gets involved in anything outside its own region. Bearing this in mind, and remembering the relative balance of power in 1945, you should be able to appreciate that almost any so-called "UN" decision made that was not specifically about European affairs would be made by the US and the USSR, and occasionally China and Britain, or possibly by one of them on its own, with all the other countries merely nodding their assent. Out of all those countries, the USA was the most powerful and the most interested in affairs outside its own borders; therefore the most likely to make unilateral decisions in the name of the UN.
In the particular case of the division of Korea, it was the US that made the decision to split the country and the US that did the work. The USSR was happy to take a slice of Korea if it was given one, but the original "UN" intention, if you want to call it that (agreed by Chiang-Kai Shek, Winston Churchill and FDR), was to make Korea independent. The US went back on that, and actual plans for the split were drawn up by US officials. The names of the officials are Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel. You can look these names up yourself.
there weren't any US troops in SK at the time
There were US troops in SK at the time. In fact, South Korea was being run by the US military in a similar fashion to the way Iraq was before the recent so-called hand-over of sovereignty, with a hand-picked former exile (Rhee Syngman) running the "government", and US soldiers completely in charge of everything. There just weren't enough soldiers there to defend against a full-scale attack from the North.
and the US had no defense treaties with SK.
It was worse than that. The US had made a public statement saying, in effect, that it didn't care about Korea, and would not defend it. The person who made that statement was Dean Acheson. (Again, you can check my facts if you don't believe me. Look up the "Press Club" speech.) That ill-judged statement was the signal for Kim Jong Il to attack.
Basically, there are an amazing lot of parallels between the way the US screwed up in Korea and the way it is screwing up today in Iraq. The US very seriously betrayed the Korean people, and you can be sure that Koreans (North and South) will never completely trust the US. And you know what's worse? 1945-50 wasn't the first time the US betrayed Korea. When Japan invaded Korea in 1905, the US under Theodor Roosevelt decided to "hand over" Korea to Japan.
So, you may think North Korea is paranoid when it regards the US with deep mistrust, but I think it is eminently reasonable to do so.
If NK starts building nukes, there is going to be enormous pressure on SK and Japan to follow suit.
That's no problem for either SK or Japan. They have the technology already. Neither of them would ever preemptively use the weapons on NK or anyone else, so there's no threat to the peace there.
Secondly, an NK with nuclear weapons will inevitable start making demands of SK, demands that can't be met.
I'm not sure how nukes make any difference from the status quo ante with regard to South Korea, since both countries have the means to inflict considerable harm on each other already. But what demands would NK be making? If it's just the matter of a few billions of dollars (or even tens of billions of dollars), SK will be happy to oblige.
(We still don't know if NK actually has nukes, of course.)
Doubtless, the USSR must share some of the blame, and it is possible to quibble about how much, but what the USSR and the USA agreed to was a split over the surrender of Japanese troops. This solidified into a split of the rule of the country by default when USA officials drew up the plans without any forward planning for how to make the country independent. That oversight was a due to combination of ignorance and arrogant disregard for the -- to those who drew up the plans -- entirely inconsequential people of an entirely inconsequential peninsula. The ignorance was to a degree understandable, but the contempt was criminal.
Having established this arbitrary split, so that nationalists with left-wing sympathies naturally wound up governing in the North, and those without such leanings wound up in charge of the South, it was only a matter of time before someone was going to try to reunite the country by force, unless priority was given to creating dialogue and enabling a political process. Neither the US nor the USSR took such steps, though, and the US -- again showing thoughtless contempt for the Koreans -- made a public proclamation to the effect that South Korea was not within its defence perimeter.
That was encouraging to the North, which then attacked, and was overwhelmingly successful, driving the Americans and their puppet government all the way down to Pusan. It would have made a lot of sense at that stage for the USA to throw up its hands and say, okay you got me, I'm leaving. But it didn't. And that's when the carnage started.
The carpet-bombing of North Korea was wrong, and utterly disproportionate, the napalming of its forests was also wrong, and many other atrocities were committed by the US in that war, including lots of uncontrolled deliberate targetting of civilians. And please don't hide behind the UN. This was overwhelmingly a US war, and the allies were the usual suspects -- i.e., Britain, Canada (in those days, Canada was a usual suspect), Australia, plus a few US clients who sent small numbers of troops. Most of the Korean troops on the US side had to be shanghaied.
> Because the DPRK wasn't installed by the Soviets, right?
Did I say it wasn't? I said the DPRK government perceived the Southern government to be the puppet of an occupying power. I did not say that the DPRK could not with equal legitimacy be seen in the same way.
> Kinda "forgot" to mention 90,000 combattants stepping across the border and seizing most of the peninsula up to the Sea of Japan, before the counterattack.
And what would be wrong with that? It's their country, after all.
Actually it was the Allies.
Initially, it was the USA. It was the USA that divided up Korea, and handed one half to the Russians. The USA did this not only without consulting the Koreans, but did it even before they could be bothered to tell the Koreans that Japan had surrendered. The ultimate cause of whole Korean war was the USA's original, arrogant and stupid decision to divide Korea without consulting the Korean people. Why could the USA not have granted Korea its independence? No good reason whatsoever! No allies of the USA had anything to do with the original division of Korea -- a country that had proudly maintained its nationhood for more than 2000 years, at various times resisting attempts to by China and Japan assimilate it. Anyone could have told the fools at the ministry of the exterior that dividing such a country would inevitably lead to disaster.
Actually, NK regularily attacks the south. Usually its squad sized attacks...
That's true. They're just symbolic reminders that the war is still on.
> So you're saying that Nukes are OK to use, but Infantry isn't?
No, I'm saying its wrong to bomb a country to hell, regardless of whether you use nukes or TNT, of firecrackers.
> Ummm, to have a nuclear stalemate, both sides have to have nukes. So your saying that the ROK and Japan should invest in nukes too, because you can't have enough nukes when it comes to being safe?
The stalemate is, in effect, between the North on the one hand, and the South, Japan and the USA together on the other. That said, the South and Japan have mature nuclear power industries. They could have their own weapons in a mere moment, if they felt the need for them.
> It wasn't a good idea with MAD
MAD was a very good idea, even though it came about by accident. It deterred both the USA and the USSR from provoking each other too aggressively, and encouraged diplomacy.
Google doesn't think. It merely repeats the silly assertions of the superstitious.
Isaiah (7) said, addressing king Ahaz, that a young woman would give birth to a boy called Emmanuel, who would eat butter and honey. He went on to say that before the child was old enough to know good from evil, the kingdoms of Syria and Ephraim would be destroyed, and that all this would happen within "threescore and five years".
Christians falsely and absurdly claim that this is a prophecy about Jesus, but it is quite plain that Isaiah was not talking about Jesus, who was not to be born for many hundred years, yet, and whose name in any case was not Emmanuel.
Interestingly, in verse 20, Isaiah prophesies that God will shave with a razor!
Chapter 53 isn't talking about the future at all, but about the Jerusalem of Isaiah's own time. Somehow, it has come to be interpreted as prophecy. No-one reading the text without preconceptions could come to such a conclusion.
The problem that Pol Pot, Hitler and bin Laden had/have, is that they too subscribed to the opinion that the world consists of black and white, good and evil. If you're not with them, you're against them. In each case, the people they killed were, in their opinion, agents of evil.
As for Saddam Hussein, don't believe the lies. Not only did the WMDs not exist, the mass graves didn't, either:
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956, 1263901,00.html
Yes, the rest of the world is anti-Bush. The rest of the world is right to be anti-Bush. Bush should consider the possibility that there is something about him that is objectionable, why so many different people in so many parts of the world normally friendly to the USA would disapprove of him so strongly.
The rest of the world is not pro-terrorism, though.
So, clearly Bush was wrong about that. It is more than possible to be anti-Bush without being pro-terrorism. It is necessary.
Terrorism is guerrilla warfare by another name. If we like a guerrilla, we call him a "freedom fighter", a "hero of the underground resistance", or something like that. If we don't like him, we call him a "terrorist".
People engage in guerrilla warfare when their enemy has an army, but they don't. So, under the modern definition of "terrorism", you are never a terrorist if you have an army, no matter how irresponsibly or unethically your army or your politicians behave.
Someone who engages in guerrilla warfare may have a legitimate grievance, or may not. He may have good reason to believe that his tactics will succeed in bringing about his political objectives, or he may not. His actions may be proportionate, or they may not. It is the answers to these questions that decide whether a terrorist is acting morally, not whether he wears a uniform or kills civilians or not.
...UN is completely ineffective...They pretend not to like the US...
Who is the UN? Who are these people pretending not to like the US? Have you ever heard a UN official, such as Kofi Annan, pretending not to like the US? Have you forgotten that the US is the most powerful nation on the UNSC?
> "The U.S. official said the cloud could be the result of a forest fire."
It's known as "being economical with the truth". Of course it is true that a forest fire might conceivably cause a large mushroom cloud. Of course, it is also true that a forest fire can be caused by a nuclear blast. That's where the economy comes in.
Yes, North Korea has attacked someone. Once, more than fifty years ago, it attacked what it considered to be a renegade government (which had just declared itself independent from the North) installed by an occupying power.
The occupying power responded by bombing North Korea into the stone ages, and by committing various other atrocities.
The occupying power was the USA.
What the US did in Korea makes what it did in Japan look like a tea party.
The war may be called "the forgotten war" (because the US of course finds it convenient to forget an extremely shameful episode), but North Koreans have not forgotten what the US did in their country.
Since 1953, North and South have been in stalemate. Neither wants to launch an attack on the other, but neither trusts the other. In particular, the North still thinks of the South as a puppet of the US and, quite rightly, does not trust the US one inch.
It is good that the North has nukes, since it means the stalemate will continue. Which means peace.
Slashdot Mirror
What some of you don't seem to understand is that copyright was invented to protect the little guy, the creative people, not to protect big businesses. Sure, big businesses are abusing it now, and this attempt to extend copyright is wrong -- copyright is short-term for good reasons -- but the basic idea of copyright is a good thing.
Picasso was a cynical schlockmeister. He'd be laughing.The number of birds killed each year by plate glass windows, and various other human structures is huge -- many hundreds of millions in all. It doesn't seem likely that even if the US moved over massively to wind power, that wind turbines would make much difference in that area. http://www.awea.org/faq/sagrillo/swbirds.html/
So, its little more than an interface to Google. That's okay, I guess. It's quite a neat interface in its way, with the buttons for different categories of search.
But the VZ90 represents a change of direction for Clie. It is not like a Palm. It's mainly an entertainment device. If Sony come back into the market with Clie-branded entertainment devices, they'll not be competing directly with Palm, so the situation will be different from the way it was before they withdrew.
I read a while ago about how OLEDs in the future could be part of an energy revolution, causing electricty consumption for lighting to be reduced to a tenth of present levels. The article I read suggested that the day was about ten years away. Maybe it is a lot closer than that, now.
The new Clie that they've just introduced is more of an entertainment device than a traditional PDA. Since the Clie brand is well-known and respected, it would make very good sense for them to start selling entertainment devices under the Clie brand in the US, I guess.
Sorry, should have made a proper link. (Pictures of the new Clie that uses this display)
http://www.sony.jp/products/Consumer/PEG/PEG-VZ90/ feat2.html
I wouldn't mind using it like that. Anyone care to sponsor me for a trip to Japan?
By so doing, they created the conditions that made the invasion from the North, once Acheson had made his foolish statment, inevitable. If they had let Korea's indigenous civilian-dominated, left-leaning nationalist movement take power, as they certainly would have done in the absence of US interference, there need have been no split (Russia would probably have found them acceptable enough), no vacancy at the helm in the North for the former Moscow resident and committed Stalinist Kim Il Sung, no war, and no creation of a fortress nation in North Korea. All thoese things might still have happened, of course, but they'd have been rather less likely.
There is a profound difference between the Indo-Pak conflict and that between North and South Korea, which is that India and Pakistan hate each other, whereas North and South Korea don't. In fact, North and South Korea love each other, and their disagreement, though currently unresolvable, is restricted in its scope: it is solely about which system of government should prevail. It's a deep disagreement, true, but if you compare the measure of violent conflict between the Koreas since 1953 with that between India and Pakistan since 1947, the difference is vast. Yet, India and Pakistan are in dispute over a territory that is economically unimportant, and a small fraction of each country. The Koreas, by contrast, are in dispute over the whole of each other's territory, and the victory of one regime would entail the annihilation of the other. Nobody does. South Korea and Japan are becoming more friendly of late, but China will for some time to come continue to make the occasional anti-Japanese statement, despite increasingly close trading ties. No-one (except an aggressor) has anything to fear from Japan in terms of security if it gets nukes, any more than they have anything to fear from its currently very substantial conventional capability.In the Leaque of Evilness, Saddam Hussein belongs in the low echelons. His madness and badness have been greatly exaggerated by people who arguably are more evil than he (though, obviously, like Bin Laden and Hitler, they think they're good, and everyone else is evil), in the attempt to justify an unnecessary war.
In the particular case of the division of Korea, it was the US that made the decision to split the country and the US that did the work. The USSR was happy to take a slice of Korea if it was given one, but the original "UN" intention, if you want to call it that (agreed by Chiang-Kai Shek, Winston Churchill and FDR), was to make Korea independent. The US went back on that, and actual plans for the split were drawn up by US officials. The names of the officials are Dean Rusk and Charles Bonesteel. You can look these names up yourself.
There were US troops in SK at the time. In fact, South Korea was being run by the US military in a similar fashion to the way Iraq was before the recent so-called hand-over of sovereignty, with a hand-picked former exile (Rhee Syngman) running the "government", and US soldiers completely in charge of everything. There just weren't enough soldiers there to defend against a full-scale attack from the North. It was worse than that. The US had made a public statement saying, in effect, that it didn't care about Korea, and would not defend it. The person who made that statement was Dean Acheson. (Again, you can check my facts if you don't believe me. Look up the "Press Club" speech.) That ill-judged statement was the signal for Kim Jong Il to attack.Basically, there are an amazing lot of parallels between the way the US screwed up in Korea and the way it is screwing up today in Iraq. The US very seriously betrayed the Korean people, and you can be sure that Koreans (North and South) will never completely trust the US. And you know what's worse? 1945-50 wasn't the first time the US betrayed Korea. When Japan invaded Korea in 1905, the US under Theodor Roosevelt decided to "hand over" Korea to Japan.
So, you may think North Korea is paranoid when it regards the US with deep mistrust, but I think it is eminently reasonable to do so.
That's no problem for either SK or Japan. They have the technology already. Neither of them would ever preemptively use the weapons on NK or anyone else, so there's no threat to the peace there. I'm not sure how nukes make any difference from the status quo ante with regard to South Korea, since both countries have the means to inflict considerable harm on each other already. But what demands would NK be making? If it's just the matter of a few billions of dollars (or even tens of billions of dollars), SK will be happy to oblige.(We still don't know if NK actually has nukes, of course.)
Having established this arbitrary split, so that nationalists with left-wing sympathies naturally wound up governing in the North, and those without such leanings wound up in charge of the South, it was only a matter of time before someone was going to try to reunite the country by force, unless priority was given to creating dialogue and enabling a political process. Neither the US nor the USSR took such steps, though, and the US -- again showing thoughtless contempt for the Koreans -- made a public proclamation to the effect that South Korea was not within its defence perimeter.
That was encouraging to the North, which then attacked, and was overwhelmingly successful, driving the Americans and their puppet government all the way down to Pusan. It would have made a lot of sense at that stage for the USA to throw up its hands and say, okay you got me, I'm leaving. But it didn't. And that's when the carnage started.
The carpet-bombing of North Korea was wrong, and utterly disproportionate, the napalming of its forests was also wrong, and many other atrocities were committed by the US in that war, including lots of uncontrolled deliberate targetting of civilians. And please don't hide behind the UN. This was overwhelmingly a US war, and the allies were the usual suspects -- i.e., Britain, Canada (in those days, Canada was a usual suspect), Australia, plus a few US clients who sent small numbers of troops. Most of the Korean troops on the US side had to be shanghaied.
I know he's a bit odd. That doesn't mean the regime is mad enough to commit suicide. That's where the exaggeration comes in.
Did I say it wasn't? I said the DPRK government perceived the Southern government to be the puppet of an occupying power. I did not say that the DPRK could not with equal legitimacy be seen in the same way.
> Kinda "forgot" to mention 90,000 combattants stepping across the border and seizing most of the peninsula up to the Sea of Japan, before the counterattack.
And what would be wrong with that? It's their country, after all.
Actually it was the Allies.
Initially, it was the USA. It was the USA that divided up Korea, and handed one half to the Russians. The USA did this not only without consulting the Koreans, but did it even before they could be bothered to tell the Koreans that Japan had surrendered. The ultimate cause of whole Korean war was the USA's original, arrogant and stupid decision to divide Korea without consulting the Korean people. Why could the USA not have granted Korea its independence? No good reason whatsoever! No allies of the USA had anything to do with the original division of Korea -- a country that had proudly maintained its nationhood for more than 2000 years, at various times resisting attempts to by China and Japan assimilate it. Anyone could have told the fools at the ministry of the exterior that dividing such a country would inevitably lead to disaster.
Actually, NK regularily attacks the south. Usually its squad sized attacks...
That's true. They're just symbolic reminders that the war is still on.
> So you're saying that Nukes are OK to use, but Infantry isn't?
No, I'm saying its wrong to bomb a country to hell, regardless of whether you use nukes or TNT, of firecrackers.
> Ummm, to have a nuclear stalemate, both sides have to have nukes. So your saying that the ROK and Japan should invest in nukes too, because you can't have enough nukes when it comes to being safe?
The stalemate is, in effect, between the North on the one hand, and the South, Japan and the USA together on the other. That said, the South and Japan have mature nuclear power industries. They could have their own weapons in a mere moment, if they felt the need for them.
> It wasn't a good idea with MAD
MAD was a very good idea, even though it came about by accident. It deterred both the USA and the USSR from provoking each other too aggressively, and encouraged diplomacy.
It is usual, and easy, to characterize the leaders of enemy nations as mad. Such characterizations are usually exaggerated, though.
Isaiah (7) said, addressing king Ahaz, that a young woman would give birth to a boy called Emmanuel, who would eat butter and honey. He went on to say that before the child was old enough to know good from evil, the kingdoms of Syria and Ephraim would be destroyed, and that all this would happen within "threescore and five years". Christians falsely and absurdly claim that this is a prophecy about Jesus, but it is quite plain that Isaiah was not talking about Jesus, who was not to be born for many hundred years, yet, and whose name in any case was not Emmanuel.
Interestingly, in verse 20, Isaiah prophesies that God will shave with a razor!
Chapter 53 isn't talking about the future at all, but about the Jerusalem of Isaiah's own time. Somehow, it has come to be interpreted as prophecy. No-one reading the text without preconceptions could come to such a conclusion.
Isaiah predicted no such thing.
The problem that Pol Pot, Hitler and bin Laden had/have, is that they too subscribed to the opinion that the world consists of black and white, good and evil. If you're not with them, you're against them. In each case, the people they killed were, in their opinion, agents of evil. As for Saddam Hussein, don't believe the lies. Not only did the WMDs not exist, the mass graves didn't, either: http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12956, 1263901,00.html
The rest of the world is not pro-terrorism, though.
So, clearly Bush was wrong about that. It is more than possible to be anti-Bush without being pro-terrorism. It is necessary.
People engage in guerrilla warfare when their enemy has an army, but they don't. So, under the modern definition of "terrorism", you are never a terrorist if you have an army, no matter how irresponsibly or unethically your army or your politicians behave.
Someone who engages in guerrilla warfare may have a legitimate grievance, or may not. He may have good reason to believe that his tactics will succeed in bringing about his political objectives, or he may not. His actions may be proportionate, or they may not. It is the answers to these questions that decide whether a terrorist is acting morally, not whether he wears a uniform or kills civilians or not.
Who is the UN? Who are these people pretending not to like the US? Have you ever heard a UN official, such as Kofi Annan, pretending not to like the US? Have you forgotten that the US is the most powerful nation on the UNSC?
> "The U.S. official said the cloud could be the result of a forest fire." It's known as "being economical with the truth". Of course it is true that a forest fire might conceivably cause a large mushroom cloud. Of course, it is also true that a forest fire can be caused by a nuclear blast. That's where the economy comes in.
Yes, North Korea has attacked someone. Once, more than fifty years ago, it attacked what it considered to be a renegade government (which had just declared itself independent from the North) installed by an occupying power. The occupying power responded by bombing North Korea into the stone ages, and by committing various other atrocities. The occupying power was the USA. What the US did in Korea makes what it did in Japan look like a tea party. The war may be called "the forgotten war" (because the US of course finds it convenient to forget an extremely shameful episode), but North Koreans have not forgotten what the US did in their country. Since 1953, North and South have been in stalemate. Neither wants to launch an attack on the other, but neither trusts the other. In particular, the North still thinks of the South as a puppet of the US and, quite rightly, does not trust the US one inch. It is good that the North has nukes, since it means the stalemate will continue. Which means peace.