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What is our strategy? We do not have a strategy.

Erm.. Yeah, because doing something without a plan is the best way of going about things.

1) No idea how to approach your goal
2) Create problems rather than solving them
3) ???
4) Profit!

At least we know if he decides to open up shop in America, he will be gainfully employed.

Slashdot is slashdotted, so I can't tell if this was posted correctly before:

Facts you should know before you vote:

If you truly love your country, you will not just enjoy the advantages, you will be there for your country when there are problems.

100 Facts and 1 Opinion -- The Non-Arguable Case Against the Bush Administration

See The CIA trained Osama bin Laden and other Arabs in the techniques of terrorism.

Government data compares Democrat and Republican economics.

Most media exists to make money. Advertisers are understandably careful not to alienate anyone. It is not possible to develop an accurate opinion of government activities only by listening to the carefully crafted phrases from media employees who would lose their jobs if they seemed to indicate a preference for one policy over another. Books are the major media that are not ad-supported. Here are reviews of 3 movies and 35 books that discuss the corruption of the Bush administration: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.

Bush's education improvements were at least partly fraud.

I recommend a new book, The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. Don't expect any author to be perfect. However, this book is an excellent overview of the Bush family, and the best book by this author. Here is a quote which shows just one more fact about the chronic lying of George Herbert Walker Bush and his son George W. Bush: "The official family tree provided by the Bush archivists does not include the two mentally retarded daughters of John M. Walker, and lists only two of James Smith Bush's wives, not all four of them; one of Ray Walker's two wives is omitted, and George Herbert Walker III is listed with only two, instead of three, wives."

Before, Saddam was killing. Now, the U.S. government is killing and destabilizing, and you pay. Improvement?

15 of the nineteen 9/11 attackers were Saudis. Many don't like the U.S. Gov. influence on their country.

Did you see the network footage of George W. Bush holding hands with a Saudi man the Bush family knows as "Bandar Bush"? Since it was Saudis who attacked on 9/11, why did Bush invade Iraq? Was it a smokescreen to get attention away from the Saudis?

Bush borrows money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 billion. When Saudis attack, invade Iraq?

Is Bush drinking NOW?

George W. Bush's brother was shown in a lawsuit deposition on 20/20 talking about his prostitutes and using government influence to make money. Family values? Neil Bush is different from other relatives of presidents like Billy Carter; he is heavily involved with government corruption and he does his corruption with the help of his family.

The U.S. government has fought 24 wars since World War II. The system of violence works by creating fear so rich people can profit.

Facts you should know before you vote:

If you truly love your country, you will not just enjoy the advantages, you will be there for your country when there are problems.

100 Facts and 1 Opinion -- The Non-Arguable Case Against the Bush Administration

See The CIA trained Osama bin Laden and other Arabs in the techniques of terrorism.

Government data compares Democrat and Republican economics.

Most media exists to make money. Advertisers are understandably careful not to alienate anyone. It is not possible to develop an accurate opinion of government activities only by listening to the carefully crafted phrases from media employees who would lose their jobs if they seemed to indicate a preference for one policy over another. Books are the major media that are not ad-supported. Here are reviews of 3 movies and 35 books that discuss the corruption of the Bush administration: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government.

Bush's education improvements were at least partly fraud.

I recommend a new book, The Family: The Real Story of the Bush Dynasty. Don't expect any author to be perfect. However, this book is an excellent overview of the Bush family, and the best book by this author. Here is a quote which shows just one more fact about the chronic lying of George Herbert Walker Bush and his son George W. Bush: "The official family tree provided by the Bush archivists does not include the two mentally retarded daughters of John M. Walker, and lists only two of James Smith Bush's wives, not all four of them; one of Ray Walker's two wives is omitted, and George Herbert Walker III is listed with only two, instead of three, wives."

Before, Saddam was killing. Now, the U.S. government is killing and destabilizing, and you pay. Improvement?

15 of the nineteen 9/11 attackers were Saudis. Many don't like the U.S. Gov. influence on their country.

Did you see the network footage of George W. Bush holding hands with a Saudi man the Bush family knows as "Bandar Bush"? Since it was Saudis who attacked on 9/11, why did Bush invade Iraq? Was it a smokescreen to get attention away from the Saudis?

Bush borrows money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 billion. When Saudis attack, invade Iraq?

George W. Bush's brother was shown in a lawsuit deposition on 20/20 talking about his prostitutes and using government influence to make money. Family values? Neil Bush is different from other relatives of presidents like Billy Carter; he is heavily involved with government corruption and he does his corruption with the help of his family.

The U.S. government has fought 24 wars since World War II. The system of violence works by creating fear so rich people can profit.

The U.S. government has engaged in 24 wars since WW2: The system of violence works by creating fear so rich people can profit.

The lack of respect for other countries has been going on for a long time. The present violence got started in the 1940s when the U.S. government passed laws that it could secretly meddle in the affairs of other countries, and do things that would otherwise be illegal. After that, everyone who wanted to increase their international profits wanted secret action, and many got it.

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Bush borrows money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 billion. When Saudis attack, invade Iraq?

They are not just painting political graffiti with light. They are against Bush.

It's unprecedented: There are 44 well-funded groups against Bush. There are more than 3 movies and more than 35 books about Bush Administration corruption.

Magazines like The Nation are against Bush: 100 Facts and 1 Opinion -- The Non-Arguable Case Against the Bush Administration

There are hundreds of web sites like Dubya Speak, that talk about some negative aspect of Bush's personality. Dubya Speak quotes Bush: "It's only fair if other countries treat us the way they treat them." If he meant, "It's only fair if other countries treat us the way we treat them", that is something important about which George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden agree.

Foreign leaders and politicians call Bush a "moron" and an "idiot".

George W. Bush is certainly the most disliked U.S. president in history.

If I remember correctly, there were, in the early years, four major books published about Clinton. They said Cliton was having sex with slutty women. They tried to find something wrong with his small losing investment called Whitewater. They said he may have, at some time during his being governor of Arkansas, associated with people who later turned out to be involved in questionable activities. Someone in his adminstration committed suicide. The books were interesting, but a little lame.

The books about Bush are different. The books about Bush are about major governmental corruption.


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U.S. Gov.: Borrowing money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 billion.

Is this the definitive article about software RAID under Linux?

Software-RAID HOWTO. In English and HTML: Software-RAID HOWTO.

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Bush borrows money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 billion. When Saudis attack, invade Iraq?

You said, "... there is a long, long, long list of people who are more deserving of the credit that Gore would ascribe to himself."

Vint Cerf said that Al Gore deserves unique credit. Back in those days, which are very difficult to remember now, you had to buy your floppy disks from a special company, and they really were floppy.

Back then it was the raw, early, ugly days of computing. (Just like it is now, with one big monopolist and proprietary file formats, and quirky, partly finished software that wastes your time, like Windows XP SP2.)

Back then, there was no one who had power in the U.S. Congress besides Gore understood anything technical. It's difficult to remember that now. Back then, people just did not relate to computing issues. If you knew something about computing, you were considered socially eccentric.

Back then, the ARPANET was thriving, but it was used by people who considered themselves privileged, and were privileged, and definitely did not want to share their privileges.

Back then, DARPA, the U.S. government's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency would give ARPANET access to institutions and companies that were part of the effort to find new and better ways to kill people and destroy their property. Back then, it was perceived that there were enemies everywhere and it was important to protect ourselves by waging all war all the time. (Just like now.) It was called the "Cold" War. The U.S. government killed people, but the killing had to be a secret from the average citizen.

Back then there was an extremely acrimonious discussion about a new-fangled idea, the .COM top level domain. The privileged did not want their utility to be corrupted by crass commercialism. Back then, it was difficult to get spam. The ARPANET was an organization of gentlemen, who would never cause problems for each other *cough* Mitnick.

Back then, there were not enough viruses for everyone; we had to share. Back then systems were mostly not vulnerable, viruses were spread through the honor system. Okay, that is a joke. It took Microsoft to invent sloppily coded operating systems that would assure the widespread availability of viruses. Unfortunately, that is not a joke.

Back then, there was a new-fangled gadget, the Hayes 2400 Baud modem, which few could afford. There were fears that such high-speed use would cause problems for the telephone system.

Al Gore had technical knowledge. Al Gore had power in government because he was a senator and a famous senator's son. He put the full weight of government behind the idea that just anyone could have access.

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Bush borrows money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 billion. When Saudis attack, invade Iraq?

Moderators are using their moderation points to make political statements. My parent comment above is not a "Troll". You may disagree, but I am not making trouble. My statements are backed up by 3 movies, 35 books, and a very well-documented article.

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Bush borrows money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 billion. When Saudis attack, invade Iraq?

You have an anger problem, which seems to be true of most Bush supporters. Bush supporters find it very easy to justify killing other people, and don't realize that some of those killed will have family members who will want to retaliate.

And, you didn't read the books.

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U.S. Gov.: Borrowing money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 billion.

"Whether or not we should have gone over there has *nothing* to do with how or why technology failed."

The Navy's super-expensive Aegis system caused the U.S. Navy to shoot down a civilian airliner, remember? The technology failed because the U.S. government system allows high-profit junk technology, paid for with the hard-earned money of U.S. citizens.

It would be possible to give many, many other examples.

Those who are angry and don't know it are easily manipulated.

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U.S. Gov.: Borrowing money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 billion.

MODERATORS: Whoever moderated the parent comment as Flamebait is not smart enough to be called ignorant, he is iggerunt.

The parent comment says, "Support for Israel may be the greatest cause of our problems." The king of Jordan says this is so. The foreign minister of Iran says this is so. (They were both interviewed on the Charlie Rose show.) Osama bin Laden said U.S. government support for Israeli violence was one of the two reasons he attacked the United States. (The other reason was U.S. government support for those who are against needed political change in Saudi Arabia.)

The U.S. government has been supporting the killing of Arabs for many years now by giving between 3.5 and 5 billion of your tax money to Israel, every year. There are only 14 million Jews in the entire world. There are only 4.8 million Jews in Israel. That money is about $1,000 for every man, woman, child, and baby in Israel who is Jewish, every year.

That money must be used to buy weapons made in the United States, at inflated prices. I seriously doubt that anyone who is in control of this policy has anything against Arabs or Jews, or even knows much about their cultures. It's government corruption, only that, not ideology.

To get votes from the millions of Jews in New York, Governor Pataki basically declared war on Arabs. To learn more about this, see the article, New York Governor Pataki's statements are equivalent to a declaration of war. Those who want power don't care how much damage they do.

Osama bin Laden says he wants a Muslim-religion-controlled political coalition. I've studied the matter for years, and I don't think there is much chance he can achieve that. The violent religious extremists in Muslim countries are not crazier than the violent religious extremists in the United States, however. The corruption caused by those who want weapons profits is supported by some of those who call themselves evangelicals. The evangelicals have an ugly plan that sounds to me like it might achieve a terrible goal. They want to kill all the Jews. They don't say that, of course. They don't take reponsibility for that. They say that their ancient books say that all the Jews will be killed or converted. Since there is slim chance that Jewish people would want to be evangelicals, or would be accepted by evangelicals, they are really saying that all the Jews will be killed. They are helping their prophecy by encouraging the 14 million Jews to get into bloody battles with the 1.1 billion Muslims. Experiment: Go into a very poor area of the U.S. and ask the next 10 street kids you see what they think the outcome of such battles will be. I will accept whatever they say.

Abba Eban, a respected Jewish leader, said that after World War II Jews were not welcome in Europe, even though they had suffered a lot. I agree with that. Some Jewish violent extremists believe that Jews must fight for their own land because they are not welcome elsewhere. That's not true, of course; Jews do very well in making contributions to New York. The weapons makers encourage the Jews in their worst impulses.

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U.S. Gov.: Borrowing money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 billion.

It was only a Slashdot comment, posted at 6:53 in the morning. The major point is correct. Many bills before Congress are given misleading titles. I could only think of 3 that early in the morning. If you don't like the ones I picked, choose others, like this one: Congress Degrades National Parks. Here's a quote: "The National Park Enhancement and Revitalization Act, HR 4158, sponsored by Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD), has an appealing but deliberately misleading title."

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Bush borrows money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 billion. When Saudis attack, invade Iraq?

For full image backups, try Acronis. Symantec learned customer care from Microsoft, it appears.

With Acronis, you can make a full system drive backup of Windows XP while Windows is running.

Last time I checked, Ghost was VERY quirky.

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U.S. Gov.: Borrowing money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 billion.

Criticize George W. Bush? That's easy. Check this out: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government

Or this:

U.S. Government: Borrowing money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 billion.

Or this:

15 of the 19 9/11 attackers were Saudis. Many don't like the U.S. Gov. influence on their country.

Did you see the network footage of George W. Bush holding hands with a Saudi man the Bush family knows as "Bandar Bush"? Since it was Saudis who attacked on 9/11, why did Bush invade Iraq? Was it a smokescreen to get attention away from the Saudis?

"Interesante (Score:0, Troll)
by Anonymous Coward on 12:04 AM -- Saturday October 09 2004 (#10477597)
Wow, thats pretty neat."

How can that be a troll? É interesante, acordo. It's just a first post. Over-rated maybe, but not a troll.

It is neat. It proves the old adage, which I just invented: If it is possible, some programmer will do it.

I'm interested in the sociology of this. Is it possible that the executives at Google did not realize that they were offering a free place to put backups of encrypted files?

That's a suggestion for the Google file system shell. There should be automatic encryption, using a locally stored password. Didn't the Google executives realize that most of the data will not be useful to them, because it will be encrypted? I hope I never see a Google ad for Ö|tè&~1}¥bkä40e)Æ&#243 ;G.

For many people, safe storage is much more interesting than yet another email account. Of course, everything in the entire world should be free, not just information.

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U.S. Gov.: Borrowing money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 billion.

"Correct. However, having a gi-normous, constantly-growing deficit is not." (I agree with that.)

Is that word gi-normous similar in meaning to huge-gantic?

U.S. Government: Borrowing money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 billion.

I agree that Michael Moore sometimes has an objectionable way of presenting material. But, as you are doing, many people talk about Michael Moore instead of talking about the huge amount of corruption he tries to document.

There is a huge, huge amount of material. Here are reviews of 35 books that say the same thing as Michael Moore. You can have the same message presented in a learned way, or a funny way, or a typically Republican way, or a journalistic way: Unprecedented Corruption: A guide to conflict of interest in the U.S. government

Here is just a little hint of the corruption: Bush borrows money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 billion. When Saudis attack, invade Iraq?

Here's another hint: George W. Bush's brother was shown in a lawsuit deposition on 20/20 talking about his prostitutes and using government influence to make money. Family values?

Here's another hint: The U.S. government has engaged in 24 wars since WW2: The system of violence works by creating fear so rich people can profit.

Here's another hint: Did you see the network footage of George W. Bush holding hands with a Saudi man the Bush family knows as "Bandar Bush"? Since it was Saudis who attacked on 9/11, why did Bush invade Iraq. Was it partly a smokescreen to get attention away from the Saudis?

This is not a major story. It is just meant to be a local story. For example, see this 2002 story: Secrets of Aids 'immunity'. Here is a quote, "Scientists have known since the mid-1980s that some people with HIV do not go on to develop Aids."

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Bush borrows money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 billion. When Saudis attack, invade Iraq?

This is not a major story. It is just meant to be a local story. For example, see this 2002 story: Secrets of Aids 'immunity'. Here is a quote, "Scientists have known since the mid-1980s that some people with HIV do not go on to develop Aids."

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Bush borrows money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 billion. When Saudis attack, invade Iraq?

Someone thought of using Jojoba seeds for biofuel. However, after giving the Jojoba plant enough water to grow fast, the resulting product was too expensive and too slow-growing.

So, I was skeptical about this plant until I read more. This plant is different. It's a tropical plant, where presumably there is enough water.

See the Jatropha curcas description and cost and photo. The Jatropha System explains the advantages.

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U.S. Gov.: Borrowing money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 Billion.

I agree. That's a shocking conclusion, however, because business owners are usually a higher proportion of Republicans. Do Republicans in Crawford know something we don't know?

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U.S. Gov.: Borrowing money to kill Iraqis. 140 billion borrowed. With interest, you pay 200 Billion.

Kerry moves that much closer to socialism with increased Nationalistic moves towards our boundaries with jobs and trade, increased taxes, and far too many government spending programs that we just don't need

I can think of a "government spending program" that the world surely don't need...

It isn't this kind of money I bet.

also, good thing for the Bush regime that lying to the American people isn't considered to be perjury, or Gitmo would be holding mssers Bush, Cheney, Powell, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith et al...

despite the legal spinning and political bs, the facts remain:

Clinton lied about a blowjob in the Oval Office--total monetary cost to the American people--$80 Million

Bush lied about the 'clear and present danger' of Saddam Hussein--total monetary cost to the American people: $130 Billion and growing

hope you're getting your money's worth!

If you have older computers lying around, fix 'em up and donate them to local families who have family in the war.

Yes, preferably with Linux installed and the browser's homepage preset to this.

Is he a relative of yours? What gives you the right to say his live is an acceptable cost? Would you be okay with your father / brother / uncle being in that position? If so you're a very unique person - most people I know would be furious with that.

And by using a crystal ball you discern that American women would be wearing Burkas if Baby Bush didn't invade? Where did you get your crystal ball from? The GW Bush fan club?

Look at it this way for a moment. And ponder how many lives have really been saved by the war in Iraq, compared to how many lives could have been saved by spending that money elsewhere. What is the opportunity cost

$200B/250m = ~$800 for each man woman and child. (That's the total USA cost of the war so far, divided by the population of the USA.)

While the number is outrageous, I think yours is a little high.

Cost Of War

Which means we could have spent over $4000 per person relocating every citizen of Iraq to Someplace Else.

Iraq

You'll have to forgive the Iraqis if they aren't yet jumping for joy about the open source revolution; they may have other things on their minds right now.

Ahahahahaa, so I guess you love your own post the best?

Goddammit, 117 billion dollars down the fucking Iraq drain (wait, most of it goes to Halliburton), that's 400 bucks for every citizen of the USA.

So you got a job? Feeling secure in it? I guess so, otherwise you'd not be living in this fantasy world where GWB is a good president.

I think that the links provided could be more relavant.

Ah, but we CAN put a price on freedom! In fact, I think the going rate is about $111 billion.

And the value of love? Billions. In fact, even gay love is worth $16.8 billion.

So fear not - our capitalist society can put a price on EVERYTHING!

The Internet functions like a jungle full of ninjas. If an unsuspecting user walks through there and gets assaulted by a ninja, her complaint might be "But that's illegal!" right before her head is separated from her body. In order to catch a ninja, you have to be a ninja -- you have to swing through the trees with the greatest of ease and slice his head off. To survive without being a ninja, you put on a massive suit of armor so that it's harder to slice your head off. It can still happen, though, so you need to know how to use your armor.

I'm being overly dramatic and overly metaphorical, so I'll make it simple:

You CANNOT stop spam, viruses, worms, phreaks, spyware, hacks, cracks, modchips, reverse engineering, social engineering, or DOS attacks by making them illegal. I'm not saying that all of them should be legal, just that our tax dollars should not go to writing laws about them.

You can ONLY stop these things by educating people on how to not get hurt by them. Because they are all a confidence game on the user's computer, and on the user themself, they can all be prevented, but only by intelligent users.

Our tax dollars should go to educating people about how to not get hit by these things. Every school should be given funds to educate children in such things as programming/scripting (the basics of which go hand-in-hand with what they're learning in math), security, the basics of how to generally use software (like how to use any email client, not just Outlook Express or Hotmail) as well as things like open source/Linux (teaches them something they can take home without begging mommy and daddy to spend $20-$200 on a new piece of software)...

Even outside of schools, people should know that you don't just go download some new piece of software just because it looks cool and some friend told you about it. You go online and look it up, find out how many people are using it and what they think of it, whether the company that made it is trustworthy, whether there's an open source alternative, and so on. If you still want to try it and it doesn't look trustworthy, you run it in an untrusted user account, throwaway wine setup, chrooted environment, usermode linux, or throwaway computer.

People should know what a web browser / email client is and why you need to use one that is standards-compliant and secure. They should know how to set up sandboxes to play with potentially unsafe stuff. They should know how to use PGP, or at least why they care. They should know that it doesn't matter who they are or how unimportant their stuff is, someone wants to break into their computer, especially if it's easy.

What's more, We have the money. We just have to spend it on the right things.

A couple items caught my attention.

This is actually done with PREVENTION in mind. Given an existing legitamite threat, this is well-spent money. This isn't just anti-terror, as nations like North Korea are perfectly capable of this level of threat, and wouldn't be without an excuse to excercise it (Bush's infamous "axis of evil" comment?).

I've not been a fan of how much or even how we've been spending to fight terror (see http://www.costofwar.com for what else we could have bought), but I would consider with what information and resources American enemies have that I'm not opposed to spending my tax dollars on such a program.

Yes, obviously we'd have to be nuked for this to pay off directly for us. However, in the case of such an incident, it'd be tremendous if we didn't run around like chickens with their heads detached. There were some lessons learned in 9/11 that are worth recalling.

You must not be an American, because if you were you'd know that the Republicans have all but erased any semblance of a surplus that Clinton left us with.

Sure, many economists believe that in a faltering economy it is the government's responsibility to increase spending to "pick up the slack", but Bush has gotten out of control, spending $100B+ on war (apparently it costs San Francisco about $284M alone). Not to mention the human cost of course.

And, oh, the war did bring some great amount of wealth to America. In the form of contracts to big American corporations. So altruistic.

So running a deficit isn't a big deal, as long as you have good credit and you can finance the interest (or equivalent). It doesn't seem that Bush is doing us any favors by running up a deficit and hurting our credibility globally.

I'd say that it's with your first point that your argument falls apart. If the US were really concerned with defense, they would post their troops along the border instead of in Iraq. They would be building the missile-defense shield and researching other ways of automating defense instead of researching tactical-nuclear bunker-busters and high-speed mobile artillery units and rail-guns for battleships (battleships?). While the US military has had a few primarily defensive projects in its current incarnation, it has always been an offensive force. The Soviet-era offense=defense argument no longer holds, and probably never did.

At any rate, huge standing armies haven't been necessary since the fall of the Soviet Union; and it's beginning to become clear that they weren't really that necessary/effective before then either. The USSR could have wiped us all out with the contents of one of their germ labs alone.

It was our nuclear arsenal that deterred them, but they had one of those too: MAD. MAD should really stand for Mutually Assured Defense (Spending) since that's really what both the US and the USSR got out of it: an easy way to scare their populations into huge taxes to support a massively bloated "defense" bureaucracy.

There's a common myth that it was the huge military budget of the USSR that did them in. In reality, they spent *far* less than we did and ended up with pretty similar capabilities. It was the lack of a vibrant private sector that ended up stimulating the collapse.

Capitalism killed the USSR; the military just kept them at bay. Regan could have said "I'm going to bankrupt the USSR by building toasters" instead of tanks and the end result would have been the same. In fact, it probably would have happened sooner. The breakaway republics that began the fall of the Soviet Union were no longer interested in the "protection racket" of the USSR and were equally unafraid of the US; they just wanted the Russians off their backs.

Now that we're dealing with nation-states and groups that have little to nothing to lose by threatening us, the nuclear threat won't keep them at bay. The threat of having US soldiers in their homelands doesn't seem to deter them, either; in fact, it just pisses them off even more. Worse, it pisses off the Americans who have to pay absurd taxes to ship those troops over there and maintain them and watch them kill children or die every night on the news. The US military has been largely ineffective in deterring attacks on the US lately. Conventional military forces create more terrorists than they kill. Just ask Israel.

National defense is a negative sum game, the point is to minimize loss, not to eliminate it.

Sure, but what's the easiest way to minimize loss? How much loss has been *minimized* by spending $100 billion in Iraq? I'd argue none. In any case, it hasn't paid for itself and probably won't ever. Sometimes it's cheaper/better *not* to act than to blindly throw money at the military out of fear. Worst case is we lose access to a few oilfields on the other side of the globe that were being kept by some puppet regime that we set up anyways. Or, you know, maybe Israel has to begin to play nice with all of it's neighbors who hate it instead of trying to unilaterally dominate the politics/economy of the region. Either way, I don't care.

Wrt wealth, you'll notice that's why I used the correct term: capital.

``The World Health Organization (WHO) and other UN bodies estimate the cost of providing treatment and prevention services in developing countries for tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and malaria at $12 billion a year '' (The Black Vault).

I happen to agree with you, that we could cut other, far more expensive programs and do a lot more good. Cut corporate welfare, cut fat contracts to Halliburton (who has previously been convicted of embezzling millions in government funds), cut spending on weapons the military say they don't need simply because it gives money to some senator's constituents.

Hell, if we took the billions spent on ousting Saddam and spent them on providing humanitarian aid around the world (see how far it could go), I don't think there would be very many terrorists still out to get us, and I doubt they'd have nearly as much support.

So yeah. I think you're right about priorities. But saying we could cut other programs instead doesn't mean a thing. That money could be doing far more good--in terms of concrete improvements like health care and food as well as abstracts like literacy and education--than it does now.

And despite it all, I do like the space program.

The 12 days of christmas are up 18.8 percent from the last year because of a war in Iraq, and horrible Bush spending this year. Rub that together with the greedy marketing guys everywhere, and you have increases accross the board. The psychology of parenting is such that most people will attempt to provide the best possible Christmas or Haunnukah for their loved ones, even if it means they spent 20% extra this year, and even if it killed them, their credit rating or family doing so.

Cost of operations in Iraq so far: $85.38B and growing.

Gotta love this countries priorities.

"If you don't like their politics, kill them."

That is the least sophisticated way of relating to other people. No money for fixing things, or making things better in advance, and billions for violence.

For all those in the U.S. who wanted a war: Was killing Arabs as satisfying as you thought it would be? Are you happy with the cost? Is $1,000 per second and $4 billion per month okay with you? Did you have no other plans for the money that comes out of your pocket?

The U.S. has a long history of aggression in the Middle East. But when Arabs also decide that aggression is a way to solve problems, is that totally different? Should Arabs be happy to be killed by such superior people as Americans? Should they be grateful that the Americans, who believe they know what is right for the world, are forcing them to learn American political convictions?

Plus an unbudgeted couple of hundred billion (give or take, after all, who's counting?) in Iraq.

Error in your sig. Should read:

"There is a terrorist behind every Bush." And in front of, and to the side of him and his business associates. Weapons and petroleum give the easy profits. But there is no need for weapons unless someone can be found to be an enemy.

For all those in the U.S. who wanted a war: Was killing Arabs as satisfying as you thought it would be? Are you happy with the cost? Is $1,000 per second and $4 billion per month okay with you? Did you have no other plans for the money that comes out of your pocket?

The U.S. has a long history of aggression in the Middle East. But when Arabs also decide that aggression is a way to solve problems, is that totally different? Should Arabs be happy to be killed by such superiour people as Americans? Should they be grateful that the Americans, who believe they know what is right for the world, are forcing them to learn American political convictions?

Because when the planet killer starts to light up the sky, in the few remaining seconds/minutes/hours/days/months of our life, we can say "Why oh why didn't we give some more money to these guys instead of paying $70 billion so that Haliburton could build some more oil pipelines?"

(In Iraq, that is) is approaching $70 billion as I type. How much are we spending on finding, let alone planning to deal with, the real Weapon of Mass Destruction that the cosmos will - not might, will - lob at us sooner or later?

I'm just picturing Stacey Implants on Fox whooping and flashing her brights because we've assassinated Saddam bin Laden's great grandkids and Saved Civilization Yet Again, just as the planet killer is nuzzling it's way inside lunar orbit. Shudder.

According to www.costofwar.com, the estimated cost so far is at the moment almost $68 billion, though quite a big part of it is the future interest payments. The cost of the occupation is $4 billion a month ($6 billion with all the interests included), as Rumsfeld stated in a reply to the Congress. The $100 billion line will be reached quite soon...