You know... if you got the liver of a binge drinking college student, it would probably be pretty close to fois gras. I don't see that overpowering anything, it tastes like... butter.
I was amused that the one time I had it (which was recent), ws over a fancy diner with a bunch of doctors (it was me, a lawyer and like 4 MDs), one of them ordered some fois gras. Another commented "thats basically what your liver looks like after a few days of heavy drinking"....mmmm buttery liver.....
This is commonly my problem with the free market advocates.
The Free market would have most people working 16 hour days 7 days a week if it wasn't for the labor movement which resisted against the so called "free market". The free market will settle on whatever condition satisfies the people who have the most money. Whether it settles into a state that provides for the poor and distributes the benefits of society equitably, well thats outside the scope of the "free market", the "free market" doesn't really care about that any more than people are willing to "vote with their dollars". The thing is... its hard to actually vote with your dollars effectivly.
Sure YOU can, but look at whats involved to make people even take notice of issues that they might otherwise make decisions based on? Then what it takes to actually do it. Lets say proctor and gamble is a company whose buisness practices I deplore or really scrwed over some employees and makes me want to vote with my dollars.
How the FUCK am I supposed to do that? They own more brands than I can shake a stick at. Just trying to identify what products they are producing and selling is a full time job in and of itself, and not one I can easily do while I am perusing isles at the grocery store.
Overall, expecting the free market to fix an issue seems to be less effective than petitioning the government to do it. Its not that we can't vote with our dollars, or that it wouldn't be effective if we could... its that its almost impossible to read the ballot when every entry is a write in.
Right, and I am not saying otherwise. I genuinly think most restrictions that people try to put on one another are done with the absolute best of intentions. That doesn't make the restrictions smart or right however.
It has been said "if we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable" (Louis De Brandeis, don't ask for context, its a quote I found a while back). The way I look at that is, having the authority to make a law is fine, but when people feel they can get away with breaking it, there has to be something more there too it.
We have rules against murder, but the vast majority of people don't murder just because they are in a situation where they can get away with it... there is more to that rule than someone in authority saying "thou shall not".
So yah viewing porn on a desktop at work, most people wont do it even when they know they can get away with it, because they do understand the issues. However, can we really reasonably expect a person at home on a laptop to a) see the a problem and b) expect he could get caught either way?
My view is that when you make a rule that attempts to rule out what people see as reasonable activity, people will reasonably break it. Period. Thats it, its just human nature. This underminds the very authority itself. When authority is seen as unreasnoable, it gets ignored, thus the very power of authority is lessened by unreasonable and or unenforcable restrictions.
Its like the war on drugs. I often talk about some of the other aspects but, one of the reasons I do dislike it so much is that, I loved my country. I really had respect for the laws until I realised how unreasonable that was, how little sense those laws made, and i lost alot of respect for authority.
Yes, your comments are interesting and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter!
Seriously though...its one of those things thats soo funny because its true. However, thats also why its so sad.
I am not even terribly involved in any wikis... I just know human nature, and yes, people generally would much rather complain and raise flags than fix problems. I know because.. well.... me too motherfuckers!
It seems to me like the simplest fix is to give people headphones and design the work space so that a person walking by can't see everyones screen casually.
Problem solved. No need to lose employees (which studies show it costs about 150% of the positions annual salary on average to replace someone). Nobody needs to get offended either. Hows that for thinking outside the box?
he question wasn't "why shouldn't I do it" the question was "why is it bad in the first place"
This isn't a question of who has the right to put what restrictions on who...it was a question of why the restriction exists in the first place. I happen to wonder myself.
It seems, like many things, a bad attempt to fix a problem. Yes, its a problem if people, even on break, are viewing porn in the office. There are indeed issues in the workplace with it (why there are issues is another problem... personally it wouldn't offend me, and I think that people who are offended generally can learn to get over it and their attitude is actually the problem but whatcha gonna do?)
Anyway, they fixed the "problem" of complaints about peoeple viewing porn by oitlawing all porn on company machines. However... laptops? Much of the time I use my laptop is at home. Where is the harm in having downloaded some porn onto the laptop, and occasionally viewing it at home?
This is the issue here, a laptop with porn on it. Its not like we are talking abotu a desktop here.
The company may be right, but it sounds to me like they are petty and silly. It may be their right to be petty and silly, but that doesn't suddenly make it mature and reasoned.
I am a gnome user, never could get into KDE but... um...
Maybe this is weird, I am told I am crazy. However, I really thought CDE was slick. I figured that would apply to KDE too but, for some reason, it just never did it for me.
I don't know about 2k clone. Though, I never used 2k, XP is the first windows I have used since 95, and even then all I did was play games with XP.
However, fish is part of our diet. Its not something i really eat alot of, so usually I like it to be a treat, something I like alot. Like tuna. There are a number of species that I would just hate to see go.
Giant squid, whales, sharks... I can take or leave. Even dolphins. However, if we can keep tuna around, I think we should. Salmon I like. Cod can go, bass I can do without, not a big mackerel fan. Even halibut, can be dismissed. Swordfish though? Tuna? Salmon? Pretty much the first panl of the neighborhood sushi restraunt order sheet.
You can only depopulate a species so much before their chances of survival as a speicies (even after you stop farming them) goes down. There has to be enough of them to create stable populations, find mates, and produce enough new young to continue the population.
Do we know how close any of these species tipping point towards extinction is to the price point where demand drops low enough for them to recover?
My guess is that would be a very hard question to answer. In the end, your right, it will all work itself out eventually with the collapse of the fishing industries. However, how far down the path will that be? As we go down that path, how do we effect the recovery time. Is it linear as long as we do nothing, or does a delay in action of 5 years mean 100 years of recovery?
I don't know the answers but, as you can see, this leaves me with some questions and a little trepidation to just say we need to leave it to market economics.
It would be a crying shame to loose some fish. I know I would miss them.
They did get what they wanted... they drew us out into a military conflict. Thats what they wanted, its far more "fun" for them to run an insurgency with daily planning and fighting. It play right into their recruitment strategy.
Certainly we tuned it into a win for ourselves by rolling them back there. However, the initial move was exactly what they were hoping for. In either case, its an example of their strategy working (that is, costing us). Its a classic battle of attrition fought with not quite so classical means.
Whats really funny is, I can't even tell what conservative means anymore, except that its what republicans like to call themselves. In fact, both conservative and liberal have completly lost their meaning.
Lets see if I can remember how it goes. The Libertarians are the classic liberals. The modern liberals, are the defacto conservatives. The conservatives aren't at all conservative. The neocons are liberals with a socialist background who decided they wanted to call themselves conservative.
Personally... I am about as left wing liberal as they come. However, I have no problem with the old conservatives. I mean shit, the venerable Goldwater critized the exclusion of gays from the ilitary saying "Everyone knows that gays have served honorably in the military since at least the time of Julius Caesar.". William F Buckley Jr wrote an article on why marijuana should be legalized!
Put that in a current day conservative pipe and smoke it!
People generally don't like to think about that though. It really takes alot of the bite out of terrorist attacks when you put your head into the mindset of the terrorist and try to see why he does what he does and how he chooses his targets. Look at his goals.
People seem to like to just throw up their hands, and call them "crazy". Afterall, if they are crazy, you can't understand them, they don't make sense, its the only explaination!
In reality though, its very simple. Imagine that you are just you, and you have an enemy, and enemy who is out to get you, an enemy that you feel is threatening your very way of life and the way of life of others. Now imagine that enemy is the United States, a big powerful government with a big powerful army.
You can't hope to engage them on a level playing field and win. So, how do you fight them?
Never mind whether we deserve to be fought or why. None of that matters. In their mind, the decision of who the enemy is is made. The decision to fight is made. What follows naturally from there is pretty much exactly what they do.
You hide, you work in shadowy networks. You utilise your advantages, you are small, you can hide amongst people similar both ethnically, culturally, and who share some amount of your ideology, or at least who see a common enemy.
Then you strike. What is the goal of your strike? To attack their weaknesses. Terrorism is like jujutsu. Its not about delivering a killing strike to an enemy. Its about redirecting the enemies energy. Its about throwing him off balance, its about using his own attacks and counter attacks against him.
Shit, any geek with some time on his hands could devise a pretty damned effective terrorist campaign. A bomb here, a shooting there. Its cheap, but effective. Look at it this way...
You spend a hundred bucks and a few weeks time building a bomb. You plan a place to put it where it will hit lots of people.... maybe make two or three bombs and target the rescue squad too.
You choose the time to strike. You choose what statement you release. If you re careful, you probably even get away with it the first time (and maybe you get away with it for a long time if you are lucky and good).
Then, as we have proved over and over, the government will play right into you rhand. You blow up a few 10s of people. Probably all told in terms of financial impact (hate to look at it that way) a couple o fmillion dollars in terms of lost wages to families, medical bills, property damage.
Then entire police forces, FBI etc are mobilised. They will spend millions more looking for you. You just hit the local town, state, federal gov, and private individuals for a collective total of probably a couple of 10s of millions of dollars.... all for under $100 and a few weeks of work.
Thats the model, scale it up, scale it down. Do one big one, or a few little ones. They will be spending money looking to solve the case for years to come. People may even lose some of their civil liberties. They may lock down your target... but thats ok, you wont hit the same place or way again anyway.
Educating people as to how this works and finding ways to overcome peoples natural urges to give in to the tactic are the only ways to fight it. essentially, you can't fight terrorists by fighting them. You have to isolate them ideologially, you have to cut off their means of recruiting new people (same thing) and then, you find the individuals doing it.
What you don't do is send in the army to where you think their "base of operations" is. You don't topple regiemes. You don't take away civil liberties. Because as soon as you spent more money on fighting them than they spent hitting you.... they have already won.
I would say September 11th did so much damage it "paid for itself" the moment the planes hit in terms of damage. Since then it paid for itself over and over again.
They won the moment they hit. They won again the moment we invaded afghanistan. Th
Almost as brave as dropping bombs from the sky far above surface to air defenses on targets who have already had their air forces destroyed? Or maybe as brave as declaring war when neither you nor your family are in the military?
At least the guy who did this has to be worried about a large, well funded, high tech government using its resources to track him down and capture him. As someone who has onc or twice considered going into illicit buisness, I can tell you, it takes something more than the bravery I have to disregard that.
Then again, maybe he doesn't care. Its not really brave if you don't feel you have anything to lose.
I know this is a late reply but I don't disagree at all. You are right.
However, as I said, I hold our allies to higher standards than others. Someone has to break the cycle of violence and violence in response to violence and violence in response to violence in response to violence.
I don't care per se which side breaks the cycle, however I do believe that its far easier for the more powerful group to break the cycle. As I have said, both sides have acted poorly.
When a friend of mine acts poorly, I believe its the place of a friend to call him out on it, and to call him to be more of a man, even to be the better man than those who have treated him poorly.
I see this as no different. The US should be calling on Isreal to be the bigger country, to forget about who hit who and be the first to offer a hand in peace...and when that hand is batted away, to offer it again and again until they are tired of knocking it away and have no choice but to take it.
When our good friend is acting like a man, then we may turn our attention to the children who will not accept that peace. However, not before.
I note that, as I said, Armenians and Arabs are both listed as semitic peoples.
> So, are you really joining those who are saying that the actual numbers (around 6 million) are not real? That fits on > with how you ignore facts when you don't like them. If you really want to help your case, you should learn what really > happened and what words really mean.
don't remember if I answered this seprately. No. I am not saying the numbers arn't real, just that I tend to be skeptical of everybody and I firmly believe in the law of fives and that people tend to bias their facts from their own viewpoint.
I would love to believe that there is a group of people thats always objective and honest. I don't believe any group, not even jews, is that perfect. Sorry.
I was a scout for about 3 weeks... and that was about 8-10 years before that kid who was the center of some controversy for not allowing him in because he didn't believe in god and wouldn't say the oath.
I thought it was amusing because I was an atheist when I joined, and seem to remember having mentioned similar reservations to my scout master, who didn't seem to feel the need to make a big deal about it. Of course, between that incident and the not allowing gay scouts controversies, I have pretty much lost most of the respect that I had for the organization.
Far too pro-nationalist for my taste anyway. Though I was young enough when I joined that I didn't even have a concept of what that meant:)
Just a note... I know the collequial (sp?) meaning of antisocial is similar to "shy" or "bad with people"
however... its not really what it means. Anti-social litterally means "against society" and refers to a person who is a sociopath, or could be said to "not have a conscience". You know, the people who scam people and say that their victems deserved to be scamed because they were dumb enough to fall for it.
Often they can, in fact, be quite charming and confident people.
Yah, except,.... I am not aware of any legal right they have to make those restrictions.
copyright gives them the right to say who may and may not make copies. I have yet to see any law (and please, correct me if I am wrong) that gives them the authority to say what you can do, other than distributing copies, with the software. Its also well established that distribution of a legal copy of a copyrighted work is legal. That is, no book publisher can actually stop me from turning around and giving away or selling a copy of a book that I got legally from them.
I guess you could make the case that laws exist preventing you from dissassembling and "breaking a copy protection scheme". However, thats another beast entirely.
I could be wrong but... thats my take.
Overall though, they are just non-rewritable CDs with no data on them of any value. I would just toss them in the trash or look into recycling.
A) A person can be anti-isreal (or dare I say, anti-zionist) without being anti-semitic (i happen to be anti-any-movement-that-claims-the-right-to-anythin g-based-on-some-dieties-word) B) Even for a jew hater, anti-semetic is the wrong term as alot of jews arn't semitic anymore, and on top of that, arabs and armenians are indeed semitic (yes, I know this is a semantics argument) C) Believing a different story of events does not equal hating a people. Reasonable people can disagree on detail and usually both sides of most arguments tend to be wrong in some sense. I have no doubt that both the holocaust rememberers inflate the figures to make it seem worst (or selectivly ignore the other groups who were victems) just as frequently as the deniers conflate the figures to make it seem less bad.
If you really want to help your cause, maybe you should try answering points with facts and trying to engage in useful debate, rather than just attaching a slur (yes anti-semite is as much a slur as kike) to a person and berating them for it.
Alot of times when I discuss this stuff, people tend to label me as Anti-Isreal, and in a real way I would even label myself as Anti-Zionist. I like jews, some of my best friends, but... this idea of some fixed homeland that they somehow need or were promised by god... seriously, get over it.
Anyway... thats neither here nor there. I tend to come off that way for a simple reason... I hold our allies to higher standards than our enemies. Honestly, I think both sides of the entire issue have dealt with it like a horde of 6 year olds. Its fine to talk about ideals and rights and claims to land, etc. However, this is the real world, we have to be pragmatists guided by ideal not the other way around.
The history here is interesting, but only the facts on the ground today are really relevant. The history is, in a way, a fact on the ground, but not the way that people try to use it. Everyone feels that they are right... so the history that "proves" that they are right is the least important history. Its the history that the "enemy" feels makes them right that is important... because of what it tells you about their psychology.
I honestly think that the most astute political figure of the last 100 years was Ghandi. If either side had the balls to really employ his tactics and strategy of nonviolence, they would quickly garner the worlds attention and become a political problem that would easily cause the other side much grief until they change their ways.
If every bombing in a tel aviv market was followed by food aide and investment in the economic development in palestine, or the bombings in tel aviv stopped and the Isrealis were faced with throngs of unarmed people marching without resistance at their checkpoints and accepting the violence of the isreali military.... the result would be apping the will to fight out of the other side, rather than reinforcing it.
In the end, history is nice for seeing where we are, but in the end, who cares what each side thinks they deserve?
The blurb on titan rain that you linked to was interesting. However, still just a claim of anonymous sources, with links to news articles that it calls "sensational" and "spotty". Still no detail like what you posted.
The official, who requested anonymity, said the attacks had originated from websites registered with Chinese Internet service providers.
Ok so another anonymous officual makes a claim. Now is this him making stuff up, doing a bad jib of dumbing it down for the reporter, or is this bad reporting? I think its bad reporting however you slice it, whether its false or just wrong is another story.
I mean, "attacks has originated from websites". Excuse me? Is that inaccurate or what? Actually tracing someone back to a physical keyboard is hard work. In truth, its not really possible to do with 100% accuracy, unless you follow all the way to the end and look in his window... but theres evidence (like you state, local tty logins) which is subtle enough and where a person would feel comfortable enough they might feel safe thinking that nobody will get that far down their trail, that I would say you have some measure of certainty.
Though, on top of that, the assumption of "at least tacit aproval" from the government. Maybe, maybe not. None of what I have heard so far demonstrates abilities beyond that of well, lots of people if they had the interest and motivation to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
You know... if you got the liver of a binge drinking college student, it would probably be pretty close to fois gras. I don't see that overpowering anything, it tastes like... butter.
....mmmm buttery liver.....
I was amused that the one time I had it (which was recent), ws over a fancy diner with a bunch of doctors (it was me, a lawyer and like 4 MDs), one of them ordered some fois gras. Another commented "thats basically what your liver looks like after a few days of heavy drinking"
-Steve
This is commonly my problem with the free market advocates.
The Free market would have most people working 16 hour days 7 days a week if it wasn't for the labor movement which resisted against the so called "free market". The free market will settle on whatever condition satisfies the people who have the most money. Whether it settles into a state that provides for the poor and distributes the benefits of society equitably, well thats outside the scope of the "free market", the "free market" doesn't really care about that any more than people are willing to "vote with their dollars". The thing is... its hard to actually vote with your dollars effectivly.
Sure YOU can, but look at whats involved to make people even take notice of issues that they might otherwise make decisions based on? Then what it takes to actually do it. Lets say proctor and gamble is a company whose buisness practices I deplore or really scrwed over some employees and makes me want to vote with my dollars.
How the FUCK am I supposed to do that? They own more brands than I can shake a stick at. Just trying to identify what products they are producing and selling is a full time job in and of itself, and not one I can easily do while I am perusing isles at the grocery store.
Overall, expecting the free market to fix an issue seems to be less effective than petitioning the government to do it. Its not that we can't vote with our dollars, or that it wouldn't be effective if we could... its that its almost impossible to read the ballot when every entry is a write in.
-Steve
Right, and I am not saying otherwise. I genuinly think most restrictions that people try to put on one another are done with the absolute best of intentions. That doesn't make the restrictions smart or right however.
It has been said "if we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable" (Louis De Brandeis, don't ask for context, its a quote I found a while back). The way I look at that is, having the authority to make a law is fine, but when people feel they can get away with breaking it, there has to be something more there too it.
We have rules against murder, but the vast majority of people don't murder just because they are in a situation where they can get away with it... there is more to that rule than someone in authority saying "thou shall not".
So yah viewing porn on a desktop at work, most people wont do it even when they know they can get away with it, because they do understand the issues. However, can we really reasonably expect a person at home on a laptop to a) see the a problem and b) expect he could get caught either way?
My view is that when you make a rule that attempts to rule out what people see as reasonable activity, people will reasonably break it. Period. Thats it, its just human nature. This underminds the very authority itself. When authority is seen as unreasnoable, it gets ignored, thus the very power of authority is lessened by unreasonable and or unenforcable restrictions.
Its like the war on drugs. I often talk about some of the other aspects but, one of the reasons I do dislike it so much is that, I loved my country. I really had respect for the laws until I realised how unreasonable that was, how little sense those laws made, and i lost alot of respect for authority.
-Steve
Yes, your comments are interesting and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter!
Seriously though...its one of those things thats soo funny because its true. However, thats also why its so sad.
I am not even terribly involved in any wikis... I just know human nature, and yes, people generally would much rather complain and raise flags than fix problems. I know because.. well.... me too motherfuckers!
-Steve
It seems to me like the simplest fix is to give people headphones and design the work space so that a person walking by can't see everyones screen casually.
Problem solved. No need to lose employees (which studies show it costs about 150% of the positions annual salary on average to replace someone). Nobody needs to get offended either. Hows that for thinking outside the box?
-Steve
No not good enough for me.
he question wasn't "why shouldn't I do it" the question was "why is it bad in the first place"
This isn't a question of who has the right to put what restrictions on who...it was a question of why the restriction exists in the first place. I happen to wonder myself.
It seems, like many things, a bad attempt to fix a problem. Yes, its a problem if people, even on break, are viewing porn in the office. There are indeed issues in the workplace with it (why there are issues is another problem... personally it wouldn't offend me, and I think that people who are offended generally can learn to get over it and their attitude is actually the problem but whatcha gonna do?)
Anyway, they fixed the "problem" of complaints about peoeple viewing porn by oitlawing all porn on company machines. However... laptops? Much of the time I use my laptop is at home. Where is the harm in having downloaded some porn onto the laptop, and occasionally viewing it at home?
This is the issue here, a laptop with porn on it. Its not like we are talking abotu a desktop here.
The company may be right, but it sounds to me like they are petty and silly. It may be their right to be petty and silly, but that doesn't suddenly make it mature and reasoned.
-Steve
wow that made me laugh so hard, I am practically crying.
KDE is a what?
I am a gnome user, never could get into KDE but... um...
Maybe this is weird, I am told I am crazy. However, I really thought CDE was slick. I figured that would apply to KDE too but, for some reason, it just never did it for me.
I don't know about 2k clone. Though, I never used 2k, XP is the first windows I have used since 95, and even then all I did was play games with XP.
-Steve
You know, I don't really disagree with you.
/. when I am hungry.
However, fish is part of our diet. Its not something i really eat alot of, so usually I like it to be a treat, something I like alot. Like tuna. There are a number of species that I would just hate to see go.
Giant squid, whales, sharks... I can take or leave. Even dolphins. However, if we can keep tuna around, I think we should. Salmon I like. Cod can go, bass I can do without, not a big mackerel fan. Even halibut, can be dismissed. Swordfish though? Tuna? Salmon? Pretty much the first panl of the neighborhood sushi restraunt order sheet.
Maybe I shouldn't
-Steve
The question remains though, is that enough?
You can only depopulate a species so much before their chances of survival as a speicies (even after you stop farming them) goes down. There has to be enough of them to create stable populations, find mates, and produce enough new young to continue the population.
Do we know how close any of these species tipping point towards extinction is to the price point where demand drops low enough for them to recover?
My guess is that would be a very hard question to answer. In the end, your right, it will all work itself out eventually with the collapse of the fishing industries. However, how far down the path will that be? As we go down that path, how do we effect the recovery time. Is it linear as long as we do nothing, or does a delay in action of 5 years mean 100 years of recovery?
I don't know the answers but, as you can see, this leaves me with some questions and a little trepidation to just say we need to leave it to market economics.
It would be a crying shame to loose some fish. I know I would miss them.
-Steve
Well I guess it depends what "they won".
They did get what they wanted... they drew us out into a military conflict. Thats what they wanted, its far more "fun" for them to run an insurgency with daily planning and fighting. It play right into their recruitment strategy.
Certainly we tuned it into a win for ourselves by rolling them back there. However, the initial move was exactly what they were hoping for. In either case, its an example of their strategy working (that is, costing us). Its a classic battle of attrition fought with not quite so classical means.
-Steve
Whats really funny is, I can't even tell what conservative means anymore, except that its what republicans like to call themselves. In fact, both conservative and liberal have completly lost their meaning.
Lets see if I can remember how it goes. The Libertarians are the classic liberals. The modern liberals, are the defacto conservatives. The conservatives aren't at all conservative. The neocons are liberals with a socialist background who decided they wanted to call themselves conservative.
Personally... I am about as left wing liberal as they come. However, I have no problem with the old conservatives. I mean shit, the venerable Goldwater critized the exclusion of gays from the ilitary saying "Everyone knows that gays have served honorably in the military since at least the time of Julius Caesar.". William F Buckley Jr wrote an article on why marijuana should be legalized!
Put that in a current day conservative pipe and smoke it!
-Steve
I think gitmo is full.
Which is too bad, because that means now everyone with a gripe against paypal will be secretly sent off to nations in africa to be tortured.
-Steve
Yah thats very very true.
People generally don't like to think about that though. It really takes alot of the bite out of terrorist attacks when you put your head into the mindset of the terrorist and try to see why he does what he does and how he chooses his targets. Look at his goals.
People seem to like to just throw up their hands, and call them "crazy". Afterall, if they are crazy, you can't understand them, they don't make sense, its the only explaination!
In reality though, its very simple. Imagine that you are just you, and you have an enemy, and enemy who is out to get you, an enemy that you feel is threatening your very way of life and the way of life of others. Now imagine that enemy is the United States, a big powerful government with a big powerful army.
You can't hope to engage them on a level playing field and win. So, how do you fight them?
Never mind whether we deserve to be fought or why. None of that matters. In their mind, the decision of who the enemy is is made. The decision to fight is made. What follows naturally from there is pretty much exactly what they do.
You hide, you work in shadowy networks. You utilise your advantages, you are small, you can hide amongst people similar both ethnically, culturally, and who share some amount of your ideology, or at least who see a common enemy.
Then you strike. What is the goal of your strike? To attack their weaknesses. Terrorism is like jujutsu. Its not about delivering a killing strike to an enemy. Its about redirecting the enemies energy. Its about throwing him off balance, its about using his own attacks and counter attacks against him.
Shit, any geek with some time on his hands could devise a pretty damned effective terrorist campaign. A bomb here, a shooting there. Its cheap, but effective. Look at it this way...
You spend a hundred bucks and a few weeks time building a bomb. You plan a place to put it where it will hit lots of people.... maybe make two or three bombs and target the rescue squad too.
You choose the time to strike. You choose what statement you release. If you re careful, you probably even get away with it the first time (and maybe you get away with it for a long time if you are lucky and good).
Then, as we have proved over and over, the government will play right into you rhand. You blow up a few 10s of people. Probably all told in terms of financial impact (hate to look at it that way) a couple o fmillion dollars in terms of lost wages to families, medical bills, property damage.
Then entire police forces, FBI etc are mobilised. They will spend millions more looking for you. You just hit the local town, state, federal gov, and private individuals for a collective total of probably a couple of 10s of millions of dollars.... all for under $100 and a few weeks of work.
Thats the model, scale it up, scale it down. Do one big one, or a few little ones. They will be spending money looking to solve the case for years to come. People may even lose some of their civil liberties. They may lock down your target... but thats ok, you wont hit the same place or way again anyway.
Educating people as to how this works and finding ways to overcome peoples natural urges to give in to the tactic are the only ways to fight it. essentially, you can't fight terrorists by fighting them. You have to isolate them ideologially, you have to cut off their means of recruiting new people (same thing) and then, you find the individuals doing it.
What you don't do is send in the army to where you think their "base of operations" is. You don't topple regiemes. You don't take away civil liberties. Because as soon as you spent more money on fighting them than they spent hitting you.... they have already won.
I would say September 11th did so much damage it "paid for itself" the moment the planes hit in terms of damage. Since then it paid for itself over and over again.
They won the moment they hit. They won again the moment we invaded afghanistan. Th
Almost as brave as dropping bombs from the sky far above surface to air defenses on targets who have already had their air forces destroyed? Or maybe as brave as declaring war when neither you nor your family are in the military?
At least the guy who did this has to be worried about a large, well funded, high tech government using its resources to track him down and capture him. As someone who has onc or twice considered going into illicit buisness, I can tell you, it takes something more than the bravery I have to disregard that.
Then again, maybe he doesn't care. Its not really brave if you don't feel you have anything to lose.
-Steve
Kind of like all the contractors on the death star?
-Steve
Isn't it actually defacto illegal to hide the cost of the product in the shipping and handling costs?
I had heard that but never really looked into it.
-Steve
I know this is a late reply but I don't disagree at all. You are right.
However, as I said, I hold our allies to higher standards than others. Someone has to break the cycle of violence and violence in response to violence and violence in response to violence in response to violence.
I don't care per se which side breaks the cycle, however I do believe that its far easier for the more powerful group to break the cycle. As I have said, both sides have acted poorly.
When a friend of mine acts poorly, I believe its the place of a friend to call him out on it, and to call him to be more of a man, even to be the better man than those who have treated him poorly.
I see this as no different. The US should be calling on Isreal to be the bigger country, to forget about who hit who and be the first to offer a hand in peace...and when that hand is batted away, to offer it again and again until they are tired of knocking it away and have no choice but to take it.
When our good friend is acting like a man, then we may turn our attention to the children who will not accept that peace. However, not before.
-Steve
Btw.... going to wikipedia (sorry for the late response, took me a while ti have the time to come back to this)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semite
I note that, as I said, Armenians and Arabs are both listed as semitic peoples.
> So, are you really joining those who are saying that the actual numbers (around 6 million) are not real? That fits on > with how you ignore facts when you don't like them. If you really want to help your case, you should learn what really > happened and what words really mean.
don't remember if I answered this seprately. No. I am not saying the numbers arn't real, just that I tend to be skeptical of everybody and I firmly believe in the law of fives and that people tend to bias their facts from their own viewpoint.
I would love to believe that there is a group of people thats always objective and honest. I don't believe any group, not even jews, is that perfect. Sorry.
-Steve
Its also nothing new.
:)
I was a scout for about 3 weeks... and that was about 8-10 years before that kid who was the center of some controversy for not allowing him in because he didn't believe in god and wouldn't say the oath.
I thought it was amusing because I was an atheist when I joined, and seem to remember having mentioned similar reservations to my scout master, who didn't seem to feel the need to make a big deal about it. Of course, between that incident and the not allowing gay scouts controversies, I have pretty much lost most of the respect that I had for the organization.
Far too pro-nationalist for my taste anyway. Though I was young enough when I joined that I didn't even have a concept of what that meant
-Steve
Just a note... I know the collequial (sp?) meaning of antisocial is similar to "shy" or "bad with people"
however... its not really what it means. Anti-social litterally means "against society" and refers to a person who is a sociopath, or could be said to "not have a conscience". You know, the people who scam people and say that their victems deserved to be scamed because they were dumb enough to fall for it.
Often they can, in fact, be quite charming and confident people.
-Steve
Yah, except,.... I am not aware of any legal right they have to make those restrictions.
copyright gives them the right to say who may and may not make copies. I have yet to see any law (and please, correct me if I am wrong) that gives them the authority to say what you can do, other than distributing copies, with the software. Its also well established that distribution of a legal copy of a copyrighted work is legal. That is, no book publisher can actually stop me from turning around and giving away or selling a copy of a book that I got legally from them.
I guess you could make the case that laws exist preventing you from dissassembling and "breaking a copy protection scheme". However, thats another beast entirely.
I could be wrong but... thats my take.
Overall though, they are just non-rewritable CDs with no data on them of any value. I would just toss them in the trash or look into recycling.
-Steve
Excuse me
n g-based-on-some-dieties-word)
A) A person can be anti-isreal (or dare I say, anti-zionist) without being anti-semitic (i happen to be anti-any-movement-that-claims-the-right-to-anythi
B) Even for a jew hater, anti-semetic is the wrong term as alot of jews arn't semitic anymore, and on top of that, arabs and armenians are indeed semitic (yes, I know this is a semantics argument)
C) Believing a different story of events does not equal hating a people. Reasonable people can disagree on detail and usually both sides of most arguments tend to be wrong in some sense. I have no doubt that both the holocaust rememberers inflate the figures to make it seem worst (or selectivly ignore the other groups who were victems) just as frequently as the deniers conflate the figures to make it seem less bad.
If you really want to help your cause, maybe you should try answering points with facts and trying to engage in useful debate, rather than just attaching a slur (yes anti-semite is as much a slur as kike) to a person and berating them for it.
Just a thought.
-Steve
Alot of times when I discuss this stuff, people tend to label me as Anti-Isreal, and in a real way I would even label myself as Anti-Zionist. I like jews, some of my best friends, but... this idea of some fixed homeland that they somehow need or were promised by god... seriously, get over it.
Anyway... thats neither here nor there. I tend to come off that way for a simple reason... I hold our allies to higher standards than our enemies. Honestly, I think both sides of the entire issue have dealt with it like a horde of 6 year olds. Its fine to talk about ideals and rights and claims to land, etc. However, this is the real world, we have to be pragmatists guided by ideal not the other way around.
The history here is interesting, but only the facts on the ground today are really relevant. The history is, in a way, a fact on the ground, but not the way that people try to use it. Everyone feels that they are right... so the history that "proves" that they are right is the least important history. Its the history that the "enemy" feels makes them right that is important... because of what it tells you about their psychology.
I honestly think that the most astute political figure of the last 100 years was Ghandi. If either side had the balls to really employ his tactics and strategy of nonviolence, they would quickly garner the worlds attention and become a political problem that would easily cause the other side much grief until they change their ways.
If every bombing in a tel aviv market was followed by food aide and investment in the economic development in palestine, or the bombings in tel aviv stopped and the Isrealis were faced with throngs of unarmed people marching without resistance at their checkpoints and accepting the violence of the isreali military.... the result would be apping the will to fight out of the other side, rather than reinforcing it.
In the end, history is nice for seeing where we are, but in the end, who cares what each side thinks they deserve?
-Steve
What gets me is this one:
http://www.ioltechnology.co.za/article_page.php?i
Ok so another anonymous officual makes a claim. Now is this him making stuff up, doing a bad jib of dumbing it down for the reporter, or is this bad reporting? I think its bad reporting however you slice it, whether its false or just wrong is another story.
I mean, "attacks has originated from websites". Excuse me? Is that inaccurate or what? Actually tracing someone back to a physical keyboard is hard work. In truth, its not really possible to do with 100% accuracy, unless you follow all the way to the end and look in his window... but theres evidence (like you state, local tty logins) which is subtle enough and where a person would feel comfortable enough they might feel safe thinking that nobody will get that far down their trail, that I would say you have some measure of certainty.
Though, on top of that, the assumption of "at least tacit aproval" from the government. Maybe, maybe not. None of what I have heard so far demonstrates abilities beyond that of well, lots of people if they had the interest and motivation to do it.
-Steve