I live 30 miles from the nearest small town, I grew up here, and I eat a lot of venison. If you think you are telling me anything I dont already know you are badly mistaken.
Now, you think you can process an animal larger than an elephant like it was a white-tail? Really? I'd love to see how you think you are going to get it off the ground. And in those days there were plenty of other predators and scavengers out there. Leave that meat laying on the ground and every other meat eater in the area will be on it in a blink. You think you are going to come back in 7-10 days and find anything edible left? Wrong.
All you could do was work fast to remove the best cuts quickly, before the wolves, tigers, and bears showed up and started eating. And bad luck for you if you get in their way. Remember, you dont have a gun, you dont even have a bow and arrow. Stone-tipped spears, that's it. Against a pack of dire-wolves? A giant cave bear? A sabre-tooth tiger? Yeah, right, have fun with that.
And that's assuming you could kill the thing in the first place. Barring very extraordinary circumstance your attempt would only get you killed anyway. You would be a total idiot to even try it when there were so many other much more practical types of game available in abundance.
It's hilarious how many people cling to this myth against all logic and evidence though.
Yeah, really. Again, traps are not effective tactics on elephants! Building a simple pit trap may only take a few hours for someone that's practiced at doing so, but it just isnt likely at all to trap an elephant, no matter how it's constructed and camoflaged. These things are not normally sized anything like large enough for a mammoth anyway, and you arent going to bother sizing the thing up for a creature that is never going to fall for it.
The largest creatures that were 'hunted' were the giant Bison, and they were driven off cliffs. Elephants dont drive like that.
Plus, let's say you manage to pull it off anyway. Great, you have a ton of meat. Enough to feed you all year. But you cant just throw it in the freezer, you know. Yes, humans could have had some primitive methods of preservation (though that is pure speculation without evidence,) but these would still be extremely labour intensive and require that the kill be dressed and processed quite quickly, before it went bad.
What portion of that ton of meat do you think you are actually going to be able to slice off and preserve before it goes rotten? It will be a very small proportion. Even very late period hunter gatherers who were capable of quite sophisticated preservation techniques never used them all that much. A typical case would be the Idaho salmon runs, where it was long expected that the gross oversupply of fish meant a lot of smoking or salting went on. Guess what? When you dig up the sites where the fish were harvested, there is no sign of that. They had a much quicker and easier (if less efficient, but when the meat is over-abundant that isnt such a concern) method of storing the nutrition. They fed the fish to their dogs, and then when they got hungry during wintertime they ate the dogs.
When the pygmys killed african elephants (much smaller than mammoths) you would see multiple bands converge and 30 or 40 people slicing off hunks of meat, everyone taking as much as they could possibly handle, yet even more would be left behind.
Running a herd of bison off a cliff produces an even greater surplus of meat, with far less work, and far less danger. Hunting smaller game could easily satisfy their need for meat, with probably only a slightly lower investment/return ratio, and is still less dangerous. A hunter who would avoid those easy and very effective ways of bringing home the meat, and decided to go after mammoth instead, would almost certainly be an ex-hunter very soon. And there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that anyone ever did that.
The standard hunting technique for big game appears to have been to trigger a stampede off a cliff.
You are correct, that was the usual and effective method. You are incorrect to assume that it would work on mammoths. There is no evidence it did, and attempts to use this method on surviving near relatives of the mammoths (elephants) dont work and tend to backfire spectacularly. Elephants are not bovines, they are much smarter, and rather than running over the cliff they will turn around and stomp the humans.
Generally speaking, the assumption is that mammoths were hunted by luring them into pit traps.
But again the known elephant intelligence level makes this an unlikely hypothesis at best. Elephants are extremely hard to trap. The amount of energy one would have to expend, on average, to bring down a mammoth in this way just wouldnt make sense - particularly not when there was an abundance of other game that would have been so much easier to take using that method or others.
Again, I am not ruling out that a very young or old, or sick or wounded or otherwise disoriented mammoth might have occasionally have stumbled into a pit trap intended for another animal, but subsistence strategies are not built around such long-shots. Subsistence hunters consistently execute strategies that make sense in terms of calories out vs calories in while minimising the risk of injury to the hunter (important today, imagine how much more important with no doctors and no medicine so that even minor wounds could easily result in death!) which is why we have survived as a species.
Also, mammoths - if they are like elephants in that respect - are not purely social animals. Females herd together, but males often wander alone.
Sure, you have a few wandering bulls that arent accepted in the herd. Attacking a young healthy male would be far more dangerous than it could possibly be worth. Attacking an old bull on his last legs? Still quite dangerous, but more feasible at least, particularly as that animal might be more susceptible to some form of trapping. But again, that would have been an occasional opportunistic score, not a subsistence strategy. You wouldnt go out in the morning thinking "hey, I know what, let's go comb the forest and try to find an old half-dead bull mammoth for meat. There's got to be a fair chance that there is one wandering around out there somewhere today," That's just not a sensible strategy. What you would do instead is go out to hunt deer or bison or whatever was typically abundant and easily harvested in the area, and then maybe one day you just happen to come across that old lame bull in dire straits, stumbled into a pit or whatever, and you take that one individual because it happens to be right there so why not.
Look people like the image of the stone-age human hunter taking the huge bull mammoth down with a spear, perhaps working in groups... it's a very popular image for that reason. But it's utter nonsense. There's no hard evidence mammoths were ever hunted by humans. There is some evidence that mammoth meat was consumed by humans, which is often conflated, but scavenging food isnt the same thing as hunting. There is even some evidence that mammoths may occasionally have been killed by humans - but it was more likely an opportunistic event than a planned hunt. A small, young mammoth that happened to get cut off from its group? An isolated individual that got stuck in a bog? Sure, some of that would have happened, and humans would certainly seize the opportunity, but that's a far cry from actually going out to hunt healthy, full-grown mammoths with a stone spear.
Wooly mammoths were quite a bit larger and more dangerous than todays African elephant. And we have one and only one known case of a human group hunting African elephants without firearms. Pygmy hunters in central africa do it and have apparently done it for centuries. BUT they dont do it with stone spears - they use bows and arrows coated with a potent poison. And even so, they often lose hunters. For even a large group of humans armed with Clovis technology to attack a full grown african elephant, let alone a mammoth, would be suicidally foolish.
Elephants arent just HUGE animals, they are also quite intelligent. They are also social animals and move in groups. Another large (though much smaller) animal that also moves in groups and certainly WAS hunted at the time is the bison - but not only are even the extinct, gigantic species of bison still much smaller than a mammoth, there is a huge difference in their group behaviour. Bison are much more cow-like, and can be stampeded easily. And THIS is how they were actually hunted - whole herds were stampeded into fatal falls, then the humans went in to salvage meat and other material from the corpses afterwards. This is a much smarter tactic than trying to take one down with a spear (though also extraordinarily wasteful,) and in fact we know that is exactly how our ancestors did it. But that tactic just doesnt work on elephants.
So, no, mammoth extinction did not come at the tip of a spear. If human action helped to bring about mammoth extinction, it was not in such a direct fashion.
What? The IPCC was just collecting already published data, there was no 'new' studies done.
That's a very weak dodge. Metaresearch doesnt get some magical exemption from scientific procedure. Whether you are going out and collecting raw data to start with, or importing the results of a dozen earlier studies and going from there, all information necessary to replicate your results must be made openly available for replication or else you simply are not doing science.
A little to the north Sweden has been doing the same thing. Old nuclear power plants get shuttered, new ones cannot be built... but the Finns are happily keeping theirs running and selling the excess electricity to make up the shortfall.
That's an interesting response. Pretty much the exact opposite of my own. Frankly I am impressed that Greenpeace actually managed to do something vaguely positive. First time for everything I guess.
And no, I am not anti-nuclear, quite the opposite. But obviously security at this installation needs some attention, and it sounds like they brought attention to that fact without doing any damage. Compared to their usual activities, this was a real good deed.
Firefox's new versioning scheme wouldn't be a problem at all if they had a stable API that didn't break a user's extensions on each update
That aggravates the situation, but no, the insane (aka 'liar') new versioning along with all the effort obviously put into 'fixing' parts of the UI that wasnt broken (but are now after the 'fix'ing) rather than doing something productive would still be a problem even without that.
And this wont stop as long as most people are stupid enough to accept browsers that will just run whatever random script some random website hands them. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem in that way. If the major browsers would behave sanely, these insanely bad web practices wouldnt work, and the insanely bad 'web designers' that come up with them would have to learn to write real web pages or find another line of work. As is, too many people dont know and dont want to know, and we all pay the price in one way or another.
I'll keep my noscript and be happy that broken pages actually display as broken for me, so I know to avoid them, rather than having my browser just randomly download and execute whatever crap codes the broken web page needs to make it look like something else.
Okay, so they were selling and profiting off of someone else's IP. Doesn't matter who they were "marketing" it to, if the copyright violation crosses into the jurisdiction of the US government then of course they will act.
On the surface that seems like a reasonable argument. However it ignores the fundamental principles our justice system is founded upon, on several points. We supposedly believe in innocent until proven guilty, and due process of law, for example. Yet these actions are being taken without a trial. Furthermore, the offenses you mention are not criminal offenses, but civil offenses, which in our system of justice are supposed to be handled in a very different way from this.
Without in any way defending the sites in question, the actions being taken by ICE in this case do not seem at all consistent with the principles of american justice.
By the letter of the law this is not true. The fifth amendment, for example, begins "No person shall be held to answer..." NOT 'no citizen.'
The founders made clear their belief in *human rights* which emanate from natural law and are common to all people, given by our creator and common to all human beings regardless of nationality.
However unfortunately we have been doing a very poor job of living up to the ideals of the founders or even the letter of our own laws, so what you say seems to be defacto correct.
Hello, I dont know what planet you are on, but here on planet earth the US has been threatening Iran regularly for many years. Both with words, and with acts (of war) as well. This goes back at least to 1953, when the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran and installed the Shah. In 1979 they overthrew this dictator and the US has been both threatening them and committing acts of war against them constantly ever since. During the 80s we encouraged and supported Saddam Hussein in his brutal war against Iran. In 1987, and again in '88, the US launched direct attacks on Iran, sinking naval vessels and destroying infrastructure. Also in '88, the US shot down a civilian Iranian airliner killing nearly 300 civilians. The US has never apologised for this attack.
In the early 90s it looked like relations might finally be normalised, but in '95 sanctions were imposed by the US and relations quickly and predictably deteriorated as a result. By 2002 we have GW Bush publicly labelling Iran part of the 'axis of evil' and threatening them very publicly. Since 2003 the US government has acknowledged that it routinely violates Iranian airspace with surveillance flights, and also that it is engaged in covert operations inside Iran, primarily to encourage and support separatist groups. Even as recently as earlier in the week, Obama administration officials have not only continued Bush's policies in this regard, but also his bellicose talk. Each administration in turn has made it a point to announce that they would not rule out a nuclear first strike against non-nuclear Iran!
So it's really laughable ignorance, at best, for you to claim the US never threatened Iran. If you are looking for bias you need to go find a mirror rather than trying to project it on me.
So far as whether they actually captured a drone as they say, on that and that alone you are correct. They are perfectly capable of fabricating the incident. But given that the US has admitted to running just the kind of operation they claim to have intercepted, and running them regularly since 2003 at least, the claim is hardly an incredible one. Regardless of the truth about this incident, we know the US regularly invades their airspace in this manner because the US government has admitted the fact.
Iran is the one developing nuclear weapons in the neighborhood garage, against international laws, verified by international committees, and subject to international sanctions. That makes Iran the bad guy, not the international community for doing something about it.
Actually Iran has signed the NPT and been verified in compliance with that treaty over and over again. Even the latest IAEA report continues to show them in compliance with their NPT obligations. They have no bomb, they have diverted no uranium, and the very worst accusation that has any credible evidence behind it is that they may be interested in developing the necessary technology so that they *could*, should they decide to do so later, develop a nuclear bomb relatively quickly. This ' break-out capability' is something that many other nations have and have had for years - Japan for instance reached this point many years ago, and should they ever decide to develop the bomb they could do it quickly. There is no obligation in international law or treaty for Iran to refrain from this, it is not in violation of the NPT, and many other countries have the same capability without anyone making an issue of it.
Iran signed the NPT as a non-nuclear power and has so far complied with it. They are regularly inspected and the inspectors have always found them in compliance, even in recent years after those inspectors have been thoroughly politicised and clearly aimed at finding the opposite. By comparison, the US signed the NPT as a nuclear power, which exempts it from those intrusive inspections (which we know the US government would never allow.) The obligations of a nuclear power under the NPT however are clear and the US is in constant violation, both in failing to pursue nuclear disarmament and in blatantly co-operating with nations that have not acceded to the NPT in their pursuit of nuclear weapons. Both Israel and India are non-NPT powers that have developed nuclear weapons with US assistance in blatant violation of the US obligations under the NPT. So the fact is that Iran has been playing by the rules and getting punished for it, while they watched their potentially hostile neighbors developing nuclear weapons in open defiance of those rules and being rewarded for it. Under the circumstances it doesnt seem possible for any fair-minded observer to conclude that the primary problem here is on their end.
I dont like the mullahs anymore than anyone else, but blatant war propaganda is still blatant war propaganda and fair is still fair. This dishonest demonisation of Iran and blatantly dishonest and unfair dealing with them doesnt harm the mullahs - in fact it helps them. The Iranian democratic opposition groups who the US claims to support are weakened with every rattle of the sabre. Threats of war, particularly ones based on such blatant dishonesty and double standards as are on display in this case, simply help unite the populace behind their current rulers and work to prevent democratic revolution in Iran, the only long-term solution to the problem of the mullahs.
Plus, history suggests that the end of alcohol prohibition didn't make whisky production stop, so there's a fairly good reason to believe that there's still big money to made.
See here's the thing. Whiskey production certainly continues - but the mob doesnt control it anymore.
The LAST thing a drug cartel wants to see is an end to prohibition. Legalising their products would simply open them up to legitimate competitors and bring the prices (and thus the profit margins) way down.
In fact the cartels have quite a bit of influence with various officials at all levels in Mexico, but the last thing they would use this influence for would be legalisation. Instead they are used to direct law enforcement against their competitors and away from themselves, to reÃnforce their monopoly position and keep raking in the profits.
Gnome 1 had potential. Gnome 2 should have been a warning though - it still might have been usable for a lot of people but the overbearing nanny attitude came through real clear in, for instance, how they not only removed the option for unix keybindings from the GUI, but actually went to the extent of deliberately sabotaging things at a deeper level so that it could not even be restored with gconf or the like.
Aside from briefly installing it, taking a look, laughing heartily, and then deleting the thing, I havent used GNOME since that day. But I sure do find it amusing, the constant string of articles and upset users they are producing by continuing doggedly on that same idiotic path that was set years back. Frankly, expecting GNOME to do anything else is insanity at this point. That project is so thoroughly rotten it would probably be impossible for them ever to produce something worth using again.
"Pretty tame as DRM goes" is a very odd sort of apology for it. Frankly, DRM is DRM. I dont mind pay $60 for a good game, but if it comes with DRM you couldnt pay me to install it.
Slashdot Mirror
I live 30 miles from the nearest small town, I grew up here, and I eat a lot of venison. If you think you are telling me anything I dont already know you are badly mistaken.
Now, you think you can process an animal larger than an elephant like it was a white-tail? Really? I'd love to see how you think you are going to get it off the ground. And in those days there were plenty of other predators and scavengers out there. Leave that meat laying on the ground and every other meat eater in the area will be on it in a blink. You think you are going to come back in 7-10 days and find anything edible left? Wrong.
All you could do was work fast to remove the best cuts quickly, before the wolves, tigers, and bears showed up and started eating. And bad luck for you if you get in their way. Remember, you dont have a gun, you dont even have a bow and arrow. Stone-tipped spears, that's it. Against a pack of dire-wolves? A giant cave bear? A sabre-tooth tiger? Yeah, right, have fun with that.
And that's assuming you could kill the thing in the first place. Barring very extraordinary circumstance your attempt would only get you killed anyway. You would be a total idiot to even try it when there were so many other much more practical types of game available in abundance.
It's hilarious how many people cling to this myth against all logic and evidence though.
Yeah, really. Again, traps are not effective tactics on elephants! Building a simple pit trap may only take a few hours for someone that's practiced at doing so, but it just isnt likely at all to trap an elephant, no matter how it's constructed and camoflaged. These things are not normally sized anything like large enough for a mammoth anyway, and you arent going to bother sizing the thing up for a creature that is never going to fall for it.
The largest creatures that were 'hunted' were the giant Bison, and they were driven off cliffs. Elephants dont drive like that.
Plus, let's say you manage to pull it off anyway. Great, you have a ton of meat. Enough to feed you all year. But you cant just throw it in the freezer, you know. Yes, humans could have had some primitive methods of preservation (though that is pure speculation without evidence,) but these would still be extremely labour intensive and require that the kill be dressed and processed quite quickly, before it went bad.
What portion of that ton of meat do you think you are actually going to be able to slice off and preserve before it goes rotten? It will be a very small proportion. Even very late period hunter gatherers who were capable of quite sophisticated preservation techniques never used them all that much. A typical case would be the Idaho salmon runs, where it was long expected that the gross oversupply of fish meant a lot of smoking or salting went on. Guess what? When you dig up the sites where the fish were harvested, there is no sign of that. They had a much quicker and easier (if less efficient, but when the meat is over-abundant that isnt such a concern) method of storing the nutrition. They fed the fish to their dogs, and then when they got hungry during wintertime they ate the dogs.
When the pygmys killed african elephants (much smaller than mammoths) you would see multiple bands converge and 30 or 40 people slicing off hunks of meat, everyone taking as much as they could possibly handle, yet even more would be left behind.
Running a herd of bison off a cliff produces an even greater surplus of meat, with far less work, and far less danger. Hunting smaller game could easily satisfy their need for meat, with probably only a slightly lower investment/return ratio, and is still less dangerous. A hunter who would avoid those easy and very effective ways of bringing home the meat, and decided to go after mammoth instead, would almost certainly be an ex-hunter very soon. And there is no evidence whatsoever to indicate that anyone ever did that.
You are correct, that was the usual and effective method. You are incorrect to assume that it would work on mammoths. There is no evidence it did, and attempts to use this method on surviving near relatives of the mammoths (elephants) dont work and tend to backfire spectacularly. Elephants are not bovines, they are much smarter, and rather than running over the cliff they will turn around and stomp the humans.
But again the known elephant intelligence level makes this an unlikely hypothesis at best. Elephants are extremely hard to trap. The amount of energy one would have to expend, on average, to bring down a mammoth in this way just wouldnt make sense - particularly not when there was an abundance of other game that would have been so much easier to take using that method or others.
Again, I am not ruling out that a very young or old, or sick or wounded or otherwise disoriented mammoth might have occasionally have stumbled into a pit trap intended for another animal, but subsistence strategies are not built around such long-shots. Subsistence hunters consistently execute strategies that make sense in terms of calories out vs calories in while minimising the risk of injury to the hunter (important today, imagine how much more important with no doctors and no medicine so that even minor wounds could easily result in death!) which is why we have survived as a species.
Sure, you have a few wandering bulls that arent accepted in the herd. Attacking a young healthy male would be far more dangerous than it could possibly be worth. Attacking an old bull on his last legs? Still quite dangerous, but more feasible at least, particularly as that animal might be more susceptible to some form of trapping. But again, that would have been an occasional opportunistic score, not a subsistence strategy. You wouldnt go out in the morning thinking "hey, I know what, let's go comb the forest and try to find an old half-dead bull mammoth for meat. There's got to be a fair chance that there is one wandering around out there somewhere today," That's just not a sensible strategy. What you would do instead is go out to hunt deer or bison or whatever was typically abundant and easily harvested in the area, and then maybe one day you just happen to come across that old lame bull in dire straits, stumbled into a pit or whatever, and you take that one individual because it happens to be right there so why not.
Uh, no.
Look people like the image of the stone-age human hunter taking the huge bull mammoth down with a spear, perhaps working in groups... it's a very popular image for that reason. But it's utter nonsense. There's no hard evidence mammoths were ever hunted by humans. There is some evidence that mammoth meat was consumed by humans, which is often conflated, but scavenging food isnt the same thing as hunting. There is even some evidence that mammoths may occasionally have been killed by humans - but it was more likely an opportunistic event than a planned hunt. A small, young mammoth that happened to get cut off from its group? An isolated individual that got stuck in a bog? Sure, some of that would have happened, and humans would certainly seize the opportunity, but that's a far cry from actually going out to hunt healthy, full-grown mammoths with a stone spear.
Wooly mammoths were quite a bit larger and more dangerous than todays African elephant. And we have one and only one known case of a human group hunting African elephants without firearms. Pygmy hunters in central africa do it and have apparently done it for centuries. BUT they dont do it with stone spears - they use bows and arrows coated with a potent poison. And even so, they often lose hunters. For even a large group of humans armed with Clovis technology to attack a full grown african elephant, let alone a mammoth, would be suicidally foolish.
Elephants arent just HUGE animals, they are also quite intelligent. They are also social animals and move in groups. Another large (though much smaller) animal that also moves in groups and certainly WAS hunted at the time is the bison - but not only are even the extinct, gigantic species of bison still much smaller than a mammoth, there is a huge difference in their group behaviour. Bison are much more cow-like, and can be stampeded easily. And THIS is how they were actually hunted - whole herds were stampeded into fatal falls, then the humans went in to salvage meat and other material from the corpses afterwards. This is a much smarter tactic than trying to take one down with a spear (though also extraordinarily wasteful,) and in fact we know that is exactly how our ancestors did it. But that tactic just doesnt work on elephants.
So, no, mammoth extinction did not come at the tip of a spear. If human action helped to bring about mammoth extinction, it was not in such a direct fashion.
Sounds like this guy has been reading a little classic from the good Dr. Szasz.
That's a very weak dodge. Metaresearch doesnt get some magical exemption from scientific procedure. Whether you are going out and collecting raw data to start with, or importing the results of a dozen earlier studies and going from there, all information necessary to replicate your results must be made openly available for replication or else you simply are not doing science.
A little to the north Sweden has been doing the same thing. Old nuclear power plants get shuttered, new ones cannot be built... but the Finns are happily keeping theirs running and selling the excess electricity to make up the shortfall.
That's an interesting response. Pretty much the exact opposite of my own. Frankly I am impressed that Greenpeace actually managed to do something vaguely positive. First time for everything I guess.
And no, I am not anti-nuclear, quite the opposite. But obviously security at this installation needs some attention, and it sounds like they brought attention to that fact without doing any damage. Compared to their usual activities, this was a real good deed.
If your definition of the web includes a requirement that the user execute arbitrary code from arbitrary sources then I am not interested in your web.
That aggravates the situation, but no, the insane (aka 'liar') new versioning along with all the effort obviously put into 'fixing' parts of the UI that wasnt broken (but are now after the 'fix'ing) rather than doing something productive would still be a problem even without that.
Without NoScript who cares? It isnt a functional browser.
And there is, finally, a workaround-almost-but-not-really-noscript extension for Chrome. It isnt good enough.
And this wont stop as long as most people are stupid enough to accept browsers that will just run whatever random script some random website hands them. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a chicken and egg problem in that way. If the major browsers would behave sanely, these insanely bad web practices wouldnt work, and the insanely bad 'web designers' that come up with them would have to learn to write real web pages or find another line of work. As is, too many people dont know and dont want to know, and we all pay the price in one way or another.
I'll keep my noscript and be happy that broken pages actually display as broken for me, so I know to avoid them, rather than having my browser just randomly download and execute whatever crap codes the broken web page needs to make it look like something else.
Your rant would make some sense were it targetted at a country that actually has a nuclear arsenal. There are many of these. Iran is not one of them.
An interesting point, but the Islamic Republic of Iran has explicitly accepted the treaty anyway which renders the point somewhat moot.
On the surface that seems like a reasonable argument. However it ignores the fundamental principles our justice system is founded upon, on several points. We supposedly believe in innocent until proven guilty, and due process of law, for example. Yet these actions are being taken without a trial. Furthermore, the offenses you mention are not criminal offenses, but civil offenses, which in our system of justice are supposed to be handled in a very different way from this.
Without in any way defending the sites in question, the actions being taken by ICE in this case do not seem at all consistent with the principles of american justice.
By the letter of the law this is not true. The fifth amendment, for example, begins "No person shall be held to answer..." NOT 'no citizen.'
The founders made clear their belief in *human rights* which emanate from natural law and are common to all people, given by our creator and common to all human beings regardless of nationality.
However unfortunately we have been doing a very poor job of living up to the ideals of the founders or even the letter of our own laws, so what you say seems to be defacto correct.
Hello, I dont know what planet you are on, but here on planet earth the US has been threatening Iran regularly for many years. Both with words, and with acts (of war) as well. This goes back at least to 1953, when the CIA overthrew the democratically elected government of Iran and installed the Shah. In 1979 they overthrew this dictator and the US has been both threatening them and committing acts of war against them constantly ever since. During the 80s we encouraged and supported Saddam Hussein in his brutal war against Iran. In 1987, and again in '88, the US launched direct attacks on Iran, sinking naval vessels and destroying infrastructure. Also in '88, the US shot down a civilian Iranian airliner killing nearly 300 civilians. The US has never apologised for this attack.
In the early 90s it looked like relations might finally be normalised, but in '95 sanctions were imposed by the US and relations quickly and predictably deteriorated as a result. By 2002 we have GW Bush publicly labelling Iran part of the 'axis of evil' and threatening them very publicly. Since 2003 the US government has acknowledged that it routinely violates Iranian airspace with surveillance flights, and also that it is engaged in covert operations inside Iran, primarily to encourage and support separatist groups. Even as recently as earlier in the week, Obama administration officials have not only continued Bush's policies in this regard, but also his bellicose talk. Each administration in turn has made it a point to announce that they would not rule out a nuclear first strike against non-nuclear Iran!
So it's really laughable ignorance, at best, for you to claim the US never threatened Iran. If you are looking for bias you need to go find a mirror rather than trying to project it on me.
So far as whether they actually captured a drone as they say, on that and that alone you are correct. They are perfectly capable of fabricating the incident. But given that the US has admitted to running just the kind of operation they claim to have intercepted, and running them regularly since 2003 at least, the claim is hardly an incredible one. Regardless of the truth about this incident, we know the US regularly invades their airspace in this manner because the US government has admitted the fact.
And? That in no way contradicts anything I wrote in the post you were replying to.
Do you have any doubt that if the US were to shoot down a Chinese drone in US territory the US would be saying the same thing?
Actually Iran has signed the NPT and been verified in compliance with that treaty over and over again. Even the latest IAEA report continues to show them in compliance with their NPT obligations. They have no bomb, they have diverted no uranium, and the very worst accusation that has any credible evidence behind it is that they may be interested in developing the necessary technology so that they *could*, should they decide to do so later, develop a nuclear bomb relatively quickly. This ' break-out capability' is something that many other nations have and have had for years - Japan for instance reached this point many years ago, and should they ever decide to develop the bomb they could do it quickly. There is no obligation in international law or treaty for Iran to refrain from this, it is not in violation of the NPT, and many other countries have the same capability without anyone making an issue of it.
Iran signed the NPT as a non-nuclear power and has so far complied with it. They are regularly inspected and the inspectors have always found them in compliance, even in recent years after those inspectors have been thoroughly politicised and clearly aimed at finding the opposite. By comparison, the US signed the NPT as a nuclear power, which exempts it from those intrusive inspections (which we know the US government would never allow.) The obligations of a nuclear power under the NPT however are clear and the US is in constant violation, both in failing to pursue nuclear disarmament and in blatantly co-operating with nations that have not acceded to the NPT in their pursuit of nuclear weapons. Both Israel and India are non-NPT powers that have developed nuclear weapons with US assistance in blatant violation of the US obligations under the NPT. So the fact is that Iran has been playing by the rules and getting punished for it, while they watched their potentially hostile neighbors developing nuclear weapons in open defiance of those rules and being rewarded for it. Under the circumstances it doesnt seem possible for any fair-minded observer to conclude that the primary problem here is on their end.
I dont like the mullahs anymore than anyone else, but blatant war propaganda is still blatant war propaganda and fair is still fair. This dishonest demonisation of Iran and blatantly dishonest and unfair dealing with them doesnt harm the mullahs - in fact it helps them. The Iranian democratic opposition groups who the US claims to support are weakened with every rattle of the sabre. Threats of war, particularly ones based on such blatant dishonesty and double standards as are on display in this case, simply help unite the populace behind their current rulers and work to prevent democratic revolution in Iran, the only long-term solution to the problem of the mullahs.
See here's the thing. Whiskey production certainly continues - but the mob doesnt control it anymore.
The LAST thing a drug cartel wants to see is an end to prohibition. Legalising their products would simply open them up to legitimate competitors and bring the prices (and thus the profit margins) way down.
In fact the cartels have quite a bit of influence with various officials at all levels in Mexico, but the last thing they would use this influence for would be legalisation. Instead they are used to direct law enforcement against their competitors and away from themselves, to reÃnforce their monopoly position and keep raking in the profits.
No, actually, that does NOT restore the v1.0 keybindings. It restores a limited subset of them, it's not the same thing.
Gnome 1 had potential. Gnome 2 should have been a warning though - it still might have been usable for a lot of people but the overbearing nanny attitude came through real clear in, for instance, how they not only removed the option for unix keybindings from the GUI, but actually went to the extent of deliberately sabotaging things at a deeper level so that it could not even be restored with gconf or the like.
Aside from briefly installing it, taking a look, laughing heartily, and then deleting the thing, I havent used GNOME since that day. But I sure do find it amusing, the constant string of articles and upset users they are producing by continuing doggedly on that same idiotic path that was set years back. Frankly, expecting GNOME to do anything else is insanity at this point. That project is so thoroughly rotten it would probably be impossible for them ever to produce something worth using again.
"Pretty tame as DRM goes" is a very odd sort of apology for it. Frankly, DRM is DRM. I dont mind pay $60 for a good game, but if it comes with DRM you couldnt pay me to install it.