Given that Iran is operating under an authoritarian government, I would have thought that just shutting everything down would be quite possible.
If you think of "authoritarian" and "not-authoritarian" as a binary switch between extremes, and if you assume that an authoritarian government not only is absolutely authoritarian in structure, but also of perfect in loyalty to the leadership and competence, that assumption would be natural.
Reality doesn't quite work that way, and particularly not in the present situation in Iraq. It probably doesn't help the authoritarians that the "opposition" includes people who are former high ranking government officials with lots of contacts in and through the government at all levels, and that some are, in fact, current senior leaders*. Even authoritarian regimes don't have governments that are from top to bottom composed of mindless drones with unquestioning loyalty to the leader.
Mousavi was the last Prime Minister of Iraq before the position was abolished in 1989; among others in the opposition, Mohammad Khatami is the most recent former President of Iran, and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is Khatami's predecessor as President and, perhaps more importantly, the current chair of the Assembly of Experts (a body whose official duties include supervising, electing, and dismissing the Supreme Leader), and there are others in positions of power that are either aligned with the opposition or, at the least, not committed to backing Khamenei and Ahmadinejad.
'A particular view' is what I'm having trouble with here.
Clearly, because you are not recognizing that what the parameters of "rights" are is a matter of subjective opinion, not verifiable objective fact.
Defend a civil right, regardless of whether it fits a particular political strategy.
I have said nothing about "political strategy". I have said that the idea that something is or is not a civil right is itself a political position. Any concept of rights is political.
The Soviets tried the alternative and look where it got them.
That's a pretty amazing false dichotomy on top of all the other problems.
The Soviets did not try "the" alternative to what you describe.
So Democracy in Iraq, neighbors to Iran, had no influence at all on Iranians *also* wanting real elections?
Probably not. Iran had a real reform movement before the US invasion of Iraq, which was largely derailed, with the aid of the propaganda boost given to the hardline elements by the belligerence of the US in the region (and the invective direct at Iran as part of an "Axis of Evil" in particular) during the last administration.
The "Democracy in Iraq" hasn't been considered much of a showpiece for emulation outside of the same group of people in the West who were cheerleaders for the war in the first place.
And speaking of moderate administrations, if students here and abroad are willing to take hits, perhaps the President of the U.S. should be as well. And before you repeat the mistaken idea that Iran will crack down harder if the U.S. spoke in support of the protestors, jut what do you think is happening today?
The problem isn't that Khamenei will try to crack down harder if the US takes sides, the problem is that the US taking sides, rather than merely supporting, generally, an end to violence and fair results, validates Khamenei's propaganda that the West, particularly the US and Britain, are behind the reform movement and that it is not a genuine, broad-based, organic domestic opposition. This could well undermine support for the opposition.
Its not a mistake that the people in the US most vigorously wanting the President to take sides are the same people that openly expressed that either Iranian candidate winning would result in Iran continuing to be an "enemy" of the United States, and even in many cases that it was better if Ahmadinejad won, since that way we'd have a clear and unmistakeable enemy rather than a "reformer" that it might seem we could work with.
Expressing support and best wishes for the protestors gives them a boost in spirit that they need if they are to succeed.
I think its pretty insulting to the Iranian opposition, especially given the "spirit" they have demonstrated thus far, to suggest that their morale will crack if they aren't given an explicit and direct endorsement by a foreign leader, particularly the leader of a country that has pointed to their nation as an enemy for decades.
Even the president of France has come out strongly in favor of the protestors...
France is not the US, or the UK, so the political dynamic with respect to Iran is different. Franco-Iranian relations have been far more friendly than those of the US or UK with Iran, which means that individual instances of French criticism of Iranian government action don't feed into easy government propaganda narratives about manipulation by longstanding enemies.
A man on US soil gets attacked by agents of a foreign government.
Slashdot response: "It's the US's fault".
If by the "the US" you mean "the US government", I'll just ask one question: who is supposed to protect people on US soil from being attacked by agents of foreign governments?
I mean, last I looked, even those generally opposed to government doing anything else think that's the governments job.
So, yeah, anytime that happens, its a failure of the US government. Possibly a failure that couldn't be effectively avoided without greater harms (e.g., to freedom), so one that must be an accepted risk, but a failure nonetheless. And unless you acknowledge the failure, you'll never get to the point of considering whether its a failure of the type that must be accepted, or whether it reveals a problem that can and should be addressed.
(Even if they aren't agents of foreign governments, it is a government, if not necessarily a federal government, responsibility to effectively address violent crime.)
Granted, the ACLU can and should do whatever the hell they want, they aren't accountable to me (or anyone else who isn't a member), and they certainly are intended to be an ideological organization, it just seems odd to me that they claim that the driving ideal is individual rights and freedoms and then neglect such a major one.
They don't agree with you that it is an individual right.
Then again, the American Civil Liberties That Aren't Self Defense Union (ACLTASDU) would be much less catchy.
The 2nd Amendment doesn't say anything about self defense, whether or not it protects an individual right. Weapons may have instrumental utility in self-defense, but you can have the RKBA and no right to use arms in self-defense, or the right to act in self-defense without the RKBA.
Trigonometric mumbo-jumbo aside, what you're saying is: Having my civil rights defended (or not) depends on which parties membership card I have in my wallet.
Not at all. The ACLU's particular interpretation of what are individual rights is a political position, but they don't defend those rights based on the party of the individual whose rights are violated.
I'm saying that the idea that an organization can both be "non-political" and advocate any particular view of legal rights is self-contradictory. To advocate a particular view of legal rights is to adopt a particular political position.
The question is: why is it taking them so long? That seems like a pretty straightforward feature, in particular since they already handle outbound number transfers.
Outbound is easier, given what Google Voice does. For an outbound transfer, they just have to give someone else control of the number. For an inbound transfer to work, they still need a way to get to the phone that was previously covered by that number when actually using the number links back to Google Voice. To do that, it would seem that either Google needs to assume the role of primary service provider on that number (whether its a landline or mobile), or cause a new number to be issued by the primary service provider to replace the number transferred to Google (which, while it probably requires less work, does require an arrangement with the service provider, and isn't covered by existing requirements for portability of numbers, so it would probably require carrier-by-carrier agreements to set up a clean process for doing it.)
And a 24 year long high school teacher didn't know what the sign for factorial means. Choices where along the lines of : ! & %
<pedantic> Well, from those choices, I would know that "!" was probably intended, but that's as much skill at dealing with improperly-posed questions as anything else.
In fact, though, none of the options are correct as you have related the question: what the sign for factorial means is "factorial", just as a stop sign (or "sign for stop") means "stop", not "red octagon with a white border". </pedantic>
Think of how badly the NRA's support base would be undermined if a politically neutral organization was available for second amendment support.
Support of an individual right to keep and bear arms is (as is, incidentally, support for every individual liberty the ACLU supports) a political position. You can't be a "politically neutral" organization and be an organization dedicated to defending or advancing a particular political position or set of political positions. What you propose is incoherent, akin to the idea of "triangle in Euclidean 2-space with interior angles summing to 240 degrees" it is a series of words which make sense individually and fit together grammatically, but which is self-contradictory and therefore meaningless.
They don't forget about it. They just take a neutral stance.
More specifically, they interpret as a collective right, which puts its outside of their mission and therefore not something that they will take action on as an organization.
While certainly one can disagree with this (and certainly, the most recent US Supreme Court decision does), the ACLU openly is about defending individual liberties as it understands them, not enforcing the current status quo declared by the Supreme Court, or defending the idea that anything anyone can imagine is in fact an individual freedom.
If one believes that things that are not within the scope of what the ACLU considers individual liberties are, in fact, individual liberties, that is a good reason to support organizations that are dedicated to protecting those things as individual liberties, but I don't see why it is a reason to oppose the ACLU. OTOH, if one opposes the things that the ACLU does consider individual liberties, that would be a reason to oppose the ACLU.
While I'm not a Ron Paul supporter, Precious Metal *is* better than cash. Cash just sits there and loses value to inflation.
There are two major purposes often associated with money, historically: as a long term store of value and as a medium of exchange. Precious metals, as a medium of exchange, are pretty inconvenient, but better than having no standard at all; cash is for superior for that purpose. Precious metals are a decent store of value. If you tend to store value by hoarding cash, you're probably better off switching to hoarding precious metals. If you use cash mainly as a liquid medium of exchange, and store value in forms other than cash -- which is probably far more common -- you may not stand as much to gain from switching to precious metals for any purpose.
Unless you are deliberately out to "test the system" you will just make your life miserable with nothing to show for it.
You can't put a stop to official abuse unless you stand up to it. And, much as I disagree with Ron Paul and his supporters on just about every policy issue, that seems to be something that he and they understand and prioritize more than most people.
Yes, it sometimes involves personal inconvenience. That people are too interested in avoiding any inconvenience to stand on their rights is exactly what people who would whittle away at those rights rely on.
One of the most fun things about Opera Unite is that it allows standard users to enable it and run websites from behind the corporate firewall.
If you are in an environment where you have both a restrictive corporate firewall and a loose corporate desktop administration, at least. But, since just about anything can be tunnelled over HTTP, most corporate environments are probably going to restrict what software can be installed on systems as well as having a firewall.
As long as Opera has been installed on a computer, a standard user doesn't need admin privileges to enable Unite.
If so, that just means that corporations, etc., are going to view Opera itself as a security hole (and rightly so.)
Opera's Unite is not meant to refine the web as a hosting solution in the traditional sense, but as a way to make your files accessible to yourself and others through it.
But how, exactly, does that differ from the role of hosting "in the traditional sense"?
And I wonder how the RIAA will detect music-sharing on your private friendsbased network.
Well, as for "private", the Unite introduction shows "privileged access" (password protected) requests going over HTTP, not HTTPS; so even assuming, for the sake of argument, that connections from the local web server to the proxy server are secured somehow, those from the proxy server to the client who is accessing them aren't, so the RIAA's strategy of putting pressure on ISPs to be piracy cops would seem to quite applicable.
Seriously, these speed evaluations are irrelevant, boring, and inane to the extreme. How about some evaluation of the possible uses this new technology will be put to, and how its abilities to support these uses compares to other competing or similar technologies.
Underneath all the marketing speak, its (1) a local webserver, and (2) a central proxying service, giving you some of the benefits of a local webserver, with the drawbacks of an additional dependency on an external server which presents a single point of failure. The only additional advantage it seems to have is that the local webserver actively connects to the remote proxy, which makes Unite useful if you have to tunnel through a firewall you don't control (but where you have enough control of the computer to put Unite on it in the first place).
Maybe it does have a security hole in it. But shouldn't we actually find out first before we just guess and assume that it does?
Why should we bother? What compelling new feature does Opera Unite bring to the table that would get me not to use one of the better performing, more-established, free webservers available if I wanted to host web-accessible content on my PC?
For example I wouldn't make my entire MP3 collection web accessible using Google storage space. Why because even though my intention is to use it only so "I" can access all my music anywhere I go, Google might not see it that way. (Or what ever company I happen to have storing my data). With Unite and a few clicks I can have my music available to me and not have to worry about the company hosting it thinking I might be breaking the law.
I don't understand what even remotely new Unite brings to the table here. Its not the first webserver available for desktop OSs, or the first free webserver available for desktop OSs.
Granting that there are reasons you might want to run a webserver on your desktop or laptop, why would you want it to be Opera Unite as opposed to one of the myriad other options?
All nickels minted after 1964 are made out of a copper-nickel clad (alloy). The metal value of a nickel might be worth more than 5 cents, but I doubt it.
You can always check here, but the upshot is that you would be correct to doubt it.
Furthermore, his innocence or guilt will depend on what he paid his employees. If I agreed to work for him for $20/hour and he gave me a $20 face-value gold coin per hour, then he's innocent and an idiot.
If by "innocent" you mean "guilty only of failing to report any of the wages to the IRS, and of failing to withhold or pay any of the required payroll or income taxes", then, yes, this would appear correct.
The "all I'm paying is the face value of the coins" scam isn't the only (or even the main) reason he's in trouble.
Very well spelled out and argued, but you missed the fact that the GP was making a rhetorical point. Some people believe that all fiat paper is illegitimate, and by "counterfeit" s/he meant "phony".
GGP specifically said that it was "counterfeit" because of a specific Constitutional provision that, as I pointed out, has no bearing. Your attempt to claim that I am missing the point by cleverly redefining a word in GP's post in a way which is superficially plausible for the word itself but completely ridiculous in the context of the post is mildly entertaining, but not particularly convincing.
A big part of the reason for regulating ISPs like utilities is because, in very many areas, free competition does not exist (even in places where there is some competition, it may only be between a local monopoly telco and a local monopoly cable company).
Maybe it's OK for reclaiming energy from cars in places where they're supposed to be slowing down, instead of wasting it in the breaks.
But if it's a Prius (or other hybrid) with regenerative braking...
As I understand it, the maximum regenerative braking on the Prius is reached at the point when you aren't using the regular brakes, if you are using the brakes, you are dissipating energy into heat and losing it just like any other car braking. If these are placed in places where a Prius would normally need to use its brakes, they will no more be stealing energy than they would from a car without regenerative braking. Anyhow, no regenerative braking is perfectly efficient, so even if it was in a place where the Prius was using regenerative braking, it would probably be overall better (as some of the energy the Prius would have lost would be reclaimed), even though it would reduce the energy regenerated on the car.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think of "authoritarian" and "not-authoritarian" as a binary switch between extremes, and if you assume that an authoritarian government not only is absolutely authoritarian in structure, but also of perfect in loyalty to the leadership and competence, that assumption would be natural.
Reality doesn't quite work that way, and particularly not in the present situation in Iraq. It probably doesn't help the authoritarians that the "opposition" includes people who are former high ranking government officials with lots of contacts in and through the government at all levels, and that some are, in fact, current senior leaders*. Even authoritarian regimes don't have governments that are from top to bottom composed of mindless drones with unquestioning loyalty to the leader.
Mousavi was the last Prime Minister of Iraq before the position was abolished in 1989; among others in the opposition, Mohammad Khatami is the most recent former President of Iran, and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is Khatami's predecessor as President and, perhaps more importantly, the current chair of the Assembly of Experts (a body whose official duties include supervising, electing, and dismissing the Supreme Leader), and there are others in positions of power that are either aligned with the opposition or, at the least, not committed to backing Khamenei and Ahmadinejad.
Clearly, because you are not recognizing that what the parameters of "rights" are is a matter of subjective opinion, not verifiable objective fact.
I have said nothing about "political strategy". I have said that the idea that something is or is not a civil right is itself a political position. Any concept of rights is political.
That's a pretty amazing false dichotomy on top of all the other problems.
The Soviets did not try "the" alternative to what you describe.
Probably not. Iran had a real reform movement before the US invasion of Iraq, which was largely derailed, with the aid of the propaganda boost given to the hardline elements by the belligerence of the US in the region (and the invective direct at Iran as part of an "Axis of Evil" in particular) during the last administration.
The "Democracy in Iraq" hasn't been considered much of a showpiece for emulation outside of the same group of people in the West who were cheerleaders for the war in the first place.
The problem isn't that Khamenei will try to crack down harder if the US takes sides, the problem is that the US taking sides, rather than merely supporting, generally, an end to violence and fair results, validates Khamenei's propaganda that the West, particularly the US and Britain, are behind the reform movement and that it is not a genuine, broad-based, organic domestic opposition. This could well undermine support for the opposition.
Its not a mistake that the people in the US most vigorously wanting the President to take sides are the same people that openly expressed that either Iranian candidate winning would result in Iran continuing to be an "enemy" of the United States, and even in many cases that it was better if Ahmadinejad won, since that way we'd have a clear and unmistakeable enemy rather than a "reformer" that it might seem we could work with.
I think its pretty insulting to the Iranian opposition, especially given the "spirit" they have demonstrated thus far, to suggest that their morale will crack if they aren't given an explicit and direct endorsement by a foreign leader, particularly the leader of a country that has pointed to their nation as an enemy for decades.
France is not the US, or the UK, so the political dynamic with respect to Iran is different. Franco-Iranian relations have been far more friendly than those of the US or UK with Iran, which means that individual instances of French criticism of Iranian government action don't feed into easy government propaganda narratives about manipulation by longstanding enemies.
If by the "the US" you mean "the US government", I'll just ask one question: who is supposed to protect people on US soil from being attacked by agents of foreign governments?
I mean, last I looked, even those generally opposed to government doing anything else think that's the governments job.
So, yeah, anytime that happens, its a failure of the US government. Possibly a failure that couldn't be effectively avoided without greater harms (e.g., to freedom), so one that must be an accepted risk, but a failure nonetheless. And unless you acknowledge the failure, you'll never get to the point of considering whether its a failure of the type that must be accepted, or whether it reveals a problem that can and should be addressed.
(Even if they aren't agents of foreign governments, it is a government, if not necessarily a federal government, responsibility to effectively address violent crime.)
They don't agree with you that it is an individual right.
The 2nd Amendment doesn't say anything about self defense, whether or not it protects an individual right. Weapons may have instrumental utility in self-defense, but you can have the RKBA and no right to use arms in self-defense, or the right to act in self-defense without the RKBA.
Not at all. The ACLU's particular interpretation of what are individual rights is a political position, but they don't defend those rights based on the party of the individual whose rights are violated.
I'm saying that the idea that an organization can both be "non-political" and advocate any particular view of legal rights is self-contradictory. To advocate a particular view of legal rights is to adopt a particular political position.
Outbound is easier, given what Google Voice does. For an outbound transfer, they just have to give someone else control of the number. For an inbound transfer to work, they still need a way to get to the phone that was previously covered by that number when actually using the number links back to Google Voice. To do that, it would seem that either Google needs to assume the role of primary service provider on that number (whether its a landline or mobile), or cause a new number to be issued by the primary service provider to replace the number transferred to Google (which, while it probably requires less work, does require an arrangement with the service provider, and isn't covered by existing requirements for portability of numbers, so it would probably require carrier-by-carrier agreements to set up a clean process for doing it.)
<pedantic>
Well, from those choices, I would know that "!" was probably intended, but that's as much skill at dealing with improperly-posed questions as anything else.
In fact, though, none of the options are correct as you have related the question: what the sign for factorial means is "factorial", just as a stop sign (or "sign for stop") means "stop", not "red octagon with a white border".
</pedantic>
Support of an individual right to keep and bear arms is (as is, incidentally, support for every individual liberty the ACLU supports) a political position. You can't be a "politically neutral" organization and be an organization dedicated to defending or advancing a particular political position or set of political positions. What you propose is incoherent, akin to the idea of "triangle in Euclidean 2-space with interior angles summing to 240 degrees" it is a series of words which make sense individually and fit together grammatically, but which is self-contradictory and therefore meaningless.
More specifically, they interpret as a collective right, which puts its outside of their mission and therefore not something that they will take action on as an organization.
While certainly one can disagree with this (and certainly, the most recent US Supreme Court decision does), the ACLU openly is about defending individual liberties as it understands them, not enforcing the current status quo declared by the Supreme Court, or defending the idea that anything anyone can imagine is in fact an individual freedom.
If one believes that things that are not within the scope of what the ACLU considers individual liberties are, in fact, individual liberties, that is a good reason to support organizations that are dedicated to protecting those things as individual liberties, but I don't see why it is a reason to oppose the ACLU. OTOH, if one opposes the things that the ACLU does consider individual liberties, that would be a reason to oppose the ACLU.
There are two major purposes often associated with money, historically: as a long term store of value and as a medium of exchange. Precious metals, as a medium of exchange, are pretty inconvenient, but better than having no standard at all; cash is for superior for that purpose. Precious metals are a decent store of value. If you tend to store value by hoarding cash, you're probably better off switching to hoarding precious metals. If you use cash mainly as a liquid medium of exchange, and store value in forms other than cash -- which is probably far more common -- you may not stand as much to gain from switching to precious metals for any purpose.
You can't put a stop to official abuse unless you stand up to it. And, much as I disagree with Ron Paul and his supporters on just about every policy issue, that seems to be something that he and they understand and prioritize more than most people.
Yes, it sometimes involves personal inconvenience. That people are too interested in avoiding any inconvenience to stand on their rights is exactly what people who would whittle away at those rights rely on.
If you are in an environment where you have both a restrictive corporate firewall and a loose corporate desktop administration, at least. But, since just about anything can be tunnelled over HTTP, most corporate environments are probably going to restrict what software can be installed on systems as well as having a firewall.
If so, that just means that corporations, etc., are going to view Opera itself as a security hole (and rightly so.)
But how, exactly, does that differ from the role of hosting "in the traditional sense"?
Well, as for "private", the Unite introduction shows "privileged access" (password protected) requests going over HTTP, not HTTPS; so even assuming, for the sake of argument, that connections from the local web server to the proxy server are secured somehow, those from the proxy server to the client who is accessing them aren't, so the RIAA's strategy of putting pressure on ISPs to be piracy cops would seem to quite applicable.
Underneath all the marketing speak, its (1) a local webserver, and (2) a central proxying service, giving you some of the benefits of a local webserver, with the drawbacks of an additional dependency on an external server which presents a single point of failure. The only additional advantage it seems to have is that the local webserver actively connects to the remote proxy, which makes Unite useful if you have to tunnel through a firewall you don't control (but where you have enough control of the computer to put Unite on it in the first place).
Why should we bother? What compelling new feature does Opera Unite bring to the table that would get me not to use one of the better performing, more-established, free webservers available if I wanted to host web-accessible content on my PC?
I don't understand what even remotely new Unite brings to the table here. Its not the first webserver available for desktop OSs, or the first free webserver available for desktop OSs.
Granting that there are reasons you might want to run a webserver on your desktop or laptop, why would you want it to be Opera Unite as opposed to one of the myriad other options?
If you don't like the default new tab behavior, you can change it.
You can always check here, but the upshot is that you would be correct to doubt it.
If by "innocent" you mean "guilty only of failing to report any of the wages to the IRS, and of failing to withhold or pay any of the required payroll or income taxes", then, yes, this would appear correct.
The "all I'm paying is the face value of the coins" scam isn't the only (or even the main) reason he's in trouble.
GGP specifically said that it was "counterfeit" because of a specific Constitutional provision that, as I pointed out, has no bearing. Your attempt to claim that I am missing the point by cleverly redefining a word in GP's post in a way which is superficially plausible for the word itself but completely ridiculous in the context of the post is mildly entertaining, but not particularly convincing.
Probably because its a branch that is stripped down and on which less can be done, producing less opportunity for vulnerabilities.
A big part of the reason for regulating ISPs like utilities is because, in very many areas, free competition does not exist (even in places where there is some competition, it may only be between a local monopoly telco and a local monopoly cable company).
As I understand it, the maximum regenerative braking on the Prius is reached at the point when you aren't using the regular brakes, if you are using the brakes, you are dissipating energy into heat and losing it just like any other car braking. If these are placed in places where a Prius would normally need to use its brakes, they will no more be stealing energy than they would from a car without regenerative braking. Anyhow, no regenerative braking is perfectly efficient, so even if it was in a place where the Prius was using regenerative braking, it would probably be overall better (as some of the energy the Prius would have lost would be reclaimed), even though it would reduce the energy regenerated on the car.