I have been wondering for some time if terrorism is considered acceptable in certain situations? In a David vs Goliath situation where there is no realistic chance of stopping or defeating a more powerful aggressor, would it be considered acceptable to use non-conventional means and terrorism? Or is the weaker victim expected to play by the rules of warfare and accept its eventual defeat?
Country A with a powerful military attacks its neighbouring country B with a weak military in order to expand its territory and gain access to resources. The population generally supports this attack, army A only attacks military targets, but army B stands no chance of repelling the attacking army and does not receive support from third parties.
In this specific situation, would we hold country B to the same standards or would we deem it acceptable if country B attacked non-military targets, civilian infrastructure, and in the extreme civilians? That does not necessarily mean that such actions would be desirable because of the resulting reaction. And there might also be higher order effects, for example a change in the understanding what is acceptable in such conflicts, that make such action undesirable in the longer term.
No, and if you try to refer to Russia attacking Ukraine, it's not acceptable when/if they attack and kill civilians.
That's still not close to what happened on 7th Oct where Hamas went out to murder random people to invoke terror, stop the Abraham negotiations and provoke a severe reaction of Israel.
Some of what gets labeled as "terrorism" is very legitimate resistance. For instance, there's little difference between the Haitian Slave Revolt, the Pueblo Revolt, the Warsaw Rebellion and the Al Asqa Flood (Oct 7th). Yet only the latter is labeled as "terrorism". Repressed people or people forced off their land always have the right to armed resistance. It's also debatable if anyone living on stolen land can be considered a "civilian".
Are you sure that the logic of an attack such as 9/11 is that you are directly punishing the individual victims? I don't think so- the attackers don't care if the victims are innocent or guilty, they just think that the action will produce some desired consequence.
Exactly like Israelis bombing civilian buildings, btw.
9/11 was an Israeli attack on the US, so yes that's terrorism. Even if we take it at face value, it was a drop in the bucket compared to the millions killed by the US in acts of terrorism in the Middle East. Also, the Europeans genociding the Indigenous Americans was the worst terrorism this planet has ever seen.
I have two of them, and I just checked and both are quiet. Mine don't connect to WiFi unless you go through an entire process first with an android phone and Matter.
It's great having them on WiFi - you can turn on the AC before getting home to pre-cool, without having to leave it on all day.
I have a friend who diy'ed a button on single webpage that he presses on his phone while at work in order to open the gate to the building that he lives so delivery people can get in. I also think Bret Victor diy'ed the AC as mentioned while he was a student quarter century or more ago[0]
I know this sounds like the famous "just do it this way in linux instead" criticism of Dropbox back in the day. But I do think we reached "life parodies fiction" with these smart devices where it makes sense to give diy another go. And with AI, there's less excuses this time around I would imagine.
But I would literally rather buy a cheap phone, a cheap SIM, hotspot it and connect it to a charger and have the AC connect to that and isolate it that way instead of letting it touch the network.
You can (and should) just segregate your network to have separate paths for IoT/"smart devices" and normal personal/family devices. Makes it all worry free and transparently observable.
I have my IoT on a separate VLAN and I can observe communications for any given device at any given time.. this seems like a much saner solution than outright not buying any IoT devices, though that is also a respectable decision!
Really? And then complain about the energy cost? People are nutz. Like it's so unbearable to come home, open windows to get peak hot air out, then turn on AC and get cool. Energy is too cheap it seems.
Also even very old AC remotes show there is usually the option to set up times etc.
They wouldn't see it until they opened it, so clearly they didn't open it because of the book. And if they need to open your suitcase (not because of the book), they have a reason for that.
I was chosen "randomly" for secondary inspection. This was after a failed bombing plot and the TSA implied a lack of Christianity was the proximate cause of the attempted attack.
After. But then I continued to get selected for additional screening on the rest of the legs of that trip and the return. So either I was going to get searched every time I got on a plane already, or they flagged me for additional scrutiny after the initial search.
Probably just bad luck. TSA seems to have designated targets for abuse. My wife is one of them. Every time we travel, she consistently gets selected for secondary screening while I breeze on through. There is not a single thing about her which even a fanatically committed conspiracy theorist could spin as a justification, but it has been going on for years. She has a good sense of humor and the agents treat her well enough, but having your stuff rummaged through every time you go through security is grating.
Even paying for PreCheck doesn't get her off the hook. You'd think it would help, but no.
Before you figure that out, you will be surprised to discover that it's impossible to tell if the speed of light is the same in both directions, with only the average of a round trip being the speed of light.
I hate this one because it's true Einstein said we cannot measure the speed of light in one direction that is independent of the clocks' synchronization technique being used to measure.
And yet, somehow we changed that to "we don't know the speed of light in one direction!!!" Which is bogus - can you imagine if speed of light was different if you were pointing east vs west? In space, what is even a direction vs another?
Did you even read the wiki you linked? We've done one-way speeds, it's down below.
How do you synchronize the clocks and compute the measurement, without depending on the conclusion?
You run into a similar problem with Michelson-Morley: because the apparatus and the light both get distorted by any motion, you can’t even in principle detect the aether wind with interferometry. You need a non-comoving dynamic source, eg, LIGO with black hole collisions.
Their one-way experiments seem to require similar, ie, we can observe dynamics but cannot measure a static bias.
I'm over my head with your statement, but my guess is - Yes that's the point. Either you do 2 way or you accept 1 way clock-sync collusions.
My argument is it's not "We don't know speed of light in 1 direction". Also, there's another common youtube video that says "we've never measured teh speed of light!".
Those statements are just for click bait, shock value. It's not rooted in the science.
Doctors make mistakes pretty much non-stop, and they are rarely held accountable because the system as a whole works OK. AI makes less mistakes than the doctors do (I read a lot of medical notes).
Anyone resisting ethnic cleansing is a "terrorist", and so is anyone that happens to be standing next to them, as well as their nearest kin. We know the playbook.
I'm hoping it's bots doing that, and not my fellow, because I don't like to think that my fellow humans are actually this full of hate.
But either way, contributing to HN has become rather unpleasant these days.
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