Java's source-code was open to the public for over a decade now. The only thing that changed recently is the license, but that license never prevented you from bundling it beforehand. Until very recently the Sun JRE license did not allow redistribution. This meant that a Linux distribution could include support for installing it, but the end user would have to download it from Sun, accepting the license conditions. This was true even for the source, which made it a colossal pain on *BSD, since the source distribution required patches to build on *BSD and the BSD projects did not have the rights to distribute derived binaries, meaning that the end user had to get the source from Sun, then the ports system would apply the patches and build it. Okay so I would agree with you on *BSD but there really was no reason (as far as I know) for Linux distributions for not bundling Sun's binaries. And last I checked, Linux makes up a sizable market share (with respect to *BSD).
The source code has been open to the public for over 10 years. This includes the Java, C and ASM source code.
The license prevented anyone from distributing forked code but it *was* freely available to the public. Nothing prevented anyone from auditing the code or patching it for internal use so long as they didn't redistribute their changes to the general public and call it "Java". As a result, Java was already enjoying the vast majority of the benefits associated with open-source with free of its risks.
Java has been open-source for over 10 years now. Open-source fanatics would have you believe otherwise. No one is able to please *everyone* in the open-source community (nor should they try).
Sun has open-sourced a lot more products than any other company in recent history. They got *some* thanks from the community but they also got a lot of whiners asking for more. You give someone a finger and he wants your entire hand. Go figure.
That's a silly argument. Nothing preventing Linux distributions from bundling Sun's JRE in the past the same way they do now. The fact that Linux distributions refuse to bundle software with licenses they do not *personally* approve of is not the same thing as saying that the license actually prevented them from doing so.
Open-source extremists have no one to blame but themselves.
Java's source-code was open to the public for over a decade now. The only thing that changed recently is the license, but that license never prevented you from bundling it beforehand.
distributed denial of service attack. Storm, for instance, has somewhere between 5 and 500 thousand computers infected, scattered across the world. That is a lot of IPs to try to block in a short period of time. The 'source' is random computers from disparate ISPs located all over the world. I don't see why this is the case.
500,000 * sizeof(ipAddress) should be small enough
At most you need to upload 10MB worth of data back up the stream asking for those IPs to be blocked. That shouldn't take more than a second or two.
2) Once you detect it, wouldn't it be easier to propagate a request up your stream asking it to cut off incoming traffic from X?
For example, if I (somehow) know the IPs of people that are part of the DDoS attack, I'd send them up to my provider, and he would send it up to his upstream provider, etc until the traffic gets cut off as close as possible to the source. Everyone saves a lot of traffic and we're all happy, no?
The government should be in charge of laying out the infrastructure and lease it to all ISPs at the same price. What they do with it beyond that point is 100% their choice.
The problem with Bell is that they own both the infrastructure and the service, so when they sell the service they give themselves lower infrastructure leasing rates than 3rd-party ISPs and make it impossible for them to compete. By all other accounts Bell is *worse* than all other ISPs. Their own competitive advantage, price, is gained through illegal monopolistic practices.
The government should nationalize the infrastructure and fine the heck out of Bell for their practices.
It works in great Israel and it somewhat works in Canada. Just because Bell doesn't like it doesn't mean it doesn't work.
In Israel you have two types of companies: one sells you access to the infrastructure and another sells you access to the service (internet, phone, etc). This places Bell on equal footing as any other internet provider and it has led to a very competitive marketplace.
We don't have the option of Rogers in Quebec. Bell is a huge ass monopoly here and if these laws are rescinded we will go back to the dark days of Bell versus Videotron, both of which are monopolies. Both provide overpriced service and poor customer service.
I absolutely love some of the smaller ISPs that resell Bell infrastructure. Their prices and service is way better but they are the mercy of Bell.
The government should nationalize the infrastructure components of Bell and Videotron and the remaining companies should only deal with selling services on top of that infrastructure. This would put Bell, Videotron and resellers on equal footing. They have something similar in Israel and it led to a very versatile marketplace.
Technical issues aside, anyone who has had the displeasure of dealing with Bell will know what I'm talking about. They have horrible customer service and constantly pass new rules to squeeze more out of their customers. To make matters worse they are acting like a monopoly, passing excessive fees off to their resellers then offering "discounts" to customers that go to them directly. Anything and everything to ensure that they regain their monopoly.
They should be charging resellers per MB using their real costs (as opposed to making profit on the underlying infrastructure) and they should keep their hands completely off it at that point. If the reseller wishes to "shape" traffic or impose caps that is *their* business. Bell the infrastructure should separate itself completely from Bell the internet provider.
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Your right on the history, but you can see how it can be interpreted either way
It would take a great amount of spin for people to get this wrong and in my view this is precisely what is going on in media centers around the world (even in the US and Canada). Anyone who spends more than 30 minutes reading up on the history of the middle-east should know better. The problem is that people only know what they watch on TV (few people open books or research stories in depth online). The problem with news agencies is that they:
1) Present very short sniplets with no historical context. 2) Side with the perceived underdog, regardless of their past actions. 3) Apply double standards to Israel and other countries all over the world.
Let me give you a specific example of what I mean.
1) They only cover terrorist attacks in Israel. Rarely (if ever) do they cover anything positive in Israel. This is precisely why people think you're insane if you say you're planning to move to Israel or vacation there. Everyone thinks is a constant war-zone, which it is not.
2) The real struggle is between all of the Arab countries and Israel, not the Palestinians versus Israel, yet the media never presents it in this light. Let's be honest here: everything that goes wrong in the UN happens because of the automatic majority of middle-east tyrants hold there. All the money, weapons and political pressure which Palestinian terrorist groups come directly from Arab countries. If this was a simple dispute between Palestinians and Israelis it would have been over decades ago. Secondly, the media seems to ignore the past actions of the Palestinians. Take for example Mr. moderate Abbas and the great Arafat before him. In both cases these people have repeatedly denied the Holocaust and called for Israel's destruction through terrorism but the media refused to carry this story. So these people carry one saying one thing in English and a totally different thing in Arabic. You can't report this story honestly unless you report on their full history. You can't claim Abbas is a moderate when he repeatedly exalts "the sacrifice of martyrs". When that psycho gunned down children in Jerusalem last week Abbas glorified his actions on official PA television. You can bet this story never made it to North American TV, because it doesn't fit nicely into the dumbed-down story they're trying to sell you.
3) When Hezbollah shelled Israeli civilians, killed some soldiers and kidnapped others, Israel replied by declaring war on them. The UN and NGOs immediately blamed Israel for sparking a war and even the UN cautioned Israel not to do anything rash. The same story repeated when Gaza shelled Sderot civilians with over 7000 missiles over the past couple of years and Israel finally decided to respond. We keep on hearing the words "disproportionate response" coming out of people's mouths. In my view, a "proportionate" response would be for Israel to shell Gaza indiscriminately and pass out candies in the streets with civilians get hurt or die. What Israel has been doing is sitting on its hands while its civilians get massacred. As far as I'm concerned anyone other country would have shelled the crap out of Gaza if it would have pulled this sort of thing on its own civilians and it's outrageous for them to ask Israel to show more restraint than they would.
A lot of bloodshed would be spared on both sides if Israel was allowed to kick the crap out of these terrorist groups, deport their people and make sure they never came back. The sooner all the extremists get kicked out, the sooner Palestinians moderates can take power and form a sovereign state. Israel wants this as much as anyone else. Can you begin to imagine how much everyone's economy would benefit from a true peace agreement in that region?
Your also right it is a holy war, but I don't think the term just pertains to the Muslims, why else would the future Israelis really want that land?
Give me a break! You can't excuse turning down an offer for 95% of what you're asking for, then incite terrorism as a negotiating card and then claim to be blameless. Palestinians lost any sort of right for a 50/50 compromise. Every bit of terrorism they use takes another bit of legitimacy away from them until one day they will find themselves left with nothing. They deserve nothing move.
Israel proved its willingness for peace with actions, not just words. It withdrew from the Sinai, Lebanon and Gaza both on a civilian and military level. In many cases it did this unilaterally without asking for anything in return. Arafat did nothing but talk. In English he would talk peace, in Arabic he would incite to terrorism. It also doesn't help his case that he stole *billions* of dollars from his own people. The guy was an arch terrorist and a crook.
So, what you are saying is, if someone takes most of your country and forces you into a tiny over crowded part of it, and then they take most of that too, then they offer you the shitty uninhabitable parts back, while keeping control of your infrastructure, they are being generous. Take a look at the map of Israel and Palestine today, all of that used to be Palestine, now it is almost all Israel, the coat the borders and the airspace are ll controlled by Israel, and this super greedy 100% that you talk about is just 100% of the land taken inside the west bank, how can you honestly say that the Palestinians didn't compromise?
If the Palestinians got what was fair, they would split the entire country 50/50 with equal access to the sea, and air, and equal rights to govern themselves and allow the right of return for Palestinians. 1) No one took their country. Palestine was the name of a region (so named by the Romans after they defeated the Jews and renamed the region after the Jews' ancient enemy the Philistines which bare no relation to today's so-called Palestinians). The region belonged to the Ottoman Empire until the British took it over. Gaza used to belong to Egypt and the West Bank used to belong to Jordan.
2) If you actually look at history maps you will find that Palestine actually consisted of what is today Israel, the disputed territories, Jordan and parts of Lebanon and Syria. When the British and French divided the land they actually took 50% of Palestine and renamed it Trans-Jordan (today's Jordan). That was meant to be the Arab half of Palestine. The other half was promised to the Jews (refer to the Balfour declaration and others which followed in subsequent years). Then some genius decided to rename the remaining half Palestine and divide *that* in half again. It's no coincidence that most Jordanian citizens are Palestinians, because Jordan *is* Arab Palestine.
3) If you take a look at the maps in 1947 when the UN partitioned the land you will find that most land allocated to the Jews was desert. If it is blooming green today it is because they built it up to what it is. It didn't magically turn from desert to farmland over night. Now that their land is all green suddenly the Arab want a piece of it. You can't have your cake and eat it too!
4) Gaza's borders with Egypt are controlled by Egypt. Gaza's borders with Israel are controlled by Israel. How is that different from anywhere else in the world? If Egyptians won't allow Palestinians to cross it's because they have a long track recording of stirring up shit. If Israel won't let them have free reign in their airspace it's because they're launching rockets and driving car-bombs into civilian structures. When Israel fully withdrew from Gaza in 2005 many months went by when Gaza launched rockets into Israel and Israel did not respond at all. They *could* have declared independence and practiced self-rule but instead they chose to start shit up again. They're bearing the consequences of their actions.
5) How can you argue for Palestinian "right of return" (aka let's destroy Israel's democracy by swamping it full of Arabs) while simultaneously denying Jews the right to live in a future Palestinian state? Isn't that racist? So a Jew-free country is okay but a country with 20% Arabs it not? Frankly if we were playing fair I'd say it should be 100% Jew-free in Palestine and 100% Arab-free in Israel so they could both be sovereign states.
1) When someone offers you 95% of what you're asking for, it's not good enough. Negotiation is about getting 100% of what you're asking for.
2) We should totally ignore the fact that Barak offered Arafat Israeli land in exchange for land he wanted to keep for the settlements. Arafat totally could have come back and continued negotiations but he did not.
Demanding 100% of what you want is not called negotiation. He responded with terrorism in the form of the second intifada. There is plenty of documentation to back up what I'm saying here, the most public of which are Bill Clinton's own memoirs.
You've got it backward. There are plenty of documentation that proves that Arab countries were on the verge of attacking Israel in 1967. Not only did they line up vast armies right on the border but they also made public declarations to that end. We have plenty of books, audio recordings, and videos to prove that. Even Russia nowadays admits that it gave Egypt false intelligence in order to provoke it to attack Israel. Be that as it may, there is no disputing that Israel was defending itself from an impending attack, not the other way around.
PS: For months leading up to the 1967 war, Israel was being raided by terrorist groups from these countries who were murdering its civilians and retreating back to their native countries. Even if it wasn't under impending attack these raids alone are enough as a declaration of war.
You've got your history wrong. No one "invaded" an "already occupied" land. When Jews immigrated to the region (back then it wasn't a country) in the early 1920-1940s they bought some land and lived on it (many still hold the deeds to prove it). They were normal civilians like their Arab neighbors. In 1947 the UN partitioned the land along ethnic lines. Cities that had a Jewish majority were marked for Israel and cities with Arab majority were marked for them. Israel accepted this partition and declared independence, the Arabs did not. They invaded the very next day.
Fast forward a couple years into the future, what you have now is not a dispute over territory. It's a religious war. Any non-Muslim living in the middle-east is marked for "liberation" by Muslim extremists regardless of the historical background. These people aren't asking for pre-1967 lines, they're asking for pre-1948 lines before Israel even existed. There can be no negotiation over people's rights to live. Our lives are not worth any less than the lives of people that own the rest of the middle-east and it offends me that people don't get that. Forget Israel for a second, try living in peace as a non-Muslim anywhere else in the middle-east and see how far you get. Then get back to me. It's no coincidence that Israel is home to some of the world's smallest minority groups that were massacred in other middle-eastern countries and retreated back to Israel where they now practice their beliefs in peace.
If what you said was true Israelis wouldn't be sitting on their hands as Palestinians shell their civilians. They'd arm their civilians with rockets and have them right back at the Palestinians.
The undeniable fact is that Palestinian terrorists launch attacks from civilian centers and target civilians exclusively. The Israeli military is not located anywhere close to civilian centers. There is absolutely no excuse for attacking Israeli civilians this way and no way you could claim it was done by accident. Israeli troops have one of the lowest rate of collateral damage in the world. When Palestinian civilians are killed in the cross-fire it is by mistake, not because they were targeting them.
If Israel wanted to wipe out the Palestinians, it could do so in a day but it does not. If the tables were turned the Palestinians would not hesitate for a minute, as they have already demonstrated.
From 1973 onward (mostly due to the 1967 war) Israel stopped living under the threat of attack from foreign countries. Individual terrorist groups are another matter, but it is quite hard to deter stateless players. No country seemed to have figured that one out yet.
I don't think we're going to be able to bridge the gap in perception here. Israel fought a war LAST YEAR with Lebanon over security concerns.
That's because for years they threatened to bomb Hezbollah bases in Lebanon and cut off shipments of weapons from Syria and Iran but were under international and domestic pressure to keep things quiet. So for years Hezbollah bombed civilian and military sites in the Israeli border and Israel did not reply. All the critics said this would destroy Israel's deterrence and it did.
No western country uses this form of deterrence
The French used it in Algeria, the UK used it in Northern Ireland. It's very difficult to believe that torture isn't used this way by the British and American forces in Iraq given the countless eyewitness accounts by prisoners and interrogators, the video recordings and photographs, and they have plainly stated they are doing so. What more do you need exactly?
I can only speak on the few photos I've seen. Pretty much all of them (with the exception of the single water boarding incident) amounted to intimidation, not torture. Who cares how uncomfortable you make people under interrogation? They're not going to reveal secrets under they're under *some* form duress. I believe that on this count people are watering down the definition of torture.
I am saying that if you can protect even a single life by not releasing security-sensitive information then you should do so.
And what I am saying is that keeping "security-sensitive" information secret costs people's lives. How?
You could reveal this information months after this information is changed but you definitely shouldn't be revealing it while it's "live" and poses a security risk to reveal.
Since this has never actually happened, and these kinds of leaks have been going on for centuries, I don't think we have much to worry about.
More importantly, if we're discussing a subjective matter (which I believe we are) then who the heck cares what they think?
Fair pricing on goods really isn't subjective. Remember that $600 toilet seat? It's now $2000. Does it take an "expert" to determine that? Why do meals served in Iraq cost $250 each? The idea that only the military and defense contractors themselves are qualified to do any assessment whatsoever of military spending is a canard used for decades to avoid scrutiny for their corruption.
Toilets and food is one thing, Apache Helicopters are another.
Army personnel have to bear responsibility for their actions if they do something wrong
Really, how? The generals that make purchasing decisions never set foot on the battlefield. There hasn't been a serious investigation into procurement corruption in the Pentagon in over 60 years, so there is no possibly for punishment. The worst case scenario is early retirement to the cushy "consulting" job defense contractors gave you in exchange for procurement favors.
Numerous individuals were fired from their positions or placed in jail when investigation found they did something improper. I agree with you though that there should be more investigations and more frequent punishments for misconduct.
It would really suck if the tables were turned and *you* were being constantly watched, criticized and second-guessed.
1) I am. I do security work and I'm closely scrutinized.
2) THEY SIGNED UP FOR IT! This is akin to celebrities whining about the paparazzi. They wanted all this power and money, and make no mistake they're all making million
Either "draw" a share on the keyboard and the letters you hit make up that shape or put together some program which takes some combination of shapes and colors to come up with a password. For example:
Types of objects: Car, Box, Plane Colors: [display 5 of them]
I don't disagree with you. My point is that more users should make their voices heard on this issue. You can be sure that if Google received thousands of emails to this effect they would change their tune.
Search results is one thing, medical records are a lot more personal.
What gives Google the right to retain my private information for 18 months? This is especially worrisome in light of the fact that they are venturing into the medical domain and the kinds of stunts that Facebook has been pulling.
If I want to delete all my records *now* I should be able to do so, no questions asked.
Israel's deterrence worked great for years until the UN and US started "expressing concern" whenever they tried to take out terrorist groups.
When was this? The only time in the past 50 years Israel has not been under constant attack was during a brief period before and after the Oslo accords from about 1992 to about 1996, and that was entirely due to an effective two-way ceasefire. When it became clear that the Israeli government was unwilling to implement the accords, the ceasefire collapsed. Israel has not, and will not, achieve security in the Holy Land through sheer force of arms.
Talk about a twisted sense of history. From 1973 onward (mostly due to the 1967 war) Israel stopped living under the threat of attack from foreign countries. Individual terrorist groups are another matter, but it is quite hard to deter stateless players. No country seemed to have figured that one out yet. As for Olso, I guess you are living in lala land because every source of information (except the Palestinians themselves) agree that the Oslo accords fell apart because Arafat was a corrupt egomaniac that promised a lot and delivered nothing. He preached peace in English and hate in Arabic. His own people voted in Hamas because they were sick and tired of his corruption and the corruption of his party. The Palestinians first requirement under the Oslo accord and Road Map is to disarm their terrorist groups. They never began doing this, not even in the slightest. Meanwhile, Israel has yielded Palestinians self-rule in large parts of the West Bank and completely withdrew from Gaza. These are permanent concessions Israel has made at great personal cost (in terms of lives, money and heartache). The Palestinians have given nothing back but lip service.
No one is using torture as deterrence.
You fail to understand the purpose of torture. Torture does not produce useful information, everyone knows this. The purpose of torture is to, literally, "terrorize" the subjects of torture. It is to intimidate the victim specifically and the public generally. "Don't act against us or we'll torture you."
Whatever you're smoking, please stop it. No western country uses this form of deterrence, though former dictator Saddam Hussein and current middle-east dictators probably still use it.
There are plenty of NGOs that read the papers in full and publish their own summaries. Individuals don't need the kind of information you're asking for. They don't understand enough about the military to interpret the data, though the NGOs I mentioned do.
So you think this information should be released to any NGO that asks, and that's NOT a security risk, but shouldn't be given out to individuals because that IS a security risk? I think there's a contradiction here.
No. I think that detailed classified information should remain classified until it no longer poses a security risk. You could declassify the information 30 years later (I believe this is the current practice in many countries around the world). I think higher-level information should be released to NGOs without including security-sensitive information. For example, you could discuss how many informants you have, what percentage of raids were successful, the rate of mistaken civilian deaths, etc. But it makes little sense to discuss *who* your informants are, *how* you maintain contact with them, etc.
Breaking news about how your particular government does it does not justify risking the lives of our soldiers to do it. Lives are worth more than this.
This is a false dilemma. Even if releasing this information risked the lives of soldiers, and without a shadow of a doubt it does not, the lives of soldiers do not have UNLIMITED value. Is it worth $100 billion for an operation to save the life of the President or ? Fuck no it isn't! NOBODY'S life is worth that much.
Slashdot Mirror
The source code has been open to the public for over 10 years. This includes the Java, C and ASM source code.
The license prevented anyone from distributing forked code but it *was* freely available to the public. Nothing prevented anyone from auditing the code or patching it for internal use so long as they didn't redistribute their changes to the general public and call it "Java". As a result, Java was already enjoying the vast majority of the benefits associated with open-source with free of its risks.
Java has been open-source for over 10 years now. Open-source fanatics would have you believe otherwise. No one is able to please *everyone* in the open-source community (nor should they try).
Sun has open-sourced a lot more products than any other company in recent history. They got *some* thanks from the community but they also got a lot of whiners asking for more. You give someone a finger and he wants your entire hand. Go figure.
That's a silly argument. Nothing preventing Linux distributions from bundling Sun's JRE in the past the same way they do now. The fact that Linux distributions refuse to bundle software with licenses they do not *personally* approve of is not the same thing as saying that the license actually prevented them from doing so.
Open-source extremists have no one to blame but themselves.
Java's source-code was open to the public for over a decade now. The only thing that changed recently is the license, but that license never prevented you from bundling it beforehand.
500,000 * sizeof(ipAddress) should be small enough
At most you need to upload 10MB worth of data back up the stream asking for those IPs to be blocked. That shouldn't take more than a second or two.
1) How do you detect a DDoS attack?
2) Once you detect it, wouldn't it be easier to propagate a request up your stream asking it to cut off incoming traffic from X?
For example, if I (somehow) know the IPs of people that are part of the DDoS attack, I'd send them up to my provider, and he would send it up to his upstream provider, etc until the traffic gets cut off as close as possible to the source. Everyone saves a lot of traffic and we're all happy, no?
This is the most obvious flamebait I'm read in a while. I'm surprised that Slashdot's editors let this one through.
The government should be in charge of laying out the infrastructure and lease it to all ISPs at the same price. What they do with it beyond that point is 100% their choice.
The problem with Bell is that they own both the infrastructure and the service, so when they sell the service they give themselves lower infrastructure leasing rates than 3rd-party ISPs and make it impossible for them to compete. By all other accounts Bell is *worse* than all other ISPs. Their own competitive advantage, price, is gained through illegal monopolistic practices.
The government should nationalize the infrastructure and fine the heck out of Bell for their practices.
It works in great Israel and it somewhat works in Canada. Just because Bell doesn't like it doesn't mean it doesn't work.
In Israel you have two types of companies: one sells you access to the infrastructure and another sells you access to the service (internet, phone, etc). This places Bell on equal footing as any other internet provider and it has led to a very competitive marketplace.
We don't have the option of Rogers in Quebec. Bell is a huge ass monopoly here and if these laws are rescinded we will go back to the dark days of Bell versus Videotron, both of which are monopolies. Both provide overpriced service and poor customer service.
I absolutely love some of the smaller ISPs that resell Bell infrastructure. Their prices and service is way better but they are the mercy of Bell.
The government should nationalize the infrastructure components of Bell and Videotron and the remaining companies should only deal with selling services on top of that infrastructure. This would put Bell, Videotron and resellers on equal footing. They have something similar in Israel and it led to a very versatile marketplace.
Technical issues aside, anyone who has had the displeasure of dealing with Bell will know what I'm talking about. They have horrible customer service and constantly pass new rules to squeeze more out of their customers. To make matters worse they are acting like a monopoly, passing excessive fees off to their resellers then offering "discounts" to customers that go to them directly. Anything and everything to ensure that they regain their monopoly.
They should be charging resellers per MB using their real costs (as opposed to making profit on the underlying infrastructure) and they should keep their hands completely off it at that point. If the reseller wishes to "shape" traffic or impose caps that is *their* business. Bell the infrastructure should separate itself completely from Bell the internet provider.
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Your right on the history, but you can see how it can be interpreted either way
It would take a great amount of spin for people to get this wrong and in my view this is precisely what is going on in media centers around the world (even in the US and Canada). Anyone who spends more than 30 minutes reading up on the history of the middle-east should know better. The problem is that people only know what they watch on TV (few people open books or research stories in depth online). The problem with news agencies is that they:
1) Present very short sniplets with no historical context.
2) Side with the perceived underdog, regardless of their past actions.
3) Apply double standards to Israel and other countries all over the world.
Let me give you a specific example of what I mean.
1) They only cover terrorist attacks in Israel. Rarely (if ever) do they cover anything positive in Israel. This is precisely why people think you're insane if you say you're planning to move to Israel or vacation there. Everyone thinks is a constant war-zone, which it is not.
2) The real struggle is between all of the Arab countries and Israel, not the Palestinians versus Israel, yet the media never presents it in this light. Let's be honest here: everything that goes wrong in the UN happens because of the automatic majority of middle-east tyrants hold there. All the money, weapons and political pressure which Palestinian terrorist groups come directly from Arab countries. If this was a simple dispute between Palestinians and Israelis it would have been over decades ago. Secondly, the media seems to ignore the past actions of the Palestinians. Take for example Mr. moderate Abbas and the great Arafat before him. In both cases these people have repeatedly denied the Holocaust and called for Israel's destruction through terrorism but the media refused to carry this story. So these people carry one saying one thing in English and a totally different thing in Arabic. You can't report this story honestly unless you report on their full history. You can't claim Abbas is a moderate when he repeatedly exalts "the sacrifice of martyrs". When that psycho gunned down children in Jerusalem last week Abbas glorified his actions on official PA television. You can bet this story never made it to North American TV, because it doesn't fit nicely into the dumbed-down story they're trying to sell you.
3) When Hezbollah shelled Israeli civilians, killed some soldiers and kidnapped others, Israel replied by declaring war on them. The UN and NGOs immediately blamed Israel for sparking a war and even the UN cautioned Israel not to do anything rash. The same story repeated when Gaza shelled Sderot civilians with over 7000 missiles over the past couple of years and Israel finally decided to respond. We keep on hearing the words "disproportionate response" coming out of people's mouths. In my view, a "proportionate" response would be for Israel to shell Gaza indiscriminately and pass out candies in the streets with civilians get hurt or die. What Israel has been doing is sitting on its hands while its civilians get massacred. As far as I'm concerned anyone other country would have shelled the crap out of Gaza if it would have pulled this sort of thing on its own civilians and it's outrageous for them to ask Israel to show more restraint than they would.
A lot of bloodshed would be spared on both sides if Israel was allowed to kick the crap out of these terrorist groups, deport their people and make sure they never came back. The sooner all the extremists get kicked out, the sooner Palestinians moderates can take power and form a sovereign state. Israel wants this as much as anyone else. Can you begin to imagine how much everyone's economy would benefit from a true peace agreement in that region?
Your also right it is a holy war, but I don't think the term just pertains to the Muslims, why else would the future Israelis really want that land?
Israel has tried, repeatedly, to
Small correction, it was the Greeks that conquered the region from the Jews and renamed it, not the Romans. You can read more about at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philistines and the top of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Palestine
Give me a break! You can't excuse turning down an offer for 95% of what you're asking for, then incite terrorism as a negotiating card and then claim to be blameless. Palestinians lost any sort of right for a 50/50 compromise. Every bit of terrorism they use takes another bit of legitimacy away from them until one day they will find themselves left with nothing. They deserve nothing move.
Israel proved its willingness for peace with actions, not just words. It withdrew from the Sinai, Lebanon and Gaza both on a civilian and military level. In many cases it did this unilaterally without asking for anything in return. Arafat did nothing but talk. In English he would talk peace, in Arabic he would incite to terrorism. It also doesn't help his case that he stole *billions* of dollars from his own people. The guy was an arch terrorist and a crook.
If the Palestinians got what was fair, they would split the entire country 50/50 with equal access to the sea, and air, and equal rights to govern themselves and allow the right of return for Palestinians. 1) No one took their country. Palestine was the name of a region (so named by the Romans after they defeated the Jews and renamed the region after the Jews' ancient enemy the Philistines which bare no relation to today's so-called Palestinians). The region belonged to the Ottoman Empire until the British took it over. Gaza used to belong to Egypt and the West Bank used to belong to Jordan.
2) If you actually look at history maps you will find that Palestine actually consisted of what is today Israel, the disputed territories, Jordan and parts of Lebanon and Syria. When the British and French divided the land they actually took 50% of Palestine and renamed it Trans-Jordan (today's Jordan). That was meant to be the Arab half of Palestine. The other half was promised to the Jews (refer to the Balfour declaration and others which followed in subsequent years). Then some genius decided to rename the remaining half Palestine and divide *that* in half again. It's no coincidence that most Jordanian citizens are Palestinians, because Jordan *is* Arab Palestine.
3) If you take a look at the maps in 1947 when the UN partitioned the land you will find that most land allocated to the Jews was desert. If it is blooming green today it is because they built it up to what it is. It didn't magically turn from desert to farmland over night. Now that their land is all green suddenly the Arab want a piece of it. You can't have your cake and eat it too!
4) Gaza's borders with Egypt are controlled by Egypt. Gaza's borders with Israel are controlled by Israel. How is that different from anywhere else in the world? If Egyptians won't allow Palestinians to cross it's because they have a long track recording of stirring up shit. If Israel won't let them have free reign in their airspace it's because they're launching rockets and driving car-bombs into civilian structures. When Israel fully withdrew from Gaza in 2005 many months went by when Gaza launched rockets into Israel and Israel did not respond at all. They *could* have declared independence and practiced self-rule but instead they chose to start shit up again. They're bearing the consequences of their actions.
5) How can you argue for Palestinian "right of return" (aka let's destroy Israel's democracy by swamping it full of Arabs) while simultaneously denying Jews the right to live in a future Palestinian state? Isn't that racist? So a Jew-free country is okay but a country with 20% Arabs it not? Frankly if we were playing fair I'd say it should be 100% Jew-free in Palestine and 100% Arab-free in Israel so they could both be sovereign states.
So let me see if I've got you straight:
1) When someone offers you 95% of what you're asking for, it's not good enough. Negotiation is about getting 100% of what you're asking for.
2) We should totally ignore the fact that Barak offered Arafat Israeli land in exchange for land he wanted to keep for the settlements. Arafat totally could have come back and continued negotiations but he did not.
Demanding 100% of what you want is not called negotiation. He responded with terrorism in the form of the second intifada. There is plenty of documentation to back up what I'm saying here, the most public of which are Bill Clinton's own memoirs.
You've got it backward. There are plenty of documentation that proves that Arab countries were on the verge of attacking Israel in 1967. Not only did they line up vast armies right on the border but they also made public declarations to that end. We have plenty of books, audio recordings, and videos to prove that. Even Russia nowadays admits that it gave Egypt false intelligence in order to provoke it to attack Israel. Be that as it may, there is no disputing that Israel was defending itself from an impending attack, not the other way around.
PS: For months leading up to the 1967 war, Israel was being raided by terrorist groups from these countries who were murdering its civilians and retreating back to their native countries. Even if it wasn't under impending attack these raids alone are enough as a declaration of war.
You've got your history wrong. No one "invaded" an "already occupied" land. When Jews immigrated to the region (back then it wasn't a country) in the early 1920-1940s they bought some land and lived on it (many still hold the deeds to prove it). They were normal civilians like their Arab neighbors. In 1947 the UN partitioned the land along ethnic lines. Cities that had a Jewish majority were marked for Israel and cities with Arab majority were marked for them. Israel accepted this partition and declared independence, the Arabs did not. They invaded the very next day.
Fast forward a couple years into the future, what you have now is not a dispute over territory. It's a religious war. Any non-Muslim living in the middle-east is marked for "liberation" by Muslim extremists regardless of the historical background. These people aren't asking for pre-1967 lines, they're asking for pre-1948 lines before Israel even existed. There can be no negotiation over people's rights to live. Our lives are not worth any less than the lives of people that own the rest of the middle-east and it offends me that people don't get that. Forget Israel for a second, try living in peace as a non-Muslim anywhere else in the middle-east and see how far you get. Then get back to me. It's no coincidence that Israel is home to some of the world's smallest minority groups that were massacred in other middle-eastern countries and retreated back to Israel where they now practice their beliefs in peace.
If what you said was true Israelis wouldn't be sitting on their hands as Palestinians shell their civilians. They'd arm their civilians with rockets and have them right back at the Palestinians.
The undeniable fact is that Palestinian terrorists launch attacks from civilian centers and target civilians exclusively. The Israeli military is not located anywhere close to civilian centers. There is absolutely no excuse for attacking Israeli civilians this way and no way you could claim it was done by accident. Israeli troops have one of the lowest rate of collateral damage in the world. When Palestinian civilians are killed in the cross-fire it is by mistake, not because they were targeting them.
If Israel wanted to wipe out the Palestinians, it could do so in a day but it does not. If the tables were turned the Palestinians would not hesitate for a minute, as they have already demonstrated.
From 1973 onward (mostly due to the 1967 war) Israel stopped living under the threat of attack from foreign countries. Individual terrorist groups are another matter, but it is quite hard to deter stateless players. No country seemed to have figured that one out yet.
I don't think we're going to be able to bridge the gap in perception here. Israel fought a war LAST YEAR with Lebanon over security concerns.
That's because for years they threatened to bomb Hezbollah bases in Lebanon and cut off shipments of weapons from Syria and Iran but were under international and domestic pressure to keep things quiet. So for years Hezbollah bombed civilian and military sites in the Israeli border and Israel did not reply. All the critics said this would destroy Israel's deterrence and it did.
No western country uses this form of deterrence
The French used it in Algeria, the UK used it in Northern Ireland. It's very difficult to believe that torture isn't used this way by the British and American forces in Iraq given the countless eyewitness accounts by prisoners and interrogators, the video recordings and photographs, and they have plainly stated they are doing so. What more do you need exactly?
I can only speak on the few photos I've seen. Pretty much all of them (with the exception of the single water boarding incident) amounted to intimidation, not torture. Who cares how uncomfortable you make people under interrogation? They're not going to reveal secrets under they're under *some* form duress. I believe that on this count people are watering down the definition of torture.
I am saying that if you can protect even a single life by not releasing security-sensitive information then you should do so.
And what I am saying is that keeping "security-sensitive" information secret costs people's lives. How?
You could reveal this information months after this information is changed but you definitely shouldn't be revealing it while it's "live" and poses a security risk to reveal.
Since this has never actually happened, and these kinds of leaks have been going on for centuries, I don't think we have much to worry about.
More importantly, if we're discussing a subjective matter (which I believe we are) then who the heck cares what they think?
Fair pricing on goods really isn't subjective. Remember that $600 toilet seat? It's now $2000. Does it take an "expert" to determine that? Why do meals served in Iraq cost $250 each? The idea that only the military and defense contractors themselves are qualified to do any assessment whatsoever of military spending is a canard used for decades to avoid scrutiny for their corruption.
Toilets and food is one thing, Apache Helicopters are another.
Army personnel have to bear responsibility for their actions if they do something wrong
Really, how? The generals that make purchasing decisions never set foot on the battlefield. There hasn't been a serious investigation into procurement corruption in the Pentagon in over 60 years, so there is no possibly for punishment. The worst case scenario is early retirement to the cushy "consulting" job defense contractors gave you in exchange for procurement favors.
Numerous individuals were fired from their positions or placed in jail when investigation found they did something improper. I agree with you though that there should be more investigations and more frequent punishments for misconduct.
It would really suck if the tables were turned and *you* were being constantly watched, criticized and second-guessed.
1) I am. I do security work and I'm closely scrutinized.
2) THEY SIGNED UP FOR IT! This is akin to celebrities whining about the paparazzi. They wanted all this power and money, and make no mistake they're all making million
Either "draw" a share on the keyboard and the letters you hit make up that shape or put together some program which takes some combination of shapes and colors to come up with a password. For example:
Types of objects: Car, Box, Plane
Colors: [display 5 of them]
Pick the right combination as your password, etc.
I don't disagree with you. My point is that more users should make their voices heard on this issue. You can be sure that if Google received thousands of emails to this effect they would change their tune.
Search results is one thing, medical records are a lot more personal.
What gives Google the right to retain my private information for 18 months? This is especially worrisome in light of the fact that they are venturing into the medical domain and the kinds of stunts that Facebook has been pulling.
If I want to delete all my records *now* I should be able to do so, no questions asked.
Israel's deterrence worked great for years until the UN and US started "expressing concern" whenever they tried to take out terrorist groups.
When was this? The only time in the past 50 years Israel has not been under constant attack was during a brief period before and after the Oslo accords from about 1992 to about 1996, and that was entirely due to an effective two-way ceasefire. When it became clear that the Israeli government was unwilling to implement the accords, the ceasefire collapsed. Israel has not, and will not, achieve security in the Holy Land through sheer force of arms.
Talk about a twisted sense of history. From 1973 onward (mostly due to the 1967 war) Israel stopped living under the threat of attack from foreign countries. Individual terrorist groups are another matter, but it is quite hard to deter stateless players. No country seemed to have figured that one out yet. As for Olso, I guess you are living in lala land because every source of information (except the Palestinians themselves) agree that the Oslo accords fell apart because Arafat was a corrupt egomaniac that promised a lot and delivered nothing. He preached peace in English and hate in Arabic. His own people voted in Hamas because they were sick and tired of his corruption and the corruption of his party. The Palestinians first requirement under the Oslo accord and Road Map is to disarm their terrorist groups. They never began doing this, not even in the slightest. Meanwhile, Israel has yielded Palestinians self-rule in large parts of the West Bank and completely withdrew from Gaza. These are permanent concessions Israel has made at great personal cost (in terms of lives, money and heartache). The Palestinians have given nothing back but lip service.
No one is using torture as deterrence.
You fail to understand the purpose of torture. Torture does not produce useful information, everyone knows this. The purpose of torture is to, literally, "terrorize" the subjects of torture. It is to intimidate the victim specifically and the public generally. "Don't act against us or we'll torture you."
Whatever you're smoking, please stop it. No western country uses this form of deterrence, though former dictator Saddam Hussein and current middle-east dictators probably still use it.
There are plenty of NGOs that read the papers in full and publish their own summaries. Individuals don't need the kind of information you're asking for. They don't understand enough about the military to interpret the data, though the NGOs I mentioned do.
So you think this information should be released to any NGO that asks, and that's NOT a security risk, but shouldn't be given out to individuals because that IS a security risk? I think there's a contradiction here.
No. I think that detailed classified information should remain classified until it no longer poses a security risk. You could declassify the information 30 years later (I believe this is the current practice in many countries around the world). I think higher-level information should be released to NGOs without including security-sensitive information. For example, you could discuss how many informants you have, what percentage of raids were successful, the rate of mistaken civilian deaths, etc. But it makes little sense to discuss *who* your informants are, *how* you maintain contact with them, etc.
Breaking news about how your particular government does it does not justify risking the lives of our soldiers to do it. Lives are worth more than this.
This is a false dilemma. Even if releasing this information risked the lives of soldiers, and without a shadow of a doubt it does not, the lives of soldiers do not have UNLIMITED value. Is it worth $100 billion for an operation to save the life of the President or ? Fuck no it isn't! NOBODY'S life is worth that much.
Nor is it worthwhile to s