I understand that of the 120+ people killed in Gaza in the past week, about 20 were civilians (not militants).
No, 20 were children. The number of civilians is more like 53 according to this article: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/israe...
I worked on the beginning of Regan's Star Wars project. We viewed the problem as one in which you try to stop a bullet with a bullet. Add long range and intelligence to the bullet and the problem gets harder.The problem is hard and physics places many constraints on the solution. At one point management thought that space based defense was what we wanted until we showed that the time/distances were too great to be effective. Now we just have a scaled back terminal defense with very limited capabilities.
After all these years the only value that I think that missile defense has is PR. Effective? Not really. Forget Star Wars the movie. It's not going to happen.
Star wars to me actually made sense (although maybe not in the way it was pitched to the public).You could use a small nuclear device to screw up a much larger nuclear device while both were at very high altitude. Ok, you are going to cause a shit load of nuclear fallout to come down but hopefully that will be somewhere else like over the atlantic, pacific or mainland Europe. Either way, better a bit of fallout than an actual missile targeted at Washington or New York.
The things about Iron Dome though, is that the rockets they are trying to hit are basically crap. The rockets might have a decent range but they have no way of targeting them so they generally do sod all apart from scare people. Hamas have been launching them for days with no real effect in the latest conflict but even if you go back years they have very rarely killed or even hit anyone. Israel on the other hand kill hundreds of Palestinian civilians every year with their very advanced military hardware, often provided by the US for free.
Don't get me wrong, I think the launching of rockets randomly against the civilian population of Israel is utterly wrong, but the reality seems to be that both sides are quite happy to kill civilians on the other side its just that Israel is much better at it.
Maybe, the people of Gaza should all just up and leave so that Israel can have its promised land. It's not like then being there is stopping Israel building new settlements anyway and with the US always backing Israel there is no chance of that changing.
"pro-unrestrained capitalist propaganda" I guess is what leftists are calling anything that disagrees with their own viewpoints. Funny how we're all supposed to be tolerant of different opinions, until those opinions don't follow left-wing thought. Then the most vile denunciations are appropriate to use, and dehumanizing your targets is a suitable response. Sickening, but here we are.
Hey, I am not advocating any sort of violence against you for your opinions so I am tolerating them. I respect your right to be led by those that pay the money into brainwashing you rather than try thinking for yourself, that would be too difficult.
And I don't think this of everyone who disagrees with my own viewpoint, even those who are on the right wing side of the political spectrum. I do think that most people I see espousing smaller government on here though are not actually very well informed on what exactly government does, and why it is a bad idea. I also think that most of them do not really every try to make an informed judgement by reading about things from a wide variety of political perspectives in order to come an informed decision.
Somebody please, mod this funny, as we watch the continent burn under the revival of old time fascism of right wing nationalists.
Lol, if you lived here you would realise that is far from the case. Right wing parties did well in a few recent european elections, but they did NOT win enough votes to form any sort of majority government. Most of Europes current government is pretty centrist, certainly compared to the US.
It never ceases to amaze me how Progressives can so blithely condemn BIG corporations and their answer to solving the "BIG Corporation" problem is always to give more power to the largest, most powerful organization on the planet. Because large size causes corruption in companies, but it must only cause nobility in governments, right?
You seem to completely ignore that governments are elected and therefore accountable to the people. That fact that the US political system is shit and unrepresentative does not mean every countries government is so in most of Europe the view that governments should be reigned in is not so widespread as the governments there do a better job.
Corporations on the other hand answer to nobody apart from their own profits. Therefore it is entirely right that government does its bit to push them in way that their aims (making money) are aligned with that of society.
(Americans need not reply to this post, since most of you seem to be brain washed by the shit you see on your own pro-unrestrained capitalist propaganda that tries to pass itself off as impartial news).
Is the ISP an accomplice too? And the operating system vendor?
Are you really not able to see a difference between your examples and running a tor exit node?
Let me spell it out for you: ISP's are selling you a service but tracking you in order to make sure any people using their network for anything illegal can be traced, a tor exit node is designed to let people be anonymous and untraceable. The judge made the assumption that anyone who wants to be untraceable to law enforcement must be a criminal, which is actually not such a huge stretch.
Bollocks.
Castro nearly started a global nuclear war. That's why Kennedy had the embargo instituted in the first place, and until Castro is 100% gone the US will never open up to them.
Castro was just trying to get some insurance against a US invasion. The US has a history of invading places in south america just because they didn't like the leaders, even when the people we wanted to put in power in the place where total scumbags. We preferred scumbags we could manipulate with arms deals and money to anyone who the people might choose. It is a miracle that Cuba survived to be honest.
The ban has nothing to do with 'Cold War tensions' it is because Cuban immigrants to Florida hate Castro for the property that he nationalized - and pissing off those voters risk losing Florida in federal elections (and thus losing the Presidential election). Thus draconian prohibitions related to Cuba stay in place.
Personally I also think it is also partly because the CIA got their nose bloodied there by Castro back when they preferred US mobsters and business to be in charge over anyone who might actually represent the local population.
But money is the one thing you can use to hurt a corproation. Enough people with multi-million lawsuits, and they won't be able to afford it.
That only work with real corporations as they usually need to turn a profit for their shareholders. In this case government, either local or federal will just write them a cheque to cover it.
The only real way to change this is for enough people to flat out refuse to vote for anyone who is not 100% opposed to this, even if that means voting for a smaller party or independent. We also need to throw first past the post voting in the bin and move to proportional representation as it encourages people to vote for smaller parties in this way. It also means those in power do not have absolute power as they are often usually reliant on other coalition parties to vote with them in order to get things done, weaker government is better government.
I'm hoping for nce hefty civil lawsuits for pain and suffering.
Why would they care? They can just settle the law suits with your tax money like they do already.
I don't think any amount of training is going to make me able to do Stephen Hawking's work. I also could never be trained to the point of competing with an NBA player at basketball.
Not everyone can do anything. Many can do what they happen to be passionate about, but even then it's not always possible to work out. Some people have exceptional talent and passion in a field and some just flat out lack one or both. There's only so far you can go training someone when their brain just isn't *wired* that way.
What a stupid example. Of course there are total outliers who this does not apply to, they are very few and far between though.
You try to imply I love living under a police state, even though we don't have one.
That depends on your perspective. If you were one of the people who went out peacefully objecting to the way our society works in any of the 1% demonstrations recently and found yourself being pepper sprayed for no apparent reason with no recourse against the police officer that did it you might not be so sure.
I'm disapointed that you don't get the purpose of intelligence services. It's their job to spy on foreign countries, not on their own citizens.
So anything your nation does in your name to fuck over foreigners is fair play then is it just because that is their mandate?
The thing to recognise is that foreigners who object to this sort of thing often have very little they can do as a comeback to make it stop. They can't lobby their own government to do anything about it since their government is powerless in the face of the huge US military. So they strike back the only way they can, they attack the easy targets who give their government a mandate to this sort of crap for them: US citizens.
Just to be clear, I am not condoning terrorist attacks on the US, but I do understand how someone who feels aggrieved with the US military or various 3 letter agencies can feel they have no other way of stopping what is happening to them other than flying a plane into a building killing themselves in the process.
And before we go half cocked about 'enable anyone who can afford a car to work' we need to think about what that means -- because you are right they now ARE working. So is uber their employer? Are drivers *really* independent contractors?
Exactly. Uber are really just a huge multinational minicab company. They will then use the advantage of scale to drive smaller local companies out of business. Maybe the local businesses deserve it though, but lets not delude ourselves as to what is happening.
I say this because most minicab firms have their drivers as self employed contractors too so they can avoid having to give them any of the perks that you are entitled to as a regular employee.
Not so worried about the cars, Uber and Lyft inspect them to make sure they are in good condition, and even if they didn't the first bad ride would flag it.
Actually, the examples the poster you replied to gave might not be that obvious. The average consumer of these services rates the service based on things like how clean the back seats were, not on the brakes not working or the car having some other intermittent mechanical fault.
Personally, I don't see any difference between Uber and any other cab company other than the fact they use technology. You still notify the company when you want to go somewhere, they send someone who is self-employed then take a cut of the fare.
I also think that these companies need to recognise that often, local laws exist because the people who live in the are want them to. Here in London we have lawa that may or may not (our courts are still deciding the details) restrict their ability to operate. It is not up to us to change our laws to make things easier for some international company head quartered in the US and sending all its profits there. We should change our laws if the we want to and enough people write to their politicians demanding the change.
You might think us a bunch of backward retards or whatever for having such laws, then fine sod off and don't do business here.
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