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" it costs the USA a lot more to get any measure of military might since it does not have a conscripted military"

Your military ignorance is showing. Modern war doesn't need a rotating pool of short timer cannon fodder. Modern war needs highly experienced fighters and technicians, MANY technicians. The last time the US tried conscription it was far worse than a failure, it was severely counterproductive. The All Volunteer Force (one of Donald Rumsfeld's notable accomplishments, not that anyone remembers his first time in office) was key in transitioning from the demoralized Hollow Force era to the skilled, experienced volunteers who fought Desert Storm and subsequent conflicts. It takes longer than a mere two or four year enlistment to make a skilled (for example) aircraft maintainer. Prime time in service for the people who get shit done is second or third enlistment. Junior and mid-grade NCOs are the backbone of the military.

Col. Heinl (RIP) was a highly respected Marine historian. This is what conscription got the US: https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~...

Mandatory national service for the US is a self-destructive idea.
There was a reason we needed LARGE military jails during the Viet Nam War.

An an Air Force NCO (1981-2007), I don't want the average POS off the street running to the AF recruiter because they are scared of conscription to become cannon fodder. It happened before and it sucked. Drug and discpline problems were rife in the old Hollow Force.

Who wants national defense depending on people who resent having the job?

National service would be a resource hog that would not address the need for retaining mid-level technicians and supervisors. It would take money away from force enhancement to sustain a rotating pool of low level troops who would haul ass out the gate after soaking up vital training time.

The volunteer force works well. Let's keep it that way.

A reminder of How Things Really Worked:

http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/Vietnam/heinl.html

Everyone knows that an argument from appeal to popular opinion is invalid. http://pages.csam.montclair.edu/~benham/funstuff/logical.html

He had doubts about God ...

Indeed. See his later books like Letters from the Earth and The Mysterious Stranger Manuscripts (claymation here).

Twain also disliked sending Christian missionaries to Africa.

Oh I think that's putting it rather lightly. After reading about Twain's efforts to in King Leopold's Ghost, I read Twain's King Leopold's Soliloquy: A Defense of His Congo Rule in which Twain rips the Belgian King Leopold II apart (in my opinion the farce Twain made of Leopold is better than the more direct Crime of the Congo by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle). We seem to think that human rights and anthropology are modern day efforts when historically artists like Twain were very politically active and quite in tune with the truths of corrupt governments (the United States notwithstanding).

I assure you that in Twain's mind at the time of his death, he had many issues that he held from his writings -- most likely because he felt we weren't ready for that level of truth yet. Really the only question for me is whether or not he still felt the need to drench these memoirs in satire and wit when a hundred years from then he can just out and out straight to your face tell you what he feels as he recounts his life. I'd imagine he knew that saying some of this stuff one hundred years ago would be career ending or life threatening ... and not until those involved, lampooned and criticized are long gone would the world be ready for this. This will most likely prove to be a delicious read indeed.

We'll randomly select a number of universities to read the key points of the law, and submit one question each to the congress

I like your idea, but it only moves the problem elsewhere — I wouldn't necessarily trust the universities over the law-makers. The "correct" answer may depend strongly on the question being asked. For example, preparing the questionnaire for the recent Afghan "surge" legislation, a University could ask something like (see? both .edu-links):

• Do you support killing innocent Afghanis so that Haliburton gets to own a trans-Afghanistan oil pipeline?

Like it or not, legislating is the job of the elected legislators — we just have to pay more attention to their passing laws, we don't approve of...

if you vote for a bad law, you won't be able to say "golly, I didn't know"

Such "not knowing" ought to be a disqualification in itself... If it is not, then the electorate is stupid, not the politician. Relying on some Universities to rephrase the bills into multiple-choice questions is not going to solve the underlying problem... Unfortunately...

Well it's no longer rated funny :).

Maybe it's because most US people don't know that Iraq was considered an ally (or at least a useful tool) of the USA before Iraq invaded Kuwait.

The USA was amongst the many countries supplying Iraq in the Iran-Iraq war.

http://www.unobserver.com/index.php?pagina=layout5.php&id=815&blz=1

After the Iran-Iraq war was over, Saddam even spoke to the US ambassador and complained about Kuwait.

And the US ambassador (April Glaspie) said: "I think I understand this. I have lived here for years. I admire your extraordinary efforts to rebuild your country. I know you need funds. We understand that and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country. But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait.

I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 60's. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction. We hope you can solve this problem using any suitable methods via Klibi or via President Mubarak. All that we hope is that these issues are solved quickly. With regard to all of this, can I ask you to see how the issue appears to us? "

http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/glaspie.html

After that discussion, how was Saddam to know that the USA would be against them in that war? Don't forget the US actually supported them in their war against Iran.

So the Iraq-Kuwait war began, and then the USA came and smacked Iraq.

And this is how the coins go round, out of your pockets and into certain people's pockets :).

"There are good reasons to have a draft"

Such as?

I'm too lazy to parapharase this post I made elsewhere, so I'll just edit to reflect retiring recently:

Rant mode on:
My opinion as a 26-year Air Force NCO is that a return to conscription will cost lives for nothing, would be a financial disaster, weaken the armed forces, not build any sort of (positive) shared national identity among the victims, and otherwise is a terrible idea.
Conscription instantly builds justifiable, bitter resentment among the tiny minority of victims. By the time you filter the physically and mentally fit out of the pool, you have an even smaller slice of the youth population. Not being totally stupid, some of these folks wake up to the fact that THEIR sacrifice is to appease some other fellows desire for SHARED sacrifice, whatever THAT is. These bitter humans form a pool of first-termers who will not re-enlist. Guess where the investment in training them went? Out the gate along with their ability to train brand new people, who must suffer learning by (KABOOM!) experience instead of mentoring.
Training the rotating victim pool falls to the career enlisted, who are exhausted thereby, and saddened at the deterioration of the military they had worked so hard to build. More career people quit...depleting the mid-career ranks, later depleting the senior ranks...
The blast radius of this stupidity isn't limited to Army units. Conscription was famous for scaring those unwilling to be bullet catchers into the Air Force and Navy. I came in a few years after the draft ended, but the horror stories were still fresh and I believe them. Drug use (not healthy for quality aircraft maintenance or fighting aircraft carrier fires...Forrestal, cough, cough..), discipline problems (hard to threaten someone who WANTS to be discharged!), morale in the shitter, you name it.
Effectiveness goes down, costs go up, waste goes up, experience goes away, and the downward spiral goes on unless a Ronald Regan shows up to un-fuck it.
Rich folk still dodge service as they always have and always will, because there is no SOCIAL censure for doing so. Poor folks who don't want to be there, led by inexperienced supervisors, die and are wounded in greater quantities than in the highly effective Volunteer Force. Surviving conscripts, shanghaied by a government that took them, fucked them, and chucked them end up homeless and ruined, just like the last time.
World War II is over, and that massive level of shared service is not economically supportable or necessary or intelligent due to technology. Army service is not a viable substitute for parenting either, because the kind of harsh discipline that is necessary to control the actively unwilling no longer exists and the public will not tolerate it. Society has changed, and I respectfully submit that proponents of conscription either have no clue or deliberately want it as a spoiler to damage the military.
Consider the Volunteer Force. It rebuilt itself during the 1980s into an effective war machine, won the (conventional) Gulf War battles with minimum loss and impressive speed, withstood the first drawdown, and is doing surprisingly well at simultaneously managing drawdown/transformation/the mess in Iraq.
Do we REALLY want to toss conscripts into the mix? Why would putting less-committed, less-professional, less-trained people into incredibly stressful situations be better for anyone?
Anyone out there with substantial recent US military experience favor a draft? Very few I've heard from.
The lessons of conscription have been learned.
Read and heed:

http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/Vietnam/heinl.html

"The all volunteer force is supposed to give us professional, dedicated warriors. But it doesn't seem to work out that way."

It give you mostly professional, dedicated warriors, but they are still ordinary humans. The lessons of conscription have been learned. Enjoy:

http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/Vietnam/heinl.html

a person who can use Word 97 will have little difficulty adapting to Word 2007

Oh great smart one, having been stuck using the wrong printer, is there a way in Word 2007 to select a printer other than the default? We have a Vista Machine and are still resorting to changing the default printer to change printers. Somethings are not easly found in Word 2007. It's my Wife's machine. I had to do a Google search to find you use the big round Icon in the upper left corner to find the print menu.
http://oit.montclair.edu/documentationpdf/Word_2007_Intro.pdf

In any other GUI word processor Windows and otherwise, finding the print menu is easy and mostly in the same place.

Well at least you guys had Saddam well trained enough that he did ask permission to invade Kuwait. Just too bad for Saddam that you bastards weren't honest and told him that you would be mad if he did attack Kuwait instead of egging him on.
I mean he did ask the USA ambassador for permission and you could of said no.
Here is a transcript
http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/glaspie .html
Too bad that Saddam trusted America. Pretty fucking stupid, he died for trusting the US of A.
Oh, I consider obscene profits to be when the CEO of Exxon retires with 1/2 a billion dollars of payment to be obscene.
(ok, it was only $400 million)

About Cambodja, either you are lying, or you need to study more ... North Vietnam and China supported Pol Pot, not the US, sir.

Actually, you're the one full of bullshit here. The US not only suspected that their bombing of Cambodia would push Pol Pot to the top, but they actually expressed a desire for this in intelligence documents. The UN was falling over itself to accommodate him. Even decades later, they still hold a soft spot for the Khmer Rouge, so that activists such as John Pilger can say:

I watched Khmer Rouge officials welcomed back to Phnom Penh by U.N. officials who went to astonishing lengths not to offend them. Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot's henchman who once said that the only mistake the Khmer Rouge had made was not killing enough people, took the salute of U.S. and other U.N. troops as a guest of honor on United Nations Day in Phnom Penh.

It's true that at certain points, the North Vietnamese also supported Pol Pot. But that in no way means that the US didn't support him. They protected him politically ( the legacy of which we see in the above quote ), and also gave him weapons:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/US_ThirdWorld/US _PolPot.html
http://www.zmag.org/zmag/articles/hermansept97.htm
http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/pol/pol potmontclarion0498.html

This is certainly no secret ...

After Vietnam fell, all of Indochina fell together to communism. Living standards dropped as usual, millions were executed.

Well, firstly, Indochina didn't fall to communism. Parts of it fell to state capitalism. And yes, under this system, living standards drop 'as usual'. The state is far better at oppressing workers than individual capitalists.

And today, southeast asian states who didn' become communist have orders of magnitude better living standards than those who choose the route to communism.

Well, as I already pointed out, they didn't turn to communism, but state capitalism. If they looked like they were evolving to communism, they would get the US up their arse as fast as Russia did in 1918, or Vietnam did many years later.

Funny thing is that the anti-protesters at that time, always failed to condemn the soviet and chinese support of the north Vietnamese,

That's because the biggest villain was the US. Sure, there were lesser villains, but you have to concentrate on the biggest one, to ease the suffering of the innocent people who were under attack from both the US, and their own governments. But the US was always leading the way in attacks on innocent people, so that's what people rallied around.

just like you today pretend that IRAN is not behind the terrorist attacks in Iraq.

Don't be fucking absurd! It was the US who launched the terrorist attacks on Iraq, NOT Iran. Iran has always SUPPORTED Iraq in this war.

but the Iraq people could be a lot better, and the US troops could have been gone home for a long time, if it weren't for the direct participation of Iran and Siria national in the insurgency

What Iran and others do have nothing to do with the length of the occupation, just as they had nothing to do with the invasion. The US and their coalition of the killing intend to stay in Iraq as long as politically and economically possible - no shorter. This was always their plan, and they are executing it perfectly.

The massive participation of Iraqis on the last election show that they are relieved of bei

I hadn't heard of techtown, but as soon as you mentioned Wayne State, I knew who the brainchild was .....

WSU is very, very lucky to have Dr. Reid as their President. That's a guy with vision. And boy, does he love his technology!

We were sorry to see him leave in '97, but all of the good things that have happened at Montclair State in the last 10 years were from his vision.

Good luck Dr. Reid, glad to see you're still pushing the envelope!

Why is an ID card a scheme to spy on people? Do you want them to take you to the police station and interrogate you to see whether you actually are a citizen of the US and that your papers aren't fake? Why don't you complain about, say, state issued driver's licenses or social security numbers? Those things are just made by the gov to spy on you, right? I mean, can't they just believe you when you tell them you have a driver's license?

Guess you didn't live in Soviet Russia where they required internal passports. You couldn't go from one town to another, heck you couldn't even walk aroung town, without your passport.

Collectivization

One more detail should be mentioned. An internal passport system was established in 1932 to control the mobility of labor and to prevent peasants from deserting collective farms. Most peasants did not receive passports, they were permanently attached to the land. This administrative move was, effectively, the reestablishment of serfdom.

Comparing very poor French farms (visited in late 1950's) with the state farms in Poland (where I worked one month each summer in early 1950's) I can say, without hesitation, that poor French peasants were much better off than typical agricultural workers on Polish state farms. My personal experience with Soviet collective farms goes back to the difficult period of WWII. Those who visited USSR in 1950's told me that the standard of living of Polish agricultural workers was much higher than that of their Soviet counterparts.

Is there any proof of that besides what came from the Iraqi regime?

sigh... Arguing that Bush Senior gave (or hinted) permission for Saddam to invade Kuwait is untrue. The nature of the conlict between Iraq and Kuweit at the time was related to two issues:

a. Loans given to help Iraq fight the Iraq-Iran war, and whose payment threathened to bankrupt the Iraqi economy.
b. Kuwaiti slant-drilling which relates to the actual 'border dispute' in question (see: http://www.crsk.org/un.htm). This was the 'border dispute' Glaspie refered to and it had nothing to do with later Iraqi claims on Kuwait. (As far as the Kuwaitis were concenered they 'stole back' their own oil from territory Iraq shouldn't have occupied in the first place. Iraq, unsurpisingly, disagreed). Various excerpts of the Glaspie-Hussein meeting were available on the internet for a long time, e.g. : http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/glaspie .html . I suggest you read them to get a better picture.

I read it in a quaint text file written on a dead tree. Linky link.

But, a bit of googling did help me find a related study (sorry for the PDF).

Reading the source document PATRIOT Act instead of reading something about the PATRIOT Act written by an organization seeking funds for more Brie & Strawberry parties.

Reading the source document EO 9066 and visiting Manzanar everytime they cruise so quickly by it on their way to Mammoth or Tahoe to smoke dope, drink mundane beer and surf the slopes.

Reading Alexander Solzhenitsyn's account of the Soviet Gulag

(McCarthy && HUAC) != any americans shot, tortured, exiled, imprisoned, etc

(McCarthy && HUAC) != Cuban Isle of Pines

BTW, if there is another 9/11 then I have no doubt that it will get much worse than the Holocaust ... Gen. Franks Doubts Constitution Will Survive WMD Attack ... I hope the innocent vicitims caught in the net will have exercised their Second Amendment Rights. Will you be their beside them VIOLENTLY DEFENDING their rights or will you bleat like a sheep thinking they deserve to be herded into Camps because they happen to be the same ethnic group as the terrorists and they also compete for your script kiddy programmer job.

No illusions about the outcome of the VIOLENT DEFENSE of rights ... read about the Warsaw Ghetto

• 238 Pu (1%)
• 239 Pu (58%)
• 240 Pu (27%)
• 241 Pu (9%)
• 242 Pu (5%)

You can't beat an army with a stronger will and with greater numbers. It's why the US lost in Vietnam...

Single Vendor Support.

Hardware, software, servers. All one phone number.

It matters. Anyone who says it doesn't has too much free time on their hands.

A Sun system breaks, great, you call Sun, they come out and fix it. Then, if it was the HD that failed, you type "boot net - install", come back in an hour, and you have a fully working machine.

Besides this, if done right, a Sun lab is a "WOW!" factor.

When I attended Montclair State University, most labs were PC & Mac. We had one SPARC lab -- SPARCstation 5's & 20's.

That was the "WOW" lab. Whenever the Dean needed to take someone on a tour, that was the lab they stopped in.

And I have to tell you, as an undergraduate, it was DAMNED cool to work on Sun workstations ...

Forget that KDE/GNOME/whatever bullshit argument. CS students will use whatever they have. It's *GOOD* for them to get exposed to other environments, whether it be OpenWindows/CDE (as it was in my day... Solaris 2.5.1) or CDE/GNOME or whatever.

A desktop is a desktop. Forget this "it's familiar" or "it's easy" bullshit.

What difference does the desktop interface make to people who are majoring in CS?

If it does, they should reexamine why they're there.

From reading the comments, I've realized that few Slashdot commenters know much about the history that leads to the present war in Iraq. So, here is a very short recounting. The details given here have been reported by many reputable news sources. There seems to be no disagreement about these facts.

All the actions by the U.S. government mentioned here were largely hidden from U.S. citizens. United States citizens paid the bill, but were mostly unaware of what their government was doing. Even though the U.S. government is presently at war with Iraq, only a small percentage of Americans can find Iraq on a map. It is said that a high percentage support the U.S. government's war in Iraq, but this is a blind kind of support that does not mean that there is comprehension.

Thread 1, Iran: Hidden elements of the U.S. government overthrew a democratically elected president of Iran (Mossadegh) because he wanted to reduce the profits of U.S. and British oil companies doing business in Iran. The U.S. government supported a very weak man, the Shah of Iran, who became very brutal toward his own citizens. Eventually, people in Iraq overthrew the Shah. The U.S. government's actions de-stabilized the country and encouraged the violence to come.

People in Iran began supporting terrorism against the United States, in retaliaton for hidden U.S. government interference with the Iranian government.

To counteract Iranian support of violence against the U.S., the U.S. goverment began supporting and encouraging Iraq in a war against Iran. This was very profitable for U.S. weapons manufacturers. Weapons manufacturers in the U.S. were delivering weapons to Iraq under long-term contracts up until the same month as the U.S. began war on Iraq the first time.

April Glaspie, US Ambassador to Iraq, encouraged Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait. She said,

"I admire your extraordinary efforts to rebuild your country. I know you need funds. We understand that and our opinion is that you should have the opportunity to rebuild your country. But we have no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts, like your border disagreement with Kuwait." [my emphasis]

She also said, "I was in the American Embassy in Kuwait during the late 60's. The instruction we had during this period was that we should express no opinion on this issue and that the issue is not associated with America. James Baker has directed our official spokesmen to emphasize this instruction. [my emphasis]

Here is a complete transcript of the meeting between the U.S. ambassador and Saddam Hussein. (http://www.chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/glaspi e.html)

Ambassador Glaspie acted on instructions from Secretary of State James Baker, as she said. Later, she denied knowing that she was encouraging war. (Mr. Baker is a friend of George Bush and was later White House Chief of Staff.)

It is not known why the U.S. government would support Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. However, in the meeting mentioned above, April Glaspie said, "We have many Americans who would like to see the price [of oil] go above $25 because they come from oil-producing states."

The fortune of George H. W. Bush was heavily dependent on oil profits, and Texas is an oil-producing state. If the U.S. government is successful at gaining control of Iraq, profits for some companies in the U.S. will increase enormously because Iraqi oil will be sold directly to U.S. companies, rather than to Turkish companies, as it is now.

Thread #2, Afghanistan: There is a huge amount of oil in one of the countries inland from Afghanistan. However, the only good way to get the oil to people who would buy it is to build a pipeline through Afghanistan. The Soviets wanted to get

Elsewhere one can read about how, not suprisingly, our current mideast conflict has as much connection with oil as any in the past.

A Miata? Come on..

Oh, would you prefer this? Yuck!