This page says 80% would opt to return, which means they would be in a majority in a very short time. Arab politicians have called this the 'winning card' that will cause Israel to 'cease to exist'.
http://www.mideastweb.org/refugees1.htm The refugees have a sincere tie to their land and homes. Many have kept the keys to their houses, houses that no longer exist. Many certainly were evicted unjustly, or left in innocence to protect their families from war and from subjection to unknown alien rule. Most refugees who are still alive were quite young in 1948. Many others are descendants who never saw Palestine. Over 80% of the refugees polled in Lebanon, as well as those polled recently by IPCRI and other organizations in the West Bank and Gaza, insisted that they would want to return to Israel, even though the place where they lived no longer exists, and their fields may be home to a housing project or an office building.
Returning the refugees to Israel would put an end to Jewish self-determination, as noted by Palestinian as well as Israeli sources. The large numbers of refugees, together with the much higher birth-rate of the Arab population as opposed to Jews, would soon create an Arab majority. In a seminar held at Al-Najah University under the auspices of the Palestine National Authority, Sakher Habash noted:... our principles in "Fateh" has always been to liberate all our Palestinian national land and to set up a democratic state on it. This clearly demonstrates that there has been no room for the 242, 194 and 181 resolutions in our literature. However, we to our surprise, have to begin rethinking them. In our literature, all resolutions which deny the Palestinians their right in their homeland are false and completely rejected. This is a principle each of us abides by until we realize our return, I personally hold that we have to stick to the principle, and at the same time we must attempt to arrive at periodic solutions as a step toward attaining the principle viz. Tactic flexibility versus principle adamancy. This, I believe, is the closest approach to the refugees issue. Fateh stance which should be adhered to in the final solution negotiations calls for abiding by the international resolutions.
To us, the refugees issue is the winning card which means the end of the Israeli state.
Not only the Fatah, but Arab leaders and media have unabashedly admitted that the refugee issue and right of return are being used as a means to destroy Israel. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser told an interviewer on September 1, 1961: "If the refugees return to Israel, Israel will cease to exist."
A large chunk of refugees are denied citizenship by their host Arab governments. There's a fair chance that these governments would kick them out to Israel if the right of return were allowed. And you don't need a majority to take over the government. Almost all Arab countries are actually run by an minority, anti democratic party. The Mid East web page actually points out that the numbers of refugees have grown much faster than the Palestinian birth rate, partly by marriage to citizens of the host countries who become 'refugees' too. And so do their kids. Arab state media will try to get as many of their people as possible into Israel because that will destroy it.
Basically the Arab leaders and UNRWA have colluded to turn Arab 'refugees', most of whom have never lived in I
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Camp_David_Summit#Refugees_and_the_right_of_return
Due to the first Arab-Israeli war, a significant number of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes inside what is now Israel. These refugees, numbering over four million today (but 700,000 at the time), comprise about half the Palestinian people. Since that time, the Palestinians have called for full implementation of the right of return, meaning that each refugee would be granted the option of returning to his or her home, with property restored, or accept compensation instead.
Israelis asserted that allowing a right of return to Israel proper, rather than to the newly created Palestinian state, would mean an influx of Palestinians that would fundamentally alter the demographics of Israel, jeopardizing Israel's Jewish character and its existence as a whole. The Israelis also argued that a larger number of Jewish refugees had been pushed out of Arab countries since 1948, and were not compensated, and that most of them ended up in Israel. Four million Palestinians arrving in Israel (pop 7million) form a majority and would be able to vote for (for example) a Hamas government. There's no way any Israeli government, no matter how doveish, will ever accept it.
You'd be better of using the Independence Day model of interstellar economics, where a permanently spaceborne species arrives at a technologically less advanced planet, strips it bare and then moves on.
Indeed I've always thought that that's the way the Federation really worked in Star Trek. All the feel good stuff we see is just propaganda from inside the system like Starship Troopers was. If you really were a primitive species then the Enterprise would arrive for peaceful contact and leave. But it would send your coordinates and description of your planetary defences (i.e. none worth mentioning) back to the Federation. A bit later swarms of starships would arrive and your planet could be turned into more starships and any survivors could be reprogrammed to serve on them, which doesn't seem a very skilled job. People seem curiously inhuman too. My explanation is that they're not really people. Physically they are mostly human with a few aliens, but socially they are more like insects in a hive. They follow orders without question and work without payment and show little concern for their individual interests or safety. If they'd been programmed to do their job without any choice in the matter it would all make sense.
It explains why they don't have money, or politics, or arguments of any sort. In the best 1984 style of course they criticise the Borg for behaving like this because it's always useful to have an enemy. I suspect that it's not really necessary anymore of course since their drones have long since lost even the possibility even considering that the system they are in is anything other than totally benign.
But this is bittorrent. If the RIAA etc cared they could just connect to all the trackers and get a list of which IP addresses downloaded what. Then they could identify the ones in a country/ISP where they have some legal representation and subpoena the user names. In fact there's a lot of evidence that they already do that. So it's not like you have any privacy regardless of client.
Actually much has I hate and despise Apple and their products they should get a pass because they are not a monopoly. IIRC in the Microsoft case, Microsoft's business tactics of tying one product to another were not illegal until they were declared a monopoly by a judge.
Now Apple has about a 6% share of the desktop business, maybe less. That's nowhere near a monopoly so they can be as nasty as they want because you can always choose not to buy their stuff.
And given their users will rationalize away pretty much any sort of abusive behaviour in a "he hits me 'cuz he love me" sort of way, why not squeeze 'em hard?
E.g.
http://www.macworld.com/article/131991/2008/02/ipodtouch.html
The iPod touch software update released at last month's Macworld Expo added applications that already appeared on the iPhone along with other new features. But it also delivered some confusion among iPod touch owners who wondered why they were being charged $19.99 for a software update.
It turns out Apple didn't have much of a choice about charging for the iPod touch January software update, according to analysts familiar with accounting regulations.
"It's an accounting requirement that if you upgrade a device that's not on a subscription, you have to charge," Needham and Company financial analyst Charles Wolf said. "Apple has a choice of what to charge, but they have to charge."
The iPod touch software update added five new mobile apps - Mail, Maps, Stocks, Weather, and Notes. (All five apps already appear on the iPhone.) The iPod touch's Maps application also includes the ability to chart your location as well as other features added in the iPhone 1.1.3 software update.
The free iPod touch 1.1.3 software update - which includes important security fixes - also includes all of the new software applications as part of its 165MB download. Purchasing the software upgrade from Apple actually just downloads a tiny file that unlocks the changes you've already downloaded onto your iPod. And interestingly, it's not just the programs that cost money; without paying the $20 upgrade fee, touch users don't get the ability to rearrange icons or view songs lyrics either, for example.
Both the iPhone and iPod updates appeared at the same time, yet only the latter featured a charge. However, that's because Apple accounts for the iPhone on a subscription basis; it accounts for the iPod touch differently, and so it has to charge for an upgraded device, analysts say. It's hilarious really.
It's very low resource usage - I had an very old ultraportable notebook running XP with 384MB of Ram and a slow disk, but Opera and uTorrent both ran very well.
It actually works on ubuntu quite well too -
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=191161
I've got a question: If you use uTorrent on Linux, will it be as fast as it is on windows? I mean, which is better,to use Azureus or uTorrent under wine? Personally I'd prefer Torrent over Azureus. Both feature filled, but Torrent seems less of a burden on my system. Torrent seems to stay under 10% CPU usage, which is fine with me. Pretty much a damning indictment of Java that wine+a small win32 application+a completely different OS actually runs better than a Java one.
Now I'm sure people will say there are bloated Win32 apps and efficient Java ones and I can think of some examples. But on average Java applications tend to be absurdly resource intensive.
I'm not sure what you think I meant, but actually I was alluding to people who've been questioned by the FBI after posting something online that seemed to me to be fairly innocuous if a bit unfortunately phrased. It's not a conspiracy at all - the FBI are presumably under pressure to check out potential threats but they don't have the resources to much more than skim read and they tend to err on the side of caution when they decide who to interview. But the net result is that you may well end up wasting a big chunk of time both your time and their time if you advocate 'blowing up' federal agencies, even if most of your audience can work out from the context that you don't mean it literally.
Well, according to Gödel, we probably can't find a complete, consistent theory of everything. Does that mean neither God nor Einstein's spirit exist? I think that just means that science will approach some ideal theory asymptotically. So you won't ever get there but each generation of scientific theories will get closer than the last - there will be a few corner cases which none of the old theories could not explain but one of the new generation ones could. Which is actually quite a good description of science. It also means that there will always be things for scientists to do.
http://www.ctinquiry.org/publications/reflections_volume_1/torrance.htm
Here let me refer to a very interesting letter, recorded by Helen Dukas, which Einstein wrote to a child who asked him whether scientists prayed.
I have tried to respond to your question as simply as I could. Here is my answer. Scientific research is based on the idea that everything that takes place is determined by laws of nature, and therefore this holds for the actions of people. For this reason, a research scientist will hardly be inclined to believe that events could be influenced by prayer, i.e. by a wish addressed to a supernatural Being. However, it must be admitted that our actual knowledge of these laws is only imperfect and fragmentary, so that, actually the belief in the existence of basic all-embracing laws in nature also rests on a sort of faith. All the same this faith has been largely justified so far by the success of scientific research. But, on the other hand, everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe-a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is indeed quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive His 'spirit' is the actual laws that govern the universe as far as I can tell. In physics it would be a complete, consistent theory of everything. We don't have this yet, but we could possibly discover (and you'll note I didn't say invent) it. We do have various approximations of this uber theory though, relativity for big stuff and quantum mechanics for small. It's an odd idea actually - it reminds me of Plato's Theory of Forms. By analogy, the spirit would be the True theory, and our current approximations would shadows of it. All of which is obvious very science friendly.
Is it just me or isn't he in danger being invited in for a "friendly chat" with the FBI? Remember kids - we live in less innocent times and rhetorical excesses can seriously mess up your day.
Well yeah, that is their prerogative. And they've decided that only GPL code is allowed in the kernel.
But if you do that you have to accept that companies with drivers that depend on third party code will not support Linux because they can't release that third party code under the GPL. As will companies that don't want to release the code because the consider it a trade secret. And good luck getting them to release hardware details either since they'll probably view driver source code and hardware register details as being equally sensitive.
Given that most hardware companies don't bother with Mac support and Macs have a far higher market share and allow binary drivers, making things difficult for them like this seems to be highly self defeating.
I don't consider myself to be socially awkward. I have an instinctive love of precision which lesser minds confuse with pendantry and a contempt for the pointless social rituals of the bovine masses.
Is that just on Mac? On Windows it seems to be quite CPU efficient. IE uses about 13-20% of a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo playing a flash video, same with Opera. Mind you on a 1Ghz P3 I remember it was still CPU friendly so it must know how to scale itself to work on fast and slow machines. Probably the Mac port is less optimized, which is really what Steve Jobs is saying - optimize for OS X or we'll cut you out of the iPhone.
Mind you the iPhone only has GSM, so it's hard to imagine youtube working particularly well. Then again, youtube does work well on the iPod Touch last time I tried it over WiFi.
You're free until some ambitious bastard spots a vacancy and declares himself leader and starts killing anyone that stands up to him. If you imagine a graph of freedom vs time, a revolution is sharp spike upwards in the direction of more freedom followed by a sharp spike down as the new regime starts terrorising people into submission. The point is that the system may settle in a stable state with lower freedom level at the end of it. In fact apart from the American revolution I can't think of any examples where this didn't happen.
And you don't need a revolution either, if a society collapses into smoothly into anarchy it's likely someone will take advantage of this to seize total power. Anarchy is a surefire gateway to tyranny.
Slashdot Mirror
You must work for Clinton campaign
Actually no, I don't work for the Clinton campaign.
But in any case, not all refugees will choose to return
UNRWA says 4,448,429 refugees.
... our principles in "Fateh" has always been to liberate all our Palestinian national land and to set up a democratic state on it. This clearly demonstrates that there has been no room for the 242, 194 and 181 resolutions in our literature. However, we to our surprise, have to begin rethinking them. In our literature, all resolutions which deny the Palestinians their right in their homeland are false and completely rejected. This is a principle each of us abides by until we realize our return, I personally hold that we have to stick to the principle, and at the same time we must attempt to arrive at periodic solutions as a step toward attaining the principle viz. Tactic flexibility versus principle adamancy. This, I believe, is the closest approach to the refugees issue. Fateh stance which should be adhered to in the final solution negotiations calls for abiding by the international resolutions.
Israel has a population of 5.4 million Jews and 1.5 million Arabs from http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Society_&_Culture/newpop.html
This page says 80% would opt to return, which means they would be in a majority in a very short time. Arab politicians have called this the 'winning card' that will cause Israel to 'cease to exist'.
http://www.mideastweb.org/refugees1.htm
The refugees have a sincere tie to their land and homes. Many have kept the keys to their houses, houses that no longer exist. Many certainly were evicted unjustly, or left in innocence to protect their families from war and from subjection to unknown alien rule. Most refugees who are still alive were quite young in 1948. Many others are descendants who never saw Palestine. Over 80% of the refugees polled in Lebanon, as well as those polled recently by IPCRI and other organizations in the West Bank and Gaza, insisted that they would want to return to Israel, even though the place where they lived no longer exists, and their fields may be home to a housing project or an office building.
Returning the refugees to Israel would put an end to Jewish self-determination, as noted by Palestinian as well as Israeli sources. The large numbers of refugees, together with the much higher birth-rate of the Arab population as opposed to Jews, would soon create an Arab majority. In a seminar held at Al-Najah University under the auspices of the Palestine National Authority, Sakher Habash noted:
To us, the refugees issue is the winning card which means the end of the Israeli state.
Not only the Fatah, but Arab leaders and media have unabashedly admitted that the refugee issue and right of return are being used as a means to destroy Israel. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser told an interviewer on September 1, 1961: "If the refugees return to Israel, Israel will cease to exist."
A large chunk of refugees are denied citizenship by their host Arab governments. There's a fair chance that these governments would kick them out to Israel if the right of return were allowed. And you don't need a majority to take over the government. Almost all Arab countries are actually run by an minority, anti democratic party. The Mid East web page actually points out that the numbers of refugees have grown much faster than the Palestinian birth rate, partly by marriage to citizens of the host countries who become 'refugees' too. And so do their kids. Arab state media will try to get as many of their people as possible into Israel because that will destroy it.
Basically the Arab leaders and UNRWA have colluded to turn Arab 'refugees', most of whom have never lived in I
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_Camp_David_Summit#Refugees_and_the_right_of_return Due to the first Arab-Israeli war, a significant number of Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes inside what is now Israel. These refugees, numbering over four million today (but 700,000 at the time), comprise about half the Palestinian people. Since that time, the Palestinians have called for full implementation of the right of return, meaning that each refugee would be granted the option of returning to his or her home, with property restored, or accept compensation instead.
Israelis asserted that allowing a right of return to Israel proper, rather than to the newly created Palestinian state, would mean an influx of Palestinians that would fundamentally alter the demographics of Israel, jeopardizing Israel's Jewish character and its existence as a whole. The Israelis also argued that a larger number of Jewish refugees had been pushed out of Arab countries since 1948, and were not compensated, and that most of them ended up in Israel. Four million Palestinians arrving in Israel (pop 7million) form a majority and would be able to vote for (for example) a Hamas government. There's no way any Israeli government, no matter how doveish, will ever accept it.
You'd be better of using the Independence Day model of interstellar economics, where a permanently spaceborne species arrives at a technologically less advanced planet, strips it bare and then moves on.
Indeed I've always thought that that's the way the Federation really worked in Star Trek. All the feel good stuff we see is just propaganda from inside the system like Starship Troopers was. If you really were a primitive species then the Enterprise would arrive for peaceful contact and leave. But it would send your coordinates and description of your planetary defences (i.e. none worth mentioning) back to the Federation. A bit later swarms of starships would arrive and your planet could be turned into more starships and any survivors could be reprogrammed to serve on them, which doesn't seem a very skilled job. People seem curiously inhuman too. My explanation is that they're not really people. Physically they are mostly human with a few aliens, but socially they are more like insects in a hive. They follow orders without question and work without payment and show little concern for their individual interests or safety. If they'd been programmed to do their job without any choice in the matter it would all make sense.
It explains why they don't have money, or politics, or arguments of any sort. In the best 1984 style of course they criticise the Borg for behaving like this because it's always useful to have an enemy. I suspect that it's not really necessary anymore of course since their drones have long since lost even the possibility even considering that the system they are in is anything other than totally benign.
But this is bittorrent. If the RIAA etc cared they could just connect to all the trackers and get a list of which IP addresses downloaded what. Then they could identify the ones in a country/ISP where they have some legal representation and subpoena the user names. In fact there's a lot of evidence that they already do that. So it's not like you have any privacy regardless of client.
I'm not downloading anything illegal.
I would bitch more about the DMCA but the Patriot Act says I could be sent to Gitmo for doing it.
Now Apple has about a 6% share of the desktop business, maybe less. That's nowhere near a monopoly so they can be as nasty as they want because you can always choose not to buy their stuff.
And given their users will rationalize away pretty much any sort of abusive behaviour in a "he hits me 'cuz he love me" sort of way, why not squeeze 'em hard?
E.g.
http://www.macworld.com/article/131991/2008/02/ipodtouch.html The iPod touch software update released at last month's Macworld Expo added applications that already appeared on the iPhone along with other new features. But it also delivered some confusion among iPod touch owners who wondered why they were being charged $19.99 for a software update.
It turns out Apple didn't have much of a choice about charging for the iPod touch January software update, according to analysts familiar with accounting regulations.
"It's an accounting requirement that if you upgrade a device that's not on a subscription, you have to charge," Needham and Company financial analyst Charles Wolf said. "Apple has a choice of what to charge, but they have to charge."
The iPod touch software update added five new mobile apps - Mail, Maps, Stocks, Weather, and Notes. (All five apps already appear on the iPhone.) The iPod touch's Maps application also includes the ability to chart your location as well as other features added in the iPhone 1.1.3 software update.
The free iPod touch 1.1.3 software update - which includes important security fixes - also includes all of the new software applications as part of its 165MB download. Purchasing the software upgrade from Apple actually just downloads a tiny file that unlocks the changes you've already downloaded onto your iPod. And interestingly, it's not just the programs that cost money; without paying the $20 upgrade fee, touch users don't get the ability to rearrange icons or view songs lyrics either, for example.
Both the iPhone and iPod updates appeared at the same time, yet only the latter featured a charge. However, that's because Apple accounts for the iPhone on a subscription basis; it accounts for the iPod touch differently, and so it has to charge for an upgraded device, analysts say. It's hilarious really.
I like Vista and I voted for George W Bush twice. He is great man. Like Hitler.
Hal Porter
It's very low resource usage - I had an very old ultraportable notebook running XP with 384MB of Ram and a slow disk, but Opera and uTorrent both ran very well.
It actually works on ubuntu quite well too -
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=191161 I've got a question: If you use uTorrent on Linux, will it be as fast as it is on windows? I mean, which is better
Now I'm sure people will say there are bloated Win32 apps and efficient Java ones and I can think of some examples. But on average Java applications tend to be absurdly resource intensive.
Those +1 Informative links go to wikipedia, an online encyclopedia.
I'm not sure what you think I meant, but actually I was alluding to people who've been questioned by the FBI after posting something online that seemed to me to be fairly innocuous if a bit unfortunately phrased. It's not a conspiracy at all - the FBI are presumably under pressure to check out potential threats but they don't have the resources to much more than skim read and they tend to err on the side of caution when they decide who to interview. But the net result is that you may well end up wasting a big chunk of time both your time and their time if you advocate 'blowing up' federal agencies, even if most of your audience can work out from the context that you don't mean it literally.
A carefully written set of personal horoscopes whose predictions mirror those of science?
Is it just me or isn't he in danger being invited in for a "friendly chat" with the FBI? Remember kids - we live in less innocent times and rhetorical excesses can seriously mess up your day.
Yeah, those natives were good eatin'
Dude, what about if you went there and your internet connection BROKE? That means NO MORE INTERNET EVER!
Well yeah, that is their prerogative. And they've decided that only GPL code is allowed in the kernel.
But if you do that you have to accept that companies with drivers that depend on third party code will not support Linux because they can't release that third party code under the GPL. As will companies that don't want to release the code because the consider it a trade secret. And good luck getting them to release hardware details either since they'll probably view driver source code and hardware register details as being equally sensitive.
Given that most hardware companies don't bother with Mac support and Macs have a far higher market share and allow binary drivers, making things difficult for them like this seems to be highly self defeating.
I don't consider myself to be socially awkward. I have an instinctive love of precision which lesser minds confuse with pendantry and a contempt for the pointless social rituals of the bovine masses.
Oh wait. Nevermind.
It's very important.
If Ndiswrapper is in violation of the GPL then the network card vendors will have to release their source code.
Is it bad that when I saw this I thought
Is that just on Mac? On Windows it seems to be quite CPU efficient. IE uses about 13-20% of a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo playing a flash video, same with Opera. Mind you on a 1Ghz P3 I remember it was still CPU friendly so it must know how to scale itself to work on fast and slow machines. Probably the Mac port is less optimized, which is really what Steve Jobs is saying - optimize for OS X or we'll cut you out of the iPhone.
Mind you the iPhone only has GSM, so it's hard to imagine youtube working particularly well. Then again, youtube does work well on the iPod Touch last time I tried it over WiFi.
Something must have gone wrong with slashdot's fractionated mind.
You're free until some ambitious bastard spots a vacancy and declares himself leader and starts killing anyone that stands up to him. If you imagine a graph of freedom vs time, a revolution is sharp spike upwards in the direction of more freedom followed by a sharp spike down as the new regime starts terrorising people into submission. The point is that the system may settle in a stable state with lower freedom level at the end of it. In fact apart from the American revolution I can't think of any examples where this didn't happen.
And you don't need a revolution either, if a society collapses into smoothly into anarchy it's likely someone will take advantage of this to seize total power. Anarchy is a surefire gateway to tyranny.