Noone seems to be looking too hard at what happened. So lets have a quick walk through the scandal:
The BBC reported that the goverment had decided to "sex up" the dossier which contained evidence of weapons of mass destruction. This is the dossier known as the "dodgy dossier" (because there was little or no actual evidence of these WMDs and a lot of fuzzy language that didn't say a lot but sounded threatening).
At the heart of the dodgy dossier was a claim that WMDs could be ready within 45 minutes. This was a major pinnacle of Blair's justification of war. David Kelly (an important intelligence expert) expressed to Gilligan (BBC journo) that this claim was dubious.
Now lets not get this wrong, after the war weapons inspections teams have been crawling all over Iraq and they have found ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE of WMDS, let alone WMDS that could be released in 45 minutes. So this 45 minute claim is without a shadow of doubt ABSOLUTELY BOGUS.
Now before this report was released, Tony Blair was talking up the dossier and the contents of it and saying how this dossier justified war for about 9 months. SO when the dossier was released he had built up a massive expectation of the contents of the dossier (which eventually turned out to be pretty underwhelming).
After Kelly's death, it was widely reported that the dossier had been passed backwards and forwards between Blair's press office, intelligence departments, and other cabinet members. They were altering the report, improving the wording etc. One alteration that Alastair Campbell made (Tony Blairs Head of (press) Communications) was that the 45 minute claim should have much stronger wording. So it is clear that this dossier has been messed with to improve its impact and pursuasiveness. Instead of being an impartial intelligence report, it has turned into a PR document.
So what now?
Kelly expresses scepticism about the report to Gilligan. Gilligan reports that the government has "sexed up" the dossier. The government who perceive this as a major PR loss if this goes unchallenged, and which has a lot riding on this report anyway challenges the BBC on this.
So the Alistair Campbell challenges the BBC head on, makes a massive confrontation in the press (trying to bluster the governments way out of the mess). He demands that the BBC reveal their source of who said that the "dodgy dossier" had been "sexed up". Gilligan refused, and the BBC stood by him because he had tapes from the interview with Kelly so they could prove their point.
The goverment doesn't like the BBC anyway at the moment, and had openly criticised the BBC's coverage during the war for not presenting the government's side enough - I think the government wished that the BBC's coverage of Iraq was more like Foxes! (It is a joke criticising the BBC for not presenting the government's side enough - the reason the BBC is such an amazing institution and people listen to/watch it around the world is that they always present both sides of a story and allow the viewer to make their own mind up). In addition before the war, the government had been floating ideas for what to do with the BBC when its charter comes up for renewal including such ridiculous ideas a *privatising* the BBC!(BBC's charter is renewed every 10 years, and it is this charter that allows it to operate/collect the license fee. There is always an anti-BBC lobby that is against everyone having to pay a poll tax on the BBC. )
So this standoff between Alastair Campbell and the BBC has be looked at in the context of the government's ongoing feud with the BBC.
The government get wind of who the source is (probably through intelligence channels) and they put about the word to the press that although they will not release Kelly's name, they will confirm to any press member if they suggest the right name. So the press are phoning up with lists of candidates, and miraculously some of them guess David Kelly.
So the government has leaked his name to the press, eve
> I don't know about the Blunkett dude. Never even > heard of him in my life. I'll let you worry > about him;)
Blunkett actually is a more left wing than Blair - but very authoritarian, as the home secretary he is pushing for national ID cards, and biometric passports. also he has given the police and all sorts of government bodies incredible and wide-ranging surveillance powers, so even the National Health Service can request details of who you've emailed which is a bit of a joke!
> However, overall, I think left-leaning ones are better [on liberties]. It is almost automatic why that is so. > Liberal ideology simply meshes well with liberties than conservative ideology.
Nonsense! in a lot of respects, right wing ideas merge well with liberties - for example the idea that people should be free from interference from the state is very typically a conservative idea (like tax cuts is a conservative policy, whereas tax rises is a left wing policy).
as I said in my other reply to your post politics is better represented as authoritarian/libertarian and rightwing/leftwing, and you cant really combine them that much.
> I'm not really sure how liberal Blair and his government is....But it seems that Blair might even be a conservative
You seem to be confusing liberal and left-wing a bit. It is as possible to be rightwing and liberal as it is to be leftwing and liberal. libertarianism (ie individual liberty) is opposed to authoritarianism (ie state takes priority over individual needs), just as left wing (social responsibility) is opposed to right wing (every man for himself).
tony blair while nominally left wing (he was elected on a left wing platform) is probably just right of centre. At the last election there was little to differentiate the conservative and the labour party in the UK. I would say that Blair is more authoritarian than liberal, but nowhere near as authoritarian as that nasty piece of work GWB (please don't rise to my bait unless your response doesn't involve US "neo-patriotism":-).
> Yet the high quality episodes are only available > to paying subscribers and the parent comment is > a link to a torrent that gives you that materal > for free.
Im not sure if this is true - the link I put here is only ~200MB and it hasn't downloaded yet so I can't check it out, there is another torrent ~4GB which is an iso of the DVD. I didn't put a link to that one.
> Whats more, this comment is marked > informative.
> By the time you get to 75 grand a year,
> you'll be paying half that in taxes every year, > roughly 43% of your total income.
BULLSHIT
For 75K you are at the bottom end of the 30% tax bracket, you get taxed at 30% for each dollar over $63550 at 30%, your federal income tax (the largest hitter in most peoples taxes) will come to $17144 or almost 23%, even before Bushes tax cut it would have only been $17931, or just under 24%. That is before any deductions at all, even the standard deduction. Medicare and Social Security combined are only about 8% and you can live in one of the states that doesn't have income tax, like Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, or Wyoming.
You shouldn't even be paying 43% marginal until you are making well into the 6 figure range.
In UK we have VAT at 17.5% on virtually every single sales transaction you make. Is the US equivalent called Sales Tax or something?
Seeing as you spend virtually all your income on VAT taxable things, you would be foolish to discount it.
Also we have road tax, alcohol and tobacco tax and national insurance so a hell of a lot of our income goes on tax. A lot more than you think if you only pay attention to income tax, which is what they want you to do. In the UK we have a word for all these extra taxes that they won't charge upfront off your income - stealth taxes.
the article about nuclear powered space travel is bunkum. the author clearly knows very little about his topic as it is riddled with factual errors. He is talking about a land rush on mars - the idea that say half the earth's population would jump into their space ships and go to mars is nonsense! the sheer amount of energy required to do this just is not feasible.
Then he talks about "deltaV" by which he means that in space it costs energy to change your speed rather than maintain your speed. He completely neglects the fact that the biggest limit on acceleration is going to be how much "g force" the human body can tolerate for extended periods, rather than how much fuel or how powerful the rocket/engine is.
He also talks about bringing a large asteroid into earth's orbit for mining. maybe this is feasible, but this would a) alter the moon's relationship to the earth's orbit (question: are 3 body systems as stable as 2 body systems) and b) completely discounts the risk of the asteroid falling to earth, potentially destroying a swathe of the population!
Just like he completely neglects the risk of a large quantity of radioactive material being released into the earth's atmosphere in the case of an accident. He claims that although one of his engines would use the same amount of radioactive material as chinobyl, but 1% of the amount of material as the "ivy mike" nuclear test, then there would not be a problem with radioactive material being released into the atmosphere.
TO THIS DAY, radioactive materials from chernobyl can be detected in sheep which are farmed on hills in Wales. I don't see why this wouldn't be true about other parts of (northern) europe. He is incredibly myopic if he thinks that nuclear space disasters are an acceptable risk.
I could go on, but I shall leave it at this: the author is guilty of wishful thinking, he conveniently ignores major showstoppers, and I can only describe him as a complete buffoon.
come on moderators this comment doesn't deserve -2. its true, winamp2 good, winamp3 bad. and whats this adding -1 overrated to an already -1, that just doesn't make sense.
The only good media player for Winblows!!! Please save it!
well its not that good any more! winamp2 was honed to semi-perfection(lack of multiple playlists and the appalling beat detection of AVS being my two main gripes), but winamp 3 is riddled with bugs, bloated and they clearly have done no further development on it since they released it this time last year. (its been at 3.0d all year)
The whole point is that the hardware that does just filtering is *less* general purpose than a computer (e.g. it is impossible to alter its configuration at all, in the extreme case) and so it may be easier to close attack entry points on it and prove it to be non-vulnerable... and I didn't assume a bridging configuration. If you assume a bridging configuration then it can be compromised (when I said compromised I assumed compromised in such a way that malware goes through), leaving all machines bridged from it vulnerable. Thus I have to disagree with your judgement. I don't understand how a non-bridging configuration can block packets. ultimately the blocking machine/device is going to have to take packets in on one interface and spit them out on another in all but the most esoteric network configurations. Also from a security point of view (and what I forgot to mention by the time I got to the end of my previous post), if a vulnerability is discovered in the machine, the computer is probably easier to update than the programmable hardware. And (not that I want to resurrect an old/. argument) a computer doesn't have to be reliant on one vendor which you would be with the machine, although I understand your point about the hardware being less likely to be able to have arbitrary code injected into it. As I see it either situation could leave a network vulnerable.
I am not a lawyer (and to those who get annoyed when they see IANAL lines, you can get into quite a bit of trouble representing or even implying you're one when you're not)
I think noone could come on slashdot and have a reasonable expectation that the poster of a comment giving a legal opinion that they have just read is actually a lawyer.
They showed us some lame arse XBox game Safe!!! I approve of your spelling. From where I'm standing (UK), I get pissed off when lazy people use the US spelling of arse (ass). I assume by youe usage that NZ uses the same spelling as UK and therefore I am pleased. good work!
Some advantages I can think of:... A hardware device is usually harder to hack than the software platform doing checking. A clever piece of malware can compromise the checking machine itself. Nothing to stop a clever piece of malware fscking up the hardware (which after all, is ultimately a computer and vulnerable to algorithmic weaknesses just as your standard von neuman architecture general purpose processor). If checking is done by a secondary machine, by the time it detects the malware the infected machine may be significantly damaged already. A hardware device placed between the network and the machine, on the other hand, can stop things early enough. Nonsense. What about the situation where the secondary machine is operating in bridging configuration - it will stop things in exactly the same amount of time as this hardware will. Even if it was just promiscuously listening there is no reason why it would take much longer to detect things. OK thinking about it if it was promiscuously listening, it wouldn't be able to do anything about mal-packets that it found, so I stand by my original response to this point: nonsense.
Ultimately I do not see how this machine is any different from a virus checker (except on the packet level). Its nothing new, its nothing clever, presumably its not that different to standard IDS schemes such as SNORT signatures, and its biggest weaknesses are going to be exactly the same as virus scanning. i.e. getting the signatures out to enough people quickly enough.
We still pay for unlisted numbers here in Australia...
That's shocking!!! While BT (British Telecom) is certainly not the best incumbent monopoly, as long as I can remember everybody has had the free choice of whether their number is unlisted or not.
3. Laws that require cooperation from foreign governments in the fight against spam. If the foreign government does not lean on their ISPs to stem the flow of spam, then we start employing some port 25 blocking at our perimeters. If AT&T stops routing the port 25 traffic for some spam-friendly Chinese ISP, then you can bet that the ISP will quickly become cooperative.
why do you think any foreign government would respect laws passed in the U.S.!!!!! the laws govern the citizens of the US or something like that.
do you think the U.S. governement respects the laws of any other country? pffff!!
he gives the game away (if its not obvious already), there is one point where he calls it open writer or something, the rest of the time luxuriosity! ha. good way to make some cash though
Slashdot Mirror
Noone seems to be looking too hard at what happened. So lets have a quick walk through the scandal:
The BBC reported that the goverment had decided to "sex up" the dossier which contained evidence of weapons of mass destruction. This is the dossier known as the "dodgy dossier" (because there was little or no actual evidence of these WMDs and a lot of fuzzy language that didn't say a lot but sounded threatening).
At the heart of the dodgy dossier was a claim that WMDs could be ready within 45 minutes. This was a major pinnacle of Blair's justification of war. David Kelly (an important intelligence expert) expressed to Gilligan (BBC journo) that this claim was dubious.
Now lets not get this wrong, after the war weapons inspections teams have been crawling all over Iraq and they have found ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE of WMDS, let alone WMDS that could be released in 45 minutes. So this 45 minute claim is without a shadow of doubt ABSOLUTELY BOGUS.
Now before this report was released, Tony Blair was talking up the dossier and the contents of it and saying how this dossier justified war for about 9 months. SO when the dossier was released he had built up a massive expectation of the contents of the dossier (which eventually turned out to be pretty underwhelming).
After Kelly's death, it was widely reported that the dossier had been passed backwards and forwards between Blair's press office, intelligence departments, and other cabinet members. They were altering the report, improving the wording etc.
One alteration that Alastair Campbell made (Tony Blairs Head of (press) Communications) was that the 45 minute claim should have much stronger wording. So it is clear that this dossier has been messed with to improve its impact and pursuasiveness. Instead of being an impartial intelligence report, it has turned into a PR document.
So what now?
Kelly expresses scepticism about the report to Gilligan. Gilligan reports that the government has "sexed up" the dossier. The government who perceive this as a major PR loss if this goes unchallenged, and which has a lot riding on this report anyway challenges the BBC on this.
So the Alistair Campbell challenges the BBC head on, makes a massive confrontation in the press (trying to bluster the governments way out of the mess). He demands that the BBC reveal their source of who said that the "dodgy dossier" had been "sexed up". Gilligan refused, and the BBC stood by him because he had tapes from the interview with Kelly so they could prove their point.
The goverment doesn't like the BBC anyway at the moment, and had openly criticised the BBC's coverage during the war for not presenting the government's side enough - I think the government wished that the BBC's coverage of Iraq was more like Foxes! (It is a joke criticising the BBC for not presenting the government's side enough - the reason the BBC is such an amazing institution and people listen to/watch it around the world is that they always present both sides of a story and allow the viewer to make their own mind up).
In addition before the war, the government had been floating ideas for what to do with the BBC when its charter comes up for renewal including such ridiculous ideas a *privatising* the BBC!(BBC's charter is renewed every 10 years, and it is this charter that allows it to operate/collect the license fee. There is always an anti-BBC lobby that is against everyone having to pay a poll tax on the BBC. )
So this standoff between Alastair Campbell and the BBC has be looked at in the context of the government's ongoing feud with the BBC.
The government get wind of who the source is (probably through intelligence channels) and they put about the word to the press that although they will not release Kelly's name, they will confirm to any press member if they suggest the right name. So the press are phoning up with lists of candidates, and miraculously some of them guess David Kelly.
So the government has leaked his name to the press, eve
> I love the double standards here on Slashdot.
I love the people on slashdot who don't bother to check out the article/link before having an opinion on what it supposedly contains.
I can confirm the link I provided is to the LoRes episodes seeing as my torrent finished downloading today.
You plonker rodney!
ok I agree with you now.
> I don't know about the Blunkett dude. Never even ;)
> heard of him in my life. I'll let you worry
> about him
Blunkett actually is a more left wing than Blair - but very authoritarian, as the home secretary he is pushing for national ID cards, and biometric passports. also he has given the police and all sorts of government bodies incredible and wide-ranging surveillance powers, so even the National Health Service can request details of who you've emailed which is a bit of a joke!
> However, overall, I think left-leaning ones are better [on liberties]. It is almost automatic why that is so.
> Liberal ideology simply meshes well with liberties than conservative ideology.
Nonsense! in a lot of respects, right wing ideas merge well with liberties - for example the idea that people should be free from interference from the state is very typically a conservative idea (like tax cuts is a conservative policy, whereas tax rises is a left wing policy).
as I said in my other reply to your post politics is better represented as authoritarian/libertarian and rightwing/leftwing, and you cant really combine them that much.
Google for political compass for more info.
> I'm not really sure how liberal Blair and his government is....But it seems that Blair might even be a conservative
:-).
You seem to be confusing liberal and left-wing a bit. It is as possible to be rightwing and liberal as it is to be leftwing and liberal. libertarianism (ie individual liberty) is opposed to authoritarianism (ie state takes priority over individual needs), just as left wing (social responsibility) is opposed to right wing (every man for himself).
tony blair while nominally left wing (he was elected on a left wing platform) is probably just right of centre. At the last election there was little to differentiate the conservative and the labour party in the UK. I would say that Blair is more authoritarian than liberal, but nowhere near as authoritarian as that nasty piece of work GWB (please don't rise to my bait unless your response doesn't involve US "neo-patriotism"
> Yet the high quality episodes are only available
> to paying subscribers and the parent comment is
> a link to a torrent that gives you that materal
> for free.
Im not sure if this is true - the link I put here is only ~200MB and it hasn't downloaded yet so I can't check it out, there
is another torrent ~4GB which is an iso of the DVD. I didn't put a link to that one.
> Whats more, this comment is marked
> informative.
It is informative!
here is a link to a torrent from suprnova:
Season 1 Episodes 1-19
> Brits make fun of French and Irish
and Germans, and Yanks...
> By the time you get to 75 grand a year,
> you'll be paying half that in taxes every year,
> roughly 43% of your total income.
BULLSHIT
For 75K you are at the bottom end of the 30% tax bracket, you get taxed at 30% for each dollar over $63550 at 30%, your federal income tax (the largest hitter in most peoples taxes) will come to $17144 or almost 23%, even before Bushes tax cut it would have only been $17931, or just under 24%. That is before any deductions at all, even the standard deduction. Medicare and Social Security combined are only about 8% and you can live in one of the states that doesn't have income tax, like Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, or Wyoming.
You shouldn't even be paying 43% marginal until you are making well into the 6 figure range.
In UK we have VAT at 17.5% on virtually every single sales transaction you make. Is the US equivalent called Sales Tax or something?
Seeing as you spend virtually all your income on VAT taxable things, you would be foolish to discount it.
Also we have road tax, alcohol and tobacco tax and national insurance so a hell of a lot of our income goes on tax. A lot more than you think if you only pay attention to income tax, which is what they want you to do. In the UK we have a word for all these extra taxes that they won't charge upfront off your income - stealth taxes.
the article about nuclear powered space travel is bunkum. the author clearly knows very little about his topic as it is riddled with factual errors. He is talking about a land rush on mars - the idea that say half the earth's population would jump into their space ships and go to mars is nonsense! the sheer amount of energy required to do this just is not feasible.
Then he talks about "deltaV" by which he means that in space it costs energy to change your speed rather than maintain your speed. He completely neglects the fact that the biggest limit on acceleration is going to be how much "g force" the human body can tolerate for extended periods, rather than how much fuel or how powerful the rocket/engine is.
He also talks about bringing a large asteroid into earth's orbit for mining. maybe this is feasible, but this would a) alter the moon's relationship to the earth's orbit (question: are 3 body systems as stable as 2 body systems) and b) completely discounts the risk of the asteroid falling to earth, potentially destroying a swathe of the population!
Just like he completely neglects the risk of a large quantity of radioactive material being released into the earth's atmosphere in the case of an accident. He claims that although one of his engines would use the same amount of radioactive material as chinobyl, but 1% of the amount of material as the "ivy mike" nuclear test, then there would not be a problem with radioactive material being released into the atmosphere.
TO THIS DAY, radioactive materials from chernobyl can be detected in sheep which are farmed on hills in Wales. I don't see why this wouldn't be true about other parts of (northern) europe. He is incredibly myopic if he thinks that nuclear space disasters are an acceptable risk.
I could go on, but I shall leave it at this: the author is guilty of wishful thinking, he conveniently ignores major showstoppers, and I can only describe him as a complete buffoon.
God his stupidity makes me angry.
come on moderators this comment doesn't deserve -2.
its true, winamp2 good, winamp3 bad. and whats this adding -1 overrated to an already -1, that just doesn't make sense.
winamp 3 is a pile of shit.
Winamp 5.0?
Is this the Fibonacci release or something?
The only good media player for Winblows!!! Please save it!
well its not that good any more! winamp2 was honed to semi-perfection(lack of multiple playlists and the appalling beat detection of AVS being my two main gripes), but winamp 3 is riddled with bugs, bloated and they clearly have done no further development on it since they released it this time last year. (its been at 3.0d all year)
As far as I am concernd nullsoft is dead already.
...wheres the article?!!!
There's no link to an article in the story!
The whole point is that the hardware that does just filtering is *less* general purpose than a computer (e.g. it is impossible to alter its configuration at all, in the extreme case) and so it may be easier to close attack entry points on it and prove it to be non-vulnerable... and I didn't assume a bridging configuration. If you assume a bridging configuration then it can be compromised (when I said compromised I assumed compromised in such a way that malware goes through), leaving all machines bridged from it vulnerable. Thus I have to disagree with your judgement. /. argument) a computer doesn't have to be reliant on one vendor which you would be with the machine, although I understand your point about the hardware being less likely to be able to have arbitrary code injected into it. As I see it either situation could leave a network vulnerable.
I don't understand how a non-bridging configuration can block packets. ultimately the blocking machine/device is going to have to take packets in on one interface and spit them out on another in all but the most esoteric network configurations.
Also from a security point of view (and what I forgot to mention by the time I got to the end of my previous post), if a vulnerability is discovered in the machine, the computer is probably easier to update than the programmable hardware. And (not that I want to resurrect an old
I am not a lawyer (and to those who get annoyed when they see IANAL lines, you can get into quite a bit of trouble representing or even implying you're one when you're not)
I think noone could come on slashdot and have a reasonable expectation that the poster of a comment giving a legal opinion that they have just read is actually a lawyer.
They showed us some lame arse XBox game
Safe!!! I approve of your spelling. From where I'm standing (UK), I get pissed off when lazy people use the US spelling of arse (ass). I assume by youe usage that NZ uses the same spelling as UK and therefore I am pleased. good work!
Some advantages I can think of: ...
A hardware device is usually harder to hack than the software platform doing checking. A clever piece of malware can compromise the checking machine itself.
Nothing to stop a clever piece of malware fscking up the hardware (which after all, is ultimately a computer and vulnerable to algorithmic weaknesses just as your standard von neuman architecture general purpose processor).
If checking is done by a secondary machine, by the time it detects the malware the infected machine may be significantly damaged already. A hardware device placed between the network and the machine, on the other hand, can stop things early enough.
Nonsense. What about the situation where the secondary machine is operating in bridging configuration - it will stop things in exactly the same amount of time as this hardware will. Even if it was just promiscuously listening there is no reason why it would take much longer to detect things. OK thinking about it if it was promiscuously listening, it wouldn't be able to do anything about mal-packets that it found, so I stand by my original response to this point: nonsense.
Ultimately I do not see how this machine is any different from a virus checker (except on the packet level). Its nothing new, its nothing clever, presumably its not that different to standard IDS schemes such as SNORT signatures, and its biggest weaknesses are going to be exactly the same as virus scanning. i.e. getting the signatures out to enough people quickly enough.
We still pay for unlisted numbers here in Australia...
That's shocking!!! While BT (British Telecom) is certainly not the best incumbent monopoly, as long as I can remember everybody has had the free choice of whether their number is unlisted or not.
British courts making it illegal to tell anyone that some servant saw Prince Charles and another man doing the nasty
whether or not you believe this is true, check the front cover of Private Eye this fortnight, its pretty funny.
motion sustained.
I suggest 'cuntware' just to be as offensive as possible.
I heartily second this. 'cunt' is an amazing and versatile word.
Oh, and there is a book about brewing real ale which, ironically, came from the US.)
bzzzzt. that's not ironic. surprising maybe.
3. Laws that require cooperation from foreign governments in the fight against spam. If the foreign government does not lean on their ISPs to stem the flow of spam, then we start employing some port 25 blocking at our perimeters. If AT&T stops routing the port 25 traffic for some spam-friendly Chinese ISP, then you can bet that the ISP will quickly become cooperative.
why do you think any foreign government would respect laws passed in the U.S.!!!!! the laws govern the citizens of the US or something like that.
do you think the U.S. governement respects the laws of any other country? pffff!!
he gives the game away (if its not obvious already), there is one point where he calls it open writer or something, the rest of the time luxuriosity! ha. good way to make some cash though