Also, Israel already assassinated someone by exploding their cell phone way back in 1996.

When I started on Debian, there was only apt-get. (And dpkg if you manually pulled .debs from somewhere).

Then a little while later, there was aptitude, which was nice.

apt the command didn’t show up until 2014.

The Geneva conventions do not contain the level of protection for civilians that you think.

In particular, Israel has ratified and is a party to the conventions of 1949. After much debate in 1949, those conventions ultimately allowed things like indiscriminate carpet bombing of cities (which the US practiced extensively in the previous war).

Later protocols from 1977 added more civilian protections more along the lines you propose. These protocols banned carpet bombing and introduced the concept of proportionate response into the conventions.

Israel and the United States have not ratified the 1977 protocols 1 and 2 concerning additional civilian protections. According to the text itself, they are not bound by the provisions if they do not agree.

Used to be, you could correlate the message timestamps with Fox News programming, and get a pretty good idea of what set him off.

Actually I think the world population is such that you need to add one or two bits.

None of the current ICBM platforms were designed for missile defense. Missile defense simply did not exist at the time.

Sentinel is busting its budget because it’s renovating and rebuilding all of the ground segments: all of those decrepit silos and computer systems. It’s still money well spent in my opinion.

Missile guidance is not a computationally hard problem, and it hasn’t changed much since the 50s. Terminal missile defense is a fantastically hard problem, and wasn’t mastered until the last decade or two. And the current generation missile defense capabilities still haven’t all been demonstrated in combat.

Having said that, I would generally expect NATO’s missiles to work as advertised in a hot war. And I would plan for Russia’s missiles to be somewhat less effective than they advertise, but still a credible threat.

I’m just repeating what happened or what the plan was the last couple of go arounds, with Napoleon and Hitler.

Napoleon did occupy Moscow, but it didn’t help him very much.

Hitler was turned back just short of Moscow, but the Russian government had all sorts of continuity plans that involved moving further east. Entire factories were uprooted and shipped into the Urals.

1. Even with nuclear annihilation, NATO could still get to Moscow in a three day operation. It’s just a question of which cities back home are still standing.

2. Moscow is not the big prize you might think it is. Russia can just retreat hundreds of kilometers further east and carry on.

3. NATO can do the thunder run, but they are not equipped to win a massive land war in Asia. You really gotta listen to the Sicilian from Princess Bride on this one.

Question, when you move to a new place in Spain, do you need to register residency with the police?

I don’t know if Spain does that or not, but I think Italy does some version.

The United States doesn’t have that, and doesn’t have a national id card. Although most people effectively register themselves to get a driver license, that is only required if you drive. So voter registration nominally provides some way for the government to get the information on residency, which is important for figuring out which local elections you need to vote in.

Now recently, in the last couple of decades, some states started requiring photo id verification to vote. This defeats the purpose of having a separate voter registration system, because you still have to go to the driver registration system to get either a driver license, or a non-driving photo ID. Nevertheless, the separate voter registration system has hung around in every single one of these states, because the real goal is to prevent people from voting.

Here’s another factor: The ISS is in a high inclination orbit that is excellent at overflying most of the US and Russia. Not so great as a base for deep space missions.

Both of these astronauts were multiple-mission space veterans before they left. They have space shuttle experience. Sunita has prior command experience on ISS. These two are basically the most veteran professionals that NASA has on the roster.

They have now been resupplied with clothing on a Progress module. I think it was like 45 days before that showed up.

They have both stated that they’re happy for more time on orbit, and I’m mostly inclined to believe them.

—BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE—

Side effects include all of your contacts calling you freakin nerd.

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The Geneva conventions are not monolithic documents, and they are not completely uncontroversial. I believe the article 51 you refer to is in a 1978 addon protocol that Israel has not ratified. For reference, there is a different article 51 in the original 1949 conventions, that talks about when an occupying army may conscript civilian labor.

Like any other international treaties, the conventions only apply to countries that have signed on and ratified the treaties. The United States and Israel have not ratified the additional protocol, so from their perspective they are not bound by the text.

The original 1949 conventions do have protections for civilians, but they are weaker protections. Ratiometric evidence of civilian casualties is heartbreaking, but unfortunately simply not relevant to the 1949 conventions. Under those rules, if a facility is used by your enemy to harm you, you can attack that facility. Period.

IDF is always careful to portray how they scrupulously follow the 1949 conventions when they speak to the media. Clear violations that become public are referred to investigation.

As in any war, some elements of IDF are almost certainly violating the conventions. But as a USian I don’t think I’ll get close to understanding the truth any time soon. I basically don’t trust any news source coming out of that region any more.

“Watermelon Man” by Herbie Hancock has a beer bottle solo credited to Bill Summers.

I believe the German tanks are already traversing the steppes of Ukraine that they yearn for.

If you’ve met the deductible for the plan year, the deductible is now off the table. And presumably you need to look at your policy to see what it covers after the deductible is met.

“50% before deductible” is an odd term that I haven’t seen in an health insurance policy. Usually, coinsurance doesn’t kick in until after the deductible is met.

criminal lawsuit?

What? Do they mean “criminal prosecution?”

Instead the story is that the source engine was located in the “Src” directory in their Visual Source Safe. And the Half Life 1 engine was in a separate branch named GoldSrc because it was about to ship real soon, and they needed to keep changes to a minimum.

Could be your freezer cycling up and down. Mine gets real warm right after I load in a week of groceries. I also should probably store more stuff in the freezer for thermal mass.

Any type of parole has to be at least marginally less dangerous for the hostage than execution.