You seem to be implying that Israel has nuclear weapons. Israel never said it does.
Neither has Iran; in fact, they've outright denied it.
So the question becomes, why should the IAEA believe Israel and not Iran? If Iran has to let UN inspectors check out their stuff, shouldn't logic dictate that Israel should as well? You know, to make sure they're on the up-and-up.
You seem to be confusing facts. The IAEA has independently confirmed that Iran is enriching nuclear material to 20% level, and has developed a heavy water reactor. And again, IRAN HAS SAID SO ITSELF. None of this evidence depends on anything Israel has said.
They have no requirement (whether legal or moral) to join the NPT. They have repeatedly stated that they would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the middle east and would be willing to sign the NPT once the region cools down (peace treaties are signed with the remaining Arab neighbors).
So? I can say 'my name is Mary, Queen of Scots" all day long; doesn't make it fact. That's what the petticoats and tinfoil crown are for.
I fail to see your point. The fact of the matter is, Iran signed the NPT and then proceeded to violate its terms. Israel has not signed the NPT and as such has not violated any terms. The NPT is nothing more than a legal document.
Furthermore, the US is not in the same situation as Israel. If Mexico was launching missiles and sending terrorists across your borders daily I daresay you would have bombed them back into the stone age.
[citation desperately needed]
Funny, because when I read the news, I see all sorts of stories about the Israeli military performing strikes in Turkey, Egypt, etc., but not once in the past several years have I heard about any nation's regular army invading Israel.
You can make excuses and defer blame 'til the cows come home, but history shows us the truth.
Citation needed, indeed. I'd like to know how many times Israel has struck targets inside Turkey and Egypt in the past decade. Please, provide reliable citations.
The rule is simple: stop applying double standards to Israel.
The only double standard I've seen in Israel's case is the one where they feel they can rattle sabers at their neighbors day-in and day-out, but the minute one of those neighbors so much as builds a single 5% enrichment facility, which has no purpose other than civil power generation, Israel seems to think that's crossing some sort of line and said neighbor needs to be wiped out in a nuclear holocaust.
Both the IAEA and Iran itself admit to 20% enrichment, the existence of a heavy water facility and the development of ICBM. None of these are needed for civilian use, nor does Iran (a country with enough oil to meet domestic demand for over 100 years) need nuclear energy in the first place.
Don't expect her to live by standards that your own country doesn't live up to.
OK; my country readily admits to its nuclear capability, and is a signator of the NNPT.
Your move, Israel.
What's your point? The US has openly tested and used nuclear weapons. Israel has not.
You seem to be implying that Israel has nuclear weapons. Israel never said it does. They have no requirement (whether legal or moral) to join the NPT. They have repeatedly stated that they would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the middle east and would be willing to sign the NPT once the region cools down (peace treaties are signed with the remaining Arab neighbors).
Furthermore, the US is not in the same situation as Israel. If Mexico was launching missiles and sending terrorists across your borders daily I daresay you would have bombed them back into the stone age. Israel has the capability to do so, yet has not. My point is simple: don't compare the situation of the US (with neighbors such as Canada and Mexico) to Israel. If Israel was located between those two countries then we could talk.
The rule is simple: stop applying double standards to Israel. Don't expect her to live by standards that your own country doesn't live up to. Don't criticize her for mistakes any more than you already criticize other countries for those same mistakes. Apply equal standards and it will be genuine.
At no point in the document does the NSA say that Israel planted listening devices. People are doing some very heavy reading between the lines. That's a nice way for the NSA to pin blame on a scapegoat and then turn around saying they never said any such thing.
People will believe what they want. If they hold a grudge against Israel they will believe this. But if you are interested in the truth and have read what the document *actually* says, at no point was Israel found to be spying.
an anti-vote button. I am willing to bet the vast majority of users would disagree with this move.
Firefox's handling of Bugzilla has been terrible for years. It is the primary reason I switched from Firefox to Chrome. I was tired of the one-way communication, especially coming from a so-called open-source project.
Case in point: my post got flagged as Offtopic. Anyone who thinks it is offtopic to say that we've got to cut science spending because we're spending too much money altogether doesn't seem to understand what is going on.
Science spending is not a Human Right, nor is caring for the Disabled and Elderly. It is a very wonderful thing to do, but my point is that when you don't have the money, you don't have the money. Everything needs to get hit *including* things we care deeply about. The sooner people internalize this message, the easier it'll be to get out of debt.
Is that the government is spending too much money. It doesn't matter how you try to spin this, the fact of the matter is they need to start cutting costs.
Notice I'm not blaming one party over another. I just think the American people are doing a disservice to themselves when they accept mud-slinging in order to distract them from this fact. Keep your eye on the ball and demand that *any* party that is elected into power balance the budget and start paying back the debt.
1) Network usage is close to maxing out capacity. 2) ISPs would be forced to raise prices for everyone if network usage was un-throttled; otherwise they'd risk losing money.
I'm willing to bet that:
1) We are nowhere close to maxing out our bandwidth. 2) ISPs are enjoying an extremely high profit margin. There is no excuse for raising prices even if unfettered P2P access is allowed.
Canada is a 1st-world country enjoying internet prices of a 3rd-world country. We pay one of the highest rates in the world. There is no excuse for it!
Cry me a river. Either Israel gets to slow down Iranian nuclear weapon development or they get to bomb it outright. Which would you rather have? Don't expect them to sit on their hands as Iran openly boasts about its plan to wipe Israel off the map and develop the weapons for doing so.
PS: Every one of your points is hearsay. None of the aforementioned attacks on Iran have been linked back to Israel. There are plenty of countries going out of their way to slow down Iran, many of such attacks even coming from other Arab countries.
The entire idea behind Ethonol was obviously flawed from the get-go. So much so that I honestly believe someone should go to jail for this. How many millions of dollars were lost? How many extra people starved to death worldwide because of increasing food prices?
It's not difficult to notice Facebook pages or Twitter accounts broadcasting pro Al-Qaeda or Hezbollah messages. Heck, half the time they link to the official web pages of those terrorist groups. Take that and combine it with the fact that trusted organizations should be able to flag suspected accounts and it shouldn't take much for an ISP to act on it.
If the RIAA can flag *songs* to be removed, why is it so unthinkable that trusted organizations should be able to flag *terrorists*? If you believe that you've been unfairly flagged, provide counter-proof to the ISP and/or take it up in court. If you're on a terrorist list, getting delisted from Twitter is the least of your problems.
Any little bit we can do to help rid the world of these extremists the better.
Uh... I'd hate to let facts get in the way of your ranting, but there is wide-spread protest against this behavior by Jews. Many of the protestors are Orthodox Jews no less. The Chief Rabbi of Israel has even come out publicly condemning this behavior.
Your first two citations re:Russia selling Iran nukes have nothing in them saying that they do. In fact, your second citation explicitly says that Russia is NOT selling Iran nukes.
I never said Russia is selling Iran nukes. I said Russia is making billions of dollars a year selling weapon systems to Iran. Russia is against economic sanctions because it would prohibit them from continuing to make more such sales in the future.
No sir. You stop making shit up. Stop making assumptions about whether other people's points are sourced until they reply.
The real issue is that there is significant international pressure for Iran to stop its nuclear program for civilian (power) purposes.
What "civilian" purposes? I'll repeat my question in case you missed them the first time around:
Why does Iran need nuclear energy program when it has enough oil to meet domestic use for over 100 years?
First off, Iran is quite correct in that this is unfair as they are have signed the NPT, and have cooperated with the IAEA. Secondly, now that such crippling sanctions are in place against them, why should they stop? They are rightly convinced that the world will view them as a nuclear threat whether or not they stop their civilian program, and they now need that civilian program more than ever due to the sanctions.
The NPT entitles Iran to start a civilian energy program *if* and only if they declare their intent to do so ahead of time and provide full transparency throughout the process. Why then did Iran conceal their nuclear program for years? Why then did Iran boot out IAEA inspectors? Why did the UN catch Iran in possession of schematics for outfitting a nuclear warhead on their missiles? Why then did Iran use computer modeling to study the a core of a nuclear warhead? This and more curtsey of http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-15643460
Economic sanctions are a precursor to war. The American propaganda machine wants war with Iran. When have you ever known the American's to let the truth stand between them and one of their holy wars.
Right, because Obama some crazy yahoo with a track-record of declaring wars. Give me a break. You have one of the most left-wing Presidents in power and even he cannot deny that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.
The facts are stacked against your twisted reality. On the one hand, there is no reason for Iran to develop a nuclear energy program. On the other hand, it has a long record of training, funding and outfitting terrorist groups to attack its enemies. They don't even deny doing so. To add insult to injury, they slaughter their own civilians in the streets. Why are so many bleeding-heart liberals exerting more energy defending dictators than working to remove them? Who do you think is helping Syria slaughter its people? http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/12/21/uk-iran-syria-kidnap-idUKTRE7BK0S620111221
It's sad to see people go to such lengths trying to explain away Iran's covert nuclear weapon program.
Every single intelligence service in the world is in agreement that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. All, that is, except Russia and China. Of course Russia is selling billions of dollar's worth of weapons to Iran (and Iraq before that) and China is heavily dependent on Iranian oil.
Even ignoring this fact, why in the world would Iran need nuclear energy? They have enough oil to meet domestic demand for over 100 years (!!). It makes absolutely no sense for them to go nuclear for any reason other than a weapons program. Furthermore, why did they hide it all these years? They are allowed to develop nuclear energy so long are transparent about its development *ahead of time*. Why would they risk all this cloak and dagger behavior if they weren't hiding anything?
If it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it's a duck.
The Age of Paradox [1] provides a nice explanation. A society predicated on efficiency and productivity favors producing the same amount of work with less people, and paying those people more money. Inevitably, this leads to higher and higher unemployment and a situation where the remaining people (employed) are making more and more money. Note he is not referring to the top 1%. He is referring to you and I. Each of us is equally responsible for the situation we find ourselves in today. We work more overtime in order to make more money, and then wonder why there are so many more unemployed (who we just replaced by working more hours). One simple fix (suggested by me, not the author of the book) is to make it less profitable for one employee to do two people's work. As soon as it's more profitable to hire two people and stick to 37.5 hours of work, employment will go up and we'd all be happier people.
No rights, no matter how precious, are without responsibilities. You can't hold up a white flag, then shoot soldiers as they lower their fire-arms. The more people we allow to abuse these rights, the sooner they will cease to exist.
We need to fight to protect Democracy. It might shock certain people, but fighting abuse is part of that fight. I leave it up to the smart people of Slashdot to propose ways of combating said abuse without eroding the rights of people who act in good faith.
Who said anything about stopping everything? I mean putting a damper on consumerism (buying more than we need) and disposable products (made in China, breaks after two days). The while thing is wasteful. You want to help the environment? Make it more expensive to buy disposable products than reusable ones. Substantially increase the cost of non-vital items. Funnel the resulting funds back into some research fund for reusable energy.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to be implying that Israel has nuclear weapons. Israel never said it does.
Neither has Iran; in fact, they've outright denied it.
So the question becomes, why should the IAEA believe Israel and not Iran? If Iran has to let UN inspectors check out their stuff, shouldn't logic dictate that Israel should as well? You know, to make sure they're on the up-and-up.
You seem to be confusing facts. The IAEA has independently confirmed that Iran is enriching nuclear material to 20% level, and has developed a heavy water reactor. And again, IRAN HAS SAID SO ITSELF. None of this evidence depends on anything Israel has said.
They have no requirement (whether legal or moral) to join the NPT. They have repeatedly stated that they would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the middle east and would be willing to sign the NPT once the region cools down (peace treaties are signed with the remaining Arab neighbors).
So? I can say 'my name is Mary, Queen of Scots" all day long; doesn't make it fact. That's what the petticoats and tinfoil crown are for.
I fail to see your point. The fact of the matter is, Iran signed the NPT and then proceeded to violate its terms. Israel has not signed the NPT and as such has not violated any terms. The NPT is nothing more than a legal document.
Furthermore, the US is not in the same situation as Israel. If Mexico was launching missiles and sending terrorists across your borders daily I daresay you would have bombed them back into the stone age.
[citation desperately needed]
Funny, because when I read the news, I see all sorts of stories about the Israeli military performing strikes in Turkey, Egypt, etc., but not once in the past several years have I heard about any nation's regular army invading Israel.
You can make excuses and defer blame 'til the cows come home, but history shows us the truth.
Citation needed, indeed. I'd like to know how many times Israel has struck targets inside Turkey and Egypt in the past decade. Please, provide reliable citations.
Nonsense.
The rule is simple: stop applying double standards to Israel.
The only double standard I've seen in Israel's case is the one where they feel they can rattle sabers at their neighbors day-in and day-out, but the minute one of those neighbors so much as builds a single 5% enrichment facility, which has no purpose other than civil power generation, Israel seems to think that's crossing some sort of line and said neighbor needs to be wiped out in a nuclear holocaust.
Both the IAEA and Iran itself admit to 20% enrichment, the existence of a heavy water facility and the development of ICBM. None of these are needed for civilian use, nor does Iran (a country with enough oil to meet domestic demand for over 100 years) need nuclear energy in the first place.
Don't expect her to live by standards that your own country doesn't live up to.
OK; my country readily admits to its nuclear capability, and is a signator of the NNPT.
Your move, Israel.
What's your point? The US has openly tested and used nuclear weapons. Israel has not.
You seem to be implying that Israel has nuclear weapons. Israel never said it does. They have no requirement (whether legal or moral) to join the NPT. They have repeatedly stated that they would not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the middle east and would be willing to sign the NPT once the region cools down (peace treaties are signed with the remaining Arab neighbors).
Furthermore, the US is not in the same situation as Israel. If Mexico was launching missiles and sending terrorists across your borders daily I daresay you would have bombed them back into the stone age. Israel has the capability to do so, yet has not. My point is simple: don't compare the situation of the US (with neighbors such as Canada and Mexico) to Israel. If Israel was located between those two countries then we could talk.
Nonsense.
The rule is simple: stop applying double standards to Israel. Don't expect her to live by standards that your own country doesn't live up to. Don't criticize her for mistakes any more than you already criticize other countries for those same mistakes. Apply equal standards and it will be genuine.
At no point in the document does the NSA say that Israel planted listening devices. People are doing some very heavy reading between the lines. That's a nice way for the NSA to pin blame on a scapegoat and then turn around saying they never said any such thing.
People will believe what they want. If they hold a grudge against Israel they will believe this. But if you are interested in the truth and have read what the document *actually* says, at no point was Israel found to be spying.
an anti-vote button. I am willing to bet the vast majority of users would disagree with this move.
Firefox's handling of Bugzilla has been terrible for years. It is the primary reason I switched from Firefox to Chrome. I was tired of the one-way communication, especially coming from a so-called open-source project.
I agree that the problem is entitlements.
Case in point: my post got flagged as Offtopic. Anyone who thinks it is offtopic to say that we've got to cut science spending because we're spending too much money altogether doesn't seem to understand what is going on.
Science spending is not a Human Right, nor is caring for the Disabled and Elderly. It is a very wonderful thing to do, but my point is that when you don't have the money, you don't have the money. Everything needs to get hit *including* things we care deeply about. The sooner people internalize this message, the easier it'll be to get out of debt.
Is that the government is spending too much money. It doesn't matter how you try to spin this, the fact of the matter is they need to start cutting costs.
Notice I'm not blaming one party over another. I just think the American people are doing a disservice to themselves when they accept mud-slinging in order to distract them from this fact. Keep your eye on the ball and demand that *any* party that is elected into power balance the budget and start paying back the debt.
I'd like to see proof that:
1) Network usage is close to maxing out capacity.
2) ISPs would be forced to raise prices for everyone if network usage was un-throttled; otherwise they'd risk losing money.
I'm willing to bet that:
1) We are nowhere close to maxing out our bandwidth.
2) ISPs are enjoying an extremely high profit margin. There is no excuse for raising prices even if unfettered P2P access is allowed.
Canada is a 1st-world country enjoying internet prices of a 3rd-world country. We pay one of the highest rates in the world. There is no excuse for it!
Cry me a river. Either Israel gets to slow down Iranian nuclear weapon development or they get to bomb it outright. Which would you rather have? Don't expect them to sit on their hands as Iran openly boasts about its plan to wipe Israel off the map and develop the weapons for doing so.
PS: Every one of your points is hearsay. None of the aforementioned attacks on Iran have been linked back to Israel. There are plenty of countries going out of their way to slow down Iran, many of such attacks even coming from other Arab countries.
The entire idea behind Ethonol was obviously flawed from the get-go. So much so that I honestly believe someone should go to jail for this. How many millions of dollars were lost? How many extra people starved to death worldwide because of increasing food prices?
This isn't like file sharing. When someone uses stolen credit card numbers the original owners get charged *real money*. Real people get hurt.
0xOmar targeted Israelis for nationalistic reasons. This attack was not random or simply meant to cause a hassle.
It's not difficult to notice Facebook pages or Twitter accounts broadcasting pro Al-Qaeda or Hezbollah messages. Heck, half the time they link to the official web pages of those terrorist groups. Take that and combine it with the fact that trusted organizations should be able to flag suspected accounts and it shouldn't take much for an ISP to act on it.
If the RIAA can flag *songs* to be removed, why is it so unthinkable that trusted organizations should be able to flag *terrorists*? If you believe that you've been unfairly flagged, provide counter-proof to the ISP and/or take it up in court. If you're on a terrorist list, getting delisted from Twitter is the least of your problems.
Any little bit we can do to help rid the world of these extremists the better.
Uh... I'd hate to let facts get in the way of your ranting, but there is wide-spread protest against this behavior by Jews. Many of the protestors are Orthodox Jews no less. The Chief Rabbi of Israel has even come out publicly condemning this behavior.
Sources:
http://www.jpost.com/NationalNews/Article.aspx?id=249899
http://www.jpost.com/NationalNews/Article.aspx?id=251169
When is the last time the majority of Muslims staged a public protest against the repression of women or terrorism?
Your first two citations re:Russia selling Iran nukes have nothing in them saying that they do. In fact, your second citation explicitly says that Russia is NOT selling Iran nukes.
I never said Russia is selling Iran nukes. I said Russia is making billions of dollars a year selling weapon systems to Iran. Russia is against economic sanctions because it would prohibit them from continuing to make more such sales in the future.
Of course Russia is selling billions of dollar's worth of weapons to Iran (and Iraq before that)
[citation needed]
#1 Iraq did not have weapons, ergo Russia did not sell weapons to them
Wrong. Here is your citation: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/12/world/europe/12moscow.html
#2 If Russia already sold weapons to Iran, they already have them, therefore their "proliferation" is a done deal.
Wrong again. Iran is continually trying to get its hands on more offensive and defensive gear from Russia: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11388680
Please stop making shit up.
No sir. You stop making shit up. Stop making assumptions about whether other people's points are sourced until they reply.
The real issue is that there is significant international pressure for Iran to stop its nuclear program for civilian (power) purposes.
What "civilian" purposes? I'll repeat my question in case you missed them the first time around:
Why does Iran need nuclear energy program when it has enough oil to meet domestic use for over 100 years?
First off, Iran is quite correct in that this is unfair as they are have signed the NPT, and have cooperated with the IAEA. Secondly, now that such crippling sanctions are in place against them, why should they stop? They are rightly convinced that the world will view them as a nuclear threat whether or not they stop their civilian program, and they now need that civilian program more than ever due to the sanctions.
The NPT entitles Iran to start a civilian energy program *if* and only if they declare their intent to do so ahead of time and provide full transparency throughout the process. Why then did Iran conceal their nuclear program for years? Why then did Iran boot out IAEA inspectors? Why did the UN catch Iran in possession of schematics for outfitting a nuclear warhead on their missiles? Why then did Iran use computer modeling to study the a core of a nuclear warhead? This and more curtsey of http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-15643460
Economic sanctions are a precursor to war. The American propaganda machine wants war with Iran. When have you ever known the American's to let the truth stand between them and one of their holy wars.
Right, because Obama some crazy yahoo with a track-record of declaring wars. Give me a break. You have one of the most left-wing Presidents in power and even he cannot deny that Iran is developing nuclear weapons.
The facts are stacked against your twisted reality. On the one hand, there is no reason for Iran to develop a nuclear energy program. On the other hand, it has a long record of training, funding and outfitting terrorist groups to attack its enemies. They don't even deny doing so. To add insult to injury, they slaughter their own civilians in the streets. Why are so many bleeding-heart liberals exerting more energy defending dictators than working to remove them? Who do you think is helping Syria slaughter its people? http://uk.reuters.com/article/2011/12/21/uk-iran-syria-kidnap-idUKTRE7BK0S620111221
It's sad to see people go to such lengths trying to explain away Iran's covert nuclear weapon program.
Every single intelligence service in the world is in agreement that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. All, that is, except Russia and China. Of course Russia is selling billions of dollar's worth of weapons to Iran (and Iraq before that) and China is heavily dependent on Iranian oil.
Even ignoring this fact, why in the world would Iran need nuclear energy? They have enough oil to meet domestic demand for over 100 years (!!). It makes absolutely no sense for them to go nuclear for any reason other than a weapons program. Furthermore, why did they hide it all these years? They are allowed to develop nuclear energy so long are transparent about its development *ahead of time*. Why would they risk all this cloak and dagger behavior if they weren't hiding anything?
If it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, it's a duck.
Scientists are the dumbest smart people I know... Enough said.
Every time I need to configure Linux software my head almost explodes... and on top of it, I'm a software developer!
Linux is usable, but so much more painful than Windows. The user experience is orders of magnitude worse.
Let's be honest: all politicians lie. The question is who gets caught.
http://code.google.com/p/jdart/
Web is boring ;) Let's see Dart running on the Desktop.
The Age of Paradox [1] provides a nice explanation. A society predicated on efficiency and productivity favors producing the same amount of work with less people, and paying those people more money. Inevitably, this leads to higher and higher unemployment and a situation where the remaining people (employed) are making more and more money. Note he is not referring to the top 1%. He is referring to you and I. Each of us is equally responsible for the situation we find ourselves in today. We work more overtime in order to make more money, and then wonder why there are so many more unemployed (who we just replaced by working more hours). One simple fix (suggested by me, not the author of the book) is to make it less profitable for one employee to do two people's work. As soon as it's more profitable to hire two people and stick to 37.5 hours of work, employment will go up and we'd all be happier people.
It's an interesting book. Give it a read!
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Age-Paradox-Charles-Handy/dp/0875846432
No rights, no matter how precious, are without responsibilities. You can't hold up a white flag, then shoot soldiers as they lower their fire-arms. The more people we allow to abuse these rights, the sooner they will cease to exist.
We need to fight to protect Democracy. It might shock certain people, but fighting abuse is part of that fight. I leave it up to the smart people of Slashdot to propose ways of combating said abuse without eroding the rights of people who act in good faith.
For the love of god. Put Oracle out of its misery. They're killing a good thing.
Who said anything about stopping everything? I mean putting a damper on consumerism (buying more than we need) and disposable products (made in China, breaks after two days). The while thing is wasteful. You want to help the environment? Make it more expensive to buy disposable products than reusable ones. Substantially increase the cost of non-vital items. Funnel the resulting funds back into some research fund for reusable energy.