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The Best and Worst Technologies of 2003?
Phoe6 asks: "Last year, at Hexadecimals discussion group we shared a news that Worst Technology of 2002 was TIA (Total Information Awareness by DARPA).
What is the Worst Technology of 2003? For the Best, Time Magazine seems to have adjudged Steve Jobs' iTunes as the Invention of 2003.
What are your ratings?"
let's make it two in a row...
I have a plan. Using mainly spoons, we'll tunnel our way out of the city...
I'll not saying best or worst though.
I really hate Dan Patrick.
Oh, the horror...
There's this thing called "two-point-six" or something that Bill keeps ranting about... I dunno... maybe that's it
((lambda x ((x))) (lambda x ((x))))
And the CVS now has AI diplomacy. All, right!
Slashdot: when news breaks, we give you the pieces.
... the pissing videogame from those kids at MIT
Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
Pan: SCO - do I need to list the reasons.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
I'd say the PowerMac G5. For one thing, its a completely new design internally, losing a lot of the legacy of old Mac OS machines. (Which they can do since they don't need to support a 20 year old BIOS or OS.) Another advancement is the attention spent on creating a case that can effectively, efficiently, and quietly cooling the new design.
So HTML colors and IPv6 are in. Decimal is ugly.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
Rutan's rocket ship! Broke the sound barrier in 2003, though it's suborbital spaceflight will be in 2004.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
It would have to be Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction! America actually fought a war against vaporware!
Apple iPod. Because of that I'm listening music 24/7 now... Too bad for my ears.
Iraq: war to save the U
While I agree that the Slashdot DDoS attack caused many people quite a bit of annoyance and frustration, I think leaving the impact at that is very short sighted.
Firstly, I don't think the blame for this DDoS can be centered on just one person or group. Obviously, those who attacked Slashdot are to blame, as are Slashdot's sysadmins, and the people at Arrowpoint. And secondly, the costs of this are much greater than you might think.
I have an eight year old daughter. We had a family pet - a rabbit, black, named Midnight, and my daughter was very fond of it. Midnight, sadly, passed away about two months ago. A week or two after Midnight died, my daughter came to me in tears and asked me, "Daddy, why won't God bring Midnight back? I've been praying like Deacon Simmons told me to."
Naturally, I had to think about how to respond to this. I finally answered, "well, honey, God is a little like Slashdot. He can seem arbitrary, cruel, and unresponsive, but he's really a nice guy who's just a little out of touch and is a little slow at responding to requessts."
This was fine, and I thought that would be the end of it. However, when Slashdot went down last week, my daughter burst into my den, positively sobbing and wailing, and managed to choke out "Daddy! Daddy! I can't get to Slashdot!" "Honey," I said, "it's just a website." But, between sobs, she said, "but you said God is just like Slashdot, remember? Does this mean God is dead?"
I tried to console her as best I could, but nothing seemed to work. When Slashdot came back up, she seemed to return to normal, but she hasn't been quite the same since. She doesn't ask me about God so much any more, and she seems less interested in Church.
As a good Christian, I will turn the other cheek, and not call for the punishment of those responsible. But to the heinous criminals and negligents responsible for this, I must ask, how do you feel about destroying a small girl's sense of innocence and wonder about the world? About crushing her childish dreams and idealism? About shattering her faith in God and his benevolence? About possibly having crushed her soul and emotion forever, leaving her to live the rest of her days in spiritual agony as a broken, scarred husk of a person?
I hope all of you think long and hard about what you've done. What is the soul of a child worth, next to a few double-checks of the router?
Thank you.
This has to be the least welcome technology to have come to the public's attention in 2003. Thanks alot, Diebold.
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The requested URL
its invented all the time, thats whats great about it
How about Serial ATA drives which became popular this year. It was about time that the old fashioned ribbon cables were replace with something more modern.
This is America, damnit. Speak Spanish!
...also known as "Beagle 2". I don't have to say which one this belongs to, do I?
This signature is intentionally left blank.
the iPod is the best invention that last 18 months.
Jonahweb.com has stuff.
Yahoo! Groups font choice!
Agh!
-Peter
Although I think this would belong more under an invention for 2002, it still gets my vote this year.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
Linux Kernel 2.6
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
Ok, technically it's not out this year, but they have started releasing beta copies to people.
Right before windows XP came out, the majority of home/business users were finally 'getting it' -- they were figuring out the filesystem, the menus, etc.
Then XP came out and turned their world upside down. Sure you can revert the theme and menus back to win2k, but I don't know anyone that has done that. Not to mention new features integrated into explorer, like CD burning and MP3 playing. Quite a steep learning curve for XP's majority users.
Longhorn is going to come out, and users buying a new Dell or Gateway will get it automatically. Sidebars, and SQL data storage? Their world will be turned upside down once again.
_______
2B1ASK1
Just to touch on the other topic posted here about DVD burners the fact that there is multiple formats out has got to be the worst. I don't think the VHS/BETA fight took this long to figure out a winner. One format would help everyone in the long run and its about time we got to it!
Make me your friend. All my friends get +1 modifier and I need friends :)
i would say most of the militaries technology has been rendered completley useless in a real war situation (as apposed to one made up in some hawks head) when with all that gear and satellites with 1m resolution they couldnt find any WMD (or traces) and having to resort to kicking peoples doors down to get fed with lies and personal scores
meanwhile the Iraqis are killing these technosavvy hi-tech super stealth armies with donkeys and 20$ homemade bombs
so yeah the worst technology this year is ALL OF IT
Electronic Voting run by Republicans.
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
It's too soon to judge the "worst technology of 2003". Whatever it is, we'll find out later, when the side-effects have made themselves known.
Probably it's some bio-tech invention we haven't heard about, which is going to render us all sterile and hairless, several years from now.
-kgj
-kgj
THIS is a link. Remember, links are HTML and are clickable in a web browser. Otherwise, it's just text.
Best: Sharp Zaurus 5x00SL series Linux PDA's.
Worst: Spammer Viruses
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
This is not in regard to quality (I think it's shoddy, but that's irrelevant). This is in regard to the amount of damage it will do to the computer industry. The number of competing products which will never see the light of day because of unfair competition. The millions of man-hours which will be spent in 2004 fixing its problems. Windows 2003 is my vote for the worst of 2003.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
suicide bombers of course,
they had more impact globally and financially changing more peoples lives than anything else
pretty effective if attention is your goal and an innovative way of applying old technology to modern problems
I was reading an article in a recent issue of DefenseNews recently where they were reporting that a lot of TIA isn't being scraped, it's being given over to private contractors to perform. The feds still think it's a wonderful idea to track everything we do, they just don't want to so directly involved for political reasons. Private companies are not subject to these sorts of pressures and have considerable leeway on how much tracking of customer information they perform. So DARPA is looking to them to do most of the work and simply provide the government with the processed information.
Remember folks, just because CNN says that TIA is over doesn't make it so, necessarily. The privacy vs. terrorist-defense war isn't over -- it's just beginning. And next time, the government won't be so bloody obvious about what it's trying to do.
GMD
watch this
Lemmie see if I got this straight. Inferior camera, none of the advantages of digital apply here, costs more than a disposable film camera.... what's the advantage again? Okay, I can see saving one use film strips, so it is 100% reusable, but that is the only benifit. OTOH, now that it can be hacked, there may be one benifit. A cheap digital that you can take in poor environemntal conditions and not feel bad about wrecking it. ALso, you can use it in situation where you know you will destroy it, such as taking close up pics of explosions, etc.
did you notice that the default parameters are "Male, looking for female aged 18-35"?
Without a doubt, that is the largest age spread I have seen on ANY dating service as the default. Oh, sure- some go 18-99, but that doesn't count.
What I'm talking about is how the average slashdotter would be happy with any girl who's legal and willing- but the cutoff is not where they're "too old" but when they're "too wrinkly"... Fuckin' nerds.
CmdrTaco's gently-used sex-toy emporium.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
It's not even gonna be out *next* year.. kinda like tapping Duke Nukem Forever as 2003 Game of the Year, innit?
=)
And as far as the Fischer-Price XP theme goes, every single install of XP I've ever done for myself and others gets instantly reverted to 'Classic' mode. My take is, it's a laptop, not a Speak-n-Spell.
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
Extensible Firmware Interface EFI
Worst technology introduced. MS/Intel
Replaces traditional PC BIOS and Consumer Rights simultaneously.
Best: All the Spam control software Worst: Spam, just keeps getting worse.
I'm just glad this year passed without further proliferation of those damned singing plastic fishes.
According to the TIA website, they've renamed the Total Information Awareness project, replacing Total with Terrorist... so I'll skip the political spin and just go along with the idea that this new name indicates a new technology not intended to spy on everyone, just bad people! Man, I'll sure sleep better knowing that.
When I was a child I dreamed of a future with a jet pack on my back. I would fly like Superman as I traveled around.
Now, as an adult I find out they want me to ride a scooter with big ugly wheels. Grrrrrrrr.....
Sleep is for the Weak
NO! I meant to say WORST invention of the year.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
Mozilla because I'm low on karma!
"Derp de derp."
Best: Super Model Cloning Kit
Worst: GE Bathtub Toaster ( fresh hot toast while you bathe )
it's flopping and flopping badly. of course, all those pictures of the president falling off of one were worth all the effort.
m.
I'd like to nominate the Longhorn hype machine for worst technology. All the press garnered by an OS we won't see until 2006 at the earliest is stupifying at best, and patently annoying at the worst.
Plus, with OS X Panther, I have 95%+ of the Longhorn "Innovation" today - tell me why I should wait three years?
Blogging Weight Loss, Distance Education, and more at verlin.com
Hardware central have a great review of the year here: http://www.hardwarecentral.com/hardwarecentral/edi torials/5139/1/
Personally I cant decide what I would class as the worst. There's plenty to praise and plenty to whine about.
It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.
No, not really.
Probably the completion of the human genome mapping.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
Remember the breakthrough that was supposed to compress random data to 10% of its size? I inquired and was given an unreadable prospectus and had a goon call me asking for an investment. I honestly felt threatened by the Sopranos-style approach of the caller. I called him Guido and bravely hung up the phone. Then watched my windows and doors for weeks.
If it were done when 'tis done, then t'were well it were done quickly... MacBeth
In any case, I think you were right, you got the year wrong, since it was released in 2002.
Hey, I left off a bullet item in my list:
Mencken had it right. So glad that's old news.
How about Total LACK of Information Awareness by SCO. Their "technology" is trying to kill open source.
Another awful invention was the Welchia/Nachi "fix" for the MSBlaster worm. I don't know what this person was thinking, but it was annoying as hell. I think it's supposed to die tomorrow, so it sneaks in under the wire.
Two more technologies that suck are spyware (I'm not sure when they were invented -- more like infected -- but they sure became annoying this year) and spam worms that hide their origin, send out adverts for penis enlargers, and oh yes DOS attack anti-spam crusaders. I hope these people die of hyper-penile growth.
Best technology? Well, I'm rather fond of the 2.6 kernel. I like the new KDE too.
There is one technology that is the worst of 2003. It has brought us unprecedented spam, loss of privacy, identity theft, pop-ups, a playground for the worst trolls, virus propagation, and some things that are downright ugly (such as www.aintitcoolnews.com). Without it, we would not have ever seen the likes of Goatse.
I'll give you one hint: Al Gore invented it.
Dean's grassroots campaign.
re: "urine control" -- yes, but whose face to put on the screen? (Bill Gates, Dubya, SCO execs, ... the list is endless)
Best: OpenSource. Free-as-in-speech is good. Free-as-in-beer is better. True last year, true this year.
Worst: DRM and anything like it. It threatens to turn me into Gollum.
"ITS MINE, My computer is MINE!!!! Myyy PRECIOUSSS! DRM is trickies. WESSS HATEEEESSSS them."
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
Apple has only done one thing right: iTunes.
In hardware, however, it is the same old smoke-and-mirrors story. They come up with the best looking boxes to hide "leading edge of last year" slow technology, and cover it up with cooked benchmarks.
The iPod looks good on the front end, but watch hate for the thing rise once you have to replace the $150 batteries. If you can't put the bunny inside, don't buy it.
Your not even close you loser... [url=www.loser.com]loser[/url]
All they have to do to get TIA implemented throughout the country is:
Rename it TnA and then hold a referrendum.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
The radio tags for billing/tracking. There's a technology with a lot of promise for being very, very cool, and at the same time, possessing vast potential for abuse.
I can see the arms race now. RFID tags, RFID countermeasures.
Stores selling things by RFID, and claiming countermeasures are the providence of theives (echos of RIAA, MPAA).
Sigh.
www.voiceofthehive.com - Beekeeping and Honeybees for those who don't.
It's about the only Microsoft thing I would ever recommend to anyone who was suggesting something other than Microsoft.
It makes my nipples hard when I use MSC and the revamped policy tools. And XP theme/DirectX9 capabilities lurk underneath for when you need to be distracted.
It's great. It also doesn't look like complete ass with a half-done icon set and primary colors. Grey and blue and antialiased. Works for me.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
(NOT ZEOSOFT - modding myself down for typo) ZeoSync said its scientific team had succeeded on a small scale in compressing random information sequences in such a way as to allow the same data to be compressed more than 100 times over -- with no data loss. That would be at least an order of magnitude beyond current known algorithms for compacting data. More here. (Via brushstroke.) ZeoSynch press release here.
If it were done when 'tis done, then t'were well it were done quickly... MacBeth
The evidence SCO invented to claim ownership of Linux.
VHS was inferior to Beta. Could this happen to
the DVD also? Nahh, it's all digital...
He is the best sailor who can steer within fewest points of the wind, and exact a motive power out of the greatest obsta
Should say province. That's what I get for posting before coffee.
www.voiceofthehive.com - Beekeeping and Honeybees for those who don't.
Fest(ering), which supports/finances/deepends on the georgewellian fuddite corepirate nazi execrable/unprecedented evile life0cide against the creators' planet/population?
that's our vote.
consult with/trust in yOUR creators.... the best has yet to come....
Removing democracy from the voters is about as bad as it gets.
Well, except that you can block those ads for the ridiculous OSDN/Slashdot/Rob Malda dating network/personals pages. Oh, and the ThinkGeek ads, too... "hella kewl" my ass. Sheesh...
RFID technology and Diebold/Windows/Interweb voting machines.
Never mind the SCO-is-worst quotes, frivolous litigation and blackmail have been around for millenia.
Yeah, but we won the war.And most everyone is better off for it.
-----
I *hate* that argument. It's so stupid. Of *course* we won the war!!! We're the United States! Were we expecting to *lose*? It's like saying that the war was right because we found Saddam. Of *course* we found Saddam! We're the United States! Were we expecting not to find Saddam? Thinking that maybe one man would somehow elude the grasp of the most powerful nation on earth???
We went to war over WMDs. We went to war because we were lead to believe that there was an immediate threat to the saftey of Americans. If there were no WMDs, than we went to war for the wrong reason, and that makes the war wrong, plain and simple.
As for them being better off, that's an incredibly arrogant and paternalistic thing to say. Its their country. Let them run it. Don't assume that we are blessing them with our precious system of government, because honestly, they don't want it. Why do you think the reaction in Iraq has been: "thanks for getting rid of Saddam, now get the fuck out!" They don't want to become another America, plain and simple.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I woke up on Christmas to little kids driving up and down the street on gopeds and mopeds outside my parent's house. At first I thought they were battery powered and didn't go very fast, but I was apparently wrong. They honk at each other and idle them outside, polluting the air in more ways than one. They fly down the road faster than anyone without traffic sense should be allowed. And people wonder why americans are generally overweight and unhealthy.
So in evaluating technologies as best and worst, are there any personal feelings people rate these with? Personally I would say that improvements to communication and travel are good because it brings family and friends closer - 1200 miles doesn't seem as far as it used to, and it's a lot cheaper to get there (It was actually cheaper for me to drive home for Christmas than fly this year). On the other hand, people like my father refuse to use a self-propelled lawn mower because it forces him to get some routine exercise. He wouldn't say it's a bad technology, just not useful to him.
Go RAID, you can saturate it. Yes, it is too fast for a *single* physical drive to saturate. Wasn't part of the purpose of RAID that the drives be inexpensive (depending on how you expand the acronym? Independent/Inexpensive)? IDE RAID systems are cheap and effective alternatives to SCSI RAID, even if the failure rate of individual drives is higher.
Shudder...
yeah -- well, I guess you could use it to surf the web, but I'd get something bigger for real computing.
The best invention this year was boobies.
Even if I say something insightfull or inteligent, it doens't matter cause I'm an ass.
Right. 250 mass grave sites have been reported and only 40 or so have been investigated so far:
+ 1983: 8,000 Kurds rounded up an executed
+ 1988: The "Anfal campaign" 180,000 Iraquis disappeared
+ 1986: Sarin, VX, and Tabun chemical weapons kill between 8,000 and 24,000 Kurds, injure thousands more. There are pictures of the attacks where you can see the gas over the villages and pictures of the victims, not to mention Iraqi documentation.
+ 1991: Tens of thousands of Shites killed
+ Iran-Iraq War: Up to 1 million dead. Numbers likely unknowable. Documented chemical attacks against Iranians. Iran estimates 60,000 affected.
+ 4000 Kurdish villages wiped off the map.
+ Human Rights Watch reports from 50,000 to 100,000 Kurds killed in the various attacks and purges over the years with 500,000 becoming refugees.
+ So far: 300,000 victims in mass graves. Some with hands tied behind their backs apparently buried alive.
And we also have credible reports of medical experimentation, beatings, crucifxion, hammering nails into fingers and hands, amputating penis and breasts with an electric carving knife, spraying victim's eyes with insecticide, branding with a hot iron, raping children and wives in front of parents and spouse, nailing tongues to wooden boards, extracting teeth with pliers, cutting off of tongues, victims shredded in plastic shredding machines.
Victims so far: approaching a million in a country with a population of something like 25 million.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
Don't be so sure.
it sucks, need we say more.
I mean come ON, how many free rides does Apple get? I like Apple, they have great designers, but don't you think it's kind of retarded to give best invention/product to a product that is, in essence, just a rip off on numerous products already made? Not only that, but don't you think its a sad statement on Apple AND The industry if we give props to a program that is neither original nor all that great?
I mean let's see here. First you have the annoying fact that iTunes is sooooooo horribly limited from a technology perspective. AIFF is the testicle sweat of codecs, AAC is just Apple's way of invading your womb, mp3 is a blind man's bluff, and (jump back) IT HAS WAV CAPABILITY. Hold the phones, get Sony circa 1982 on the phone, WE CAN RECORD A CD IN A 20 YEAR OLD FORMAT! Point is I don't consider a measly four options for codecs very good, especially when adding in the rest is literally point and click.
But, you say, I have the iTunes store! You sure do partner, but its kind of a one way trip since AAC files are a pain to convert out of AAC (see capturing audio) and you can't shop anywhere else with iTunes. Yeah, nothing like the glorious method of using one product to force use of a second product, eh? Wait a second, that sounds like a similar plot I saw someone in Redmond try!
From just a format perspective, how about the fact that winamp5 has like 10 codecs (haven't looked, but it supports everything I've trried including WAV, MP3, OGG, FLAC, etc.). True, I like the iTunes interface a lot more, but the program itself is more robust in winamp than iTunes.
So basically the grand point here is that unless you use an iPod iTunes isn't required reading, and while the program is snazzy it isn't necessarily the best and is definitely not original.
-rt
Best: MSBlaster worm.
Yes, best. The payload was relatively benign. It could have just as easily lunched hard drives. It was the wake-up call the industry needed to take patching and security seriously. MS has changed their entire security focus mostly due to it. My employer is finally financing a patch management solution. We also now have a real, enforced, security policy. Many more users now know the importance of installing updates and using and keeping a virus scanner up to date.
I nominate OnStar vehicle GPS system for both best and worst.
Best because (among other uses) if your car gets ripped off, they can find it fast.
Worst because it can be used as vehicle-embedded spyware.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
itunes isnt all that innovative. digital music library management apps has been around for a while. and an online music store isn't really a new idea either...just been on hold for a while because of those RIAA bastards.
it should be voted a good technology, but not the best. theres been a lot of cooler stuff being developed, like bulletproof glass car windows you can shoot (it seals back up) but people cant shoot through.
01100111 01100101 01110100 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101 00101110
Anything to do with Microshit or their hard and soft affiliates.
There's positively no need for it, except for migration and translations.
Worse is the people in denial about all the change taking place. A proprietary OS will not be the tablet/notebook/PDA/desktop leader beyond 2005. Even worse still are those who say they're open source but take inveiglers "shortcuts" whenever an opportunity in coding arises to cut corners and sell out the user's privacy and security for a profit.
To all those wintel pundits who say things aren't going to change anytime soon: get a clue and get a life. You had your day and your time is done.
I think the poster asked for the best technology, not the best invention of the year. Dumb ass. Too bad Microsoft is winning.
We WON the war. And most everyone is better off for it.
In precisely what way are people, other than the Iraqi dissidents whom Saddam was actively torturing, better off for our having won the war?
So far, nobody has shown that Saddam was in any way a threat to me personally, since I don't live in Iraq. It appears that he didn't have any WMDs, so he couldn't have been going to supply those to terrorists. So I'm no safer for his having been deposed.
Meanwhile, my government has spent vast sums of money on a very expensive war. Money which could have gone towards healthcare, education, medical and scientific research. Heck, maybe it would even have gone towards tax breaks.
Well, that sounds rather selfish of me. So why not think of all the people whose suffering could have been alleviated if, for example, those billions that the war has cost us had gone towards making cheap medicines available in Africa? Are you saying that it's better to rescue a few thousand people from an oppressive regime, than to rescue many millions from preventable diseases? Because I have my doubts about that one.
The most dangerous people in the human history have been those who have an unwavering right in their own righteousness. Hitler, Stalin, Jesus, several Popes and so on.
The owls are not what they seem
iTunes is a very simple piece of software and a successful marketing campaign. Just because it is (arguably) well done should not classify it as an innovative technology -- especially when it's not even a new idea.
I personally have no interest in using any of these flashy new online music stores. Until they are DRM-free, use an open protocol (ie. cross-platform), and offer lossless formats, just say no. In the meantime, support only independent artists.
Wow this must be one of those sophisticated nuanced liberal arguments I keep hearing about(Bush Lied! Illegal immmoral war!) ...ask the Iraqis they support our invasion overwhelmingly(plain and simple!).We are going to let them(NOT the UN!) run their country very shortly.
We went to war over WMDs 'cause that was the "legal"way to do it based on existing UN resolutions.WMDs were the excuse not the primary reason(plain and simple....eh?).
The deposing of Hussein and reform of Iraq ia actually an important front in the war on terror.
As for the certainty of US victory and the capture of Saddam Howard Dean has all but secured the Democrat Party nomination by saying we wouldn't succeed.
"Paternalistic?"
Unwavering belief, not right, of course.
The owls are not what they seem
Darl?
sic transit gloria mundi
Were we expecting not to find Saddam? Thinking that maybe one man would somehow elude the grasp of the most powerful nation on earth???
*cough* Osama *cough* *hack* real war on terror *wheeze*
He responds to a troll modded post with brilliant repartee..."I Hate what you say....its Stupid!"
thats insightful?Hell if he added "its NOT fair!"
I suppose you would give him a 6.
Vaporware is a 'never has been'
Abandonware is a 'had it, but sold/disposed/threw it out'.
We know he had them, the UN knows he had them, *he* knew he had them. His Kurdish and Iranian victims certainly knew he had them.
Go back a few years and ask Al Gore about Saddams WMD's. Ask Hans Blix. Ask Tom Daschle. Jaques Chirac. John Kerry. Madeline Albright. See what they say.
They were all campaigning hard to go to war, because we knew (or they told us) that Saddam had, and was building more, WMD's. Now, because Bush says the same things and actually does something about it, suddenly it's all a falsehood. An 'illegal war'.
Why weren't you yelling "vaporware" when Clinton attacked with those cruise missiles?
The real question is...what happened to all that stuff? Did he, in fact, dispose of it? Well WTF didn't he provide unambiguous proof of that? Or is it merely buried out in the desert, like they did with some frontline aircraft.
"It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons."
--Sen Hillary Clinton, Oct 10, 2002
"If Saddam rejects peace and we have to use force, our purpose is clear. We want to seriously diminish the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program."
--President Bill Clinton, Feb. 17, 1998
Hey, no worries about politically incorrect "master/slave" references anymore...
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
"We are going to let them run their country very shortly" reminds me a lot of "Your call is very important to us. Please hold while our phone system accidentally disconnects you."
If, by "them" you mean the governing council of Iraqis we selected to run Iraq, you are probably right. If by "them" you mean a government chosen by the Iraqi people, I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you!
We're installing a government that we selected. Yes, it's composed of Iraqis, no it's not fair to say we've really handed over power. Our troops will stay there as long as "the Iraqi government" wants them there. "The Iraqi government" will be there as long as we want them to be there. That doesn't make it a mutually beneficial relationship.
There are more than two political positions in Iraq. If you are against US occupation, that does not mean you are a Baathist.
Time Magazine seems to have adjudged Steve Jobs' iTunes as the Invention of 2003.
Steve Jobs is an asshole. His products are constantly being praised by the societal elite, but you know what? No one else cares! Apple has held a consistantly small market share for 15 years. The Apple faithful will continue to be, the rest of the world will continue to not care.
Personally I think that iTMS is pretty cool, but so what? How is it the best technology of 2003?
My vote would be for cheap ($100) dual format +R/RW & -R/RW DVD writers.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Of *course* we won the war!!! We're the United States! Were we expecting to *lose*?
Quite a few pundits were predicting a Vietnam-style quagmire, thousands of Americans killed in street fighting in Baghdad, etc.
We went to war over WMDs. We went to war because we were lead to believe that there was an immediate threat to the saftey of Americans.
No. We went to war because Saddam was a continuing (not "imminent") threat to the region and the world. WMDs were merely one aspect of that threat.
As for them being better off, that's an incredibly arrogant and paternalistic thing to say.
You actually think it's plausible that the Iraqi people were better off with Saddam in power? Not even Dean goes that far.
Why do you think the reaction in Iraq has been: "thanks for getting rid of Saddam, now get the fuck out!"
Yes, that's the general plan, as soon as we can insure that the remaining Baathist thugs won't be able to seize power again.
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
It would have to be my pick, it is the future of linux and will bring it into ma
instream computing.
If you're going to use UN resolutions as a justification for anything, please enforce them in numerical order.... The US's ally, Israel, has never complied with most of the UN resolutions about their denial of civil rights to Palestinian residents. There are probably UN resolutions that the US is in violation of, as well as International Criminal Court actions the US ignored about their mining of Nicaragua's harbors, which is an act of war.
And besides, this isn't a UN war. That resolution was from the *old* UN, that did whatever the US told it to. The *current* UN has France and Germany in it, so this war was run by the Coalition of the Willing, which let the US do whatever they wanted to.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
No. We went to war because Saddam was a continuing (not "imminent") threat to the region and the world. WMDs were merely one aspect of that threat.
Iraq may be better off without Saddam, but there's no denying that we went to war for the WMD's, only for the WMD's, and solely for the WMD's. There are no WMD's, so the war was wrong.
After buying a legit upgrade, I ended up using a crack to get it to install anyway. Quark will get no more of my money.
Ireland jumped on the Electronic voting machine bandwagon as well, but there are real problems with it.
The catch is that the "If nobody's looking, change the vote to 'Republican'" feature was only tested in the US.......
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This is about companies that actually create things...not law firms.
Grand Theft Auto. It's worse than molesting children.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
You have been listening to Howard Dean too much. I liked Sen Lieberman's comment on Dean- if Dean can't see why the capture of Saddam makes us safer, then maybe Dean shouldn't be in charge of our national security.
We are better off because a crazed dictator who is sworn enemy of the United States with terrorist connections and an arsenal of weapons is no longer in power. We are better off because a free and democratic Iraq will transform the entire region into a more stable and less hostile place. We are better off because other crazy dictators have seen the results of Saddam's actions, and they are reacting to it (and at the same time they are proving that the Bush Doctrine works).
It appears that he didn't have any WMDs, so he couldn't have been going to supply those to terrorists. So I'm no safer for his having been deposed.
There are lots of weapons that are not accounted for. Are you really ok just waiting for them to be used before we anything about it?
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
Just because she's _your_ supermodel doesn't mean _you're_ any better looking...
The message you requested is temporarily unavailable because this group has exceeded its download limit. Please try again later.
/. post....
Imagine that, from a linked
______ Eagles may fly but monkeys don't get sucked into jet engines.
Let's just go straight to the biggest stat: How many people did Jesus kill? What's that? Zero? Oh, yeah, that really makes him one of the "most dangerous". How about how many people he tortured? Oppressed? Mugged? Still zero.
I'm not arguing with the rest of your list, but Jesus? Get a clue.
If there's one technological move that scares the bejeezus out of me it's the US government's rapid deployment of intrusive technology to monitor individuals, or to track their movements and actions.
Whether it's Patriot Two, and the far reaching powers that it gives government agencies to snoop at just about anything you can think of in your life, or the fingerprinting and scanning of people entering or leaving the country, or the increasing use of things like EZ_Pass by law enforcement, it seems that overall this is probably the worst abuse of technology that we can imagine.
Add to these the powers given to corporate interests by things like the DMCA, and it seems that technology is being used to strip away many, many fundamental rights that we should enjoy as citizens.
Three Squirrels
(Go ahead, mod me down. I AM totally off-topic. It was worth it!)
licet differant, aequabitur
I deny that we went to war only for WMDs. OK, your turn.
WMD's were the excuse and not the primary reason? When Dean is elected, it will be because people are pissed off that WMD's were the excuse and not the primary reason. Every time I hear stuff like this I send him a check.
How about the excuse the "The terrorist strikes on Sept 11 were because terrorists didn't like the American way of life"
HELLO?
What's even more surprising were the number of people who actually believed it. It gets worse. Some people STILL believe it!
As for whatever made "Iraqi's weapons of mass destruction" just disappear into thing air, that should be the BEST INVENTION OF THE YEAR. Truly something to marvel over. (Of course these weapons existed, our esteemed president wouldn't lie to us, he's a politician!)
Easily the best technology of 2003 was the Slashdot Dupe-Post-Checker(c). Using the up-to-now unknown technologies of "regular expressions" and "pattern matching", the wiz-kid staff at Slashdot was finally able to automatically check if a story had already been posted before.
Oh wait, I'm getting ahead of myself.. that isn't due out until 2004, right? Or maybe it's just vaporware..
So they're not better off?
- rape rooms
- 300,000 dead spread over multiple mass graves
- torture chambers
Say what you will about the war and the bad planning of the aftermath, about the needless alienation of the world over the reasons for it and the often cynical rewarding of contracts for Iraq's reconstruction, but to assert that Iraq was better off under Saddam is to show that you're not thinking straight.
Slashdot's dupe-catching technology?
How about the continued poliferation of so-called Digital Rights Management?
Glowing fish have got to rank up there somewhere...
You're just spouting nonsense. It doesn't do _anything_ with consumer rights, numbskull. Intel is a supporter of Linux.
Ya paranoid freak.
Though for me, the ability to hack the game code is probably the next-best thing after its rough-edged cuteness. I'm currently dicking around with the code to add a server option that allows you to choose the radius of a nuclear bomb's fallout and aftereffects. I also made up my own ruleset which has an ICBM, IRBM and Tactical Nuke. Oh, and I threw together a patch which causes dropping a nuke to affect your reputation and to remove infrastructure from around the epicentre of the blast.
(Whew, that's quite a lot to say.)
Slashdot: when news breaks, we give you the pieces.
Electronic Voting run by a company that heavily donates to the Republicans.
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
all those pictures of the president falling off of one were worth all the effort.
Would be even funnier to see the president run over by a fleet of Segways. But I guess will have to settle for the president's father vomiting on the prime minister of Japan.
-kgj
-kgj
I'm pretty much hairless already! And since I don't have a girlfriend, I might as well be sterile! So exactly how is this bio-weapon of your going to change my life, again?
....
Who knows? Maybe the reverse will happen
-kgj
-kgj
Actually, we helped Saddam out quite a bit during the Iran/Iraq war in the 80's. We became his sworn enemy only when he invaded Kuwait and we realized that oil would be far cheaper in the hands of people we saved from invasion. And please don't give me that crap that we help everyone. Do you think we'd be in the middle east at all if the region's major export was corn?
with terrorist connectionsBefore or after we invaded Iraq? Nobody had any proof to this speculation before we invaded, but now we have created a self-fufilling prophecy. Of course terrorists are on his side now because they hate us and we invaded Iraq.
and an arsenal of weaponsWhere exactly are these again? I'm curious.
a free and democratic Iraq will transform the entire region into a more stable and less hostile place.A capitalistic Iraq will allow those who participated in the invasion to profit immensely from transforming the middle east into a "western" country. However only "western" in the sense of say, African nations in which we can lord impossible debts over their heads and force them into low wage labor.
We are better off because other crazy dictators have seen the results of Saddam's actions, and they are reacting to it (and at the same time they are proving that the Bush Doctrine works).True. North Korea did react by announcing their intentions to blow up South Korea and Japan.
There are lots of weapons that are not accounted for. Are you really ok just waiting for them to be used before we anything about it?If that sort of policy is acceptable, then it surely would be alright to assume you were carrying a gun, shoot you, only to find out later you didn't have one. BUT, you had the possibility of owning one. So, I had to shoot you.
"Other bands play, but Manowar KILLS"
talk about cruelty? it doesn't get either any better or worse than this?
"Pick: Apple - for pumping out the goods all year long."
No, they screwed the pooch on the new 15" powerbooks...white dots and 1.8 hour battery life all for only $2300.
I'm sure you'll defend it; but some of us are apple users and haven't lost our critical facilities.
Iraq may be better off without Saddam, but there's no denying that we went to war for the WMD's, only for the WMD's, and solely for the WMD's. There are no WMD's, so the war was wrong.
We went to war to distract the US population from the fact we haven't solved a damned thing in Afghanistan; we went to war for the oil; we went to war because the current administration has been unable to resolve domestic issues such as increasing poverty, decreasing employment, and corporations that have destroyed the economy to enrich a few people.
We went to war because the American people demanded some sort of retaliation for 9/11/2001. (Side note: after the shuttle blew up on re-entry, it took 3 days to get 2 separate investigations going. Why did it take 18 fucking *months* to begin investigating the 9/11 attacks? And why was the crime scene cleaned up by then?)
No. The war was not over WMDs. Bush may have used the threat of WMDs to whip the citizenship of the US into a war frenzy, and he used falsified documents to do it, but that wasn't what the war was about.
As for the grandparent post: Saddam was not a threat at all to the region. He was a threat to the people of Iraq, but not to anyone else. If you want a continuing threat to the region, take a look at Isreal and Palistine and Saudi Arabia, two of which enjoy American protection and aid.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Security council resolutions actually mean something (i.e. war on korea). General resolutions are just polls. Israel has never had a resolution against them in the security council.
I'm not an isreali fan, but lets stick to facts, okay dexter?
"We went to war to distract the US population from the fact we haven't solved a damned thing in Afghanistan; we went to war for the oil; we went to war because the current administration has been unable to resolve domestic issues such as increasing poverty, decreasing employment, and corporations that have destroyed the economy to enrich a few people."
Those area all plausible reasons for us to go to war, but unfortunately wrong, despite your overheated rhetoric.
We went to war with Iraq for two reasons: (1) The bush administration felt Iraq was a serious threat to Isreali security (2) Iraq established a beach-head for the middle east that we could control the region.
Already Libya has folded and Iran is close. While it may have been an ugly messy war, strategically it makes a lot of sense.
Paris Hilton
(Anyone who doesn't get the Nick Lowe reference is forgiven...)
I don't think the guy is making the suggestion that Jesus himself was personally responsible for killing anyone. However, millions and millions of people have been killed "in Jesus' name, Amen" since Emperor Constantine converted and established the Roman Catholic Church.
I think Mohammad should also be on the list too, because millions and millions of people have been killed "Bismillah," including many he personally had a hand in killing during the Jihads that established Islam as a world religion.
(posting anonymously to avoid being lynched for bringing this all up...)
NS's DNS hack was a pretty direct application of their Internationalized Domain Name (IDN) design, which brings up the problem that there's a large demand for non-7-bit-ASCII domain names, and the main proposed solution (from NS) has many of the same failures that their missing-DNS-resolver had - it's really only designed for the web, has marginal support at best for email, and fails completely for most other protocols. The alternative is to make the major DNS handlers (client as well as server) 8-bit-clean, do something different to address the uppercase/lowercase relationships, and make sure there aren't any problems with null bytes in Unicode names or other gotchas, and get enough standards committees (plus Microsoft) on board with it to get the thing actually deployed. It's an ugly job and somebody's still got to do it, otherwise somebody will do a much uglier job like NS did.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Unencrypted wireless keyboards. Oh man, how did that get out of the gate?
ActiveX Spyware. Looks like an official message from the OS, better click on it.
MP3 players under 256 megabytes. Look ma! I have the convience of spending over 200 dollars for something that barely holds more music than carrying around a el-cheapo CD player and two CDs, plus with the added advantage of lossy compression!
The Color T-Mobile sidekick. "Whoops, we screwed the pooch on licensing so we're going to remotely delete your games. Also, there is no software to download from developers. Enjoy your vendor lock-in!"
Anything targeted at "business people." "Oh hi IT department. I saw a cool ad for this treo/PDAphone/speech2text/etc but I'm too stupid to read the instructions so lets setup a time where you can train me on the stupid stuff I can afford to buy every week and then never use again."
Email to phone services. "Now I can get spam read to me by a computer voice on my cell phone!"
"Speed-up" dial-up web proxies that cost almost as much as DSL. Geez people, just get the damn DSL line.
Segway HT Has yet to revolutionize anything but has shown us how the media can be exploited for free advertising.
Red Hat Linux.
RH:Screw you guys, we're going corporate, you know, where the money is.
ME:But, but I'll pay you for updates! In fact I do!
RH:Too bad kid.
Lindows. Worst. Name. Ever. Its like a Sonyo or a Magnetbox.
Windows/Office activation. Pain for when you need to re-install and pushes people back to the 2000 products.
Cellphone earpieces with hanging mics. You look like a crazy person talking to yourself. No really, you do.
AGP 8x Thanks for making my old AGP cards obsolete and bringing back old PCI cards for PCs that don't need kick-ass 3D.
Best tech:
Alltheweb.com Google now has a kick-ass competitor.
The T-mobile sidekick. Once you get over the vendor lock-in its the best mobile browser out there, sans java-script.
The Treo600. Camera and all the palm apps you can handle and it plays MP3s.
Google text-ads. This should be self-explanatory.
Mandrake policy. Nice to see a distro care enough to say how long they're willing to support the product.
Gnomemeeting. Its like a big geek party.
DVD players that can play SVCDs. Finally.
Adapative spam filters. Just golden.
The Firebird/Thunderbird projects. Bye, bye IE/Outlook on windows.
Wifi everywhere. Love it.
We became his sworn enemy only when he invaded Kuwait and we realized that oil would be far cheaper in the hands of people we saved from invasion.
Ok- he tried to illegally expand his borders, and we kicked is ass back out. Even if we did just do it for oil, it was the right thing to do. And do you realize that we only get about 2% of our oil imports from Kuwait, right? If the was was just about oil, we would have probably gone after Canada or Mexico or Saudi Arabia instead.
Before or after we invaded Iraq? Nobody had any proof to this speculation before we invaded
President Clinton knew about Iraq's terrorist links. According to this recently leaked memo, the CIA has been tracking an al qaeda/Iraq link for over 10 years.
Where exactly are these again?
If Saddam had complied with the UN, we would know now, wouldn't we...
A capitalistic Iraq will allow those who participated in the invasion to profit immensely from transforming the middle east into a "western" country.
The Iraqis themselves are very optimistic about their future after Saddam. Why aren't you?
African nations in which we can lord impossible debts over their heads and force them into low wage labor.
Yeah- lets blame the US for everything. Many African nations are struggling with poverty- must be our fault. Theres no other explanation.
North Korea did react by announcing their intentions to blow up South Korea and Japan
North Korea's actions have just confirmed why we have regarded them as a terrorist supporting rouge nation for years now.
BUT, you had the possibility of owning one. So, I had to shoot you.
If you had seen me shoot people in the past with a gun, and you had no evidence that I had got rid of my gun, then yes, you should shoot me if I threaten to kill you. That is the smart thing to do. We are not suicidal, after all.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
Actually, I think Segways were mostly banned from sidewalks, not streets, and mainly in cities where Segway was lobbying to get official permission to use them on sidewalks. The right place for them is bike lanes - they're fairly similar in speed.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Shit, I'd say that takes the cake for WORST TECHNOLOGY OF 2003, no questions asked! Chip my dog, my cat, my guinea pigs, that's cool. Call me superstitious, but chipping human beings is too close to the "Mark of the Beast" for my comfort. [shudder]
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
HA! Get yur bang on!
Parent: ""It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons."
--Sen Hillary Clinton, Oct 10, 2002"
Heh, funny how the right also routinely attacks her but when you need someone to back-up your war of choice there she is.
Or perhaps we can just make the worst technology ever Television. Its brought down the level of political discourse to the point where people have no problem tossing aside facts and believing what the man in the suit is saying. I mean, he LOOKS presidential, he certainly can't be lying. Right? Right?
Worst: Microsoft Rights Management Services (RMS) - Forces everyone who does business with you to use RMS if you use RMS. - Forces you to use RMS to do business with anyone who uses RMS. - Slanders the good name of Richard Stallman. Can he sue them for this? One of the Best: YahooPOPs. (Provides free SMTP/POP3 access to Yahoo Mail by downloading html, parsing out message, converting to SMTP/POP3) I know it is rather trivial in the big scheme of things, but it is a clever program that demonstrates the creativity and originality of the OSS community. http://sourceforge.net/projects/yahoopops/
Unknown host pong.
"When Dean is elected"
to what head of the Baath Party?
Nobody gives a rats ass when we find the WMDs just that they don't go off over here.
Seriously if you guys had any intention of playing to win you would go with Gepbhardt or Lieberman.Do you really think Dean can get the nomination again in 2008 against Ms. Rodham?
long before the hoax is exposed! Hahaha!
Your Howard Dean can't save you now Comrade
DARPA's TIA didn't get to be the agency in charge, but the various pretend "anti-terrorist" policy decrees are nonetheless increasing the amount of government data that's accessible by spooky agencies, decreasing the accountability levels (requests vs. formal administrative requests vs. court orders), letting the spooks who were previously only allowed to deal with non-US targets go after US targets as well, and in general there's lots more unprotected data floating around. And the government's been rapidly increasing their demands for private-sector data and data from private individuals - airlines giving the TSA info on who's flying, which they pass on to other spooks who issue no-fly lists, "financial institution" definitions extended to just about everybody including pawn shops, "PATRIOT" and "PATRIOT II" and the like.
Moore's Law means that lots of this is inevitable, in the private sector as well as government. Forty years ago, computers were room-sized and were limited to punch cards for input and magtape for mass storage, and people were worried about privacy then, but actually _doing_ anything with records was a slow process, required long expensive development cycles, and had trouble correlating any data that didn't have simple common keys like Social Security Numbers. These days, wristwatches sometimes have more CPU power and storage than those mainframes, pocket-sized computers have much more, and a spreadsheet and a few Excel macros running on any bureaucrat's desktop can run ad-hoc queries in minutes that would have taken the IRS a year to design and develop back then, and can match up names and addresses with reasonable accuracy.
The real key is minimizing creation of correlatable data, limiting access to data you have, not collecting (or giving out) information that people don't need, using different email addresses for different correspondents, etc. Cryptography gives us a few tools for things like that - hashes, Chaum's blinded signatures. Traditional business practices also have tools, like paying cash instead of credit cards, or Amex's one-use credit card numbers. But it fundamentally requires committment, and there are too many businesses that find it financially useful to collect more data for data mining, and the political climate was going downhill rapidly before the terrorist carte blanche. (Remember Louis Freeh?)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
There is nothing inovative about distributing music online in 2003... ever heard of napster, or kazzaa ?
What is inovate is distributing music online without the RIAA (and their budies) chasing after you and your customers.
Apples music sharing is a great buisness and/or political innovation, its extremely ignorant to consider it a tech innovation.
I agree, we didn't go to war for WMDs. That was just the excuse.
We went to war because Bush realized he could get away with it in a post-9/11 environment. I hope he enjoyed using up his free pass, he isn't going to get another one.
As for the worst, I guess everyone here already thought to suggest that it's everything from Microsoft, because it's spreading holes for spam virus/worms. But I would come with old-old name: CVS. It's the worst tech still survived 2003, despite upcoming Subversion with Arch and existing Aegis with Darcs.
Less is more !
Here is my "worst" list:
1. TIA/MATRIX/etc. - The last thing we need is a "democratic" government starting up 24/7 survelience on everyone. The whole scheme stinks of facist and police state policies.
2. DRM/Palladium/Trusted Computing/etc. - This technology is appearing in more and more retail devices and computer software. When I buy devices or software, I expect them to work... Not lock me out because I might be some pirate.
3. RFID Customer Products - This technology might be good for mass inventory scans, but it starts becoming scary when it starts being implemented in the retail product. I do not like the idea of my good broadcasting what they are to anyone that asks.
-Valen
Your logic looks like this:
A) "We went to war...solely for the WMD's"
B) "There are no WMD's"
Therefore
C) "The war was wrong"
In your reasoning, while A may be true, and B may be true, there is no logic that allows you to come to C as your conclusion.
Correct logic would look like this:
A) WMDs are the only justification for a war.
B) There are no WMDs
Therefore
C) The war is not justified.
This logic is clearly ridiculous as there are many reasons beyond WMDs for legitimately going to war--a country attacks us, a ruling power or ethnic group is committing genocide, a ruling party is terrorizing its people and committing horrendous atrocities, or a country's aggressiveness is destabilizing a region--to name a few. I think the problem here is that I've kept your premises but changed your conclusion.
I think I know what argument you were trying to make. Let me see if I can straighten out your syllogism so that the conclusion remains unchanged.
A) Bush took the country to war.
B) Everything Bush does is wrong.
Therefore
C) The war is wrong.
There. Doesn't it feel better to be frank with your agenda?
I'm a friend of a friend of the working class.
I agree with you that he did it because he COULD, after 9/11. Just like FDR joined WW2 because he COULD after Pearl Harbor.
Don't worry about another war - Iraq needs plenty of time to gel, and we won't be starting another one an time soon unless it is in response to a direct, state sponsored attack like the Afgahn war.
BWAAHAHAHAHHAHA. Israel is a threat to the Middle East!?!??! That is so stupid it is funny. Israel is the ONLY good thing going on in the Middle East (besides the birth of a free Iraq).
Also, perhaps Iraq was a threat to Israel. Saddam had vowed to destroy it, and had used missiles against it in the last war. He also attacked Iran and Kuwait, and tried to assasinate the U.S. President. You could have hardly picked a worse example of a "harmless" leader of a country.
Wow, how misinformed are you? Most of the population of Iraq hated Saddam, and are at worst cautious about the US presence. (Who can blame them after 20 years of rule be an evil dictator that the US help set up).
There's currently a small, but (relatively) powerfull segment of the population that were the weasel-boy minions under Saddam that did all the evil shit (you don't murder and brutalize hundreds of thousands of people alone). These are the people carrying out the attacks.
It's a pretty hard sell to say the war is over when there's US soldiers killed every other day in Iraq. Calling it a war is just a matter of semantics, but there's certainly no question there's still active resistance operating in Iraq.
You're right about one thing though, it still remains to be seen exactly what the US is really setting up in Iraq.
AccountKiller
Head of the nail, meet zazas. Thanks.
I think you fail to take into consideration that the post-Saddam era is just beginning. There hasn't been enough TIME to accumulate enough atrocities to counterbalance the ones committed by Saddam during his decades in power.
Here's how things could get worse than Saddam. Right now, Iraq has anarchy and factional fighting--the sort of place where Al Qaeda thrives. So now instead of being a place where Al Qaeda had to keep a low profile (for fear of Saddam), it's the next Yemen/Afghanistan. How does Saddam compare to the Taliban if the Taliban had stayed in power as long as Saddam? Better or worse?
Or--alternate scenario! Let's say we install a US-friendly leader. Let's call him the Shah of Iraq. Now let's say Iraq's Shiite majority overthrows the Shah and establishes a theocracy. Sound familiar? It should. How was life in Iran under the Ayatollah? Better or worse than Saddam?
Or, let's say we have to keep troops stationed there indefinitely just to keep the above two scenarios from happening. Sounds very Vietnam, don't you think? Yes, I think so too. How's Ho Chi Minh plus a whole lotta dead US soldiers? Better or worse than Saddam?
You may think those who fear for the future of Iraq aren't thinking straight, but to me they're the only ones thinking at all.
In March 2004, Gore himself said that he made a mistake when he claimed to have invented the Internet. He used the word "invent". See CNN and CBS (not Snopes) for Gore's actual quotes.
Correct logic would look like this:
A) WMDs are the only justification for a war.
B) There are no WMDs
Therefore
C) The war is not justified.
--------
Change that slightly and you'll have it right. (A) should read:
A) WMDs were the primary justification for the war.
If there were no WMDs, that means the primary justification for the war did not in fact exist, and therefore, we should not have gone to war.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Bin Laden believed it, it should be good enough for you. If you bothered to educate yourself about our enemies, you would have read Bin Laden's demands to the West following 9/11. About 2/3rds of them are demands to abolish sinful activities such as secularism, interest-based banking, drinking, free press, etc. or face death.
It's a simple potential cost vs potential benifet analysis.
The potential benifet of getting rid of Saddam was minimal. Yes, he has done terrible things in the past, but you can't bring those people back. Thus, his past behavior only factors into the analysis as an indicator of his future behavior. Since he was under a great deal of international scrutiny, the chances of him acting similarly in the future, without the international community being able to stop him promptly, were minimal.
You also have to factor in the potential long term benifet of changing the organization of society. Experience has shown that such top-down democratization as we are attempting does not work without an underlying culture ready to support it. There is a reason why there are almost no democratic countries in the Middle East --- culturally, they are not ready for it. So to see a long term benifet from this democratization of Iraq, Iraq would somehow have to be different from most evey other Middle Eastern country.
One potential benefit is reduced state-supported terrorism. If Saddam was funding and arming terrorists, then getting rid of him would be better for our safety. Again, this benifet did not materialize. Even the Bush administration has admitted that Saddam really had no ties to Al Queda.
One last potential benifet is really the turning point. If Saddam had WMD, then there was a huge potential benefit in getting rid of him so he could not use it. WMDs posed a direct danger to the United States, and surrounding areas, because they could be used without giving us time to react. Since there were no WMDs, this benifet did not materialize.
The potential costs are very high. Say what you will about Saddam, you can't deny that Iraq was stable. Instability kills far more innocents than war. About 3000 Iraqi civilians were killed as a result of the Gulf War. 110,000 were killed as a result of all the infrastructure that was destroyed. 70,000 of those were children under the age of 15. After the Gulf War, the government remained in power. Now, in Iraq, he have no strong government, and the potential civilian death toll is even higher.
There is a very high potential that the resulting government in Iraq will be unsuccessful. Our new Afghan government is having serious problems, and internal instability and danger is again a problem in the country. There is a very real possibility that our western-style government in Iraq will fail, and that the country will be thrown into turmoil.
Now, add to these potential costs the actual cost of the military operation, the cost of the lost American and Iraqi lives, the cost of our decreased moral stature around the world, the cost of our breaking international principles of sovreignity, and the cost of increased terrorism as a result of our (effectively unilateral) actions.
To the American people, it was the WMDs, and to a lesser extent, terrorism, that sealed the deal. Without these huge potential benifets, the cost/benifet analysis of this situation works out, by a large margin, in favor of not going to war.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
We are going to let them(NOT the UN!) run their country very shortly.
>>>>>>>>>>
No we're not. We're going to install a US-designed, US-backed government. If we let them have free reign about how to shape their government, they'd most likely choose a conservative theocracy. Why? Because their conservative muslims! Their culture doesn't do the whole democracy thing, not yet anyway.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
There is a difference between what Bin Laden sys and what Al Queda's goals are. Simply, Al Queda has no goals. He uses anti-Western rhetoric, but nobody takes him seriously except the loonies.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
We're going to install a US-designed, US-backed government.
Nope. Remove your head from the hole in which you have wedged it. The constitutional convention is underway at this very moment.
If we let them have free reign about how to shape their government, they'd most likely choose a conservative theocracy. Why? Because their conservative muslims!
The majority of Iraqis are not conservative muslims. They're they "reform" muslims, if you understand the expression.
Don't be confused by the fact that the country is referred to as ethnically Shiite. That's something entirely otherwise.
Finally, your position that the Iraqis would elect themselves a nice, comfortable theocracy is the most disgusting type of paternalism. You're an asshole.
we haven't solved a damned thing in Afghanistan
A regime that provided material aid and support to international terrorists is no longer in existence. A major source of funding, facilities, and equipment for international terrorists is now closed to them. A loya jirga, or constitutional convention, is underway right now to continue the process of establishing a legitimate government in Afghanistan. Oh, and 28 million Afghans no longer have to live under a regime so oppressive it made Tehran in 1979 look liberal by comparison.
Haven't solved a damned thing, eh?
we went to war for the oil
Oil available to the United States on the foreign market declined after the start of the war, first because some OPEC nations chose to restrict their trade with us, and secondly because we effectively shut down Iraq's oil production facilities for an indefinite time.
If we wanted to secure an oil supply, we would have invaded Venezuela or the Ukraine, both of which are far more important oil trading partners than Iraq ever has been.
we went to war because the current administration has been unable to resolve domestic issues such as increasing poverty, decreasing employment, and corporations that have destroyed the economy to enrich a few people.
The Dow is over 10,000, the NASDAQ is over 12,000, last quarter's economic growth was the highest it's been in over twenty years, and jobless claims have hit a four-year low.
What else you got?
We went to war because the American people demanded some sort of retaliation for 9/11/2001.
Actually, the American people did not demand retaliation. If you'll recall, the cities of the United States were filled with candlelight vigils and prayer gatherings after 9/11, not bloodthirsty mobs.
Why did it take 18 fucking *months* to begin investigating the 9/11 attacks?
Beg pardon? I don't know what you mean by "investigating," but believe me, the intelligence and law enforcement services were on the case in a matter of minutes. Hell, we had a list of the 19 hijackers within hours after the attack, and we had the 20th in custody the following day.
Bush may have used the threat of WMDs to whip the citizenship of the US into a war frenzy
None of the things you refer to in that sentence happened. There was never a war frenzy; support for the war was solid, but reserved. Read the polling data. And President Bush (when did we stop referring to the Chief Executive by his rightful title, for crying out loud?) did not use the threat of anything to do garner support. He simply made his case using the facts at hand: Iraq supported terrorism, both directly and indirectly. (Al-Qaida splinter group Ansar al Islam, Abu Nidal, Hamas, et cetera.) Iraq had refused, for more than a dozen years, to comply with mandated disarmament proceedings. Iraq had, in fact, continued to attempt to build proscribed weapons. Seems simple enough to me; why don't you get it?
Saddam was not a threat at all to the region.
Oh, please.
If you want a continuing threat to the region, take a look at Isreal and Palistine and Saudi Arabia, two of which enjoy American protection and aid.
Yes, absolutely. The Palestinian terror groups are definitely a threat to the region. (There's no "Palestine," nor has there ever been. What you're referring to are the lawless provinces of eastern and southwestern Israel.) Israel and Saudi Arabia are not threats. In fact, Saudi Arabia has been among the most stable states in the gulf region, despite the internal rise of Wahhabism. Saudi Arabia has a lot of problems, but a direct threat to their neighbors they are not.
Wow. You're just a fucking moron, ain'tcha?
Long live InDesign! Death to Quark and their double-priced, half-assed crapola!
~Philly
You are one stupid Bitch!
Seriously do you believe this shit you are spouting?
Your argument about WMDs is irrelevant to anything going on in the world today.Plus what happens when we find them? You are going to look not just stupid but irrelevant just like Howard Dean did when we got Saddam.Do you just want to give up and submit to Islam? I for one have no intention of pissing 225 years of Freedom down the toilet much less Western CivilisationTM*
"The best kind of Civilisation -and not just because we are ethnocentric!"
No, there's not. Osama bin Laden founded Al-Qaida. His "Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places," published in Al Quds Al Arabi in 1996, defined Al-Qaida's mission and methods.
Go read it. It will send chills up your spine.
Thank god that man's been dead for over two years now. If he had lived, he would have been really dangerous.
Yeah, the Taliban is still in power, right? Wrong. Osama may not be captured, but for all we know he could already be dead. Either way, we took away from al Qaida a large source of security and funding - the Afghan government.
we went to war for the oil
Really? My gas prices haven't improved. Iraqi oil being sold on the open market isn't going into a US account - it's being used to improve the Iraqi infrastructure. And US taxpayer money is being used to get refineries updated and back online.
we went to war because the current administration has been unable to resolve domestic issues such as increasing poverty, decreasing employment, and corporations that have destroyed the economy to enrich a few people.
Have you even seen the news lately?
Stocks End First Positive Year Since 1999
New Jobless Claims Lowest of Bush Tenure
You might want to find a new source for the conspiracy theories.
***
Radio Shack. You've got questions...we've got blank stares(TM).
That would be nice wouldn't it? Unfortunately, it would be a little more difficult to make invisible terrorist ties to Canada and Mexico. But I am actually a little surprised we didn't go after Saudi Arabia instead.
President Clinton knew about Iraq's terrorist links. According to this recently leaked memo, the CIA has been tracking an al qaeda/Iraq link for over 10 years.That is interesting, especially considering the term 'Al Qaeda' is actually a term invented in 1998 after the Oklahoma City bombings to describe very loosely knit extremist organizations around the world. Now that we have given them an umbrella name to operate under, we have not only given their efforts focus, but allow independent groups completely unrelated to bin Laden to claim affiliation with this 'Al Qaeda' thing. It's this exaggeration which has allowed the current administration to link any terrorist group they please in Iraq back to bin Laden.
The Iraqis themselves are very optimistic about their future after Saddam. Why aren't you? If Saddam had complied with the UN, we would know now, wouldn't we...For some reason, I find it joyless to indirectly participate (via my tax dollars and due to the place of my birth) in the unilateral invasion of a country on anecdotal evidence. If we had given UN inspectors the time they requested instead of bullying the international community it is possible we could have resolved the situation without getting anyone killed. Is that too much to ask?
North Korea's actions have just confirmed why we have regarded them as a terrorist supporting rouge nation for years now.Do you think it is worth putting that corner of the world in that much danger to prove that point?
Yeah- lets blame the US for everything. Many African nations are struggling with poverty- must be our fault. Theres no other explanation.Our fault? If by that you mean imperialists then yes. This is an issue with a much longer backstory, but when you invade peoples lands and completely alter their ways of living without their consent and at the behest of the international community it tends to fuck things up. People have struggled to feed themselves in Africa since the beginning of time, perhaps. But now they have guns, tanks, armies, corruption (of course) and international debts. Desperation is the seed of corruption. Since the fall of the Taliban, many kurds have been forced into corruption - dealing opium - to survive because they are out of options. It would be a bald-faced lie to say our specific western cultural influence has not lead Africa to its current state.
If you had seen me shoot people in the past with a gun, and you had no evidence that I had got rid of my gun, then yes, you should shoot me if I threaten to kill you. That is the smart thing to do. We are not suicidal, after allThe smart thing to do would be to not hand out guns in the first place.
Cheers, and Happy New Year
"Other bands play, but Manowar KILLS"
Run a google groups search to get some fun comments from thinkit's days of newgroup trolling. Or, click this link if you're lazy.
Google Group Search on comp.lang.c: thinkit
Man, give it a rest. You've been at this for years now, mabey a good resolution would be to give up. You've been banised to trolldom everywhere you post. I'm off to go drinking, woohoo!
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
Actually, Iraq's chemical weapons are NOT from the United States.
This is factually incorrect. This list of agents was proven to have come from the United States.
--------
Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
I prefer posts of this size tobe broken down into bulleted like sectionn whe the enter key is used often... Especially when quotes are involved.
If using a phone causes undue hardship to others, or allows unfair advantage (cheating on tests, anyone?) then ban its use in that particular environment... okay, that makes sense. You may not LIKE it, but at least there's some reason for it. But now that phones are coming with cameras as a matter of routine, they become LESS useful in some of the very situations where they were previously useful. Are you quietly texting someone to keep the library quiet or reading a message, or are you trying to snap upskirt pics of the girl in the next row? The professional worriers can't tell, so they simply insist you not use (or possibly even possess) the phone at all. Sounds a lot like MS service pack "fixes". By adding one feature, they break others.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
"It is clear, however, that if left unchecked, Saddam Hussein will continue to increase his capacity to wage biological and chemical warfare, and will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons." --Sen Hillary Clinton, Oct 10, 2002
Which part of "IF left unchecked" you are unable to decode with your obviously damaged reading organ?
And how do you infer from "will keep trying to develop nuclear weapons" that Iraq actually had them?
Now, Clinton spoke about "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction *program*". Notice how he never assumes that Iraq has acquired such weapons. Every single country with a bit of cloud will have a program, some for nastier bits of weapons than others (last time I checked the US has weapons, no programs, based on bioligical, chemical and nuclear technologies).
In other words the Clintons were on top of the money and you are trying to distort the meaning of their words by putting them out of context and actually ignore what they are actually saying.
Lame.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
That Hussein's regime was the darling of the West until he unwisely invaded Iraq in 1991 (after mistakenly believing he have been given green light to do so by the US).
During all those years Human Rights activists were telling goverments in the West, but specially in Washington and London, the nature of this regime, but all fell on deaf ears. Even MPs in the UK raised the issue in the House of Commons (when the gassing of the Kurds in Halabja) but their complaints were swiftly ignored (no suprise there, Margaret Tatcher counts amongst her friends a certain Augusto Pinochet, whom also happened to be helped by the US goverment during his small terror reign).
So the US and UK discovering all this now is aking to a thieve to truns agisnt another and denounces him to the police.
To make it all worse, Human Rights concerns was a complete afterthought and when it becme apparent the big lie the WMDs is, it became the only saving grace of this whole fiasco.
The inavders of Iraq are acting like a thief that brakes into a house just to find a murderer (which happens to be an old buddy) just before executing somebody and saving the victim.
The thief may have stopped the bigger crime, but one still has to question his initial motives for breaking in without permission.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
If the UN passes a resolution is only up to the UN to enforce it.
No member country should prempt the policies of the UN and no country has the moral or politcal authotiry to decide to enforce any resolutions unilaterally.
If you are going to defend the invasion of Iraq at least do it on serious grounds and stop insulting our intelligence.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
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