Re: Multiple passports?
Bill Stewart wrote: When I saw the title of this thread, I was assuming it would be about getting Mozambique or Sealand or other passports of convenience or coolness-factor like the Old-School Cypherpunks used to do :-) Actually the only passports that are significantly more convenient than US or UK ones (i.e. are more likely to get you in to more places with less fuss from locals in dark glasses) are from the northern European states without a reputation as colonialists - in particular Scandinavian countries Ireland. Everyone likes them. I know plenty of people who used to keep both an Irish and a British passport. Unlike you picky Americans our governments don't have any objection to people being citizens of as many places as they an get away with. And in the days of emigration (all has changed now) you could get an Irish passport if your granny had once spent a wet weekend in Downpatrick. All our passports are being assimilated into EU ones at the moment so I don't know if this has changed. We used to do the Israel/everywhere else thing as well and also would issue spare passports for other places that were unpopular. IIRC Pakistan at one time looked askance at passports that had been to India. South African visitors weren't popular in many countries. And I'm pretty sure that Britain sometimes issued spares to people who wanted to go to the USA after visiting Cuba or Iran (both increasingly popular holiday destinations from here) I strongly suspect that this has changed now that UK pass laws are taken as dictation from the USA.
Re: Multiple passports?
Bill Stewart wrote: When I saw the title of this thread, I was assuming it would be about getting Mozambique or Sealand or other passports of convenience or coolness-factor like the Old-School Cypherpunks used to do :-) Actually the only passports that are significantly more convenient than US or UK ones (i.e. are more likely to get you in to more places with less fuss from locals in dark glasses) are from the northern European states without a reputation as colonialists - in particular Scandinavian countries Ireland. Everyone likes them. I know plenty of people who used to keep both an Irish and a British passport. Unlike you picky Americans our governments don't have any objection to people being citizens of as many places as they an get away with. And in the days of emigration (all has changed now) you could get an Irish passport if your granny had once spent a wet weekend in Downpatrick. All our passports are being assimilated into EU ones at the moment so I don't know if this has changed. We used to do the Israel/everywhere else thing as well and also would issue spare passports for other places that were unpopular. IIRC Pakistan at one time looked askance at passports that had been to India. South African visitors weren't popular in many countries. And I'm pretty sure that Britain sometimes issued spares to people who wanted to go to the USA after visiting Cuba or Iran (both increasingly popular holiday destinations from here) I strongly suspect that this has changed now that UK pass laws are taken as dictation from the USA.
Re: Trials for those undermining the war effort?
Harmon Seaver wrote: Translate/transliterate is irrelevant -- you don't change people's names, you especially don't change the name of the god. This was a Jewish religion, after all, and as I mentioned before, the Old Testament is simply awash with praises for the *name*. The whole name thing became so utterly important to the Jews that they wouldn't even say it aloud less they mispronounce it. So if Rabbi Yeshua was god incarnate or the son of god, it's the same thing. This is *so* off-topic and others have replied sensibly, but you really, really, do miss the point about transliterations, that is writing languages in different scripts. Alphabets don't usually map onto each other 1:1. Each version of the alphabet has some symbols that represent more than one sound, or sounds represented by more than one symbol. No alphabet codes for all sounds used in human language, and each alphabet misses out different sounds. It is *impossible* to take something written in the Hebrew alphabet and write it down accurately in the English alphabet, and vice versa. There are sounds coded for in each alphabet that are not coded for in the other. No-one was trying to change anyone's name. Hebrew words, place names, people's names, were written in the Hebrew alphabet, but read by people who spoke Aramaic and pronounced the letters differently. Then they were written down in Greek, which lacks some consonants, but adds vowels. No possible Greek version of any word could have been exactly the same as the Hebrew. Then they were written into Latin, and copied from Latin into English - and that over a thousand years ago, since then our pronounciation has changed. It is like the game of Chinese whispers, at each stage a different noise is introduced into the signal. Yeshua is probably a better English rendition than Jesus because it has only been through one stage transliteration, not 4 or 5, but it is still, inevitably, inaccurate. Also of course we don't actually know exactly how words were pronounced in those days, its all reconstruction about which scholars differ. And it seems that many people in Palestine in those days had a Hebrew name and a Greek name, just as many Africans these days have a name in their own language and one in English or French, so the Greek version of one of the names might well represent how it was spoken better than the Hebrew, at least some of the time. In fact one approach to trying to work out how people in Palestine actually spoke in Roman times is to look at the Greek spellings of words and assume that Greek writers wrote down the words as they were then spoken - Hebrew spelling had been fossilised for centuries and probably did not represent the actual sounds used very accurately at all, and anyway most people spoke Aramaic which was then a just-about-mutually-intelligible sister language of Hebrew There need be no intent to change people's names. It is impossible to avoid. Maybe this isn't all that off-topic. It is hard to imagine how anyone who failed to see the real problems inherent in transliterating between different codes could have much of a grasp of software or cryptography.
Re: Trials for those undermining the war effort?
Harmon Seaver wrote: You don't translate names. Especially you don't change the name of the god. Read the Old Testament, see how incredibly many times you find phrases like the holy name of the lord, blessed be the name, the wonderful name, etc. You don't even know the difference between translation and transliteration.
Re: Trials for those undermining the war effort?
Harmon Seaver wrote: You don't translate names. Especially you don't change the name of the god. Read the Old Testament, see how incredibly many times you find phrases like the holy name of the lord, blessed be the name, the wonderful name, etc. You don't even know the difference between translation and transliteration.
Re: Trials for those undermining the war effort?
Harmon, your knowledge of the history of the Roman Empire early Christianity is flakier than Choate's physics. Go home and read some history books instead of New Age loonies with a persecution complex. No point in refuting the heap of ignorance appended below because there isn't enough meaningful in it to require an answer - but if it makes you feel superior to fantasise that using a modern-style transliteration of an Aramaic name as Yeshua instead of the Latin-style Jesus makes you some sort of elite soul, go right ahead. The Greek spelling of the name is Iesous anyway. And the origin is the same Hebrew name that also comes to us as Joshua and Hosea. That sort of thing happens when you move between alphabets. Harmon Seaver wrote: On Tue, Apr 01, 2003 at 08:43:34PM +0100, Ken Brown wrote: Steve Schear wrote: At 06:34 PM 3/30/2003 -0500, stuart wrote: On Sunday, March 30, 2003, Harmon Seaver came up with this... You give too much credit to the Romans. Catholicism worked so well because it is a virus, and conversion was often forced upon heathens by their fellow countrymen. Interestingly though, Christianity started in the Holy Land but never got much traction there. Not true. Palestine became majority Christian quite early, as did parts of Syria, Armenia and Arabia. All those places, and also Egypt, were largely converted long before the Christians had any political power. No, they weren't christian -- they were followers of Rabbi Yeshua ben Yoseph ha Natzri, later called Mesheach ha Israel. No Jewish moma ever named her little boy Jesus, which is a Greek name, and the Jews had just spent 200 years of ethnic cleansing anything that looked, smelled, or spoke Greek. Jesus and Christ and christianity were something invented by the europeans -- a take-off of the Jewish messiah and with some of the early writings, heavily edited, of Rabbi Yeshua's apostles, but rather a different thing. When the Romans started trying to alter things, the groups in Palestine, Syria, etc. essentially told them to fuck off. The epistles of Paul, for example, were written in Greek, while the earlier stuff was originally written in Hebrew, then very badly translated into Greek, essentially by the word for word substitution method, which really resulted in some strange passages in the new testament. Some scholars have been reverse translating them by the same method with good results, but of course there's a lot of official opposition to this (just as there is to translating the Dead Sea scrolls) and zero funding. Interestingly enough, Paul's letters would have been totally lost except for one man, Marcion, who collected them all. Unfortunately, he was a Gnostic, not a christian, and a rabid anti-semite, so he took a scissors and cut out anything that was at all favorable to the jews and burned it, leaving some very strange and heavily altered texts. The new testament wasn't canonized until around 400-500ad, can't remember exactly, but anyway long after the council at nicea where they excommunicated all the Palistinian, etc. followers of the Rabbi, and also after christianity had been made the official state religion of the empire, so any hope of the real authentic older teachings being included was long gone. And, of course, we know that pretty much as soon as they were made the official church, they went about destroying the old religion's temples, sacred texts, etc and persecuting the followers. Talk about broken chains of tradition. 8-) -- Harmon Seaver CyberShamanix http://www.cybershamanix.com
Re: U.S. Drops 'E-Bomb' On Iraqi TV
Kevin S. Van Horn wrote: the side contributing the most corpses won. True of Vietnam of course. And of WW2, the dead being mainly in Eastern Europe and China. Arguably of WW1 as well, the Germans lost fewer men on the Western Front than the Belgians, French and British, but they had more deaths from disease. On paper they won on the Eastern Front, but the Soviet Union was produced out of the Russian defeat and I suspect many Germans would, in the log run, not have thought that that was a good outcome.
Re: U.S. Drops 'E-Bomb' On Iraqi TV
Kevin S. Van Horn wrote: the side contributing the most corpses won. True of Vietnam of course. And of WW2, the dead being mainly in Eastern Europe and China. Arguably of WW1 as well, the Germans lost fewer men on the Western Front than the Belgians, French and British, but they had more deaths from disease. On paper they won on the Eastern Front, but the Soviet Union was produced out of the Russian defeat and I suspect many Germans would, in the log run, not have thought that that was a good outcome.
Re: Trials for those undermining the war effort?
Harmon, your knowledge of the history of the Roman Empire early Christianity is flakier than Choate's physics. Go home and read some history books instead of New Age loonies with a persecution complex. No point in refuting the heap of ignorance appended below because there isn't enough meaningful in it to require an answer - but if it makes you feel superior to fantasise that using a modern-style transliteration of an Aramaic name as Yeshua instead of the Latin-style Jesus makes you some sort of elite soul, go right ahead. The Greek spelling of the name is Iesous anyway. And the origin is the same Hebrew name that also comes to us as Joshua and Hosea. That sort of thing happens when you move between alphabets. Harmon Seaver wrote: On Tue, Apr 01, 2003 at 08:43:34PM +0100, Ken Brown wrote: Steve Schear wrote: At 06:34 PM 3/30/2003 -0500, stuart wrote: On Sunday, March 30, 2003, Harmon Seaver came up with this... You give too much credit to the Romans. Catholicism worked so well because it is a virus, and conversion was often forced upon heathens by their fellow countrymen. Interestingly though, Christianity started in the Holy Land but never got much traction there. Not true. Palestine became majority Christian quite early, as did parts of Syria, Armenia and Arabia. All those places, and also Egypt, were largely converted long before the Christians had any political power. No, they weren't christian -- they were followers of Rabbi Yeshua ben Yoseph ha Natzri, later called Mesheach ha Israel. No Jewish moma ever named her little boy Jesus, which is a Greek name, and the Jews had just spent 200 years of ethnic cleansing anything that looked, smelled, or spoke Greek. Jesus and Christ and christianity were something invented by the europeans -- a take-off of the Jewish messiah and with some of the early writings, heavily edited, of Rabbi Yeshua's apostles, but rather a different thing. When the Romans started trying to alter things, the groups in Palestine, Syria, etc. essentially told them to fuck off. The epistles of Paul, for example, were written in Greek, while the earlier stuff was originally written in Hebrew, then very badly translated into Greek, essentially by the word for word substitution method, which really resulted in some strange passages in the new testament. Some scholars have been reverse translating them by the same method with good results, but of course there's a lot of official opposition to this (just as there is to translating the Dead Sea scrolls) and zero funding. Interestingly enough, Paul's letters would have been totally lost except for one man, Marcion, who collected them all. Unfortunately, he was a Gnostic, not a christian, and a rabid anti-semite, so he took a scissors and cut out anything that was at all favorable to the jews and burned it, leaving some very strange and heavily altered texts. The new testament wasn't canonized until around 400-500ad, can't remember exactly, but anyway long after the council at nicea where they excommunicated all the Palistinian, etc. followers of the Rabbi, and also after christianity had been made the official state religion of the empire, so any hope of the real authentic older teachings being included was long gone. And, of course, we know that pretty much as soon as they were made the official church, they went about destroying the old religion's temples, sacred texts, etc and persecuting the followers. Talk about broken chains of tradition. 8-) -- Harmon Seaver CyberShamanix http://www.cybershamanix.com
Re: Silly wiccan, tricks are for kids!
Steve Mynott wrote: Tyler Durden wrote: Well, I think there's an obvious disconnect on this issue. Clearly, pre-Christian religious practices survived Christian persecution throughout the ages. From the little I know, some of the practicing Druids actually have received a nearly unbroken chain of tradition. The modern druid traditions, as followed by Willian Blake, only date back to the eighteenth century. There is no unbroken chain of tradition. Completely correct. The stuff of modern neo-paganism is synthesised from bits of Celtic and Norse lore got from books (books written, of course, by Christian priests and monks who preserved the ancient pre-Christian stories - without them we would know nothing of the old stories); bits of renaissance early modern astrology and magic; 18th 19th century speculations; and stuff borrowed from India; and stuff that was just plain made up. Very little of it is older than about 1880, almost nothing older than about 1700. That doesn't mean it is bad, evil, or wrong; it does mean it probably has very little connection with anything our ancestors thought, said, or did 2,000 years ago. In a social sense it is fundamentalism's twin - both are reactions to a world dominated by liberal agnosticism, as it has been (at least amongst the educated ruling classes in western Europe) for the last 2 or 3 of centuries. It arose not in opposition to Christianity but in mourning for it. And if Christianity and her tomboy sister Islam are getting more powerful again, it might well be that neo-paganism, like the old-fashioned sort, is on the way out. There is certainly no significant unbroken pagan or magical tradition in Western Europe. Mediaeval and early modern magical practices in Western Europe were mostly post-Christian, or para-Christian, rather than survivals from paganism, and those that were survivals came through the *literary* tradition rather than through folk memory. Many of them arose in a Christian/Jewish context from a cobbling together of Classical and Cabbalistic sources with folk practices derived from debased versions of Catholic liturgy - people excluded from a theological understanding of Catholic ritual developed folk traditions that gave a magical or superstitious meaning to the rituals. Two books to read if anyone is interested: Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas, and The Stripping of the Altars by Eamonn Duffy (the latter is basically an anti-Protestant polemic, but the vast amount of information in it about 15th century ritual makes fascinating reading, if you like that sort of thing)
Re: Missile -launchers in iraq
Tyler Durden wrote: [...] PS: Anyone notice the conceptual similarity between shock and awe and blitzkrieg? Yes, similar in some respects, though not the same. Shock and awe (terrible name for a quite sensible idea) was about a military force which is overwhelmingly stronger than its opponent attempting to win quickly and with minimum casualties on either side by rapidly and completely disrupting the enemy's ability to respond intelligently. Blitzkrieg (not a word the Germans used officially in 1939 1940 - I'm told it was coined by an Italian journalist) was about a quick victory over an opponent of similar strength to oneself, by a deep and rapid penetration, close co-operation between arms, and continual re-evaluation of objectives by field officers on the ground. Blitzkrieg is one of the roots of SA - but it has others including the punitive expeditions of colonial times, the British attempt to support indirect rule in Iraq by airpower alone in the 1920s, the massive aerial bombardments of Germany and Japan in WW2, the nukes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, unrelenting Israeli pressure on the Palestinians, and even US actions in places like Grenada and Panama. The US has *not* used shock and awe in this campaign. If it had it might have thrown everything at Iraq in the first few hours - all the MOABs, all the cluster bombs, all the bunker-busters, all the B1s, B2s, B52s can drop. It might have sent airborne troops in on the first day, ignored Basra, dropped men in Baghdad. The ideal shock and awe opening to the war would have had the citizens of Baghdad see those 3000 missiles go off more or less simultaneously, in the first 30 minutes, not the first 3 days, a ring of fire round their city, to the background of the exploding bombloads of 100 B52s. The TV and radio and military communications would have been knocked out. The presidential palaces and guards barracks would not have been just hit, but removed. The dazed citizens would have wandered into the streets in the morning to find them already patrolled by Americans. If Saddam Hussein had survived the bombing he'd have woken screaming to see not his own bodyguard but the SAS. In fact the war has been run like a classic tank campaign, a blitzkrieg - tightly controlled armoured penetration over narrow fronts, avoiding easily defensible places, keeping on the move, attempting to catch the enemy in the open and destroy him by rapidly bringing together local massive concentrations, but just steaming past an enemy unwilling to fight or hunkered down in cities or fortifications. Guderian or Tukachevsky or Tal would have recognised the strategy instantly. (Zhukov or Montgomery might have wanted larger, heavier formations). The tremendous advantage given by the total air superiority has been used just ahead of the attack, as a sort of updated version of the moving barrage of WW1. It has actually been quite a successful blitz. They are still making better time than the Germans did on the road to Warsaw. I don't know why they are not trying the shock and awe strategy. I can think of a number of possibilities. They aren't mutually exclusive. In declining order of likelihood: - perhaps they have a greater respect for the Iraqi military than they let on - maybe, despite the hype, the battlefield technology is not yet in place, or not in great enough strength. The news over here has mentioned British marines trying to find the launch sites of the missiles aimed at them and that hit Kuwait. The pre-war propaganda was all about JSTARS or whatever spotting the launch site instantly and targeting retaliation within seconds. But we're still using blokes with binoculars. - maybe shock and awe is a bad idea anyway. It might just be too risky. If you throw everything you have got at them on day one, what do you do if they don't cave in on day two? OK, you make sure you have enough kit to keep on doing it - that's actually part of the doctrine - but sooner or later it runs out. And there are loads of other countries out there who need their dose of SA. It is a very expensive kind of warfare. - it could be that the military is just too innately conservative for the much-hyped SA - perhaps there are some new tricks they didn't want to use in sight of Iran - which (rumour has it) the PNAC types want to invade next (I hope to God they don't) - perhaps they're saving it for a final attack on Baghdad - maybe they wanted to use all their nice tanks before they were obsolete. They haven't had a real fast-moving large scale tank battle in ages. They never got to fight the Russians, in 1991 they were mostly shooting at the backs of men running away. It would have been a shame to let an entire generation of big boy's toys rust unused. The RAF somehow found a role for the last Vulcan bomber in the Falklands... - perhaps the generals took one look at the likes of Rumsfeld and Cheney and Perle and the other PNACs and thought to themselves, without moving
Re: Trials for those undermining the war effort?
Steve Schear wrote: At 06:34 PM 3/30/2003 -0500, stuart wrote: On Sunday, March 30, 2003, Harmon Seaver came up with this... You give too much credit to the Romans. Catholicism worked so well because it is a virus, and conversion was often forced upon heathens by their fellow countrymen. Interestingly though, Christianity started in the Holy Land but never got much traction there. Not true. Palestine became majority Christian quite early, as did parts of Syria, Armenia and Arabia. All those places, and also Egypt, were largely converted long before the Christians had any political power.
Re: Missile -launchers in iraq
Tyler Durden wrote: [...] PS: Anyone notice the conceptual similarity between shock and awe and blitzkrieg? Yes, similar in some respects, though not the same. Shock and awe (terrible name for a quite sensible idea) was about a military force which is overwhelmingly stronger than its opponent attempting to win quickly and with minimum casualties on either side by rapidly and completely disrupting the enemy's ability to respond intelligently. Blitzkrieg (not a word the Germans used officially in 1939 1940 - I'm told it was coined by an Italian journalist) was about a quick victory over an opponent of similar strength to oneself, by a deep and rapid penetration, close co-operation between arms, and continual re-evaluation of objectives by field officers on the ground. Blitzkrieg is one of the roots of SA - but it has others including the punitive expeditions of colonial times, the British attempt to support indirect rule in Iraq by airpower alone in the 1920s, the massive aerial bombardments of Germany and Japan in WW2, the nukes at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, unrelenting Israeli pressure on the Palestinians, and even US actions in places like Grenada and Panama. The US has *not* used shock and awe in this campaign. If it had it might have thrown everything at Iraq in the first few hours - all the MOABs, all the cluster bombs, all the bunker-busters, all the B1s, B2s, B52s can drop. It might have sent airborne troops in on the first day, ignored Basra, dropped men in Baghdad. The ideal shock and awe opening to the war would have had the citizens of Baghdad see those 3000 missiles go off more or less simultaneously, in the first 30 minutes, not the first 3 days, a ring of fire round their city, to the background of the exploding bombloads of 100 B52s. The TV and radio and military communications would have been knocked out. The presidential palaces and guards barracks would not have been just hit, but removed. The dazed citizens would have wandered into the streets in the morning to find them already patrolled by Americans. If Saddam Hussein had survived the bombing he'd have woken screaming to see not his own bodyguard but the SAS. In fact the war has been run like a classic tank campaign, a blitzkrieg - tightly controlled armoured penetration over narrow fronts, avoiding easily defensible places, keeping on the move, attempting to catch the enemy in the open and destroy him by rapidly bringing together local massive concentrations, but just steaming past an enemy unwilling to fight or hunkered down in cities or fortifications. Guderian or Tukachevsky or Tal would have recognised the strategy instantly. (Zhukov or Montgomery might have wanted larger, heavier formations). The tremendous advantage given by the total air superiority has been used just ahead of the attack, as a sort of updated version of the moving barrage of WW1. It has actually been quite a successful blitz. They are still making better time than the Germans did on the road to Warsaw. I don't know why they are not trying the shock and awe strategy. I can think of a number of possibilities. They aren't mutually exclusive. In declining order of likelihood: - perhaps they have a greater respect for the Iraqi military than they let on - maybe, despite the hype, the battlefield technology is not yet in place, or not in great enough strength. The news over here has mentioned British marines trying to find the launch sites of the missiles aimed at them and that hit Kuwait. The pre-war propaganda was all about JSTARS or whatever spotting the launch site instantly and targeting retaliation within seconds. But we're still using blokes with binoculars. - maybe shock and awe is a bad idea anyway. It might just be too risky. If you throw everything you have got at them on day one, what do you do if they don't cave in on day two? OK, you make sure you have enough kit to keep on doing it - that's actually part of the doctrine - but sooner or later it runs out. And there are loads of other countries out there who need their dose of SA. It is a very expensive kind of warfare. - it could be that the military is just too innately conservative for the much-hyped SA - perhaps there are some new tricks they didn't want to use in sight of Iran - which (rumour has it) the PNAC types want to invade next (I hope to God they don't) - perhaps they're saving it for a final attack on Baghdad - maybe they wanted to use all their nice tanks before they were obsolete. They haven't had a real fast-moving large scale tank battle in ages. They never got to fight the Russians, in 1991 they were mostly shooting at the backs of men running away. It would have been a shame to let an entire generation of big boy's toys rust unused. The RAF somehow found a role for the last Vulcan bomber in the Falklands... - perhaps the generals took one look at the likes of Rumsfeld and Cheney and Perle and the other PNACs and thought to themselves, without moving
Re: Silly wiccan, tricks are for kids!
Steve Mynott wrote: Tyler Durden wrote: Well, I think there's an obvious disconnect on this issue. Clearly, pre-Christian religious practices survived Christian persecution throughout the ages. From the little I know, some of the practicing Druids actually have received a nearly unbroken chain of tradition. The modern druid traditions, as followed by Willian Blake, only date back to the eighteenth century. There is no unbroken chain of tradition. Completely correct. The stuff of modern neo-paganism is synthesised from bits of Celtic and Norse lore got from books (books written, of course, by Christian priests and monks who preserved the ancient pre-Christian stories - without them we would know nothing of the old stories); bits of renaissance early modern astrology and magic; 18th 19th century speculations; and stuff borrowed from India; and stuff that was just plain made up. Very little of it is older than about 1880, almost nothing older than about 1700. That doesn't mean it is bad, evil, or wrong; it does mean it probably has very little connection with anything our ancestors thought, said, or did 2,000 years ago. In a social sense it is fundamentalism's twin - both are reactions to a world dominated by liberal agnosticism, as it has been (at least amongst the educated ruling classes in western Europe) for the last 2 or 3 of centuries. It arose not in opposition to Christianity but in mourning for it. And if Christianity and her tomboy sister Islam are getting more powerful again, it might well be that neo-paganism, like the old-fashioned sort, is on the way out. There is certainly no significant unbroken pagan or magical tradition in Western Europe. Mediaeval and early modern magical practices in Western Europe were mostly post-Christian, or para-Christian, rather than survivals from paganism, and those that were survivals came through the *literary* tradition rather than through folk memory. Many of them arose in a Christian/Jewish context from a cobbling together of Classical and Cabbalistic sources with folk practices derived from debased versions of Catholic liturgy - people excluded from a theological understanding of Catholic ritual developed folk traditions that gave a magical or superstitious meaning to the rituals. Two books to read if anyone is interested: Religion and the Decline of Magic by Keith Thomas, and The Stripping of the Altars by Eamonn Duffy (the latter is basically an anti-Protestant polemic, but the vast amount of information in it about 15th century ritual makes fascinating reading, if you like that sort of thing)
Al-Jazeera website [was: Re: U.S. Drops 'E-Bomb' On Iraqi TV]
'Gabriel Rocha' wrote: it is around 1130, local time, Geneva, Switzerland and http://www.aljazeera.net/ is working just fine. (well, it might be a fake, but not having ever seen the original, I don't know) It looks like over here in Europe we're getting DNS to aljazeera.net pointing to a French site. I don't know if that would have been the case a few days ago. http://www.cursor.org/aljazeera.htm has pointers to news items claiming that: Launch of English website delayed until mid-April Doha - Waves of spam kept Al-Jazeera's website down for a third day on Thursday and officials at the satellite channel said it was coming from US e- mailers apparently angry over its coverage of the Iraqi war. The Qatar-based network, which has broadcast graphic footage of dead US and British soldiers, also said it would now have to delay the introduction of an English-language site for several weeks due to the barrage of spam, or junk electronic mail. English.aljazeera.net will not be launched until mid-April, online editor-in-chief Abdel Aziz Al-Mahmud told AFP. Which, if true (could be COW-a-ganda) means AJ are victims of successful DoS. Maybe someone should tell them about Spam Assassin. aljazeera.com.qa gives me 64.70.250.49 which ARIN assign to cybergate in Florida. Last stages of traceroute are: Nuts! That has a website pointing to Al-Jazeera Islamic Bank For all I know Al-Jazeera may be the Qatari equivalent of Acme and Ace in Roadrunner cartoons. Default corporate brand name.
Re: aljazeera.net hacked again?
AJ are being hammered at the moment - I'm getting timeouts to them the picture I'm trying to look at is loading at 91 bits a second Either they are very popular or else the DoSsers are onto them big-time.
Re: Things are looking better all the time [TERROR ALERT: Cerenkov Blue]
John Kelsey wrote: I wasn't thinking of Al Qaida. There are a *lot* of people who might like to have a last-ditch deterrent against a US invasion or other action. I can think of a few workable deterrents against US invasion: - ICBMS - an army with a reputation of fighting nastily when attacked - a serious US-based political lobby friendly to the country Russian, China, and Britain have all three. France has one and two halves these days. The logic is that Israel should join the permanent membership of the Security Council - and India is a candidate as well. That's all the permanent members are really, a gang of countries who agreed not to fight each other because they had the nukes, so had to be sure to tell the others when they were going to pick on third-party country in case two of them picked on the same victim and ended up fighting each other by accident. The Security Council was nothing to do with the rule of international law (bye-bye Richard-Might-is-Right-Perle, I hope the rest of the warmongers take the pension-reducing plunge soon) and everything to do with the logic of MAD and carving up the world into spheres on influence. (And North Korea is in the Chinese sphere of influence, which is why the US leaves policing their nukes up to China.)
Re: aljazeera.net hacked again?
Nslookup www.aljazeera.net now fails. As does ping 213.30.180.219 Looks like they got them again Mike Rosing wrote: On Fri, 28 Mar 2003, Ken Brown wrote: It looks like they were blocked in the USA (or else suffered reallly badly from hacking) and have maybe re-established the service in the Land of Freedom. aljazeera.net, www.aljazeera.net, and english.aljazeera.net all give me 213.30.180.219 All of that is blocked in the US. I can browse it, it gives me a page in Arabic, which is not one of my language. The source code URLs are in Latin script of course so I can just about navigate. http://www.aljazeera.net/Cartoons/index.asp?cu_NO=1Temp_id=197 has some cartoons which are quite good Take a look at http://www.aljazeera.net/Cartoons/index.asp?cu_NO=1Temp_ID=197Index=3 I do not think any COW-friendly hackers would be publishing it - it shows some starving kids hoping that the invaders are bringing them food but getting blown apart by a bomb. Which is why the US can't get it of course! That it's blocked here is good proof the US government is really pretty sick. Can you forward some of the best ones? I can put them on a US server and see how long it takes before that goes down :-) Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike
Re: aljazeera.net hacked again?
Harmon Seaver wrote: Hmm, weird -- I just got 64.106.174.80 on a lookup for aljazeera.net, and the same for english.aljazeera.net, but now I'm getting nothing for both. So trying from another server in AL, I get the same IP and can also actually lynx to the site (which I couldn't do from here) but only get a 404 for either one. This is not the IP that was reported before. It looks like they were blocked in the USA (or else suffered reallly badly from hacking) and have maybe re-established the service in the Land of Freedom. aljazeera.net, www.aljazeera.net, and english.aljazeera.net all give me 213.30.180.219 I can browse it, it gives me a page in Arabic, which is not one of my language. The source code URLs are in Latin script of course so I can just about navigate. http://www.aljazeera.net/Cartoons/index.asp?cu_NO=1Temp_id=197 has some cartoons which are quite good Take a look at http://www.aljazeera.net/Cartoons/index.asp?cu_NO=1Temp_ID=197Index=3 I do not think any COW-friendly hackers would be publishing it - it shows some starving kids hoping that the invaders are bringing them food but getting blown apart by a bomb. I think they may be being hosted in France: Traceroute, once I get beyond the UK academic network, shows: 7 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms gi2-0.linx-gw1.ja.net [146.97.35.126] 8 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms ldn-b1-geth14-1.telia.net [195.66.224.97] 9 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms ldn-bb2-pos1-2-0.telia.net [213.248.74.13] 10 10 ms10 ms10 ms prs-bb2-pos1-1-0.telia.net [213.248.64.166] 11 10 ms10 ms10 ms prs-b3-pos5-1.telia.net [213.248.65.66] 1240 ms 300 ms 351 ms competel-01748-prs-b3.c.telia.net [213.248.71.10] 1330 ms30 ms30 ms 213.30.128.94 14 *** Request timed out. The timeouts repeat continuously after that. 213/8 is assigned to RIPE who assign it to ATT-GLOBAL-NETWORK-SERVICES what looks like a French company called CompleTel (http://www.completel.fr) http://www.ripe.net/perl/whois?form_type=simplefull_query_string=searchtext=213.30.180.219do_search=Search netnum: 213.30.180.208 - 213.30.180.223 netname: ATT-GLOBAL-NETWORK-SERVICES descr:NOISY LE GRAND country: FR admin-c: SW1043-RIPE tech-c: SW1043-RIPE tech-c: DC425-RIPE status: ASSIGNED PA mnt-by: COMPLETEL-MNT changed: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 20030325 source: RIPE route:213.30.128.0/18 descr:CompleTel France NET origin: AS12670 mnt-by: AS12670-MNT changed: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 20001004 source: RIPE person: STANKIEWICZ WLODEK address: ATT-GLOBAL-NETWORK-SERVICES address: 1 Place JEan Baptiste CLEMENT address: 93160 address: France phone:+33 4 97 23 22 62 nic-hdl: SW1043-RIPE notify: [EMAIL PROTECTED] mnt-by: COMPLETEL-MNT changed: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 20030324 source: RIPE person: DATA COMPLETEL address: COMPLETEL address: 15 rue des sorins address: 92741 NANTERRE address: France phone:+33 1 72 92 47 04 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] nic-hdl: DC425-RIPE notify: [EMAIL PROTECTED] mnt-by: COMPLETEL-MNT changed: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 20010717 source: RIPE
Re: Things are looking better all the time [TERROR ALERT: Cerenkov Blue]
John Kelsey wrote: I wasn't thinking of Al Qaida. There are a *lot* of people who might like to have a last-ditch deterrent against a US invasion or other action. I can think of a few workable deterrents against US invasion: - ICBMS - an army with a reputation of fighting nastily when attacked - a serious US-based political lobby friendly to the country Russian, China, and Britain have all three. France has one and two halves these days. The logic is that Israel should join the permanent membership of the Security Council - and India is a candidate as well. That's all the permanent members are really, a gang of countries who agreed not to fight each other because they had the nukes, so had to be sure to tell the others when they were going to pick on third-party country in case two of them picked on the same victim and ended up fighting each other by accident. The Security Council was nothing to do with the rule of international law (bye-bye Richard-Might-is-Right-Perle, I hope the rest of the warmongers take the pension-reducing plunge soon) and everything to do with the logic of MAD and carving up the world into spheres on influence. (And North Korea is in the Chinese sphere of influence, which is why the US leaves policing their nukes up to China.)
Re: aljazeera.net hacked again?
AJ are being hammered at the moment - I'm getting timeouts to them the picture I'm trying to look at is loading at 91 bits a second Either they are very popular or else the DoSsers are onto them big-time.
Re: aljazeera.net hacked again?
Harmon Seaver wrote: Hmm, weird -- I just got 64.106.174.80 on a lookup for aljazeera.net, and the same for english.aljazeera.net, but now I'm getting nothing for both. So trying from another server in AL, I get the same IP and can also actually lynx to the site (which I couldn't do from here) but only get a 404 for either one. This is not the IP that was reported before. It looks like they were blocked in the USA (or else suffered reallly badly from hacking) and have maybe re-established the service in the Land of Freedom. aljazeera.net, www.aljazeera.net, and english.aljazeera.net all give me 213.30.180.219 I can browse it, it gives me a page in Arabic, which is not one of my language. The source code URLs are in Latin script of course so I can just about navigate. http://www.aljazeera.net/Cartoons/index.asp?cu_NO=1Temp_id=197 has some cartoons which are quite good Take a look at http://www.aljazeera.net/Cartoons/index.asp?cu_NO=1Temp_ID=197Index=3 I do not think any COW-friendly hackers would be publishing it - it shows some starving kids hoping that the invaders are bringing them food but getting blown apart by a bomb. I think they may be being hosted in France: Traceroute, once I get beyond the UK academic network, shows: 7 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms gi2-0.linx-gw1.ja.net [146.97.35.126] 8 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms ldn-b1-geth14-1.telia.net [195.66.224.97] 9 10 ms 10 ms 10 ms ldn-bb2-pos1-2-0.telia.net [213.248.74.13] 10 10 ms10 ms10 ms prs-bb2-pos1-1-0.telia.net [213.248.64.166] 11 10 ms10 ms10 ms prs-b3-pos5-1.telia.net [213.248.65.66] 1240 ms 300 ms 351 ms competel-01748-prs-b3.c.telia.net [213.248.71.10] 1330 ms30 ms30 ms 213.30.128.94 14 *** Request timed out. The timeouts repeat continuously after that. 213/8 is assigned to RIPE who assign it to ATT-GLOBAL-NETWORK-SERVICES what looks like a French company called CompleTel (http://www.completel.fr) http://www.ripe.net/perl/whois?form_type=simplefull_query_string=searchtext=213.30.180.219do_search=Search netnum: 213.30.180.208 - 213.30.180.223 netname: ATT-GLOBAL-NETWORK-SERVICES descr:NOISY LE GRAND country: FR admin-c: SW1043-RIPE tech-c: SW1043-RIPE tech-c: DC425-RIPE status: ASSIGNED PA mnt-by: COMPLETEL-MNT changed: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 20030325 source: RIPE route:213.30.128.0/18 descr:CompleTel France NET origin: AS12670 mnt-by: AS12670-MNT changed: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 20001004 source: RIPE person: STANKIEWICZ WLODEK address: ATT-GLOBAL-NETWORK-SERVICES address: 1 Place JEan Baptiste CLEMENT address: 93160 address: France phone:+33 4 97 23 22 62 nic-hdl: SW1043-RIPE notify: [EMAIL PROTECTED] mnt-by: COMPLETEL-MNT changed: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 20030324 source: RIPE person: DATA COMPLETEL address: COMPLETEL address: 15 rue des sorins address: 92741 NANTERRE address: France phone:+33 1 72 92 47 04 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] nic-hdl: DC425-RIPE notify: [EMAIL PROTECTED] mnt-by: COMPLETEL-MNT changed: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 20010717 source: RIPE
Al-Jazeera website [was: Re: U.S. Drops 'E-Bomb' On Iraqi TV]
'Gabriel Rocha' wrote: it is around 1130, local time, Geneva, Switzerland and http://www.aljazeera.net/ is working just fine. (well, it might be a fake, but not having ever seen the original, I don't know) It looks like over here in Europe we're getting DNS to aljazeera.net pointing to a French site. I don't know if that would have been the case a few days ago. http://www.cursor.org/aljazeera.htm has pointers to news items claiming that: Launch of English website delayed until mid-April Doha - Waves of spam kept Al-Jazeera's website down for a third day on Thursday and officials at the satellite channel said it was coming from US e- mailers apparently angry over its coverage of the Iraqi war. The Qatar-based network, which has broadcast graphic footage of dead US and British soldiers, also said it would now have to delay the introduction of an English-language site for several weeks due to the barrage of spam, or junk electronic mail. English.aljazeera.net will not be launched until mid-April, online editor-in-chief Abdel Aziz Al-Mahmud told AFP. Which, if true (could be COW-a-ganda) means AJ are victims of successful DoS. Maybe someone should tell them about Spam Assassin. aljazeera.com.qa gives me 64.70.250.49 which ARIN assign to cybergate in Florida. Last stages of traceroute are: Nuts! That has a website pointing to Al-Jazeera Islamic Bank For all I know Al-Jazeera may be the Qatari equivalent of Acme and Ace in Roadrunner cartoons. Default corporate brand name.
Re: aljazeera.net hacked again?
Nslookup www.aljazeera.net now fails. As does ping 213.30.180.219 Looks like they got them again Mike Rosing wrote: On Fri, 28 Mar 2003, Ken Brown wrote: It looks like they were blocked in the USA (or else suffered reallly badly from hacking) and have maybe re-established the service in the Land of Freedom. aljazeera.net, www.aljazeera.net, and english.aljazeera.net all give me 213.30.180.219 All of that is blocked in the US. I can browse it, it gives me a page in Arabic, which is not one of my language. The source code URLs are in Latin script of course so I can just about navigate. http://www.aljazeera.net/Cartoons/index.asp?cu_NO=1Temp_id=197 has some cartoons which are quite good Take a look at http://www.aljazeera.net/Cartoons/index.asp?cu_NO=1Temp_ID=197Index=3 I do not think any COW-friendly hackers would be publishing it - it shows some starving kids hoping that the invaders are bringing them food but getting blown apart by a bomb. Which is why the US can't get it of course! That it's blocked here is good proof the US government is really pretty sick. Can you forward some of the best ones? I can put them on a US server and see how long it takes before that goes down :-) Patience, persistence, truth, Dr. mike
Re: US may fabricate discovery of WMD
Tim May wrote: [...] The American CIA, DIA, FBI, ONI, and other groups are quite capable of producing fake cargo manifest, fake credentials, fakes of all other kinds, and of planting faked evidence. The kind of people who sell foreign foods to corner shops and ethnic restaurants are capable of faking most of that. I have it on reliable authority (from people who have used the service) that at least one well-known Japanese shipping company you'll probably have heard of will fake bills of lading for 25 dollars. The people I met who used this service also (quite legally) faked EU origin for goods of axis-of-evil origin for import into the USA by landing them in Britain or Holland, and repacking in a new container. So that explains why so much Asian-style food seems to come from the Netherlands - and there I was thinking it was down to the Dutch skill at high-tech intensive agriculture :-) I'd guess that a few transactions like that in series could hide pretty well anything in a sort of real-world mixmaster. It would be traceable by a determined effort, but probably not by the effort most journalists, or even small-country police forces would be able to put in, especially if the the paper trail or the real route went through some pairs of states that don't want to be seen talking to each other in public. In the unlikely event that the North Koreans wanted to send a nuke to the USA, they might not need an ICBM. Just bribe or otherwise subvert a few shipping clerks in South Korea or China and get them shipped over in a container of tractor parts. (Or as Tim said a few months ago, send them with the regular shipments of cocaine - though that would involve first getting them from North Korea to somewhere that actually has an agriculture)
Re: Things are looking better all the time
Bill Stewart wrote: At 04:14 PM 03/26/2003 +1200, Peter Gutmann wrote: The RAF used an EFP in 1989 to assassinate the chairman of Deutsche Bank I assume that's some Italian or German group's acronym and not Britain's Royal Air Force? :-) (Besides, I thought assassinations were usually an SAS (Special Air Service, not Scandinavian Airlines) thing...) Red Army Fraction (As Germans I suppose it would be something like Rote Armee Fraktion?) Most people called them faction in English but they preferred fraction as it was meant to imply that they were only a small part of a vast army of workers et.c They weren't, of course. Bloody heck, they even have a web site: http://www.rafinfo.de/ More often called Baader Meinhof Gang presumably because Ulrike Meinbhof looked sexier than most terrorists. And yes, http://www.baader-meinhof.com/ exists - though it seems to be a fan site. So now we have assasination groupies.
Re: US may fabricate discovery of WMD
Tim May wrote: [...] The American CIA, DIA, FBI, ONI, and other groups are quite capable of producing fake cargo manifest, fake credentials, fakes of all other kinds, and of planting faked evidence. The kind of people who sell foreign foods to corner shops and ethnic restaurants are capable of faking most of that. I have it on reliable authority (from people who have used the service) that at least one well-known Japanese shipping company you'll probably have heard of will fake bills of lading for 25 dollars. The people I met who used this service also (quite legally) faked EU origin for goods of axis-of-evil origin for import into the USA by landing them in Britain or Holland, and repacking in a new container. So that explains why so much Asian-style food seems to come from the Netherlands - and there I was thinking it was down to the Dutch skill at high-tech intensive agriculture :-) I'd guess that a few transactions like that in series could hide pretty well anything in a sort of real-world mixmaster. It would be traceable by a determined effort, but probably not by the effort most journalists, or even small-country police forces would be able to put in, especially if the the paper trail or the real route went through some pairs of states that don't want to be seen talking to each other in public. In the unlikely event that the North Koreans wanted to send a nuke to the USA, they might not need an ICBM. Just bribe or otherwise subvert a few shipping clerks in South Korea or China and get them shipped over in a container of tractor parts. (Or as Tim said a few months ago, send them with the regular shipments of cocaine - though that would involve first getting them from North Korea to somewhere that actually has an agriculture)
Re: Things are looking better all the time
Bill Stewart wrote: At 04:14 PM 03/26/2003 +1200, Peter Gutmann wrote: The RAF used an EFP in 1989 to assassinate the chairman of Deutsche Bank I assume that's some Italian or German group's acronym and not Britain's Royal Air Force? :-) (Besides, I thought assassinations were usually an SAS (Special Air Service, not Scandinavian Airlines) thing...) Red Army Fraction (As Germans I suppose it would be something like Rote Armee Fraktion?) Most people called them faction in English but they preferred fraction as it was meant to imply that they were only a small part of a vast army of workers et.c They weren't, of course. Bloody heck, they even have a web site: http://www.rafinfo.de/ More often called Baader Meinhof Gang presumably because Ulrike Meinbhof looked sexier than most terrorists. And yes, http://www.baader-meinhof.com/ exists - though it seems to be a fan site. So now we have assasination groupies.
Re: Things are looking better all the time
Declan McCullagh wrote: Or perhaps we'll see someone take a GPS-controlled small plane, which can carry 1,000 lbs, and turn it into a flying bomb or delivery system for something quite noxious. These planes can be rented by the hour at hundreds of small to medium sized airports around the U.S. Though I don't know if the autopilot is configurable enough to let an attacker program it to head to a certain altitude at a certain location and then bail out via parachute. Another novel that came out with the idea - and the first one to explicitly mention GPS AFAIR - was The Moon Goddess and the Son by Donald Kingsbury from 1987 (incorporating parts from stories in Analog back in the 1970s) which has an Afghan refugee studying aero engineering in the US and setting up light planes to autopilot an attack on the Kremlin. (To be honest when I first heard the news about 9/11 that's what I thought might have happened - until I saw a TV screen I didn't realise they were passenger planes) A good book which got less attention than it deserved. Contains a brilliant idea for what should have been done in LEO after Mir. I suppose it has been eclipsed in the memory of sf fans both by really happened to the Soviet Union and perhaps also by Mary Jane Engh's Arslan (AKA The Wind from Bukhara) which overlaps in subject matter a little. Rumsfeld, Blix Barada Nikto!
Re: About Christers versus Ragheads
Neil Johnson wrote: On Monday 24 March 2003 06:32 pm, Tim May wrote: can be destroyed, ushering in the the Rapture and Christ's Dominion on This whole rapture bit always amused me. Rapture isn't even mentioned in the Bible. It's all based on TWO (count'em TWO) verses in the New Testament. Actually, the pre-millenialist rapture ideas have been going out of fashion amongst so-called fundamentalist Christians for a while. The peak of them was probably the 1970s. For the last 30 years a lot of the new churches (keywords charismatic Toronto Experience restoration vineyard etc) have reverted to the older position that the rule of the saints can be established on Earth by everybody being converted - which sounds just as heavy, but does mean that they think that things can get better, so it is worth getting involved in the world. The rapture ideas came in as part of dispensationalism in the 19th century (Google for Scofield Reference Bible) and, even in the United States, has probably never been the majority view amongst Christians though it might have got pretty near it in the 60s/70s/80s (Eve of Destruction (Barry McGuire became a Christian evangelist IIRC) Ken Brown (evil lefty Christian wimp) Rumsfeld, Blix Barada Nikto!
Re: About Christers versus Ragheads
Neil Johnson wrote: On Monday 24 March 2003 06:32 pm, Tim May wrote: can be destroyed, ushering in the the Rapture and Christ's Dominion on This whole rapture bit always amused me. Rapture isn't even mentioned in the Bible. It's all based on TWO (count'em TWO) verses in the New Testament. Actually, the pre-millenialist rapture ideas have been going out of fashion amongst so-called fundamentalist Christians for a while. The peak of them was probably the 1970s. For the last 30 years a lot of the new churches (keywords charismatic Toronto Experience restoration vineyard etc) have reverted to the older position that the rule of the saints can be established on Earth by everybody being converted - which sounds just as heavy, but does mean that they think that things can get better, so it is worth getting involved in the world. The rapture ideas came in as part of dispensationalism in the 19th century (Google for Scofield Reference Bible) and, even in the United States, has probably never been the majority view amongst Christians though it might have got pretty near it in the 60s/70s/80s (Eve of Destruction (Barry McGuire became a Christian evangelist IIRC) Ken Brown (evil lefty Christian wimp) Rumsfeld, Blix Barada Nikto!
Re: Things are looking better all the time
Declan McCullagh wrote: Or perhaps we'll see someone take a GPS-controlled small plane, which can carry 1,000 lbs, and turn it into a flying bomb or delivery system for something quite noxious. These planes can be rented by the hour at hundreds of small to medium sized airports around the U.S. Though I don't know if the autopilot is configurable enough to let an attacker program it to head to a certain altitude at a certain location and then bail out via parachute. Another novel that came out with the idea - and the first one to explicitly mention GPS AFAIR - was The Moon Goddess and the Son by Donald Kingsbury from 1987 (incorporating parts from stories in Analog back in the 1970s) which has an Afghan refugee studying aero engineering in the US and setting up light planes to autopilot an attack on the Kremlin. (To be honest when I first heard the news about 9/11 that's what I thought might have happened - until I saw a TV screen I didn't realise they were passenger planes) A good book which got less attention than it deserved. Contains a brilliant idea for what should have been done in LEO after Mir. I suppose it has been eclipsed in the memory of sf fans both by really happened to the Soviet Union and perhaps also by Mary Jane Engh's Arslan (AKA The Wind from Bukhara) which overlaps in subject matter a little. Rumsfeld, Blix Barada Nikto!
Re: [IP] Risks of Iraqi war emerging Some officials warn of a mismatch betweenstrategy and force size. (fwd)
Eugen Leitl reposted an article by someone: From: Dave Farber [EMAIL PROTECTED] Risks of Iraqi war emerging Some officials warn of a mismatch between strategy and force size. By Joseph L. Galloway Inquirer Washington Bureau Knowledgeable defense and administration officials say Rumsfeld and his civilian aides at first wanted to commit no more than 60,000 U.S. troops to the war, on the assumption that the Iraqis would capitulate in two days. The total combat force now numbers about 180,000 troops. Intelligence officials say Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and other Pentagon civilians ignored much of the advice of the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency in favor of reports from the Iraqi opposition and from Israeli sources that predicted an immediate uprising against Hussein once the Americans attacked. Much as I love to say it, one of the things I hope to come out of this war is sufficient egg on the faces of Rumsfeld and the other PNACs so that it's be at least another 100 years before anyone listens to them. Those of us who aren't in the USA sleep safer in our beds if we know that the US realises there are huge costs to war. I don't want a world where anybody - even the good guys - thinks that they can start a war with no risk. The officials said Rumsfeld also made his disdain for the Army's heavy divisions very clear when he argued about the war plan with Army Gen. Tommy Franks, the allied commander. Franks wanted more and more heavily armed forces, said one senior administration official; Rumsfeld kept pressing for smaller, lighter and more agile ones, with much bigger roles for air power and special forces. Our force package is very light, said a retired senior general. If things don't happen exactly as you assumed, you get into a tangle, a mismatch of your strategy and your force. Things like the pockets [of Iraqi resistance] in Basra, Umm Qasr and Nasiriyah need to be dealt with forcefully, but we don't have the forces to do it. Though this might be wrong. If the pockets are in cities, and if you don't want to kill thousands of civilians, what use are heavy weapons? For literal street-fighting you want units like the British Paras Royal Marine Commandos, or the Gurkhas. And guess just who is in Basra now?
Re: What shall we do with a bad government...
Vincent Penquerc'h wrote: Tim - I don't think the cowboy (aka Shrubya) knows enough economics to realize that, in the long term, income and expenditure must be in some kind of rough balance. He's always been able to lean on daddy's money. I'm wondering whether the successive US administrations are not increasingly planning to live off the world, by way of their economic debt. Buy with monkey money, never reimburse. Effectively taxing the other economies for their expenses. Straightforward imperialism. US follows the British example, 2 centuries later. The PNACs even sound like Palmerston and Castlereagh. Though economies might be already too linked together for this to work fine, as damage to one part of the world's economy will reflect on others, including the US. Hmm, I think I'll do some googling now... Didn't work in the 19th century either. Empires and armies cost too much.
Re: Unauthorized Journalists to be shot at
This has now happened - Terry Lloyd one, of Britain's better-known reporters, seems to have been killed by US marines. According to the cameraman he was picked up by Iraqi ambulance, so its a fair bet they weren't embedded in the COW (thanks for the acronym, Tim) http://www.itv.com/news/236548.html Ken Brown wrote: Major Variola (ret) wrote: I'd think that the troops would explain this to the reporters tagging along as they confiscate all their transmitters before an op. I simply wouldn't trust the reporters, even though they're toast too if someone mis-IFFs. Its a lot more serious than not shutting off your cell phone on a plane. Besides, I doubt the reporters have Iraq's FCC's clearance to use those frequencies there, until we extend the Little Powell's authority to that domain. :-) Kate Adie's broadcast (which I heard on the BBC) was in the context of a discussion of non-embedded reporters. She claimed that all the best news from Gulf War 2 had been from people who weren't bedding with the military. The ones who are being threatened are the ones with the temerity to travel independently rather than under military orders. There was also a comment by Robert Fisk to the effect that (I can't remember the exact words): There will be a war on. There is no law in a war, you can do whatever you can get away with. In an article I found online Fisk gives his rules of thumb for spotring compromised reporters: - Reporters who wear items of American or British military costume helmets, camouflage jackets, weapons, etc. - Reporters who say we when they are referring to the US or British military unit in which they are embedded. - Those who use the words collateral damage instead of dead civilians. - Those who commence answering questions with the words: Well, of course, because of military security I can't divulge... - Those who, reporting from the Iraqi side, insist on referring to the Iraqi population as his (ie Saddam's) people. - Journalists in Baghdad who refer to what the Americans describe as Saddam Hussein's human rights abuses rather than the plain and simple torture we all know Saddam practices. - Journalists reporting from either side who use the god-awful and creepy phrase officials say without naming, quite specifically, who these often lying officials are.
Re: What shall we do with a bad government...
Vincent Penquerc'h wrote: Tim - I don't think the cowboy (aka Shrubya) knows enough economics to realize that, in the long term, income and expenditure must be in some kind of rough balance. He's always been able to lean on daddy's money. I'm wondering whether the successive US administrations are not increasingly planning to live off the world, by way of their economic debt. Buy with monkey money, never reimburse. Effectively taxing the other economies for their expenses. Straightforward imperialism. US follows the British example, 2 centuries later. The PNACs even sound like Palmerston and Castlereagh. Though economies might be already too linked together for this to work fine, as damage to one part of the world's economy will reflect on others, including the US. Hmm, I think I'll do some googling now... Didn't work in the 19th century either. Empires and armies cost too much.
Re: Unauthorized Journalists to be shot at
This has now happened - Terry Lloyd one, of Britain's better-known reporters, seems to have been killed by US marines. According to the cameraman he was picked up by Iraqi ambulance, so its a fair bet they weren't embedded in the COW (thanks for the acronym, Tim) http://www.itv.com/news/236548.html Ken Brown wrote: Major Variola (ret) wrote: I'd think that the troops would explain this to the reporters tagging along as they confiscate all their transmitters before an op. I simply wouldn't trust the reporters, even though they're toast too if someone mis-IFFs. Its a lot more serious than not shutting off your cell phone on a plane. Besides, I doubt the reporters have Iraq's FCC's clearance to use those frequencies there, until we extend the Little Powell's authority to that domain. :-) Kate Adie's broadcast (which I heard on the BBC) was in the context of a discussion of non-embedded reporters. She claimed that all the best news from Gulf War 2 had been from people who weren't bedding with the military. The ones who are being threatened are the ones with the temerity to travel independently rather than under military orders. There was also a comment by Robert Fisk to the effect that (I can't remember the exact words): There will be a war on. There is no law in a war, you can do whatever you can get away with. In an article I found online Fisk gives his rules of thumb for spotring compromised reporters: - Reporters who wear items of American or British military costume helmets, camouflage jackets, weapons, etc. - Reporters who say we when they are referring to the US or British military unit in which they are embedded. - Those who use the words collateral damage instead of dead civilians. - Those who commence answering questions with the words: Well, of course, because of military security I can't divulge... - Those who, reporting from the Iraqi side, insist on referring to the Iraqi population as his (ie Saddam's) people. - Journalists in Baghdad who refer to what the Americans describe as Saddam Hussein's human rights abuses rather than the plain and simple torture we all know Saddam practices. - Journalists reporting from either side who use the god-awful and creepy phrase officials say without naming, quite specifically, who these often lying officials are.
Re: Journalists, Diplomats, Others Urged to Evacuate City
John Kelsey wrote: At 07:42 AM 3/20/03 -0800, James A. Donald wrote: ... The story you are telling is part of a big commie lie -- that the US aided the bigoted Taliban against the elightened communists who created a constitutional democracy where every man and every women have a vote, and universal education and health care were guaranteed, etc. I guess the particular Commie lie I'd always heard along these lines was more like the US aided a lot of crazed, bloodthirsty bandit chieftains who were nominally anti-communist, and deeply anti-invading-Russians, some of whom later wound up being Taliban bandit chieftains. US originally helped the kind of people who later became the Northern Alliance - a rather odd mixture of unreconstructed Stalinists, liberals in the European sense of the word, separationists, local bandit chiefs, drug growers, pro-Iranian Shiite Islamists and who knows what else. The Taliban formed later, in Pakistan, and was at least at first indirectly funded by the US through Pakistan and through material inherited from some other groups - and of course later by various Arabs (who may or may not have thought of themselves as Al Qaida before the US pinned the name on them while looking for a New Enemy for the New World Order). But there certainly was some assistance from the US to the Taliban. US They didn't buy those 500 Stingers in Kmart (though some of them might have later turned up for sale in Peshawar or wherever it is they sell such things)
Re: Fwd: Informer alert: War begins in Iraq
Harmon Seaver wrote: What sort of dictatorship is this where the people own automatic weapons freely? Shades of Switzerland! Soviet Armenia? When they fell out with the Azeris they got their scratch army together in /days/ According to the Russian news they used hunting rifles. I'd been reading enough of the gun-wanking propaganda from the US on lists like this to think that people in places like Armenia didn't have guns. Turns out that in some rural parts of USSR quite a lot of people had them and of course it all made no difference to anything political whatever as long as the Soviets were willing to control the place. As soon as it became obvious that no Russians intended to die to keep Armenia in the Union, things changed.
Re: Fwd: Informer alert: War begins in Iraq
Harmon Seaver wrote: What sort of dictatorship is this where the people own automatic weapons freely? Shades of Switzerland! Soviet Armenia? When they fell out with the Azeris they got their scratch army together in /days/ According to the Russian news they used hunting rifles. I'd been reading enough of the gun-wanking propaganda from the US on lists like this to think that people in places like Armenia didn't have guns. Turns out that in some rural parts of USSR quite a lot of people had them and of course it all made no difference to anything political whatever as long as the Soviets were willing to control the place. As soon as it became obvious that no Russians intended to die to keep Armenia in the Union, things changed.
Re: Journalists, Diplomats, Others Urged to Evacuate City
John Kelsey wrote: At 07:42 AM 3/20/03 -0800, James A. Donald wrote: ... The story you are telling is part of a big commie lie -- that the US aided the bigoted Taliban against the elightened communists who created a constitutional democracy where every man and every women have a vote, and universal education and health care were guaranteed, etc. I guess the particular Commie lie I'd always heard along these lines was more like the US aided a lot of crazed, bloodthirsty bandit chieftains who were nominally anti-communist, and deeply anti-invading-Russians, some of whom later wound up being Taliban bandit chieftains. US originally helped the kind of people who later became the Northern Alliance - a rather odd mixture of unreconstructed Stalinists, liberals in the European sense of the word, separationists, local bandit chiefs, drug growers, pro-Iranian Shiite Islamists and who knows what else. The Taliban formed later, in Pakistan, and was at least at first indirectly funded by the US through Pakistan and through material inherited from some other groups - and of course later by various Arabs (who may or may not have thought of themselves as Al Qaida before the US pinned the name on them while looking for a New Enemy for the New World Order). But there certainly was some assistance from the US to the Taliban. US They didn't buy those 500 Stingers in Kmart (though some of them might have later turned up for sale in Peshawar or wherever it is they sell such things)
Re: Journalists, Diplomats, Others Urged to Evacuate City
Tim May wrote: -- the truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983...about 300 Marines killed. (Tyler Durden will probably claim that this was not on U.S. soil, but it's a distinction without a difference.) There surely is a difference. They had walked into someone else's war. Well, damn near everybody else's war. Of all the places in the world you ought not to go if you want to not be shot at, a war with 8 sides (Residual Lebanese govt. vs Palestinians vs. Israel vs Islamist Shia militias vs. non-Islamist Shia militias vs. Sunni militias vs Maronite militias vs Druze - with interference from Iran Syria) at least 3 of whom hate /all/ the others, and /all/ of whom have a history of shooting at each other, is hardly at the top of the list. If you go to where the vultures and the jackals are disputing over a corpse that isn't actually dead, you have yourself to blame if you get bitten.
Re: Fwd: Informer alert: War begins in Iraq
Despite what Eric Cordian and others have said here, I think it unlikely that there will be a big body-bag outcome for the US. The force balance is so overwhelmingly one-way, and most Iraqis really don't want the current Ba'athist government. A lot of them will give up quickly. Could be wrong of course. I've half a suspicion that the US will skip the long airwar phase (after all the Iraqi airforce mostly defected to Iran in 1991 we've been bombing the shit out of their fixed air defences every second Saturday for 10 years) and move straight into a land advance, perhaps with the Brits in front (see if that Chobham armour really does work), with the smart bombs et.c used to knock out the enemy just in front of the advance, in a sort of computerised version of the old moving barrages of WW1. Large-scale House-to-house fighting unlikely. But some ponderables: 1) if they really only want to rule Iraq directly for 6 weeks or 2 months that means EITHER they hand over to an international peacekeeping force (bloody unlikely given current PNAC drumbeating in Bushite circles) OR else the new Iraqi government is essentially the successor to the old, with the civil administration and most of the military still intact. And in a 1-party plutocracy like Iraq, that means with the Ba'ath party still intact, maybe even including Saddam's Tikriti friends relations. They run most military large business organisations huge parts of civil government media. So no real change then - the dog barks too loud so we shoot him and replace him with another dog from the same kennel. Only alternative to that that can preserve an Iraqi state is US (or just possibly UK - after all we've had a lot of practice) direct rule for /years/ We don't just dfeat Iraq, we conquer it. Bush still claims the USA is not an imperialist power. 2) What happens if the US forces liberate somewhere (Basra would be first) and they locals say thanks very much for liberating us, now we are free we are going to declare a Republic and hold elections and have our own constitution modelled on yours... Do the Americans have to say thanks very much for the flattery, but don't you move a muscle until we can get you ragheads back under Baghdad where you belong? 3) what about the Kurds? What about the Kurds? Does the US force them to rejoin Iraq? Does the US continue to deny them Kirkuk and other cities of their homeland? Does the US allow Turkish troops to invade northern Iraq (i.e. remain in there- there are probably some already) Is this the end for US support for Turkish domination over the area? If the Turks refuse to play ball, is it the end for US support for Turkish membership of NATO? 4) And what about those Iranian People's Mujahideen who supported the wrong side in the first Gulf war and have been camping out in eastern Iraq for 20 years? Their strength is often exaggerated, but they do have tanks and they have no-where else to go. Their backs are really against the wall (OK, the river, but its the same thing). Once upon a time they were better soldiers than any units of the native Iraqi army. Do they fight to the death? Or just surrender? What does the US want with a whole load of heavily armed neo-communist militant Iranian Muslims? Send them back to Iran to face the music? I don't think so.
Re: Give cheese to france?
Kevin S. Van Horn wrote: By the way, one piece of evidence that economics is maturing into a real science is that it is becoming usable by engineers; in particular, it has been applied to investment analysis and portfolio theory, resulting in significant improvements in investment performance. splutter! That's why the value of most investments has halved over the last 4 years then?
Re: Give cheese to france?
Harmon Seaver wrote: Ah yes, forgot about that -- the fancy condo right smack in the downtown historic district used to be a while city block of historic buildings people wanted to save, and, in fact, there were developers with money who wanted to restore them, but the city, for some reason no one could figure out, condemned them, took the whole block with eminent domain, then razed the whole thing -- with no plan whatsoever in mind for what would replace it. Or so it seemed. Then they sold the whole block to this other developer for one dollar, and gave him a ton of TIF to build a big, very modern, condo which doesn't even remotely jive with the rest of the area. This same city council approved a zone change from church/residential to business with no knowledge, supposedly, of what or who the purchaser of the property would be -- the church said it had to be kept secret. Turns out it's a new Super Wallmart. Isn't it great the way fascism works? That's not fascism - that's old-fashioned public officials acting in their own interests. The first answer to it is democracy. Vote the buggers out. The second is resistance. The third (not yet tried) is open government. Government should not be allowed to keep secrets from citizens, and the words commercial in confidence on a contract signed by government should invalidate it. Local governments are people we employ to fix the drains and clean the streets and make sure he schools stay open. No reason we should tolerate them doing deals behind our backs.
Re: Unauthorized Journalists to be shot at
Major Variola (ret) wrote: I'd think that the troops would explain this to the reporters tagging along as they confiscate all their transmitters before an op. I simply wouldn't trust the reporters, even though they're toast too if someone mis-IFFs. Its a lot more serious than not shutting off your cell phone on a plane. Besides, I doubt the reporters have Iraq's FCC's clearance to use those frequencies there, until we extend the Little Powell's authority to that domain. :-) Kate Adie's broadcast (which I heard on the BBC) was in the context of a discussion of non-embedded reporters. She claimed that all the best news from Gulf War 2 had been from people who weren't bedding with the military. The ones who are being threatened are the ones with the temerity to travel independently rather than under military orders. There was also a comment by Robert Fisk to the effect that (I can't remember the exact words): There will be a war on. There is no law in a war, you can do whatever you can get away with. In an article I found online Fisk gives his rules of thumb for spotring compromised reporters: - Reporters who wear items of American or British military costume helmets, camouflage jackets, weapons, etc. - Reporters who say we when they are referring to the US or British military unit in which they are embedded. - Those who use the words collateral damage instead of dead civilians. - Those who commence answering questions with the words: Well, of course, because of military security I can't divulge... - Those who, reporting from the Iraqi side, insist on referring to the Iraqi population as his (ie Saddam's) people. - Journalists in Baghdad who refer to what the Americans describe as Saddam Hussein's human rights abuses rather than the plain and simple torture we all know Saddam practices. - Journalists reporting from either side who use the god-awful and creepy phrase officials say without naming, quite specifically, who these often lying officials are.
Re: Orwell's Victory goods come home
So which American on the list is going to write to Congress to demand that the Statue of Liberty be sent back to France? Ken
Re: Unauthorized Journalists to be shot at
Major Variola (ret) wrote: I'd think that the troops would explain this to the reporters tagging along as they confiscate all their transmitters before an op. I simply wouldn't trust the reporters, even though they're toast too if someone mis-IFFs. Its a lot more serious than not shutting off your cell phone on a plane. Besides, I doubt the reporters have Iraq's FCC's clearance to use those frequencies there, until we extend the Little Powell's authority to that domain. :-) Kate Adie's broadcast (which I heard on the BBC) was in the context of a discussion of non-embedded reporters. She claimed that all the best news from Gulf War 2 had been from people who weren't bedding with the military. The ones who are being threatened are the ones with the temerity to travel independently rather than under military orders. There was also a comment by Robert Fisk to the effect that (I can't remember the exact words): There will be a war on. There is no law in a war, you can do whatever you can get away with. In an article I found online Fisk gives his rules of thumb for spotring compromised reporters: - Reporters who wear items of American or British military costume helmets, camouflage jackets, weapons, etc. - Reporters who say we when they are referring to the US or British military unit in which they are embedded. - Those who use the words collateral damage instead of dead civilians. - Those who commence answering questions with the words: Well, of course, because of military security I can't divulge... - Those who, reporting from the Iraqi side, insist on referring to the Iraqi population as his (ie Saddam's) people. - Journalists in Baghdad who refer to what the Americans describe as Saddam Hussein's human rights abuses rather than the plain and simple torture we all know Saddam practices. - Journalists reporting from either side who use the god-awful and creepy phrase officials say without naming, quite specifically, who these often lying officials are.
Re: Give cheese to france?
Harmon Seaver wrote: Ah yes, forgot about that -- the fancy condo right smack in the downtown historic district used to be a while city block of historic buildings people wanted to save, and, in fact, there were developers with money who wanted to restore them, but the city, for some reason no one could figure out, condemned them, took the whole block with eminent domain, then razed the whole thing -- with no plan whatsoever in mind for what would replace it. Or so it seemed. Then they sold the whole block to this other developer for one dollar, and gave him a ton of TIF to build a big, very modern, condo which doesn't even remotely jive with the rest of the area. This same city council approved a zone change from church/residential to business with no knowledge, supposedly, of what or who the purchaser of the property would be -- the church said it had to be kept secret. Turns out it's a new Super Wallmart. Isn't it great the way fascism works? That's not fascism - that's old-fashioned public officials acting in their own interests. The first answer to it is democracy. Vote the buggers out. The second is resistance. The third (not yet tried) is open government. Government should not be allowed to keep secrets from citizens, and the words commercial in confidence on a contract signed by government should invalidate it. Local governments are people we employ to fix the drains and clean the streets and make sure he schools stay open. No reason we should tolerate them doing deals behind our backs.
Re: Blood for Oil (was The Pig Boy was really squealing today
I'm trying to think of something I'd personally be less interested in investing my own money in than an oil pipeline through Afghanistan. Lots of money invested up front, literally hundreds of small groups who could threaten to damage it as a way of demanding a share of the loot, very hard to defend, etc. What an opportunity! And best of all, neither oil wells nor customers at either end!!
Re: The burn-off of twenty million useless eaters and minorities
Kevin S. Van Horn wrote: Tyler Durden wrote: Black leadership is one potential issue here, but the other ethnic groups that do so well in the US have no identifiable leaders here. Which is precisely why those ethnic groups do so well, while U.S. blacks do not. The value of leaders is vastly overrated in American society. Same over here in London. I'm a white, English, middle-class sort of bloke. Who are my community leaders? The parish priest? The borough councillors? The landlord of the pub? The member of parliament? The head teacher of the local school? All of whom, apart from the publican, I helped to appoint, and none of whom I feel in the slightest way deferential to or look up to for leadership whatever that is. Who are my community leaders? It's just a silly question. No-one would ask it. Ken Brown
Re: The burn-off of twenty million useless eaters and minorities
Kevin S. Van Horn wrote: Tyler Durden wrote: Black leadership is one potential issue here, but the other ethnic groups that do so well in the US have no identifiable leaders here. Which is precisely why those ethnic groups do so well, while U.S. blacks do not. The value of leaders is vastly overrated in American society. Same over here in London. I'm a white, English, middle-class sort of bloke. Who are my community leaders? The parish priest? The borough councillors? The landlord of the pub? The member of parliament? The head teacher of the local school? All of whom, apart from the publican, I helped to appoint, and none of whom I feel in the slightest way deferential to or look up to for leadership whatever that is. Who are my community leaders? It's just a silly question. No-one would ask it. Ken Brown
Re: Life Sentence for Medical Marijuana?
Tyler Durden wrote: And then there's the PERSISTENT rumors of him actually taking an accidental DEA bust in a Florida airport after landing a fresh new cargo. Supposedly this was a bit of a snafu and they had to let him go on the hush-hush...(And I keep hearing there's video of that bust.) Oh, PERSISTENT rumours eh? So they must be true. The TRANSIENT sort are just a pack of lies.
Re: Passenger rail is for adventurers and bums
Bill Stewart wrote: Tim commented about railroad stations being in the ugly parts of town. That's driven by several things - decay of the inner cities, as cars and commuter trains have let businesses move out to suburbs, and also the difference between railroad stations that were built for passengers (New York's Grand Central, Washington's Union Station) and railroad stations that were built for freight, where passengers are an afterthought (much of the Midwest has train stations surrounded by warehouses and grain silos, not houses or shops). That's an important point. Railway systems are bistable - they want to be either all-passenger or all-freight. They have completely different requirements. Freight moves slowly, but takes up a lot of space. Also it isn't amenable to timetables. Passenger trains move fast and need timetabling. Passenger trains, especially in urban areas, go for cheaper trains more expensive infrastructure - better rails for a smooth ride, electrification. Goods trains are much more likely to slam big diesels on and move over crappy old rails. Different economics. They tend to exclude each other. Rail systems dominated by goods people, like mast of US, see passenger trains as a sort of flashy parasite, denying them use of their network at irritating times. And vice versa. One of the reasons that the UK railways are having a harder time upgrading these days than the French or German is that they tried to share tracks. The railway beside my house has to pass about 20 passenger trains an hour each way. When some huge long thing hauling 50 trucks of gravel comes along, it gets in the way.
Re: Shuttle Diplomacy
Thomas Shaddack wrote: I just hope they won't mothball the ISS... Not if the scheduled Chinese manned launch goes ahead.
Re: Passenger rail is for adventurers and bums
Steve Mynott wrote: In the UK at least railway stations tend to have been built in the ugly parts of towns for good reason -- simply because land is a lot cheaper in the low rent parts of town. Also railways stations and the associated cheap hotels with a large transient population tend to attract undesirables such as drug dealers, muggers and hookers and the sort of thing which pushs the value of your house down and nice middle class people don't want on their doorstep. The people in richer areas tend to have more political clout and more effectively oppose development of this sort. Actually, in most places in UK, the railways precede the development of the town. So the industry cheap areas follow rail, rather than vice versa. What you say is often true about new road building though. Everyone wants big roads a couple of miles away - no-one wants them on their doorstep. That's how Labour took over London in the 1970s - the old Tory GLC committed political suicide by road-building. Roads do not make votes. Of course, what /should/ happen is that the people who need the roads pay the people whose towns they go through...
Re: punk and free markets
Gold star. Velvet Underground is definitely ground zero for Punk to my ears, but with this recent set of pre-Velvets minimalist releases (eg, Dream Theater, with LaMount Young, John Cale--who helped start the band I was in, and others), the stage was somewhat set. Yeah, yeah, yeah; I loved the Velvets too - but the stuff we Brits called punk in 1976 was quite unlike that, except for being a bit raucous. It was more derived from a kind of mutated pub-rock mated with football chants, with undertones of Hawkwind-like bass riffs, played by semi-competent nerds. NY invented punk first. Then London invented something else and stole the name. So sue us.
Re: Passenger rail is for adventurers and bums
Eugen Leitl wrote: On Fri, 31 Jan 2003, Thomas Shaddack wrote: I don't know how it works in the US, but railroads are both comfortable and pretty reliable in Europe. A bit too expensive, especially in Germany. I also like being able to work on the train -- given that here cities are only a few kilotons apart and ICEs are pretty speedy flying can take longer. Otherwise I agree, bahning beyond 5-6 h starts to become tedious. ICE trains bloody good. Returning from a holiday once I went from my hotel in Berlin to my local pub, 50m from front door, in London, by train, in 12 hours. The first half of the journey, ICE to Koln, was only about a quarter of the total time. Koln to Brussel was slw but I got to see some beautiful scenery. Then Eurostar - fast on mainland, semi-fast in Britain. When the Channel Tunnel Rail link is finished (15 years late - pah - the only reason British government agreed to build tunnel in first place was French said they would pay for, won, all of it, Thatcher might have been a free marketeer but she was a nationalist first and was shamed into agreeing - same as the USA is going to stay in manned spaceflight because of China) when fast link to Koln complete (maybe already?) the trip would be perhaps 8 or 9 hours. OK. flight is maybe 2 hours. But it would have taken half an hour to get to Berlin airport, for international flight they'd want you in an hour early, planes are even worse timekeepers than trains, and it would take me an hour to get out of the airport at the other end with baggage checks customs passports, then 2 hours to get home from Heathrow, or just over an hour from Gatwick. And so *much* less comfortable than train. And you have to book - train you just turn up and walk on. But really I like the ICE train for the same reason I like rockets and big buildings and bridges with cables in funny places and large shiny objects in general GOSH! WOW!
Re: Passenger rail is for adventurers and bums
Bill Stewart wrote: Tim commented about railroad stations being in the ugly parts of town. That's driven by several things - decay of the inner cities, as cars and commuter trains have let businesses move out to suburbs, and also the difference between railroad stations that were built for passengers (New York's Grand Central, Washington's Union Station) and railroad stations that were built for freight, where passengers are an afterthought (much of the Midwest has train stations surrounded by warehouses and grain silos, not houses or shops). That's an important point. Railway systems are bistable - they want to be either all-passenger or all-freight. They have completely different requirements. Freight moves slowly, but takes up a lot of space. Also it isn't amenable to timetables. Passenger trains move fast and need timetabling. Passenger trains, especially in urban areas, go for cheaper trains more expensive infrastructure - better rails for a smooth ride, electrification. Goods trains are much more likely to slam big diesels on and move over crappy old rails. Different economics. They tend to exclude each other. Rail systems dominated by goods people, like mast of US, see passenger trains as a sort of flashy parasite, denying them use of their network at irritating times. And vice versa. One of the reasons that the UK railways are having a harder time upgrading these days than the French or German is that they tried to share tracks. The railway beside my house has to pass about 20 passenger trains an hour each way. When some huge long thing hauling 50 trucks of gravel comes along, it gets in the way.
Re: punk and free markets
Gold star. Velvet Underground is definitely ground zero for Punk to my ears, but with this recent set of pre-Velvets minimalist releases (eg, Dream Theater, with LaMount Young, John Cale--who helped start the band I was in, and others), the stage was somewhat set. Yeah, yeah, yeah; I loved the Velvets too - but the stuff we Brits called punk in 1976 was quite unlike that, except for being a bit raucous. It was more derived from a kind of mutated pub-rock mated with football chants, with undertones of Hawkwind-like bass riffs, played by semi-competent nerds. NY invented punk first. Then London invented something else and stole the name. So sue us.
Re: Shuttle Diplomacy
Thomas Shaddack wrote: I just hope they won't mothball the ISS... Not if the scheduled Chinese manned launch goes ahead.
Re: Passenger rail is for adventurers and bums
Eugen Leitl wrote: On Fri, 31 Jan 2003, Thomas Shaddack wrote: I don't know how it works in the US, but railroads are both comfortable and pretty reliable in Europe. A bit too expensive, especially in Germany. I also like being able to work on the train -- given that here cities are only a few kilotons apart and ICEs are pretty speedy flying can take longer. Otherwise I agree, bahning beyond 5-6 h starts to become tedious. ICE trains bloody good. Returning from a holiday once I went from my hotel in Berlin to my local pub, 50m from front door, in London, by train, in 12 hours. The first half of the journey, ICE to Koln, was only about a quarter of the total time. Koln to Brussel was slw but I got to see some beautiful scenery. Then Eurostar - fast on mainland, semi-fast in Britain. When the Channel Tunnel Rail link is finished (15 years late - pah - the only reason British government agreed to build tunnel in first place was French said they would pay for, won, all of it, Thatcher might have been a free marketeer but she was a nationalist first and was shamed into agreeing - same as the USA is going to stay in manned spaceflight because of China) when fast link to Koln complete (maybe already?) the trip would be perhaps 8 or 9 hours. OK. flight is maybe 2 hours. But it would have taken half an hour to get to Berlin airport, for international flight they'd want you in an hour early, planes are even worse timekeepers than trains, and it would take me an hour to get out of the airport at the other end with baggage checks customs passports, then 2 hours to get home from Heathrow, or just over an hour from Gatwick. And so *much* less comfortable than train. And you have to book - train you just turn up and walk on. But really I like the ICE train for the same reason I like rockets and big buildings and bridges with cables in funny places and large shiny objects in general GOSH! WOW!
Re: Life Sentence for Medical Marijuana?
Tyler Durden wrote: And then there's the PERSISTENT rumors of him actually taking an accidental DEA bust in a Florida airport after landing a fresh new cargo. Supposedly this was a bit of a snafu and they had to let him go on the hush-hush...(And I keep hearing there's video of that bust.) Oh, PERSISTENT rumours eh? So they must be true. The TRANSIENT sort are just a pack of lies.
Re: Atlas Shrugs in Venezuela
James A. Donald wrote: Harmon Seaver: Why not the army? If it was only the executives and a handful of highly qualified specialists, you would not need the army. Strikers are mostly oil industry. And better-paid workers, technicians, engineers so on. They might include safety officers, firefighters, truckdrivers, communications engineers, construction workers so on. I don't know what the Venezualan army is like, but the British army is full of such people, has been for at least 150 years - the technical branches outnumberd the infantry sometime in the 19th century - though that is partly due to the British habit of counting the Artillery as a technical branch, the others being the Royal Engineers (what you guys call combat engineers), the Electrical Mechanical Engineers (everything from motor mechanics to network technicians) and the Corps of Signals. They aren't all thick squaddies. Right now the firefighters are on strike in England the military are running the emergency services. Not as well as the professionals, but better than any other bunch you would be likely to find.
Re: DNA evidence countermeasures?
Thomas Shaddack wrote: But now how to avoid leaving random DNA traces? What about giving up on NOT leaving traces and rather just use eg. a spray with hydrolyzed DNA from multiple people, preferably with different racial origin, thus still leaving fragments like hair or skin cells, but contaminated with wild mix of DNA, so the PCR-copied mixture will be unusable for reliable identification? Nope. Already they have DNA from all over in the sample. Bacteria if nothing else. Probably other humans. So if something from you matches something there, you are spotted. If you were trying it on you would do best to spray around DNA from a close relative so they can't tell the difference. Think - you are a suspect. They find 2 human DNA signals at the scene of the crime, one from you, one from someone quite different from you. Well, they can look for the other guy in their own time, but they've got you. If they are using a stringent enough test (often they don't) the odds against it not being you are huge. But if they have 2 almost-but-not-quite different sequences - well, how can they be sure tht the one that looks like yours isn't really the other one amplified badly (which happens)? NB - the vast majority of forensic DNA evidence is used to support the defence.
Re: Atlas Shrugs in Venezuela
James A. Donald wrote: Harmon Seaver: Why not the army? If it was only the executives and a handful of highly qualified specialists, you would not need the army. Strikers are mostly oil industry. And better-paid workers, technicians, engineers so on. They might include safety officers, firefighters, truckdrivers, communications engineers, construction workers so on. I don't know what the Venezualan army is like, but the British army is full of such people, has been for at least 150 years - the technical branches outnumberd the infantry sometime in the 19th century - though that is partly due to the British habit of counting the Artillery as a technical branch, the others being the Royal Engineers (what you guys call combat engineers), the Electrical Mechanical Engineers (everything from motor mechanics to network technicians) and the Corps of Signals. They aren't all thick squaddies. Right now the firefighters are on strike in England the military are running the emergency services. Not as well as the professionals, but better than any other bunch you would be likely to find.
Re: DNA evidence countermeasures?
Thomas Shaddack wrote: But now how to avoid leaving random DNA traces? What about giving up on NOT leaving traces and rather just use eg. a spray with hydrolyzed DNA from multiple people, preferably with different racial origin, thus still leaving fragments like hair or skin cells, but contaminated with wild mix of DNA, so the PCR-copied mixture will be unusable for reliable identification? Nope. Already they have DNA from all over in the sample. Bacteria if nothing else. Probably other humans. So if something from you matches something there, you are spotted. If you were trying it on you would do best to spray around DNA from a close relative so they can't tell the difference. Think - you are a suspect. They find 2 human DNA signals at the scene of the crime, one from you, one from someone quite different from you. Well, they can look for the other guy in their own time, but they've got you. If they are using a stringent enough test (often they don't) the odds against it not being you are huge. But if they have 2 almost-but-not-quite different sequences - well, how can they be sure tht the one that looks like yours isn't really the other one amplified badly (which happens)? NB - the vast majority of forensic DNA evidence is used to support the defence.
Re: Indo European Origins
R. A. Hettinga wrote: At 4:25 PM -0500 on 1/9/03, Trei, Peter wrote: Basque is unique, as you say I remember someone saying somewhere, probably on PBS, that Basque is *very* old, paleolithic, and lots of popular mythology has cropped up that it's the closest living relative to some other ur-language, which even Indo-European is derived from. pedant mode ON All contemporary natural languages, like all biological species, are the same age. Of course some might change more slowly than others (Greek seems to have a;ltered less than Latin in 2500 years), or might remain in one place longer than others (it is silly to say that Welsh is an older language than English, but it is older in Britain) I don't know. The youth of today. They should make them all do cladistcs. pedant
Re: Indo European Origins
R. A. Hettinga wrote: At 4:25 PM -0500 on 1/9/03, Trei, Peter wrote: Basque is unique, as you say I remember someone saying somewhere, probably on PBS, that Basque is *very* old, paleolithic, and lots of popular mythology has cropped up that it's the closest living relative to some other ur-language, which even Indo-European is derived from. pedant mode ON All contemporary natural languages, like all biological species, are the same age. Of course some might change more slowly than others (Greek seems to have a;ltered less than Latin in 2500 years), or might remain in one place longer than others (it is silly to say that Welsh is an older language than English, but it is older in Britain) I don't know. The youth of today. They should make them all do cladistcs. pedant
Re: citizens can be named as enemy combatants
Michael Cardenas wrote: I think you're overreacting a bit. The actual case involves someone who was in a foriegn country for years, and was in the war zone at the time he was fighting the US. Hey, I'm not a USAan and I don't even live there. But I think I know your Constitution well enough to know that I never read the bit about how long you have to live in a foreign country to lose your rights. The argument is just the same as the one we're always using about crypto or security. The system is as strong as it's weakest link. If there are 2 doors to your house you need to lock them both. Someone, somewhere, has to decide whether this man's service in a foreign army is naughty enough to lose him his constitutional rights. If *that* decision-making process has weaker legal protection than a normal criminal trial would have had, the effect is that the legal protection of the whole system is reduced. If the process of removing someone's constitutional rights is not itself subject to those rights, then those rights are hollow and can be removed at will. Ken Brown
Re: The trend toward signing away rights
Trei, Peter wrote: If you put one of these stickers on your car, you are giving the police permission to pull the car over without probable cause if they find it on the road late at night (1am-5am, or something like that), just to check that all is in order. I think it's being promoted as an anti-theft tool. This is parents using the police to control their own children.
Re: The trend toward signing away rights
Trei, Peter wrote: If you put one of these stickers on your car, you are giving the police permission to pull the car over without probable cause if they find it on the road late at night (1am-5am, or something like that), just to check that all is in order. I think it's being promoted as an anti-theft tool. This is parents using the police to control their own children.
Re: Money is about expected future value....nothing more, nothing less
Marcel Popescu wrote: It does appear that the law in England is not as demanding as I believed: http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/banknotes/legaltender.htm The concept of legal tender is often misunderstood. Contrary to popular opinion, legal tender is not a means of payment that must be accepted by the parties to a transaction, but rather a legally defined means of payment that should not be refused by a creditor in satisfaction of a debt. Yep. If I owe you 100 quid, and I give you that value of English bank notes, and you sue me in an English court saying I haven't paid, you will lose. Which is fair enough - it is the state's court so why should they help you if you don't like the state's money? If I offer you 100 pounds worth of cowrie shells, then they might take a different view.
Re: eJazeera?
As always, standards are driven by the mass-market and the mass market is already speaking on this one. In 18 months time there will be no difference between mobile phones cheap digital cameras - all but the cheapest phones will come with built-in cameras. Its almost certain that these devices will have GPS location, and probable that they will have Bluetooth as well. 802.11 less likely because of power consumption - possible that there will be little base stations to go Blt - WiFi so the Bluetooth becomes a wireless drop cable. Realtime video isn't on the horizon unless someone pulls a lot of bandwidth out of the bag, as ever network speeds grow more slowly than processing power. So effectively everybody will be walking around with the ability to take timestamped photos and transmit them. BrinWorld arrives, at least in public places. No policeman gets to bludgeon a demonstrator unrecorded ever again - expect them to wear visors and helmets increasingly often, and to remove the identifying marks from uniforms (as, or course, riot cops and vigilantes have been doing for decades) The authorities will be able to take down the cell networks - though they won't be able to do that without causing some publicity. They won't be able to confiscate all phones from everyone who is walking the street. Presumably in high-security situation (like interviews with presidents or rides on torture planes) phones can be removed from visitors but they will be rare. Mobile phones are now so ubiquitous that taking them away has come to seem as odd as asking visitors to remove their shoes or to wear face masks. Ken Brown Tyler Durden wrote: Well, the rason d'etre of 'eJazeera' as I see it is primarily for publically-taken photos and videos to be quickly gypsied away from their port of origination (ie, the camera that took them), so that they can eventually make it into a public place on ye old 'Net. The enabling technology as I see it here is802.11b, Wi-Fi. A typical scenario is the case of public demonstrations where the local authorities are called in, and where they get, shall we say, a little overzealous. In many such cases (here, New York City, Here, USA, and there--China, etc...), such authorities will attempt to confiscate devices that could have captured the events or captured the perpetrators (and their badge numbers, if applicable) in photo or video. The ultimate aim of eJazeera is to make even the thought of capturing such video non-existent, due to the commonplace practices outlined in an eJazeera-type document (or eventually tribal knowledge). Short of that, it is of course in itself desirable for such events to get onto the public 'Net.
Re: eJazeera?
As always, standards are driven by the mass-market and the mass market is already speaking on this one. In 18 months time there will be no difference between mobile phones cheap digital cameras - all but the cheapest phones will come with built-in cameras. Its almost certain that these devices will have GPS location, and probable that they will have Bluetooth as well. 802.11 less likely because of power consumption - possible that there will be little base stations to go Blt - WiFi so the Bluetooth becomes a wireless drop cable. Realtime video isn't on the horizon unless someone pulls a lot of bandwidth out of the bag, as ever network speeds grow more slowly than processing power. So effectively everybody will be walking around with the ability to take timestamped photos and transmit them. BrinWorld arrives, at least in public places. No policeman gets to bludgeon a demonstrator unrecorded ever again - expect them to wear visors and helmets increasingly often, and to remove the identifying marks from uniforms (as, or course, riot cops and vigilantes have been doing for decades) The authorities will be able to take down the cell networks - though they won't be able to do that without causing some publicity. They won't be able to confiscate all phones from everyone who is walking the street. Presumably in high-security situation (like interviews with presidents or rides on torture planes) phones can be removed from visitors but they will be rare. Mobile phones are now so ubiquitous that taking them away has come to seem as odd as asking visitors to remove their shoes or to wear face masks. Ken Brown Tyler Durden wrote: Well, the rason d'etre of 'eJazeera' as I see it is primarily for publically-taken photos and videos to be quickly gypsied away from their port of origination (ie, the camera that took them), so that they can eventually make it into a public place on ye old 'Net. The enabling technology as I see it here is802.11b, Wi-Fi. A typical scenario is the case of public demonstrations where the local authorities are called in, and where they get, shall we say, a little overzealous. In many such cases (here, New York City, Here, USA, and there--China, etc...), such authorities will attempt to confiscate devices that could have captured the events or captured the perpetrators (and their badge numbers, if applicable) in photo or video. The ultimate aim of eJazeera is to make even the thought of capturing such video non-existent, due to the commonplace practices outlined in an eJazeera-type document (or eventually tribal knowledge). Short of that, it is of course in itself desirable for such events to get onto the public 'Net.
Re: was: Echelon-like resources..
Tyler Durden wrote: [...] Granted, Chonskty can be a little tiring on the ears His voice seems to have mellowed over the years. I heard him on the radio last week and he sounded just like Garrison Keillor :-) Ken Brown
Re: was: Echelon-like resources..
Tyler Durden wrote: [...] Granted, Chonskty can be a little tiring on the ears His voice seems to have mellowed over the years. I heard him on the radio last week and he sounded just like Garrison Keillor :-) Ken Brown
Re: software-defined radio killer app
The biggest police station in western Europe is being built less than half a mile from where I live. Your phone will keep on ringing and ringing... Major Variola (ret) wrote: In some parts of rural america, folks signal the presence of cops by flashing their headlights when driving. Occurs to me that would be a cool function for SDR: press code for or say cop. For N seconds, phone periodically sends cop message picked up by other phones, ignored by base station [1]. Phone also listens for these local broadcasts. Upon hearing a suprathreshold number of cop messages the phone alerts its owner. Better than a radar detector for emissionless, but visible, cops. Over the hill coverage. Issues of spoofing, trust, consensus familiar to readers here. [1] (different band entirely? UWB? B-tooth? FRS? )
Re: software-defined radio killer app
The biggest police station in western Europe is being built less than half a mile from where I live. Your phone will keep on ringing and ringing... Major Variola (ret) wrote: In some parts of rural america, folks signal the presence of cops by flashing their headlights when driving. Occurs to me that would be a cool function for SDR: press code for or say cop. For N seconds, phone periodically sends cop message picked up by other phones, ignored by base station [1]. Phone also listens for these local broadcasts. Upon hearing a suprathreshold number of cop messages the phone alerts its owner. Better than a radar detector for emissionless, but visible, cops. Over the hill coverage. Issues of spoofing, trust, consensus familiar to readers here. [1] (different band entirely? UWB? B-tooth? FRS? )
Re: Challenge to TCPA/Palladium detractors
James A. Donald wrote: -- On Wed, 7 Aug 2002, Matt Crawford wrote: Unless the application author can predict the exact output of the compilers, he can't issue a signature on the object code. The On 9 Aug 2002 at 10:48, Eugen Leitl wrote: Same version of compiler on same source using same build produces identical binaries. This has not been my experience. Nor anyone else's If only because the exact image you depends on a hell of a lot of programs libraries. Does anyone expect /Microsoft/ of all software suppliers to provide consistent versioning and reproducible or predictable software environments? These are the people who brought us DLL Hell. These are the people who fell into the MDAC versioning fiasco. Ken
Re: Challenge to TCPA/Palladium detractors
James A. Donald wrote: -- On Wed, 7 Aug 2002, Matt Crawford wrote: Unless the application author can predict the exact output of the compilers, he can't issue a signature on the object code. The On 9 Aug 2002 at 10:48, Eugen Leitl wrote: Same version of compiler on same source using same build produces identical binaries. This has not been my experience. Nor anyone else's If only because the exact image you depends on a hell of a lot of programs libraries. Does anyone expect /Microsoft/ of all software suppliers to provide consistent versioning and reproducible or predictable software environments? These are the people who brought us DLL Hell. These are the people who fell into the MDAC versioning fiasco. Ken
Re: Pizza with a credit card
Michael Motyka wrote: Quite clearly cash has got to go! I'm not sure how tough this would be to sneak past the slumbering electorate. Pretty tough I expect. But the usage level is certainly going down while the percentage of electronic transactions is skyrocketing. We've even had concresscritters suggesting that the transport of $10K !interstate! should be illegal. You want to spend ten thou on pizza? Bloody hell, that's excessive. Any company selling you that much would lay themselves wide open to being sued because they got you addicted to fatty pizza and made you /obese/. They could be liable for millions! No respectable company could possibly allow that to happen. There should be a law against it! Our legislators must act to defend vulnerable corporations against predatory customers like you who spend too much money! Ken (who has to choose among the 10 or so local Pizza delivery companies in his part of London on the basis of which postcode database they use, because most of them think he lives in the wrong street)
Re: Pizza with a credit card
Michael Motyka wrote: Quite clearly cash has got to go! I'm not sure how tough this would be to sneak past the slumbering electorate. Pretty tough I expect. But the usage level is certainly going down while the percentage of electronic transactions is skyrocketing. We've even had concresscritters suggesting that the transport of $10K !interstate! should be illegal. You want to spend ten thou on pizza? Bloody hell, that's excessive. Any company selling you that much would lay themselves wide open to being sued because they got you addicted to fatty pizza and made you /obese/. They could be liable for millions! No respectable company could possibly allow that to happen. There should be a law against it! Our legislators must act to defend vulnerable corporations against predatory customers like you who spend too much money! Ken (who has to choose among the 10 or so local Pizza delivery companies in his part of London on the basis of which postcode database they use, because most of them think he lives in the wrong street)
Re: Are you ready for your loyalty check?
Trei, Peter wrote: [...] That means tens of thousands of private-sector employees working in industries such as banking, chemicals, energy, transportation, telecommunications, shipping and public health would be subject to background checks as a condition of employment. Cor. This could lead to a lot of pissed-off people, very knowledgeable about infrastructure, losing their jobs. I no-longer work for a US private-sector company, though I did for 14 years, and a lot of that in computer security related jobs. Can I get to recruit some of my ex-colleagues to the Revolution? Just for the record I'm a Christian Socialist, and some of my best friends are anarchists and greens, and I think that the War Against [other people's] Terrorism is immoral, as is the War Against [other people's] Drugs, and the current government of Israel itself is using terrorism right now, as have the governments of the USA, Britain, and France, within the last few years. And Iran is the nearest to a democracy in the Middke East. Does this mean I can get purged? What happens when they fire everybody?
Re: William Pierce Dies of Cancer at 68
Eric Cordian wrote: Pierce made a lot of sense, if one ignored the politically incorrect hyperbole in his writings. It is ironic that Pierce died on the day Zionist War Criminal Ariel Sharon described destroying an apartment building full of civilians with a missile as ...in my view one of our biggest successes. - CHARLESTON, W.Va. (July 23, 2002 6:52 p.m. EDT) - White supremacist leader William Pierce, whose book The Turner Diaries is believed to have inspired Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, died Tuesday of cancer. He was 68. Inspired as to method perhaps. We don't get much news of him over here, but IIRC McVeigh was not a white supremacist? And certainly didn't talk with the kind of thuggish brutal irrational racism that Pierce ands his fellows did. Of course, unlike them , he actually killed large numbers of innocent people.
Re: warchalking on the Beeb
5 minutes of it on the breakfast-time Today show on BBC radio 4 a couple of days ago. Positive almost to the point of ingenuousness - they suggested that LSE was offering wireless as a public good which wasn't quite how LSE described it at a ukerna seminar 6 months ago. online version at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2144279.stm Ken Optimizzin Al-gorithym wrote: Well, its official. Warchalking (802.11x domain marking) appeared on the US edition of the BBC News. No hype re: anonymity t*rr*r*sm tigers bears; a mention though of service-contract violations, and the gift community concept. Thank you Mr. Beeb. (And all your privacy-invading TV IF locating white vans)
Re: Are you ready for your loyalty check?
Trei, Peter wrote: [...] That means tens of thousands of private-sector employees working in industries such as banking, chemicals, energy, transportation, telecommunications, shipping and public health would be subject to background checks as a condition of employment. Cor. This could lead to a lot of pissed-off people, very knowledgeable about infrastructure, losing their jobs. I no-longer work for a US private-sector company, though I did for 14 years, and a lot of that in computer security related jobs. Can I get to recruit some of my ex-colleagues to the Revolution? Just for the record I'm a Christian Socialist, and some of my best friends are anarchists and greens, and I think that the War Against [other people's] Terrorism is immoral, as is the War Against [other people's] Drugs, and the current government of Israel itself is using terrorism right now, as have the governments of the USA, Britain, and France, within the last few years. And Iran is the nearest to a democracy in the Middke East. Does this mean I can get purged? What happens when they fire everybody?
Re: William Pierce Dies of Cancer at 68
Eric Cordian wrote: Pierce made a lot of sense, if one ignored the politically incorrect hyperbole in his writings. It is ironic that Pierce died on the day Zionist War Criminal Ariel Sharon described destroying an apartment building full of civilians with a missile as ...in my view one of our biggest successes. - CHARLESTON, W.Va. (July 23, 2002 6:52 p.m. EDT) - White supremacist leader William Pierce, whose book The Turner Diaries is believed to have inspired Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, died Tuesday of cancer. He was 68. Inspired as to method perhaps. We don't get much news of him over here, but IIRC McVeigh was not a white supremacist? And certainly didn't talk with the kind of thuggish brutal irrational racism that Pierce ands his fellows did. Of course, unlike them , he actually killed large numbers of innocent people.
Re: warchalking on the Beeb
5 minutes of it on the breakfast-time Today show on BBC radio 4 a couple of days ago. Positive almost to the point of ingenuousness - they suggested that LSE was offering wireless as a public good which wasn't quite how LSE described it at a ukerna seminar 6 months ago. online version at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/2144279.stm Ken Optimizzin Al-gorithym wrote: Well, its official. Warchalking (802.11x domain marking) appeared on the US edition of the BBC News. No hype re: anonymity t*rr*r*sm tigers bears; a mention though of service-contract violations, and the gift community concept. Thank you Mr. Beeb. (And all your privacy-invading TV IF locating white vans)
Re: Ross's TCPA paper
Pete Chown wrote: BTW, I have been thinking for a while about putting together a UK competition complaint about DVD region coding. No promises that anything will happen quickly. On the other hand, if people offer help (or just tell me that they think it is a worthwhile thing to do) it will probably move faster. I think it is a worthwhile thing to do. But then as I don't even have a DVD player or own any DVDs I probably have very little basis for taking such an action myself!
Re: Ross's TCPA paper
Pete Chown wrote: [...] This doesn't help with your other point, though; people wouldn't be able to modify the code and have a useful end product. I wonder if it could be argued that your private key is part of the source code? Am I expected to distribute my password with my code?
Re: Ross's TCPA paper
Pete Chown wrote: [...] This doesn't help with your other point, though; people wouldn't be able to modify the code and have a useful end product. I wonder if it could be argued that your private key is part of the source code? Am I expected to distribute my password with my code?
Re: Sci Journals, authors, internet
Steve Furlong wrote: My experience with scientific journals is more than a few years old. Do any of youse have personal experience with publishing both several years ago and recently? In practice these days many scientists put copies of their stuff on personal or institutional websites, perhaps regardless of journal's objections. If you Google for the authors of recent papers you often find something, quite often something closely resembling their next paper. There is a difference between refusing a paper that has already appeared elsewhere and trying to enforce copyright after paper publication. Most journals try the first, many no longer try the second. It really depends how much clout they have. /Nature/ might be able to enforce their embargo by the mere threat of not publishing your next paper. /The Proceedings of the Yorkshire Geological Society/ might be less fearsome. I doubt if anyone makes a fuss about papers presented at scientific conferences or privately distributed to colleagues (how private is private is up to the editors I suppose) Abstracts, posters, and so on don't usually count as prior publication - science could hardly function if they did. Some publishers - such as the American Society for Microbiology - say they won't accept papers published on a non-personal website, but don't mind those that have appeared on a private website. Also data can be published as long as it doesn't constitute the substance of the submission. Biomolecular journals often /require/ that data (especially sequence data) be freely available online. /Nature/ also allows personal republication: we are happy to extend to all authors the rights laid out in our new licence agreements in respect of the material assigned to us: to re- use the papers in any printed volume of which they are an author; to post a PDF copy on their own (not-for-profit) website; to copy (and for their institutions to copy) their papers for use in coursework teaching; and to re-use figures and tables. (http://npg.nature.com/npg/servlet/Content?data=xml/05_faq.xmlstyle=xml/05_faq.xsl) /Science/ still demands exclusive copyright as far as I know. (http://www.sciencemag.org/feature/contribinfo/faq/copyright_faq.shtml) but explicitly allows not-for-profit online reprints /after/ publication. These days, if your paper is /not/ online, it is less likely to be read. So it is in the interest of the scientist to get it as widely available as possible. Publishers walk a fine line between over-exposure, reducing potential paper sales, and annoying their contributors. On-line access to material has now become a 100% necessity in almost all fields. Most people looking up papers start with abstracting services and citation indexes such as SCI, which is available to research institutions through various deals (ours come through http://tame.mimas.ac.uk), or Medline (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/medline.html), Current Contents, EMBASE so on, all of which are now online. If a journal isn't abstracted (both the ones mentioned above are) it is unlikely to be read except by a small group. Many journals and publishers make some or all of their full texts available on line to subscribers, and a large minority make them available to non-subscribers. Some put recent papers on their websites and withdraw them later, others are print-only for the first year or two and upload older stuff. There are also a number of commercial web archives to which you can subscribe - but of course a great many research institutions do, so many scientists are used to seeing things online. I can see a lot of things from Science Direct (http://www.sciencedirect.com/) or Elsevier. others like PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed). There are old papers archived in places like JSTOR. In the fields I have looked at most - microbial ecology, evolutionary biology - I reckon I can read rather more than half of the relevant papers online, about half of those freely the rest because we subscribe to various services. In straight microbiology the proportion is probably higher, largely because of the American Microbiology Society which puts a lot of its publications on the website. (Such as http://intl-aem.asm.org/ - they also say they throttle the site allowing no more than 1 download per minute per remote site) A lot of learned societies are in effect either charities or government-funded, and so are less concerned with profit. For example the US National Academy of Sciences now puts new papers up daily, often some time before they appear in print - the latest version has Quint, Smith, et al (2002) Bone patterning is altered in the regenerating zebrafish caudal fin after ectopic expression of sonic hedgehog and bmp2b or exposure to cyclopamine which is as good a title as any http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/122571799v1 Loads of review current journals are online as well. The Annual Reviews are all online (though not all available
Re: Sci Journals, authors, internet
Lucky Green wrote: Peter wrote: (Hmm, I wonder if it can be argued that making stuff intended for public distribution inaccessible violates the creator's moral rights? I know that doesn't apply in the US, but in other countries it might work. Moral rights can't be assigned, so no publisher can take that away from you. Peter has an interesting point, since in addition to common law applies to a trend in copyright that is prevalent in Europe (and presumably some other countries), but rather alien to the US, taking that trend further. [...snip...] Bills are pending or have already passed, that make it illegal for a buyer of a work of art to simply dispose of the work, or use it as kindling in his fireplace, once he no longer desires to own it. No, you can't just burn that painting you bought from some street corner painter five years ago. Though you are permitted to give the painting back to the artist. Without compensation, of course. [...snip...] True, but it is an old process. In French law there has been a concept of moral rights in a work for a very long time. These are inalienable, you can't sell them. The two most important are (IIR the jargon correctly) integrity and paternity. The right of integrity means that if someone buys the copyright to a work, then alters the work in a way that could affect the reputation of the originator, they can be sued. So, for example, if a painter paints a picture, sells it to a publisher, then the publisher prints a defaced version as a book cover, the painter can perhaps sue the publisher. The right of paternity is the right to be known as the originator. It was imported into English law in, IIRC, 1989, but has to be asserted - which is why nearly all books published in Britain these days have a note asserting the rights of the author to be known as the author. These rights did not exist in the USA ( still don't, quite), but the US didn't really have copyright law in the European sense until the 1980s anyway - what they /called/ copyright was something you had to apply for and register - very different from our English tradition which is based on an idea of the natural property rights of an artist or author in their own work, and so has never had to be registered or applied for, any more than you have to get government permission to own the clothes you stand up in. The moral rights limit the freedom of action of publishers to the benefit of artists and authors, not, as far as I know the ultimate purchasers, but then IANAL and IA-certainly-NA-French-L. Some people who know a lot more about it than I do have said that English law traditionally treated copyright as a matter of property, French as a matter of personality, and the US as a sort of government licenced monopoly or patent. But they are all much closer to each other these days, with international copyright law being a compromise between the old systems. Ken Brown
Re: Sci Journals, authors, internet
Tom wrote: [...] - publication the creator can control if and how his work gets published. only he may cite from or describe his work in public as long as neither the work nor a description of it are published with his permission. (e.g. even the publisher can't leak stuff without the author's consent) This is basically copy right as already existed in England, not one of the moral rights. - credit the creator must be given proper credit, and he can choose if and what kind of credit (e.g. if he wants to use his real name or a pseudonym) Yep, this got added to English law (but not US, I think, except for the weird VARA Peter mentioned which only applies to unique original objects) - defense against disfiguration (?) creator can fight against attacks on the integrity of his work, within limits. this is the complicated part. as I parse it, the intention was that if you, say, write a poem against communism and by some freak accident the communist party adopts it as their hymn, you can stop them from doing so (unless you enjoy the irony of it). I don't know about the German laws but this is not, I think, the case in most other countries. Just borrowing a poem using it somewhere else would (at worst) count as parody, which is legally protected speech in the US ( usually in England as well). I think the law is more intended for the Alan Smithee situation, where a publisher (or record company, film studio, broadcaster, whatever) takes a work and changes it so that the author thinks it makes them look bad, and they don't want to be associated with it. I am no expert, but I think up till 1989 in common law jurisdictions this would have to have been pursued as defamation - which in the USA means the aggrieved party has effectively no chance at all, and in England that the side with the most expensive lawyers wins. to me, the german copyright appears to take much more consideration of the author, while the US copyright system is entirely economical in nature. That is my general impression. As an example of the sort of nonsense that some countries recognise moral rights to avoid, while Googling around for these things I found this heap of prdroid shit: ... any submission of materials by you will be considered a contribution to Boeing for further use in its sole discretion, regardless of any proprietary claims or reservation of rights noted in the submission. Accordingly, you agree that any materials, including but not limited to questions, comments, suggestions, ideas, plans, notes, drawings, original or creative materials or other information, provided by you in the form of e-mail or submissions to Boeing, or postings on this Site, are non-confidential (subject to Boeing's Privacy Policy) and shall become the sole property of Boeing. Boeing shall own exclusive rights, including all intellectual property rights, and shall be entitled to the unrestricted use of these materials for any purpose, commercial or otherwise, without acknowledgement or compensation to you. The submission of any materials to Boeing, including the posting of materials to any forum or interactive area, irrevocably waives any and all moral rights in such materials, including the rights of paternity and integrity. (http://www.boeing.com/companyoffices/aboutus/site_terms.html) Ken PS in English these are moral rights - morale is borrowed from French and means the mental state of an army :-)
Re: Sci Journals, authors, internet
Lucky Green wrote: Peter wrote: (Hmm, I wonder if it can be argued that making stuff intended for public distribution inaccessible violates the creator's moral rights? I know that doesn't apply in the US, but in other countries it might work. Moral rights can't be assigned, so no publisher can take that away from you. Peter has an interesting point, since in addition to common law applies to a trend in copyright that is prevalent in Europe (and presumably some other countries), but rather alien to the US, taking that trend further. [...snip...] Bills are pending or have already passed, that make it illegal for a buyer of a work of art to simply dispose of the work, or use it as kindling in his fireplace, once he no longer desires to own it. No, you can't just burn that painting you bought from some street corner painter five years ago. Though you are permitted to give the painting back to the artist. Without compensation, of course. [...snip...] True, but it is an old process. In French law there has been a concept of moral rights in a work for a very long time. These are inalienable, you can't sell them. The two most important are (IIR the jargon correctly) integrity and paternity. The right of integrity means that if someone buys the copyright to a work, then alters the work in a way that could affect the reputation of the originator, they can be sued. So, for example, if a painter paints a picture, sells it to a publisher, then the publisher prints a defaced version as a book cover, the painter can perhaps sue the publisher. The right of paternity is the right to be known as the originator. It was imported into English law in, IIRC, 1989, but has to be asserted - which is why nearly all books published in Britain these days have a note asserting the rights of the author to be known as the author. These rights did not exist in the USA ( still don't, quite), but the US didn't really have copyright law in the European sense until the 1980s anyway - what they /called/ copyright was something you had to apply for and register - very different from our English tradition which is based on an idea of the natural property rights of an artist or author in their own work, and so has never had to be registered or applied for, any more than you have to get government permission to own the clothes you stand up in. The moral rights limit the freedom of action of publishers to the benefit of artists and authors, not, as far as I know the ultimate purchasers, but then IANAL and IA-certainly-NA-French-L. Some people who know a lot more about it than I do have said that English law traditionally treated copyright as a matter of property, French as a matter of personality, and the US as a sort of government licenced monopoly or patent. But they are all much closer to each other these days, with international copyright law being a compromise between the old systems. Ken Brown
Re: Artist's rights? [was: RE: Sci Journals, authors, internet]
These laws don't really get into cyberpunks territory, because they are about rights that are reserved to the original artist, and cannot be transferred to publishers or distributors or record companies, and can only be possessed by natural persons, not corporations. So (in France, not the USA) a musician or a film directory might be able to sue Time Warner or Sony if they insist on adding watermarks or copy protection to a work, but neither could sue a cypherpunk for taking the watermarks off. In the USA the moral rights, AFAICT, wouldn't apply to the copy or reproduction anyway, only the original. Trei, Peter wrote: As an example, consider the Richard Serra's 'Tilted Arc', a 12 foot high, 120 foot long, 70 ton slab of rusty (and usually grafitti covered) steel which blocked the entrance to the main Federal building in lower Manhatten for several years. After about a zillion complaints, it was moved, and Serra sued the GSA for $30million, on the grounds that the piece was site specific, and that by moving it the GSA had destroyed it. http://www.law.harvard.edu/faculty/martin/art_law/tilted_arc.htm But the important point about that is that the artist lost! According to the website the tried breach of contract, trademark violations, copyright infringement and the violation of First and Fifth Amendment rights and lost all of them. So the new law has no real effect other than to give a few days work to some lawyers. [...] http://www.law.uchicago.edu/Lawecon/WkngPprs_101-25/123.WL.VARA.pdf discusses the 'Visual Arts Rights Act of 1990, which is highly relevant to this topic. Thanks for that - I hadn't heard of VARA before. No real reason I should have I suppose, it being in the USA and me not. It seems much more limited than the French moral rights, in that it only applies to unique objects, not to texts or to broadcast or recorded work. According to the commentary in that paper the US experience with VARA seems to agree with what I have read about the French laws (in books and papers trying to explain them to us English, who never had such rules before), in that few actions are taken under it and that they are almost always relatively unknown sculptors objecting to treatment of a work of public art. With the implication that they are doing it more for the publicity than for the damages, which are either never awarded (in the USA) or are tiny (in France). Ken
Re: Degrees of Freedom vs. Hollywood Control Freaks
Major Variola (ret) wrote: Jeezum, how old *are* you? We haven't called vacuum tubes 'valves' for some time.. Oh yes we do! I never call them anything but valves.
Re: Degrees of Freedom vs. Hollywood Control Freaks
Major Variola (ret) wrote: Jeezum, how old *are* you? We haven't called vacuum tubes 'valves' for some time.. Oh yes we do! I never call them anything but valves.
Re: NYT: Techies Now Respect Government
Tim May wrote: On Sunday, May 26, 2002, at 10:07 AM, John Young wrote: Thomas Friedman in the New York Times today: For example, in another place: The question `How can this technology be used against me?' is now a real R-and-D issue for companies, where in the past it wasn't really even being asked, said Jim Hornthal, a former vice chairman of Travelocity.com. People here always thought the enemy was Microsoft, not Mohamed Atta. No, the reason companies deployed crypto was not because they feared Microsoft would read their mail, but because they feared hackers, terrorists, thieves would read their mail. As for worrying about terrorism, many corporate headquarters have anti-truckbomb measures in place. In front of the Noyce Building in Santa Clara, Intel's high-rise headquarters building, there are extensive barriers and other measures to prevent a truck bomb from being driven into the main lobby and detonated. These have been there for most of the past decade; security was not an afterthought resulting from 9/11. Exactly I can't imagine that any large US company that operated abroad - which is effectively all of big ones - didn't think about the same sort of thing. My ex-employers did business in a number of African and middle-eastern countries, some of them in a state of civil war, and had planned responses to kidnapping or murder of employees or their families, and to armed attack on company buildings, so physical security had always been on the agenda. If any of them were complacent about security in the USA itself, they would surely have been shaken out of it in the 1960s if not before. (Hey, didn't you guys use to have bank robbers? And what about the days when payrolls really were rolls of paper money?). Anyway, after abortion clinic bombings in the 1990s, and the Atlanta Olympic Oklahoma bombings and Seattle protests surely no corporation the USA could have been naive enough to think that they were immune to politcal violence? The US company I used to work for in London had it's buildings within the blast radius of IRA bombs in 1983 and 1991 (and nearby in 1982 and 1995). The main thing that worried them in London was being occupied by demonstrators against the company's policies in other countries, or by anti-Globalisation protestors. We had discussions with police and others about corporate response to attacks or demonstrations. I participated in them at one point to discuss IT security. It was that sort of discussion that persuaded people to pay for firewalls and proxy servers. I don't think the idea that whole areas of the net woudl be wiped out by stupid Microsoft word macros occured to many of the non-IT managers, but they certainly didn't want to be hacked by Greens, who some of them had an exaggerated fear of. One of the reasons I knew it was time to leave was when I found myself talking to men in suits about defending ourselves against demonstrations that friends of mine might have been taking part in.
