I dunno. I'm still holding out for a Xiph.org offering.

Okay, sure. That's, practically, not a difference. There are 300 million Americans; if they can activate as much of their population as soldiers, they're still an order of magnitude bigger than us. They would crush us.

That's the danger of constantly blowing up civilian targets: we're teaching them that we are bad people, that we murder innocents, and that they should hate us. In a war, we won't have memories of constant attacks and deaths of friends and family; they'll have decades with dozens or hundreds of attacks yearly, a constant stream of innocent body parts. Guess who is going to feel like they're dominating the big bad aggressor five years into the war, and who is going to feel sick of all the fighting and economic strife and bombs landing in our yard?

The doomsday scenario isn't for torture; it's for constant missile strikes on populated civilian targets where civilians have congregated.

Again: Imagine you drive 2 miles from your house to the book store. Then, the book store blows up. You were meeting friends there, and they're now dead. That's what we do to Arabs.

Relatively accurate. It's about the same as "racist nonsense published on right-wing 'news' site."

The journals they got the stuff into are about as reliable and factual as, say, youngcons or breitbart.

Not necessarily. I could bring a high explosive into the airport, or a chlorine gas bomb, and just set it off in the terminal. That would kill a bunch of people; so much for incompetence.

Actually, we use drones. We've sent missiles from drones repeatedly over the past few years, racking up civilian casualties like pinball points. We don't walk into the coffee shops to detonate ourselves; we send a flying robot.

This has happened again, and again, and again. Americans have one event to remember, which was long ago; Arabs are constantly given reason to joint the fight against America, and have a whole slew of offenses over years to remember. A protracted war will favor the Arabs, who have much more to look to when seeking their moral right to vindication.

Well the liberal progressives at the New York Times, the Huffington Post, and other, along with piles of conservative bloggers, are all in agreement over this bit about Obama:

It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

Even the favorite president of the Liberal Media doesn't get a free pass on that one.

Do you think the Arabs aren't doing just that? Or are you sitting around thinking, "Gee, America is so great. I bet the Arabs we blew up last week, their friends and families, I bet they think America is so great, too. I bet when people tell them, hey yo, America just murdered your children, your parents, your friends and lovers, they're like, nah yo, America is straight dope, so great, wave flags!"

No, they're sitting around going, "Fucking Americans! Blew up coffee shop where my sister was! Again I have lost friends and loved ones! American evil machine is set on killing my countrymen!" It doesn't take that much effort to piss people off; look at Nidal Hasan for a good example.

You can live in your fantasy world where America's hands are clean, but reality will continue to ignore your delusions.

Let's say someone robs a convenience store.

Our current solution is to send the police to their neighborhood with grenades, which the police toss into an open window in a house where the suspect believed to have robbed the store is attending a party with 30 other college students.

Should we just ignore people who rob convenience stores? I would love to hear your non-violent solutions.

No, but that's not the point. We're not bombing military targets; we're bombing civilian population centers, claiming there is a "suspected terrorist" there, and then writing off anyone caught in the blast as a "Militant". The word "militant" has been redefined to cover what historically would be termed "Civilian Casualty", and has nothing to do with people being of the persuasion to take up arms of any sort.

Imagine if France, in its pursuit of "eliminating global terrorism", were to blow up the Starbucks that your girlfriend was drinking at, because a Russian immigrant suspected of having connections to global terrorism had been drinking at that same Starbucks that day. What would be your position regarding taking up arms against the state of France? Would you join the Anti-Franco Republican Army and seek to destroy the seed of evil sitting in the crown of western Europe?

We do this every day. Every day, we blow shit up, and civilians die. Every day, we give someone a reminder that we are the bad guys. Every day, we give someone a reason. Do you think that's keeping America safe?

An event that took out a few thousand people, once. We lose more than that many to smoking, or alcohol poisoning, or driving. The amount of death from driving increased by more than the amount of death from 9/11 over the next few months, since people were spooked by planes.

Think about that: the events of September 11, 2001 itself caused slightly fewer deaths than the actions of people who elected to not get on planes because of the deaths caused by the events of Septmeber 11, 2001. People worrying about 9/11 caused more deaths than 9/11 itself.

Non-event.

We're talking about the north part of Africa (Egypt and such) and the south part of Europe (Saudi, Pakistan, Turkey, etc.). It's actually dozens of countries and an immense region. It's like talking about China, except if China were the size of Russia, and less population-dense.

The region is bigger than the US.

I didn't get that far. "Countless lives have been saved" that count is zero. 9/11 was a non-event.

We have some sort of war being waged against a faceless enemy that supposedly comes in, hijacks our shit, and attacks us from within. We haven't really stopped any such attacks; we've brought attention to attempts which were never going to succeed, but that's it. The PETN underwear bomber is one of the better examples: you can't blow up PETN that way; it needs compression, else it just burns.

The scenario we're worried about is untenable. We're not holding back an army; we're worried that people will cross our insecure borders, hide among our population, and then rise up as an army from within. They will blow shit up without warning, they will be everywhere, and they will destroy us. To combat this, we basically bomb other countries, call anyone over 18 a soldier ("militant"), and prove to the world that we're the axis of evil that must be removed.

This behavior is rattling the lion's cage of 3 billion muslims in Saudi and south-east Asia. We have 300 million Americans here. If an open theater of war comes in earnest, we will have Americans who can remember government prattling and a single attack, versus Arabs who can remember friends and family dying in bombings of coffee shops by Americans across decades. When we don't win immediately, we will lose our morale; while the muslims, remembering the constant bombings, knowing they are in the right, and still standing despite the onslaught of American military power, will recognize that they aren't *losing*, and will gain morale. The gaining of morale means more of that 3 billion become resources, soldiers to deploy to the fight; they will overwhelm us.

It's worse than providing no value for a great destruction of wealth. If we didn't win the war immediately, the protracted war would favor the abused muslims, and they would flatten America. A war machine that big would not simply push for its independence and then quiet; once it had crushed America, consumed it, taken the land for its own, the thirst for blood would spread across the globe. In the excitement, the blood of the oppressors would spill: some executions for vengeance would be carried out; this would be abandoned as soon as the international sphere was recognized, and the war would move to Canada, to South America, to Europe and Asia.

There are only two ways to stop it once it begins: either complete and total global annihilation, probably by nuclear war, such that communication and supply infrastructure is destroyed and pockets of survivors are too busy trying to survive to carry on a war; or the complete subjugation of the world as a whole by Arabs. We are fermenting an XK-class end-of-the-world scenario or a CK-class restructuring event.

That is the danger of this political warfare.

They are, in fact. It's just that you can still gain access to your non-privileged X server, and have access as the user running X. You can then make it run any shellcode you want, or return to libc and run some shell commands (doesn't require writable/executable memory this way), thus allowing for injection of a local privilege escalation attack or some sort of information leak (e.g. concurrent brute forcing of passwords). In the most basic case, landing as the non-privileged X user allows you to inspect your own processes, i.e. the X server itself, and keylog and harvest passwords.

You don't get it. We've forked it 5 times; it's just old, bad code. We need to rewrite a completely new X system like Wayland or Mir so that all these old bugs are permanently gone.

My experience has been the opposite. MCSE, CCNA, and so on, the technical certifications, have been valueless. High-level technical certifications, such as the CCIE, are never asked for, but hold their respect... and can bill you as overqualified (a CCIE is like that CCNA you need, except made of solid gold and way more expensive and hefty than the paper mache model you wanted). They can bolster your CV if they're recent, but are quickly eclipsed by actual experience.

The non-technical certs tend to hold up better. CAPM and PMP are known as the most valuable certifications, but they're project management; while these skills are helpful if you're a programmer or IT engineer, and the CAPM can be had with 6 months of deliberate study and $2000 of investment, I'm not sure you'd gain much from certification that you wouldn't get by just spending $150 on books (i.e. an RMCProject CAPM study guide and the PMBOK5e) and giving a casual read of the material. Likewise, BPM, data management, PHR, and so on all have immense value, but are useless if you're a technical person (unless you're looking for a job writing BPM software).

Go for the light certifications as a vehicle to expand your skills; leverage them to decorate your resume; but catalog your skills and collect your experience. In the technical fields, being active and current is more valuable than being certified.

Legitimate companies have a high volume of stable charges, and so can show a culpable minimized percentage of bad faith.

Niche companies light up like a fucking christmas tree when you start sending chargebacks.

No, it's not.

Your line of thinking could be expanded: perhaps Uber should go around the entire country talking to every single individual. Perhaps they should interview every police officer. Perhaps they should subpoena all cell phone and e-mail records the person has, read all their personal stuff, and hire private investigators to infiltrate their office parties. 15 years and 36 million dollars later, they can decide if the person is safe.

To clear a person in a thousand jurisdictions would take man-hours. You'd need staffed agents in all those jurisdictions making $40k-$70k. In India, maybe you could pay them $20k; they might not do their job well, so you'd have to clear them in the same way. Also, India's police and court systems are notoriously easy to bribe, and your hired help might be bribed as well. In the end, it's going to cost you hundreds of millions of dollars to make tens of millions of dollars in profit, or you're going to charge people $15 per mile.

No matter what you do, you can't get a perfect record. At a point, you're putting in twice as much effort for half as much return; at a point, you're putting in a hundred times more effort for the barest fraction of return. The economic cost of such wasteful spending creates inefficiencies in the system, distorting and destroying wealth, leading to poverty, starvation, poor governments, weaker police forces, higher crime, disease, mental illness, and death; diving off the cliff of diminishing returns actually harms more people than it helps, but it abstracts that harm in the same way that belching toxic gasses into the air abstracts the cumulative health issues from the actions of coal and oil power plants.

It is foolish to complain constantly that more can be done, because we can always cite precisely what more could have been done in hindsight; but there are thousands of things which will not help the next time, and we will eventually create a great machine of ineffective and expensive countermeasures that each may prevent one incident somewhere every hundred years. Improvements are made by recognizing those things which are cheap to adjust for and have improved return, or have significant cost but have significant return. In some cases, those improvements are outside your capabilities: Uber is an international service, and there are no international crime databases; just national crime databases are a good approximation, but India doesn't have that. Even background checks in America are faulty, because a person may have been reportedly in south Asia but in fact had crossed the border undocumented into some third-world-country to produce, procure, or take part in the production of child pornography; this person could effectively evade a top-level investigation, and become a school teacher.

The world of economics is a complicated one in which certain kinds of harm are cut off by other kinds of harm; the least harm is done by trading those small losses for big gains. Every time a society finds a way to put in less effort for the same or greater productive output, wealth increases; every time a society puts in more effort (cost, money, time, resources, labor) for something that returns less value, wealth decreases, and poverty increases.

Due diligence can fail. Uber claims they did their background checks; apparently this is hard in India, as every police district has its own database: if you commit a crime in some other town, you're not on file locally. You have to physically walk to each precinct and request information about the person's criminal record--every city in India, every precinct--which could take years to verify the criminal history of one man.

You can cut this down by only looking into where he worked or lived before, which is less-accurate but faster. There's no way to verify that he isn't telling you about all the places he's lived or worked, so he can leave out places where he committed crimes.

Criminal liability lies with criminals.