Nominations for 2003 Vaporware Awards

spin2cool writes "Wired News is now accepting submissions for its fifth annual Vaporware Awards. These awards "celebrate all those eagerly anticipated gizmos that were put off, put away or quietly put down. And, of course, those that existed merely as a figment of someone's imagination."

Comments

Re:WMD detector

[edalytical]

WMD definitely fall into the category of things "that existed merely as a figment of someone's imagination."

Nanotechnology

[kautilya]

Refer to a random nanotechnology source. Pick a random word with nano (as in nanobot, nanomotor, nanogear etc) as its prefix. It will certainly qualify.

Re:Windows Longhorn

[mcSey921]

2009 is listed as "an outside chance" from some Gartner analyst. 50% 2006, 40% 2007 and an outside chance of 08-09. Not to defend M$, but Gartner Group doesn't make their release schedule.

Re:WMD detector

[nomadic]

Oh come on...it's easy to hide a few vials of anthrax or nerve gas, but it's not easy to store all the equipment needed to make it.

The administration said there were WMDs. They said they knew where they were. They lied.

Re:Iraqi WMDs!

[mcc]

Man, it is going to be SOOOO much fun watching you guys when we begin to uncover cache after cache after cache.

The "there are no WMDs" line is not the message.

The message is, secondarily, "Saddam was not a real or credible threat to the U.S. or its interests". Primarily, the message is this: "Regardless of the 'just'ness of this war, George Bush acted wrongly in initiating it. He acted wrongly in rejecting the real, basic, and relatively quick diplomatic solutions to the problem he claimed to be going to war to solve. He acted wrongly in not only going against the will of, but actively flipping off the United Nations, finally and unquestionably destroying the convention that we have tried to hold since the end of WW2 that countries don't just go invading other countries just because they feel like it, even if those other countries are "bad". And he acted wrongly in brazenly, openly lying to the people of the United States and the entire world about his reasons for going to war."

The "there are no WMDs" line is just icing. It's a "isn't this pathetic, not ONLY was Saddam not a real or credible threat to the U.S. back before the war when we THOUGHT he had WMDs, he didn't even HAVE WMDs". If you want to claim Saddam having WMDs would be automatic proof he was a threat, let me put it to you this way: I know where to find the WMDs. No, really, I do. I know where they are. I'll tell you: They're in North Korea.

I wonder how many ways you'll be able to say: Yeah, but America still sucks and I hate George Bush.

Probably the same way that Bush supporters manage to find so many ways (when it's the better part of a year now and there's still no credible reason why the U.S. went to Iraq except to be the world's unilateral playground monitor) to say: Bush didn't lie to us.

Besides, there are so many excellent reasons to hate George Bush, and only a portion of them have anything to do with Iraq.

Re:WMD detector

[GSloop]

Set this in context of what was accused... ...by the president in his State of the Union message. Anyone who listened to that speech would now reasonably expect our forces to be finding "25,000 liters" of anthrax, "38,000 liters" of botulinum toxin, "500 tons" of sarin,
mustard and VX nerve agent, and "29,984" munitions capable of delivering chemical agents -- along with a hidden nuclear weapons industry.

If these were "realistic" estimates of what Saddam had, and they were being honest about it, it's certainly not the kind of thing one smuggles out of the country under your shirt or hidden in your trousers. It's not the quantity that can be easily and quickly destroyed, especially without
notice.

So, was the imagery intentially deceptive? Was it intended to simply have shock value?

If these weapons DID exist, which, given the other statements and the credibility of the administrations, I don't believe they did - again, if they did, where are they now?

We'd better hope either that there were NONE, of that if there were, that we find them. Because if there were and we don't, then the only answer is "we don't know who has them."

Since the war was basically conducted to prevent the transfer of WMD to "bad-guys" or terrorists, then the very objective we used to promote the war was the outcome of it.

Frankly, IMHO, the President gave the whole world a bill of goods that was a total crock. The was was not justifiable on the WMD grounds. What might be a reasonable justification was the brutal dictator himself.

Yet to play that card, one would have to account for the US's part in arming and looking the other way when he did the dirty work for us. (Like attacking Iran and using WMD, which we provided intelligence data to make it more effective.) We forget how the US encouraged the Shia and Kurds to rise up against Saddam and then let them get cut down like wheat.

No, going to war against Iraq on humanitarian grounds wouldn't sell, certainly not for the hawks in this administration. And if we go to war on humanitarian grounds, then why was Bush so opposed to our involvement in Bosnia and the other conflicts around Serbia?

Oh, BTW, the assertion that the WMD could be in Syria doesn't fly. If the sat intelligence as Powell showed it, could supposedly pinpoint the presence of WMD so cleanly and clearly, then sending it to Syria wouldn't work either.

Cheers,
Greg

The US gave them the WMD

[Offwhite98]

The US gave them the technology for missiles and the germ and gas WMD decades ago. The proof as I have heard some joke, the US simply kept the reciepts. The US has benefitted from providing weapons for wars in Iraq and Afganistan. The US provided weapons to Afganistan to fight the Soviets and to Iraq to fight Iran. That is a lot of blood on our hands as Americans and I wish people were not so shortsighted about it. I hear my friends say these terrorists simply hate us because the US is a successful world power, but they miss the point that these people have suffered greatly because of US policy to do whatever necessary to protect our monetary interests. The US will have to learn the peace should be the top US interest.

It's called a "bluff"...

[anactofgod]

There is a very simple explanation of why Saddam Hussein would have played the games he did with the UN weapon's inspectors and allowed the world to continue to think that he had developed WMD, when in fact he may have had none in any militarily significant quantities.

Any poker player could recognize the situation he was in. Saddam played what he thought was a very strong hand 12 years previously, anted up in a big way, and was called by US-led coalition forces. Now, he's stuck in the same game, with a much weaker hand, facing a very strong one, and he can't just fold. What would a poker player do? Bluff, of course!

The most reasonable explanation I have been able to develop was that Saddam was trying to bluff his way out of a untenable situation. He cared not one whit about "bloodying America's nose", or being "seen as a martyr". He only cared about surviving an invasion by the US and maintaining his hold on power, in that order. The best way to survive an invasion is to prevent it from occurring in the first place.

If I were Saddam in 2001, I too would have postured that I had WMD, and the wherewithal to use them (established many years previously when he gassed his own population and the Iranians), in the hopes that that would change the equation for the US strategic planners. (For recent evidence of the effectiveness of this strategy, I give you North Korea.)

The facts that
(1) the Bush administration put our troops on the ground and went ahead with it's plans for invasion and
(2) Saddam did *not* use WMD in a last ditch defense even when he showed no restraint in the past

indicates to me that the simplest and most likely explanation is that not only did Iraq NOT have WMD in any militarily significant quantities, but our government knew that to be true, even when they were positing the opposite.

I have heard every whacked out theory on Saddam and the WMD, and some well thought out, but very convoluted ones, but surprisingly, never ONCE have I heard this very simple bluffing explanation put forth in the media. How can it be that no official "analyst" has thought of it?

---anactofgod---