Tangaroa

"people decide to just blow themselves up for _no_ reason" = they have established a coherent subsect of Islam which teaches that Islam requires they forever be waging war against the nonbelievers and which celebrates dying in such a war as the highest honor, giving them a very clear reason that anyone with open eyes is well aware of by now.

"Jihad means war only. Fighting, with the sword." - Abdullah Azzam.

"The Quran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope." - The Muslim Brotherhood creed

"We love death more than you love life." - Nidal Hassan

"We love death. They love life." - Azzam Tamimi

"We are going to win, because they love life and we love death." - Hassan Nasrallah

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"installing the shah in Iran" = the West intervened after Mohammad Mosaddegh launched a coup d'etat against the Shah of Iran, this after Mosaddegh had dissolved parliament and declared himself dictator. Look it up.

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"giving military aid in abundance to Israel" = the US gave anti-tank missiles to Israel in 1973, which ruined the Arab League's plan to finish the job that Hitler started. After the Egypt-Israel peace treaty, the US annually gave billions of dollars to both sides. Aid to Israel is given with the restriction that it must be spent on American weapons, making it both a subsidy for the US arms industry and a means of crippling Israel's arms industry.

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"giving guns to Osama" = The US once was nice to Osama, and this therefore justifies him ordering the 9/11 attacks. The specific choice of which parties to distribute weapons to was mostly made by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

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"giving guns to Saddam" = The US sold weapons to Iraq in the Persian Gulf War, and this therefore justifies the 9/11 attacks by a completely unaffected third party.

> But, yes, your policies led to the 9/11 attackers deciding to attack you. Is this not blisteringly obvious?

In exactly the same way that wearing miniskirts leads to rape. Take for example UBL's main grievance: the presence of the international Desert Shield force, or as UBL put it, allowing infidels to live in the land of the two holy cities. That force was there at the request of King Saud of Arabia. So what makes this agreement between King Saud and 30+ other powers a valid cause for the King's subjects, or anybody else, to wage war against the US? What makes Usama bin Laden the superior authority to say who is allowed to live in Arabia? What justifies forbidding people from holding any other religious belief than the approved one? What makes Usama bin Laden the sole authority on religious matters in Arabia who can decide what religion people are allowed to believe?

Netscape Communicator or Amaya, unless there was an earlier one.

I was on various Linuxes for several years and went back to Windows. Why?

* Buggy updates. About 1 in 3 kernel upgrades produce a crash or hang on bootup. About a quarter of those that survive booting fail to recognize my network card. A smaller fraction of updates delete features from my desktop, and some give me a broken X that won't load. Then there's the annoyance that the upgrades often spend half a gig of bandwidth; I'm glad I'm not on dial-up anymore, or in a rural area.

* Uncancelable fsck. Windows does not randomly keep me off my own computer for an hour at a time when I'm most interested in getting some work done.

* Games. I don't even mean mass-market games. Wine for old Win9x games is a crapshoot. The Linux version of Adobe's flash player underperforms and the open source version doesn't perform. On games that are playable, the sound is a half-second off.

* Opportunity. Windows came with my new computer.

YMMV, but these are my reasons.

To answer these questions in the order they were posed: Yes, yes, yes, and yes.

Hugs are sexual harassment. Any unrequested contact with the opposite sex is cause for immediate termination (or expulsion if you're still in school) and may lead to criminal charges.

Different cultures are different, but this is the standard drill repeated from elementary school onward through workplace policies in my part of the US. People routinely ignore it without punishment, but it's there hanging over the head of everyone.

I would imagine that http gzip compression would cut transmission size just as well regardless of whether the file text is minified or not.

And I would be wrong; this guy found that gzipped minified text can be 50% smaller than the original gzipped file: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/807119/gzip-versus-minify

A relevant letter sent to the New York Times in 1975:

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Dear Sir:

Your newspaper frequently uses the term "Palestinian" to describe a section of the Middle East population which is Arab, to differentiate it from Israeli Jews. As the holder of a Palestinian Identity Card and a Certificate of Discharge from a Palestinian Unit of the British army, I find this practice annoying and certainly untrue...

We Palestinian Jews wore the uniform of the British Army, and on our shoulder epaulettes the single word, "Palestine" in English. We tried to get permission to wear Hebrew insignia, fly the Jewish flag and be recognized as Palestinian Jews, but-no, Palestinian meant Jew and Arab, and who cared if there were fewer than 3000 Arabs as compared to 36,000 Jews in khaki? In British Army nomenclature, the equivalent of a GI is BOR, meaning British Other Rank. We were formally known as POR, Palestinian Other Ranks.

So we fought the war as Palestinians, set up the Jewish Brigade as Palestinians, and I'll be damned if I agree that only Arafat and his assassins are Palestinians.

As a Palestinian, I was arrested by the British on suspicion of smuggling immigrants into the country. As a Palestinian, I had the honor of commanding the 329th Palestinian Company of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (REME - all Jews). There were no equivalent Arab units. Once a British general said to me, "Migawd| I have so many things to dislike you for, for being a Jew, American born, a Palestinian-and you don't even know how to handle a knife and fork!

So cut it out, please. Call them what you will, but not Palestinians.

Yours truly, Joe Criden

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Source: http://afsi.org/pamphlets/PalestiniansKahn.pdf

Long-term unemployment is happening in the US too: http://blogs.cfr.org/kahn/2013/04/17/our-long-term-unemploym...

Unemployment in the US is near 15% including U6, or near 23% if using pre-1994 counting methods: http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-chart...

(On that subject, I'm looking for work in the north SF bay area, Sonoma/Marin region)

It is not only the confession that may be rejected, but everything based on information that he gives about co-conspirators. Imagine that it was not only him and his brother, but that there is a cell of a dozen people getting money from an overseas hub that manages a wider network of AQ cells. He talks without being allowed a lawyer, and the FBI uses the information to roll up another five or six cells and seize the hub's assets in the US. When it gets to appeals court, all of the seizures and arrests can be thrown out as fruit of the poisoned tree because the warrants were based on inadmissable information from an unlawful interrogation.

<blockquote> Well after consulting with people behind some of tech behind OWS, I doubt something like this would be effective.</blockquote>

You could try doing it without calling for a war to kill everybody who disagrees with you, without turning to violence as your first resort, without trying to change the names of public parks that were named after civil rights activists, without raping the women who make the mistake of joining your movement alone and before becoming members of the protected in-crowd, without the antisemitism, without seizing or destroying public property, without trying to divide society against itself, without shitting on police cars, without demanding that other people pay for the costs of your expenses that you create, etc, etc.

TL/DR: Don't be a bunch of fascist yobs or else society might treat you like you're a bunch of fascist yobs.

Every criminal case could be similarly described as one in which allowing the defendant their legally guaranteed rights (to remain silent and have legal advice) could (through strengthening the defendant's case and allowing silence on the question of co-conspirators) lead to someone depriving others of their rights (not to be victims of crime, from murder to graffiti). The question is not how to weigh these peoples' rights against each other. Instead, we have set standards on what the police are allowed to do and what the police are not allowed to do. The question is whether the police are failing to follow these standards.

As to the other questions, if an actor deprives another person of their rights, we assign the blame to the actor alone and not to any third party who allowed it to happen unless it can be proven that the third party had the intent to allow it to happen and were therefore co-conspirators in the crime. Where rights conflict, the questions of who gets which rights and who does not are answered by writing laws and judicial opinions. Several hundred years of such work has produced ready answers for most situations.

The frictive responses are unhelpful, but for the sake of courtesy an employer is entitled to a well-written introductory letter (even if only a paragraph) and an employee is entitled to a response (even if only a line). For both workers and employers who care greatly about common courtesy, the lack thereof does show the unsuitability of the other party.

Hell no.

Previous HN discussions of Qubes:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4472403 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2645170 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2477667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1796384 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1246990

According to the article, the judge created a new standard that it is copyright infringement for a one-sentence clipping to be on a website that is a substitute news source in the sense that people go there to read the news. Any news and opinion blog qualifies under this new standard.

This ruling changed copyright law and fair use. Adding your own original content, if it leads people to read your blog rather than click through to the AP article, enhances the claim of copyright infringement because your blog is now competing with the AP as a substitute source for news. Your original content no longer enhances your fair use defense, as it did before this ruling, but now enhances the copyright holder's claim of infringement. RTFA!

We're not talking about what Meltwater did. We're not talking about blogs that mindlessly copy and paste content. We're not talking about what used to be considered fair use before this new ruling that changed the law. We're talking about the new standard laid down by Judge Denise Cote that would make copyright infingers of every ordinary blogger who played by the rules of what the rules were last week.

That new standard is that if people might view your blog as a place to read the news, you are guilty of copyright infringement if you quote as much as a single sentence of another person's news article. RTFA!

According to the article, the judge decided that news reporting -- what blogs do -- is not transformative but is competitive with the AP. Taking enough of an excerpt to get the gist of the story -- what reputable blogs do -- is taking "the heart" of the copyrighted work, which is now infringement according to the article.

Blogs that add their own criticism and commentary, which rewrite the story in their own words, reduce the incentive to read the original story. The blog acts as a news site and a substitute for the original story, which according to the article strengthens a claim of copyright infringement. The circumstances in which criticism and commentary would justify a fair use defense just got tightened, as did the amount of an article that is considered a sufficiently small portion to be fair use.

This is a hugely important decision. Any blog that excerpts a bit of a news story is now guilty of copyright infringement, and it will be seen as infringement for profit (hampering a fair use defense and increasing penalties) if the blog has ads or a tip jar.

The first two examples are examples of incompetence on the part of web developers, not Firefox developers.

A website breaks with images turned off? It's a broken website. Websites are supposed to work with images turned off. That's one of the first things a web developer learns.

A website breaks without Javascript? It's a broken website. Websites are supposed to work without Javascript.

We sorted all this out when the hot technologies were ActiveX, VBScript, Java, and Flash. If a web site requires anything more than plain HTML+CGI for its core functionality, it is either broken or it is not a website.

100-1 might be an exaggeration, but the knowledge of different tools, methods, and patterns and how to apply them gives the experienced programmer the ability to produce code that does more, more quickly, and with fewer side effects than the inexperienced programmer. There is also a matter of natural talent: The best software engineers can design software that the average programmer would not be able to develop to the same quality if given years to work on it.

To give an anecdote, the place where I most recently worked had two developers who had been there since the beginning, a software engineer and another coder. The engineer on a bad day could quadruple the output of myself and the other guy in terms of both the number of changes and their value to the project.

Did everyone here skip US History in high school and college? One of the main reasons for creating the Constitution was that the Articles of Confederation made it too difficult for the government to use military force against US citizens on US soil, e.g. Shays's Rebellion. The Constitution allows Congress to raise and use an army -- such as through an Authorization for the Use of Military Force -- and to destroy "Insurrections", i.e. US citizens on US soil. And when the President swears to defend the Constitution against "all enemies, foreign and domestic", what did you think "and domestic" means?

And no, you don't have a Fifth Amendment to not be shot at when you join the enemy during a war; and no, being a citizen does not give you rights, and the Constitution does not grant you rights. The Constitution grants the government powers and limits those powers. All people inherently have rights by virtue of being born. Read Blackstone's Commentaries; the Founding Fathers did. That was the standard law textbook in the colonies at the time of the Revolution.

Remember that this whole drone nontroversy arises from the killing of al-Qaeda's leader Anwar Awlaki and a few of his followers who all happen to have been US citizens and who had invaded Yemen and carved out their own country there. The drone question is not about hypothetical harm done to innocent Americans, it's about whether the army may use military force on al-Qaeda when there is a Congressional law explicitly directing that the army do so. Why is this even a question?

How about asking the adult black male whether it is legal for the army to fire on enemy soldiers during a war, the question which is the subject of this discussion. Let's stay on topic.

That linked video shows US forces firing on an armed force carrying at least one AK-47 and at least one rocket-propelled grenade launcher which was tracked from a previous encounter with US forces.

http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/201878.php

http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/201889.php

Wikileaks had this information, knew that the force was armed and not civilian, knew that weapons were recovered from the scene, and intentionally lied about it when they called the video "Collateral Murder".

US copyright law considers a performance of a work to be a copy that must be authorized by the copyright holder. For example, a songwriter is entitled to royalties if an orchestra plays the song, and singing Happy Birthday at a birthday party is illegal but you're allowed to hum it (the tune is out of copyright, the lyrics are not), and that is why restaurants have invented their own birthday songs. Back to the subject at hand, the playing of a recording for an audience has been considered a performance since recordings were first invented, so it's illegal whether you're on an oil rig or not.

If the rig is in international waters, the story might be different.

The French Resistance and Warsaw Uprising were not entirely irrelevant, even if they were defeated.

It used to be common law in the UK that the police and soldiers were only trained experts in performing a part of the civic duty of all of the people. This changed around the Cold War.

True, there was no national dialogue on guns until the Democratic Party-controlled press fabricated one. The Newton shooting was going to be another crime story to be largely forgotten in a month except that the Democratic press made it the top headline of every party-run newspaper for over a week. (Meanwhile, where the hell are the news articles about Benghazi and the second September 11 attacks? Our "nearly defeated" wartime enemy launches simultaneous attacks on dozens of US facilities around the world, with tens of thousands of fresh recruits, and there is NO news coverage? WTF?) It is a classic "pseudo-event" as Boorstin called them, or in common parlance, a fake news story. It is obvious that the Democrats are using their near-monopoly power over the media to create the image of a public frenzy where there was none, for the purpose of raising enough public support through the bandwagon effect to shoot another hole in the Constitution. They are doing this partly by slandering the Constitution's supporters as "gun nuts" and potential murderers. Imagine if the political cartoons in your newspaper regularly portrayed EFF and online free-speech activists as child rapists, kidnappers in bondage gear dragging screaming little girls away, because a few people use Tor and Linux for trading kiddy porn. That is how the Democratic Party is depicting anyone who believes in the Constitution and the orderly process of law whether they are gun owners or not.

This is not intended to be a partisan statement. I am a Democrat. I am also able to see what my party is doing, and I don't like it. This also has nothing to do with Obama; the pressure is coming from the party machine, not the White House. Obama is doing nothing significant, proposing minor regulatory changes that stay within the bounds of the Constitution, while giving the appearance of doing something to appease the party's desire for action.

The definition of freedom in about a third of those countries is that you have the freedom to surrender your independence to God and the state, and if you step out of line they will kill you in public as an example to everyone else. The definition of freedom in another large chunk of the world is that the single-party state is the sole legitimate representative of the people and has the sole power to decide what freedom is, and people who obey the party line have plenty of freedom but if you step out of line they will seize your property "for the people" and throw you in jail on false charges.

I will take the American definition of freedom, thanks.

I used to bottom-post until I noticed that I was the only person doing it over several years of communication, and that following the old convention now made _me_ look like the newbie who doesn't know how to use email.

Top-posting is efficient for single responses to single-issue threads because it brings the newest and most relevant message to the forefront. Context is not a problem for most messages because readers who have been following the discussion can get sufficient context from the sender and subject line. For the minority of messages where it is a problem, the parent post is right after the text. Context does become a bigger problem when there is a long thread with multiple users discussing multiple topics using the same subject line, as often used to happen on Usenet but which I have rarely seen in email.

I will still inline-post if replying to multiple issues in a long post like in old Usenet debates.

I wish I could say anyone was hiring at the entry level, but everything I see is "senior", "manager", or "3+ years experience required". It leaves me wondering how anybody starts out.

You already have a lot of skills and experience for someone who just graduated. A business should be glad to get you at entry-level wages. Good luck finding work.