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: 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: 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)
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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: [...] 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
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: trillions a day?
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: How could this possibly be true? :ast I checked, GDP for the US was about 10 trillion bucks a year, the combined GDP of every nation on earth per year can't be more than 100 trillion, most of which doesn't involve anything crosiing a border, so how can there possibly be trillions of dollars worth of foreign exchange a day? Because the money goes round more than once. Because most foreign exchange ends up right back where it started before the end of the day, with tiny bits shaved off for interest. Because vast proportions of the apparent US money traded are, and have been for years, in the euro-dollar market in London and never touches down in America at all. (the relative importance of that has declined but other non-US markets are growing to replace it) Because banks lend money they don't have, and the people they lend it to lend it to others, who can include banks, who can lend the same money to more than one person - and as long as no-one is *really* stupid (remember Nick Leeson?) most of the money comes back home at settlement time. Because lots of money doesn't really represent spending power at all. Say that A owes B a billion dollars. B owes C a billion dollars worth of euros. C owes A a billion dollars worth of yen. Minor fluctuations in exchange rates, combined with traders efforts to pull a fast one, mean that smaller amounts of money - say a few hundred thousand a day - permanently changes hands, and can be spent. But, absent the meltdown of one or another market, the whole pot never gets spent. It can't, because it is mostly always promised to someone else. Because people don't just trade money, whatever that is. They trade various kinds of rights and duties to money and other property. A has a billion dollars. How much is it worth to B to buy the right to borrow that billion for 1 day sometime next week, if they choose to? That has a value. A sells that right to B, and C and D. What happens if B C both want to cash in? Well, A has to borrow the second billion from E in a hurry... and so on. Because as Bruce Sterling told us many years ago, cyberspace is real, it is where the banks keep the money. Most of the money in the world is entries in databases in London banks and market traders that no-one will ever spend. Most of the rest is in banks in Singapore, Tokyo, and New York. No-where else has any at all, statistically speaking :-) Ken
Re: Bad guys vs. Good guys
R. A. Hettinga wrote: The reason we have ready availability of credit in the first place is because consumer debt is the most profitable business in the United States. I really wonder what component of this market is actually payment driven. After all, to easily buy *anything* over, say, $100 right now, you have to borrow money, use a credit card, to do it. ? I use a debit card, one that draws against my bank current account the way a cheque does (probably check to you). It's the same card that is used as a cheque card. Lots of purchases over $100. I've bought a miniature video camera with it, maybe 1500 dollars US. Still involves merchant charges of course. As far as they are concerned it is no different from a credit card. The cashier at the till probably doesn't even know the difference (after all it says Visa on it).
Re: UK e-money legal, sort-of
Sorry Adam, that wasn't me, I just quoted it from the article in the Register. So I know no more. Ken Adam Back wrote: On Thu, May 09, 2002 at 04:09:23PM +0100, Ken Brown wrote: anybody that wishes to issue electronic money can do so as long as they satisfy a number of core criteria specified by the Financial Services Authority (FSA), without having to first obtain a banking license. In essence this means that as long as the issuers of the e-money can meet the capital requirements of one million Euros or 2 percent of the e-money to be issued, they are free to do so. Do you know is that minimum or maximum of those two figures? ie if you have 2% of capital you issue is that enough or does it have to be larger of those. GBP 600K (USD 900K) is still a lot of money for a small scale operation. If it were the former it might be more plausible that someone might set something up as a hobby operation. The tricky part as ever will be putting money into the system if it's anonymous ecash, to limit fraud. Interfacing anonymous to non-anonymous transaction systems is a problem. The convenient non-anonymous transactions systems (credit cards, debit cards) typically are quite vulnerable to fraud and have weak security systems. There is a limit of one thousand pounds sterling on the maximum 'purse' value; the e-money must be redeemable within five days and the currency must be usable for at least one year. What does the redeemable within five days mean -- that this is the maximum processing time for in-transfers or for out-transfers? Adam -- http://www.cypherspace.org/adam/
Re: Jim Darling
jill jill wrote: [...] Cut the link Einstein.ssz.com then we can have real good unmoderated list,right Tim. The act of moderation to end all acts of moderation?
Re: BBC2 to recreate Stanford Prison Experiment
A quick walk round South London would show that a very large number of men (including myself) shave their heads anyway - probably not as many as 5 years ago, when it was almost normal, but a significant minority. Ken Generic Poster wrote: ..from an ad in circulation on BBC2 (UK) if I recall inaccurately. If they shaved your head, would you lose your individuality? If they took away your name, would they take your identity? [..] 16(?) men. Half with power, half with none. See how events unfold in: The Experiment. Coming soon to BBC2... -- We don't need no steenking badges!!! - Blazing Saddles.
which tends to extreme early specialisation,
Jim Choate wrote: On Thu, 25 Apr 2002, Ken Brown wrote: One of the classic examples of what is now called chaos (a word that I don't like in this context). The exact trajectory taken by simple models Uhuh... of predator-prey systems is often very sensitively dependent on initial conditions. Of course in real life these things are stochastic anyway Then I take it you don't like 'stochastic' since they really mean the same thing in this context. Same as what? Stochastic certainly doesn't mean the same thing as chaotic in this context, so I assume you didn't mean that. [...] so the variables in your model should actually be probability distributions, which makes the sums much harder and leads to considerable handwaving. unpredictabilty hand waving. What I meant was that many biologists, even people who teach biology, don't have the maths to describe the models in detail. So the books and lectures tend to handwaving. The mutual incomprehension between maths biology can get extreme at times. And even if they did their students, or the readers of their books, certainly don't. I have been present at a practical class when a student complained to the lecturer that he had promised that there would be no mathematics on this course. She was moaning about something simple to do with exponentials - the sort of algebra they tried to teach us at the age of 12 or 13. From the lecturer's point of view it *wasn't* mathematics, it was just general knowledge, the sort of thing he'd expect any reasonably educated person to know about, or at least able to pick up quickly. As the course was about (amongst other things) enzyme reaction kinetics it is a bit hard to understand how anyone could imagine getting though it without at least that level of maths. Possibly a worse problem in UK education than in most other countries. We encourage extreme early specialisation. In our schools you can drop mathematics at 15 or 16 if you want, even if you later go on to study science subjects at university. Well, you'd have trouble getting on to a physics or engineering course, but you could do biology. The most advanced maths I did in what you would call high school was very introductory calculus - simple differentiation mostly. Also the briefest introduction to integration. We weren't expected to be able to do it, just know what it was, only a couple of hour's teaching. And that was an /optional/ course, I could have got away without it. Not a mention of matrices, nothing even approaching statistics, probability, number theory, none of what they then called modern maths (anything which mentioned sets or topology), no algebra more advanced than the quadratic equation formula (which we were expected to be able to use, but not derive or prove). And I was someone on a science track (Biology, Chemistry, Physics) at a selective school that specialised in science. My undergraduate courses included pick-ups on statistics and probability, without which it would be impossible to take Biology, but that was all. Then these biologists who are semi-literate in maths become graduate students and, need to do some modelling, and meet up with mathematicians or physicists who may not have studied any biology since the age of 13. Of course all these folk did science at school - they probably have never had any serious language or history teaching at all. It is compulsory in British schools to do at least one modern language, usually French for some reason, but only between the ages of 12 and 16, and it is usually badly taught. In my experience most people who go on to do science simply fail the class - they make you go to it, but you don't have to pass to get onto other courses. There is no requirement to graduate in classes you don't intend to continue with, so loads of kids don't. The same works the other way even more strongly. Most people studying arts or humanities at university will never have passed a science exam or maths exam in their lives, and will have dropped or failed most of the subjects *before* GCSE. I think the US equivalent to that would be leaving a junior high school to go to a senior high school. They are exams you take at 15 or 16, and most of the brighter kids only attempt the ones that they intend to continue later. Of course the other side of the coin is that what we call 6th form education, 16-18, is, in sciences at any rate, the equivalent of the first year of University in other countries. So the system is good at producing very knowledgeable people, very young. One of the reasons that British research is significantly more productive than French or German. By the time the French or German advanced student catches up with their British counterpart in knowledge of their specialised subject they are probably in their late 20s. I didn't intend to write this rant... don't get me onto school sport Ken
Re: Upcoming workshop on category theory and concurrency
KPJ wrote: [...] I have noticed this on-line anomaly which several people: they require more data on an online communication subject than on an offline communication subject. Appears irrational to me: online security can never become higher than physical security of the subject. But I disgress. Not security, bandwidth. Millions of people can address me through email, and hundreds do, every day. Not enough time to read, so heaps is skipped. In an ordinary day I doubt if as many as 5 strangers come up to me and talk to me face to face, without me having approached them first, and I live in a big city. Also body language stuff.
Re: haos -- from MathWorld
Jim Choate wrote: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Chaos.html Er, yes, it is a great site. It even has a definition of mathematical chaos: A dynamical system is chaotic if it 1. Has a dense collection of points with periodic orbits, 2. Is sensitive to the initial condition of the system (so that initially nearby points can evolve quickly into very different states), and 3. Is topologically transitive. Chaotic systems exhibit irregular, unpredictable behavior (the butterfly effect). The boundary between linear and chaotic behavior is often characterized by period doubling, followed by quadrupling, etc., although other routes to chaos are also possible And this implies that chaotic means the same as stochastic One of the reasons I don't like the word chaotic is that it misleads people into thinking it is the same as random, or as stochastic.
Re: Cypherpunks Europe
Tim May wrote: Not sure about the rest of europe - but we have a targetted crypto list in the UK (UKCrypto, sensibly enough) so already have a forum for uk-specific issues. Thats not to say some of it wouldn't be better here - but I am sure our problems with .. [name elide to prevent His search engines from finding text with His name in it and then threatening legal action.] Well, he's not quite as bad as Sr Ac used to be. Do you mean _Him_? He indeed means Dr. L G* a long-time reader of, and spasmodic contributor to, the UKcrypto Cyber-rights-UK mailing lists. Has recently been the main troll in sidelining a thread on something I've forgotten about into a rehash of censorship/anti-censorship arguments. I once followed-up to a post mentioning Him and received many threatening e-mails demanding that I cancel my post and inform Google that it was to be removed forthwith or both Google and myself and my ISP would face massive legal attack. He makes anti-Choatian category errors - sort of I understand physics therefore I understand ethics|law|politics|society - delete as appropriate. The main one being that he really seems to think that if something is against the law then it shouldn't happen, and that it can be prevented. Ah, I remember - the thread was about Deutsche Bahn suing ISPs who allowed links to websites purporting to contain instructions for disabling German railways. I was tempted to tell him, and his lawyers (er, barristers) to fuck off. Lawyers will do. Barristers are professional advocates, lawyers who plead in court. Very unlikely to be writing cease-and-desist letters. In England retail lawyers are solicitors. Either than or to hire a freelance IRA guy to blow him up. I don't think you get freelance IRA guys. Not with both kneecaps, anyway. L** G*** is a nice man. He wrote that the Cult of the Dead Cow were a bunch of barely literate mindless American teenage delinquents. If they lived in England they could possibly sue him for that :-) Ken
Dead cowboys wage peace on the Internet
Hereinunder attached is vauely on-topic, though spins some unneccessarily self-important new jargon. They don't quite seem to get that TCPIP is fundamentally P2P from the bits up. I like the phrase disruptive compliance. The Net has a passive-aggressive personality? Ken Waging peace on the Internet By Oxblood RuffinPosted: 19/04/2002 at 15:56 GMT Hacking is a contact sport. The more people who have contact with one another, the better. -- Shaolin Punk, Proxy Boss, Hacktivismo There's an international book burning in progress; the surveillance cameras are rolling; and the water canons are drowning freedom of assembly. But it's not occurring anywhere that television can broadcast to the world. It's happening in cyberspace. Certain countries censor access to information on the Web through DNS (Domain Name Service) filtering. This is a process whereby politically challenging information is blocked by domain address (the name that appears before the dot-com/net/org suffix, as in Tibet.com, etc.). State censors also filter for politically or socially-unacceptable ideas in e-mail. And individual privacy rights and community gatherings are similarly regulated. China is often identified as the world's worst offender with its National Firewall and arrests for on-line activity. But the idea that the new Mandarins could have pulled this off by themselves is absurd. The Chinese have aggressively targeted the Western software giants, not only as a means of acquiring technical know-how, but also as agents for influencing Western governments to their advantage through well-established corporate networks of political lobbying. Everything is for sale: names, connections, and even national security. Witnessing hi-tech firms dive into China is like watching the Gadarene swine. Already fat and greedy beyond belief, the Western technology titans are being herded towards the trough. And with their snouts deep in the feedbag, they haven't quite noticed the bacon being trimmed off their ass. It isn't so much a case of technology transfer as digital strip-mining. Advanced research and technical notes are being handed over to the Chinese without question. It couldn't be going better for the Communists. While bootstrapping their economy with the fruits of Western labor and ingenuity, they gain the tools to prune democracy on the vine. But to focus on Beijing's strategy misses the larger opportunity of treating the spreading sickness that plagues cyberspace. Cuba not only micromanages its citizens' on-line experience, it has recently refused to sell them computers, the US trade embargo notwithstanding. Most countries indulging in censorship claim to be protecting their citizens from pornographic contagion. But the underlying motive is to prevent challenging opinions from spreading and coalescing through the chokehold of state-sponsored control. This includes banning information that ranges from political opinion, religious witness, foreign news, academic and scholarly discovery, news of human rights abuses all the intellectual exchange that an autocratic leadership considers to be destabilizing. The capriciousness of state-sanctioned censorship is wide-ranging. * In Zambia, the government attempted to censor information revealing their plans for constitutional referenda. * In Mauritania - as in most countries - owners of cybercafis are required to supply government intelligence agents with copies of e-mail sent or received at their establishments. * Even less draconian governments, like Malaysia, have threatened Web-publishers, whose only crime is to publish frequent Web site updates. Timely and relevant information is seen as a threat. * South Korea's national security law forbids South Koreans from any contact - including contact over the Internet - with their North Korean neighbors. The risks of accessing or disseminating information are often great. * In Ukraine, a decapitated body found near the village of Tarachtcha is believed to be that of Georgiy Gongadze, founder and editor of an on-line newspaper critical of the authorities. * In August 1998, an eighteen year old Turk, Emre Ersoz, was found guilty of insulting the national police in an Internet forum after participating in a demonstration that was violently suppressed by the police. His ISP provided the authorities with his address. * Journalist Miroslav Filipovic has the dubious distinction of having been the first journalist accused of spying because his articles detailed the abuses of certain Yugoslav army units in Kosovo, and were published on the Internet. These are dangerous trends for all of us. The Cult of the Dead Cow (cDc) and Hacktivismo are not prepared to watch the Internet's lights dim simply because liberal democracies are asleep at the switch. Our fathers and grandfathers fought wars defending, among other things,- our right to speak and be heard.
Re: Coins vs. bills
For some reason the mention of a Susan B Anthony dollar stuck in my brain as an Alice B Sheldon dollar. Susan Anthony is a person who I've never heard of. I'm almost tempted not to find out who she is or was to preserve a nugget of delicious cognitive dissonance. A world in which governments put Alice Sheldon on the currency would be an interestingly different world from the one we seem to be inhabiting. [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On 10 Apr 2002 at 13:43, Sunder wrote: I've had several dozen of these (stamp and other vending machines provided them as change here in NYC), and kept only one. You're not supposed to keep currency, you're supposed to spend it. I generally prefer the bills to coins, because the coins make an annoying jjingle jangle and also wear out my pockets. They're horrible. Sure, they look like gold when you get them but they oxidize quickly when handled and look worse than old pennies. Serves the mint right for trying to pass what clearly is a slap in the face of anyone who remembers that the US currency was at one time tethered to actual gold. Now that everyone knows that even coins are only of symbolic value, I don't see why they don't make them out of plastic. Because symbols work better when they bear certain kinds of resemblance to what they are symbolising? Human brains are hard-wired that way. Plastic money doesn't twang the right neural circuits. Who would care for non-alcoholic communion wine? [...] Anyway, no-one has yet come up with a convincing reason for me to want to carry any kind of electronic wallet for small transactions. Anything under, say, 50 dollars American, is more easily done in physical cash money. If nothing else the irritation that you'd go through when you lose one and have to get another makes it not worth it. If I lose coins I lose the value of the coin and nothing else. If I lose a bank card it ruins my day. Even if the card was only good for 50 quid I still have to jump through hoops to get a new one. Obviously smart cash might make sense as public transport tickets, or as a prepaid hotel bill (to hotel owners at any rate), and smart-card applications for these things have been developing for decades. (We certainly were issued with something like them at the hotel for the 1989 Eastercon in UK - which I only remember because it was the last I went to for some years, they might have been around much earlier) But in general street use - why bother? Even if these putative electronic wallets were as easy to get hold of as cash (walk up to a machine any time of day or night, stick in some id, type in PIN, walk off) you might as well just use cash. I suppose they could be of benefit to the operators of ATMs. The one at the all-night filling station round the corner from me seems to be have someone using it every ten minutes or so in the late evening. So, at a wild guess, the stock level might be between 5 and 10 thousand pounds. That's getting towards where it might pay someone to use heavy machinery to get it out of the wall. Even if it splurts itself with ink (there are a lot of stupid criminals out there) that is still very inconvenient for the building owners. But there's nothing in it for the user. An initially valueless smart wallet might be less attractive to muggers, but they just have to wait for you to activate it. Or point a knife at you till you do. And the more faffing about you need to do (PIN, setting authorisation limits, pointing the thing at the reader) the more old-fashioned cash would seem simpler. Now, using a mobile phone as money might sell. People seem determined to use them for everything else. If there was a way of transferring prepay directly between SIMs it would be used by teenagers (and drug dealers) to settle small debts. Maybe they already are and I haven't noticed. Ken Brown And her smoke goes up for ever: http://www.mtsu.edu/~dlavery/Tiptree/clute.htm
Re: Coins vs. bills
Trei, Peter wrote: [...snip...] what you said is all true but the benefit (as you pointed out) is primarily to the retailer, not the shopper. All this doesn't apply to higher-value transactions of course. Ken, when was the last time you paid for a call from a UK public phone with coins? Iirc, most British public phones no longer accept coins (unlike in the US, where you have to search for one with a card slot). I think I stopped putting coins in phone booths on the street about when I started carrying a mobile, which was late 1999 IIRC :-) Later than most. These days, just about wherever I am, even if I don't have a mobile, someone else does. Phone booths are on their way out for anyone who has either a job or friends. As you say, they are mostly card-only now - used to be specialised phonecards (I've used UK ones in Greece and Germany so they aren't *that* specialised) now they accept normal bank-issued credit and debit cards. I guess the changeover began in the 1980s was more or less finished by mid-1990s. Some shops and bars have coin-operated ones. I get more trouble with buying train bus tickets. The machines try to accept notes but almost all fail. They are the main reason I like the new higher-value coins (though of course they are nothing like the value of the pre-C20-inflation guineas and sovereigns my great-grand-parents probably weren't wealthy enough to see many of) This fits in with the thread about deployment problems. For these low-price transactions buyers prefer cash. Monopoly retailers (as phone booths were 20 years ago and railway trains of course almost always are) can dictate how they wish to be paid. If a PTT wanted you to use their own cards, you had to. Competitive retailers have to get the buyers on board. Even more off-topic Trei, Peter also wrote: From: [EMAIL PROTECTED][SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Go and read 'Repent Harlequin! Cried the Tick-Tock Man' by PK Dick for a particularly slackless society with this technology. Might be easier to find if you substitute Harlan Ellison as the author, though. - Sten Mea culpa. It's been a long time since I read 'Dangerous Visions'. Must be, seeing as Harlequin was published in Galaxy magazine, then reprinted in Ellison's Paingod and other Delusions, not in DV which was an original-story-only anthology that came out a year or two later :-) Ken Brown
Re: all about transferable off-line ecash (Re: Brands off-line tech)
Adam Back wrote: [...snip...] Another example would be having to give a deposit to get mobile phone for people with poor credit ratings. Also in Europe pay as you go, cash only mobile phone usage is popular due to credit elegibility reasons also I think. You can plunk down a 10 pound note and walk out with a mobile phone with air time on it, you can buy more air time similarly.) Slightly off-topic, but credit eligibility isn't the main reason for prepay. A lot of well-off people like it because it is easier to administer. I know people with jobs and credit ratings who chose to move to prepay, but I can't think of anyone who went the other way. You walk into the shop and buy airtime, which many people find easier than having yet another relationship with yet another boring company. Incidentally what they actually sell you is a card with a number printed on it, which you then send to phone company - there would be a lot of money for anyone who found a way to predict the numbers - this is cypherpunk technology - millions of people all over the world are paying cash money for large random numbers. They are also popular with parents who give them to their kids don't want to have to bankroll a serious teenage phone habit. And some people even like anonymity. The airtime numbers are available more or less anywhere, supermarket checkouts, every little corner shop, sometimes even bars. There is also a new breed of phonecard shops, sometimes doubling up as small Internet cafes and/or the more traditional copier shops. For some reason many of them are run by Africans (high-tech retail in UK is usually dominated by Indians). Their main business is in long-distance discount phonecalls. You get a certain amount of long-distance or international phone time through a local number. If you'd asked me 15 years ago I might have guessed that reselling bandwidth would be a big business in the first decade of the 21st century, but I wouldn't have guessed that it would mostly be over-the-counter in corner shops. Actually selling bits of plastic with numbers printed on them (most of them don't even bother with mag stripes) seems very low-tech and physical! Ken Brown
