Sure folk can argue that dismantling the Jim Crow discrimination against Palestinians in Israel would be 'giving in to terrorists'. But would it have been wrong to end Jim Crow in the US South if the civil rights movement had been violent?
Well, that's an interesting question. Why do you think great civil rights leaders are generally pacifists? Probably because it's very hard for people to swallow that the cause can be good even if the people supporting it are all people who are doing bad things. You are basically right in that the Palestinians' situation would be far, far better off if they understood the concept of nonviolent resistance, and simply took advantage of the media to make Israeli troops look bad. Hell, there wouldn't be an occupation anymore by now. Instead, they make themselves look like a bunch of nutcases by running around in the streets, burning American flags and American Presidents in effigy, shooting guns, strapping pretend bombs onto their little children to indoctrinate the concept of martyrdom from childhood and so on.
I don't support much of the discrimination that you speak of, since as you point out, that systematic discrimination is bad regardless of how bad the Palestinian terrorists are. And while I recognize that the British created many problems with their partitioning attempts and the aftermath in the 40s (similar things happened with Muslims in India fleeing to Pakistan to avoid persecution by nationalists), I am not sure your analogy to what happened in Serbia is very accurate - the analogy to India/Pakistan is far more realistic.
I admit I'm torn on this issue by the same problem as you - how can a state be a "Jewish" state and still be democratic? I don't have an answer to that - I think the Jewish people deserve to have a homeland because history has repeatedly shown that as an itinerant ethnoreligious group, you are always subject to the whims of your host nation. Of course, I also think the Palestinians have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I cherish the values of Western democracy, and the separation of church and state we have in America is key to what makes America a great nation. How then do you maintain a Jewish character and identity, while not being fundamentally discriminatory as a democracy? This is what has led many to accept that only a two-state solution will ultimately be able to make everybody happy, rather than the one-state solution you propose.
I could see eventually a two-state confederation with mutually guaranteed rights, where citizens of either were free to travel between, work in, or reside in either state, and perhaps even joint national defense as a long-term solution, but that would first require quite a few years of peaceful coexistance within a two-state system with no violence, no occupation, no terrorism.
By the way - there are plenty of states that are democratic but have rather particular citizenship rules. Not every democracy is as open in their immigration policies as America is. Note that I think Israeli Arab citizens should have full rights as citizens (the concept of different classes of citizenship based solely on religion or ethnic background is definitely antithetical to democracy), but I don't think it negates the possibility of democracy just because a country doesn't want to annex two adjoining territories and absorb their demographics, economies and so forth into the larger nation-state.
Israel was only created after the second world war had been won and the NAZI party utterly destroyed.
That's correct, mostly in reaction to British and American guilt over their having allowed six million Jews to be slaughtered and the world's inability to respond to the Nazi threat faster - so yes, but the point was that Jews wanted a homeland, a haven they could go to so this would never happen again, and the major world powers acknowledged that this was essentially true, and the Jewish people did have the right to a homeland. In the case of the British, there was the very specific guilt over having shut out migration to Palestine as Jews tried to flee Nazi Germany and occupied Europe.
Should German attrocities against Jews be justification for Zionist attrocities against Palestinians?
Absolutely not, and you will notice that I did nothing of the sort. I was defending the creation and right to exist of Israel as a homeland for Jewish people. That doesn't mean that everything that every person has ever done in Israel was good or right, or that the Israeli military has always responded with due and appropriate force to every threat. Nonetheless, your use of the phrase "Zionist attrocities [sic]" undermines your credibility - atrocities are committed by bad people, not by a principle that in no way undermines the Arab peoples' rights. In any case, outside of a very few specific cases (such as apparently behavior of units under then-General Sharon's command in Lebanon), not every Palestinian killed or injured is an atrocity. When your people start wars, people, including civilians, die. That's just a fact. If you don't like that, then don't start a war.
Shamir and his crew were oputright terrorists, every bit as indiscriminate in their murders as Arafat.
Yes, during the first half of this century some of the radical and violent Jewish militia organizations were absolutely just as bad as Arafat and other early Palestinian counterparts. Most of that extremism died out with the creation of Israel though. Of course, there are still certain extremist elements within the settler communities and the like, but the critical point is that mainstream Israeli society doesn't accept or embrace that sort of terrorist violence anymore, whereas mainstream Palestinian society still accepts terrorism as a legitimate "response" to occupation (which unfortunately is a myth - the current occupation and repeated incursions has been essentially a response to the Al Aqsa Intifada).
At the time the US helped to create Israel the Jim Crow laws were still in force in the US south. One of the reasons that the supporters of those laws supported the creation of Israel was to ship Jews off to Israel rather than to have them in the US.
Sure, there were absolutely people who felt that way about the Jews, the Blacks, etc. So? Liberia was founded by American Black expatriots who migrated back to Africa voluntarily. Sure, lots of American racists wanted Blacks gone, but that doesn't delegitimize their right to _voluntarily_ go back to their homeland to escape persecution, does it?
It is not a history in which any side comes off well.
You are right that there were lots of bad things done in the Palestinian protectorate on all sides (Arab, Jewish and British) pre-1945. That is essentially old news at this point - not saying we should forget about it, or pretend it didn't happen or whitewash it, but let's not justify current Palestinian terrorism based on actions of Jewish settlers from a bygone era who are either dead or in nursing homes at this point. Let's talk about the reality of the here and now.
Israel offers peace and amicable discussion of boundaries. If the Palestinians were willing to go to the negotiating table, they would even likely get joint rule of Jerusalem (I believe Barak offered something along those lines, even). As far as I know, Barak offered essentially everything the P
You know, everything I've read indicates that quote has been frequently _misattributed_ to a Nintendo executive, and that in fact it was never said by a Nintendo employee. Go google for "Kristian Wilson", you'll find some discussions on this that seem to indicate nobody can ever cite a real original source for the quote.
Umm, you realize most of the Jews who went there went to avoid being killed (this admittedly was a minority), persecuted, or discriminated against elsewhere? And you realize that Hitler and his Final Solution led to the creation of Israel, right? The military capability of Israel to defend itself has partially been because of America's support, but originally was in large part a result of individuals, Jews who believed the existance of a Jewish state in Israel was the only way to assure their children and future generations they would have the opportunity to live their lives and practice their religion freely.
Now fast forward to today: many Jews leave peacefully and happily in the United States, far more than live in Israel. So maybe Israel isn't necessary to fulfill it's original "Zionist mission". At least right now. Of course, with all of the nice educated folk here on Slashdot who subtly attack Israel and its right to exist, it's not hard to see why many American Jews might still be paranoid enough to continue supporting Zionist causes - we have learned our lessons from history. In any case, there is a reality on the ground, which is many Jews living in Israel and many Palestinian Arabs living in Gaza and the West Bank. The Israelis have won several wars over the last 50 years with their neighbors (who generally speaking attacked them trying to grab land), partially due to overt American support. Of course, that American support was no different from the American support given to other allied democratic governments during the Cold War. And now today, it's pretty tough to just abandon all those Israelis and let them be slaughtered by their unfriendly neighbors.
In any case, opinions on how to solve the disputes between the Israelis and Palestinians (and both sides certainly have legitimate grievances that need to be resolved), the assertion that if Israel didn't exist, nobody would have been hurt ignores basically all the events of the twentieth century and displays a complete ignorance of historical knowledge.
Fuel cells are a storage/extraction mechanism for energy. You can also just burn ethanol/methanol and ethanol at least combusts quite decently in a standard internal combustion engine (i.e. an FFV vehicle). The hard part isn't building the fuel cell, it's producing the fuel used in the fuel cell in a cost effective, environmentally friendly way. There are some decent proposals to do this for ethanol, but that's really where the research is needed right now.
From personal experience, she is inclined toward paranoia and hysterics, yes. We had a bit of a dispute over the "groklaw" name (I was the original registrant of groklaw.org, which I registered before her Groklaw blog re: SCO fiasco ever existed - rather, I think she had a blog, but hadn't really started doing any analysis on the SCO case, and hadn't used/registered any of the groklaw.* domain names). She got herself in a bit of a tither and implied that I had squatted on the domain name or that it was presumptuous of me to use the name for anything when she had popularized it so much (of course, I had registered the domain name first).
She sort of ignored the obvious evidence of the date of registration in the WHOIS records. I had registered it for my own blog, which I ended up putting up at a slightly different address, which I preferred to the more limited groklaw.org domain. Anyway, not like she threatened me legally or anything nasty, just had a somewhat arrogant and paranoid attitude about her.
I was originally inclined to just give it to the non-profit she claimed she was setting up at the time, in exchange for some sort of token something or other - credit, kudos, etc. (didn't really want money for it), but her attitude left a really bad taste in my mouth, despite my respect for the work she's done on the SCO case (when she first contacted me, I had only seen her groklaw site once or twice, this was before the groklaw stories on Slashdot were a daily occurance).
In any case, I put it off, forgot about it, and the domain ended up expiring and ended up in a squatter's hands. Oh well, at least now I don't have to worry about figuring out what to do with it.
Grammar is _not_ all tradition in the sense that you imply. It's partially tradition in the sense of common usage, partially tradition in the sense of standardized rules agreed upon for consistency, and partially cognitive wiring. In this particular case, the formal rule of using "he" as a gender neutral pronoun is dissonant with the common usage of the language, and the cognitive effect based on common usage. In English, "he" and "she" have strong human-gender associations since they are rarely used with objects except to specifically ascribe gender to said objects. Because of this fact, most speakers find it confusing to use the word "he" in the context of describing a human of unknown gender - thus the frequent substitution of the gender-nonspecific pronoun "they". This substitution tends to work well because it's usually contextually clear whether the singular or plural is meant by the speaker, whereas there is generally no contextual clue to indicate that "he" refers to a person of unknown gender.
As others have mentioned, this "misuse" of the word 'they' goes back at least 600 years in common English usage, so there's plenty of tradition behind it as well. While we all know because we learned in elementary school that you can't use "they" because "they" is always plural, and it must agree with the subject, that rule simply doesn't match with the way the word is commonly used. Your assertion that the language hasn't changed yet is an odd one - the dictionary judges these language issues by seeking consensus from a bunch of grammarians. Is that a more valid way to judge the way a language is changing than to look at how people use the language in common speech, and even in common writing? Are "ain't" or "ya'll" grammatically incorrect, or a grammatically legitimate part of a non-standard dialect of English? Maybe we need an academy to dictate our language to us, like the French have.
The whole concept of the use of "they" as an incorrect gender neutral singular pronoun is somewhat silly. It is frequently used that way in common English speech (at least in the US, in most of the places I've lived), and it conceptually (i.e. linguistically) makes sense. Both "he" and "she" have strong gender connotations in English, and neither feels appropriate for the case of unknown gender. The confusion you reference with they is almost never a practical issue - as in the sentence you referenced, it's conceptually clear that a single person is being referred to, despite the use of the word "they". The idea of constructing and imposing a new pronoun is fairly laughable - you can construct and impose lots of new words and you might have some success, but the baseline words, numbers, basic body parts (excluding euphemisms and sexual references), pronouns, articles and other fundamental words to the language are very slow to change and very resistant to imposed change.
It would seem prudent at this point, given the clear need for such a word, and the commonplace use of the word they for this purpose, to just accept it as grammatical usage. The word notes on they at dictionary.com are quite interesting on this subject actually, and on the origins of they/them and the modification from the Old English form to the Norse-derived form.
I think all of us would love to see the cable card spec actually implemented. DirecTivo is fabulous, but many of us live in places where we don't have the exposure to get a satellite link (an apartment with the wrong directional facing, for instance). Ultimately, I think Tivo needs cablecard to be adopted to succeed as a company, to make sales and installation as painless as possible. And even better, perhaps with cablecard in place, they could finally get some partnerships going with the otherwise obstreperous cable companies, if they could convince them they could turn a premium Tivo-based offering into a profit-center for themselves at signup time.
They tried. Apparently they have the same problem lots of Slashdotters complain about: nobody values software anymore. The big cable companies didn't want to bother paying licensing fees for Tivo software, figuring they could get their own salaried programmers or offshore shops to write the code and hack the hardware for the budget cable boxes their partners (Scientific Atlanta, Motorola, etc.) make. Tivo's only real hope was using their patents as a heavy stick and beating people over the head with them - I just hope they snuck into their DirecTV contract some terms that force DTV to recognize the patents and keep licensing them even if they try to drop the Tivo relationship.
Of course, you and I recognize that Tivo's offering is far superior to the Time Warner or Comcast "DVR" offerings, and I certainly am willing to shell out 200 bucks and pay 10 bucks a month for Tivo instead of just paying 10 bucks a month to my crappy cable company. But the average joe goes the easy, bundled route instead. Tivo's only hope, in my opinion, is the Cable Card technology, which should let their boxes replace the cable company box, and then market the whole thing as a premium replacement for the crappy box the cable company gives you, or partner with cable companies to offer the Tivo box as an "upgrade" option when you sign up for cable service.
Damn, come to think of it, I should be running this company, I'd get it on its feet in no time.
I do love the liberal state, to be honest. Agreed, the car insurance situation may not be ideal, but you should consider yourself lucky you don't live in New York. Health insurance rates are about 2.5 times as much, and you can't get individual PPO coverage at all in New York (just "POS" which is what it sounds like). I know people who have kept legal residence in Massachusetts just to keep the health insurance. Compare also to states like Florida, where if you have undesireable characteristics, you sometimes can't get health insurance at all (apparently, this is second hand info, I haven't lived there since I was a kid).
The state does need to be involved in regulating insurance, though I agree perhaps absolute fixed pricing may not be the best. The thing is, in NY, the prices aren't fixed, but the supposed benefits are, so there is a substantial price range - you pay a LOT more for Empire Blue Cross, for example. The way the companies make up for it is with their claim payment rates - you go for a cheaper company, they deny a much larger percentage of claims and just ignore your calls. The only good thing is that the state is required to publish that information, so you can avoid the bargain basement health insurance.
So, in short, you shouldn't use the fact that Progressive can't get their super-normal profits in Massachusetts as a justification for bitching the state out. Massachusetts isn't a perfect state, it has its faults. But until you've tried some of the others (I've lived in CA, NY, MA, FL, VT to name a few), don't knock it.
That's odd, in Massachusetts the cops average about 95 on the highway. The Mass Pike often consists of two lanes of commuters going just below 80 to avoid getting pulled over, and the left lane clear open with the occasional State Trooper plowing by everybody else somewhere between 90 and 100 miles an hour.
Obviously you live in a cheap part of the country. Here in New York City, a single person can barely get by on about 50k. A family of four - well, you have to send your kids to private school here, don't want them going to public schools here, I assure you. So realistically, about 100k can support you family of four here, assuming renting in a very middling part of town, or living well outside of the city and doing a long commute. Anything better than that is gonna require more income than that. Even up in Boston, 100k is barely middle class for a family of four. I don't know where you exist, but from my observations, kids are expensive. God knows, I'd never put my children in public schools.
Not everyone who runs a successful business is an MBA and not everybody who runs a company into the ground is one either. The bad rep of MBAs comes primarily from the crazy and heady days of the dot com boom where lots of inexperienced, freshly minted MBAs with little or no real-world business experience were running companies on a wing and a prayer. The real question is does the nerd have the ability to go out and be a front face of the company, to generate high level sales, to focus on profitable markets and know when to give up on unprofitable ones. If so, he or she could be a fine choice to run a business - knowledge of the technology is definitely a plus, but isn't itself sufficient to justify letting "the pimply-faced nerd" run a business (and by the way, some of us do know how to practice personal hygiene, and still understand technology).
Generally, most small shops need to have somebody who can and is willing to act as a sales frontman. Doesn't necessarily have to be somebody with a serious business background, but it would be helpful to have experience in managing customer relationships, contacts to help drum up business in the appropriate area and so forth. Once you get things rolling, you can get a lot of new business by referrals, but somebody still needs to manage those customer relationships, even if they are also an active participant in the service work that your team provides.
I've worked with several small shops of this sort that made a good living for themselves (in several capacities, both as a consultant on projects, as a customer for their services and so on).
You are right that in general making contacts and impressing people with your brains is ultimately the number one factor in success in the real world. I still disagree with your assessment of the value of a quality college education for a person who wants exposure to academic subjects outside of their core area of study, for people who potentially want to make any sort of real research contribution to the world, or people who want a deeper and broader understanding of their own field than on-the-job experience alone can provide. Shockingly, there's a lot of interesting theory behind computer science that I know having taken lots of excellent theory classes in Harvard's CS department when I was in college (I actually studied physics, but that's another story). Sure, I can also solve lots of hands-on problems and have - but I bring value to a company or project in more than just how to code in Java or C++, or basic design patterns or even how to solve basic programming problems. I can sit down with academic research papers and turn algorithmic concepts into actual product implementations. I can put my mathematicians cap on and solve complex problems and lead a team to implement them.
And there are the other things I got out of college - a deep understanding of history and philosophy that has informed my world view, experience leading and organizing groups of people that is valuable in managing and organizing teams and companies. And those connections you mention? Yeah, you can get lots of useful connections in college too (if you go to the right kind of college).
Is college worth the money? Depends on what you want and what your personal goals are. But don't dismiss it just because you don't need to go to college to have a work ethic or to be able to do problem solving or coding work. I worked as a programmer for several summers when I was 15 or 16, and I was an excellent programmer then, and could have (was offered unsolicited) jobs getting paid 50k at the time. I'd like to think I'm a lot more than just an excellent programmer now though.
I understand the logical difference between copyrights and patents, my point was the difference in the tone and presentation of the insurance product. If you don't see how those two pitches for the product differ in the way they aim to achieve a sale, then you obviously don't have much sales experience.
Because before they were singing the tune "we don't believe Linux infringes on copyrights, and we're so sure of it, we'll sell you insurance". Now they are singing the tune "Linux might infringe on up to 283 patents, don't you think you want insurance?".
That is the difference between noble altruism and fear-mongering. I understand the fear can be an effective sales tool, but that doesn't mean I can't call it like I see it. As for Bruce and PJ, they are well respected, so the company initially obtained the benefits of their reputation. If the company's management stops acting in a way that people respect, they will eventually lose that goodwill. I don't think this means everybody is a mindless Slashbot.
No, I appreciate the gap in the market the company is filling. I'm just pointing out that potentially infringing 283 patents is not as big a deal as the summary or the article makes it sound. And that dropping figures like that represents an attempt by a company selling insurance to drum up business - which they have a right to do, I suppose. But there is a fine line between filling a need in the mind of business leaders and running a protection racket. What happens when this company starts sending letters to CIOs that say "Your company might be infringing on up to 283 patents! Don't you think you should be protected?". This kind of talk could easily degenerate into a protection racket for those who don't understand the way IP law traditionally works in the software industry.
When they were saying "We don't believe Linux infringes on any IP rights, and we're so sure of it, we're willing to sell insurance to that effect", they were singing a very different tune than they appear to be now.
My other point was that proactive defensive patenting is probably superior to just pooling risk. If this company really wanted to be helpful, they would start acquiring or filing for patents of their own, which they would license back to the community for use in GPLed software. Then you wouldn't just be paying for insurance, you'd be paying for a company to be willing to proactively defend against vendors who decided to target Linux.
Starting to sound like Open Source Fear Mongering to me. I don't know of any product that doesn't "potentially infringe" on other patents. Certainly for every software product I've worked on, when we did a patent search, we turned up several patents we potentially might be infringing on. Of course, our solution was to file a few of our own defensively so if any of our competitors came after us, we'd be able to go back after them too.
The problem with Linux is that there is no one organization with sufficient stake to specifically pursue such a strategy. Though I'm sure if push came to shove, IBM would be willing to use its patent arsenal in defense of its Linux-using customers, given how much they've invested in Linux deployments and Linux-based services work. Anyway, of course it's in this insurance company's interest to point out every possibly infringing instance.
But when you think about the fact that it's quite likely that a good 30-40% of us will end up dying from cancer eventually, it's not all that funny. The way I see it, by the time many of us youngins (and there are lots of 20-somethings around here on Slashdot) get old, there will be lots of ways modern medicine can keep us alive longer. There are lots of good ways to treat heart and cardiovascular disease, and I think those diseases tend to be fundamentally simpler than cancer in their causes and solutions.
Since cancer isn't really one disease but rather a symptom of aging cells suffering from genetic screwups that turn off normal cellular signalling and protective mechanisms, it's a lot less likely to be meaningfully "cured" by the time we get old. And as people are surviving longer and longer, more people will get to the point where they have some cancerous growth somewhere. Anyway, having seen it first hand, getting very ill from cancer is about the worst thing I can imagine. And there are lots of drugs, all of which seem to work somewhere between decently and not too well, depending on the type and malignancy of the cancer you are dealing with.
Anyway, we'll all end up dead some way some day. Personally, I can think of a lot of ways I'd rather go than cancer. Like a massive heart attack while having sex with a 20 year old.
This is actually an interesting question. I am not specifically aware of any general screening possible for pancreatic cancer either. There are many blood markers that can be positive for specific cancer types, but it seems more likely that an MRI or CT scan for something else (unrelated) showed this tumor. Somebody else mentioned some uber-blood screening tests - I've never heard of these, but it does sound like a good idea. In fact, I'm surprised more hasn't been done on that.
In any case, he's insanely lucky. Pancreatic cancer in general is very bad news - very difficult area to get to, tough to treat.
Like you said, the default javascript prefs need to be changed. Status bar should be immutable. And XUL links should always require some sort of authentication step from a user, warning them that they are about to open a XUL link ("You are about to execute an application from an untrusted source on the Internet. If you do, you may be vulnerable to certain security risks. You should only run such applications from trusted sources. Trust this source? Yes, No, Always"). The immutable status bar is then a last line of defense for users that are too dumb to know to say 'no' to a scary-looking warning box.
But you are right, XUL does provide a better/easier mechanism than IE DHTML or ActiveX for these spoof attacks right now. Seems like the fix is pretty darned easy, since the nature of the attack makes it somewhat limited in scope (unlike ActiveX attacks, which are virtually unlimited in scope).
Actually, perhaps a better idea would be to just ship Firefox/Mozilla with Internet-based XUL disabled. In other words, the XUL renderer can only load local XUL files by default and all attempts to load XUL from the Internet are blocked unless the user changes the default settings.
I appreciate that some of these stories submitted by Roland Piquepaille are about interesting topics, but EVERY single one of them includes at least one or two traffic-whoring links to his blog site, from which he derives advertising revenues. His blog site posts are generally completely inarticulate summaries and rehashings of the original articles that he writes, knowing that Slashdotters are too lazy to even read the artcle.
Hemos seems to usually be the culprit posting the Piquepaille stories. I don't mind if Hemos wants to post stories submitted by this guy (though often even the submissions are inaccurate summaries of the original articles), but it would be appropriate to edit out his links to poorly written, uninformative summaries that he posts on his blog before posting the story. I don't mind somebody occasionally using a Slashdot submission to let the community know about some new product they or their company has developed or interesting article or book they've written, but this blatant traffic farming is way over the top.
Agreed. That's the kind of person Dr. Crick was - he would always open his home up to a friend, especially somebody whose intellect he respected. The nasty vitriolic posts from uninformed Slashdotters everytime Crick is mentioned are not fair. She doesn't always receive fair credit for her contribution, true, but don't blame Crick. He didn't do politics, and he didn't do the credit game, and he had nothing to do with when the Nobel was awarded (which happened to be after her death).
Of all the folks involved, Crick was the least interested in credit-mongering. He really showed little interest in talking to reporters or going around speaking about past accomplishments (but was always willing to talk about research he was currently working on). In fact, he preferred to spend time doing new research rather than harping on old accomplishments, even in his old age and illness.
Really, he was such a decent guy in a dorky, nerdy way, I can't help coming to Dr. Crick's defense. As we say on Slashdot, he will be sorely missed and is truly an American (and worldwide) icon.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's an interesting question. Why do you think great civil rights leaders are generally pacifists? Probably because it's very hard for people to swallow that the cause can be good even if the people supporting it are all people who are doing bad things. You are basically right in that the Palestinians' situation would be far, far better off if they understood the concept of nonviolent resistance, and simply took advantage of the media to make Israeli troops look bad. Hell, there wouldn't be an occupation anymore by now. Instead, they make themselves look like a bunch of nutcases by running around in the streets, burning American flags and American Presidents in effigy, shooting guns, strapping pretend bombs onto their little children to indoctrinate the concept of martyrdom from childhood and so on.
I don't support much of the discrimination that you speak of, since as you point out, that systematic discrimination is bad regardless of how bad the Palestinian terrorists are. And while I recognize that the British created many problems with their partitioning attempts and the aftermath in the 40s (similar things happened with Muslims in India fleeing to Pakistan to avoid persecution by nationalists), I am not sure your analogy to what happened in Serbia is very accurate - the analogy to India/Pakistan is far more realistic.
I admit I'm torn on this issue by the same problem as you - how can a state be a "Jewish" state and still be democratic? I don't have an answer to that - I think the Jewish people deserve to have a homeland because history has repeatedly shown that as an itinerant ethnoreligious group, you are always subject to the whims of your host nation. Of course, I also think the Palestinians have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I cherish the values of Western democracy, and the separation of church and state we have in America is key to what makes America a great nation. How then do you maintain a Jewish character and identity, while not being fundamentally discriminatory as a democracy? This is what has led many to accept that only a two-state solution will ultimately be able to make everybody happy, rather than the one-state solution you propose.
I could see eventually a two-state confederation with mutually guaranteed rights, where citizens of either were free to travel between, work in, or reside in either state, and perhaps even joint national defense as a long-term solution, but that would first require quite a few years of peaceful coexistance within a two-state system with no violence, no occupation, no terrorism.
By the way - there are plenty of states that are democratic but have rather particular citizenship rules. Not every democracy is as open in their immigration policies as America is. Note that I think Israeli Arab citizens should have full rights as citizens (the concept of different classes of citizenship based solely on religion or ethnic background is definitely antithetical to democracy), but I don't think it negates the possibility of democracy just because a country doesn't want to annex two adjoining territories and absorb their demographics, economies and so forth into the larger nation-state.
Israel was only created after the second world war had been won and the NAZI party utterly destroyed.
That's correct, mostly in reaction to British and American guilt over their having allowed six million Jews to be slaughtered and the world's inability to respond to the Nazi threat faster - so yes, but the point was that Jews wanted a homeland, a haven they could go to so this would never happen again, and the major world powers acknowledged that this was essentially true, and the Jewish people did have the right to a homeland. In the case of the British, there was the very specific guilt over having shut out migration to Palestine as Jews tried to flee Nazi Germany and occupied Europe.
Should German attrocities against Jews be justification for Zionist attrocities against Palestinians?
Absolutely not, and you will notice that I did nothing of the sort. I was defending the creation and right to exist of Israel as a homeland for Jewish people. That doesn't mean that everything that every person has ever done in Israel was good or right, or that the Israeli military has always responded with due and appropriate force to every threat. Nonetheless, your use of the phrase "Zionist attrocities [sic]" undermines your credibility - atrocities are committed by bad people, not by a principle that in no way undermines the Arab peoples' rights. In any case, outside of a very few specific cases (such as apparently behavior of units under then-General Sharon's command in Lebanon), not every Palestinian killed or injured is an atrocity. When your people start wars, people, including civilians, die. That's just a fact. If you don't like that, then don't start a war.
Shamir and his crew were oputright terrorists, every bit as indiscriminate in their murders as Arafat.
Yes, during the first half of this century some of the radical and violent Jewish militia organizations were absolutely just as bad as Arafat and other early Palestinian counterparts. Most of that extremism died out with the creation of Israel though. Of course, there are still certain extremist elements within the settler communities and the like, but the critical point is that mainstream Israeli society doesn't accept or embrace that sort of terrorist violence anymore, whereas mainstream Palestinian society still accepts terrorism as a legitimate "response" to occupation (which unfortunately is a myth - the current occupation and repeated incursions has been essentially a response to the Al Aqsa Intifada).
At the time the US helped to create Israel the Jim Crow laws were still in force in the US south. One of the reasons that the supporters of those laws supported the creation of Israel was to ship Jews off to Israel rather than to have them in the US.
Sure, there were absolutely people who felt that way about the Jews, the Blacks, etc. So? Liberia was founded by American Black expatriots who migrated back to Africa voluntarily. Sure, lots of American racists wanted Blacks gone, but that doesn't delegitimize their right to _voluntarily_ go back to their homeland to escape persecution, does it?
It is not a history in which any side comes off well.
You are right that there were lots of bad things done in the Palestinian protectorate on all sides (Arab, Jewish and British) pre-1945. That is essentially old news at this point - not saying we should forget about it, or pretend it didn't happen or whitewash it, but let's not justify current Palestinian terrorism based on actions of Jewish settlers from a bygone era who are either dead or in nursing homes at this point. Let's talk about the reality of the here and now.
Israel offers peace and amicable discussion of boundaries. If the Palestinians were willing to go to the negotiating table, they would even likely get joint rule of Jerusalem (I believe Barak offered something along those lines, even). As far as I know, Barak offered essentially everything the P
You know, everything I've read indicates that quote has been frequently _misattributed_ to a Nintendo executive, and that in fact it was never said by a Nintendo employee. Go google for "Kristian Wilson", you'll find some discussions on this that seem to indicate nobody can ever cite a real original source for the quote.
Now fast forward to today: many Jews leave peacefully and happily in the United States, far more than live in Israel. So maybe Israel isn't necessary to fulfill it's original "Zionist mission". At least right now. Of course, with all of the nice educated folk here on Slashdot who subtly attack Israel and its right to exist, it's not hard to see why many American Jews might still be paranoid enough to continue supporting Zionist causes - we have learned our lessons from history. In any case, there is a reality on the ground, which is many Jews living in Israel and many Palestinian Arabs living in Gaza and the West Bank. The Israelis have won several wars over the last 50 years with their neighbors (who generally speaking attacked them trying to grab land), partially due to overt American support. Of course, that American support was no different from the American support given to other allied democratic governments during the Cold War. And now today, it's pretty tough to just abandon all those Israelis and let them be slaughtered by their unfriendly neighbors.
In any case, opinions on how to solve the disputes between the Israelis and Palestinians (and both sides certainly have legitimate grievances that need to be resolved), the assertion that if Israel didn't exist, nobody would have been hurt ignores basically all the events of the twentieth century and displays a complete ignorance of historical knowledge.
Fuel cells are a storage/extraction mechanism for energy. You can also just burn ethanol/methanol and ethanol at least combusts quite decently in a standard internal combustion engine (i.e. an FFV vehicle). The hard part isn't building the fuel cell, it's producing the fuel used in the fuel cell in a cost effective, environmentally friendly way. There are some decent proposals to do this for ethanol, but that's really where the research is needed right now.
She sort of ignored the obvious evidence of the date of registration in the WHOIS records. I had registered it for my own blog, which I ended up putting up at a slightly different address, which I preferred to the more limited groklaw.org domain. Anyway, not like she threatened me legally or anything nasty, just had a somewhat arrogant and paranoid attitude about her.
I was originally inclined to just give it to the non-profit she claimed she was setting up at the time, in exchange for some sort of token something or other - credit, kudos, etc. (didn't really want money for it), but her attitude left a really bad taste in my mouth, despite my respect for the work she's done on the SCO case (when she first contacted me, I had only seen her groklaw site once or twice, this was before the groklaw stories on Slashdot were a daily occurance).
In any case, I put it off, forgot about it, and the domain ended up expiring and ended up in a squatter's hands. Oh well, at least now I don't have to worry about figuring out what to do with it.
As others have mentioned, this "misuse" of the word 'they' goes back at least 600 years in common English usage, so there's plenty of tradition behind it as well. While we all know because we learned in elementary school that you can't use "they" because "they" is always plural, and it must agree with the subject, that rule simply doesn't match with the way the word is commonly used. Your assertion that the language hasn't changed yet is an odd one - the dictionary judges these language issues by seeking consensus from a bunch of grammarians. Is that a more valid way to judge the way a language is changing than to look at how people use the language in common speech, and even in common writing? Are "ain't" or "ya'll" grammatically incorrect, or a grammatically legitimate part of a non-standard dialect of English? Maybe we need an academy to dictate our language to us, like the French have.
It would seem prudent at this point, given the clear need for such a word, and the commonplace use of the word they for this purpose, to just accept it as grammatical usage. The word notes on they at dictionary.com are quite interesting on this subject actually, and on the origins of they/them and the modification from the Old English form to the Norse-derived form.
I think all of us would love to see the cable card spec actually implemented. DirecTivo is fabulous, but many of us live in places where we don't have the exposure to get a satellite link (an apartment with the wrong directional facing, for instance). Ultimately, I think Tivo needs cablecard to be adopted to succeed as a company, to make sales and installation as painless as possible. And even better, perhaps with cablecard in place, they could finally get some partnerships going with the otherwise obstreperous cable companies, if they could convince them they could turn a premium Tivo-based offering into a profit-center for themselves at signup time.
Of course, you and I recognize that Tivo's offering is far superior to the Time Warner or Comcast "DVR" offerings, and I certainly am willing to shell out 200 bucks and pay 10 bucks a month for Tivo instead of just paying 10 bucks a month to my crappy cable company. But the average joe goes the easy, bundled route instead. Tivo's only hope, in my opinion, is the Cable Card technology, which should let their boxes replace the cable company box, and then market the whole thing as a premium replacement for the crappy box the cable company gives you, or partner with cable companies to offer the Tivo box as an "upgrade" option when you sign up for cable service.
Damn, come to think of it, I should be running this company, I'd get it on its feet in no time.
The state does need to be involved in regulating insurance, though I agree perhaps absolute fixed pricing may not be the best. The thing is, in NY, the prices aren't fixed, but the supposed benefits are, so there is a substantial price range - you pay a LOT more for Empire Blue Cross, for example. The way the companies make up for it is with their claim payment rates - you go for a cheaper company, they deny a much larger percentage of claims and just ignore your calls. The only good thing is that the state is required to publish that information, so you can avoid the bargain basement health insurance.
So, in short, you shouldn't use the fact that Progressive can't get their super-normal profits in Massachusetts as a justification for bitching the state out. Massachusetts isn't a perfect state, it has its faults. But until you've tried some of the others (I've lived in CA, NY, MA, FL, VT to name a few), don't knock it.
That's odd, in Massachusetts the cops average about 95 on the highway. The Mass Pike often consists of two lanes of commuters going just below 80 to avoid getting pulled over, and the left lane clear open with the occasional State Trooper plowing by everybody else somewhere between 90 and 100 miles an hour.
Obviously you live in a cheap part of the country. Here in New York City, a single person can barely get by on about 50k. A family of four - well, you have to send your kids to private school here, don't want them going to public schools here, I assure you. So realistically, about 100k can support you family of four here, assuming renting in a very middling part of town, or living well outside of the city and doing a long commute. Anything better than that is gonna require more income than that. Even up in Boston, 100k is barely middle class for a family of four. I don't know where you exist, but from my observations, kids are expensive. God knows, I'd never put my children in public schools.
Not everyone who runs a successful business is an MBA and not everybody who runs a company into the ground is one either. The bad rep of MBAs comes primarily from the crazy and heady days of the dot com boom where lots of inexperienced, freshly minted MBAs with little or no real-world business experience were running companies on a wing and a prayer. The real question is does the nerd have the ability to go out and be a front face of the company, to generate high level sales, to focus on profitable markets and know when to give up on unprofitable ones. If so, he or she could be a fine choice to run a business - knowledge of the technology is definitely a plus, but isn't itself sufficient to justify letting "the pimply-faced nerd" run a business (and by the way, some of us do know how to practice personal hygiene, and still understand technology).
I've worked with several small shops of this sort that made a good living for themselves (in several capacities, both as a consultant on projects, as a customer for their services and so on).
And there are the other things I got out of college - a deep understanding of history and philosophy that has informed my world view, experience leading and organizing groups of people that is valuable in managing and organizing teams and companies. And those connections you mention? Yeah, you can get lots of useful connections in college too (if you go to the right kind of college).
Is college worth the money? Depends on what you want and what your personal goals are. But don't dismiss it just because you don't need to go to college to have a work ethic or to be able to do problem solving or coding work. I worked as a programmer for several summers when I was 15 or 16, and I was an excellent programmer then, and could have (was offered unsolicited) jobs getting paid 50k at the time. I'd like to think I'm a lot more than just an excellent programmer now though.
I understand the logical difference between copyrights and patents, my point was the difference in the tone and presentation of the insurance product. If you don't see how those two pitches for the product differ in the way they aim to achieve a sale, then you obviously don't have much sales experience.
That is the difference between noble altruism and fear-mongering. I understand the fear can be an effective sales tool, but that doesn't mean I can't call it like I see it. As for Bruce and PJ, they are well respected, so the company initially obtained the benefits of their reputation. If the company's management stops acting in a way that people respect, they will eventually lose that goodwill. I don't think this means everybody is a mindless Slashbot.
When they were saying "We don't believe Linux infringes on any IP rights, and we're so sure of it, we're willing to sell insurance to that effect", they were singing a very different tune than they appear to be now.
My other point was that proactive defensive patenting is probably superior to just pooling risk. If this company really wanted to be helpful, they would start acquiring or filing for patents of their own, which they would license back to the community for use in GPLed software. Then you wouldn't just be paying for insurance, you'd be paying for a company to be willing to proactively defend against vendors who decided to target Linux.
The problem with Linux is that there is no one organization with sufficient stake to specifically pursue such a strategy. Though I'm sure if push came to shove, IBM would be willing to use its patent arsenal in defense of its Linux-using customers, given how much they've invested in Linux deployments and Linux-based services work. Anyway, of course it's in this insurance company's interest to point out every possibly infringing instance.
Since cancer isn't really one disease but rather a symptom of aging cells suffering from genetic screwups that turn off normal cellular signalling and protective mechanisms, it's a lot less likely to be meaningfully "cured" by the time we get old. And as people are surviving longer and longer, more people will get to the point where they have some cancerous growth somewhere. Anyway, having seen it first hand, getting very ill from cancer is about the worst thing I can imagine. And there are lots of drugs, all of which seem to work somewhere between decently and not too well, depending on the type and malignancy of the cancer you are dealing with.
Anyway, we'll all end up dead some way some day. Personally, I can think of a lot of ways I'd rather go than cancer. Like a massive heart attack while having sex with a 20 year old.
In any case, he's insanely lucky. Pancreatic cancer in general is very bad news - very difficult area to get to, tough to treat.
But you are right, XUL does provide a better/easier mechanism than IE DHTML or ActiveX for these spoof attacks right now. Seems like the fix is pretty darned easy, since the nature of the attack makes it somewhat limited in scope (unlike ActiveX attacks, which are virtually unlimited in scope).
Actually, perhaps a better idea would be to just ship Firefox/Mozilla with Internet-based XUL disabled. In other words, the XUL renderer can only load local XUL files by default and all attempts to load XUL from the Internet are blocked unless the user changes the default settings.
Hemos seems to usually be the culprit posting the Piquepaille stories. I don't mind if Hemos wants to post stories submitted by this guy (though often even the submissions are inaccurate summaries of the original articles), but it would be appropriate to edit out his links to poorly written, uninformative summaries that he posts on his blog before posting the story. I don't mind somebody occasionally using a Slashdot submission to let the community know about some new product they or their company has developed or interesting article or book they've written, but this blatant traffic farming is way over the top.
Of all the folks involved, Crick was the least interested in credit-mongering. He really showed little interest in talking to reporters or going around speaking about past accomplishments (but was always willing to talk about research he was currently working on). In fact, he preferred to spend time doing new research rather than harping on old accomplishments, even in his old age and illness.
Really, he was such a decent guy in a dorky, nerdy way, I can't help coming to Dr. Crick's defense. As we say on Slashdot, he will be sorely missed and is truly an American (and worldwide) icon.